#i really struggled with deciding a style for the pc character sheets this campaign but i think ive nailed it

[i-rolled-a-zero]

The hero the city never asked for: Iron Jaw!

With his mighty "Crocodile Tears" he can raise his strength and attack to do devastating damage!

[kapanbenernya]

Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide 2 -- Extreme Rat Extermination Service

So not long ago, my friend told me about another game on steam that he wanted me to check out. The game in question was Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide 2. He said it’s some kind of four player co-op game like Left 4 Dead 2. Actually he needn’t explain the game to me because I actually owned Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, the game that came before this one. I remembered buying it years ago and unable to actually play it until years later because my PC and my internet could not support the game. Actually now that I think about it, I still never get to really play it because nobody is still interested in the game. You know what? Let’s forget everything I said about it and refocus on Vermin 2.

Yeah, I’m just gonna call it Vermin 2, the full game’s name is too fucking long

In Vermin 2, you are some guy/elf/dwarf living in some Victorian Era London type of world fighting giant rats and buff white dudes. This very basic and very unrepresentative description of the world and the lore of the game might just net me an invitation to the chopping block by the Warhammer fanboys, but I don’t care. Look, it’s a Warhammer lore okay, so cheat-sheet's probably there’s a god or some gods with their respective cults and war happens, hopefully involving hammers. Here’s what I can gather from the prologue: a rat guy and some lovechild between a viking and an orc wants to open a portal to somewhere not good, and our heroes must stop them. 

Warriors from the northern region with horned helmets? Wonder where the inspiration came from

Our heroes are a ragtag band of five people which includes a soldier with kickass facial hair, a religious nutter, a fire witch, a scottish elf-woman, and discount Gimli. The gang was formed in the events of the first game which I have absolutely no idea how it happened because I didn’t play it, and I have no intention of checking the lore. I mean have you SEEN the lore? If you can be bothered to check, it’s actually rich and ornate, with multiple race and languages. That’s why I will never touch it without a 10-foot barge pole; I still aspire to have a decent sex life someday. 

But I’m getting sidetracked, so here’s how the number of heroes will affect the gameplay

The hero you choose will define your play-style. Or to be more exact, the play-style you prefer will mostly dictate which hero you will find enjoyable. You wanna be a quick whoosh whoosh DPS? Go for the elf. You wanna be a stone-wall tank? Go check out the shield-bearing duo: the soldier and the dwarf. You wanna be kinda useful and kinda useless at the same time? Go for the character that looks like he’s from Bloodborne. Interested in being the prick that fills everyone’s screen with bullshit? The fire witch’s your lady, matey. But that’s not all the depth that comes from choosing a hero. You got 3 class for each hero, each offers different passive buffs and hero skill. Don’t think you can try them all instantly though, the game’s gonna make you work for it. You will have to unlock the classes by leveling up with the first class already unlocked from the get-go. 

I mean if they didn’t do that, I’d be able to make a joke about being in a classless society etc etc.

After you’ve chosen how highly you are ranked above the local commoner, in comes the weapons. Your main bread and butter is the melee weapon. Of course there’s the good old stereotype on the weapon variety: fast but weak, strong but slow, and medium but medium. The only ones that are a bit different than the rest are the weapons that’s paired with shields, which allows you to block more incoming attacks from enemies before getting your guard broken. Okay, let’s see the variety of shield weapons available: fast but weak, strong but-oh bother, it’s just the fucking same. Mind you, these weapons are not shared among heroes, for each weapon are exclusive to one hero and one hero only. So don’t think you can cheat the game by giving the whoosh whoosh elf a goddamn mace and shield. 

But as the old adage goes: “man cannot survive on bread, rats, and buff dudes alone”, so here comes some tasty peanut butter spread to save us from blandness in the form of ranged weapons. As with the melee weapons there are also varieties of different types of ranged weapon for each hero and class, and also like melee weapons, exclusive to each hero. Now, don’t expect to me explain the uniqueness of each weapon type and/or combinations, because that shit’s up to you to try and decide which one’s up your alley. 

With those weapons explained, care for a little test drive on rats and buff dudes?

Believe me when I say there are a lot of enemy variations in this game. First off, there’s two factions of enemies going hand in hand to knock the living shit out of your party: the Skaven and the Chaos Army. Although for simplicity matters, I preferred calling them rats and buff dudes respectively, simply because that’s what they are. To start, you’ve got the mob enemies. They’re weak, plentiful, bland, and makes up for 90% of the enemy. And then there’s the elite enemies. They are enemies that have different behavior and approach towards your party. There are ones that disables a player, the ones that punishes loners and drags them away from the party, area denial, the big tanky mini-boss, and so on. These elite enemies are unique in design and therefore can be easily distinguished from the mob by audio cues and vision, especially after the in-game characters shouted callouts before the enemy can even be seen anywhere in this plane of existence. But the one thing I find curious is that design-wise and gameplay-wise, I find that the elite rat enemies are more interesting than the elite buff dudes. I mean you got the sneaky rat and the hooker rat that makes you stick together, the gas rat and fire rat that pushes you away from a beloved choke point, and gatling rat that’s 100% bullshit. But the elite buff dudes are just variations of even buffer dudes that charge in blindly with the mob with roughly the same results or fat dudes with magic hurricanes that’s just here to fuck your shit up, fam.

I gotta admit, still hilarious when it happens to everyone except you

Well, what else can I say about the game?

It’s your standard co-op four player PvE combat goddammit, what else do you wanna know? You grab your friends, choose your weapons, pick a map, and slay some rats. Simple, true and tried ever since the old age of beat em’ up games to the crowned exemplar of the 4 player co-op FPS genre: the Left 4 Dead series. But as of writing the previous sentence, why do I suddenly think that If I was given a choice to play Left 4 Dead or Vermin 2, I'd prefer Left 4 Dead? I mean they were basically the same: traverse map towards the objective, enemy mobs spawning at the worst possible timing, and stupid stupid teammates that just gotta fuck shit up right before the level exit.  After taking my time to reflect on both games, I think I kinda know why. I think it’s because some of Vermin 2′s elements is pretty fucking shit.

You see, the enjoyment of the game doesn’t stem from the gameplay alone.It’s also affected by the amount of bullshit you gotta go through to actually experience the gameplay. And with vermin 2, the bullshit comes from having to struggle with the bad netcode. My playtime was 23 hours, and I’m quite sure the amount of time I spent waiting for my friend to be able to connect to my lobby is about a third of that. No joke, you know the worst record? 30 minutes. And even after the four of us can connect, it’s everybody’s guess whether or not we’re still gonna be a four man party after the level or someone’s gonna get dropped from the lobby for no particular reason. And what happens when someone or everyone got dropped? That’s right! Restart the fucking lobby! 

And by restart the fucking lobby, I mean more gambling whether or not the fucking thing’s gonna connect again.

Another lesser complaint I got is the weapon power system. Unlike L4D which just plops you the same weapon on every campaign, in Vermin 2 you gotta find your own weapons via lootbox that you get by completing campaigns or challenges. Thing is, the weapon power you can get from the lootbox is capped based on the difficulty that you play. So get this, you start out with bad default weapons which will result in you getting beaten to mulch which motivates you to get better and better weapons until you hit the cap. What’s next? You have to move on to the harder difficulty with your capped weapons, which will result in you getting mulched again. So there you go, trapped in a cycle of mulch-ification towards better weapons. The small number of maps available didn’t help either. Only 13 maps in total, compared to 12 maps in L4D and L4D2.

13 is less than 12? This guy’s off his rockers

Yeah, yeah, dodgy mathematics aside, do remember that every map from L4D is divided into 4/5 segments each. That adds up into around 48/60 maps total, and I needn’t elaborate further to show you that 48 is bigger than 13. That’s not taking into account the numbers of custom maps readily available. Yeah, who’s the brainlet now, bozo? And I swear, the quick play is deliberately messing with my party. Somehow we always end up on the map where we gotta pop some pimples in a cave. If not that, the one where we gotta connect the lines on some temple. I swear to God, small map pool or not, this is ridiculous. It’s like this map tosses off the map RNG every once in a while so it gets chosen.

Now, if you’re a smarter person, you’d have followed the dotted lines all by yourself and successfully deducted the 20 car pile-up all these problems caused. But since unlike me and my big smarty brain, you didn’t know that 13 is less than 12, I fucking doubt it. Here let me explain to you and your slowy slowy boo boo brain.

visual pun, ladies and gentlemen

That’s right, 13 maps, 4 difficulty, and there you go on the mulch-ification cycle.  Hope you don’t get bored of running the same levels again and again before reaching the higher difficulty. I know I sure did.

In Brief

After all the spanking I gave the game in the last paragraphs, it’s still fun, and it’s still a good alternative for L4D. Especially more so if you like L4D, but you’d like it more if it was melee-focused, class-based, grindy, and all-around dodgier. It’s kind of a shame really, because I can see that this game had potential to be better, but in the end it just got tossed aside with the remark “like L4D, but made by somewhat incompetent spods”. All because while the core gameplay is very much fun and functional, the elements that support it ends up being a hindrance, not unlike a brake on a car that could go off randomly. This game kinda proves that you can make a gold bar shaped like the world’s sexiest pair of titties, but bury it in deep enough bullshit and people are going to stop giving a shit, mainly because you already had shit deep enough to fertilize the Sahara desert.

P.S.

I am very much aware that the connection problem might stem from me and my friends’ own internet connection, but I did rule it out because L4D works like magic in comparison, and this proves that SOMETHING had to be wrong with the game to cause all the connectivity problems.

27/8/2018

[kayawagner]

The Usual Suspects: NPCs and You

Tell us which evil NPC did the bad thing.

I originally discussed this topic in an older article on Rogue Princess Squadron, but after a couple of recent games I thought it was worth discussing again.

One of the primary ways a GM can bring a game world to life is through the NPCs the players interact with. They can give information, point the characters in the direction of adventure, be adversarial challenges, or even provide emotional motivation for the characters to do what they do. Through them, the GM breathes life into a setting and turns it into more than just a green screen backdrop for hacking and slashing away at some monsters. But what happens when a GM’s NPCs all feel the same and the players start to get bored or annoyed?

Recently, tension in a semi-regular game came to a head when we players butted heads with one of the NPCs. The session opened with our boss confronting us about a botched mission we didn’t even know we botched. The problem was, the NPC was played as incredibly antagonistic and downright rude. Our reactions to this took the GM by surprise as the session suddenly went in a direction he didn’t expect. As I eventually pointed out, I wouldn’t take that behavior from a real-life boss, so there was no way my bad ass character would just sit there and take that kind of abuse. This wasn’t the first time the GM was taken off guard with how we responded to one of his NPCs, but it also wasn’t the first time one of his ‘friendly’ NPCs pissed us off, pushing us to respond in ways he didn’t expect. In fact, most of his NPCs came off very similarly antagonistic.

The situation reminded me of years ago when a friend was trying his hand at GMing with a D&D game. We were both relatively new to GMing, so often offered each other feedback and suggestions to help us both improve. After one game night in that campaign, I struggled to come up with a diplomatic way to express my concerns. Finally, in my nuanced and oh-so-tactful way, I blurted out, “All of your NPCs are dicks.”

Luckily, he’s used to my style of tact and we were able to have a conversation about his use of NPCs. I pointed out that every NPC we had met, from the peasants in the village to the nobility running the region, was rude, condescending, demanding, shady, or just downright unfriendly. Ultimately, my character had no reason to put her life on the line to help these people, regardless of whatever monetary reward they were offering for us to fix the problem. My friend had fallen into a trap where he was defaulting to the same style of NPC for every character we came in contact with, and the game was starting to suffer because of it.

Some may be blessed with a natural acting ability that lets them bring the residents of a game world to life with minimal fuss, but the rest of us need to work at it. 

A lack of variation in the tone and behavior of the NPCs a GM presents is an easy trap to fall into. When running a game, there’s so much to keep track of and creating and running NPCs isn’t a skill that comes naturally to everyone. Some may be blessed with a natural acting ability that lets them bring the residents of a game world to life with minimal fuss, but the rest of us need to work at it. This is also a thing that can happen to new and old GMs. I’ve seen it happen to newbies getting their feet under them and old pros that don’t realize they’re stuck in a repetitive rut.

I have always believed that NPCs are a hugely important aspect of GMing. Without them, the game world is just a stage with set dressing on it and unless I develop a strong attachment to the other PCs, I stop caring about the world and just focus on the combat and the puzzles, which isn’t what I game for. As a GM, I work to breathe life into a wide array of NPCs and I know I struggle with the more subtle, Machiavellian types. I can do scene chewing bad guys and big bad monsters, but the slimy, shady NPC you need to work with though you know he’s going to stab you in the back is one I have to work at.

Here are some thoughts that will hopefully help with creating and running NPCs:

The subtler aspects of NPCs are going to be lost on the players, so paint them with broad strokes. At some point, ask your players what they remember about certain NPCs you’ve introduced in previous sessions. More than likely, they’re going to remember the larger details of personality and deeds. “Oh, he was the smarmy and growly guy that ran the fight ring.” “She’s the airhead socialite that dated the monkey!” Unless the NPC is one that’s in play every session (almost a GM-PC, which can be a minefield of its own), NPCs with subtly nuanced personalities are going to get overlooked and forgotten in the face of bolder and easier to ‘get’ characters.

Plot hooks land better when they’re presented by NPCs that catch the players’ interest. Sure, you can use the generic bartender to give your players a plot hook, but they’re only going along with it because it’s what’s expected of them or there’s nothing better to do. Breathe a personality into your NPCs and the players are going to be far more interested in what they have to say. They’ll remember that mission they went on to help the wizened and grandmotherly goblin-witch (that looked like Yoda’s mother) far more than they’ll remember the job they got from generic ‘insert here’ bartender. Don’t hesitate to fade away NPCs the players don’t have any interest in and refocus on the ones that catch their attention.

Vary your NPCs up a bit and it’ll make things more interesting for you too.

Keep track of your NPCs! Having to play the rest of the world is a big job, but it is an important one. As an extension of that, it is also vitally important to keep track of the characters you’ve introduced to your players. It’s not as much of a problem with NPCs you’ve put together through careful prep work before the game and intend to use long term, but there are often NPCs made up on the fly as the players bring up ideas you hadn’t thought of beforehand. If there’s a chance at all they’ll interact with that character again, make sure you note who they are and what their involvement was. The ‘airhead socialite that dated the monkey’ mentioned earlier was a throwaway NPC made up on the spot when they decided to call some of the numbers in the monkey’s little black book (it’s a long story). They got such a kick out of talking to her that they called on her several times during the rest of the campaign.

If you’re not good with coming up with NPCs on the fly, make a cheat sheet. A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, I played in an awful game where all the NPCs were named Joe, Bob, or Joe-Bob. This included the NPCs the GM had prepped beforehand. This GM was a problem on many levels, but it was also clear he didn’t think he needed to improve at anything. Needless to say, I didn’t stay in that game for very long. Even GMs that are good at coming up with NPCs on the spot may need a little help now and again. I find a cheat sheet of names relevant to the setting and types of characters the PCs could interact with is handy. Naming your shady Russian fixer ‘Bill’ is likely to push the players out of immersion. You can also come up with a cheat sheet of personality and physical traits to pull from if that’s something you struggle with as well.

Be Mindful of Stereotypes. If every bartender in your game is middle-aged man with a beer gut, you might want to take a moment and reconsider. It’s easy, in that modern game, to say the beat cop is an Irish guy named O’Malley, but it’s also been done to death. What if you made that beat cop a no-nonsense Latina named Rodriguez? Does that change the purpose the NPC serves? Probably not. While sometimes stereotypes can be a quick shorthand, it’s good to be mindful of them and subvert them on occasion. If you automatically think of a particular type of person for an NPC you need to put in play, maybe take a step back and consider some other options.

Occasionally take stock of the NPCs you’re using most often While relevant to our topic of NPCs, this is crucial for any element a GM uses, from settings to plot hooks and more. We all have tools we’re comfortable using, but falling back on those too often without changing things up will get repetitive for your players. Review the NPCs you’ve used most often and determine if you need to bring in someone with a different flavor to spice things up. Try and think about it from the player’s perspective as well; you may know the background differences between some NPCs, but they may all look the same to the players.

Not every NPC needs to be distinct and interesting. Sometimes a bartender really is just a bartender. The ones that do matter, though, should be as varied and interesting as the rest of the world your PCs inhabit. It’s a skill that can take time to develop, but with a little practice you’ll see the difference in how your players interact with the world. The first time they get emotional about an NPC, whether they’re protective of them or intending to murder them, you’ll know you’ve gotten it right.

Have you found yourself in a rut with your NPCs? I’m curious how other people have fixed the problem of NPCs not helping bring the game world to life quite right.

  The Usual Suspects: NPCs and You published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com