Screw the Rules, I Have Good Design

This is a super nerdy article totally focused on making games. I've been irritated lately by things that follow this mold, so it's only natural that I mention it. If you're not a super nerd planning on making your own game someday, you can probably skip this. It has some value for GMing though, since a lot of GMs make house rules.

One of the thing that annoys me in game design is when people insist on making things a certain way because they need to conform to existing, previous design decisions.

I don't quite think I can explain this very well, so I'll use an example to illustrate.

Waaaay back in the 90s there was this popular fighting game called Mortal Kombat. A lot of you guys have probably heard of it! The characters in MK were very similar. They all had the same normal moves with the same hitboxes, and they all had the same number of special moves. One characters had an exception (Johnny Cage's groin punch). This game was really, really not that fun design. Most of it was about playing the best character (probably Sub-Zero; Scorpion had an anti-projectile teleport though, making it not so clear-cut) who had slightly better versions of the same watered-down moves.

Mortal Kombat never really strayed from this design much. Characters continued to have very similar basic attacks and fairly similar special moves. Although different characters became the best, it was still clearly in favor of characters that had broken gameplay elements or slightly better versions of the same boring special moves.

By contrast, around the same time, there was Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition (CE for short). CE was an older, more busted/abusive version of SF compared to the newer versions of the game (HF, Super SF2, ST, and HDR) but it was much more refined than Street Fighter 2. The moves in CE were very different from each other. Ken's low medium kick was vastly different than Sagat's in both reach, power, and utility. Projectiles in the game fired at varying speeds, recovered at different times, and had very different amounts of hit stun and damage. Special moves had radically different properties as a whole - Bison's torpedo (psycho crusher) behaved much differently than Honda's torpedo (sumo headbutt) despite being similar moves.

SF2 would definitely be the harder game to balance. It's had a lot of iterations whereas each Mortal Kombat game, with the exception of 3, has had only one (3 had a version called Ultimate Mortal Kombat, with a lot of new characters and the same basic gameplay). While MK was never really ever balanced at all (MK vs. DC sure isn't) it would have taken the developers much more effort. Why didn't they?

The problem really is rules. Moves in the old MK universe (not sure if this is entirely true but I suspect it still is) follow a certain design guideline. Moves deal x amount of damage if they're a certain kind of hit, and put you in a certain type of stun. Moves that knock you up or down or launch you around all launch you in a certain way. Rather than fine-tune these values, the MK designers set up a bunch of guidelines for how they'd make abilities, and just sat down and made a bunch of skills and threw them into the game. This is from what I have seen still the case even in the more recent MK games, although there's a lot more types of attack now so there is more diversity.

This isn't really for fighting game design though. It's far more of a pen and paper or MMORPG type of design. D&D 4th suffers from it a little bit, and Returners FFRPG has a lot of it there. These systems are good uses of rules to create lots of cool things, but Returners in particular is kind of bad about having not enough flexibility (particularly in the equipment area).

There's another type of design that totally throws rules out the window. In fact, this is pretty much the entire design behind SF2CE and most SF games in general. This design says, design a lot of broken stuff, make your characters really unique, and hand the broken stuff out, a few to each character. This is also the method WoW uses, notably. After you've totally thrown your game on its head you can then adjust things.

Most games use this method, and it is also bad. The main reason it is bad is that you can very easily create metagame shifts - if you give some class something you don't think is that bad and it then becomes overpowered, many people will switch to playing that class and abusing the tactic you gave them. Even worse, when you fix the imbalance (nerf it!) people get pissed.

The only way this design strategy is even sort of good is if your players can easily adjust to changes. A good example of doing this is Guild Wars. When skills get changed, GW players can easily change out their skills for different ones and there are numerous quality build options for any given class in both PvE and PvP.

A bad example of this is World of Warcraft. Classes are forced to take skills (or be less effective) so nerfing them is generally bad stuff. For instance, if one were to nerf a rogue's crippling poison so that it was less effective, the rogue could not change that ability out. While there is some ability to change talents, any change to a class can resonate strongly. Also, talent changes cost the player valuable gold and are quite expensive, especially for lower level players who are more likely to make mistakes.

A really bad example of this is Ragnarok Online. In RO, if you mess up your character's build with an errant misclick, it costs you real money to fix. Prior to the introduction of the cash shop, which lets you spend real money for things in the game, you could not fix these errors at all. One misclick meant you'd need to delete your character and make a new one. If the developers ever change the way the game is played by altering skills or adding new equipment that forces you to re-stat your character, you have to pay real money to fix the problem or delete your character.

The moral of this story is really to never play RO.

So there's a third way to design, and it involves rules but only sort of. It's way harder to start but way easier to balance. That method is using a design skeleton. It's a made-up-ish term and I feel sort of nerdy using it. Oh well.

What I mean by design skeleton is that you take a base character and give him some things he can do no matter what. This stuff should be common to everyone - some classes or characters might not have these traits in favor of powerful other tricks but the basic character skeleton is shared by all characters as a default.

To illustrate this somewhat I'm going to bring up a game that no one actually played, Tabula Rasa. In TR every character could use a ranged weapon with a certain base amount of skill, so everyone could defend themselves. They could also melee with their ranged weapon too. These abilities were NOT sub-standard. I made a support character (healer type) and I had a significant number of weapon switches, including shotguns and rifles. I did not even use my class specific weapon and instead relied on basic guns as backup to my class powers.

Even better in my opinion is that every class in that game had some access to self heals in the form of repair kits and modules to repair damaged armor. The healer classes were way better at it and could do many things like area effect repairs and large single target repairs, but everyone could recover from lots of damage if they took cover and used repair kits.

This did not exclude my healer class or the combat classes. My friends played assault classes, and I was able to greatly aid them with my repair packs and 'magic' spells, which were better than the assault characters' repairs and magic, and let them focus on shooting things with their assault class guns. Still, there were times when my repair kits weren't needed and my mana was low, and I happily pulled out my rifle or shotgun and did some blasty.

This design is absolutely awesome. I especially liked the fact that assault characters could aid themselves if I couldn't get to them, either due to reloading (med/armor/shield packs took a long time to reload, so if you ran out of uses in the pack you'd have to wait a few seconds) or because I wasn't close enough. The main failings of TR was a bad beta filled with bugs (which led to bad PR), and characters that weren't unique enough. The end game classes were really sexy, though.

With a game design like TR's where baseline characters are able to function, you have more wiggle room for broken design elements. I would take it one step further, though.

Another really good example of design skeleton is hidden in World of Warcraft. That element is the "PvP trinket." Once per couple of minutes, any character can use this trinket to get out of a control effect for free, and it protects them from control effects for a very brief period. Every character has equal access to this trinket for very minimal effort. I know it's one of the cheapest items to buy with honor points, although I got mine for getting ranking (which was also very easy).

This trinket lets people break free of chain fears or stuns for a moment and gives them a chance to turn a battle around. It doesn't give them a complete pass, since it lasts only a few moments and has a long cooldown. This means you've got to use it intelligently, but it means that if you fight against a complete stun lockdown or fear/charm chain, you've got a few seconds to break free and stop them from keeping the lockdown going. This means you've always got a shot in a fight - a rogue can't ambush you from behind and stun you forever with no way to fight back until you die (It's worth noting that rogues in particular are kind of good at re-stunning you immediately after it runs out, but warlocks can have a hard time dealing with the trinket).

Other good examples include universal mobility options. These options need to have counters, but things like dashes, flying, multiple jumps, or whatever are pretty good at forcing the fight to go in different directions. A player should always have the avenue of escape if it's a fight they can't win. On the flip side, these options should not be entirely uncounterable. A good example might be a stamina meter so that dashes cannot be used to just flee forever. Another good example might be snares/movement slow that some characters can employ to keep others from fleeing.

Within this design structure you do need to look at all the pieces though and design counters around them. For instance, if you have absolute methods of escape such as teleportation, you need to design a counter to that, such as a class that can lay down anti-teleport fields or has a debuff that cancels teleporting skills. To that end, you also need to be able to counter those elements, so the anti-teleport field needs to be small enough to be escapable, or needs to be able to be destroyed. The teleport debuff should be able to be removed by friendly players, and so on. This creates strategy elements that enhance the game, rather than subtract from it.

Another important thing within the design skeleton is giving people abilities which obsolete elements of the design skeleton. If you give everyone a dash for escaping, some characters might get a better dash ability or a flight or double jump. These characters probably won't use their dash very much in favor of using their other skills. Another better example is the repair kits one, where normal characters can use repair kits to heal themselves, but healers can do a much better job on both other characters and themselves. These things are perfectly normal and natural elements, and should be encouraged.

If you make characters decent without needing special powers, you'll find people that will experiment a lot more with those special powers. This is good, fun, and enhances your game. And when you make changes, people won't feel as much like their character is useless, because even without their special powers at 100%, characters can still contribute.

This does not preclude the use of easy 're-skill' options that let players fix their characters. Always, always let players fix their mistakes.

Game Reviewers Suck

This post was conceived on Friday, for the record.

Game reviewers are notoriously bad. I'm referring to any game reviewer. They just don't get games.

It kind of makes sense, because if a game reviewer had enough sense to know what made a good game, they might be making their own. That's what Sirlin did, right?

Most game reviewers aren't literary geniuses. Am I wrong for suggesting that the literary merit of a video game be judged by people with backgrounds in literary analysis? It sounds common sense to me.

I'm not really serious on that point, honestly. I don't think you should have a lit degree to be able to judge a game's plot. However, people judge stories by the quality of the actual story itself, often making points towards originality. However, in most cases I would argue that the value of a story is in the method it takes to get to the individual plot points. In general I think this is really glazed over by game reviewers.

Case in point: Mass Effect was a really awesome game. Most people who read this site either haven't played the game (go!) or probably liked it. The story in Mass Effect, most people would agree, is pretty awesome. I wouldn't say that it's original though. It had a fairly stereotypical space opera plot, but the devil was in the details, in the actual storytelling. I feel like no game reviewer ever gets this right.

Gameplay is the single most important part of a game for me. It's also never elaborated on by game reviewers. Occasionally game reviewers get little snippets of why a game should feel right. Typically they say things like how Halo 1 'just felt right' and such. They don't say things like the slower gameplay make things easier to pick up on, or weapons have the right killpower without feeling too strong, grenades had the right arc, right blast radius, etc. Never does a game reviewer get nitpicky with a game, and when they do it's to complain about something like "throwing fireballs in SF over and over is so easy and people do it all the time on XBL."

Just recently I had a friend who played the new Bionic Commando. I've never played this game before. He said to me that the game felt really satisfying. He then went on in great detail about how the bionic arm physics worked, and what you could do with the arm. He brought up sample scenarios of things you could do with the arm to illustrate what awesome things you could do in the game.

When I read a review of Devil May Cry 3 a long time ago, none of the awesome things Dante could do, such as midair leaping off enemies, wall running, air dashing, midair combos, teleporting, and so on were even addressed. When I actually talked with friends I explained all of these things and they asked how you could do it, and I explained to them. I explained also that the game was too damn hard for mortals and most people would not be able to play it, but because of the stuff I said about the game, people wanted to play it anyway. Heh.

Music and sound effects are a mixed bag. A lot of game reviewers don't have the slightest clue about how to talk about them. Generally, sound effects should produce a psychological effect when they're heard, like the noise when you fire a gun should be satisfying, the sound when you jump should make you feel a certain way, and so on. Most reviewers are like "sound effects did the job, k" and move along. I feel this is generally worse than bringing it up at all.

Lastly is the 'fun' categories. Generally people totally wipe out at this because fun is highly subjective. I see fun categories pretty much all the time but they are pretty much useless. Some of us like matching colored jewels together, others enjoy reading huge walls of dialogue, and others like fighting through crowds of bad guys with chopsticks. What's fun for you? Ultimately this is the category which determines a purchase or a rental, but it is too subjective.

Fun can be distilled though, if we run it through a peer review process. A lot of game magazines do a sort of mediocre effort at this. If we want a solid review of what makes a game fun, a majority of a game publication's staff should play the game, and give briefly what makes the game exciting, and the game's flaws. Instead, we have one guy that writes a huge biased article with maybe one other person's opinion on the matter.

I think the biggest troublemaker in the game reviewing world is Yahtzee. He pretty much provides no useful information in any of his reviews. I just watched a couple of reviews of his, and they're pretty much of no value in purchasing games. They're interesting as entertainment value, sure (especially if you've already played the game) but are pretty much useless as an actual review tool. He addresses annoying, superficial points that often don't matter or are totally overblown, and tangents on things that have nothing to do with games.

But hey, he's more popular than me, so what do I know?

Got Your Nose

Deception can take on many forms. However, for us nerds in competition it serves a very important purpose. This is because when we play competitive games, our opponent must not know our intentions. If we disguise our intentions, it makes it much more difficult for them to read us. If the opponent can't read us, they have to guess to counter us.

As I mentioned in my previous articles, the first step is to know what your intentions are. You must be aware of each choice in a decision point. If you're at tempo advantage for instance, your natural answer is to keep attacking, and so your opponent will want to stop you from attacking. They might block, or they might do some counter move, or try to parry, or some other attack. You could guess what they're going to do. You could also condition them so they want to do one thing instead of another.

In a situation at tempo advantage, the best way of deception is to condition them not to do something when you are at advantage. A good example might be to do the fastest possible actions at tempo advantage, which discourages them from attacking. Then instead of attacking quickly, do a slower, unblockable move or a move that hits in a difficult way (such as a low attack or overhead).

As mentioned before, conditioning is a good way to persuade the opponent into doing something. But we're talking about deception here. In poker, deception is very powerful. If you can fool people into thinking you are strong when you are not, you will win many many games of poker.

Once upon a time, I was playing Capcom vs. SNK 2 with a friend of mine. It was a very tense moment and I was winning, up about 75% of my Sagat's life against his Zangief, who was almost dead at about 20%. He had a full super meter though and I told him that if he wanted to win, he would have to land final atomic buster, Zangief's throw super. Throughout the match, I reinforced this idea, that he would have to FAB me in order to win. Zangief also has another super though. It's an air grab super that jumps up and grabs people in the air and does a lot of damage, although not as much as FAB. I whiffed a crouching fierce in front of Zangief and he rolled at me. He rolled through my fierce punch, and I saw the super flash. In this situation, it would be better for me to jump, to avoid the FAB since if you jump you will avoid the grab.

But in this situation I stood still because I knew he would not do the FAB since I had been commenting on it for a good 45+ seconds. He did the airgrab predictably, I hit him out of the air and went on to win the match.

In Magic, the same can be said for cards in your hand. If you are a green player, you might pretend that you have some powerful instant casting card (such as Giant Growth) that makes one of your creature cards more powerful. If you have this buff in your hand, you might be able to use it to wipe out one of their creatures, putting you at a strong board advantage. If they think you have this card, they'll be more likely to make safer moves, which can benefit you.

So in the situation that you have the card, your 'tells' will be based around what you want them to do. If you want them to lose resources to you, you'll want to put up the air that you don't have the card. You might lie to them and say you don't have any in your deck, or just act like you don't have many tricks or are drawing bad cards. Then when they make the "smart" attacking play, you can block and pump up with giant growth, making your creature defeat theirs.

If you want them to play passively so your deck has time to build up, you'll want to suggest that you have a G-growth in your hand so that they don't attack for fear of losing card advantage, and don't block for fear of losing card advantage. In this way, you can build up your defenses safely and they won't want to attack. In some cases the fake won't stop them, but you can reinforce it quickly with a real threat - all it takes is for them to lose a strong creature to a weak blocker that gets buffed by an instant spell to make the threat very real. After that, all you have to do is suggest that you might have a G-growth in your hand. Better yet, suggest that you don't. Reverse psychology works really well.

What about... StarCraft? I haven't mentioned that game in a while.

Zerg are -really- good at deception. I'm a protoss player, but I love zerg. Zerg can spawn from any hatchery, and you can morph them into any type of unit you want with only one building needed, unlike terrans or protoss. Protoss need templar archives, gateways, robotics facilities, and so on. Zerg just need hatcheries and the appropriate tech building. So it is not uncommon to see someone switch from a heavy muta air build into a hydra/lurker ground build, to an ultra/defiler ground build as the situation demands. If you're playing versus terran, they have different counters for zerg. They need goliath/valkyrie to counter mutas, or tons of medics and marines. They need tanks to counter lurkers. By switching tech on your opponent, you screw with their counters. If you know a terran player's tendencies, you can run mutas to get them to build turrets and make lots of medic/marine, then switch to hydra/lurker and really screw their day. Now they've got to build tanks and sci vessels, except that takes a ton of effort and resources. If you're good with lurkers, you can just walk them right up to the enemy base unless they counter.

Yeah, I don't play zerg because they take too much micro, but man, they rock.

One thing I liked doing in first person shooter games with large maps is act as a spotter without actually engaging. I'd watch many enemies move in and I'd call them as they come in, but I wouldn't engage myself. After the enemy attack had moved in, I'd attack the back end and kill guys from behind. By hiding my presence I could get a couple kills and make things way easier on the defending guys. In general, this meant we could defend with way fewer people and could devote much of our force to offense.

Another thing I liked to do in Halo is mask attacks on the enemy base in order to steal their vehicles. With a large attacking force, a group of us would attack the enemy in our vehicles. Other people would sneak in and steal the enemy vehicles and drive them to hiding places and park them, so that the enemy would not have any respawning vehicles at their base until they came to our hiding spots on foot and got them back. In the meantime, our attacking force was attacking the objective, but really they were just stalling for time so that the defenders would not stop people from stealing their vehicles (Actually, the attackers didn't know what was going on, but we did, so basically they died so we could steal vehicles. Oh well, we won anyway~)

Tricking people into doing something is sweetness. A good idea is to position yourself such that there is one very obvious thing you want to do. Then... do it! If your opponent is very good, he will probably think you are tricking him into defending against the obvious thing, then he will try to do what beats the counter move instead.

If your opponent is knocked down, you might rush at him and huddle very close as though you are going to throw him. This seems like an obvious bait for a dragon punch. Your opponent would never fall for that, so instead he will try to take the advantage, except you actually do the throw, and he gets thrown. Very tricky!

So what about real life? It is pretty nerdy to take a skill like this and apply it only in competition, right?

The answer is that you should generally not try to decieve people in real life situations. It is okay to be tricky in competition, because in the end you still show respect for the person, and in its own way, tricking and decieving them shows respect for them - it says, "you are a good enough player that I'm forced to hide my intentions when I'm playing against you."

Lying and hiding the truth in real life though are not respectful things. There is no competition or prize to be won by being dishonest.

All in Your Head

I was asked specifically to do an article on stress management. Don't hate me because I personally think this article sucks.

In order to write this article I had to do homework. I'll be really honest here. I have no idea how to deal with stress. I'm not a very stressed person generally, but doing the research for this article made me realize that when I do get stressed I tend to express it poorly. For instance, when I'm in a gaming tournament, I generally play far worse than I do in casuals. My most recent SF4 tournament, I lost in the first round to a bad Ryu player. At the last K-con SC4 tournament, I lost in the quarter finals to someone probably better than me, but the match was incredibly horrible and I made tons of mistakes.

My research generally wasn't very promising either. 99% of the stuff I read suggested either something new-agey or escapist as a means of dealing with stress. If you want any of these new-age stress management links from me, post a comment and I'll dole out some links. I have no doubt they do work for people who live generally stressful lives, but they do absolutely no good for people like me.

The escapist things, like going for a walk, or doing yoga or whatever nonsense probably works for people with stressful lives. However, when you are in a pressure situation and your performance actually matters, it doesn't work at all. You can't pause your tournament match of SF4 and do some yoga or walk out of your job interview and go jogging a few miles. You've got to cope with the stress and turn it into a positive energy that empowers you.

One way to improve your overall stress management skills in crunch time is, annoyingly, lifestyle changes. Now generally I prefer technique, such as when you get into situation x, do move y and it handles the situation better. However, healthy lifestyle changes such as eating better, exercise, and basically anything that puts dopamine in your system helps you cope with stress, since dopamine puts you in a positive state of mind. The studies I read state that cigarette smoking doesn't help (stimulants in general don't) even though dopamine is a product, which was sort of surprising to me. Marijuana does, scarily enough, as does moderate drinking (eg. a beer here or there; excessive drinking hurts).

Don't take that as an advertisement to go smoke weed, by the way.

Anyway, lifestyle changes only work if you practice them beforehand - don't go smoke a joint before a poker tournament then ask me why you lost. The idea is that you influence your body to produce more good chemicals on a regular basis. I say lifestyle changes because it's not just stuff you put in your body. Having healthy friendships and romantic relationships helps us cope with stress better and it's not just because those people are there for moral support. The relationship actually puts chemicals in our blood that help us deal with problems even when they're not around.

As a side note, rumor has it that sex is a pretty good performance drug. Coffee, soft drinks, and cigarettes are not! Don't smoke before a big match, or drink energy drinks. Drink fruit juice (pulpy juice is best) and eat a low-fat, high-fiber breakfast or lunch. Chocolate chip cookies are a pretty good performance drug, especially oatmeal chocolate chip (I'm seriously not joking).

Next idea is to care less about what you're doing. I know, laugh. I know it's ridiculous but it's so true! If you care less about the outcome of whatever it is that you're doing, you'll be less stressed about it but more importantly you'll perform better.

I am someone who used to be gifted with good local competition in Soul Calibur. For a long time, 3 of the 4 best players in my state, who were also among the top 20 or so in the Northwest, were local to me. Of those 3 (I'm one of them), I was the better player. When I played against the other 2 in casuals it typically resulted in somewhere between 6-4 (bad days) and 8-2 (in the zone) win ratios for me. In competition, I almost always played better against them than the other top players, typically playing like I was 'in the zone'. When I played against decent (but typically worse) players, I tended to play a lot worse, and most tournaments I play in, I tend to get upset by someone not quite as good as me (occasionally I meet someone really good, but usually that results in me getting pasted). By comparison, the other people in my crew that I beat on a regular basis typically place first and second, and generally no lower than top four.

The reason for this is because I care far less about matches against my friends than I do about unknowns. I know I can beat my friends - I've studied their playstyles and I know them inside and out. They know my game too, so they have the same advantage against me - but despite that I know I can win. Against an unknown, there are many variables I have to think about, and it causes me a lot of stress. I am well known for losing matches against people when I could just beat them with standard frame traps and pressure (not really even having to think) just because I try to think too hard during the match.

Just saying "relax" doesn't work. Care less. The lesson is that the outcome doesn't matter as much as you think it does, so don't worry about it as much. Most likely your life will go on no matter what, and you'll be able to make up your failures even if it takes some time. If it is a life or death thing, such as a combat situation, even still worrying about it will just make you screw up. Just focus on doing what you know, because the outside stuff will just screw with your brain and make you lose your skills.

Foreknowledge helps. "Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance" is how the saying goes. If you know what to do in a particular situation, if you've got the skills to pay the bills, handling the rest is easy. If you're a guy, most likely you can just convince yourself you have the skills even if you don't.

Yes, I realize that's kind of sexist.

What's most important in this scenario is that you believe you can succeed if you just stick to your guns. This doesn't always work in competitive games but it works in pretty much any other scenario, including job interviews, college exams, and oral presentations. If you're confident in your material and your skills, it'll help you deal with the task ahead.

Preparation in general is sort of a relaxer. If you actually make the prep time, it helps to really boost confidence. A good example might be if you do rehersals before a performance and the rehersals go well. You can duplicate that scenario for an oral presentation or job interview. Combo practice and practice matches before a tournament help a lot. I used to never play casuals before a tournament because I believed 'going in cold bore' helped keep me from making dumb mistakes and kept people from learning my tricks. This is not a good idea in actual execution and you should really practice as much as you can before an event without exhausting yourself physically or mentally.

Going back to lifestyle really quick - SLEEP. I can't stress how important good sleep is for performing at 100%. Go to bed early if you have to - don't take sleeping pills. Eat a good meal (low fat, high fiber, eat a lot of food) and get some quality rest. If you sleep well and eat well beforehand you will feel over 9000 times better in the morning.

Anyway, that's most of what I have - stick to your guns, practice, live healthy and don't take the stressful situation too seriously.

And uh... don't rely on any new-age tricks or escapist methods of dealing with stress. Work with your problems, don't try to ignore them.

Minimum Standards of Entry

Somewhere along the line I realized that I'm biased.

I read a lot of other social blogs and post little random comments here and there. Most of the authors there and I have a lot of overlap. Most of them are pretty cool guys and post lots of cool stuff. Some of them post on scary stuff like religion, which I am too much of a wimp to do (I'm not a religious person so my beliefs are probably offensive to most people who read this).

The odd stuff is where we disagree. I lose a little bit of respect when self-help social bloggers suggest things about religion that I don't agree with (or more accurately, misinterpret non-religious people). I also don't really like it when people suggest that eating a normal diet is inherently bad (I realize it probably is from a health standpoint, but I am a gamer, not a dietitian).

Sometimes I need to expand my views slightly. In the case of the diet thing it is a good thing to eat better, to lose weight, and to be more healthy. It's also a good thing to stop smoking. I write a blog about mental health and self-improvement, and quitting smoking or otherwise improving your physical health is definitely along the path of self-improvement. I personally hold those values kind of low, but I realize that actually these things are important to some people. I doubt I'll write much about physical health, but thinking on my bias a little helps me refine my viewpoints a little better.

The religion issue is sticky, and I feel a bit troubled writing about it. I am a nonreligious person. I absolutely respect people with religious beliefs though, and try to give them as much room as I can to practice their beliefs around me without being obstructive or telling them that they are inherently wrong or anything like that. Unfortunately, religious people are not willing to do the same for me, or most people practicing other religions not their own. Religious debates are very difficult and frustrating because neither one will just accept or understand the other's side as a valid belief choice (it's not like we have definitive proof of any of these things - just clues that compel us to believe). This is why I don't talk about religion - it's hard for people to understand that I don't believe because there's not enough hard facts in religion's favor, but if there were, I'd believe because it'd be obviously correct.

That of course, brings me to the actual topic. This is another rant.

I can't stand closed-minded people. I look at the people that annoy me most - drama queens, selfish jerks, and so on. The people that frustrate me the most are closed-minded people.

The reason why I dislike them so much is because it is absolutely impossible to have a real discussion with a closed-minded person.

A discussion with a normal person has us talking about a subject. I talk about my views on the subject. The other person will explain their views. I will say what I think about their views, and they'll provide a rebuttal, to better explain the reasons why they have them. If I agree with that rebuttal, I'll say so, and say that the person's views on the subject are valid. If I don't, then I'll say so. Sometimes this might end with neither person giving in, but because most people are at least somewhat open minded we will typically agree to disagree. There will be respect given for each person's point.

A closed minded person is different. They openly attack viewpoints not their own. When I explain to them how their beliefs are wrong (or even just that I disagree with them) they treat it as a personal attack and get defensive. Instead of respecting other people's viewpoints, a closed-minded person condemns them.

What bothers me so much is that closed-minded people then create a barrier that keeps them from gaining any new understanding. If a closed-minded person thinks that the world is flat, they will not accept evidence that shows that the world is not flat. They will probably treat the presentation of evidence as a personal attack, and openly condemn whoever provided it. They will probably launch attacks against that person's credibility, or use other logical fallacies in order to make the person look bad, or their argument seem wrong.

But the truth stands strong. When people try to condemn the truth, it stands firm, and people can see how ridiculous these closed-minded people are. The world is round and the earth rotates around the sun.

There is a minimum standard of entry for my respect. You -must- be an open minded person. If you are not, I cannot respect you. I cannot respect someone who chooses their uneducated ways of thinking instead of shedding their mental restraints and growing and improving as a person. No matter how much I grow as a person, this point will remain the same. If you can't take the world around you and the advice of others and change yourself, I cannot respect you.

If you're reading this and are closed-minded (unlikely!), you can change. Do it.

Actually angry?

This is not such a good post. I'm really irritated at people in general right now.

Redefining Nerds was created with the idea that I could help people. It's life-changing information for people who need a little bit of a push in the right direction. People that read it let me know in IMs and such that it's helped them out quite a bit.

This isn't so much for the people that read this site, because generally if you've actually decided to come here and read, you're probably on the right path. The problem I have is with people I talk to either on websites, in IM, in chat, or in MMOs.

Most people I talk to are okay, honestly. They have a pretty good sense of right and wrong, and understand when they make mistakes. I explain to them what was a good choice when they make a bad one, and they are usually like 'yeah, but blah makes me mad' and so on. This is okay. I feel like most people in the world fall into this category.

The people I can't stand are the selfish, jerkface people that do not have this natural code of ethics. Although they would not believe so unless you told them to their face, they absolutely do not care about anything except what they want. Anything said that they don't agree with is treated as a personal attack, and any personal goals they make are purely selfish. Any selfless actions these people do are only to make themselves look better in the eyes of other people.

Am I bad because I really, really dislike these people? I feel bad because I should not hate anyone. I am frustrated with myself because these people are horrible and I cannot change them, I can only feed their ego with attention. What do I do?

This has frustrated me a lot lately. Should I hate them, shun them? Should I actively seek their downfall? Probably not. But I struggle daily with this sort of dilemma.

What do we do with people who genuinely are only in it for themselves?

Please Select Your Character!

I get in debates all the time about how to make a character in a roleplaying game. Most people I talk with suggest that concept is the most important thing about a character and that everything else should fit around it.

I dislike this theory. I'll be talking about RP-oriented characters here, so mostly pen and paper characters. However, if you roleplay in other games such as MUDs or MMOs or whichever, this is also valuable information.

My belief is that one must take a balanced approach to character building. You can't be happy with a character if your guy or girl isn't fun to play in game terms. You'll also be less happy if your character isn't interesting in roleplaying terms. Separating roleplaying even further, your character needs a good, interesting personality and enough backstory to look into as the game progresses.

The first thing I recommend is a style. You don't want it to be too specific, but you want to help shape what your character's class and abilities will be, and give you an insight into their personality. If you have no idea on your character's personality, skip this step. We'll come back to roleplaying design in general later, so this is just a kicker to get you started.

Your style is mostly your character's general attitude (cocky? shy? smart? funny? wise?) combined with a few little things about what your character does in adventuring (hack things with swords? magic? sneakyness? diplomacy?). Don't be too specific at this step. No backstory, period. If this step results in you being only able to pick one class or build or whatever at this point, you've gone much too far.

Build is the next important thing. If you're not good at this step, ask someone who is. I cannot stress this enough - it is a total pain in the butt to go through a whole campaign as a character whose abilities you decide aren't fun.

First, eliminate anything that doesn't fit your character's style. This step should be pretty obvious. If this narrows your choices down to one thing, ask yourself very seriously if that's what you want. Then ask your pro minmaxer friends if it's a good idea. I've been asked before if some top tier build or strategy would be good by roleplaying friends before. I explained very indepth that it was, and why it was. They went on to make characters that they had a blast playing.

Anyway, even if you think you're a pro minmaxer it's good to ask friends for advice anyway. When I wanted to make a particular character, I asked one of my good pro minmaxer friends if it was a good idea, and he talked about his experiences and how he thought my idea would not be fun. In the end his advice helped me make a choice that I would enjoy.

Anyway, through trial and error (talking with pro friends) you should come to a character class and spec that you will be happy with. Most roleplayers scoff at me when I suggest this step. However, when I go over this step with roleplaying friends they come to me and say how fun playing their character is. When I go back to the people who scoff at me, they are playing their concept characters and being like "well I like my character, but I don't really like this or this" to which I reply "well you should have taken these abilities instead, and it would be more fun for you."

So after you have your style and basic idea for character and a concrete (set mostly in stone) build, you get to the fun parts. You can do the next two steps in either order.

What is their personality? Now that we know their skills and such we can think more clearly on who they are as a person. What drives them and motivates them?

One of the big tests I do for each player in my PnP games is to have them sit down and do a MBTI type analysis (in character) such as the one on humanmetrics.com. Even if the end result isn't exactly what the player is expecting, letting them answer the questions helps put them in the mindset to play that character better. All of the players I've run this through have said it's an amazing tool as long as they're not being held to exactly what the test says. That's not the point, though. The point is to aid you in 'thinking in character.'

As with the build portion you'll want to probably ask people about this sort of thing. The GM will be able to give you advice here but that's more important for our last step. Other players will be able to say "this sounds fun" or give you suggestions for your personality.

The last step is backstory and justifications. This is the fun part for me. It's fun to minmax, sure, but it's much more fun to make up why all the minmaxing actually occurs. At this point we know your characters' abilities and probably their future ones too. We know a lot about their personality, although maybe we don't if you skipped step 3 (you'll need to do it after this).

Go over everything your character can do and ask yourself, "why?" If you can't figure out exactly why right offhand, come back to it. This should be organic, really, and it can take place during Step 2. If you've got certain skills you picked out, ask yourself, "Why did I learn them? Who taught them to me?" If you've got certain powers or abilities, ask yourself exactly why they are what they are. What do they do outside of the world of game mechanics?

This is the best time to hook up with the GM because he can give you tons of details about your world. If this is a MUD/MMO environment, get with a fellow player who knows a lot about the game world. If you do this then you can more easily integrate yourself into the game world. It gives you more hooks because people don't have to interact directly with something about you - they only have to be interested in some other aspect of the already existing game world, letting you get involved more easily in roleplaying.

The other trick is that in a pen and paper world you can actually create parts of the game world this way. The GM most likely doesn't have his whole world designed, so any bit of it you want to include into your game helps his job a lot. Unless he is the DM of the Rings, anyway.

Lastly, after our four steps, we want to finish up. Add some finishing touches to your personality or backstory, and fine-tune your abilities to better match up to your character's history. Sometimes this involves making small sacrifices in ability, but don't worry about that as much as you should worry about the overall concept. Talk with your powergamer friends about any choices you make (sometimes seemingly small choices are huge) and talk with your GM about any tweaks to your character or backstory.

Every little bit you let your GM know keeps him in the loop. More importantly, it lets him know you're excited about playing, and that helps keep him motivated. When I have players that are really into my game and want to do things in it, it really motivates me to make new and cool stuff for them to explore and discover.

I'm going to go over my player group now because literally all of them used this method and all of them are extremely excited about the characters they are playing.

Fejn is a samurai who hears the spirit of the sword. Her people live in the forest, and hear the spirits of the trees, but not Fejn. She listens to the heart of the sword, instead. The spirit of the blade guides and protects her. In game mechanics she is a dual wielding monstrosity that can handle literally any threat, and she has tons of HP, too.

Maximillion (yes the 'o' is intentional) is a young, naive engineer who grew up under a family of traders. He's curious about the world and incredibly optimistic, and his gadgets are always handy to have around. In game mechanics, he's incredibly number crunched and he has the potential to do the highest single hit damage of any character. He also produces a number of different gadgets, each with some gamebreaking special effect in the form of either buffs or debuffs.

Seanna is a blind mage from the same people as Fejn, and she is relatively naive compared to most mages. She has impressive magical talent, though, and is a natural expert at all forms of magic, both offensive and defensive. In game mechanics, she also deals ridiculous damage from the main types of magic available to her class, and is reasonably durable despite being a 'squishie' type of character. Her blindness is done in the sake of minmaxing but creates awesome character drama.

Kalenreth, or Kal is a wolf-man thief with ties to the local thieves' guild. He's got a skill for literally any scenario, thanks to his guild training. He's a big loudmouth but his mouth is equally good for getting him out of a jam. He's relatively loyal to his party but his first loyalty is to the thieves guild. He won't hesitate to do whatever it takes to get the job done. In game mechanics, he's got a skill for everything, he's nimble and hard to hit, and he often supplies the party with stolen goods.

Spencer, although that's not actually his real name, is a bounty hunter. His goals don't really mesh well with the rest of the party, but in Spencer's player's case that's sort of the point. He creates a lot of interesting drama, and his practical advice often tempers the rest of the team to consider things they otherwise wouldn't. In gameplay terms he's also an offensive beast, but he has flexible damage types and control effects added in, giving him some added punch to make up for his less-than-Faen/Max single hit power. He can also use his control effects while still tearing stuff up, which is highly effective.

Eddie is kind of the exception. He's an older sorceror with the power to summon incredible creatures. He's the most powerful class in gameplay terms but he is kind of a wallflower. Still, he has fun playing his character despite being kind of a wallflower player. He built his character mostly around being strong but has no idea what is strong. He is by far not having the most fun out of all of my players.

Thus! You should use this method whenever possible! It will let you make fun, enjoyable characters and everyone will have an awesome time playing with you.