Monthly Archives: May 2010

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

I wonder whether PvP MMO games such as All Points Bulletin should adopt a gear system which is inverted to the norm for most MMOs, such that players start with powerful gear that degrades to a constant level, rather than having to work up to the level of gear of the early adopters by struggling against those same – now seemingly overpowered – early adopters.

It’s like have an Olympic race where you’ve trained yourself to be an excellent athlete at the four hundred metres event with times towards the low end of the forty second bracket, but when you turn up you find out that all the runners who competed last year now have bionic leg replacements that mean they can run it in the low thirties. The problem is that the only way to get bionic legs yourself is to win against the guys who already have them. So your competitive goal actually turns in to trying to convince one of the bionic competitors to give you a piggy back, and the whole race turns into some sort of perverse bionic Grand National with unenhanced jockeys riding around on the backs of whichever bionic big boy they can convince to carry them.

I just don’t think PvP is compatible with the traditional gear system of MMOs because game knowledge and skill is already a massive obstacle for the new player to overcome, layering on an additional artificial ‘gear gap’ makes for a game that will be inordinately intimidating to all but the most dedicated of masochists. This is why I think Counter Strike was (perhaps still is) the darling of the FPS online world for so long, because it used gear to allow players to specialise into different roles based on their personal preference or what the map demanded, without creating any sort of gap between the new and veteran players; yet if you visit a Counter Strike server as a new player you will know who the veteran players are quickly enough, because they will be the ones who understand the map and use its terrain to their advantage, but if you play carefully and craftily, you have every much a chance at killing them as they do you. This is why I think that adding gear levels to FPS games in order to keep players grinding away at them is such a massive mistake by gaming companies, because yes, you may well keep the early adopters invested in your game for longer, but once your game has been established for a week or two you essentially close the doors to a huge proportion of the potential new player population.

When you take these things into consideration, it quickly becomes clear just how good EVE Online’s skill training and ‘ship role’ systems are for allowing players to have disparate levels of ‘gear’ and yet still participate in PvP in a meaningful way.

Today’s post was brought to you by the phrase ‘Oh look, I’ve been two-shot by a magnum having emptied my entire automatic rifle clip into them without any discernible effect’, and the command ‘/quit’.

A civil guest will no more talk all, than eat all the feast

With everyone weighing in on the “Are Games Art?” debate sparked by Roger Ebert, Tim and Jon of the Van Hemlock Podcast (to which you obviously subscribe, but just in case you don’t, do) decided that to properly tackle the subject needed a widely recognised expert in both fields, able to effortlessly leap from the merits of different weapons in Call of Duty to Constable’s use of light in Dedham Vale, from the legacy of Henry Moore in contemporary sculpture to Mortal Kombat fatality combos. Unfortunately Brian Sewell was busy playing the Halo: Reach beta, so I had to fill in instead.

As is probably obvious, my thorough and in-depth art knowledge comes mainly from Wikipedia (which is how I know Vincent van Gogh was a quadruped with four legs, a heart and a beak for eating honey, who lived in large rivers such as the Amazon [citation needed]), but I had a rather splendid time burbling away about narrative, interactivity, a proposed taxonomy of games and saying “aaaaah” (bonus game if you’d like to play along at home: every time we say “aaaah”, shout “No, not ‘aaaah’!”, and take a drink).

Ven Hemlock Show 102

If you’re particularly interested in the history of Ebert vs Computer Games, it starts around the time of the Doom movie:

Ebert in “Answer Man” on Doom (October 30 2005): “As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games.”
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051030/ANSWERMAN/510300302/1023

Strangely enough that prompted a little bit of feedback, the subject being touched on a couple more times in following weeks:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051113/ANSWERMAN/511130307/1023
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051127/ANSWERMAN/511270304/1023

Resulting in lots of good reader feedback:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051206/COMMENTARY/51206002
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051208/COMMENTARY/51208002
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051214/COMMENTARY/51214001

Christophe Gans, director of Silent Hill, was asked about Ebert’s stance in 2006, drawing another reply:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060430/ANSWERMAN/604300302/1023

Clive Barker took up the cudgels in 2007:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070721/COMMENTARY/70721001

And then there’s the most recent piece that kicked off the current round of the debate:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool.

There’s an excellent puzzle in Dungeons and Dragons Online that made me chuckle quite a lot when I first encountered it. When I say the puzzle is excellent, I do of course mean that it isn’t. At all. And when I say puzzle, I do of course use the word in its loosest sense, more along the lines of ‘curious nuisance’ than anything else. It is an excellent puzzle, however, because it shows just how difficult it can be for an MMO developer to try to implement game mechanics such as puzzles, whilst catering to every combination of race, class, equipment and skill that a player, or indeed party of players, might bring to the adventuring table.

The puzzle in question, and I do want to emphasise again that I use puzzle in the same way that I would still call a two piece jigsaw puzzle a puzzle, is found in the depths of the Tangleroot Gorge quest line concerning the Splinterskull orcs, specifically starting with the quest Agent of the Darguul which is activated once you’ve obtained access to the inner stronghold of the Splinterskull fortress. Upon entering the inner sanctum and having killed a few orcs guarding the entrance, the player is presented with a raised drawbridge spanning a chasm which appears to be infinitely deep and is bounded, as only D&D chasms can be, by sheer walls of rock at either end. The immediate message is ‘the bridge is the only way across’. Now if this were a pen and paper game, say, then the players would be able to come up with all manner of crazy strategies to ruin the DM’s carefully planned puzzle, they would form a human ladder; one of the more engineering minded types would build a hang glider; the tomb raider types would lasso their way across; the mage would cast one of Levitate Party, Chasm-Spanning Phantasmal Bridge of Convenient Expedience, or Polycell’s Quick-Drying Chasm Filler; and the dwarf Barbarian would just move his character on to the next part of the map with an angry mutter about how he hadn’t munchkined this character into an orc threshing machine to spend his time dallying around with stupid bridges that had developed far too great a sense of their own self worth.

In DDO the characters are limited to one option, which is: what the developer intended. As such, a brief examination of the situation reveals a lever on the other side of the chasm that the players need to hit to lower the bridge. Well, it’s not so much a lever as a giant flat board with a target painted on it on top of a stick, the sort of thing you see at funfairs attached to a chair suspended above a pool of water which tips up and dunks some poor fellow when it’s hit with a projectile of some sort. To its credit the DDO version isn’t surrounded by flashing neon with a big arrow suspended from the ceiling pointing down at it, but it’s pretty obvious after the most cursory of inspections, and it wouldn’t be entirely out of place for it to have an orc in a top hat and cane standing beside it shouting “Roll up, roll up! Hit the lever, win a prize! How about you sir? You look handy with a projectile weapon, fancy trying to lower the draw bridge for your lady friend there? No sir, that’s not a euphemism! Roll up! Roll up!”

Of course the designer, being a conscientious type, was concerned that there was an outside chance of a player turning up without a projectile weapon of any sort. It could happen, especially if they were a purely melee class and running the dungeon solo, although nowadays I imagine most players are veteran enough to realise that even if you have -20 to all projectile weapon proficiency rolls it’s still worth taking some sort of ranged weapon with you, just in case you stumble upon the side of a barn that needs hitting from a distance, say. Or a big painted target on the other side of a chasm. It might take a few attempts, with the first few probably ending up with you embedding sharp projectiles into the buttocks of any fellow adventurers who didn’t have the common sense to leave the instance and wait for you to finish before coming back in, but eventually you’ll twang something across the chasm that bounces off three walls, catches an orc a glancing blow to the back of the head and then flops against the lever as it falls to the floor. So what was the solution to the problem of a player turning up without a projectile weapon to their name (other than perhaps that weapon which one doesn’t whip out in public and try to shoot across chasms as it’s considered bad form and rather unhygienic)? I think the designer might have got a little bored at this point, because directly opposite the lever, on your side of the chasm, is a modest looking crate. Inside which is a bow and a set of arrows.

I can imagine some of the party conversations that have taken place at that bridge:

“Damn, the bridge is up and there’s no other way across this conveniently inconvenient chasm!”

“There’s a lever on the other side!”

“Are you sure? It’s not a torch holder or weapon rack or something?”

“No, quite sure. There’s a big orc over there in a top hat shouting about it. And the neon sign saying ‘Hit here to lower bridge’ is a bit of a giveaway too.”

“Well that’s no use, I don’t have any projectile weapons with me. Do you?”

“No. Well, yes…”

<zip>

“Argghhhh, put it away! I told you before! Remember? At the Queen’s ball…”

<zip>

“Sorry. Ok… Ok! I have a plan! I could use my tumble skill to roll up to the edge of the bridge on this side of the chasm and then throw a loop of rope over to the pillar on the other part of the bridge. Now, the rope isn’t long enough to reach all the way, so I’ll use my jump skill to leap out to the rope and the momentum of my swing as I hit it should carry me most of the way to the other side. Then, when I reach the zenith of my swing I’ll let go, at which point you can cast Harold’s Handy Hand of Helping to give me a push which should allow me to reach the chasm wall on the other side. Then I’ll use my climbing skill and my +4 Claws of Chasm Climbing to scale the wall, leap over the top, kill the orc in the top hat, and then bypass the lever mechanism with my disable device skill!”

“Or we could just use the bow and arrows in this crate here.”

“Bu…”

“Your idea was splendid. Really it was. We’ll do that next time, eh?”

“*sigh* I suppose so. Do you even know how to use that bow?”

“Oh yes, it’s quite simple really. You just slot the arrow here, like so. Then you pull back li…”

<*twang*>

“Arrrgh! Oh God, my buttocks!”

“Oh my. Terribly sorry! Let’s try that again.”

<*twang*>

“Owwww! Ah ha heee, ooooo, ow.”

“Oh dear. One more go…”

<Sixteen arrows later>

“A hit! A most palpable hit! And the bridge is down. Come on my friend, let us continue on… are… are you ok?”

“I’ll… be fine. Just… need… to run…. bent over. And… mustn’t sit down.”

“Y’know, with your diminutive halfling size, a little tin foil and some chunks of pineapple and cheese, we could hire you out as a delightful presentation piece at parties…”

“Am… hffff…. going to stab you with… hssss… an arrow. Just as soon… ahhhnggg… as I find a doctor with good strong grip and some… ooohoohooo…. pliers.”

Next week: World of Warcraft’s incredible grind to get the key for Karazhan when it was first released, and the curious question as to why no player ever found the spare key hidden under the mat outside the front door.

Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second

Flicking through the lists of search terms that lead poor, unsuspecting surfers to our strange shores I sometimes feel a bit guilty that we’re not a lot of use to people with problems like “D&D online adventure pack zoning into instance frozen progress bar”. Sometimes I’m curious as to why someone’s looking for “most obscure npc in wow”. Then there are the strange and depraved Rule 34 searches, which I won’t repeat verbatim for fear of causing a positive feedback loop of further hits, but suffice to say I believe there are Dragon Age mods that will partially fulfil your wishes towards the Lady of the Forest, but I’m really not sure about the radish. Or whether anyone’s created an in-game model of a paddling pool filled with custard.

In most instances it’s fairly obvious how the internal workings of a search engine decided KiaSA was a potential match, thanks to either MMOG keywords or our proclivity of culling post titles from quotations (it’s not Google’s fault that the relationship between the post title and the actual content tends to be tangential at best; sorry whoever was looking for “The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned”, you probably didn’t have the Ewok Festival of Love in mind). Sometimes, though, it’s a puzzle not only as to what the searcher thought they might find on the ‘net, but quite how they wound up here at all; step forward Search Term of the Month (And Quite Possibly Year): “does ed vaizey have a hairy chest”. Terribly sorry, we really don’t know, but we’ll be sure to ask if we bump into him.

Thought for the day.

You see those innocent level one neutral-con critters that every MMO has running around in the background acting as part of the scenery?

In my MMO, whenever a player killed one of those critters, a fifty tonne version would fall from the sky onto the player’s head, squashing them flat.

And then explode.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Knowledge boundaries are interesting in MMOs.

In crafting it is generally the character that gains the knowledge required to perform a task. Without the character knowing the required recipe, the item in question cannot be crafted.

Where to find that recipe is player knowledge, the player can often find out within the game, or instead meta-game and look up where to go and what to do on a website.

Are these boundaries arbitrary, or can certain knowledge only be restricted to the character, whereas other knowledge must be imparted to the player in order for them to be able to function within the game? Can we move more knowledge to the character, such that players spend less time reading what to do, where to go and who to speak to on websites, and more time in finding out for themselves in the game? Would we want to?

Who learns the information, character or player, and how this is expressed in an MMO is fascinating. For example: the more reliance there is on the player’s knowledge, the less relevant the character becomes until it is merely an avatar, a vehicle for the player within the world. Whether you want the players or their characters to be the inhabitants of your world should perhaps be an important consideration in the design philosophy of an MMO, and this can be determined, in part, by whichever of the two you choose to deliver knowledge of your game world to.

When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

If I were to give you one word to describe me when tanking in an MMO it would be arrrgrghhhohgodohgodohgodwhoiswhereiswhathelphelparrrgggggghplah, which is admittedly not a word that will be found in the OED any time soon, but is about as close as I can get to what I’m actually thinking at the time without embedding an audio recording of me alternating between sweaty-faced screaming, mumbling in face-clutching wide-eyed horror, and laughing maniacally while chewing off the ends of my fingers.

I am not a good tank.

It’s the same every time: I read around the class, find out which abilities cause the most threat; what a decent rotation of these abilities is; how best to start a pull; how to snap aggro back if a mob decides to wander off and have a nibble on the healer; how to smile internally when the over-eager DPS AoE-pulls an entire group and you simply let them die. I practise the techniques on mobs out in the wild, grabbing a few at a time and methodically working through all that I’ve learnt, and everything seems to be in order. And so, suitably geared, with my well-thumbed curly-paged Guide to Tanking tucked in my back pocket, I head into a dungeon with a group of other well meaning folk, approach the first group and – having made sure everyone is ready – pull.

How do I describe what happens next? Imagine trying to maintain the attention of a pack of wilful and disobedient dogs when a lorry from the nearby Cat, Anise and Bouncy Ball factory crashes through the fence of the training school and discharges its contents all over the lawn: it’s the same with me and maintaining the attention of mobs. At least that’s what happens initially. Then, as the healer spams away trying to keep everyone alive, the mobs generally begin to congregate around them, until they look like one of those beleaguered Tanface McPermhairs from some nondescript boy-band, trying to force their way out of an airport through a crowd of screaming teeth and spasming pigtails.

No matter what I do I always seem to have my tanking magnet set to the same polarity as the mobs, so that I charge into the midst of them and then watch, demoralised, as they fly away from me in a thousand different directions at once or, as is more often the case, in a tightly directed beam straight at the healer.

The reason this issue has come to mind is that I’ve been playing my Warden alt some more in LotRO recently. I set out to play them purely as a solo venture: what with their primary role being to tank, and me being the tanking equivalent of a turbofan in a feather factory, this seemed like a sensible idea. I really love the concept of the class though, and seeing as they are well suited to soloing, it made for a happy marriage of circumstance. I ended up tanking anyway to some extent, because it turns out that Turbine have added quite a nifty tanking simulator into their game where a player can go and practise some of the fundamentals of managing aggro in a group without ruining the evenings entertainment for a number of other players. Enter the well known Skirmish system in which it is quite possible to have a fair crack of the tanking whip without causing undue alarm and distress to unsuspecting players, because the numerous NPCs that one encounters, both in the form of the player’s own soldier and in the various skirmish specific NPCs that aid you during the encounter, make acceptable substitutes for real players. So I read the forums, picked a soldier class that I thought would be a suitable match to my Warden (some form of DPS is recommended, seeing as we Wardens are a little lacklustre in that department, but have self-heals and defences enough to keep us going through all but the toughest of fights) and headed into a skirmish.

I was not a good tank.

I’m getting better. At first it was frustrating to the point of almost giving up. After a while, however, I slowly began to get the hang of it. For example, I no longer become frozen to a mob, such that when I see another mob run off and attack someone else I persist in hitting the mob I’m currently targeting, but harder, in the hope that it will make the other one run back over to me. Switching targets is a no-brainer, I knew I had to do it, and yet I’d get stuck when in combat, scared that the instant I stopped thwacking my current mob it would laugh at me and run off and eat the healer. You have to overcome the irrational anthropomorphisation of mobs if you want to tank, you have to allow your logical mind to win through, such that you don’t see angry Orcs with a will of their own, but a number of spinning plates that you need to balance. When you spin a plate on the end of a stick (if you’re any good) you have a good amount of time before that plate will slow to the point that it falls, so you can go and spin-up another plate and another. Every now and again you come back to the already spinning plates and you give them another little nudge, but they need less work than when you first started on them. The difference with tanking is that you have a bunch of other people running around slowing your plates down, some slowing one plate down considerably while others are slowing all the plates down gradually. It’s a tricky and technically challenging balancing act.

Playing as a Warden in a skirmish is somewhat of an extreme way of being introduced to tanking, a bit like someone deciding to learn to surf in shark infested waters while giving themselves paper cuts. For one, the Warden is a curious tanking class in that they have very little snap aggro and instead rely on aggro-over-time abilities, which means that once they’ve had a chance to build aggro you’re never getting anything off of them, but at the same time the critical phase of the initial pull needs that much more co-operation from the other members of the group while the Warden builds that aggro. For another, skirmish NPCs are perhaps the biggest bunch of over-aggroing dunderheads that you’re likely to encounter outside of the Charge of the Light Brigade. On the positive side, you’ll never hear an NPC scream “U SUK TANK LOL” when they die for the second time in a run.

It makes for a forceful, if frustrating, learning experience, but without the soul-crushing demoralisation of a baptism by anonymous peers.

Thought for the day

The Liberal Democrats seem to be following the ol’ MMOG Hype Cycle; a blaze of publicity and hope offering people a fresh alternative to the tired old system they’re all sick of, then strong initial performance building up confidence that they really can be a player, but when it comes to the crunch and actually plunking your money(/vote) down it turns out people aren’t that keen on a change after all and go back to the more traditional options.

(I knew that rank in Perform: Biting Political Satire would come in handy)

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life

Having sorted out Italy in Napoleon: Total War I moved on to the Egyptian campaign, which proved slightly trickier on the motivation front as I faced the British for the first time. To get into character and see the appearance of a Union Jack as a threat rather than reason to stand up and salute I wore a beret, spoke with an outrageous accent and ate lots of croissants to steel myself to send the Rosbifs packing. Turned out not to matter too much; after devoting maximum resources to building up a navy (it took five turns to get one small corvette) I sent it out to scout the Mediterranean a bit, show the flag, discourage the landing of any troops on my lightly defended shores, and it ran into the British fleet. Which consisted of about twelve ships of the line, four frigates and a couple of sloops. There might’ve been an aircraft carrier in there as well, possibly a couple of nucelar attack submarines, it was hard to tell at the speed I was retreating, so my naval policy was modified to staying in port and shouting “zut alors!” from time to time. The land forces made up for it, though, storming through Egypt and capturing swathes of the Ottoman Empire to triumph in that campaign, but it’s going to be more difficult still for the final campaign, Europe from 1805. I’m rather hoping the British will go along with a plan to carve up Europe between us in a 100-years-early Entente cordiale, but that doesn’t seem terribly likely. Courage, mes amies!

Anyway. Much of the attraction of the Total War series is the way it combines two genres: the strategic turn-based campaign, where you build and govern your empire, and the tactical real-time battles that result when you send your armies into combat and trample the enemy with elephants. (If you’re playing as the Carthaginians in Rome: Total War, at least. Not so many elephant-based units in 19th century Europe. Unless the next Total War game covers the 1870 siege of Paris and you get to take the zoo animals into battle rather than just eating them.) You can skip either aspect if you really want, though; the games come with selections of historical battles and skirmish modes to leap straight into the real-time battles side of things, or if you’re more of a political leader and don’t want to get your hands dirty on the campaign map you can leave it to your AI generals and have the computer automatically resolve fights.

Over in Dungeons & Dragons Online I’ve gained a couple of ranks and therefore have some Action Points to spend, and poring over the range of enhancements available it struck me that, as with Total War, there are two quite distinct parts to the game: planning and building your character, and adventuring with them. Most MMOGs have the two elements, but the dichotomy in Dungeons & Dragons Online is particularly pronounced.

Combat in DDO is, for an MMOG, fast paced; when attacking you hit what’s in the cross-hairs in the middle of the screen, not necessarily a target selected by clicking or hitting Tab (there’s no friendly fire, thankfully, or 97.4% of adventures would end in bitter acrimony after the first encounter. Or possibly before, if somebody went to buff another player but forgot that left clicking triggers an attack rather than selecting a target.) Magic users will probably have a hotbar or seven filled up with different spells to cast, but melee characters tend not to have many abilities to activate in a fight compared to other games; my regular in-combat clickable abilities (as opposed to buffs, toggles etc.) are outnumbered by the sack full of different weapon sets I cart around for various encounters.

Where DDO’s combat is streamlined, the character planning side of things has many strange knobbly bits sticking out and causing turbulence. DDO’s rules are derived from a pencil and paper game: the Generic Universal RolePlaying System. No, wait, not that one, Dungeons and Dragons. The clue was in the title, in hindsight. With MMOGs being more combat focused than pencil and paper games the rules are quite heavily modified, but creating a character is still a rather involved business. In WoW, WAR or LotRO after picking a race and a class your toughest decisions generally involve beard style and colouring, in DDO you’ve got stats, skills and feats to worry about. As you ascend ranks and levels the choices open up further still, as DDO allows you to combine classes. I think this is almost, if not entirely, unique for a class-based MMOG, and as the saying goes “you haven’t seen hybrids until you’ve seen a Wizard/Rogue/Cleric and Paladin/Sorcerer/Bard duo in DDO”. It can be a bit daunting trying to choose from a list of 50 feats when you have a nodding acquaintance with the pencil and paper rules, let alone if you’re coming to it fresh.

Like Total War, though, you can, to a greater or lesser extent, skip either facet of the game if you really want. Recognising the complexity of character building, Turbine added Paths that your character can follow, so you just need to decide whether your fighter wants to focus on dealing damage, tanking or whatever, and the game sorts out the rest for you. It won’t give you the most ludicrously optimised min-maxing munchkin build possible, but at least you won’t end up with totally inappropriate stats. If it’s the character planning side of things that’s more interesting to you, there isn’t exactly an option to build an adventurer and hit an “Automatically Resolve” button instead of battling through a dungeon to gain loot and XP, but there is an out-of-game ecosystems of forums, spreadsheets and standalone character planning tools to tinker about with theoretical builds. Again like Total War, I think the game is at its best when you at least dabble in both sides, so time to check when the next rank of Tempest opens up and make sure I’m meeting the pre-requisites for it.

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Maps are lying swine and never to be trusted. So was my experience in Lord of the Rings Online over the weekend, and so has it been in many an MMO before then. The problem is that maps are devious; your stock and standard openly vindictive sort is not to be found among maps. No indeed, a map will pretend to be your best friend, it will helpfully show you where you are and where you need to be, it may even subtly suggest where sir or madam might like to go next, which it does in an obsequious subservient fashion while bending over to touch the floor repeatedly as it backs out of the door, and then as soon as your attention is elsewhere it attacks like an origami katana.

Sometimes it goes like this:

You stand inside the entrance to the dungeon and are full of enthusiasm for the thing, Tom has the map open and is pointing to the location of the bric-a-brac that you’ve been sent to find, which is helpfully highlighted on the nasty little thing. “Don’t worry chaps”, says Tom, “our goal lies just at the end of this corridor here” and he looks at the rest of you with a smile that says he feels he’s doing you all a tremendous favour by guiding you to such a simple objective, and you all set off, light of step and good in spirit, towards your goal.

Of course, you have to fight group after group of angry orcs on the way there. Of course you do. And of course the map doesn’t show you any of these inconveniences. Or the pit trap.

So after you’ve heaved Tom out of the hole, then lowered him back down again so that he can retrieve the map that has flung itself from him in a bid for freedom (or maybe just to spite you) and after you’ve fought a few more groups of orcs, you finally reach the end of the corridor.

“Just on other side of this wall” pants Tom, and the rest of you wait patiently while he looks left, then right, then left again in order to find the passage that will allow you to get around to the other side, which doesn’t exist. “Well there’s no way through here” he states, you note, somewhat obviously. At which point Harry grabs the map with a “give that here will you you dummy” and looks at it with the sort of studious but disappointed look you imagine God would have worn as he pondered where to place the Galapagos Islands after realising that he hadn’t left any room for them in the Mediterranean. “Ah, I see where you went wrong, Tom” he says “you assumed that this bit here was connected, and it does look like it on the map, but clearly you’re meant to go down this corridor over here to the west, and then loop around and come at it from the north”. And it all seems so obvious when Harry explains it like that, so the rest of you pick yourselves up from where you were slumped on the floor and trudge off with Harry boldly leading the way.

And of course there are more groups of orcs to fight on the way.

Of course.

So you head back to the east and then north west, then due south, and then back on yourselves a bit so that the front of the party runs into the back of the party as they cross each other’s path, and you fight groups of orcs all along the way and have to go back at one point when you realise that you’ve lost Roger and that one of the orcs has taken his place on a dare from his mates to see how far he could get before anyone noticed. You follow the map and at every junction there is a huge discussion as to which way the map says you all should go, then the discussion becomes an argument and harsh words are spoken and someone gets a bloody nose, at which point a vote is taken and the tally of results show no votes for the right path, one for the left path, and five votes to go home and sod the whole silly business.

You get there in the end however, exhausted and sick of the sight of stone walls and moss and orcs and each other, you content yourselves with the fact that at least the map now shows that you are standing in the same spot as your objective, but as you look around the empty chamber you realise that you have been betrayed. Alan grabs the map from a bewildered looking Harry, and twists it and turns it in the vain hope that he can convince the map that it’s wrong, but the map never lies. It just chooses only to show you part of the truth. As Alan scrunches and unscrunches the map and turns both it and his head in wildly opposing directions he, at one point, holds it up to the light in order to get a better look, the light from the candelabra hanging three floors up.

Three floors up.

Roger wonders out loud if it would be possible to find something to break through the wall to the side near the entrance, where you were all standing what seems like a lifetime ago, but after several sharp suggestions about the appropriateness of his head for such a task giving its relative density, he lets it drop.

People get angry and start shouting at each other. Someone in the back starts to cry. Harry exclaims through a red face that it wasn’t his fault that the map didn’t show multiple levels to the place, and everyone else wonders out loud who they should blame then. They wonder if they should perhaps blame the map, but they do so in that tone of voice that implies that they blame Harry, with especial blame reserved for his parents for being careless enough to have given birth to him in the first place. The map lies quietly and innocently on the floor where it was thrown, though if anyone were to look closely they would see that its edges were curved in what looked suspiciously like a smile.

Then everyone goes mad. People fetch out their own maps and then run off in different directions. They decide not to worry about fighting the orcs anymore, instead they just run past and ignore them. The orcs give chase but tire of it pretty quickly and return to their camp only to see the same adventurer they were just chasing coming back down the corridor at them and followed by another adventurer who wasn’t there a moment ago. Both adventurers dash past the orcs before shooting off at right angles to one another down opposite corridors like some sort of formation aerial display team. The orcs give up at this point and decide to have a nice cup of green tea and ignore the whole silly situation until it goes away, at which point an adventurer with his face buried in a map clatters into them at speed and tumbles them all onto their backs. “Hoi, Roger, stop cavorting with those orcs will you and get to looking with the rest of us” shouts Harry as he runs past for the sixth time, “or at least ask them for directions won’t you?” But Roger is unable to offer a reply from his place on the floor, what with six orcs jumping up and down on his chest.

After ten minutes of fruitless searching and painful wounds at the hands of the orcs, Tom slumps down in defeat with his back to a chest in the corner of a room and decides to have a nap. When the others find him they wake him with a loving kick to his head so that he jumps up with a start, knocking over the chest and spilling its contents over the floor. And there in the middle of it all is the object they’ve been searching for. “Well here it is all along. Seems Tom has been having us for fools, letting us run around like that when he knew where it was all along” says someone. “Can’t believe he blamed it on his map” says another. And they all show their appreciation for what they think is a cruel joke on Tom’s part by hitting him lovingly around the chest and head with their rolled up maps.

The item of their quest found and packed carefully away in a backpack, the group beam on one another; they love one another again, they love the dungeon with its dank walls, and they love the orcs, even Roger, whose chest was never quite the same again. They look quietly around with a silent satisfaction and fatherly love for all things, and a feeling that all was right in the world.

At which point Tom asks if anyone can remember the way out.

Sometimes it goes like this:

You’re riding towards the final goal of your quest; you can see the objective on your map and it’s a clear straight line from where you are now to where you need to be. As it rapidly approaches you settle back in the saddle and enjoy the sights and sounds of the rolling forested hills as they blur past and your mind drifts to thoughts of your reward.

After a little time you begin to realise that you should have reached your destination, and when your eyes focus from out of your blissful daydream you see that your horse is scrambling against the side of a modest incline, at the top of which stands the person with whom you need to speak. It’s only a very modest slope, no more than a few feet high, but no matter how much you urge your mount on, it just cannot seem to make any headway up it. Perhaps the slope is covered in a particularly greasy moss, or perhaps you should have fitted those chunky off-road horse shoes instead of slicks, either way the message seems to be that you’re not getting up this slope. This modest gentle slope. A slope so shallow, that if you tripped and fell while half way down, you’d be equally likely to roll back up to the top as continue on down to the bottom.

You check left and right and see that the slope runs to the horizon in both directions and that it will take some time to ride around it. You check the map again and see no sign of such an obstruction. Then, given such a gentle slope, you do what any reasonable person would do in such a situation. You calmly look left and right again, assessing the situation, making sure nobody is looking. And then you go mad. You fling yourself at the slope every which way you can imagine. You take a run up, even though your horse only ever goes one speed, even from a standing start. You try jumping the horse up the slope. First one long jump with a run up, then lots of tiny little jumps as the horse hoof-spins against the base of the slope; with the little jumps you start to make some progress up the slope, but because they are erratic in nature and because the horse is hoof-spinning all the while, you slowly start to drift off to the left or right, and you windscreen wipe your way along the slope in this way for a good mile or so before your horse blows a cylinder and smoke starts to come out of its bum. You resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to have to run all the way around and you curse your map for not giving you any indication of this time wasting obstruction; your map chuckles quietly itself, holds out its hand behind its back and makes a beckoning motion, and the developer quietly drops half your subscription fee for the month in its upturned palm.

Eventually you make it all the way around and back to the top of the slope, only a few feet up from where you were struggling earlier, but nevertheless you are at the top now. The quest rewarder is standing only a few yards off, and you sit with straight back and look down on the slope that was once the master of you. With pride swelling in your chest you stand up in the stirrups and shout your triumphant victory to the audience of mountains that curve around your field of view, and in doing so surprise your horse, who takes a few startled steps forward and on to the slope, which is only too happy to expedite your three foot descent to the floor below.