I love low-powered formats. I have a lot of bulk. I enjoy limited play, but it’s not always realistic to try putting together a cube and a group to draft. So I had an idea: I’d just build my own format.
I call it “Off By One”, or +-1.
These are the current working rules:
- All decks must be exactly 40 cards.
- No proxies, for reasons that will become obvious.
- Every non basic-land-card in your deck must have a single handwritten edit that adds or subtracts 1 from a single digit or number word on the card. This can be in the P/T, mana cost, or rules text.
- Edits can’t be made to the reminder text on a card. (e.g., Blightreaper Thallid reads, “{3}{G/P}: Transform Blightreaper Thallid. Activate only as a sorcery. ({G/P} can be paid with either {G} or 2 life.)” You can change the ability cost from 3 to 2, but you can’t change the reminder text to allow you to pay 1 life for the Phyrexian mana cost.)
- Number words in this case refer to literal numbers (one, two, ten) as well as the words “once” and “twice”. The usage of “once” and “twice” in Magic rules are shorthand for “one time” and “two times”, where the word “thrice” is never used in favor of “three times”. This is an arbitrary distinction. We know what it means, so it allows us to expand our options.
- Articles, like “a” and “an” are not treated as number words.
- Changes in quantity can and will create conflicts with singular and plural nouns. Changing “one spell” to “two spell” instead of “two spells” but reading it as “two spells” because that makes sense is expected. We get it.
- A “zero” or “0” can’t be subtracted from. The Magic rules don’t account for things like negative mana costs or damage.
- Card text changes are based on the current English version of the card text according to Gatherer.
- This is a meaningful distinction because Japanese does not have articles. For example, the EN version of Reach Through Mists reads “Draw a card.” but the JP version reads “カードを１枚引く。”. (Draw 1 card.)
- No sleeves. This is meant to be a casual and disposable format.
- There is currently no restriction on rarity for deckbuilding. You can use bulk rares, or expensive ones if you’re willing to render them worthless by writing on them. See rule #2.
This is all so far. There is currently not a banlist, but that may change. Immediately, Phyrexian Censor’s effect, “Each player can’t cast more than one zero non-Phyrexian spell(s) each turn” is game-breaking, and it seems more likely that instead of banning individual cards, individual edits will be banned.
I messaged my brother, whose memory for these things is better than mine.
me: bro, did I finish FFX or did I watch you finish it?
bro: you watched me finish it, you never finished it.
And that was how I realized I’d never finished a Final Fantasy game. It wasn’t surprising but it was staggering. I’d started plenty of them, but never finished one. My mind was made up: FF7R was going free for PS Plus members, and I was going to finish it.
As I embarked on the first steps of that journey, Final Fantasy X + X-2 HD Remake dropped for Switch. Perfect. I picked it up as well and started playing it during downtime here and there. I was looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. My expectations for this journey could not have been more misplaced.
I don’t remember the first RPG I finished, but my heart says it was Pokemon Red. Our family went straight from the NES to the PS1 and we didn’t have any RPGs for either. We played a lot of platformers, racing games, puzzle games. I tried playing the old NES Zelda games and bounced off. I couldn’t tell you when I first played Super Mario RPG, but I never finished it. I don’t think I finished Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door either. I don’t remember finishing Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. I can’t remember ever finishing A Link to the Past until I was in my 20s maybe. But something in me has rendered me nearly incapable of leaving a Pokemon game unfinished for some reason.
This is all to say that I have a long history with the Pokemon-style of turn-based RPG combat, which hasn’t aged particularly well in Pokemon’s case. I knew what I was in for going back to FFX and I knew what I wasn’t in for going to FF7R.
FF7R is an amazing game. The world is realized in a way that lies so far beyond what the original was capable of, it’s just mind-blowing. Seeing the pores in Barret’s nose is something that I enjoy in a way that only someone who’s followed gaming since its barely-discernible inception can appreciate. I love that Jessie became a character. I think Wedge could’ve been better written than “hungry overweight guy” but I wonder if leaning into the idea of some characters being more caricatures was supposed to make Barret’s portrayal seem less out of place.
My problem with FF7R is that I don’t think it’s fun. I wanted it to be fun, and I stuck with it even when I realized it wasn’t and it wasn’t going to be.
FF7R’s combat is complicated, and it is thoroughly engineered in a way that tries to marry the traditional ATB style of combat with action-based combat that wants to be like a clunky Devil May Cry. Sometimes you’ll try to swing your sword at a flying enemy and you’ll just fly up to them and do some cool mid-air swordplay. The dodge mechanic feels like it was tacked on and the timing feels too tight for it to be useful: anything you can effectively dodge, you could also just keep your distance and not need to dodge. The battles just felt like I was spamming one attack until my meters filled up and then trying to make my one character do useful things while I wondered why my AI characters weren’t charging their gauges.
One thing FF7R needed to make the combat feel better was the ability to set AI for your party members so you don’t have to micromanage them. The micromanagement aspect feels directly opposed to the spammy nature of combat. It almost never felt like my AI companions were doing enough unless I was jumping between characters, which isn’t fun, it’s just another button to press in the middle of spamming attacks. The game gives you the option to set hotkeys for abilities and potions and things and I never used them because you have a button that makes time slow to a crawl mid-move. Why would I take the time to remember hotkeys when I’m already forced to effectively menu to get anything done? (I use ‘menu’ as a verb here, as in how speedrunners call the act of quickly navigating menus ‘menuing’)
Some of the things the game gives you are halfhearted half-measures aimed at reducing the severity of these issues with out actually dealing with them. Some enemies can only be hit from behind, so you can’t just spam the attack button, you have to dodge roll and then spam the attack button. If you don’t do that and you just try to rush them from the front, you get hit in a way that has a solid 5 seconds of unavoidable hitstun while you collapse and then stand back up. Cool and fun. Wow. Some enemies have to be hit with spells to render them vulnerable to combos, and if you try to just attack them, you get hit with unavoidable hitstun! Hooray! Now I get to do my favorite thing from video games: waiting.
The game’s story is neat, and some of the minigames are cool. The dance scene with Andrea is great fun. The series of sidequests you have to slog through in every area is not cool. Navigating the game’s map is awkward and finding where you need to go for a given quest isn’t always clear. Trying to find the missing kids for the schoolteacher was a nightmare. As I moved into the back half of the game, I did something I never do: I turned the difficulty down. I didn’t want to spend any time in combat I didn’t have to, and I wanted to get through the side quests as quickly as I could. I wanted the game to be over.
When the game was over, I was happy for it to be over. And despite that, I still look forward to the next episode.
When I started FFX, I did so with gritted teeth. “Turn-based battles”, I thought. “What fun.”
For the first 5 or 6 hours, the game felt like a slog. A lot of cutscenes, a lot of dialogue, and then random encounters and turn-based battles.
Things picked up as I neared the Sinspawn boss during Operation Mi’ihen. The boss was tough, and my party wasn’t. I didn’t want to grind, so I played it smart instead, and the game let me. Things clicked for me. Combat wasn’t a grind anymore, because I wasn’t grinding. It was a puzzle. Every combat encounter became a puzzle where I could clearly see enemy stats (with Sensor) and turn order. At that point, it became something more akin to Into the Breach for me. Once combat fell into place, I was really enjoying the game.
Once I got the Celestial Mirror, the question was wide-open: do I want to get the Celestial Weapons? That was the first point in the game where I started looking at info online, the playthrough was blind albeit for my rough memories of the game up until the Calm Lands. So I thought, “well, I can get them but I probably won’t complete them”. I got Tidus’ Celestial Weapon, Caladbolg. I played through the Yunalesca fight (which was TIGHT, because my party was underleveled but determined) and got the Sun Crest. Well, all I needed was the Sun Sigil.
To get the Sun Sigil, you have to beat the final race against the Chocobo Trainer with a final time (after time- from balloons and time+ from birds) of less than 0:00:00. Wow, cool.
I tried it anyway. I got close. 4 seconds. I left in frustration.
A couple days later, I tried it again for the hell of it. And after a few tries, I actually got a time under 0:00:00. I was able to complete one of the 7 Celestial Weapons.
Well, why not another?
I have over 80 hours in FFX now. I’ve completed 6/7 Celestial Weapons, all but Wakka’s because I don’t like Blitzball. Yes, I dodged 200 consecutive lightning bolts. Yes, I chased down all the butterflies. Yes, I had to beat Dark Anima to get the Destruction Sphere from Macalania Temple so I could get Anima and the Magus Sisters and finish Yuna’s Nirvana. I’ve decided I want to max out every character and complete the sphere grid. I might get Wakka’s Celestial Weapon. I think I want to beat Penance, which is something my brother, who has a 1000+ hour save file for the original release on PS2, never did because Penance and the Dark Aeons weren’t in the original NA release.
I went through and finished the game once just to do it. The final bosses are trivial when you have multiple characters who can deal 99999 damage per hit. I rediscovered a love for turn-based battle that I didn’t expect to, and I’m glad I did. I think it’s indicative of where I’m at right now and what I’m enjoying at this point in my life: I’ve been playing a lot of solo games versus all the time I spent playing competitive games when I was younger. If anything, I don’t find that disappointing or disheartening, I find it encouraging, that I’ve fallen back in love with a part of my gaming history I’d become disenchanted with.
No one will ever read these if I don’t post with any consistency.
‘Let’s Go, Pikachu’ (which I’m going to refer to from here as ‘LGP’) is weird. My sister (Arlis) by now has played through the whole main game and into or through a big chunk of the postgame content. I turned to her on the couch and asked her straight out: will I like LGP? She pauses and puts her clasped hands in front of her as she tries to put together a response.
“First of all… yes.”
I knew the game would be weird, and I didn’t plan to play it. I have a long and storied history with Pokemon as a franchise. I’ve played all the main generational entries, some of the remakes, and a bunch of the spinoffs. I love it and it’s a part of me.
Some of the games are openly weird in their own ways. Pokemon Quest and Pokemon Duel are very much their own things entirely. But LGP is a remake of Yellow Version with a bizarre take based off Pokemon GO.
The way they’ve eliminated random battles is amazing and I would love to see it in the series proper. Wild Pokemon spawn from tall grass and wander around the map nearby, not unlike the way enemies wander around in Super Mario RPG, for example. This allows mechanics like encounter chaining to work better than in the main series because you can honestly just avoid all Pokemon except the ones you’re chaining.
I started the game by naming my partner Chocobo (Let’s Go, Chocobo) and my rival Dingus Joe. I assumed the rival would be a rudeboy like Blue/Gary Oak, but no, Blue is actually a character in the game separate from your rival. Your rival, who I gave a mean name to, is a sweet boy who loves Pokemon and wants you both to become great trainers. He’s supportive and sweet and incredibly endearing and I’ve started calling him DJ in my head canon as a way of conceding that I was very wrong in my assumptions of how the rival character would come across.
When I realized the game explicitly told you how many times you’d chained catching the same Pokemon, I spent a couple hours next to Viridian City until I’d chained 169 female Nidorans and encountered a shiny one. My shiny Nidorina (Anima) is like level 32 and is a monster.
TBQH if I hadn’t done this from the start, the game would be a lot harder and I wouldn’t have learned some of the things I have. Spending all this time boosting my catch combo left me with a TON of Health candies, which I had no idea what to do with.
The removal of EVs for AVs, which are raised by feeding your Pokemon candies, threw me so hard and left me in a position where I almost ended up out of my depth because I didn’t understand that my Pokemon weren’t gaining stats the way they could’ve been. My instinct was to mistrust the candies because I didn’t understand them, and that’s how I ended up with a bunch of dramatically underpowered Pokemon. On one hand, I think it’s a neat change for the series, but on the other, it’s absolutely busted and drives home just how much this game is designed for single player experiences versus multiplayer battles.
LGP is just ‘Pokemon’ enough to be familiar and fun, but weird enough to make it a standout entry parallel to the core series games. I’m into it.
We kinda lucked out into a Switch at release, and I’ve put something like… 90 hours in Breath of the Wild at this point, and I still feel like I’ve hardly scratched the surface.
I honestly wonder how I should be approaching this game conceptually. Any piece of negative criticism that surfaces, I try to read and engage. I’ve heard Jim Sterling’s opinions on it and I respect him, his opinions, and his position on a lot of the game’s design decisions, but it feels like we’re playing different games. I’m not going to go into his stance here, but I will go into mine.
Breath of the Wild isn’t perfect, and I think that it’s a mistake to assume that a 10/10 game is “perfect”. I think a 10/10 game conceptually is well-made from top to bottom, with thoughtful care put into every aspect by the developers and artists and anyone who touched the finished product. There’s no such thing as a perfect game, but great games are real. When I play Breath of the Wild, I see the lessons they took from Dark Souls and Skyrim and how they avoided some of the more agonizing pitfalls of those games.
Skyrim in particular is always fresh in mind. You couldn’t just try mixing ingredients in Skyrim. You either had what you needed to make XYZ or you didn’t. You also constantly found potions and you could just buy them, eliminating the need to craft them. You also couldn’t cook, which meant the tons of food you picked up just got stuffed in your mouth when you were out of potions. There was a fundamental disconnect between the existence of crafting components and the ability of the player to use those in meaningful ways. It feels like Nintendo got that right with Breath of the Wild in forcing the player to make anything they want or need themselves. Sometimes people will gift you food or potions if you save them from roaming enemies or bring them rare ingredients, and you can take the recipes from those and use them yourself, but there’s no recipe catalog to scroll through.
That’s one of the aspects of the game that, to me, reinforces the connection between you, the player, and Link, your avatar. Your armor is rarely obtained and powerful. Your other items are fleeting and ephemeral. Link does, has, and knows nothing that the player does not. When you open a chest, it opens. You, the player, see what is inside rather than watching Link marvel at it. You are in the middle of fucking nowhere on the fringes of what’s left of Hyrule and no one is around to see the look on Link’s face, and you, the player, don’t care what’s on his face. You care what’s in the chest, and the game gives you that.
In Breath of the Wild, you aren’t playing Link’s story along a set path. You’re playing your story, as Link.
This is the origin point for a series I’m tentatively calling “Caught Up”, a place where I can dump my opinions and observations and criticisms of whichever game I’m putting hours into at any given time.
I’m calling it “Caught Up” because I feel like I’m perpetually behind. I rarely play games at release because not many games really grab me, and even when I do try something new and exciting, it doesn’t always stick. I bought ACNH and DOOM Eternal at release and I’ve put a couple hundred hours into ACNH and didn’t finish DOOM Eternal. It’s a toss-up.
This isn’t meant to be a review series as much as a series of essays about how I experience games.
Welcome to “Dungeons By Design”, a series where I’ll be taking a closer look at dungeon design in games.
Look, real talk: I love crawling dungeons. Tabletop or video games, it doesn’t matter. I’ve spent a lot of time crawling, delving, and spelunking and I love all the complexity and variety and elegance of their designs, so I wanted to share my appreciation for everything that goes into them.
For this first installment, I want to focus on concepts that I’ll be touching on through the series.
DISCLAIMER: Please keep in mind that many of these concepts are general examples that have variations and exceptions that we’ll explore later on. A lot of the explanation and definition ahead may be obvious to some, but I wanted to be very clear with the terms I use from the start so we can all avoid confusion later over jargon. To a dungeon veteran, a door holds an incredible amount of uses, intrinsics, and baggage from decades of use as a staple entity. Something as simple as what a door is and what purpose it serves in a dungeon context is a trope that many of us take for granted, when to anyone else it would just be a plain old door. So yes, we’re going to have to talk about what a door means and the possibility space it occupies.
We’re going to start with the core definition that I intend to work off of: what exactly is a dungeon?
This is a dungeon.
As I’ll refer to them from here on, a dungeon is a discrete sub-area in a game through which player characters must venture in pursuit of a goal and whose layout is revealed by exploration. It is an unknown and mysterious place where characters in a game must go to seek something within or beyond it, and it is a place that presents challenges, information, and rewards to those brave enough to probe its depths. Dungeons are places where gameplay happens as players go from the start to the end.
This definition is incredibly broad, and there are a lot of things that fall under it that most people wouldn’t consider dungeons in the traditional sense, and that’s good. The driving idea behind this series is that by examining and deconstructing dungeons in all their varied forms, we can approach them more thoughtfully as designers and as players. Casting a wide net here will give us plenty to think about.
With our definition established, we can work into details from that base.
When examined conceptually and in the abstract, a dungeon and its many, many aspects exist both on macro and micro scales. You’ll notice quickly that a given thing tends to contain smaller versions of itself. Dungeons sometimes have smaller dungeons inside. A quest is a task that often comes with a list of more specific tasks.
There are a few aspects that are core to the dungeon concept, and we can consider them in relation to scale, from macro to micro but in no way diminishing in importance.
First, there is always a goal. A dungeon has a defined start and end point. Sometimes you’ll backtrack after reaching the end, sometimes you won’t. The important thing is that a dungeon as a whole has a completed state that it will reach once the players have finished the quest that brought them there, which we will refer to as the “main quest of the dungeon”. This gives the area its own failure state and conditions apart from “rocks fall, everyone dies”. Failing the dungeon doesn’t always mean you’ve lost the game as a whole.
Next, each dungeon always has a linear path that can be drawn from the start point to the goal of the main quest, which we’ll call the “critical path of the dungeon”. Structurally, a dungeon is a maze that the players have to navigate. Tabletop dungeons are the clearest example of this: they can generally be drawn out on graph paper as they’re mapped by players and the path can be drawn through it as if it were a simple 2D maze.
Finally, the contents of the dungeon are unknown to players when they enter. The process of exploring a dungeon reveals the map to the players, and this is absolutely key to the player experience. The players are in the dungeon to complete the main quest, but the real gameplay is in the journey from the start to the end, a process that we’ll call “crawling the dungeon”. The process of the crawl is often where players accumulate information, items, experience, and currency that can be used in the current and future dungeons.
To recap, we have three key components that combine to create the dungeon experience:
- A dungeon has a “main quest”, which is the player’s reason to be in the dungeon in the first place.
- A dungeon has a “critical path”, which is what the player must discover through their exploration to complete the main quest.
- And a dungeon must be “crawled”, which is the combined challenge the player must overcome to continue along the critical path.
Now, let’s get into the rote parts of a dungeon. On a very basic level, a dungeon’s physical spaces are defined by points where the player must “transition” to another area. Transitions represent travel between two points, so the player starts at an “origin”, makes the transition, and arrives at a “destination”. A point of transition can either be “one-way” if the player can’t return to their origin via a transition from the destination point or “two-way” if they can. If the ground gives way beneath you and you fall into a cave, that’s a one-way transition. If a dungeon’s front door is wide open and you can come and go as you please, that’s two-way. These transition points are generally called “entrances” and “exits”, and the difference between the two depends on whether you’re coming or going. Entrances and exits can both fall along a dungeon’s critical path, but the critical path always starts at the destination point of some entrance and only sometimes ends at the origin point of an exit.
A dungeon is its own place, and you have to go there.
In general, you transition into a dungeon from an entrance located in an “overworld”. This is just what it sounds like. The overworld is basically what a person would call “outside”, where a dungeon is an enclosed area accessible from outside. (You are always “inside” when in a dungeon.) The Legend of Zelda games have overworlds with dungeons that have a single two-way entrance, but other cases aren’t so simple. In some games the existence of an overworld is only a plot point: the dungeon is the entire game, 100% of the playable space. Rogue itself is basically just the dungeon, but Angband has a hub town at the top where you start. Dungeons themselves can have “sub-dungeons”: geographically, architecturally, and/or thematically distinct extensions that branch off of the critical path through the main dungeon.
As players explore a larger dungeon, they move between “zones” of the dungeon that have a unifying theme in their design and in their contents. The theme can be most anything: an island, a mine, a hedge maze, a cave, a prison, a forest, a sewer, the bottom of a lake or pond, or a large building. The list goes on. A sub-dungeon can be it’s own single zone, part of its parent zone, or can even contain multiple zones if it’s long enough.
This theme of a zone is reflected in individual “floors” or “levels”, where each floor is generally its own single map. Sometimes a single floor in the game is its own entire zone, like in Enter the Gungeon, so every time you make a floor transition you arrive in a new visually-distinct place. Each floor generally has “stairs” that allow you to transition to the corresponding stairs on another floor, but there are many exceptions to this. In a dungeon styled like a real building, stairs will line up and their function will be obvious, but in a more free-form design like that of most procedurally generated dungeons, the positions of the stairs may not have any vertical relation. Risk of Rain’s level transitions are only one-way, so the portal that leads to the next level always drops you at some inert destination that serves as the start of the new level.
The critical path for a given floor leads the player through “rooms” and “corridors” of varying size and contents. A room is an enclosed area that contains points of interest for the players. Rooms are the designer’s primary gameplay spaces and can often be identified by type: a kitchen, a dining hall, a throne room, a bedroom, or an office, for example. Sometimes a room can be a large outdoor space like a garden or a courtyard that’s just surrounded by walls. Rooms generally have “doors” that serve as its entrances and exits, very often being literal doors that obscure vision into and out of the room. Corridors are the hallways that connect rooms. Some designs forego the use of corridors entirely, preferring to have each door lead to another room. Other designs integrate corridors into the playable space of the floor and create dangerous bottlenecks for PCs and NPCs alike in combat.
By its rooms combined, the dungeon holds the player’s journey.
Players normally have multiple goals they seek to reach as they crawl a dungeon, which can be long or short term depending on the context. The main superclass of player goals are “quests”, also known as “missions” or “trials”, which can be composed of comparatively shorter-term goals called “tasks” or “objectives”. At times, players will be completing tasks along a “quest line”, a linear sequence of related quests where the completion of one allows the start of the next. Where the main quest of the dungeon serves as the player’s primary long term goal, it often requires the completion of multiple tasks in the process, each of which is likely to be a quest in its own right. Completion of specific goals can be mandatory or optional for progress. Optional short term goals are generally called “side quests” and can often provide the player with rewards that aid their progress in the main quest.
Quests come in many forms, but in deconstructing them, you can see that a quest is a list of conditions that must be fulfilled. Usually those conditions are simple tasks that require the player to go to a specific place and perform a specific action like speaking to a certain person, obtaining a quantity of a specific item, or defeating a particular enemy. In some cases the player has an item that must be delivered safely to the target person or place, and in others the player has an NPC that must be escorted to the target person or place and protected during the journey. These skeletal tasks are the basis of both small and large quests.
The key “thing” that drives a game’s overarching plot is often referred to as a (or the) “MacGuffin”. The title is usually reserved for THE BIG THING OF IMPORTANCE in a game or story. Examples include the One Ring that Frodo carried into Mordor, any damsel that’s ever needed saving, and the Amulet of Yendor that lies at the bottom of so many dungeons. In some cases the MacGuffin is the defeat of the primary antagonist, which we’ll call the “final boss”.
Often the players must defeat numerous “bosses” at the end of given areas of the dungeon that require specific tactics to defeat. Bosses are hostile characters that present a significantly higher threat to players than more common hostile characters, often referred to as “mobs” (mobile entities) or “actors” in varying contexts. Many games also have “sub-bosses” or “mini-bosses” that serve as difficulty spikes along the player’s progression without posing as powerful or complex a threat to the players as a proper boss. At times the sub-boss role will be filled by “elite mobs”. These are normally just stronger versions of common mobs that are made visually distinct so the player can identify them, and they are normally accompanied by a band of common mobs that they lead. The nomenclature here is based on reflecting the power and difficulty of an enemy by its rank in the hierarchy of enemy characters, going from the lone final boss at the top to the hordes of lowly common mobs at the bottom.
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We’ll pick up here next time as we take a look at just what is and isn’t a dungeon under our working definition. Thanks for reading!
I never finished that IRDC US 2015 writeup.
The year feels like it’s flown by, but at the same time it feels like it’s taken forever. I need to organize my thoughts more and get some things added to various parts of the site, it’s all in need of updates and upkeep.
I did a lot of work in Super Mario Maker over the last year and my level “Can You Survive the KOOPARENA??” won Best Experimental Level of 2015 from r/MarioMaker. I’ve written a ton of code and I’m gearing up now for my first 7DRL challenge, and my first completed game period.
More soon, I promise. I have a lot to talk about.