An Unpleasant Game in Pleasant Company
Mar. 30th, 2022 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptI got to play a game on Sunday with friends that, if I had to describe it succinctly, I would say "It wants to be Nethack: The Board Game." For a slightly more helpful way of describing it, I would say that this is a game for people who enjoy both the gamebooks of the 80s and 90s (like Fighting Fantasy or Wizards, Warriors, and You. If you're not familiar with the idea of the gamebook, you can peruse Joe Dever and others' gamebook series called Lone Wolf for free at Project Aon) and the way that Nethack, as a game, expects you to learn about its mechanics and progression by trying things, failing at them, and dying. A lot.
The game is called Sleeping Gods (link to a non-spoiler review of the game) and I played it with a couple of friends for a few hours, because one of those friends was writing a review of the game. The premise of the game is that 1-4 players control an adventuring party of 9 (a captain and eight adventurers) as they sail in the world, having adventures and trying to collect proper artifacts to be able to reach one of the endings of the campaign.
That sounds pretty interesting, right? Well…the premise isn't bad, but it gets hindered significantly by the gameplay loop for each turn. Each turn starts with doing an action on the ship that's generally beneficial, to find supplies, to heal a point of damage, to drop off fatigue, to gather potentially-equippable abilities, or to recall command points that get used to activate abilities, abilities, or artifacts. Ship actions can be restricted if the place that a character wants to go has already suffered too much damage to be used, and if the ship suffers too much damage, the campaign ends in failure.
After the ship action, there is a draw from the event deck. Events start mild (which can be beneficial), progress to dangerous, and then from there to deadly. The event deck also serves as the campaign's clock, as any given campaign only gets three passes through the deck. In the time that I spent, we only went a little way into the dangerous part of the first pass of the deck, and it took three hours to get to that point, so this game is not meant to be played in a single marathon setting. (There's a mechanic to record the state of your adventurers, campaign, the world, and the rest so that you can stop any time you like. We didn't use it, but it looked like something that would take some time to learn how to do the first few times.)
After the event action, then the player characters get to do two actions on the world. A travel action moves the ship to a new part of the current map or to a different part of the map, represented by an atlas. Moving off the current page in any direction means turning to a new two-page spread and going from there. In the three hours we spent, we didn't leave the starting pages, for there was plenty to do already there. If the ship is at a place with a market, one of the actions can be to see the wares at the market and purchase them. If there's a port, there's an action that involves using the services of the port, whether to heal, repair the ship, visit the market, and so forth.
The main part of the story is in the explore action. Points of interest on the map have numbers in them, and those numbers correspond to entries in the adventure gamebook, which will provide some narrative and then usually require the players to test their skills against a challenge or engage in a combat encounter. Different aspects of the adventure may be engaged if the characters have keywords granted by quests achieved or started, so some locations may have nothing for you until you have the actual keyword needed to engage its adventure. The explore action carries most of the story along with itself.
Unfortunately, the problem I had with the game isn't in the story and the explore actions and the worldbuilding, it's in the mechanics. Non-combat encounters are resolved by trying to reach a target number using the skills of the captain and crew. Skills are represented by icons associated with the crew members. Each icon that a crew person has, whether innately to them or with abilities they have equipped (abilities cost command points to equip to characters) adds 1 to the total toward success, but also requires the character to take fatigue to apply their skills to the situation. A character may only stack two units of fatigue by default before they are too exhausted to contribute to any other skill checks, and the second fatigue reduces their combat damage by one. After all the icons have been added, the character draws a card from the abilities deck and adds its fate number (1-6) to the number of icons put forward to determine of the skill check succeeds or fails. The fate deck is weighted heavily to the 2-5 range. Failure generally means taking health damage, and may or may not include various statuses applied to the characters as well. The story proceeds on success or failure, for most cases, so the characters usually have to decide whether or not they want to put effort into success or to just take the penalty or rely on luck to get through things.
Checks, whether part of the story, or part of the navigation (some areas require you to pass a check or take ship damage every time you enter that space) start at 5 as their target number. During the hours that we played, we also encountered checks that needed 8 and 10 for success and that carried correspondingly harsher penalties for failure. So, much like gamebooks, there are going to be lots of times where you're going to have to rely on good luck to defeat a skill check, or to suffer damage from a bad randomizer, even after you've spent a significant amount of effort trying to avoid that fate. 2 health hits doesn't seem like much, except when most of the characters only have 5 hit points as their base, it becomes a problem to keep taking 2 hits. Which will waste additional time going through the event deck to get back to port, and then costs money having to heal at port, unless the characters just want to forge ahead and take the end-game penalty that comes from a total party kill, assuming you're not playing on permadeath mode where losing all your characters stops the campaign there. So expect, every turn, to have to have characters take damage from unlikely-to-impossible to succeed at events in the early game.
The last element to talk about is the combat mechanic. There are no random encounters in Sleeping Gods, but instead each encounter requires finding your opponents in the appropriate deck, shuffling them, and then laying them out side by side. Supposedly, the gamebook gives you an idea of how difficult the combat will be by assigning it a level, but in the limited time I played, the level system involved was wildly inaccurate about the actual difficulty of combat.
Each opponent has a grid of elements underneath their portrait, representing vital areas to target, parts of their body that will do damage, and parts that will have effects on the party or the monster at the end of a full combat turn. Up to four combat actions can happen from the crew in each round. To defeat an opponent, all of the elements with a heart on them must be covered by wound damage. To do damage to an opponent, the character must beat a target number that represents the difficulty of hitting the opponent using their accuracy score. Some weapons have higher accuracy than others, and the player characters get to add a fate card draw to whatever innate accuracy they have. But again, even level 3 opponents have a target accuracy of 5, so expect to miss a lot with any character who isn't good at hitting things. Missing does allow you to do one point of damage, so no attack is ever completely ineffective. Damage on a hit all have to be adjacent to each other, after the initial damage point, no diagonals unless you have a weapon that allows you to hit on the diagonal, or you have a synergy attack from another PC that allows it. Some of the heart spots require multiple points of damage before they are appropriately covered.
After a character attacks, the creature gets to counter-attack the character that attacked it - it will always do a base amount of damage if it is alive, plus any uncovered damage elements on its character card. Which means that if the additional damage-dealing isn't covered on a successful attack, many of the opponents have the ability to one-shot in their counterattack, and even if it is, many of the opponents have the ability to two-shot characters. Damage from counterattacks can be mitigated by characters that have the ability to block the counterattacks, but higher block generally corresponds with lower damage on successful attacks. Which is to say, unless your characters are well-equipped to fight before they get into fights, you're going to be hurting after combat. Admittedly, in our small playthrough, we didn't have any combats where the party wiped, but there was a lot of trying to think through the tactical parts of making sure everyone stayed alive long enough to have a second round at fighting. And yes, the opponent that gets attacked gets to counter-attack after every time it gets hit, plus each opponent gets one attack in after all the characters have done their attacks for the combat round, so every combat is fought at a disadvantage to the players to encourage them to take as little time as possible hurting their opponents. (Or figuring out how to get enough block to mitigate the counters.)
At the successful conclusion of explores and adventures, the party usually gains at least one experience point, some amount of new quests, and possibly some equipment or other adventure elements that will make some later adventure easier. Abilities can be bought for the characters with accumulated experience, with costs anywhere from 3 to 7 experience points for an ability. And, oh, yes, experience can only be spent in port, so either someone has to charge ahead or retreat back to heal and improve themselves.
So, it's a wide-open sandbox game where the characters start at disadvantage, have to soldier through failure and getting hurt and more disadvantage getting stacked onto them so they can find things that might help them later on, but they're also Stalked By The Bell, so they can't stay in the starting area for very long building up their levels and abilities if they want to go exploring to other parts of the map. There's a lot of frustration inherent in this game, and the only thing you can carry over from one campaign to the next is the knowledge of how this campaign and all your previous campaigns went. So if you want to chart out what the optimal path is to get to what you are interested in, expect to take a lot of notes as you flail around, looking for something that's either not impossibly hard or not terribly punishing and gives decent rewards for the punishment involved. So if you liked having to take notes about all of the mechanics of Nethack as you discovered how they worked, you'll enjoy the note-taking you have to do in this campaign game. If you liked the way that gamebooks could be unforgivably cruel to you if you failed their skill checks, or their luck checks, then you might enjoy this game as well. For everyone else, though, I'd say that unless you're ready to commit to all of the failure that you're going to experience (and that the designers acknowledge that they've planned for and, at least to some degree, intend) before you finally start getting okay at the game and figuring out how to make sure that you have better than average odds at succeeding at both skill checks and combat, steer clear of this one. I was intensely frustrated by it in these first few hours because of having to make choices between bad, worse, and worst, even for the quests that were suggested as ones to start with to get into the game and the world, and the general disadvantage of the players in combat at the start, and the general balance of the game going against the players from the beginning. Even when we succeeded, it didn't feel like victory or progress, but having managed to survive things and then spending additional turns going back and healing up meant spending all of the rewards that we just earned, possibly only gaining a small advantage from an artifact that didn't have to be sold for cash to heal with, and burning yet more time (and having to deal with yet more disaster checks) getting back there to heal up.
A good premise, and some interesting decisions for mechanics, but the game designer could have made a better game from the beginning by giving the PCs a fighting chance for the early parts of the game and making them have to decide between succeeding at the small things or strategically failing at some of the small things so as to be able to save up their abilities for handling the bigger ones. (But that means they have to be able to succeed at the bigger ones once they've gotten a little bit of equipment and abilities, which I'm not entirely convinced they will be able to do.)
The game is called Sleeping Gods (link to a non-spoiler review of the game) and I played it with a couple of friends for a few hours, because one of those friends was writing a review of the game. The premise of the game is that 1-4 players control an adventuring party of 9 (a captain and eight adventurers) as they sail in the world, having adventures and trying to collect proper artifacts to be able to reach one of the endings of the campaign.
That sounds pretty interesting, right? Well…the premise isn't bad, but it gets hindered significantly by the gameplay loop for each turn. Each turn starts with doing an action on the ship that's generally beneficial, to find supplies, to heal a point of damage, to drop off fatigue, to gather potentially-equippable abilities, or to recall command points that get used to activate abilities, abilities, or artifacts. Ship actions can be restricted if the place that a character wants to go has already suffered too much damage to be used, and if the ship suffers too much damage, the campaign ends in failure.
After the ship action, there is a draw from the event deck. Events start mild (which can be beneficial), progress to dangerous, and then from there to deadly. The event deck also serves as the campaign's clock, as any given campaign only gets three passes through the deck. In the time that I spent, we only went a little way into the dangerous part of the first pass of the deck, and it took three hours to get to that point, so this game is not meant to be played in a single marathon setting. (There's a mechanic to record the state of your adventurers, campaign, the world, and the rest so that you can stop any time you like. We didn't use it, but it looked like something that would take some time to learn how to do the first few times.)
After the event action, then the player characters get to do two actions on the world. A travel action moves the ship to a new part of the current map or to a different part of the map, represented by an atlas. Moving off the current page in any direction means turning to a new two-page spread and going from there. In the three hours we spent, we didn't leave the starting pages, for there was plenty to do already there. If the ship is at a place with a market, one of the actions can be to see the wares at the market and purchase them. If there's a port, there's an action that involves using the services of the port, whether to heal, repair the ship, visit the market, and so forth.
The main part of the story is in the explore action. Points of interest on the map have numbers in them, and those numbers correspond to entries in the adventure gamebook, which will provide some narrative and then usually require the players to test their skills against a challenge or engage in a combat encounter. Different aspects of the adventure may be engaged if the characters have keywords granted by quests achieved or started, so some locations may have nothing for you until you have the actual keyword needed to engage its adventure. The explore action carries most of the story along with itself.
Unfortunately, the problem I had with the game isn't in the story and the explore actions and the worldbuilding, it's in the mechanics. Non-combat encounters are resolved by trying to reach a target number using the skills of the captain and crew. Skills are represented by icons associated with the crew members. Each icon that a crew person has, whether innately to them or with abilities they have equipped (abilities cost command points to equip to characters) adds 1 to the total toward success, but also requires the character to take fatigue to apply their skills to the situation. A character may only stack two units of fatigue by default before they are too exhausted to contribute to any other skill checks, and the second fatigue reduces their combat damage by one. After all the icons have been added, the character draws a card from the abilities deck and adds its fate number (1-6) to the number of icons put forward to determine of the skill check succeeds or fails. The fate deck is weighted heavily to the 2-5 range. Failure generally means taking health damage, and may or may not include various statuses applied to the characters as well. The story proceeds on success or failure, for most cases, so the characters usually have to decide whether or not they want to put effort into success or to just take the penalty or rely on luck to get through things.
Checks, whether part of the story, or part of the navigation (some areas require you to pass a check or take ship damage every time you enter that space) start at 5 as their target number. During the hours that we played, we also encountered checks that needed 8 and 10 for success and that carried correspondingly harsher penalties for failure. So, much like gamebooks, there are going to be lots of times where you're going to have to rely on good luck to defeat a skill check, or to suffer damage from a bad randomizer, even after you've spent a significant amount of effort trying to avoid that fate. 2 health hits doesn't seem like much, except when most of the characters only have 5 hit points as their base, it becomes a problem to keep taking 2 hits. Which will waste additional time going through the event deck to get back to port, and then costs money having to heal at port, unless the characters just want to forge ahead and take the end-game penalty that comes from a total party kill, assuming you're not playing on permadeath mode where losing all your characters stops the campaign there. So expect, every turn, to have to have characters take damage from unlikely-to-impossible to succeed at events in the early game.
The last element to talk about is the combat mechanic. There are no random encounters in Sleeping Gods, but instead each encounter requires finding your opponents in the appropriate deck, shuffling them, and then laying them out side by side. Supposedly, the gamebook gives you an idea of how difficult the combat will be by assigning it a level, but in the limited time I played, the level system involved was wildly inaccurate about the actual difficulty of combat.
Each opponent has a grid of elements underneath their portrait, representing vital areas to target, parts of their body that will do damage, and parts that will have effects on the party or the monster at the end of a full combat turn. Up to four combat actions can happen from the crew in each round. To defeat an opponent, all of the elements with a heart on them must be covered by wound damage. To do damage to an opponent, the character must beat a target number that represents the difficulty of hitting the opponent using their accuracy score. Some weapons have higher accuracy than others, and the player characters get to add a fate card draw to whatever innate accuracy they have. But again, even level 3 opponents have a target accuracy of 5, so expect to miss a lot with any character who isn't good at hitting things. Missing does allow you to do one point of damage, so no attack is ever completely ineffective. Damage on a hit all have to be adjacent to each other, after the initial damage point, no diagonals unless you have a weapon that allows you to hit on the diagonal, or you have a synergy attack from another PC that allows it. Some of the heart spots require multiple points of damage before they are appropriately covered.
After a character attacks, the creature gets to counter-attack the character that attacked it - it will always do a base amount of damage if it is alive, plus any uncovered damage elements on its character card. Which means that if the additional damage-dealing isn't covered on a successful attack, many of the opponents have the ability to one-shot in their counterattack, and even if it is, many of the opponents have the ability to two-shot characters. Damage from counterattacks can be mitigated by characters that have the ability to block the counterattacks, but higher block generally corresponds with lower damage on successful attacks. Which is to say, unless your characters are well-equipped to fight before they get into fights, you're going to be hurting after combat. Admittedly, in our small playthrough, we didn't have any combats where the party wiped, but there was a lot of trying to think through the tactical parts of making sure everyone stayed alive long enough to have a second round at fighting. And yes, the opponent that gets attacked gets to counter-attack after every time it gets hit, plus each opponent gets one attack in after all the characters have done their attacks for the combat round, so every combat is fought at a disadvantage to the players to encourage them to take as little time as possible hurting their opponents. (Or figuring out how to get enough block to mitigate the counters.)
At the successful conclusion of explores and adventures, the party usually gains at least one experience point, some amount of new quests, and possibly some equipment or other adventure elements that will make some later adventure easier. Abilities can be bought for the characters with accumulated experience, with costs anywhere from 3 to 7 experience points for an ability. And, oh, yes, experience can only be spent in port, so either someone has to charge ahead or retreat back to heal and improve themselves.
So, it's a wide-open sandbox game where the characters start at disadvantage, have to soldier through failure and getting hurt and more disadvantage getting stacked onto them so they can find things that might help them later on, but they're also Stalked By The Bell, so they can't stay in the starting area for very long building up their levels and abilities if they want to go exploring to other parts of the map. There's a lot of frustration inherent in this game, and the only thing you can carry over from one campaign to the next is the knowledge of how this campaign and all your previous campaigns went. So if you want to chart out what the optimal path is to get to what you are interested in, expect to take a lot of notes as you flail around, looking for something that's either not impossibly hard or not terribly punishing and gives decent rewards for the punishment involved. So if you liked having to take notes about all of the mechanics of Nethack as you discovered how they worked, you'll enjoy the note-taking you have to do in this campaign game. If you liked the way that gamebooks could be unforgivably cruel to you if you failed their skill checks, or their luck checks, then you might enjoy this game as well. For everyone else, though, I'd say that unless you're ready to commit to all of the failure that you're going to experience (and that the designers acknowledge that they've planned for and, at least to some degree, intend) before you finally start getting okay at the game and figuring out how to make sure that you have better than average odds at succeeding at both skill checks and combat, steer clear of this one. I was intensely frustrated by it in these first few hours because of having to make choices between bad, worse, and worst, even for the quests that were suggested as ones to start with to get into the game and the world, and the general disadvantage of the players in combat at the start, and the general balance of the game going against the players from the beginning. Even when we succeeded, it didn't feel like victory or progress, but having managed to survive things and then spending additional turns going back and healing up meant spending all of the rewards that we just earned, possibly only gaining a small advantage from an artifact that didn't have to be sold for cash to heal with, and burning yet more time (and having to deal with yet more disaster checks) getting back there to heal up.
A good premise, and some interesting decisions for mechanics, but the game designer could have made a better game from the beginning by giving the PCs a fighting chance for the early parts of the game and making them have to decide between succeeding at the small things or strategically failing at some of the small things so as to be able to save up their abilities for handling the bigger ones. (But that means they have to be able to succeed at the bigger ones once they've gotten a little bit of equipment and abilities, which I'm not entirely convinced they will be able to do.)
no subject
Date: 2022-03-30 02:24 pm (UTC)Not quite sure whether fixing that would also fix the apparently fundamental flaw in the time split between the adventure and the admin parts of the game. Adventure turn, back to base turn to do admin is only supportable if you can whizz through the second one, or if you can stack several adventuring turns before needing a return to port turn.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-30 08:55 pm (UTC)And if we want to go back to base to do things, we'll still have to expend fatigue to add symbols to our fate draw so that we can travel more than one section in that travel action, so going back to base isn't a free action, really, either.
I'm sure it's a rich and epic game to people who are willing to suffer through the learning curve, but I can't imagine how many hours it's going to take just to make it through Sokoban consistently.