Frank Branham: Bad Level Design, Heroscape, and not about Essen

Given the above title, and its timing, I'm pretty certain that no one will read this. Which means the two of you who are entering this mass of text are going to find a long rant which isn't exactly about videogames.

Because most videogames are solitary affairs, level design is of key importance. The levels and scenarios have to change, and the challenges have to evolve in order to keep a player's interest over the course of the game. It seems obvious, but an amazing number of videogame abominations have appeared over the years. Even the vaunted Halo had some serious repetition going on. The library level consists of walking through the same corridor with zombie things leaping out at you around every turn. The level goes on for 4 or 5 years or so.

Bungie eventually got the idea. Halo 2 features a return to the Library level, flashing the chapter title "Oh No, Not Again." on the screen as you enter. This time, the level lasts for maybe 30 seconds. As best as I can figure, it was a formal apology.

Level design is somewhat related to scenario design. And as wargames and collectible miniatures games edge their way into our little fortress, scenario design becomes more of a concern.

Look at Heroscape and Memoir '44. Light games, modular pieces, and some reasonably interesting scenarios. Both games have fairly controllable collections of components, as they are expandable as opposed to collectible.

There are some limitations in the scenario designs, however. Heroscape does not use unit powers and abilities in their scenarios. This is presumably to allow players to tailor their forces at the start of the game. History, however, creates weird Agincourt and Zulu Wars-like imbalances in their forces that make for interesting scenarios.

Memoir '44 makes a weirder error. In most wars, you have attackers, defenders, and objectives. Memoir '44 has a great game system, but its primary goal of unit elimination makes for some fairly weak scenarios. Nowhere is this more clear than the Arnhem scenario. While the terrain and forces look correct, the Allies best strategy is to try and avoid entering Arnhem, as that bridge is a problem. There are objective markers, but the bulk of the points are from taking units.

As you drift into collectible minis games, things get rather worse. You don't really get a fixed set of minis, or a map. Most of the "scenarios" are on the order of "pick a 200 point army and fight to the death". You might get an advanced scenario of "pick a 400 point army and fight to the death, but in the middle there is a TREE!"

Be still my beating heart.

I sometimes suspect that part of this is the bias against wargames from the Euro crowd. A lot of wargame designers worked out the whole objective and scenario design over the years. They realize that the entire flow and pace of the games really stems from that aspect. All of the systems, dice mechanics, and special abilities are just details. The scenario is the game.

Some of the wargame-lite designs in comparison look as if they are running around screaming "Look! we're battling! WooHoo! Yippee!" ( The really light ones are doing just that of course on purpose. They'd better be short, though. ) And so Eurogamers play the light little games, and think that "Well that's nice, but it isn't really much of a game." They'd be right. Someone forgot to include the game.

Curiously, my favorite wargame minis game lite is the old Mutant Chronicles game. It is a Richard Borg design. The system will not thrill you, it isn't half as clever as Command and Colors, and is a basic Heroscape kind of game. The scenarios and the campaign system are simple, functional, and vastly entertaining. Mission objectives are of the typical "kill this", "go here", "get out alive" sorts of things. The missions determine how many credits you get to outfit your characters on future missions. This changes the abilities of teams each time. Each team also has a primary purpose of getting points for killing aliens. Dying makes you lose credits. While the game system is simple, figuring out how to kill things, AND finish your mission, and not die, and make sure that you do better than your fellow marines makes for quite a tricky game.

On top of this, advanced missions have secondary missions. Two of the marine teams have the scenario's primary mission. Two of the teams have totally different random secret missions. Fun, chaos, and a fair bit of backstabbing ensues. I have NEVER seen another game that gets as much mileage out of its scenario design.

My first Heroscape scenario
This entire rant started because I wanted to drag out my Heroscape set for the Mercer Meeples. I have a sizable collection of the plastic stuff, and have been looking for a big castle scenario. There ain't much. There are some ok battlefields, but the scenarios come down to "pick a 300 point army....blah.blah...fight....blah....blah...eliminated."

There is an amazing tool called Virtualscape that will allow you to design a battlefield and will keep track of parts, and will even check your map to make sure it is possible to build, and will generate a PDF of your build, and render a high quality pic of the map.

I'm going for a 3 on 1 scenario that I may try out today. There is an outer bailey of castle walls, and an inner tower with a pair of windows and scattered ladders. Object is to take over two points inside the small castle. It is a really tall, dense map. With the castles, I think it is 36 blocks tall.

The map has a lot of choke points, some obvious archer perches, and a couple of nearly unreachable glyphs.

To try and get the uneven forces idea in, I am requiring that one of the 3 attacking players must take ONLY flying units, while his cohorts must only take non-flying units. This will force them to coordinate their attacks in order to clear out some of the perches, and unblock the choke points with the advance force.

One nice thing about the published Heroscape designs is that the better ones include an objective and a time limit. I really have no idea what the point values or time limits should be. I'm going to go with a reinforcement rule for the defender. He gets so many points each turn. At any time, he can spend points to bring in reinforcement. The idea is inspired by Descent (where it is vastly misused. Reinforcements in the game are so cheap, that they can quickly outnumber objective critters. The game really wants for fewer, nastier monsters. )

I'll add a link in the comments, and probably post it to Heroscapers once I get at least a good test run in.

© 2006 Frank Branham

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Comments:

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Hey, I’m reading. Excellent stuff… Posted by Mikko Saari on Oct 19, 2006 at 03:28 AM | #

Me too (and 163 others to date), if only to distract me from the reports of the big event happening only a few hours away from my home. Posted by Jeff Allers on Oct 19, 2006 at 07:29 AM | #

Good stuff, read it first.  Might read the essen stuff later, maybe not… trying to sort out and remember all the German titles mentioned before they’re brought here and translated is too much work… Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Oct 19, 2006 at 10:02 AM | #

Space Hulk was a good game for having nice scenarios available, especially if you were also getting White Dwarf magazine (I’ve lost touch with Games Workshop stuff, so maybe they still do).  Every so often you would get some new rules and even a new room piece.  The scenarios were also often linked up, so you could get benefits from doing well in the earlier missions. Sounds like you can actually improve the skills and stats of your team members (in Mutant Chronicles) though, which sounds even more interesting.  I did enjoy the ‘campaign’ aspect of the GW games like Necromunda (futuristic gangs) and Blood Bowl (fantasy themed rugby/football). I will need to check out that Mutant game, thanks for the tip! Posted by Jim Clapperton on Oct 19, 2006 at 02:39 PM | #

There is a set of connected level scenarios at heroscapers.com, called collectively “The Siege of Dulhammer Crag”.  It’s a two-player set of levels, where one player has the hordes of evil and the other player has the army of good that doesn’t get reinforcements for the rest of the game (or get very limited reinforcements). There are seven scenarios in all, but there are branching points so that you won’t necessarily see all of them, and depending on how well you do in a particular scenario, your army constitution might change (even in the case of the hordes of evil).  This has gone through some threads of discussion on heroscapers.com and I think might be featured in a future Codex issue. Which vaguely reminds me; Knizia’s Lord of the Rings also features abstractly (as always) level scenarios that are interrelated, even more so when you use the expansions. I don’t mind the simplest scenarios, e.g., “300 points and FIGHT!” The fight forms the body of some very formidable games, such as Go and the chess family.  And Heroscape is a nice example of having enough variety in terms of team composition that the special powers become the “scenario” for the game.  Playing a game against Q9 and Braxas is very different from playing one against six sets of 4th Mass, even on the same board. Posted by Ava Jarvis on Oct 19, 2006 at 05:10 PM | #

I’ve been thinking lately that there is a dearth of good HS scenarios lately.  Funny you should mention it. I don’t know what the “solution” is other than to design them myself.  Most frustrating, I think, is to see pictures of interesting looking battlefields (e.g. on HeroScapers.com) and then not find a map for them..... Posted by Joe Casadonte on Oct 22, 2006 at 08:41 PM | #

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