Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Munchkin, a card-based tabletop game by Steve Jackson, bills itself as “a tasteless parody game which brings the essence of the dungeon crawling experience - without all that messy roleplaying!” Mocking Dungeons and Dragons and various other tabletop RPGs, Munchkin is all about kicking down dungeon doors, grabbing as much treasure as possible, and backstabbing your “allies” along the way. It’s an extremely entertaining card game, and manages to keep itself fresh with periodic “expansion” releases that add new dungeon and treasure cards.

The basic premise of the game is pretty simple. Everyone starts at level 1. The object of the game is to reach level 10 before anyone else does. You do this by fighting monsters and playing various cards that allow you to instantly increase your level by one. Each turn, you pull a card off of the “door” deck. If it’s a monster, you get a chance to fight it. To beat a monster, your level needs to be higher than the one listed on its card. But wait! How are you supposed to slay a level 20 Plutonium Dragon when your maximum level (before you win) is 9? Treasure! Various bits of treasure add to your level for the purposes of slaying monsters. An Extremely Impressive Title(tm) and a Flaming Broadsword of Unfairness later, and your level 1 character is effectively level 7. Defeating a monster gets you a level and a number of treasures, drawn from a “treasure” deck.

This brings about an interesting issue. Since you start with no treasure and most things in the game are above level 1, how do you defeat anything? By asking other players for help! This usually won’t come free; someone might offer to help you, only to demand first pick of the loot. Managing your relationships with the other players is the crux of Munchkin; it’s hard to win without other people helping you, but only one person can stand triumphant at the end of the game. Deciding when to help someone and when to hinder them (there are plenty of cards you can use to make monsters stronger or make players weaker) plays a large role in whether you end up winning. Of course, there’s a healthy amount of luck too (as any collectible card game player can tell you). You never know when someone is going to use a Transferal Potion to swipe your game-winning victory over a Potted Plant out from under you (Greg can tell you more about that).

It takes about an hour to finish a game, and if the D&D fantasy theme doesn’t jive with you, there are various other Munchkin sets modeled after science fiction, pirates, and Lovecraft-ian horror (to name a few). If you have a few friends to play with, you’re sure to have an entertaining time!

For the past five weeks, Katt, Greg, Scott, Tim, Ryan, and I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons on Friday nights. Ryan and I have played on and off for a number of years, starting with Second Edition and moving through 3.0 and 3.5 before arriving at our current campaign using the 4.0 ruleset. What I’ve noticed over the years is that the game has become much more accessible to a common audience. To really know how to play Second Edition D&D, you needed to have tables and rulebooks pretty much memorized. Arcane ways of displaying statistics (anyone remember 18/xx Strength scores?) and a really clunky combat system (THAC0? Negative armor class?) made it next to impossible to sit down and understand anything if you’d never played before.

Things got much better in 3.0 and 3.5, where the old systems were tossed out and rebuilt to be much easier to understand. Every action in the game turned in to a check; one would roll a d20 plus some sort of modifer based on your skills and stats). Keeping track of your abilities was still a pain though. How does one keep track of a power with “X uses per day” when the flow of time in the game world and the real world is so different?

4.0 fixed that problem, although the changes drew outcries from D&D “purists” that claimed the game had been “WoWified” (a derogatory reference to Blizzard Entertainment’s popular World of Warcraft). The game’s focus shifted to streamline things; instead of tracking individual powers, everything was reclassified as “at-will” (infinite uses), “encounter” (once per battle), or “daily” (once in between extended rests). In addition, the list of skills (formerly enormous) was pared down. Things like Spot and Listen (skills that few people took) were combined in to skills like Perception. Not only did this grant one’s character access to a larger range of skills, it made performing skill checks (comparing one’s ability to do something with its difficulty class, a number representing how hard it is to succeed at something) much easier.

So far, I’m enjoying the revised system immensely (as the one running the adventures!). It’s far easier to keep track of player and monster statuses in combat, and I don’t have to spend time running all sorts of confusing calculations just to see if Katt’s arrows hit the goblin in the corner of the room. My players seem to be enjoying it too; the less they have to focus on the “metagame” (keeping track of the game in order to play it), the more energy they can devote to thinking out their actions and role-playing their characters.

If you’ve played Dungeons and Dragons (or any other tabletop RPG), what sorts of experiences have you had between editions?

This is huge. For many years now, I’ve been thinking about how we could leverage parallel processing and cloud computing to do intensive video processing, then send the rendered output back to a dumb terminal for things like high-definition video playback. My dreams have come true: OnLive appears to have perfected the idea in relation to games. Their architecture takes input from a keyboard/mouse/controller, which then arrives at a server. All of the video related to your inputs is then rendered and sent back to the client, all well-within (apparently) acceptable bounds for latency. Effectively, your PC becomes a dumb terminal that just sends controller commands and receives a video stream from a cluster of machines. Instead of playing a game running on your local machine, you’re playing it on a cluster of machines somewhere out on the internet.

The bandwidth requirements aren’t bad; you need a 1.5 megabit connection for 480i resolution (~640×480), and a 5 megabit connection to do 720p (~1280×720). The company also plans to release a set top box with HDMI, Ethernet, a few USB ports, and optical audio so that you can play titles on your television. The content model looks to be subscription-based (everyone seems to love annually recurring revenue these days), but few details are avaialble other than to expect the service in “Q4 2009.” If this works, the console as we know it is effectively obsolete, as is spending large amounts of money to keep a gaming PC up-to-date. We’ll see how it all plays out!

Playing games and researching cures for cancer? These aren’t two activities that you generally associate with one another. However, computers don’t lend themselves terribly well to protein folding; it is (understandably) difficult for them to “think outside the box.” Enter fold.it, a puzzle game based around folding proteins into optimal configurations to learn more about how they interact with the body. Fold.it players receive protein data from a central server, then are given a set of tools to graphically manipulate them. Points are rewarded for meeting certain criteria, and integrated chat channels and scoreboards help foster communication and competition.

What I find fascinating is that fold.it has managed to leverage an entertaining pastime as a research tool. It makes one ask what other ways we can leverage games and distributed computing to achieve scientific progress.