Tag Archives: design

Age Is Just A Number…

Posted on by dconstructions
Reply

One of the innovations of the early internet was “long games”: games made up of comment chains on forums where the only way to lose was not to reply or for the game to end. One popular long game was trying to post a statement that the subsequent poster could not find objectionable in some way. One of the best moves in that game was:

“I don’t think innocent babies should be left to die in the street”

Followed by

“Oh really? So you want to take a dying baby and remove its opportunity to see a beautiful street before it dies?”

The lovely subtext of this long game was of course that communication based one one-upping someone is no communication at all. Social media thrives so much on correcting the op that we’ve not only forgotten that this kind of communication is worthless, we’ve started to think it’s the only kind that’s worthy. Takes must be hot, dunks must be savage and faux iconoclasm the greatest virtue. Another practice of the early internet was to scorn the “me-toos” because they added a post but no content. As I said at the time, this was an insane and horrific idea because nothing is so important in a conversation as the (typically nonverbal) affirmation of our interlocutors. 

Agreeing with someone might be a radical act of insurgence, in a world where disagreement is a commodity. Cosy, low-conflict games are appealing perhaps because they step away from this world. We’re tired of marketing constantly asking us to choose between Coke and Pepsi, or feeling envious of instagrams. We’d rather just get along and be understood, and the demand for conflict is so overwhelming now we are fleeing from it.

Indeed, gamification is so often seen as nothing but the things that made people want to play World of Warcraft so much that it continues to backfire when applied to things like health programs. It turns out that using the same mechanisms that get people to addicted to poker machines, calling it “a game” and slapping it on things was bad for the things and not much to do with gaming either.

In a similar way, I think a lot of people are drawn to the new trend of cosy games because social media and hustle culture seem so keen to measure us all the time. Numbers must go up is the catch-cry of capitalism and social media, which reports at every second how much you are liked, in precise numbers. It seems to be everywhere too – computer game high scores gamified into everything we do. My friend has a car she hates because it rates every drive she takes by how efficiently she drove. I mentioned this to another friend though and she remarked that for her, she’d love to get extra information, like another beautiful insight into the world around her. My friend very wisely pointed out that information, even when it is a rank or a measure, does not have to be a judgement. Age is just a number and so is a score out of ten. Even if that number is important, even if we need it to be high or low for a purpose, it doesn’t have to become a value, or a virture.

Last entry I talked about how the orthogame is inherently a critique-machine. Even cooperatively, a game is designed to evaluate your efforts and report back. It is natural for humans to take that as a challenge and a judgement. As much as we would like to say that what matters is how much fun we had or the friends we made along the way, the points are not awarded for that at all. Competition and measurement are not emotionally neutral: NASA tests have shown that board games are a bad thing to take on long term space missions because they inevitably cause resentment and division. Games are constantly likened to war and conflict and success in them used as proof of greatness and virtue.

However we can, as my friend observed about the car measure, get over attached to things too. We can see in the long game discussed above that the contrariness was contrived and the antagonism existed only to create comic interactions. Competition and competitiveness and scoring are just mechanics. They aren’t necessarily, even in an orthogame, why we are playing. We must act as if we want points in order to get the most out of the game, but we can do so without getting too attached to them. 

The same of course is true of rules: we can get over attached to them and think following them is the point, but that doesn’t mean we want to get rid of them entirely. Sometimes rules are part of the fun in themselves – another famous long game trend of the early internet were several based on Mornington Crescent, a game that is about rules that cannot be won. How much rules actually matter though and how much we value them can vary between people. I remember once playing Elder Sign, a cooperative game, and we lost on the final roll. A friend said he was going to fudge that, obviously, because as he put it, we are here to have fun, not “get screwed over by the rules”. I was totally able to have fun and lose on one roll, because I was aware of that contract going in, but it didn’t ruin my fun to take on his values of play over rules. I also remember learning to play solitaire as a child and excitingly telling my father that I had won by only cheating slightly once and he sucking the wind out of me entirely by telling me it didn’t count. The point is that to a large extent how much we care about rules and how much we care about competition are extrinsic things we bring to the table, not intrinsic to rules and competition themselves.

Naturally a lot of people were a bit confused by my last entry about games being too competitive because to them competition was both the accepted standard and a thing that didn’t really concern them very much – they did not attach a strong value to it. It was no big deal. Some were so invested in the idea of the former, though, that they were surprised I would even call it out as an issue. I can understand that: much like rules, if you don’t see competition as a lever you can pull on, you might never examine its presence at all. That does bother me a little when it comes to designers, but then again I’m always the person who pulls on EVERYTHING because it’s probably a lever. Some have accused me of destroying bookshelves as a result, if you follow the metaphor. 

Some even suggested that I was wasting my time playing games if I was going to insist they not have competition. Again, I can understand that somewhat. One can drive oneself mad and be permanently unhappy if you spend your whole life demanding every single cat be a dog. (Although this is also a great way to explore what you might be assuming or forgetting are pre-established assumptions. I once had the privilege of watching someone see a play for the first time and be outraged that he was expected to just accept that if a person walked off stage and changed hats they were a different guy. I also once had a friend who had never encountered anything to do with superheroes until they saw the Dr Who episode about superheroes which talks about the trope of “not killing” and watching them deal with how stupid that idea is was the greatest thing ever. Untainted eyes are wonderful and help us better understand everything, especially how things appear to outsiders, which we so easily forget.) You can also drive yourself crazy insisting that the things you think are important are so to everyone – sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and competition is just a means to an end, a mechanic that doesn’t matter because of course we are just playing for fun. Losses don’t make us feel stupid, attacks don’t make us feel mean. To me it seems really strange that so far, every game about cats and dogs that’s come out has been competitive, not cooperative, but it clearly doesn’t strike anyone else as odd whatsoever.

Image
the age old struggle

But I also think that assuming anyone wanting to think outside the box should just get a new box is a thought-terminating cliche. So too, is the idea that all game mechanics are neutral and don’t bleed into us because “it’s just a game”. It is true that we add things to them, and we can get hung up on them being things they are not. It is true that competition is just another mechanic. But it is also true that every mechanic is not just anything, and just because we realise that competition is a mechanic, not the goal doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at what the goals are and how competition moves us towards or away from that. It is also true that mechanics can and have immense power, even if they have more on some folks more than others. We also have to be very careful of saying “well all games are like that” – because they are not – or that gamers should just get over it and like a game regardless of its mechanics. The whole wonderful thing about living in the post golden age of games is we should have learnt by now that even the orthogame is full of variety and possibility and levels of subtlety and intensity that appeal to different people in different ways. I don’t really “get” why some people find timed games stressful, but I respect it. You might not get why I don’t really like competition, but you have to recognise it is a thing, inside the world of games. 

Also, you know what else is like rules and like competition, things that are very useful but we attach way too much value to but don’t actually mean as much as we think sometimes? Categories. A lot of people tend to act like categories are an absolute truth handed down by God, which is why they got so mad when Pluto stopped being a planet, as if that means anything. I remember someone saying that they should have waited until Percival Lowell’s widow died before changing it, as if a category change is a demotion or at all worth anything. Categories exist for the same reason rules and competition exist: as a tool to get where we are going, and the goal is the thing that matters. So when you say to me “well, games just are competitive, move on”, I’m going to say you’re putting way too much truth value on a category. Or more briefly: “says who?”.

I can respect that you put a lot of value on categories, but a category is just an exercise in understanding, and not one I value highly. I really believe games, even orthogames, can be anything we want them to be, without falling into a meaningless soup of nothingness and dadaism, and it’s our job as artists to break the rules. Even when our art form is making rules.

The Atomic RPG Action

Posted on by dconstructions
Reply

Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about it recently. It comes up a lot when we play The Score but it also sneaks into other RPGs all the time – and I think we probably find ways to do this kind of thing more than we might imagine, but it’s not written down in any rulebooks. And pretty much the entire history of RPGs is thinking of things people are actually doing and turning them into written rules.

First, let’s do an example, and I’ll do Star Wars again because I’m old. Luke wakes up to find his new droid has wandered off into the desert. He goes looking for it, and finds signs of sandpeople. He pulls back to see if he can see them from a distance, and they – having set a trap – ambush him and knock him out. He is saved at the last moment by the appearance of a strange figure using crazy mind powers, who is luckily, a person Luke has been thinking about.

Image
Atomic comes from the Greek a-tmos, a as in not and tmos as in cuttable. Something you can’t cut divide any further..

As a writer, here’s how you might think about this scene: you want to establish some character beats. Luke isn’t as tough as he thinks he is. Obi-Wan has mysterious powers. We can show that by having a nice moment of “plot zig zag” – Luke finds the droid is gone (oh no), Luke finds the droid (hooray), Luke sees sand people (suspense), Luke is attacked (surprise), Luke is saved (hooray). You would write this all as one scene, and the chief purpose of the scene would be to get the two characters together in an interesting way, and establish some character and world building.

Obviously there isn’t and can’t always be a parallel between non-participatory storytelling and participatory storytelling, but here’s how this might look in an RPG: Luke would make a roll to see if he can find R2D2s trail. He succeeds! Then the GM has him roll perception to notice the sand people. He succeeds! He decides he will hide. The GM decides (somehow) that the sand people are setting up a trap so gives Luke some rolls to see if he can figure this out, like say Local Knowledge and Perception. Fail, and fail. Okay, Luke, give me a dodge roll. Fail? Okay they knock you out. But … I guess an old wizard comes along and stops them from eating you? Luke’s player will spend a point on his I Know This Guy stat to say this is an old mountain hermit he’s met a few times.

And at this point someone might go – and it might be the GM, and it might be in secret, or it might not – “oh, can that be the person my character, Princess Leia, was trying to find?”. And that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s a lot like retro-active continuity but done in the act of creation. It makes sense that this thing that we’ve already decided happened and that thing we’ve already decided happened are linked. Perhaps causally or through an heretofore unestablished connection. And like I say, I think we do this all the time.

So often when I’m generating random stuff from tables, I’m putting two or three things together so that they are linked like this. Which has got me pondering: is there a way to make this an explicit mechanic? In The Score I’ve been toying with the idea of drawing two cards at once, so that you can explain the failure of the first by the arrival of the second, or resolve the failure of the first with the success of the second. However particularly since the game is all about drawing cards, it tends to work better at the table if everything is atomic. And that’s when it hit me: almost everything we do in TTRPGs is atomic like this. The example above was something you might call a scene but each roll stood on its own. The GM might have prepared several ways the encounter might have gone, and seen that as a cohesive whole but each roll was “what happens now, at this point” with Luke rolling to see if he gets a yes or a no or a sort of outcome. The story branches around these atomic choices. And that’s fine…

…but if you were writing this scene, you’d write this at the very least as a one-two punch. First this, then that. Luke takes a hit, gets rescued. You’d get the two things at the same time.

There are some systems that can work like this. You could do a scene-based resolution where say, Luke’s trying to “find R2D2” and he gets a yes but, and the player decides that he gets ambushed then saved. In this case though the test is still a kind of an atomic thing – a yes no maybe of “does this happen”. And if you go out to this step, the scene with Obi-Wan is connected to Luke not being at home when the stormtroopers arrive and to Luke finding Obi-Wan and getting some of his backstory.

Alternatively you could have a tug-of-war style system (like in Dogs in the Vineyard or Cortex) where the GM is playing “planetary threats” and there’s a back and forth wagering until finally Luke wins but with a sacrifice (he takes a wound, say). This does get to the idea that we build in connections and outcomes but it does still feel like we’re trying to solve a singular situation. We have a procedural scene: Luke wants to achieve an outcome and rolls to determine if he does. And certainly we can start with that idea and bring in what I’m talking about, because “solving a problem” is a pretty standard core RPG mechanic.

But what I’d like to see is something that steps outside the atomic. Imagine a situation where every roll in an RPG is always two rolls, in the sense of we’re getting two ideas we want to link together. This isn’t the same thing as rolls that produce lots of information, like in the Genesys system, because that still feels to me sealed inside the atomic concept. Although again, that’s probably a good way to come at this problem – it might be that we’ve solved this issue already, with this idea. But I’m curious about what else we might do. Another way to think about this is systems where everyone rolls their initiative at the start of the round so you know that when you finish your action, who is coming next. Similarly the Balsera Initiative system where you decide who goes next is going to prompt into this area as well. What we want is for players to think about connections, and what just happened and what’s about to happen is a start.

But what if whenever Bob the Fighter wants to do X we get Eric the cleric to roll for whatever they are doing next? Of course you’ll say they don’t know what they’re doing next, but we often DO have some idea. Maybe Bob is trying to bust down the door and Eric the Cleric is going to blast some spells. Roll both. Then explain and describe the whole thing when you know all the things coming into the scene. In this case there’s basically four outcomes, but they’re all kind of interesting. Can Bob fail to get the door down but Eric look badass when casting spells? Maybe. If I was writing that scene, I’d have Bob hit the door, hurt himself, have a comedy beat and then a skeleton shoot out of the door a second later and getting blasted. Or maybe the door opens but Bob goes sliding in, looks up and sees a skeleton about to kill him – and then Eric saves his life. If Bob wins and Eric wins, then it’s a moment of two comrades acting in perfect synchronicity. If Bob wins and Eric fails then Bob slams open the door only for the skeleton to shoot past him and Eric’s faith to fail. If they both fail…the skeleton kicks the door open, knocks Bob down and Eric fails to get his holy symbol up.

Of course all of those situations can be achieved with atomic rolls but I hope you can see how starting with lots of information coming into something BEFORE we interpret the roll, we can get different results. And that currently, we mostly do RPGs where each player makes an atomic choice and gets a singular answer back from the system before we move on. And there’s probably a whole other series of things we could be doing that aren’t atomic like this. Games naturally teach us to take turns and keeping things atomic does mean that each player feels independent and in control. Turns, in other words, make sense. But they’re not the only way to play. We don’t take turns in tug of war – we all come in at once.

I do not have the answers here. I only have this question, this start of an idea. I’m putting it here because I want to see someone take it somewhere. Because that’s what I’m talking about – collaboration. Collaboration, like narrative, is rarely atomic. Let’s see where we can go, not just one step at a time, on our own.

Five Reasons Guild Wars 2 Has Great World Design

Posted on by dconstructions
2

Looking for a new MMO after City of Heroes closed, I’ve ended up playing Guild Wars 2. It’s mechanics are fairly good, having learnt a lot of important lessons of what actually makes MMOs fun for lots of people. But it is also appealing because its world building is very good, and there is much to be learned from that if you’re doing your own world building. Here’s five quick lessons from things GW2 does very well:

#1: Familiar Faces, New Twists

Races and factions need strong hooks, and the truth is the bucket of hooks is very small. It has to be because hooks are big and bold. They need to be because hooks are exactly what they sound like: they exist for people to grab a hold of quickly and easily. So it makes sense to use archetypes and familiar checkpoints, like having a big strong animalistic race that likes fighting. It makes to have a naturey-race that is all pretty and graceful. People have clear things they like in games and they can quickly latch onto things like this and go “this has what I like and feel comfortable with.” This is why it’s usually okay for fantasy games to have elves and dwarfs, or not-elves and pseudo-dwarfs.

But it’s also important to have new things to explore underneath those hooks. For example, in Earthdawn, all the elves went mad as they tortured their own flesh to stave off the madness of the horrors. That gives them a new kick. In Guild Wars, the wood elf types are a) actual plants and b) the youngest of all races, so they lose all of that ancient-and-wise thing elves normally have. But they’re still pretty and nature-attuned, with a strong hook. The ego and magically-better-than-everyone hook is instead given to the adorable little chibi hamster people, the Asura. The Charr, the big tough cat guys are kilrathi-klingons, but unlike most warrior races they don’t shun technology but embrace it. They are in fact the greatest technologists on the planet because that’s what a military industrial complex DOES BEST. The Norns are basically vikings but their gods are more like those of native American tribes, so they’re a bit more than just not-vikings. The humans are the most vanilla, but their twist is their gods have abandoned them and they are almost extinct. No great glorious human empire.

Twists can be poorly done, or not done enough, or destroyed by protesting too much (Talislanta, I’m looking at you, goddammit), but they are vital to put in to keep things interesting.

#2: Culture Matters

The best way to make races feel more than just archetypes or cookie-cutters is to explore culture. That’s where a lot of the twists above come from: for example, by exploring the ideas of a culture built around war, it is easy to see that they might embrace technology. Likewise, the Asura’s tendency for arrogance and technomagical genius has had a profound effect on their societal design and typical worldview. Everything has become a competition, and their government is full of mad cultists pursuing science at any cost, and nobody really cares. The norns have a deep spirituality which, because this is fantasy, is literally true, and colours everything they experience. The Charr were ruled by the magic-using clan among them, but since overthrowing that clan have a distrust of magic and a need to reestablish themselves post-revolution. And all these things effect the stories you get involved in, the characters you make and the choices you face.

Culture isn’t just more realistic, it makes worlds feel more lived in. You know what the man on the street thinks and feels, not just what he wears or what flag he follows. It can give even the most tired cliches depth, and be a great way to reveal the twists you need to keep things fresh. It is also the best and easiest way to inspire and push stories. Culture is what makes humans human, and so we instantly respond to it. It’s why we travel the earth and study other countries and indeed, play other roles. You can never skimp on it, and the more of it you do, the better.

#3: Everyone’s An Egotistical Jerk

As with hooks, it is important that players don’t have to be total bastards. People who want to be the good guy when they play need somewhere to go. But on a cultural and political level, no nation, no organisation, no group and no mindset should be saintly, and all of them should have reasons to disagree with all the others. This is partly because it’s much more realistic (and it makes your cultures more realistic as a result) but also because again, it drives story. Stories are about conflict, and cultures are at their most interesting when they conflict – and in the real world, they always do.  This works on a micro-level, when the elf in the party hates the dwarf, but also on a massive macro-level, where alliances are regularly forged and then dispelled as goals run together, then drift apart.  Even what appear to be classic tales of white and black have these elements: Bespin tries to be a neutral party in the war against the Empire; the drama of Empire Strikes Back comes from Lando making an alliance with one side to further his own goals. Gondor and Rohan are enemies before Sauron turns up and forces them to unite.

In Guild Wars 2, the Charr’s warlike culture forces them to constantly attack the other races. It’s all they know. The norn likewise have a culture built around pride: only those who build great legends go to heaven, so they are driven to prove their superiority. The Humans are fighting for survival, but also have been told by one of their gods that they have a Manifest Destiny to spread across the whole planet. The Asura’s absolute mastery of magic proves they should be running the world and they may have the resources to do it. And the plant-born Sylvari are so young they judge everyone on first impressions, which is usually that they are jerks trying to kill them.

#4: We All Have To Work Together

Sometimes, you can make your factions too disparate and too distrusting. Even if “adventuring types” are the exception, your game can suffer if there are no good reasons for people from these vastly different backgrounds to be thrown together. Vampire: The Requiem made this mistake and the campaign they released with it required a massive amount of justification to explain having one of each clan in the party. You want your cultures to conflict, so you have to squish them together. If everyone is hiding away in Elfhome or the sewers, then conflict won’t happen.

Guild Wars 2 does this nice and simply with geography. When the great dragons returned (see point five) they rearranged the world a lot. The norn were pushed south from their mountain home until they ended up between the Charr and the Humans. The Humans are right next to the Charr, but everything behind them is worse. The Charr need to expand to ensure they don’t become so weak that the magic users of their number come back and crush them, but don’t have enough resources right now to crush the Norns or the Humans, so might actually need allies. And when the Sylvari appeared, they grew like seeds from a newly sprouted World Tree, which bloomed very close to the Asuran Empire. The Sylvari, new to the world, need guidance from the other races, but they also know the most about the Elder Dragons, so everyone really needs their knowledge too if they are going to survive. The Charr need magic support if they are going to hold off their old oppressors, but can’t risk encouraging it in their own ranks. The norns will need to learn more about surviving in the plains now they are out of the mountains. Everyone is holding pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle and they can’t finish it alone. Wired into the setting are thus ways to drive everyone into co-operation so the conflicts above will occur.

#5: There Are Millions of Things That Need Doing, Right Now

Obviously, the biggest thing driving the races towards cooperation, both indirectly (because of land movement) and directly (because otherwise they’ll die) is the return of the Elder Dragons. These enormous jerks lived below the oceans for milennia, and now are back to end the world, like a whole pack of Midgards. That is a problem that really needs to be fixed, teamwork or no teamwork. So there’s a strong driving goal there. But that’s not the only one.

On a smaller scale, every culture has its own crisis, or crises to deal with, many of which we’ve already covered. Away from their ancestral lands, the Norn spirits are restless and angry. The Charr are recovering from a devastating civil war that the losers would love to restart in a second; the Asura are heading towards a civil war as their culture becomes sicker and sicker. And the Humans are trying to survive, which has also, on a micro-level, forced all humans of different cultures together to unite.  There is so much stuff to do it almost makes you despair – but you can’t, because you don’t have time. Which is the other point: these problems are at a crisis point right now, and could easily tip over. If the Charr can’t hold their city from enemies, they’ll fall back into civil war, and if that happens their race could be wiped out by undead, or ghosts or dragons, and without the Charr, the other nations are screwed, because they don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle (see above). So everything matters, and it matters right now. There’s a quote in Warhammer I always remember: “The Empire is always one-dagger thrust away from anarchy”. I keep that in mind whenever writing settings, because it means that every dagger thrust is always the most important thing in the world.

And it absolutely should be, because that way everything the players do feels important, feels charged with meaning and accomplishment and resonance. It also means storytellers never run out of ideas, and there are always things that must be done. You players will never need to look for motivation because it oozes out of every micron of the setting. So there can never be player paralysis either. Don’t get me wrong, if you want you can pursue your own goals, parallel or tangentially: start a business, join a band, run a city, whatever. But if you want or need adventure, plot or conflict, it is low-hanging fruit, fresh on the vine.

You can see what needs doing, you get a sense of how to do it (those missing jigsaw pieces) but also a sense of what prevents that (everyone’s a jerk), which you know about because culture matters, and which is interesting because of the new twists. So you have a goal to reach, a path to walk, obstacles to encounter, character motivation and flavour to describe. Your setting, in short, has written your stories for you. Exactly as it should.