Archetypes and Planting Flags

We respond instinctively to archetypes, and a lot of shysters take advantage of this. Yes, there's a lot of interesting, useful stuff about them (Hero With A Thousand Blah Blah Blah) but the reality is that if you come up with a list of, say, 3 or more things, and define it broadly, then it will resonate with people as a powerful model. Some of this is just numbers: If I list 8 types of Stamp Collectors and define them loosely enough, odds are good I've covered 90%+ of the potential audience, and that last 10% will probably find a way to make it work. A larger part of it is how our brains tend to glom onto data - archetypes (like stereotypes) are the chocolate frosted sugar bombs to our brain's appetite for understanding - they're tasty and they go down easy.

So, with all that cynicism established, I do want to talk about how they're useful - especially the ones you create yourself.

After my post last week, I was speaking to one of the subjects (the Rookie) and he voiced an interesting thought, wishing there was some way to note people's archetypes and then keep track of the characters they've played and see how those things overlap. We agreed that for a lot of players there's a comfort zone that they like to stay within, and there's a lot of value in pushing them out of it, but at the same time you don't want to push them too far out of it.

Now, doing this is tricky, but the first part of requires identifying the player's comfort zone, and this is where the idea of making your own archetypes becomes handy. See, an advantage of making archetypes for your players is that you can afford to not be entirely precise, but at the same time you're going to get more specific than you would with generic character types.

Once you've figured that out, you can do something Fred did, long ago, when setting up Born to Be Kings (The first FATE game, and my favorite campaign of all time). See, Fred knew his players and their tendencies pretty well, so as part of character creation he took each player aside and planted a single "flag" outside of their comfort zone. This flag was the one element he was imposing on the character backgrounds, and it served as an irritant to form a pearl around.

What's interesting was that each of us responded differently to the flag. One player who usually tends towards logistics had a fae element inserted, and jumped into it with both feet. Another player was uncomfortable with it, and that friction drove a lot of play. But one way or another it forced us all to play differently than we would have if we'd been given free reign.

Constraint breed creativity strikes again. Who knew?

Anyway, this is one of those ideas that not hard to implement, but may be tricky to implement well depending upon how well your players respond to structure and how much trust they have in you as a GM (especially if your flag would force them to make what they consider a non-optimal build choice) so you may need to learn how to strike a balancing act. This is easier in something like FATE or Cortex Plus where an Aspect or Distinction is rarely a "wrong choice", but it's still entirely possible with games like Pathfinder or 4e (4e actually offers some really interesting options for this with Themes), even if they are entirely in-fiction.

Anyway, when the time comes for you to start your next game, stop and think about your players, and how you can help them push beyond the archetype you see them in and into something more complicated, interesting and fun.

The Five People At My Table

I believe that when you design a game, it helps to have an audience in mind, the more specific the better. Trying to make a game for everyone seems noble, but it's unlikely to challenge you as a designer, and it's more likely to produce something that's fairly weak sauce. Yes, targeting an audience runs the risk of making your focus too narrow, but the alternative is vastly more boring.

For me, there's a table of five players that I keep in my head when I design. They raise questions and challenges to my work that I would not raise myself. They're all real people, dear friends and loved ones, but today I want to talk about them in terms of the roles they play.

First and foremost, we have the Connector. She plays for story, and for her, stories are about people much more than they are about grand, exciting things. She has negligible patience for rules, especially for rules pertaining to things she views as uninteresting or unimportant to play. However, she is intensely motivated to engage the fiction, very organized and outright driven in her play. Left unchecked, she will take over discrete but very tidy portions of the game world.

She teaches me to ask myself whether a rule really makes the game better, and she forces me to make sure that the fiction is engaging and robust enough to survive her interest.

Next, we have the Evil Muppet. He's creative, whimsical, engaged and is himself a fantastic GM, so he's a huge help at the table, but he also has a strong agenda of play - he wants me to bring the pain. He wants play to be personal, intense, laying bare buckets of blood and pain.

Just as the Connector makes me look at the fiction, the Evil Muppet makes me look at the characters and ask if I'm giving the tools to make these into the kind of people capable of driving and feeling that kind of intensity, or am I just providing interesting numbers. He also forces me to raise the bar on my design because if I don't, he'll casually make it better.

After that is The Swooshy Giant Brain. The Brain is smart. Really, really smart - probably smarter than anyone else at the table, certainly smarter than me. Yet despite that, her big interest is to swoosh around, stab things, and occasionally do something totally unexpected. But she's still going to almost absent-mindedly deconstruct or extrapolate the most complex things you put in front of her with terrifying ease, whether they're rules, puzzles or the very underlying logic of your game.

The Brain teaches me to build bulletproof. Complexity has its place, but she makes me really question whether it is adding to things. But strangely, she also reminds me to check for the fun.

Next is The Rookie who, in fairness, has been at this table long enough that the name is no-longer really fair, but sometimes these things stick. The Rookie is enthusiastic, rules saavy, willing to learn and all around a great player, but his experience has been both narrower and briefer than mine. In many ways, the rookie is very much like myself, minus most of a decade.

The Rookie teaches me not to take things for granted, whether techniques or rules history. He's smart enough that I don't need to hold his hand, but that doesn't mean I should leave him hanging.

Last is the Wildcard, who alternates between being the greatest inspiration and the most maddening player at the table with reckless abandon. He's a great player with enough system patience to try something out followed by an enthusiastic willingness to dump anything he thinks is crap. To call him a proactive player would be an understatement, and he couples that initiative with a twisted, creative mind that guarantees to take things in directions you would never expect.

The Wildcard is something like the mirror image of The Swooshy Brain - just as I need to design for her scalpel, I must design for his oncoming freight train. He forces me to build robustly, but more than that, he forces me to challenge my own assumptions. When I ask myself what he would do in a given situation, the answer often allows me to surprise myself.

So those are my five. They help me out, whether I'm designing a game, planning an adventure or just kicking around an idea. So I guess the question is: who's at your table?

A Pitch In The Dark

Fred has opened the door to pitches for a book of Don't Rest Your Head hacks, which is a fantastic idea. You can find out more details, you can check out his post, and if the idea appeals to you, I strongly encourage you to consider writing a pitch.

I've had an idea for a DRYH hack for years, and this seemed like a good opportunity, so I crafted a pitch[1]. After passing it along to Fred and Ryan, I asked if they would be cool with me putting it out there in public, both as example an encouragement. They gave the thumbs up, so I'm going to share it here in hopes it helps someone considering their own pitch.

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Proposal #1: Don't Turn Your Back
~2000 Words
Rob Donoghue - [redacted]
I've Written for Evil Hat, MWP, WOTC and White Wolf.

Don't Turn Your Back: A game of action, espionage, and the prices to be paid for both.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a hack for using DRYH to run stories in the style of Casino Royale - superspy stories with all the trappings of gadgetry and badassery, but with nightmares and madness being replaced with the growing threat of compromise and moral decay. Characters are Agents, badass masters of espionage, assigned to stop The Opposition from carrying out their Sinister Master Plan.

While this was conceived in the vein of Daniel Craig's James Bond, the idea is flexible enough to handle much of the "action-espionage" genre. This is not suited to games of quiet intrigue - it is for a game where intrigue is shaken (not stirred) with excitement, violence and sex.


Mechanical Tweaks:

Exhaustion is now moral exhaustion, the toll of taking lives and trying to live in the strange limbo of a spy's life. Go to far, and you're In the Wind.

Madness is Support (sounds nice, doesn't it) - you can draw on it for resources and gadgets, but doing so runs the risk of Blowing Your Cover.

Talents - Two Statements, one "I Always" and one "I Never", both with a qualifying conjunction from the GM(A la Mortal Coil)

Despair is The Master Plan, and serve as a clock for the game.

New Elements:

Asset Dice - A single blue die to represent that NPC helping you out. Useful, but expendable. Works like extra discipline, and can be sacrificed to recover from being In The Wind or a Blown Cover, but the Asset goes to the GM.

Help and Trust - Loan another agent your discipline dice for a roll, but he may choose to put any bad outcome on you.

Secret Agendas - In multi-agent games, everyone has their own agenda over and above stopping the opposition.

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[back] 1 - My wife's comment was 'only you would apply for a job at your own company'

About Those Elves

Today, I want to talk about elves.

When you sit down to make your own fantasy setting, whether for publication or just for your own game, the simple reality is that you stand under the twin shadows of Tolkien and D&D. They set an expectation for what a fantasy world looks like and, more importantly, they establish the baseline you will be judged against. Even if you had never read either, nor any of the bajillion books influenced by them, your fantasy setting would be described in terms of the way it's _not_ Tolkien.

One of the classic decisions to make in a setting is how to handle race - not in the nuanced sense of modern conversation, but rather the seemingly simpler question of the inclusion of non-human races. There are a few ways to approach this, and there are good and bad angles to each approach.

The first is to just roll with it. You shrug your shoulders, accept that a fantasy setting has humans, elves, dwarves and maybe some kind of hobbit analog. Elves are long lives, magica, beautiful, blah blah blah. Dwarves dig holes, grow beards, drink and fight. Hobbits do...well, something other than just farm in pastoral-england-equivalent. Probably steal.

This can be done well, as illustrated by most published D&D settings. Just accepting it and moving on to more interesting things tends to work out pretty well, provided those other things are actually interesting. It's also fairly hard to do this too badly, since there are clear guidelines to follow. You'd need to really take steps to make it worse.

The best such setting find ways to make the dwarves and elves interesting within the bounds of these ideas. Dragon Age, for example, has very standard-seeming dwarves, but enough thought has gone into their culture that they feel much more interesting than the standard. The worst settings tend to accentuate the stereotypes even further, though thankfully, it is rare to see that in a finished product.

The next option is to yank them out. There are two approaches to this - the first is to simply embrace a human-only fantasy setting. This is a powerful, workable idea, but I'm not going to dwell on it much because that's a hole other kettle of fish. The other approach is to remove one race or another.

Skyrim does this very well - the setting very clearly had dwarves(effectively) at one point, but they all vanished at some point in the past. Adds a mystery to the setting, provides an excuse for interesting ruins, but removes the need of dealing with them in play.

The famous bad example is from a brilliant game called Talislanta, which famously advertised "NO ELVES" as a means of setting itself apart from D&D. And it was true, as far as it went. Tal actually had dozens and dozens of races, many with fascinatingly fleshed out cultures. But if you looked at the art, there sure were a lot of slim, graceful, pointy-eared races as part of the mix. It looks and feels like they got rid of the word elves to prove a point more than to serve a purpose.


Supplemental to this is the possibility of inserting your own. I feel really torn on this because on one hand I'm always a fan of celebrating creativity and encouraging people to do new and interesting things, but in practice, it follows certain predictable patterns.

Most such races are ones that are cool to some specific segment of the readership. There's always someone who wants to play a cat-man or a minotaur or whatever, and it's usually pretty clear when such an inclusion is the author's race of choice. That's not intrinsically bad, but when the author thinks the race is awesome, he's less likely to actually make the case for why the race is awesome to anyone else.

The real rub is that introducing a new race takes work. Elves and Dwarves have decades of assumptions and imagery to build on and your new race does not. If you give them equal time, you give the new race short shrift, but if you give the new race more space, you're showing favoritism. It's hard to balance.

Games that have done it well have gone full bore from the ground up. Earthdawn used the hell out of its art assets to make sure the T'skrang were as strongly present in the images of the game as any other race, and it paid off (at least for me, since they're one of the few non-core races from a game I can remember off the top of my head).

Games that have dropped the ball are legion, and mostly forgettable.


The last and often most interesting approach is to put your own spin on it. Let the races remain recognizable, but change them enough. I turn back to Dragon Age for a great example of this - it's elves were very clearly once "classic" elves, but they've fallen from that and are now under the boot of history. Sovereign Stone did something more drastic, but interesting, and overlayed the races with a _different_ stereotypical model, so you had Samurai elves and Mongol Horsemen Dwarves and so on. It had problems, but the underlying idea was interesting enough to keep in mind.

Terrible examples of this include kender. Worse examples of this include reskinning kender.[1]

Now, the point of calling out these different approaches is not to say one of them is best, but rather to simply suggest that when you sit down to make your fantasy opus, this is something to consciously think about. Don't make a decision by default or out of a knee-jerk reaction. Know what you want, and make the choice that serves that.


[back] 1 - Ok, why the kender hate? Because they're terrible. They are designed to enable the worse sort of screw-the-other-players play while allowing the all purpose what-my-character-would-do-defense. They are an idea that barely work in fiction, where there are checks on their behavior and on response, but which utterly fail in a real social context.

Jazz Rules

I made a reference to something in comments on Friday which I realized is not an actual colloquialism, so I want to unpack it a little bit, since I think it's a powerful, useful idea.

I am not a huge jazz fan. There's some stuff I like, but it's never been that big a thing for me. I attribute a lot of that to early exposure to improvisational jazz and the fact that it was utterly terrible.

See, improvisational jazz is one of those things (like writing, and gaming) which is not hard to do, but is very hard to do well. When a novice discards form, technique and rules, he does so without the understanding of why those rules were there in the first place. The result tends to suffer greatly, and the novice is often left baffled as to why. He's not doing anything different than the old hand, so why is the outcome so different?

If you're really good at something, almost anything, you're probably nodding right now. You can encounter this phenomena in almost any field. There are a couple reasons for this. As humans, the less we know about something, the more highly we rate our own abilities[1], so that's working against us, but there's also an issue with the nature of mastery. Many, many skills follow a similar trajectory where you start out learning what to do and then, after hitting a kind f tipping point, starting to learn what not to do.



All of this is relevant anytime you want to write about how to do something, because the advice you need going up the slope is not the advice you need when you start going down it. This can lead to a lot of confusion, especially when the advice you might want to give is apparently contradictory.

A lot of what I write is for folks who are climbing up the curve. I hope to be helpful to those on the far side of it, but I also trust them to be more capable to find what they need in my stuff without me hanging a sign on it. But it does mean that I occasionally give advice that might be really good in some situation, but REALLY BAD in your situation.

I'm not happy about that, but I'm not terribly worked up about it either. It's just one of those things that's going to happen. The best I can do is be aware of it, and hope that others recognize the same.

Anyway, to wrap this all up, when I refer to something as "Jazz Rules", I mean something that you need to learn to do before you can stop doing it.

[back] 1 - There used to be a great post about this at You Are Not So Smart, but it seems to have vanished. This sucks. Anyway, it's called the dunnin-kruger effect, and it's kind of interesting.

Counting Noses

Want a quick litmus test for the health of your game? Ask one of your players how many NPCs they can name. If that number can be counted on one hand, that's a red flag.

This may seem counterintuitive at first - after all, games are about the characters, and we all know the dangers of the GM falling in love with her NPCs - but it's never quite so simple as that. NPCs are a necessary part of the landscape for a healthy game for a number of reasons.

First, and perhaps most simply, if you only have one or two NPCs, then they're more likely to be the worst kind of NPCs: Elminster style blunt instruments used to beat the players down the path chosen by the GM.

Beyond that though, NPCs are important because they are the anchor points for motivations. Consider almost any motivation powerful enough to drive a character in play, and try to imagine how that works without other characters. Even seemingly internal goals, like growing stronger, need people to be tested against. Enemies provide competition and anger. Allies provide opportunity to prove yourself and sympathy. More complicated relationships spawn more complicated inspiration.

NPCs also provide handles for players to grab onto when they are looking for direction. It's not uncommon for players to find themselves at loose ends, either between adventures or at a point of frustration, and having NPCs on top of mind give an easy way to address that. Enemies can be pursued, allies can be consulted - for players, a known NPC is like a door in a dungeon room. They can open it at their leisure.

They also provide a point of comparison. NPCs can give a sense of how the world works, and give the players a sense of how they're doing. Fighting someone once doesn't tell you much, but fight them twice, and you have a story. Admittedly, this is a dangerous point, since this element of NPCs also contains the "Drizzt will always kick your ass" school of thought, but it's an unfortunate possibility, not a necessity.

So, here's the thing. I just spend some number of words defending the necessity of NPCs[1], which seems like it should be utterly necessary. Every GM knows this, after all - NPCs are one of the key building blocks of the world. Your game is, I do not doubt, utterly teaming with NPCs. You could probably name a dozen without even checking your notes.

But that's why the litmus test isn't about you. The number of NPCs you _have_ in the game is almost irrelevant. What matters is how many NPCs in your game have registered on your player's radar as anything more than "That guy from that one thing that time." No matter how crystal clear your NPCs are to you, if they're not in your players' minds, they're not helping the game.[2]





[back] 1 - I'm leaving out the very important question of how many of these roles can be filled by other PCs for the simple reason that it's a bit of a doozy. Short answer, yes, other PCs can fill a lot of these roles, but it creates a very different feel for play. Whether that's a good or bad thing is uterly a function of taste.

[back] 2 - This is, of course, also true of almost every other plot element. I've known far too many GMs to gnash their teeth at their players 'not wanting to role-play' because they don't realize that they haven't actually provided anything to role-play *with*.

Feats and Faces

I've always found the idea of feats more compelling than the reality. As I conceive them, I expect them to have a strong signature. That is, I expect them to really be strong differentiators, something that really calls out a clear distinction between characters who might otherwise be fairly similar. In 4e, this is one of the key things in determining a character's style, something I've touched upon before.

Now, a few feats actually are this interesting, or at least point that way (something like a two-weapon fighting feat is usually a gateway) but the vast majority of them are small nudges, things that might be interesting in aggregate, but which are rarely worth getting excited about it. That would not be too bad a thing, except that a flat feat can mean advancement feels flat. That's no fun.

The catch is, there are exceptions. There are a handful of feats floating around out there which are both interesting and mechanically potent. Some of the classics (like racial weapon feats) have just been seen as gimmies, feats you should always take if you can use them. I've always been drawn to those, and have always wanted more feats like them. Yes, this technically makes for more powerful characters, but usually in a way that makes them more thematic and interesting as well.

But the twist is this - I want to guarantee that. I want a player to be able to pick a feat and have it carry a lot of weight, but at the same time, I don't want to just be making more powerful feats, so here's the extra element I want.

At the end of every feat, I want to include a question.

The default question is simple: "Who did you learn this from?" or some variant on that. Maybe that's the only question. The purpose of asking is simple: to introduce a new character into the world, one with a baked in connection to the characters. The lack of that is the death of many a game, something I will probably get into tomorrow.