Some Space to Think

Archetypes and Planting Flags

2012-01-09T10:00:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-29T10:36:00.002-05:00

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.

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.

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

About Those Elves

2011-12-27T09:35:00.003-05:00

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

2011-12-26T10:00:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-22T10:00:00.004-05:00

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

2011-12-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

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.

A Bag Full Of Cats

2011-12-21T10:00:00.002-05:00

One of the jokes about older versions of D&D is that there was nothing more deadly to a wizard than a bag full of housecats. It's a double edged joke (made utterly unfunny in explaining) that highlighted both the fragility of wizards, who had trivially small numbers of hit points, and the problems with assigning even a small damage value (1-2 points) to something like a housecat.

It also interestingly showcases some of the dangers you need to be aware of if you want to have more fragile characters in your D&D or D&D-like game. This is a popular trick for changing the pacing and level of tension in a game - by making the heroes (and their opponents) more fragile, you greatly speed up fights, but also make them feel more intense because of the intense sense of threat. It can also have unintended consequences as players become more risk averse, which can really bog down play.

My own experience with this is deeply rooted in Rolemaster, which took a more complicated approach to resolving the same issue. Characters had plenty of hit points, sure, but the damage tables were full of bleeding wounds, broken bones and no shortage of gruesome, instant death. The net result was a strong sense that any fight could kill you if things just happened to go the wrong way.

While this might have been paralyzing, we actually treated it as very motivating for two very specific reasons. First, it forced us to pay a lot more attention to the situations we were in to try to leverage them to our advantage. This meant that being sneaky and smart paid off.[1]

Second, and more important, it forced us to really think about our characters and how they tied into play. As players, we faced two apparently contradictory facts: adventuring was genuinely dangerous, but we wants our characters to adventure. Forcing ourselves to resolve that contradiction made for MUCH more interesting characters, since they needed to have motivations capable of overcoming the potential risks. By itself that was sufficient to keep the game from slowing down, but it had another benefit.

See, when you have a character whose motivations are clear and strong enough to you that they overcome a risk (which is also clear to you) then you have a character who is more likely to start engaging the game more fully. That is to say, when your motive is to adventure, then you will adventure. But when adventuring is a means to an end, you will start looking for other ways to pursue that end. If your real goal is revenge against your uncle, then you might delve dungeons for power and wealth to use against him, but you might also look to disrupt his mercantile arrangements or harm his allies. This is pure RP gold.

None of which is to say that high-lethality is the only way to get that kind of investment. It absolutely is not. But if you find yourself in a game where players seem locked in a kind of dungeon-centric tunnel vision, seeing no reason to engage outside of that context, then perhaps a little extra risk is exactly what you need.

[back] 1 - I want to contrast this with 1e D&D, specifically a game I'm currently involved in. In that game, we also spend a lot of time planning, but that planning primarily engages the system. That is, we think about what spells to cast and gear to use, because those can provide substantial bonuses. Terrain and situation are helpful, but secondary concerns. Which is to say, being smart pays off, but it doesn't make things much more fun.

The Sports Paradox

2011-12-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

Every now and again someone gets it in their head that they want to do a sport-based RPG. It's a logical instinct - there's lots of great, classic sports stories out there, and they hit a lot of the same notes that make an RPG fun. I have nothing but admiration for anyone who wants to try, and I'm sure that someone will crack this nut someday, but in the meantime I want to call out the one big obstacle in the road that has been the doom of many of us, something I call the sports paradox.

The RPG Sports Paradox: The only way to make an RPG about a sport is to make an RPG that's not about that sport.

What does this mean? To understand it, take a minute to imagine a sports RPG. It doesn't matter much what the sport is, but the expectation would be that you would need rules for playing that sport. Seems obvious, but that's the trick - sports stories are not really about playing any particular game, they're about a destination. There are a couple of possible types of destinations, but they're mostly some variant of needing to win "The Big Game". The exact form of the Big Game is less important than the fact that it provides meaning to all the games along the way - they're the road to the destination.

And that's where the problem arises. Such a game will fall apart if the players lose a game. Oh, sure, there are some tricks you can pull to smooth over things ("The Maplewood team got food poisoning! We're in the finals!") but they have the clear stink of Deus Ex Machina about them. So you're left with two choices: You can either allow the players to lose their games (and hope they won't) or you can guarantee that they won't.

Allowing them to lose may be a viable option for a GM _running_ a game, but it's a bad decision for a designer unless you're very comfortable putting a warning label on your game that it could really end up sucking. It's an easy solution, and it produces unsatisfying games.

The alternative, guaranteeing victory, can be approached in a huge number of different ways, but they all have something in common - they shift to making play (and the challenges and fun in play) about things other than the game, like achieving personal goals, overcoming personal challenges, building the team dynamic and so on[1]. These are good things, and they're the actual bread and butter of sport stories, and that's awesome.

But...

You've just made play about something other than the sport. Play is no longer about the game on the field, as would be envisioned when you describe "A sports RPG".

So, that's the paradox and the trap. It doesn't just apply to sports, but rather to anything with a sports-like structure (Battle of the bands, Mortal Kombat, Shootouts at High Noon, Poker and so on) . If the narrative depends on a progression of wins to reach climax, then you're looking down the barrel of the paradox. And may god have mercy on your soul.

Now, I'll toss in my two bits here for anyone looking to crack this particular nut. It's not my white whale, but I'm sure it's someone.

The underlying system problem with this model is that it's fault intolerant. The fragility of the system is such that a single failure breaks it[2], so the trick to getting it to work may revolve around figuring out ways allow for failure in your particular narrative without being cheesy. There are a few possible models for it, some better than others. A hidden points system can kind of work, but the hand of the GM is pretty obvious in play. Similarly, you can put the players in a context like, say, college football, where the decisions on the final bowls have no relationship to previous play.

One system that I haven't seen done, but which might actually be fun, is to treat it as generational play, with each "Generation" being a season. If the players lose in a given season, you advance the clock and pick up at the next season. Obviously, this only works for certain structures - it might suit a game about high school soccer, but not one of underground martial arts battles to the death.

Whatever structure you settle upon, don't be lazy. The ultimate goal is not to be able to make a game that makes playing the sport matter without worrying about all that narrative crap. You want a solution that let's you bring those two elements together, so the dramatic and personal elements provide fuel for why your time on the field matters.

1 - One trick is to give the characters access to currency (plot points or the like) that can give bonuses in play, and allow an unlimited amount of them (effectively guaranteeing play) but then use the number or type of points used to fuel between-game problems. At first glance this seems like a great solution because the sport-play is still "real" but that veneer is very thin indeed, and doesn't hold up under heavy use.

2 - This is, BTW, the subtle distinction from a dungeon crawl. A single failure _could_ be a game ender, but the dungeon is more fault tolerant. There are many potential failure outcomes, including things like running away, getting captured or otherwise allowing the game to continue through a failure.

Something Awesome

2011-12-02T10:55:00.002-05:00

I was going to talk about what not to do today, but some awesome things happened, and I think I'll talk about them first.

First, Ryan Macklin and Elizabeth Sampat put together the Random Kindness Bundle, a bundle of games to raise money for a friend who needs to field the bills that come from fighting cancer. This is a really, really sweet bundle of game pdfs, and it includes:

Elizabeth's "Blowback", which is basically the Burn Notice RPG. I have this in print form, so the PDF is a welcome addition to my library. This is a clever, badass game and worth putting in your brain.
Vincent Baker's "Murderous Ghosts". I know _nothing_ about this game, except that A) some people on twitter really dig it and B) It's Vincent Freaking Baker - how is that not a win?
David Hill and Filamena Young's "Maschine Zeit" which is a fantastic sci-fi/Horror game. I've still got a cool ass USB stick from when it came out.
Joshua A.C. Newman's Shock and Human Contact. If you know these games, you know why they're awesome. If you don't, you're in for a treat - Shock is a brilliant game that I don't play, but I steal from shamelessly. It's core engine is an awesome implementation of Heuristic Ideation Technique (the fancy name for 5x5 grid design) which should be in every designer's toolbox.
Adam & Sage's Dungeon World Compendium - This is new for the bundle, and I haven't even looked at it yet, but I'm excited. Dungeon World is a Hack for Apocalypse World for playing D&D kind of games, and that's cool and all, but what has impressed me more is that it's been (in many ways) a clearer presentation of the things that make AW awesome, which is no mean feat. Anything these guys want to add to that body of work is welcome indeed.
A collection of Josh Roby's "Rooksbridge" fiction. Josh is cool and all, but unrelated to that, the mofo can _write_.
Ben Lehman's "Clover". I have no idea at all what this is, but I know Ben (the brain behind Polaris and Misery Bubblegum) so my prediction is that it's totally weird, breaks all sorts of preconceptions of how a game should, and provides a host of new tools for looking at games. That's pattern recognition.
Jason Blair's "Little Fears" nightmare edition, a game that is on my list of "this game is brilliant, but I will never run it, because I like having friends" games, which is where the really, really good horror games go.
Plus, if they get $4000 in donations, then Macklin will pony up and release his white whale, Mythender, into the world.

This is, needless to say, a great bundle, and well worth picking up at whatever price you're comfortable with.

But that's only half the story.

See, they launched this yesterday, round about noon eastern. And then proceeded to totally blow the doors off it. It's been less than 24 hours, and the $10,000 mark has already been crossed.

I am so damn proud of this hobby, sometimes.

What Shall We Do With This

2011-12-01T14:02:00.001-05:00

A lot of people will go to great lengths to publish an RPG. This used to be a much bigger problem in the past, when the singular vision for an RPG might require taking out a second mortgage on your house to pay for a giant print run that wouldn't even faintly sell through. Nowadays, various POD and similar options mean the bar is much lower, but the cachet (and, to be frank, the satisfaction) of producing a "real" book is still very strong.

That's cool, but it's also double edged, because there is a difference between a creation of art and a product.

I am firmly in the camp that believes in celebrating creation. If you put in a lot of work into making something and are brave enough to put it out there for the world to see, that effort merits praise, even if the creation itself is flawed. It's a kind of touchy-feely (and somewhat condescending) position, and I acknowledge that, but the hope is that the creation of a "safe harbor" is worth that. Ideally, it opens the door for deeper conversations than simple praise for creation.

However, once you put that product out for sale, and claim the honor of being "published", then you have sailed out beyond that harbor. Once I can exchange money for your product, it's on an even playing field with any other product I can buy. That is to say, if your creation is a giant MS-Word file dumped into a PDF, that might be praise-worthy as an act of creation, but it's not much of a product.

Now, obviously, this isn't an invitation to be unfair. One needs to be cognizant of the realities of creation - to expect that a one-man-shop can produce something with the polish of a WOTC product is unfair and unreasonable (though it makes it all the more praise-worthy when someone like Daniel Solis does). At the same time, however, this does not absolve a creator of responsibility for covering his or her bases.

When I look at one of these games, I find it important to think about it in terms of the three main ingredients that make a product - money, knowledge and work. Most every element in a game is made of some combination of these things, though some elements skew strongly one way or another (for example, unless you're also an artist, art is a function of money).

Now, this is important because if you're publishing your first game, you probably don't have a lot of money. The reality is also that you probably have less knowledge than you think you do. I don't mean this as a knock, it's just something that I think every creator is familiar with. Nothing teaches you more than your first product. That only leaves work, and work is a tricky one. It's admirable, but in the absence of the other factors, it can be like hitting the gas on a car stuck in first that's out of oil - lots of noise and heat, but little speed.

All this comes together when you judge a product. Even if you can set aside the things which cannot be done because of money, you have to wonder if failure are a result of a lack of knowledge or a lack of effort. This is a key difference because the first inspires some sympathy (we all have been in a similar position) while the second inspires disdain (because the one thing we demand is that you do the work). Of course, that it's not always clear where the failing occurs, but whatever the source, there will be failings, and they're fair fodder for discussion.

Anyway, this is on mind because I've been chewing on the failings of a particular product have run the entire course of this line of thinking, and I've found myself torn between two instincts. The first is to cede the ground to the "Don't be mean" line of thinking and just not discuss it at all. The second is to use it as the basis for illustration of how not to make the same mistakes. That chewing has lead to this post, which has really been me thinking it through.

In the end, I think illustration wins.

What's in the Box?

2011-11-22T13:00:00.000-05:00

While I have specific demands for maps in games, the issue if more muddled in pure-setting products, most famously defined by the boxed sets for things like Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. These are well-loved products, and their design sensibilities have influenced many setting products that followed, but they merit some examination. The questions that intrigues me is what the purpose of these products really is - are they designed to be played in, or are they just bookshelves, waiting to be filled?

To understand the distinction, let’s look at Greyhawk vs. the Realms. Greyhawk was designed to be played in if only because there wasn’t much choice otherwise. It was such an early product that it’s design as almost pure map plus gazetteer made a lot of sense. You could take it, pick a spot, and play your game. Yet even bearing that in mind, one of the interesting things about Greyhawk was that it provided a context for the locations of published adventures. I know that sent a little thrill down my spine the first time I discovered a note indicating which hex a particular adventure was taking place in. That was, I think, an inidcation of things to come.
The Forgotten Realms was subtly different. Not so much in content; there were some changes, but not enough to really change the type of product. It was, however, a different beast from a commercial perspective. The Realms were a container, one able to hold any number of smaller supplements, novels, video-games and lord-knows what else. In that sense, the initial boxed set was a skeleton to be steadily fleshed out, and TSR delivered on that promise. The realms might have been thin and disconnected at the outset, but they filled it in admirably.

(At this point there’s a requirement for an obligatory nod to the GMs of old whose insane notes provided the basis for these settings, and I hereby provide it, but only grudgingly. I applaud their creativity while I bemoan the fact that they convinced generations that binders full of data no one gives a crap about were going to be the next big thing.)

This kitchen-sink model has had a huge impact on setting design, but it’s fascinating to me because it’s so much at odds with the realities of play as I’ve seen them. By and large, I have seen games either drill down into a specific are or, if covering a broad area, touch upon the setting very lightly. That is to say, real games tend to be narrow and deep or broad and shallow, but the average boxed set aims to be broad and medium-deep, thereby serving neither need.

Now, product do exist to support these actual approaches. Many settings have “Gazeteers” or similar books - very slim (maybe 32 pages) volumes providing a very high level view of the setting, and almost all setting that produce subsequent books produce more detailed region books, those that zoom in on a specific area. Those products are much closer to the actual usage patterns of play, but they are secondary products.

This suggests a fairly cynical purpose for the main boxed set, which I alluded to above. It’s the stake in the ground that allows a publisher to tether those more-useful document to. The big setting with its big map is not necessarily there to be used on its own, rather, it’s a menu of sorts. It’s a resource that lets you find the glittering object that catches your eye and choose which area you want to zoom in on. At that point, perhaps you will flesh it out yourself, but ideally (from the publisher’s POV, at least) you’ll buy the book that deals with the part that caught your eye. Better still, you’ll be curious about a few areas, and pick up several books!

Does this sound like I’m asserting that the default model of presenting a setting is tooled more towards selling books than use in play? Well, yes, I suppose I am. Not to say that you can’t do both - I can think of several great examples where those two ideas have dovetailed awesomely (Birthright being the absolute best, in this regard). Plus, the people writing these things are almost always doing it out of genuine love, and that tends to muck with more cynical goals.

In some ways, it’s been very fortunate for the hobby that we’re so bad at business.

Double Edged Maps

2011-11-21T13:00:00.001-05:00

I love maps in RPG products. There’s something utterly compelling to me about detailed maps of things and places that don’t exist. They’re a joy to look at, and they’re fantastically information-dense. You can derive a lot of meaning about relationships and tensions in a setting just by studying a map and considering how people get form point A to Point B, or wondering how people in that mountain kingdom get crops, and how that impacts their relationship with the folks on those rolling plains next door. To this day, I have a huge fondness for Sunndi (a section of Greyhawk), despite never having actually played in it, because I really spent a lot of time zoomed in on that section of the map, thinking about it.

I want to make that love very clear, because I’m about to say something that seems to contradict it. When I see an RPG product with a huge map of the world, I immediately flinch and worry about the quality of the game. It is, to me, a red flag.

See, to me, a map is a promise. It shows me what’s going to be important to the game, and if you give me a world map, then I’m going to think that the game operates at a global level, and this is a problem when it does not. If the game has a narrower focus (as most do - truly global games are rare) then not only have I been handed a bait and switch, but I have also been handed a great deal of extraneous data. That might be annoying, but not merit a red flag, except for one other issue: It makes me wonder what the designer was thinking. That is, if they don’t understand what their game is about well enough to scale the map appropriately, what else is off base? It’s a brown M&M.

This is not to say that all large maps are bad. A large, detailed map is entirely appropriate for games of a certain scale, and I don’t begrudge them it. In fact, I think it’s pretty easy to spot the game/map mismatches if you look closely. And it’s fun to look for, since it also helps you see the games that really, really understand what their map was for. To that end, I want to call out a fantastic post by John Harper about what makes maps really fly in Apocalypse World, and add a big thumbs up to it. This is what a map should do for your game, and if it doesn’t, ask yourself why not.

D&D Media

2011-11-14T12:06:00.003-05:00

I do not drink often, but one of the occasions when I made an exception was the watch the Dungeons & Dragons movie with Fred. In retrospect, this was a very good idea. It was a terrible, terrible movie, primarily made tolerable by how much Jeremy Irons very clearly did not want to be there.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of really terrible movies, and I have to admit that the majority of the most terrible ones have been ones written to pander to me as a nerd - think Max “I’m the Smartest Cop In The World” Payne, Doom or the entire Uwe Boll oeuvre. These tend to have a common thread between them (which they share with the D&D movie) in that they tend to fall into two camps. The first are so interested in celebrating the subject of the movie that enthusiasm is used as spackle where stronger structural material might be in order. The second aren’t even interested - they just feel like they’re transcribing someone else’s interest, and the net result is something that by some miracle of suck manages to be both bloodless and putrescent.

Superhero movies have been pulling themselves out of this nosedive, and to my eyes it’s pretty clear this has been a result of a decision that these movies should not just rest on their subject material, and should in fact be good movies that happen to be superhero movies. This is not something that’s a function of any one element - writing, direction and performances have all played a part in this change - but there is an ineffable and critical change that happens when you decide the license is not enough (and, as a corollary, a sickening thud when you decide that it is).

All of which comes back to D&D. Like super heroes and video games, D&D has a long history of sucking pretty bad (if you remember the cartoon fondly, do yourself the favor of never watching it again), but like those other properties, the problems are not rooted in the material. There is nothing that keeps there from being a good D&D movie or cartoon, it’s just a function of making sure it’s good first, and D&D second.

If you doubt this, look to comic books. This is a really interesting time for D&D comics because of two things, both coming out of IDW. First, they’ve released collections of the old Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms comics. Second, they’ve released a new series of D&D comics, and the first collection is magnificent.

Now, I read the old comics back in the day, and I enjoyed them a lot, but in retrospect I feel safe describing them as inside baseball. They were fun, but they were mostly fun because I was already a D&D guy. I doubt they’d have moved my needle if they’d been “Generic Fantasy Comics”. In contrast, the new books (penned by the tremendously talented John Rogers) are a lot of fun in their own right. Zippy dialog, great art - all the things that would make it fun even if it weren’t called D&D.

That gives me hope. It’s a concrete illustration of what can be done with this thing I love (totally separate from these games I love). Why is this important? Well, it’s business. This could probably merit its own post, but you’d be better served listening to the latest episode of That’s How We Roll - it’s an interview with Peter Adkinson, and you will learn more about the business of D&D from that podcast than you will from anything else I can think of.

Notes from my talk

2011-11-08T09:21:00.008-05:00

I gave a talk at Metatopia on Sunday on talking to the talent and promised to post my notes, so here they are in all their semi-comprehensible glory. That said, on a lark, I recorded the bit of advice I got from Fred, so I'm throwing that up here as a bonus (warning - hugely amateur sound - this was me in 15 minutes between calls on my laptop).

Writers

This will be hard because you are probably also a writer
Giving people work that you could do yourself requires you to conciously let go and trust

Artists

Tips From Fred

Make sure that when you say something like a quarter page, define that in inches
discuss resolution (300dpi minimum)
Size weenies
If you’re working in print, you want CMYK, not RGB
Have some expectations for the image, communicate them clearly, but don’t be married to your vision. You’re paying them for their expertise.
Do the reference image research for them if you can.
If possible, do an art reference of These characters in these places, esp if you’ve got strongly recurring characters or places.
If you don’t have the images, you may want to do a round of references images first.
Make it clear to the artist what stages of the process you want to be involved in
Pencils
Maybe even roughs/concept sketches
Inks
Colors
Try to get ONE intermediary step, just for course corrections
Blog: The Art OrderDifferent process, but informativeWOTC Guy
theartorder.com http://theartorder.com/
FIND OUT HOW MUCH DETAIL YOUR ARTIST WANTS

Editor

Editor Blogs
ryanmacklin.com http://ryanmacklin.com/
www.ayvalentine.com http://www.ayvalentine.com/
You don’t need to communicate a lot with editors once you get going BUT
You need to communicate your vision to them to help them help you achieve it
When in doubt, blame the editor.

Layout

Go read Robin Williams “Non-Designers Design Book”
Very solid crash course in understanding what the layout guy is talking about.

Marketing

Yes, it’s marketing, even if you don’t call it that
Social Media
Evangelizers and engagement
Demo Teams
Demo Kits
Benefits and dangers of empowerment

Business Partners

Distributors
Shop Owners
Printers

Customer/Fans

Benefits and drawbacks of transparency
No bad reviews
Don’t be a dick - let the other guy do it

Collaboration Tools

Dropbox
Wikis
Basecamp
You WILL use MS word
Update schedule

Also, A hat tip to John, the editor who came up and helped me out at the talk byt talking about, well, talking to editors. You can check him out on twitter at @awesome_john or at his blog.

This Metatopia Thing

2011-11-07T13:00:00.000-05:00

A while back, Vinnie had an idea.

Vinnie, for those that don't know, is the robot brain behind Dreamation, Dexcon and a host of other nerd events in northern New Jersey. I've talked in the past about how good Dreamation and Dexcon are, and a lot of that is a reflection on how hard Vinnie works.

These conventions have historically been hotbeds of game design activity - a place to run playtests and to talk with designers of small press games. The problem is, the streams don't always mix well, and this came to a head at a previous convention, when confusions between what was play testing and what was actually a game to play interfered with some people's experience.

So, Vinnie pitched the idea of peeling off some of this and creating a designer-centric convention, one explicitly for playtests, discussion groups, seminars and roundtables. There was a lot of support for the idea, but a lot of uncertainty regarding what such a thing would look like. I admit, I shared in that uncertainty.

This past weekend was that convention: Metatopia. We got to see how the idea translated into reality, and from my perspective, it was very nearly miraculous.

I drove up very early Saturday morning, so I missed some of the fun on Friday night (including a panel of Ken Hite and Fred Hicks talkign about how to steal from other games) but I got two full days of goodness in. I didn't know quite what to expect, but I jumped in enthusiastically.

There were three major activities at the convention: Seminars, Playtests and Focus Groups.

Seminars are what you would expect: one or more people talking about some subject or other. This doesn't sound like much, but it's worth noting that the sister conventions have historically had a fairly anemic seminiar track. The reasons for that get a bit chicken and egg, but the bottom line is that it was really nice to see good seminars with enthusiastic attendees. It was good enough that I want to see what I can do to help with seminar tracks at Dexcon & Dreamation. It also provides a double excuse to try to drag Chuck Wendig back - we totally need to get him to talk about writing.

Playtests are also reasonably self-explanatory. Designer shows up with a game, runs it, and gets feedback. These are interesting because their value really depends on the GM's attitude. For GM's who came into it looking to really tear into their own game to find what made it work, it was a godsend, and you could spot those GMs because they were the ones making changes in response to play experience. For GM's who felt they had a finished game, I think it was a lot less useful - fine tuning is something you do over time. The feedback you could get at this convention was more suited to the guts of your game than the chrome.

This actually kind of hurts as a designer, because I'm not sure how to provide feedback on it, especially when it's clear there are problems with the game. Even moreso when it's clear the problems maybe things the designer is already married to. I don't want to discourage people from playtesting their game in this context, but if you're not ready to be told your game doesn't work, it's probably not helpful.

The last (and most interesting to me) were the focus groups. These were for people who had an idea for a game, but not necessarily much more than that. You sit down in a room and talk about your game and your ideas, and you proceed to brainstorm. For folks who've attended the Indie Roundtables, it's rather like that, but more focused. I LOVED these, and I wish I had done more of them - something to make a note for next year.

Anyway, there's a lot more to talk about, but for everyone who has wondered, I just wanted to make sure you had a sense of what this Metatopia thing is.

(I should also add, enough people at the con had nice things to say about the blog that I'm now feeling guilty about my half-assed writing schedule, so we'll see if that can be fixed. Also, if you attended my seminar (thank you!) I'll be posting my notes soon, probably as tomorrow's post.)

What We Want

2011-10-28T14:38:00.002-04:00

What we want in a game is a lot like what we want in life. I’m gonna riff a bit here on David McClelland via Peter Bregman with the list of desires that drive us:

Achievement (To compete against increasingly challenging goals)
Affiliation (To be liked/loved)
Personalized power (influence and respect for yourself)
Socialized Power (to offer others Personalized power, which is to say, influence and respect)

This list speaks a lot to how much our jobs and lives are going to satisfy us, and it’s no coincidence that the list also reads like a checklist of things that players want in play in an RPG (both in game and out of game).

Now, there’s no one point I want to make from this, mostly because I think there are dozens of points to be made from it, so it’s important to me to lay this out as a foundation, because it makes subsequent points easier to discuss, so with that in mind, let’s run through these.

Achievement

Achievement is probably the most obvious, since it lies at the heart of the game part of most games, and it’s intimately tied to things like advancement, encounter design and so on. It’s important to call out that there’s a reason this is achievement, not challenge, because challenge is only a part of it - it’s the increase that is truly critical. Our brains thrive on mastery - we get a buzz from learning things and overcoming difficulty, but only the first time. If we’re faced with the same problem again, it quickly bores us. If we’re faced with an utterly different problem, that might be fun, but the sense of progress is not there. It’s counter-intuitive, but the best reward for success is a greater challenge.

This is one reason we’re so attached to character advancement in games, because it’s the easiest way for a GM to ramp up challenge. Without advancement, the GM needs to either push harder every time (as you would in a non-RPG as you progress in competitive ranks) or get very creative.

Now, I should note that there’s a lot of leeway in terms of what the challenge is, and that interacts pretty strongly with what Achievement needs. Fight scenes are challenges, and they’re the sort of challenges that advancement speaks to, but if the challenge the player seeks is creative, that requires a very different sort of ratcheting effect to keep increasing challenge.

Affiliation

Hopefully, this is largely obvious - it’s a big reason we play these games rather than write fiction to similar effect. The social element of play is huge, and not to be underestimated.

However, in my experience this is also a big part of satisfaction in play. One of the rules of design behind a lot of Evil hat decisions is that everything should have a face. Settings are made most interesting by the imaginary people in them, because the fact that they’re imaginary doesn’t really keep us from forming strong attachments to them (as can be evinced by the message boards of any fandom). Play that provides opportunities to scratch the affiliation itch is going to be satisfying play.

Personalized Power

Well, duh.

Ok, maybe it’s a little more complicated than that - step back a minute and consider what power means. It means the capability to accomplish things, to make things happen. It’s the ability for your action to have a measurable, noticeable outcome. It’s the ability to shape the world through your actions. When we have this power, it is a great feeling, and when we are denied it, it can be frustrating beyond measure.

Now, the first instinct is to look at RPG characters and drawl a line to their obvious power. Throwing lightning bolts, lifting cars and cutting through hordes of monsters are such clear expressions of power that they’re the first thing the mind goes to, but in doing so, it misses the mark. Certainly, that sort of blatant power is fun, but it is not in and of itself satisfying.

The real power of an RPG character is the ability to act. Part of this is implicit in the structure of rules (you roll the dice and something is going to happen) and some of it is implicit in adventure design (it’s a poor adventure where there’s not much to do) but taken as a whole, it’s an ability to simply do things which we often lack in our day to day lives. In real life, there are complication. Doing things is slow and boring, or our situation may not allow us to impact things that matter to us. In games, we can act. We may not always succeed, but just being able to try is empowering.

Lightning bolts and flaming swords just make that ability to act more colorful. It’s the action that is power.

Socialized Power

This one is probably the most interesting because while it’s probably the most poorly served by games in general, it’s possibly the most powerful when a game makes it go, because in play it’s most often reflected by as making other people awesome, which is (to my mind) one of the best things that can happen at a table.

The real meaning of this is something that could take up multiple posts of its own, but one interesting thing about socialized power is that it is hard to do without affiliation and personalized power, since it’s the fruitful combination of the two (it’s possible, but doing so tends to be more like martyrdom than a healthy dynamic). As a result, it can take more work to achieve, and it’s benefits are probably the least obvious until you have tasted them.

There’s more to say, but at this point it starts turning to how these points interact with games at the table, and that’s fodder for future posts.

Playability in Settings

2011-10-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

Setting is, to my mind, utterly essential to RPGs, and has also been the poor cousin to rules design in a lot of the deeper discussions of RPGs. I’m not entirely sure how to address that, but I think a good start involves looking at setting design with the same eye we’ve applied to rules, and see what we find.

On my mind at the moment is the question of what makes a setting particularly playable. This is not the same thing as what makes a setting good or compelling, and in fact, a good, compelling setting can end up making a very good game even if it has no elements that make it more explicitly gameable.

While this is far from a comprehensive list, these are the elements that float to top of mind for me.

Communication

Unless the setting implicitly keeps the entire group of characters within shouting distance (something dungeons do) then they need some means of staying in touch. In the absence of this, you can end up with difficult pacing problems if the game starts going one particular direction without one or more players participating. Communication (and its companion, ease of travel) is the solution for this. Modern games have an easy solution to this with cell phones, but things like Amber’s trumps can fill this purpose as well.

As a paradoxical bonus, the presence of a communication element is necessary to make the absence of communication into a plot element. Running from zombies and trying to find cell signal is something you can’t do in 1974.

Recovery

If your game is going to have any amount of violence, then you need some way to keep long hospital trips from bogging down the game, you need some logic to address this. It might be a genre thing (as in cinematic or supers games), or it might be an element intrinsic to characters (like Vampires and Amberites) or some easy means of healing (like spells or some magical substance); whatever the form it takes, the real purpose is to keep play moving.

The exact means of recovery may also be a plot element in its own right, so its worth considering that this doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Social Context

This can take a lot of different forms, but it is best described as characters having a role in the setting, something that has a context beyond themselves, but still of an understandable scale. A family or secret society might fill this roll, but a nationality won’t because it’s simply too big.

The litmus test for this is whether or not it helps answer questions about what the character does and has done “off camera” and how well armed they are to answer questions and make decisions without a full GM briefing. That may not seem intuitive, but consider that the social context provides resources with faces - people who you can talk to and turn to in complicated situations. Not only is that play generating, it creates a virtuous cycle where that play reinforces social ties, which in turn allow fodder for more play.

However, one needs to be careful to keep contexts playable. It is structurally better to have everyone within the same context, or at least within one context, otherwise the context draw away from play. Consider the problem when every player is an agent of a different group - you can construct something artificial to tie them together, but it’s tricky to maintain. Easier to either use different groups or subgroups. Consider these examples:

In Vampire, characters were members of their clan, but they were also part of the political structure of their city. The latter could help bring a group together without the former completely pulling them apart.
In Eberron, the Great Houses were really interesting and colorful, but they were potent enough ideas that they wanted to pull the game in their own direction. Unfortunately, because it was paired to the power system, it was easy to end up with things pulling apart.
Amber has the family has an overarching group, but it has numerous shifting factions and alliances within that group.

Mobility or Position

This is not literal mobility (though that has a place, as noted under communication) but rather social (or social-ish) mobility. Characters need to have the opportunity to change their situation through their own efforts. Partly this is something that helps buy into the context of the setting, but it’s also a big avenue for player-generated plots - if they have something they want that they can get, then sooner or later they’re going to get motivated to go after it. It’s also worth noting that while this may interact with character advancement, there’s no guarantee that it will.

The alternative for this is to give the players position (and with it, responsibility). It’s a similar play motivator, just from the other end. People like being important, and important people have things to do.

There’s no reason a setting can’t have both of these, but one or the other will suffice.

I am by no means asserting that a game can’t be fun without these, or that a setting can’t work without them, but I know that when I sit down to scratch out a setting (or even a sub-part of a setting) for a game, these are the things I try to make sure are present.

Play is an Argument

2011-10-21T10:00:00.000-04:00

There's a lot of discussion about what a game is, in the context of RPGs, and even when I propose an answer, I never imagine it to be the only answer. Still, it's interesting to think about.

I was chewing on that today and considered a slightly different approach - a game (or rather, the act of play at any given moment) is an *argument* about how things should turn out. I suppose it might be nice to call it a negotiation, but I think argument is a better word since positions tend to be put forward forcefully and while there may be movement towards compromise, that is far from a necessity.

The important and potentially powerful point to this perspective is that it suggests that individual perspectives on what a game is become arguments within that context. To illustrate this idea consider that "Because it makes the best story" is a powerful argument, but it's not the only argument.

More familiar arguments include the sort of things that might be described as crunchy minutiae, like how many inches of plywood a desert eagle can shoot through. You get similar issues with strongly held opinions about setting or character elements - "My Guy" syndrome falls under this, but all manner of setting and genre expertise matters fall under it as well. Turning to an external arbiter (like dice) is another kind of argument.

These arguments are almost certainly familiar to every gamer out there, and while some might characterize them as problematic arguments, but I am pretty confident that the real confusion stems from another source. It's not the arguments themselves that create a problem, it's the certainty associated with them. As in civil discussion, certainty creates all manner of problems in coming to resolution.

Now, every group has their own biases regarding what makes a good argument, and so long as the group is in agreement regarding what arguments are and aren't fair game, then things will probably go well, provided those expectations are looked at, thought about, and communicated well.

I admit my own bias is to bring as many arguments as possible to the table, though I obviously fall victim to my own tastes, often without realizing it. I admit it can make things more complicated, but I find a lot of benefit in apparent contradictions. And more, it can become habit - looking at every argument, every time can seem like a lot of work, but the more time you spend looking at different arguments, the more arrows you have in your quiver when it comes time to resolve things (either as a player or a GM).

Everway had a great method for this, explicitly calling out three arguments out as Karma (stats), Drama (needs of the plot/story) and Fortune (draw of the cards). It was a fantastic muscle-builder for me as a GM, and I absolutely encourage a GM to try something similar, if only to see how it helps thing think about things differently.

I Woke Up With This In My Head

2011-10-20T10:58:00.002-04:00

OK, what this means to me:

The assumption is a 4 stat set in the spirit of Amber. The 4 stats are Endurance, Discipline, Power and Expression, with 4 derived stats, Willpower (Discipline & Endurance), Precision (Discipline & Power), Force (Power & Expression) and Presence (Expression & Endurance).

The core model is a double-paired idea of internal/external and Active/Passive.

Power is external/active - it covers action. Action tempered by discipline is precision (a lot of stuff traditionally thought of as Dexterity) while Force is the expression of action (think Strength).

Endurance is External/Passive, though that's hopefully obvious. Presence is patient, long term interaction with others, while willpower is the combination of Endurance and Discipline. I am attached to willpower being derived because it tends to be a giant pain in the ass in play, though that's a whole other topic.

Discipline is Internal/Passive, and it's a whole topic in and of itself.

Expression is Internal/Active, which is a little weird on the surface of it, but works if you view Internal as including personality, then it becomes a nice middle-place for Charisma.

Anyway, that's the bones of it. Still chewing on it.

I Want To Borrow 4e's Foundation

2011-10-18T11:19:00.003-04:00

Ok, here's an important thing about 4e that I would suggest that even die hard fans of other editions consider: it's foundation is excellent. In my opinion, it's a better foundation than any previous edition of D&D, though I leave that comparison up to the reader. But what does that mean?

I mean that if you took some characters and stripped them of classes, powers and almost everything else, you have a very solid little set of skirmish rules that strike a very strong balance between speed and depth. Boiled down to that level, it's easy to see that there are just a handful of refinements from 3e, and the line from the original dungeon skirmishing is very easy to see.

I've steadily come to realize that the thing that keeps drawing me back to 4e is the simple power of that foundation. You could build entirely different games on top of it which could be entirely awesome. Different stats? Different classes? No classes? No Powers? Totally different power models? it would be easy to build such a thing on top of that chassis to capture almost any flavor or style of play that you want.

See, that's the thing about the classes and powers as they exist: they represent a decision about how the game should look and feel. This is not a bad thing - the designer's vision is a large part of the reason you buy a published game - but because this look and feel is so striking, it creates a sense that it's the foundation. That is, it's easy to look at 4e and think that if you want to change it, you should change powers and classes. 4e makes it feel like those are low-level changes while they're actually quite high-level.

I don't think this is good or bad in and of itself, but it mingles interestingly with the other realities surrounding 4e, specifically it's semi-openness (which encourages high level tinkering) and it's model of game-as-web-service (which discourages many types of tinkering). Altogether, it reveals my frustration - I want to take that foundation out and play with it. Doing so is how you can get awesome things like the (very much not open content) awesome of Gamma World.

But that's not an option, at least not for anything public. I suppose it might be possible to build it forward from pathfinder or to create something similar from scratch, but both of those feel like inelegant solutions. But I want to find a solution, and I can tell you why:

I want the game I can _make_ with 4e.

Stop for a moment and consider what happens when you start looking at all those powers in 4e as building blocks for a simpler game. If you're starting from scratch, unbound by what's at-will, encounter or daily, then you can build almost anything using these parts and a little duck tape. Like spell points and spell lists? Make a list out of a set of thematically similar powers, and give them mana costs. Don't like encounter and dailies for non-magical characters? Adopt a system where lower level encounter powers become higher level at-wills. Want to make power sources more important? Maybe come up with new ways to recharge dailies? It all opens up.

Obviously, I can already do this at home, but I'm a social guy. I like sharing. And that - the game I can make with the 4e parts - is the game I wish I could be sharing.

Uniquely Qualified

2011-10-07T14:00:00.000-04:00

Nothing breaks my heart more than when I hear a GM complain that he wishes there were more roleplaying in his game. It's tragic because it's always so heartfelt and sincere and is almost always followed by said GM then introducing his new combat showpiece, hardcore dungeon crawl, or puppet show on rails. It hurts because the problem is so self-evident yet apparently completely unseen.

The solutions can also be painful, as the GM attempts to introduce "roleplaying encounters" into a game which neither wants nor needs them, but that attempt at a solution is emblematic of the problem. The idea that these other elements of gaming are somehow contradictory to roleplaying is pretty much entirely false. It's a case where there's plenty of correlation, but the cause is something else entirely.

Now, certainly there are some challenges - system mastery takes time and effort, and during the learning period, it's hard to focus on anything but the game. Sometimes a GM extends this period by following the path of the hard core - by constantly upping the challenge through increased mechanical complexity, he can extend the learning period indefinitely. That's a problem, yes, but not a problem with the games. Even the most complicated of games can reach mastery equilibrium in a reasonable timeframe with the right group or GM (or both).

But the real problem is the idea that the crunchy, fighty dungeon crawl is at odds with RP. It's nonsense, but it's deeply rooted nonsense that owes a lot to the history of the hobby and especially the history of published adventures. After all, books and movies can be full of high adventure and still support banter, character development, drama and so on - why is it a problem for games?

To understand the issue, let's take a moment to look at the heroes of fiction, especially adventure fiction. Generally speaking, they're presented with a challenge or challenges which they must overcome - not unlike adventurers. But the important part, often overlooked in gaming, is that part of the reason that the fiction is about these characters is because they are uniquely qualified to handle the challenge.

This idea of unique qualifications is a broad one because there are a lot of different things that make for UQ, and in fact in most fictions, the UQ is usually a result of a specific combination of non-unique qualifications. To illustrate that, consider that qualifications tend to fall into one of four loose categories - capability, knowledge, care, opportunity, and capability.

Capability is the first thing most gamers will think of. It means the hero is capable of tackling the problem either in the specific (he has the key to a specific lock) or in general (the problem is dangerous and he's badass). In gaming terms, we tend to jump right to thinking about this in terms of powers, skills and levels, but it can be much more nuanced.

Knowledge means that the hero sees the problem, often where others don't. Notably, it doesn't mean the hero knows _how_ to solve the problem - that's a form of capability - only that there's a problem to be solved.

Care means that the hero has a personal investment in the problem, a stake in the outcome which they're invested in. It might be because the problem affects them or those in their circle directly, or they might have a strong position on this particular type of problem. Care ends up being a kind of capability in certain types of fiction, especially noir detective stories - specifically, the protagonist has some moral backbone that allows them to pursue the problem rather than be consumed by the moral failings that surround him, like corruption.

Opportunity is, predictably, the opportunity to address the problem. It might be as simple as an issue of being in the right time and right place, but it might be part of a tangle of available time and conflicting responsibilities. Opportunity can muddle with capability very easily, especially when you start taking about authority or social position. A king can do a lot of things (capability and opportunity) but he may be bound by law (limit of capability) or unable to act due to other duties (lack of opportunity).

Look at any adventure fiction you like, and you'll find some combination of these in the protagonists. Sometimes you'll even find different combinations in different protagonists, and that can be pretty cool, but these unique qualifications provide implicit motivation and engagement for heroes in their own adventures.

Now, contrast this with the bog-standard dungeon crawl. At first blush, it looks like it demands several qualities - monsters must be fought (Capability), there's treasure to be gained (a kind of care) and the dungeon is conveniently nearby (opportunity) but they fall apart when you start looking for uniqueness.

See, by design, a published adventure needs to be able to be run through by any group of adventurers of a certain size and level, which means that, by design , it will demand no unique qualifications of adventurers (except perhaps those which it creates within its own bubble of fiction). Any other group of adventurers could do this (so much for capability), the reward is probably quite fungible (not much care left) and that leaves only opportunity. But thanks to the nature of geography and gaming, odds are good the dungeon of your level is going to "just happen" to be where you can get to it, so that feels like a fairly hollow oportunity.

But the problem is not dungeons! Not even super hard core crunchy ones. The problem is bad habits of framing. If you're a GM who wants to see more RP, then you need to start making the dungeons more engaging, and to do that, you need to figure out how to make the dungeon something that your specific group is uniquely qualified to address. Start from that foundation of generic threats and generic loot and start making it personal. Give your players a reason why _they_ are the ones going into this particular monster filled hole.

You'll find that RP emerges very naturally from that engagement, whatever system or style of play you use.

Roleplay and Exploration Rewards

2011-10-05T13:00:00.002-04:00

I was struck by a tweet this morning regarding the difficulty with handing out XP awards for exploration and roleplaying, specifically, that such rewards are arbitrary and hard to rightsize. This immediately struck me as a very valid complaint, but also one that's very easily addressable - it's just a matter of identifying the behaviors and experiences to reward, then plugging them into the reward system. For illustration, I'll be using 4e to show how to do this (primarily because it's standard reward model is very robust) but the basic idea can be used for almost any XP-driven game, especially ones with the idea of an encounter.

For purposes of awards, I'm going to provide a loose definition of both roleplaying (as a specific subset of play) and exploration. RP is, practically, engaging some element of the setting. This may seem like a strange definition if your first thought is that it's talking in a funny voice or getting very emotional at the table, but those are just ways to go about engaging the setting - that is, ways to meaningfully interact with the setting as if it matters. This can range from involved conversations with NPCs to hard choices about the fate of nations.

Exploration is a little bit easier to quantify - it's the process of adding something to the mental (and sometimes physical) map of the campaign. When the players explore The Dungeon of Doom then they get certain rewards just for being there (assuming that there are fights and challenges in a place called The Dungeon of Doom) but they have also added TDoD to the landscape. In the future, new enemies might take it as a lair, or maybe people will try to reclaim it. It's now a thing, and that makes it part of the campaign. Exploration is the process by which these things (which might properly be people, places or things) get added to the game.

These two elements may seem difficult to standardize for rewards, but they share a common idea which can tie this all together. Both rotate around the idea of campaign elements - either engaging them or adding them - and it's not difficult to systemize that. All it takes is a list.

I'm going to call this list the Game Log for simplicity sake, but the name isn't important. What matters is that it's a list of the elements that come up over the course of a campaign. It will grow over time, and it provides a valuable resource for GMs, both to handle XP awards and to provide a little inspiration when designing adventures. The log looks like this:

(You can download a PDF of the form here)

Using the Form

The Name column is for the name of the element. Elements might be anything that can recur in a game, limited only by the taste of the GM. This includes locations, NPCs and organizations, but it can also include character elements. Themes (as presented in the Neverwinter campaign setting) are another great example of a possible element.

Just keeping a list like this is useful to an GM, and most of us already keep it in one form or another, if only to answer the "Ok, who was that guy with that thing that one time?" kind of questions that pop up during play.

The level is a little bit less obvious. While it's tied to the idea of character level, it does not have exactly the same meaning. Practically, level is a measure of how important an element is, with the most important elements having a level equal to the current level of the characters. Mechanically, this is tied to XP rewards (we'll get to that in a second) but it also is a useful way to keep track of what is an isn't used in a campaign.

Generally speaking, when an element is introduced, it will probably be at the character's current level. It may "level up" any time it is engaged (see below) but it shouldn't go beyond the character's current level unless it's something the GM really wants to emphasize. That's the default assumption, but there are a few tricks that can be played - GMs looking to experiment in allowing players to introduce elements in play may allow them to do so, but start those elements out at level 1, and force them to grow in importance through play.

The checkboxes are for use in play, to indicate what's happened. "Explored" is the most straightforward - you check that box the same time you add something to the list (or, if you already had it on the list, when the players first encounter it). An element should only be explored once in its lifetime, so once this box is checked, it stays checked.

The other boxes - Touched, Engaged and Critical, see a bit more action. When an element comes up in play, you check the box that corresponds to how it came up.

If it was a memorable but unimportant part of play, then check "Touched". This is appropriate if an NPC was visited, a scene happened at a particular location, or the players talked about a thing.

If it was a noteworthy part of play, then check "Engaged". The line between touched and engaged is a bit subjective, but that's an intentional nod to GM taste. In general, something should be considered engaged when it provided a strong motivation for play or created a cost or a choice. If the players had to have an extended negotiation with an NPC or their favorite bar burned down, that would be engaged.

One trick that comes in handy is looking where else rewards are coming from. if the negotiation with the NPC is also a skill challenge, then the negotiation itself may not merit an Engaged tickmark (though it probably merits a "Touched") but if the skill challenge _also_ engages the players and characters, then yes, it totally merits a check.

"Critical" is like engaged, but moreso. If the interaction is particularly central to play, or is a turning point in the campaign, then Critical gets checked. The GM will probably know when a Critical interaction is coming, since it's usually a result of the GM doing something awful to or with the element, but it's possible to be surprised, and this is what to check if your players really blow you away.

The notes field is, as you might expect, where you keep notes. Hopefully self explanatory.

The Form and Rewards

At the end of a session, you should have a few checkmarks that indicate the things that your players found and engaged. Turning that into a reward is based on the idea of a standard award, and this is why I use 4e to illustrate.

The standard award is an amount of XP equal to that given for a monster of a given level, in this case, the level of the element (I told you that would come in handy). The basic idea is that an "Explore" or "Engaged" checkmark gets the standard award, while a "Touched" checkmark awards a fractional reward, and a "Critical" result provides a bonus. In 4e terms, these line up roughly with a minion and an elite (so 1/4x and 2x respectively).

Thus, for example, let's say that the players interact with a level 4 elements.
For discovering the element, they gain 175 XP.
If they touch on it, then the award is 44 XP.
If they engage is, then the award if 175 XP.
If engagement with it is critical to the game, then the award is 350 XP

Note - Only give the highest award, though you may give an exploration and engagement award if both seem warranted.

Run down the list, tally the awards, pool them, then divvy them among the players. Simple as that.

Notes and Thoughts

Exploration Games: You can change the proportions a bit if you want to emphasize or de-emphasize exploration. If exploration is critical to the game, then the reward for an explore tick might be as much as 5x a standard award.

Long List: So, what keeps the list from getting crazily long? While GM editorial oversight (especially the decision whether or not something goes on the list or not) plays a role, then I suggest the following trick: After an element gives its exploration award, drop its level to 1, and let it level back up in play. This means that players will get better rewards for working within a smaller list than they will by constantly having things get added, which nicely simulates the conservation of characters and locations you see in most fiction. It also provides the GM a handy tool that reveals which elements the players actually care about based on which ones get leveled up.

Personal Awards: Note that this model explicitly rewards the entire group equally for roleplaying, and I admit that's something I very strongly endorse, but on the off chance that you want to reward star players, then it's a fairly simple matter of noting the star performer in the notes column, then not adding the reward for that element to the pool, and give it directly to the player.

Slightly more complicated is the issue of personal character elements - that is, should everyone get rewarded when a given character's theme becomes important to play. My answer is a profound "yes", but if that is not to your taste, then you may consider some elements to be "owned" by a specific character, and have the reward go directly to that character rather than into the pool.

But I really suggest against it. Not only does it introduce the bookkeeping hassle of mismatched XP and the social hassle of rewarding the loudest players, it removes the incentive for players to celebrate each others awesome. If only you get rewarded for your character theme, then only you will look for ways to hook it in. If everyone is rewarded for it, then everyone's looking to bring it into play. That's a vastly preferable arrangement in my mind.

Other Systems: As noted, while it's easiest to do this with 4e, if you can figure out the standard award for your game, the model translates easily enough. Heck, you can even do thematic versions. For example: for a white wolf game, I'd forgo levels in favor of rating things from 1-5 dots and just be a little more stingy about how they level up.

The Instinct for Scenes

2011-10-03T13:00:00.001-04:00

One of the hallmarks of getting very good at something is that certain elements become habit. A musician doesn't really think about tuning his instrument or running through a few familiar tunes. An athlete just falls naturally into proper form. This is one of those things that's hard to measure because it's not what they do that distinguishes them - anyone can do that with a little effort - but how they go about doing so.

For storytellers of various stripes, one of the ways this manifests is as an instinct for scenes. They see something - a person, an idea, whatever - and they are struck by ways in which you might do something neat with it. Like other instincts of expertise, this is something that anyone can do with a little thought, but with experience, the possibilities tend to jump up and smack the storyteller in the face.

This, far more than any ideas about grand narratives, is the skill from storytelling that translates most strongly to GMing. The most consistent challenge that the GM faces is "How can I make this work?" and a lot of the worst habits of GMing emerge when no answer presents itself. Fiat rears its ugly head when the GM doesn't have a way to work with the current situation, and thus she forcefully changes it. Not only does that kind of stink on its own, it also usually means the GM is ignoring or dismissing an element that a player brings to bear, leaving the player that much more alienated.

Now, here's an important note: this is not just a hippy-dippy narrative problem. When you deal with hard core game-playing, one of the big appeals of RPGs is that it supports opportunities to think outside the box. When presented with a challenge, you can engage the environment in unexpected ways to achieve clever solutions. These solutions are every bit as much a player-initiated game element as the more story-oriented player who uses a bit of narrative authority to talk about an old girlfriend they left in this town. We invest a lot if energy in differentiating these different types of player ideas, but in the end, they're all ideas, and how the GM handles them says much more about the game than any other division.

The good news is that this instinct doesn't require that you be a writer or the like to practice. You get a little bit better at it every time you see things take a turn in a game and think, "Ok, how would this look if this were what this session were about?" Brainstorm ideas, kick them around, think what you would do with them. Steal plot twists and macguffins from TV, Movies and books and think about ways you could have handled them. In time, it becomes habit, and that does good things for your games, provided you commit to it. And that reveals the tricky part.

While the obvious part of the equation is being creative, the less obvious (and perhaps even more critical) part is being attentive. Most of us know what to do when an opportunity is presented to us, but the danger is that we can easily overlook when opportunities arise. If we don't make an effort of listening to our players and paying attention to when things shift, we'll miss our chance.

Practicing attentiveness is a little harder than practicing creativity, but it can be done. Every situation where you pay attention to people and what they want can help, not just games. It's not very different from being a good conversationalist (rather than merely dominating a conversation). And thankfully, it's one of the easiest things to talk to your players about after a game, because it's easy to couch the question in non-confrontational terms - "Are there any threads or events that came up in the game that you wish had been pursued?" is a pretty innocuous question, but it can reveal a lot.

So, creativity and attention: make a habit of them.

Editor's Note: I've changed my posting time from 10am eastern to 1pm eastern, just to be kinder to the west coast.

Status Update

2011-09-28T07:43:00.001-04:00

So, the silent period ran longer than planned. New job has been great, but it's eaten a bit of my brain as I ramp up.

Thankfully, that corner has been rounded. Regular posting will resume this coming Monday.

Geek #2: Productivity

2011-09-13T13:00:00.000-04:00

This is my second Speak Out With Your Geek Out post.

I am also a productivity geek. This has shown up in a few of my gaming posts like "Getting Things Dungeon" but it's something that runs pretty deep for me.

Like a lot of people I know, I was a bright slacker growing up. I was smart and flexible enough to get by most of the time, and as I got out of college into the job market, this produced a generally relaxed attitude. There are plenty of situations where this was helpful, but there were others (most of which I was semi-willfully unaware of) where it hurt me. Sure, things might occasionally get chaotic enough to merit a big cleanup, but I was never going to "get organized", since that was something which uptight, type-A people did, and that was definitely not me. My desk (or room, or office) might be a mess, but I knew where everything was! I could do my work, and my natural method of handling things was much more organic and efficient than any system some anal retentive old dude might come up with!

(While I did not actually add the slightly plaintive "Maaaaan" at the end of it, if you add it with your imagination, you will have captured the essence of the thing).

Still, I was kept busy, and in one of my occasional efforts to get my stuff together, I stumbled across an article about Getting Things Done and I got pretty well sucked in. It spoke directly to my situation, and it flipped a simple, but really important switch. It asserted that the purpose of getting organized was not being organized, but rather to free up your mind, time and space so that you can actually focus on enjoying the things you love. I'd never considered it in that light before, but it nailed me pretty hard.

Now, the problem is that getting organized can be very distracting. Getting Things Done is a methodology that teaches a few simple ideas, but then allows for any number of implementations. The kinds of people that GTD works for are often the kind of people likely to spend a lot of time fiddling around with their system of tasks and planners, which kind of misses the point.

I've been guilty of that more than once myself, and I've tried almost every methodology I've come across at one point or another. I listened to Merlin Mann podcasts, got myself a hipster PDA, pursued inbox zero, tried autofocus and Franklin-Covey, sorted colored post-its. There was a lot of fun to be had in trying new systems. Even if they were ultimately a distraction, I often picked up a trick or two.

Nowadays I have my personal organization pretty well under control. I very grudgingly made the transition from a pocket notebook to an iphone, but it's been worth it, as measured by the fact that my tasks are getting done.

Anyway, I would not be a real geek unless I shared my workflow, so here it is.

Email is gmail, which is kept at inbox zero. Mails that I need to come back to are flagged as @followup (The @ is a trick to put those flags at the top of the list). Emails that I can see a clear task in are entered in my task system, then archived. EMail used to be a weak link for me - the web interface was never more than ok for me - but the new Mail client in OSX Lion was good enough to become my central dashboard. I'll do a little email management from my devices (iphone & ipad) but real cleanup and processing happens at the desktop.

For task handling, I use Omnifocus, which I have on all three machines, and which syncs automatically. The syncing is a big deal, since it lets me put things in my inbox quickly, then process them properly when I have more time. I love this solution, but it was really freaking expensive (and it has no web component) but it works very well with my process.

I make much greater use of contexts than I do projects. It may just be how I think, but projects are something I only really need to do if the tasks are not self-explanatory. This is a bit of a GTD violation, and I suspect that I'll go more project-heavy over time, but for now, they're not a big part of the system.

Notes, lists and data go into text files kept on Dropbox. I use Notational Velocity to access them on the desktop, and Elements from my iDevices. I chose Elements because it let's you customize your base directory in dropbox, and because while it's a good note app, I don't actually use it for writing, so it's a good dedicated notes tool.

I'm still looking for a good solution to handling larger ideas (like email thread with Fred containing game ideas). I dump them into Notational velocity for the time being, but that feels like a poor fix.

I do most of my straight writing on the iPad (usually in writeroom) synced to dropbox, then i just open it in the appropriate app for post-processing. Simple enough arrangement.

And that's about the size of it. Any other productivity geeks out there?

Geek #1: Comics

2011-09-12T13:00:00.000-04:00

At first, I was uncertain how to contribute to Speak Out With Your Geek Out - after all, this is already a pretty geeky blog - but after a but of thinking I realized I have a few other areas of geekery that might merit some discussion, so I’m taking my week back from break to run through them.

So, I’m a bit of a comic geek. Not as much of ones as I used to be (for which my wallet thanks me) but enough that I stay on top of what’s going on in the mainstream comics, follow some small ones, and read far too many webcomics on a regular basis. This lead to the interesting experience of my going to the Small Press Expo for the first time this past weekend.

For the unfamiliar, SPX is an expo for independent comic artists and companies. Originally, it was fairly underground, populated by comics you’ve never heard of and people’s hand-bound photocopies, but over the years it has also become a large venue for web comics. SPX is a DC are con, and I have wanted to attend it for years, but I always end up missing it. Thankfully, a friend who is an even bigger comic nerd than I was going, so I hitched a ride.

First off, it was weird as heck going to a convention where I’m _not_ a super nerd. When I hit a gaming convention, it’s very familiar territory for me. There are people I know in many places, and even when that’s not the case, I have enough familiarity with what’s going on to be able to comfortably engage with people about whatever they’re doing. Not so much here - it was like flashing back to my first conventions experiences in college, which is not a great sensation. The introvert instincts kicked in, and there was a lot of listening and avoiding eye contact while wiggling through the crowd, though I did manage to engage the one or two artists I really wanted to talk to.

Second, it was really interesting from a business perspective. As Oltheros has noted more than once, small press comics and game publishing have crazy amounts of overlap, and laid out in the expo hall, some issues are even more clear. Bear in mind that since this is an expo, every table is selling something, and that’s the primary things it’s doing. It’s one of the reasons engagement is rough because you don’t want to ask a question and get bombarded with upsell (or to feel guilty for not buying what is clearly a labor of love).

So within that context, you have the full gamut of products, from the $100 gorgeous hardcovers to the $1 staple bound, probably hand-cut photocopies. And you have a LOT of them. This definitely creates a divide when you have very small products contrasted with the Topatoco table which runs the length of the wall with nothing but high production value material, but the divide is not so clear as you might think. Topatoco does great because people came to convention already knowing what they wanted, so there’s no real discovery there. That’s the real divide between the haves and a the have-nots: for most every other booth there, the job was to help people passing by to understand what they were selling and why it might be interesting.

The degrees of success at this were crazy to behold. Certainly, there was a correlation between production values and presentation, but it was far from a true distinction. There were booths of incomprehensible (but highly polished) product, just as there were tables with rough product that was very clearly presented. As in gaming, there is no small contingent in comics who strive for what they consider authenticity over commercial success, and those are the ones most likely to equate polish with presentation, but at SPX they also seemed the ones most likely to fail in thier own presentation for entirely non-commercial reasons.

It does not take a lot of money to keep a tidy table, to present your products well and to choose what you present wisely. This is as true of comics as it is with games, though more pronounced in comics - a game producer is a little less likely to have a dozen ashcans.

To come back to the point, I think part of being a multi-pronged geek is that you start seeing where your areas of enthusiasm overlap. It’s a glass bead game where the parallels between Blues Rock and Japanese Animation become self evident once you love the both of them enough. I dig that, and its one of the reasons I love finding new things to get enthusiastic about.

Time Off

2011-09-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a long weekend for Labor day, and should be back Tuesday. I've had some good changes in my life recently, but I don't yet know how they're going to impact my schedule, including my writing for this blog. I'm unlikely to _stop_, but I may need to step back to a less-than-daily schedule for a while. Or I may not need to change at all, I just don't know yet.

Whatever happens, I want to thank you all for reading. It's been a lot of fun for me to write, and even more fun when I see someone get something out of it.

Tunnels and Trenches

2011-09-01T10:00:00.000-04:00

Played more Deus Ex, though curiously that has not really been what's been eating my time. I've really grown to appreciate it's design of creating multiple paths to success, and what's most interesting to me is that those paths remains mostly obscured unless you're the kind of player who cheerfully spends time poking into every nook and cranny (which I am).

But the thing that's impressed me is something that resonates very well with adventure design. There's an old saying which I think I heard from S. John Ross, that a mystery should be like a maze - confusing if you're in it, even if it's obvious from up above. I've always liked that comparison because it speaks to one of the biggest challenges to the GM in designing coherent adventures - the GM is always looking at the maze from overhead, so it's hard to really wrap your head around what it looks like from within.

A lot of bad habits come from this, and two of them in particular are a poor sense of difficulty (that is - "my players are such idiots, why can't the see the obvious!") and railroading ("There's a path out of the maze, I just need to get them on it!").

Now, there are a lot of solutions to these problems, and I've talked a lot about flexible ones such as might be used in Leverage, but if you like your structured adventures, there's still something interesting to do about it. Thats where Deus Ex comes in.

At first my GM's instincts twitched in the face of Deus Ex mission design. Sure, it was great to have it be objective (rather than process) driven, but when you started looking around, you realize there are SO MANY ways to approach a problem that it seems unfair - it's _too easy_. But at the same time, I was impressed at how tidily the various approaches knitted together to feel organic.

The piece I was missing was that the organic feel was a natural offshoot of their being too many options. Even if there are multiple paths of approach, the player will only experience one, and by virtue of doing so, it will feel right. There's some interesting thinking there - if we figure out to do some clever jumping to get somewhere, we credit the designers for foreseeing that. And, heck, maybe they did, but more likely, they didn't stop it.

See, that's the real trick - though there are multiple paths to the goal, what really makes them work is that the player can change paths at will. You are not compelled to keep sneaking even if you have been sneaking up to this point.

This is the point that intersects with adventure design interestingly. There's a tendency in structured designs to dig tunnels - single paths to the destination. A "flexible" design might have multiple discrete tunnels, but discrete is the operative word. Writers and GMs will regretfully accept the necessity of this approach because, without a tunnel, there's no telling which way the characters will go.

A game like Deus Ex forgoes tunnels in favor of trenches. The trenches all flow towards the end point on various routes[1] which the player can easily follow, but they are also easy to step out of and into a different trench. The net effect is a sort of mesh design which has some fascinating emergent properties. Specifically, by making the process through them non-procedural, it feels more player driven and organic, and provides opportunities for meaningful out-of-combat choice and strategy. Yes, all trenches may get you where you're going eventually, but you can still be smart about picking which ones to follow.

Anyway, I have more to play, and I expect it to continue to be fun, but I just want to plant that idea in your ear: Mesh Design. It's worth a try.

1 - How do they do this? By being built _out_ from the goal. Building a maze from the outside in is a novice mistake.

The Clickable Map

2011-08-30T10:00:00.000-04:00

Ok, so this is the overland map for the video game, Dragon Age:As you might expect, you click on one of the little squares to go there. The images in the icons have meanings (town, dungeon and so on - that one in the upper right is "make camp") but the base idea is pretty simple. Predictably, there are a few other twists: the map changes over time for one, and when you click to go from point A to point B, there's a chance you may have an encounter along the way.

There are similar maps within cities and such, and it works pretty well, but what I want to really look at is how this interacts with tabletop play. See, I think there's an instinctive resistance to this kind of model in play because it's so obviously and (seemingly) arbitrarily restrictive. We treasure our broad, open ended maps with the idea that if that spot right there is of particular interest to us, then by god that's what we can set out for.

The problem is that, in practice, things end up looking a lot like this map. There are points of interest the players are aware of, and more of them are revealed over time, and those are where they go too and from, encountering things along the way. The only real difference is on those occasions where the players might actually "pick a spot" that doesn't already have an icon, but when that happens, there are two possible outcomes:

1. The GM already has something prepped, so effectively it's a hidden icon.
2. The GM needs to make something up, effectively creating a new icon.

I like both options. Stuff like that is why you have a GM and not just a computer.

And, heck, it's not like this is unprecedented. Replace every icon on that map with a number and you have the map from pretty much every adventure ever. The difference between that and the video game is sleight of hand, and I wonder if we might be better off dispensing with it.

Anyway, this is obviously not applicable for all games. If you are actually interested in hard core exploration with full on Oregon Trail dysentery and inventory management, then obviously you want an open map because you're in it for the _process_. But for the rest of us, perhaps acknowledging the role of structure can help free us up to focus on whichever part of play we're actually interested in.

Deus Ex-ing it up

2011-08-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

Played some Deus Ex: Human Revolution this weekend. Startlingly fun game, especially noting that I’ve never played the original or the (badly panned) sequel. Very interestign game to look at in terms of its relationship with tabletop for two reasons, one abstract one one nerdishly specific.

Thr abstract one is something that’s held up as one of the great strengths of the game: That almost any problem has multiple possible solutions. Faced with a goal (get in and get something) you can sneak, climb, hack, fight or god knows what else to get the job done. HOW you do it matters less than the fact that you actually do it.

It’s a great idea, though it’s much stronger for solo roleplay than traditional group play. One thing it depends on is thae idea that there are areas where the character is stronger than others, and by making the right choices he can play to his strengths. With a group, the expetation is that the weaknesses of one character will be compensated by the strengths of another, so you don’t want to offer challenges that play to only one character’s strengths. As such, the explicit range of approach variety DE:HR provides may be excessive for tabletop, but if you can look at your group as a whole, you might be able to find a way to assess their aggregate strength and weaknesss and build options that way.

The second point is one which warms my little nerd heart. The hacking system looks like it could easily have come out of any of the past century’s cyberpunk games, with their pseudo-network maps and their disposable viruses. These sytems, I shoudl add, pretty much universally sucked.

However, the model translates to the video game medium much better than it has any right to. Gaming is full of old systems which were cumbersome on paper but which can come to life with automation, and this is probably the most visible example I can think of. I’ve made my character a super hacker almost entirely for the sheer joy of playing the hacking minigame.

Anyway, good game. Definitely scratching some of my Bioware itches, while still bringing something new to the table. I’m enjoying it enough to see about maybe playing the first sometime.

Reading Fudge Dice

2011-08-26T10:00:00.000-04:00

It should come as no surprise that I'm quite fond of fudge dice, and I've put a lot of thought into the different things that can be done with their three outcomes. I've shifted things on several different axes, and I've failed as often as I've succeeded, but it's a fun area to play in.

One idea that I'm quite fond of is less about altering the dice or how they're rolled and more about what that mean. Specifically, you can get a lot of mileage out of separating the dice from the outcome.

To illustrate what that means, consider that on a normal df roll, you are judging an outcome, generally based on die roll plus whatever skill is in use as well as any other bonuses or penalties. The final outcome is expressed as a number or an adjective (or both) and that's what's used as a basis for narration.

Now, as gamers we have always implicitly understood that there can be some separation between the dice and the outcome, specifically in situations where the dice roll badly but the roll is a success or vice versa. What I propose here is to make the distinction a little bit more explicit, and make the roll itself as important to the narration as the outcome.

To do this requires a little thought about what the die roll means. Most often, we think of it as representing the role of luck in an activity, but that doesn't hold up under any real scrutiny. Luck maybe part of our lives, but it's usually something we consider as part of what happens to us, less about what we do. If we miss a target, it's because we need to get _better_, not luckier.

So instead, consider the dice to represent all the other factors that the system hasn't already accounted for. Distractions, coincidences, a good nights sleep and anything else. Think of all the reasons you succeed and fail and - unless you're a terrible egoist - those external factors will become obvious.

With that in mind, the dice represent the "swing" of the world at large. For narrow results (-1 to +1) nothing of any real note happened. You tried, you succeeded or failed, that's just the way things go.

For slightly broader results (-2 or +2) something went right or wrong. Someone gave you directions. The wind was at your back. The wind _wasn't_ at your back. The lighting was off. THere's something you can point to and say "That helped" or "Man, that got in my way".

Rarer results (-3 or +3) represent rare strokes of luck or bad luck. Coincidence falls for or against you. The librarian just happens to be and expert on the topic in question. The supplies you need were destroyed in a freak fire. Your opponent slipped on a patch of oil. You take a nail in one of your tires.

By this thinking, critical results (-4 or +4) are just a logical extension of this model. They're the truly preposterous strokes of luck, good and bad, that turn a situation around.

With this in mind, you can combine this information with the outcome (which won't be changed) to be able to describe action in terms of "success because" or even "success in spite of" to get a better picture of how a given even transpired.

This combines interestingly with aspects. If you do a dice-flipping bonus (that is, invoke to turn a die to a +) then you need to describe how the aspect is changing the situation, maybe turning a drawback into an advantage. That's very colorful, but also makes using aspects more work.

If you just go with the +2 bonus, this has the nice effect of making your efforts look more heroic. When you spend to get a +7, it's awesome, but bland. It's cooler to my mind if you also take into account that you had to do it while the floor is shaking (rolled a -2).

Either way, if you use an invocation for a reroll, this makes the story of the reroll much clearer, since it has now translated into a problem which has been overcome or worked around.

This also has some interesting interaction with bonuses, penalties and uncertainty. In this model, you can legitimately have someone roll fewer dice to simulate "lab conditions". In fact, if you think of that as pre-setting those dice to zero, then you could actually just fold penalties right into the dice.

Now, be aware this only really works if you take a light hand with bonuses and penalties, but doing so makes them much more concrete and makes them feel more toothy while actually making them a bit more normalizing. Consider - if you're rolling with a -2 penalty, you could generate anything from -6 to +2. If two of the dice a pre-flipped to -2, then the roll will be somewhere from -4 to 0. Now, some people might miss the more extreme outcomes, but I'd wager that the latter case will _feel_ more like the penalty mattered - both narratively as well as mechanically.

(as a bonus, you might allow aspect rerolls to "clear" a penalty, if you can come up with a justification for it, since a reroll represents a change of situation)

PAX - More Bitter Envy

2011-08-25T10:00:00.000-04:00

I am not at PAX, nor am I at PAX dev. This kind of sucks. I mean, it sucks a little bit less than not being at Gencon because it's at least _possible_ for me to go the Gencon without punching a huge hole in my life, but all the same? Sucks.

In fairness, much of this grumpiness stems from how awesome PAX East was. Yeah, I know PAX is primarily a video game con, but as I gushed at length, it was one of the best all-purpose gaming (and really general celebration of the tribe) cons I've been to, and in my mind, PAX offers more of the same.

Anyway, if you're going to be going, you should know two things:

1) I hate you.

2) Take some time to swing by Games on Demand. You can find out more here and here, but what you really need to know is that it's free and it's the place to get any amount of awesome gaming in. You know those rooms where they set up all the consoles so you can just walk in and play cool stuff, old and new? Imagine it like that, only with Pen & Paper RPGs. As with other walk-in rooms, it's just as suitable for someone curious to check out one thing as it is for the person who wants to spend the whole con soaking in this particular brand of nerdery.

Now, here's where I admit an ulterior motive. The PAX guys run a tight ship, and they only include programs if people use them. If Games on Demand does not see much traffic, then the PAX planners will probably decide that next time around they'll use the space for something else. I can't blame them for that, but I wouldn't want to see it happen for several reasons. Yes, G.O.D. is awesome, but that's almost secondary.

See, one of the things I liked about the PAX vibe was that there were lots of people there who were willing to consider RPGs a normal part of things without viewing themselves as RPG gamers. That's incredibly healthy and reassuring, and it's something I'd like to see get the opportunity to grow, and things like this are how it happens.

And, more selfishly, if it's a success, there's more of a chance we'll see it at PAX East.

Anyway, if you're not at PAX this week, feel free to join me in my bitterness. If you are, please feel free to ignore my death rays of envy and have as awesome a time as possible.

What Else Compels are Good For

2011-08-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

One of the curious issues I have with Aspects these days is that I almost never compel them. Not because I don't bring their negative implications into play, but because my players are sufficiently enthusiastic about playing up the negative side themselves that I don't even need to bother.

It's a good problem to have. I can easily swap to a pile of fate points in the middle of the table for them to draw out of as appropriate, but I tend not to do so because those few occasions where I offer a classic compel tend to be fun and memorable, and I don't want to lose that.

The problem, of course, is that this experience is not universal. A lot of people have encountered a lot of different problems with compels, and these problems are wide ranging enough that there's no one solution. They are either too much power for the GM or too much power for the players, depending who you ask. They're too restrictive, or too open ended, also depending who you ask. This has always made them a bit rough to write about because if you speak to one set of concerns, you inflame another. This is why I've steadily fallen into the pattern of talking about what I consider good or rewarding practices rather than seeking to solve specific problems.

So with that in mind, there are two things that go on around compels that I'm not sure get enough airtime, and which offer a slightly different perspective on things.

The first is something my players make clear to me on a regular basis, and that is that a compel is really the GM offering you an opportunity that isn't immediately visible to you. That is to say, the GM has a slightly different perspective on what's going on - maybe she has more information a broader perspective or whatever - and that means she will occasionally look at a situation or choice and go "Wow, that speaks _directly_ to this thing my player finds cool" and calls the player's attention to it with a compel. The assumption is that if the player had seen this opportunity, they would have already taken it (and that assumes a certain type of player-GM relationship). If the player has seen it and declines, then all is well and good, but the GM's done her job.

Obviously, this is harder to do if you're doing all hard compels all the time, and I tend to treat these compels as soft (that is to say, can be declined freely).

The second is that a compel can zoom the camera in on a moment, ideally a moment of choice. If the player is faced with a choice, the compel flags it as something significant, that it's a choice that means something for the character. Not every choice is necessarily this important, and some might merit hard compels and others soft, but the bottom line is that the compel is a spotlight, and it's worth using to shine on things worth seeing.

A Noun is a Person Place or Thing

2011-08-23T10:00:00.000-04:00

I love the Discworld novels. They're fantastic, and I enjoy the heck out of them, but like many fans I am partial to a particular subset of them. In my case, I'm a huge fan of the City Watch books. Nothing else comes close (except perhaps the Moist von Lipwig stuff, which I'm willing to acknowledge as a fair second). Now, there are many reasons I love these books, but there's a particular element about them which I think is very relevant to setting design.

See, I should also note that I'm a big fan of cities. I have purchased city books for games I will never play because I'm always fascinated to see how people present cities and urban adventures. I am, by and large, disappointed. The bulk of city products tend to be a handful of really interesting pages about the shape of the city, then piles and piles of pages that turn the city into some sort of above-ground dungeon.

Now, thankfully, this is less common with more modern products (and as noted, the recently released Neverwinter Campaign setting is not half bad) but what's gotten me thinking is the difference in how Ankh-Morpork (the city of the City Watch novels) is presented. Certainly, there are a handful of places (The Unseen University, the Watch House, the Opera House, the river Ankh, Guildhouses and so on) but the city is primarily defined by trends and people.

Now, people are kind of an obvious part of things, albeit one that is often undeserved in setting design. It is possible to design a setting that is almost entirely characters, but it's trickier to do it in a way that preserves player agency. That is, there is a strong tendency for a character-based setting to become about the NPCs rather than the PCs. This is where the Forgotten Realm soften go wrong, and it's where Amber often (but not always) went right by firmly tying the characters to the setting NPCs.

Trends are a little more interesting, because they apply to people and to places equally. They're the answer to broad, semi-specific question - where would a high class scribe work? How do people on the street respond to a mugging? Things like that. I can answer those questiosn about Ankh-Morpork because they're the parts that get detailed in the books much more than the specific drilldown of street addresses.

The thing is, most good city books have this information, but they tend to present it in a very different manner. They provide raw data from which a savvy reader might be able to extract trends, but only rarely do they make that leap of abstraction themselves.

Now, I'm a firm believer that one of the most useful things a published setting can do is let the GM answer when a player wonders "What's here?" It's a good, often relevant question, and I've seen a few products that have sustained the level of detail to actually be able to answer it explicitly (The Birthright campaign setting for one, the old Thieves of Tharbad city book for MERP for another) without being ENTIRELY overwhelming, but it's a lot of work.

The alternative would seem to be to arm the GM with the understanding to know the answer, or to create an answer that is consistent with the greater whole. But how do you convey that without a series of bestselling novels? The answer, I think, demands experimentation.

(Oh, and we will be getting back to prep in 4e, but let's just say that one is a many-headed beast)

4 on 1

2011-08-22T10:00:00.000-04:00

I had the unexpected pleasure of playing in a first edition AD&D game this past weekend. It was a long-standing game that my brother in law participates in, and they had an opening. This was pretty much the classic AD&D game in just about every way imaginable. They’d looked at other editions, played a little third, but stuck to first as adjusted by elements from dragon magazine and a few house rules. They were sufficiently committed to this that they had their own modified PHB, which was basically a scanned PHB with all the classes, spells and such inserted into it, and several players had printed and bound copies of it (I used the PDF – iPad FTW).

The DM did a clever thing where I was effectively a ghost helping the party out because my body was deeper in the dungeon, allowing me to establish rapport with the party before actually joining, so it’s a bit less of a “You meet a guy on the road” sort of situation. Unfortunately, the pacing of things was such that despite the very long session. We did not actually reach my body, so while I had fun, it was mostly observing and making wry comments (which I enjoy). But it also really created an opportunity to think about the game and contrast it with my 4e experience in a way that has only really been hypothetical for me until now. It’s been long enough since I really played 1e that I was doing a lot off old memories.

It was pretty interesting, because it really highlighted to me a lot of the things 4e (and, to be fair, 3e) did right, but it also cast into relief the bits that were missing that were very clearly part of the groups enjoyment of the game.

First and foremost, man, 4e makes the actual moving around and fighting better. There are several reasons for this, but the one I really want to call out is clarity. There were a lot of situations where figuring out what someone could do was sufficiently involved as to really bog things down, especially with regard to movement. This was particularly highlighted by one of the more RP-oriented players very clearly getting frustrated by her inability to engage in the fight the way the more twinked out guys were. (The fact that this was addressed with Manly Explanation likely did not help).

4e also really keeps fights more dynamic. Things took a kind of dull turn when the Big Climactic enemy cleric got silenced and cornered. It was a reminder about some of the insta-win elements of magic, but more, it made me think what a shame that there was no real push/pull/slide to keep things moving.

Where things were more telling was on the borders of the fight. Planning for an encounter and using spells and trickery to overcome a fight were really big focuses. The group made heavy use of Haste & Invisibility to make the fights into these terrifying blitzkriegs that were twice as much time spent prepping as fighting. Not necessarily as satisfying as fights, but definitely scratching a problem-solving itch. The ability to make a fight unfair through clever planning is very rewarding and not particularly supported in 4e.

There was also a lot of use of out-of combat magic, things like animating enemy corpses or using the item spell. This was most interesting to me because it was clear that some of it (healing, identifying stuff) was pretty much just exercises in bookkeeping, but other stuff (like item or enemy zombies) was cool stuff that the players felt it was cool that they were able to do.

There was really no more or less roleplaying than there would have been in 4e. The scenario only gave itself to that so much (Old temple, overrrun by Yuan-Ti) but the system really didn't speak to that. Outside of the fight, the amount of RP really came down to the player's interest in it.

There were also small things. The use of the vs. Armor Type table made weapons selection a little more interesting, though I'm not sure it's addition is worth the tradeoff of complexity. Chargen was also interesting: creating a level 10 1e character using only paper? SO MUCH EASIER than 4e.

Now, this comparison has all been useful to me so far, and offers interesting insights into the two games for me. I think it partly underscored why encounter powers are a cognitive problem for some players while daily's aren't. 1e is FULL of once per day kind of abilities, so that's part of the logic, but narrative time is a different method of thinking. On some level, I think that if encounter powers were framed slightly differently - perhaps in terms of needing a few minutes rest to recharge - they'd probably have more traction.

But what was also telling was that there were definitely two big elements that clearly were part of the fun for at least some of the players, but which are not necessarily things I'm inclined to support.

The first was related to system mastery. There was a very clear range of powers within the group, even though everyone was at similar levels. Some characters just had better powers, better gear and (not coincidentally) a better understanding of the rules that allowed them to exploit that (and yes, this included a guy with psionics). Worse, there was clearly some self-perpetuation of this. It was pretty clear in the dynamic that the most badass guys had first dibs on loot because making them more badass was "good for the party". I don't blame the guys for this - there's a solid tactical argument for it - but that's not the kind of arrangement I'd want to encourage.

A corollary of this was that it had clear balance issues. The big fight included enemies who were clearly tuned to be a threat to the party as a whole, which meant that they were keyed off the most powerful members of the party. Upshot being those powerful guys got their awesome on, and everyone else got to kind of play a supporting role. I admit I was watching that fight and I am not sure that my character would have been able to contribute at all, had I been corporeal.

For players who thrive on this element of the game, 4e must feel like castration - system mastery (and magical gear) can only pull you so far ahead of your peers. I can completely understand why that would be frustrating, but that's definitely not my bag. I'll play along - I'll have to to be effective - but it's a necessity more than something I'd enjoy. It also reminds me of the statement made early in 4e that it's less about the choices you make in chargen than it is about the choices you make in a fight. Looking at that now, that statement really holds up.

Anyway, the second element is a little more mixed, that of preparation. Now, I actually like the idea of prepping for a fight, arranging to bushwhack guys and generally benefitting from my own cleverness, but I think there's a balancing act. While there were a few bits of trickery and strategy, there was a lot more brute force application of "I Win" spells like Haste & Silence (to say nothing of the illusions) which feels a little bit less rewarding, but at the same time is utterly necessary because the DM needs to prepare for the possibility. There's sort of a vicious circle/arms race element to it. I actually remember this being an issue in 3e as well, but it's really noticeable how profound it is in this case.

But at the same time, this is perhaps the most interesting question to take back to 4e. Is there a way to support prep that's rewarding but not so overwhelming?

I think the answer is a clear yes, esp since I can think of two different ways to do it. But that's probably fodder for another day.

4e Skills

2011-08-19T09:58:00.003-04:00

Mike Mearls wrote one of those great articles that so typical of him that reveals that as much awesome 4e stuff we see, it's just the tip of the iceberg of his understanding of the game. It's about skills, and you should go read it if you haven't.

Since I show my love through graffiti, I'm going to suggest that the idea is really, really good, but I'd tweak it a little bit in play. For those too lazy to go read, Mike proposes that skill ranks be broken down into a descriptive ladder:
Novice
Journeyman
Expert
Master
Grandmaster
Impossible

And that the DM should use those guidelines for setting difficulties, such as "It would take an expert climber to go over this wall". If you have the skill at a level higher than expert, you don't bother to roll, you just succeed. If you have it lower than Expert, its out of your league. If you have it at expert, then you roll against a DC of 15 to see if you succeed.

This is pretty slick, and because it explicitly removes the "+ half your level" element of the skill rolls, it makes skill difficulties feel more coherent (rather than requiring EPIC WALLS to challenge climbing at level 25). Mike also slips in a nice trick whereby player cleverness and planning can change the difficulty category of the check rather than give themselves a modifier to the roll. Very slick.

Admittedly, there are no guidelines for how to determine character expertise, but that's a two line rule - Everyone's a novice at everything, everything you're trained in you're a journeyman at. Each feat bumps it one step. If you want to support epic chars being awesome at everything, then characters get an-across-the-board bump at 10 and 20. There, done.

Anyway, I want to call it out as a nice tweak on things, but also as one destined to disappear. If Mike could convince the Character builder to support ideas like this, I would be SHOCKED (and utterly delighted). But I'm intrigued because - unlike most web mods - it's not impossible that it could be supported. I'm going to keep one eye on this, just to see.

Zooming In On Neverwinter

2011-08-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

There is a writing technique that is commonly used when writing about a physical thing. The author starts from a very high level view, sketching a brief picture of the broader context, then steadily zooms in on the scene until focus is at the level of whatever's being written about. Lots of novels start out this way, zoomed out to the empire or nation then slowly narrowing in on our farmboy protagonist or the like.

It's also the default mode for many setting books, and I gotta say, the Neverwinter Campaign Setting book has really left me wondering about it's use as a technique in setting books, because it very nearly poisoned my impression of what is otherwise a pretty solid book.

The rub is that NWCS is a Forgotten Realms book. It's presented as more of a free-standing thing, but there's some smoke and mirrors going on there. The first ten pages of the book are basically a summary of everything I dislike about the Forgotten Realms, a mix of contextless proper nouns and uninteresting background elements given special focus because there was clearly a novel or other tie-in related to them. It's pretty bad, and I was willing to press on because so many people had so many good things to say about this book.

I'm glad I did. Not to say what follows is flawless, but people are right to be excited because NWCS has done some things very well indeed. Every time it steps away from the Forgotten Realms at large and focuses on play in its own context it becomes a stronger product.

Now, it's worth noting that this is basically a city book. There's more stuff in it, but it's really all the material for a heroic tier, city based campaign. Cities are one of my favorite things in games, and I had been wary. The previous city from WOTC - Gloomwrought in the Shadowfell boxed set - had erred too far on the side of gamey-ness for my tastes. It was interesting, but the city felt like an excuse for colorful encounters.

That may seem like enough, but I admit I kind of feel that this is what dungeon's are for. Cities (or, more broadly, campaign elements that players keep coming back to) need more of an internal dynamic, a sense of how they self-sustain and behave when the adventurers aren't looking. Gloomwrought lacked that, but Neverwinter seems to have hit the right balance for 4e. It still streamline's some details, but there's a sense that the mundane considerations of a city (like where food comes from and how trade happens) are actually in play.

More tellingly, I think I could happily run Neverwinter without ever using any of the adventure material in it. I wouldn't, because they're good (sometimes great) because of the amount of time and effort put into laying out the factions in play and making them playable. If anything, I could have happily taken more material like that, but I think there's enough.

(Also, the factions benefit from the explicit Heroic level range of the setting. It means you don't have to come up with strange logic to explain how one faction has a bunch of level 5 guys and another has a level 25 patron, but both of them are players in the context of the city.)

Still, all this pales next to 4e finally doing something that has been lacking from many games - tying chargen directly into the adventure. This is accomplished by introducing character themes which are a) mechanically more potent than themes we've seen before and b) explicitly hooked into the campaign book.

For example, if you take the Noble theme, the adventure in the book dealing with intrigue among the nobility has a special sidebar about tying this adventure into that character. Basically, this is the closest thing a published adventure can do to writing things for specific players, and it's an idea that's been a long time coming. The rest of the book could be crap, and I'd still celebrate it for this addition to the technology.

It makes me a little sad as a writer, though. This is one of those ideas that you could really go crazy with in a third party product, but since third party themes won't have character builder support, there's no real point to it. Still, that sadness is the refrain of 4e - not much to be done about it.

Anyway, the book is worth a read, and it's good enough that it could probably be used for something other than 4e. Just be prepared to just sort of blah blah blah over some stuff if you're not already steeped in Forgotten Realms lore.

Using Less

2011-08-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

I had an interesting conversation about 4e yesterday that revealed something I've been waiting for. Somewhere along the way, it has crossed the tipping point where the way to do really awesome things with it is not by adding things, but rather by taking them away.

This point was easy to see coming. As early as the PHB2 it was reasonable to look at things and think "What kind of setting would I have if I removed this class or power source?" This kind of pruning makes for a great thought exercise, but early on it had the problem that if you removed any significant portion of the game, you were limiting the range of available play. If, for example, you were to remove all Arcane classes back when the only options were PHB1 and PHB2, you've just really diminished your options.

But now there is enough material that a decision like that is a lot less impactful. Yes, you might create a problem for someone who wants to play a specific class because they want that specific class, but you're not creating a situation where a player has a really narrow class selection if they want to play a particular style. The bucket is big enough that you can take a big scoop out and still have a large element remaining.

One very nice example of this was put forward by Gamefiend on twitter, suggesting that you could treat the new Thundercats as all being psionic heroes (an idea I like at least in part because none of them have the stupid looking halos that apparently denote psionics in default 4e). Story-wise this is pretty cool: they have a world where powers are defined by certain boundaries (the psionic power source) but are now encountering enemies and ancient mysteries outside that understanding (the arcane power source). It's a classic theme, and it's classic because it works well.

Now, admittedly 4e supports this sort of things very haphazardly. Power sources have very little mechanical weight, and they have almost no meaning beyond how they apply to character classes - settings, monsters and the like have no real resonance with these ideas, which is kind of a shame.

However, while the idea has very little support, it's very supportable (and one could point out that the Dark Sun setting is pretty good evidence of this). The rub is it's never going to be an idea that WOTC is really going to get behind because it hinges on removing things, and that's bad for their business model. But they've made it pretty easy for a DM to decide what power sources mean in his world and remove things that suit his sensibilities.

Now, obviously, there's more to this than the DM tossing things willy-nilly, but I wan tot come back to the premise: 4e has reached the point where you'll get more out of it by treating design of your game as sculpture rather than painting - what you add is less important than what you take away.

(Huh. Note to self - maybe the alternative to multi-classing rules is multi-power-sourcing rules. What happens when your Warlock switches from Arcane to Divine? Must think on this. )

Jumping Turtles

2011-08-16T10:00:00.000-04:00

I've been playing Bastion lately, and enjoying it very much. It's a very pretty Xbox game with some reasonably fun gameplay and fantastic music and visuals, but what's been keeping me hooked is the story it's telling. Some of this is from interesting gimmicks, like a narrator who is very responsive to events in play, but some of it is because the story being told has absolutely captured me, and I'm curious where it's going (it does not hurt that the story in question speaks right to some of the sensibilities that I like to bring to Amber). It's not a long game, and I find myself playing it in only small bits to stretch out the experience.

I've been struck by how well the narration works to illustrate the relationship between the story and the game. This seems to be a result of the narration being in a true storytelling cadence - that is, one which speaks to the essentials of a story more than the details. To understand what I mean, consider the difference between the telling of a legend like Hercules or Beowulf to a modern fantasy novel. The old epics, designed to be told rather than read, might have as much violence or as many events as a novel, but they're described in a few sentences rather than some number of pages.

This is, I should note, not a criticism of either legends or novels - both are awesome - but they definitely deliver the story in different ways, much the same way that movies or comics do so as well. What's interesting to me is that most modern methods of storytelling tend to drill down further into the details because they can, and because they have the tools (Special effects, cool art, patient and well trained readers) to be able to do so. They take pains to make the scene interesting and compelling and - if all goes well - the scene reflects well up onto the story being told.

But there is a disconnect between that level of detail and the story. A master can smooth over that disconnect easily, but the seam is usually visible. A tale may have fantastic scenes but little real story or vice versa. The thing is that, as an audience, I think we are better trained to be forgiving of good elements/poor story than we are of the reverse (though it may also be a case where it's hard to make a good story out of bad parts).

This, in turn, leads to some interesting shifts in perspective to the point where the details can _becomes_ the story, and that gets very weird because then the story is something very different than we're talking about when we go back to King Arthur and Theseus and such.

If all this seems a weird set of distinctions, there's a very concrete way to illustrate it - pick a movie or novel you like, then think about how you'd tell its story. You won't be able to remember every detail, and even if you could, just giving a blow by blow is not a very good story. You're going to drop details, smooth hings out and change focus so it's interesting to your listener. Much the same way a movie changes for a novelization, you're to change the story to tell it. Try is with Star Wars.

Anyway, this comes back to video games because the disconnect between the details and the story being told is MUCH broader than it is in something like movies or books. It's not a total disconnect - the details (that is, the part you actually play) can feed back to the story, but usually only in highlights and details. But at the same time, the width of that disconnect means that there's more freedom to actually tell the story without fear that the details will overwhelm it. Compare this to a movie: If you have a cool story, but make every scene awesome, it's possible the scenes will be what people will take away. In a video game, making play more awesome does not intrinsically detract from (or add to) the power of the story. That's pretty potent.

Now, some qualifications are in order. There are plenty of video games where the story follows a more traditional model, and which do so by making the gameplay experience more like a movie or book. Most modern RPG's are like this, including some of my favorites like the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. There is art and skill to doing those right, but it's familiar to me.

Wat has surprised me is how much story I've been finding in simpler games, ones which are much more about gameplay. Side scrollers like Braid & Limbo or fighting games like Bastion. Yes, absolutely, video game designers have used story as a coat of paint & spackle to justify the details of their games since forever. Some have tried to buck this trend by making the game into the story (think MYST) but it's always been an odd match.

But now, as the games have matured to a certain point and there's less of a need to desperately justify why the blue colored blob of pixels wants to kill the green blob of pixels, story has moved beyond mere explanation and started finding a home in surprising places. I'm pretty happy with this.

Your Better Instincts

2011-08-15T10:00:00.000-04:00

I admit that I'm usually all about taking advantage of your instincts to hose your players to make things more fun for them, but I want to take a second to turn that around.

See, while I've gotten better, one of my real weaknesses as a GM is a tendency to be too nice. If things fall apart or go horribly wrong, my instinct is to step in with my GM authority and help save the day. This is a terrible habit - I just can't stress it enough. Even if I'm not setting forth to show the players the story of my cool NPCs (which I'm not), having them step in to dramatically save the day has the same net result. My game's no longer about the players, it's now about whatever the stakes of this particular adventure are.

This is a sinister problem, in part because it comes from a well-intentioned place. Your players are maybe upset and disappointed with the way things have gone, and you want to mitigate that. It's totally human and understandable, but it will suck the fun out of your game.

However, like all bad habits, advice to "Just stop doing it" is basically useless. There are reasons people have the patterns they do, no matter how "obvious" things may seem to people outside those patterns. So if you have this instinct and you want to change it, then the trick is not to stop, but rather to redirect it.

So, the net time you find yourself in this situation, stop for a second as you pull it all together. Things have gone badly, so you've got the cavalry ready to ride. This is the point when you should stop and think - _how_ is the cavalry going to save the day? You need to have a better answer for this than "With their sheer awesomeness" and you probably will have one, because hey, you're a good, thoughtful, conscientious GM and even if you're helping you're not just going to pull an Elminster.

Once you've thought about that, think of it as a plot seed. Specifically, think of it as something that's ready to go but is missing one key element. Then make that element the player's responsibility.

This may sound tricky, but it's surprisingly easy, and it's something you see in fiction all the time. Consider the scenario where the cavalry literally shows up to help - they've got the men, they can win the battle, but they're pinned down by the artillery up on that mesa. Clearly, someone needs to sneak up there and take out that artillery team! Really, look at almost any fiction where the backdrop involves huge, powerful forces (like a war) and you'll find eamples of how the story narrows down to some lynchpin action on the part of the protagonists.

And now here's the real dirty trick - once you've gotten the hang of doing this, it becomes a trick you can incorporate into all your adventures. This is especially true if you want games against a big backdrop, or ones with powerful NPCs calling the shots, like The Forgotten Realms or any of the older World of Darkness products. If it's important to you that things and people be bigger than your PCs, then you can still keep things robust by getting the movers and shakers up to 90% but have them need help to get that last 10%.

This works in most play models, even classic mission-based play, but it has the advantage of giving the missions a reason that is somewhat more significant than "The Prince can't be bothered. You go do it". And more, by given the players even a small part in big events, you'll find that it ties them into events more tightly over time. These events, after all, are the things that NPCs respond to, and if players have a tie to the event, that's a one-step-removed tie to most of the interesting NPCs.

Plus as a bonus, it makes something that's historically a drag into a real play booster. Normally, the more invested you are in what Khelben Blackstaff or the Malkavian Antediluvian are up to, the less invested you end up being in your players, but by looking for that 10%, that lynchpin, you turne that investment back onto the players, hopefully to a good end.

Anyway, I try not to be a nice GM these days, but the habits are still there. For me, it's useful to have a practical way to channel them.

Dropping off radar

2011-08-12T09:05:00.001-04:00

Sorry for skipping yesterday, and ditto for today. I wrenched my back working out, and sitting up to write is not much of an option. Should be back on track on Monday.

Ow Ow Ow

2011-08-10T10:00:00.001-04:00

Gah, gonna be a short one today. Wrenched my back, and my attention span is SQUIRREL.

I am cautiously optimistic about some of the things WOTC has had to say about the future of 4e at Gencon, most of which I received via Critical Hits coverage of the new product seminar. The funny thing is that I'm not terribly excited about any product in particular (except perhaps Lord of Waterdeep - people I trust keep saying good things about it) but there seems to be a shift in emphasis in adventure, setting and material design that gravitates towards a little more setting buy in and dramatic focus. That's ambitious.

I'd be excited if it could work. Every now and again I get the urge to drastically crack 4e open to better support such things. It wouldn't be hard - the core engine is pretty robust, and it would be easy to make a handful of changes (Change skills, connection between stats and attacks, revamp rituals and try some different power ideas) to make a game that would probably be a lot of fun to try. However, it would be terrible to share and on sufficiently shaky legal ground that it's just not worth the risk. Still, there's a specific area where this raises my curiosity, and that is setting.

4e tends toward static settings. This Is not a failure of writing so much as a function of the way NPCs and powers are handled. Very little in 4e has much effect longer than scene length, and there is barely even a concept of recurring enemies. The result has been settings which are magnificent set-pieces but which don't necessarily have a lot of dynamism to them. Coupled with the fact that the system is a fairly abstract one (rather than representational) it's hard for a setting to come to life on its own.

While there's some criticism in this, I feel I should also point out the upside - 4e material has been much more focused on going from Zero to playing something cool in no time flat, and that's a pretty good goal. What's more, the desire that a setting be dynamic is directly at odds with a lot of the source fiction people draw on - settings are often static backdrops except where the main characters interact with them, and there's a lot of virtue to that. Like many things, it's a trade-off, and how well it works depends a lot on how you value the elements and how they're balanced.

But the thing is, while the mechanics exert a certain gravity, it's far from inescapable. I feel that encounter design has matured a lot since 4e came out, and it's mature enough that focus can now be shifted to setting and adventures. If so, I'll be really curious to see what comes of it.

That Also Happened

2011-08-09T10:00:00.000-04:00

There doesn't seem to be anything to link to about it yet, so I'll hijack someone else's coverage of the announcement. Short form, Margaret Weis Productions has announced that they got the Marvel license and that it will be a Cortex+ product. I should also add that I will be involved in the design process (as are a number of other really awesome folks).

One thing I want to note: MWP has announced what can only be interpreted as a very aggressive release schedule (16 products in 15 months) but that is not quite as crazy as it sounds. They're following a particular model of releases which I think is very much in line with the material while also being novel in ways that I think will pay off very well.

Anyway, it's not something I can really talk about much yet, but I'm excited about it, and optimistic. I have a great love of supers RPGs in all their various forms and shapes, and on some level I think you can argue that it's the most essential of RPG genres - almost every game out there with powers and badassery and limited trips to the emergency room is some narrow slice of supers. Yet for all that, it's a well that has a lot of potential to be tapped for more goodness. Or so I hope!

So, That Happened

2011-08-08T10:00:00.001-04:00

So, the 2011 Ennies were announced on Friday night. I watched most of it via live-streaming (thanks to neoncon) and caught the parts I missed via twitter. I greatly regretted not being there.

The flowchart held up decently well, but it's clear I overestimated the power of WOTC. The reality is that I could have gone with a much simpler chart that was basically "IS PAIZO IN THE CATEGORY? THEN THEY WIN!" There's a bit of a joke to it, but that's kind of the reality. Paizo walked away with 9 ennies, and the only one which was silver was for Best Adventure, where they also took the gold. Now, I totally don't want to bust on Paizo - they do great stuff - and it seems mean spirited to suggest that there's any reason for the wins other than their quality, and so i shall not do so. Instead, I'm going to cheer them - it used to be that you had to handicap the ennies for several companies, but now it seems it's just Paizo, and that speaks well for how well they've done.

Of course, I can say this without sour grapes, primarily because the Ennies were very kind to us indeed. Evil hat took home 6 ennies for The Dresden Files - Silvers for Best Production Values and Product of the Year, and gold for Best Writing, Best Rules, Best Game and Best New Game. That was...jaw dropping. I was hoping for us to take home a few silvers, maybe a gold if we were lucky. There was just so many good competition and I had expected to be beaten by Pathfinder: Bestiary 2 for Production Values (and we were), Delta Green for writing, D&D Rules Compendium for rules (that was the real breaking point for the flowchart), The Laundry for Best new game and Mutants & Masterminds for Best Game. I didn't even expect a showing for Product of the Year (which we lost to Paizo, natch).

Were I a younger man, this would be insecurity talking, but the reality is far more about the fantastic quality of the Ennies slate this year. And with that in mind, even though it's just for this year, I'm going to encourage folks to handicap for Evil Hat. We did great, and thank you all for your support. It means the world, and the best reward you can give yourself is to check out some of the folks we beat because, man, there's real metaphorical gold in them thar hills.

Mooks

2011-08-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

Man, one thing leads to another, so here's another sidebar about mook rules.

This was inspired by my reading of the new webcomic, Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, which is basically "Greg Rucka's the Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies Webcomic" (which is a pretty cool thing). It hasn't been going very long but the most recent strip reminded me very clearly of why I don't like mook rules.

Aside if you're unfamiliar: Mook rules are rules for handling the "nameless extras" in a fight, allowing large numbers of opponents to be put in play but be casually cut down by the hero. The term comes from Feng Shui, which is the daddy of this. Some people claim the less-than-1HD rules from AD&D are the basis of this, but the similarity is - to my mind - shallow and cosmetic.

You can go read it is you like - there are only 8 comics or so at this point - but to sum up, this is the point where we see the heroine kick the asses of multiple badguys at once without breaking a sweat. This is, theoretically, supposed to impress us with just how intensely badass and awesome the protagonist is, but in practice it tends to fall a little flat. Partly because it's so blatant, partly because it's so overused, it tends to feel like the author going "See! See!" more than anything which tells me about the character (which is, I note, an interesting contrast to the page before, which is both badass and says something).

There's a trick that bad writers use to make a character seem smart - they make everyone around them stupid. This is a terrible, lame, dissatisfying trick and mooks tend to be the badass equivalent of it. By making the opposition so trivial that they are casually knocked down, you don't make your protagonist look awesome, you just underscore how lame everything is.

This is not to say that mooks can't be done well, it's just that they're often not. One of the magnificent things about Hong Kong cinema was that it made fights with lots of guys seem awesome when compared to the same number of guys fighting John Rambo. There's a balance to strike - the opposition needs to seem dangerous enough that the protagonist's triumph does not seem inevitable. This same is true of games.

Games use mook rules for a variety of reasons, but there are three big ones: Genre simulation, Bookkeeping, and reinforcing awesome. Now, I have no real beef with the first two. If you want to model Hong Kong cinema, you need rules to model the big fights. Similarly, if you're playing a system where tracking a lot of lesser adversaries is cumbersome, a system for aggregating them can be a lifesaver. The problem is the last.

Mook rules rarely illustrate character awesome for the same reasons they can fail in fiction. Unless there's a sense of real opposition, then it's just a stylish pantomime. If that's what you're really looking for, then that's fine, but I point out that you're making a tradeoff to do it. Mook rules tend to do a great job of reinforcing the lethality of a system - hundreds of peopel get shot or cut down, after all! - but they often do so in direct contradiction to the way the rest of the system works. This is not a bad thing in its own right, but you need to realize that there is a cognitive cost in introducing such a clearly meta-gaming rule, and when there's a cost, you better make sure you're getting what you pay for.

Now, Chad Underkoffler challenged me to say how you handle Zorro, Inigo Montoya and Batman without Mook rules, and I think those are GREAT examples of other ways to think of th e problem.

First, Batman's an oddball because there's some question of which batman you're talking about. Grant Morrison writing JLA Batman could fight a million ninjas and win but he wouldn't have too because he's ALREADY BEATEN THEM, but that's the extreme case. Going with something like the Animated series, Batman can take on 3 or 4 thugs at once, but he'll have a hard time of it. With that in mind, the only time he ends up in that kind of fight is when he's the one getting ambushed. If he's in control of the fight, he isolates enemies and takes them down one at a time (something easily handled by rules that handle difference in skill + surprise). If he's outnumbered, he'll try to break the fight up so he's taking on few people at a time.

Zorro follows almost exactly the same pattern (and, in fact, has the same question - lots of Zorros out there) which is no surprise given the connection between Batman and Zorro. The main difference is one of flash - Zorro may face large numbers of opponents, but a lot of the whole swashbuckling, umping around, swinging on things and so on is that it keeps him from ever being in one place where he has to fight them all at once. The exceptions to this tend to be the cheesiest, lamest of fight sequences (such as when Zorro, surrounded by men with drawn blades, sings his blade in a wide arc, hitting all their swords and - by some dark magic - knocking all his opponents back.)

Inigo is the most interesting case. He can explicitly take on 10 guys (Maybe 20 - it's been a while) because he's just that awesome, though we could only guess what that would look like. The problem is, it's clear he really sees that as a stretch - this is something that's really freaking hard, possible only because of his awesome level of skill. He's not casually dismissing the guards. Now, this doesn't rule out mook rules - you could do it with mooks that are reasonably dangerous - but it doesn't necessitate them. The same logic that we've applied to Zorro probably is equally applicable here.

Now, this does reveal something interesting - in all of these examples we're really talking less about the actual fight and more about controlling the situation. It's a somewhat different focus, and one that not all games necessarily support, but I think it's a powerful perspective.

Quantum Aspects

2011-08-04T10:00:00.000-04:00

OK, I've gotten knocked off on a tangent, and I'll stay on it for the moment. What the heck, it's Gencon week, so things are weird anyway.

First off, feedback to yesterday's post was fantastic. I want to thank everyone who weighed in. Lots of good thoughts, and the starting points of some solutions, I think. Going to percolate a bit.

But the fact that it spun off into Fate lead to me thinking about aspects, and some thinking I've had regarding them. I very rarely make concrete declarations about aspects because they are not terribly concrete. Oh, sure, there's an idea there which can be used, but its borders and shape are quite fuzzy. This is, I think, very much a good thing. It's the reason the idea of aspects can be so easily inserted into so many different contexts, but it also addresses a harsh reality of gaming - we're a painfully inconsistent lot.

Nothing reflects this more than the rules for compels, and it's no surprise that these may often be the most confusing or problematic thing for players to work with. Some of this is because they're different than other games - players who are used to implicit limiters may balk at explicit ones, for example - but I think there's a deeper, more essential issue.

So, one of the core principals of gaming in my mind is that bad things are going to happen to your characters. Some people object to this, but I'll stand by it on the simple grounds that bad things are the basis for almost every interesting thing that can happen in a game. It's theoretically possible to have a game where players just build everything up positively, but given the relative rarity of such games, I'll stick by my thesis: Bad things happen in good games.

Given that, the next question is where those bad things come from. It's entirely possible for the bad things to be random, capricious, or entirely external to the characters. This is fine, but it is my opinion that arbitrary bad things are less interesting that bad things which touch upon the characters in some way. This is not to say everything needs to stem directly from the characters - there's a sliding scale - but I definitely gravitate towards character-connected badness.

That's two value judgments so far, and here's an important jumping-off point. If you disagree with one or both of those, FATE Is not going to be a very good match for you. It won't automatically become bad as a result, but it'll be like a pair of shoes that's not quite the right size. You can still run and walk, but it'll rub you wrong, and you might just want a better-fitted pair.

Ok, so given that, how do we find good ways to draw things out of characters? Rich backgrounds can do it, of course, but that's a lot of writing and a lot of reading that no one really wants to do. There needs to be a shorthand. Advantages and disadvantages can do this, but they have a couple problems. First, they tend to have limited lists. Second, they tend to be dominated by mechanics. Some people may pick ads & disads based on flavor, but I don't think I'm being unreasonable to suggest that they are most often picked for maximum mechanical benefit (for ads) or minimal impact (for disads). Yes, I acknowledge that you may be a special snowflake who would never do such a thing, but me? I _totally_ would. My GURPs characters and various point-build supers over the years are utter embarrassments.

So, obviously, aspects step into that niche. And, conceptually, they're very straightforward - will it help you? Get a bonus! Will it hinder you? Get a fate point! But there's a lot of fiddle room in there, and that's where confuses emerges. Not so often for when the bonus is given, since that's very straightforward - player asserts the aspect is appropriate by declaring it and if the GM doesn't countermand or call for elaboration then the bonus is given. There's a little room for debate, but it's smooth going overall.

Compels though…that gets kind of crazy. On some level, it would have been easiest if we'd just been more draconian about it and let the GM say "No, you can't, you've got that aspect" and hand the player a point. That may allow the occasional dick move, but it's very clear. Unfortunately, that's not quite how we roll. We really _like_ that moment in fiction when someone exceeds their limitations or defies expectations, and it was with that in mind that we included the idea that the player could step up, spend a point and say "No, this matters enough that I will overcome my limitation and press on."

Nice concept, eh? But the "spending a point" bit really muddied the waters. People love their Fate points, and the idea of needing to spend one without getting a bonus is one that does not sit well on them, especially if they are inclined to see it as GM bullying or extortion. It's with that in mind that a lot of people have adopted a model of making the compel an offer rather than a demand, allowing players to simply refuse to take the point (and thus refuse the compel). I've talked about these Hard vs. Soft compels in the past, and it's mechanically addressable, but doing so kind of skips the underlying question.

The real question behind any compel is how the player perceives it. That is - how much does the player _want_ to be hindered by the things he declared important during chargen. Sometimes the answer is "not at all" and it's important to be able to recognize it. Sometimes the answer is "All the time" and you're likely to have problems with compelling these players because they're going to be pre-emptively embracing their problems.

But the rub is, how do you make a mechanic that incorporates both of these players?

This, I should note, is part of why I stick with hard compels (ones that demand payoff ) simply to make sure that they have teeth. Provided my sensibilities are in line with my players (and I hope thye are) my compels will rarely be rebuffed because what I'm really doing with a compel is offering the player a chance to do the thing he would have done if he'd seen the connection between it and his aspect. Yes, if the player's being a jerk and trying to run sprints with a broken leg, then I'm also using it as an enforcement mechanism, but I honestly couldn't tell you the last time I've needed to do that.

And that's where we come to the self contradiction. Through my embrace of hard compels, I am almost never put in a position where I have to use them, which is really the ideal space. That is - the best use of the tool is not not need it.

It's a nerdy kind of Zen, but I'll take it.

The Right Tool For the Job

2011-08-03T10:00:00.000-04:00

A passing comment on twitter got me thinking about a White Collar hack for Leverage. It's doable, but chewing on it lead to me hurting my teeth on a familiar nut, one which also is worrying me a little bit in the context of the system I've been developing.

I'm going to use Cortex+ to illustrate this issue, but it is far from the only game where it's an issue. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's an issue with many games, but it's most evident in games which support very flexible labels for dice pools (such as cliche's in Risus, descriptors in over the Edge, term in PDQ and Assets & Complications in Cortex+).

The problem is this: the systems have no real support for the idea of the right tool for the job.

What does that mean? In fiction (and in life) one of the best ways to solve a problem is to find the right tool for the job. If you need to drive a screw, you get a screwdriver. If you need to drive off Frankenstein's monster, you get a torch. In many cases, the real skill in an activity comes in knowing how to choose the right tools, then applying them properly.

Games poorly support this. There may be a threshold of applicability (that is, "Can I use this die in this roll?") but beyond that, all dice are created equal. If I need to make perfect croissants, it's more important to have a skilled baker than a good kitchen, but if I have "Kitchen d8" and "Baker d8" then they're equally valuable.

Now, not to say this doesn't work at all. A lot of narrative logic is perfectly fine determining what the best tool for the job was after things have been resolved. And some of this gets subsumed in the creation of dice - if you have a d8 Kitchen, there is presumably some reason why that kitchen matters, so it's no big deal, right?

Well...

Ok, so it makes me a little crazy for two reasons, one selfish and one a little more well thought out.

For the selfish one, I really like problem-solving. Figuring out the right tool for the job is like solving a puzzle, and in fact it's basically the mechanic that many games (like text adventures) use for resolution. You _can't_ solve the problem unless you use the right tool.

I don't actually want anything that restrictive, but I really like the idea of finding a clever application of a tool and being rewarded for it. Similarly, I like the idea of rewarding greater planning, though to knowledge within the game. Taken to a crunchy level, it's a similar desire to one that desires that tactics be rewarded in a conflict.

Anyway, that's my personal fun, but it's not the only issue.

The other issue is one of player choice. When dice (or bonuses or the like) are fungible - that is, can be used interchangeably - it becomes very hard to introduce situations where the player is forced to make a hard choice with mechanical consequences.

Consider, for example, the offer of help from a mob boss. It comes with certain strings attached, which would normally be enough to reject it outright, but the task is really hard and really important. Do you take his help?

Well, if his help is an extra d10, you probably don't. Mechanically, there are other ways for you to get that d10 (or near enough) that the price is almost certainly not worth it.

Now, this is admittedly an area where Cortex+ (and Leverage in particular) is a problematic example because it's built on a foundation of competence. With success as the norm, you'll be hard pressed to ever really _need_ a particular bonus so badly that you'd be willing to eat bitter for it. However, my own design has a similar success-based focus, so it's perhaps doubly informative.

This also speaks to why the interpretive solution (GM handing out bonuses to reflect this stuff) can be unsatisfying. The problem is that bonuses are - generally speaking - just as generic and easy to get as anything else.

Fate Nerds: This problem comes up with aspects a lot too, with aspects that are appropriate to the character but not the situation (or vice versa). Having your father's sword as an aspect is a great all-purpose bonus-generator when you get in swordfights, but if used that way, it offers no distinction between using it on a random thug and using it on your father's killer.

And, argh, I think that may be it. That split between "appropriate to the character" and "Appropriate to the situation" is the heart of the problem. The vast majority of game mechanics are appropriate to the character and some are appropriate to the situation, but there is almost no recognition of the synergy between the two.

And thinking about it, I can see why. It's a bookeeping challenge. The only really practical way to mechanize it is to do things in paired elements, one on the actor and one on the target. When you see this sort of thing in action (Such as attacks with a fire keyword and a creature with a fire vulnerability) it's effective, but it hinges on a lot of extra data. Could you really have a game where the bonuses are based on the interaction between two elements rather than their inherent nature?

I dunno. This one has actually thrown me for a loop - I feel like I started picking at a thread and an entire sweater has come apart in my hands. I feel like I've got a better grasp on the problem no, but am no closer to a solution.

Gencon Hotspots

2011-08-02T10:00:00.001-04:00

So, people were kind enough to help me out with suggestions about new things that they're going to get a chance to pick up at Gencon, so I may now stew in my own juices of jealousy and think teeth-gnashing thoughts while I miss the conventions. Still, no reason I should be alone in this, so join me in running through this list and stew alongside me. Oh, and if you happen to actually be going to Gencon and just happen to benefit from this, well, I suppose it can't be helped.

Green Ronin - Booth 965
Dragon Age (Second Boxed Set) - I preordered this, so I got mine a few days ago (it's awesome) but this is it's real coming out party. I've written a lot about how awesome Dragon Age is, but also complained about the ceiling that the first boxed set (which limits things to levels 1-5 imposes. This second boxed set covers level 6-10 and includes a lot of things people felt were missing in the core, like Grey Wardens.

They should also have the first big supplement for DC adventures (Heroes & Villains, I think?). If you haven't looked at this game, you need to, if only because it's all SO DAMN PRETTY.

Burning Wheel - Booth 311
Burning Wheel Gold - If you, like me, missed out on the very narrow pre-order window, this is your chance to grab it. I still haven't seen this, but I want to. The price is good, production is (predictably) fantastic but most importantly, this is the new version of a game that has seen more deep, careful thought and attention to what makes it go than pretty much anything I can think of. Luke knows his stuff, and while I don't expect this to be a revolutionary change from the existing Burning Wheel, I expect is to be pretty damn spiffy.

I don't know if they'll have it for sale, but hopefully they will have a display copy of the Mouseguard Boxed Set to show off. You want to see it.

Machine Age Productions - Booth 1356
I think (hope) they're going to have Amaranthine available for sale, and as awesome as that is, you really need to go there to see the gaming patches. Seriously. If I were there it's the first thing I'd be hitting on the dealer floor.

Cubicle 7 - Booth 711
Yes, they're going to have The One Ring, and that's a big deal, but greatly overshadowed in my mind by Airship Pirates. As far as i can tell, this is basically wall to wall steampunk porn, and I understand there's an audience for this sort of thing. They should also have a sci-fi game called In Flames that I know nothing about.

I also expect a few awesome things in the Cubicle 7 Penumbra, hopefully including Ashen Stars and Stealing Chthulu, but I can't speak to it for sure.

Third Eye Games - Booth 605
Part Time Gods - People I've needed with will long attest that I've bemoaned the lack of a "Street Nobilis" game. I am no longer bemoaning.

Flying Frog - Booth 1421
Fortune & Glory - It's a boardgame from Flying Frog who have done cool adventure boardgames with strong themes in the past (Last Night on Earth, A Touch of Evil). This one is billed as a Cliffhanger game, and it looks pulpy. I admit, that's pretty awesome.

FFG - Booth EVERYWHERE
Black Crusade - I Guess it's for playing Chaos Space Marines?

Outrider Studios - Booth 1544
Mentioned these guys yesterday for Remnants, but folding thim in here for completeness!

Other Awesome Things That Might Be at IPR, I Think, Wherever it is
Do - Well, yeah, I'll plug it. It's beyond gorgeous, Daniel remains talented beyond all reasonable measure. I can't say enough good things about it, so go check it out.
Bulldogs - I've mentioned before how excited I am for this one - it's Brennan Taylor's Sci-Fi RPG with a fFATE engine and a chassis made of Han Solo.
Dungeon World - A hack of apocalypse world designed to handle classic dungeon crawling goodness. This is going to be, by my understanding, the basic edition, with a release schedule somewhat akin to Dragon Age (with more stuff/rules to come later) but I don't know all the details. What I do know is that I've been curiously watching this develop, and I'd pick it up in a hot second.
Shelter In Place - I mention this only so you can share my bitterness. A survival horror LARP by
the remarkably talented J.R. Blackwell, it's my understanding the Gencon copies are already sold out.
Kerberos Club (Fate Edition) - Kerberos Club was already super-neat, so adding in a FATE engine is basically a big present JUST FOR ME!
Kingdom Come - It's a LARP thing, and that may be a turnoff for some, so all is well and good. I admit, I know almost nothing about this, but I have suspicions. Specifically, I have suspicions that this is born from the brains of some Canadian LARPers who are basically the super-secret-ninja-masters of truly awesome LARPing.

So, what did I miss?

A Gencon Plug

2011-08-01T09:30:00.000-04:00

Stepping off the design train briefly as we start warming up for Gencon (which I will not be attending, sadly), and I have a larger post in the works about all the new things I regret I won't be seeing which you should totally check out. However, I want to make a smaller recommendation today, perhaps even a request.

If you get a chance, stop by booth 1544 - Outrider Studios. There are a few reasons for this, and I'll break them down.

First, they have a game called Remnants which is pretty sweet. It's a post-apocalyptic game centered around battling suits of power armor, and while that's pretty cool in its own right, it makes a lot of little decisions that make it even more interesting than the premise. The core system is fairly lightweight, with some pretty clear Tri-Stat influence (that's a good thing) but some very clever tweaking, including it's handling of critical failures. More interestingly, it strikes a very interesting balance between providing a detailed setting and recognizing the flexible elements of the premise. Of all things, it's reminiscent of Sorcerer in that regard - a nice little engine with a strong core idea that is reasonably easy to skin in a variety of ways that stay within theme. Also, it deserves kudos for production - it's a $20 game (great price point) that looks good and is cleanly laid out.

So there's that. Also, I had the pleasure of spending some time in conversation with the Outrider folks at Origins, and they're good people. Perhaps more persuasively, they're folks who have decided to make a go of this crazy gaming madness, and have decided to take the risk to come down for the conventions. This is, to put it bluntly, expensive and a lot of work, and they're absolutely taking a risk in following this route, and I hope it pays off for them.

I had, I should note, not ever hear do these guys before Origins, and that was a useful reminder to me that for all I try to keep on top of things and think of myself as watching the hobby for new entrants, I can't see everything, and I'm still going to be surprised when someone comes in from a vector unfamiliar to me. This is a good, awesome, and humbling thing.

Anyway, the last reason is that it will take you over to Entrepreneur's Avenue, if you check out the map of the dealer's hall, you'll see there's a little cluster of booths. This is where you're going to see the people you've never heard of before, and that's important. It's all well and good to be going to Gencon to get the new releases you know are coming, but if that's all you get, then you're missing out. New releases can always be gotten later, but there are people and things at Gencon that you won't see anywhere else. Take the time to look at those, let yourself be surprised, and maybe try something new and unexpected.

It might suck. I have a small stack of bought-and-played-once games from gencons past, but I also have some pleasant surprises. Remnants, I should add, was one of them.

So, please, do me a favor. If you're there, swing by and just say hi. Take a look at their stuff, talk to them for a few minutes. Obviously, don't buy anything unless it grabs you, but allow yourself the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised.

Skill Contexts

2011-07-29T15:16:00.001-04:00

I am totally breaking my own rules and double-posting today because I think these ideas are complimentary enough that they would suffer from a split across the weekend. This won't make a huge amount of sense without the post prior to it, so if you haven't read that yet, start there.

--
Feng Shui's skill system was one that I really came to appreciate as I started digging into other games. It had a very clever element to it that let a reasonably short skill list feel suitably broad yet cinematic. The idea was simple: each skill actually represented three things. The first was the skill itself, the things you would expect to fall under the skill. Drive let you drive things, Guns let you shoot guns and so on.

The second was your knowledge about the skill. That is, your Guns skill also encompassed your knowledge about guns, ballistics and all things gun related. You might not be a scientist, but you could answer serious metallurgical questions if they had to do with bullet composition or gun barrels.

The third was that it encompassed how connected you were within the social network surrounding the skill. That is, your Guns skill represented how well you knew and could find gun makers, gun smugglers, black market gun dealers, the location fo the nearest gun show and so on.

I adopted this idea in a number of games, adding a 4th element: perception. Your Guns skill might not help you spot a footprint, but it would let you recreate a firefight from evidence or spot a sniper. It worked decently, better in soem contexts than others.

Recently, Brennan Taylor has taken this idea and nitro-injected it for his game Bulldogs. In Bulldogs, he has structured his skills explicitly in terms of these broad categories of action. It's pretty slick.

Anyway, I like this idea a lot, and it's one of the best ways I know to distinguish between broad an narrow skills. A narrow skill just does a thing, a broad skill has a whole array of associated things (knowledge, connections, perception and the like) with it.

Now, let's take this back to the skill system as we've proposed so far, with it's increasing narrowness of scope. It's foundation - the culture skill - is one that explicitly depends on context. By creating the culture skill, you are implicitly creating that culture in your setting. You are saying things about the culture based on what the skill does. This is pretty potent, and I intend to use that potency over the course of the game.

Specifically, I intend to make it a necessary part of advancement. That is, I am going to add an extra step between "Soldier 2d6" and "Musketeer 3d6", and that step is the explicit creation of context.

That sounds fancy, but in practice it's much simpler - it requires taking the skill, which is fairly abstract, and concretely nailing it to the setting with specifics. In this case, the specifics might be what military the soldier is serving with, such as "Sargent of the Army of the Republic 2d6" or "The Queen's Guard 2d6".

This difference is easy to point to in the fiction, but it also has the mechanical impact of turning the skill from a narrow one into a broad one (see, there was a reason for that whole preamble). It also now opens the gateway to buying a specific skill at the next die-step up, which also indicates the context within which the character's skill is exceptional.

Doing this as advancement is simple enough - the context should be something that evolves out of play, but doing this as a part of character creation offers an extra bonus: Players may _create_ these setting elements as part of character creation. In effect, character creation can become setting creation.

Obviously, this isn't required. The GM can have a list of contexts to pick from if so desired. Heck, I'd suggest having such a list as a starting point, then letting players come up with exceptions, or drive you to come up with something off the top of your head when they really need a context for the best bakers in the kingdom.

Skills

2011-07-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

Ok, enough combat for now. We'll need to come back to it after other things have evolved a bit more, but I feel like we've got enough of a foundation to work with. That brings us to something that's potentially even stickier: Skills.

Broadly speaking, skills are going to be what distinguishes one dice pool from another. That may seem like a very pedestrian, gamey way to describe them, but in practice it's the purpose they ultimately serve outside of the game space. Inside the game, in the fiction, there's obviously a bit more to it than than, but to someoen watching your game, they're the reason you rolled 5 dice instead of 3.

There are a lot of different ways to handle skills lists. There's the traditional skill list, where you create an actual list of skills which - hopefully - covers everything a character might do and let players buy from it. There's the broadly descriptive model, where players simply take descriptors (like Cop, Soldier or Pastry Chef) and use those values for anything that fall under the auspices of that descriptor. There are hybrid models that use a short list of broad descriptors to be all encompassing. And we've only scratched the surface - we haven't yet considered, stats, pyramids, simple and advance skills, specialties, descriptive vs. narrative pricing, implicit skills and many many other things.

All of which is to say, there's no right way to build a skill system. Use what you're comfortable with and you'll be fine, but if you try to present it as somehow inherently superior to other models, you mostly reveal your own ignorance. I think the skill model I'm going to pursue is clever, and I like it because it does some novel (and some less novel) things, but it's no great apex of skill design.

The system starts from two datapoints: I like cultural skills and the system has been designed so a d6 is a valid value. For the unfamiliar, cultural skills are a bit of an idea riffed from Over the Edge, where you had a 2d6 in anything you should normally be able to do. It's a super practical rule, but when you try to move the OtE system to another setting, you find yourself asking what "normal" is when you start comparing elves and dwarves. With that in mind, I want the starting point of every character to be "[Culture] d6".

Now, it will probably be pretty easy to figure out what that means, and if that was the only skill then it wouldn't really be much of an issue, but obviously we're going to need to start slicing things thinner. And that's where things are going to get a little bit fiddly, since I'm not going to let skills improve.

That sounds draconian on the surface of it, so let me explain a bit. The character's [Culture] skill will never be higher than a d6, but he can learn more specific skills at a higher level. However, rather than making a fixed skill list and letting people buy up it (So one guy might be Swordsman 2d6 and another might be Swordsman 4d6), I'm going to make the scope of skills narrow as they go up. That is, 1d6 skills (of which [Culture] is the only example) are SUPER broad. Any skill at 2d6 is still going to be very broad, but not as broad as culture. As such, Merchant, Soldier, Noble and so on are all valid 2d6 skills.

Each tier narrows things further. At 3d6 might be Musketeer or Doctor. 4d6 might be Fencer and Neurologist. 5d6 narrows down to a specific specialty, like rapier or diseases of the brain.

Obviously, each of these must be built on a foundation. So you need to have Culture to get Soldier, Soldier to get Musketeer and so on. These higher level containers create natural limiters on the flow of skills, so you don't just get "Rapier 5d6" out of the blue.

Now, this is a good start, but there's one more twist to it that I haven't touched yet, and this is the really crazy bit, but it's going to have to wait until next week. :)

The Hard Questions

2011-07-28T10:00:00.001-04:00

Ok, the remaining questions:

How many dice should it take to offset a status?
Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
What order do things happen in?
How big an advantage is 1 die?
How does this map over to multiple combatants?

These are some of the hard ones.

How many dice should it take to offset a status?
I touched on this earlier, and one commenter gave some useful breakdown, and the short form is that this is a surprisingly tricky question. If this number is fairly low (say, 1 die per) then it makes dice differences more potent because it makes it easier to smooth out any short term advantage that a smaller die pool might have achieved. Not sure if that's good or bad, but it's important to know.

This also plays interestingly into the question of how target numbers are rolled for, because there is some question as to whether and how players can -try- to recover. This is not totally black and white, since I think it might not be unreasonable to say that if you really want to focus on recovering, pick something other than attacking (with a target of 4) and do that.

Lastly, we get some interesting effects if the pricing is inconsistent. Damage could become "stickier" if it becomes more costly to remove (or reduce) a status.

But in that, I think we might have our answer - reduction. If the "cost" is 1 die per 1 step reduction (rather than total removal) then it has two interesting effects. First, it makes it harder to clear the board - totally removing a severe effect - so the more severe the effect, the more implicitly costly it has become. Second, it means that even with mitigation, the accumulation of statuses is dangerous. That is, if you are already inconveniences and harmed (or whatever) then you can't just bump a taken out result down 1 to save yourself - you need to remove it entirely.

There's also some asymmetry to deal with. The steps for inflicting a status are big, so leftover dice are going to be more common than statuses, and that's a problem, since it invites fights that never end except at the very high and very low skill ranges. Some of that will hopefully be mitigated by other things you want to spend overage dice on, but that's a weak prop.

So with all that in mind, I think the right answer is to make the price consistent, but slightly higher - Allow 2 overage dice to reduce (but not remove) a status.

Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
Touched on this yesterday, and for the moment, I'll stick with the target defining things (with the possible optional rule of allowing the attacker to define things with a higher roll).

What order do things happen in?
Ah, now there's a bit of a bear. Initiative.

I cannot think of an initiative system I've ever actually liked. Round robin works ok, so it's all the way up to tolerable. Speedy action based ones (Shadowrun, Deadlands) make me crazily stabby. Shot Clock ones (Feng Shui, Exalted 2nd) always seem promising in theory but always prove more work than they're worth in practice. I could totally cheat the whole issue and go for scene based resolution or some other abstraction to escape the question entirely, but I don't actually enjoy things like that (with the exception of how The Shadow of Yesterday handles it, which I'll probably steal).

The reality is that I'm probably going to be forced to go with some sort of round robin/turn taking model out of brutal necessity, but I don't have to like it, and I can work to avoid things like "Declare up, resolve down" because part of what I'm trying to avoid is the big pow-wow between each round of combat. If action isn't fluid then it's less fun for everyone.

Honestly, initiative is one of those areas where I really prefer GM instinct and dicelessness. That is to say, while numeric initiative totally makes sense when everyone is part of the big picture (as in the case of, say, a tactical minis skirmish) that's not how fights work in fiction or perception. They are lots of miniature stages within the large picture, and we (as audience) move from one to another according to the cadence of the fight. A good GM can use "initiative" as that audience, moving from place to place according to the logic of the fights, not according to some numeric counter. Doing so covers a multitude of sins, allows for characters with different levels of combat focus to get different levels of attention while still keeping the spotlight from lingering too long in one place.

But that's not something you can really write a rule for. That's a problem.

So, honestly, my take on it is to make the official rule very simple - literally just go around the table rather than do any weird rolling or anything - but provide guidelines for initiative as cameraman. Mechanically, we might allow some rules for speed tricks using unused dice or the like, but those are for exceptions - character for whom speed is a schtick. In the absence of that the role of initiative is to keep everyone playing and engaged, not to reward the guy who found the best mechanical abuse of the system.

How big an advantage is 1 die?
Pretty big. In the end, if a 1d advantage means an 80% chance of success, I'll be happy. Obviously, there's a sliding scale to this - 3d should beat 2d more reliably than 5d will beat 4d, but that's my ballpark starting point, with a roughly 10% margin of error. However, I expect abilities (ways to spend dice) will throw this off when I get to them, which is fine.

How does this map over to multiple combatants?
This is the most important question to apply to any combat system. It is not hard to come up with a brilliant, clever, intricate system for handling 1-on-1 fights which utterly fails to account for multiple actors. Some of them try to apply duct tape solutions, like trying to make everything into chained sets of duels or aggregating opposition, but you can see the seams when that happens.

There's also an important genre consideration to how numbers work. I hate to invoke realism, but I'll do so in this very broad context - being outnumbered sucks. One man can absolutely fight a larger number of opponents, but doing so is dependent on a lot of factors, most of them involving finding a way to keep them all from coming at him at the same time. This is important, not because of how you model tactics, but because it's very important to _society_. It's what makes armies and police and many other things work. It also matters to style. The number of people one guy can fight speaks directly to the genre of things. In a gritty setting, even badass will run from groups of lesser adversaries, but in very cinematic settings, those adversaries are probably mooks, and can be easily dispensed with.

I'm definitely looking to avoid mook rules, though that's a whole other discussion of it's own. They're easy to add if a specific genre demands it, but I don't want them as a baseline. I like ganging up to be dangerous because of the aforementioned social element (and, in fact, this sentiment is all over the Fate 2 combat rules) but I think I may have implicitly handled that already. Since status mitigation depends on excess dice, the simple reality is that multiple opponents are going to burn through your dice in no time at all, even if they're not hugely dangerous individually. That's just a gut answer for now, but I think it will do.

Fighting Questions

2011-07-27T10:00:00.000-04:00

Ok, getting into some of the nitty gritty here, so let's review.

The idea so far is that combatants will have die pools of D6's. When they go after someone in a fight, they are trying to hit a fixed target number, with a result as follows:

4 - Inconvenienced
7 - Harmed (possibly handicapped. Maybe another term)
13 - Taken Out

These are statuses which map to in-fiction effects, and they also accumulate, so an inconvenienced character who is inconvenienced again becomes harmed.

Statuses can be changed by spending unused dice. Unused dice are dice which have been rolled, but which were not necessary to hit the target number. If, for example, you rolled 4,3,3 then you can hit a 7 with 1 unused die (or a 4 with 2 unused dice) which you can use for stuff. Much of the stuff is currently undefined (and is expected to be a place for mechanical hooks) but specifically, they can be spent to "downgrade" statuses.

With that in mind, I'm looking down the barrel of the following questions:

Does the attacker choose the target number he's going for, or does he simply take the result?
When a status "rolls up" does the previous status remain? That is, if a second inconvenience becomes harm, is the target now inconvenienced and harmed, or just harmed?
Is there an option to respond to a Taken Out result?
Are statuses the only possible outcome, or are they simply the non-specific outcome? That is, is a disarm a _form_ of harm, or something with a difficulty equivalent to harm (because it has a similar impact but with player-directed outcome)
Are 3 statuses enough? Do we need 4?
How many dice should it take to offset a status?
Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
What order to things happen in?
How big an advantage is 1 die?
How does this map over to multiple combatants?

That's a lot. Enough to tempt me to just accept a standard injury model and move on, but I'm kind of dumb that way, so let's press on and work through these, though it may take a while.

1. Does the attacker choose the target number he's going for, or does he simply take the result?

Ok, two options: decide before you roll (declare intent) or declare after you roll ( describe outcome). The argument for post-roll is that the assumption is that every attack is an attempt to finish the fight. It also opens up an interesting decision-point of allowing the attack to choose to get a lesser outcome in order to keep more unused dice. That is, if you rolled 4,1,1,1 then you might feel better off taking the 4 and three unused dice (which probably need a cool name) than taking the 7 with no remaining budget.

The argument for a pre-roll decision is that it adds a little more strategy to the mix. It makes risk-taking a bit more of a calculated gamble, and it does _not_ require any post-roll decisionmaking. That's kind of a big deal, since post-roll decisions are a big source of friction - you totally don't want a player sitting there deciding if he really wants that 7 or those unused dice on a borderline case.

So, there's a clear priority conflict here with no clear answer. I think either option could work well, so it's really a matter of taste, style and (of course) subsequent testing to see which works. It's one of those situatiosn where you make a decision, but put a pin in it to come back to. With that in mind, I'm going to go with decision before the roll because I think it will be easier to test whether that feels frustrating than it will be to test if it's what people want.

2. When a status "rolls up" does the previous status remain? That is, if a second inconvenience becomes harm, is the target now inconvenienced and harmed, or just harmed?
The default assumption in most systems would be that the effects stack - that is, that you would now be inconvenienced and harmed. I'm inclined to buck that trend, at least while we have such a short list of statues, because it effectively lengthens the "damage track". This might prove to be too much bookkeeping in the end, but it's what I want to try for now.

3. Is there an option to respond to a Taken Out result?
I feel like there should be, but the real answer to this can be found in the question of sequencing. If all action is simultaneous, then this is easy to implement - just let overage dice be used immediately to mitigate an effect. Unfortunately, simultaneous action has its own drawbacks, so this question needs to be set aside until we answer the question of order of events.

4. Are statuses the only possible outcome, or are they simply the non-specific outcome? That is, is a disarm a _form_ of harm, or something with a difficulty equivalent to harm (because it has a similar impact but with player-directed outcome)
I'm strongly inclined to the latter, and as I think about it, I think the rubric may be simple. Outcomes are defined by the attacker, harm by the defender. That means that the fiction of being taken out stays firmly in the hands of the player, which is a plus. It also works nicely with the idea of hitting set difficulties, and it also supports players who are very descriptive as well as those who are not.

Curiously, this also suggests an interesting extension of the outcome ladder, which might be a little meta, but kind of resonates with me. To inflict harm AND describe it, you must hit the next target up. That is, the target for taking someone out in the way YOU want is 19. It means the "one shot kill" still exists as a possibility when dealing with very skilled opponents, but it's rare. That has some weird interplay with things when the target is already hurt, so I'll need ot think about it some more, but if nothing else it feels like a good optional rule.

5. Are 3 statuses enough? Do we need 4?
Dunno yet. But the answer to that previous question may prove a suitable compromise.

Ok, enough for today. We'll run through 6-10 tomorrow.

Actual Fight Mechanics

2011-07-26T11:24:00.000-04:00

OK, so the basic non-fight component of a conflict is this: take a swing, beat a 4, if successful, the other guy is taken out.

(I like “taken out” as a euphemism because it underscores that all ways of taking someone out of a fight are roughly equal – unconsciousness, death, getting tossed overboard and the like all fall into the same bucket, and it leaves the exact color and fiction flexible. It also leaves a hook in place later to allow players to offer their own taken out outcomes if you want to avoid death in interesting ways, but that’s a matter to think about later.)

Once we’re in an actual fight, we don’t want things to be quite so quick as all that, but we still want to respect the 4+ success rule. We could go for a numeric system (hit points or the like) but let’s think of this in terms of statuses – we have this idea that a good enough roll can result in being taken out, what else might happen as a result of a roll?

Suppose that there are two other results – inconvenienced and harmed. Inconvenienced means that the other side has gotten some transitory advantage - they’ve knocked you back, rung your bell, seized the high ground or whatever. Harm is more palpable – it’s a disarm, an injury or some other major setback. And, of course, the third result (taken out) has already been recovered.

So, at their baseline, let’s map these as follows:

4 – Inconvenience
7 – Harm
13 – Taken Out

Now, that maps to our difficulties, but it raises some immediate questions. Does it mean that you need at least a 3d pool to be able to win a fight? And what happens when two people of high skill go at each other? Do they both just die? Obviously, we need to address these issues.

Now, the first is pretty straightforward, and we’ll do something that has been done in many other systems and just have damage “roll up”. That is to say, if you inconvenience someone who is already inconvenienced, they are now harmed. If you inconvenience someone who is already harmed and inconvenienced, then they’re taken out. Pretty simple. It allows high skills to get decisive results while allowing unskilled combatants to have sloppy, ugly fights that end badly.

Still brutal, though, especially since there’s no idea of defense. Skill won’t keep you standing any longer, and that’s problematic.

The fix for this is tied into how I view the statuses. Note that it would be normal to put a checkbox next to each status an fill them in over the course of a fight, but that’s more static than I like. I actually don’t want them to be static, I want them to come and go – not just inconveniences (which are already often tenuous in games like Fate) but harm and maybe even taken out. This means that, at a high level, I want people to be able to improve their status as they play, so that’s another axis of action. Sometimes it will be a dull axis (shrugging off an injury) and sometimes it’ll be flashy (getting out of a tight corner) but the bottom line is that status can fluctuate over the course of a fight.

(Saying that, my gut is suggesting we need a 4th status, just so there’s more room for things to slide. That may be true, but I’ll sideline that concern for now. If I figure out a good mechanic for this, then one good test for it will be expanding the status list).

So how should we implement this? My first thought is to make it something you can spend extra dice on (that is, for those who don’t recall, dice that weren’t needed to hit the target number). This has an interesting upshot because it provides a double incentive to go for inconveniences and harm rather than KO’s, because you’re more likely to have extra dice left, at least in theory. Of course, the fact that hitting three “4s” may be easier than hitting one 13 may also play into that. This also provides an interesting tool for NPC behavior, since the target number an NPC aims for speaks directly to their tactics, and can be a solid part of an NPC writeup.

Anyway, at the simplest you could just say that 1 extra die can reduce things by one “step”, so a hurt can become an inconvenience for 1 die, or go away entirely for 2 dice. That’s a good baseline, but it might be too easy. This is something to test, but I’d absolutely want to fiddle with different costs, including a higher base (say, 2 dice per step), or a sliding scale (1 for inconvenience, 2 for harm, 3 for taken out if apt – or perhaps the reverse!) but the idea is solid. It just leaves two real questions – how it interacts with a taken out result, and how it sequences. Those are pretty fiddly bits, so they’re best left for tomorrow.

Combat Waffles

2011-07-25T10:00:00.000-04:00

All the previous discussion about fights also implies something that I figure I'll state outright - writing a generic combat system is a much bigger pain in the ass than writing one for a genre. So much so that most generic combat systems aren't - they are in fact implicit declarations of genre through the simple fact of how they handle things like survivability, "realism" and such.

Not to say they are unaware of this. Most provide a baseline with the expectation that it can be tweaked to handle other genre expectations (provided the game acknowledges genre expectations in the first place), but they need a starting point. So with that in mind, let's establish one.

My personal burden is that the two poles I am drawn towards in RPG combat are strongly opposed. The first is Swashbuckling, which is a bit over the top, but not as much so as Hong Kong action or Anime. The second is Rolemaster, where violence is dangerous and risky and always to be taken seriously. Those two things are hard to combine, but ideally we can pull off some sort of vinaigrette sort of emulsion.

This means the first thing to look at is stunting. This is sort of a broad question best phrased as "how tolerant is the system of players doing cool stuff that might be unrealistic or tactically inappropriate but which looks awesome?" This is a kind of important question because, practically speaking, swinging from a chandelier is a pretty awkward way to make an attack, but it looks pretty cool, so how should a game handle it?

The first option is the strict realism school, which would impose a penalty to the attack based on the difficulty of it, maybe call for an athletics roll to pull it off, and otherwise frown and tut-tut at the idea. In short, everything in the system would suggest that this is a terrible idea, and one you really shouldn't pursue unless absolutely necessary.

There's also a loose realism school which is not necessarily going to penalize such an attack so much as make it non-optimal. It might offer some small benefit (such as allowing the attack to be made with an athletics skill) for a serious tradeoff (you do unarmed damage, which probably sucks). This is something you can do, but it's rarely going to be the optimal thing to do.

At the far opposite end, you have the true stunting school (names thus for it's use in Exalted) where the character gets a _bonus_ on the attack based on how awesome it is, thus making colorful attacks desirable. This can get a little silly as players ham it up to get the bonuses, but it definitely supports the flashy.

Between those, there's a broad band of cinematic styles, ranging from abstract cinematic (like 4e's stunts, where the mechanical effects are sufficiently disconnected from the fiction to allow a lot of narrative flexibility within fairly strict mechanical interpretation. Also applies to many scene-based resolution games) to gritty cinematic (as in Feng Shui, where stunts are penalized, but that penalty is very small and bonuses are very high, which allows them but discourages their constant use).

This cinematic space is probably where I want to aim for, which is definitely on the swashbuckling end of things, but it highlights a few things. My real goal is the 1970's Three Musketeers movies, where fights have flair (and even humor), but also have a sense of danger to them despite reasonably limited bloodshed. That means I'm not looking for Hong King musketeers - it sucks in film and it's not what I want in a fight.

Part of this is tied to the cultural role of violence and death. It's important to remember that while we remember the duels and swordplay in the Three Musketeers, that was criminal activity. Duels are illegal because people killing each other is a terrible thing. It's a sin and a crime, and while you might try to outright murder the other guy on the battlefield or in certain brutal circumstances, those are edge cases. Or should be. The problem is that in any modern game, you can be certain that a player wants to be Wolverine (or the like), and such things quickly move towards the least common denominator. That's rough.

And with that, I find myself wrestling again. Is there a meaningful way to address the role of conflict in the game outside of the conflict rules? Setting design can speak to it certainly, but there's a reasonable case that they can be quite toothless in the face of a setting that says one thing and rules that say another.

Argh. Ok, I clearly need to just write some rules, then worry about this issues _after_ I do so. Doing so beforehand is proving utterly paralyzing.

What To Do With a Fight

2011-07-22T10:00:00.000-04:00

At first glance, it can seem like the question to ask yourself when designing a combat system is "How can we have everyone kill each other?" This is certainly an important question, but I think the real question is quite the reverse. That is, "How can we keep people from killing each other?"

Why? Ok, consider most any other action in an RPG or story. You want to lift a rock? Maybe roll some dice and you lift the rock. Ditto for climbing a rope, charming a barmaid or anything else. But when the action is "Stick my sword in that guy" we're uncomfortable with it being that straightforward, and when it comes to the other guy trying to stick his sword in us, then we definitely don't want it to be that simple.

So with that in mind, the real purpose of the combat system is to make the process of killing someone take enough time and effort to complicate matters without making things un-fun. That is, I admit, a kind of callous and disturbing take on it, but the role of violence in RPGs is a bit of a messy topic (and one I'm not really going to drill into at the moment).

On the "not making thing un-fun" front, many systems put a subtle (or not-so-subtle) thumb on the scales in support of the idea that the PCs are going to win any fight they engage in, albeit at some cost. This is a tricky balancing act because we instinctively want a "Fair fight" but we also want a fight we can win. This is the sports movie paradox, and it pops its head up in RPG design in a lot of odd places. This is a big issue, but it's also a high level one, which makes it hard to address at this point.

In terms of complicating violence, the trick is that the heart of a combat system is not dealing damage, it's damage mitigation. Not that dealing damage in unimportant, but rather it's simple and straightforward, and if that's all there was to it, then combat would just be back to the straightforward "I put my sword in his gut". Mitigation is all the reasons that you can't put your sword in his gut, or that it doesn't end the fight when you do.

Classically, this divides into two things - defense and resistance - though that is a division born out of tradition more than necessity. Defense is all the reasons why something wouldn't hit you (that is to say, have no subsequent mechanical effect) while resistance is all the reasons that a hit doesn't end the fight (such as damage reduction or hit points). This sounds tidy, but historically it's very muddled. Consider the role of armor - is it a function of defense or resistance? You can make a case for both (and, indeed, in some systems it has elements of both) and in doing so you highlight the division.

There's a reason that this model lines up with a similar two-part model for offense - roll to attack + roll to damage. They're opposite sides of the same coin, and a lot of games have streamlined both of these things into a single roll to hit, with damage based on Margin of Success plus some modifier (such as weapon or strength). This is certainly easy, but it tends to encounter predictable problems. Specifically, it tends to make whatever stat covers accuracy into a super-stat, and it does weird things when dealing with weapons at extremes of the damage range (since it can make "0 damage" weapons, like a ping pong ball, lethal).

Unfortunately, the alternate approach of adding more layers of rolls (say, one for attack, one for penetration and one for damage) gets cumbersome quickly, so it's not a solution either. Practically speaking, we're limited to a small number of rolls for an exchange in combat, but at the same time we want it to be more than just a single exchange. So where does this leave us?

Well, let's look at what we have for dice. Right now, our core idea is that a normal success is easy to achieve, and there's not much that's more normal than whacking someone. This means we've got a default assumption that it's pretty easy to hit someone, and I'm ok with that, because it is. And that, right there, speaks to something of a design goal - the purpose of every swing in a fight is to end the fight, so there needs to be a good reason it doesn't.

Having a goal like that is essential to making a combat system do something other than emulate another combat system you're familiar with. That specific idea is a somewhat brutal design goal, and it won't stand on its own, but it's a great start, and it gives us something to build from for the next time.

Combat is a Pain

2011-07-21T10:00:00.000-04:00

Ok, back on track. Time to think about conflict. Now, the reality is that if you're designing a game, conflict really means combat. Yes, absolutely, you might need to handle other types of conflict, but combat is the starting point. This is partly because it's such a central part of the hobby, but it's more because if your system is going to break, this is where it's going to happen. That sounds negative, so let me put it a little bit differently - no other part of a game system requires you to think about what the game will actually be like and how that interacts with expectations than combat.

That's a pretty loaded statement, so let me unpack it a bit into the four things that make combat a pain in the ass.

First, because combat tends to have explicit stakes (character well-being) that are measurable outside of the fiction (stats and information on the character sheet) its impact is directly observable in action. That is, while there may be some narrative interpretation applied to how 7 hit points got lost, it's still 7 hit points getting lost. This is not necessarily true of every system out there, but it's common enough to be a default.

Second, there's a huge range in expectations regarding how combat should go, so much so that it's one of the main yardsticks for judging genre. Games might have lethal, brutal combat, or they might have fast and loose, mostly harmless combat. Or they might have something in between. Whatever the case, the usual yardstick is that there is usually a specific look and feel the designer is going for, often epitomized by a particular book, movie or TV show though sometimes through their own personal lens of how fights work "in real life".

Third, fiction (both on-screen and in-mind) has the benefit of narrative protection for heroes, allowing an author to tell a tale of brutal, unforgiving violence without accidentally losing characters. A designer who seeks to emulate that may quickly discover that brutal and unforgiving cuts both ways. This can be addressed by effectively having different rules for players and everyone else (4E and many video games do this well) but that introduces a lot extra overhead into the system.

Last, we've got decades of training from D&D that have totally shaped our perspective. This is not a sleight to D&D but rather an assertion of its huge mindshare, as can easily be seen in most RPGs and computer games. And not just CRPGs - there are precious few shooters out there that don't have some form of hit points, and there's a good reason for that. If play is fun, then dying (and thus not playing) probably isn't. On the upside, this simple model has supported a lot of fun play, but it also means that the assumptions that might guide you in other parts of game design may fail you here. The blatant gamey-ness of combat does not stick out to people the same way it would in other parts of the game, and in fact if you move away from the established standards, people start reacting badly because they know how things should be.

Now, these are concerns, but not show-stoppers. But they're important to keep in mind as we move into designing conflicts.

Whimsy

2011-07-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

I'm briefly sidetracked today by a comment on an earlier post which used a phrase I'm utterly delighted by. The poster was concerned about the variance in larger dice pools, but described it as "the mathematical whimsy of dice pool systems". That's a fantastic way to put it, and I'm totally filing that away.

But he raises a valid point, and he's not the only one to do so. Variance is a bit of a specter that has been raised more than once. For those unfamiliar, the concern is basically this: the bigger the pools of dice get, the less predictable the outcomes get. Once you're rolling 5d6, you've still got a curved outcome, but the curve gets shorter and fatter. You can see it when you map out the curves from 2d6 to 5d6, and it only gets more pronounced with time.

Now, this is totally a function of taste. I admit that so long as pools stay under 7d6 or so, the variance is still within my personal threshold, but I completely understand that other people's thresholds are elsewhere. The thing is that this is mostly something that math nerds are sensitive too, but gaming has no shortage of math nerds, so it's not so easily dismissed as all that.

So with that in mind, let me turn the question around a bit, and look at why we have dice in games in the first place. At heart, it's a matter of determining success or failure, with the uncertainty of things providing some of the thrill of play. Notably, that uncertainty is what puts games at a remove from pure narrative, and you can determine a lot about a game by how much of that uncertainty is in the game (determined by dice) and how much is in other sensibilities (such as drama or karma).

Now, this simple point has expanded into realms of nuance, with degrees of success and success with consequences and so on. There are piles of variations, but what's interesting to note is that there is often a divergence between results (as shown on the dice) and outcomes (how those results are interpreted). The best example of this is probably D&D, where in an attack, there are 20 possible results, but only 2 (maybe 3 with crits) outcomes.

This is an important point to bear in mind when you start looking at these die curves. It's not the specific numbers that matter so much as the bands of results. If hard rolls (13s and such) are common, then the variance starts becoming an issue - possibly a frustrating on - and that's where a lot of systems fall down. By having difficulties creep up along with die pools, you end up feeling like the treadmill is outracing you. Less consistent results combined with consistently escalating difficulties can make "high level" actions feel less heroic.

The solution to this is to take the base difficulty very seriously (Savage Worlds does a great job with this). If the target is really and truly 4 most of the time, then the big die pools feel powerful (especially when paired with the ability to "spend" unused dice). Using higher difficulties to represent specific circumstance is useful as a tool to manage exceptions, not as the default.

A Little Spin

2011-07-19T10:00:00.000-04:00

Ok, so we now have a basic die mechanic (a tally system for dice pools ranging from 1d6 to maybe 5d6) and a basic method for establishing difficulties (numeric steps 4/7/13/19 based on expertise required to perform a task) and a methodology for handling success. That's a good start, but for all the thinking that went into it, there's not much there. In the absence of further details, this is just one more d6 system looking for an answer to the question of "Why not just use RISUS?"

First off, let me state that RISUS is a good answer to many questions, and if the sole purpose of this were to create a not-RISUS, that would be a little lame. There is a lot of desire in RPGS to differentiate purely for the sake of differentiation (or, more cynically, to make something different enough that you can put your name on it) so beware that particular lure.

Thankfully, I have enough things I want the system to accomplish that we still have some very organic work to do. Let's start looking at the bells and whistles.

When looking to add fiddly bits to a system, its worth thinking about when in the process you want things to happen. Are you going to introduce choices before the dice roll or afterwards? Or both? This gets further complicated when you have more than one roll (such as D&D's attack & damage) but let's not borrow trouble. We'll assume a single roll for the time being.

When making this decision it's worth realizing that there's more than just timing at work. Choices made before the roll have a very different texture than those made afterwards, and the difference revolves around the certainty of the outcome. Any choice made before the roll is, practically, a gamble. It's a choice being made on the hope that the subsequent roll will succeed. This has the benefit of being more engaging and the drawback of risking paralysis - it's easy to get hung up on what would be the "right" choice.

In contrast, choices made after the roll are very certain, and tend to be all about working with the outcome. In addition to being simpler, these choices usually are much easier to ingrate into the fiction of play. That is, characters don't use their big attack to miss - they hit, then decide it's going to be a big hit. For some people that logic is jarring, especially if the game has enough missing that it's expected, but other players find the other disconnect jarring.

So, let's say we want a before-the-roll mechanic. We probably want to embrace the gambling element of it, allowing the player to take on some risk before the roll in return for a potential reward. The easiest way to do this with the system so far is to play around with the trickle-down nature of success. Under normal circumstances, even if you don't hit the target you're going for, you still succeed to a lesser extent. You could offer a bonus on the outcome provided that failure will be absolute.

That feels a little awkward, and there are simpler alternatives. Bonus Dice, for example, are a common trick for rounding out dice pool systems. That is to say, you may get to roll extra dice, but only count the best ones. These might be true bonuses (Like in PDQ# or Over the Edge), fixed result pools (like Cortex+ always keeping the best two dice) or roll & keep systems (like L5R).

This is a pretty robust system, and has the advantage of keeping the results within the bounds of the original die pool. It's worth keeping in mind, but it's also well worn territory. I'll keep it in mind, but I'm not particularly inspired. With that in mind, I'm switching the focus to an idea for an after-the-roll bonus.

A while back, a very clever game called Secret of Zir'an failed as a result of a terrible printing failure. One of the more fun ideas it included was a very robust system for using the Margin of Success on a roll for mechanical purposes. That is, if you needed a 20 and rolled a 25, you might spend 2 points to do extra damage and 3 points to knock your opponent over. Neat little mechanic, and one I'd love to capture it.

The problem is that margin of success math is a pain in the ass. Adding up a bunch of dice is enough of a barrier - adding a second equation to the mix is just a bad idea, so the trick is to find a way to make that simple.

With that in mind, we'll try a trick that steals a page from the idea of bonus dice, but keeps the focus on the margin of success. The player may "keep" however many dice he needs to make the roll - if there are dice left over, then those can be spent as currency. It doesn't matter what the values on the extra dice are - the dice themselves are currency.

For example - let's say you're rolling 4d6 trying to hit a 7. You roll 2, 2, 3, 4. You can build the 7 out of the 3 and 4, with 2 dice leftover. Those two extra dice can be spent for extra effects (akin to Dragon Age's stunt points). I don't yet know what the points will be spent _on_, but I think that gives enough of a starting point to start hanging some bits off of.

Now, it's important to remember that these bonuses need to be tangential, not additive. That is, no number of bonuses should be able to turn a 4 result into a 7, which means the bonuses don't make the result _better_, they add additional elements to it. In the most broadly narrative sense, each bonus might be used to declare a fact of some sort. This is a fuzzy distinction, but it gets concrete when you start building specific rules - it's easy to look at any specific bonus and compare it to what a higher roll would have done, and see if there's any overlap.

Curiously, this little test also sheds a lot of light on what needs to be thought about in a conflict system, so we'll probably head that way next.

Failing Failure

2011-07-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

Looking at last weeks post, math-oriented folks have probably noticed the diminishing likelihood of failure as die pools increase. Since the absolute worst you can roll is all 1s, once you have 4 dice, you're guaranteed success. Some people might look at this as a bug and propose an easy fix, like "All 1's is a fumble", but I think understanding it requires looking at how the system handles failure.

In this case, I'm against it. Failure, that is.

This is not just a competence-porn issue, it's part of how things stay fun and interesting. This is not to say failure can't be interesting - it absolutely can - but it's rarely interesting all by itself. Failure is interesting because of the complications it introduces into the situation, and I'm all for skipping the middleman and jumping right to the complications. That is to say, if the dice come up short of the target, then it becomes a choice - would the player prefer to fail, or would he like to succeed with some complication or consequence offered by the GM.

This is easy to apply to basic difficulties (4), but how does it apply to higher levels of difficulty. Can a character take on enough consequences to successfully perform brain surgery?

Obviously, that's pretty nonsensical, so the rule of thumb is that consequences can improve the outcome by a single step, and only if there's a reasonable narrative for it (the player can male proposals if he likes). Depending on the scope of the activity, the task might be resolved in some way other than the initial skill rolled if that makes sense to the consequence. For example, if you need a computer program(7) but only roll a 5, then you might get a success by:

Having someone else do it, in return for incurring a substantial (and immediate) debt to them. The program might even be held hostage for you holding up your end.
You spend all night copy and pasting scripts from websites and you get you program, but your computer is now totally compromised by the various viruses to downloaded in the process.

None of that would help if your goal had been to design a circuit board(13), because that's a 2 step jump.

Having decided when and how failure happens, it's important to also talk a little bit about what failure means. Specifically, some thought needs to go into how re-trying works, and what the impact of failure is. In situations where the situation provides clear context for failure then that's easy, but the situation is not always clear. Looking at the circuit board example, that seems like a task with a very soft failure scenario. If you don't successfully design the circuit board, then why not just try again?

My thought is that if the task is one where the character can keep rolling til it works, then you're not rolling to see if ti works, you're just rolling to see how long it's going to take. That's reasonable, but only if time matters in the context of the game, which it often does not. But if everyone's cool with that being the case, then no problem.

However, some rolls don't invite that. There are situation where you want failure to stick, in which case failure is a demand for following a different course of action, mechanically handled by trying a different skill or by changing (perhaps improving) the situation enough to merit a re-roll.

With that in mind, the trick will be to communicate clearly to players whether they're facing a soft or hard failure. In the case of a soft failure, success is inevitable, and the roll is a shorthand for how many rolls its going to take (see the note on duration, above). In the case of a hard failure, there will be consequences of failure, and either the effort cannot be simply re-retried (or if it can, consequences stack).

So, with that in mind we know how to roll, how to judge difficulty and how to handle failure. That covers the basics. Now it's time to put some spin on it.

Difficulty with Difficulties

2011-07-15T10:00:00.002-04:00

Ok, so yesterday we established that we’d be looking at a d6 tally system with a baseline difficulty of 4. We want to expand on that so as to better handle a die pool of up to ~5d6. Given that, there are two different vectors of approach here. The first is the purely mechanical, while the second is conceptual, speaking to the role of numbers. They weave together, so let's five in from one direction and see what comes of it.

First, we'll start with numbers. Now, one great thing about d6 systems is that the numbers are pretty well known, and there are decades of games trying to come up with interesting fixes to smooth out the progression of the average roll, since that troublesome 0.5 makes life complicated. These decades are part of why, as I noted yesterday, 4 is such a magical number. And the good news is, there are a few other magical numbers.

The first candidate is 7. 7 is a great number for two reasons. First, it's the likeliest outcome of a 2d6 roll, and second, it's the first roll that's outside of the possible scope of a 1d6 roll. That latter is handy because it provides a fantastic model for something that may not be hugely difficult, but which requires training to be able to accomplish. For example, even if you know how to use a computer (1d6) you don't necessarily know how to write even a simple program. That requires specific knowledge and training - you're not just going to "get lucky" if you keep trying. That's exactly the kind of scenario where a difficulty of 7 is a handy tool.

After that, the next magic number depends on how you look at things. 13 has many of the same benefits of a 7, except that you need at least 3d6 to hope to hit it. The difference is that it's a bit less likely to succeed - 13 on a 3d6 is harder to hit than a 7 on 2d6. Now, this might suggest a compromise middle step of 10, since that's a midpoint on 3d6, and it's +3 from 7 and -3 from 13, and given that 7 is 4+3, and 4 is 1+3 (1 being guaranteed success), there's some numerical elegance in making the progression 4,7,10,13 (especially because it can be expressed as "base difficulty of 4, with quality of success increasing by one 'step' for every extra 3", something similar to what's done in a few other dice pool systems).

The problem is there's some conceptual roughness to it. I mean, yes, I could easily say:
4 - Mundane
7 - Difficult
10 - Complex
13 - Boggling
or something equally pithy and it would still be better than a lot of games (which set their baseline too high) but really it would be utter bullshit. Those terms are crazily subjective, and while I don't object to the GM interpreting situations, they provide the GM no practical guidelines for how those things are actually set, which would be irresponsible of me.

But if we drop the 10 we get something that's not quite as intuitive a progression, but is one that gives us a real, concrete basis for the progression: the numbers are such that if you are not at least operating at a certain skill level, you can't hit them. That means 4,7,13 (and 19, if we really feel it's necessary).

Now, what those things will mean are going to vary depending a lot upon the specifics of the skills, and when this ends up in a system, some of that is going to have to be offloaded, but the basic progression is pretty simple.
4 - Normal. The difficulty for day to tay tasks that might be difficult, but require only familiarity with the action being accomplished. For example: Disinfect a cut, perform the Heimlich maneuver.
7 - Expert. Difficulty for a task which cannot be accomplished without at least some proper training and experience. For example: Perform more advanced first aid (proper splints & bandages) or give CPR.
13 - Master. Difficulty for a task which requires intense, specialized training. Example: Perform Surgery, prescribe drugs.
19 - Past-master. Perform a hyper-specialized task. For Example: some sort of specialized medicine, like brain surgery or the like.

All of which is to say, the difficulty levels are built on a clear understanding of "Do Not Try This At Home". If this is something that anyone with a little familiarity could do with luck or hard work, then difficulty is 4.

Now, I should note that I view success as trickling down. If you hit a 7, you also implicitly hit a 4, which may suggest certain bonus or not, depending on the task. If you are doing neurosurgery (19) and roll a 17, then the failure is in the specialized part of the activity. In contrast, if you rolled a 12 (lower than needed for less complex surgery) then the problem was with the surgery as a whole. You get a lot of meaning trickling down through the tiers.

Also, doing this implicitly folds in duration of activity. Climbing a mountain is a task anyone could conceivably accomplish(4). Climbing a mountain in an afternoon probably requires training and experience(7). If you roll to climb the mountain and roll a 6, you still successfully climb the mountain (you beat a 4) but it's going to take you longer than an afternoon (since you didn't hit the 7).

Now, this is still just a starting point. We still haven't added in fiddly bits, and we haven't subjected it to the real test - a conflict system - but this seems like a solid start.

Mored6

2011-07-14T10:00:00.001-04:00

As I step into creating a die system, lets run through a few things I like and dislike, since these things will obviously impact the final product.

1. I want a reliable/predictable measure of the dice to be rolled. Anyone who has read this blog knows I love Cortex+, but my big complaint with it is that I need to pack _all_ my dice to play. Not because a given roll will use them all, but because I have no useful way to predict which dice I'm going to need in what numbers. This may be a small and petty thing, but there's a practical underpinning to it.

2. Next, I want to use d6s. There are some practical underpinning to this - they're ubiquitous and familiar - but it's also strongly aesthetic. I own lots of cool looking d6s that beg to be used.

3. I want the difference between skill levels (or whatever they end up being) to feel substantial, and I do not need more than 5 or 6 tiers of capability. This is a cinematic/fiction driven sensibility based on the fact that such broad distinctions make for solid character shorthands and are easily recognizable.

Up til #3, all of the options were on the table, but that last step there is going to make a count system problematic. Count systems may have very coarsely grained outcomes (based on number of successes) but the actual die pools tend to progress smoothly, with only moderate differences between pool sizes, especially at high levels. I could work around this limitation with something too-clever, but that seems like a peg-hole problem.

A flat system is still technically in contention, though it would probably require stepped bonuses. For example, my cold was game handles this by making skill bonuses (on a 3d6 roll) +2, +4 and +6. Those are a little close (they work better for Fudge) but the idea of stepped bonuses is not entirely off the table.

The tally system seems like the best contender, something in the Risus/Over The Edge/WEG space, with 5 levels ranging from 1d6 to 5d6 or something similar. Historically I might try starting from a baseline of 2d6 so there's a "step down" option and there's at least a little curve in the default roll, but I'm less attached to that idea than I have been in the past.

Now, there’s still nothing concrete to make a decision on, and this can be pretty paralyzing. Almost any choice can be made to work, so what do you do?

Simple: You do -something-. I’m going to go with a tally system because as cognizant as I am of it’s flaws, I’m even more aware of the dangers of sitting here waffling. So with that in mind, let’s see what we can do with a stack of d6s.

The first thing to do is to consider difficulties. I immediately rule out contested rolls because the last thing a tally system needs is more math, so that means fixed difficulties. Since I’m starting from 1d6 I think that means I’m going to pick the classic baseline of 4.

You see 4 show up in a lot of games. It’s a pretty convenient number for a bunch of reasons. On a straight d6 roll, 4+ means a 50% chance of success, and on a 2d6 scale it’s close enough to 75% to be reliable. On a range of die sizes it’s a number that can potentially be hit by a die of any size. All of which is to say that if you’re thinking going with 4 is a ripoff of anything, realize there’s a reason for its ubiquity.

Now, this raises an interesting question: if I’m allowing 5d6 to be rolled, is a base difficulty of 4 even faintly scalable? Certainly, the apex die pools should be reasonably rare, but that’s not any kind of excuse - a known, rare problem is still a problem. Thankfully, I have an instinct that makes this a little less problematic: I’m looking for success to be the expectation. Someone with 1d6 might have some trouble, and 2d6 still has some risk, but by the time you hit 3d6 it’s very nearly a sure thing.

That said, no reason to just leave it at that. Binary success is a little dull because it offers little differentiation between activities. Teaching high school physics ends up on par with crafting the theory of relativity. So that suggests to me that adding additional tiers of difficulty is the best solution.

The problem is that difficulty steps tend to be applied very arbitrary in play. Climbing this hill is this hard, but climbing that hill is that hard and so on. I want them to mean something a little more self-evident. And that, I think, is where I’ll pick it up tomorrow.

Bread and Butter and Dice

2011-07-13T10:00:00.000-04:00

Dice systems are, at their heart, kind of dull. This is probably a good thing, since most of the difference between systems can be built upon their framework, so you want them to be simple, reliable and dull. This is on my mind for reasons that are probably a different post, but I've been chewing on a core dice mechanic.

Right off the bat you have three big camps of dice mechanic. You have the flat roll, the tally, and the count. Flat roll is most famous in the various incarnations of D&D, which has used it as both roll vs. moving target (old D&D THAC0 tables) or roll + bonus vs target (4e). The "flat" roll may actually have a curve (as in the case of Dragon Age's 3d6) but it's always the same dice, and differentiations in skill are represented by changing the target number or changing the bonus. Fudge dice are another weird example of a flat roll that don't necessarily look it because the range is wacky (-4 to 4) but it's a fixed set of dice all the same.

Tally systems, such as those used in WEG's Star Wars or AEG's Roll & Keep system, are based on totaling up a variable number of dice. Variations in skill can change the size of the die pool, and while there may be some extra mechanical fiddliness in terms of how many dice are counted (as in the Case with Cortex+ or any game with bonus dice) , the core idea is that the pool of dice is the variable and as a subsidiary idea, the size of the dice may also be a variable.

Count systems are usually considered success counting systems, like Storytelling or Burning Wheel. You roll some pool of dice (of variable size, like a tally), but rather than add up the dice, you count the number of results that hit some particular criteria (such as 7+ on a d10, or 4+ on a d6). Left purely in that form, this is just a highly specialized tally system (effectively the dice have some number of 0's and some number of 1's) but it's worth differentiation from the tally because the ways it establishes differentiation can include changing the rules of success counting. For example, successes might usually be on a 7+, but in this particular area in which you excel, they might happen on a 6+. Thus, while the size of the die pool may be one axis, another will often include the means of determining successes.

There's a lot more fiddly in this. You can add bonuses to a Tally system to make it feel a little more flat-like. In any system, you can add variations in how you measure success and how you handle things like critical successes and failures (all to say nothing of rich rolling). You can get into wacky hybrids or edge cases (like set building), but those three models really cover the bulk of approaches, and they have different strengths and weaknesses.

Flat rolls are the simplest. Even when they require some math, it is usually quite simple, and perhaps more importantly it's _perceived_ as simple. Reading the die results in a flat roll is easy, with almost no learning curve. Even if the "post-processing" of adding bonuses or the like takes soem effort, it is -after- the roll, a critical point of distinction.

Tally rolls are probably the most robust. If you want to hang a million different mechanics off a roll, or make the die rolling a bit of a game in its own right (like rolling lots of dice, then doing many mini-resolutions from the pool) then this is probably the approach to take, but it absolutely runs the risk of daunting players. Even if you don't do a lot of fiddly stuff, the perception is that math is hard and slow, and tallying up the dice creates that sense of friction. This can be mitigated with small or familiar dice pools, but it's always the specter over the system.

Counts are something of a compromise. They offer much of the same mechanical robustness of Tallies, but they promise greater simplicity than doing math, and in my mind they deliver on that, at least to an extent. There can be a little bit more of a curve in picking up a count game, but the act of reading the dice is an educational one, and most people get much faster at it with only a little practice. Unfortunately, there are some problems that come with that. First, that simplicity is based on the method of counting remaining the same, and if the system leans on changes to that, it slows things down. Also, you can only rely on the simplicity scaling so far - if the dice pools get huge (like, Exalted huge) then it will still bog down.

All three methods can work very well. Even more, all three are robust enough that if there's some particular element you want to accentuate or avoid then you can easily tweak them to that end.

I'm dwelling on this because I have a dice system in mind for a project, and i want to step back and consider its weaknesses and strengths before I totally buy into it. More on that tomorrow.

Whups

2011-07-12T10:00:00.002-04:00

Looks like today's post went up early due to my not setting the scheduler correctly, so some of you saw it early.

As such, I'll venture into a tangent, and say that yesterday I had the privilege of meeting Alexander "Xander" Kenvan Hicks, and I can testify that he's a charming young man who I expect great things from.

Welcome to everything, Xander.

Missing the Pointy End

2011-07-12T10:00:00.001-04:00

Ok, I'm going to spoil the hell out of Game of Thrones. It's been on TV now, so I can't feel too terrible about this, but on the off chance this is an issue, I want to give some heads up before I dive right in.

Game of Thrones has been hugely influential on subsequent fiction, and I think this has mostly been a good thing. There are some folks who do not like this, feeling that this has overly darkened fantasy, but overall I think it's been a good thing. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure it's made Fred a much happier man.

That said, I think that a lot of people take a different lesson from it than I do, and it jars at time. I think a lot of people take the lesson that Ned's death is an indication that the right way to grab a reader (or a player) is with the death of a well liked character. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for killing off the occasional character for the drama of it, but that's not the important thing.

The reason that Ned's death is so potent is not that we love the character, but because it violates our expectations. Ned is a protagonist, and the expectation is that he'll get out of the situation, no matter how bad. There are lots of reasons for this, but the thing that I think is really important is about is about expectations and status quo. We're pretty well trained by fiction (especially TV and comics) that after a status quo has been established, things are going to find their way back to that state.

Ned's death breaks the status quo of A Game of Thrones quite profoundly. That, far more than the death itself, is the shock to the system.

I bring this up because it's a marked contrast to killing off a character who is important to the protagonists. If, for example, a protagonist develops a love interest, and that love interest is killed, it's often the opposite of disruptive. Usually, the disruption would be if the love interest remained in play, since that sort of thing tends to change the overall dynamic. It's the reason the pulps are full of dying love interests, the difference is that they tended to make less of a big deal of it.

Anyway, what does that have to do with your game? Just this - death is sad, but unless the players are REALLY attached to an NPC, a dramatic death is not going to move their needle much. What's going to matter is what that death _says_, and what it _changes_. This is a reason why PC death can be such a powerful thing when it happens - if players don't think it's on the table, it can shake things up. But like most powerful tools, that's a reminder of why to use it cautiously.

I Read the Red

2011-07-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

Many of my friend enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora much more than I did, and it was only after some poking that I revealed my reasons why. After that, I was assured that the problems I had with LLL were not present in the sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, so I agreed to read it and post my thoughts. I finished it up over the July 4^th weekend, so here they are.

First and foremost, yes, I enjoyed it much more. It’s still the adventures of Jean and his annoying friend, but I’m ok with that, and most importantly, the cheating was not nearly so rampant, and is mostly limited to mere hand-of-author stuff rather than caper-breaking stuff. This is, at least in part, a result of the smaller role played by the bondsmagi (and, tellingly, that part lead to me frowning at their apparent violation of their own rules) and I’m grateful for it.

For context, I actually listened to it rather than read it, and while I was originally skeptical of the overly-theatrical nature of the reading, I was quickly won over to it. The reader (Michael Page) does a good enough job with the voices that it was very easy to stay on top of conversations. One of the unexpected benefits of the audio book format is that it makes Lynch’s fondness for fantasy names much more tolerable. Hearing them spoken makes them at least feel like names when they otherwise sit like lead on the page.

The audio book also has a bit of a downside in that it casts a harsh, unforgiving light on the entirety of the text. Because there’s no way to skim, overly detailed blocks of prose that don’t actually move anything along are cast into harsh relief, and this book is awash in them. If I did not know that Lynch was a gamer, I’d suspect it based on his descriptions, which often serve to lovingly showcase his worldbuilding (which, in his defense, is pretty good) far more than they do anything to move along the plot. They’re problematic enough in their own right, but they’re far more problematic in a book that feels too long to begin with.

In fact, this really feels like two book jammed together, the first a city caper, the second a pirate tale. Either one would probably have been a good read, but their combination feels fat, and wrapping them thickly doesn’t help. This is further muddled by a number of unnecessary time jumps, most egregious of which being an opening flashback which more or less reads like a storyboard for the screenplay this book might be. It’s such a blatant structural trick that it chafes, and it also forces a technical gaffe onto the protagonists (check which names they use).

Finally, this is kind of soft writing. There were numerous points where the tension depended upon your thinking the author would be willing to go there, and Lynch won’t. That’s not too bad a thing, since it’s caper stuff, and fun is appropriate, so it mostly becomes an issue when this moves away from it’s caper roots.

That’s a lot of complaints, but here’s the rub. I enjoyed it, and I’ll read the third book – whenever it comes out – with far less hesitation. For all those complaints, there are some good parts to it. First and foremost, when Lynch is on his game, he really rocks it. Dialog and action move along, his fight scenes are great, and by and large when things are happening, they’re a joy to read. If he were more willing to jump-cut between scenes, it would be a joy to read.

I worry sometimes that Lynch is an author out of time. His writing (at least as showcased in RSURS) seems less well suited to the massive fantasy bricks of today than to the novellas and short stories of yesteryear. With only minimal editing, one could turn RSURS into a collection of stories akin to one of Lieber’s Lankhmar collections and vastly improve them thereby. Many of the longish asides (like the event while climbing) would make perfectly serviceable little stories on their own. It would also offset some of the softness of the writing since there's an expectation in short stories of a return to the status quo.

It occours to me that the seams are so clearly visible that I wonder if, perhaps, that was the original format, and it got beaten and spackled into Big Fantasy Book. It wouldn’t surprise me, since I imagine that’s the necessity of the day, but it would be a shame if so.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the book’s not flawless, but it’s a fun adventure yarn, with some surprisingly good setpieces. Glad I finally broke down and read it.

ENNIES!

2011-07-08T10:00:00.005-04:00

I had a more sober post scheduled for today, but I guess that gets bumped to Monday, since the Ennie noms got posted today!. Sadly (if unsurprisingly), this blog did not make the cut, but a number of really awesome blogs did, so I wish them luck, and in the absence of luck, perhaps they'll all kill each other and clear the field for next year! :)

However, I've no real reason to complain - Evil Hat did very well, with both Dresden Files and Happy Birthday Robot receiving multiple nominations in some very robust categories. The Best Game category is particularly interesting, both for what's there and what's not. Also, best Aid/Accessory and Best RPG-Related Product are full of things that I wish had made the Origins list.

As with any such list, one will see omissions. No nods for Smallville or Fiasco, which is more than a bit of a shame, and similarly sad to see no Dragon Age (EDIT: Fiasco was apparently eligible last year, not this year, and received appropriate honors! My error, there.). Some nice surprises, though - Glad to see Block by Bloody Block get a nod, and definitely pleased to see the love for ICONs.

I'll probably run through the list later, and give my picks and my predictions (because, hey, that's half the fun), but on the off chance you want to do the same, let me share with you my predictive model, honed through years of observation.

License Renewal

2011-07-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

When I was maybe 12, a friend got the Star Trek RPG (the really old one), and as the guy who read rules, I tried to read it, and it made absolutely no sense to me. I mean, I kind of pieced together some of the bits, and my attempt to make a character produced some sort of loser, and I certainly couldn't run it. But it was still a really interesting read. It was full of writeups on the aliens races, including ones that had only been on the cartoon, which I hadn't even realized existed. Even better, it had lists of ship weapons, and I promptly stripped that out and used the list to make up a ship combat game that allowed us to buy and build custom ships using that list. It was awesome.

The funny thing is that the things that made it awesome at the time are almost nonsensical these days. At the time, the game was not only a game, it was a window into the Star Trek universe for me. This was highly specialized, not terribly accessible information. Yes, I could potentially have gotten elsewhere if I'd managed to track down a fan guide, but that was not necessarily trivial either.

Today? The only barrier to this information is interest. The Internet provides a bounty of nerdy information on this stuff far in excess of anything a game can provide.

Now, obviously there's a spectrum to this. More popular properties have deeper online resources, and there's still some room for the RPG as Fan Guide in the world, but it's a much narrower window than it used to be. But for a big license, I wonder if the nature of the game has changed. Can a licensed game proceed on the assumption that the Internet is out there and proceed from that?

Honestly, I dunno. Intellectually, I imagine so. To do otherwise is to assume that the Game is at all likely to be someone's introduction to the license, and while there are no doubt some cases of that, my suspicion is that they're far more the minority than those introduced to the game via the license. But even saying that, what would be different?

That's the bit a pound my head against. It _feels_ like this new era should allow us to have even better licensed RPGs, but I'm not yet sure what to do differently to make it so.

Legos vs Action Figures

2011-07-06T10:00:00.001-04:00

When I was younger and just getting into RPGs, I read the hell out of the original Monster Manual, and not just for the naughty pictures. For the unfamiliar, monster entries used to be pretty short - an illustration, stat block and a very short descriptive block, often shorter than the stat block, and usually composed of a few sentences of description, and notes on special attacks and tactics.

That may sound a little dry, but I found it inspiring. Those few sentences of description were often quite colorful and suggested much more than they said. Each monster provided an invitation to flesh out the details surrounding it in your own imagination. And people did: the now-famous "ecology of..." line of articles was based almost entirely around the idea of taking that seed idea and expanding it extensively. Today's monster books - illustrated by the fantastic work in the recent Monstrous Compendiums - come down somewhere between those two points, filling in enough detail to flesh thing sout without quite going to the extremes of writing 6 pages on the ecology of the darkmantle.

This range seems like a snapshot of one of the big questions of gaming, that of legos versus action figures. That is, should the game provide you the bits with which you can play the game in your head (legos, old monster manual) or should it provide you everything you need for the complete game (action figures, fleshed out monsters). Now, before you instinctively leap to legos as the better choice (as nerds are wont to do) I want to poin totu that while the Forgotten Realms may be an example of an action-figure style of play, so are many story games. It may seem odd to lump Fiasco in with Dungeon Crawling, but in this case they're in the same bucket. Both provide the structure (in VASTLY different ways) rather than the parts. This, I hope, is a good illustration of why both approaches are fruitful and full of goodness. Anyone who as ever played with action figures knows there's no shortage of imagination applied to the play, it's just within the bounds (dare I say, creative constraints) of the form.

Hopefully that makes it clear that I don't think the question is one of one versus the other. Both approaches have a place in gaming, and that's good, because there are plenty of places where the distinction is hard to make. Take GURPS - the game is designed to be a lego, but any given setting book tends to be deep and rich enough to be all about the action figures. Sure, someone might deconstruct one for parts, but more likely, they'll just mix them up (combining the G.I. Joes with the My Little Ponies, as it were). Rather, the question on my mind is what makes for a more broadly useful _product_.

Evidence points towards action figures. Fiction and structure make money, and at first glance, legos aren't much fun for the uninitiated, but there's a bit of a hidden trick to it. If the potential customer has something in their own imagination which they wish to capture, legos are the tool for it, and this is something that the sparse, almost accidental lego-ness of early games managed to capture. If you had an idea in mind, such as swinging a sword on adventures, then this gave you the tools to manifest that idea.

The curiosity, of course, is that those ideas came from other action figures - that is to say, fiction - as people built ideas based on wanting to play something inspired by their impressions of Lord of the Rings, Interview With a Vampire, Star Wars and anything else. On some level, that created a weird cycle of fiction --> Ideas --> Game built with legos --> Spinoff Fiction (novels, gamebooks) --> new Ideas. I admit that in this context, I become a little more patient with the infinitely-milked settings (Forgotten Realms, Star Wars Extended universe) but at the same time I cement more clearly why it's not for me. I like my action figures, but when they become full on figurines, I'm out.

Teaching Vs. Learning Vs. Fiasco

2011-07-05T12:56:00.001-04:00

Look, it's just a given that Fiasco is brilliant. There's no other game like it. That's the baseline for discussion from my perspective. But there are some interesting discussions that flow from that, one of them being the prospect of Fiasco as a gateway game, one to draw in non-gamers.

This is an interesting proposition, and a compelling one. Fiasco has few rules to learn and is very flexible while still providing sufficient structure and rigidity to give play a direction. It has no GM so it's dynamic is much more like the kind of game that people think of when they talk about games. It's small, unthreatening, and as the number of playlets increases, more and more likely to have a specific implementation that appeals to a given potential player.

And yet, I am uncertain.

For all that Fiasco is quite simple, I wonder how much that simplicity is built upon a foundation of the language of RPGs. In comparison, when you read the rules to a board or card game, there's a procedural element to it which presumes little knowledge beyond turn taking and card drawing. Most powerfully, this allows you to play games correctly without necessarily playing them well. That is to say, you can make poor decisions in a game of Monopoly or Magic and, while you may be more likely to lose as a result, the game will still proceed forward. For Fiasco (and RPGs in general), that cushion is not in place. It is entirely possible to grind a game to a halt without an understanding of what the next step can and should be.

Now, I think this is something worth remembering for all the folks who think there is only one true purpose for a GM. In many games, the GM's most important role is to help get past those moments of freezing up and keep the game moving. Power, authority and all that are often just tools to serve that end.

To that end, many Fiasco games may well have a GM-in-all-but-name, the person who brought the book, explains the rules and so on, but then we're talking about how _teachable_ the game is, which is subtly different from how well it can serve as a gateway.

This is not to say that I'm dismissing Fiasco as an introductory game. i think it's a good one, and with direction and people inclined to teach, I think it's fantastic. But I'm thinking about where it falls short with an eye on how those gaps might be filled.

Happy Fourth

2011-07-04T09:09:00.001-04:00

I'm on the road today, so no post to speak of. Holiday weekend has been a ton of fun, but driving home probably won't be. We'll see if our route through the boonies saves us any hassle.

One small gaming note I will make: Since last week, I have confirmed that Ascension supports multiplayer on the ipad and iphone, and supports if very well. Well enough that I have almost a dozen games going at once. What's more, I keep finding clever things about the interface. For example, if you double tap on a card, it zooms that card up. Normal enough. But if you swipe right or left on that zoomed image, you orate through zoomed images of other cards from that same context (like your hand or a discard pile). While less essential on the ipad, where there's more space to touch things, this is incredibly handy on the iphone, especially if things get crowded on screen.

An IoS Find: Ascension

2011-07-01T10:00:00.000-04:00

So, that game I talked about Tuesday, Ascension? Turns out they just rolled out an iOS version (for both ipad and iphone). It's $5 and it's fantastic, highly recommended.

Now, some of my enthusiasm is because it's a great game. It's not a CCG, so there's no infinite booster purchasing, but the game is extensible with supplements (which are not in the app yet). Gameplay is fast and fun, and the time consuming elements (setup and scoring) are reduced to nothing with the app.

But I'm also enthused for reasons that have nothing to do with the game - this is a really well designed app, and it gives me a lot of hope for future card game apps. A few things of note:

* It works startlingly well on the iphone. That it works on the ipad is no great shock - lots of real estate after all - but I've played a few hands on my phone, and it's been elegant as heck. Dealing with constructs is a little trickier, but otherwise, it worked great.

* There's more than one way to do things. For almost every card in the game, you can use it by either double-tapping it (which zooms in to read) and tapping a button that appears next to it (which reads "Play", "Capture" or whatever's appropriate. However, you can also use card by dragging them to the appropriate area (play area, discard pile and so on). Either option would work just fine, but having both makes play much more smooth.

* The AI's pretty good. Good enough that kicking it up to the medium level resulted in my ass getting kicked.

* Haven't tried multiplayer yet, but I'm hopeful

Honestly, my only complaint is that (unlike, say, Carcassone) it's hard to watch the AI and learn from it. I could probably accomplish this by slowing down the game (it's in the options) but half the fun is the zippy gameplay, so I'll take that tradeoff.

Anyway, thes developers behind this, Incinerator Studios, have another game in the pipeline, an IoS port of Summoner Wars, and if Ascension is any indication of the quality of their work, then I;m eager to see what they do next!

Another Origins Find

2011-06-30T10:00:00.000-04:00

I became more sympathetic to the people with the rolling luggage at Origins after I started down the boardgame path. The simple reality is that if you're carrying more than one full sized boardgame, you're going to be hard pressed to find an efficient solution for carrying them. This became apparent after I picked up Ascension and the other awesome boardgame of the con (more on that in a second) and I tried to carry both around. My backpack was no use, and while I made use of my Reddoxx CPA Briefcase (which is freaking immense) one day, it was sufficiently full that there was no room for additional purchases.

So, with that in mind, I'm willing to change my stance on rolling luggage at conventions. You still need to steer clear of crowded areas (like the dealers room) with it, but if you are board-game or wargame focused, I concede the necessity. However, I offer an important caveat - don't overload them. If you're using a clever arrangement of bungie cords to try to hold two stacks of games side-by-side then you're asking for trouble. One game is going to come loose, and then it's all going to go to hell. Unless you are literally stocking a booth, stick to a single stack.

All of this also has reminded me of the importance of after-market repackaging, which is a really fancy way of saying "Putting a game in a smaller box". I love that games are getting these great organizing trays, but that's only really used to me if I play the game at home. If I ever want to take the game anywhere (like a convention or a friend's house) then it's worth my while to try to compress it down into something more portable. A few game-makers have caught onto this. The ascension bundle I got came with a box for just this purchase, and I know that AEG makes the boxes for it's game expansions with compact storage in mind.

Which comes to the other great find of the convention, Seven Wonders. This is a development game that feels a bit like the slimmed down love child of Civilization and Race for the Galaxy, which puts it precisely in my sweet spot. Still, as I mentioned regarding Ascension, merely being a good game is not enough anymore, and 7W delivered on two particular vectors.

The first is that it's fast. Gameplay is listed as a half hour, and even with learning, our first games were done in under 40 minutes. Fast is a big deal for me, and would probably have been enough, but it was driven home by the second point: That time doesn't change as you add more players. It's just as fast (or nearly so) with 7 people as it is with 3 (technically, it also supports 2, but I haven't tried the 2 player rules yet). This is accomplished by changing the deck size based on the number of people, which in turn keeps the number of turns constant. Since turns are simultaneous, the only thing that really slows down play is that guy who takes forever to make decisions. Sadly, there is only so much you can do about that, except perhaps keep playing until he feels comfortable enough to play fast.

Setup and breakdown could be a little more efficient, and to be totally frank, will probably be helped by shifting it to a custom box, but that's a small detail. Apparently the first expansion is about to hit the market (Asmodee had them at Origins, but weren't selling them when I talked to them) but there's some worry it's going to change the game too drastically. I'm willing to hold out and see before picking it up.

Anyway, it was a good purchase, and you can apparently get it for as little as $35, which is a good price. at $40 I felt ok with it, though at $50 I might have hesitated. Your yardstick may vary of course, but if you get a chance, it's worth a play.

Selfishness

2011-06-29T10:00:00.002-04:00

I go to Origins for the conversations, and the winner was one of the big ad hoc roundtables on Sunday night. Great talk for lots of great reasons, but the thing that really struck me came afterwards, on the way back to the hotel. Amanda Valentine, editor to the stars, remarked on how much she had enjoyed the conversation and, notably, how much she had felt a part of it rather than excluded because she was a woman. Now, on the face of it, this was great - I'm really glad that was the case, and I can safely say that it was not because anyone made any special effort to accommodate her. It was just the sort of conversation where people are thoughtful and respectful and topics wander the map, and that's kind of as it should be.

But my heart sank some. Not because she was wrong - she wasn't - and not even because in this hobby it was something that merited mention. Rather, it made me think about the makeup of the conversation. It included over a dozen people at various points, only two of which were women.

This is a little disturbing to me because, up to that point, it had been a pretty much perfect conversation in my eyes. Noting that gap called out two things. The first was a blind spot on my part, and while that's always jarring, that's just something to live with and learn from. The second, and perhaps more interesting and actionable item, was my asking of myself who else should have been there.

See, the rub is that I actually know a number of female game designers, writers and the like, and they're pretty awesome (and despite appearances, only _some_ of them are named Emily). Of those I know, very few were at Origins, so it would have been hard for them to get in on the conversation, which is a decent intellectual answer, but emotionally leaves me wondering if I'm just facing another blind spot. I met a lot of guys at Origins, but I can only think of three women (Amanda, who came with Evil Hat, an editor from Outrider Studios whose name escapes me and who I met in the context of speaking to her husband, and Miranda Horner, who has a list of RPG credits as long as my arm) I spent any time talking to.

It is entirely possible to write this off as a function of the gender ratio at the convention, which I presume to skew male without any real evidence to back that up. The temptation to do so is rooted firmly in the squoodgy uncertainty that dwelling on this evokes. If I think about this in terms of bringing women into gaming, it's this huge, impossible problem.

But thankfully, that's not it.

See, the reality is I'm a selfish bastard, and I'm in this for cool ass conversations with cool ass people. I WANT Emily Care Boss, Jess Hartley, Filamena Young, Julia Ellingbone, Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat, Amy Garcia and many, many, many, many, others to be in on these conversations because they make it more awesome. I don't worry about the absence of women in this conversations for some abstract reason, I worry because I fear there are awesome people out there who I'm not dragging into the circle because I don't know about them! (I worry about it with guys too, of course, but when it comes to guys, let's just say I have a very wide shot selection.)

So, help me sate my selfishness. Who should I be following? Who should I be looking forward to dragging into crazy ass conversations at cons? Who should be on my radar but isn't (possibly because I'm a dumbass).

Cool Things at Origins

2011-06-28T10:00:00.000-04:00

This was my first big convention in memory with no responsibilities, which made it weird. The biggest obvious effect was that my sense of time got absolutely shot. Summer sunlight plus being further west (plus a light right outside my hotel window) meant all my cues for telling the time were shot. This was a little problematic, and I missed one of my evening video calls home to the kid as a result, but once I became aware of it, I compensated.

I didn't play a single RPG while I was at the con. This hadn't been the plan, but it was a result of my really enthusiastically diving into the card and boardgame side of things this year, enough so that I shelled out for a board room pass to be able to try different games form their library. This lead to one of the real finds of the con, Ascension.

Ascension is a card game in the general Dominion/Thunderstone family, where a lot of the play revolves around accruing cards and then using them to win. I've heard them called deck building games, and it's not a great term but it will do. Ascension was getting some decent push on the floor as they were premiering their first expansion at Origins, so I was curious. I tried it, and I promptly walked to the floor and bought the whole set, so safe to say I liked it.

But here's the thing: it's a great game, but that wasn't enough. There are LOTS of great, fun, well designed games out there, so many that it has become the minimum I look for in a game. It needs to be a great game, but it also needs to do something else, and Ascension pulled that off. Specifically, it's got a lot of the fun of Dominion or Thuderstone without being nearly as much of a pain in the ass. Setup and breakdown (which are my biggest annoyance with those other games) is quick and easy, meaning it's a game that I can actually _play_ with a minimum of friction, and that's fantastic.

Not to say it's flawless. The art on the cards is uneven, and unfortunately some of the worst art is on the most common cards. They also clearly changed card printers between the initial game and the expansion, and the expansion cards are a tiny bit smaller and not necessarily perfectly color matched. Both problems go away when you sleeve the cards (which i did, since they don't feel like they can take as much abuse as I'd dish out) but it's a bit annoying that it makes sleeves a very near necessity rather than just a nice to have.

Still, I'm glad I got it, and I look forward to playing it more in the future.

So That Happened

2011-06-27T10:00:00.000-04:00

I usually skip the actual Origins awards ceremony. I'd pretend that this is some hipster douchebag, too cool for the event sort of thing but the reality is that in past years I have never been able to actually find the ceremony, and directions didn't seem to help. This was the first year i actually found it (and the beer garden), so that was a good reason to go.

Even so, I was mostly just there to cheer on Fred, who was inducting Erick Wujick into the Origins Hall of Fame (and rightly so). I sat in the back and had brought along my copy of Ascension and a big stack of card sleeves - an awards ceremony seemed exactly the right opportunity to sleeve up all those cards. And it was. Things started reasonably on time, and James Earnest lives up to his reputation as a great MC, and I was cheerfully ripping through those cards, and then the Damndest thing happened: we won.

The Dresden files RPG was up for the Origins award for best RPG and best RPG supplement. The competitions in both categories was crazy fierce, and I was pretty sure we had no chance - in fact, I had a high level of confidence in who we would lose too in each category. Pathfinder was just going to crush is in Best Supplement, and Best RPG was a toss up: DC adventures, unless Green Ronin split their vote between that and Dragon Age, in which case, Gamma World would take it. I was so very, very wrong.

So, now I have two statues, or at least two I share with Fred, Lenny, Clark, Amanda, Ken, Ryan, Chad, Genevieve and of course, Jim. This is pretty fantastic. I have no ideas what it _means_ - Origins award provides no useful predictor on how the other awards of the season will fall out, and I have no idea if it means a sales bump, but i don't really *need* to know those things. This crazy idea that started with a trio of friends running Amber LARPs and a long drive to Tahoe managed to do this thing, and if you asked the people on that trip if they could have ever imagined this, they would have laughed and laughed. This is something that happens to other people.

But, I guess maybe it isn't. Might be a lesson in that.

Bad Business

2011-06-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

So, I was standing at an Origins booth and noticed they had some Osprey books for $15 each, a mild discount. Osprey books are cool little military-focused history resources, so I starter looking, and saw an interesting looking one on the fortifications of the Incas, so I pick it up and wait to pay the man. He's busily playing a mini's game, so I decide to be patient, and look over the bookshelf and find another book I want to get, so I pick it up and wait some more.

Guy keeps playing his game. That's cool, I'm patient, and while I'm waiting, I succumb to impulse and pick up two more books. So there I am, standing there with $60 of product in my hands, and the guy keeps playing.

I wait, and after a while I'm a little bit less in the sweep of "oh cool" and I put back the two extra books I picked up. He's still playing.

After a bit longer, I decide, ok, I only really need one, so I set aside the second. He's still playing.

So I wait a while longer, at which point I decide "To hell with this", put down the book and wander off.

Origins has been overall quite fantastic, but that example was pretty much going to stick with me.

Or so I thought. That bit of lighthearted bad-business ended up feeling very small late in the day when word hit the bars about the WOTC layoffs. It's way to early to say anything more than it's disturbing, and that I wish the best for all those affected. Good luck to you all.

Building the Conspiracy

2011-06-23T10:00:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned conspiracies the other day, I figured I'd share a trick for constructing them which makes them easy to construct yet consistent enough to maintain a "The Truth Is Out There" vibe.

Start off with a secret - If your familiar with the Shock RPG, consider this a single shock. It's some thing or event which changes everything and upends all previous assumptions. Good examples include Aliens having landed, people developing psychic powers, time travel being possible, demons being real or something like that. If it's a big enough deal that it could be a premise for a game all by itself, that's probably a good secret.

Write it down in the middle of a piece of paper or on it's own index card. That's your premise, now comes the tricky part. Think of three or four new secrets that derive from that first one. They might be extrapolation (If demons are real, then maybe some magic is real and vampires are real). They might be consequence (Telepaths run the spy agencies and telekinetics control gambling and sports). They might be limitations (it's only possible to view through time, or it's only possible to travel with organic material). Whatever. Come up with a handful of these.

These seed secrets are your real baseline. You want to use each one as the truth that you build a conspiracy around. Based on this seed, some group is doing something. Vampires hunt in the shadows, treasure hunters are searching through time for secrets and so on.

Once you've got a spread, pick one of them and present it to the players as "the secret" and construct a game around that. You'll go into play with a handful of related secrets and a truth that players can eventually dig down to reach.

Given that, here are three more tweaks,

First, as proposed, I imagine the GM is doing this in secret because the players want to be surprised. This is not the only way to do it. If the group likes having meta-knowledge, then they may want to be in on it. Alternately, if the group wants more of a "Faction War" kind of game (like Feng Shui) this can do the job.

Second, complicated secrets can be cool, and sometimes a seed secret is interesting enough that you might want to make it the central secret. As an example, in the Terminator franchise, the base secret might be that Time Travel is possibe, but the real secret is that there's an AI in the future sending machines back in time to try to keep itself from being destroyed.

Third, which is related - you can actually repeat this process as many times as you like to create more complicated secrets. If you do this, not every secret needs to be its own conspiracy. Some may be shared secrets or otherwise part of the landscape (like time travel in Terminator) that may need to be discovered, but not necessarily unraveled.

Why Can't You Change The World?

2011-06-22T09:13:00.001-04:00

Wednesday morning at Origins is not an exciting time. The sad people who failed to file their paperwork online (like me) get to stand in line a lot (and, as ever, convention lines are such a perfect microcosm of the hobby) but once that's done, it's all "Ok, time for breakfast and wondering what to do today". That's about where I am. I've sat down in the Origins Food Court (which is probably the best food court I've ever seen - it's at least 50% real food) with an omelette and coffee and about 65 minutes before this is supposed to post. So, not much convention to write about yet, but thankfully, something's been niggling at me.

I enjoyed the recent BBC series "Sherlock", a modern re-imaging of Sherlock Holmes. It's only 3 episodes (whose quality I would sequentially characterize as fantastic-ok-great) and available on netflix streaming. I strongly recommend it, for a variety of reasons.

One element in particular has stuck with me though, that of conspiracy. It is clear over the course of the episodes that there is something bigger, just out of sight, and while that something is predictable to any Holmes fan, it's handling is excellent. What particularly grabs me is that Holmes feels like his awesomeness has elevated him, but in doing so has brought him close enough to something that had previously been too high to see. It's an idea I love: that reaching the apex of awesome reveals to you the next mountain to climb.

This idea is relevant to any game with super-competent PCs (Leverage, for example) and it's an extension of a classic questions pressed through a strange lens. If these guys are this good (and by this good I mean cinematically good, which is another way to say "explainable super powers") then why haven't they changed the world?

One answer - one that makes for a specific but very interesting style of play - is that other people of similar competence got there first with the same idea. That is to say, cinematic competence can be fuel for a conspiracy game just as surely as any supernatural element can be.

What's fun about this is that it's very easy to flesh out the NPCs and their capabilities, because you just have to ask yourself the simple question of what your characters would need to do to change the world, then assume these guys have already done it. Your character might be badass enough to build up vast wealth and a personal spy organization - and those are great goals - but it gets complicated when there's somebody out there who has already done this.

And it gets doubly interesting when the fact that you're doing this means that you're drawing their attention.

This mode works fantastically for "high level" play in a reasonably mundane setting (like the real world) because it solves the two big problems that comes with that. First, it introduces challenges which _don't_ undercut the awesomeness of the players, and in fact, reinforce it. Moriarty's not terrifying because he's smarter than Holmes, he's terrifying because he's _as smart_. Same for your PCs.

Second, it addresses the XP issue. There comes a point where just buying up skills feels like throwing points away because everything important is maxed out. This model give the opportunity to start investing XP in the world (building up your resources, base, followers or the like).

Anyway, there is obviously more to this in a good conspiracy game, but for the time being just think about what it means to have other people in the world who are as good as your PCs - just a few of them - and what that means for the world and for your group.

Off to Origins

2011-06-21T10:00:00.001-04:00

Hitting the road this morning, and in the flurry of packing, blogging got misplaced. Looks liek I'll be writing from the con!

Just to follow up on the bag things, I'm going to call out a few essentials that I try to bring, both to the con and to the floor.

Power Strip and Ethernet Cable - Both for the hotel room. Power outlets are often in short supply and wireless is often unreliable (or expensive). Coming prepared for both saves many headaches.

Throat drops - I tend to bring one bag of cough drops, one bag of vitamin c drops, and mix it up. By day 3 of talking over crowds, they're something you're very grateful for.

Water Bottle - Pick one your bag can handle - a big bottle may last you longer on a refill, but it's not worth it if it's just a hassle to tote.

Quarters - Hotel laundry Machines. Lockers. Lots of random stuff out there uses quarters, so I keep a few on hand.

Gas-X - Look, reality is you're going to be eating different food than you're used to, and it's going to take an intestinal toll. Take steps not to share your pain. This is over and above the usual rules about essential con hygiene.

Index Cards - After Dice and Pencils, these are the most useful thing you can have for any game. Write characters on them, fold them and use them as name cards, tear them up to make tokens - whatever. They're a fantastic all-purpose fallback.

Gadgets - There are few specific gadgets you need at the con, but a few needs that gadgets can meet. Some way to get information, communicate with people and maybe take pictures is enough. A smartphone can do this, though so can a laptop and regular phone, or a camera and an ipad or god knows what else. Don't pack gadgets to pack gadgets, figure out your needs, then pack the tools that address them.

Speaking of which, I should note that I won't be watching twitter for the week. I'll keep an eye out for @mentions and direct messages, but anything in the main twitter stream is going to be a loss. But I will check comments here, so if there's a questions about Origins you'd like me to answer, then feel free to ask!

The Con Bag

2011-06-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

Someone asked, and that's all the excuse I need for some unrestrained bag nerdery. The topic of what to carry at a convention and how to carry is is one that I have given utterly unreasonable amounts of thought to, and I share some of the fruits of it here. If you're about to go to a convention (like, say, Origins) and are considering what you're going to carry around, then hopefully this might help.

The first question to ask yourself is whether you need a bag at all. If you don't intend to run any games (including pickup ones) and you don't intend to buy anything, then the reality is you probably won't need to. Stick a notebook, pen & Pencil, phone and maybe a few dice in your pocket and you're good to go. If you can get one of those cool badge holders with pockets (they might have them with the Origins Merchandise, they might not) then that can even make it easier. This is, honestly a nice way to go if you can pull it off.

One tip that may help at Gencon but not at Origins - if you can get one of the pay-lockers on site, that can allow you to get by with a very minimal carry since you can drop your purchases off at a locker rather than tote them around.

Ok, for the rest of us, there tend to be two big reasons to carry a bag: to be prepared, and to shop.

Shopping is the simpler scenario. For all that a bag may feel awkward, I promise you it feels worlds better than a cheap plastic grocery bag carrying a heavy load of books or boardgames, especially given the certainty that a sharp corner is going to poke through sooner or later. If you've always got a bag, life gets much easier, though there are alternatives. If you plan your shopping (for example, knowing you'll only shop on the first or last day of the convention) then you might be able to forgo the bag except on that day.

You'll want to pick a bag that matches your shopping interests. If you're just looking for CCGs and maybe a book or two, as small bag will be fine. If you're looking for boardgames or planning to make a lot of purchases, then plan for something bigger. More on that in a minute.

Being prepared is a much fuzzier thing, and I will wager that most of us carrying bags are doing it for this reason.

Now, first and foremost, if you have a fixed kit, then you already know what you need. If you're going to be running a game, then you need certain supplies. If you absolutely must have your iPad, you need a bag that can handle it. If you have needs you explicitly must meet, then those obviously supersede any advice I can give.

But for those of you with a less fixed set of needs, let me run through some options.

First off, try to use as small a bag as you can get away with. Big bags a great, but they get heavy as you spend your time walking around. If you're packing several games "just in case" then you might want to consider packing only one or two, and rotating them out on a daily basis.

To my mind, the perfect con bag is vertical satchel style, just big enough to hold a D&D book. Something like the Ducti Utility Messenger, the Duluth Field Bag, or the Tom Bihn Cafe Bag or Risretto. They're big enough to hold the essentials for a game, but small enough that even if you stuff them to the gills, they'll only get so full. However, there is a problem.

One of the advantages of a bag like that is that it can be hung at the shoulder or cross body. This is very important if you're going to walk around a lot - a cross-body carry means that you're not constantly readjusting the strap. The problem is that this simply won't work for everyone. Specifically, large men (like myself) and many women will encounter issues with the strap going across the chest. Even if it's comfortable, it can look very awkward. Now, you can mitigate this by getting a bag with a "grippy" shoulder strap (the Redoxx Gator is fantastic for this) so you can have a stable one-shoulder carry, but it's not quite the same.

Now, I should also add that I'm biased in favor of the vertical bags because they hang better, and for the guys, they are less likely to look like a purse (a silly but very real concern). Horizontal bags can work just fine, but they tend to be bigger, and that can be an issue.

There are definitely some great messenger style bags - I'd be remiss not to mention the entire Timbuk2 line, and the remarkably spacious Bag of Holding - but I can't recommend them as con bags in good conscience.

I can hear some protests there, so let me step back a minute. These are great bags. I have several and I love them, and part of what I love is how much crap they can hold. The danger with any such bag is that it's really easy to overload yourself. Even carried messenger style, they get really heavy over the course of a day. If you're confident that you can maintain bag discipline or that you REALLY need the space, then go for it, but otherwise, I'd steer clear unless you want days full of back pain.

One aside about this - a lot of "messenger bags" are really just laptop cases. That's fine day to day, but really think about whether you need your laptop on the convention floor, and if you don't, that might be a good excuse to trim down your bag.

Now, this is where I have to admit something - one reason people choose messenger bags is that they just look cooler than backpacks or rolling carts. I can't argue with that. That timbuk2 slung across your back suggests your about to jaunt off on your mountain bike to jump off a cliff while pounding an energy drink. The backpack suggests you packed a lunch.

If this is really your hangup, then you really have two options. Option 1: just embrace it, and use a bag you think is awesome. Your back may hurt, but it's a fair trade. Option 2: just get over it and accept this is a convention, not a fashion show.

Now, I'm going to steer you away from rollers in general. I recognize they're necessary sometimes, either for physical reasons or because you're carrying miniature armies, but otherwise they're problematic. They're hard to handle on stairs and escalators, they're problematic if you need to leave the convention floor. Only do it if you must.

For the rest of us, the boring, reliable backpack is often the best choice. It doesn't get in your way when walking, you need to be a little mindful of it in crowds, but not too much so, and if you foolishly overfill it, it's not going to suck as much as it would to be carrying it any other way.

Lot of comments there, so let me boil it down. Use the smallest bag you can get away with and still comfortably carry, but if you need to have a more-than-small bag, I strongly suggest using a backpack.

Given that I hit the road tomorrow, I think I may follow this up with a bit of a discussion of what's worth putting in that bag. But in the meantime, what's your con bag? I'm not worried if it contradicts my suggestion - I know a well loved bag trumps all - but I'm curious what works well for people.

Gah, Origins!

2011-06-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

I only just looked at the Calendar and discovered that Origins has snuck up on me.

I love the summer conventions, but since the birth of my son, it's been simply impractical to try to go to both Origins and Gencon. Each one represents a week away form my wife and kid, and what's more, a week of extra parenting duty for my wife. So far as I'm concerned, she's a saint to put up with it for one convention, and she already put up with it for PAX-East. So, given that, I face the annual decision of Gencon vs. Origins, and I almost always choose Origins.

This is a fairly idiosyncratic choice. Gencon is absolutely bigger and more important. If you've got a product to launch, Gencon is the place to sell it. If you need to professionally network or see things you'll see nowhere else, Gencon is the place. Origins is simply not as big a deal (though it's still a pretty big deal), but that's part of the appeal for me, and that's doubly true this year. This Origins, I've got nothing to sell. No new releases to promote, no booth to man - I'll be going as a civilian.

Now, I could talk about a lot of fine differences in culture between the two conventions, or wax rhapsodic about the food available at Origins, but the reality is much simpler for me. At Gencon, I do a lot of stuff and see a lot of people, but at Origins, I actually get to talk to people. That's huge. Other things like playing games or seminars are a lot of fun, and I'll seek them out, but the heart of any convention for me is any time I get to sit down in a circle with a handful of people who are passionate about games and just shoot the breeze.

So, anyway, I'll be there. I'd tell you to look or me, but I'm an overweight white guy with a beard and glasses, so I tend to blend in like a ninja in this highly specialized environment. But if you do happen to find me, say hi. I am not hard to get talking.

Anyway, that means I need to go into this weekend with thoughts of packing. I put an unreasonable amount of thought into my choice of bag for the convention floor, but dammit, a man must have priorities!

An Honor to Make the List

2011-06-16T10:00:00.000-04:00

If you were to ask most gamers about RPG awards they would probably mention the Origin Awards or the Ennies. If they're in a certain segment, they might mention the Indie awards or the Golden Geek awards. But if they mention the Diana Jones awards, then you can be sure that they're a big freaking nerd.

The Diana Jones award may be the most mysterious of the RPG awards. A secretive council of gaming luminaries (no, I don't know who they are) hash out a short list of nominees, then give the award to one of them at Gencon. There are no categories, and no particular limits on what might be nominated. Most of the nominations are for games, but they can be for stranger things - ideas, projects, podcasts, organizations, people - anything related to gaming is on the table. It's not a popular award, or a structured award, and I'm not even sure whether it can be neatly summarized. In the way that some actor's are "an actor's actor", the DJA feels like the deep geek's deep geek's award.

Every year, the Diana Jones shortlist seems like a summary of what has been great and interesting in the past year. Running back through the shortlists of years past provides a snapshot of each year in turn and a sense of what sort of fantastic things have been going on. This year, Evil Hat made it onto that list with The Dresden Files RPG.

As ever, the rest of the list is fantastic as well. Sorencrane's Freemarket, Bully Pulpit's Fiasco, Catacombs from Sands of Time and Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, from Cranio Creation. Now, coming clean, I don't know Catacombs or Aliens, but their mere presence on the list is enough to encourage me to go correct that.

All of which is to say - wow. It's amazing to be on that list. I am utterly blown away.

Stuffing the Underpants

2011-06-15T10:00:00.001-04:00

Great comments on yesterday's post, at least some of which speak to the subject of today's post - what to do once you've got your underpants gnome plan in place. It's all well and good for me to say "Come up with a plan, then fill in the gaps that present themselves" but it might be a little unfair to not provide at least a little guidance on how to do so, and what you can do once you've got the trick working.

First, one of the easiest and most powerful tricks you can do is run through the list of your characters and ask yourself "Where does this plan intersect with this character?". Does it threaten someone or something they value? Does it use something they want? Is it taking place in their favorite restaurant? Would it just REALLY annoy them? Or perhaps does it have an element, such as an end, they might be inclined to support? If you don't have a good answer for one character, that's ok. If you don't have a good answer for any of your characters, then perhaps you need to consider the plan.

Second: The underpants gnomes need not be villains. Underpants planning can apply equally well to heroic or even indifferent outcomes. The characters may even find themselves as the agents responsible for delivering someone else's UG plan, which can get very interesting if they don't have the whole picture. One of the most classic twists is to have the player's handle step 2, not realizing that step 3 is something horrible.

As an aside, because it's a classic, it's kind of overdone and ham-fisted. If you must do a twist, have step 3 be something reasonably value neutral (like getting the bad guy a resource or removing an obstacle) but which will then be used in the unstated step 4. Also, if you do this, plan for your players figuring it out, and see if you can give them the tools to screw the guy who's trying to screw them. Few payoffs are as satisfying.

Third, though related to the second: The steps need not be uniformly bad or good. As Joe pointed out in the comments, having a REALLY ADMIRABLE step 3 paired with an UTTERLY ABHORRENT step 2 can make for a powerful mix. Similarly, a benign step 2 with a bad step 3 can be a great play driver. Not just for the twist scenario, as above, but even when played straight by an NPC willing to say "Yes, this bad thing will come of it, but compare that to all the good you'll do!". Fun stuff!

Fourth, and this one definitely got tipped in the comments, the true secret of the Underpants Gnomes is that you really only need to be concrete about step 1 and 3. When someone has a premise and a goal, things can go wrong in the middle, but they can regroup and keep trying to pursue the goal. As a GM, this means that so long as you keep your eye on step 3, you can be flexible about the shape that step 2 takes, possibly even requiring multiple attempts at step 2. Goals make much better planning aids than processes in this regard.

Fifth and last - once you have the trick of it, start juggling. Underpants Gnome Plans are surprisingly easy to maintain once you have them in play, so start introducing a few more. Where one such plan can blossom into a decently fleshed out arc, several of them can turn into the kind of tapestry that keeps a world feeling alive and in motion while giving the GM a bottomless bucket of resources to draw on to keep things moving.

Underpants Adventures

2011-06-14T10:00:00.000-04:00

Very interesting post about what went wrong with the Star Wars prequels that's worth a read for writers and GMs. It boils down to a pretty simple point - if you start with a simple plot, it allows for the characters and story to grow more complex in the telling, but if you start with an overly complex plot, then you've pretty much put a block on those things.

I've always subscribed to the idea that your players should be the most interesting characters in your game, and this advice applies to them as well. Starting from a simple plot creates an opportunity for your game to grow in directions that reflect you and your players.

If you want a practical way to go about this, consider the Underpants Gnome school of adventure design.

Satire aside, the 3 step plan is useful for almost any plot. Start with a villain, whoever it is, and give them a plan that really is as simple as:

Do something simple
Do something complicated
Achieve goal

This is usually easiest if you start from the goal, since that tends to suggest the previous steps. With that in mind, I strongly suggest a concrete goal - "power" (or even "profit") tend to be so amorphous as goals that they don't really suggest a course of action. If a goal of that sort is what you're looking for, then try to pick some manner of specific implementation of it, like leveling up or stealing a particular treasure.

This process is made much simpler if you embrace the cheese. There is a natural inclination to try to make the plots smart, coherent or clever, but realize that a lot of great plots have almost embarrassingly simple underpants structure. Y'know - Take Ring, Throw it in a Volcano, Free Middle Earth. Look at that example and consider how far short of the true complexity of the story that falls - the good parts lie in that difference.

Thus, start with something like:

Kidnap Orphans
Sacrifice them to Orcus
Gain Undead Army

On paper, this looks like the basis of something pretty cheesy, but it need not be. Challenge yourself and consider how this framework might make for a good story. The villain might be interesting, the orphans in question might have compelling stories, the sacrifice might require all sorts of logistics to pull off, maybe the use the army will be put to is interesting. Whatever. The point is it can be done.

The trick is that you don't need to solve all of the problems up front. The underpants plan should seem unworkable on the face of it because it leaves unanswered questions. Answering those questions is a driver of play.

All About the Glasses

2011-06-13T10:00:00.000-04:00

If you haven't yet, it's pretty interesting to check out people's answers to Friday's question, where I asked: If you were to play a game set in the DC comics universe, how quickly would you figure out that Clark Kent is Superman?

When I initially asked the question, I was just thinking of it as a simple example of how to apply narrative logic to play (not recognizing them is, in most circumstances, narrative appropriate) without needing to stress yourself out. However, the answers I've gotten to this question have really suggested to me that this may be an incredibly informative question to ask at the beginning of a campaign. It's a question with no wrong answer, but each right answer reveals a very different relationship with the fiction of the game.

Some of the big groupings I saw break down like this.

For some people (including myself), the answer is "never" (with minor qualifications, such as if he reveals himself). This is full trope buy in - treating the narrative logic of the setting as something as concrete as the logic of physics.

There were also several "Never, except..." answers that broke into two categories, tropes and stories. For the first, they would see through it if it was their particular trope (that is, if they were Batman). I tend to consider this the same as the first group, just elaborating on their position. The second group was a bit more varied, but in general they would not notice unless their personal story took thing sin that direction. As a category it's maddeningly fuzzy, but I seperate it out from the tropers because while it's also narrative logic, it's narrative logic based on a different priority stack. That is to say, it prioritizes the personal story over the setting story.

Some people nitpicked the question. You might think this does not reveal much about their play, but then you'd probably realize that yes, it probably does.

Another group viewed things through a very practical lens, and felt it really just depended on how much time and exposure they had, but given both, they would work it out because it's just logical. These pragmatists are more or less the opposite pole from the tropers, and aren't invested in the narrative logic of things.

Now, these groups were all more or less what I expected to hear from, but there were two other groups that surprised me as common responses, not just odd one-offs.

The first are the "immediately, unless..." crowd. At first blush they seem like the pragmatists, but they actually are totally willing to be "nevers" if they can can given an excuse, however thin. Super hynotism, superspeed, kryptonian muscle control or even really good acting - as long as some sort of explanation is in place, they're willing to suspend disbelief and buy into it. That is to say, they're willing to buy into comic book logic more than any abstract about narrative.

The second are what I consider "Immediately, because...". For them it's not about the logic, it's that breaking the premise is a desirable outcome. They are using the setting specifically so they can move things around, shake them up, and even break things.

Now, I'm not going to bother with naming these groups in any systematic way - that would be kind of silly, but I want to highlight a thing or two. See, a lot of people were surprised at how others answered, and it seems like the kind of surprise you don't want to have happen at your table. I can absolutely think of problems that have emerged in games I play that were a result of a single "Immediately, because..." player, not because that player was bad or problematic, but because his expectation differed so much from the rest of the table.

This is why I think it's a great question to ask before a campaign, but I think it's a question to re-ask, perhaps tuned to your specific campaign, every time you start something new. See, there's an inclination to think that these are player types, but that's just not the case. Some players might always pick the same things, but others will change choices dramatically as you move from genre to genre. Supers, for example, already calls for a certain level of suspension of disbelief from its enthusiastic fans, and someone who might willingly buy that glasses conceal Superman's true identity would NEVER tolerate that kind of "Disguise" in their urban horror or sword & Sorcery game.

Anyway, it's a question I encourage you to ask your players. Feel free to refine it as you see fit, but Clark Kent's glasses are a sufficiently universal symbol that there aren't many people who won't "get" the question as asked (so long as they "get" playing an RPG).

A Quick Survery

2011-06-10T10:00:00.002-04:00

Connectivity precludes a full post today, so I'm going to ask a question. I asked the same question on Twitter, and I intend to write about the answers I got, but I figured I'd ask here, both for those who don't use twitter and for those who do but want more than 140 chars to explain their position. So here's the question:

If you were to play a game set in the DC comics universe, how quickly would you figure out that Clark Kent is Superman? Presume that you are in a position to interact with both - You're Metropolis PD, Daily Planet Staff or one of the other interesting citizens of Metropolis.

If the answer changes based on situation (such as depending on the character you're playing) then feel free to say as much. Similarly, if there's a reasonably simple "it depends" go ahead and let me know. That said, don't worry about obvious exceptions like him directly revealing it to you.

The answers I've gotten so far have been incredibly informative to me, and I can only imagine that a little more room to speak will make them moreso.

Thanks!

PS - And because, as noted on twitter, I'm not looking to trick anybody, I'll reveal my answer up front: Never.

A Tale of Two Metrics

2011-06-09T10:00:00.000-04:00

I was originally thinking of knocking our to metrics (Energy and Responsiveness) today before I realized one of them didn't work. Let me lay them out and maybe you can see why that happened.

Energy, which in my head I was kind of calling "Jazz" was a measure of how enthusiastic and engaged the table was at the end of the games.

0 - play has been flat or bad-tired.
1 - Play went ok
2 - Everyone's totally jazzed!

Bad-tired, btw, is important to distinguish from good-tired, which can fall under Jazzed. Bad tired is just beat and unresponsive. Good tired is the end-of-a-marathon kind of tired, where you're wiped but ecstatic.

Responsiveness is an idea that, like most of these, distilled from a number of other points and which might also be called flexibility. How well did the GM respond to player actions and incorporate player feedback and response?

0 - Everything went exactly as planned. Player diversions were brought back quickly into line.
1 - Player's surprised the GM, but GM rolled with it.
2 - Unexpected Player decisions dramatically impacted play in a non-punitive fashion.

Note the emphasis on surprise and unexpected in that. If the GM offers the players a choice and he's ready for the choice they make, that's things going as planned - that is to say, 0 does not automatically equate to a railroad. The non-punitive qualifier on 2 is probably unnecessary, but is just there for the GM who's "responsiveness" takes the form of punishing player choices (which is a total 0 move).

Ok, so given these two, energy and responsiveness, which one did I discard? Obviously, energy is something incredibly critical to judging how well a game went, while it's entirely possible to have an awesome game with a low responsiveness score, especially if the GM prepares well. So given that, why is it energy I'm dropping on the floor?

The answer to this is something which, I think, casts a light on why a lot of the metrics may seem less important than the things which determine how well a game went. Specifically, it's actionable. Consider: if your game has a low energy and the cause is not something obvious and external (like everyone being tired or hungover) then what steps do you do change that, to move a game from blah to jazzed? There's no one answer to that, in part because energy is an _outcome_ not something the GM _does_. Energy maybe a good thing to check to ask yourself if a game went well, but it's not useful to check if you're trying to figure out what you did.

In contrast, if I've got a low responsiveness and I want to change that, it's very easy to suggest a course of actions, even if it's as simple as "Listen to your players, respect their choices, and be prepared for them to take things in unexpected directions". Yes, those points can all be drilled into further - that's actually part of the point - but they're specific points with a specific goal. As such, they're actionable, which important to the ultimate goal of this, which is to say to be able talk in terms of things a GM can actually do rather than in terms of things they want to have happen.

The downside of that approach is that we end up with intuitive disconnects like this. Energy feels more important - it _feels_ like something we should be measure, in part because it reflects the outcome of many other successes and failures, so it seems like it should be a rich datapoint. The problem is (and this gets even nerdier) that it's actually a very lossy signal. Let's take three ways a game might be awesome - The GM might be brilliantly engaging, the adventure might be incredibly well designed, or the group might just really click with one another. Any one of those things, or a combination of them, could result in everyone being jazzed at the end of a game. But the fact that people are jazzed does not tell me which of those things happened. I might be able to intuit the answer form my recollection of the game, but even if I'm right, knowing that everyone was jazzed doesn't help me replicate it.

So energy is important, and in fact I think it's probably a critical thing to check if we assess how well a game went - something we might want to do down the line, especially since it makes an interesting second data point to compare with GM metrics - but it's not the answer to the question we're asking.

Make sense?