The Choice Triangle

There is a business idea called, among other names, the project management triangle.  Basically, any project has three priorities - speed, quality and cost - and these are the points on the triangle. Ideally you want to quickly deploy high quality products at minimal cost, but in reality, there are usually tradeoffs.  If you want more of one, you usually have to sacrifice one of the others (and sometimes both).  Most anyone in business had encountered some form of this idea. For me, it was most succinctly summed up by David Gerrold in one of his Solomon Short quotes: Good, quick, cheap.  Pick two.

A similar triangle presents itself when it comes time to present players with a choice.  There is a great fondness in game design these days for "hard choices".  This is one of those ideas that people instinctively understand, to a point.  The problem is that a lot of things can  make a choice hard, but hitting any one of them too hard produces something that's out of skew.

The three points on our choice triangle are meaning, clarity and urgency.  As with the project management triangle, we are usually forced by necessity to only hit two of these points, but by understanding these tradeoffs, we can avoid hitting only one of them to our own detriment.

Sidebar: Player Vs Character - One important thing about these three points is that they matter both in and out of fiction, though sometimes in slightly different ways. Thus, when I speak about the player and the character, I'm not using them interchangeably here.  

Meaning is the first thing that people think about when they consider hard choices, as it is both obvious and ephemeral.  That is, the idea that a choice carries a lot of weight is one we gravitate to, but it can take many many forms.  The weight may be emotional or practical, and it most often demands an apples vs oranges kind of comparison. There's a purity to Sophie's choice (You must sacrifice one child, which will it be?) that we dig, but more often these choices are between two different values. "What would you do for a million dollars?" is a choice between values and need.  "Do you save the king or your lover?" is a choice between love and duty.  Examples abound.

The main downside with meaning is that it's rich fare - it is easy to become overwhelmed or desensitized to it when it comes up too often.  A game where every choice is meaningful is going to get melodramatic very quickly.  Of course, if you remove meaning entirely, then choices get hollow.


Ideally, meaning applies equally well to the players as to the character, but that's not always guaranteed.  If a choice is meaningful to the player but not the character then you're probably fine, but if it's meaningful to the character but not the player then the disconnect can be rough.  At best, the player goes along with it, using sympathy or habit to substitute for genuine investment.[1] At worse, it feels like a hollow exercise.  


Clarity means having an understanding and the consequences and outcomes of each possible choice.  It can come from knowledge of setting and fiction, but it will often come from mechanics, which give clarity to potentially muddy situations.  Clarity is especially important in tactical situations, so much so that it's absence has its own terminology (the "fog of war") but that doesn't mean it's not important elsewhere. While clarity is important to the specific choice, it's also important to a player's perspective on the choice - clarity grants confidence.

All the strengths of clarity can become weaknesses with excess, reducing choices to mechanical exercises.   If you've ever read a choose your own adventure with your thumb saving the tough choices, then you'll understand this - you have sacrificed other elements of the choice (excitement, fear and risk - the angels of uncertainty) in favor of a certain understanding.  Implicit in this is one of the real tricks of clarity - there is an idea that if you grasp all the variables, then the best choice will make itself clear.   And if that's true, then choice becomes an exercise in research, which is great in some situations, but not so much for play.  But without clarity, choices become muddled, players grow suspicious and play grinds.

Clarity is most important to the player - it's not really possible for something to be clear to a player and not to a character, unless the GM has failed in her duties to communicate[2].  If something is clear to the player but not the character, this may create some friction, but it's largely a roleplaying opportunity, as it's up to the player to choose how strongly to engage this division.

Urgency depends upon the immediacy of the situation, but can also speak to the immediacy of consequences.  That is, the urgency of a ticking time bomb may be obvious, but if forced to choose between trouble now or trouble later, that is also a matter of urgency.

Urgency is the most dependent upon player engagement.  One strength and weakness of RPGs is that they offer few tools to guarantee pacing - there may be only 3 seconds left on the timer for that bomb, but those three seconds may take an hour to pass, especially if someone is hungry or needs to go to the bathroom.  As such, it's hard to create urgency from scratch.  However, urgency builds on itself, and once you get it started it can be a lot easier to maintain - this is at the heart of most good fight scenes.  Juggling this is a table skill plain and simple, and that makes it very hard to plan for.  Still, without urgency, every choice can become a debate, which is not a prospect I look forward to.

Urgency of consequences are a lot easier to plan for, but they help less. It's just something you need to be aware of - if players are under constant threat anyway, faraway consequences

Sidebar: The Right Choice - Implicit in all of this is the idea that whatever choice the players are being presented with is genuinely open ended.  This is not always the case - there are times when there is (at least according to the GM) a right and wrong choice.  This is not automatically bad, but it does mean that you as the GM need to take some extra steps to make sure you're not being a jerk.  It is very easy fro your idea of the right or obvious choice to differ greatly from player experience, and when you punish players for that disconnect, you're killing everyone's fun on principle.

 Consider that each point on this triangle also reveals a reason why someone might make a "wrong" choice.  Their values might demand that they make a sub-optimal meaningful choice. A lack of clarity may result in a mistake. Urgency may keep someone from making the choice they would if they had time to think about it. These are great things - they make these fictional choices feel human to us, because they're the same reasons we make bad choices in real life.

This is not to say the choices should not have consequences. But there should not be punishments for a choice being wrong.  Wrong decisions are the fuel of play. Treasure them.

Obviously the best solution is to get all three of these together, but that's not always possible (or even desirable), but you can get a lot of juice with simple pairings.

Meaning + Clarity - A choice that is clear and meaningful tends to be one of those big, emotional choices that characters chew on and stress about in fiction.  Because it lacks urgency, it can just hang over a situation, coloring things and providing a powerful backdrop.

Meaning + Urgency - On the other hand, a choice that is urgent and meaningful tends to be very life or death.  Urgency underscores the lack of a clean conversion rate between values, and also prevents compromise, making sure the choice has teeth.  

Clarity + Urgency - Many tactical choices are clear and urgent, since you need to do something to keep that guy from bashing in your face.  Despite the lack of meaning, there are usually consequences to these sort of choices, but they're usually abstract or resource based.  Needing to take action because someone is going to cut your throat is urgent and meaningful, needing to take action because a dagger is about to do 1d4 damage to you is urgent and clear.

Anyway, there's a whole art to offering good, hard choices without being a tool, but hopefully this helps a little.





1 - There are games that depend on this, at least for short term play, and for players who can generate that sympathetic buy in, they can be very satisfying, but that's not a universal state.

2 - Though you need to be wary of that in Gygaxian play - plenty of adventures will kill you with things that would be obvious to your character but which you overlooked as a player.

My Kind of Stunts

I do not take a terribly mechanistic approach to stunts. It’s a taste thing, but by and large I want stunts to be big, sweeping things which say something big and meaningful about the character, not just to serve as a fine gradation between two characters.  With this in mind, I’m going to post up some stunts I’ve written up for another game (an Amber Game)  because they illustrate something important - these stunts were literally created for specific characters to support a specific theme that the player had chose (mechanically called an “Affinity”). 

Technically, this is for a Tempo game, but Tempo and Fate stunts are basically interchangeable, so feel free to think of them as Fate stunts.  That said, there's something important to note about most of these stunts. Let's see if it stands out. 

First, there’s Cassidy, who’s affinity is “Broken Things”

Because Friend's Help

When alone in a scene, Cassidy may spend a Fate point to declare she is getting help from a friend.  That friend has a skill of her choice equal to Cassidy's lore skill, and can help her out in any way reasonable.  The first time a friend is used, they are named, and they accrue one point.  Each subsequent time they are used, they gain another point.  After a friend has accrued enough points to equal Cassidy's scholar bonus (+9) they can no longer be called on, though a new friend may be available with a similar skill. What happens to them is an interesting question

Antici....pation

Cassidy can spend a fate point for a flashback of any time within the past 24 hours, wherein she can be doing anything that she could have done, even if she wouldn't have the knowledge to do it at the time - she is just that prepared.

The Missing Piece

If Cassidy has a substantial piece of something, she can find the rest of it, given time and attention.

Through The Cracks

Cassidy can always find a way out.  Keeping her prisoner is a delay at best.

The Shattering

Cassidy never does more damage than she intends.  She can wield a sledgehammer with the precision of a scalpel.  In addition to more or less guaranteeing that she always has all the tools she needs, it allows her to make impossibly precise called shots without penalty.

Elementary

Cassidy can keep any piece of magic or technology working as long as no one notices.

What is Lovely Cannot Stay

Cassidy spend a fate point to use a broken thing as if it were fully functional provided she has at least a recognizable piece of it.  She may only do this once per thing, and if she does, then she will never be able to fix it (though someone else might). “Thing” in this case is very broadly defined. It applies to objects, certainly, but also to ideas and large scopes.  From the Coliseum, she could give the last order to the Roman Empire, if she saw fit.

State is a State of MInd

If Cassidy spends a fate point and breaks something, she may destroy it utterly, save for piece small enough to carry. So long as there are no witnesses, she may restore the broken thing from its piece. 

Next is Fion, whose affinity is Treachery

The Price of Service

- Fion is a useful ally.  If his offer of service is accepted by someone, he grants them a new aspect (Fion's Service) which they can tap as a normal aspect, but which Fion can also spend fate points through, even when he's not present, representing the long term impacts of his actions.  However, If Fion ever chooses to betray that aspect, he can remove it and more or less declare a consequence.

Ear for Secrets

- In conversation with an NPC, Fion's player can hand the GM a fate point and ask what one thing this person is trying NOT to talk about.  if there's no answer, he gets the fate point back. Otherwise, the GM tells him.

It Takes One to Know One

- Fiona can spot a spy or a snitch with superhuman acuity.  It takes Fion approximately five minutes of conversation with someone to see if they serve a master other than the obvious one. This ability doesn't tell him  who the actual master is, though there may be hints.



Ok, so there they are.  Notice a trend?

These are, by and large, almost entirely system agnostic.  With one or two exceptions, they don't hook into any mechanics in particular (except spending a fate point, which is a pretty portable idea).  This is a result of the kind of thinking that constructs them - I don't think in terms of mechanics, but rather, I think in terms of play.  Specifically, I think about how I would imagine doing this cool thing, then have the stunt reflect that.  If that description doesn't suffice (as in the case of The Price of Service), *that's* when I turn my thoughts to mechanics. 

I also tend skip to the end.  I used to build stunts in trees and stacks with the idea that you could buil dup to cool things, but I've grown tired of that. Instead, I just zoom in on the question fo what a player is REALLY trying to do when they buy three stealth stunts, and try to provide the answer to that.

This approach has some downsides.  It takes exactly zero considerations for balance, but that's not a real problem.  What *is* a problem is that there's so much taste involved in this approach that you risk missing the tone you should be going for.  That is, the success of this model depends on being in tune with what your players like.  This is the reason that it's harder to put this approach in published material and it is to simply implement it at the table. Or, at least that's my usual thought.

I'm less certain of the truth of that these days.  Certainly, such a product would automatically narrow its own audience, but there is a case that ANY mechanical decision can do that too.  And going largely systemless does offer opportunities that other approaches don't have.

So, I'm not sure.  I might be considering sharing more stuff from my table to see if it is more useful to the world at large than I've usually considered.

What's in a Book?

If you have never done so, stop and think about what goes into a good RPG book.  Not the RPG, but the book itself.

There are a lot of challenges a designer faces when it comes time to design the book.  An RPG potentially needs to do 3 things -
1. Teach a game,
2. Provide and engaging read,
3. Serve as a reference

This is the project management triangle of game publishing - at absolutely best you can pick two, but on many days you’ll be lucky to get just one.  If there’s a game that has ever successfully done all 3, I have not seen it.[1]

But it’s not the only choice that needs to get made - completeness is also a spectrum.  To illustrate, look at Evil Hat’s two big games - Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG.  Fate is a fairly lightweight system, but those are *huge* books, because we made the decision to really talk everything through.  They’re iceberg books - the amount that actually comes up in play is much smaller than the body of information presented, but that large body is what supports the tip.

The problem is, this is daunting for many.  The idea that Spirit of the Century is a pick up game seems preposterous if judged purely by page count. So there is an impulse to step away from that level of completeness in order to provide something easier to digest.  Rules that add complexity get trimmed, edge cases get smoothed down, complex sets get standardized, all in favor of striking a balance that serves a different set of priorities.

And this is an important thing - something really critical to understanding Fate and the role of Fate Core - these are not the *right* choices, they are the choices which *best serve* the goal.  The Fate Core book is, effectively, the 101 on Fate.  It covers the basics, teaches you how to use it, and gives an implementation that works very well for a core set of activities. But like most 101’s, it is a foundation that will largely get discarded in detail (though not in spirit) as you proceed along the path of mastery.

We talk a lot about “dials” in the rules, as a way to adjust certain rules to certain effects, but even that is a streamline.  When we say everything in Fate is a dial, we really mean *everything*.  The four outcomes? Dial.  Stress and consequences?  Dial.  The fate point economy? Dial.  I can change every one of those things in substantial ways and still have a game that is recognizably Fate.  And that’s the point.

The secret of Fate Core is that there really is no core, or rather, what core there is is so small that it wouldn’t even cover a piece of paper. Fate is a tool to create and resolve interesting situations and respect what’s important.  But like most such simple premises, it spawns a thousand questions which - if answered - result in some really big books.

Why does this matter?  Because it means that Fate Core is going to be flawed.  Not just because it’s a human endeavor, but because it’s a snapshot of a certain set of priorities, and those priorities are not going to suit every gamer and every game. Hell, many of them do not suit *me*.  But despite that, it is critical that there *be* a baseline, for without that discussion is difficult to pursue and, by no coincidence, if that baseline is accessible, then it is easier to discuss.

So, read Fate Core.  Learn from Fate Core.  And when you reach the point where you want to change things to fix them?  THAT’S where the journey really begins.



1 - If you think a game has, and that game just happens to be your favorite game, then it is possible that you are a tiny bit biased. 

Where I've Been

So, I've run more silent than usual of late, but there's a good reason for it.

Evil Hat kicked off the Fate Core kickstarter a little while back, and it's doing well. Really, really well.  And part of that doing well has resulted in a number of stretch goals which are keeping me busy.  For starters, I've been writing the magic systems for the toolkit.  The target for that was 10,000 words, and as of last edit it's a little north of 17,000. That sounds good until you realize how much stuff I couldn't put in it.  There are five magic systems in there, and I had to leave out several others for reasons of space.  They'll probably see the light of day someday, though.  I've also been doing a lot of random writing of ideas for the rest of the toolkit - interesting things to do with skills, aspects, stunts and other stuff.   I'm also very excited to be working with Clark Valentine to help him produce the Fate Accelerated Edition.

All of which is to say, that most of my wordcount is going down the FATE tunnel for the moment, and will be for a little bit.  I'll be back once that slows down a little, but for the moment that's the big priority, and I thank you for your patience.

User Stories and Adventure Design

Agile project management (and related ideas like Scrum or Kanban) is something that I deal with a lot on a day to day basis. It's too big a topic to fully explain, but in a nutshell, it's a method of doing work in small, achievable chunks that steadily move towards and end goal (in contrast to planning a big project, then building it). It has strengths and weaknesses, and is very well suited to certain types of software development. It also has a strong ethos of programmers having strong influence on what's being done, so it's unsurprisingly popular among programmers.

One of the cornerstone ideas of Agile is the User Story. A story is a structured sentence that explains something that a user can do using your system. It's easy to do these poorly or just treat them as requirements, but done properly they provide a real shape to the work to be done because they're explicitly demonstrable (That's a big deal in agile - producing incomplete things that work as an iterative process). If you have something small and concrete that you can demonstrably do or not to, it becomes a lot easier to ask yourself what work you need to do to accomplish it.

Properly structured, a user story goes something like "As a [KIND OF USER] I want to [DO SOMETHING] so that [REASON]"[1]. For example, "As a student, I want to be able to buy parking passes online so I can park my car at the dorm".

I was thinking about this today, and I realized that I would love to use this in campaign planning - specifically, I want to have a "user story" for each PC.

There are a few reasons for this. First, the DO SOMETHING for a REASON pairing can be easily interpreted as a call to action and a pointer at what might happen next. That is to say, as each story gives the GM clear direction regarding where they want to go, and the reason hints at what the next arc goal for the character might be.

Note that this is slightly different (and more useful) than a goal, because it's got an explicit action component to it. There is no question of how this translates into play - it's something the character intends to do.

It also scales well. In agile, a full project can be made of many user stories. In the same way, a larger goal can be composed of many user stories, but only if the player wants to.

Take for example, a character driven by revenge. As KROM THE MIGHTY I want to FIND MY PARENT'S KILLER so that I can AVENGE THEIR MURDER.

That's nicely concrete, and depending on how it's approached, it could be the story for a session or for an entire campaign (and that distinction should be discussed with the player). For a one shot, then it's right there - in the session, Krom must find his parent's killer so he can confront them. For a campaign, this gives something to work back from. How does he find his parent's killer? Does he know who he's looking for? no? Ok, how does he identify them? Snake Symbol? SNAKE SYMBOL! And now, his user story is:

As KROM THE MIGHTY I want to IDENTIFY THIS SNAKE AMULET so that I can FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MY PARENT'S KILLER.

So how many stories should a character have? Obviously, Krom has a lot of stories that build up to his vengeance, so what do we do with them?

Agile has an idea called "The backlog". Basically, all stories go into the backlog as you think of them, and then at the beginning of a sprint (a period of doing work - in game terms, consider is a session or short arc) you pull out the ones you'll be working on for this sprint. PC user stories could work the same way - a PC might have any number of stories at a time, but only one of them is "active" for a given session. Something else comes up, throw it into the backlog - maybe it's next week's story.

The only rule is that play should be pushing stories to done. If a story has to go back into the backlog, that's a bas sign.

Now, the fact that this is based on Agile doesn't mean you need to follow EVERY rule. For example, if you consider a "sprint" to be 3 sessions or so, you may end up staggering the characters, so that they resolve their stories (and pick up a new one) at different times. You also can play fast and loose with resources, since velocity isn't much of an issue (though that might be worth considering another time). If you have one user story per player and possibly a user story or to for the group, then you should always have enough material to drive a session of play in awesome directions.

1 - Agile nerds will point out that this is not the only structure, and that Reason is far from obligatory. And they will be right. But this particular model works for what I'm trying to accomplish here.

The Argument For Rich Dice In One Image

(With Apologies to Atomic Robo. For more info on Rich Dice, check here)

Rich Skills

Sci-fi and Fantasy author Kate Elliot has a fantastic post up today about the skills that her protagonist has and why. While I do not doubt that it's useful stuff from the perspective of writing, it is lightning in a bottle on the topic of skills in game design. You should go read it. I would rather you go read it and skip this post than the reverse. It's that useful.

For those of you ignoring my advice, the short for is this - the emphasis of the post is on the importance of sewing to the protagonist of her novels (which I have not read, but now will on the strength of this post). This protagonist sounds like very standard fantasy hero material - swordsmanship, sharp wits, stuff like that - and sewing is a fairly anomalous skill in a heroic context, yet Elliot makes the case for why it's very important.

The reasons for this translate wonderfully to an RPG context, and I'm going to lay out three bigs ones right here.

1. Every Skill Tells a Story

In Elliot's post, the reason the protagonist knows how to sew is tied tightly to her upbringing and the social and economic situation she was in. It's opens a window on many other elements of her character.

In many RPGs, these hooks are explicitly called out (in the form of things like aspects), but there is no reason that skills can't carry a lot of that weight on their own, so long as someone stops to think about them. It's a little bit more indirect than having the player hang a lantern on the character's background, but it tends to feel very organic and fits the character very well because it's driven by choices that the player has made (with their skills).

How to use this in your game:

The fact that your game doesn't have "indie" mechanics is no reason characters can't have rich backgrounds tied to the setting. Go through a character's skill and use them as a basis for conversation. Find out how and why they learned the skill and perhaps where they learned it and from whom. Look for skills that are particularly high, particularly low, missing or out of place. Even if the player hadn't thought the background elements through when picking skills, this kind of focus questioning can really spark people's creativity.

2. Every Skill is a Social Skill

In Elliot's post, one key element of sewing is that it is a largely social activity, performed in groups and forming the basis of a lot of interaction.

If you stop and think about it, this is true of many groups. Think about your own life and consider how many of your social interactions are driven by "social skills" versus those driven by common interests and practices (which social skills are then layered on top of). True, fandom doesn't map 1:1 to a skill, but the idea is a potent one.

How to use this in your game:

Consider broadening your definition of what skills can do. Take a page from Feng Shui and allow skills to also be used for contacting people within the sphere of that skill. You might even want to more broadly allow skills to be substituted for social skills within their appropriate context, or at least grant bonuses when appealing to the group that the skill represents.

3. Every Skill is Part of the World

As an extension of skills being social is that every skill exists in the context of the larger society. This can be meaningful in a few ways. It might be economic (is this a skill people get rich off of, or which only the rich have time to learn?), cultural (is this a "woman's" skill? What about in a different group?), social (Is there a stigma associated with this skills? Is it associated with a particular group?) or logistic (Are there schools or organizations associated with these skills?). Any skill can be a window into any of these issues or ideas.

How to use this in your game

As GM, stop and consider the skill's context in the setting (and, if possible, take your cues from the player backgrounds). Ask what the "typical" person defined by that skill is like, then ask yourself how that changes from place to place.

Keep these questions in your back pocket for when players travel and you want to convey that things have changed. Describing things as looking different is one thing, but it's much less compelling then changing how the world sees the character. Even if it's just a small thing, it's personal, and that's huge.