The Sports Paradox

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.