Monthly Archives: January 2024

The Seasoned Gamer Challenge

Posted on by dconstructions
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I love learning new games. In fact, it might be my favourite thing about games. I think learning the rules is not just part of a game it is a kind of game in itself. One I’m great at and love. A big part of gaming is exploration and that’s what learning is: finding out what you can and can’t do, what you want and don’t want and how to get the former and avoid the latter, and seeing how the game communicates all of that and gives it meaning. It’s like diving into an ocean: a whole new world of physics to grapple with and levers to pull.

For the young people, this is Salt-n-Pepa, the world’s greatest rap trio. This is a pun on “seasoned.”

But I also like exploring games further. I may not be a gamer who plays something on BGA two hundred times in a week so I’m absolutely sure on the win to pay ratio of cards x and y. But exploration isn’t just the first dive in. Exploration is also the languid wanderings and deeper longer looks. The whimsical experiments down winding paths and the mistakes and getting lost. It’s a conversation with the rules, the designer, the art director, with yourself and with your players. It’s also a feature in your life. I remember the years we we played Warhammer and Shadowrun every week, that one afternoon where we played Settlers of Catan four times in a row, that period where we couldn’t wait to get Dominion back to the table with new people and new combos. I remember the year we got Pandemic and cards like One Quiet Night and Airlift became part of our language and thought processes, shorthand for good things we craved and things we felt in our blood and bones when they arrived. Likewise we played Arkham Horror so much we had our own in-jokes and barely had to think about our opening moves. We built up our own mythologies about how hard it was to get a job on the newspaper and why the Woods were so dangerous

And meanwhile I don’t remember the day at a con when I played six new games.

We all have too many games. We know this. It’s why terms like Shelf of Shame exist and why someone invented the 10×10 challenge (aiming to play 10 games 10 times each in a year). Both of those don’t address the core problem though: we’re BUYING too many games. No matter how much we try to keep playing, more games are coming in. I’m in a weekly gaming group now where we never play the same game twice. Why not? Because it’s unfair. Everyone has a shelf of shame ten feet high and wants their games to get to the table. We can’t circle back, it would be special treatment.

And here’s the real talk part: the fact that we buy so many games is bad for the hobby. It’s bad for design. Kickstarter and crowdfunding have been amazing for access and getting more games out, but it created more and more a trend where buying is more important than playing. Because with crowdfunding we can never try before we buy, and that means, inevitably, companies focus on what gets you to buy, not what gets you to keep playing. They know the average number of times a game is played is creeping closer and closer to 1 and might even be below 1 now. So they don’t need it to be good. Or different. Or robust. I’m not saying design is getting necessarily worse. But there is a lack of pressure on it to be better.

Meanwhile, the sheer volume and the need to appeal to the familiar means games are getting more homogenous. Since you aren’t going to play 100 games of your favourite trick taker, and find all its wonderful variations, you can play 100 different trick takers…but each one ends up feeling the same. I don’t mean variety for the sake of variety but every thing I play is starting to feel the same.

Or worse: just very middling and uninspired. Homogeneity means we keep reusing tools that work, but we’re not actually choosing the exact right tools, nor are we shaping them to fit. We’re just cutting things up and putting them back in, like a movie made only of cliches from other movies. This can get the job done but it’s not really good. And so so many games I find just leave me hollow. They are workable, but not great. Not quite finished or not quite playtested enough with enough different people. Mistakes haven’t been picked up. Rough edges aren’t smoothed off. Fiddliness not resolved into elegance.

I know some people won’t care, or think I’m an old man yelling at the cloud. In the same way I know most people don’t care about bad movies or bad books. They just want them to be there and take up space and maybe have a cute dragon in them. And that’s fine. But I do care. I care very much. And if nothing else, I think we should talk about it, which is what I hope this post encourages.

So here’s the challenge: I think every game worth its salt should be played at least fifty times to get the most out of it. I think I’d like to see the average for every game get up to fifty. But when I actually think about it, I’ve probably only played Ticket to Ride 20 times and that seems a lot. So let’s halve that. 25 times. Actually, you know what? Pandemic Legacy, if you won every chapter, was only 12 times and it was a masterpiece. So let’s say I want you to play every game you buy 12 times. Not every game in the world, mind you: JUST THE ONES YOU BUY.

And let’s assume you’re a seasoned gamer. This is something of a hobby for you. So we might assume you play games once a week. You might skip a week now and then, but you also might play two or three or four games on a night. Or a whole bunch at a convention. The average of one a week seems fair. So this means if you buy a game every three months, you can play it for twelve weeks then buy a new one. And therein lies the name of this challenge: you, the seasons gamer, can buy a game once per season.

Note you can PLAY as many games as you like. I don’t care what you play. But if you buy any games, you get four a year. One per season. Note this also doesn’t include free games, or games you borrow or games from a library. Only ones you pay money for. You get four of those a year. You get to decide if it counts when you back the kickstarter or when it arrives, but you only count those once. Also? If it comes from a charity shop it doesn’t count. Second hand purchase? You can count that as a half. And if you SELL a game on or give one away, it wipes out a purchase. If you donate it or put it in a street library, it can wipe out two! Because that’s stopping others from buying.

And I know, as a game publisher, I don’t want to be the one not encouraging sales. But I’m going to do it anyway. Maybe this is stupid of me. Maybe I’m missing the point. I’ll take criticism because it might just get this more talked about. Because I do think we’re just buying too much, and I think it’s bad for us, it’s bad for the industry and its bad for design. It’s probably not great for the environment either. It’s a consumerist mindset too, of valuing ownership over enjoyment. I think if we buy less we might actually share more. And believe me, I also know how much I want to be the nerd who owns the thing, so I can take it home and stroke it and feel special instead of having to look on from the sidelines. It is lovely to own things. But that turns this hobby into an endless game of consumership and oneupmanship, a game we can never ever win because there will always be another game that someone has and we don’t. We’re not just not playing our games, we’re robbing ourselves of every part of the joy. We’ve turned gaming as a hobby into nothing but collecting and owning, and then ripping the joy away from that as well because we can never really get enough.

Plus, it can be a whole different kind of lovely to open a game someone else has loved as well, with little notes on the scoresheets and bumps of love on the corners. Having fun with it then passing it back. and talking about how it went. The truth is games were never meant to be hung on the walls like art: they are meant to be like books, showing the wear and tear of hundreds of readers that came before, and will come after. And even if you do love having things to hold and admire, wouldn’t you rather curate that down to the very best? The most meaningful? The things that you really love?

So there it is: the Seasoned Gamer Challenge. Buy one game a season, and no more. If you set yourself this challenge this year, post about it. #seasonedgamerchallenge If you make it, or don’t, talk about that too. Talk about how buying things can end up running and ruining our lives. Because once we talk about this, we can figure out what to do about it.

The Why of RPG Mechanics

Posted on by dconstructions
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I’m slowly reading Unknown Armies 3rd edition. Compared to the average person I know a lot of roleplaying games but since I normally only buy games I’m going to run I never really know much about what’s currently out and popular. I’m generally very behind. Even when i did follow the scene I have never had the time or money or ability to read quickly to follow many games. I used to feel bad about not getting across my field but then I saw Reiner Knizia say that he doesn’t play any games besides his own because he is so busy making his own and I figure if it’s good enough for Doctor K it’s good enough for me.

But then you see UA3 for a low price second hand and you’re like I can take the time to read one of the most famous RPGs by one of the fields luminaries. It was worth it because you always learn a lot reading anything good or even half decent, if you’ve got your learning brain engaged. You get lots of ideas for blogs too.

One thing I spotted in this edition was there’s a bit in the GMing section where it explains something I’d never understood. In UA, when you make a character you list three things that effect your emotions: one that makes you feel rage, one that makes you feel fear and one that makes you feel noble. I was always confused by the last one. It makes sense for characters to have a thing that scares them so they run away from a fight and a thing that makes them want to run into a fight with anger, but I was like “noble? what’s that for?”. Now this might have been in previous editions but regardless here it explained that the noble one was basically a way for players to ask for things that made their characters feel, well, cool I guess, Rage and Noble in particular are “I want this to happen to me”.

Now I’m autistic so maybe that was obvious to everyone, but the name in particular just threw me. I also wasn’t 100% sure that’s what those things were for at all. And it made me think again about this thing where we don’t explain why RPG mechanics exist very often.

Another example: we were talking the other day about how given that the average stat in Apocalypse World is a 0 and you need a 7 to even partially succeed, the game can feel pretty rough at times, since 60% of the time you suffer a consequence (16% for a full success). That’s fine for a harsh post apocalyptic game where everything comes at a price. We did the same thing in Relics: (49/21), but in Relics we explain that the point of this is to drive players to add Memories, and to highlight the theme of desperation. But AW doesn’t explain that it too is a game of terrible choices, and sometimes a lot of Powered By the Apocalypse games don’t get this and copy the mechanics over to a setting not about desperation. I suggested the rules explain the intent, and somebody replied “why though?”

I understand that I think beyond most people, but it struck me as very odd that the very idea of explaining yourself would be odd. But for some reason it is the exception.

I kind of get this in mainstream boardgames. I get this in video games too, because a lot of the mechanics are already invisible. And yes, game designers lie all the time, and part of game design is mind control: we’re forcing you to do things without you knowing we are, and it won’t always work if you know everything going on behind the curtain. But most TTRPG players are keenos who want to dive ever-deeper into mechanics. It is a sound argument, in fact, that TTRPGs aren’t games at all, but toolkits that let GMs (and sometimes players) make a game. We also have a solid tradition of understanding that GMs are going to change rules to suit their table. So it just makes sense to me to explain why rules are the way they are!

Heck, sometimes I’ve seen the worst possible situation: games where the game designer says or implies DO NOT FRICKING CHANGE MY RULES THEY EXIST FOR A REASON, or the community does this, but then doesn’t actually give the reasons. Not to pick on Vincent Baker, but some of his games are quite OPAQUE in tone as well, which makes it worse when they are copied, and worse when people insist that the “correct” experience comes from “correct” play. I’m not accusing anyone of doing this, but I do think a lot of TTRPG designers have the same problem of a lot of GMs: they’re a fan of themselves. And that translates sometimes to keeping our cards hidden. We think we’re goddamn magicians who don’t want to give away the tricks.

Here’s a thing we know: adult learners learn best when they know WHY they are learning something. You might assume that people want to learn games so they can play games, but that’s a dumb assumption. Never assume your audience is motivated to give a fuck about anything, least of all your rules. So it’s in your interest to motivate them by showing them why things are the way they are! Something else we know is that people are smart and they like being treated as smart. If they don’t want to know why something is the way it is, they’ll skip that part. Talk up to your audience. Assume they’re game designers too. Assume they’re smarter than you are. That may be a reason that people don’t want to show the why of mechanics: they might feel it will come across as talking down to the audience. But that’s just a matter of tone: inviting in experts to show your working never feels like talking down.

Here’s one more thing we know: people don’t always get why things are there, and when they don’t get that, they don’t use them or they use them incorrectly. 20 years ago Unknown Armies could have explained that damn mechanic to me and helped a brother out. It also stops assumptions! Some people think “everything on a character sheet is things a player wants to happen in the game” and they design with that in mind. But guess what: NOT EVERYONE PLAYS WITH THAT IN MIND. So if you don’t make that explicit, you’re just going to make a goddamn mess. This points to a larger point: you should not just explain the why of each mechanic, but the why of the whole game. Obviously space can be limited but I think this is why it is really useful for most RPGs to go “Here’s what an RPG is”, because nobody actually agrees on that. Examples of play are also good for this. They show the base assumptions of what a game is and what the goal of and philosophy behind the game is and what the outcome should look like.

(I have a particular beef here about that last part too! I played D&D for years without understanding most of it because I hadn’t seen or read any of the fantasy stuff it was referencing. And there wasn’t really much in the game that explained what it was trying to do, and how it should look! This is why licensed games are a delight – you KNOW what the outcome is supposed to be, and you can tell when you get there. This may of course also be why games are loath to point to examples…it might give away the fact that RPGs rarely behave as advertised…)

The average GM being told that D&D should create Lord of the Rings and finding out it isn’t built to do anything of the sort

Mutants and Masterminds by the great Jeff Kenson has these little sidebars where they explained the WHY of mechanics. Why the designers made them work the way they did, and not something else. There was also sometimes a sense of how to put them into effect if that wasn’t clear. These sections were called “Under the Hood” and they were really useful, especially for a game as complex as M&M. I didn’t really have space to put these things into The Score but Relics goes to great lengths to explain to GMs why the rules are the way they are, so that GMs know what happens if they change them. They know which rules are load-bearing on the experience, or more connected to other things, and should be altered with caution, and which are less important or less connected.

Just talk to people. Explain things. This the neurospicy idea that we should not spend our whole lives speaking in code, hoping others get it. Just explain. A game designer is inherently a teacher, so you should aim to be a good one.