Tag Archives: game design

Systems of Control

Posted on by dconstructions
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I always like it when people write a manifesto, and I found a good one recently, but before I talk about it I want to talk about this other post of the author. That’s Jay Dragon of Wanderhome fame.

In the linked post, Dragon argues that rules are inherently a cage. That we (and Dragon here blends player and character, confusingly) want to do certain things but the rules say we cannot. I agree. We can, for example, put the playing cards in any order we want and declare ourselves the winner of Klondike/patience. It is the restrictions that stop us from doing so that makes the game work, and playing a game is voluntarily putting barriers between what we want (all the cards in order) and how to get it (we’re not allowed to just sort them). We welcome the barriers to make the conflict that drives the game.

But Dragon’s next example is the avatar-stance of D&D: my character wants to climb a wall, but the rules won’t let me. And in her manifesto, he talks more about how this conflict drives his expressionist design philosophy. The good thing about all this is it is clear and well described, which means I can see clearly where we differ on things, and thus get better discourse. So I’m not trying to call Dragon out as being wrong. But I also think that I (and not everyone) plays RPGs this way.

I don’t know if my character wants to climb a wall. They might, but I’m not always working from this avatar stance. What’s more, I don’t see the roll and rules as getting in my way. The WALL is in my way. And that’s just as meaningful as the rules about the wall. And the presence of the wall in the first place is of course a kind of rule. In make-believe we can climb a wall if we want. But we can also just not put the wall there in the first place.

I might go further to suggest that there’s an adversarial approach inherent to this argument: that rules exist to stop us and prevent us and restrict us. Of course rules present some sort of control, but just because something is adversarial does not mean it is oppositional. My partner is a lawyer and she is frustrated that every game about the law ever made puts the players against each other. She says that although the law is adversarial, it is inherently cooperative. Each party has goals but their actual goal is to reach the best compromise everyone can live with.

A better example is in improv, where you learn how to introduce conflict without blocking. If someone has a gun you can’t just say “your gun has blanks”. That’s a block, it shuts an idea down. But “my god, that’s my wife’s gun!” is conflict without a block. It takes some control “away” from the gun-holder, but it doesn’t stop things dead. Good RPG rules work like this. They “oppose” actions in a way that creates story, not opposes it. If there is a wall in my way, who put it there? Presumably the GM, because it was an offer to create an excellent scene. The rules then are not blocking you from your goal, but saying “what’s this scene about? Is it about your amazing wall-climbing skills, or is it about how your character can’t get past this obstacle and has to confront that failure?”. In essence, you’re not even measuring success or failure, but because RPGs are story-machines running on wargaming code, we constantly think of it as judging if we are allowed to do a thing.

Ron Edwards did more to destroy RPG design theory than any human ever. He took a working theory that pre-existed (GNS) and turned it into a cudgel to beat people and a cult. He also said many times that popular games of the day caused actual brain damage, something people who dealt with brain damage found pretty fucking insulting, and with good reason. The glimmer of truth in that claim, however, was that if all you know is D&D and its descendants, you will end up seeing RPG design as a thing where the rules grant your permission to do what you want. And if you start from that place, you naturally end up thinking rules are bad. Since forever, a lot of people have believed that rules inherently by their very definition get in the way of the activity of roleplaying, and are at best a necessary evil. At its more extreme ends, this leads to people arguing that if you reward players for doing things, you’ve made a mistake, which is absolute nonsense. (That post also brings up Skinner boxes, as usual not understanding that Skinner is about gentleness)

Dragon definitely thinks rules are the enemy. She suggests that we should in fact be so desperate to go against the rules that we should wish, to some extent, to break those rules. In fact, she design games around this principle. The example given is one where the rules reward you for spending time with your family, and you are supposed to, in play, get so annoyed by this you will want to break the rules.

This reminds me a bit of Experimental Theatre techniques. Some of these included running into the audience and stepping out of “acting” to pick fights or shout at audience members, to try to get them to break away from their sense of “I’m watching this man shout at me” and into “this man is actually shouting at me”. But this technique often runs into the problem that was shown in the episode of Community where Annie puts Abed in an experiment where he is told to wait and the experiment is designed to make people get angry and break that rule – to basically trick people to go against the rules. Abed (who is autistic coded) does not break the rule, and there’s a tendency for autistic people to do this. This isn’t because we’re hidebound: it’s because the world is often so confusing we follow rules as a way to survive. Likewise, Experimental Theatre stopped doing this stuff because a lot of people followed the rules and just kept “watching the play”. Similarly, I’ve had bad GMs and escape room designers set up situations inside the game where A) it isn’t real, because it’s a game and B) the game rewards anti-social or taboo behaviour and then go HAHA! WE TRICKED YOU! You’ve done the morally questionable thing, so you are a monster! Power Kill was very much like this. In it, you play a regular RPG and then it is revealed that acting as the game tells you to act you have done something terrible in a completely different context.

Scientific ethics 101: don’t violate informed consent

(I tried to play Papers Please and the game said “do this to get points” and I said “no”, but I didn’t feel like I learned anything. Partly because I just didn’t like the mechanics but also because I know that systems of control exist. I had the same reaction to The Stanley Parable: I was already aware of how video game design sculpts behaviour so it was not shocking to me to have the game break the fourth wall and tell me they do.)

The game Dragon describes goes even further than Power Kill though: it says “This game rewards you for being pro-social, that should creep you out!” which is…a very specific line of thought. I wonder how many gamers actually had this experience in play. I have a feeling that it only works for players who think rules are bad – the ones with the “brain damage” built in.

Don’t get me wrong: I think violating consent, when used well, can be amazing. I’ve written before about the genius of great art in how it makes us complicit. But you’re not going to make me break the rules just by saying “these rules reward you for doing a thing”. I’m assuming the rules exist for a reason, and I am following them until I stop having fun. Now that may happen if I’m doing anti-social things in the setting of the game, yes. This is not really a great revelation, however. Nobody has ever made a game called Molest The Little Child where you get 1000 points for each molestation; nobody has ever played that game to get points, regardless of the explanation. Most people would go against the rules if faced with that game, and play to lose.

I also think Dragon knows all this, and is more curious than accusatory. She wants to put people in a maze and see if they knock down the walls to get the cheese, but it’s ok if they don’t. Yet she does end that blog with a heavy judgement against the mouse who fails to knock down the walls. She also concludes by saying that the best way to play is to strain as hard as possible against the rules and this includes safety rules. As in, when you set up lines and veils you should go as hard as possible up to the edges of those because that, to Dragon, is both necessary and the most fun.

In 2015, the porn star James Deen was accused of several accounts of rape and sexual assault by many women in the industry (Massive Trigger Warnings On That Link!). Deen was a frequent performer in BDSM scenes which involve simulated lack of consent. Deen would allegedly use the “No” lists of his fellow performers as guidelines to find their limits and push beyond them, and used the filming of “rough” sex as a cover and excuse for his violence, partly because the presence of safe words and rules protected him. If such rules existed in the framework, then of course he couldn’t have broken those rules.

I’m not saying that people who want to push safety rules as hard as they possible can are actually hurting people. But we know that safety rules are broken in RPGs all the time. And if you think all rules are made to be tested, pushed, wrestled with and even broken, if you build a cage to watch the rat throw itself against the walls, how am I ever going to be safe? Or more generally, how am I ever sure I’ll have fun? Especially if I am neurodiverse and rely on the rules as a core of my whole participation? And then eventually: why would I ever follow your rules to begin with?

I teach my game students that game design can be thought of as a very caring, nurturing artform, where we use our empathy all the time, to put ourselves in the mind of the player and use our tools of game design to control them, but with the intent of giving them a good time. They consent to give us that control with the implicit understanding that if they play the game under the control of our systems, they will have fun. If you violate that relationship, don’t expect me to come back for more.

Age Is Just A Number…

Posted on by dconstructions
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One of the innovations of the early internet was “long games”: games made up of comment chains on forums where the only way to lose was not to reply or for the game to end. One popular long game was trying to post a statement that the subsequent poster could not find objectionable in some way. One of the best moves in that game was:

“I don’t think innocent babies should be left to die in the street”

Followed by

“Oh really? So you want to take a dying baby and remove its opportunity to see a beautiful street before it dies?”

The lovely subtext of this long game was of course that communication based one one-upping someone is no communication at all. Social media thrives so much on correcting the op that we’ve not only forgotten that this kind of communication is worthless, we’ve started to think it’s the only kind that’s worthy. Takes must be hot, dunks must be savage and faux iconoclasm the greatest virtue. Another practice of the early internet was to scorn the “me-toos” because they added a post but no content. As I said at the time, this was an insane and horrific idea because nothing is so important in a conversation as the (typically nonverbal) affirmation of our interlocutors. 

Agreeing with someone might be a radical act of insurgence, in a world where disagreement is a commodity. Cosy, low-conflict games are appealing perhaps because they step away from this world. We’re tired of marketing constantly asking us to choose between Coke and Pepsi, or feeling envious of instagrams. We’d rather just get along and be understood, and the demand for conflict is so overwhelming now we are fleeing from it.

Indeed, gamification is so often seen as nothing but the things that made people want to play World of Warcraft so much that it continues to backfire when applied to things like health programs. It turns out that using the same mechanisms that get people to addicted to poker machines, calling it “a game” and slapping it on things was bad for the things and not much to do with gaming either.

In a similar way, I think a lot of people are drawn to the new trend of cosy games because social media and hustle culture seem so keen to measure us all the time. Numbers must go up is the catch-cry of capitalism and social media, which reports at every second how much you are liked, in precise numbers. It seems to be everywhere too – computer game high scores gamified into everything we do. My friend has a car she hates because it rates every drive she takes by how efficiently she drove. I mentioned this to another friend though and she remarked that for her, she’d love to get extra information, like another beautiful insight into the world around her. My friend very wisely pointed out that information, even when it is a rank or a measure, does not have to be a judgement. Age is just a number and so is a score out of ten. Even if that number is important, even if we need it to be high or low for a purpose, it doesn’t have to become a value, or a virture.

Last entry I talked about how the orthogame is inherently a critique-machine. Even cooperatively, a game is designed to evaluate your efforts and report back. It is natural for humans to take that as a challenge and a judgement. As much as we would like to say that what matters is how much fun we had or the friends we made along the way, the points are not awarded for that at all. Competition and measurement are not emotionally neutral: NASA tests have shown that board games are a bad thing to take on long term space missions because they inevitably cause resentment and division. Games are constantly likened to war and conflict and success in them used as proof of greatness and virtue.

However we can, as my friend observed about the car measure, get over attached to things too. We can see in the long game discussed above that the contrariness was contrived and the antagonism existed only to create comic interactions. Competition and competitiveness and scoring are just mechanics. They aren’t necessarily, even in an orthogame, why we are playing. We must act as if we want points in order to get the most out of the game, but we can do so without getting too attached to them. 

The same of course is true of rules: we can get over attached to them and think following them is the point, but that doesn’t mean we want to get rid of them entirely. Sometimes rules are part of the fun in themselves – another famous long game trend of the early internet were several based on Mornington Crescent, a game that is about rules that cannot be won. How much rules actually matter though and how much we value them can vary between people. I remember once playing Elder Sign, a cooperative game, and we lost on the final roll. A friend said he was going to fudge that, obviously, because as he put it, we are here to have fun, not “get screwed over by the rules”. I was totally able to have fun and lose on one roll, because I was aware of that contract going in, but it didn’t ruin my fun to take on his values of play over rules. I also remember learning to play solitaire as a child and excitingly telling my father that I had won by only cheating slightly once and he sucking the wind out of me entirely by telling me it didn’t count. The point is that to a large extent how much we care about rules and how much we care about competition are extrinsic things we bring to the table, not intrinsic to rules and competition themselves.

Naturally a lot of people were a bit confused by my last entry about games being too competitive because to them competition was both the accepted standard and a thing that didn’t really concern them very much – they did not attach a strong value to it. It was no big deal. Some were so invested in the idea of the former, though, that they were surprised I would even call it out as an issue. I can understand that: much like rules, if you don’t see competition as a lever you can pull on, you might never examine its presence at all. That does bother me a little when it comes to designers, but then again I’m always the person who pulls on EVERYTHING because it’s probably a lever. Some have accused me of destroying bookshelves as a result, if you follow the metaphor. 

Some even suggested that I was wasting my time playing games if I was going to insist they not have competition. Again, I can understand that somewhat. One can drive oneself mad and be permanently unhappy if you spend your whole life demanding every single cat be a dog. (Although this is also a great way to explore what you might be assuming or forgetting are pre-established assumptions. I once had the privilege of watching someone see a play for the first time and be outraged that he was expected to just accept that if a person walked off stage and changed hats they were a different guy. I also once had a friend who had never encountered anything to do with superheroes until they saw the Dr Who episode about superheroes which talks about the trope of “not killing” and watching them deal with how stupid that idea is was the greatest thing ever. Untainted eyes are wonderful and help us better understand everything, especially how things appear to outsiders, which we so easily forget.) You can also drive yourself crazy insisting that the things you think are important are so to everyone – sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and competition is just a means to an end, a mechanic that doesn’t matter because of course we are just playing for fun. Losses don’t make us feel stupid, attacks don’t make us feel mean. To me it seems really strange that so far, every game about cats and dogs that’s come out has been competitive, not cooperative, but it clearly doesn’t strike anyone else as odd whatsoever.

the age old struggle

But I also think that assuming anyone wanting to think outside the box should just get a new box is a thought-terminating cliche. So too, is the idea that all game mechanics are neutral and don’t bleed into us because “it’s just a game”. It is true that we add things to them, and we can get hung up on them being things they are not. It is true that competition is just another mechanic. But it is also true that every mechanic is not just anything, and just because we realise that competition is a mechanic, not the goal doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at what the goals are and how competition moves us towards or away from that. It is also true that mechanics can and have immense power, even if they have more on some folks more than others. We also have to be very careful of saying “well all games are like that” – because they are not – or that gamers should just get over it and like a game regardless of its mechanics. The whole wonderful thing about living in the post golden age of games is we should have learnt by now that even the orthogame is full of variety and possibility and levels of subtlety and intensity that appeal to different people in different ways. I don’t really “get” why some people find timed games stressful, but I respect it. You might not get why I don’t really like competition, but you have to recognise it is a thing, inside the world of games. 

Also, you know what else is like rules and like competition, things that are very useful but we attach way too much value to but don’t actually mean as much as we think sometimes? Categories. A lot of people tend to act like categories are an absolute truth handed down by God, which is why they got so mad when Pluto stopped being a planet, as if that means anything. I remember someone saying that they should have waited until Percival Lowell’s widow died before changing it, as if a category change is a demotion or at all worth anything. Categories exist for the same reason rules and competition exist: as a tool to get where we are going, and the goal is the thing that matters. So when you say to me “well, games just are competitive, move on”, I’m going to say you’re putting way too much truth value on a category. Or more briefly: “says who?”.

I can respect that you put a lot of value on categories, but a category is just an exercise in understanding, and not one I value highly. I really believe games, even orthogames, can be anything we want them to be, without falling into a meaningless soup of nothingness and dadaism, and it’s our job as artists to break the rules. Even when our art form is making rules.

Monkey See

Posted on by dconstructions
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I’m someone who learns well from examples. Sometimes I find it hard to learn without examples. For this reason I tend to like ttrpgs that have really explicit mechanics and instructions about what we’re doing and how we’re supposed to do it. A strong brief and a strong sense of the core idea is vital to getting me on board.

This is why I’ve always been a fan of games based on pre existing media, and emulation in general. It’s also why I want my games to be filled with examples – example characters, examples of play, the lovely Japanese trend of replays, and of course prewritten scenarios and adventures. Hooks and prompts are a good start but you need to show me how to write one and show me the finished product. This might be an autism thing – we’re very emulative. And with me if I spend five minutes with a person I will be copying their accent and mannerisms. So it could be just a very me thing.

How true that is – as in, to what degree this is mostly/only a Steve problem – determines whether any of the following thoughts are useful, so I’m posting this partly as a question: how much do examples guide you in how you approach an RPG?

There are lots of ways this manifests. I don’t, for example, typically like games that ask you to come up with a concept for your character before you start chargen. Thats what chargen is for! This is why I like to do it randomly. It’s also I suppose why I don’t like games or GMs that ask me to describe what I’m doing before I roll the dice – that’s what the dice is for.

More dramatically, it prevented me from getting into D&D as a kid. A lot of silly people will demand that rpgs aren’t emulating media but that’s exactly how they were designed. The magic system in D&D was taken from the Dying Earth, the setting from lord of the rings, and the combat explicitly from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood. The alignment system was furpm the Elric books. The classes were roughly from Conan and the Fahrfhd books. The idea of going off and fighting shit in caves mostly comes from Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor. Very swiftly a bunch of other insane shit was added like priests from Hammer horror films, lovecraftian demons, poorly understood ideas of medieval history and a bunch of rubber dinosaurs. And then Beastmaster came along so they jammed that film in too.

Nowadays it is probably hard to understand because D&D dominates culture so hard but that produced a combination that wasn’t exactly representative of fantasy fiction at the time. If D&D hadn’t become so insanely popular until it made these things normal it would stand out more how bizarre and chaotic a lot of it was. But more importantly it depended on being inside a subculture. If you hadn’t grown up with those books and movies, it didn’t make much sense.

Enter me at age 11, who has read two and only two fantasy books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I have seen a total of one fantasy film: The Neverending Story. It will be twenty years before I see Conan, thirty before I see Beastmaster (which cleared up so much). I try to understand D&D but it’s really hard. I don’t know what any of it means. I know dragons guard gold in mountains, sure, but what the fuck is an orc?

Two years later I find TMNT which is set in a universe I understand, because I have seen Die Hard and a dozen other action films. And kids cartoons which are basically the same thing. That makes sense. I’m home.

Years later I bounce off other games which are either really open or a little harder to pin down. I cannot get my head around how to play Nobilis or why anyone would want to. I didnt really get the world of darkness (I didn’t see the crow till later). I’m currently reading Unknown Armies and until it mentioned Twin Peaks I thought it was about Elmore Leonard. And it is a bit, yes. But you wouldn’t pitch it as an Elmore Leonard game. I remember trying to play cyberpunk and nobody telling me what kind of characters to make or what they were supposed to do. My first and second characters in that game were killed by “obvious traps” because “I should have known they were traps”.

I tended to find my home in history: ars magica, call of Cthulhu, blue planet become my favourites. And genre as I said: ghostbusters and Buffy are the two games I’d save from a house fire or a meteor strike, and TMNT has my boyish heart. Now I design games where you can’t do anything but follow strict genre cues. The system simply won’t let you.

And I find a lot of games really do end up back at finding the media you know to get you started. Even if they’re in a totally unique setting – especially if they are – they come back to “have you ever seen a coen brothers film? It’s like that”. When I was working on the first 40K rpg we had an in-house brief that went: “it’s the A Team fighting Cthulhu in Star Wars”. Obviously we can’t always put these things in our texts; certainly not on our branding. But if we keep doing this, we should recognise how vital it is. How it’s the core of what we’re doing and so it should be core to the rules we write. The only reason D&D appears not to need this is it invented its own genre and rewrote pop culture around that.

Maybe im wrong though. Maybe nobody else needs this but me. Maybe everyone got world of darkness fine. Or maybe they’d seen a bunch of vampire movies to give them context. And maybe it’s about time we admitted this and put it front and centre in our designs.

Let me know your thoughts. You know, like in the movies where everyone responds to a viral post.

Stream of Consciousness Game Design: SUPER SHOWDOWN

Posted on by dconstructions
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So most RPGs kind of focus on players playing one character at a time. But most comics these days are ensemble affairs, where half a hundred guys criss-cross continuity in continuity-shattering events. About time we simulated that. And thus: SUPER SHOWDOWN (with a foreword by Ilan Muskat)

Foreword by Sexy Game Designer Ilan Muskat:

I’m ruggedly handsome, but I don’t have any design credits. I’d better design some games in time to write a foreword for your next one! – Ilan

Chargen:

Everyone makes up a team of superheroes. The team can be just one person (The Hulk, Spidey) or a big team of guys (The Avengers, the X-Men). Say no more than six characters each though. Each hero in your team is represented by a single die: a d4, d6, d8, d10 or a d12. The smaller the dice, the less subtle you are. Someone who just pours out power like Cyclops would be a d4, someone who has a lot of little tricks and is hard to pin down, like Nightcrawler, is a d12. The number of dice represents endurance, how much you can bring that power to bear. Cyclops might have like 4d4 because his visor gets knocked off all the time, but the Hulk might be 20d4. Write down on a piece of paper (A4 or foolscap in size) who is in your team and which die represents them. So you might have something like this:

Iron Fist (4)d10
Power Man (10)d4

Put the die for each character next to that character. Just one! That die itself is a stand in for that character. IMPORTANT: each player should use dice all of one colour, different to colours/designs used by others at the table.

Come up with a name and an ethos and a niche for your team. Eg Heroes For Hire: They are mercenaries on the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen.
Event-Gen

Now take all the dice from all the players and throw them from one of the table so they roll hard across the whole thing. Any dice that end up on your piece of paper are in your comic during this event. You may claim one character of your team that didn’t end up on anyone’s sheet back onto your sheet as well, but you could totally get a whole new team. So why is Daredevil and the Wasp in Heroes For Hire? That’s what you have to figure out. Meanwhile the guy who came up with the Avengers has to figure out why Power Man is working with Herbie in Stark Tower.

Villain-Gen

Two options here:

1) Hero v Hero. All heroes not on pieces of paper have gone rogue. Divide them equally and randomly among the players. The team possessed by the player to your left is who your team will be fighting this issue.

2) Hero and Villains unite. Everyone makes up a small rogues gallery for their team using the rules above (at least one fewer villains than they have heroes). Then everyone draws a line down the middle of their paper. Then all the villain dice are rolled again, across the table. Any villains on the left side of your sheet have teamed up with the heroes for this story. You get to decide why! Ask the people who invented the villains for tips. Villains not on paper become the enemy of your team using the method above: collect them up, divide them equally and randomly between players, fight the villains on your left.

In this case, heroes in the first big roll that don’t land on anyone’s sheet are Not Appearing In This Story. The same goes for villains on the right side of your paper. Maybe they’ll be killed in a big fight. Maybe they’ve been captured. Maybe they’re off in their own storyline having a Secret War or Annihilation or somesuch. Put them aside for the NEXT event!

IMPORTANT: for a good, balanced game, you want about equal numbers of heroes and villains, so when you roll the dice, try to make sure the area covered by everyone’s pieces of paper is about half the area where the dice will fly.
Combat:

“Villains” (aka the guy on your left) always roll their dice first, and announces some kind of scheme to destroy the world. Then heroes roll to respond. Here, both you roll all your dice for that character ie, roll ten d4s for Power Man. Or roll one d4 ten times and note the results.

Compare all your dice to all their dice.

Matched results: If one of your results exactly equals a villain dice, that’s confrontation! KATHOOM! POW! The die you matched with yours is knocked out of play! Yours isn’t!

Villain dice lower than yours: You get in their way somehow, but don’t slow them down. They don’t do evil. Nobody loses a die. The battle looked awesome though!

Villain die is HIGHER than yours: Choose: either you get beaten up (lose a die) or something bad happens. The evil plan takes shape. Aunt May marries Dr Octopus. Dr Doom kills a puppy. Something like that.

Flexible villains are more likely to succeed but generally don’t do quite as much damage. Abomination with his chunk of d4s hardly ever rolls higher but when he does he totals a city block, kills hundreds. Mystique (1d12) gets the better of heroes all the time but just runs off and does more planny plans stuff, or sleeps with Wolverine or whatnot.

After all dice are assigned, any dice left get rerolled, for act 2! Keep going until one side runs out of dice. If it’s the Heroes, the villains win, or at least conquer the heroes (but perhaps their plans to murder innocents is foiled, so it’s not bad. The heroes may teeechnically win, maybe retreating to their hide-outs all banged up – but villains aren’t punished. If the villains run out of dice first, they are totes foiled and all either killed or arrested (genre-permitting). If a character has no dice left for themselves, they don’t make it to round 2 or the end of the story. Decide what happened to them! Peeps with lots of dice hang around longer! But cost more to build (just work out what feels right for point buy, I trust you).

Of course, you can duck the hit and pass it on. The question is, how many times will they let Bad Things Happen to keep their dice around to go the distance?

If you’re getting hammered, ask for help from another team! CROSSOVER EVENT!  Problem is, if you do, then their villains come into play as well! Doh! Or, swap one of your characters for one of theirs! If you do this, you MUST invent a love story to explain why! (“Kittie Pride come and help Spiderman instead of Thor! Because THOR LOVES IRON MAN! and Iron Man is DRINKING AGAIN!”)

When you (and any of your buddies) have done your event, someone else does theirs! While Daredevil and Wasp were fighting Giant Man and Magneto, what were the X-Men doing? And why? When everyone’s done, retrieve the other dice and play with them, or start from scratch!

OPTIONAL RULE:

If at any time, a die falls on the floor, that character permanently dies or is massively depowered or something. CONTINUITY IS SHAKEN FOREVER! Everything else is resettable.

And that’s how you play the game.

In Which I Am Cranky At Netrunner for No Good Reason

Posted on by dconstructions
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I am cranky with Netrunner. I bought it, and now I don’t know if I can play it.

This is not Netrunner’s fault. This is my fault. Netrunner is a living card game, a game which is built around gathering cards in a large pool, and then building decks to face off against others in competitions. Those are its design and production goals. It is not a game which you can play straight out of the box and expect everyone to have a balanced deck to play with. Indeed, the factions are specifically designed to have holes in them that other factions can plug – but rules limitations are placed on how much cross-faction stuff you can use.

This means I am now screwed, because what I really want is a game that I can play out of the box. That, in fact, is the ONLY thing I want.

I figured what I’d do is try and fix this by buying a few booster boxes. Slot in some of the new cards to help cover the weak points in each faction’s deck. Problem is, now I have a bunch of decks which STILL aren’t balanced against each other. They can’t be, without rigorous testing. And I’d have to figure out what level I wanted to balance them at – harshly, demoralisingly brutal lunges for victory, or fun romps for all involved, or wacky experiments in storytelling, or everything in between? And I’d have to rejig those decks depending on which one of those games I’d want to play. Yes, I have the option of rejigging those decks in the first place, but that’s a lot more work than just finding the game that suits the mood and players and pulling it off my shelf.

The only real option is to go for the jugular so you can win, and thus only play in tournaments, because that’s the easiest to calibrate. But I hate going for the jugular, and I hate playing to win. They’re the things I try to minimise as much as posisble in my game-playing and game purchases.

This is not Netrunner’s fault. I had a square hole, it is a round peg. Netrunner is still a beautifully designed game with a sexy setting and seems to be well set up for tournament play and collecting. But this is why I gave up playing Shadowfist, and why I shouldn’t have gotten into Netrunner: it is way too hard to control the experience I have, and turn it into the experience I want. All too often in Shadowfist, I just wanted to have fun, but my opponents had built to crush, and I felt I had to compete with that or have no fun at all – but competing with that killed my fun.

Sigh. Live and don’t learn, I guess. But at least I know more about my tastes now.

How It All Began

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June 6th, 2006 I was asked to write my first RPG book, the critically acclaimed and fan-favourite, Children of the Horned Rat.  I just found in my folders the very first notes I made on the book, before we even got jobs or the outline, just trying to get a sense of Why Skaven Are Awesome (always a great place to begin). Here then, you can see great art taking form!

skavennotes

I shall translate the scribbles:

(picture of a skaven)

Evil Science (& Terrorism)

– electricity

-nuclear waste/power

-plagues

-bio-engineering

-privacy

(This is me nutting out the theme of the skaven, what makes them scary – a key fear vector is they are the fear of perverted science.)

In a circle: BE ASH. Not sure what that means. I think it means playing a Skaven is fun because you get to call everyone Primitive Screwheads, and build freaky robot hands and cars with medieval tech.

Biology

– smell and musk

– breeding = insane

– adaptable

– completely omnivorous

– resistance to disease

– CARRIERS (ala komodos, plus pestilence) – this was the old idea that komodos had no venom (now known to be false) but they ate such rotten food their breath was an infectious death sentence.

– sharp claws and teeth, strong jaw

– fur – waterproof, cold and warm

– senses – incredible

– speed and reflexes – phenomenal – good metabolism – always hungry

– can get anywhere – flexible

– strength low, courage low

All Chargen Is Random Chargen

Posted on by dconstructions
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If you want it to be. You can make it random. Which is heaps fun.

There are two basic objections to random chargen. The first is it removes total, absolute control over the character creation process. And that’s fair enough. If your fun arc depends on you having a perfect pre-conceived idea of who your character is in your head to begin with, and then creating a system to fit the image, birthing it Athena-like from your brain, then I get how leaving anything to chance would get in the way. The second object is that it produces characters that are unplayable and unfun. Generally, this objection comes from the fact that when people hear “random chargen” they think of D&D’s random chargen where the randomness causes the power level to be random, so some players end up a bit ahead of others. That can be unfun, but of course random chargen doesn’t have to do that. Random chargen can be perfectly balanced, and indeed, you can use point-buy systems to make sure your random chargen is balanced.

The last part is the bit we only realised recently because we are Slow Of Mind. G and I adore random chargen, we love sitting down and rolling on tables and seeing whole new universes appear out of nowhere, but only so many games have random chargen – or so we thought. Last night we came to our senses. We got out Savage Worlds and made Novice level characters using a totally random system. Every time it came to spending a point, we would roll randomly to find out where to spend it. Suddenly, point-buy became random, and as usual, it was glorious.

For example, you have five attributes, and five points to spend. Roll 1d5 five times, once for each point, to see where it goes. Granted, it becomes fairly ridiculous when you do it for equipment buying but otherwise it worked surprisingly well for something as simple and rules-light as SW. Without any cheating at all, they are highly playable and mostly make sense!

Below are the characters we created but I’m really blogging this so others can use the idea. I wouldn’t want this awesomeness not to be used around the world just because other people think point-buy games can’t be random, like we did.

Water-Walker

Race: Mantis-Man

Agility: d6  Smarts: d6 Spirit: d4 Strength: d8 Vigor: d8 (Parry 4 Toughness 8)

Fighting d4, Area Knowledge (The Swamplands) d4, Shooting d6, Healing d4, Investigation d6, Persuasion d4, Swimming d6, Boating d6, Driving d4, Tracking d4, Streetwise d4

Edges: Carapace (2 points Natural Armour), Mantis Leaping (x4 normal distance), Arcane Background (Miracles)

Hindrances: Outsider, Curious, Pacifist (Minor), Doubting Thomas

Miracles: Detect/Conceal Arcana, Boost/Lower Trait. 10 Powers points.

He’s basically a scout/indian agent type – lots of outdoors skills plus low-level faith magic. I pointed out that it was weird that I had no Faith skill, necessary to use the Miracles power, so maybe I could use a substitute. Mr G brilliantly suggested I use Boating or Swimming, and together we decided that I was less a mantis and more a Jesus Bug, and that my religion was based around the philosophy of spiritual surface tension. Just like the lake, the universe is full of fluid, and we must walk softly  on it. Those who are heavy with evil or sin, or drive their weight harshly against the surface, soon plunge beneath and find nothing but death. Alas, their descent causes waves which can cause even good, softwalkers to stumble, so those of the faith must help others stand, and keep the surface smooth and taut. Such an incredible idea! We wondered why I was also a Doubting Thomas (no belief in the supernatural) but we had two options there – either he just sees supernatural things as some lies of the devil, or he is so into his beliefs and his natural environment he doubts civilisation exists.

If I was going to actually play him, I’d get rid of maybe Persuasion and Streetwise to get a few more dots in other skills and maybe swap Spirit and Smarts, but otherwise, he is ready to go! I want to play him and am sad I can’t….

G’s char was:

Race: Dwarf

Agility: d6 Smarts d4 Spirit d6 Strength d6 Vigor d6 (Parry 2, Toughness 5)

Climbing d4 Knowledge (Journalism) d4, Taunt d6, Persuasion d8, Riding d4, Shooting d4, Guts d4, Boating d4, Gambling d4, Investigation d4

Edges: Low-Light Vision, Tough

Hindrances: Slow, Young, Quirk, Vow (Minor)

With the ability to climb, taunt and persuade added to Journalism, we knew instantly that this character was a paparazzo, who would get the shots of the celebrities no matter what. (We hadn’t specified any setting, SW doesn’t do that) So we made his Quirk “Never Without A Camera” and his Vow “Never To Give Up On A Story/Photo”.  The Lowlight vision would come in handy in the darkroom (or could, in fact, just his night-scope fitted camera!). We discussed briefly which fantasy settings would have paparazzi or similar, and how they might be translated to worlds without press or photography. A gossip paparazzo is not unlike a bard, after all….

Two awesome characters, a bundle of great ideas, all from a system that – on the surface – doesn’t appear to be random. Today’s lesson is: DON’T LET THAT STOP YOU.

Why I’m Really Excited About The Cortex Hacker’s Guide (And You Should Be Too)

Posted on by dconstructions
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In case you missed it, the Kickstarter for the new Cortex Hacker’s Guide went live 48 hours ago. At time of writing this, they’d already got $10K pledged which is a fanatastic start for what might seem to be a fairly niche product. It’s a great kickstarter with heaps of levels to pledge at, and some great stretch goals. I’m really excited to be a part of it, not least because it’s my first official kickstarter. My own projects have so far used IndieGoGo and haven’t had a cool video to go with them. MWP’s video is great and I got a little shiver of excitement when Dave Chalker listed my contribution – mutant animals – as one of the sections.

It’s also fantastic to see this product come out, after nearly two years of waiting. Marvel Heroic Roleplay sort of got in the way, because hey, Marvel is a 200-pound gorilla of a licence (and one hell of a game). It’s always good when something you’re proud of finally gets to come out (assuming we get the next five grand). It’s also great how MWP have designed this particular KS. Us writers have all been paid our base rate, but anything the company makes beyond costs goes into paying us more. MWP already pays above average for a gaming company, because they are classy, professional people who are joy to work with, but passing on the return to writers takes that to a whole new level. One of the biggest problems with the RPG industry is the market won’t bear price rates that pay authors a fair rate for their work. Until, of course, crowdsourcing came along, allowing consumers to send money directly to those authors. Hopefully, more companies will follow MWP’s lead. We want that because good writers deserve good money, and they go elsewhere if they don’t get it. Letting them make more money on products keeps good designers writing good material for the games you love.

If that alone doesn’t convince you to back this project, let’s talk about the content.

You might not know what a Cortex is. Cortex was originally designed by Lester Smith and others for the first product from MWP, the long-forgotten Sovereign Stone fantasy RPG, then hammered into a full generic system by Jamie Chambers, after which it was used in such games as Serenity, Supernatural and Battlestar Galactica (all great games, btw). I’ve been a fan since the beginning of Cortex’s goals: it’s got a central rigidity like its design-cousin Savage Worlds, but, like Unisystem, is simpler and cleaner because it wasn’t designed to also support miniatures. As someone who finds most generic systems (eg GURPS, ORE, FATE) generally far too heavy, Cortex is right in the sweet spot for me.

Then something really awesome happened. Cam Banks, Josh Roby and Rob Donoghue (and others) came onto work for MWP and produced Smallville and Leverage. Both games started with the very “core” or Cortex, which is roll one die, rated from d4 to d12, for one “axis” (originally your attribute) and one die for a second axis (originally your skill) and add them, plus roll extra dice if you have them, but still just add the two highest. Both games then transformed that central idea by adding some very modern and indie approaches. In Smallville, they replaced the two axes entirely, replacing stat+skill with Emotion + Relationship, to build a completely different mindset. In Leverage, they got rid of hitpoint ideas and replaced it entirely with FATE-like Aspects and some other great ideas. These new interpretations were, as a whole, nicknamed Cortex Plus (or C+).

This wasn’t just great design, it was great modular design.  There are at least two key aspects to game design – having numbers that work and make sense, and dressing the numbers up so they communicate the right information while making sense. So far, few games have really looked at breaking those two things down separately. I can only think of FUDGE/FATE as the exception. I’m good at dressing up the numbers but not always good at building the basics, so I was intrigued (not to mention incredibly impressed with both Smallville and Leverage as RPGs as a whole). The first thing I did after reviewing these two excellent games was email Cam Banks and demand to know when Cortex Plus was going OGL. He didn’t have an answer – yet. Instead, he got back in touch about the Hacker’s Guide.

The designers were well aware that with Cortex Plus, the genie was out of the bottle and there were suddenly a lot more you could do with the system, and that the two incarnations were not just great games but great ideas that inspired more tinkering. That rather than split them up into Cortex Plus Drama and Cortex Plus Action, the two could be cross-linked and combined and broken down and rebuilt, and that was in fact more interesting than taking a core system and hammering out a few appropriate Merits and Flaws for your favourite TV show. However good Serenity and Supernatural were, they could be made better by bending things around more, and applying these new ideas. I was already chafing at the bit to do this; I was not surprised to find I was not alone. One such interaction of the two came out soon after, as Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, and very nice it is too.

But putting out a whole new game was an expensive idea. Instead, the idea was to bring all these ideas together in one place, in a shorter form. The Hacker’s Guide, on the surface, looks like a shotgun-blast sourcebook, adding new traits and merits to the Smallville and Leverage systems so you can play them in other settings. But it’s a lot more than that. We crossed the streams and relinked the wires, and in the process, teach you how to do that yourself. Some of that teaching is explicit and direct, some of it is implied by seeing our end results. Cortex is one of the most interesting systems around right now, and some incredible stuff has been done with it already, and we’re taking that even further. That’s exciting as hell and something I’m really proud to be a part of.

I knew the moment Cam asked what I wanted to do. My first RPG, the thing that made me love this hobby, was Erick Wujcik’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG. Nothing else I’ve ever seen has ever got right the part I loved so much about that game, which was being able to play almost any animal imaginable. Finding a way to do that – and keep the simplicity which is so important to Cortex – was a huge game design challenge, and I’m really proud of how it came out. It’s not TMNT, of course, (no use of copyright material should be implied!!) but inspired by that RPG and how it inspired me. TMNT holds a special place in my life, and Erick was a hero, and later, a mentor and a personal friend, so this is also my way of giving something back. That’s my personal connection; for you, the point is that if you liked TMNT, my response to it is here, and it a more passionate and dedicated response to that game and its goals you will not find anywhere else in the hobby.

So if you are interested in RPG design, both indie and trad, and where the two meet, if you’re interested in how to take a core idea and expand it and develop it across settings and genres, so as to learn how to do that yourself, whatever your core system of choice, then you should be excited about the Hacker’s Guide. And if you ever liked the TMNT rpg and really feel a need to play any reptile, bird or mammal you can name, then you should be very excited about my contribution. So go out and back it already. If only because I need the cash.

Fragments of Old Game Design

Posted on by dconstructions
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Was cleaning up some old notes and found an outline to an old game idea I had about ten years ago. The idea was a game based on trick taking, but with the twist that you could add more cards than just one to each hand – but of course then you’d have nothing to play at the end of the round if others still had cards. Like a weird combination of cribbage and whist. Never really got the mechanics working but I decided the setting would be a bunch of mad Scottish clans doing Gaelic Wrestling or something. And the one thing I really like doing in game design is coming up with flavour. So what I did back then was sit down and come up with four clans and their 12 members each. (I chose those numbers so I could play test the game with an ordinary pack of cards, see.) Anyway, I still have the names, so here they are for your enjoyment, or possible window in game design.

Clan Tankerus

Kilt Bill

Gundam McRoss

Savage McTavish

Mel, The Woad Warrior

Connor McWickening

Connor Seanery

Biaoughie McSlayer

Dirty MacGonagal

Di Haird

Vinn Dalziel

William Warbles

Siobhan Siobhoff

 

Clan Derstine

Ewan McHobeewan

“Doc” Mactardis

Laddie McBeth

Patrick Fitzinwell

Conner Commover

Ewan Mee

Haggis Itwitchoo

Fluyed Macanix

Apple McIffon

Meghan Mogg

Dinah Fashe

Hairy Nobb

 

Clan Samwych

Brenda Fender

Duncan Dellishers

Ronnie McDonald

Steamy William

Enormous Richard

Bloody Annoying Mary

Moira Lesse

Livia Withongions

Ozzie the Bruce

Haddie Biglunshe

“Whiskey” O’Goughgough

Ann O’Therun

 Clan Tasstick

Len And MacCartnee

Glen Orglender

Ben Toomie

James Tiekirk

Tickel M’Sporran

Skyclad Sally

Tam O’Shantern

Rob Roy Rogers

Bess Tiensho

Old Ock Waintens

Katie Lang

Johnie Coomlaitly

Functionalism in Design

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That is to say, function as the guide to design choices. I remember having a lightbulb turn on in my head when Paranoia’s GM section listed “things players do in the game” – Shoot Things, Complain, Lie, Blow Things Up, etc, and what to do about them. It’s also nice when we take those things and make them the actual mechanics or the basis of the mechanics.  It actually helps you run the game when you can see things like that.

For example, I liked the way Dread (which is now Scorn) first edition had three classes – one based on fighting, one on using magic and one on investigating, thus summing up the three main activities of the game. It was also nice when back in 1980 Call of Cthulhu wrote skills in the sense of how to use them: it wasn’t “Search” but “Spot Hidden”. That tells the GM to hide things, and – more importantly – that there are things hidden from the Players. Paranoia and Ghostbusters also had great skills like Lug Heavy Thing and Fall Through Testtube Racks (for scientists in horror films). I also have a soft spot for what they call effect-based superpower design systems because they also focus on what powers do, which is not only a great way to think about things from a different angle (narra-topologically, Wolverine’s claws do the same thing as Colossus’ fists) it also helps identify core game activities.  Wild Talents breaks powers down into Attack, Defend and Useful (and “Duds” not worth points); Smallville breaks superpowers into: Attack, Defend, Move, Sense, Control and Enhance, which I find quite lovely. Dr Who wires core activities into its initiative order: talkers go first, then runners, then fighters. Because that’s how it goes in the show – not only are those things the most common reactions/actions in the show, but the show always privileges them IN THAT SPECIFIC ORDER. Gorgeous mechanics.

Robin Laws has always been big on identifying core activities in various games and that’s what caught my attention in his new Hillfolk: It might be just because of the simplification of the bronze-age setting but his list of abilities are: Enduring, Fighting, Knowing, Making, Moving, Talking, Sneaking.  You can add names to them to customise them but at their core they cover pretty much everything that happens in an RPG. Although I find it interesting he’s split Moving and Sneaking; they COULD be separate but in another sense they are both about the same thing. Then again, Sneaking is usually also a kind of Knowing as well…but that’s part of the fun. It’s never going to be a perfect classification but thinking about it is a good place to start.

Coincidentally, the stat list I was just making was very similar, without seeing Mr Laws’ work. I had Knowing, Doing, Talking and Enduring. But I also want to use it to do more than that, maybe use it to reflect character from a descriptive point of view, so I might end up shifting it. Not sure yet, but something that points out what the player cares about, or perhaps a combination of the two, such as how they get what they care about. So something like

I present myself as….

But I strive for…

I seek it by….

I survive by…

 

Anyhoo. Enough of my game. The point is, even if you like Strength and Intelligence, what are they for? And have you told your readers? Could you change the language without removing the sim nature? Could be “Force My Might Upon the World”? Verbs, we were told in school, are DOING words. If you want a mechanic to be used, maybe you should talk about it in that sense. Put the verbs into your mechanics, and take out the nouns.