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Procedure and Rules, Experience and Best Practices in RPG Design

In game design, role-playing games, techniques on January 16th, 2023 at 12:00 pm

A few thoughts on procedures and experience in TTRPGs (thanks to Rob Donoghue)

A little over a week ago, TTRPG designer Rob Donoghue wrote a thread on Mastodon that struck a real chord with me, and crystallized some thoughts about rules and guidance for GMs in rulebooks that have been coalescing for a long time. I agree with almost everything he says, but I have a couple comments to add.

Go read the thread and come back. I’ll wait and, really, it’s worth it on its own. Credit to Jesse Bourneko’s comment on that thread for sparking some of this response as well.

Rob says some powerful things about the merits of GM rules versus GM guidance in RPG rulebooks, and the relative power of procedure versus experience. And the heart of it, I think, is that it is about the art of playing an RPG well. Which is to say skillfully.

So a digression about my experience analyzing skill and best practices in creative activities. In my day job, I’m a customer service supervisor, which means that I professionally coach people on having constructive, productive conversations with people who may or may not be interested in constructive or productive, but definitely want to get their way.

Because I am heavily analytical and tend to focus on finding patterns, I have opinions on the role of procedure and experience. For all but the most experienced employees, I coach to best practices first and foremost, and only coach to exceptions when the advisor hit all of the best practices for what I am coaching them on. In spite of this, though, I do have enough experience to recognize that there are a great many exceptions to best practice based on personalities, the specific challenges being faced and the state of information held by the parties. I’ve literally analyzed thousands of interactions at this point, to say nothing of my own, personal experience in customer service.

But, as I said, 98% of my feedback focuses on best practices. To apply experience and contradict best practices constructively, you need to understand why the best practice you are deviating from is a best practice in the first place. What it is trying to accomplish and why it normally accomplishes this. If you have that level of mastery, you can deviate from the best practice constructively with regular success, but until you reach that level of experience – which will generally require a certain amount of reflection about what you are doing and why, in addition to practical experience you will be more successful if you stick to the best practice. Until then, you are more likely to deviate at the wrong time or in the wrong way because you don’t have the depth of understanding – that is experience – for your gut to lead you in the right direction. In fact, your gut has a good chance of leading in the wrong direction more often that chance would dictate.

People come to their jobs with their own history of life experience which has taught them ways to handle day to day life and people, and they want to apply their experience of high school, relationships and parents to customers. Generally, this makes their work life much harder because they want to stay in their comfort zone, even when it is detrimental to their own happiness. These strategies for talking to people are the mechanisms they have built to get what they want and to protect themselves from emotional harm for years, maybe decades and have gotten them to a place where they are probably safer and happier than before they started using them. When their normal practices lead to disaster they often rationalize by saying the customer is unreasonable, or worse. It’s not easy getting people to break out of that comfort zone, even as an experiment to see if it really will work better.

And the situations where best practices don’t succeed, or even backfire, make it even harder to get them to buy in. It is often natural to seize on one bad experience and ignore 5 or 10 or 15 positive experiences. People are not wired to process complex cause and effect, and the best practice is the difference between this one disaster and all of the successful interactions they’ve ever had. Because it is impossible to do A–B testing for a side-by-side comparison, folks rely on their intuition, and when it is trained on the wrong experience, it will often lead people astray.

Time to draw this back to RPGs.

Procedures included in a rulebook are the designer’s best effort at showing you how to consistently have a good game with their rules system. If they are writing a PbtA game aimed at an audience that grew up on Shadowrun and Amber Diceless, the designer knows that the the Amber player will have instincts that will not work right with PbtA because they are very, very different systems, just as customer service situations are different than a normal interaction with a sibling. To help bridge the gap for new players, the designer crafts Agenda, Principles and Moves to guide players to avoid using reflexes that worked well for them in their usual games but will cause a disaster if applied alongside these rules (while, effectively, getting out of the way of players that would go in that direction naturally, although that can be complicated psychologically). The goal is to provde players with the means to have a consistently good game when, if left on their own, the game might go up in flames because the GM’s experience leads them in directions which are wrong for this system. In fact, a major source of frustration for designers in the early Forge days was players applying their tools from trad gaming and then complaint that this new game sucked because they didn’t follow the best practices.

But all of the GM rules are best practices and there are times when you will achieve better play by breaking them. The catch is that you need to understand – really understand – what the procedures are accomplishing, and how it contributes to satisfying play, to break them constructively with any consistency. I don’t think designers are immune to this effect, either. One of the main drivers of second editions of successful indie games is, I suspect, because the designers don’t have enough opportunity to build all of the relevant experience themselves during development, and five years later they have so much more experience that they see their own game more clearly, and they want to share that with their players.

All of this is complicated by a factor that Rob does not address directly, especially when he talks about Level 1 and Level 2 rules: RPG rules regularly interact directly with a fiction that is being generated in play. While you can make up a story about the events of a board game, but it is not an integral part of play – or an element directly addressed by the rules – like an RPG does. That means that expertise in boardgames is functionally different than expertise in RPGs. Most of the play in boardgames happens in that second level, so spelling it out will frequently undermine the reason for playing in the first place. Rob mentions that the play space in RPGs is much less knowable in RPGs than in boardgames without directly addressing why this is.

One final point related to all of this. The best way to get better at role playing is practice, and a big part of practice in a creative field like RPGs – or customer service – is to try new things a few times and see what the results are. In the case of RPGs, play new games by new designers that recommend new best practices and, before you try overwriting the new practices based on your previous experience, see what those new best practices do and see how they interact with the Level 1 rules. Even if they are not to your taste, you will still add them to your toolkit, and broaden your experience, and then, if you want, drift things a little bit because you have experience with those rules and practices, not a theoretical understanding. I’m not saying drifting immediately based on your prior experience is wrong, but it will stunt your growth and development as a roleplayer. And a corollary of this is that the broader your experience with different styles of games, the faster you will reach the point that you can drift successfully. Even so, I recommend trying a game with unfamiliar rules systems and procedures a couple of times as written and then hack it. See what the best practices want to accomplish and then drift based on your experience to get closer to what you are looking for.

In the long run, your fellow players will thank you, and so will you.

The Trouble with Trias: a Malfunction at the Intersection of Craft and Reward Mechanics

In boardgames, game design, mechanics on June 23rd, 2011 at 2:30 pm

In the comments to my last post, Ben Draper asked me if I knew of any board games with (by my definition) bad reward mechanics to match the RPG example of the old World of Darkness games. I knew there was one floating around the back of my mind, but it took me a couple of hours to remember what it was. I’d even committed to writing about it once already, as a negative example of craft in game design.

Trias is a game about dinosaurs and continental drift. Played on a modular hexagonal board with three types of terrain: mountains, forest and plains (the board’s origin is probably a couple of cannibalized Settlers of Catan sets) which the players seed with herds of their respective dino species. During the game, the players breed and move their herds around the board and break the board up into sub-continents by drifting hexes outward into new positions.

It’s a straightforward area majority game in the mold of El Grande or San Marco with the continents the players create acting as scoring areas. Whenever a continent is broken in two by drift, one of the new landmasses is scored. The player that has the most herds on the new landmass receives two points and the second-place player scores one. At the end of the game (after the asteroid strikes, destroying all dinosaur life) there is a final scoring of all the continents where the winning species receives one point for each hex making up the continent and the second-place species earning half that many points. Read the rest of this entry »

Good Reward Mechanics

In boardgames, game design, mechanics, role-playing games on June 13th, 2011 at 12:28 pm

 

Over the last couple months I’ve developed a new view of what makes a reward mechanic good. It’s arisen from viewing, in close proximity, and thinking about this excellent Extra Credits video about achievements in video games and an old blog post by Dogs in the Vineyard & Apocalypse World designer Vincent Baker including an interesting discussion in the comments).

I believe that a good reward mechanic acts as a giant landmark or sign post, drawing players through the fun ways to play the game offers while helping them avoid viable but boring (or downright painful) options. If you, as a player, pursue well-designed rewards you will use the other mechanics in ways that are fun. Ideally, the more aggressively you pursue those rewards, the more fun you have, although roleplaying games have complicating factors which keep this a theoretical ideal. Boardgames or video games which violate this principle are missing the point and are much more likely to be outright broken. Often, designers of these games argue that the people that break them aren’t playing the game in the right spirit, but I would argue that the designer doesn’t understand what a game is.

Other factors – rewards that also serve as currency, largely – can be added to reward mechanics, complicating the picture. Good game design is more complicated than getting this aspect of the reward mechanics right, too. Nevertheless, I think any game that falls down on this front fails, or is at least horribly weakened, as a game design, and bells and whistles will not cover it up. Read the rest of this entry »

Linnaeus’s Four Principles of Dice Game Design

In boardgames, game design, mechanics on October 18th, 2010 at 2:26 pm

Like most people in my generation of gamers, I love rolling dice; big handfuls of them when possible. Unfortunately, this clashes with a lot of other elements of my taste in games, and there are very few dice games that I love as much as I love rolling dice. While I don’t think I have all the answers for what makes a brilliant dice game, I do have some thoughts; principles, if you will.

I choose the word principles advisedly. Principles should be followed but, unlike laws or rules, they are provided with the expectation that they will be broken *when there is sufficient justification*. I’m not sure how much the designers of the recent spate of dice games (To Court the King, Kingsburg, Pickomino, Roll Through the Ages, &c.) considered these problems, but all of them, as far as I know, break one or more of these principles, and I don’t think they have sufficient compensation for it. Read the rest of this entry »

Supers RPGs and Comic Book RPGs

In game design, gaming society, mechanics, role-playing games on October 14th, 2010 at 11:09 am

WARNING: An uncharacteristic amount of namedropping occurs in the following anecdote. I’ve done my best to keep it to a minimum, but some is necessary for context.

I was fortunate enough to attend DexCon 13 in July, partially as a birthday present to myself. My first session was an experimental session of Marvel Superheroes run by With Great Power… designer Michael Miller. Darren Watts, president of Hero Games (publisher of the Champions RPG) and Indie Press Revolution (the latter newly minted at the time) was just closing up the IPR booth as we started up, and when someone mentioned we were playing MSH, Darren expressed nostalgia for the game. That inevitably led to us wheedling him into taking the last available seat for the game. Seriously, supers gaming with Michael and Darren was too good an opportunity to pass up. Read the rest of this entry »

Strategic Bricolage

In boardgames, game design, mechanics, race for the galaxy, techniques on October 5th, 2010 at 10:32 am

One reason why I love Race for the Galaxy so much is the strong exploration element. You find new combinations of cards and powers regularly – even after hundreds of plays – which keeps it a fresh, fun experience. The reason Race for the Galaxy maintains this for so many plays when other games are exhausted after a handful of times is that it demands strategic bricolage. Read the rest of this entry »

Narrative Arc in Boardgames

In game design, mechanics on September 23rd, 2010 at 11:26 am

The concept of narrative arc in board games was (to my knowledge) first described by Jonathan Degann in an essay he wrote for the (sadly moribund) Games Journal as part of his Game Design 101 series. It didn’t find a lot of traction for some reason, though, and it doesn’t come up much in the analysis of board and card games. I think it’s an important analytical tool so I thought I’d dredge it up from the depths, clean it off, and see if I can offer a few extra notes about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Bohnanza: the RPG

In boardgames, game design, mechanics, role-playing games on May 28th, 2010 at 3:52 pm

Okay, not literally. But I ran an idea up the flagpole on Twitter and got a reaction from a few people, including a request to expand a bit and, well, here we are 🙂

My original tweet said:

The hand management in Bohnanaza is crying out to be used as a conflict resolution system in an RPG. Read the rest of this entry »

More to Come on Craft

In game design, mechanics on January 19th, 2010 at 2:22 pm

I didn’t intend for my post on the role of craft in game design to be the start of another series of articles, but it appears that there is some demand for more on the topic. Well, from Ryan Macklin and Seth Ben Ezra anyway. I guess I’ll try writing a couple more pieces and see how it goes.

Seth suggested that I dissect a few games, looking at the craft (and lack thereof) in their designs. Doing an adequate job of this for an entire game would require a pamphlet, not a blog post, though, and I’m not up to taking on such a large project. Instead, I’m going to pull out individual rule systems, or clusters of closely-related systems, and discuss them. So far, I have four subjects in mind, and we’ll see if there is demand for more after that. Read the rest of this entry »

Craft and Game Design

In game design on January 5th, 2010 at 4:56 pm

Large swathes of the gaming community devote themselves to finding new mechanics and (for roleplayers) new techniques of play. Games are routinely dismissed with the simple statement that they offer nothing new. I am something of a neophile, so I understand this position, but I also feel that it misses the point. Often, these games do not suffer from a lack of novelty, as their critics say. Instead, they are poorly crafted. Craft is something you have to feel, though. You cannot (easily) point to it in a rulebook or explain in a review (let alone a quick, dismissive comment), so it’s easier to fall back on something superficial like a lack of novelty.

This, of course, begs the question, what is craft? Read the rest of this entry »

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