More and more these days, I am fascinated by the power and role of decisions. Decisions create buy-in, generate unexpected outcomes, and provide drama. As I’ve come to see it, most of all, decisions provide meaning.
But not all decisions create meaning—to do that, a decision needs to be personal, needs to have weight, and has to be visible. Each of these things is challenging to engineer reliably. I’ve been trying to take stock of what works for me. This is what I’ve come up with so far.
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It’s hard to make RPGs that build, maintain, and deliver on tension at the right points of a story. Systems that don’t allow for tense scenes or palpable stakes just don’t have grip. And yet, if a system engages too directly with tension and action, the outcomes it produces feel trite. At worst, an errant die roll can derail a campaign that took weeks or months to build. While I think there are a lot of different techniques for pacing a story, I’ve come to believe there are a few overarching modes a system might be aligned with.[1]
- NB: As with all the times I’ve suggested deconstructing ideas, I don’t actually think these are the only ways RPGs influence the tension of their games. I also think that a single system might use any or all of these approaches in different ways at different times. I find it useful to separate them out and talk about them, though. [↩]
When you’re designing a game, it can be helpful to ask—and answer—”what do I want my players to describe?” It’s probably not the first question you want to answer, but when you need to ask it, you know you will. It’s not quite the same as “what happens in my game”[1] because, importantly, it’s about what details your players will dwell on, what will give the game its texture.
Once you have some answers to that question, the next thing to consider is how to get your players to actually spend some effort describing those things. This is part of what Vincent’s whole thing about “rightward pointing arrows” was about. They’re one possible technique for making the things described in the fiction meaningful and important enough that people don’t gloss over details, and thus describe what you want them to.
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- Look at the wonderful illustrations from Dylan Meconis for the Italian edition of Dogs in the Vineyard for a great expression of “what happens” in Dogs. [↩]
While we’re generally all about Becoming Heroes, we’ve recently hit upon one part that is harder than it needs to be—character generation. Right up front, we ask you to decide eight traits, three circumstances, and three ties. We don’t give you a lot of guidance around selecting these traits and people get stuck around six traits in.
Now, I don’t think getting stuck is a fatal flaw—it usually clears up when you talk about it as a group—but we’re going to add trait suggestions to each arc in our next revision. For instance, the Lost King should probably have some trait relating to their nobility. The Dutybound should have a trait related to where their duty comes from. Lots of places can inspire traits; the system just doesn’t yet help you find them.
In designing Piece of Work, we’re addressing character generation directly. We’re using a Dread-esque questionnaire that walks you though building your character. It works phenomenally well. First, it breaks up tasks like “allocate your skill points” or “pick your gear” into a series of discrete steps. Because those are smaller decisions and those decisions have context, they’re much easier to make.
Second, it lets us gently reinforce the tropes and setting of the game. Instead of just picking a random piece of gear, you have an item you picked up when things started to go wrong. Instead of just knowing the person to your left, you’re childhood friends. This added context pushes characters to create conspiracies, attach nostalgic meaning to things, to have conversations with other characters fraught with historical subtext—all staples of the noir genre.
I’m now on the hunt for other systems that use smaller choices to reduce the strain of creating a character. Dread is obviously one. Spirit of the Century‘s phases works this way. And Leverage not only has bite-sized char-gen steps, but moves some of those choices out of char-gen and into actual play. What are some of your favorite char-gen systems, and how do they help create a character?
Last night was a fruitful night for Et in Arcadia Ego. We’ve been talking a lot about feminism, sexism, privilege, and judging the past by modern standards. All of this is, of course, of immense importance to any game trying to put itself in a period of immensely inequitable gendering and even worse class divides. But the key thing that I want to talk about right now is what this brought us to, in terms of game mechanics.
A lot has been said about the endings to ME3, and hell, they got me thinking too. Let me start by saying that I don’t have a particularly strong objection to the content of the ending I got. My primary objections to how ME3 ended are based in the context of those endings and what they lacked, rather than what they contained. Further, I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned from these endings and Risk: Legacy.
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I’ve been thinking lately about the different kinds of play encoded in classic card games. It’s kinda cool, really: most card games are highly social games, in terms if where the locus of interaction lies. This means that they can do a really good job of informing the more game-y elements of our RPG design.
So, as work on our cyber-noir game Piece of Work, I see it more and more as having Texas Hold ‘Em at it’s core, where there’s common information and there’s hole information, and you need to second-guess the forces arrayed against you and use what you have to win by strength or bluff.
As we work on Austin’s top-secret game about what it’s like to fight for your home against its enemies, both internal and external, I see it as being shaped like Hearts. You take on some pain and risk as you fight, but you could go another route: take on all the pain and shoot the moon. If you fail, you fail bad. But at a certain point, do you have another option?
And as I work on Et in Arcadia Ego, I see it like Blackjack. You push for what you want, but constantly risk going too far. Then the façade of civility falls, and everyone sees the raw human malice and desire and need under it all that they’ve been furiously denying, and they turn their faces from you, making you carry the burden of their shame.
Of course, Arcadia is the only one of these games that actually uses cards. But the structure is there regardless of the implementation.
I’ve been thinking about immersion lately. I know it’s a dirty word in RPG circles—no one can agree on what it means, for a start. And I’ve not taken part in many of those conversations, so I know there’s a lot of thought on the matter that I’m missing.
Here goes.
I was talking with Alex P. recently, and he observed that a lot of the complaints he sees—and some of the complaints he has—about what I’ll call Forge-style indie RPGs is that they make the machinery by which they produce a story visible and available for direct manipulation, and for a certain demographic, this leaves you wondering what you’re even doing there. No immersion, no surprise. You can see what you’re doing, and so you have to stay a little bit out of the mind of the character who’s caught up in living the story. You can see what you’re doing, so you get there with intention.
I could say that this is a failure of design, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s a matter of calibrating it to taste, and that “taste” is this old point of creative agendas.
So Austin and I have lately begun asking ourselves what it is we want when we sit down to play a game, in the most generic of senses. I think that I, fundamentally, want something that gives me the same feeling of story-glow I get from good TV or good novels. So, my agenda requires some degree of interpretive and especially editorial authority in the game. This, in turn, requires at least one someone to exercise control over the machinery of the story. Obscuring tools doesn’t help people use them, and my agenda needs those tools to be used!
I think that this is another case of managing expectations. You’re never designing all things for all people, so be clear with yourself and your audience about what bits of machinery the game exposes, for who to fiddle with, and we’ll all be better off.
But different people object to seeing different machinery, too! Alex doesn’t like seeing the raw mechanisms of the story. I don’t like seeing the raw mechanisms of the probability. All love to the guys at Evil Hat, but skill + 4dF vs. static difficulty loses some of my interest precisely because I see it as just adding a normal distribution in [-4, 4] to a comparison between two static values. I don’t know why, really—most dice systems are about this transparent.
(I don’t think that this is something you can design for, much. But it’s something to remember when selling people on your game, or reading reviews.)
