A few thoughts intersected the other day. Let’s see if I can get them down.
Here’s the short of it: balance is a canard. You don’t want balance, at least not in an RPG. You want interesting choices. Balance is a response to one kind of failure of interesting choices, that of a dominant strategy. But you can have a lack of interesting choices in the other direction: if every choice is equivalent, that is, if your choices are false choices, then your game (qua game) suffers just as much as if it had a dominant strategy.
So, you need to make things asymmetrical, maybe even unbalanced (gasp, gape). It’s a balance to strike, between the fire of a dominant strategy and the ice of false choices. You need to make the experience of play involve moments of “if I had only done X”, so that the rest of the choices you make are meaningful.
Now, there’s a strong version and a weak version of this claim. The weak is that, for all choices, you should have at least two meaningfully different options, where it is not transparently clear which will be the better one. The strong version is that you should also have some options that are clearly worse. I only mean to maintain the weak version, but with the caveat that what is clearly worse to you may well be compelling to someone else.
There’s another wrinkle to this, which Austin articulated very nicely the other day: when he comes to the table, he wants to see the choices other people make, and he wants those choices to be different from his own. So you need choices that ramify into other meaningful choices.
OK, theory, fine. How do you do this? Obviously, that’s context-dependent. But here are my principles on the matter:
- Make your game have multiple axes of interaction, which are not directly comparable. You can think of this as “choose the problems you want to expect”. In Apocalypse World, for example, you can focus on personal effectiveness or group effectiveness: are you a badass, or are you a badass because of and through your gang? Obviously, the latter comes with some problems—things that aren’t in your control like challenges for leadership, supply issues, communication issues, etc. But at the same time, there are things you can do with and as a gang that you simply can’t as an individual.
- Play enough to see the ruts you make when you play. If, after choosing M, you consistently go from there to Q, F, R, then consider collapsing those options. Especially if there’s no other way onto that path, and everyone else you see follows it the same way.
- Make a variety of things in your game. Like, mechanically meaningful widgets. This can be variety within a category of thing, or a variety of categories of things. This is a contentious point; a lot of games have been made, many very good, without many types of things. I acknowledge that this is a taste thing for me. I like games where you get to choose from lists of Distinctions/Moves/Gifts/whatever, and make up your own, and engage with the game outside the act of play-as-play. So, if that’s not your aim or style, at least help the players to make interesting situations where the choices they have to make in the story are valid.
So, I’ve been posting to G+ these snippets: they’re a little too small and underdeveloped for the blog but I thought I’d do a round-up and save them here. If you want to know more about how Piece of Work is going, take a look over here:
On the topic of damage.
On the topic of perspectives.
On the topic of the core mechanic.
On the topic of purchasing gear.
There’ll probably be more as we finish our final playtesting and toss around more rules edits. Hope you enjoy!
So, a while back, we talked about doing a thing called Demand Mechanics. The idea is that we will do improvisational mechanic design: pull something out of a hat, bat ideas around for how to make mechanics about it. The video didn’t go up right away, due to none of us really knowing anything about video editing. At this point, we think it’s better to get it up than not, so here it is, in its raw unedited glory. It was fun to do, and we hope you’ll enjoy it!
In this half-hour segment, we design mechanics for the following things:
- Feeling bad about killing orcs.
- College exams
We like to divide things, I guess. Often, it’s into binaries. Today, it’s a troika.[1]
There are three things I’m currently thinking about in RPG design, and those are story, emotional response, and interaction.
- I feel that word is very appropriate in this case; like a troika, these three are distinct, but must work together to bring everything forward. [↩]
So we’ve been discussing damage in Piece of Work. In a cybernoir story, eventually someone is going to get shot, stabbed, or clubbed. Mechanically, there are a lot of options available for tracking hurt—hit points, statuses, health levels—but each has drawbacks that doesn’t deliver the effect we’re after. We want something gripping but still lightweight and story-focused.
Unfortunately, many damage systems are disconnected from the visceral thing they represent. Hit points are engaging while we mark off a few more points, but they don’t reflect the gaping wounds later in the story. We can check the box labeled Angry but that doesn’t feel like the irrational anger of a jealous lover. Health levels are flat and wide—they simultaneously say too much about a character’s capabilities and not enough about the reason they’re in the shape they’re in. They are, in short, abstract.
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So, I think Primetime Adventures is a great game. So great a game, that we might well ask why we don’t just use it for everything. Well, because of reasons.
Let me unpack that a bit. Some time ago, I was promulgating the notion that most of what makes a successful instance of RPG play is shared genre-expectations among the people at the table. I still think that this is true.
Primetime Adventures is a game with some powerful mechanisms for getting everyone at the table to share those genre-expectations. It’s a one-two punch: first the pitch, where everyone at the table gets in the same general area of idea-space, and then fanmail, which works[1] as a feedback mechanism to let players tell each other “yes, more of that, please!”
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- When it works. It can and does fail. [↩]
People don’t just read texts as some kind of blank slate. We read them with assumptions and background knowledge, sure, but we also bring a particular set of tools to bear to understand them as we read them. You should really read Ryan Macklin on the subject of reading texts.
OK, good. Now, I’m going to talk about some of my personal experience with this issue.
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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?
