When a character dies, it can be a real buzzkill in a lot of games. Some games make this not so—in Fiasco, you can continue to exert influence over the story, in the name of a dead character, just as easily as a live one. In Dogs in the Vineyard, you don’t die unless you’ve had a dramatic death scene, and figured that the conflict was worth staking your life on. But in many other games? Death can happen all too easily, once anything comes to blows.
Category: Game Design
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The Boundary Paradox
Earlier, I talked about how boundaries figured into Being Awesome, and into Exalted. After some thought, I realized that there was a lot going on with this idea of boundaries in RPGs.
Boundaries do two things simultaneously. They limit the game from the creative infinite, and create an identity for the game that is unique to it. Setting makes up some of the game’s boundaries, but in play it is often the case that rules do most of the grunt work. But this makes sense because all games are defined by rules. Without rules you do not have a game, you have Calvin Ball. Rules define a simply incredible volume of a game by their very presence, though a full discussion of how and why “System Matters” is beyond the scope of this post. Suffice to say, rules define a great deal about the tone of a game, and how it’s played.
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What We Have in Common
The wonderful Joshua A.C. Newman recently tweeted this:
In my Human Contact backer’s survey, the players who said they played D&D said, “D&D, of course”. All three of 248.
This raises an interesting point. All three of us here at Transneptune began gaming with D&D. A lot of what we do exists in reaction to this, whether we want to admit it or not. A lot of our idea of what pathological gaming is and can be, and what good gaming is and can be, stems from this common ground we have.
But I think that the whole story-games movement is opening up the field to many people who might never have played RPGs precisely because they weren’t interested in D&D. The game is undeniably still popular, but the audience for games where you sit around a table with friends and make up a story with the aid of some dice seems to be widening.
So what, then, is the purpose of our D&D reactionism? Well, it certainly provides a common language and a common set of experiences among the three of us. But let me turn that question outward for a moment, and ask what you, our phantasmal readers, have found as the recurring touchstones of this genre? What benefit do you see to having a common set of references, and how common do you think D&D really is?
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Epic versus Heroic
This distinction has been brought up many times by many people, though not as much in reference to gaming, and not in so many words. The gist of this distinction is historical: Epic protagonists from ancient sagas like Gilgamesh and Beowulf do not undergo the same kind of psychological change and examination that modern ones do. Gilgamesh is what he is, and his story does not examine or care about the choices he makes nearly as much as their consequences. A lot of creation myths and parables also fit this pattern. When the character is well-defined and consequences are interesting, it can make for a decent story.
The more interesting story in my mind is the one that examines the protagonist’s choices and their motivation. Consequences figure into their psychology, and their future choices, but aren’t the focus of the story. I want to know who this protagonist is, what makes him great, and why he has decided to use his talents the way he does. If Gilgamesh is a good example of an Epic protagonist, then Gregory House might be a good example of a modern one. In the show, his actions are largely secondary to the motivations he has for them. Other characters spend the majority of the show analyzing and overanalyzing his motives, emotions and affect.
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Vision and Core Experience
There are many qualities that are advantageous when developing games. An understanding of mathematics. A background in drama and philosophy. Historical perspective. Innovative ideas on play. The list is as long as my arm. But one that I have become keenly aware of is unity of vision. It’s more of a concern when you have multiple designers all struggling to form ideas around the kernel of a game, as we tend to have. But concerns over unity and coherency are ever-present even for the single developer.
Do Not Go Gentle has been causing us fits to design primarily because not one of us has a clear idea of what we want to do with it. We know some things that will be true of the game when it’s done, but without some central shared vision to build on, we’ve been at a loss to make significant headway. It started off as a zombie panic game, but then transmuted into a game about the last days of one’s life, and then loosely to something inspired by Ghost. Without a firm idea of what we’re trying to write, we can’t construct mechanics or even really know if it’s worth building.
Which is not a problem we had with In a Dragon-Guarded Land.
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Power and Balance
Reading through Leverage, there’s something very interesting to be learned from the section on creating a job. In Leverage, both the show and the game, the crew’s marks are pretty much always rich and powerful, guarded by as much physical, financial, and legal protection as they want. Yet they are all still vulnerable.
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Ars est Celare Artem
Kabuki Stagecrew That’s Latin for “the art is in concealing the art”. I’ve long held it dear as a motto, through work as a stagehand to work as a systems administrator. In both such jobs, the pinnacle of achievement is to do your job such that people not only don’t know you’re doing it, but forget that it’s even a job that needs to be done.
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Mechanics with Side-Effects
I want to talk for a bit about something I sometimes see in RPGs (and, less often, in other games): mechanics that resolve one thing while producing a side-effect for something else. For example, critical hits in D&D, divine interventions in In Nomine, and the complications/opportunities system in the Leverage RPG. For the purposes of this article, a side-effect mechanic is primarily about one thing (whether you succeed at something, generally) but that produces a side-effect that is taken into consideration elsewhere in the game.
That's the way I roll First, though, I’m not a huge fan of side-effect mechanics. I find they usually add more complexity than benefit. They can be jarring if the side-effect is something fairly removed from the original thing being resolved. Side effects have to be balanced such that they work with the core mechanic, neither ruining its original feel nor making the secondary effect insignificant. In short, the whole concept is troubled from a design perspective. Still, there are times when it’s completely appropriate. Where and when is the key question.
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Math, Crunch, and Dice
As designers and players, we’re into narrative-focused, story-oriented games. Such games typically eschew complex mechanics in favor of one or two thin premises and a boat-load of charm. So what then, do we have to say about the “crunch”—the technical rules—in our games? Surprisingly, we spend a fair amount of time debating how to mechanize everything from war to afternoon tea.
Game mechanics are not optional in a role-playing game. If done correctly, they can re-emphasize the narrative, in the same way that a picture frame can help a viewer focus on a painting or courses in a meal help a diner enjoy an elaborate meal. If done wrong, they become a distraction to telling a story. In some examples, they may subvert the role-playing altogether as players concentrate more on leveling up than saving kingdoms or winning love.
Here’s the thing I find essential: Mechanics in RPGs are as much a form of world-building as the setting of a game; perhaps moreso. As Austin pointed out about Exalted, when the mechanics of your game don’t support the fiction of your story, the entire affair approaches farce. That, incidentally, is one of the reasons that indie games so frequently have novel mechanics and concentrate on stories of a particular type. By stripping down the system to just the pieces that are essential to establishing the feel of the game, a designer can push players towards styles of play that those mechanics are good for.