Hello all. Long time no write. We are hard at work on Et in Arcadia Ego these days, and that’s been the subject of many trips to the Baker Street Pub. While all of us had a feel for the genre and had our source material in mind, we kept having problems modeling that material with game mechanics. The problem wasn’t that the mechanics were bad—in a certain way, they actually accomplished the goals we set out to achieve. But we kept iterating on them, trying to make them match our inspiration, only to have them twist in our hands like so many fae promises. Last night we had a lot of progress stemming from applying some old-fashioned questioning our assumptions.
Category: Game Design
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Release Dates
So, we’re not going to finish Dragon-Guarded Land by tomorrow. Looks like May is when it’ll be out. We’ve finished the text except for a few small edits, but we’re still waiting on some art and then I have to do layout. Then to get proofs from some print-on-demand services, and we’ll be ready to go.
But there’s one more important point: we don’t like the name. The name of this game has given us trouble since the beginning. We started with Destiny, which was too generic and, we later realized, too much like FATE. We used Loom for a while, but that was opaque and also a LucasArts trademark. We moved on to In a Dragon-Guarded Land, which we’ve lately shortened to Dragon-Guarded Land, because we liked the poem “The Realists” by W.B. Yeats. That title is misleading, opaque, and pretentious. While we love pretension, the other two are deal-breakers.
So we’ve been trying to come up with a better title. (more…)
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Four dimensions
This is a really quick thought, that just came up in conversation with Austin:
There are two (relevant) axes to consider when comparing RPGs to other media: interactivity vs. passivity, and visual vs. verbal. Here’s a chart:
Figure 1 So, there are certain properties that visual media handle better than verbal—spectacle, small details being hidden in the background. There are also certain things that verbal media handle better than visual—internal monologues and that sort of introspective analysis of motivation.
Interactive vs. passive is a slightly different kind of axis—it’s more about how you desire to experience a story. But it also alters the landscape of what you can tell to a degree—interactive stories have a hard time with certain kinds of reveal and inevitability, but interactive stories can gain a kind of plausibility through avoiding certain “we have to split up in the haunted house, it’s required by the genre” stupidity.
Now, there are two important things I want to ask: what other properties of these categories am I missing; and where does theater fit on here? Traditionally at least, it’s passive, but I’ve been to some experimental theater events that strain that boundary, and it’s a lot more verbal than comics or movies, but hardly wholly so.
We’ve not been posting much lately. We’re working on finalizing Dragon-Guarded Land, and that’s taking a lot of our time. I hope to get back to more frequent posting—and of course, more frequent thinking!—about games soon, though. But what will be really exciting is getting this book finished and out there! This is going to be our first release, and there’s some palpable excitement around here.
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Unfairness, Struggle, Glory
Unfairness in stories, heroic stories in particular, is the point of those stories. To defeat overwhelming odds in the name of good is dramatic and interesting. Specifically though, heroes in these stories need to overcome the ways the opposition is unfairly better than them. In Tolkien’s tale, the humans fight back against huge armies of orcs by defending themselves in citadels, by gathering their own huge army, and by a neat if ill-advised metaphysical hack against the big bad.They apply their strengths to the weakest points in their opposition, and so counterbalance the unfairness they’re up against.
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The Best Game I’ve Ever Played
Some talk on Twitter the other day (ending here) got me thinking about the best game I’ve ever played. Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps understandably, it violated a lot of the common assumptions about how to play role-playing games, but for at least two of us who played—me, and Austin—it changed the way we see role-playing games and what we felt that they could do. What follows is an anecdote, hopefully interesting.
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A New Direction
We here at Transneptune Games have had a breakthrough. There’s been a lot of talk on this blog about things like “story” and “narrative”. We’ve talked about moral choice, the feel of a mechanic. We’ve even talked about, dare I say it?, fun.
But we’ve realized that none of this is sufficient to make the game we want to play. (more…)
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Lessons from Retirement
The most fascinating thing happened to me after a few years of playing World of Darkness. Over time, I began to hate combat. Like fire-in-the-soul, singing the world-ripper melody of vengeful dead gods level of hate. I took my katana and trenchcoat and just hung them up in my dingy undercity apartment, never to look at them again. I was hesitant to give it up at first, mystified as I was by this development, but my loathing grew stronger and purer with every minute we spent killing some asshole’s mooks.
After a time, I realized that there was a genre clash. When playing Mage, a game about transcendence and the malleability of reality itself, I found I was really just playing a super hero in a setting that was mechanically unfit for it. When playing Vampire, I had the same problem. The game’s fiction was laden with these cool ideas and highfalutin concepts, but somehow we spent hours just trying to hurt some guys with our katanas and Desert Eagles. Where was all that intellectual conflict? From what I’ve heard of a lot of WoD games, this is not uncommon. Part of this problem is rooted in a confusion within the source material—at no point in Mage: the Ascension are we told what Mages do with their time. The War is over, the Technocracy won by any meaningful definition of the word, and the spirit realm is basically off-limits. Ascension is not a goal that has a mechanic, or is even explicitly attainable. And if it was attainable, ἀρετή, the stat governing your Ascension, was utterly opaque, meant to be a kind of platonic-ideal-world understanding of the entire universe-as-a-whole that was impossible to play. Combine that with the still-extant threat of the Mage-Hunting Technocracy and you have a cocktail for aimless HITMark kill quests and zombie-survival-but-with-magic games.
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I Hate Mooks
So in the Dragon Age computer/console games, you fight these endless hordes of faceless monsters called Darkspawn. The hero of the story must kill their leader in order to neutralize the giant horde of them that is threatening the ambiguously middle-ages european landscape. These monsters are the giant threat that the hero must deal with, but ultimately the hero’s victory over the Darkspawn is unsatisfying because the hero faces a foe that represents no moral quandary. Even the final boss, the Big Bad, is a mook! It is as faceless as its minions—despite being a fallen Elder God it offers no commentary, no insight whatsoever on the human or trans-human condition. It merely roars and directs its mindless masses. Luckily, I am finding that the sequel is much better about this, though certainly not perfect.
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Shape of a Mechanic
I wanted to talk about a concept I’ve recently hit upon that I’m calling a mechanic’s “shape”. To do that I have to introduce a few prerequisite concepts, but first, a caveat. I don’t believe in a grand unified theory of game design. Instead, I take a view that’s closer described as “there are many facets to truth.” So, when I say that I need to define what I mean by mechanic in the first place, I’m not claiming to have a perfect, complete, or final definition of the term. I can only bring up the parts that are currently on my mind here.
To me, a game mechanic is a rule, strategy, behavior, or convention that governs some sort of activity or sub-activity in a game. It has a domain that it applies to—where it fits in the entire system of mechanics. A simple mechanic might be “when you hit someone with a weapon, you roll that weapon’s damage dice and inflict that many hit points of damage.” The mechanic tells you what its domain is or the activity that it applies to—in this case, hitting someone with a weapon. It also tells you what to do when that thing happens—roll damage and reduce hit points.
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Fair and Balanced
We talk a lot on this blog about issues of balance. This is tied to fairness ((See Rob Donoghue for more thoughts on that.)). There’s a strong unspoken assumption in game design that, if you believe balance is a relevant category for your game, then your game should have it, should be balanced.
I’ve just been talking with Austin about why I’d rather play D&D 3.5 than D&D 4 if I’m looking to play a minis game, and in so doing, I had a realization. Two rogues with spears in a party, flanking at long reach? It’s great. It’s something hard to do with 4e. It’s something particular to the ways 3.5 is broken and imbalanced. And it’s part of why I would play 3.5 not just as a minis game, but as an actual role-playing game.
Role-playing games should be unfair, but they should be unfair in both directions. (more…)
