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In fiction writing, new writers are usually told to avoid adverbs. The idea is that there are better ways to say “he moved quietly” that do a better job of connecting with the reader and painting a mental picture. The theory is that the English language has a lot of rich verbs, nouns, and adjectives which do a better job than the “bland verb + modifier” approach that you can lean on if you let yourself use adverbs. Now obviously not all advice is universal, and masters know when to break the rules, etc., etc., but as a basic guideline I think it’s pretty sound.

I’ve been trying to read as many of the Game Chef games from this years competition as possible, and I noticed a few games that featured something I feel is analogous to adverbs in fiction writing, which is where the designer just tells the players that it’s their responsibility to inject the theme into the game. A designer who wants a game to be spooky will say “describe it in a spooky way”. A designer who wants a dreamlike atmosphere will say “play out the scene like it’s in a dream”. A designer who wants to evoke a sense of childlike wonder will say “make this decision the way a child would”. Obviously it’s important to give the players guidance toward what sort of content is thematically appropriate, but that can’t be the only thing a game does to deliver its theme. The rules, procedures, and creative touchstones that the game itself provides need to directly push the game into thematically appropriate content. For example, Kira Scott’s space madness game Into the Void tells the GM to introduce horrifying possibly-hallucinatory images, but also tells them to base the images on character traits that have previously been moved “into the void” by the mechanics, metaphorically grounding the horrific imagery as relevant to the protagonists’ characterization, which is a strong horror-fiction technique. The game has the “make it nightmarish” advice in there, but it doesn’t just use advice. Telling someone your intended end-goal isn’t the same as telling them how to get there, and I think a game needs to tell you how to get there, not just where the game designer hopes you’ll end up.

An important feature of any RPG system design is the incentive structure it creates to elicit behaviors from the players. Sometimes the incentive structures will be consciously designed to play off each other, creating a space for interesting choices (for example, in the D&D 3e/3.5 character building system for Fighters there’s usually a tradeoff between accuracy and damage: do you want to hit often, or do you want to do a lot of damage when you do hit? Both are desirable, but often the choices that move you closer to one goal will make it harder to achieve the other, even if it’s just in terms of opportunity cost). Sometimes the incentives will seem at first glance to be unidirectional, such that more of X is always better. In a comment on a Vincent Baker blog post, Simon Carryer used a phrase that crystallized my thinking about some systems that do that:

it sucks to be playing against your own integrity

Oftentimes these seemingly unidirectional incentives do have a counter-incentive: the player’s integrity. In a competitive game that integrity might be their sense of “fair play”. Since I don’t read or play many competitive games I more frequently see the incentive balanced against a player’s artistic or aesthetic integrity.

For an example, let’s look at Wushu, which has two separate subsystems which feature this problematic pattern. In Wushu, for each action you roll a number of dice and compare the result on each die to a score from a trait that seems relevant to the action. Each die that rolls under the trait score counts as a “success”. Assuming that you want your character to succeed, there’s an incentive to roll more dice (each extra die you roll has a possibility coming up a success, with no mechanical downside) and an incentive to roll against a stat with a high value (a greater chance that each die you roll be a success, with no mechanical downside).

Wushu‘s most famous rule is that you get an extra die for each “detail” that you add to your action narration. Since more dice are better, you are incentivized to get as many dice as you can, which means you’re incentivized to add as much detail as you can. Which means that the game is encouraging you to create “purple prose”, frequently derided as poor storytelling. The counter-incentive that’s encouraging players to limit the number of dice they use is the desire to maintain artistic integrity: you want to get as many dice as you can without pushing the bounds of good taste.

In Wushu character creation, players author their own traits and assign scores to them by spending points from a limited pool. During play, you decide what trait to use with each roll by picking one that is “relevant” to the action you’ve described. Since a broad, generally applicable trait is more likely to be relevant than a concrete, specific, flavorful one, the game has created another incentive: when creating your character, create a few broad, general traits and give them high scores. Since you’ll almost always be able to narrate an action that seems “relevant” to a broad trait, you’ll almost always be able to roll against the high score associated with it, leading the the greatest number of successes for you. The game has created an incentive to repeatedly engage in similar actions so that you can always use the same broad, bland trait with a high score attached to it. The counter-incentive that’s encouraging you to create more traits, create interesting traits, and use a variety of traits and actions during play is your artistic integrity: you don’t want to be “boring”, “predictable”, or “repetitive” in the way you create or play your character.

When a game creates an incentive that is only countered by your own integrity it encourages you to operate on the edges of your integrity, which sucks. It means you’ll sometimes cross that boundary, making decisions that you (or the people you’re playing with) regret, and will make you uncomfortable about decisions that come close to crossing. If the incentive’s reward is built around character effectiveness, and the game expects social esteem in the group to come from demonstrating character effectiveness, then the game presents players with a terrible choice: do I want to be considered a poor player because I’m not as mechanically effective as I could be, or do I want to be considered a cheesy player with things like trait grubbing and social wheedling? The difficultly of gauging your friends’ sensibilities and navigating that difficult course can lead to social tension, and “labeling” or “pathologizing” people. Concepts like “munchkin”, “powergamer”, or “min-maxer” were created to stigmatize people who respond to the obvious incentives in a game but trip over the hidden social counter-incentives that groups apply as patches to questionably designed systems. This blog post isn’t a demand that games be made jerk-proof or to insulate against obnoxious behavior (bullies and griefers can find ways to make anything unpleasant), but people who are making a good-faith effort to play a game according to the player-facing incentives it presents shouldn’t be led into doing things that make the game unpleasant for themselves or others.

Rather than relying heavily on players’ or groups’ integrity to carry a large load, I think game designers will generally be better served by thoughtfully designing the incentives in their games. Obviously the creative sensibilities of players and groups are important, but it’s dangerous to make them into “load bearing” aspects of a game system’s design, especially if it’s not done thoughtfully and intentionally. There are multiple ways to avoid the problem I’m highlighting in this blog post. For example, in Dogs in the Vineyard‘s conflict system, for each trait or object you “concretely demonstrate in the fiction” you roll dice and add them to a pool, making it superficially similar to the Wushu mechanic I criticized above. However, there are diminishing returns to adding dice to your pool in DITV: You only use dice out of the pool a few at a time, so there’s no benefit to having an overly large pool as long as you have enough to pick from, and there’s some benefit to leaving some traits unrolled so that your opponent faces uncertainty rather than perfect information when making their own dice-game decisions against you. The game provides an incentive to invoke traits or objects (thus making the game’s fiction richer), but the incentive isn’t so overwhelming that you feel dumb or unskilled for not including as many as you can at every opportunity (which would make the game seem silly and overwrought).

Another approach to avoiding the “integrity counter-incentive” is to associate different mechanical decisions with a basket of explicitly designed pros and cons. This is the approach I took when designing the dice system in my game Final Hour of a Storied Age. My game also lets you roll more dice by invoking more traits, but rolling more dice isn’t unambigously better: it makes you more likely to win a roll but also decreases the chance that you’ll have a big impact if you do win and exposes you to more risk if you lose (similar to the accuracy-vs-damage tradeoff I mentioned at the top of the blog post). By designing the system so that there are good arguments to be made for using each choice along the spectrum, the rational part of players’ brains can feel justified in signing off on the decisions that seem intuitively and aesthetically appropriate to them, and they don’t feel undue pressure to compromise their integrity to get an extreme mechanical result. There is some mechanical pressure, since the game wants to guide and encourage action at times when people aren’t sure what to do, but the pressure isn’t so overwhelming that it swamps players’ creative choices.

I’m not a D&D player, but I try to keep my eye on what’s going on with D&D since it has such a big influence in the hobby. During the 3e vs. 4e edition wars it was a common rallying cry amongst 3e fanboys to say that 4e had removed roleplaying from the game, to which 4e fanboys would invariably reply that nothing was stopping any player from roleplaying well in a 4e game. Since these are broad-brush generalizations they’re pretty easy to dismiss, but I think there’s a useful observation hidden inside them. First, we should realize that the 4e reply I gave above is a form of cheap argumentation: The question isn’t whether it’s impossible to roleplay with 4e, but whether the design of 4e discourages roleplaying. Although I can’t speak from first-hand experience, I think there is some merit at the core of the 3e fanboy’s complaint.

The D&D 3e design includes a complex character creation system and encourages players to think in terms of “builds” of which classes, prestige classes, feats, etc., they want to use to achieve their character concepts. These choices are rarely made of discrete elements but are strongly coupled together: Prestige classes have prerequisites, you have to take lower level class features before the upper level ones, you accept the “flavor” consequences of some choices for desired mechanical effects, you accept the mechanical consequences for desired “flavor” choices. Players are encouraged to take these choices seriously, to think about them ahead of time. This encourages commitment to a character concept.

Many elements of the 3e system were widely criticized. One criticism was the need for “system mastery” to know that some of the choices were just categorically worse than others. Another criticism was that many choices included tradeoffs between combat effectiveness and effectiveness in other arenas which made it harder for different characters to harmoniously function “as a party” while interacting with different situations: player A was twiddling his thumbs during the fight, player B wandered off to get a snack while the rest of the party negotiated with the baron. The 4e designers tried to address these issues by making it hard to make bad character building decisions. While the optimizers can still find ways to make smart decisions pay off, the difference between a mechanically optimized character and a non-optimal character weren’t as dramatic. Additionally, the designers made sure that each character had a combat role to play: each character has an array powers that do damage and inflict status effects on monsters. While there are many reasons to commend these design decisions, one consequence is that the choices matter less. This is the source of complaints about the “same-y” feeling about 4e classes and powers. If one mechanical choice is roughly the same as any other then making those choices creates less investment in the choices the players actually make. Less investment in a character could easily manifest as less “roleplaying” and a greater lapse into purely mechanical talk. Since 4e’s mechanical design is more robust than 3e’s and it gives players lots of fun-looking mechanical buttons to push it’s easier to switch into purely mechanical talk and not contribute to rich and robust fiction. As a result we can see that there is some merit to the concern about there being “less roleplaying” in 4e: roleplaying isn’t outlawed in the game, but one of the psychological mechanisms that supports investment in a character is weaker in 4e than the earlier edition.

If we’re trying to extract lessons from this analysis to use in other game designs, I wouldn’t recommend inserting “system mastery” features like feats that only newbies use, but I would recommend making sure that the mechanical choices feel sufficiently different to players that they matter. One way to do that is to make it harder to evaluate choices on a single axis, such as damage-per-round. By making hit point damage the common thread in all 4e powers it encourages players to think about their choices in those terms. On top of that, damage and hit points, as bland totalizing mechanics, tend to blur differences rather than making them more distinct.

I’ve been interested for a while in thinking about narrative or storytelling techniques from different media and how they apply to RPGs. The Jank Cast recently started a series of podcasts along these lines that I’ve been very interested in. In episode 119 they discussed “perspective”, although I think I’d be more likely to use the term “viewpoint” (I found this book to be a great resource on the topic). I felt that the discussion in the podcast lacked a solid grounding by glossing over the basics and ended up conflating a number of issues, such as viewpoint and stance. Since this is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while I wanted to get some of my thoughts down in a blog post.

In written fiction there are a few commonly used viewpoints: First-Person, Third-Person-Omniscient, and Third-Person-Limited. The first-person viewpoint involves a narrator telling a story they participated in to the reader. This viewpoint lets the author communicate the thoughts and feelings of the main character directly to the reader, and also allows the writer to use the descriptions and narration of the text to contribute to the main character’s characterization since what the character chooses to relate to the reader tells us important things about the character. The third-person-omniscient viewpoint, by contrast, has access to the inner thoughts of all of the characters and the narrator is generally not a defined character in the story. While this allows the author to communicate lots of information to the reader it usually means that only the actual events of the story, rather than how they are related, can contribute to an understanding of character because it usually requires the narrator to be somewhat neutral and distant. The third-person-limited viewpoint is a sort of “best of both worlds” approach. Instead of having access to the inner thoughts of all characters it limits itself to the thoughts of one character at a time. Since the text is so tightly tied to a particular character the author can use description, etc., to contribute to characterization. In some ways it allows the reader to be even closer to the character than first person because there is no particular narrator relating the story to the reader: Harry Dresden isn’t telling me this story, I’m experiencing the story the way Ned Stark did. In addition to those viewpoints, there is also what is sometimes called the third-person-cinematic viewpoint. This viewpoint doesn’t relate any of the inner thoughts of any characters, it only tells the reader what they’d be able to observe if they were watching the scene as they would in a movie. Unless the characters explicitly verbalize their thoughts, the reader can only infer what they are thinking via their actions. This viewpoint has many of the limitations of third-person-omniscient but few of the advantages so it’s rarely used in prose fiction, but it’s the way that most movies or plays would be written.

Thinking about these viewpoints in an RPG context gets very fuzzy very quickly. Looking at the classical player/GM split, the common case is that each player controls a single character so the temptation might be to say that they experience that character’s story in the first-person viewpoint, but I’m not sure that’s true. Even though the player is responsible for deciding the inner thoughts of the character, it isn’t always common to articulate those thoughts. Putting aside for a moment the issue that the player is contributing to the creation of the fiction, would the player’s experience of the character’s story be appreciably different from a reader’s experience of a third person account of it? Since the GM in this scenario tends to not have input into the character’s voice, the biased descriptions that we usually associate with first-person or third-person-limited aren’t used. Since the GM in this scenario is most commonly responsible for describing an environment that any person there would perceive, I think the closest match is actually to the third-person-cinematic viewpoint. Sure, RPG players sometimes articulate the inner thoughts of their characters, but frequently only to the extent of communicating attitude or emotion (“I’m going along with this, but I’m suspicious”, “I’m being nice to his face, but I actually hate this guy”) the way an actor would use nonverbal communication in a film. I think this helps explain why references to film or television techniques, such as describing what the camera sees, are so common in RPGs even though, as a verbal medium, one might initially assume they had more in common with written fiction.

However, in the podcast Todd did offer one interesting example of something that seems closer to third-person-limited: in Apocalypse World, the GM is instructed to bring fictional details to the attention of particular players. By threatening an NPC that a player cares about and bringing that to that player’s attention the GM is subtly shading the world description: you notice this because you are the type of person that would care about this. I think I also stumbled across a technique for doing third-person-limited in game design with my Ronnies game Brick & Mortar: Last of the Independents. Since it’s a GM-less game, instead of relying on a GM to contribute external fictional details I have Apocalypse World-style moves that tell players when to do certain things. By framing the “when” condition of the move in a particular way a game designer can shade how the player will interpret the fiction contributed by the other players. For example, my Survivor character has this move:

Quiet! Did you hear that?: Whenever people are engaging in unproductive bickering, mention the ominous thing you just noticed.

This contributes to the characterization of the Survivor: they are the kind of person that expects the people around them to engage in unproductive bickering. When a player is being vigilant for “unproductive bickering” their perceptions are subtly shifted, similar to how a third-person-limited author would use narration and description to color the story in a characterful way. Although Brick & Mortar has some issues as a game, I think this technique is an interesting one that could use further development. It should be especially useful in the “tightly focused situation with defined characters” genre of games.