Dan

In an effort to better understand RPG design I read a lot of games, both published and in-development. A recent feedback thread on The Forge reminded me of an issue I’ve seen more than once: game text that can only be interpreted by people who already know how to play. Here’s an example from the game in the linked thread: “It’s important to include enough clues and information that some can be missed.” If you’re someone who knows what “enough” looks like then it’s probably easy to follow that rule, but if you don’t already know what amount of clues leads to a fun play experience how are you supposed to know whether you’ve got enough? It’s like a recipe that tells you to “cook until done” — easily followed by a chef that know what the dish is supposed to look like when it’s done and utterly impenetrable for someone who’s trying to experience the dish by following the recipe. Obviously you have to make some assumptions about what the reader knows in order to write an RPG (we need to assume a common language in order to communicate at all), but whenever possible we designers ought to avoid assuming that the reader understands the ideas that a game text is trying to explain (if the reader already knew how to play, why would they be reading the game?). It seems to me that this is an instance of the “Curse of Knowledge” described by Chip and Dan Heath in the fantastic book Made to Stick. In brief, the idea of the Curse of Knowledge is that it’s difficult for someone who knows a piece of information to see the world from the perspective of someone who doesn’t, making communication between the two difficult. If you’re a game designer you obviously understand your own game, so it’s easy to fall into the natural human pattern of communicating with others as if they understand it, too. Since the whole point of writing a game is to explain it to other people, our challenge as game writers is to figure out how to successfully communicate with people who don’t (yet) understand the game.

Something that’s been on my mind for a while is the idea of complexity in RPGs. While I have a hard time thinking of any RPGs as very mechanically complex (I’m probably at an extreme end of the tolerance-for-complexity spectrum: for a decade I had a job that required deep understanding the internal operations of microprocessors, which are among the most complex things that humans create), I do recognize that some RPG systems are a lot harder for many people than others. I’ve been working on a hypothesis that one of the sources of perceptions of complexity is when games have ambiguous terms, concepts, or situations that people can interpret in ways which put them into incompatible frames of reference without indication to the participants that their communication is breaking down. Basically: games that allow miscommunications to entrench themselves end up seeming complex and confusing.

Here’s an example of rules leading to ambiguous interpretations: In every AP podcast of Apocalypse World that I’ve listened to, there has been confusion over how to use the Hx mechanics. As an example, here’s the stat highlighting rule:

Go around the table one last time. Every player finds the character her character knows the best, the one with the highest Hx on her own sheet (resolving ties on a whim). That other player says which of the character’s stats is most interesting to her, to highlight.

So, am I looking at the list of Hx’s on my sheet, where I have an Hx for each of the other characters and finding the one with the highest rating? Or am I looking at everyone else’s sheet where they have an Hx with me listed, and finding which of their sheets has the highest rating for me? It’s not easy to figure that out: it can be easy to lose track of who the pronouns are referring to, the concept of nonreciprocal relationships isn’t always intuitive for people, and it is easy to forget which direction the Hx “____ knows ____” relationship flows in. Is the Hx on my sheet how well I know you, or how well you know me? Usually, it’s pretty clear to the participants that they could make a good case for either interpretation so they look it up in the book or defer to someone with greater rules expertise so the ambiguity doesn’t lead to a breakdown, but it frequently results in confusion at the table.

A more pernicious situation can arise if people start using incompatible interpretations of something but don’t notice that their fellow gamer is operating an alternate (possibly mistaken) interpretation. I think I noticed an element of this in a recent episode of the Virtual Play podcast (for the specific details, listen to the episode then read my comment on the website). One of the things that many RPGs expect is for players to interact with the system in a slightly oblique way, such as by doing or saying things with your character with the expectation that another player will map that fictional action to some sort of mechanic. Even if the “sender” and “receiver” aren’t on the same page, it’s frequently possible for the receiver to think he has successfully translated sender’s input into the mechanics because the mapping functions we use in a lot of our subsystems tend to be very tolerant of unusual input: My perfectly normal attempt to indicate I’m doing X in situation A can be, with a sufficiently generous spirit, be interpreted by you as Y that kind of makes sense for situation B. You don’t notice that I’m not operation in the context of situation B since my input seems to function in your context, and I don’t notice that you’re not operating in situation A since you are indicating that you are successfully interpreting what I’m doing.

I noticed another potential source of ambiguity while listening to the Roo Sack Gamers use the Fight! mechanic in Burning Wheel Gold (a system with a reputation for complexity). Since our hobby involves a lot of talking, we tend to adopts shorthands when speaking, i.e. we drop “unimportant” details since we expect people to pick them up from context. It’s not unusual for someone express a thought like “I’m not sure if weapon lengths matter on this roll, but I know that when weapon lengths apply I get 2 bonus dice for using a sword” as something like “I get +2 on this, right?”. If the person asking the question and the person answering it are thinking in the same context that works fine. However, if lots of elements of the system can translate into a +2, it’s easy for the person answering to assume that an entirely different question has been asked (maybe you’re getting a +2 for a successful maneuver on a previous action), and they might say “yes” to the question they think the uncertain player is asking. Hearing affirmation will entrench the idea in the questioner’s mind, even though it was never fully articulated and might have been rejected if it had been. If the players aren’t on the same page they can drift further and further apart until they finally notice that something is breaking down. Once they do, they’ll need to look backward through multiple steps to find the source of the problem, which makes this seem like a “complex” situation to resolve.

I’m not sure I have any compelling conclusions to take away from this line of thought yet (other than to bring some new skepticism to the idea of “universal” mechanics within a game, since mismatched contexts will be easier to detect if different mechanics require different vocabularies), but I wanted to get some of these thoughts down in a more concrete form.