designing
Choices Must Matter
0I’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.
Viewpoint and RPGs
0I’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.
The Halo Effect and RPGs
2I recently finished The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig. It’s a business book that talks about some psychologically-difficult-to-avoid errors of perception and analysis that undermine business books, especially books which purport to find simple rules that lead to successful business results. The biggest point he makes is related to the Halo Effect. Basically, he explains that if a certain factor seems like it ought to contribute to an overall result, then there is a strong tendency in humans to have their perception of the overall result also impact their perception of the individual factor (so, for example, if a company is financially successful people will tend to rate it as highly “customer focused”, but if it’s having trouble they won’t, even if there’s no difference in the company’s actual customer interactions). It’s a well-written, interesting, and thought-provoking book.
As is my tendency lately, I immediately started mapping the ideas in the book to the field of roleplaying game design. The most obvious thing here is that many of the factors that would seem to feed into an overall “fun session” are strongly subject to the Halo Effect. Things like “a chance to hang out with friends with the same geeky hobbies”, “fictional content I enjoy”, and “good game mechanics” all seem like they ought to feed into “fun session”, so if you have a fun session you are likely to remember the game mechanics as being good even if they weren’t (I listen to a lot of AP podcasts, and it still amazes me how often people will say that they enjoy a game after I’ve listened to an entire session of them struggling with it). This is yet another reason that designers need to observe objectively when playtesting to be able to identify what truly does or doesn’t work since self-reporting will be strongly influenced by the Halo Effect. (It also means that people with an established fanbase can produce poor games and have them called “good” by their fans, which is more common than I would like the RPG hobby).
I think it also ought to raise some questions about the “playtest at conventions” strategy that some indie designers have committed to over the past few years. Does the high-energy environment of a con cloud useful data? Does the weird microcelebrity “I played with the designer!” thing pollute your results? I’ve never been to a con so I’ve been reluctant to share my thoughts about this stuff, but I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of mixing advocacy and testing, which seems to be a lot of what the “playtest at cons” movement is about.
Enough is not enough
0In 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.
Final Hour of a Storied Age rev 0.71
0A new playtest draft of my epic fantasy roleplaying game is available: Final Hour of a Storied Age rev 0.71. This version incorporates some layout and readability improvements that hopefully make the game a bit easier on the eyes.
Changes in 0.71:
- Changed “Starting a New Chapter” to “Starting Chapters”
- Changed “Playing Out a Chapter” to “Playing Chapters”
- Formatting and layout changes
- Minor text changes (mechanics unaffected)
Complexity, Confusion, and Ambiguity in RPGs
0Something 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.
The Psychology of GM Prep
0GM Prep is a complicated topic that impacts how games are designed and how they’re played. There is a lot of “folk wisdom” related to classically structured RPGs and what should or shouldn’t be prepped, and a lot of interesting new games like Apocalypse World make what is or isn’t prepped by the GM a big part of the game design. I want to look at the topic from the psychological perspective of how different types of GM prep affect the GM and players of RPGs and how it shapes their subjective experience of playing.
I’ve blogged before about the psychological compliance technique of commitment and this is a big part of the GM prep picture: when a GM preps something for a game they make a commitment to contribute what they prepped to the fiction during play. This is very useful in a lot of RPG designs, because the psychological pressures on a GM during play (high cognitive load from keeping track of lots of details, face to face with the players, etc.) are different from those faced during prep. A good game designer will take into account which decisions they want the pre-play GM’s mind to make (and stick to) and call for prep that results in those decisions. This can be a way to get the game to introduce what Vincent Baker calls “unwelcome content”. Humans tend to make different decisions when framing them in short term or long term contexts. Most dramatic stories benefit from emotionally hard-hitting events and most games about challenge benefit from including genuinely dangerous obstacles. It’s frequently valuable to have these decisions made by the more cerebral pre-play GM than the one who is looking his sympathetic players in the eyes and might be tempted to pull punches. By using the principle of commitment, a game designer can get the GM to introduce content that might be uncomfortable in the short term but will provide a bigger long-term payoff (e.g. a more dramatic story, a more impressive victory, etc.).
A story from actual play: When I first tried to GM Mouse Guard, I tried to do it in what is popularly referred to as the “improv style”, i.e. I prepped almost nothing and intended to introduce the obstacles faced by the players on the fly. Although the game seemed to function, it was a totally unsatisfying experience for me as a GM. I felt like the players weren’t accomplishing anything – I was psychologically attributing their successes to my belief that I started throwing them softballs after taking sympathy on their early struggles. I decided to abandon that approach and switch to a strongly prepped game: I decided before each session what situations they’d face that would call for skill rolls, whether I’d be applying conditions or twists if they failed, and what those twists would be. The difference was night and day: by making these decisions before the game, I knew with complete confidence that what the players were or weren’t accomplishing was coming from them, not me, so I could be excited and enjoy their successes, commiserate with their troubles, and appreciate the gravity of their sacrifices – I could be a fan of the players rather than feeling like I was patronizing them.
So GM prep clearly has benefit for some games. Are there downsides? Let me talk about “railroading”. Railroading is when the GM plans for a certain sequence of events to happen, and uses subtle or overt manipulation or negation of player’s fictional contributions to cause those events to happen as originally planned. “Which way do you go?” “We go north.” “You get lost and circle around for a while, eventually ending up back where you started. Which way do you go?” “East?” “You go east for a while and enter a forest clearing just in time to see…” The GM is so committed to a certain element of fiction being introduced that other fictional contributions get stomped on. Why is this bad? Primarily because many games also rely on the principle of reciprocation to build investment in the fiction and game system. It’s OK for me to introduce content that might seem unwelcome because you know you’ll have a chance to respond and introduce your own content. If the players realize that their contributions are either being explicitly or implicitly ignored, then the principle of reciprocation stops working — since they’re not really getting a chance to say something that the GM must respond to, the GM has fewer psychological incentives working to get the players to accept the GM’s fictional contributions (in the classic railroading horror stories the GM ends up relying completely on authority).
What about less overt railroading? Here’s a hypothetical situation: we’re playing a classical “party of adventurers confronts dangerous situations” RPG. As GM, I prep a series of exciting set-piece battles, culminating in a dramatic showdown with the villain on a rope bridge over a river of lava. But, during play, the players decide they want to go to the ice realm instead of the fire realm. Thinking quickly, I reskin the encounter to take place on a bridge over a river of ice-cold water instead. Is this a problem? My answer is that it’s a lesser problem than explicit blocking of contributions, but it’s still a problem because of the frame of mind it puts the GM in: you’ve decided that the player’s contributions determine nothing but meaningless color. And by making the fire snow “meaningless” in your own mind, you undercut some of the value of your prep: you have no commitment to the fictional details of the situation, which will make it harder for you to engage with the fiction that’s happening in the game and increase the odds that you (and likely everyone else) will have a flatter, less satisfying gameplay experience.
The classic overreaction to the problem of railroading is to abandon prep entirely. As I’ve already explained, though, GM prep can be incredibly valuable. The trick is to figure out what kind of prep is right for the game you are playing. On his blog recently, Vincent Baker has been talking about the idea of “open” vs. “closed” questions in a game. When everyone is on the same page about which questions are going to be determined in-play, then there’s no risk of squishing those opportunities for fictional contributions by doing “bad” prep. Different games leave different questions open. In Dogs in the Vineyard, for example, the GM decides that there are mutually incompatible desires between NPCs in a town. There’s really never an opportunity to do an “It was all just a big misunderstanding!”ending in DITV, or have a “Can’t we all just get along?” plea really succeed. Somebody will be unhappy by the time the PCs decide to leave town (and maybe it will be the PCs). If the players came into the game expecting that they’d be able (with enough cleverness and skill) to achieve an everybody-wins solution, then the prep the GM did would likely conflict with that expectation. Once everybody’s on the same page about understanding what sort of the problems exist in DITV towns, though, the game tells the GM explicitly not to plan for a particular solution – players deciding what to do about the problems in the town is what the gameplay is all about, and most of the fun of GMing DITV comes from seeing the players interact with the situation in a way that’s unique to the people you’re playing with and the characters they chose to play.
Some people believe that the only solution to avoiding railroading is to abandon the idea of plot altogether. DITV and some other games solve the problem of achieving a satisfying story without railroading by guaranteeing how a story will proceed (for DITV, it’s in a series of emotionally and morally charged conflicts, in Apocalypse World it’s in a series of gritty situations, etc.) but not where the story will go. For some stories, such as character dramas, this is a great approach. It’s not ideal for all stories, though: some genres have strong expectations about how the plot will proceed. My own game Final Hour of a Storied Age is about Epic Fantasy stories, and I think that genre has strong requirements for how the overall plot happens, so I included a strong plot outline mechanic in the game (however, Storied Age is also GM-less and has no pre-session prep). I also recently participated in a playtest of Boarsdraft by J.B. Mannon which models the Harry Potter novels, so it has a heavy requirement for an overarching mystery plot that lasts the entire school year. These games are up-front about the overarching plot, so there isn’t any confusion about whether that’s an open question or not. In my opinion, pinning down the overarching plot is a design decision that lets you leave other questions open: now will you get there, but how. That doesn’t mean that pre-deciding plot works for every game: the mechanics of a game will often give the participants the impression that certain questions are open, and if believing those questions are open conflicts with a pre-planned sequence of events then something has to give (in so-called traditional play it’s often the game mechanics that give –- the GM will start fudging in order to achieve the planned plot). Most traditional RPGs give the players the impression that they’ll have the freedom to choose where to go and what to do, which is frequently incompatible with a crafted plotline. This explains why some people find it much easier to achieve functional play with these games when they use a sandbox approach rather than a plotline approach to play.
In a well-designed game the psychological incentives aren’t operating at cross purposes, so what you do or don’t prep is an important element of game design, and should rarely be a casual decision made at the whim of one participant.
Final Hour of a Storied Age 0.70
0A new playtest draft of my epic fantasy roleplaying game is available: Final Hour of a Storied Age rev 0.70. Based on feedback and playtesting I’ve added a few examples and also added a new mechanic that gives players a bit more active control over some of the dice mechanics.
Changes in 0.70:
- Added influences and crossings terminology to star charts
- Added mechanic to tweak dice results on viewpoint/adversity rolls
- Added examples to character creation
The default PDF has digest-sized pages which are meant to be read in 2-up view. The pages fit side-by-side on a landscape oriented 8.5×11 page, but it can be tricky to get the PDF to print out like that, so I created this printer-friendly version, too: rev 0.70 printer-friendly (it also replaces the shaded boxes with outlines).
I want to thank everyone who has given me feedback and the playtesters who have tried the game.
Interview on New Style podcast
0On the second episode of the New Style podcast, Scott Dunphy interviewed me about my game Final Hour of a Storied Age. Scott had a lot of good questions and I had a lot of fun doing the interview. Scott’s goal with the podcast is to highlight games that aren’t getting as much attention as the “big names” in the design community, and I think that’s a cool contribution to the community and a great use of the podcast format.