Making It Easy

What’s the most surefire way to scare away a player base? I’m sure you’ve got ideas, but there’s one I think is much higher on the list that you’re not considering.

Barriers to entry.

RPGs in general seem to have this thought that they are for intelligent folks, and so they can get away with being a bit complex. For some games, this is true, but if you want more than the twenty people you’ve personally sold your game to interested, you will want to cut back on as much complexity as possible.

The Product
As an indie developer, I have less worry about this, as it’s pretty obvious if you’re looking at ExoSquad, there’s only going to be one rulebook, so starting point is very obvious. Those with larger games, or larger ideas, may have this issue.

Look at the latest edition of D&D. On the shelf you have two products and a product line that call newbie attention. Should a newbie grab the Player’s Handbook? What about the red box ‘Starter Set’? Or maybe it’s one of these ‘D&D Essentials’ books?

Don’t get me wrong, I like the new edition, and even like a number of the Essentials books. For someone who’s never played before, these products are instant complexity. Making a ‘first sale’ is all about making the purchase easy, and complex game lines don’t do this. (Side note: as an indie developer, you’re going to need to be a creator, developer, accountant, manager, sales person, PR agent and a number of other roles or have the money to cover people who can do these things. Sweating yet?)

The Rules
Rules complexity can create a huge barrier to entry, especially if the prospective player has no point of reference on when various rules matter. Modern games are getting better about their book layouts as experienced developers realize how the books are used. Even so, I still occasionally open an RPG and find related information in completely separate chapters! Word processors are powerful tools, people, you have no reason not to change your layout to help your customer.

Guide your new players into the game. Show them what’s important, and in what order. Convert one person, and you have the opportunity to convert their friends, and like books, RPGs spread by word-of-mouth.

Character Creation
I separate this from the rules because this one point is enough to run some players away before they even see the rules. This is less about your first sell and more about your subsequent sales. If someone is teaching your game to another player, they have the helping hand through the book, but they still need to make a character they want to play. How easy do you make it?

This is where point buy systems fall flat most of the time. Try to get a newbie to make a GURPS or HERO System character without getting frustrated in some degree. It might happen, but not quickly.

So make your system intuitive. Make it easy to grasp and easy to use. You want people sharing it, and you want those receiving it to pick it up and love it. Don’t make them wait for pay out, we live in a time where entertainment is available now so you have to deliver if you want to keep them interested.

As for me, I intend to make ExoSquad remarkably easy in regards to character creation. Pick a weapon, pick some tactics and gear, GO! Once you’re in game, the complexity should come from choice on the battlefield or in conversation, not from reading the rules. You’ve all seen FRE’s design, simplicity is one of it’s core values.

Your turn, readers:

Are barriers to entry the biggest enemy of RPGs?

Also, great article on teaching kids to play D&D on the main Wizards website. A few comments in this article sparked this blog post, I’ll let you see if you can guess which ones.

What Is Your Game About?

In the last few days, a number of games bloggers have asked about ‘what’s this game about?’ It’s a commonly asked question posed to game designers, and a fairly apt one considering we’re in a tightening market with fewer dollars available. The problem is, the context of the question will prove troublesome as there are many ways to answer the question.

The one cited by A.L. at Reality Refracted is the one posed most often by John Wick. To clarify, John Wick’s version of the question is intended to have a one word answer and is better asked as ‘what is the theme of your game?’ Now, I understand why he doesn’t use my terminology, for the same reason that the term theme needs to be clearly defined when that same question is asked of amateur writers.

The goal of Wick’s question seems to be to keep the designer focused on the point of the game, and not get lost in mechanics. This is absolutely a good goal, but I wonder if too much focus is a bad thing?

Getting so lost in your theme that even the player’s don’t know where to go gets you the question posed by Andreas Davour over at The Omnipotent Eye: What do you do in this game? He cites some very strong thematic games that fail to answer the question to presented. The mechanics can give the players an easy idea of where to go with your game. Leaving out ‘thematic’ mechanics in an effort to better guide the game play is definitely a good idea.

When I get the ‘what’s it about?’ question, I deliver what Randy Ingermason called a One-Sentence Summary. To summarize the first step of the snowflake method, a One-Sentence Summary is an attempt to encapsulate the entire plot of a novel in a single sentence.  As one sentence limits you in amount of detail, you are forced to boil down your concept to a single idea that can be expressed clearly. In a way, it’s a much freer version of Wick’s question.

In RPGs, the One-Sentence Summary would need to answer a few questions in as few words as possible:

Who do the player’s play?
What is the tone?
What is the conflict?

Without these three ingredients your summary is incomplete and doesn’t make for easy comparison between two products on a shelf. Remember my advice about simplifying mechanics to encourage certain types of game play? Same principle applies to your sales attempts. Make the decision as easy as possible in an effort to leave as little ‘guess’ left for your buyer.

FRE has a simple one sentence summary which is at the head of the rules:

FRE is simple system to help moderate freeform roleplay in any setting.

This gets the idea across succinctly, as it relies on the ‘freeform’ point. The players are whomever they like, the conflict is with whatever comes up, and the tone depends on how things are role played. That explanation aside, I do think I need to provide readers more focus on what the point of the engine is, and will probably include the key point (Conflict.) in the revised sentence I’ll put on the extended version of FRE.

When I was pitching Velocity to early playtesters, the sentence was:

Hovercar racing pilots dealing with underhanded rivals both on and off the track.

And Exosquad:

The first pilots of an experimental armored division fight a war to bring unity back to the solar system.

So, readers, what’s your game about?

Free-For-All Friday: Player Motivations

So, I was good, I wrote my post for today back on Wednesday. Felt it was current enough to be interesting, and was a good topic to muse about. Then, while reading my RSS this morning, I stumble upon an article by The Chatty DM.

He’s covering the idea of player motivations, which is quite different from character motivations that I covered in Hook, Line, and Sinker. I’m going to leave most of his article over there for you to read, but to summarize for this discussion:

The 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide lists a number of core player motivations:

• Acting
• Exploring
• Instigating
• Power Gaming
• Slaying
• Storytelling
• Thinking
• Watching

He goes on to make the claim that, regardless of what’s written on the tin, that 4th Edition caters to Power Gaming, Slaying, and Thinking to the expense of the rest.

Now, while I agree that it does cater to these three things in a number of ways (See the character optimization boards scrambling for even +1 damage in the system.), most of these motivations are in fact covered by the design and/or marketing of the product.

Acting: If any of the motivations aren’t given a solid set of rewards or encouragement in the system itself, it’s acting. There is no mechanical reward for it, and very little in the way of support for players who want this sort of thing in the way of advice.

Exploring: Exploring is given a mechanical kick in the rear through action points. The concept of ‘one more encounter, and you’ll earn an action point’ can be enough to keep some groups going. The fact that once it’s earned, you’ll lose it if you sleep makes the odd number encounters something worth running through.

Instigating: This one there isn’t a real mechanical reward, except as it relates to Power Gaming. Instigating players are as likely to cause trouble as they are to advance the in game narrative, and to them, that shaking up of the status quo IS the reward. In other words, this one doesn’t NEED a mechanical award.

Power Gaming: Optimization is rewarded.

Slaying: Like most versions of Dungeons and Dragons, most of the rules are how to kill things better and what happens when you kill those things.

Storytelling: This one is one of the better supported motivations below the key three Chatty DM called attention to. Via Skill Challenges, which admittedly needed work to become as good as they could be, and Quest rewards, the system actively encourages advancing the narrative in ways other versions of Dungeons and Dragons didn’t. It even produced support, not in mechanical aspects, but help for GMs in the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2.

Thinking: I actually feel this one could have been done better out of the box (Back in 2008), but think they’ve made some definite improvements with the new monster design and more cohesive classes that work even better as a team.

Watching: This is another one I think Wizards of the Coast did a wonderful job with. Watchers often just want to spend time with friends, and possibly make new ones, and between the character builder, Encounters, and an active push to make Dungeons and Dragons ‘mainstream’ to some degree has definitely made this a good time for casual players to get into the game.

To summarize, I think most player motivations that can be planned for were planned for well. Some in the core rules themselves, and some via the marketing efforts of the company. Does this mean some of them couldn’t be improved? Absolutely not, and I wish the Chatty DM the best of luck in his efforts. I’ve literally just discovered him, but even cursory examination of his blog is interesting, and if you like my thoughts on design, his aren’t far off. Definitely check it out.

FRE is going to be getting a one page Primer written soon to take advantage of KORPG’s One Page RPG challenge. And while the Primer is only going to be a page, expect a bit meatier version coming eventually after I’ve worked out how ‘fiddly’ I’d like it.

ExoSquad is on a back burner right now, the holidays sucking up most of my time.

Velocity is of course still awaiting its edit.


Last thing: Obviously, I've picked a new theme, what does everyone think? Better than white on black? Should I dig around for another good template? Or can anyone suggest a good (Cheap.) designer?

Blog updates!

So, I promised you news. It’s good news, but I didn’t want to jump the gun too much with it.

First piece of news is good for you: I’m moving my blog schedule from Sundays to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So for those who have enjoyed my game design discussions, or my GM help, you’re going to be getting more of both! I’ve also got some ideas in store for both that I am sure you’ll like if you liked my previous blog series. The new schedule will be:

Monday: GM advice and theory. If you liked Hook, Line, and Sinker, you want to start checking in on Mondays.

Wednesday: Game design theory, ideas, and concepts.

Friday: Free for all. I’ll update everyone on my games on Fridays, and discuss whatever topic I feel like that week. Think of it as my day to go crazy and take along anyone who feels compelled.

So, first bit of news out of the way! Now we’re on to the next piece of news. In the long term, while I love my url, it isn’t appropriate for the long term focus of Thunderstorm Game Design as a business entity, so I will eventually be changing the url to something more accurate. Not happening immediately and I still don’t have a new url in mind, but it is coming, so keep an eye out for it.

Serious topic out of the way, now I get into the fun stuff!

Worked a tad on ExoSquad, got some idea of what all the attacks will be able to do, just getting to organizing and focusing them. Since I hate teasing, I’ll explain the idea I have for the weaponry and attacks. Each combatant gets a primary weapon, which is a basic idea, for example a Rifle. You can add various modifiers to this rifle who let you pick various tactics to use in combat. This goes back to my retraining argument in that after each mission, and sometimes during special conditions during a mission, you’ll be able to change out for new weapons and therefore get to pick new tactics, allowing you to swap builds on the fly.

The other thing I’m working on is a project I’m currently calling Freeform Roleplaying Engine, or FRE. FRE is a system for roleplaying that leaves the story in the hands of the players, the Moderator there to oversee interesting story and ensure conflicts are resolved fairly. It uses a simple system of narrative control to determine both power and longevity of characters. It definitely has its roots in FUDGE and FATE, with descriptive terms instead of a massive amount of numbers, and it’s completely diceless in its base form. The system is being designed primarily for online freeform roleplayers, but it should play just as well at the table and will not be very demanding on the Moderator (GM).

If you do like the blog, you should definitely subscribe to the RSS feed, available at right. Or you can check out my Twitter @pathunstrom. Come back tomorrow for a new GM advice article!

Hook, Line, and Sinker Part 4: The Climax

You set the hook by appealing to what drives the characters. You kept them on the line by putting that hook at the end of a series of smaller, more focused challenges. You designed those challenges with a series of smaller hooks and choices. Now, at the end of the game, you need the climactic final confrontation, you need to sink it and bring them back for your next adventure or campaign.

The climax is one of the most important parts of a story, and when it’s missing, people can tell.  In games, players often make their own climaxes, remembering the most iconic moments that present themselves during the game. The problem is that’s the relying on luck method, and this series is all about planning out awesome games.

When it comes to design, every adventure and campaign needs its own climactic encounter. That encounter, in order to give it prime memory real estate, needs to be the last challenge of the night. Beyond that, it needs a handful of things to improve its chances of success.

Stakes

The climactic encounter should have the highest stakes of the entire adventure or campaign. One set of stakes that’s perfect for the climax is of course the life, or at least story importance, of the player characters. Lethality of some sort should always be in the game, but during the climax, life and death become a genuinely interesting set of stakes due to the fact that failure by being removed from the campaign can have far reaching effects on the shared narrative. Another perfect stake in the climax is the hook itself: the ownership of the McGuffin, the secret, the revenge, or the glory. Finally, bring in the fates of non-player characters, allies and enemies known and unknown.

Tension

Tension is a difficult thing to generate, but by raising the stakes, you’re halfway there. The next step is to make losing a real possibility, or even a probable outcome. Some of this is making it challenging via the statistics built into the game, the enemies in the climax should be the most powerful of the adventure, but other ways are from your style as a DM. Don’t pull blows, fight dirty. Make the players feel like they have to work for it. That said, don’t make it impossible. If the heroes can’t win, it kills tension just as much as if they’re sure to win.

Setting

If the climax is a combat encounter, it should have the most interesting terrain features. If it’s a social encounter, public locations are best, especially if they have a lot of people involved. These types of locations make it interesting on a fundamental level. A combat with a dragon is interesting; a combat with a dragon on a stone bridge over a lake of lava with minions flowing from both sides with the McGuffin resting on a pedestal on the far side is climactic. An argument with a Vampire Prince is interesting; an argument with the Prince at Elysium is climactic.

The Unexpected

The last thing a climax need is a shift. The climax is where hidden allies throw their hand in with the heroes, where traitors turn on their ‘friends,’ where hidden plots come out, and nothing ever seems to go right. Besides the story implications that are usable in any type of conflict, combat encounters should have some major turning points, more so than a standard encounter. Take a page out of a video game’s book, make the ‘boss’ monster go through changes in tactics, or changes in forms. Have minions appear halfway through. Change the battlefield mid combat.

When it comes to ideas for a climactic conflict, the best place to look is your favorite movies. There’s only a handful of ways to successfully climax a story, and they’re all closely related.

So, readers, what do you think, did I miss any critical elements of a good game climax?

So I’ve reached the end of Hook, Line, and Sinker. I hope everyone has enjoyed it, I know I did! From the things I spoke on, I have a few more ideas for GM based articles coming, so expect this to become a regular fixture for the blog. I also have a few things I’ll be discussing next week regarding the blog itself and since the school semester is finally over, I’m going to buckle down and do some serious design work on ExoSquad, and a new project I’ll be announcing soon.

Minimum Competence

I promised an ExoSquad update, and while there isn't much in the way of firm rules yet, as I'm a firm believer in designing by design. But that said, even after the ideas are there and the design bible written, you have a crazy idea that you've just got to try.


I stumbled upon that idea today. Imagine never missing. You roll the dice knowing you'll hit, but the dice tell you something more than a simple pass or fail: they tell you how effective you are.


Low rolls mean you graze or just scare your opponent, high rolls are deadly accuracy.


Applying this idea to ExoSquad, I've got a quick idea of how I can go about it.


Assuming a twenty-sided die, I'd make 1s always give a single point of heat.  After all, that's what heat is, right? It is something to worry about, even if it doesn't hit. Then, in the 2-5 range, it'd be based on weapon, maybe a smaller amount of heat, or a small beneficial effect like forced movement.


Stepping up the ladder, we get into the 6-13 range, the classic range of potential hit zones.  This will be your baseline effects, mostly damage, with an added benefit.


Then we push into the 'guaranteed hits', 14-18.  They aren't 100%, but a good portion of the time, a 14 (Or 70%+ for percentile.) or better is going to hit the target.  These get bonuses: a more powerful secondary effect, more damage.


Then we have the 'critical range' of 19-20. In Exosquad, this zone will be for the absolutely amazing effects at each level. And most of them should include an immediate threat roll from the enemy, in addition to whatever benefit it offers.


So, one roll determines effect, another spits out the specifics of the hit. Of course, each type of weapon and attack will have different riders and abilities, with different levels of damage to go with it.


In an effort to speed up game play, as most tactical RPGs have a bad habit of bogging down in combat, how do I apply this concept to the NPC killables? My idea is simple: a choice. Each enemy offers either two effects, and the player may choose which they want.


Perhaps an infantryman with a mounted machine gun can offer either an amount of heat (Say. . . a four-sided die.) or one heat and a forced move to represent a tactical retreat.


This system leaves the effects entirely in the hands of the players, who can choose between significant damage and stuns, or movement into what may be a less useful position and damage.


So, think about it, maybe try it out at home with a quick system hack in your tactical RPG of choice.  Let me know!


For a little bonus, I’ve also been thinking on Velocity, and have decided it’ll be more interesting as a ‘shared story’ type RPG where winning the dice roll means you decide the narration of the event, instead of determining pass/fail. I’ll need to set the thresholds regarding when you can actually knock an opponent out of the race, though leads will be determined by the narrator.


Come back next week for part three of Hook, Line and Sinker, and find out how Adventures should be planned using narrative tools.


Your initiative, readers; comment below:


Do you think removing the ‘whiff factor’ from games is a good idea?


How would you like to steal the DM’s thunder and choose the outcome of events in Velocity?

Building Blocks

Part 2 of Hook, Line, and Sinker will come next week.

For the record, I love tactical miniatures games. I also love strategic board games. They’re fun to me, but I’ve encountered something in trying to spread this love to others on a regular basis. There’s a resistance to classic strategy and tactical games. Even new games suffer from a stigma.

When 4^th Edition Dungeons & Dragons came out, there was an oft cited reason why it was ‘bad’: There’s no roleplaying! Now, I disagreed with this sentiment, sometimes violently (verbally, not physically; I’m a confirmed nerd!), but as I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized it wasn’t so much that it discouraged roleplaying as it modeled those classic games in a way. The flavor of the game was intentionally left somewhat murky in an effort to let it be something to everyone.

Now for some of us, this isn’t a problem. We like projecting our own ideas onto the skeleton abstracts give us. We don’t care what the book tells us, we just need the strings of numbers to make it work. But it’s like building with Legos: it’s always going to have those edges, and it’ll never be perfectly smooth.

Others, they want something different. They want, if not reality, a smoothly rendered experience. The guy with the sword, even if he does AWESOME THINGS does it differently than the guy with the wand or bow or dagger. Each of the abilities in the game should function in a logical progression independent of the building blocks that some systems offer. The game will be smooth, and each technique feels different in a physical sense as much as a narrative one.

I do think these two groups can operate together, but both will end up making concessions of some sort to the other side. I admit to being in the first group, I like being able to define, and redefine, on the fly during games.

With ExoSquad, I want to use building blocks for the combat abilities.  Guns all function approximately the same way in real life, and so to make it interesting, each attack needs to be a different way to use a specific gun. This does tie back into Heat, of course, but also things like covering and suppressive fire, sniper shots, and anything else you can think of both from real combat and action movies and anime.

Each attack will target one of a number of defenses, all currently unnamed, and hitting allows you to apply Heat and effects. The effects will be common fare to tactical games: moving opponents, debuffs, and buffs.

I also want something ‘building block’ style for the social aspects of the game, including how the group receives its secondary missions. Something so that the way the missions are given make sense to the characters histories, but also add the tension such things should offer.

So, Readers, what do you think?  Building blocks a good way to play? Or should everything have a more granular system? Let me know below!

Taking Heat

The mechanic in discussion today is 'hit points.' Some people like them, some people hate them, and some people really don't care.  I assume if you're still reading, you have an opinion on them, and it's probably a strong one.  So time for me to lose the last of my readers this week:

I think it depends.

It depends heavily on the game and the overall feel the designers are going for.  Even among heavily complex games, there seems to be a solid divide.  Some like things rough and tough, one hit, you're gone.  Others, Dungeons and Dragons at the top of the list here, offer quite a bit of plot immunity.  I'll say I think I like the middle road the best.

I don't think you should die in a single hit.  It really sucks to run into a combat situation and having the dice come up just right to leave you totally unable to continue.  Some sort of plot armor needs to exist.

I do think you need to have some form of 'danger' at all points.  Threatening your ability to fight, or, even more extreme, to play at all, is a fairly good way to keep players invested in their characters.  I honestly think this is why combat with real death is so common in RPGs.

So, with these in mind, I'd set to the design possibilities on how to balance this concepts in ExoSquad, since I knew I wanted the tactical give and take common in D&D, but without the 'but he survived a dagger to the kidney!' complaints common to that system of HP.  I also needed to consider that in an era of firearms and heavy armor, you typically want a solid hit to be a kill, so anything that is actually a 'hit' needs to be near deadly.

Thinking about it, I considered reversing the process: instead of ticking health down, why not count up?  Then use something akin to a saving throw to determine if you go down. . .

So I begin tinkering with the number themselves.  If the weapons aren't necessarily hitting when you roll the dice, they have to be doing something meaningful.  Obviously, they're threatening the target.  So each weapon has a 'threat value' instead of damage.  As any fighter accumulates 'threat' their chance of being hit and downed increases.

From there, I had to decide a way to determine when the threat finally brought a combatant down.  In this case, I chose a dice roll based on current threat.  This meant that the roll got harder as the battle gets more hectic, and adds that frightening chance of being blown away by the first bullet.

I realized, though, that I needed a 'when' to roll.  Instead of making the roll after every attack, I have chosen to make it only at the end of the combatants turn, making one roll against current heat before passing the turn to another player.

Should it be every turn?  Or should there be a limit?  In this case, I think there should be a certain threshold before any combatant needs to start making rolls.  This means weaker combatants are likely to fall early, but tougher ones will go longer in the fight, but will almost certainly be more likely to be killed when they get in over their head.

And so I present the ideas behind Heat, the HP I'll be using in ExoSquad.  Each combatant will have a Threshold which determines their minimum Heat before they need to start making rolls against their Heat.  If they roll under their Heat, they are downed.  I'll discuss the mechanics regarding being downed in a later post, I promise.

So, folks, what do you think of the concept of Heat?  Is it a good middle ground?

ExoSquad

In a future of terraformed colonies throughout the solar system, a war has begun.  Colonies in the Outer Planets are tired of being ruled by the bureaucracy of the Inner, a situation only exasperated by the slow speed of communication between them due to interference from the asteroid belt.  A war begins, pitting retrofitted space craft against each other, and eventually ground forces in planetary warfare.

In an effort to reduce the cost of life, the Inner Planets develop a new technology: anamorphic armor equipped with top of the line anti-armor and anti-personnel weaponry.  The first unit just arrived on a station in the Belt, and they've picked some of the best, brightest, and craziest pilots, soldiers, and civilian specialists to take them into battle.

Welcome to ExoSquad; one of these is yours.  Treat her well.

Game Ideas

I've already discussed Velocity lightly.  Fast paced, conflict driven, team oriented racer RPG.  I've got that first draft burst finished, but I'm unhappy with the rules.  Will be working on that, and applying some of the mechanics and ideas from this blog to the game.

The second idea in its infant stages is a mecha game.  I know there's a few of these on the market, but I want to find a way to fit the tension sensitive special attacks and the 'unbeatable until. . .' bosses into the game.  Tactical movement will be minimal, but attack choice will be critical.  These are the initial ideas, will build on them soon.  Also: it needs a title, anyone care to help out?