Sitting On The Shelf: Game Book Covers

I’ve recently been reading a great book from a novelist, The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing (Everything a Writer Needs to Know.) by J.A. Konrath.  In it, he has an article called “Rusty Nail, Street Dates, Jacket Copy & Book Covers”. Skipping the bits about his book, he makes a simple statement:

“Covers are important. Some booksellers believe they are the single most important element when it comes to book sales. I agree.”

So do I.

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but, as I’m sure we all know, everyone does it. It’s not just books, though, we all judge products based on their packaging. Games are products. Yes, very blunt, ‘duh’ statement, but I want to make sure this concept comes through clear.

When I’m looking for a new game, which admittedly is not as often as I’d like, I don’t go into the store looking for a specific title, designer, or system. Sure, I know my preferences, and I hope I end up with something good, but sometimes the journey is the worthier part.

A good cover absolutely draws my eye. High contrast between title and cover helps it stand out. Professional looking images also helps. I’m sure I’ve passed on some acceptable or even good games over the years because the front cover is a mess. I also know I’ve saved myself a lot of hassle with terrible games following the same rules.

After a book has my attention, I hit the back cover (Or jacket if it’s one of the rare RPGs that has one.). I want to know, quickly:

• What’s the conceit? What will I be playing?
• What parts of the game does it consider important?
• What system does it use?
• Is it still as professional as the front cover?

The conceit, or theme, is important because in reality it’s what you’re asking your players to believe. If you’re trying to attract sci-fi gamers, discussing elves on the back isn’t likely to help you attract them. If you’re pushing fantasy, or emotional conflict, you need to make sure the players get that before buying the game.

What mechanics are you touting? What’s that thing that sets your game apart from all the other games on the shelf? You need to make a selling point on this, you need to get your prospective player to think they need your book and not have something they could do themselves. (The hobby has a history of do-it-yourselfers, don’t underestimate them.) If it’s your NPC write ups, let them know.  If it’s a new mechanical system, say so.

The system you use is important to state, depending on how you’ve designed it. Is it based on another system? If you have the license, use their marks.  If you don’t, you may want to consider some way to reference the source, but make sure to read up on trademark law so you know what’s fair and what’s trading on their mark. If you made your own system, now’s the time to brand it. Make a logo, make a name, and give people something to ask for if they want your game. It will help down the road if you ever make a new game with the same system.

Now, some of you might feel I’m being trite about professionalism, but it is absolutely critical, even for small timers, to be as professional as they know how to be. Your book should have a uniform appearance; it should be the same quality from cover to cover. This professionalism will let the purchaser know you took your time and aren’t wasting their time. It speaks well of everything you’ve done.

Now, if the inside doesn’t match that cover, you’ve got other problems, and I’ll touch on them in the future, but keeping in mind how people look at books will definitely help you sell some if you ever make it to print.

Video Inspirations

So, getting back into the swing of things at school, it’s affecting my schedule a bit. Of course, to top that off, Champions Online went Free-To-Play recently, and sucked me back in. The truth is, while a lot of the Champions formula is straight out of the standard MMO formula, it did some things I’d not seen before that I really enjoyed, and keeps me wanting to play the game.

One of the major things they did that I loved is the break down of enemies into Henchmen, Villains, Master Villains, Super Villains, and Legendary Villains. This breakdown lets players know about how many they can take on their own. For example, a group of 5 on level henchmen is a pretty fair fight in Champions. A Villain and a Henchman or two is also a fair fight. Once you get up into the super villain levels you want groups of people for a fair fight.

That is, of course, the theory and the math breaks down occasionally. The idea, though, is spectacular and was one of the changes made to 4th Edition D&D I absolutely loved with the addition of the Minion, Elite, and Solo entries in the Monster Manual. This makes it very easy to throw together mixed groups of various power levels against a group of heroes without guessing if you’re going to just obliterate them or have the group steamrolled.

The other thing I liked about Champions is the way energy works. Your energy has a point of equilibrium where you recharge to almost the moment you leave combat. You also have a base power that is your energy builder; attacking with it builds up your energy bar, which drains when you use your more powerful (and interesting) powers.

I like this system, and have seen various systems in games do something similar. Building up a resource to turn it into ‘cool shit’ is a pretty well tread territory for a reason, my only complaint about it in Champions is that the power builders are really boring. Some people have leveled the same exact complaint at At-Wills in 4th Edition, and not unfairly.

The last part of the Champions formula that I love is that (for Gold members) you can modify the color and point of origin for a number of powers which allows a creative player to make dozens of archetypes using only their basic chains of powers. My example is Necromancer, my first Champions character.

Necromancer uses the Telepathic power set, which is a series of powers using telepathy for various effects, shielding, stuns, basic crowd control effects. By modifying the colors and origins, telepathy looks a lot like dark sorcery. Basically, it openly encourages reskinning which is at the heart of great role playing in most systems.

What about you guys, what video games inspire your mechanical design?

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.

Setting The Tone

As a designer, you should have some core idea of what your game should be. I touched on that briefly in ‘What is Your Game About?’. The question today is if your core idea is based on a mood or tone, how, exactly, do you set it up to encourage that tone?

The first place to help set the tone is the voice in which you write the rules. How you present your game to the players is going to get their mind set on that tone you expect in the game. A great example is certain selections from the World of Darkness line. They set the tone for a very dark game where truth is definitely a subjective thing.

The fiction isn’t the only place your writing voice can help. How you name your mechanics, the headlines, and even how you describe your mechanics will effect your players mindset while playing.

The next major place to set the tone is in your mechanics. This is probably far and away the more important element of setting the tone in a fairly universal manner. For example, Dungeons and Dragons definitely makes your characters feel like big damn heroes, where as Dread lets its mechanics work over time to bring that overbearing emotion upon a group.

But how do you do it?

Start with the piece of paper every player has in front of them. Character sheets let you know in real terms the kinds of things you’ll be doing. World of Darkness makes it clear that social situations will and should happen by devoting an entire third of its character sheet to social abilities.

The next place is the resolution mechanic. This is harder to use, but can be done spectacularly. Using multiple dice to get totals creates a bell curve that makes everyone feel a bit more average, and those who consistently do things at the high end of the bell seem very much cut above the rest. A single die allows more luck into it, and combined with a strong voice, this randomness could become a core feature of your game.

Less mainstream options include changing up the mechanics completely. Cards, Jenga, whatever. If it helps encourage mood, go for it.

The other area you can play with your resolution mechanic is the math behind it. How easy is it to succeed or fail? Does it get harder as time goes on? Easier? Each of these choices will reinforce a certain tone of play.

The subpoint to mechanics is more than just resolution, what about resources? How important are they? How common are they? How powerful are they? One common resource is hit points. When they’re gone, you’re dead. Each system has their own math behind this mechanic, and that math gives you an idea of how lethal the system is.

Some systems offer the players the ability to do something completely impossible once in a while, but dole it out as a resource. Things like Action and Drama points are a solid resource that encourage a certain style of play.

Desperate games, like low levels in the newest version of Dark Sun, have a resource that you need just to stay at full effectiveness. Survival Days and Sun Sickness help reinforce the idea that you’re in a world where survival is hard on everyone.

I know this post is vague in its approach, and that’s because the choices you make are going to depend on the mood you want to create. If any of my readers would like me to examine creating a specific tone in more detail, let me know in the comments!

Complexity Cakes

It seems the conversation that’s buzzing through the forums and blogs this week is options and their relationship to complexity. The conversations are often long, with detailed posts, and generally complex. There’s some good points all around, and I’d like to weigh in on the topic myself, and give you guys some tools with which to evaluate the complexity of your own games.

Types of Complexity
In general, I recognize three types of complexity to a rules system, and they happen at different levels and different areas of the game. There’s nothing wrong with any of them, but there’s an amount of personal taste to each of them and so you’re going to need to decide on how much of each your game will include based on your expected audience.

Mechanical Complexity
Mechanical complexity is directly related to how much you have to do to resolve a single part of the game. A highly complex mechanic is the D&D 3.5 grapple rules. You need to make a roll, consult the result, make another roll, consult its result, and then maybe, in three or four steps, you do what you wanted. A simple mechanic is like Monopoly’s turn structure: roll dice, buy property or pay rent.

In general, I’m an opponent of overly complex mechanics. A good game is one that I can teach the base mechanics in a few minutes (15 minutes is too long). That simplicity opens the game to the most people which in turn allows the most new ideas to enter the game. All of that is a good thing.

Complex Options
Being able to pick at cost what you can and can’t do sounds great on paper. I can choose both an A/C and a radio in my car, or one or the other if I so desire. Options are GREAT in real life. But they’re generally harmful to interesting game play. If you could buy any property on the board in Monopoly, you might feel better and more in control, but the game would devolve into an initial dice off, people buying as many properties as possible followed by turned of destitute land barons trying to bankrupt each other (Which I must admit doesn’t sound much different from a typical game of Monopoly!).

That said, options get complex when there are too many of them, and multiple ways to get some of them. See Item of Power in the 2nd Edition of Big Eyes, Small Mouth. It allowed you to get double the character point investment but conditional on having the item of power. So you could buy a weapon attack for 4 points, or buy an item of power for 2 and buy the same attack for half cost. This doesn’t improve the game, giving the option to take twice as many powers.

Complex Choices
Complex choices are deciding between two similar things: two places to move, two attacks to use, two possible powers, two possible spells, et cetera. Each choice loses you something, but gains you in other areas. A great example is the game of Go. Each piece has exactly the same amount of power in theory, but where you choose to play those pieces affects the game in far reaching ways. The choice of playing in one place over another is very complex, with years needed to master the ‘optimal’ moves.

In general, I feel that choices are what should be complex in a game. The more interesting the choices, the more satisfying the game. Too few choices and the game isn’t even worth playing.

Those three types of complexity cover just about anything you’ll find in a game.

I gave my opinions above on what I feel is most important to a game, but in the end, like so many things, there are a range of tastes out there and you can’t please them all. As such, you need to pick a value for each of these that appeals to the players who are likely to play your game. If you’re selling a product, you have to keep the audience in mind.

And how about you, readers, what forms of complexity do you prefer in your systems?

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?

System Considerations: Player Actions

Monday, I discussed what DMs can do to encourage players to get into the game, get a little nutty and add to the narrative on their own. Today, I want to approach that same topic from the designer’s mind set.

Obviously, different designers have different ideas on what the players should be adding to the story. In X-Crawl, for example, the players need to be showboating and doing crazy awesome things as much as possible. The Tomb of Horrors, on the other hand, is much less player oriented and more puzzle oriented, wanting to limit players from doing insane things. Since we have two possible extremes, I’ll just talk about the principles of building in incentives and disincentives for the kind of things you want your players doing.

The basic concept is of course that anything you build incentives for is more likely to happen, and anything with a disincentive is less likely to happen.

The issue then becomes how do you create incentives for a specific kind of action? Ones I’ll expand on include mechanical simplicity, mechanical bonuses, resources, and experience points.

Mechanical Simplicity
Why was grappling not used very often in OGL games? It had a long series of problems, but one of the primary ones was its complexity. In a game full of complex subsystems, grappling was by far the most complex action any character to partake in. Often, even if it was the choice that everyone at the table wanted to see, it was passed over just due to how much that thematically interesting action slowed the overall flow of the game.

So learning from that mistake, the obvious way to encourage actions is to make them mechanically simple. The less work the Player needs to do to make it happen, the more likely they are to do it. One or less die roll with a well documented effect allows the players to make a choice and have it done with minimal fuss. This allows people the ability to focus on the the action and flow of the game.

Mechanical Bonuses
Why do you stunt in Wushu? Obviously, because it made you effective. The more you added to the game, the more likely you’d succeed.

So write in bonuses for taking the sought after actions. Extra dice, bonuses to the die rolls, whatever it is that helps your Players succeed. The higher chance of success will draw them to it just for the chance to be more effective over all.

Resources
Resources are more abstract, but your system can encourage different things through its resources. Drama points, Action points, even in game currency can all be used to encourage different types of games. A micro-economy of earning and spending these resources keep the players focused on the actions you want in the game, while making unwanted actions ‘not on the menu’ or by raising their price. The only issue with raising their price is you also raise their apparent worth in Players’ mind.

This type of pricing creates an scarcity of the different types of actions, which makes taking the action as much a goal as the actual character goals themselves. If you’re trying to encourage actions, this type of scarcity brings more focus on the intended actions, but if you’re using it to discourage actions, you may unintentionally make those choices more appealing due to their rarity.

Experience
The final place that is easily designed around and good at encouraging actions is Experience. However the characters get better at what they already do is a place to put in systems for encouraging the actions you want to focus on. Set the rewards for only the actions you want, and don’t give experience for other actions you don’t want to happen.

To discourage actions you generally take the opposite approach. Penalize discouraged actions, make them more complex mechanically, dock potential XP.

So, readers, what kinds of actions do you want Players taking in your games? How do you plan to encourage those actions? How do you intend to discourage actions you don’t want taken?

Designing From Top to Bottom

A common complaint I see when comparing one system with another is disassociated mechanics. Basically the mechanics do not emulate the players’ idea of the story. This is a load of bull.

ALL mechanics in RPGs are disassociated from their actual action. Casting a spell in universe is nothing like pointing to a block of text in a book and picking a target or two. Hacking a computer in game universe is not anything like rolling a pile of dice and hoping for enough high rolls. Swinging a sword in universe has nothing to do with rolling a die and praying for a high roll. Fortunately, or unfortunately, all of these mechanics are disassociated from their actual action in universe because we, the players and GMs, cannot do these things in real life with the same skill or speed our characters can manage. So we abstract them as dice rolls in an attempt to roll the characters’ skill, luck, environmental concerns, and other factors into a single easy to calculate system. Until you’re calculating attack damage with physics equations, you’re using disassociated mechanics.

That long winded explanation out of the way, I finally managed to figure out what people mean when they ask to remove dissociative mechanics. What these players are asking for aren’t mechanics related to the action involved (Really, would you want to cast a literal magic missile every time you wanted to use the spell in Dungeons & Dragons?), they’re asking for top down game design.

For those new to game design theory as a whole, and maybe even to games, top-down game design is when you take a concept, let’s say a wizard, and design all of the mechanics to support that mental image. A good example in games is Magic the Gathering’s Sleep card. Another example is pretty much all of the OGL rules for Dungeons & Dragons and the new Essentials classes for 4th Edition.

Top-down design has some major traps, primarily in the balance category. Back to my Dungeons and Dragons example, wizards in the OGL were just better, because that’s what the designers, and even some players, expected. Other times, it’s making options not powerful enough due to that flavor you’re aiming for.

The direct opposite of top-down game design is bottom-up design. In this case, you create a set of mechanics, and then add the flavor afterwards. Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition’s core classes all use mostly bottom-up design: solid rules that are given tenuous flavor that is simple to rearrange or ignore all together.

The traps in top-down design come in when things become far too homogenized, and therefore boring. When all options are literally the same, there are no interesting decisions left to be made. Beyond this, a number of players don’t like the feeling that the mechanics don’t actual mean anything and can be redefined at will.

As player, I much prefer bottom-up game design as it lets my imagination spin as fast as possible and lets me do things that top-down design often says are impossible. Really, no mechanics are so well defined as to be impossible to change the definitions to suit your taste, but many players and Game Masters have trouble making that leap from one set of descriptors to another.

As a designer, I do a little of both. Behind the scenes in ExoSquad I have a long list of ‘equal’ abilities that can be mixed and matched into the various weapon abilities, but the ones I choose for each weapon are based on a top-down analysis of the abilities and what I’m trying to emulate. Velocity’s pre-alpha rules, on the other hand, are purely bottom-up and are incredibly flexible as mechanics go.

My question for the comments is this: which style of design do you prefer, and why? If you’re a designer, let me know in the comments, and explain what challenges you’ve experience on either design ethos!