Do RPGs Suck?

I read a post today over at Mob United about ‘why RPGs are failing’ and leveled some serious criticisms at the industry in general. Some of the ideas are most definitely founded on real events, with the OSR movement and Pathfinder both retreading old territory, and many of the indie publishers doing things related to one of the above or some other system.

But I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. All things are built on history, and looking at the evolution of dungeon crawlers to produce a new dungeon crawler isn’t a bad thing. Examining social engines to design a better social engine helps in the long term.

In the end, Malcolm levels the criticism that rules systems aren’t going to do anything, that you have to offer something unique that another person couldn’t give. It seems he believes that the fiction, the stories are what players can’t do for themselves.

The problem is that’s false. As human beings, we gravitate to stories, and we create them out of our own lives. No memory is a perfect recollection of events, but those events and people are categorized to make recalls more simple. Malcolm even goes so far as to say why is dungeon crawling any different from the Hero’s Journey. In reality, what is remembered by the players, and is best applied in a game system, are the archetypes that make up things like the monomyth.

My honest conclusion is this:

This decade has seen the release of some very excellent RPGs, things I wish I had the time to play. Those games have been challenging the limits of RPG design space, story space, and even challenging what we call an RPG.

RPGs aren’t necessarily failing, though they are struggling. We, as designers, need to offer unique experiences without the effort demanded of older systems. The stories people want can come from many mediums, and they will choose the easiest or best value. Video games, movies, and books all demand less effort, and less time, than RPGs, and these things tell stories that are just as good as RPGs. We can take advantage of RPGs putting the player as the protagonist in ways none of these other mediums can, and that’s the place we can ply our strength.

What about you, readers, what are the unique strengths of RPGs?

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.

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?

Interesting Idea

Yup, it's Sunday. I don't normally post on Sundays anymore, but I felt like giving a designer and student a hand.

Through one of the webcomics I read, I was linked to an interesting Masters Thesis project attempting to meld comic books and video games. The game itself is in a rough state, but it is a theoretical project. Go, try it out, take the survey, give this guy a hand.

http://q2nsummerdays.squarespace.com/

That's it from me!

3 Lessons For Great Stakes

You’ve got an established game, but it’s starting to get dull. The only thing the characters ever fight for is their life, and it’s hard to take that willfully. So how do you spice up your game and threaten the players with something they can actually lose?

Setting stakes is a skill most GMs need to learn, and learn to use well. The concept is simple: give the characters, and players, something to care about. In general, major tropes include fighting for your life against a given enemy, or fighting some world threatening entity. These are good tropes in the right genres, but aren’t always going to keep their ability to fire your players up.

So what are the key ingredients of a good stake in an encounter, adventure, or campaign?

1. Defined

A stake has to be clearly defined to be effective. Make it clear what it is the characters will lose if they fail, and the fate of the thing as well. Destroying a loved item or person has more immediacy than straight theft, but theft opens up many avenues of continued adventure.

The definition also makes it clear that choosing not to take an adventure means losing the stake in a specific way. This allows them to plan in a way that they can’t if you just tell them they’ve lost something.

2. Personal

Personal stakes are always more useful for drawing your players in. If they care about whatever it is they might lose, they’ll fight harder, and smarter, to save it. Try to steal their trademark weapon, their character’s lover/best friend, even threatening their hometown (If you sufficiently developed it.) can all have useful effects.

Making it personal will also cause the player who has the most stake in the situation to push his fellows into doing things they might decide against otherwise. Don’t underestimate social pressure as a tool for guiding your players.

3. Worthwhile

A stake needs to have some value. Allies who hearth wounded heroes, contacts, friends, money, lands, even power are all acceptable in terms of worth. All of these things have a perceived value, and your players will fight for any one of them.

This worth also helps keep the players from experiencing a ‘shock’ in regards to whatever thing they may lose. If you kill an NPC, your players will start to treat the NPCs like cardboard cutouts. By killing NPCs that produce value, they’ll be forced to continue to go to new allies for help. This keeps them from becoming insular in the game world.

So go out there and change the stakes. Let your players know their fortune they keep tied up in local businesses is going to be lost if the Orc warbands go to war, the wizard’s master is dying of an unknown disease, and the king has kidnapped the woman the fighter has been eyeing lately, and the rumor is the king is looking to marry. Oh, and to top it all off, the sky is falling.

What about you, GMs, what have you used as stakes lately?

FRE: Primer Release and Design Notes

Welcome to Free-For-All Friday! Today I’ve got something special for everyone, in the form of my first game release. Last week I mentioned I was taking KORPG’s 1 Page RPG Throwdown and writing up the ‘intro’ to Freeform Roleplaying Engine, AKA FRE. I wrote it, tested it against one of the most brutal optimizers I know, I’ve edited it. It’s as done as a one page document can be, so I’m giving it to you guys for free. In a big twist, you’ll be able to find it here on Googledocs instead of having to deal with one of the terrible upload sites. So, how about you go get that so I can get into my designers notes and you have an idea of what I’m talking about!

FRE: Intent
When I began designing FRE, I was looking for a system that’s easy to play and easy to run with as little need for outside determinants as possible. The reason I wanted such a quick system is because the intent was to design a system for forum based freeform roleplay. Dirty secret: freeform is how I got into the hobby!

I knew I didn’t want dice because dice are clunky and impractical to the flow of a freeform game, and while some systems have limited dice spectacularly, it was still too much dependence for my goal. I also knew that some systems being used by freeformers were overly complex, requiring many hours of complex calculations to produce a ‘balance’ that really wasn’t necessary for freeform games.

So my goal became obvious: a system in which any character was balanced with another regardless of breadth or depth of ability, and which was quick and easy to use.

FRE: Resource Management
I chose research management as it was the easiest way to determine outcomes without relying on flimsy statistics that could only handle a narrow band of power well. With resource management a god and a vagabond are equally ‘plot important’ even if the god attacks with world shaking power and the vagabond just creeps people out.

Resource management also lets the players have a ‘give’. By encouraging stake setting the system encourages players to go only so far as they are willing, so character death or removal is a choice of the players, not the system choosing to arbitrarily destroy them.

FRE: Plot
I want to bring up Plot specifically due to its major revision between versions. The original version of plot read as follows:

A User spends Plot to change the story in any way, including adding new NPCs, surviving death, rewriting history, or making an Offense or Defense when they are out of those two attributes. Plot that is spent is lost.

The power I originally gave plot made it the de facto ‘best’ stat in Primer, even if it didn’t recover like Offense and Defense. Combined with encouragement to give out much more Plot in the draft, this made the game more about convincing the Moderator to hand out as much Plot as possible to take advantage of the system.

While this is not the final form Plot will take in the full version of FRE, it’s what works for Primer, which had to be approached as a stand alone game.

FRE: Moderators
Because I couldn’t do it in Primer itself, I will offer my advice to Moderators here. Don’t hand out more plot than you can handle. The more you give, the more the players will write into the game (This is good.), but if you can’t keep up with all the plot threads, start pushing them to their conclusion in an effort to simplify your task.

NPCs should max out at about 4 of either stat, and only because that’s where players will be. While players can advance their characters with plot, it isn’t intended, and if they do it too much their ability to cause lasting changes diminishes, so even a combat monster should wreck the game too much.

FRE: Stakes
While stakes are only mentioned briefly in the Primer, they are at the core of FRE, and writing out the Primer has brought it to the forefront of my mind when I begin designing the Basic set stakes will play an even bigger role in the mechanics of the system. Part of that is to better model fiction, which is what most freeformers are trying to emulate from the start.

Stakes make it obvious what it means to win or lose in any specific scenario. This way ‘losing’ doesn’t have to be death, but can be more interesting to the overall plot in general.

FRE: Player VS Player
One thing that I’m sure some of you have noticed is that the system works just fine as a PVP system. This is intentional, and is going to stay in the system. Much of the drama of forum freeform games comes from player interactions and not Moderator plot. Even so, the system will be able to produce team based games just as easily, and I intend to make that obvious for the full product.

So there you have it, FRE, from the designer’s mouth. Any other questions, I’d be glad to answer in the comments!

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?

Coaxing Your Players to Awesome

Do you ever get tired of coming up with all the cool ideas? Does it cause you undue pressure? Ever wish your players would come up with something neat for you to respond to once in a while? Let them know they have some dramatic license and they might start helping!

Dramatic license is about imposing your own ideas on the game world. Most of the time, the DM has all the dramatic license, controlling the world, the NPCs, planning the dungeons, moving the mountains. The old joke that a DM represents the ultimate god of the game world didn’t come into being for nothing. This truth, though, is on shaky foundations as more systems implement ways to empower players to affect the game universe through more than simple mechanics.

If you want your players to take control a bit and make the game more interesting, you need to give them incentives to do so and not create disincentives for doing so. Eventually, the combination of these things will draw out more creative play from your players, regardless of the system.

Incentive: XP
If you have a system that has XP as a reward, it’s a wonderful mechanic to offer for people who come up with great ideas. XP makes you more powerful over time, so even small awards add up. Any time they come up with a cool combat action or anything that you feel improves the game, give them a nominal XP award.

Incentive: Action Point/Drama Point/Bennie/Will Power
If your chosen system has a ‘sometimes’ resource used in combat, it’s a great place to award for cool ideas. If they spend a major action to do something cool, but not very effective, give an action point to make up for it.

Incentive: Bonuses
Mechanical bonuses, any thing that makes characters more likely to succeed, are a great way to encourage ‘cool’ actions. If the cool actions are more likely to succeed than normal, your players are more likely to attempt them.

Disincentive: Multiple checks
If it takes more than one roll to determine if the action succeeds, and they need to make all of them, your players are less likely to attempt it. The simple fact that they will fail more often is enough disincentive to keep the imaginative attacks from happening very often.

Disincentive: Penalties
This is similar to multiple checks, in the fact that penalized actions are more likely to fail, so why attempt? The harsher the penalty, the more likely they’ll ask to take a different action altogether. As a counter point, this is a spectacular way to discourage actions you deem disruptive.

So, more incentives, less disincentives, and encourage it verbally every chance you get. Very simple steps to a more imaginative game from your players.

What about you, DMs, what ways do you incentivize cool actions in your game? Can you think of any ways you unintentionally disincentivize those actions?

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?

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!

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.