Yes

It’s a commonly offered piece of advice to GMs: Say ‘yes.’ Say yes to every crazy idea, say yes to every character concept, say yes to every behavior and desire. And if you don’t say yes, throw the dice.

Other people tell you to NEVER say yes. Leave it up to the dice, or tell the players it’s impossible.

Really, neither way is right.

As I’ve mentioned before, talking to your players is the first thing you need to do. Expectations, both theirs and yours, need to be addressed so that the game can operate on some accepted terms. If you’re expecting a gritty ‘realistic’ game with long lasting wounds and heavy consequences, your players need to know this before you drop that first broken limb on a character.

Talking with your players also lets you know what kinds of crazy things they’re going to want to do. If they want to take down the local/world government, you know ahead of time and can find a way to make it happen and be interesting for both parties.

At this scale, the campaign design, it is generally a good idea to compromise. Sometimes, the appropriate answer is yes.  Sometimes, it’s no. If you’re running a high fantasy romp featuring a band of royalty taking a McGuffin to be destroyed, and they suggest a fairly boring creature with almost no personality and no skills, you might need to reconsider how that story takes place. Of course, if all of your players suggest such characters, maybe your entire campaign needs to be refocused?

Lower down the scale, at adventure design, you will usually be saying no to new adventures while they’re in one, but after the climax, you want to say yes. If they think it’s not pertinent to continue the current story line, and move on to an interesting tidbit that was mostly a side concept, let them follow it. You as a GM should be flexible enough to play anywhere.

On the encounter scale, absolutely say ‘yes.’ ‘Yes and . . .,’ ‘Yes, but. . .,’ ‘Yes, if. . .’ Any one of these allows the player to do what they asked for, and continues to keep the game interesting. The players decide to complete a ritual sacrifice because it was an enemy on the altar? Yes, and a dark god now has its eye on these apparently fallible heroes. They want to pull of a crazy stunt to get the drop on an enemy? Yes, but if they fail the roll, the enemies see them and get the surprise instead. They want to create a large explosive with a stick of gum, a computer and a paperclip? Yes, if they can make the necessary rolls.

Now, I used to use ‘No’ to stop my players from wasting time on things that weren’t going to help them. I wish, now, that I’d caught the hint, and used those preventative measures to make the story more interesting. A personal failing, but one you can learn from: if the players focus on some shiny thing, make something up for them, it’ll be better than you think.

So, GMs, any time you can think of in which saying yes, or no, made your game more interesting?

In Which I Talk About Games I Play

I talk about games quite a bit but I realized that I don’t talk about the games I like much. So this is going to be my day to ramble on about the games I’ve played lately and in the past that have had an effect on how I think about game design.

Board Games
I love board games, and love trying new ones. I grew up playing Risk and Monopoly like everyone else I know. I loved Risk as a kid, it was long, and our house rules made it longer. Obviously, eventually I experienced other board games

My latest board game fixation is Small World. I got to try it for the first time a few weeks ago and love it. Most of the tactics are pure skill and decision-making, the race and power combinations are fun and provide a cool depth to the game. Even the reinforcement die is a neat piece that allows some luck to exist in the game for those willing to gamble a bit.

I tried Sid Meier’s Civilization last weekend, and have to say, for a Fantasy Flight Games work, I was highly impressed. Still way more tokens than I normally like, but very nice quality, and an interesting set of mechanics. Definitely one I suggest trying out.

My favorite board game, though, is Go. I love strategy games, and Go is pretty much exactly the perfect game to scratch that itch. I don’t even have much more to say about it except for those who haven’t played, you need to at least try it out.

Card Games
In the card game department I have mixed feelings. I’m not really into collectible games anymore, their unknown potential costs really get to me. I do like a few boxed card games, and I still have one CCG I love.

The latest boxed card game I’ve picked up is Rowboat. It’s a Spades variant that is actually quite fun to play. There isn’t much more to say about it except the art is pretty good and if you like traditional card games you’ll find this one quite easy to pick up.

My CCG of choice is The Spoils put out by Arcane Tinmen. I could go on for hours about this one, but to make it brief: this game is everything I love in CCGs. Very tight mechanics, a beautifully concise rulebook, plenty of player interaction, and better in draft and sealed than constructed.

Miniatures Games
I like miniature war games, and typically buy on quality of models, but my choice for play is definitely Monsterpocalypse. Great flavor, great game play, and an excellent community.

Other than that, I own some Warhammer 40,000, some Warmachine, and I am currently looking into Infinity.

Role Playing Games
Considering this is a role  playing blog, this is definitely the key category of today’s post, since my views on RPGs definitely matter in the long run for the blog itself.

D&D is of course the hot button in the market right now, and my particular flavor is 4th edition. Unlike some developers, I absolutely believe in game balance and niche protection, and while 4th isn’t perfect in those senses, it’s far ahead of OGL games. I’m also big on suggesting the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 since it has some excellent lessons on running games, some of which have been around a long while and I include similar suggestions in my Monday posts.

I’m a fan of World of Darkness on some levels. I love the flavor, and big fan of the baseline mechanics even if they need plenty of work. I don’t agree with the way most groups play the game, so I don’t get in many groups locally. If I’m going to be an asshole GM, this is the game I’d do it in, being a stickler for the personal horror elements of the game.

One of my loose and fast rules I really like is Dread. Those who haven’t gotten a copy should absolutely consider it if you can find it. When it comes to top down mechanics, Dread does it absolutely right. Using the tower produces a wonderful ramp into that titular emotion. The questionnaire character sheet makes it much easier to get into a character and generally I wish I would have thought of it.

This post is running long, so I’m going to end with those and touch on other influences to my games later. Well, readers, any games of any type I absolutely should try, let me know in the comments below!

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!

Rambling, RPG Prices, and Tag Team Powers

Friday means Free-For-All, which basically means I could talk about anything. Today, it’s going to be me rambling about various topics.

First of all, my process. When I write my Free-For-All post, I rarely go in with a plan. I surf my Twitter feed, check Facebook, and Feedly, my RSS reader, looking for something to write about. Sometimes I see a great blog post and I use that, other times, I’m forced to come up with something, like my designer’s notes for FRE.


The first thing I found this week is an email from Steve Wieck of DriveThruRPG. He talks a little about Price Anchoring and a few of the downfalls of extremely low prices on DriveThruRPG. The price he calls out specifically is $1, I assume in reference to Adamant’s somewhat regular sale. The quick version is that at $1, it costs DriveThruRPG one cent after only paying for Paypal and the Publisher of the work. Not including other costs they incur transmitting the work to the purchaser, or even having the website up. Obviously, this would not be sustainable over a long period.


The problem is, if people all wait around for things like Adamant’s sale, the ‘value’ of RPGs would eventually drop, leaving us with almost nothing in way of potential dollars. As a developer, and eventual self publisher of RPGs, this is a problem, and something I wrestle with internally an awful lot. I know pricing is going to affect sales. I also know that lower price sells more. But how low? Obviously, one dollar is too low if I plan on using DriveThruRPG exclusively (I haven’t decided on my distribution model yet.), as I don’t want my distribution channel to fail. I also feel that fifteen dollars for an e-book is way too much.


One of the other things I study as a hobby is fiction writing, and recently, publishing as a whole. One guy I’ve found who likes sharing his views and experience is J.A. Konrath. His experience on the Kindle has led him to believe that the ‘sweet spot’ for ebooks is $2.99. I’ve discussed the idea with a few people, and I’d venture to say it’s likely between that price and $3.99. That’s fiction, though, something we buy in physical form between $6 and $13 in softcover, and upwards of $25 in hard cover.


So what’s the sweet spot for RPGs? I honestly don’t know. I can make an educated guess. We know that the price anchor for RPGs is between $15 and $30 for physical product. If I keep the assumption that ebooks are not as ‘valuable’ as hard copies, what would I aim for? I think somewhere between $5 and $15 is going to end up being ‘the right price’ for electronic products. You can bet I’ll be trying different price models with my games, so hopefully sometime in the future I’ll be able to tell you exactly what price is ‘right’ for RPG products.


The next thing I want to talk about is a post over on Nevermeet Press by shinobicow about ‘tag team powers’ in 4th Edition D&D. His idea was feat bought powers that required the teammates to act on the same initiative count. I like the core idea, but hate the concept of forcing players to delay to do something awesome. 4th Edition is definitely the ‘be awesome, all the time’ edition, and delaying is decidedly not awesome.


So, how do I counter his design? Simple: Look at Arena Fighting. Arena Fighting feats offer you a bonus to specific powers for a feat. Why not make tag teams like this? The first idea was one of the iconic attacks from the X-Men: The Fastball Special. Thinking about it, I realized we already had a power that represents the throw, and the attack could be just about anything, really.


The Warlord’s Knight’s Move lets an ally Move their speed. Perhaps, the feat changes Knight’s Move to a shift with a bonus equal to the Warlord’s Strength, and a fellow party member with Fastball Special gets to make an attack with a specific Exploit before they move before the end of the next turn. That would of course need an additional benefit, perhaps treat the attack as if they had charged, or lay in some extra damage for the Special.


Obviously, a very rough idea, and I plan on writing up a few of these and trying them in a one shot game to see how they fair. After I’ve got some balance, I’ll see what I can do to make them available to you guys!


So, RPG pricing, what do you guys think?


How about team up attacks in any RPG?


Update 2011-01-09: Chuck Wendig, freelance penmonkey, covered the topic of e-book pricing on his blog on Friday. Some interesting insights and Gareth from Adamant made a comment as well.

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?

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?