Blankshield

Go see Serenity.

I'm just sayin'.

Wow. I say that one of the best things to do in game design is to steal other people's stuff and I don't even get a raised eyebrow? What does it take to get comments out of you people?

Ok, on to the questions. The three questions that are getting asked around the forge these days everytime someone pops up with a new game are:
What is your game about?
What do the characters do?
What do the players do?

These are very high-level questions. To give two (extremely different) examples, I'll give the answers for both D&D (3.0 and 3.5 specifically) and my own game Death's Door.

D&D:
What is your game about? Killing monsters and taking their stuff.
What do the characters do? specialize their abilities (classes), work in groups, improve on a linear scale to face progressively tougher monsters and get progressively better stuff.
What do the players do? Players: direct a single character's actions, make tactical choices in combat and during character advancement. GM: control the environment, direct all secondary characters and antagonists, provide appropriately scaled challenges and rewards.

Death's Door:
What is your game about? Facing & accepting death as part of life.
What do the characters do? Know they are going to die, try and get three goals accomplished before that happens.
What do the players do? Provide real goals for the characters. Direct a character's actions towards their goals OR set roadblocks between other characters and their goals OR provide feedback and encouragement AND rotate through all three roles during the course of play.

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If you cannot answer these three questions about your game, your design will flounder. However, this doesn't mean you need to know it all right off the bat. When I started designing Death's Door, all I had was the answer to the first question, and couldn't articulate it nearly so clearly. I flailed around with things like "It's all about how, in western society, we have these taboos and it's about looking at them and blah blah blah."

Rather than knowing the answers, what you need to do is keep these questions in mind so that they inform the writing process.

Gech. That sounds artsy and highbrow and shit. Let's try this:

If you aren't thinking about what the characters should do, then you won't necessarily answer it with your rules, and people reading the game will not be able to consistently create characters that will work with the system. A good example of nailing 'what the characters do' is D&D 3.0 and 3.5. It is made very clear throughout character creation that the characters are specialized, are meant to work in groups, and advance over time.

If you aren't thinking about what the players do, you may fail to give them the necessary tools to interact with the characters and the rest of the imagined space. You may also fail to give them enough ties into that space to maintain interest. A good example of this breaking down is Shadowrun. What a character (netrunner) does is very clear and very detailed, but it wasn't well attached to what the players do: while a character is netrunning, that player is engaged, and everyone else is stalled, often for long stretches of time. Also, the player with the netrunner is often stalled while the other players are engaged.

If you aren't thinking about what your game is about, your rules will lack focus. Some of them will support different or opposing styles of play, sometimes your flavour text and setting will not mesh with the rules for actually playing, and further. A good example of unfocused rules is Advanced D&D, way back in the day. The rules and 'how to play' advice couldn't decide if you were supposed to kill things and take their stuff, or engage in moral/ethical conflicts, or be just like characters in popular fiction, and ended up implying that you ought to be doing all three and it should work just dandy.

Alright that's it for today. A couple more questions, in a bit more of a confrontational vein tomorrow. In the meantime, for further meaty chewing, Troy posted a great 'non-rant' on the forge about these three questions. Find it here.

James
(and post comments!)

"No more mister nice Gaius!"

Me and my big mouth. :)

Ok, game design. I'm going to arbitrarily drop off the "theory", at least for now. A lot of this is also going to be straight regurgitation of things I've learned at the forge, but I'll, um, try to regurgitate it in new and interesting ways.

Today, I'm going to cover the Big Two. Or at least, what I consider the big two.

You cannot copyright rules.

Nor can you trademark them. The actual rules and methods of play associated with a game (any game) are a process. Processes can be patented, but nobody bothers with doing this. D20 and the creative commons license are not "permission to use our rules", although they look an awful lot like that on the surface. They are "permission to use our trademarks". There's some fuzzy bits around the edges about the fact that presentations can be covered under copyright, and of course the actual text is copyright, but "roll a D20, add a number, if it exceeds another number, it is a success" is absolutely 100% ripoff-able. This applies to all of the rules in all of the games out there.

What this means is that, for practical purposes, there is no reason for you to not pick and choose the rules you like from other places. Do you like D20's "roll+skill vs target number?" Use it. A big fan of White Wolf's 5 dots skill progression? Yoink. This segues nicely into the second point, which is:

Play games. Lots and lots of games.

I am abso-fracking-lutely serious. Death's Door relies heavily on the fixed-length model, which I would never have even seen without My Life with Master. Likewise the shared dice pool and rotating antagonist, which came from other places. These are things I picked up from playing different games, and different kinds of games. I could not have written Death's Door a couple of years ago. I would have given up in frustration, becuase I did not know how to make the right kind of rules. Hell, I didn't know the right kinds of rules even existed.

About once a week, someone new comes onto the forge, posts about the cool new game they are writing and asks for feedback on it. Almost invariably, they are met with questions (sometimes gently, sometimes less so) that, bluntly, are pushing towards "You need to think this through some more." This is, almost equally invariably, because the person's gaming experience is almost entirely D&D (or one of the other "big boys"), and the rules they have created bear a heavy stamp from that mold. Often, the "new and innovative" mechanics are clearly and obviously there only to answer a perceived deficiency in the existing rules, and don't stand up on their own.

This is not meant to be a slam on these folks; it's exceedingly common, and is a mistake akin to a new driver grinding the gears when they learn to drive a standard. All they are lacking is experience, and tools. All they have is a hammer, and all of their problems begin looking like nails.

Next post will talk about the questions posed to new designers mentioned above. In the meantime, think about this, and you'll be well on your way to putting a saw in your toolkit.

Why does your game have a strength statistic?

James

Squee!

Battlestar Galactica Season one is out on DVD!

With commentaries! ('33 Minutes' was originally even bleaker. Dear lord.)

Squee!

/rabid fanboy

James

Well, the Bad Habits article is in the can, more-or-less, I just need to let it sit a couple days, clean it of grammer and continuity and send it out. As noted, I will link here when it happens.

Question for the floor: What do you want to see next?

A couple of people (Angel, Eric) have noted the need/desire for a follow-up article on Good Habits, or "how to teach". I'm not sure I'm the right guy to tackle that, but I'll give it a shot. It's a long way off, though.

Is there anything else folks want to see me spout off about, in terms of games, gameplay, theory or design-like topics? Do you want my views on current RPG theory? Forge-jargon to plain english dictionaries? Game reviews? Do you want me to shut my yap about all this gaming crap?

Inquiring me's want to know.

James

The Butt First Method

This is the working copy of part four of a several-part essay that focuses on How to be Comprensible both to people in the gaming hobby as well as newcomers to it. It is absolutely a work in progress, and please do contribute via the comments.


Situation: Person A asks a question.

Problem: Person B starts to answer, and gets distracted.

Example:
Person A: How do I use Panache again?
Person B: It's kinda how fast you are... actually, the best way to show it is to run a mock combat so you see how it works. (rummage rummage) Sorry, gotta get out my dice. (rummage rummage) Take a look at this - I picked up a bunch of new dice and this one's my favorite. Last week, I rolled this die, and it came up ten, like three times in a row. [...]

Why is it a problem?
That should be blazingly clear from the example. It's a problem because the question never gets answered. And worse, the question starts to get answered, so you're left there hanging with half an answer from one person, and everyone else sees that someone is responding, so they assume you've got your answer. My mother-in-law describes this as "going through life butt first." (I have to do laundry. But first, on the way to get laundry, I notice the bed is unmade. So I have to make the bed. But first I need clean sheets. But first, on my way to the cupboard, I trip on that loose board. I need to fix the board. But first....) In the end, it's just spinning wheels and wasted effort, because you start a thousand things and never get a single one finished.

So how do we fix it?
Focus, focus, focus. Pay attention to what you're doing. There's a boatload of articles and advice books out there on keeping focused and acheiving goals instead of dropping out halfway. Go read some. After you finish reading this article.

Practical tips:
Pause, then answer. Before you launch, take a couple seconds and think about the question. Part of the Butt First behavior is caused by just not thinking ahead.

Look at the person you are talking to. Don't look at your sheet, don't fiddle with dice, don't keep watching TV or reading the book. This will do wonders for your ability to finish the conversation you're having, instead of getting distracted.

Turn the damn TV off. Minimize distractions in the environment. Keep your play area uncluttered, and make sure that the things that are there serve to put focus back on the game and the people playing it.

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Well, that's four of four. Are there any I'm missing? I'll compile these into a single article, tidied up and incorporating comments, and post a link here to the finished article. Probably on Blank Shield Press, possibly on the forge.

James

I know it, therefore you know it.

This is the working copy of part three of a several-part essay that focuses on How to be Comprensible both to people in the gaming hobby as well as newcomers to it. It is absolutely a work in progress, and please do contribute via the comments.


Situation: Person A is new to a game, or situation.

Problem: Person B omits crucial information from an explanation.

Example:
GM: Ok folks, we got a combat!
(Players variously roll dice and otherwise do stuff)
Player A: "umm..."

Why is it a problem? Short of the unwashed ignorant lout, there is no greater barrier to entry for the hobby of gaming than the huge volume of data, lingo and jargon. We likes our little in-jokes, yessss, precious.

This is usually a good thing. In-jokes and references naturally develop over time, and are how we connect with the other people at the table. They're a huge part of the fun. Common knowledge (when the GM calls combat, we all roll Panache without being prompted) is part of this insider information, and is not just part of the fun, but lets us skip past tedium and get to the interesting parts.

Where it becomes a problem is when, either through inattention or deliberate snubbery, it becomes exclusive instead of inclusive. Healthy 'good' in-joke behaviour is "hey remember that time when..." and everyone laughs. Unhealthy is when it turns into "Hey, remember that time - oh, no wait. You weren't there." (turns to other people) "But wasn't the samurai fish slap the funniest thing ever?"

Part of why it's a big problem in teaching games is the 'inattention' side of the equation - we don't explain things at all because "we all know it". It may have been weeks or months or even years since anyone you gamed with didn't know "the rules" And the rules can be anything from the Panache example to "everyone brings their own drinks".

So how do we fix it?
This is one of the really hard ones to work around, because even more than the other stumbling blocks, this one is all about ingrained social habits. Thems is hard to break. Also, they are often habits that we don't actually [i]want[/i] to break - we just want to bend them enough to get the new guy up to speed, and then snap back into the same patterns.

Be mindful. Keep in mind how it feels to be the guy on the edge of the group. Be patient. Teaching a new guy the ropes is, frankly, boring for most people. Try to remember how much faster this will bring the whole group back online.

Also, and this is a bigger thing for the "fun" side than the "teaching" side: Don't get so caught up in demonstrating how cool and kickass your group is and how much fun you have that you forget to include the guy in that fun.

Practical tips:
Post-it's: Put a sticky note on your character sheet that says "Bob knows none of this shit." Put it on top of something you have to look at or change a lot, like hit points in D&D.

Use the Buddy system: Designate someone friendly to sit with the new guy and make sure he's included. This should be someone willing to say "Hey! Shut up, Bob's trying to figure this out."

Stop and explain: When you give an inside joke or make a rules jump, stop and explain it. Tell the cool story, or explain how the rule works. Yes, it slows down the group more now, but it keeps the group healthier over all and, in my experience, makes things reach full steam sooner.

I've been trying really really hard to keep my mouth shut.

But I can't.

The news and conversation lately have all been about New Orleans. Certainly a major disaster and deeply painful tragedy for many people. I personally know people who have lost everything.

But does no one remember the tsunami that devastated entire countries barely nine months ago?

New Orleans, upsetting and tragic though it is, exists in the richest country in the world, and has an estimated death toll in the hundreds. The tsunami hit the poorest parts of some of the poorest countries in the world, and had an estimated death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

I'm not honestly certain why I'm angry, or about what. But I am. It's the same anger I felt when the world mourned Princess Di and Mother Theresa, who had died a week earlier, was ignored.

Sorry.

James