Things I asked Mearls & Crawford

When you’re in charge of making the new Dungeons & Dragons and you offer to do a live chat on the internet, there’s no way you can get to everyone. Thousands of people were tuned in and asking questions, so there was no way to get to everyone. Still, I kept track of the questions I did ask, and decided to post them here, and why I think they’re important.

How do you plan to deal with the five-minute-workday?

This is one of the most important points of Dungeon Crawl games, and it’s something I saw very early in the game. The player characters would play hard for an encounter or two, and then take a four-hour walk back to town, or secure a dungeon room to rest in for the next six hours. With long rests getting you all of your hit points and all of your hit dice back, this gets to be a big pacing problem pretty quickly.

Is there a plan to break up combat pacing mechanically, or will that be largely left to the DM?

Combat in the playtest is monotonous. And I don’t mean that to be harsh, I mean that it hits the same notes over and over again, which may well be the direction they’d prefer. “Move, Attack, Minor Spell, Major Spell,” are pretty much your only options in a fight, which is fine as long as you have a Dungeon Master that’s keeping things interesting in other ways. There are a few outliers (rogues hiding, for instance), but this is how entire combat encounters roll, and while that was certainly enough ‘back in the day,’ it makes for some pretty boring encounters without a way of shaking things up.

My players have lamented the loss of Awesome Daily Powers. Are there plans to include options that will have a much more pronounced “Wow” factor?

The playtest player characters look good, and they don’t lack for interesting, but there isn’t anything on the sheet that made my players go “Holy shit, check this thing out!” The games that do this better than anyone, in my experience, are Warmachine and Magic: The Gathering, and both of those are doing really, really well. It hits one of those psychographic cues that I think is really important in gaming: it’s fucking badass. A 14/14 with flying and trample that costs 12 mana is going to make your face drop. Same with a warcaster that has RoF infinite. There’s something visceral and attention-grabbing about something that’s bigger and cooler than it has any right to be, and as long as it can be generally balanced, there’s no reason to not include more “Wow” factor abilities.

A small point, but I found the concept of Hit Dice was ambiguously worded. At second level, your Hit Dice are 2dX. Does this mean your roll 2dX? If so, how many times can you do this? Or do you roll 1dX and you have two uses? Wouldn’t it make more sense to write that as 1dX (2)?

We played with the latter, but it’s vague.

I am the RPG 1%

Browsing through Lumpley’s blog on a lark, I came across this lovely article on how to sell Dread to people who don’t already want to buy Dread. Now, I’ve never really had that problem because the good folk of Whyte Ave in Edmonton are a role-playing lot, and they love them some innovative design. Dread’s Jenga-tower resolution mechanic is about as innovative as design in role-playing gets, so all I have to tell interested parties is “When it looks like the shit could hit the fan, you take a block from the bottom and you put it on top.” I’ve sold out of Dread.

But there’s a concept in that article that I found particularly interesting, and that’s her use of what seems like an entirely made up statistic that 90% of players show up to a role-playing game to consume the medium, 9% are occasional participants, and 1% are active participants and content-creators. I’m a content-creator. I like to fiddle around with game design, and I appreciate design from a consumer’s point of view. I am like a million other role-playing game enthusiasts who is “writing a game” that will likely never see the light of day. More importantly, I write a blog, and while my level of participation is low, I’m still creating content that some people find interesting or valuable. That’s really important.

But I’m not. In the role-playing game industry, at least at a design level, I’m nothing, nobody. I’m certainly important in other directions, mostly in sales and community leadership, but people should not be designing role-playing games with me in mind. I’ll play damned near anything and find something to like in it. Hell, I played RIFTS for years, and had a blast.

The 1% of people in the role-playing game industry aren’t the people you need to design for. You need to design for the 99% that aren’t us, because if you can get those people buying your product, you’re going to make a lot of money. You need to make product for the guys who just want to show up and play, who spend hours reading the books because they’re neat. And to go back to RIFTS for a moment, nobody does this better than Kevin Siembieda. One of the constant refrains I hear in my position behind the counter is “I can’t believe this game is still around.” Then four people come in and buy RIFTS: Lemuria and they’re super-stoked about it, not because they’re going to go home and play it, but because they’re going to sit at a Starbucks and read the book cover to cover, Oohing and Ahhing at the awesome pictures of Dragon Mech Warrior King Insect Demons and the stats for power armor that makes no godly sense whatsoever. This is why Kevin is still in business, he understands the Wow Factor of your average gamer better than most of the people currently designing role-playing games. If he could get his feet back on the ground and start pumping out product like he was in the late nineties, he’d be laughing.

And this is sort of what the guys at Wizards of the Coast have been trying to do for a while, now. You can see it all over the design of Fourth Edition, and having played the Fifth Edition playtest thingie, I can see a lot of work being put into getting some of those people back. Fourth Edition had REALLY COOL POWERZ and your hero was a balls-to-the-wall ass-kicker from the word Go. There were entire books full of COOL RACEZ and WICKED GEAR that were trying to reach something in the 90% gamer that made them go “Whoa!” One of the problems, though, was that Fourth Edition was dedicated to a sterile brand of balance that made it impossible to reach that visceral WANT reaction. I think some of this came from a miscommunication between Brand and Design, and like one of my friends constantly says “The biggest problem with Fourth Edition is that it was built to fix all of Third Edition’s problems, and it did, but then nobody liked it because it didn’t feel like D&D.” It made balance a primary concern, and while that’s great, while that is a brilliant goal to try and work towards, it’s a goal that makes players like me happy. It doesn’t make players like my friend Matt want to play.

Matt doesn’t want to play a balanced game. If we’re using Mark Rosewater’s “Timmy, Johnny, Spike” chart, Matt’s a Timmy. He wants to experience something, and he wants that something to come in the form of Awesome Wish Fulfillment. His favorite character was a troll called DeathStalker. He wanted a character that was Huge and Powerful and Awesome and Strong and nobody ever fucked with him ever. Because that’s the sort of thing players like Matt, players who are the 90% of gamers, really want. I think Matt’s a pretty extreme example, for sure, but what about that quiet guy who shows up and uses his powers but doesn’t really say much? He’s probably just there to watch the story unfold and have a drink with his buddies, and designing a game that gets players like him involved is actually really tough.

Designing for the 90%

Some of this comes back to my Busted Game Theory.
ShadowRun, D&D 3.5 and RIFTS are the three games that most immediately come to mind when I think about how to design a game for the 90% of gamers who aren’t me. They are all, intrinsically, games about wish fulfillment. You get to be exactly as cool as you want to be, in whatever direction you want. You want to be pretty, agile, flexible? Be an elf. Looking for big, brutal and smashy? Rock a troll. Want to be smarter than everyone? Hackers and rogue scholars. Looking to be faster, stronger, better than normal? Juicers are the way to go.

If you’re looking to design with these players in mind, you need to understand that what you’re looking to build isn’t a game that’s cool. Because wish-fulfillment is seldom actually “cool.” It just seems cool to the players who are into that specific direction of wish fulfillment. You need to cater to the people who want to be an Action Movie Star and the guys who want to be in World Wrestling Entertainment. You need to build a game that is complicated and fiddly, a game that can be “broken” in a lot of different ways and in a lot of different directions.  Third Edition D&D did this flawlessly, and it’s still the most popular version of the game ever printed.

With that in mind, it also has to be fun. Setting has to take a back seat to your player characters’ awesomeness. Have you ever really looked at the setting of RIFTS? It’s a ridiculous hodgepodge of settings and milieus that serves as nothing more than a backdrop for how awesome your character is.  Sure, there are dragons out there, but they’re mostly there in case you get a hankering to prove you’re more awesome than a flock of dragons. There’s a tyrannical cult-nation of human supremacists, too. You should probably go kick their asses so that you can punch Future-Hitler in the face. The setting for Shadowrun is, honestly, no better. It’s a stew of fantasy tropes and horrible 1990’s cyberpunk bullshit. Why? Because trolls are cool. You know what’s cooler than a troll? A troll in a trench coat punching Future-Corporate-Hitler in the face.

Importantly, power creep is not a thing you need to avoid in a game that caters to the 90%. It should be actively embraced. It should be crammed into books as often as it can be justified. One of the lessons game design has learned from Yu-Gi-Oh and Warmachine is that if everything in a game is broken, nothing in the game is broken. If you put a bunch of crazy over-the-top machine-gattling-rail-guns in your first book, you’d better have something that one-ups that bitch in the next book, because that’s gonna need some one-uppin’. Power creep allows those players who are enjoying the media while expressing their wish fulfillment to continually reach for a new wish to fulfill. If you already have a Hackmaster +10, the +11 coming out in the next book is going to look pretty sweet, whether you can obliterate small villages by yourself or not. This keeps people buying books, it keeps people playing your game (or buying your game without playing it, in the case of many RIFTS folk), and it makes sure that no matter how “cool” the last stuff was, the stuff in your next book will be even “cooler.”

And this isn’t going to make people like me very happy at all. I will probably complain about your game publicly and wonder why the hell I can’t keep it stocked on my shelves, because seriously, who plays this garbage? But I already know who plays this garbage, and there are a bunch of people I could point towards it with a clear conscience, because that’s the game experience they’re looking for.

And there are more of those people than there are people who could appreciate Burning Wheel.

D&D Playtest Session One

So, the public playtest is out and running around, and my group just finished our first session of it.

My crew ran the gamut from second-time players through to AD&D veterans, and most had similar things to say about the experience: it feels like a step backward, and that isn’t meant as a compliment. There were some differing opinions about how far we’ve strayed, some players saying it feels like third edition, with others saying it plays more like second or first, but there is general agreement in the fact that it plays a lot like previous versions of the game, and that this is not necessarily a good thing.

The best points about the game are that it is very much Dungeons & Dragons. The character sheets are familiar, and without much in the way of rules tweaking, we found ourselves in familiar territory. We knew what we were about, and everyone was able to make informed decisions based on their understanding of D&D in its previous incarnations and from other media that mirrors the conventions of the game. It was really easy to pick up and play, and there were only a few occasions where we had to stop and look something up to see if “this version” of the game had such-and-such a rule (in particular, critical fumbles and attacks of opportunity). The flow of the game was less immediately heroic than Fourth Edition, which is in many ways both a benefit and a flaw, but we all had fun, and that’s the important thing.

As a Dungeon Master I found myself settling into a comfortable role, doling out boxed text and sending waves of monsters at the players. The monster blocks were instantly recognizable and easy to work with. The descriptions of sounds, smells and lighting all helped my descriptions work, and I found the game flowed really easily and a lot like my experiences of playing First Edition as a DM.

The worst points about the game were the same things that make all of the editions previous to Fourth less than great. There was a real sense of slogging, even though the hits were harder and the combat rounds faster. The battles were quick and bloody, sure, but there wasn’t a lot to  work with. Every player on the table bemoaned the loss of Awesome Daily Powers, noting that the player characters had fewer options for mechanically-enhanced ass-kickery. Singlue use spells for the casters couldn’t quite make up for the loss of Serious Face Kicking that would result from the busting of a massive daily power. Skills were another sore point, with each player wishing that they had different skills on their sheet than the ones they were presented. A rogue without Perception? No one had Bluff? Really?  One player in particular found it atrocious that the laser cleric would have a minor spell that does nothing but damage. It doesn’t heal, doesn’t provide a bonus, doesn’t debuff the enemy, doesn’t do anything but hit a guy with lasers. Yeah, the damage was solid, but rogues and fighters are there to cause damage. Clerics are support, and that spell doesn’t support anything other than killing things faster.

As a Dungeon Master, I found each encounter made the game seem longer and more boring until eventually we just stopped because one guy had to go home. The adventure we were presented had a lot of choke points and it often felt as though one or two creatures were In the Shit, and the rest were standing off on the sidelines while stuff happened. It was tough to make the encounters interesting because a) they were very short, b) they lacked the tactical depth of Fourth Edition or even Three-point-Five, and c) it’s just another room full of fucking bugbears. I used some of my best description to liven things up, but it was turning into a real grind towards the end. Contested strength checks to move a guy out of the way would have been great, if there wasn’t always someone right next to the guy you’re trying to move.

Mechanically, the playtest isn’t all that different from Dungeons & Dragons Second or Third. Movement has certainly improved, but the encounters we played didn’t really build on that too much. Using Attributes for Saving Throws makes mechanical sense, but one player pointed out that not having Int attached to Armor Class or a more general saving throw made the Attribute feel a lot less mechanically important. Advantage and Disadvantage were stunningly intuitive, and likely the best version of the concept I’ve seen thus far, though when something grants Advantage or incurs Disadvantage is a little murky in actual play. The loss of Attacks of Opportunity is a massive blessing, and has sped up combat considerably. It’s also made running away a much more viable option in combat, as you don’t have to give your opponent a free chance to kill you if you want to disengage and get out. In future sessions, I will be working on putting player characters into specific situations that will test out how some of the rules work, specifically movement, magic, conditions and hiding.

Until then, may your adventures always remind you of adventures from your past.

Innovative Design

One of Dieter Rams' Ten Principles of Good Design (and mind you, it's only one; the others are just as important, if not as flashy) is "Good design is innovative." A good game design requires innovation, it has to do something that hasn't been done before, or do something that has been done before in a way that is appreciably unique. Because board games and card games are so reliant upon rules to remain interesting, we see a lot of cool rule innovation happening in both of those sorts of games. Collectible card games, in particular, are constantly innovating, and it's really neat to be able to watch innovation occur at three month intervals (that might seem long, but it's blistering fast...). One of the hot new CCGs that's on the market, Cardfight!! Vanguard, uses cards for everything. Damage is cards. Response triggers are cards. Buffs and debuffs come from cards in your hand. They're using zones in a way I've never really seen them used before, and I think that's really neat. Most of the game is very similar to Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon, but they're doing old stuff in a unique and interesting way, and those innovations have made the game incredibly popular among our Yu-Gi-Oh players.

Role-playing games can get away with sloppier innovation than other games, largely because a huge amount of the fun that comes from RPGs comes from sources outside the defined rules set. You can come up with really interesting rules, and people will certainly appreciate them, but how those new rules are utilized on a table is largely up to the group of people playing. So we see innovation less often in role-playing games, generally, but the innovations we see are really, really neat. Today I'd like to talk about a few of my favorite innovations from the last ten years or so, and why I think think they're a big deal. Now, I'm not going to claim that I have all of my sources in order; I'm listing innovations based solely on where I became aware of them, but they could easily have shown up in other works before that.

FATE Aspects

Attributes define who our characters are. They tell us what the character can and cannot do, what he or she is good at and what he or she is poorly at. Generally, though, attributes have failed in that they are sort of an arbitrary collection of statistics. They don't tell us anything about the character, they simply determine the limitations of that character in specific types of tasks. Really, what is the difference between a character with Dexterity 16 and another with Dexterity 17? Not too terrible much. There isn't even a mechanical difference; they both get the same bonus.

FATE introduced Aspects, which were more personalized, free form and provided meaningful information about your character right on the character sheet. Free form attributes didn't make their debut in FATE (they'd been seen previously in Sorcerer, Over the Edge, and Hero Wars). Aspects, though, pushed the idea into new territory, encompassing items, careers, catchphrases... anything that can be used to define your character.

Gumshoe Investigation

Someone once said of Robin D. Laws: "If you give Robin a job, he comes back with something that is somehow infinitely better than the thing you told him to do, and at the same time exactly what you told him to do." I believe that person was Kenneth Hite, who is himself an accomplished designer, but he's managed to describe Mr. Laws as a designer pretty spot on. Robin Laws is one of the best in the role-playing game industry, and the simple, elegant solution to The Investigation Problem is a great example of that.

The problem is something anyone who has played role-playing games for a long time will recognize. You enter a 10ft x 10ft room with a clue in it. You roll your Find Clues check, and it comes up empty. The game crawls to a fucking halt. That isn't fun, no one is enjoying that. The options become "The GM spoon-feeds you the clue," or "You roll over and over again until you finally get the clue, which makes the skill check arbitrary and ridiculous." The solution was one of the most incredibly elegant pieces of games design I've ever seen.

If you are trained in finding clues of a specific type, you find the clue as soon as that clue becomes available to you.

This gets the focus back where it belongs: putting the clues together and getting chased by frog men down the streets of Innsmouth. Just having the clues is seldom enough to solve a mystery, and the closer you get to solving the mystery, the more intense the resistance to your solving it gets, which leads to all those crunchy-fun actiony bits.

Dread Conflict Resolution

It's tough to do horror role-playing games well. It's a medium that extols the virtues of wish-fulfillment and power fantasies, and those things actively hinder your character in a horror game. This is, in my opinion, the greatest failing of White Wolf's games, the key reason that Vampire so often devolves into a superhero game with trench coats and fangs. As much as I would love to partake in the introspective navel-gazing that Vampire games advertise, I never really get a chance to. There are too many explosions.

To get horror done right, there are a few requirements you need to fulfill. Characters have to be less inherently powerful than whatever they're up against. There needs to be a sense of rising dread as the stakes get higher and the options get fewer. And sometimes, the shit has to hit the fan and everyone dies. Dread hits the last two notes brilliantly, using a Jenga tower to ramp up the anxiety and constantly move things towards a room covered in fecal matter and shame. Every time something happens that could be horrible, take a block from the bottom and put it on top. If the tower falls, people die.

Meditations on Resolution and Detail

I was reading a blog post about how D&D has really boring scenery most of the time, and the first thing I thought about was Mouse Guard. Then today, there was a news post from the guys at Wizards of the Coast about how D&D doesn't do skills in a way that's really interesting or compelling, and there's a few different systems for skills and that sort of suck. Again, I thought about Mouse Guard. To me, both of these things stem from a single issue, and that issue is addressed head-on in Mouse Guard in a really elegant way.

In D&D, skills actually serve to limit player authorship. In early versions of the game, versions without skills, a player had to clearly describe every single action he or she was going to take, and ask a lot of important questions about the surrounding area to make sure they weren't making an insane mistake. The advent of skills allowed a player to quickly and simply describe the task he or she was about to attempt in a sort of gaming short-hand. "I'm going to search for traps," and then rolling dice was a perfectly acceptable way to handle situations that would have taken a lot of thought and consideration without the skill. And that's actually pretty cool, that's a neat piece of gaming technology that gets the focus back where it belongs, on the violence.

But somewhere along the way, we got lazy. We started replacing ingenuity and thought with skill checks almost entirely. Rather than try and remember a pertinent detail yourself, you'd roll a History check. Rather than role-play your way through a sticky situation, you'd roll a Diplomacy check, and that was it. That's all that was expected of our players, and while that certainly made it easier to get to the violence, I think D&D design has sort of lost its way when it comes to skill design and why and how skills are used in the game. Players aren't authoring things anymore, they're rolling dice and calling it good.

And Mouse Guard presented some really elegant fixes to that problem, while still retaining the shorthand. A really good example of this is how the game handles weather watching. If you'd like to know what the weather is going to be like in the near future, you can make a weather watching check. If you succeed, you decide what the weather is going to be like at the start of the next session. If you fail, the GM gets to throw a weather-shaped monkey wrench in your plans, or you take a condition.

There are two parts of this that deserve a closer look: 1) you decide what the weather is going to look like and 2) if you fail, things get worse. Deciding what the weather is going to look like is a hell of a lot of power to put in a player's hands, but properly balanced with the threat of a massive drawback, it's not that big a deal. But imagine that power (and that threat) applied to other aspects of the game. To take an example from the Wizards post, let's look at a history check.

You're in the middle of deep, dank dungeon, and you come across a statue of a beautiful woman in her middle years, holding what looks like a spear, but the haft is busted halfway to her hand. With the current resolution system, you would roll a d20, add your skill bonuses, and compare them to the difficulty. If you succeed, the DM tells you stuff about the statue (or not). If you fail, nothing happens.

With the Mouse Guard system, you'd roll your D20, add your skill bonuses and compare the result to a difficulty number again. This time, if you succeed, YOU tell everyone what's up with the statue. Make it up. Tell a story. If you fail, the DM gets to throw a twist at you. The statue attacks, it crumbles and a horde of scarabs crawl out, the ceiling collapses, the statue's sculptor begins haunting you for getting it wrong, whatever.

What this does, and I think this is important, is provide a mechanical reason to add detail to the world. With success, players get a chance to author bits and pieces of the world, and with that duty spread among multiple people, more interesting details will begin to emerge. With failure, the DM gets to throw in twists and challenges that add further detail to the world through their very existence. Used while travelling, this will give players and DMs a chance to flesh out the scenery. Used in dungeons, it will provide a powerful tool for adding depth to a simple treasure-hunt. And in the right circumstances, it might encourage players to rely less on their skills. If you're in a room with three sleeping dragons and a kobold is about to sound a gong to wake them up while you're on a ladder over a river of lava, let's face it: you don't need any added complications in your life. Maybe you should think this one through the old-school way.

Ten Things About Las Vegas

So most of my “regular” readers know that I put up something of a travel blog over the course of any time I’m away detailing my various adventures and derring do, and finding ways to make those adventures relatable to games and gaming. This time around, though, I have not had the usual hour a day to devote to writing because I have been incredibly busy from eight in the morning straight until two in the morning most days. If these hours seem skewed to you, it’s because I don’t normally get up until ten and I don’t go to bed until around four in the morning. So I hope my dear readers understand the delay. After all, it’s fucking Las Vegas.

And because I can’t remember ever day in exacting detail (they’ve all rather blurred together in a haze of booze, gambling and shopping for clothes – and houses…), I’m going to be changing up the format this time around. I am not going to be writing a day-by-day account of my trip, but will instead be looking at a theme for each day that I post. And because I almost always do one of these, today I’ll be starting off with my Ten Things About Las Vegas (Since the Last Time I Saw Her).

Ten Things About Las Vegas (Since the Last Time I Saw Her)

1. The money isn’t where it used to be. If you look around America, there is an obvious financial crush going on, and I think that the most obvious place in the world to see that is in the place known for its ridiculous amounts of money. Las Vegas, the City of Lights, uses more power in a day than a third world country does in a year. That’s a statistic I just made up, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to be told it’s accurate. Lights are everywhere, there is money everywhere, and everything is of impeccable quality. Until you get up close. Vegas is starting to show some of the cracks in her make-up, even in the richest, prettiest, most incredibly well kept casinos. The Wynn is gorgeous, for instance, but the paint in the men’s room has been peeling for some time. The Venetian is incredible, but the carpets are starting to look their age. The newest casinos of which I’m aware, the Aria and the Red Rock are in great shape and their newness practically glows off the walls, but the rest of Las Vegas is slowly starting to come apart at the seams. Much like I found in the Palace at Versailles, the floors squeak, and it’s the little details like that which illustrate the full impact of the American economic collapse.

2. I’m particular. I travel in a very set sort of way, and that way is called “ADVENTURE TIME!!!!” which is not in any way affiliated with the children’s television show of the same name. If you would like to travel in a style similar to ADVENTURE TIME!!!!, the process is simple. Every day, wake up whenever the hell you feel like waking up. For me, that’s usually around nine or ten in the morning when I’m travelling, but if I’m at something like GenCon, it’s closer to seven. Then find something to do. At a convention, that usually involves a game I call “Go to Every Seminar.” When I’m travelling by myself or with a significant other, we usually decide between us which thing we’d like to do that day and then we go do that one thing.

And maybe that’s the real kicker for me. I don’t fill my days with stuff. I plan a thing early in the day, and everything that comes after that is just… whatever. I’ll do whatever I feel like doing. If that involves going to dinner at the Crab Shack, well then fuck it, we’re going to the Crab Shack and eating some goddamn corn. If that means going to Castro Street to see the gay partying that is San Francisco, so be it. In Las Vegas, I haven’t had much of a chance for that sort of thing. There hasn’t been a ton of spontanaeity on this trip, it’s all been pre-planned, and usually by someone who isn’t me.

Also, I have some things I love to do when I’m vacationing, and one of those things is partying. I was informed early on that it was not going to be “that kind of vacation,” to which my mental response was “So it’s not a vacation?”

3. I used to have a crush on her, but now I think she’s a thieving whore. The last time I visited Las Vegas, I didn’t have any money to gamble away, which made her seem like a pretty tame place to be. She was open and friendly and weird and flashy and classy and fun and all the sorts of things I look for in a city. This time, I came with dollars, and that was obviously a massive mistake, for two reasons. The first was shopping. See, I don’t do a ton of shopping at home, at least not for clothing. I spend a lot of money on meals out, and I buy gadgets and gifts for friends and family, but since I decided that time share money wasn’t worth time share grief, I’ve been skimping on my wardrobe in a huge way. Coming to Las Vegas was like opening a fashion floodgate for me. I have three new pairs of jeans, two new shirts, a leather jacket, a belt, and some shorts that got forced on me. We got a brand new, never-been-worn, pair of Guess jeans for six dollars. My twelve year old me is kicking the crap out of my incredibly well-adorned ass right now. The second pitfall was gambling. See, I’m not much of a gambler, really. I have an addictive personality, I form habits pretty easily, and I’ve been known to do incredibly stupid things of occasion. That all adds up to “I don’t know when to quit,” and that has become apparent through my gambling this week.
Once upon a time, I would have considered living in Las Vegas full time. As of now, I think I’d probably just end up hating on her. I could probably rock three months at a time. Probably. I’ll write Dave a business plan.

4. Shopping. I realize that I don’t make this abundantly clear very often, but I actually do know how to dress myself. Dave is of the opinion that I am far fatter than I am and keeps trying to get me into clothes that are XXL or bigger, and occasionally shaming me for it. Personally, I think I’ve been looking like a million bucks lately and my girlfriend agrees. I’m sorry, sir, but her opinion weighs a little heavier than yours most times.
Also, going back to how I’m particular, I have some pretty quirky ideas about how I want to dress myself, and trying to force me into something that I don’t want to wear is only going to make me seem like an asshole because I don’t want to wear those things. I don’t wear shorts, for instance, and I ended up feeling like a total dick that I don’t like, nor do I wear, shorts.

Regardless, I have a bunch of new clothes, and I think they look pretty great on me. I’ll be showing them off at the store damned near constantly for the next little while.

5. She’s not as friendly as I remember her being. Las Vegas in 2008 was one of the friendliest cities I’d ever been to. People would just say hello to you on the street for no reason, and everyone I talked to had an awesome story to tell. Then again, the last time I was in Las Vegas, I was actually allowed to party, and that might have made all the difference. Drunk me is a pretty friendly dude, if a little quiet, and I’m a lot more likely to walk up to a complete stranger and start a conversation than I am when I’m stone sober.

Las Vegas this past week has been cold. Not in temperature – weather wise, it’s been gorgeous – but by the people. They’re distant, they don’t want to talk to you, they’ve got places to be and crowds to hang with. Maybe it’s because this time I’m older and fatter and Las Vegas is a superficial sort of place, very hung up on appearances. Maybe it’s just that America as a whole is under a lot of stress, and Sin City is feeling the crunch a little harder than most.

6. Tits. The first show we went to was a thing called X-Burlesque. I don’t do a lot of burlesque shows in Edmonton, but I know they’re gaining some popularity with the Victorian renaissance that’s made SteamPunk cool, and there is at least one person on my Facebook friends list that invites me to all of the burlesque shows she’s performing in. I am, however, familiar with burlesque and it’s trappings, and what I saw at X-Burlesque was nothing more complicated than a very well thought out strip club show with much more expensive drinks. There were tits everywhere, and one girl, the Asian lady, kept making eye-contact, which was both very sexy and incredibly frustrating. I don’t like being able to see a girl naked without being able to at least attempt to bring them to orgasm. It hits all of the wrong buttons for me, and none of the right ones that make the wrong ones stop.

7. Sleaze Sells. The second show we saw was a thing called Absinthe, and it was brilliant. It was a self-aware, self-referential, sleazy, vulgar circus act. The ringmaster was a slimy grease ball with a vicious smoke-damaged voice and a mean streak. His assistant was a perky, sexually repressed, squeaky bimbo. The acts were incredibly impressive, most especially the Eastern European fellows who did a paired gymnastics routine that was, as the kids say, off the hook. When one 250lb man-slab can hold another 230lb man-slab horizontal from the ground with one hand, I consider that a feat worth seeing.

The second comic shop we visited was also incredibly sleazy. It was in a seedy part of town in the corner of a strip mall, with ugly, hand-painted signage. The interior was murky and dank, there were trees everywhere crowding the space and making the whole shop claustrophobic, with strange reaching branches to lash out at you from nowhere. The shop’s only saving grace was the store-cat, an addition I have occasionally petitioned Dave and James for, to no avail. Dave points out, we have trouble keeping plants alive. That gentleman apparently has no difficulty selling through 200 copies of a comic book we barely carry. Also, he has a porno moustache, thinning hair and a big, pink Las Vegas car.

8. The GAMA Trade Show taught me nothing I don’t already know. It turns out, I’m already really good at my job. I was actually pretty excited to hit GAMA for the seminars. In particular, I was hoping to hit a few by Dave Wallace, who literally wrote the book on making your store successful, but his seminars were late in the convention and I had already given up entirely on the con by Wednesday evening. If you need someone to tell you to get involved with D&D Encounters if you’d like to sell more role-playing games… Well, you’re in the wrong industry, pal. Every time someone asked a question, my mental response was “How the hell do you keep your doors open?” There was one guy who was incredibly proud that he had discovered a prizing system this year that almost exactly matches the one we’ve been using for years. When I found out that an employee making minimum wage in Nevada makes $5, and that the average new house costs $150k, that sort of answered my question. I have to be a lot better at what I do than most of the people at the convention because it is so much harder to succeed in the city of Edmonton than it is to succeed in the city of Las Vegas. For the cost of my rent each month, I could afford to buy a brand new Las Vegas home. If your employee can sell two single-issue comic books per hour, he or she has earned out his or her wage.

Things I’m bringing home with me from the convention: Um… A new appreciation for how incredible my store is.

9. Shoes are of the utmost importance. In 2009, my ex-girlfriend bought me a pair of incredible shoes with incredible liners in them. I am still wearing those shoes, and they have never failed to be the most incredibly comfortable pair of shoes I have ever worn. If you would like to get shoes that are perfect for your feet, you need to go talk to Holly at Totem Outdoor Outfitters in Edmonton on a Saturday. You will not be at all disappointed.
Yesterday, I bought new shoes because I’d left my dress shoes at home. Having a whole schwack of new clothes didn’t mean a thing, really, because my shoes were looking pretty ragged after three years of continual beatings, and they didn’t really match anything I’d just bought. So I picked up some new shoes, and they look good, but they feel like crap on my feet. I’ll be needing to go in and pick up some new Super Feet insoles from Totem soon.

10. Couches. So, when I said that I wanted to come on this trip, my understanding was that it was just going to be Dave and I. When I heard his mother and her friend were coming along, I was a little surprised, but it was certainly manageable. I like his mom quite a bit, and while I’d only met her friend once or twice, she seemed like a nice lady. When I heard Ida from Warp Two was coming along, I was a little confused but figured she’d be bunking with the ladies or we’d have a room with three beds.

That is not what happened at all.

I have spent this week sleeping on a couch. Dave offered to share his bed with me, which is a thing I chose to not do mostly because I am uncomfortable sharing a bed with a dude and partially because, as much as I love Dave, I don’t really want to ever be in the same bed as him. I have a pretty solid reputation for being a very sexual person, and that mixture of traits – sexual dude plus sleeping in the same bed as your boss – comes rife with jokes and innuendo. So the first night in Las Vegas I “slept” on the floor. That’s in quotation marks because there wasn’t really a lot of sleeping to be had. Since then, I’ve been sleeping on a couch in our upgraded room. The couch is not long enough to fit my body onto, it’s more of a loveseat really, but it’s a far cry better than sleeping on the floor or in the same bed as my employer. My knees, for the record, are not happy with me, and if there’s one thing I’m looking forward to about getting home to Edmonton, it’s sleeping in a bed.

In Response to Matt James

So, Matt James* suggested that the good folks at Wizards of the Coast should start using Dungeons & Dragons Insider to provide new content for older editions of D&D. Personally, I disagree. I also disagree with the whole horde of people who think that Wizards should release their backlist of older-edition D&D material (including, yes, Zak Smith). A lot of the reasons for this are based in my understanding of how publishing works. According to a good chunk of the internet, I am deeply wrong, but no one has yet given me a really good reason as to why my position is incorrect.

The way I understand Mr. James’ proposition working is this: Wizards of the Coast would pay freelance writers, editors, developers, and a manager to oversee the creation and promotion of new material for Dungeons & Dragons editions one through four. That product would be published on the Dungeons & Dragons website as part of the company’s subscription site, Dungeons & Dragons Insider. It is his thinking that the amount of money brought in through new subscriptions to the service would more than pay for the cost to create that material and would provide a hefty boost to the company’s profits.

So about how much would the thing cost?

Let’s start with the freelancers. A new author makes 2-3 cents per word when freelancing, and most of the D&D insider articles are in the 5000 word range. An unproven author writing an article for Dungeons & Dragons first edition would make about $150. That might not seem like a ton of money, especially for a huge corporation like Wizards of the Coast, but there are other factors we’d need to be looking at.

How much does it cost to edit an article? First of all, you need to pay a slushpile editor to go through the manuscripts. Obviously, Wizards of the Coast already has a slushpile editor or three, so it wouldn’t be that hard to have them go through a few more manuscripts a week, yeah? Let’s assume our slushpile editors read a bit faster than your average reader, and clock them in at 300 words per minute. Let us also assume that these slushpile editors are getting paid minimum wage, and that they will go through four bad manuscripts before they reach a good one. Let us further assume that the slushpile editor will only make it 1000 words into an article before determining that it is bad, but will have to finish a good article to ensure that it is quality throughout. It would take about a half hour, getting paid $9.04 per hour (Washington State’s minimum), so we’ll tack on $4.50 per article. If wizards of the coast uses unpaid interns for this, shame on them.

Then it needs to be edited, which will probably take a little longer. For the sake of brevity, let’s just say that it takes an hour to edit an article (not counting rewrites, chatting with the author, whatever else). Let us further assume that this editor is getting paid a bit more than the slushpile editors. Let’s go with $12/hour, which is paltry and far less than Glassdoor would have you believe.

At this point, I think it’s really important to point out that I’m going with incredibly conservative numbers, here. Slushpile editors are probably getting paid more than minimum wage (unless they’re unpaid interns, in which case, they’re getting paid, well, nothing). Wizards of the Coast doesn’t tend to hire people without degrees, and people with university education are usually able to pull significantly more than nine bucks an hour. Wizards of the Coast’s editorial team likely make good coin. It isn’t Oprah dough, but it’s a sight better than $25k a year.

But so far it has cost us $166.50 to make this article. That is $166.50 that could have gone to pushing the product that is already the focus of the business.

Oh, but there’s more!

D&D articles have art in them. Your average illustrator makes some $24.34 an hour, though if you’re working with beginners, you could be paying as little as $10.08 per hour. How many hours does it take to make a publishable illustration? Well that’s going to change from illustrator to illustrator, but from the few reports I’ve heard, a few. Let’s call it 2, so $20.16 per picture. I’m sure the rates are actually quite a bit more expensive than that, but we’re being really generous with our estimates, here.

According to Glassdoor, the Wizards of the Coast graphic designers make between $46k and 51k per year. That’s about $23 an hour at the low end. Graphic designers lay out the articles so that they look pretty on the page. The only example of layout I’ve had the benefit of seeing myself took about four hours, but most of the layouts in D&D articles are a lot simpler than the layout of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, so let’s call it two hours. That’s another $46.

I’m sure there are people I’m missing, and costs I haven’t accounted for.

We’re sitting at $232.66 on a very conservative estimate, for an article that isn’t related to the main push of our business right now. How many people need to sign up for D&D Insider because of this one article to make it a worthwhile investment? It would take roughly thirty people to break even. In order to be able to expand (by making enough money to publish more articles) and turn something of a profit, it would require closer to 80 people at 7.95 per month (the average of the three plans). You’d have sixty people paying for the article you’ve already written and another in the future, with $160 to go to other expenses such as servers, rent, and the heating bill.

I can’t think of a lot of industries where you can get nearly a hundred people to buy your product based on a single article. Obviously, I don’t know how many subscribers D&D Insider has, but I can’t imagine a hundred people reading Jared von Hindman’s article preview and immediately hitting the Subscribe button.

For most, the reason you join up with D&D Insider is for the cool toys you get to play with. I mean, Dungeons & Dragons Insider is offering a lot of tools (character builder, monster builder, that sort of thing) to people who currently play D&D 4E, which provides a much better reason for subscribing to the service than any single article could. Without a better reason to join up, the vast majority of consumers are going to shuffle right past your article and read some of the absolutely free material available online.

Even if you were publishing two articles per month, you’d be asking each subscriber who was there specifically for older edition material to pay $3.98 per article, and you’d be doubling the costs of getting the articles out there in the first place. And that’s before we start factoring in the costs of taking resources away from the horse Wizards already has in this race.

There is no good business reason to focus on anything that isn’t D&D Next right now. It’s their flagship, they’re building hype for it, they’re trying to convince people that it’s going to be worth buying, and they’re going to need people publishing articles about that. Publishing new product for older editions would be stealing thunder (and staff, and dollars) from the game they actually need to carry right now, which would hardly represent a “minimal impact to their current brand.” Every single page on the Daily D&D should be somehow related to how wicked-cool D&D 4E is, or how wicked-cool D&D Next is going to be.

Allowing other companies (like Paizo) to cater to the core audiences that believe a previous version of D&D is the “gold-standard,” makes much better business sense than spending their own resources fishing to get lost customers back. The majority of people who already play D&D will buy a new edition, and new editions serve as a great jumping-on point for new players, something that the Wizards of the Coast brand team has been pushing for a while now. D&D Encounters has brought thousands of new gamers to the hobby, and each of those gamers represents hundreds of dollars in the sale of new books, D&D Insider memberships, and word of mouth advertising.

And that word of mouth advertising carries to even more new players, which is worth way more than whatever good will Wizards could drum up for catering to a very vocal minority of players who believe the company abandoned them with Edition X. Whether or not your 2^nd Edition buddy would take a glance at what Wizards is putting out right now doesn’t matter half as much as a university kid who has never played D&D before excitedly telling her not-yet-gamer friends about this kick-ass new thing she’s found. Those friends will spend money, and they’ll spend it on the edition that Wizards of the Coast is backing at the moment.

 

 

*Yeah, I did read your article, I just didn’t see how it made any sense at all.

In Regards to Aris Bakhtanians

So, this is a thing that happened.

This isn’t really something that affects the tabletop gaming world, but it’s something our cousins over in the console and computer gaming world have to deal with, and there is definitely some cross-over. Story time!

I have a jar at the store. It’s actually an action figure display case thingie that’s been turned into a jar. It’s called the Fag Jar. See, my little brother came out a few years ago, and I take the use of slurs of that nature pretty personally. I love my little brother fiercely, and I want my store to be the sort of place he’d be comfortable coming to play games. Moreover, our store is located on one of the trendier avenues of Edmonton, an area known for its liberalism in the face of crushing neo-conservativism, and it’s a spot that attracts a pretty broad customer base, including many people from the LGBTQ(etc) community. We’ve gone so far as to put a rainbow triangle sticker on the door to let people know that we’re an inviting, welcoming place for people of all sexual preferences.

Then we started holding Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments. Now, I’m not going to say that everyone who plays Yu-Gi-Oh! is bad for this, because I know a bunch personally who have made a real effort to clean up their language and take a more accepting and tolerant approach to the environments in which they game. But when we started holding tournaments for the first time, I was appalled at the vast majority of the players. Anything that was unacceptable, anything that was mildly displeasing, was instantly labeled “gay.” Didn’t draw well? “God, that’s so gay.” Someone plays a card that isn’t popular? “You’re such a fag.” It got to the point where I had to start penalizing people for it, which is where the Fag Jar came in.

I put the jar in a couple of years ago, and it has never, ever been popular. You say that something is gay, and it’s not obviously having sex with something of the same gender? You put a dollar in the jar. Call someone a fag, and you’re not appreciating their stereotypically fashionable choice in footwear? You put a dollar in the jar. You get one warning, that’s it. When the Jar has enough money in it, we’ll donate it to Edmonton Pride.

And here’s the big thing: I’m not a fan of censorship. I don’t like being told what I can and cannot say, and I don’t think anyone else should tell someone what they can and cannot say. But I am a fan of having manners. What you and your friends call one another outside of my store is your deal. You can say homosexual slurs all fucking day, and I won’t be the least bit upset with you for it. Hell, if you want to, be sexist to your female friends and throw in some racial slurs as well. Have at.

But you don’t get to insult my brother in front of me while I’m at work, because I’ve asked you not to. Some of my players, I’ve asked many times. I’m not allowed to leave, you see. I have to stand there and try and deal with the fact that you’re publically declaring that my friends, and more importantly my family, are worth so little to you that you will use their sexuality to describe how incredibly terrible you find a thing. And I shouldn’t have to do that, because when people ask that you stop doing a thing around them, the good people stop. When someone is obviously upset that people are doing a thing, the good people stop.

Which brings us back to Mr. Bakhtanians’ terrible behavior, and the affect that it is having on the fighting game community. Mr. Bakhtanians suggests that sexual harassment is a part of the culture of competitive fighting games, and he’s right. It is a part of the culture of competitive fighting games, but it shouldn’t be. Not that people shouldn’t make “mildly lecherous comments,” but because when someone asks you to stop, when someone is obviously upset at the lecherous comments people are making, those comments should fucking stop. People shouldn’t have to stop making sexual comments during games, but it becomes a very different thing when someone is upset about them. On one scale, you have “it’s just a joke, guys, no worries.” On the other, you have an act that is so heinous it’s been codified into law as a crime.

Take a moment to digest that. What Mr. Bakhtanians has suggested is that the competitive fighting game community’s culture has as an ingrained and irrevocable tenant an act that is considered a violation of another human being’s rights*. What does that say about the culture of that community? What does it say about the culture of that community that a horde of people have come out swinging on his side?

I hear a lot of the same comments regarding the Fag Jar, and I ask a lot of the same questions. One fellow was bold enough to suggest that he should be allowed to use homophobic slurs because he has friends and relatives who are gay**. If we want more people to play these games that we love, if we want to reach more people with these incredible hobbies we have, we’re going to need to start acting like good people. We need to be inclusive. We need to be tolerant. And when someone asks you to stop being a dick, a really good way to handle that is to listen to them.

Stop. Hatin’s bad.

 

*In Canada, at least. The Canadian Charter of Rights is pretty specific about it, as is the Labour Code.

**My response is that he has more reason than most people to avoid doing exactly that.

Fancy Chart Things!

For the record, this thing is fucking awesome. When I went looking around for a list of emotions, this was one of the many possible models I found, and I think that it is easily the most game-worthy. For one thing, it’s already symmetrical, it’s got concentric levels, it’s rocking a solidly game capable shape, and it would look good in black and white in the middle of a character sheet.

What I find particularly interesting about this model is that it’s got a strange number of sections in each point. There are eight points, and four sections in each point. The human mind reacts in kind of a cool way to even numbers and odd numbers. Even numbers it associates with things that are man-made, reliable, constructed. Even numbers are more closely associated with nature, randomness, and simplicity. It’s no mistake that poker deals a hand of five cards, for instance, or that 21 is the number you’re aiming at in Blackjack.

So the chart above is blessed with some inherent level of order and structure based on just how many points there are and how many sections there are per point. It’s given a bit more natural a feel by having curved edges and a flower-like design, but there is definitely something constructed about the picture, and that actually works for us in a strange way. The game we’re building is one that is built out of chaos and strangeness; any points of order we can find, regardless of how seemingly miniscule, will have a great impact in defining and balancing the game’s aesthetic.

As a playable board, the graphic provides us with some interesting new options. In my previous article, I suggested we should be doing each emotion on a 10-point scale, something like Sanity or Morality. But now I have this adorable four-point-per-emotion circular scale I can play around with, and the possibilities open right up as far as system is concerned. I’m still thinking points, but I’m thinking about ways to make the points and the scale in the picture interact. How many tracks can you have points devoted to at once? How many degrees of separation can you have? For instance, is it possible to be pensive and apprehensive at the same time? Yeah, it is. Is the grief somehow lessened by feeling apprehensive? No, not really. So trying to come up with ways for these tracks to make sense as part of a game mechanic is going to be sort of interesting.

This has been sitting in my drafts folder for the better part of a week. It’s not perfect, it certainly needs some work, and I’m struggling with making it as elegant as possible, but I figure I’ll post this up, mull it over and pick it up again when I have something worth writing about it.

Theft

One of the major principles of good design is “Don’t design more than you have to.” Dieter Rams said something to this effect when he was setting out his ten Good Design points, and I definitely think it’s a good way to look at making something that works. Over-designing games can be as bad as under-designing them. So the first step in trying to build a system that is going to work for you, a system that will do the thing you want, is to define what it is you want the design to do. In our case today, we want to design a system that externalizes internal motivators, fears, anxieties, passions, thoughts. We want a system that will turn a nagging insecurity into a usable character, setting or plot point.

This comes in two parts, I think. First, to be able to build a character or setting or plot point from a psychological factor, we have to be able to identify those factors. This will, I think, be the harder point to address. The second is to use those factors to affect the game in a real, mechanical way. Honestly, there are so many systems kicking around for dramatic editing that I don’t think this will be at all a hassle, but I’ll talk about what’s been done before anyway. Neither of these is a comprehensive list of every role-playing game that has ever touched on these topics, mind, but are the games that I am aware of that will influence the implementation of the Classic Fantasy ideas.

Identifying Emotions

In most role-playing games, the emotional state of the player characters isn’t really all that important, and there are no mechanics really attached to them beyond the occasional status effect. In Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, emotions are only given the slightest of lipservice. Barbarians rage, Bards use their pretty words to sway their foes, and Enchanters use magic to ply the feelings of their playthings. Even in games that purport to be about emotions often fail to really take them into account mechanically. The World of Darkness books make mechanical notes for willpower and the character’s morality, but don’t really look at happiness, sorrow or fear in a real way (one of White Wolf’s major failings as I’m concerned). But for the vast majority of the role-playing games, emotions don’t matter mechanically. They’re something you can just sort of ignore. It is safe in most fantasy role-playing scenarios that your players will decide the emotional state of their characters for themselves.

For the purposes of classic fantasy, though, there is a clear and present need to mechanically represent a character’s emotions. Nothing exists apart from the protagonists’ emotional and psychological state in a classic fantasy setting, and that means we need to be able to reference those emotions in some meaningful way. To my knowledge, the best examples we have of an “emotion tracking” mechanic exists in the form of Sanity from Call of Cthulhu and it’s many, many offspring (morality in the World of Darkness, stress in Unknown Armies, etc). Optionally, there are a few games that leverage the emotions of the player characters as status effects (Mouse Guard is the only one that comes to mind, though certainly D&D mucks about with the interactions between emotions and status in examples like Rage for barbarians and the various magical abilities of bards). Both of these ideas are somewhat flawed for our purposes, but they’re a solid jumping off point, so let’s see what we can cannibalize.

Sanity and it’s various spin-offs have one thing in common that makes them unsuitable for a game like the one we’re designing right now: they are thresholds for badness. When your sanity gets low enough, you go completely batshit insane. Same is true of morality. Unknown Armies spruced it up some, giving you the ability to harden yourself to various forms of stress or find yourself spiraling into various forms of horrifying delusion. But these systems don’t really catalogue emotion as much as they provide us a way to conceptualize a character’s eventual fall from stressors that are not inherently physical.

To counter that, to make it an integral part of game play, I think it’s important that we establish that each track is a system towards increased authority. Whether you are exerting authority through joy or through sadness, through anticipation or surprise, your character’s emotional state will be taken into account through the course of a scene as a positive addition to it, not as a punishment for failing to meet some requirement of play. So, no matter how much you have invested in any given emotional track, your contribution to the setting, plot or characters will be important, and your authorship will matter.

Making Them Matter

So once we have an idea of how to mechanically represent a character’s emotions on a piece of 8.5x11, we have to figure out how those emotions are going to matter within the scheme of the design. How is the game going to use the emotions we determine via the scales?

One of the things I keep coming back to is the idea that the emotions are represented through character, setting or plot. This is going to be important, I think. Your characters emotions will likely need to manifest in one of these ways throughout a scene, and that means we’ll need rules for inventing elements of those three things on-the-fly (because your emotional state is always going to be different, we can’t really plan for a game of this sort). This is also suggesting – though not dictating – that the game should likely be GM-free, much like Insects of God. There isn’t a lot of room for a narrative that is centrally controlled; this is a type of story that wants to move around freely.

One of the best systems currently developed for coming up with random plot elements is found in the Burning Wheel system. In that system, when someone fails at something, they probably still succeed at whatever it was they were trying to do, but it comes at a price. You can either take a status effect (hungry, sick, injured, tired, angry) and deal with the effects of that, or you can take a Twist, which is a cute way of saying ‘Surprise me,’ to the Game Master. It’s a really neat mechanic, one that leads to a bunch of unique scenarios, and it provides a weirdly restricted level of authorship to the player choosing. Either you can get worse, or the plot can. Choose.

With something like this game, though, that choice can’t come balanced against the bad. We want the bad, but we also want good things to happen, because the happy things can be just as horrible and life-threatening as the not-so-happy things. These choices have to come as part of the natural play flow, creating non-player characters, set pieces and plot points out of nothing as a matter of the game’s course. This means that we need to reward behaviors that provide for interesting emotional situations, and game mechanics that involve shifting from one set of emotions to another, or moving more deeply into a given emotion, and the creation of NPCs, setting fixtures and plot have to be simple, seamless, and engaging. 

To me, this sounds like a diceless system, the sort of game where you shift resources back and forth across a set of constantly shifting pools to try and deal with the various onslaughts of bullshit that are coming at you from every direction. And strangely I’m seeing a more elegant version of one of my least favorite diceless games, the game Marvel Comics commissioned to simulate their heroic world. That system relied on pools of “stones” that could be shifted from resource to resource, or split into smaller disposable chunks to provide short-term bonuses. I’m seeing something similar for this, where we have permanent points that are shifted from emotion to emotion that can be discarded for a temporary bonus when absolutely needed in any given category.

Getting Into It

Tomorrow I’m going to talk a bit more about the nitty gritty bits of making the game work, but I think that this is a solid starting point. We have an idea of how to represent emotional states within the game, using points that aren’t unlike Call of Cthulhu’s Sanity system, and we have some ideas of how to implement those ideas into the game. We have a really simple idea of how that system is going to affect how the game plays and what points are focused on through play, and we have a really cursory idea of a system that could help us achieve that.

So join me tomorrow when I start punching characters in the feelings.

On Classic Fantasy in RPGs

I have about a half hour to write this before I go to bed, but it’s been knocking around in my head all day, and I sort of need to get it out. So understand if it’s a little less polished than my usual rambling diatribes of drivel and inanity.

Two things led here. The first is a book I read on the publishing of science fiction and fantasy by Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroeder. It was published a dozen years ago, but a lot of the advice in the book really holds up, and I’ve found a lot of it invaluable as advice at the game table too, especially the bits about how to structure a story and stuff you probably shouldn’t write a book about. I’m sad I don’t have my copy anymore, because there are a lot of times (like much of today) when I would really like to flip through it and reference something. The something in particular here is an oft-forgotten branch of fantasy literature, the branch that doesn’t involve any flaming swords of ice giants or whatever. It’s sort of the grandpappy of epic fantasy, the first forays into the impossible as firmly grounded by the rules of the possible. These are the Alice in Wonderland stories, or the Wizard of Oz stores, or the Narnia stories (though to be fair, Narnia has its fair share of swords and monsters and the like). These were stories in which the events that take place make no sense except as an extension of the psychology of the protagonists. Things happen to Alice that make no goddamn sense at all, but when considered in terms of her struggles in her real life become perfectly sensible in an allegorical sense. Dorothy’s relationships with the fantasy creatures in Oz reflect the relationships she has with people in her every-day life as well, and her quest to find her way home, a quest that she didn’t have to go on at all to find the answer, is one that provides her the insights she needs to overcome her anxieties. This sort of fantasy doesn’t happen all that often anymore, though there are some more contemporary examples. The two that spring to mind immediately are Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and the Gunslinger (when taken out of context from the rest of the books in the Dark Tower series, though some certainly retain the same feel).

If I remember correctly, Doctorow and Schroeder call this sort of fantastic tale “Classic Fantasy,” though I’ve also seen it described as “Victorian Fantasy.” Could be wrong, I can’t flip through the book.

The second thing that brought me to this subject was the entirely lovely Tale of Sand. Written by a young Jim Henson, the story follows a fellow called Mac through a strange desert while he is chased down by a villainous gunman for unspecified reasons. It was never turned into a movie during Henson’s lifetime, but this year an intrepid Ramon Perez got a hold of it and kicked it into life as a graphic novel. Perez’ line art is some of the most distinctive in the role-playing game industry. His work on RIFTS and Legend of Five Rings was spectacular and the comics he’s worked on never fail to stun with their incredible action shots and unique framing. He’s one of my favorite illustrators, and his work on Tale of Sand was out of this world.

Tale of Sand is very much a classic fantasy. There are a lot of things that happen, from the very beginning, that make no sense at all outside the context of the protagonist’s psychology, from being given a map, and told to mind it carefully (but “don’t trust the map"), to having the villain and the recurrent young lady make their Big Reveal, the whole thing is a clusterfuck of strange occurances, and weird scenes. It’s beautifully rendered, it’s incredibly well crafted, but if you’re not trying to figure out what is going on in Mac’s head, the whole story makes about as much sense as a badger in a fez doing your taxes in the lifeguard’s chair at the kiddy pool. There is no reason for him to be running, there is no understandable motivation for the antagonist, the events that crop up and the characters Mac interacts with would seem entirely random if not for the fact that he clearly invented them from aspects of his own psyche.

So I read that today, and my first thought on putting the book down was “That was a damned fine book, and I’m glad I bought it.” The second thought was “Why can’t role-playing games do that?”

Role-playing games as we currently understand them are woefully inadequate tools for this sort of storytelling. In my experience, there are a total of two games that could be capable of handling this sort of narrative weirdness, and one of them is a role-playing game in only the most cursory sense. Nobilis, by the lovely Jenna Morrin, can handle classic fantasy narrative when it really bends itself to the idea; it provides a level of authorship that few role-playing games can really handle, though the presence of a Hollyhock God actually diminishes the effect of putting that much narrative control into the hands of the players. And Insects of God, by the incredible Jason L Blair, is probably the closest I’ve ever seen to a device capable of handling classic fantasy in a role-playing game, but it’s not really a role-playing game in the strictest sense of the word. No one is playing a role, players take turns narrating the entirety of the protagonists last moments on earth.

Now, it could well be that people just don’t want to play this sort of role-playing game. Not everyone wants to play a game where characters are psychoanalyzed during play, and there is certainly a contingent of players who believe that this sort of thing would be deeply boring. But I think that there are enough players with an interest in this sort of gaming that it would be remiss of us to not try and build a system that would allow for this sort of story to grow out of a game (someone recently said on twitter that “role-playing games aren’t games about characters in stories, they’re games that result in stories about characters,” and I liked that; also, I’m paraphrasing). So, how do we build a game that results in these sorts of stories? How do we take what is rumbling inside a character and spraypaint the walls with it? How to we build characters that will naturally create reflections of aspects of themselves within the context of the game?

That’s what I’m going to spend the next week or so looking at, I think.

A Better Points of Light – Afraid of the Dark

Darkness fell across the surface of the world, and civilization ended.

 

Entire empires were obliterated in a single night. Nations with histories older than words were toppled with ease. As the lights of every house went dim, the Darkness entered, and smothered, and tore, and rended. The only safe places were those that were used to beating back the night, the lighthouses, the watchtowers, the labyrinthine catacombs of the dwarves and the phosphorescent forests of the elves. These places, where the light never died, where illuminations magical held back the Dark, were all that was left.

 

Ten thousand years have passed, and while we have begun to rebuild, the Dark is still out there, waiting. It feasts on the foolish and the brave, any willing to step out into it without torch or match. We have cities again, built against the walls of the lighthouses, reaching out only as far as the light can touch. We have nations again, after a fashion, and trade. Torches that burn ever bright are our only salvation, and they come at such great cost that a mage can only fashion a few each year. But progress is being made. Every year, we beat back the Darkness ten yards at a time. We are winning, we are taking our world back by inches and feet.

 

But we know what is out there, we know what lives in the Dark, and we are scared. The small, skittish things that scavenge close to the light, those things we can deal with. But there are bigger shadows moving in the Darkness, and when those come for us, many fear we are well and truly doomed.

I had this idea for a setting while reading the very beginning of a webcomic. What if we took the Points of Light idea literally? What if the entire world was swarmed by malicious Darkness, and the only places left were the lighthouse cities and the watchtower fortresses? What if every adventure came with a sudden and desperate need for light.

So I decided to write it like I would for a submission to Wizards of the Coast for their Great Setting Search, the one that brought us Eberron. I’m calling it “Valgust.”

Fantasy Setting Proposal Template

1. Core Ethos Sentence. “Valgust is heroic Points of Light D&D taken to its most extreme.”

2. Who are the heroes? The heroes are the Bringers, those brave souls who push back against the Darkness and bring the relics of civilizations lost back to their people. They are the Wardens, who watch the mystical lights that keep the Dark at bay, allowing their cities to grow and prosper. They are the Foragers, who bring food and water and building supplies from the catacombs beneath the world or from the Elven cities in the Deepest Forests.

3. What do they do? The Bringers are adventurers good and true, forging out from their comfortable homes to wrest prosperity, technology, magic and resources from the Dark’s grip. The Wardens empower magical crystals with the ability to burn brightly, and fight back the Darkness with the power of their faith. The Foragers are explorers and traders, getting what they need by any means necessary. In practice, though, the lines are seldom that clear, and often the three groups work closely together, piecing civilization together from the scraps that are left to them. They work with politicians, planners, teachers, scholars, mages, and all walks of civilization to bring light and life and happiness back to the world.

4. Threats, Conflicts, Villains The Darkness is ever-present. It has been so for as long as anyone can remember. There is no light in the world, and where the Darkness exists, so too do the things the live within its cloak. There are creatures that once lived in the light, but have been twisted and perverted by the Dark’s whispering, taunting words, and there are things that have never seen the light of day, crafted from the stuff of the Dark itself. Who knows what is leading them, what they have planned, how they keep the volatile forces under their rule controlled. Also, there is a distinctly paranoid feel to the setting; everyone is acting in their own best interest, and that will often get people (and sometimes entire cities) killed.

5. Nature of magic. Once, magic was everywhere. Upon a time, swords were crafted that could hew castles in twain and wizards roamed that could set entire nations ablaze. The Darkness has smothered magic like a blanket. There are still some who can find it, but they are far fewer than once they were, and their skills are coveted. A weapon made with a simple enchantment can fetch entire kingdoms as their price.

6. What’s new? What’s different? Valgust is a setting that takes the idea of Points of Light and makes it literal. There are only a few places in the world with light, fighting back a malicious darkness that wants to smother the world. It is a deadly world of faded ideals, where people are forced to do anything to survive. The shadowborn are a new enemy type, three new classes (Bringer, Warden, Forager), a setting-established nemesis, plenty of room for various sorts of play (exploration, combat, role-playing), and a world that can easily incorporate anything from any book ever published for the 4^th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a dark horror feel that steps away from Ravenloft, a hyper-deadly setting that is distinct from Dark Sun.

The Busted Game Theory

I was having coffee with Friend Ian yesterday, and discussing the future of Dungeons & Dragons, and perhaps more importantly the history of Dungeons & Dragons and some of it’s queerer idiosyncrasies. In particular, we got onto the topic of the current development and the slight air of panic we’ve picked up on from the folks at Wizards of the Coast. Our conversation had turned from more general game design discussion to more focused questions about where we are in the development timeline. I know people have playtested the game. Is it done? Is the playtesting they’re doing to fix the niggly wiggly bits? Or do the folks at WotC really have no idea what their players want?

This brought us to an interesting point about Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, something that has been sitting in the back of my head for a long time: Fourth Edition solved every problem in 3.5, and people didn’t like it. I liked it, but I’m not the game’s core audience, really. I’m an aficionado, the sort of person who revels in GNS theory and Glass Bead Games. I deeply appreciate great design, and Fourth Edition – at its core – had that. And, y’know, it solved every problem that 3.5 had.

Admittedly, this came with its own stack of problems, but D&D Fourth Edition is easily the cleanest design in the game so far. It was basically… perfect. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it, really. Nothing about the game was dangerously exploitable, it was balanced and clearly written, there was some real thought put into how each part of the game was going to interact with every other part. It did what it did perfectly, but for some reason that made it feel “wrong.”

Maybe games don’t have to be perfect. Maybe they shouldn’t be.

RIFTS is an incredibly popular game, and it is – to be entirely fair – garbage. Really. Really really. It’s system is trash. Even the world, the world that is tossed around in the infamous RIFTS-only argument “I don’t like the system but I like the world” is a derivative hodge-podge of speculative fiction tropes taken from all over the nerd spectrum. Objectively, as a person who has had a lot of fun playing RIFTS, looking at the design of the thing is painful. The attributes have nothing to do with the rest of your abilities, how good you are at fighting is determined by a skill which is entirely different from how the rest of the skill system works in the game, the skill list is hyper-specific to the point of obtuseness, there is a type of damage that could kill one section of player characters with a single shot but barely scratch another set, armor has two different sets of rules depending on what sort of armor you’re wearing… It’s brutally bad.

Other great examples include Exalted, Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu. None of these games are particularly well designed, but they are incredibly popular with players all over the world. So… Why?

Games with design flaws, games that have large, glaring errors in their rules systems, provide certain psychographics of gamers a way to leverage those system problems to their advantage. These are the Johnny players of the role-playing game world, and they represent a fairly hefty chunk of our playerbase. And everyone has a bit of that in them. Even if you’re not looking to min-max your fighter to the Nth degree, everyone likes finding those synergies and occasionally getting to exploit them to do something that is particularly cool with the game’s crunchy bits.

And very well designed games don’t tend to offer a lot of exploits like that. The best designed games in the industry right now are likely Greg Stolze’s Reign and Steve Long’s HERO. Neither game really offers players a way to break the system in half. Which is sort of what you’re aiming at with your game. Neither game is as popular as RIFTS, either.

And maybe this is something we’re missing right now. Maybe it’s part of the Lonely Fun of a roleplaying game system, figuring out how to beat the rules into submission. Maybe, sometimes, you need to hack at bits of system until they scream. Maybe, sometimes, the fun of the game isn’t so much about the game, but about That Cool Thing you can do that shows off how clever you are. Maybe it’s about fixing a broken game and making it playable because you enjoy the challenge of making a bad system work (which is, I think, why most game designers get into the industry). Maybe, sometimes, the roleplaying games that are the most fun are the ones that aren’t very good at all, because you get a chance to make them good, and that’s what you’re really looking for. And maybe, sometimes, the old busted game is just more fun to fuck around with.

Flavor in Game Design

I read an article talking about how Monte Cook is wrong to suggest that giving a dwarf with an axe a +1 bonus to hit because dwarves love axes. Story, the article said, is not tied to giving bonuses for stereotypical racial traits, and in fact make it more difficult to build characters outside of those stereotypes.

Except, the person who wrote the article didn’t even really bother to read what Mr. Cook was saying. Cook wasn’t at all talking about story. He was talking about flavor, and those are two very different things. Story is certainly a part of flavor, it is the thing that carries the weight of a game’s narrative, whether it’s a role-playing game, a board game or chess. The story of chess is very simple, and mostly implied, but it’s there. More important, though, the flavor of chess is has nothing to do with that implied story. Knight, pawn, bishop, queen. Each piece is named for a figure of medieval Europe.* This flavor is divorced from the story of “You are a commander. You meet an enemy on the field of battle.” The two are not one and the same. See, I could make a game with all of the pieces from chess with a totally different story, but it would still have chess-like flavor because of the nature of those pieces.

Flavor allows us to make assumptions about a game. If there are dwarves in your setting, there are some concessions you need to make to people who know what dwarves are. In some cases, you’ll need to strictly adhere to the tropes of the dwarven people. In other cases, you’ll run counter to those tropes. But in both situations, you need to be keenly aware of what those tropes are, what people are expecting from your inclusion of this flavor, and how to cater to or subvert those assumptions.

What Cook was suggesting was not that story should be dictated by +1 bonuses to hit with axes. What he was asking is “Should the fact that dwarves stereotypically like axes be reflected in a game’s mechanics? How closely should the tropes of the epic fantasy genre affect the design of a game with that genre’s tropes?” And it’s a fair question, one that begs to be answered by Ron Edwards. System matters, and how a system ties to the flavor of the game is an important point in how the game will be played. The systematic concessions made to setting determine the texture of the game, how it feels in your mouth while you’re chewing on it. This is one of the biggest reasons I’m worried that the Assumed Setting of Fifth Edition D&D will be the Forgotten Realms. I believe that any system designed to specifically cater to the Forgotten Realms as a setting will by necessity play more like Second Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

And while I love me some Second Edition D&D, I’m not really looking to play something that feels like it right now.

So, to answer Cook’s question: Should flavor determine mechanics? Yes. How much should it do so? As much as it makes sense in your design. I mean, I don’t know what you’re cooking up yet, so I can’t really speak to any given set of mechanical curiosities. I don’t even know if we’re looking at a top-down or a bottom-up design yet. In a top-down design, it makes a lot more sense to try and capture the flavor of the game mechanically. In a bottom-up design, you’ll be looking much more closely at how you can crow-bar the flavor to the kick-ass mechanics you’ve built.

Which actually makes me wonder how much thought has gone into the overall design philosophy this late in the game’s design. From what I understand, there is already a playtest-ready version of the game floating around. If we’re confused about fundamental design questions regarding the depth of flavor’s influence on the rules, color me slightly concerned.


*Yes, even pawn. Etymologically, it’s linked to the word pedonem, or foot soldier, in Anglo-French.

Con Merchandizing for Lyndsay

One of my favorite stories about convention merchandising is about Robert Khoo. Whether or not it’s true, I have no idea, and I’m telling a half-remembered story that I read many, many months ago, but the general idea went like this:

Scott Kurtz has been to a lot of conventions, and when he’d show up at one, he’d arrange his books on the front table in chronological order. People would buy lots of the first book and lots of the most recent, but a lot of the stuff in the middle was skipped. He figured people just wanted to start the series from the beginning or pick up the new product, but fewer people wanted to jump in during the middle and just assumed that’s how his sales would always work at conventions.

One of the many years he was placed next to the Penny Arcade booth, Robert Khoo rearranged his books. He came over from his booth on the last day of the convention and set the books up chromatically. Suddenly, books started flying off the shelves that hadn’t sold more than a couple of units at a convention. When sales started to die wind down again, Khoo came over and arranged them based on the size of the piles, making a pyramid of books. Again, there was a surge in sales. The third time he came by, Kurtz asked him “What are you going to do when I’ve only got three books left?”

“Don’t worry,” Khoo said. “I have a plan.”

When people began to filter out of the con for the final time, Khoo came over to find a smattering of books left on the shelf. He propped them up in such a way as they were facing the direction of the people leaving. When the convention was over, Scott had sold all of his books for the first time ever.*

What’s the moral of this little merchandizing fable? The key to good table marketing is to try new things.

What spurred this little storytime? The lovely GeekyLyndsay** of Dragon Chow fame is going to a convention and doesn’t want to use a table to display her dice bags. Which makes all sorts of sense because, if you’ve ever tried to find an effective merchandizing solution for dice bags, you know that tables, display cases and shelves are basically the worst possible furniture in the world. The problem comes from the nature of bags, I think. They defy shelving units, their strange shape making it damned near impossible to display the full awesomness of the bag. If the bag is lying flat, it looks boring. If you have them propped up so you can see their tops, they lose any sort of clear identifiable qualities. Nothing about this is good. So to be able to display dice bags more effectively, you need to think outside the box some.

My most fervent suggestion is to have people carry them around the con and show them off. This comes with two really key components: product champions (those people who love your stuff and want to sell it for you) and mobility (because they don’t have to be at the table when they’re showing off the bags). It gives people the opportunity to touch the bags, to interact with them, and more importantly to interact with people who like them. Each individual carrying the product provides a testimonial to your product’s awesomeness, and they can go into more detail about what makes your bags more kick-ass than the bags getting sold by Random Steampunk Booth #7. Rather than let the bags speak for themselves on a personality-free shelf, you have someone there to sell, not only the product you’ve made, but the services you’re selling (I believe Lyndsay is still doing personalized bags, for instance). Product champions are incredible people, and I think Dragon Chow has enough fans that it would be easy to convince a number of them to run around with sacks of them.

Another option: Hang them from the ceiling. Get some very long twine and some clothes pins and make a display of dice bags that can be seen from across the convention hall because it’s the only display that has a billion colors and goes all the way to the top. Color-code them so that people look over and see a blast of colors that go from floor to ceiling, and make sure you’ve got multiples of each bag hanging around at the bottom of the display so that you can sell them without having to climb an enormous ladder to get them.

Even more option: Make designs out of them on the cubicle walls of your booth. Use clothes pins to make an attractive design or pattern that will have people stopping in to at least check out what the hell it’s made out of.

Yet more option: Have people wear the bags as hats. Give a free bag to any customer who wears their bag on their head for an hour for you acting as a de facto booth bunny.

One More Option: Get a bunch of spinning racks, like the ones they use at bad jewelry stores that are made of slat-wall on a spinner. Put hooks in, and hang your bags in an easy-to-navigate pattern on the floor. This option is quite a bit more expensive, obviously, but the spinning racks would belong to you, and you could use them at other conventions in the future.

There are a lot of ways to merchandise your dice bags without putting them on a table or arranging them on a shelf. The key, though, is to keep switching things up, keep giving people something new and interesting to look at. Rearrange by color, size, shape, number of items, popularity of items, difficulty in making the product, scent or taste, whatever. Just keep giving people a reason to come back to your booth every day (or make your booth come to them) and make sure that when they do, you pounce on them like a half-starved tiger on a helpless gazelle. Because customers love the attention.

*For the record, I have no idea whether or not this story is true. I also don’t know if it was actually about the people I think its about if it is true. But it seems like a very Khoo thing to do, and I don’t at all think he’d mind if it was added to his already expansive Legendary Character.

**This article was edited to reflect the fact that I am terrible at alternate name spellings. With a name like Kristoffer, you'd think I'd be more conscious of stuff like that.

SCP Foundation

Every once in a while, I get the idea in my head that I should do some monster research, that I should go trawling the internet looking for some inspiration for a really over-the-top creepy monster or something. Then I remember that the SCP Foundation exists, except that I can never remember what it's called because "The SCP Foundation" is a terrible fucking title for anything. I keep mixing up the letters. Or including letters that don't exist. Because it doesn't even stand for anything. 

Today on Reddit, someone posted a link to it, and I decided to keep it here, on my blog, for the rest of forever. If you've never taken a look at the SCP Foundation before, it's very cool. Reading over a few of the entries now, I'm a bit taken aback at the amateurishness of the writing, but the idea behind the project is intensely awesome.

Basically: Catalogue a list of monsters from the point of view of the scientists tasked with keeping them safe and safely away from the public. Each entry has an item number, an object class, a list of special containment procedures, and a description of the thing and its abilities. It is written something like a field report, without embelishment or hyperbole. Just "This is the thing. This is what we've observed it doing. Don't touch it with your hand or it will wither your flesh to the shoulder and you'll die from necrosis a week later. Also, it's a five year old girl." 

http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

For the Birds

For over four years, I’ve kept a pair of lovebirds in my home, Merry and Pippen. Yes, I am aware of the spelling mistake, but that’s how I’ve always spelled his name in my head. I don’t write about my birds often.

Lovebirds, for the uninitiated, are not ideal pets. They are incredibly loud, quite messy, and they don’t take easily to training. Complicating matters was the fact that these two birds had a long precedent of not having been trained before I got them, and they were incredibly closely bonded to one another. See, a singular lovebird is a charming, personable friend. Two lovebirds form a clique, and if you happen to lack feathers, you are not invited to any of their best parties.

Still, they have filled my apartment with chirpings loud enough to occasionally wake the neighbors and a lot of strange, distant affection for a number of years, and I appreciate their company.

Today, Pippen died in my hands. Though I had only had him for four years, he was a pretty old lovebird. The previous owners had him for some seven years, and the average lifespan of a lovebird is between ten and fifteen years. So, to the best of my knowledge, he was eleven, and had a good run of things.

The event has made me understandably a lot upset. I was really fond of the little guy, and he was by far the friendlier and more intimate of the birds. He was a total sweetness and I really enjoyed having him around. I’ll miss him.

So… What does this have to do with games and gaming? Not too terribly much, actually. I considered making this an existential blog post about how death works in the current D&D cosmology, and while that would certainly be a decent article, I think it’s a bit much for me at the moment. I also considered writing a post about how the deaths of player characters are handled in role-playing games (a phenomenon categorized by “Oh, he or she is dead. Moving on to the next room”). Which also has some meat on it. Or I could talk about the deaths of animal companions in D&D, something we typically neglect as nothing more than a rules inconvenience. Any and all of these would be great articles. And maybe someday, when I’m not feeling like a sack of smashed assholes because my bird just died, I’ll get around to writing them.