Category: Game Design

Demand Mechanics

March 24, 2013
So, a while back, we talked about doing a thing called Demand Mechanics. The idea is that we will do improvisational mechanic design: pull something out of a hat, bat ideas around for how to make mechanics about it. The video didn’t go up right away, due to none of us really knowing anything about video editing. At this point, we think it’s better to get it up than not, so here it is, in its raw unedited glory. It was fun to do, and we hope you’ll enjoy it!

In this half-hour segment, we design mechanics for the following things:
- Feeling bad about killing orcs.
- College exams
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Game Design
Another troika

August 30, 2012
We like to divide things, I guess. Often, it’s into binaries. Today, it’s a troika.1

There are three things I’m currently thinking about in RPG design, and those are story, emotional response, and interaction.

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1. I feel that word is very appropriate in this case; like a troika, these three are distinct, but must work together to bring everything forward. [↩]
Game Design

emotional response, interaction, story, theory
Visceral Reactions and Abstract Damage

July 30, 2012

So we’ve been discussing damage in Piece of Work. In a cybernoir story, eventually someone is going to get shot, stabbed, or clubbed. Mechanically, there are a lot of options available for tracking hurt—hit points, statuses, health levels—but each has drawbacks that doesn’t deliver the effect we’re after. We want something gripping but still lightweight and story-focused.

Unfortunately, many damage systems are disconnected from the visceral thing they represent. Hit points are engaging while we mark off a few more points, but they don’t reflect the gaping wounds later in the story. We can check the box labeled Angry but that doesn’t feel like the irrational anger of a jealous lover. Health levels are flat and wide—they simultaneously say too much about a character’s capabilities and not enough about the reason they’re in the shape they’re in. They are, in short, abstract. (more…)

Game Design

context, damage, mechanics
Why don’t we just play Primetime Adventures?

June 11, 2012
So, I think Primetime Adventures is a great game. So great a game, that we might well ask why we don’t just use it for everything. Well, because of reasons.

Let me unpack that a bit. Some time ago, I was promulgating the notion that most of what makes a successful instance of RPG play is shared genre-expectations among the people at the table. I still think that this is true.

Primetime Adventures is a game with some powerful mechanisms for getting everyone at the table to share those genre-expectations. It’s a one-two punch: first the pitch, where everyone at the table gets in the same general area of idea-space, and then fanmail, which works1 as a feedback mechanism to let players tell each other “yes, more of that, please!” (more…)
1. When it works. It can and does fail. [↩]
Game Design

fruitful void, make vs. let, Primetime Adventures, shared expectations, theory
Reading Texts

May 22, 2012

People don’t just read texts as some kind of blank slate. We read them with assumptions and background knowledge, sure, but we also bring a particular set of tools to bear to understand them as we read them. You should really read Ryan Macklin on the subject of reading texts.

OK, good. Now, I’m going to talk about some of my personal experience with this issue. (more…)

Game Design

expectations, experiences, texts
Tension

April 23, 2012
It’s hard to make RPGs that build, maintain, and deliver on tension at the right points of a story. Systems that don’t allow for tense scenes or palpable stakes just don’t have grip. And yet, if a system engages too directly with tension and action, the outcomes it produces feel trite. At worst, an errant die roll can derail a campaign that took weeks or months to build. While I think there are a lot of different techniques for pacing a story, I’ve come to believe there are a few overarching modes a system might be aligned with.1

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1. NB: As with all the times I’ve suggested deconstructing ideas, I don’t actually think these are the only ways RPGs influence the tension of their games. I also think that a single system might use any or all of these approaches in different ways at different times. I find it useful to separate them out and talk about them, though. [↩]
Game Design

GM, story, tension
What happens, what’s described?

April 20, 2012
When you’re designing a game, it can be helpful to ask—and answer—”what do I want my players to describe?” It’s probably not the first question you want to answer, but when you need to ask it, you know you will. It’s not quite the same as “what happens in my game”1 because, importantly, it’s about what details your players will dwell on, what will give the game its texture.

Once you have some answers to that question, the next thing to consider is how to get your players to actually spend some effort describing those things. This is part of what Vincent’s whole thing about “rightward pointing arrows” was about. They’re one possible technique for making the things described in the fiction meaningful and important enough that people don’t gloss over details, and thus describe what you want them to. (more…)
1. Look at the wonderful illustrations from Dylan Meconis for the Italian edition of Dogs in the Vineyard for a great expression of “what happens” in Dogs. [↩]
Game Design

D&D, Dogs in the Vineyard, Hot Guys Making Out, narration, theory
Decision Points in Character Creation

April 9, 2012

While we’re generally all about Becoming Heroes, we’ve recently hit upon one part that is harder than it needs to be—character generation. Right up front, we ask you to decide eight traits, three circumstances, and three ties. We don’t give you a lot of guidance around selecting these traits and people get stuck around six traits in.

Now, I don’t think getting stuck is a fatal flaw—it usually clears up when you talk about it as a group—but we’re going to add trait suggestions to each arc in our next revision. For instance, the Lost King should probably have some trait relating to their nobility. The Dutybound should have a trait related to where their duty comes from. Lots of places can inspire traits; the system just doesn’t yet help you find them.

In designing Piece of Work, we’re addressing character generation directly. We’re using a Dread-esque questionnaire that walks you though building your character. It works phenomenally well. First, it breaks up tasks like “allocate your skill points” or “pick your gear” into a series of discrete steps. Because those are smaller decisions and those decisions have context, they’re much easier to make.

Second, it lets us gently reinforce the tropes and setting of the game. Instead of just picking a random piece of gear, you have an item you picked up when things started to go wrong. Instead of just knowing the person to your left, you’re childhood friends. This added context pushes characters to create conspiracies, attach nostalgic meaning to things, to have conversations with other characters fraught with historical subtext—all staples of the noir genre.

I’m now on the hunt for other systems that use smaller choices to reduce the strain of creating a character. Dread is obviously one. Spirit of the Century‘s phases works this way. And Leverage not only has bite-sized char-gen steps, but moves some of those choices out of char-gen and into actual play. What are some of your favorite char-gen systems, and how do they help create a character?

A Piece of Work development, Game Design

Becoming Heroes, character creation, design, Dread, Leverage, situation, Spirit of the Century, theme
Chekhov’s PC

March 19, 2012

One thing we haven’t talked much about here is character flags—things about a character that signal what kinds of story elements interest the player. For example, if one of your players has a character with lot of skill in picking locks, then probably you need to throw some locks at that character. This is a major difference between a simulationist take on RPGs and a narrativist one. In simulationist play, the challenges are all laid out in advance, and if you want to excel, you need forethought, scouting, and planning. In a narrativist model, you know what the challenges will be because they’re tailored to your characters, and you should expect that if you’re good at lockpicking, you’ll need to pick a lock.

(Caveat: I’m not a huge fan of GNS, but I find it useful in discussing larger-scale issues such as character flags.)

Obviously, I’m a proponent of looking at character flags to figure out how to structure play. But flags are just the beginning. Russian playright Anton Chekhov has an adage about guns that applies equally to characters in an RPG. That is, the characters created for a game should strongly influence the events of that game.

More specifically, when someone plays a wizard in your game, not only should you let them decipher some runes, or throw in a mystic library to explore, but magic should become a central theme to the plot of the game. Perhaps there are people tampering with the structure of magic, or the old magic is returning, or magic has gone wild and uncontrollable. The point is, the story is about these characters because these are the characters that matter, which we know because these are the characters that were created by the players. They matter because of who they are and what they do.

In Becoming Heroes, we do this mechanically, because each character has an arc and the arc points are specific events that you should expect to see in the game. In Piece of Work, we’re using a system we call Clocks that allows a player a more freeform way to specify what they want to see. But every system has some way for the players to shape the story, if you’re listening for it.

Game Design

authority, character creation, flags, story, theory
Card Games

March 9, 2012

I’ve been thinking lately about the different kinds of play encoded in classic card games. It’s kinda cool, really: most card games are highly social games, in terms if where the locus of interaction lies. This means that they can do a really good job of informing the more game-y elements of our RPG design.

So, as work on our cyber-noir game Piece of Work, I see it more and more as having Texas Hold ‘Em at it’s core, where there’s common information and there’s hole information, and you need to second-guess the forces arrayed against you and use what you have to win by strength or bluff.

As we work on Austin’s top-secret game about what it’s like to fight for your home against its enemies, both internal and external, I see it as being shaped like Hearts. You take on some pain and risk as you fight, but you could go another route: take on all the pain and shoot the moon. If you fail, you fail bad. But at a certain point, do you have another option?

And as I work on Et in Arcadia Ego, I see it like Blackjack. You push for what you want, but constantly risk going too far. Then the façade of civility falls, and everyone sees the raw human malice and desire and need under it all that they’ve been furiously denying, and they turn their faces from you, making you carry the burden of their shame.

Of course, Arcadia is the only one of these games that actually uses cards. But the structure is there regardless of the implementation.

Et in Arcadia Ego development, Game Design

cards, classic designs, Et in Arcadia Ego, models