Free Spacer

Playtesting: a N00b perspective

Jun 222010

OK, so picture this scene:

You’re exploring an abandoned RRS mining facility. The air inside is breathable and you and your crew go exploring in one of the larger areas. This area contains a great deal of rubble, vats full of toxic stuff and a pool of the same dominates the room.

At the other end of the room, right in front of the doors you and the crew need to get to, a nice little war is beginning. Upon closer inspection, the warring parties are Nar weevils and Kar’jah fighting for dominion of this toxic space.

Essentially, you’ve got furry bugs and plant-monkeys between you and your goal – but you also have guns and your shield skill kicks ass (being the crew’s shield mechanic does have its privileges).

This was the opening to my first playtest session of Free Spacer.

While one of our team members tried repeatedly to toss a metal locker in the toxic goo to see what would happen, the rest of us started in on the killing.

I learned very quickly to appreciate being able to pool my dice in defence or offence as the battle progressed.

Two plant-monkeys coming at you? More shields! Taking an aimed shot at a fuzzy bug from a reasonably safe spot? More fire power! We ended up with a room full of scorched enemy, minimal damage to the team and a locker that refused to be moved.

The next room got even more interesting.

I’m one of the first into the loading dock- but I’ve managed to completely misunderstand that sneaking into a place is a declared mode of movement. I did not declare it and might as well be wearing a giant “shoot me” sign.

This will not go well. A ragtag crew from a ship near the facility are hiding at the back of the room and preparing to take shots at me as I stand around behind a flimsy shelter.

My dice pool (most of which is in defence) is my saving grace. I take hits for sure, but my shields are good enough that the guy shooting me takes damage as the shots bounce back and hit him. Ha! How do you like those awesome dice rolls jerk?

There are no rules about what you need to roll to successfully moon an enemy though (I know because I asked).

More of the crew come in and they manage to find better spots to hide in. My new goal is to repeatedly shoot the guy who fired on me first – and then pick off the two people with him. I take several aimed shots and coupled with my uncanny ability to roll zeroes (zeroes are good – you get a re-roll) I still can’t seem to kill the guy.

My fellow crewmembers rally magnificently and even though they are wounded, we manage to kill all but a couple of guys who run away, and in my head are shrieking with fear like little girls.

I look at our battle board of carnage and decide my first Free Spacer triumph must be expressed artistically (and anyway, the markers were left within my reach and I’m a compulsive doodler). Here is the scene of the evening’s victory:

Victory!

And what did I learn this evening? Keep your shields up, take aimed shots and remember: over time, moderate damage = death.

-Renee McTavish is a writer, new FS playtester and would one day like to tame one of the plant-monkeys as a butler. See more of her stuff at Rambleicious.ca.

Creation of Free Spacer Aliens

Game Design, World Building 2 Responses »

May 202010

Last Post I told you all about aliens and my journey to bring aliens into Free Spacer. I was asked to tell you more about “the method used to design your aliens… …How did you determine your desired criteria for what was acceptable and what wasn’t”.

Random Alien Generator

One of the Pillars of Design for Free Spacer is that the game allows the Gamemaster & Players to be the authors of their own adventures. To espouse this design goal I am using the same tools that I am creating for the Gamemaster. The core setting tool, under development, is the Sector Generator. This tool will allow the Gamemaster to create an entire sector from the system to the life inhabiting it including fully playable Alien Sophonts.

The Sector Generator will be a group of unconnected charts allowing the Gamemaster to create a full Sector quickly from any direction.

When the aliens were originally designed, only the Sophont Generator segment of the Sector Generator was complete. After a lot of research and testing I decided against some of the standard categorisations, such as mammal and reptile, judging them too earth-centric. Instead I divided the Sophont generator into four categories: Structure, Diet, Reproduction, and Details. I then figured out the most probable options for each category.

For example, the structure charts determine the number of limbs, percentage of these that are manipulators, type of Skelton, type of locomotion, and average mass and length.

I made each chart to return the most likely outcome and restricted the stranger outcomes to those that are usable in the world.

For example, the most common number of limbs on a Sophont is five (includes tail) with the highest number at eight and the lowest at 3.

The generator is designed that the most common return will not be human; instead the most common return will be strangely average being not too different or hard to understand.

The Chart also returns a set of natural Skill augmentations that allow aliens to be mechanically different without taking over individual characters choices in life. One of our design goals was to make aliens that were not typecast into particular roles like Klingons.

Societies

One choice I made early in the design process, is that Alien species would not dictate the Society the aliens were a member of. In Free Spacer there is no Human Federation or Alien Empire. Instead all major powers are multispecies, a particular species may establish, be more common, or even dominate the society, but there would be very few mono-species societies. This decision had huge repercussions; it made characterising both species and societies far more difficult. It also made it much more difficult to explain the alien species to players. Still this decision had its desired effect, much more believable societies and species that would believably function.

Making Aliens

When making the aliens we used a combination of Random rolls and inspiration based choices to build up the list of ten aliens. To ensure our aliens were not ridiculous assortment we created two directly from humans and created a few guidelines to help us through the process:

Cannot be too similar to one another
Must be able to fit inside a Starship
Cannot be one animal in bipedal form
Must be memorable, fun to play, and a bit awesome.
Must be able to manipulate objects with its hand or other type of manipulator.
Must have a face to allow emotions.

While these simple rules seem obvious, they were much more difficult to implement then you might think, especially during the art phase. People have a tendency to generalise an alien. I would often hear players say things like “Lizard guy”, “Armadillo Guy”, or “Plant lady” and art concepts would initially come out as generalised.

Result

After all this work my art director is currently inking and colouring the Alien concepts. While it is still easily possible to generalise the aliens as “Armadillo Guy” or whatnot, but if you think about it, Avatar Aliens are just big blue cat people. Still Free Spacer Aliens are different enough to give them more depth than that. I think they look great and would love to hear what you all have to say. An upcoming post will introduce you to one of the aliens and explain their specific design process.

Aliens: Wrinkled Foreheads vs. Tentacles

Game Design, World Building 4 Responses »

May 102010

Aliens are integral to the setting of my upcoming Space RPG Free Spacer. When I began to create the Free Spacer setting, I had many decisions to make about the people that would populate the Milky Way Galaxy. Would I have Aliens and, if so, what sort do I have? Here are my choices and their emergent repercussions.

Life out there…

The first and foremost question is: Do we have aliens or not? This is mainly a choice based on the possibility of life in our Galaxy. How plentiful is life and how evolved is it? Our current scientific research shows a lot of potential for basic life, even in our own solar system. With this great potential for life, Free Spacer needs to have aliens. So what about alien people? It is conceited to believe that humans are the most evolved life form in the galaxy. So amongst the billions of different life forms in the galaxy some must be at least as evolved as humans.

What to call them?

There are three standard terms used in science and Sci-fi intelligent alien life forms, Sentience, Sapience, and Sophonts:

Sentience is a capacity to sense and/or perceive subjectively.

Sapience is often defined as wisdom, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment.

Sophont: An intelligent being; a being with a base reasoning capacity roughly equivalent to or greater than that of a human being. The word does not apply to machines unless they have true artificial intelligence, rather than mere processing capacity.

So using these definitions Sentience is out, not particularly rigorous. It could as easily apply to a great ape or maybe even a cat, as they sense the outside world subjectively. This leaves Sapience and Sophont. Personally I like the word Sophont, it was coined during the golden age of Science Fiction by Poul Anderson and used by the great Spider Robinson. Sapient is a useful word as nearly everyone knows what it means. I’m going to use both with Sophont as the noun and Sapient as the adverb.

Actually Alien, but Understandable

Now that I have decided to have Aliens and what to call them, how alien do I make my Sophonts? The alieness of a Sophont can be gauged on a scale between Star Trek style wrinkled forehead humans to completely incomprehensible.

Gene Roddenberry chose to use the wrinkled forehead aliens to let his audience see the actor’s eyes. He wanted his audience to understand the aliens and identify with them. This idea is just as important in an RPG, players need to understand the Alien they are playing. Still it is unlikely that life out there will look just like humans. I want my Aliens to be much more alien than that.

One of the other pillars of design for Free Spacer is that the stories told are the Gamemasters stories. This pillar meant that I needed to have an Alien Generator to let Gamemasters easily create their own Aliens.

Having these very alien Sophonts in Free Spacer immediately ran into problems. The first issue was that highly variable Sophonts made the size of rooms and the use of devices impossible to design. So I had to create guidelines, for sapient life. These guidelines are integrated into every aspect of Free Spacer’s Milky Way. Technology, conveniences, ship design, and even social practices between societies are based on what my aliens are like.

Post-mortem

Although my aliens are not much stranger than those in Star Wars, their alieness had an interesting repercussion, explaining them. When telling players about the aliens or hiring an artist to do alien concepts, it was difficult to describe these very alien Sophonts without reverting to a silly simplification. Still now that it is done, the extra work describing these aliens seems to be working out. I have ten very different original alien species and they are looking great.

Is Ebert Right? Games as Art

Community, Game Design 2 Responses »

Apr 212010

Penny Arcade, the clown princes of the game commentary, brought my attention to a recent article by Roger Ebert, which is a response to his earlier conversation with Clive Barker and a TED video by Kellee Santiago. Although I agree whole heartedly with Gabe and Tycho, Roger Ebert does have some good points.

Roger Ebert vs. Games

Roger Ebert is steadfast in his insistence that Games are not Art, but his reasons for this are less then rigorous. He seems to have many things that qualify a work as art. He even qualifies “trash” film as “not great art”:

I treasure escapism in the movies. I tirelessly quote Pauline Kael: The movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have no reason to go. I admired “Spiderman II,” “Superman,” and many of the “Star Wars,” Indiana Jones, James Bond and Harry Potter films. The idea, I think, is to value what is good at whatever level you find it. “Spiderman II” is one of the great comic superhero movies but it is not great art. – Ebert “Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker”

If Ebert can appreciate the Art in this so called “Trash” then why are games not so qualified? In the same article he makes what might be one of the most over quoted things he ever said. (besides the thumbs up thing):

If you can go through “every emotional journey available,” doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. – Ebert “Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker”

Does choice ruin art? It seems to me that Roger Ebert is missing the point, a game can and most games do have an “inevitable conclusion” independent of their “smorgasbord of choices”. As an example, in the GTA series, players are in a sandbox and have a great number of possible choices. Yet no matter what choices the player makes, as long as they participate, they will come to the “inevitable conclusion” that life is a absurd state in which mundane existence is a mere break in our nature as petty, violent, and greedy insects climbing for the top. How many pieces of Art have tried to convey this message? GTA conveys this message to new audience in a new way through the very nature of it game mechanics. That is Art.

I’d have to say that there are only two good points that Roger Ebert manages to make. The first is that Famous Game producers are not rigorous in their approach to Games as Art. Clive Barker and Kellee Santiago are obviously no match for Roger Ebert, but their inability to defend Games as Art shouldn’t be taken as condemnation of Games as Art. The second point is one that it is hard to find a quote for. It is a point he seems to skirt around, but it is there as the subtext to all he writes. Games are not Art because those with power to create games are not artists they are business guys.

Penny Arcade is Right

Of course Penny Arcade is right, but not for the reason they think. It is essential that Games are considered Art and are critiqued as Art. This feedback will convince Game Companies to place Artists (Game Designers) in charge of their games and allow them to express themselves. A world where this is true is a world with great games, which do all that all other great Arts do and more.

Answer

Art is not easily defined by any philosophy and Philosophers much greater then Roger Ebert have argued over and written great treatises on the subject. My answer to Roger Ebert’s good points and Tycho’s question are the same; you just have to look to the top. Is the person who conceives of the game, makes the decisions, and has the final say an Artist Game Designer? Is this Artist Game Designer actually deeply involved with the creation of the game? If both answers are yes; the game is Art. If either answer is no, then the game isn’t Art. It is that simple.

Narrative Mode in Video Games & RPGs

Game Design, Game Mastery No Responses »

Apr 122010

I went to Game Developers Expo this weekend and one thing you have to say about these conferences; they have some tasty food and fun Swag. You have to love chocolate croissants and mini-Frisbees.

The presentations were very good and were all very intriguing and thoughtful, but when Armando Troisi talked about his work on Mass Effect 2 he brought up a particular topic I had been thinking about quite a bit lately, Story Perspective.

Story Perspective as Armando called it, or Narrative Mode includes the point of view of the audience or players. Armando talked about the PoV of the player in Mass Effect 2 and compared it to other games such as Dragon Age. He talked about the difference as Subjective vs. Objective gameplay.

In Subjective Gameplay the player is their avatar they decide everything it does at a micro level; it is a first person narrative mode. (Not necessarily 1^st Person Camera though) In this mode the player decides every word the avatar says (usually without voice acting) He had several example of these games, including Dragon Age and Knights of the old Republic.

In Objective Gameplay the player is not their avatar, but they control many of the avatars choices. They make choices on a more macro level; it is a second person narrative mode. Mass Effect 2 is his example of the mode; the player decides what sort of dialogue choice Commander Sheppard makes, his intent rather than his exact words.

Narrative Mode in RPGs

These ideas are very applicable to Traditional RPGs, both for the Gamemaster and the Player. Some Gamers consider these different modes as play styles and many games will move between these different modes depending on the situation. For RPGs, I will break Narrative Mode is two categories: PoV and Scope.

Most players have a conscious preference about their roleplaying Point of View. Those who like to speak in their character’s voice use First Person Point of View; they refer to their character as “I”, and state exactly what their character says. Other players prefer to play in Second Person Point of View, they tend to explain what their character says, and refer to their characters as “he” or “she”.

Few Gamers realise the scope used during their play and often consider it merely a function of pacing. Roleplaying Scope ranges between the Micro and Macro. The most common Micro choices are made in actions like tactical combat, which describes every exact action chosen by the round. Common Macro actions are used in contemporary games, where players choose the intent of their actions without choosing the individual actions to arrive at that intent. To increase the narrative, the Player or Gamemaster will sometimes describe the scene and the actions cinematically that lead to the chosen result.

All ranges of Narrative Mode can be of good use in RPGs. Even the most 2^nd Person Players may like to perform a 1^st Person scene, if provided with enough support. 1^st Person Players may also enjoy 2^nd Player scenes, perhaps to speed up scenes. Gamemasters should feel free to vary Scope, choosing a different scope for every scene or task. Some tasks will work better at a micro scope like conversation, but others are more macro scope tasks, such as trade or long distant travel. Gamemasters may even find interesting effects or efficient mechanics by changing scope, a chase scene or negotiation may be even be more exciting at a more macro level , while adding a micro scene to trade may make the normally mundane activity seem more real.

Rules are the basis of Setting

Community, Game Mastery, World Building No Responses »

Mar 282010

Can you play a social game with 4^th edition? Or use WoD for a dungeon crawl? Does System Matter? Of course, you can use any system to play any sort of game, but should you?

Cross Purposes

Is it so bad to play at cross purposes; most systems are designed to have mechanics to handle any situation. So why does it matter?

Well, take D&D 4e for example; when you perform non-tactical combat actions you use a secondary system to perform skill challenges. If your game uses mostly this light unrefined quick skill challenge rule set, PCs will wander around with a great many relatively useless detailed powers while they use an under powered and unbalance system instead.

Would it not be better to use a system that did what you wanted it to?

House Rules

Many GMs solve this issue with house rules. House rules are a double edge sword as a good house rule can sometimes make thing work just the way you want, but house rules may also have horrible side effects. Well designed games are balanced for a specific array of gameplay and a bad house rule can often change this balance having many unforeseen effects.

Ironically, house rules seem to show how much system does matter; for the group to have type of fun they want, the GM has to change the rules. The system provides the structure for the setting. The rules give players abilities and tasks they can perform. Combat heavy ruled games structure encounter creation to produce many of opportunity to fight.

Generic Systems

Does any of this really matter in a generic system game though? Is it possible to create a rules system that allows players to do anything and GMs to create many different settings without the breaking the system. A game like GURPS seems to head in that direction, but the GURPS rules still set the underlying reality. Due to the way GURPS systems work, GURPS settings tend to have similar deadliness and allow PCs to do the things in the same ways. It seems to me that the system, while broad, has a great deal of effect on the play setting.

Rules Light

Story games and rules light systems are all the rage now. Games like Inspectres or FUDGE have simple rules, a small list of character attributes, and a list of special skills you get to make up yourself. You roll one dice that results in the story moving forward. Less framework, more imagination. This affects the setting and gameplay a great deal. The game is less consistent and relies on GM/player views rather than a codified system. Gameplay slows to examine a moment of Roleplaying rather skill testing, combat, or caper planning clearly making that the most important aspect of the game.

Indeed, Systems do matter and the system you choose should concentrate on the type of gameplay that fits your group’s preferences. The perfect system is the one that supports the essential aspect of the setting with its core mechanics.

Escapism & Suspension of Disbelief

Community, World Building 1 Response »

Mar 162010

Ever since film school I have disliked the terms: Escapism and Suspension of Disbelief. I believe that they are used to dismiss philosophic and speculative pursuits. These ideas have a direct connection to rigorous thought on Roleplaying Games.

Escapism is defined as using a mental diversion, as an “escape” from the banal aspects of daily life. Who has not heard RPGs, Sci-fi, or Fantasy referred to as Escapist? My retort is that no hobby, pastime, or other work can be essentially escapist. Any activity, no matter its perceived essential nature, can be used by an individual as an escape and therefore any activity, no matter its perceived banality, can be used for non-escapist reasons.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” to explain how the viewer can enjoy, identify, and believe fantastic plays, films, novels, or games. His idea is that the viewer must mentally convince themselves to believe the fantastic before them that they would otherwise disbelieve. I think this is exactly the opposite of the truth. In reality, viewers automatically believe whatever is before them.

In his work The Allegory of the Cave, Plato postulated his theory that education and wisdom would allow the viewer of the world to disbelieve that which was presented to them and see the world for what it was. Although Plato is talking about the eternal forms, rather than the separation between fantasy and realism, the point is there. It is education that brings disbelief, rather than the ability to believe. Ask any older brother, little kids believe anything you tell them until they learn better.

A great example is Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, when this film was first shown to a live audience the popular legend is that some in the audience ran away so not to be hit by the train. So even if we just suggest that the audience was shocked, it seems that a viewer/listener automatically believe what is put in front of them and it is their own active disbelief that tells them otherwise.

JRR Tolkien also disagreed with Coleridge; Tolkien wrote his essay On Fairy-Stories suggesting that the author must develop an internal consistency to avoid jarring the viewer/reader from their fantastic world. This seem like the proper approach, besides who am I to disagree with Grandfather Tolkien.

So fight back and save your hobbies, never call them escapist and don’t use the term suspension of disbelief. If you must, you can counter with the term “suspension of belief.” When it come to roleplaying never be a sceptic.

WotC cancels the Star Wars RPG!

Community 4 Responses »

Mar 032010

It is official, as of May this year, D20 is dead. WotC’s Star Wars was the last big d20 title still in production. Unfortunately, WotC has announced that they won’t be renewing their Star Wars license with Lucasfilm.

I loved the old West End Games: Star Wars and could never get into the new D20 version of Star Wars. Still D20 Star Wars was a bench mark game; it was the test bed for many of the D&D 4^th Edition Rules, which love it or hate it was big change for the RPG industry. As the last big D20 product it was only a matter of time before they either remade it to line up with 4^th edition rules or cancelled it.

On the heels of their Star Wars announcement WotC has announced that they will be putting out a new version of TSR’s Gamma World and their redesign of the D&D Dungeon Delve as D&D Encounters. WotC’s world goes on without the force, but I would bet that this won’t be the end of Star Wars RPGs. Until then I hope you have another Sci-fi roleplaying game, I do.

Structure is Essential to Design

Game Design No Responses »

Feb 282010

Since beginning Free Spacer, I have found one process more useful than any other; Organisation or Structure. The structure of the work has a much greater effect on my ability to write or design it then I would have ever believed. Continual tweaking of the books structure reveals and solves many of the day to day design issues and blocks.

I found through play testing that structure is even more important to players. When we first tested chargen, players did not understand it and found it rough, after we reorganised it they loved it. This made me realise just how important structure and presentation is to players, especially in step-by-step process like Character Creation. The books structure is how players understand the content.

An interesting approach to RPG structure and orientation is from Rob is the creator of the free Science Fiction RPG Icar his article Rob Lang’s free guide to organising your RPG goes in depth into his ideas on RPG structure. Rob’s article is very entertaining and his basic structure makes sense and are surprisingly similar to the structure I am developing for Free Spacer.

Free Spacer has several key differences from Rob’s suggested structure. I decided to put a Preface before the contents section, the preface is similar to his Introduction, but shorter and more about flavour and providing a dramatic opening into the galaxy of Free Spacer than explaining mechanics and technical bits and pieces. Introduction to mechanics is done is the Basic Mechanics section, which is before Character Creation so that players will have an idea what the various elements of their character are before creating them. The Mechanics Section has been divided into four sections to help fulfill one of the design goals for Free Spacer, creating a great reference manual. The Game Master should be able to start an encounter and find everything the group needs by opening the book to one section. No flipping around, a clear and concise reference of the rules, mechanics, and galaxy.

Why I am making an RPG?

Community, Game Design No Responses »

Feb 162010

My journey to the world of Game Design has been a long and windy one. I started playing Roleplaying Games in junior high with 1983’s red boxed Basic Set of Dungeons & Dragons. It was great, I played with my best friend Shawn. We would play all the time, even without dice or rules while doing his newspaper route. I still can’t believe he never gave me a cut of his paper money. After I moved I continued to play when I could.

After years in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets chasing my dream of being an test pilot and astronaut, I found out that not only did test pilots not become astronauts without being engineers, but that my eyes weren’t 20/20 and I was therefore unqualified. So I worked and traveled and came home with a new plan, Film.

In 2002, I graduated from SFU with a degree in Film production and job at Electronic Arts as Video Game QA. So now I bounce around the Vancouver video game industry as a game designer and love designing games. So the question becomes, why am I creating a traditional pen and paper RPG as my first major solo work? Especially in what many people consider a dying industry.

My short answer is usually in the vain of, “RPGs are my first love” or “It is a great circle, I have finally returned to my routes”, but these are not complete answers.

Why not video games?

I still love video games. My Xbox 360 get a quite the workout, but develop video games is not easy. Programmers or at least scripters are a necessary part of development. Although I am a decent scripter, I cannot simply sit down and build a game, no problems. Even with 3^rd party solutions, like Unity or Flash, creating a video game becomes more about technical development and less about design.

Why Traditional Roleplaying games?

Traditional Pen & Paper RPGs combine two of my favourite things, game design and story. Since before I played my first game of D&D, I loved to tell stories. I learned Game design from mentors like Tyler Sigman while working on more than five video games titles. I believe that there is still a real Market for RPGs and that many in the community are looking for a Space Science Fiction RPG like Free Spacer. My hope is that many people will play Free Spacer and at the least it will be an incredible demo of my design and storytelling abilities.

Most importantly I have always loved RPGS and I don’t know why it took me so long to get here.

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