RPG Tools & Tech could kill Streamlined Mechanics

Sep 032010

Today I listened to a Podcast by the entire Pulp Gamer Media Network at GenCon. Near the end of the segment they started talking about new technology in RPGs: D&DI, Smart phone Apps, iPad Apps, and the amazing, but cost prohibitive Microsoft Surface. These tools are awesome!

Even now, I am putting together plans for virtual tools for Free Spacer, why not? Currently Free Spacer Character Creation takes around 45min plus any disagreement on the type of Crew the group wants to play, but still, an interactive guide to move players through that and allows them to share the Crew/Ship sheet all on the ultimate character sheet (otherwise known as the iPad), would so sweet. It’s been done for D&D4e, I want it too.

During the podcast, one of the guys, I’m not sure who, mentioned how much he loved transparent (streamlined?) mechanics and how technology did that for him. I defiantly agree about the Streamlined mechanics. A smoothly flowing game in which everyone understands the rules and there is little need to look stuff up is a worthy goal for all designers. Working in the Video Game industry though, I can tell you the rules and calculations behind the scene in any game are anything but streamlined or transparent. If you looked behind the curtain of most Video Games you would find a great swath of Spreadsheets, dangling modifiers, and a different mechanic, from physics simulation to dialogue trees, for every task in the game. The result is a huge team of designers and programmers creating unique mechanics and a mammoth task of testing every little thing as it all works differently.

So I must say as we race forward to embrace technology, we must be careful; these marvellous tools could kill the wonderful new trend in design of simple consistent and streamlined mechanics. If you play D&D 4e you know that it is nearly unthinkable to make up a character without the D&DI Character builder. With D&DI it takes a couple of hours without it many hours especially if you’re not sure what you want to make. The trend requiring the use of such tools is a bit alarming; will you be unable to play without one? What will it do to the rules of our games? My concern is that Game designers will allow the tools to make them less rigorous about their game mechanics and that games will become unplayable offline. Game mechanics will use more and more spreadsheet data, dissimilar mechanics, and systems with little regard for streamlining or ease of use. This can happen if players stop worrying about the ease of use in their games and instead just say… grab that tool it will calculate the millions of dangling modifiers and swaths of data. Now yes I am being alarmist, but I have seen this happen before; in film school, when film students switched from shooting their projects on film to shooting on video, they lost all their shooting discipline and shot hours of footage instead of just what they needed. The stopped planning and the project got worse. In any creative endeavour, rigour is important it makes for better project and in this case better games.

I believe though, the community can have a fun with the awesome new tools and still demand rigorous and streamlined mechanics from all the game designers out there. Do not let companies require you to use a tool just to play your favourite Roleplaying Game.

My Geek Wedding & Free Spacer SitRep

Game Design 4 Responses »

Aug 302010

It has been a long while since I last posted. (The last one was done by one of my playtesters – Thanks Renee!) Now yes, I do have a long list of excuses, but the biggest is my wedding on August 3^rd and my long honeymoon the week after to New York City. Throughout this was all a crazy wonderful time, I have been constantly working on Free Spacer.

The book is pretty much Feature Complete, but there is undeniably much refining to do. After a large review by my production manager / Art director / wife (weird calling her that), we discovered many issues, most of which are unsurprising.

There are many things that I learned from this project:

Babies aren’t always easy to identify, let alone kill; a central part of my original mechanics for the system was opposed rolls. In gameplay this resulted in the GM rolling a lot of dice and made the game awkward.
Design is a process; no matter how many games I’ve done, I’m still surprised of how much has to be done as preliminary for the real mechanics. I created a large number of Advanced tasks that are unnecessary and, in retrospect, can be easily integrated with the standard tasks. Funny how you can never see this from the front.
Read other Games; seeing how other games tackle different design hurdles is invaluable. You’re unlikely do things the same way, but other’s approaches can be inspiring and help you look at issue from a whole other direction.
Keep your Design Pillars in view; no matter how well you know your design pillars, make sure you post them somewhere you can see to remind you to rigorously vet your design choices. It is easy to get off track, your design pillars are like the North Star, if you cannot see it you’ll design yourself in circles.

I am currently streamlining and restructuring Free Spacer’s mechanics to be more accessible, consistent, and Player-centric so that the GM doesn’t have to roll a million dice. Once this sweep of the system is finished, hopefully the game will be stable enough to talk about on this blog in more detail.

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.

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.

Just Right

Community, Game Design No Responses »

Feb 102010

Recently, a friend saw a presentation from on the founders of Pixar that talked about what made them so successful. The presentation focused on people, they posited that good ideas don’t always make good games, often they don’t make anything at all. The right people on the other hand can take a plain, mediocre idea, and through correct execution make something good.

Now, I’ve heard this argument many times, when I was at EA I heard it all the time and you can’t really disagree with it. Ideas are easy to come by. Who doesn’t come up with ideas everyday of things that could be amazing? Obviously, most of these great ideas don’t become anything. So, on a simplistic level it is the people. If all the right people are out there making good games from mediocre ideas, then why are there so many mediocre games? Are some of these people the wrong people? Or is it something else?

First, what factors make one better at creating RPGs then the next? Is it one’s number of years experience playing games or the number of different games one has played? Could it be one’s education in games, math, or specific subject matter? Is it one’s involvement in the RPG community or ability to market the project? Could it be one’s experience at big companies like White Wolf or WoTC or the amount of money spent on the project? Perhaps as the romantics believe it is the one who cares the most or works the hardest?

When put this way it seems that it has to be a little bit of each: idea, experience, education, money, community, marketing, passion and hard work. All of the above is usually the right answer, but I’d have to add timing and luck to this list.

Perhaps, it all has to be just right, but I doubt any of us can say what that looks like.

Everyone, let’s make an RPG!

Community, Game Design 4 Responses »

Feb 062010

When I’m out there on the net, it seems like everyone and their dog is making their own RPG. When Gary Gygax wrote his seminal Role-Playing Mastery, he had an entire chapter on designing your own game. It seems, when you read it, that he believed the natural progression for a Game Master was to design their own game. Sooner or later a Game Masters, who seriously pursue their hobby, will make their own game. Yet, as I check out shelves of my Friendly Local Gaming Stores there aren’t that many out there. What happens to them?

If they aren’t published paper, are they PDFs? Well, there are definitely a lot more on sites like RPG Now, but after you peruse the list there seems to be a lot of one offs or settings for other games. These projects were created by one or two people. Other RPGs, like Icar, are community projects, which are impressive effort. None of these games are mainstream. Did these would be designers want to make something big and fail? Or was being published at all the triumph they sought.

As I look through all these games, I often feel intimidated that it’s really an impossible task. The goals I’ve set for Free Spacer are ambitious and as I head towards design finish the future is scary. Yet as the one thing I’ve learned from those that went before me it that the most important thing is to finish the work.

Create the Game.

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