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.

Playtesting: a N00b perspective

Community 2 Responses »

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.

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.

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.

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.

RPGs: Boards, Boxes, & Cards

Community No Responses »

Feb 012010

In June 2008, Dungeon and Dragons: 4^th edition was released and, love it or hate it, was a revolution in Roleplaying. D&D 4e brought new conventions from board games and collectable card games into Roleplaying. The new D&D emphasises miniatures and tactical maps.

At the end of last year, November 2009, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay upped the ante, with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3^rd edition. The game is a huge box set with D&D 4e style action cards, Talisman style character cards, and special dice.

It seems that the big game companies are attempting to make our hobby more accessible. Do box sets and fancy dice make RPGs more accessible? Green Ronin’s new box set, Dragon Age RPG, seems show that they think so, but I remember the Basic D&D box set. This isn’t exactly a new approach, so the real question is, will it work? The ICv2 Review didn’t seem to think so and the RPG.net Review was a little more reserved. I think it would be great if it did; I would love to see more people playing RPGs, but I doubt it.

It seems to me that the difference between RPGs and Board Games is not the addition of fiddly-bits, the cards, and the dice; rather it is in the casual vs. campaign style play. Most Board Games are one off experiences. You play once and when that game is over, it is over. If you want to play next week, you play the game again. It is a series of evenings, playing games while most RPGs are a serial experience; you play one game that continues from session to session. Series versus serial Gameplay is the gap they’re trying to jump and I guess we’ll see if they’re jumping in the right direction.

Jobs & Your Project

Community, Game Design No Responses »

Jan 252010

One of the most difficult parts of designing an RPG or doing any other project is the necessity of working another job on the side. Lately I have been working a contract; doing design and project management on a Nintendo DS title and is severely limiting my bandwidth for Free Spacer.

On breaks at work and in the evenings after work I find it incredibly difficult to get into work mode, even to write a blog. It is like changing from 2^nd to 5^th gear, I stall. Fixing this is not easy; working harder isn’t always possible I need to develop another strategy. So what is my problem? Is it a time management issue? Or something else?

There is a lot of information out there on Time management and as I did research and found lots of info on time management for writing. While these experiments seemed like they would be very informative, any long term use of time management techniques could in themselves be quite a time waste. These techniques have not solved the issue, but may have led me to the answer.

Some people work out or go to classes, I myself have been able to do this. The difference seems to be, the schedule, responsibility, and deadline. I am scheduled to be there at a particular time and I feel guilty if I skip it. Is it as simple as scheduling the time and insuring that there is a goal to meet? That is the new plan; I’ll give it a try, schedule it, and get the work done.

Science Fiction; Setting versus Genre

Game Design, World Building No Responses »

Jan 062010

Science fiction has been around for a long time, in the 2nd century the first Science Fiction story Lucian‘s True History was written and in 1902 the second film ever made was Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon. Even with this long history, Science Fiction is generally misunderstood.

The most commonly misunderstood aspect of Sci-fi is the difference between Sci-fi the genre and Sci-fi the setting. Simply put, a setting is the place, time, and world where the story is set, while a genre is the purpose, intention, and raison d’être of a particular work.

I have had people on multiple occasions tell me that they don’t like Sci-fi because it is too scary. These people are confusing genre and setting; they’re talking about the Horror genre in a Sci-fi setting. Another good example is Star Wars; Star Wars is obviously set in a Sci-Fi setting, but the genre is heroic sword and sorcery fantasy.

In Science Fiction setting can be defined by its list of tropes. You can be pretty sure something is a Sci-fi setting if it’s set in the future, different realities, other timelines, elsewhere in the galaxy, or uses nonexistent science and technology. No matter the background variation, the central requirement for the Science Fiction setting is that science or technology is a key aspect.

Science Fiction as a genre is historically difficult to define, but here is my attempt at defining the genre of Science Fiction:

Sci-fi is fundamentally a genre of scientific speculation, change, and tracing the results of theory to answer questions of “what if?”

This definition places works like Star Wars and Jason X outside the Sci-fi genre, but stories like those by Asimov and Bradbury, films and television like Star Trek and Blade Runner, and games like Rifts and Traveller squarely within it.

Sci-fi Warnings, Predictions, & Remembrance

A stalwart tradition of Sci-fi is to warn or predict the outcome of scientific progress or historic repetition; this tradition seems to stem from Science fiction’s tendency to teach, preach, or allegorise. Three classic examples:

Prediction; Jules Verne’s story of a journey to the moon in his, De la Terre à la Lune.
Warning; The Cyber Punk subgenre is a warning of the building powers of corporations and the merging of human and machines.
Remembrance; Nearly every sci-fi show has had at least one episode showing future Nazi’s, warning the audience that once forgotten the mistakes of the past will repeat.

Hard versus Soft Sci-fi

The major division in Science fiction is usually considered to be the Hard versus Soft Sci-fi. The core difference between hard and soft Sci-fi is the difference between hard (physical) and soft (social) sciences, but due to the simultaneous use of both in most contemporary Sci-fi; the difference between Hard and Soft is often cited as the degree of scientific rigor used.

Sci-fi & Space RPGs

Despite the rising popularity of Science Fiction, partially driven by visual effects, Sci-fi RPGs, especially Space RPGs, are a small part of the RPG community. In the world of Sci-fi RPGs there are only a few contenders:

Traveller; The original 1970s Space RPG, the newest version published by Mongoose.
Warhammer 40k RPGs; A long anticipated set of three RPGs(Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and the upcoming Deathwatch)in the popular 40K war game Universe.
Star Wars; the current Star Wars RPG fits WotC’s semi-4^th edition fantasy rule set to a Tee.
TV & Movie Licensed Games; Made to allow players to experience the film or TV world, tend to be great source books that use a standardised rule set like D20 or the Cortex System.
Rifts & GURPS; These generic systems have space and sci-fi source books with settings and specific mechanics.
Indies; Indie Games and Homebrews are legion. They are abundant on the internet and are often only setting that work with a published game system such as D20 or Fudge. Promoted by sites like The Forge, published on the internet on sites such as IPR or RPGNow, and through publishers such as Mongoose Publishing’s Flaming Cobra Imprint or Studio 2.

Science Fiction & Free Spacer

It is into this relatively small universe of Science Fiction RPGs that that my upcoming Space RPG, Free Spacer, embarks. While designing Free Spacer I rigorously built game mechanics and setting on theoretical hard and a few soft sciences. I used this science as a base with several RPG design goals as guidelines. I projected the effects of these sciences on people and societies and allowed the world to evolve into the distant future creating an internally consistent galaxy with few artificial constraints. My hope is that Technological limits, economies, and customs, will be set by the fictional sciences and will be the basis for an inherently Science Fiction setting and mechanics.

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