Click to download pdf.

You’re supposed to play with the sheet angled at about thirty degrees, yeah. Why? Cause it amuses me. And it maximizes the left-right distance between the dice pools.

Dice go in the big circles, and there’s little bits of reminder-instructions sprinkled around the sheet.

I’m never sure what to put at the top of the character sheet. I used to be all about a slot for “Concept” but increasingly game designs are expressing character concepts directly, instead of as emergent properties.

Anyway, time to sleep.

Just a bare snippet of a thought today on the drive to work.

Game designers don’t create stories. We create procedures that create stories. We in fact create procedures that let other people create stories. We’re like, three steps removed from the actual end result. What a weird little hobby we have.

So here’s an “Example of Play” that I made up and tried to gloss over the holes that are still gaping in the design.

Alice is playing Jain, an architect who leads a group of people living in a crashed city-ship that she designed and brought into the battle above Agora. She’s from the Hierarchy faction, so is a domineering ubermensch, and from the Oppidan culture, so she’s very much an urbanite who cherishes cosmopolitan cooperation.

Ben and Christina are playing other leaders of other groups of people that have alliances and rivalries with Alice’s group in the city-ship, but that’s not important for this bit. Right here and right now, they’re going to play some of the Followers on Alice’s sheet; Ben will play Lor the City Controller, and Christina will play Gnoscis, the slave gladiator.

Dan also plays another leader, but for this scene he’s going to play Alice’s Opposition.

Alice sets out what she wants her movement to do, and in doing so frames about half the scene: “Since we’ve just crash-landed, we’re going to need to repair the damages that the city-ship suffered in landfall. So Jain is going to organize the citizens into work groups, send them out into the surrounding territory to fell trees, and use them to rebuild.”

Dan now decides who or what is going to try and prevent Jain’s people from getting the repairs done. He could decide to put some guerrilla fighters in the woods, or have an old enemy from the war resurface and attack the city-ship, or whatever, but he decides that Jain’s opposition is going to be the woods themselves. So he quickly writes up “The Black Woods,” giving it a Position, some proto-Complications, and some Spoils in a process yet to be determined, all of which are counted in dice. “The Black Woods is a proud wilderness, and will swallow up what workers you send into it!” he declares, which are his stakes.

Alice rolls in her starting Ideal “Diversity combines many strengths together 3d8″ and her Resource “Industrial Equipment 3d6″. Her Ideal rolls up a 3, a 5, and a 6. Her Resource rolls up a 2, a 3, and a 5. She keeps Ideals dice on one side of her character sheet and Resources dice on the other side.

Alice starts off, narrating, “The workbells ring throughout the city-ship, assembling the people before whatever screens are still working. I tell the people of the city that they will be engaged in a great project that will bring honor and recognition to many. Their regular workgroups have been issued new assignments, and their handlers will direct them to their work area in the surrounding forest.”

Alice can only mount a one-die Action, since no two dice add up to four or less. She points at a three and says, “One die.”

Dan rolls the Woods’ starting Position “The wilderness resists the touch of man 3d6″ and assigns a proto-Complication to “Rough territory, hard to travel without roads or flyers 2d4″. The Position rolls a 3, a 4, and a 5; the Complication rolls a 1 and a 2.

Dan shakes his head. “Your people are used to the orderly grid of streets and mass transit within the city-ship, and have hardly any outdoor survival skills to speak of. Most of the work teams can’t even get to their work sites, which have been placed only a few hundred yards into the surrounding Woods.”

Dan points at the 1 and 2, which add up to less than four, and says, “Two dice.” He discards the one (since it’s from a Complication, it does not become Fallout). He now has a 3, a 4, and a 5 in Position and a 2 in Complications.

Since Dan beat Alice by one die, Alice must discard one of her dice. She tosses the 6, which was on a d8, anyway.

“Further,” Dan narrates since it’s his Action, “the few teams that do scramble into the backwoods are attacked by ravenous monsters that look like a cross between dinosaurs and hyenas, with tufts of fur coming off their shoulders and big red claws!”

Now Dan rolls in a new Complication, “Terrible man-eating beasts 4d10.” He gets a 2, a 4, a 6, and a 10. He points at his pair of twos. “Two dice.”

Alice can’t beat two dice right now, so she needs to do something. Since she’s making a Reaction, she could introduce another of her Ideals or Loyalties, but she decides to just reroll the 3 and 5 that she already has. She rolls snake eyes, a pair of ones! She points at those and the 2 she still has, and declares, “Three dice! Of course I anticipated native life, and the security teams go into action, protecting the work crews.”

The two ones were from rerolling her Ideals, so they become Fallout and are removed from her pool.

Now it’s Alice’s turn to take Action, and she decides to bring in one of her Followers. Since she just mentioned the security teams, she decides to introduce Gnoscis. She takes Gnoscis’ 2d8 dice, rolls them (a 2 and a 4), and scoots them over to Christina. She points at her two and Gnoscis’ two. “Two dice. The security teams hack their way into the interior while the construction crews roll out the heavy machinery to flatten the Woods around the ship. The trees they destroy won’t be harvestable, but will function as serviceable roads while the rest of the teams start felling trees.”

Dan already has two twos, but if his Reaction only ties Alice’s Action, he still loses one die. He rerolls his 6 and 10, but gets a 2 and a 5. He can still only mount a two-die Reaction. “The trees are tough, and have deep roots, but over the course of the day they fall one after the other, until there are trails of crushed trees radiating out from the ship.” He tosses the 5.

Since play goes around the table, it’s now Christina’s turn, and she rerolls Gnoscis’ 4. It comes up a 3, so she can only mount a one-die Action. “The gladiator leads his team of bloodthirsty duelists out along the roads, striking deep into the heart of the Woods after every rustle they hear.”

Dan’s already used two of his 2s in the Reaction against Alice’s bulldozers, so he only has one 2. He could roll in a new Position for his Reaction, but since this is at the beginning of play and is an example of play anyway, let’s say he doesn’t have another Position. He’s going to lose a die, and he tosses the d10 showing a 5. “Fleeing from the crashing machinery and chased by the well-organized security patrols, the beasts of the Black Woods fall easily to the gladiators.”

“We’re totally skinning them and using their pelts in our gladiatorial gear,” Christina gloats.

Now it’s back to Dan, and he decides to use his last Complication. “Things are proceeding well enough the following day, until the work teams start dropping like flies in the east, knocked unconscious by fungal spores that their trampling of the woods must have kicked up,” Dan declares, and rolls in a 3d6 for “Poison Spores.” He nets himself a 1, a 3, and a 5. Pointing at the 1 and the 3, he announces, “Two dice.” He then discards the 1 and reduces Poison Spores to 2d6.

Alice could use two dice (one in front of her, one in front of Christina), but then she’d still lose a die. She’s only got one die left in her Ideals, so she decides to bring in another Ideal. This escalates the conflict, increasing her investment (and decreasing the fallout die size). She rolls in her 2d6 Ideal “Lessers serve their betters to become greater themselves” and gets two fours. “Well, crap!” Since she ties the two-die Attack, she loses one die (one of those disappointing fours) and sighs, “Well, they were really just plebian worker-drones, anyway, so some losses are to be expected. The medical teams go recoup who they can, and we leave that portion of the woods alone.”

Alice’s Action, now. She doesn’t have to reroll anything — she can still mount a two-die Action and she knows Dan doesn’t have any more Positions to throw in. So she points at her two twos, rather gloatingly, and narrates, “As the lumber starts streaming into the city-ship, it’s cut down and processed, then put to good use, buttressing crumbling corners and propping up sagging balconies.”

Dan waves sadly at his pair of twos, which just ties, so he loses a die, which is going to be one of the twos he’s come to depend on. “Yeah, well, there’s bugs and rodents in all that lumber you bring in, so you get a nasty infestation of creepy-crawlies in your pristine little city! I surrender.”

Alice cheers a bit, and gets her stakes — the interior of the city-ship is rebuilt. She didn’t lose any Resource dice to do it, but she did rack up two Fallout dice.

Since she used two Ideals, the Fallout die size went from ten to eight. Alice rolls 2d8 and gets a 1 and a 3. Any result of 4 or less makes her change one word of her Ideals; any result of 1 means she has to take a keyword from her Opponent’s Position. Since the Black Woods’ Position is “The wilderness resists the touch of man,” she rewrites her Ideal to “The wilderness’ diversity combines many strengths together.” In her fight with the Black Woods, she has come to respect its noble resistance.

Additionally, since Dan goaded Alice into investing two of her ideals, he gets to bank two Resource dice for his own character.

The Black Woods has Spoils to the tune of 3d4, 2d6, and 1d8. Alice gets to take one of these and add them as Resource dice to her own sheet. So she takes “Building Materials 3d4.” The other two Spoils are incremented by one (3d6, 2d8) and the Black Woods is filed away in the Opposition Library to be used by any other player later on in the game.

The next scene is Ben’s. He decides what his leader character is doing, and somebody picks up Opposition for him, and the others play his followers or perhaps an allied leader.

—

After writing this up, I’m thinking the threshold for putting dice together should probably be pushed to five instead of four. There are lots more options of dice that ‘fit into’ five, and you don’t have that two-twos problem where you set that up and then you can only better your chances by rolling two ones, which are immediately lost thereafter.

Note that I didn’t include much on the (very rough) banking and support rules, which will allow players to take the Spoils that they win in one scene and either ‘bank’ them for a delayed payoff (if what you’re doing should properly take multiple scenes to accomplish, and have a big payoff at the end) or send them to another player as ’support’ (so two leader PCs can cooperate with each other).

This conflict is harvesting and building and stuff, but the system should support diplomacy, battles, exploration, even scientific research.

Opposition is filed away and accrues value so that players are rewarded for reincorporating things.

Since the setting can be (and often will be) Opposition, and the Positions and Complications of Opposition can change just as much as the PCs can change, the action of each scene should have a direct effect on the setting and situation.

I just did a test run of Agora character creation.

Holy Fucking Shit!

So yesterday at, like, I don’t even remember when, I had one of those lovely experiences where an entire game design tried to shove itself into my brain all at once. I spent the next few hours hastily scribbling down notes and refining them and relating them, and cursing at them when they didn’t immediately work right or when the game design shoving itself through my ear was, like, 95% of the design and wanted me to just come up with the missing 5% spontaneously.

Anyway, it’s the game where I get to play Alpha Centauri, and maybe a little Battlestar Galactica, and maybe a little World of Warcraft the way it should have been implemented. You play a faction and its apotheosized leader; your stats are Ideals, Loyalties, Followers, and Resources. It kicks you in the face and demands that you defend what you believe in. Assuming, of course, it works.

Here’s the introductory flavor text that isn’t so much about the game itself as the setup for the game:

By this point everybody in the design blogosphere has read Vincent explaining how to create situation. If you haven’t go do so, because that’s some good shit, there.

What interests me is that Vincent’s procedure begins first with a set of elements that will become the situation and then assigns characters to players. The players then elaborate the situation to something playable, which entails adding new details to the characters. The details of the characters are dependent on what the situation requires. In this, the characters come from the situation.

In Full Light, Full Steam, the characters are created before the situation is. The situation is built out of the things that the players have flagged as elements that they are interested in and have embedded in their characters. The creation of the situation does not change the characters (except maybe slightly, to the extent of saying, “By the way, you have a brother named Joe.”). Here, the situation comes from the characters.

Skipping back a generation or two, your basic prepackaged adventure has a situation that is created without any reference to the characters, and vice-versa. The characters have no effect on the situation, and the situation has no effect on the characters. Indeed, one of the parts of being a “good roleplayer” here is finding ways to relate your character to the situation that they are thrust into. So there the characters are, I dunno, installed into the situation.

I’m not sure where to go with this observation, though. My moral relativism tells me to say that none of these is necessarily better than the others, but I’m not even sure if that’s the case. Consider:

1. The latter two are probably somewhat easier to implement multiple and serial situations under, since the first would require rewriting elements of the characters for each new situation (which isn’t necessarily bad, just more work, and a little counter-intuitive).
2. The prior two are more likely to engage the players than the last one, since the situation has pre-arranged ties to characters.
3. The first and last are quicker to perform than the middle two-step process of characters, then situation.

And I’m sure I’m missing some. Is it as simple as different benefits from different approaches?

For a lot of gamers, “roleplaying game” is synonymous with open-endedness, a developing experience that can go on and on indefinitely, accreting details and significance and personal resonance. While the open-ended nature of roleplaying games does have some distinct advantages, especially in terms of investment and immersion, those advantages come at a cost. Somebody has to keep the flywheel moving, and that is not always the easiest thing to accomplish.

Here’s the thing: the basic function of roleplaying is to create fictional problems and resolve them. That description conflates a lot of different things, though. For instance, the GM usually creates the problem outside of roleplay and the players resolve the problem through in-character action. If we phrase the description in exacting language, we get something like “players create a conflict-riddled situation and reveal it in play, then address the situation in order to eventually resolve its conflicts.”

In a closed-ended game, this is relatively simple to accomplish. The game consists of three phases: revealing the situation, addressing the situation, and resolving its conflicts. When most or all of the conflicts are resolved, the game is over. This is how most prose fiction and film works. This is how every middle schooler is taught how stories work. We are all pretty familiar with this structure.

The Problem of Continuous Play

However, in an open-ended game with an expectation of continuous play, this becomes problematic. On the one hand, continuous play might try and spread those three phases across its infinite length, resulting in lots and lots of revealing of information and maybe a little addressing the situation, but never any resolution of the conflicts. This is the classic “never-ending campaign” where the player characters are continually chasing after some Big Bad that they never quite catch or subdue. This can be incredibly frustrating, and delayed gratification can only string the players along so far before the game collapses. On the other side of the picture are games in which the player characters are pitted against some conflict or adversary or similar, triumph over their obstacles, win the day… and then wonder what to do next.

In order to play, we need conflicts to resolve. If we don’t resolve the conflicts in front of us, we get bored. If we run out of conflicts, we get bored. Obviously, we need to make conflicts a renewable resource, so that while we resolve existing conflicts, we replace them with new conflicts. This sounds easy, and in some cases it actually is; however, there are pitfalls.

The Pitfalls

When we start off a new game, we have the advantage of a clean slate on which to build the situation and its conflicts, and we create most if not all of the significant details of the game out of thin air. When we start playing, the revelation of the situation is also the revelation of the conflicts embedded in that situation. For instance, in the scene introducing the noble house of Capulet, we are also introduced to the plans to marry Juliet to the Prince. Everything proceeds with a certain amount of elegance.

However, when we are introducing new conflicts to an established situation, we do not enjoy the same advantages as before. If we want to create new knots of characters, desires, and obstacles — also known as conflicts — we must either add new elements to the situation or create new relationships between established elements in the situation. The additions to the situation that we prepare must be things that we can reveal through roleplay while remaining true to the continuity of previously established facts. We can’t start off a scene and say, “Okay, remember the Capulets? Yeah, they’re totally space aliens now.” Wedging in new elements and relationships without trampling the continuity of prior play is the first potential pitfall in creating new conflicts.

In addition to the basic continuity of established fictional “facts” there is the continuity of the narrative, in which the players have worked to acheive successes great and small in the face of adversity. It is just as much or even more of a breach in continuity to negate prior victories by slapping in a replacement conflict that is the same thing as before with a new coat of paint. This is the second pitfall: “Took out the zombies beseiging the castle? Well now the Black Lich has ogres who are… beseiging the castle!” In many ways, the parts of the situation which have been resolved through player action are the most sacrosanct. The players have invested in these elements through roleplay, and negating the weight of prior player actions is directly threatening that player investment. New conflicts must be different: they must threaten different character desires with different obstacles. If the players take out the zombies, the Black Lich can send in a covey of vampire “diplomats” who try to seduce the Queen. The playing field is different, and the players won’t feel cheated out of their victory.

One rich method of introducing new conflicts is by exploiting the fallout of prior player addresses. For example, in the first session of a game our hearty adventurers set off to save the kidnapped princess from a neighboring tribe of orcs. In the course of the game, we slaughter every last able-bodied orc warrior and run off with the princess. In the next session of the game, we might be faced with an army of angry orc wives who are descending on the kingdom to avenge their fallen husbands. This often creates conflicts which players are automatically invested in as an organic continuation of their prior actions, and that’s great.

However, no matter how “organic” this may seem, this is the end result of a conscious decision made by somebody, usually the Game Master. This often constitutes a judgement on the addresses of the players to the tune of, “Well, you should have thought about the poor orc wives and orc babies when you were merrily slaughtering everybody.” This is like the hopped-up version of negating player actions; this is invalidating them entirely. Not only is their prior success taken away, but their actions are twisted into making the situation even worse. You’re saying, “Remember when you rocked the world? Turns out you fucked up.” Not to be a big dirty hippy about it, but the game’s theme is created through the interaction of player addresses and the situation. Retroactively invalidating the players’ addresses of situation is a direct attack at the game’s theme.

This is the third, perhaps most dangerous pitfall to avoid, although I hasten to add that this does not mean that new conflicts should not arise out of prior addresses. That creates awesome investement. Care must be taken, however, to make sure that the new conflicts do not arise out of prior addresses in such a way that the prior addresses are invalidated. The orc wives can start lining the horizon as a looming threat, but which is more interesting: “you shouldn’t have killed all their husbands despite that’s how the fantasy genre works, and now you’re in trouble!” or “when you attacked the orc encampment, the women were out campaigning against the trolls to the south — turns out the females are meaner and more warlike than the males!”

To sum up: when we create new conflicts in an established situation, we need to (a) retain continuity of facts, (b) retain continuity of the narrative, and (c) retain continuity of theme. How to avoid these pitfalls? Here’s two broad solutions, cribbed from television and myth, respectively: the episodic solution and the epic solution.

The Episodic Solution

The episodic solution is to create new conflicts almost whole cloth. In many cases, this is explained as creating a new situation entirely, and transporting the player characters through space and time, into the “new” situation. However, as the player characters are part of any situation in play and the characters are already related through play to the elements of the prior situation, the truth of the matter is that this method is grafting a large chunk of new situation onto what has already been established. Even if the characters from last session will not make an appearance in this session, their influence and impact will be carried over through the vehicle of the characters.

In Dogs in the Vineyard the GM creates a new town for each session and the player characters travel to that town to interact with it. However, as the GM is creating the town based on the prior actions of the Dogs, and as the Dogs will be bringing in their memories, experiences, traits, and relationships from prior towns, all “new situations” are at least weakly connected to situations that have been revealed and addressed before.

Because each episode takes place in a different place and time, continuity of facts is easy — they’re not there to trample on. Since the player characters deal with entirely new conflicts unconnected to their prior exploits, continuity of the narrative is also pretty safe — and mostly in player hands, since the burden is on them to maintain their status as heroes, scoundrels, average joes, or whatever. Continuity of theme is perhaps the most vulnerable here, but only in the most abstract manner in that new conflicts may echo prior conflicts. And as a final safeguard, however the players address the new conflicts, the new and unconnected set of specifics allows enough deniability to say “this situation was different” (an ambiguity around which serial Dogs play is built).

The episodic solution is, by far, the easier of the two. It’s sort of plug-and-play situation. It also lends to episodic play, which allows the players a little more leeway in terms of scheduling and participation. Perhaps most importantly, it mimics the very familiar structure of television serials, providing a solid common foundation for the players’ creativity. While I won’t go so far as to say that this solution has been conquered and there is nothing more to develop, I’m pretty confident that we’ve got most of the basic structure and further development will be neat variations and filligrees. The real meat is in the epic.

The Epic Solution

The epic solution requires a hierarchy of conflicts, with one or more “epic” conflicts of grand scope as well as a number of more modest small-scale conflicts. Generally speaking the epic conflicts are composed of some or all of the smaller conflicts. The key here is that the small-scale conflicts are available for resolution in individual sessions, giving the players a sense of accomplishment, while still keeping the epic conflict looming over their heads so they retain a sense of purpose and the game can continue on.

Two quick examples of this in print: Exalted and Tribe 8. In both games you are facing complete and utter metaphysical destruction of the universe — how’s that for an epic conflict — as well as much smaller and more manageable conflicts that you can actually, you know, deal with at the gaming table. All of the support is for creating and resolving those smaller conflicts which form the bulk of play. Whether or not the designers actually expected the players to resolve the epic conflict and save the universe I will leave as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: see Design What Doesn’t Matter.)

In a nutshell, the Epic Solution protects the continuity of facts by continually elaborating what has already been established, filling in details between the stuff that’s already been revealed. It maintains continuity of narrative by using character actions in the small-scale conflicts to build towards the epic conflicts. It preserves continuity of theme by directing all addresses towards a unified eventual goal (or tight cluster of goals).

The episodic solution is the easy and straightforward one; this method has to stoop to a couple tricks and stratagems to pull off what it’s after. The obvious and bone-headed way to go about this is to map out the epic conflict and all its subsidary conflicts before beginning play, and this is almost doomed to failure. Player addresses will twist the subsidary conflicts in unforeseen ways and player preferences and expectations will bring some conflicts to the fore when they were “supposed” to remain in the background. Worst of all, players will end up fabricating their own conflicts which just throws the entire master plan out the window. We’ve seen a lot of flailing about in GM Advice and the like on how to manage the chaos introduced so you can remain true to the plan, which has led to a lot of rebelling from the very idea that epic conflicts can even be implemented in games. However, both the arguments for GM illusionism and the rebelling from epic conflicts must be understood as reactions to the boneheaded way of exercising the epic solution. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Instead of mapping out the entire beast ahead of time, not all of the conflicts need be determined before play. It is possible to introduce new small-scale conflicts into the fabric of an established situation dominated by epic conflicts, and even to tie those small-scale conflicts into the epic conflict in a meaningful way. The trickiest part of the epic solution is to do so in a way that the new conflicts were “always there” and retroactively part of the epic conflict.

The key is relatively simple: keep an open mind and allow each new small-scale conflict to at least partially redefine the epic conflict. In technical terms, the small-scale conflicts reveal new information about the epic-scale conflict — and you do not know what they will reveal until you play. While you might define the epic conflicts in broad strokes at the beginning, the epic conflict begins with little to no details. Each session as you resolve one of the small-scale conflicts you (the characters, the players, even the GM) learn something new about the master plan. To put it bluntly: you create the specifics of the epic conflict through play, not before play.

So you might start with an epic conflict like “The criminal mastermind known only as the Ringleader is trying to take over San Angeles!” Then in the session where you subvert his plan to infiltrate the sewers under the bank, you learn that the plan has something to do with money; in the session where you defeat his lieutenant, you learn that the Ringleader is operating out of a submarine out in the bay; in the session where you prevent him from kidnapping the entire guest list at a charity ball, you find out that he’s got his eye on the lovely Miss Clara Oakenfeld. And so on. Eventually you might get to the point where you have “learned” that the Ringleader is in fact Clara’s long-lost husband, horribly disfigured in a nautical accident but intent on reclaiming his place among the city’s elites and… you get the picture.

I said this method is taken from myth — specifically, this is taken from the means by which myths were passed along and developed over time. The big, epic-scale conflict was usually already known; Hercules had to prove his divinity in order to be admitted into Olympus. Everybody knew those. But if you can imagine a storyteller — either a professional actor or priestess or just some old guy by a fire — telling the story and trying to entertain the audience, that’s when the details get filled in, and filled in to whatever purpose the storyteller happens to have at the time of the telling. “Hercules had to prove himself,” one tells the story, and the next one tells the story, “He had to perform labors to prove himself,” and another guy who tells the story to the next town says, “He had to perform labors to prove himself, like cleaning out a stable that was bigger and stinkier than yours right here!” Then somebody else throws in a jealous Hera, and somebody else makes him visit Gibraltar, and on and on it goes. While we don’t get benefits of the iterative retelling format (quick, somebody design a game on that premise!), we can still build our big conflicts with blocks made out of small conflicts — whether or not we know what shape the big conflict will turn out to be.

I said the other one was from television, but I lied; this solution is, too. This is how they develop seasons of shows like Buffy, Alias, and Stargate (even Friends). At the outset of each show, nobody was thinking Spike would sacrifice himself to defeat the First Evil, that Sydney was actually working for whatever evil intelligence agency she was a sleeper agent for, or that Baal would help SG-1 defeat the Replicators. The eventual epic conflict was shaped by the smaller-scale conflicts, and the smaller-scale conflicts got their direction, weight, and significance from the (as yet undefined) epic conflict that they supported. In the end, you build an epic just like you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

So this last week I participated in the Gaming Blogosphere Blackout we like to call Game Chef. If, in the unlikely chance that you weren’t aware of them, you can find the details of the challenge at the website. I came out of the fray with two game titles and one half-baked half-implemented almost-game.

Our Steel, King’s Law

My “alpha entry,” the one that I will stand up and claim as my own in public, is a game in which the players all take on the roles of musketeer-ish Watchmen of the King, arresting criminals in the Night Lords syndicate. It is a pretty straightforward interpretation of Steel+Team+Law. The meat of the game is a big old fencing system where players have a finite number of tactical options and your fellow players try to anticipate what you are going to do. The number of your teammates who are able to correctly anticipate your move becomes the target number for the GM to roll over. I’m curious to play this one, if only to see how the resolution system works out in practice.

Reflection

My “beta entry,” which did not make it to completion, was a weightier undertaking that did not fit as easily into the ingredient list. The premise was that you played one side of a factionalized and emotional situation in one session, waited two weeks, and then played the other side. To give you an idea of how high my target was, I wanted to be able to play Israelis and Palestinians. Yeah, bit off a little more than I could chew, there. However, this is an idea that I might try to develop outside of Game Chef, as fitting it into the time constraints and ingredient restrictions was putting some awkward strains on the design. Chief among them was that, with only two sessions, it was categorically impossible to really come to any resolution of the situation — all the players could do was explore it and their characters’ reactions to it, ending with a stalemate where the players were more informed of how terrible and unresolvable their situation was. (This may mean that I hit my target of Israelis and Palestinians, after all.)

The Ancient and Venerable Art of Tippling

My “gamma entry” was directly inspired by Graham Walmsley’s entry Euthymia in which he uses the level of beverages in the players’ glasses as the resolution mechanic. I made a little joke about it being a drinking game, and shortly thereafter the new genre of the Roledrinking Game took form in my head. It was a sad day for gamers everywhere. In this game, you play generic fantasy dwarves knocking back a few at the local pub and boasting about their exploits. Everyone is trying to one-up each other, and the resolution mechanic is a drinking game — if somebody doesn’t buy your story, they take a drink; if you want to counter their protest, you take a drink; if they want to push their protest, they take another drink, and so on. It has mechanics named “I’ll Drink To That!”, “Go Bottoms Up,” and “Drown Your Sorrow.” The best part of all, however, was that I was actually able to reduce the rules to an 8″ x 3″ rectangle, which means I can print them on ceramic steins from cafepress. How’s that for a Con product?

After I posted Tippling, another Game Chef was inspired to write The Incredible Ninja Drinking Game, so there are at least two examples of the species thus far. Judson has suggested that we run a Roledrinking Game contest much like Game Chef later in the year, with the six winning games being printed on a matched set of six steins. A disturbing suggestion; watch here for upcoming details.

Results of the Experiment

I actually wrote 90% of Our Steel the Saturday after the ingredients were released, so I can understand the 24 Hour RPG contest, now. I didn’t really even mean to; I just sat down on Saturday morning and then it was 1am. By contrast, I struggled with Reflection all week and it never took shape out of the clay I was working with. (Tippling was written pretty much on the drive back to work from Taco Bell.)

I am pretty satisfied with Our Steel, and can see a fat load of emergent qualities embedded into the game that should make it pretty fun. There is only one real emergent quality in Tippling, and that’s to get the players shit-faced as quickly as possible.

Our Steel is also, I expect, a challenging game, and while it seems strange, I would actually put a disclaimer at the front of an eventual print product version saying something to the effect of, “This is a difficult roleplaying game. If you win, you will have worked hard for it.” It isn’t difficult like Dogs or Under the Bed is difficult, challenging you to take not-quite-comfortable looks at sometimes emotional issues; it’s difficult like… the only parallel I can think of is that it’s difficult like climbing a mountain in a team of mountain-climbers is difficult. That is, it is technically difficult, requires cooperation in order to succeed, and that success is pretty obvious when acheived. That said, I expect the game is fun whether or not your team actually rips victory from the jaws of defeat.

I did not know what to expect from Game Chef going into it; it seemed like fun and I entered with a pretty open ended “see what happens” attitude. I’m pretty impressed with what came out of it, both in terms of how it led me to stretch, and also in the other designs that I had the pleasure of reading about on the forums. Now the judging of the entries begins, which is peer-reviewed for the first time this year. With two entries, I think that means I’ll be reviewing eight other entries in two weeks, so I’ll have my plate full. I’m looking forward to it.

Brand suggested in passing that, by contrast to Design What Matters which pushes you towards Vincent’s Fruitful Void, Design What Doesn’t Matter tries to clear away all the brush from the foot of the Monolith. I like this; I may use it.

This is why I like it:

• Are you a monkey freaking out at the base of the Monolith?
• Or are you some hapless fool losing your sanity by staring into the Void?
• Or do you, you know, alternate every other Sunday?

See? Funny. And as well all know, Funny is more important than True.

So every once in a while we talk about two broad-based philosophies of game design, that being (a) designing for what matters in your game, and (b) designing away what doesn’t matter in your game. So if you wanted to design a game for, I dunnno, clan-based politics, following the Design What Matters method would provide mechanical support for players manipulating relationships with others, forwarding their beliefs, convincing others, maybe blackmail and skullduggery, that sort of thing. Following the Design What Doesn’t Matter method you provide mechanical support for combat, buying things, travel times, and maybe some wilderness encounters. Assuming that the players know what the game is supposed to be about (which is a different matter entirely), two groups using the two games will end up playing something roughly similar in content. If the end result is the same, what’s the big deal? You have to go into a little more detail to find out.

Design What Matters says, “Okay, you want this? Here’s some tools to do that.” It provides explicit and relatively exacting instructions on how to pick and hit that target. These designs are usually highly idiosyncratic, focused, and balanced. As such, they are either resistent to kit-bashing and house ruling or fall apart when subjected to such treatment. Someone once called them “Designer Games” which is pretty accurate, not in the sense of designer jeans, but in the sense of designer drugs. They’re built for a finely-sharpened purpose. Typically speaking, they don’t do anything else, or they do it poorly. These games are tools that allow you how to do something that you may have never done before.

For a nearly exhaustive distillation of Design What Matters, see The Power 19, which is all about identifying what you’re designing for and then figuring out how to design for it.

Examples of Design What Matters: Primetime Adventures. Dogs in the Vineyard. Once Upon a Time. Monopoly. Scrabble. A forklift. A pulley.

Design What Doesn’t Matter says, “Okay, you want this? Let me get rid of all that other stuff for you, so you can focus on what you want.” It provides vague or even non-existent instructions on how to focus on anything; in fact these games shy away from focus as a general concept. Instead, this philosophy provides many and varied methods to not focus on things, to resolve them quickly and move on, to avoid depth and complexity. The goal is not to provide the most superficial experience possible; it’s to marginalize those skipped-over elements so that you can focus on the “real meat” of roleplaying, whatever your group happens to think that is. That’s also an important part of this philosophy — it assumes you have a functional or semi-functional group who is able to decide what they want and do the focusing work themselves. Which is, really, something that any group of adults should be able to do if they know each other marginally well. Because of this philosophy, these games can “do anything” because the game doesn’t actually do it; the players do. The game just removes all the other pesky details that are getting in between you and your fun. It’s a tool that helps you do what you would already be doing, and do it better. It is, at root, a labor-saving device.

Examples of Design What Doesn’t Matter: GURPS. Shadowrun. World of Darkness. Blue Rose. Mind’s Eye Theater. Costumes. MacOS X. Microwave ovens.

In the end, they’re all just tools, albeit with different uses, at your disposal. You use the first set of tools to build what you want, you use the second set of tools to clear away the stuff you don’t and build what you want on your own. Still sound like no big difference? Let’s rephrase it in terms of the range of use of those tools.

Design What Matters games let you play anything the tools allow you to build.

Design What Doesn’t Matter games make it easier to play anything that you could have come up with on your own.

Ah ha, now we’re starting to uncover the difference. The two philosophies, in addition to functioning differently, also provide a different range of possibilities. I’m not going to go into which philosophy has a broader range here; in fact I think that’s probably an effort in futility, and generalized observations will be trumped by specific reality every time. The important thing to realize is that there are some things that the tools can build that are beyond your ability to do on your own, and there are some things that you can do on your own that the specialized tools can’t do. Because I like rephrasing, let’s do it again!

Design What Matters pushes you beyond your normal limits.

Design What Doesn’t Matter makes you comfortable within your limits.

It probably sounds like I’m saying that the first is better than the second, doesn’t it? Being comfortable is for pansies, we should always strive to push beyond our limits all the time, 24/7, rah rah rah, right? I don’t know about you, but when I’m coming home from my two-hour commute through the heart of Los Angeles, my limits would really appreciate not being pushed right about then, and it’d be real nice to get comfortable in some pajamas, a blanket (it’s cold recently), and maybe a cat or two. So too, sometimes it’s just nice to settle into a well-loved character, setting, or game and just get comfy in that milleu. Just look at games like Munchkin and Hackmaster for examples of how that comfortable-in-the-game phenomenon can be sold nearly undiluted (albiet with a postmodern self-referential spin, as always).

Or perhaps we can ditch the whole pansy-sounding ‘comfortable’ thing and say that Design What Doesn’t Matter enhances what you’ve already got. Or that it liberates you to focus how you like — it’s like gaming feng shui (the philosophy, not the ninja game). Design What Doesn’t Matter is sort of an optimization of make-believe, and that’s pretty cool.

On the Design What Matters side, we can start to see this as more of a challenge, a dialogue, or a prod — the goal is to move your frame of reference beyond the prior limits of your experience and ability. While it can be “softened,” this sort of thing is by its very nature not comfortable. Or it is “comfortable” in the same way that an endorphin burn or adrenaline rush is comfortable — the correct word here is “euphoric.” I doubt many people are comfortable playing Dogs in the Vineyard, but I’m sure most folks certainly experience euphoria somewhere in the process. We’ve come back to the designer drugs analogy — Design What Matters games try to provoke a specific altered state of consciousness, one that may be beyond your normal experience.

Again — and I hate to have to jump up and down and keep repeating this, but I feel it’s necessary — I’m not saying that one is fundamentally better than the other by any means. What I am saying, however, is that these two philosophies lead to two design approaches which result in two different kinds of play. The results are different. Sure, the content is the same — you can shoot people in the face in Shadowrun or in Dogs — but the difference is in the experience. Shooting people means something different, feels different, works different; it has a different weight and tone and quality. All of that comes from how the design impacts play — which is why design philosophy is so important.

I, personally, am going to keep writing Design What Matters games. I doubt that’s a surprise. The reason why, however? Cause the Design What Doesn’t Matter market’s already swamped, and I’m not interested in wading into that kind of competition. Thanks to GURPS and OGL, there very literally is not one genre or premise that I can think of that doesn’t already have a supplement that can be used to run it, and there are more coming out every day. Especially in the case of GURPS, the stuff that’s already out there is superior to what I could produce. So when I want that kind of experience — the feng-shuied tricked-out optimized and streamlined facilitation of my own imagination — I’ll go there. The stuff that needs writing — the stuff that pushes me into new experiences and revelations about myself — that’s where I’ll be in the mean time.