Here’s an errant thought that’s dancing in the mix of all the other crap that’s occupying my brain. These are design goals for a game that, unlike FLFS and Agora, can be run quickly and easily, without much prep or expertise. If I can design a game that fulfills these, said game could be played instead of Monopoly, at the drop of a hat, anytime and anywhere.

1. Plays in one two-to-four hour session
2. Character Generation uses Chinese Menu (one from Column A, one from Column B) and takes five to ten minutes
3. Character Generation employs significant flags
4. Character Generation becomes Situation Creation through play
5. GMless/GMful
6. Uses handy tools: no polyhedral dice; perhaps playing cards
7. Hand of playing cards = resources = diminishing resources = pacing
8. Play can continue “next session” with different players

Simon Rogers did a little stint of interviews among RPG publishers and compiled it all into an article, View from the Pelgrane’s Nest: Is the RPG Industry Screwed?, which is pretty interesting and you should go read it. Go ahead; I’ll wait here.

“The Industry” and its Woes

Now, I’m just going to skip over the guys who can’t quite see past the way the business model worked twenty years ago, because, while they’re quaint and all… well, they’re like that uncle who kind of forgets that he retired but he wants to tell you how the business world works but he has trouble sending email. Three things interest me:

The d20 Glut - A lot of the interviewees mentioned this, and while I certainly saw the terrible fruits of the d20 phenomenon on the local game store shelves, I can’t say that I was very impressed, or that it really registered on me. Oh look, another d20 product, cleverly titled 17 Rings of Power and containing… 128 pages dedicated to said seventeen rings, all of which are… pretty boring. I expected that this stuff either (a) sold slowly to people who either didn’t think or didn’t care about how they would use it in an actual game (the fetish-value of some of this material was relatively high) or (b) didn’t sell and got returned to the distributor and hence to the publisher and the publisher went under, which they should have. You put out a dumbass product, you lose your money. That’s justice. But apparently the retailers still have these copies? For some reason? Did they buy these books without part of the contract covering returns of unsaleable merchandise? Cause that’s… oh yeah, more stupid business practices. You make dumbass decisions running your store, you lose money. More justice.

Which is all well and good except it means that the retail outlets, outlets that guys who didn’t fall into the giant sucking hole called the d20 Supplement Mill rely on, are clogged with unsaleable merchandise. Which brings us to…

The Death of Gaming Retail - I have regularly patronized exactly three gaming stores my entire gaming life, which is now going on, like, 16 years or something. The first, I’m Comics, went under but as the name suggests, it wasn’t really a gaming store so much as a comics store with some games. But there’s nothing new or surprising about a hobby store going under; I remember way back when I was little there used to be hobby stores that sold model airplanes and model rockets. They’re gone, too. The second, Metro Games, has sold its soul and become Metro Entertainment, focuses far more on memorabilia and fan-fetish merchandise, and stays in business, as far as I can tell, by getting genre celebrities to come sign things every two weeks. I imagine that this works for them since they’re in Santa Barbara — hey James Marsden, come spend a weekend in Santa Barbara, oh, and sign posters for a couple hours. The third store, Game Castle, has stayed true to the gaming mother lode, sells roleplaying games and high-strategy board games (Catan, Rio Grande Games, etc), and a year or two ago had to find a larger space because they were doing too well for their cramped starter storefront. It doesn’t hurt that Game Castle is snugly situated between I don’t even know how many colleges — at least four or five — and is two blocks from the freeway (essential in LA).

When I was 12, I went to I’m Comics about once a week; when I was 20, I went to Metro every few weeks; these days, I go to Game Castle once every few months. My last gaming purchase that wasn’t online was Blue Rose, when it came out, and that’s like… three years ago, now? I get my gaming on via the internet. Which brings us to…

MMOs Take Over the World! - My wife and I started in playing WoW shortly after it started, and for a good long time I tried very hard to roleplay on WoW. They had, after all, RP Servers, and you could form guilds, and do guild RP, and… god damn did it suck. It was stilted and cramped and simply didn’t work. There was absolutely no reward system for anything resembling roleplay, and a giant reward system including experience, loot, pretty graphics, and tactical challenges for doing just about anything other than roleplay. In fact I got so frustrated with the difficulties in roleplaying on WoW that I gave up the game for six months or so. Somewhere in there I realized the simple fact: World of Warcraft is not for roleplaying. It’s for pretty graphics and tactical challenges and amassing XP and loot. I’ve since returned to the game with that understanding and it’s a whole lot more fun. It is more fun, in fact, than most tactics-based roleplaying games I’ve ever played, and certainly much more fun than all that d20 crap that won’t sell off the shelves.

“The Industry” Loses… and Gains

One of the best quotes in the article comes from Jeff Tidball, who says: “You can divide roleplayers into two general camps based on style of play, with smash-and-grab-and-level-uppers on one side, and everyone else (storytellers, world-builders, wanna-be novelists, etc.) on the other. The first, much larger, group is now — with current network and console technology — much better served by computer RPGs than tabletop RPGs. The computers are just plain better and faster at the game experience they want.” I think he’s spot-on. For tactical challenge, second-to-second action and suspense, and even the wonder of exploring exotic locales, computer games have RPGs beat. I’m not particularly disturbed by this; it’s a lot like saying “For creaming butter and making mashed potatoes, electric blenders have RPGs beat.” MMOs and computers do that stuff better than we can; let them. We do other stuff better.

However, there is the simple fact that the RPG “Industry” has long subsisted on the audience that enjoys that sort of thing, and for a long time RPGs have been one of the few ways to produce that sort of content. With that audience leaving, it signals some pretty big changes for the “Industry.” Jeff goes on to say “As those customers (the smash-and-grabbers) stop buying tabletop RPGs, it stops being economically viable to produce them professionally for the second group.” and here I disagree. I think Jeff’s got a little case of “industry blinders” and can’t see the opportunities that this shift opens up for RPGs.

Computer gaming can have tactical challenge and thrilling, pretty action. That’s what it does, and it does it well, and I’m going to be playing WoW this weekend. What RPGs need to do is focus on what they do better, and the things that are unique to tabletop gaming. From my perspective, the thing in question is people. RPGs can involve emotions, beliefs, ideals, creative endeavor, friendship, rivalry, and even romance in ways that computer gaming can’t (yet) replicate, because those things come from people and come from people interacting with each other. Now, I’ve spent lots of my life defending the internet’s ability to connect people — I’m not in any way saying that somehow with a computer involved it’s no longer socializing with real people, because it is. But the specific medium of online computer games is a pretty poor medium for — yep, emotions, beliefs, ideals, creative endeavor, friendship, rivalry, and even romance. That’s what RPGs do better.

The Roleplaying Game has spent its entire history hampered by geek status. The association has been so strong, in fact, that D&D has become one of the prime identifiers of geekdom. The irony, of course, is that RPGs aren’t a substitute for social activity; they are a social activity — just, historically, with a rather high barrier to entry in terms of tactical finesse, mathematical ability, and genre familiarity (what’s a drow?). However, if RPGs cede the tactical challenge territory to MMOs (which can handle the math internally) and focus instead on real people and crises that derive from real people, the resulting product can shed that barrier to entry and gain a far broader appeal to a hugely expanded market. When I ran a game store, the biggest seller (after jigsaw puzzles) was How to Host a Mystery which is, when you get down to it, a boxed one-shot LARP for eight players. Nobody thinks HHM games are geeky; in fact they’re kind of quirky and cool. Anybody who can throw a dinner party can run it. Now: which, do you suppose, is the larger market: (a) geeks who read Tolkein when they were 13 and who enjoy fiddling with math and (b) anybody who can throw a dinner party?

Games recently out and on the horizon — Primetime Adventures, Breaking the Ice, and 1000 Stories come immediately to mind — serve as stellar examples of games that can be marketted, not just to gamers, but to just about anybody. My mother, who has regular little get-togethers with her friends all the time, could take PTA to one such evening. Everybody’s familiar with television; everybody’s dreamed at least once of being in a television show or writing for one. For an extra added bonus, PTA uses a deck of cards, which is a much more common household item than polyhedral or even six-sided dice. Bunco night can be PTA night. If losing one part of the audience to MMOs expands the potential market for RPGs to include my mom and her friends and people like them, statements like “it’s not economically viable to produce RPGs without the smash-and-grabbers” become pretty ludicrous. In fact, the reverse is probably more true: roleplaying games become economically viable without the smash-and-grabbers.

The only obstacle is reaching that market, who are either completely ignorant of RPGs or burdened with Jack Chick-inspired misunderstandings. It’s a two-pronged problem of promotion and distribution. Luckily, the answer to the distribution half is already here, killing the retail game stores — the internet. With RPGs available to anyone anywhere with an internet connection, we’re already in billions of homes worldwide. And that’s not just the indie games — I can get a copy of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Player Guide or Mage: the Whatever They Renamed It just as easily as I can get Dogs in the Vineyard or Dust Devils. There is very literally nothing that a brick-and-mortar retail store can offer RPGs that a well-designed website can’t replicate (theoretically, a b&m offers face-to-face sales… but when was the last time that happened in your FLGS? — and nobody ever sold bunco to somebody else in a store).

Which leaves us with promotion, and that’s a sticky problem. Promotion is tough, and most of its success stories happen by happy accident. Promoters have to be in the right place at the right time to benefit, but they also have to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity when it arrives. And that is the greater part of promotion — having material ready for when an opportunity arises. Primarily, we need sample games that anybody can get at and run with minimal fuss, with URLs printed on them for where they can find more. Then we need to put them in the spotlight, and be in the spotlight, ourselves. Now, I have a new-found love of the gaming conventions, but that is not the spotlight. That is, in fact, the opposite of the spotlight, a safe place and time away from everyday life where gamers can not worry about scrutiny. We don’t need to abandon the con, but we do need to outgrow it and start placing RPGs in other contexts. RPGs need to invade dinner parties, coffee shops, schools (take it home to your parents!), parks, community centers, and — I can barely believe I’m suggesting this — church groups.

It’s a huge undertaking, and not one that I expect anybody will be flinging themselves at wholeheartedly, but it also doesn’t need anybody to fling themselves at it. We’re already moving in this direction, anyway, and the distributed work of a few hundred people is, I suspect, going to push RPGs in some of these directions with or without conscious intent. And you never know, if such a thing happens and RPGs start getting played by millions of people all over the place, I might have to take the scare quotes off of “The Industry.”

So Mo is advocating in Getting Around to (One of) the Point(s) (and I thought I liked parentheses) that players can, if they don’t like how the published system does something, do it another way and get the same result.

Judson is talking in the Story Games thread The Akido of Game Design about how games can be designed with the naive assumption that all rules will be followed, with the even more naive intent to make the rules unbreakable, or turn the whole thing around and design the game rules so that “exploiting” them is how the designer intends it to be played.

It’s not a new idea that players will ignore rules they don’t like. However, I’ve read a big pile of posts and threads and articles where indie players and designers avow that they play their games “exactly according to the rules” or “exactly as the designer intended” which is, when you get right down to it, more or less impossible. (Short version: authorial intent has an influence on reader reception, but it does not and cannot dictate reception exactly due to the very nature of language.) Players will interpret rules, even if they don’t introduce formal house rules.

A great example of this is Lacuna Part 1, where Jared refuses to allow players the illusion that they’re following the rules exactly and producing a play experience as he intended. How you play Lacuna will be determined by your personal idiosyncracies, and in fact how you play says something about you as a person and as a gamer.

Process and Product

Rules channel play. They determine not only what happens but how it happens, at what cost and with what side effects, guiding players to interact with each other in specific ways. Rules are about creating a product and provide a process to get there. Players select rules based on both what those rules produce and how they go about it, and players abandon rules when they either produce something they don’t like or when they do it in a way they don’t like.

Mo’s central conceit is that the point of a game is to produce a certain end result — a product. Dogs is designed to put players in a situation where their beliefs are challenged and they must either escalate or let their beliefs be trampled on. Primetime Adventures is designed to foster a groupthink atmosphere where the players collaborate on creating a television serial. And so on. There are many different techniques (processes) that will get players to that same end product, and different players have different technique preferences. A given game book may offer a desirable end product but an undesirable process to get there. Mo’s argument is that, assuming that the social contract allows for it, players may elect to use processes beyond those presented in the book to get to the end product that is.

Judson and later comments in the thread point out the potential disconnect between the product that a book promises and the actual product of the process the book provides. If a game says that it is about epic derring-do and then hands you a character who has trouble killing rats, well, there’s a problem there. You might want to modify or abandon the process that ends with your character covered in rat bites. The designer might see you changing things willy-nilly and put out a new edition. The new rules do not make your character triumph over the rat population; they make it harder for you the player to change things around in the published process (or make changing this less effective). Or to put it more kindly, the designer may try to provide a system that does not “need” to be modified in order for it to be played. I suspect that this impulse usually comes from a Design What Doesn’t Matter philosophy — you needn’t be spending your time worrying about rules when you should be playing.

One strand of indie design inverts the problem by putting a focus on creating a set of rules that “hits the target” of a specific intended type of play. These games provide a rule set which encourages players through overt and subtle means to play a certain way and get a certain result — the process rewards the players to keep them on-target to create the end product. This shifts the emphasis from liberating players so that they can create the end product on their own to showing players how to reliably create the end product by specific processes. While the end product is still the eventual goal, these games focus on the process that creates it; in many ways it is not an exagerration to say that the game is the process.

Which seems to bring Mo’s proposal in direct conflict with this design philosophy. If the game is about the process, about the steps and obstacles and progression towards the end result, avoiding that process in favor of another one is, in effect, playing another game entirely. One of my own designs, Agora, is an extreme example of this. One of the prime tenants of Agora is that in order to create any progress, you have to risk what you’ve already got. This is exemplified in the dice mechanic, in which any die roll risks losing that die. You roll in dice representing the things that you are risking in the conflict, use those dice to make the other side lose dice, and whoever runs out of dice first loses their stakes. Usually players will surrender their stakes rather than continue on, since the risks can easily outweigh the potential gains. The product of the game is to put yourself and your followers on the line for your vision of future society; the process is a pretty straightforward matter of risking dice representing things that you care about.

Now, I can easily see players disliking that process. Deciding to sidestep that process in pursuit of the same product, though, changes things. Resolving all conflicts in, say, open negotiation as to what you’ll lose in order to gain your stakes, would result in an almost completely different game — much more staid, controlled, less dangerous, less risky. And that would be perfectly fine.

Publishing Books, Popularizing Games

I am not going to explode in a puff of smoke if somebody plays my game differently than I intended it to be played. There’s no reason whatsoever for me to point out that they are playing it wrong, that they are ignoring important rules, or that they won’t possibly enjoy themselves playing that way. Most likely, they are enjoying themselves playing that way; that’s why they play that way. And in fact, if somebody out there took something I wrote and played something based off of that material and had fun, that’s a cause for celebration! I’ll more likely ask to hear what they did and what happened, because that’s absolutely awesome. I will no more count it a failure than I would count it a failure if someone used a sculpture that I made as a decorative doorstop (which, for reference, my dad still does ten years after I made that sculpture). Here’s why: I design games and I write books. I don’t write games. So when somebody reads my book and enjoys a game that comes out of it, I count that as a success.

Mo’s proposal that an undesirable process can be sidestepped in favor of a more desirable process is not (generally speaking) changing the rules of the game being played. It’s simply using rules that weren’t presented in the book. Back to the Lumpizzle Schiprizzle: “System is the processes by which the players agree on the characteristics and development of fictional content.” This has no direct correlation to the rules presented in any book anywhere. This refers only to what happens at the table. If Mo’s table uses some rules they found in a book and some other rules that they found somewhere else and they have fun doing it, that’s awesome. If the end product of following these patchwork processes resembles the end product promised by the book in question, that’s just gravy. What’s important is that the end product they create is something that they all want to produce and the process that they use to get there was entertaining for everybody at the table.

The book is not the game, and that has some pretty significant repercussions for the production of the book. This is actually a portion of the publishing process where the mainstream guys are leagues ahead of the indie guys. A book is a product sold to customers and read by consumers; a game is an experience enacted by players. That the players may be the consumers or that the customers are buying the book in order to play the game does not equate the book and the game any more than a chicken farmer made my dinner last night. The book and the game are related, certainly, but they are not the same.

Some people buy the book without playing the game. Some people buy the book without any intention of ever playing the game. There are a ton of books out in the world that were written and published in order to be sold, not played. The obvious examples are tie-in novels the likes of which White Wolf and Alderac both produced with a good measure of success. Less obvious examples are sourcebooks which provide flavor and background, whether or not the events of an actual game ever take place in that location or directly concern the faction or technology or whatever the sourcebook is about. These books provide two things. The first is simple: context. If I’m playing Changeling, the material I read in Kithbook: Redcap will be useful to me even when I’m not playing a redcap or opposite a redcap. The second is a little more amorphous: inspiration, both in terms of fictional content and in terms of process. I have not yet played Exalted or The Shadow of Yesterday, but having bought and read the books, the content has inspired me to create epic storylines like Exalted and tie flags to character advancement like TSOY. And to be perfectly frank, White Wolf and Clinton have my money despite me not playing their games.

Some people play the game without buying the book. This may sound odd, but this is actually the majority of gamers in the world — one guy buys the book and plays with his four friends. One sale, five players. I’ve played Nine Worlds without having read more than a paragraph out of the book. I’m sure you’ve played games that you haven’t read the book for, too. From the designer’s standpoint, they’re putting a lot of hard work into that game’s design that will be enjoyed by people who have not given them any money. For some altruistic souls, that may be fine, but there is also some more pragmatic considerations taken into account. Most obviously, simple play can lead to later sales. Games of all stripes operate on this principle, from indie games to board games to sports (gotta buy a baseball mitt). If it was fun to play the game that Jimmy brought, I’ll buy the necessary materials to play it on my own later. Additionally, this can generate cross-sales. Nine Worlds was all sorts of fun at Gamex; I’ll buy Dust Devils to see how that plays out, too. Lastly, this also helps build brand recognition, a high-level concern that the indie publishers are only starting to realize exists. To take a page from the web comics guys, it’s not a stretch to consider selling teeshirts, mugs, and dice bags imprinted with logos, characters, and memorable quotes, and sell them not only to people who’ve bought the books, but to people who have only ever played the game. The game itself can be an icon.

Designing for Players Not Using the Published System

So once we start looking at the book as a separate monster from the game, players disregarding portions of the book in favor of personalizing their game seems like less and less of a crisis. In fact, once you separate the book and the game, the design that goes into the book is pretty profoundly altered.

First, though, the absolute rock-bottom basics. You’re providing a book and making claims about what the book is good for. If you’re a good indie designer and have that target of intended play, the text that you provide must give clear instructions on how to follow the intended processes to get the intended end product. Players won’t do everything “right” all the time, even when they’re trying, but the text needs to get them to the point where they’re performing processes accurately enough to get the end product. In the most basic terms, you promise something (a play experience) and you need to deliver on it. Simple.

However, let’s elaborate on that a bit. You are promising a play experience; you are selling a book. When you sell anything, you present its features — this sportscar goes 120 bazillion miles a second — and so the features of the thing that you are selling — the book — are the things that need to be what’s featured. So in order to make a solid sales demonstration, you need to present how the book provides the game experience. Put the book in the potential customer’s hands; have them read a pertinent section explaining a rule or look up the cost of whatever they want their character to buy or do. Put the quick-reference chart out of the book in front of them. Send them home with the character sheet out of the back of the book. Link the book to the game. Which is all salesmanship and I was talking about design, right? I still am. In order to do any of that you need to have that easily-read rules section, equipment costs table, quick-reference chart, and character sheet. In order to sell the book as essential to the play experience, the book needs to be essential to the play experience. And you can’t make that essential link as long as you’re considering them the same thing in the first place.

However, once you’ve made that sale and the customer takes the book home, hopefully to become a consumer and play the game with others, then’s when the real design work pays off. Because the players are not going to play the game exactly as you intended. Not only may they want to make a few little changes to accomodate their social reality, but they will, inescapably, interpret the rules as they read them. The ensuing game is what sells their friends on buying the book; it’s what sells the original customer on buying a second book; it’s what sells everybody on buying into the brand.

So you give them options. At any given time in any given game, any given player should have more than one option. Options should be within and without the fiction of the game. Mo should be able to call down a conflict and throw her dice around and she should be able to offer up a mutually beneficial and mutually appreciated alternative to rolling dice. Problems encountered in the game should allow for multiple approaches, not only in terms of in-character action (sneak past or overpower?) but also in mechanics and interactions at the table (roll dice or narrate or cut scene?). Players should have resources available to them that can swing results in their favor when it’s important and some means to signify when the results aren’t important. And lastly, leave one option open, unconstrained by the processes presented in the book — the “Say Yes” portion of “Say Yes or Roll Dice.” Consider it an expansion port that they can plug in whatever procedures they’d like to add.

Additionally, design with a space for player input to make a significant difference in the game. Again, this goes for both in-fiction events and at-the-table interactions. If a game design is a rattling machine that always does one thing, it’s entertaining once per playgroup, and the players are engaged as an audience experiencing a spectacle rather than as creators collaborating on something personally significant. This can be as high-brow as thematic concerns that the story will address in play to the down-and-dirty simple mechanics of spreading points out on a character sheet. The more input each player has, the more that player owns the ensuing experience and it becomes not something that happened to them, but something that they did themselves. Not only will this reduce players abandoning the published system, but even when they do supplement the provided processes with their own stuff, the tie-in that the design guides them to make will keep them from straying so far that they miss the intended target that you’ve promised them when they bought the book.

The point, for both options and input, is that these provisions supercede silly little things like how many dice to roll when. Options and input empower the players to take the processes provided in the book and run even further afield from what you might have intended. It makes the game about the players making choices about the play experience they are creating. And it makes the game less about what the designer originally intended. It is providing the seven-cornered cube, and inviting the players — and the readers — to take what you started and create out of it something profoundly original.

And how much better is that than getting some people you don’t know on the other side of the planet to roll dice in a certain way?