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Do we need Ding in our RPGs? Part I
Since the early days, we’ve had character advancement in our role-playing games. The classic example goes something like this: The players stumble upon an encampment of some sort of designated monster race – say, goblins – and then the players proceed to attempt to slaughter them. After a dramatic combat, when the players emerge “victorious”, each killed goblin nets the players a certain amount of “XP” or “experience points”, as does any collected treasure. And the players are hungry for as much XP as they can get, for once they get enough they can advance to the next “level” – and each level adds more abilities, potence, and goodies than the one before. So though you may start off a lowly level 1 fighter, kill enough adversaries and loot their treasure and you will eventually attain the mythical level 20, when you will be so much more than you are now – so much more capable, skilled, and powerful.
And the desire for more power is a common one. After all, if you had more power, you would be able just to give a marauding bunch of bandits the hairy eyeball, and they would hop right over to some other village with a less mighty protector, right?
Well, not exactly.
You see, the dirty little secret – well, actually, it’s not that much of a secret – is that as your character levels up, you fight higher and higher level opponents – yes, they have levels too – which is good because now you need twice as much XP to get to the next level as you needed to get to this one.
It’s a never ending cycle, a carrot that promises that the next level will make you more powerful when the truth is that the Game Master(GM) generally chooses what adversaries you fight based on what’s going to be a certain amount of challenge. Your character’s life never gets easier, you see, because as your power increases you wind up facing that much more powerful foes, so as to always keep the relative power balance the same!
So it occurred to me, as I am sure it has occurred to many in years past, if the protagonists and the antagonists are always balanced against each other no matter what, then why lift one side just to rise the other? Why have advancement or levels at all? All they seem to do is provide an artificial veneer of progress, when in fact none is really taking place.
The truth is, you don’t really want progress after all. Think of it, what if your character grew in power, but your challenges did not? Well, then everything you do would get easier and easier, and all the obstacles you faced would seem more and more trivial. And the game would lose all drama and get boring fast.
It’s important that there are always obstacles in the path of the protagonists – for that is where drama comes from. These could be physical, military, emotional, even spiritual – there’s needs to be challenges to overcome.
But we don’t have to overcomplicate it. We don’t need to create a level system for the illusion of “progress” – not if we can admit to ourselves that we don’t really want progress – not in the manner of our character’s life becoming easy and uninteresting.
We can simply embrace the idea that our “progress” is no more and no less than the progress of the story that we tell. That we move from the first reveal to the next plot twist, to the final obstacle. If we are telling an exciting and compelling story, we really don’t need Level 2 and another fighting stance. Which, come to think of it, is why you can tell just as fulfilling stories in the comics even though most supers begin with their full powerset, as opposed to receiving one power doled out every ten issues.
The next post will address the dual questions of what awards do players get without advancement as well as whether we can still accomplish everything we could in a level based game without advancement.
Scott Pilgrim, or Dare to Fail
[Multiple spoilers may follow. Just sayin’.]
Recently I watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for the second time and roundabout the same time I had a friend telling me how very much he didn’t like the movie. But as I was watching it I was mesmerized by the approach to storytelling the movie took. It may well be, at least in this writer’s opinion, the most authentic translation of a comic book/video game to film – certainly the most ambitious. It was a unique and fascinating experience.
And yet, for all its merits, Scott Pilgrim fails, in several ways. The story itself is two dimensional. The fight sequences began to seem unending. Some of the plot twists were cliched (although still fitting.) And if after you finish the movie you’re like, “What? He chose Ramona? What about Knives Chau?” you’re not alone – seems like that’s how the script was originally written before Hollywood got its claws into the film and forced a “Guy gets the Trophy Girl” ending. Obviously if you ask me, Scott and Knives make a better ending. Guess what? They didn’t ask me.
However, my friend’s rejection of the movie led me to wondering – would it have been better if this movie hadn’t been made? Do the admittedly considerable flaws relegate the endeavor of this film to the pile of “what were they thinking?” and “they should have known better”?
Actually, I don’t think so. And there are two reasons why.
The first is that for all the movie does not give us, what it does get right is not only awesomely cool, but it’s awesomely cool in a new and unique way. There aren’t many movies made like this – because what they tried to make was a funky, largely original concept (for a film). So when you see an over the top battle sequence that thrills, and that ends with Scott’s vanquished foe bursting into reward tokens as blue “+2000” floats over his head – you notice! In a way, this movie is an experiment at filming a story using the metaphors and language of comic books and video games, not the standard film techniques – and the unusual result shows that.
So you come away with many of these “wow” moments, regardless of how the film succeeds or not as a whole. It’s just so damn authentic. And the experience of those moments is something you aren’t going to get in most other films. So Scott Pilgrim has that going for it.
But even if it utterly failed to produce any of those moments, it is vital that story tellers dare to try new things, dare to overreach, dare to fail, because without that audacity amazing opportunities will be missed.
And that’s really the larger point. Scott Pilgrim (the film) was incredibly ambitious. And even if they had failed from top to bottom (which they did not) I have to give them serious applause for what they were going for. I have to support that kind of risk-taking – because those kinds of risks are exactly what leads to the truly mind-blowing successes when they do work.
So that’s the lesson of movies like Scott Pilgrim, or Chronicle, or even the venerable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. There’s a quote from another movie I like a lot, Stick It:
“Make [them] look. But I’m not talking about putting a cute smile on your face as if they’re doing you a favor. Make them look. If you’re gonna eat mat, you eat mat hard. Don’t play it safe. You gotta throw your best tricks as hard as you can.”
All of us who run or play story games could take a lesson from this – and from Scott Pilgrim.
Be bold. Be audacious. Dare to fail – spectacularly. Because not only will you create a spectacle – you may create moments of transcendence within your gaming group that will be part of each of you forever. I know I have – and those moments are the greatest rewards I have ever gotten from story gaming.
Would you give that up?
Paving the way versus “earning” it
I was working on a facet of the Dream Factory 2.0 improved Boon system, talking it over with some of my friends and playtesters, when the subject naturally turned to how the acquisition of a new Boon, such as increased wealth, a new magical artifact, or a powerful ally, is justified. And quickly I was presented with one of gaming’s most common conflations – paving the way for a story event or change versus earning it.
There are quite a few gamers out there (you know who you are, grin) that are all about the pursuit of conquest – not within the game, but over it. That is, these conquest driven gamers are looking to prove themselves in these games – they want to know that they earned their character’s successes in the story – or conversely, should failure occur, they want it to be because they as a player earned that failure. To a great extent, there is an element of pride involved – that in “beating” the game, they can claim a personal victory, not unlike the victories claimed in all kinds of games from sports to chess to solitaire.
There’s nothing wrong with conquest gamers. I personally am friends with many of them. But there’s another way, a way that interests me much more deeply whereas conquest gaming leaves me cold. A way that posits as the fundamental goal not the satisfaction of victory, but the extraordinary experience of being a part of creating and experiencing a deep and fulfilling story.
Even with narrative gaming, you can’t hand out desired story outcomes like water. Not because the players haven’t earned them, but for a much more important reason – it’s boring! A compelling narrative must involve elements of suspense, drama, and a dash of unpredictability – for this is what takes all the masterfully crafted elements and binds us irrevocably to them.
And then there’s consistency and cohesion to consider – or to put another way, the very integrity of the story itself. Not integrity as in honor and ethics – though that’s good to have in your game. No, integrity as in the basic structural soundness of the story, its stability and believability. Nothing will ruin that faster than permitting story outcomes and events that do not have sufficient in-game justification.
You just can’t shove anything you want into the story and not damage it, unless you take time and care to make sure that it fits – that it feels natural. So if the player wants to buy a Boon of having a powerful new Ally – perhaps a highly placed government official or something – you need to pave the way for the introduction of this new thing. It’s not about the player earning it – although they are paying Karma points for it. But Karma points are not enough and neither entitles nor requires damage to the integrity of the story.
Everything in the story is this way. Every event, every addition, deletion, or modification to the story and its elements needs to be done thoughtfully and with respect to the fundamental wellbeing of the story’s integrity. This to me is the cardinal rule of running role-playing games – well, narrative ones, anyways.
It’s true that purchasing an approved Boon guarantees the player of the outcome of getting what it represents in game. But it does not give the player a shortcut, a way to skip having to pave the way for its introduction. It simply makes a certainty out of a possibility, and engages the GM on the player’s side to help them pave the way for it to manifest.
Whether or not players are involved in personal conquest, always, always, always, pave the way for each and every in-game occurrence that needs it. Your gaming experience will thank you for it.
To sim or not to sim…
I touched on this a little in the previous post, but I wanted to go a little more in depth. Now I could write a whole essay, a whole series of essays, about this. But blog posts are supposed to be easily digestible in a limited period of time, right? So I should probably just hit the high points for now.
My thought is this: if a game (a roleplaying game, of course, that’s what we are talking about) tries to be realistic via its ruleset then it’s trying to Sim – that is, it’s trying to simulate what would “really” happen if the events in the game played themselves out in real life. (Or at least the life that matches the context of the story, even if that includes magic, or faster-than-light travel, or whatever.)
There are a couple of signs that a game is a classical “sim” type of RPG. One starting point is the character sheet. Are there character attributes encoded on the character sheet, for later application in figuring out whether the character can do something, like dodge a sword blow or break down a door? If you look at a character sheet and see many attributes like Strength, Dexterity, Toughness, Perception, Mind, and so on, you may be looking at a Sim game.
A better measure is what are the points of uncertainty in the game and what sort of answer do we look for in resolving them? Every RPG, being story based, has points of uncertainty where we don’t know (for example) if our protagonist will defeat the enemy – or even survive their onslaught. We need some way to determine the outcome – and that’s what the ruleset is usually for, telling us how we decide (or who gets to decide) that outcome.
The most common method (though obviously not the only one) is to have a formula that adds known quantities to create a probabilistic goal – and then one rolls dice to see if one can make the required target. A character with a Strength of 10 and a Bash skill of 5 may be trying to break down a door with a Toughness rating of 20, and perhaps the game’s formula says to add Strength plus Bash plus the roll of two six sided dice, and if you beat the Toughness rating of the door, it falls. In this case, the players would be hoping to roll a 5 or better on 2d6.
This is a Sim style game. When coming up with rules on how things should be determined, the author decided that they wanted to, to some degree of accuracy or other, model what would really happen in a similar situation in reality. In a way, most Sim style rpgs (most mainstream ones) are kind of like simple computer programs run manually by the GM (the game’s referee).
When you design a Sim style game, you have a LOT of work cut out for you. You have to:
1. Come up with way to model the attributes of the real world.
2. Come up with rule sets and formulae that create outcomes that are believable.
3. Keep it all simple enough to be used by normal people.
4. But at the same time, prevent abusive “holes” in the system from being exploitable.
It can be a huge challenge! But it occurs to me that perhaps Sim RPGs are answering the wrong question. Perhaps when Bif the Beneficent tries to break down the door, instead of asking “What would really happen in real life” we could instead ask “What outcome makes a better story?” And “better” could be defined however you like – a more dramatic story, a more comedic story, a more fulfilling story, etc.
It’s not that we are simply tossing out realism, mind you – because outcomes that are consistently unbelievable past our threshold of acceptance ruin the story, rendering those other goals moot. But perhaps we can police the realism of our story gaming the same way that writers do – by simply keeping it in mind ourselves as we choose outcomes (and having a GM enforcing the same.) Perhaps we don’t need rulesets to do that for us.
Maybe all the rules of the game have to do is help us resolve story uncertainties in the most interesting way? With of course provisions for when players have differing opinions on that score?
Sim games will always have a place – after all, currently they are the majority, and you would not be wrong to say “vast”. And a good crunchy dungeon romp or by the numbers battle can be as enjoyable as any board game or computer game – more so, in some cases.
But nothing achieves better story gaming than RPGs pointed straight at the target – non Sim, story based resolution rulesets. Having played Sims for decades, I have found my new home, both as an RPG author and RPG gamer, with Story Gaming.
And that is why I built Dream Factory, why I am writing its second edition, and why I have an utterly new RPG project lined up after that.
Because ultimately whether a character’s actions are perfectly and accurately realistic is far less important, at least to me, then whether the character’s story is compelling and moving. And rulesets that help the achievement of those goals are the ones that most excite me.
And so it begins… again…
There is a hole in your mind… What do you want?… No one here is exactly what he appears…. Nothing’s the same anymore…. Commander Sinclair is being reassigned…. Why don’t you eliminate the entire Narn homeworld while you’re at it?… I see a great hand reaching out of the stars…. Who are you?… President Clark has signed a decree today declaring martial law…. These orders have forced us to declare independence…. unless you people get off your encounter-suited butts and do something!… You are the one who was…. If you go to Z’Ha’Dum, you will die…. Why are you here?… Do you have anything worth living for?… I think of my beautiful city in flames…… like giants in the playground…… Now get the hell out of our galaxy!… We are here to place President Clark under arrest.
Waitasec… I drifted there… where was I?
Oh yes, my core gaming group (who have generously been my playtest group for the past few years as well) has reassembled and as of yesterday we have a new game and game plan! Two spanking new characters, a brand new invented world (even if I did steal some of the better bits from others sources, ahem), a new quest, new lynchpins and quandaries, the whole kit and caboodle – and the first game to be played with the all new completed (so far) 2.0 rules – especially the new Boons and Effects! (I feel like a “Whee!” is somehow appropriate here, but I’ll restrain myself – somehow, grin.)
I would love us to have another member, maybe even two – it would be nice to have at least three players besides me (the GM), so if you are in the local area (Southwestern NH/Southeastern VT) and are interested, let me know, benn@4efix.com – could be fun!
The game plan we built yesterday wound up being fantasy, which for our group is unusual as we’ve typically gone “Super” often. But to avoid the stereotypical fantasy gaming experience, we made a few tweaks:
- no non human intelligent races – no elves, dwarves, etc. However, we do have different human races and cultures which are reminiscent of the standard fantasy tropes. So while we have the Dunad humans, who tend to be a short, stocky, hardy, mountain people, they have no special racial “abilities” like detection or craftmanship – gives the whole thing a more “authentic” less campy feel.
- We set it in a more Renaissance type period as opposed to a more primitive middle ages. (Still no gunpowder though.)
- We choose a more adventurous, swashbuckling theme. (Okay, that one’s less about being unique, grin.)
In addition, we came up with five magic systems (I did, um, “borrow” a few from Lyndon Hardy) including:
- Wizardry – the practice of spell-casting, with each Wizard learning how to engrave his spells on reality itself, to deepen the channel through which magic flows – the deeper the channel, the less chance of a miscast.
- Sorcery – the practice of Demon summoning, all about domination and control. Good news, if you dominate the demon you summon, you can have them do one thing for you. Bad news – if they dominate you they can ride your body like a Harley for awhile.
- Alchemy – the practice of finding substances and things in the world that one can combine essences of to create potions – knowing that it’s a matter of probabilities, and that you frequently have to start out making a hundred potions to even have a 50/50 chance of winding up with one success.
- Artificery – the practice of making artifacts and magic items, requiring days or even weeks of rituals of patience, perseverance, and above all perfection to finally make that one perfect item – unless you make one tiny mistake and have to start from scratch.
- And finally, the Naturals, who do not count themselves as a magical practice – and indeed are mostly against magic, which makes sense given the techniques they learn to, through calm serenity, project harmony and tranquility – which can interrupt, stifle, or even destroy all other forms of magic.
We’re all stoked to play – and with the disappearance of ALL the mages of rank master or above, across the whole continent, the apprentices are the only one’s left to trying to figure out what this all means – including the sudden and unexplained appearance of countless obsidian spires off the coasts of this continent.
Guess it’s up to the Questers to get to the bottom of what’s going on – and to do something about it!
And they’re off!
Without the “storytelling”, there’s very little point to the “game”.
This isn’t just a Dream Factory centric observation – although the idea has been baked into the DNA of Dream Factory and probably will be baked into every other game I ever make:
It’s all about the story-telling. Or to be more accurate, It’s all about the story experiencing.
Whether you are a GM or a player, either way, you are the audience for the story being developed by your gaming group. Now, I’m not going to say what “correct” or the “right” kind of play is. Except I sort of am – but please, I don’t mean it literally. I know quite well that we each, individually and in groups, can and should pursue our fun or other rewarding experiences wherever we find them.
But a roleplaying game has a bit of a baked-in idea – that we are using characters that we play (or inhabit, or manipulate, or “own”, or act through/portray/guide/etc) to not only interact with a developing story, but often use the lens of that character’s perspective as our camera lens through which we experience the story.
So the story matters.
In my experience, roleplaying games tend to go to one extreme or the other. Classical roleplaying games tend to try to simulate to some degree the aspects of the entities of the game, with things like strength attributes and structural damage capacity rating – and then contain rules for how to determine if your character swinging (with a 17 Strength) an axe (with a damage rating of 12) using his melee skill (rated at Rank 7) at a door to chop through it (the door’s toughness rated at 27) – does the character chop through it? How quickly? These classical games are in large part like little computer simulations, but instead of a computer program run on a computer, the rule set is the program and they are run in the minds of the GM and the players. The key guiding point is some level of accuracy, that is, given all the data (character strength, Axe sharpness and weight, skill, and the material and structure of the door) would the character be able to break the door down?
Classical RPGs therefore ask “what ought to happen?” to mean “what is realistic, given the setting?”
The newer indie narrative style games work differently. Though they are varied and individual, my experience of them in general is that they function by making a game of the story elements themselves. So rather than rule sets simulating the reality of the game world, they have rule sets meant to induce certain player behavior and/or experiences. For example, an indie narrative RPG might have a rule that each time a character suffers embarrassment, humiliation, or shame in the story in game, they acquire points which can be spent to decide critical things – like stopping the evil plan or breaking down doors. This creates a situation that induces the players to play towards horrible personal experiences in character for the story power to decide important turning points.
Indie RPGs therefore use the game mechanics not to simulate the game world, but to create (hopefully) interesting feedback loops of behavior wherein the rule set channels or promotes directly the desired texture and atmosphere.
However, I tend to feel extremely “meh” ultimately about both. I don’t care if a story is an accurate simulation of “what would really happen” if its boring, frustrating, or simply not the compelling tale it could be. And to constrain or induce specific behavior through overly artificial mechanics seems cumbersome and the wrong focus.
The focus, I think, should be on creating an experience the audience will remember, one that is moving, compelling, surprising. Special. Emotional, even. Unique. You know that feeling you get after seeing an amazing, mind-altering, life-changing TV show or movie? Yeah, like that.
There’s NO reason you can’t have that in your roleplaying too.
All you need is a roleplaying game with rules that stay the %$!#@ out of your way until you need them. Rules that let your group tell the story it wants to tell, without intruding to either promote un-needed accuracy (like that door really needed to fall 3.7 seconds faster) or to heavy-handedly push it’s own agenda (like the game would be better if everyone over-acted).
The rules ought to be there to handle it when there is disagreement or uncertainty about what happens next.
And that’s pretty much all they should ever do – meaning until that occurs, there shouldn’t even be the NEED for rules. Until that happens, the rules should shut the *bleep* up!
And funnily enough, that’s why I made Dream Factory.
Rockmelt: Will it make me post more?
Well, after discussion with a writer friend who has gone whole-hog on the social media front (whose website can be found at www.maynedon.com, if I may permitted to pimp him out), I am going to try *some* amount of making this work.
What that means is trying to post more, here. Making a Facebook Page and using it. Maybe even twitter – we’ll see.
I have to keep the focus – especially right now – on designing, writing, and publishing the second edition of Dream Factory, *but* it’s probably time for me to try to do *some* marketing and leveraging of social media to get DF a wider base of exposure.
My current tool for use: Rockmelt
www.rockmelt.com
It’s interesting.
Here we go.
I’m a bad blogger – but a good (or at least focused) game designer.
I just wanted to add a note, because I realize that this blog looks a LOT like many others I have seen – sporadic entries to say the least – and I always come away from those blogs thinking, “Hmm… Seems kinda dead… I guess this thing isn’t much of a going concern.”
Now I realize that all a quiet blog means is that the guy not blogging is doing something else.
In my case, a lack of regular blog posts does NOT indicate that I am not playing and working on Dream Factory. Quite the opposite – I both play DF and work on it many times each week, with no exceptions. What I am not good at is taking time away from working on DF, from doing my income paying job, from watching my TV shows (there, I said it, grin), and generally dealing with life stuff to make sure I post blogs consistently. I suck at that. I admit it.
Long story short, please do not assume that the sporadic and lightly populated blog means anything regarding the liveliness of the Dream Factory RPG itself. Because nothing could be further from the truth – as my friends will verify, it’s just about all I talk about and do.
And the proof of that is me running DF at local Cons (JiffyCon, when it’s in Eastern MA, CarnageCon) – not to mention a new edition on its way, to hopefully be available to the general public in September or October.
Count on it. 🙂
Dream Factory 2nd Ed coming together!!
Since December 2009, when I first came up with DF, I have been honing and play-testing, culminating in a published game in November of 2011, when I took this game to CarnageCon and ran it.
Since then, I’ve been working to improve it, to simplify it where possible, and to deepen in where necessary. The second edition I am working on now is I believe head and shoulders above the first.
The latest challenge is a total redesign of Boons – ongoing story effects that you can purchase – to better reflect the worth of them, while still keeping Boons relatively simple. The redesign was the greatest struggle yet in all of my design of DF, first edition or second, and I had several false starts, but finally, I think I have a Boon system that is what DF 2.0 needs.
The Boon system was one of the last mechanics that needed to be overhauled for DF2.0, and with that hopefully out of the way, the mechanics work on DF2.0 may be largely done, leaving nothing but the rewriting, editing, and publishing – which aren’t small things at all, but moving from mechanics work to the writing part feels like needed progress – especially if I want to have this all done by September 1st.
After all, there’s another CarnageCon in November. 🙂
Note: Without the kind and generous help of my friends, and their willingness to not only playtest but help brainstorm solutions to problems, none of this would have been possible. Thank you Andrew, Jeff, Ben(2), and Mike!
The Day Of…
Well, ’tis here. Packed up most everything last night. Gotta grab a shower, load up the car, hit the bank and the snack store, and then it’s off to the ‘Con. It’s 8:19am now, and at 1pm today I run my first Dream Factory Con session. The compressed self-contained nature of convention gaming will be a new experience for as far as GMing – since usually when I GM I like to take my time letting things roll as they like.
It will be interesting.
I hope there will be a lot of vendors and merch up there as well (apart from the 45 copies of DF I’m bringing). Maybe a few new quirky RPGs that someone else has written to add to my collection. 😉
Buckle up, here we go.