Adventures That Assume the Party Will Be Foolish

Many old school D&D adventures from back in the day were written with the clear assumption that a party would go up to a door, make little effort to discover what might be behind it, open it, and all bumble into the room beyond the door.  I say "bumble" because this is a good way to get dead, whether you're clearing houses in the Middle East or exploring dungeons in a fantasy setting.

It's also the easy way to write D&D adventures.  If you start by assuming that the adventuring party is going to do something stupid, it's a lot easier to endanger them.

Now granted an awful lot of D&D adventuring parties do behave in foolish ways with regularity.  The typical adventuring party in D&D is a gang of Chaotic-Neutral thugs, slightly homicidal muggers, looking for creatures to beat up and rob (and kill, if they can get away with it).  (See http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/10/thugs.html ) They would never think to do something like take prisoners to gather information, and the very idea of running away from an encounter, especially one that isn't necessary, seems to be foreign to most parties, even those who are not thugs.

But this kind of foolish behavior is not inevitable (nor is everyone a thug) and should not be treated as so by adventure writers.

What precipitated this rant was a session at "D&D Encounters" recently.  We were led out of the sewers by some guard/guides to an open area in a town, a town known to be a very dangerous place.  The referee, evidently following what was written in the adventure book, said we could set up only in a particular very narrow area in the middle of a broad thoroughfare.  I supposed he would then let us do our due diligence about spreading out--an absolute requirement in a world of area-effect spells and ambushes-- before having the encounter start.  When that wasn't forthcoming I protested at being required to be in the small area when there was lots of room to set up some kind of defensive perimeter.

But then the person we were following, the nominal heir to the throne, but who we knew had been acting erratically and dangerously, turned up and gave a brief badguy's speech and then blasted our entire party from a distance with an area-effect spell.  We had been confined a small area so that everybody could be hit by the spell. No initiative was rolled and we weren't given a chance to react.  This was true even though I said, as she was giving the speech, that I had tried to bail out of the way (spread out).

You might expect the "D&D Encounters" adventures to be written more realistically and intelligently than old-time dungeon crawls, but perhaps not.  We still have the same old assumption that the players are foolish if not stupid.  I asked the referee if indeed his adventure book specified that we should all be blasted like this, and he said yes.  (It's worth noting that our guides/guards were all killed in the blast, conveniently getting them out of the way.)

The equivalent of this in a video game is a cutscene that makes the player(s) do somethng he or she would never do, in order to advance the plot.

But what if the party just won't do what you have planned for them?  If you're a referee, you can wing it (sometimes), make something up that ultimately gets back on track.  If you're an adventure writer for other referees you don't have that option.   In the end you have a different choice: make the party do something that, for some parties, will annoy them no end because whatever-it-is is foolish; or let the referee go "out of character" and say, "if you don't choose to pursue this adventure, the entire sequence is over".  If the players decide they don't want to go further, then your linear plot may not be as good as you thought, and in any case no matter how good a story is, some people won't like it.

What might be my more general advice for adventure writers?  Well, my first bit of advice is don't write a linear adventure that has to follow a particular story.  But that's exactly what a lot of people want to or even need to do.  In that case I suggest that even if you're writing a linear story try not to suppose that the adventurers will do exactly what you expect.  Anyone who has reffed a lot of D&D knows that the party is more likely to do what you don't expect than what you do expect.  There are ways to canalize a party, to force it to follow particular path, without assuming that it behaves foolishly.  Find and use them.  The more often you assume that a party will do a particular thing, the more often your adventure will go awry.

6 words about game design

(You may have seen this on BGG or Gamasutra already.)

According to tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter is 6 word stories.  Those can be amusing, and I once asked Britannia fans to write the story of Britannia in 6 words with good results.

But this time I have something harder in mind: say what a game designer does, or what he is, in 6 words.  Or if that's too challenging, try 10.  I have a version of both, but I'll hold off on it for now.

“Analog” versus “Digital” in Games

Blogs are informal, and occasionally allow the writer to indulge himself, as in discussing his pet peeves.  One of my pet peeves is the misuse of the terms analog and digital to represent non-electronic games and electronic games.  I prefer the terms tabletop and video because they are more mellifluous and more directly address what people typically mean when they say analog games or digital games.  I use video rather than computer because of the odd notion in many quarters that game consoles don’t count as computers. (They’re just limited and specialized computers, computer wannabes, really.)  So I have to use video in order to include consoles.  Baseball is an analog game, but sports are not usually what people mean when they talk about “analog games”, nor are they talking about “tag”or other children’s games.  They usually mean games played at a table.

Something that is analog is continuous without discrete units or detents.  Time is analog although we try to divide it into smaller and smaller pieces.  Sound is also analog, although we have been able to divide it into such small parts that we can’t tell the difference between the digitized sound on computers and music CDs as compared with actual sound. ¹(Definitions from Dictionary.com at the end of the article.)

Something that is digital is divided into discrete units with nothing in between.  The result of a die roll is digital: it’s a number one through six and cannot be 1 ½ or 2 3/4.  Modern computers do everything in “ons” and “offs” (1s and 0s), hence they’re digital.

There are analog computers, such as a slide rule for those who remember such things.  In World War II one of the reasons to develop digital computers was to replace the analog computers that were laboriously used to calculate ballistics tables for artillery.

You can see then that many tabletop games are in fact digital.  Therefore it makes no sense to use “digital games” for electronic games.  Nor does “analog games” work for non-electronic games.  I actually used “electronic” and “non-electronic” for a while, but they are too cumbersome.  So I substituted “tabletop” where that’s appropriate (again, baseball is not a tabletop game, but is a non-electronic game).  And I substitute “video” (or sometimes “computer”) for electronic games.

While I am probably fighting against a tidal wave, I can only say that using “analog” to describe tabletop games and “digital” to describe video games does not make sense.



Analog:
adjective
of or pertaining to a mechanism that represents data by measurement of a continuous physical variable, as voltage or pressure.

Digital:
adjective
5.      electronics: responding to discrete values of input voltage and producing discrete output voltage levels, as in a logic circuit: digital circuit
3.      representing data as a series of numerical values
4.      displaying information as numbers rather than by a pointer moving over a dial: a digital voltmeter; digital read-out
1.      of, relating to, resembling, or possessing a digit or digits
2.      performed with the fingers


¹Yes I know there are still people who claim that they can tell the difference between analog sound and digital sound, and there are a few nuts who claim that digitized sound is destroying modern ears.

"Thugs"

I’ve observed D&D players for more than 35 years, and one consistent observation is that the majority of them play characters who are essentially Chaotic Neutral thugs.  This is particularly true if they’re not in a long-term campaign.  They’re happy to go around beating up other creatures, killing the ones that they can get away with killing (that is, the monsters or the evil types), mugging those they may not kill, and getting whatever useful stuff they can extract out of people or other creatures.  The ideal of “hero” only goes so far, sometimes doesn’t go anywhere at all, though there are also many players who are quite willing to be heroic in the game.

There are various levels of “thug”, and a lot worse than thug, such as the people who are entirely self-indulgent, will do whatever they want, and don’t care about what happens to their fellow party members.  Often the completely self-indulgent players are below the age of majority, but it can happen at any age.  I think of D&D as a highly cooperative game, and such people are nearly impossible to work with.  On the other hand I can work with thugs–sometimes.

I had an example of thuggishness at a recent “D&D Encounters” session that I play in at a local game shop.  D&D Encounters is organized by Wizards of the Coast to help introduce people to D&D.  It is a series of connected sessions with a story of sorts, though the major purpose is to have battles.  This seems partly to be built into 4th edition D&D, though some of this battle orientation is unavoidable because the sessions are open to whoever happens to walk-in and so we often have new players who don’t know the story or have any history with the group.  Over the course of playing since last winter there are only two players (including me) left from the original group that was large enough to play three sessions simultaneously.  I started playing to learn about 4th edition D&D and continue because I sometimes get boardgames playtested after the D&D, and because I like the other person who has been with it from the beginning.  Over the course of that time we have played three “seasons”, so I am now with my third character that I have run up from first level to third.

So while the game is highly linear, which tends to be associated with a strong story orientation, in practice there isn’t much story because players change so often.

In general at these sessions people are willing to be the good guys and do what’s required to have the adventure, if only because there’s no alternative.  There can be lots of hostile byplay between characters, though, and at least one character was killed by his own party on a day I wasn’t present (though knowing the character, I have to say he was asking to get dead). 

But at the end of this recent adventure we ran into problems.  We had defeated the enemy, and clearly our final task for the “season” was to pursue and defeat “the heir”, the bad guy.  As the fight ended, some civilians came out of a nearby building and gave us some information and then a “general” who was more or less second-in-command in what was left of the city came up to ask us to go defeat the heir.  It was a rather odd interjection, as we were clearly going to dothat  anyway because that’s what the linear D&D Encounters calls for.

It is typical in RPGs that if you’re always a good guy and never ask for any benefit you may not get one.  So when my female character spoke to this “general” who was asking us to take on the bad guy alone while her troops protected what was left of the city, I asked if she had any magic items that she could lend or give us that would help us in the last battle.  She said no but if we used her name with the merchants we might be able to get good deals if there were any to be purchased (though this would be after the final battle, of course).  In the circumstances, with what is left of the city more or less falling down around us owing to plague monsters, I thought that was the best we could get and I was ready to go on.

But some of my colleagues thought otherwise.  (I might interject here that all but two of the players are 18 to 20 years old, and that includes the referee who is not highly experienced.  I’m three times their age and there’s one other player who is in between my age and theirs.  He is regarded as the “talker” of the group, because they aren’t keen to do the talking, and I tend to keep my mouth shut so as not to control things too much.)  So the talker and one or two of the others essentially tried to verbally shake down this general to get more benefits-- starting the thug behavior that I’m talking about.  I put both hands over my mouth, to the amusement of the referee, because I wanted to let things play out however they were going to play out.  And the way they played out was that the referee, who has already shown himself to be fairly extreme in his points of view and reactions at times, played the general as quite offended.  We came to a point where part of our party threatened to refuse to go after the bad guy (the heir) even though that would mean the end of the city.  And the general pretty much said “do your worst”!   I finally spoke up and said I was going after the bad guy and went some distance away because I didn’t want to be associated with what was going on.  The inexperienced referee finally asked the experienced referee of the other group, who is the local organizer of the whole business, what he could do.  In the end that referee said well you can go to the stock rooms and shake these guys down for whatever they’ve got but meanwhile the city will fall down around your ears and that will be that.

The session ended at that point and we had a long discussion about the appropriateness of the thuggish behavior.  My main point was that their attempted shakedown had failed, and so their behavior was not appropriate no matter what they thought of it.  I said I had asked for something and got a concession and that was pretty clearly (to me) all we were going to get.  When the ensuing conversation made this even more clear (I thought), then they should have given up rather than proceed to the ultimate shakedown.  But there was lots of disagreement.  No one seemed to think he or she had done anything wrong, though some of the people who seemed to agree with the shakedown artists while it was happening now said they were no part of it . . .

Thugs, gangsters, whatever you want to call it, that’s often the way D&D characters behave.  I’m sure next week we’ll go on to take out the bad guy, and I hope that my efforts have separated me from my thuggish colleagues (not that it matters as that will be the end of the “season”), but it’s possible that we’ll get no benefit other than the knowledge of a job well done.

Much of playing with this group is about people-watching–they love to banter with each other (and talk over each other), and it takes a long time to get anything done-- and it was certainly interesting.  But not good play.

Dragon Rage news

Dragon Rage is available in the US for a limited time from Fun Again Games:
http://www.funagain.com/control/product?product_id=024826

A review of Dragon Rage appeared in a British blog.   http://rivcoach.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/review-dragon-rage-from-flatlined-games/
Also on BGG. 
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/684165/boardgames-in-blighty-reviews-dragon-rage

A review of Dragon Rage on Opinionated Gamer.
http://opinionatedgamers.com/2011/10/04/review-of-dragon-rage-flatlined-games/#more-3873

Another review at Fortress Ameritrach.
http://fortressat.com/index.php/articles-boardgame-reviews/2898-dragon-rage-review.

Video review, in German, of Dragon Rage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nj-ZHlwA7I&feature=youtube_gdata

When you start a game design, conceive a game, not a wish list

This is something that should be obvious, yet despite everything I’ve written about beginners designing games I have not said it explicitly.  And I know from my teaching experience that to many people it isn’t obvious.  It is especially important for people who want to design video games rather than tabletop games. 

When you set out to design a game it’s important to know what you want that game to do, what the impact will be on the players.  But it’s much more important to know how the game is going to do that.  Typically, beginners trying to design a video game will have visions of how wonderful it will be and how “kewl” and how much it will be just what they want to play, but if they try to solidify their notions they end up with a wish list of what they want the game to do, not a description of how the game is going to do it.  And if you try to pin them down to how the game is going to do it they have no clue.  (I don’t mean the details of programming, I mean the mechanics that the programming will enforce.) This is a special case of “hiding behind the computer”.  The would-be designer completely loses track of the link between where he wants to go and where he is now, he more or less assumes that the computer will make it possible.  “And a miracle occurs”.

What you want the game to do is part of the “idea”, how it will do it is part of the “structure”.  As many have said, ideas are a dime a dozen.  It’s the execution, the how, that makes a difference.  The structure provides the framework for “how” to happen.

A wish list is OK, but if you don’t know how to get there you may just be describing your favorite game on steroids, your favorite game “to the max”.  Frequently in such lists the would-be designer will say that he or she will have the best story ever, the best graphics ever, and so forth, which actually doesn’t mean anything at all.  Because unless you know some practical method that will let you have the best story or the best graphics or the “best _____”, no one’s going to believe you’ll do it and it’s most unlikely to happen.  In other words you’re wishing, not designing.  In a sense it’s a form of fanboy-ism.

The tabletop game designer is less likely to fall into this trap because there’s no computer to hide behind.  It’s much more obvious that the designer has to figure out the mechanisms the game will use to reach the desired result.  This is yet another reason why it is more practical and more instructive to learn to design with tabletop games even if you intend to be a video game design.

Too many Choices?

Several people have pointed out that a major difference between wargames and Euro-style games is the number of (plausible) choices presented to a player when it is his turn.  Wargames, especially the old-style (“traditional”) Avalon Hill hex and counter wargames like Stalingrad, Afrika Korps, Waterloo, and their descendants, offer vast numbers of choices to a player when it's his turn and he can move every one of his 40 or 50 units in a great variety of ways.  Some of these choices are not plausible but a great many are.  The great number of choices is one of the reasons why these games can have a lot of depth (“strategic depth” is the phrase sometimes used).  There can be a lot of strategy in the game because there are a lot of choices.  And it's to be noted that these are two player games, where you don't have the variables of the intentions of several other players and you don't need to worry about the impact of your choices on what those players might do to you.  In a two player game you know the other player is your enemy, period.

In most Euro-style games you have relatively few plausible choices in your turn.  In the Euro games where you're playing cards then you only have as many choices as the cards allow.  You are often limited in the number of cards that you can have in hand as well.  In Euro boardgames you often control very few pieces or units, and you are often quite limited in what you can do by action points or money or other resources.

This means that often players are "put on the horns of a dilemma" in choosing amongst the few alternatives that are available.  And that's what games of strategy are about.  But in wargames with many more choices, the dilemma is often greater.

In a multi-player wargame (such as Diplomacy) consideration of the intentions of other players increases the range of options when you play.  On the other hand, even though most Euro-style games are for more than two players, there often isn't much direct interaction with other players.  That means you don't have to worry as much about their intentions as in a wargame, again limiting the number of choices you have to make.

Concomitants of few choices
I'm convinced that this difference in the number of choices means that it's much easier to play a Euro-style game intuitively than to play a traditional wargame intuitively.  To me when you have a large number of choices you have to use logic, as well as intuition, to effectively decide what to do.  But I can't explain that conviction, as I think you could argue that when there are too many choices that's the time when intuition can be more effective than logic.  Perhaps it's just that I play logically rather than intuitively, and I grew up with traditional wargames.

Another consequence of limited choice is that players can fail to pay attention for various intervals and still have a chance of using their intuition to choose an at-least-decent move.  If you don't pay attention in a typical hex-and-counter wargame you're going to get your butt kicked by someone who is paying attention.

Limited plausible choices also means the player does not need much downtime to think about how he's going to move/play.  In effect, each player's move is much less complex than in a wargame, but it takes much less time as well.  In a sense it is as though you divided up the wargame turn into many separate turns.  Yet the Euro games do not take longer than wargames, in fact typically less, and that may be because Euro games usually have more or less arbitrary turn limits.  You play to a certain number of turns or points and then you're done, you don't have to dominate the opposition in the sense of wiping them out or capturing their capital or other distant/difficult objective that you would have in many traditional commercial wargames.

Transparency
Another consequence of the relatively small number of choices is that many Euro-style games are fairly "transparent," that is, after a player plays one game he often thinks that he knows the right things to do to win, and in many cases he's correct in that thought.  This contrasts with many other games, especially some wargames, where you may have to play the game quite a few times before you come close to fully understanding the strategies involved.  I'd cite my game Britannia as a case where playing once only begins to reveal the strategy of the game.  People who are used to transparent Euro games sometimes play Britannia and complain that the game is badly unbalanced, because they have not yet begun to see what the various colors can actually do to influence/control the outcome.

This transparency is one of the reasons why Euro-style games are popular.  After all, the origin of Euro-style games is as "family games on steroids," and while we are long beyond that with many Euro-style games, there is still this tradition that they should be relatively easy to "figure out" how to play well.

The transparency of most Euro-style games may help explain why so many of them are only played a small number of times.  Players figure it all out quickly, then move on to the next game.  Perhaps it’s more likely that a game with few plausible choices per turn is less likely to have the kind of depth that characterizes some games with lots of choices that people play dozens to hundreds of times.

Much of that transparency comes from the limited number of plausible choices players are typically faced with.   If there are more choices than a player wants to deal with, "analysis paralysis" can set in.  The player can't figure out what to do, and does nothing for an extended period., either not taking his turn, or doing nothing in his turn.

Resemblance of Euros to traditional card games
In respect of few choices Euro-style games of all kinds much more resemble cardgames than Chess or Go.  In a card game you have a relatively small number of choices, represented by the cards in your hand.  In typical traditional cardgames each card can only be used for one purpose such as playing it onto a trick in Bridge.  A relatively simple boardgame like Checkers may have a similar number of plausible choices in each turn, but Chess or Go have many, many more.

In chess we have only 16 units on a side and only 64 locations on the board, but in many cases most of those units can move, and offer a variety of choices.  The vital importance of each choice-- in a top class game if you make one mistake you may be doomed-- means that a player must consider a great many choices despite the small number of units.

On the other hand Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts and Crosses) presents very few choices, which is one reason why a well played game always ends in a draw.  Checkers presents many fewer choices than Chess or Diplomacy, but a lot more than Tic-Tac-Toe.

In Diplomacy there are only 34 units in the entire game yet seven players when it starts.  Much of the richness comes from the fact that there are many players.  There is a tactical richness in the movement of the units even though there are not a large number of choices, because movement is simultaneous and deterministic (no chance is involved in conflict resolution).  The fact that there are many players and their intentions can make a big difference to what you do means that even with a few units that can be a great many plausible choices.

RPGs
For most RPG players I think RPGs tend toward the few choices and the intuitive side, which probably works better with the story style than with a wargame style.  I play RPGs as wargames and see more choices and use logic much more to decide what to do.  And I generally despise the story style because I hate not being in control of my own fate, yet in the story style the player often has to follow the story.  (To me as a player, much of the purpose in a game is to control what happens.  Stories imposed by the designer or referee don't allow this.)

Wizards of the Coast in 4th Edition D&D has changed the game to limit the number of choices, while at the same time assuring that every character has something to do every turn.  Characters have relatively few powers, but these include some that can be used every turn.

Examples from a game club
I recently had this fundamental difference between Euro-style games and wargames brought home to me once again in my primary playtest group, which is the NC State Tabletop Gamers Club.  The members of this club are college undergraduates, a few graduate students, and me.  In my experience of groups of Euro gamers (who are usually much older on the average) people play as many different games as they can and few games are played over and over.  At NC State several years ago, when the club was smaller, a lot more wargame-like games were played.  Now the members play few games that have lots of choices, and their favorite games are games with relatively few choices for the player such as Betrayal at House on the Hill, Red Dragon Inn, Dominion, and Ascension.  Boardgames seem to be played much less than in the past.  One of the more popular boardgames is a prototype race and maneuver game I’m developing that has only five or six pieces per player.

What immediately brought this home to me was the following episode.  One of our members likes to play Stratego, partly because she has a very good memory for pieces that have been temporarily revealed.  She had played Stratego with her boyfriend a few weeks before, so I asked them to play a Stratego-like game that I have designed, tentatively called Solomons Campaign because it involves getting transports to the other side of the board in the midst of islands, submarines, surface ships, and airplanes of World War II vintage.  But Solomons Campaign is a much more fluid and much less hierarchical game then Stratego.  Immediately the young lady had some trouble with the rules, because there many more combinations possible and not the very clear hierarchy of strength from the Marshall down to the Scout that characterizes most of Stratego.  The only departures from the strength hierarchy in Stratego are the bombs and the ability of the Spy to attack and kill the Marshall.  In Solomons submarines can sink some ships when attacking, but cannot touch others (such as destroyers).  But submarines lose to many ships and planes when attacked.  The strongest ship (battleship) can't successfully attack the subs (but is not killed when attacking).  The next strongest ship (aircraft carrier) wins when attacking a sub, but loses when attacked.  Two planes can combine together to attack, such that two bombers can exchange with a battleship. 

She was also thrown off because I believe that in a modern game people don't want to have to memorize the location of pieces, so in Solomons once a unit's identity has been revealed it stays visible; hence she didn't have the memorization advantage she felt she had in Stratego. 

She also struggled setting up her pieces, because even though there are 25 pieces per player in this version of Solomons and 40 in Stratego, the hex board has many more locations (13 by 12 = 156) than the square Stratego board, so there is lots of room to set up the pieces.  In Stratego there are 92 locations and 80 pieces altogether, and you fully occupy four rows when you set up.  In other words there were vastly more setup choices in my game.  In Stratego you just don't have very many places to put your pieces. 

So altogether in Stratego you have fewer choices about where to set up, and as a result of the congestion on the board you have few choices of move when you start playing--only the front six pieces  (lakes are in the way).  In Solomons each piece has six directions it can go because of the hex board, instead of four (and can move one or two hexes straight in any of those directions).  Furthermore, you can move two pieces at once if they're both airplanes.  And airplanes can move over friendly pieces.

In actual play, the Stratego lover struggled because the game is very unlike Stratego in the number of choices each turn.  Other games have shown that she is not good at figuring out strategy in wargames, like many people who aren't accustomed to playing wargames, so she suffered a form of paralysis quite strikingly.  She just didn't know what to do strategically.  Her boyfriend is more accustomed to wargames, and he ultimately made inroads on one flank and sent a transport through to win.

Even though the game is a distant cousin of Stratego, it is much more like a strategic wargame, and so less suitable for a mass market. 

I recall one of the other members last year telling me that she did not care to play wargames because there were too many choices.  (I think it was also because there tended to be too many rules to keep track of.)  This young lady is one of the more intelligent people you would ever meet, but she plays tabletop games to relax and claimed that she relied on intuition as much as logic to make her moves.  When there were too many choices, she said, she would just guess (or rely wholly on intuition, I'd say). She did play my other Stratego-like game (a space wargame, on squares, with just 19 pieces per side) and acquitted herself very well against someone who had played it three times before.  That game is in between Solomons and Stratego in the number of choices.

As it happens these two examples are females but I don't think gender has anything to do with it.  It's a matter of preferences that can turn up in males just as in females.  90% of the club members are male, yet the preference for games with fewer choices is widespread. It may be worth noting that the proportion of Euro players who are female seems to be much higher than the proportion amongst wargame players.  This is similar to the proportions of hard-core and casual players of video games who are women (much higher in casual than hard-core).  Whether this is because women are steered away from wargames when young, or “naturally” prefer fewer choices when playing games, or don’t care as much for “in your face” competition, or something else, I don't know.

Cinematic RPGs and Huge RPG Books

At the UK Game Expo this summer I was part of a four-person panel of “RPG designers”.  This was a little funny, because I’ve not actually designed an RPG from scratch, though I wrote a lot about them in White Dwarf and other magazines back in the day.  (I was not on the game designers’ panel, but that was just as well as the British designers amounted to 10 or so people.)

One of the questions to the RPG panel was how much the particular game rules mattered to what kind of campaign the referee wants to run.  For example, for a story-based campaign do you need a story-based role-playing game?  I said any game could be adapted for any campaign, but another panelist, Sarah Newton of Cubicle 7, disagreed, and I can see why. 

Sarah pointed me to a free RPG called Fate.  This is about 80 pages of downloadable rules, associated with another, partially free RPG called Fudge.  It strongly encourages a story-based rather than rule-based RPG campaign.  Players don’t even have ability numbers, they have various strengths or aspects (that can be quite poetic), and players use those aspects along with simple die roll modifications to (practically speaking) convince the referee to allow such-and-such to happen.  If you’re interested in story-based RPGs, I strongly recommend you read Fate (version 2.0 is a free download:  http://www.faterpg.com/resources/ ).  (Don’t confuse it with the computer game Fate.)

 (Spoilers follow if you haven’t seen the fourth Indiana Jones movie.)

The extreme version of story-based RPGs, something that appears to be more and more popular and which Fate could easily be used for, is the cinematic campaign.  In such campaigns it would be quite normal for characters to take actions that one might see in tentpole adventure movies.

The best example I can think of is Indy’s survival of a nuclear blast because he hides inside a refrigerator.  The force of the blast that launched the refrigerator Lord-knows-how-far would have killed him, the shock when it hit the ground would’ve killed him, and there’s no way it could have stayed closed during the “flight” and yet open easily after coming to rest.  But in a movie we just kind of accept it and move on, because we knew it was going to be fantastical before we went to it.  Yes, there are lots of people who would never bother with an Indiana Jones movie because they know it’s fundamentally nonsensical, but also lots who ignore the silliness of it and love to watch.

TV programs like Lost routinely also veer into the land of unbelievability.  Don’t get me wrong, fantasy can be quite believable if you begin with the assumption that magic exists; I’m talking about events that occur in a story that are so astronomically unlikely that they’re unbelievable no matter what the technological/magic parameters of the setting.

Teenagers often play fantastical RPGs, which I have tended to call “brain fever”.  Whatever you could hatch in your feverous brain, the referee might go along with!

In a cinematic RPG the players would argue about how wonderful their character was in this nuclear refrigerator situation and persuade the referee to give them some chance to survive.  While in reality the chance is ridiculously astronomical (if I even bothered I’d say “role 10 d10s and if you get a 10 on all of them you survive but are so badly hurt you’re unable to move”), more typically the referee will give a significant though small chance such as 1 in 100 or even 1 in 20.

Players might argue that their RPG characters are much tougher than a normal person (Indiana Jones is far tougher than a normal person, but not a superhero).  Because of that “magical” toughness their character should be able to survive in the refrigerator.  It doesn’t really matter that the refrigerator itself would be unlikely to survive. . .  Sure.

As you can see from my example, I would not be a suitable referee for a cinematic RPG.  The ridiculousness of what was going on would offend me, and if I bothered to give any chances at all they would be truly astronomical.  But some of that may come because I treat D&D (the only RPG I play) as a kind of cooperative wargame, not as a storytelling engine.  The cinematic D&Ders are clearly playing for story, not for gameplay.

Games like Fate remind me of one well-known wargamer’s view of RPGs: he feels they are too “loosey-goosey”, he wants to know what he can and cannot do.  Games like Fate are much more like miniatures rules, which seem to require constant negotiation anyway (as another well-known wargamer said), than like boardgame rules which are supposed to define all possibilities.  I think a cinematic RPG will work better if it's less precise, if more comes from the players and less from the referee, and less yet from the rules.  Or as they say in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” the rules are actually more like guidelines . . .

I think part of the unbelievable cinematic play derives from a widespread failure to understand probability and large numbers.  To most people one large number is as good as another even if one is 10,000 times more than the other.  They don’t seem to understand that 1 in 100 is immensely different from 1 in a million (or even 1 in a thousand), which is in turn immensely different from 1 in a billion.  And your average person has no clue about probabilities.

But a bigger part probably may come from what I see as the great increase in game-playing as escapism in the form of wish-fulfillment.  Players don’t want to be limited, they want to get away from reality, the want to feel powerful and heroic, so a cinematic game can suit their feelings and purposes.

Wargames require mental (not physical) concentration, movies don’t.  (In contrast many computer games require physical concentration, except even if you die you just respawn or go back to a save . . .)  Wargame-style tabletop RPGs inevitably will become less popular over time, while story-style will become more popular, as people tend with passing generations to concentrate less on a particular thing.  It’s a trend seen in TV, the theater, and computer games as well as many other parts of life, so why wouldn’t it affect RPGs as well?  If the story style of play takes direction from the players and the rules, rather than depending heavily on the referee, then it’s as practical as the wargame style.  In fact, for the wargame style the referee needs to master many rule details, while the story style can be much less precise, and that may appeal to many referees.



To go back to the Expo, I was looking at Cubicle 7s 600+ page large-format hardcover books.  Why, I asked myself, would younger people especially, who normally don’t read books, buy such enormous tomes?  I asked Sarah about the demographics of Cubicle 7's market, and she answered 25 to 40 years old.  So that includes lots of Gen Xers and the older millennials, perhaps beyond the age of the millennials who are famous for the acronym “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read).  On the other hand, millennials will read a lot when they really get into something, but that kind of enthusiasm is uncommon.

The only reason I can think of for good sales is that these books are bought as a substitute for imagination.  It is often suggested that young people don’t use their imaginations much because for many, many years now stories have been presented to youngsters whole cloth, with visuals.  Their toys are from particular stories, video games have the stories built-in, television and movies are everywhere, and so youngsters have rarely had to figure out stories on their own.  They aren’t, for example, presented with the challenge of making paper boats and then figuring out what to do with them.  Any boats they have are ready-made and associated with specific stories.  So in RPGs they’re much more likely than my generation (boomers) to use something imagined by someone else rather than to imagine it themselves.

I’ll interject a related observation here.  A few years ago I attended a talk by Monte Cook of D&D fame at the Origins Game Fair.  At one point he observed that published D&D adventures spend a lot more time on story than in the past, and wondered why.  My answer is that people don’t buy the adventures to play them so much anymore, they buy them to read them, and they want to read a story with a plot rather than just read about a situation.  The buyers can then take whatever aspects of the story they like and incorporate them into the stories that they are telling in their own games, and they can also incorporate the game ideas they get into their adventures, but most of the time they don’t use the entire published adventure.  There are so many inexpensive published adventures now that few people would have time to use even a small fraction, so they’re often bought to be read, not played.

Impressions of Ancient Conquest I

The Britannia "game system" has been used in other published games such as Maharaja (Avalon Hill), Hispania (Azure Wish), Rus, and most recently Italia (Phalanx) and China: the Middle Kingdom (Decision Games).  Some people categorize these and other games such as History of the World as “sweep of history” games.  The original game of this category may have been Ancient Conquest, which was recently reissued.

A fundamental idea for Britannia (and for most sweep of history games) comes from Ancient Conquest.   I read the rules while watching a game being played in the late 70s.  The idea: having each player control several nations each having individual objectives.  I did not see the game again until I bought a used copy several years ago, to see what resemblance there is between it and Britannia.  And now the original publishers, under different ownership, have issued a new edition of the game, so I have the opportunity to compare the new edition with Britannia.

This is not a review, because I have not played, nor have I watched anyone play, the game since that day decades ago.  I can't tell you how well the game plays.  But I can describe it and compare it with Britannia.  Hence "impressions".

Although the idea of having several nations controlled by each player is implemented in Ancient Conquest I, the game has very little in common with Britannia otherwise.  It's hard to say which of two things is the biggest difference:

First, Ancient Conquest I is a battle game and Britannia is a war game.  That is, economics and grand strategy are very important in Britannia, while Ancient Conquest I is a game of strategy and tactics because there is no economy, rather there's an order of appearance, and because there are thousands of hexes to maneuver in.  You always know what force your opponent will have available in the future, and control of particular locations does not generally affect the force available.  In Britannia the nations can vary immensely in strength owing to their economic success, which derives from their success in holding territory.  In a battle game territory is only useful for the terrain and geopolitical implications, and details of maneuver can be very important.  In a war game territory usually equates to additional forces, following the age-old principle that land equals wealth.  This is no longer true in the 21st century, but has been true for agriculturally-based nations through most of history.  Sometimes maneuver in such games is very important, sometimes not.  Axis and Allies equates territory directly with economy, and uses areas rather than hexes, but maneuver can be fairly important, so there are all kinds of degrees to these differences in emphasis.

Second, and not surprising given the first, Ancient Conquest I is a hex and counter wargame, with numbers on the counters representing combat strength and movement; Britannia is an area a game with larger counters that have no numbers on them.

The sequence of play is also different between the two games.  In Ancient Conquest I a player plays all of his nations at the same time, and they can cooperate with each other to the point of attacking a common enemy or garrisoning a single town.  In fact, if you ally with another player then troops of both colors can defend a single city.  In Britannia each nation is entirely separate, and plays in nation order.  Once in a while you will see a nation controlled by a player attack another nation he controls because that suits the strategic situation.

In Ancient Conquest I each player can score a maximum of 40 victory points, rather than the variable numbers used in Britannia-like games.  How you earn points differs as well, because more than a third of the point entries involve destroying a minimum number of enemy combat factors.  Most of the rest involve holding a city at particular times, often through several turns.  (There are a couple dozen large cities on the board, and a lot more than that which are fortified.)  The “kill the enemy” victory criterion fits with the “battle game” instead of “war game” nature of Ancient Conquest I.  Where there are no economic objectives and no way to generate more units than normal, it makes sense that destruction of enemy units becomes a primary objective.  Scoring is tracked on the four 8 by 11 cards that list the possible scoring.  The rules say that scoring the maximum is very hard.

Each player has from 20 to 31 ways to score.  7 of those 20 are kill points.  11 of those 31 are kill points.  Because there are no area borders on the board, cities are the territorial representation for points.  The most important nation by far (for points) is Assyria, which can score 28 of the 40 for its color; no other nation can score more than 15.   The 17 nations are grouped as:
•    Assyria (both Middle and Neo-), Marsh people (southern Sumeria), Mitanni, Lydia.
•    Elam, Hittites, Cimmerians (presumably including Scythians as well), Judah-Israel.
•    Egypt, Media, Urartu, Arameans.
•    Kassites and Babylonians, Chaldeans and Neo-Babylonians, City States (Neo Hittites?), Phrygians, Philistines.

Mitannia and Assyria were traditional enemies until Assyria turned them into a vassal state.  The Chaldeans conquered the Kassites, who were more or less broken by a bizarre Hittite raid.  These are the only combinations that are a bit odd, but it’s just about impossible to set up four sides without having some odd combinations.  For example, historically the Picts and Angles were deadly enemies but are the same color in Britannia, while the Scots succeeded the Picts peacefully but are enemies in Brit.

Because the game uses hexes there are many more locations than there are in Britannia, which has 37 land spaces and a handful of sea spaces.  The board in this edition is plasticized paper, 22" x 34", with hexes sized for the 200 half-inch counters.  (Some of that width is for tables.)  It is after all a traditional hex boardgame from the 1970s.  Yet it does avoid one standard hex practice, big stacks.  Two missile units or a missile and foot can stack together, otherwise only one is allowed in any location except cities, where three can be placed.  This is the reason there’s a siege table, because those three defend together.  I’d forgotten how small half inch pieces are, but this is mitigated by the limited stacking.

In other differences from standard hex wargames, there are no zones of control and attacking an adjacent enemy is not required, so you could send several units adjacent to several enemy hexes but only attack one of them.

Combat in Britannia is "independent", that is, the strength of the defender does not affect the damage done by the attacker, both sides rolling.  Ancient Conquest I has only one die and combat tables (normal and siege) something like the original Avalon Hill 3-1 combat table.  You calculate the odds, attacker rolls, table gives result.  Hence combat is "dependent" on the strength of the other side as well as your side.

There are 17 nations in Ancient Conquest I, 17 in Britannia (though one, the Romano-British, is a successor to another).  As I have made more than one ancient Near Eastern prototype, I find the nation choices interesting.  But my prototypes cover longer periods of time.  This game is about 1500 BC to 600BC, so Hammurabi is not involved, nor empires before him such as Sargon’s.  There are a couple nations representing Sea Peoples, though no other indication of the ancient Near Eastern “Dark Age” around 1200 BC.  

Aside from horse/chariot, foot, and missile troops there are war machine (siege engine) pieces and pieces representing items involved in objectives, such as gods and the “Chosen People” who must be carried off the Babylon for the Babylonian player to score.

It’s impossible to successfully legislate against negotiation over the table, because players can comment endlessly about the state of the game in order to try to influence other players.  Nonetheless this game attempts to outlaw oral negotiations (presumably, secret oral negotiations) while allowing a player to send one written message and one reply to another message each turn (that’s not “per player”, that’s “altogether”).  (The rules mistakenly say “verbal” negotiation is not allowed; it should be oral, as “verbal” means “with words” and so includes writing as well as speaking, even though many people now mistakenly use “verbal” as a substitute for “oral”.  In another few decades we’ll no longer have a word that means “with writing or speaking or both”, in fact even now you can’t really use “verbal” any more because it may be misunderstood.  Your pedantry for the day... make sure your rules mean the same thing to everyone.)

Rules say this game takes five to six hours (presumably longer for beginners); there is no version for other than four players.  Ancient Conquest I is priced at $44.95 according to the Excalibre 2011 catalog.  The game was designed and originally developed by Denis P. O’Leary, and development for this edition is by Robert Mosimann, owner of Excalibre Games.

I’ve made a comparative table in WordPerfect, but that won’t display well here.  See a version of it at http://pulsiphergames.com/britannia/AncientConquestI.htm
Notice that is case sensitive, and it's an I, not a one.

Since this is a description, let me describe the other physical aspects of the game.  The 200 half inch pieces contain two numbers (combat strength and movement) and a silhouette and country name.  The words and numbers might have been easier to read if printed in black.

Aside from the board, pieces, and rulebook, there are four victory point charts, a double-width combat chart, and an order of appearance chart.  All are on heavy plasticized card stock.  The 12” by 9.5“ by 2” box is also coated for better resistance to wear, and a tighter fit than any game box I can remember.  You’re most unlikely to have it come open accidentally!

The 20 page rules (LOTS of photos) left me puzzled in a couple places, but that might be sorted out in actual play.  Unlike Britannia there are no leaders, but there are special rules such as the David and Goliath rule and Plague rules.

You can see from the copyrights on the various components that this game has been several years in the making, back to 2006.  It is part of a group of four reissues that Excalibre are offering to kick off a new series of game publications under new management after a very long period of inactivity.  The other games are Conquerors, A Mighty Fortress, and Battle for Stalingrad.

While we’re comparing, if you are familiar with Charles Vesey's Chariot Lords (Clash of Arms) you would notice a considerable resemblance to Ancient Conquest I, not only in the subject but in the way points are earned.  Vesey's game is also a battle rather than war game, in this case you generally receive reinforcements from your dead unit pile at a set rate.  Yet it is an area game, not a hex and counter game, so it's a mixture of Ancient Conquest I and Britannia and unusual ideas (most notably random movement order each turn, which makes for a very chaotic situation).

I have not tried to compare this with the original game, since the current game is what counts to potential buyers.  From memory I’d say it is very much the same game. 

While this is a “sweep of history” game (perhaps the first), it will be a very different experience from playing Britannia-like games.  It will be interesting to hear about the gameplay from people who play the game several times.

There are some typical questions that come to mind in people who want to design games but haven't really done so yet.  One of these is "how do you actually start a game"?

I have written about how games originate, what element starts the thought process.  http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/662/idea_.php  This time I want to focus on questions you can ask yourself, lists you can make, techniques you can use, rather than on specific aspects of the game.

I am supposing that you don't want to make a game that's just like some published game.  This can be good practice, but unlikely to result in a commercially viable game.   I'd rather spend less time modifying an existing game rather than make a clone from scratch.  No, that's not commercially viable, but it's good practice. 

There are various ways to approach game design, for example as problem-solving to create something that succeeds mechanically, or secondly as a way to find interesting things for people to do (play).  The first doesn't always result in a particularly-interesting game, and playtesting can show this.  The second may have a potential to be interesting, but you may never be able to figure out how to make it happen, how to have the game provide the interesting things to do.

Some designers are very cerebral, some design from the gut, and the rest are somewhere in between.

The extreme gut method is "I've got some notions written down, can quickly make a 'kind of' prototype, let's play and make the rest of the rules as we go along" method.  This might be called the "seat of the pants" method or "winging it" method.  This reminds me of a D&D referee who prepares almost nothing before an adventure and makes it up as he goes along.  Some game designers can manage to do this occasionally and get good results, some make a hash of it.  But there usually has to be a partial game as a starting point.

What it reminds me of is a painter staring at a canvas, about to paint something, he has a vague idea of what.  I'd call it the "artist" method of creating a game, as opposed to the more "scientific" method that many use.   My guess is that people who are making commercial games rather than art games would rarely proceed this way.

The beauty of paper prototypes is that this can be done pretty quickly.  It doesn't work for video games unless you are a dynamite programmer and aiming at a quite limited game.



If you're lucky, and if you have experience, another way a game may start is that it all leaps pretty clearly into mind, and it works when played about like you thought it would.  But that still means there's a long, long process of playtesting and modification to be done.

This "leap forward" may be preceded by a long gestation period when you're trying to get your ideas to fit together, and then suddenly it all comes together.  You nibble at it like a dog chewing a bone (and sometimes dogs bury them or just forget about them for a long time).  Once again, you usually have to have something in mind to start with, so it's one step beyond "the start".


Now let's look at some things you can do to organize your thoughts, to be more "scientific" in your method, and to help you avoid making games that are purely derivative.  Recognize that it's still going to take a while. A game isn’t built in a day.

Likability of Games
Make a list of games you really like.  List the three or four outstanding reasons why you like the games, each one in turn.  Do some of the reasons occur again and again? 

Now do the same for games that you really don’t like.  This time, list three or four things you do like along with three or four that you don’t like.  Do some of these “bad” games nonetheless have some “good” characteristics?  This will often be the case; a really good game succeeds not only by having good characteristics, but by avoiding bad ones.

At some point you may want to list of three or four things you’d really like, that you want in a game you’re working on.

The Essence of games
Another approach is to write the essence of games you like.  The essence is a two or three sentence description that gets to the heart of what the game is about.  Do the same for some games you don't like.  Then try to do it for a game you want to design.  I've written about this separately: http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/04/essence-of-game.html

What is the player going to do?
You might find that the things you like about games are often related to what the player does.  One of the most important aspects of game design is the question, “What is the player going to do?”  Try making brief lists again of what the player(s) do in games you really like, and what they do in games you dislike.  Then make a list of what you want players to do in a game you’re working on.

What’s going to happen?
Another way to look at a game is, “what happens”?  A way to approach this in game design is to make a list of events you’d like to have occur in your game.  Some of these events may occur many times, some only once, some may not occur in every play of the game.  You can make such lists forever if you go into enough detail.  Try to end up with a list of 10 to 20 events at roughly the same level of detail (“granularity”).  (Those familiar with Systems Analysis will recognize that the Event List is an important part of analysis.)

The two methods above are both aspects of what legendary video game designer Chris Crawford says in his First Law of Software Design, “Always start by asking, ‘What are the verbs?’”

Answer a "what if" question
This seems to be the start of many science fiction stories.  Do you have, or can you think of, any "what if" questions that can be turned into games?  These are legion for alternative history ("what if Napoleon had died in one of those early battles in Italy").   And many historical games can be designed to allow exploration of alternate histories.  Or it may be as simple as "what if chess pieces had differing combat strengths". 

Reality Management for Game Designers

For a couple decades I regularly taught graduate computer management classes.  One of the most important themes of those classes was that a manager/supervisor has to recognize what reality is, not what he would like reality to be or what he thinks it ought to be.  If you don’t know what’s really going on, how can you make it work better?  Yet a great many managers lose track of reality, and the really poor ones are often in what I call “cloud-cuckoo land.”

You might feel that this shouldn’t matter to game designers but in fact it’s very important.  Game design in some sense is project management.  Your project can’t come to fruition if you don’t recognize the reality of it, the true state of your game.  The classic project management cycle is plan-execute-monitor-control-replan and continue with execution.  That’s the same thing you’re doing with the game as you create it and especially after you have a playable prototype.  In case it’s not clear, “monitor” means observe what is happening (the execution) and how that doesn’t match the plan, and “control” means act to change how things are going when they’re not going according to plan.  Of course, if you have no plan you don’t know where you’re going and so you’re most unlikely to get there.  For a tabletop game the plan isn’t so much a prescription for how things will go (because things will change), as a description of where you want to end up.  For a traditional AAA video game the plan is more prescriptive because it takes so long to get to a playable prototype.

Your principal reality check is playtesting.  That’s why it’s vitally important to pay attention to playtests and to *listen* to playtesters.  If you’re making a game with a team rather than solo (solo is common for tabletop games), you can also hope that the team will provide a reality check.  Unfortunately the team’s view of the game will be so skewed by their closeness to it that they will have lost touch with its reality to some extent.  (Clearly you can’t rely on your family and close friends as principal playtesters to keep you grounded in reality; though that depends a lot on the family!) 

In other words, insofar as the purpose of most games is to satisfy the target audience, it’s important that the playtesting is with the target audience.  Otherwise playtesting doesn’t match reality.  I’m convinced that this has been the flaw in many video games that fell on their faces, although it still more common that the games are issued before they have been sufficiently tested owing to unchangeable marketing schedules.

Remember that there are facts revealed by playtesting that the playtesters won’t tell you, won’t even notice.  I recall specifically a game that worked well and playtesters seemed to enjoy, but which had the flaw that whoever was ahead halfway through almost always won.  I had to keep track of the points and notice this before I had a chance to fix it.  With a great deal more playtesting it might have been noticed by the testers, but don’t wait for playtesters to reveal flaws you can detect yourself by monitoring a series of games.

The heart of game design is monitoring and control, not the planning.  Video game design books often give an entirely different impression because they concentrate so much on planning.  That’s because, for AAA games, so much planning must be done before the playable prototype stage is reached.  The focus on planning is in fact a defect of the software creation process, at least as it has been traditionally practiced.  Nowadays we have Agile and Scrum and other methods of speeding up the process so that a playable prototype is reached early rather than late in the production.  But it’s still the case that it takes a long time to make a playable prototype of a video game compared with the time it takes to make a tabletop prototype.  That’s why many experts recommend that people planning a video game make a paper prototype as soon as possible, if that’s practical at all.  I know of at least one video game where the entire game was “played” in a paper version before the software was created.  (Shadow Complex, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4119/making_shadow_complex_donald_.php?page=2)

The need to focus on reality is why I sometimes say that game design is about critical thinking and self-criticism.  One reason why novice game designers struggle is that they’re not accustomed to “getting down to reality”.  Young people especially have been encouraged to “follow their dreams” and “be creative”, and are told that they’re special and wonderful, consequently they can be pretty far into cloud-cuckoo land when they are evaluating a game that they have created.  Experience helps, both experience in game design and experience with a broad variety of life.  A broad and deep education helps as well.

A reason why free-to-play online games have been so successful is that the players provide a strong reality check as the game is developed.  The game is usually made available to players long before it could be called “finished”.  Then if enough players like it they are likely to tell developers what they like and what they don’t like, providing a strong reality check as long as a relatively small group’s opinion does not become dominant by virtue of being noisier.  That’s the danger of online communities.  They may have opinions that don’t jive with the majority of players, yet because they are amongst the minority who talk online about the game their opinions may be taken as representative of all the players.

Recognition of reality in the sense of what your target audience wants and needs is very important.  I recently talked in a post on my primary blog (http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/) about avoiding arithmetic in games because so many people find it frustrating.  Some respondents were dismayed that I didn’t recognize an opportunity to help improve arithmetic skills by putting them into games.  But that’s a venture into cloud-cuckoo land.  People in this century don’t want frustration in their games.  The reality of the commercial game market is "arithmetic frustrates most people".

There is a well-known book about creating usable websites called “Don’t Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.  What the author means is, don’t make people think about how to get at the information that’s on the website, because this distracts and frustrates them.  This has to be modified specifically for games.  In many games we want people to think, but we want them to think about the mechanics and dynamics of the game, and about the opposition, not about something that is ancillary to the game, that is not part of success or failure.  What’s important in a D20 tabletop RPG is whether or not you hit, not whether you can add modifiers to calculate your to-hit total.  Doing arithmetic is ancillary, though there are other games where arithmetic is central to success or failure. 

Don’t make people think about doing math unless math is central to the game.  Don't make people think about anything that isn't necessary to the game.

But it all depends on your target market.

Last year I was asked to write a blog post for Buffalo Games, a maker of family games. This was originally posted on their Facebook page.

          What’s important in board and card game design

Game design is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.  Don’t think that the idea is important.  What makes a marketable game is the execution, the creation of a complete game, not the idea.  Some ideas are better than others, true, but there are hardly any original ideas–if you’ve thought of it, probably a hundred others have as well.  Virtually no publisher pays for an idea, publishers pay for completed games (though they may then change them...).  So be prepared to work!

The second most important thing to remember about ideas is, you need to work at getting lots of them: maybe a few will work out well.

Ideas come from everywhere, from all kinds of associations: you must actively seek to get ideas, don’t wait for them to come floating by.

Lots of people have game ideas, fewer make a prototype, fewer still actually play the game.  You don’t really have a game until you have a prototype that can be played.  It needn’t be pretty, but it must be functional.  If people enjoy playing a merely functional version of the game, they’ll enjoy the pretty published version even more.  Maybe when you submit the completed game to a publisher you’ll make a pretty version.

You don’t have to have a full set of rules to start with, you just need to know how to play.  Writing nearly-perfect rules is the hardest part of designing a game.  Trying to write perfect rules when the game is new may be a waste of time, as the game IS going to change.   In the end, though, if the rules are inadequate, the game won’t be played correctly, which is usually a disaster, and you can’t leave rules writing until the very end because the rules must be tested just as the game must be tested.

“Playtesting is sovereign”.  Play your prototype, probably solo at first to work out the worst kinks, then have others play.  And play.  And play.  Virtually no game prototype is good at first.  The key to a good game is to playtest it, revise it, playtest it, revise it, playtest it, revise it, and so forth until the gameplay is polished to a gleam.  Change is the norm. 

You will probably get sick of the game before it’s “done!”  As Reiner Knizia says, it’s easy to get a game to an 80% completion state, hard to get it to 100%.   And you may think it’s “done” only to find that something MUST be changed.

Getting your game playtested is an invitation to say it sucks!   Your playtesters must be in your target audience (you ALWAYS have a target audience), and you need a lot of them.  Your family is not sufficient!  You need people who are willing to tell you the truth.

If you just want to design one game at a time, go for it.  If you want to be a game designer, you need to be designing a lot of games at the same time.

Unless you are very very lucky, you aren’t going to get rich designing games.  Do it because you love it, and perhaps you’ll make some money along the way.

Risk Legacy

Someone I was corresponding with mentioned Risk Legacy to me, and I found the rules online and read them.

The idea is that you a series of games (beginning as more or less standard Risk) are connected together, and as you play the board and other parts of the playing environment change, and rules change, from one game to the next. In the process you write on the board, destroy cards, stick stickers on the board in the cards, open sealed envelopes, write on stickers, and other things which render the game unplayable if you want to start from scratch. This is all in the name of personalization, that what the player does makes a difference to the environment in the long run.

Some people seem to think this is an innovative or cool idea. What’s cool about destroying your game? There’s nothing cool about destruction, period. Too many people look to express themselves, look for their reason (excuse) for existence, in destruction rather than in creation. Top that with what I can only describe as another of the destructive Triumphs of Capitalism, planned obsolescence: it’s not only built in obsolescence, it’s programmed destruction.

What’s innovative about rule changes? There lots of games where the rules change, though perhaps not very many where the play of one game changes rules in the next game. But so what? There are lots of games that have well tested variants and you can play the game with a variant whenever you want, hence changed rules. Here you have a more chaotic set of changes in rules. Yes, the choices you make in one game affect another. But does it really matter? And is it worth rendering the game useless?

There is no reason why this game could not have been designed so that it could be reusable. As it is you buy a game that you immediately start to destroy after you play it once. In fact there seems to be a celebration of destruction, disguised as personalization.

Moreover, it appears to be designed for a situation that will rarely occur, where you have the same 3 to 5 people playing a long series of the same game. But even if you do have that situation, at the end you need to buy another copy of the game to play again. Duh?! The cynic in me says that Hasbro may have hit on a real bonanza, a way to persuade people to buy the same game over and over if they really like it. I’d be ashamed to sell it. *Shakes head*.

Quite apart from that, do we have built-in design problems? As if leader bashing wasn’t a problem in some games, here we mark the leader off very clearly over a series of games.


Again I can only shake my head. My ego isn’t so weak that I need to personalize everything, including my games. Though I have nothing against personalization when it isn’t destructive. Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but to me this whole idea is destructively stupid as implemented.

Lew Pulsipher

Review, The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell , 2004-5 Harper-Collins.

This is the first of a series of historical novels about Anglo-Saxon England facing Viking attacks, especially the Great Army. Some of the Britannia players at WBC put me onto this, though it was sheer luck that I passed by it in the library stacks while browsing the other day.

I haven't read an historical novel in 35 years, but this one feels kind of like fantasy without the magic; in any case, you can see that my interest in the setting is greater than normal, thanks to the game Britannia.

Bernard Cornwell is a very well-known author of historical military related novels, especially the ones about Sharp that have been turned into a series of TV movies starring Sean Bean (I've never seen any). This novel is pretty intense and pretty grim at times, told very much from the first person point of view of a single person, the young heir to the earldom of Bamberg in Northumbria. A major character is King Alfred the Great, shown here as a very pious, sickly man who values learning as well as military prowess.

As many historical novelists, Cornwell appears to know his subject very well and to take as few liberties as possible. But with so few sources of information for that time this is a case where the historical novelist has a great deal of room to maneuver in.

I only had this book from the library, otherwise I'd already be reading the next. I look forward to reading more of this series, which will reach six books in October.

Book contract

As some of you know, I recently signed a contract with McFarland & Co, Publishers, for a book about learning to design (video) games. I have just finished the "next-to-final" draft, which is being commented on by some people, and will need to submit the final draft by Oct 15. With luck it will be available next year. (Keep in mind how long these things can take.)

The title I favor is "Learning Game Design", because I have not tried to be comprehensive. In fact, I've cut out almost as much as there is in the book (102,000 words at this point).

While it is about learning video game design, it also covers tabletop design to a great extent, both because they are the same in most respects, and because the best way to learn video game design is to start with the tabletop, as I explain at length in the book.

Lew

The Interface

All games have an interface, whether it’s pressing a button or moving a joystick, or manipulating cards and pieces. A poor interface can ruin a game; if you’ve played many video games you’ve surely been frustrated when the game made it hard for you to tell it what you wanted to do, a failure of the interface. We’d all like to just think what we want the game to do, and have it act accordingly, but that remains an aim for the Matrix/Star Trek holodeck future.

For a AAA game there might be a designer or two who only work on the game interface. People who are learning to design games cannot devote all their time to interface but it is still important topic.

Jakob Nielsen is the guru of usability for commercial Web sites, and has been for many, many years. (His partner is Don Norman, who wrote "The Design of Everyday Things", a classic book which I recommend you read.) Much of what Nielsen writes about making easy-to-use Web sites also applies very closely to designing good games. Every few weeks he publishes a new article. I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to be a good game designer read his material. You can begin with http://www.useit.com/alertbox/design-diversity-process.html

Nielsen identifies ten general principles--rules of thumb--for Web user interface design. I'll try to summarize these in relation to games.

"Visibility of system status". Users should be able to look at the game and know what's going on (as far as they ought to know, of course–information about the opposition may be hidden). When they do something they should be able to see the result, usually immediately.

"Match between system and the real world". The game should use words, phrases, and concepts easily understood by the user. We know that you shouldn't ask five-year-olds to do complex math or understand "big words". But every target audience has its characteristics that the game needs to accommodate. Furthermore, information should be presented in a logical order.

"User control and freedom". Give users a way to bail out when they make a mistake in using interface--not a game mistake but a game manipulation mistake. Allow undo and redo in video games.

"Consistency and standards". Follow platform conventions. People expect things to work a certain way, and if you do it another way that may interfere with their enjoyment of the game. This is one place where doing it the standard way is almost always a good thing.

"Error prevention". Design games so that users are unlikely to make mistakes. Good error messages are important but design that avoids mistakes is better.

"Recognition rather than recall". Don't make the user memorize things or keep track of things, let the game do it. Instructions should be easy to find if they're not visible.

"Flexibility and efficiency of use". Allow expert users to install shortcuts, such as remapping keys and joysticks on a controller. Don't expect the new user to use obscure commands.

"Aesthetic and minimalist design". Don't provide irrelevant information. Don't require two actions where one action will do.

"Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors". When a user does something wrong, describe exactly what the problem is and suggest a solution

"Help and documentation". The ideal game does not require the user to learn any rules, but this is rarely practical. Help and documentation (such as rules for tabletop games) should be easy to search.

See http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html.

A really big playtest failure

"Playtesting is sovereign", I like to say to students. But it has taken a long time for videogame companies to recognize this, and there're still examples of complete failures to do playtesting right even when they play test.

An example from last year is Final Fantasy XIV. Final Fantasy games are normally praised but this one has been trashed by reviewers. It's score on Metacritic (an aggregator of reviews) is 49, which is really bad for a videogame. http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/final-fantasy-xiv-online/critic-reviews

Here are some excerpts:

"It may be hard to believe, and painful to accept, but the last 'official' chapter of Final Fantasy is a huge disappointment, and it not only becomes the worst chapter of the saga, but also one of the worst MMORPG we have played in a long time. It's obvious that Square-Enix is no longer what it used to be."

"Final Fantasy XIV is in no way, shape, or form ready for commercial release. We suppose there is potential down the line for the experience to improve with patches and tweaks, but that doesn't justify why the game is in such shambles at launch. "

GameSpy (gave a 40). "Extended stretches of confused incredulity, punctuated now and then by bursts of intense anger. And yeah -- I just equated FF XIV with a filthy bathroom."

PC Gamer (gave a 30). "A shallow, slow, grind-heavy MMO crippled by a horrible interface and nonsensical player limitations."

So didn't they playtest it? Yes, they did! I found evidence of an open beta: (http://www.ffxivvault.com/ffxiv-beta-information.php and http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/12/final-fantasy-xiv-beta-test-now-recruiting/). "Anyone that wishes to be among the first to play the new MMORPG, which will launch on PlayStation 3 and PC in 2010, can sign up at the official beta site. Square Enix says that no prior MMO experience is required, and players selected to be in the beta will test the Windows version of the game."

So what happened? Did they test only with fanboys and girls? Did they ignore the results? It seems unlikely that they ran out of time and put the game out before was ready, because Square Enix is one of the more respected and consistently good videogame publishers.
So what can happen to give a "false positive" from playtesting?

First, you could be playtesting with people who know the game so well that the problems just don't register. But this would be likely only if the people within the studio were the playtesters, and in this case it was an open beta.

Second, you can have open playtesting but somehow you only get fanboys and fangirls, people who will say good things about your product no matter what. The have lost their critical faculties where you are concerned. Perhaps this is what actually happened. This is why you want to try to get many playtesters who don't know your products and you aren't prone to this kind of thing.

Third, you could just ignore the results, saying "oh well we know it's good". I'm convinced that Microsoft has done this quite frequently, adding smugly "we know what's best". There can be many examples but in the video game category the most famous one is the huge controller that Microsoft included with the original Xbox. Apparently it was sized for people my height (2 meters) with correspondingly large hands. According to what I've read Microsoft continued to maintain that it was fine but finally changed to a much more normal sized controller.

Fourth, perhaps they asked the wrong questions and yet didn't pay attention to the actual play. Frequently if you ask people what they think you'll get a different story than if you simply watch them and listen to them without interfering. Jakob Nielsen, the guru of web usability, always cautions you to watch people, not asked them what they will do or what they have done, because you get better data.

How long it takes

Gamers are often surprised at how long it takes for games to be published. Mayfair recently published a game that one of the principles thought they had had for eight years. Once I decided to revise the Britannia took three years to revise it and get it published. The Dragon Rage reissue took a similar time, though much of that was because it was a startup publisher. I have a game with Mayfair now that they originally saw it PrezCon 2008, if I recall correctly.

The book publishing industry can be slow too. My contribution called "The Three Player Problem" leads off the ETC Press book Tabletop Analog Game Design. This book was released this month. Because of the way ETC Press does things, giving unformatted electronic copies of books away and selling formatted publish on-demand versions for those who want paper copies, you'd think their process would be faster than a typical publisher that needs to print several thousand copies of a book. But this book has many contributors, and most of them did not write that contribution as soon as they were asked, the way I did. So I wrote my 5,000 words and "finished" the submittal copy on 13 September 2009. This was posted on a wiki for comments. I made slight changes by March 2010. The book was published in August 2011, nearly two years after I wrote the article.

When you read Writer's Market you see that publishers often say they'll take 15 to 18 months or more to publish a book once they've received the manuscript. I suppose much of this time must be in editing, because there's no typesetting involved anymore. All I know for sure is that but publishing takes a long time just as game publishing takes a long time.

Simple Versus Complex As a Game Design Philosophy

At conventions this summer I’ve watched two multiplayer fantasy wargames with many similarities but perhaps different philosophies of design. At the UK Game Expo in Birmingham England I watched Wizards of the Coast’s new game Dungeons and Dragons Conquest of Nerath being played, and at WBC in Lancaster Pennsylvania I watched a not yet published (P500) game called War Party.

Both games can accommodate up to four players, but by dividing them into two sides, that is there were not four independent sides but two partnerships, rather like Axis and Allies when you play with four or five people. (You can play four sides, but the games aren’t designed to optimize that situation.) If you play with three then one player controls two of the four nations/kingdoms. One nation is in each of the four corners.

There seem to be two points of view about game design expressed in current games. The short expression of my view is “KISS” or “keep it simple Simon”. The longer expression of this is my favorite quote related to games, which I put at the bottom of the page for my blogs and my website: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery).

The opposite view, which seems to be more and more commonly expressed in Eurostyle games these days, is that complexity is good, pretty much for its own sake. It’s as though adding features is a good thing, even though virtually every game can be reduced to a simple essence. (See http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/04/essence-of-game.html). Especially in abstract games, which includes many Euro games despite the atmosphere that’s tacked on, I think simpler is better so that players can concentrate on strategy rather than on details.

These two games, essentially about the same topic and approached in the same way, can be used to represent the two different views, although Nerath isn’t as simple as it *could* be. There is much more unit differentiation in War Party than in Nerath. In the latter game the units of each nation are often functionally the same as units of other nations. There are no separate, individual heroes who are not military units like all the other units. In War Party there is more differentiation, but there are also individual heroes that can be customized in a variety of ways. A couple of the military units in Nerath are allowed to go into the dungeons and “explore” while in War Party it is presumably the individual heroes who go. There appeared to be a lot more pieces on the board in WP, as well. Both are games about war rather than about battle, that is, economy plays a big part in success or failure.

Nerath uses Event Cards. Is this a complication? Event Cards are a case of adding variety (and replayability) without adding much rules complexity, because the rules are on the cards, and only need to be considered one by one as you draw the Events.

Nerath uses a victory point method, mostly related to capturing territories, that should see the game ended in about 90-120 minutes. I watched enough games to believe that. I was told War Party was upwards of 3 hours.

There are many other differences. For example, Nerath uses very nice plastic figures, while War Party uses large cardboard counters. Nerath has set-in-stone starting positions that mix the four nations closely together, as well as a standard playing order, both simplifying the game. I can see people developing standard first turn movement deriving from the standard set up, but that doesn’t make the play complicated, it just gives players something to think about when they’re not playing the game. In War Party each nation starts at the corner the board and spends a couple turns expanding without much contact with the other nations. Nerath also includes seas and ships that are absent from War Party.

And I would expect that Nerath plays faster because you don’t have that slow period of expansion without strong competition. The war is on immediately thanks to the way the nations are mixed together and yet sometimes have one part separated from another part of the same nation.

Nerath is not nearly as simple as, say, Diplomacy or Risk, but it is much more colorful than either. “Colorful” comes from the cards, from the intertwined nations, and from the pieces. By comparison War Party looks drab, but not having watched it nearly as much as I watched Nerath, I might not have seen the “color” beneath the surface.

One reason to play this kind of fantasy game is the color. If people are primarily interested in your game because of the topic, rather than because of the gameplay, then you can get too simple. You can remove so much of the color, the flavor of the topic, that potential players are no longer interested in the game.

I’ve not played either of these games, nor have I talked with anyone who’s played a lot (that is, who wasn’t involved in the development of the game), so I can’t tell you which game plays “better”, if any. I’d prefer to play Nerath because it’s a shorter game and the concept doesn’t deserve a longer game, and because the strategy looks much more interesting (I like the mix of sea and land). But I am sure there are people who would prefer the more complex game in terms of rules and variety, even though I suspect it is less interesting in terms of strategy.

WBC, Dragon Rage, and Tabletop game design book

I was at WBC in Lancaster PA for three days recently. My Thursday night talk about game design had a pretty good attendance, perhaps slightly less than when it is on the weekend (I couldn't be there at the weekend this year).



A review of Dragon Rage appeared in a British blog:
http://rivcoach.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/review-dragon-rage-from-flatlined-games/
Also on BGG:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/684165/boardgames-in-blighty-reviews-dragon-rage




The multi-contributor ETC Press book "Tabletop: Analog Game Design," edited by Greg Costikyan and Drew Davidson, is now available (electronic downloads free). Greg briefly describes it at:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GregCostikyan/20110808/8151/Tabletop_Analog_Game_Design.php (you can click on the title of this post for this one)

Downloads in electronic book and PDF formats at:
http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/22317/tabletop-analog-game-design

My piece on "The Three Player Problem" is the first chapter in the book.