August | 2010 | Justin Achilli

30 August 2010

Subtractive Design

I remain an enthusiastic observer of the ongoing Guild Wars 2 development. In particular, I like that they’re challenging the MMO trinity of DPS-healer-tank. And of course, whenever I find myself liking something, I get all upset and manage to find some aspect of it that gets me all bent out of shape. Clinically, I’m not sure that’s neurosis, but, hey, shake what yer mama gave ya.

Depicted: legitimate trinities.My primary point of contention is one of fundamentals. First off, who’s the authority who claimed that DPS-healer-tank is a “trinity”? Who imparted divine status on this mode of content consumption? It’s not a holy trinity. It’s a default. Many games have proven that you can deliver a steady, spooled, subscribed-to stream of content by rolling with the proven model. Forgive me for getting all fired up oevr semantics, but I don’t see anything divine in doing the same thing over and over, especially when it’s what most of the medium already does.

And that brings me to my second quibble. Don’t start your design with a negative. Don’t build your premise on what your game isn’t. The Halo franchise wasn’t established when a Bungie guy ran into a room and shouted, “I’ve got it! Let’s not build an RTS!”

Of course, all this is a bombastic way of saying that in design, you need to know what you want your player to experience. It’s not enough to break an existing model. It’s not enough to cast your design in terms of what it’s not. The pivotal piece of your game… is what it is.

Over at RPG.net, the term “fantasy heartbreaker” often arises. (Russell and Ben have even adopted it as an eye-winking moniker for their own journal.) The “fantasy heartbreaker” is a title that casts itself in terms of another game — D&D — and distinguishes itself only in the differences. “My game is like D&D, only the elves are dinosaurs.” “It’s like D&D but the combat is way more realistic.” “It’s like D&D with a much better magic system.” The “heartbreaker” comes in terms of the idea being, well, really not good enough to support its own weight, despite the doomed, loving myopia of the designer. “It’s like Vampire, but you’re a Highlander instead.” “It’s like Changeling, only it exchanges folkloric themes for gratuitous SCA fan service.”

Now, I don’t say of any of this to cast the stink-eye on ArenaNet. They’re smart, skilled developers and they know what they’re doing. I can guarantee you they had this whole conversation and decided what they wanted to do with GW2, even if it started with a critical look at other games in the market and their own initial title and a list of ways in which they wanted to depart from that experience. That’s fine, so long as it results in a definitive statement of what their design is and doesn’t languish in what their design isn’t.

Subtractive design is a productive method of game design. In subtractive design, you pare away what didn’t work in a previous design, trim the excess, shear off the experience that’s not central. It leaves behind an integral core. It’s valid. Negative design, however — choosing your direction as a derivative of where you know you don’t want to go — well, that’s a disastrous and all too often well-traveled path.

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26 August 2010

Open Game Table, Volume Two

Open Gaming Table, Volume 2 is now available in print and digital download formats. If you enjoy reading blogs and ruminations on the things that make games what they are, this Jonathan Jacobs-collected passel of journal entries is a gold mine. I wrote the foreword, so I’m not entirely unbiased on the matter, but you’ll certainly find more herein than my perspective. For me, talking about games is as much fun as playing games, so if you’re of a similar sort and the about part is as fulfilling as the games part, you’ll definitely enjoy this virtual, text-baseed panel of some prominent pontificators in the blogging community.

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24 August 2010

Vampires and History (and My Amateur Psychology)

Implicit to vampires is a sense of history. Whether your flavor of vampires is damned to suffer the vagaries of the world for all time (as White Wolf’s vampires have been) or bears a less florid immortality, the idea is often that a given vampire might well have been around a lot longer than your modern mortal era, which is when a mortal discovers them and learns about this ancient (or at least annuated) evil.

In fiction, that’s easy as pie. Throw in some kind of historical flashback as a prelude, fast-forward to you anachronistic blood-drinker lamenting about how it was easier to be a vampire before information traveled so quickly, and boo-yah, you’re done.

Suggested lapses in history need not be comical. They can be a point of conflict or a source of understanding.It’s harder to accomplish in a game, however. In a traditional tabletop environment, coteries often have pretty tenuous relationships keeping their individual vampires together. Here’s my Nosferatu vagrant, for some reason rubbing elbows with your Gangrel hell-raiser, and we’re hanging out in the back of the Ventrue character’s Maibach as his driver shuttles us to some damned charade the Prince demanded we attend. Now add to that some of the implied history that’s available to us — I’m a Roman plebe, you’re a WWI doughboy Embraced in the trenches, and the Ventrue is a young turk from the heyday of American Psycho. With nothing in common, from clans to history, what’s supposed to unite us when we go about robbing banks, attending Princely demands, or doing whatever it is that we vampires do every night?

I think of that as a challenge, not a problem. It’s an opportunity to make something completely unique. Our coterie, with our weird and disparate historical backgrounds, is now unique. It’s more than a stock completion of the MMO trinity of tank-healer-DPS. It’s more than just a from-the-book assembly of clan archetypes. Heck, the way we built the rules, our hypothetical coterie doesn’t even have to be any different in power level. We can all be neonates with no experience affecting our Traits, with a few allowances made for our histories. My plebe starved into torpor when his patrician sire sealed us both into his crypt to wait out the Vandals. Your doughboy’s last memory is of the machine-guns mowing him down before waking in the 21st century with a powerful thirst. Patrick Bateman over there has never known torpor or the fog of ages. And we’re good to go. We can skip the anachronisms, if we want, by assuming we’ve all had a few weeks or months to come to grips with this modern world, or we can take advantage of our implied historical gap and do the stranger in a strange land thing. It all depends on how we want to play it and how deeply.

A modern perspective contrasted with history or speculation equals content.On a level other than the narrative, as players, we enjoy the ability to create something called a theory of mind. We can understand the factors that make other people’s outlooks different than our own. While this has an obvious applicability to game narrative — different roles are important to a roleplaying game — where this really takes shape is in the realm of community. Your vampire and my vampire might not get along, but at least we understand that each other is there and we can potentially project a hypothetical response that each other might have to a given situation. If those don’t mesh well, fine; we avoid each other. If they’re somewhat in accordance, that’s a gold mine. That’s a point of commonality. That’s a thing we want to do… potentially together, so, hey, next time you’ve got an evening free or you’re online, let me know. We can play a game of vampire together. And maybe your doughboy, my plebe, and Joe’s yuppie can finally give that glittering 100-year-old sissy Kindred who dates high school girls what he deserves.

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19 August 2010

Meaningful Choices: Covenants and Sects

The last time we talked about Vampire, we talked about clans. The interesting aspect of clans is that they hit a very important note in Vampire: the idea of the sins of the father being visited upon the child, the very gothic (and Biblical) concept that you may well be damned by a decision you didn’t even make. Your sire belonged to organization X, and now so do you.

That’s great, and it makes for a nice blog entry, but let’s move on to another concept. Let’s talk about the social aspect of himself that a vampire can choose.

Let me put this up front. I thought covenants were one of the great breakthroughs in Requiem. I know people disagree, and some people find the covenants as presented a bit bland. FWIW, YMMV and all that, but what they provided that was somewhat absent from Masquerade was the ability to, well, choose one’s social network. The covenants provided a great dynamism that the Camarilla vs. Sabbat conflict in Masquerade lacked.

That last bit is important. Even though social structures in the form of sects existed in Masquerade, often the choice of clan made the decision of sect for you. Sure, you could be a Camarilla Lasombra, but the setting implied that you’d be spending a lot of time explaining or getting your ass kicked. You could, if you wanted, stretch some definitions and some player expectations and portray a Ravnos antitribu who upheld Camarilla doctrine, or you could be a Sabbat Ventrue without buying into the ideas that supposedly shaped the antitribu of that clan.

But, come on. Who ever did this? In most cases, you picked your clan partially because of the sect connotations that came prepackaged with it. And that’s what I think the covenants fixed. They established another axis on which to make a meaningful choice for gameplay.

Now, I’m certainly not going to leak any untimely secrets, but this sort of meaningful choice is at the center of MMO gameplay. Given that “MM” means “massively multiplayer,” the sorts of present options that put players in contact with one another and build relationships, well, those are central to the multiplayer experience.

Choosing your affiliations has value to both PvE and P2P avenues of gameplay. From the PvE perspective, I could choose, say, to affiliate myself with a police faction, a church faction, a gang faction, a league of occultists, “the goblins,” some group of space aliens – whatever the context of the game is, I can find a group with which to align myself and thus procure new content. Similarly, for player-to-player to interactions, “covenants” are similar to guilds and other persistent entities. They’re the groups of common interest, playstyle, viewpoint, and activity.

That’s the key, “meaningful choice.” Requiem provides a diversity of choice, while Masquerade arguably makes the gravity of that choice greater, but the setting makes your decision for you. Thoughts?

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15 August 2010

Setting Sketch: The Queen of Roses

I’ve been working on Wintergris over the bachelor weekend while my wife and daughter are away, and in some of the downtime, I scribbled this together. It seems like it might be a fun thing to run as a one-on-one campaign using Pathfinder or maybe something more painterly. I liked that it mixes intrigue and “go fight stuff.” In fact, I see the player in the role of the Queen’s Envoy as sort of like Walsingham from Elizabeth. It’s also fun to revel in the influences here. You can see obvious inflections of Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, and a heapin’ helpin’ of Victoriana. Or perhaps just a less-deft Gormenghast.

Since time out of mind, the Queen has rules the City of Roses, which spans beyond the horizon in all directions. Truly, none knows what, if anything, lies beyond Roses; no once call recall ever meeting anyone from outside its walls or even how to leave its environs. So it is with the Queen, as well — it seems she has always ruled, and likely always will.

The Queen and Court

Hidden behind a curtain-veil that surrounds her throne, the Queen rules the City of Roses as its unquestioned monarch. Beneath her, her court schemes in secret after making a show of bowing to her absolute power.

The court is very much an extension of the Queen’s will. She grants and rescinds titles with motive known only to her, and her poisonous ire one day might turn to fawning favor the next.

At present, the courtly fashion accessories in vogue are fanciful masks, giving the impression that the whole of the aristocracy is involved in an elaborate charade. While the nobles conspire behind their stylish accouterments, the politics of the realm take shape. One is left with the impression that the ceremony is as much for protection as it is for amusement — but exactly who’s playing the joke on whom often remains unclear.

The City of Roses

The city itself is a sprawling mystery, a vast urban dystopia, and a clash of haves and have-nots. Unseen forces plot inscrutable agendas while the Queen’s court conducts its own perilous game of power and intrigue. Things man was not meant to know prowl the City of Roses at night, while it also issues forth wonders that might be considered little less than miracles.

In the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, towers soar skyward, pushed toward the heavens by gossamer architecture and traversed by bridges that seem to fly from structure to structure, while stained-glass windows glitter like gems when the sun strikes them.

Not all is so beautiful or vibrant in the City of Roses, however. Much of the city is poor, filthy, underdeveloped, or industrial. The city’s mines churn out coarse ores from beneath the surface of the earth. Smithies and refineries spew impenetrable smoke. Rookeries and tenements flourish in the shadows of the wealthy districts.

Much of the city — perhaps a third or more by the reckoning of some sages — is a cyclopean ruin, a still-standing testament to forgotten times. Today these ruins house the desperate and strange, and are even whispered to be the domains of monsters and other unspeakable things.

Matters of Faith

Officially, the religion of the City of Roses is Theosophy, a pursuit of virtues that lead men toward “the Absolute.” The Queen’s Theosophy is a civic faith, intended to promote critical thought, science, artistic expression, commerce, and a more vaguely defined “good deeds.” Understanding of universal mysteries and a study of the arcane arts are also relevant, as Theosophy maintains that the cosmos and all its attendant powers are both conscious entities and interrelated in some capacity.

An official religion does nothing to stem the tide of the various other faiths, cults, and outright heresies that thrive in the city. Everything from veneration of obscure pantheons to nature worship to a bizarre sect claiming that the Queen herself is a god finds adherents in the City of Roses. Ancestor worship, deification of abstract concepts, the Temple of the Rat-Curse God: All of these and more find their place from the home shrines to the subterranean altars of the city.

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12 August 2010

Send In the Clans

Fundamentally, clans and traditional RPG classes do the same thing. They represent how a player wants to play the game. When you choose a clan, you’re telling your Storyteller, “I want to do the sorts of stuff my clan is known for.” You can mess with that a bit, but for the most part, a clan is what it is.

Before clans, most depictions of vampires recalled the classic, Lugosi-style revenant aristocrat.Further than that, though, the clans do something that classes don’t. They construct a social presence. They’re something to which a character belongs, and they’re a concept around which players can build a social solidarity for their characters. When combined with an illustrated, explanatory two-page spread, they enable a player to say, “My character is like that… and there are others like him, who may well have his back.”

In theory, this is little more than faction. It’s an organization and a player belongs to it. It’s not that different from pledging fealty to the duke or enlisting in the space marines. In practice, though, it’s a much more momentous thing. It’s an automatic point of commonality with other vampires, Kindred who are not alike only in their suggested function or occupation (like a class), but who share a lineage, a supernatural proclivity, and probably even an outlook.

It’s a social network, that is. A clan fills a game role by giving a character a function, like a class, but also a sense of belonging. It tells players, “There are others like you. Find them and do your clan shit. That strength in numbers will help you against your common enemies.” Oh, and you certainly have some common enemies. Right there in that two-page spread it told you what your clan’s prevailing attitude was toward other clans, and you can bet it isn’t, “Yeah, those guys are pretty cool. You can trust them.”

So there: All in one elegant, fun declaration of self you have:

Function
Image
Attitude
Allies (ostensibly, as this is Vampire, after all…)
Validation
Direction
Plot hooks

As an added bonus, clans give you the opportunity to play against type, effectively doubling that buffet of options up there. You may want to be the rebellious Ventrue, the Gangrel in repose, the humanistic Nosferatu. All of that positive stuff, well, it’s still content if it’s a negative you want to oppose or a social more you want to flout. It’s still grist for the roleplaying mill.

TIm Bradstreet’s timeless, iconic modern vampire, which still strikes an emotional chord twenty years after its first appearance. A fine piece of work, despite being done by a Steelers fan.I remarked at a GenCon panel this year that the two-page spreads were magic, and I stand by that statement. Early drafts of Vampire didn’t have the clans. A vampire was a vampire was a vampire, and that’s all fine and good, but aside from needing to drink blood, and the assumed competition among each other for this finite (and taboo) resource, where was the conflict? With eternal life and no other inherent motivations, what did vampires do? The clans took shape in that vacuum.

Introducing clans was Chris McDonough’s idea, and it came comparatively late to the development of the game. I have to think that it was the masterstroke of the game, that one magic moment when a mostly good game suddenly had its chrysalis and became a great game. Everything else worked and then, when clans became a part of it all, they tied everything together and even provided a bit of extra dimension that grew into a part of the Vampire milieu that ultimately became inextricable from it — perhaps even its focus. What better way to illustrate the religious motif pervading Vampire than with a literal transference of the sins of the sire to the childe? This concept naturally made the transition from Masquerade to Requiem. Those other, post-Vampire elements of pop culture that borrowed from Vampire, whether the houses in the Wesley Snipes Blade movie to the different factions of Underworld to the familial groups of MySpace sparkletards in Twilight and the Camarilla-redolent societies in True Blood all bear the mark and capitalize on the gravity of Vampire‘s clan concept.

The clans all have distinct personalities and characters, whether from Masquerade or Requiem, and always have.The clans were bigger than any signature character, and that’s all to the good. In fact, they might be so sovereign as to eclipse the single most recognizable “character” in the World of Darkness: the world itself.

Let’s get personal. I remember being introduced to the World of Darkness through Vampire. Although Mage was my first real love among the White Wolf games, I came back to Vampire in short order, entirely because I loved the clans, their feel, and what they represented. I knew that at one-on-one tabletop games or fifty-person live-action games, I’d have a contingent of clanmates who might well be allies or antagonists, but who would represent a specific take on the vampire myth. They were people first and foremost, but I could at the very least understand them as vampires and take it from there.

Imagine: What would Vampire be without clans? It would certainly be personal, because the individual’s motivation would take prominence. But for those players who want a little extra guidance, some examples to follow, and some culture to be a part of… what in the game could take their place? What could accomplish what clans do as elegantly, as characteristically, and as indelibly as the clans? Without clans, Vampire certainly wouldn’t be the same game, and it’s likely that you and I wouldn’t be talking about it now.

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5 August 2010

Not Dead, Just Traveling

Back from GDC China, and off to GenCon. I hope to post from the road. If not, be well and I’ll have something substantial — vampire clans! — when I return.

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Justin Achilli