If you’re into Vampire, I’ve recently put up some redlined material from the forthcoming Anarchs Unbound book. A blog entry discussing the redlining process and the general production pipeline is here.
If you’re not into Vampire, perhaps you’ll enjoy this music video. It’s the song that will play at my funeral.
If you’re like me, you don’t have time to paint miniatures, and even if you could find or make the time, they’d eventually look like you painted them with a hammer while recovering from having your head kicked off by 35 beers. Prepainted minis, cardboard chits, and slotted-base figures are godsends for people like me, who enjoy a visual artifact at the game table, but who can’t quite muster the skill to create them myself.
Click to embiggen, and to see at scale with a 28mm fig.
Here’s a great photo from Benoist Poire, showing the use of a piece of non-gaming “terrain” that creates a great effect. It’s a fish-tank accessory, but when placed on the gaming table, it’s a buried titan’s corpse, or the entrance to a fearsome temple, or the relic of an ancient culture of giants, a fetish left by a non-terrestrial society, or an idol crafted by slaves to honor one of the original race of vampiric blood-gods. Whatever it is, it’s begging to be explored.
I love coming across this sort of thing, the repurposing of something entirely ordinary that, when shifted in scale or perspective, becomes the foundation of a game session or even an entire campaign or chronicle. Look at this! An entire megadungeon could exist below it, or it may be the last shrine that still contains a complete translation of the Book of Nod in Aramaic. You don’t even have to use the thing at the table (Vampire doesn’t usually require miniatures…), you just have to have seen it in context. Marvelous! Makes me want to stop at Petsmart on the way home to see what other amazing artifacts line the aquarium aisle.
I asked on Twitter if gamers had a “right to hack.” The response was somewhat more even than I had expected.
To be clear, when I say “right to hack,” I’m talking about a player’s ability to get into the nuts and bolts of the game, wether setting or systems, and make changes they felt like making. For the purposes of the conversation, I didn’t care whether we were talking about tabletop games or video games. Call it kitbashing, homebrew, house rules, or actual code manipulation, if you will.
Most of the conversation asserted that it was, in fact, the player’s right to bend systems and setting to taste. In fact, some approached the topic from a “just try to stop me” perspective, indicating that for some, it’s more than a right and nigh upon a duty. Especially from the tabletop RPG angle, I can see this. Groups of tabletop players literally need to make their own mark on their games, because the improvised stories that emerge from them — and indeed, outside the written body of work for these games — are the game’s content itself. A publisher can construct a scenario, but once that scenario is in play, it’s inherently being manipulated toward the player group’s end.
It becomes a bit different in video games. The “right to hack” takes on an almost Oliver Wendell Holmes approach, in which a player’s manipulation of the game systems is allowed to travel as far as where another player’s game experience begins. For instance, if I’m playing a game by myself, I can hack it all I want — I’m changing the experience only for myself and I’m not affecting anyone else. But when I do it in a situation in which other people are involved, I’m not only affecting my game but theirs. If we agree to share that modified environment, that’s fine, but if I’m playing a version of the game that offers me different and not-agreed-upon differences, I’m playing against the spirit of the entertainment.
Most remarkable about all of this talk was the sense of community that the conversation indicated. When hacking tabletop games, the expectation was that the changes made were accepted by and intended to satisfy the players collectively. I’m not hacking my fighter to have an unfair advantage to outperform yours by breaking the rules. My vampire can’t use Mage magic while yours has to use by-the-book Disciplines. Changes that are made affect the players as a whole and, indeed, the gamemaster who’s coordinating the whole affair.
In terms of video games, the “right to hack” may begin with a single player, but eventually grows to encompass and benefit the whole community of players. Now, that’s not really surprising, given that few people want to identify themselves as cheaters, but the very idea of what we being hacked here game a sense that it was being performed in the interests of fair play. Not so much, “I’m going to do this,” but, “Lets’s do this.” For example, the old WoW add-on that showed the spawn locations and best routes for completing quests was initially created by a player seeking to most efficiently level his character, and that player then shared the mod with other players to offer them the same benefit. In fact, Blizzard eventually saw how many people had been using the mod, saw that it had benefit to their players, and rolled it into the “official” game system.
I love this sort of thing. As a game designer, design is really only the beginning of the process. A game is nothing but a box of pieces, a book, or some code until it’s played. The game comes to life when the player brings the spark of activity to the inanimate parts in question. If that design needs to change to accommodate a player or community’s breath of life, that’s not only fine but desirable. The game itself is just a thing. It’s what we do with it together that matters, and if what we do with it changes the nature of the game in order to facilitate that player-to-player interaction, more’s the better. After all, what right should I have to stop it?
In fact, I think there’s a certain responsibility, or at least an enlightened self-interest, for publishers to watch how their games are being hacked and to criticially determine whether those hacks do, in fact, improve the game experience so that they can be integrated into future editions, expansions, patches, or what have you. There’s no playtest so thorough and useful as actual in-play games, and with the ready communication and online, updatable nature of modern games, a designer who wants longevity for his titles would do well to turn today’s best hacks into tomorrow’s core rules.
My kid loves games. None too surprising, of course, and when I say that she loves games — she’s three — I really mean that she loves opening the boxes and hammering around with the stuff inside. Unfolding maps, stacking pieces, punching out chits, all the sorts of things that aren’t really playing the game that nonetheless involve or facilitate playing with the game.
Fighting the goblins.
Conceptually, Madeleine certainly understands a lot of things, even if they’re not exactly the rules of a given game. For instance, we recently played Ticket To Ride and she was upset that when my wife played the pieces to claim a route, the color of the trains on the route didn’t match the color of the route itself. Of course, she didn’t know the rules themselves, but she made her own associations among the game components in her mind.
Anyway, I had ordered the Pathfinder Beginner Box because I wanted to take a look at the boxed loot and see firsthand how successful it was as an introductory piece of material. When it arrived, Madeleine, being no stranger to the appearance of games and other boxed goodies, assumed that this was another something for her. She pushed her stepstool over to the kitchen island where I was unboxing the whole thing and jumped right into playing with the pieces. She put together some of the figures on the stands and was already familiar with dice. I don’t know how, exactly, we started actually playing, but when we did, she took right away to the interaction between the players, even though it was only the two of us.
In fact, she liked it so much, she talked about what she had done afterward, and even asked to play again when she woke today and wanted to play again after we got back from the zoo.
The reward for any good dungeon delve is a pile of loot.
Of course, we weren’t playing Pathfinder as its rules define it, but I described a few situations, she told me she wanted to fight the whatevers, and then she rolled the dice. The cause-and-effect sequence took form. Over the course of our play, I observed the following things:
Civilization's victory over the fiendishness of monster-kind.
The result was certainly more toy than game, but the interaction had the key elements of a true game. The only thing missing was meaningful choice, in that there were no real consequences to actions and that Madeleine’s choice for both of her characters was either fighting or casting a spell based on which character we were talking about. Still, she chose which treasure next to pursue and which square on the grid she wanted to occupy to fight the monster, so the rudiments of game play as opposed to toy play were there. Toy play is also consistent to the way her age group participates in expressive activity, so it was encouraging to see that expectation and her formative steps into development beyond those boundaries.
Next time, though, I’m not backing off the TPK.
I have long maintained that Vampire is a proactive game, as opposed to a reactive game. In a reactive game, the GM pits the players against a specific situation. The old man comes to the tavern, gives the PCs a map, and off they go to plumb its depths. In a proactive game, however, the players’ characters have their own goals, and much of the game tale revolves around their seeking to accomplish their agenda. Certainly, there’s room (and some would argue necessity) for a Storyteller to interject defining thematic moments and events, but much of the play is directed by the wiles of the character. It’s reasonable, in Vampire, to say, “The Prince wants to know who strangled his ghouls during the Michaelmas riots? I don’t care. My Brujah union delegate would rather continue undermining the Ventrue power-grab happening at Tammany Hall.”
That’s a great recipe for creativity, especially for those troupes that understand that gameplay is a shared creative experience. When the players and the Storyteller work together to create a compelling chronicle, the results are engaging for both sides of the ST screen.
In practice, though, I’ve observed that sometimes a player needs a bit of a “push” in order to start forming an agenda for her character. Many games tout a wholly open-ended experience. “You can do whatever you want!” seems like a great pitch, but in reality, it often confounds the player with the paradox of choice. If I can really do anything I want, how do I narrow down my options to refine my character concept?
(The other side of the paradox of choice, of course, is the illusion of choice. I still have a dismissive opinion of Aion, for example, because I watched one of their web videos that told me I could do whatever I wanted in the world and then promptly couched my opportunity in the terms of the DPS-Tank-Healer paradigm used by every other MMO. And you can’t change any of the world through your actions, so provided your definition of “do whatever you want!” is do what you can already do in every other game and have none of it result in anything of significance, well, you’re golden.)
Gaining control of an abstracted resource — becoming Prince or Primogen or acquiring Influence in Vampire — is a game objective that becomes more valuable as the context of the game and story develops.
This is where I think the roles of the clans has been one of Vampire’s greatest assets. This past weekend at the Grand Masquerade, my table at the Antediluvian dinner spoke a bit about this very concept. The clans are like social classes: They help define what I’ll be doing in the game, but they’re defined by the Kindred who constitute them, not their role in a gamist party dynamic. They’re families, not occupations. I can play them to type or against type and always use them as a sort of template, but I never have to be defined by the template. They’re character shorthand, and I can play my entire unlife as a clan member in the terms they present, or I can individualize and characterize beyond them if I choose.
Compare this to, say, the first edition of Wraith, which didn’t provide a role or concept for characters to adopt. It did so very broadly: You can belong to the Hierarchy, Renegades, or Heretics, but those are purely social constructs and more setting elements than direct objectives. When Rich Dansky did his revision work for the second edition of Wraith, he turned up the importance of the guilds, which provided a much-needed sense of direction for the players. It helped define what the game was about. It provided and extremely important context and a statement of the game’s essential experience.
Big score is an easily understood reactive model, since the players are in direct competition. Each reacts to the other's degree of success by trying to trump it.
In the transition to video games, this is still a critical piece of gameplay. In many games, it’s absent because the player’s role is wholly defined. You don’t need a guild or clan in Words With Friends, for example, because that’s not what the game’s about. The choice is moot in World of Warcraft, by comparison. Whether Alliance or Horde, you can still be a warlock or rogue and you’re only picking avatar options as a subset of team. WoW defines the gameplay experience by class, however, and likewise doesn’t allow actions to affect the world, which makes the essential experience how you’re killing the monsters, not whether you’re killing the monsters or to what end. WoW and Words with Friends and D&D are reactive — here’s what you’re going to do. Here are your letters or your quest, now hop to it! It’s a directed gameplay in which the essential experience is immediately available to the player, and “figuring out the world” isn’t part of the loop.
When you play Vampire, though, “figuring out the world” is part of the game, as is figuring out how to leave your character’s signature mark on it. It’s a good dovetail of gameplay and setting, since there’s a lot the player doesn’t know at the beginning of a chronicle and horror as a genre thrives on the unknown.
It’s also interesting to note there that the reactive games mentioned above are industry leaders in their comparative segments. By comparison, Vampire has always represented itself as an alternative to the mainstream type of game in its medium — and it maintained an impressive second-place position based on that variant in the essential tabletop roleplaying game experience.
In contrast, casual and social games thrive on reactive designs, because by not forcing the player to make those decisions, they can get directly into the objective-driven play. Play a round, take your turn, have a ten-minute session and you’re done until you choose to return. It’s the play transaction that partially defines the success of the model.
One of the things I’ve been working on recently is powers with multiple parameters. I’ve said before that there’s no such thing in a game as “too powerful” but that the concept instead reflected “doesn’t cost enough of the game resource.” As an expansion of that idea, I’m looking at powers that have multiple parameters defining them.
"I spend one mana point and instantly cause global apocalypse" probably needs some mitigating parameters.
Let’s say you have a power called Touch of Death. To invoke it, you pay X resource and the target dies. Pretty straightforward, right? In most cases, X would be a pretty high number, since the resolution is so simple and severe. Assuming you’re talking about a conflict-resolution game, being able to trump the conflict resolution is a very potent ability.
So, assuming we want to keep the Touch of Death power, how can we make it “not overpowered” in terms of resource expenditure? By applying parameters.
Propagating the power affects the value of X. Look at, for example, the multiplayer aspect of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Everyone effectively has Touch of Death. It’s a single button press. Using it appropriately is the core of game play — kill the other Templars. It costs nothing to perform, but the many other parameters, such as proximity, approach, visibility, and counteraction assume the traditional cost associated with resource expenditure. It “costs” nothing to make an assassination, but I have to manipulate the other events of the game to facilitate the action. Thus time and environment control are the resources.
“Casting time,” whether in the form of cooldown, ramp-up, or some more exotic method can mitigate the resource cost. If Touch of Death takes three seconds to activate, it’s at a disadvantage if used toe-to-toe against a quicker-acting power.
Distance is another frequently employed parameter. Touch of Death implies that I have to touch my target, putting myself in his vicinity and thus exposing myself to capabilities he may have (especially if the implementation times of those other powers are less than that of Touch of Death). My intended target may neutralize me before I’m close enough to employ the Touch of Death.
Any number of other parameters may affect the cost and perceived potency of a power. These may be setting elements, as many tabletop RPGs use (like blood points in Vampire or spell components in fantasy games). They may be mechanical impositions — the rules of board and card games or the interactive systems of video games. It’s not just what a power does that defines it, it’s how the player must interact with the game experience to invoke that power that affects its balance, cost, and significance on play.
Complexities like these are one of the reasons game design is such an iterative and observational discipline. A designer needs to watch and adjust all of these different parameters so they create the experience the game intends to communicate, and that requires both playtest and an eye toward which specific parameter tweak(s) can generate the best results.
So, I’ve been wondering what to do with this blog again, as I do about every year and a half or so. My post frequency has fallen off a bit of late, because I had directed so much attention on working on (and blogging for) the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire. My work there is done now, and Eddy’s taken over the management and development of it. That will maybe let me get back in here and bang around with blogging more than once a week.
It's a prison.
I’ve also left White Wolf/ CCP again and have taken a position with Ubisoft that will be moving my family and I to France. The projects are under heavy NDA, so I can’t talk about them here or even say what they are, but I’m glad to be working on them. (I know, I hate the “Oooh, it’s under NDA” non-remark remark, but I don’t make the rules.)
For a while I was talking about the intersection of tabletop gaming with digital gaming, and I’m sure I’ll continue to have some amount of that sort of outwardly facing contemplation. With the conclusion of my Vampire work, I’m able to turn more attention back to my Pagan Lands setting work, which has received some good feedback over its course. I’ve also got a little darling game project that’s a sort of dinner-murder-mystery about Queen Victoria trying to raise Prince Albert from the dead that may see the light of day. And, of course, fiction writing, for the two or three projects that occupy my hobbyist’s attention in bursts. Maybe some more mixed music sets when I find the time. Probably change the general look of things here.
General RPG consideration, video game consideration, and just plain design talk have always been fun for me, so I’m sure that’ll remain here, too.
I think the biggest change is that this blog might actually become more personal again. Not personal as in things that I don’t want people to see, but personal in that I may end up showing a more holistic approach to games design than I had previously. A designer doesn’t exist in a vacuum: A designer is the sum of the games he plays, the life he lives, and the external influences on him.
I’m about to have a lot of external influences. I’m moving into a different culture, learning a new language, and still being a parent while continuing to design and play games amid it all. At the very least, I hope to have nifty photos of cool European surroundings. Hopefully you remain interested.
I remember when I first started playing Vampire. In particular, I remember a lot about the times in between the times I first started playing Vampire. I recall plotting the things I was going to do in the next session, jumping at shadows while I did my retail job, spooking myself with the idea that there are vampires out there.
This is the hallmark of a good game. When your player enjoys playing so much that he’s thinking about playing even when he’s not playing, you have a winner. “Playing while you’re not playing” isn’t limited to any particular game form — it applies to RPGs, card games, video games, MMOs, any kind of game you can imagine — and that’s why it’s so valuable.
Pushing that forward a bit, the results magnify when multiple people participate in playing while they’re not playing. The game experience becomes a token, a symbol of what brings people together, and it’s a motivation to do it again.
I talk a lot here about relationships, in particular the relationships between gamers. Playing while you’re not playing is amazing fodder for fostering those relationships. Community thrives in downtime. You don’t have to look any further than forums to see this, or to visit any convention and listen to the conversations that are happening away from the actual tables. Whether people are talking in-character (known by a variety of appellations, such as downtime, soft RP, etc.), discussing the rules and how to manipulate them, or simply talking strategy and content, shared experiences are the basis of relationships. And once those relationships are in place, once you know you enjoy them, you want to go back to them — you want to get back into the game to have more good times, and to share more of those fun experiences with the friends who facilitate them. It’s a positive feedback loop.
It’s separate from worldbuilding. In some ways, wordbuilding is playing while you’re not playing, but it’s generally absent the community or relationship aspect. It’s typically a solo endeavor, more of a tool than an end itself. That’s not to knock it — I’ve made a pretty good career out of some amount of worldbuilding — but it doesn’t satisfy the urge for why people play games. But to expand the exercise even further, add players to that worldbuilding. Give those players something to talk about after the game itself, and you’ve hit a very powerful combination. Fun exercise plus compelling environment equals let’s play again soon.
Understanding why people play games and giving them reasons to do it again are central tenets of game design. More on this soon.
The best tabletop session I ever ran was one that threw me completely for a loop.
Pantaloons are key.
I had maps. I had encounters. We had some bottles of wine at the table and the setting I was running was my Belluna D&D campaign, which is a sort of romanticized Renaissance Italy with plotlines shaded by the Borgias and the Godfather. I had a roughly plotted scenario in which the players were supposed to fight their way onto a guarded ship at the wharf, find the cursed clock that was a actually a bound time elemntal, and track it back to the abandoned church at which the session’s bad guy was holed up.
The players didn’t want any of that.
As players, we got buzzed on the wine. As characters, everyone got loaded, fell into the canals, started a street party, and dragged a parade of partygoers to the docked ship, where the sailors joined the festivities and the PCs crept on board to find the clock clue I had originally scripted them to have to fight to find.
I didn’t use two-thirds of what I had written. It was glorious.
I didn’t force the story into its predetermined script. The players saw a portion of the setting that they liked and they ran with it. The GM and the players participated together.
