Justin Achilli

Tag: gaming

4 July 2010

Worldbuilding: Keep It Weird, Part Two


In Frostholm, the dragons were all druidic instead of wizardly, to emphasize their connection to nature. It’s a small change from expectation, but a significant one.One of the keys to making a weird environment interesting is the 90/10 rule. No, this isn’t Sturgeon’s Revelation, but rather a way to keep your project — whatever it is, from a game campaign to an MMO design to a novel or short story — both accessible and intriguing. I talk about this a lot when I do panels at conventions, but it’s just as relevant here.

The 90/10 rule states that when executing a given concept, 90 percent of that concept should be what your audience expects, and 10 percent should twist that expectation or provide a permutation that throws the situation for a loop.

 

Now, this isn’t license to bust out all your dick moves and be antagonistic just because you can. Remember, you’re there to play with them, not against them. If you line up something deadly, they need clues beforehand. If you’re just setting tone or highlighting weirdness, you can spring it on them with little forewarning. If one particular piece is a climactic part of your campaign, foreshadow the weirdness with both a bit of the expectation and a bit of the swerve.

A few examples, both original and borrowed from friends:

The premise: The village on the bluff overlooks a massive expanse of verdant forest.

Weird it: The forest is actually a massive, sprawling field of giant mushrooms.

The premise: The characters encounter a group of pilgrims en route to visit a holy shrine.

Weird it: The pilgrims are actually apostates, fleeing from a pogrom against their heresy. They’re not necessarily evil, just those whose faith diverges from an official canon.

The premise: The craggy mountain is the stronghold of an ancient, wicked dragon.

Weird it: The dragon is actually a prisoner of the mountain, having nested in it when he was young, but having grown too big to escape via the aerie. The dragon is either mad with hunger, or magically spreads tantalizing rumors, tricking adventurers and monsters into investigating or lairing so he can devour them.

The premise: The bizarre, ruined castle is a relic of a bygone age.

Weird it: The castle is actually an edifice from the far future, temporally misplaced, and within its walls, time rolls backward from the outside world, leaving the PCs younger than they were when they entered.

The premise: The dungeon chamber has a huge, central fountain spewing noxious water.

Weird it: The dungeon chamber has a huge, central fountain that has been overgrown with beautiful, precious flowers unseen anywhere on the surface world that grow in the dim light of the subterranean environment.

The premise: The megadungeon is a massive structure that looms centrally in its environment, such as a tower, a mountain fastness, or a sunken ruin.

Weird it: The megadungeon consists of several isolated clusters of small environments scattered over a broad surface area, though they’re linked by passages too small for most of the regular denizens to traverse.

The premise: The haunted ruin is a bastion of wicked creatures who lurk beyond the fringes of civilization and occasionally venture forth to terrorize the good people of a nearby settlement.

Weird it: The haunted ruin is a bastion of wicked creatures, alright, but when the sun sets, something… changes… in that ruin that leaves even its monstrous occupants petrified with terror, and they hole up in their rooms to hopefully wait out another night’s horrors.

The premise: In the vaults and cisterns beneath the city streets, an unspeakable cult practices rites venerating hideous cthonic entities.

Weird it: That cult is actually a very beneficent faith, driven into hiding by a more predatory official faith or political movement. (Odd that “the good guys lurking in the shadows beneath the city streets” is the alien concept, isn’t it? If gaming has done nothing else, it’s established some principles of weirdness that have become the rule rather than the exception.) 

The premise: The horde of orcs and goblins advances on the beleaguered town, intending to siege it.
This isn’t a city in ruin, it’s a construction site. The nanomachines building it simply haven’t yet completed their work.

Weird it: The horde is actually a group of orcish and goblin celebrants, harmlessly re-enacting a historical raid on the city, but it’s really just an excuse to march and get drunk.

Swerve it again: Only this time, a faction of hobgoblins among them is serious, and turns the revel into a bloody riot and actual raid.

Credit where it’s due, James over at Grognardia recently did a piece on the fantastical feel of giant mushrooms, and it tickled me. Also, I shamelessly stole the orc-raid scenario from John Nephew of Atlas Games.

Ultimately, all of your efforts to weird things are their own stories, mysteries to explore. All you need is that single line of description as to how they’re weird and that’s both a great hook for curious players and a broad stroke that allows you to evoke an “other” feel without tying yourself down to a very specific conclusion. (This last is important because it allows your players room to come up with their own explanations, which you can appropriate if they intrigue you. Thus, you can glean a bit of entertainment from the players it’s your job to entertain as GM.) Whether you intend to make your world idyllic, grotesque, exotic, wondrous, alien, or any other form of novel, the key to doing it is in the details, but not overburdening those details.


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2 July 2010

Worldbuilding: Keep It Weird, Part One

Part of the reason I love the Wilderlands of High Fantasy so much is that its broad geography includes lots of little weirdnesses. Here lies an ancient sculpture of a two-headed goat that’ll turn your head into a goat’s head if you steal it’s treasure. There lies a wrecked hot-air balloon with a still-functioning astrolabe. The Wilderlands have a decidedly old-school fantasy mix of anachronistic technology and “modern” fantasy staples like swords and magic. It’s truly a fantastical place, with plenty of those gaps in the setting I lke so much that allow my imagination to run wild in them. What the hell is that goat-thing? Did someone make it? What possible reason could they have had to do so? Is it the result of hostile magic? Some bizarre technology my character doesn’t understand? What about that hot-air balloon? From what civilization did it spring? Were there more like it? Is it a crazy tinker’s construction, or did some bygone culture produce significant quantities of these? If it’s the latter, why haven’t I seen more? If it’s the former, where’s his workshop? (I want to plunder it.)

By contrast part of the reason I don’t have the same level of enthusiasm for places like the Forgotten Realms or Eberron is that the worlds feel more “known” and inherently less wondrous. Vital civilizations own the world maps, and the only places that feel foreign, alien, and dangerous are designated, contained areas, “danger gardens” where the world-spanning cultures have agreed to let the crazy flourish to bleed off some of the overabundance of adventurers that seem to populate their cities. Granted, Fourth Edition D&D is much better about these sorts of things, given the economy of words it uses in its support material, but it’s just impossible to escape the feeling that someone has already overturned every rock in these worlds and painstakingly catalogued their contents. 


Something happened here, and I want to stumble across the place and speculate as to what.To me, the beauty of the exploration campaign is having the sense that my group is the first to find a location, or if that’s not the case, that we’re the first people here in eons. While I’m certainly able to enjoy a more cosmopolitan campaign (you know how I loves me some politicking, backstabbing, and concocting long-term plans, all of which are key components of Vampire), when I’m after exploration, I want to be dazzled and endangered. When I’m running an exploration campaign, I want my players to feel like they’re discovering or re-discovering something awe-inspiring or curious — but it has to be memorable. 

Now, none of this is an attempt to enforce a One True Way. It’s rather an exercise in building setting from the perspective of knowing what I want in that setting and understanding how to achieve that result by design. There are amazing cosmopolitan fantasy game city-settings out there, like Ptolus and Sigil. (Perhaps paradoxically, I’m not all that interested in the Wilderlands’ City-State of the Invincible Overlord.) Plenty of genre fantasy has its adherents, or it wouldn’t sell and it wouldn’t be the standard it is today. But those aren’t the worlds I want to build or the purposes to which I want to use those worlds, so I need to know how to avoid the methods by which they’re constructed. 


Too pastoral. Doesn’t freak me out enough.I know why I have the tastes I do. They’re my favorite parts of all the genre fiction I enjoy so much, from back when fantasy meant fantastical instead of a publisher-mandated trilogy with li’l kids in a reliable Western Europe pastiche and, oh, here’s your frontispiece maps. Instead, I want the weirdness of Clark Ashton Smith and the decadent ruin of Robert E. Howard. Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar feels like an opium dream. Jack Vance’s world careens toward the end of its history, and labors under the shame at having forgotten much of that history. I apologize for sounding like a broken record, but the reason I enjoy these pioneers so much is that when they were writing, much of this was new stuff, and hadn’t yet become a by-the-numbers department of the book store. (I don’t want to come across as a purely curmudgeonly advocate of bygone days. I’m rereading some of the Elric tales right now, and they don’t do a whole lot for me, nor does the saga-homage of Tolkien.)

Along those lines, I want the games I play and run to have that feel for the player of being a visitor in a strange, often hostile land. That means I have to challenge my players’ sense of comfort with the world that surrounds them. However, I have to do it in a manner that makes them want to accept that challenge and bring the world to heel. I can’t be so weird with the world as to alienate them, disconnect them from sensory understanding, or risk ridiculousness.

The most magnificent fantasy creature I’ve experienced to date is the alzabo from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I won’t spoil it for you, because those books are damned well worth reading, but it’s a dangerous, horrifying, alien, otherworldly thing that is going to wreck your shit unless you’re extremely clever or insightful. Contrast that with, say, the garden-variety goblins that populate so many ersatz fantasies, which are so commonplace as to be known quantities. There’s no horror, no wonder, no fantasia at all, even though we’re supposed to be dealing with Others or monsters. 


Not even a Scott Fischer illustration can redeem this mess.It’s possible to take horror, wonder, and fantasia too far, of course. The D&D monster I hate with the heat of a thousand suns isn’t the goofy flumph or the preposterous flail snail (You know what? I actually kind of dig the flail snail). It’s not even the hokey nilbog. It’s the goddamn rast. The rast isn’t weird or alien, it’s just gibberish, a grab-bag of dumb-looking critter bits and screwy game effects. It’s a trans-dimensional, fire-aspected, dog-headed, blood-drinking, paralysis-causing-when-it-looks-at-you, clawed volcanic spider oh, God, make it stop already. It’s the opposite of an alzabo. It’s just a pile of stupid. 

That’s why, in my current worldbuilding exercise, I strip the comfortable stuff out. In my Wilderlands campaign, which is under revision, I’ve tried to capitalize on that brilliant original Judges Guild material and I’ve pulled out the parts that don’t hit the themes I want and have replaced them with the ones I do. Included among the things that had to go were all the stock fantastical races, the elves-n-orcs-n-dwarves-n-gnomes. Instead, I replaced them with things that are either one-off mysterious entities of wholly inscrutable origin like the psychic fungus that had symbiotically attached itself to a ruined tower. I didn’t have any idea what the symbiosis with an inanimate structure might be, but the idea felt out-there enough to tantalize me. Alternatively, I’ve left the critter cultures there, but pulled them back from common contact with the world. You don’t meet an orc, you meet an odd humanoid with violent tendencies and bestial features that perplexes you with its similarity to you but puts you off with its bellicose nature. 

I don’t overload the detail. I don’t write encyclopedia entries for encounters. I give enough sensory input to create an impression, and I let the unspoken aspects of creature encounters resonate with my players. They can’t all be perfect encounters, but that’s okay. I ust don’t want any of them to be run-of-the-mill.

Next time: Building accessibly weird places.


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22 April 2010

Seeds in the Garden

 As a followup to the entry on building gardens instead of museums, let’s look at a few techniques that allow for flexibility in worldbuilding, player empowerment, and plot construction.

Let the Players Hold a Few Cards


Conan’s world is built on exemplary details rather than dogmatic statements, giving readers and players a chance to fill in the blanks, which invests them with a sense of co-creation.As you present information to your players, let them take a proprietary stake in the world. This is the tabletop setting version of the golden rule of MMO design, “let the players do it,” and in more open-ended video game environments, this solution works as well. (Tangentially, I’ve long wanted a video game in which my reward for exploration is being able to name the region.)

For example, a player might want to have a character origin from a city or location you mention in passing. (This was why you made the mention but left it undetailed, right?) As part of that origin, he mentions a certain lord, manor, or hermit. Even if you’ve got a backstory already worked out for the region the player adopts as a homeland, it’s an easy enough task to work the character’s creation into the mix.

As another example, over the course of play, a player takes a shine to an organization you presented as a tertiary antagonist. He decides that his Ventrue really likes the way . Sure, you may “lose” an antagonist, but you can always make another, and your reward is an empowered player, and an empowered player is a happy player.

Some of Those Cards Are Liabilities

It’s okay in this situation for a player to overstep himself. Does a player want to be the king’s daughter? Or the prince’s favored childe? No problem. She may certainly gain some benefit from that, but as the game master or designer, that gives you new hooks on which to hang story introductions. As well, the trade-off is that, for a bit of benefit, the player has effectively volunteered to be part of a subplot connected to the prominent figures to which they’ve attached themselves. They may have to solve a problem that affects their patron… or they may be the hostage taken in an effort to leverage that patron.

Plant a Seed of Doubt


What if it wasn’t the Goblin King who stole the baby, but the parents themselves, who were something other than they seemed?The seed of doubt is a revelation that establishes choice in a plotline. Itcan be a red herring, or it can be a clue that a clever player discovers that leads him to the truth. Instead of having a black hat who’s undoubtedly to blame for the priestess’s disappearance, what if you set up your plotline to cast equal suspicion on the jilted princess and the heretic witch? Either one could be the true culprit. Most importantly, whichever one the players suspect, they’ll have doubts that they’ve chosen the wrong one, so they’ll investigate further, which is more fodder for exploration and meaningful roleplay.

You, as the gamemaster or the designer, should be sprinkling seeds of doubt throughout the game. Why? Two reasons.

One: They add depth. Without possible outcomes other than the obvious, your story is linear. It’s not a question of if your players’ characters resolve the mystery, it’s when. They can never go awry, and the only surprise inherent to them is the moment of the reveal. If the players have choices, they get to enjoy the opportunity to solve rather than wait out a plot progression. They can choose the wrong one, which makes for consequences, which makes for drama.

Two: They give you options as a gamemaster. When used in tandem with the “Don’t Know” method below, they allow you to feel out the outcomes and decide if you want to pursue the one the players seem to prefer. Or, if your players prefer lots of drama and surprises, it lets you set them up to be wrong, and thus give them a debacle to solve their way out of.

Additionally, however you use them, they let the players feel smart for being right, or sets their resolve against being wrong again.

Don’t Know

Seriously, don’t answer a question you pose in play or in background material. Let the answer arise over the course of play. Keep your options open – you may write a storyline thinking that the disfigured monk is the culprit in your mystery, but the players have shown much more interest in interacting with the winter witch who lives near the standing stones on the hill outside town. Watch what your players are telling you they want to do and give them more of that. They’ll feel clever for “figuring it out,” and their reward is doing some of your work for you.

This isn’t to say that your plans are invalid. But games are a shared experience, after all, and you’re participating with the players when you let them (indirectly) determine the outcomes of events in the world. For example, you may change plans mid-chronicle to have the winter witch be an agent of the disfigured monk, or vice versa. But the upshot is that the players get to resolve the events to which they are central in the way they’d like to see the outcome, and you still get to flex your worldbuilding muscles in response to the criteria they’ve established. It’s a challenge that you’ll learn from, working within parameters that come from external sources.

Of course, don’t let them know that you don’t know. Part of the fiero of solving in-game challenges is them feeling that they’ve puzzled out your clues (and thus worked within the external parameters posed by your gamemaster’s role. So you both win).

Also, using the “seeds of doubt” technique is a great way to stoke player imaginations and sort of stock the pond for the “don’t know” technique. It’s fine to have possible answers and allow the players to make the decision (behind the curtain) from among them.

This is much harder to accomplish in video games than in tabletop games, because video games have to be coded and the content arranged to answer the questions when the player resolves them, but with creative uses of content creation and story advancement models, it’s possible. But it’ll be expensive.

Know When You’re Right


Sometimes the good guys is the good guy. If the concept is solid, “shading” techniques will only detract from his function.In many cases, you will have made a decisions, and it’s for the best. Know when not to change. In particular, elements that relate to the theme and mood of your game enjoy some sacrosanct status, as changing them can result in a shift from the direction that you’ve established for your campaign.

Some of these are obvious. If you’re running a pretty straight-faced game, you won’t want to make your vampire prince a talking bear, or have the lone unexplored planet in the solar system have an atmosphere high in nitrous oxide. But others of these you’ll have to learn as you hone your craft. Will it change the flow of things for the negative to have the sentient garden instead be an underground grotto, or to have the faerie manhunter instead be a woman? Only you can guess at the answer to these questions.

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16 April 2010

Build Gardens, Not Museums

 Worldbuilding comes with perils, not the least of which is often the tendency for a designer or writer to want to answer all of the questions he puts forward. This is a natural instinct. It creates a feeling wholeness and integrity. It suggests that the created world is a logical place, and that cause has effect. From a perspective of vanity, it demonstrates that the designer knows what he’s doing: No loose ends means nothing can unravel.


Two geniuses conspire drunkenly. What are they planning? WAIT, WAIT, DON’T TELL ME.Where’s the fun in that?

If you’re a writer, leave some loose threads. If you’re designing a game world, leave some of those stones unturned. The interstices, the lacunae, that’s where a world comes alive because they invite the creative participation of the readers or the players. A player or reader who finds a gap or shadowy bit in your world uses her imagination to fill that gap or shine light there. It makes her feel the world is partially hers.

(I’m not saying make your plot a sloppy mess — but we’ll cover plotting more in part two of this topic.)

Now, many worldbuilders don’t want to hear this. They hold up their worlds as bits of virtuoso craftsmanship, unassailable, unchangeable works of sovereign genius.

But that’s not interesting. If the player can’t change the world through his actions, or if the reader’s every bit of creative enjoyment takes a back seat to the writer’s omnipotence over the world, that leaves the audience disengaged. Especially in the modern communication medium, participation is key.

That’s not to say a writer needs to relinquish his “canon,” or that a game world needs to be slave to every passing player caprice. Writers, your readers don’t commit their details to print or digital permanence unless you let them, but they’re going to remember your work for far longer if you let them come along for the ride instead of just watching from the station. Gamemasters and designers, you’re building the world on a macro level, but isn’t it all really just a stage upon which your players can shine? Doesn’t it exist for them to explore, solve, and wonder about?

After all what’s more compelling, a block of quarried stone, or a sculpture?


Blasphemy? Or have I witnessed a secret resurrection? Let me savor not knowing for a while.This was the stock in trade for Vampire when I was running it. The writers and I would spend a few paragraphs putting together a situation or setting, and then we’d cast a bit of mystery over the idea by suggesting that the opposite might be true. Prince Umbrageo holds the city in his iron grip… or does he? Who are those vampires over there? Is there some truth to the fledgling Martina’s claim that she holds the Prince in blood thrall? What’s the real story here? Even if a chronicle never investigated that little quandary, it made the fictional world seem like a bigger place. It gave the sense that not all of the answers had been discovered, that some mysteries still exist.

Not everything fits in a neat little box. That, friends, is where the imagination can shift into high gear. Even though it’s tertiary to the central story (which it must be, because a world of nothing but smoke and mirrors is as unfulfilling as a “museum world” in which you’re not allowed to touch anything), the little things keep boiling in your players’ or readers’ minds. It keeps them coming back to you, hungry for more.

Next time: putting the theory in practice. Get out your gardening gear, as we’ll be planting some fecund seeds of doubt.

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29 March 2010

Two Designers…

More accurately, two designers who didn’t work on D&D jabbering about what they’re doing in D&D and why parts of the game they didn’t design are pretty cool. It started as a two-word setting abbreviation that burst into my head last night….

Justin Achilli: Gormenghast + Laputa

Ethan Skemp: HOTT

Justin Achilli: We watched Laputa last night, and I wanted to find the castle and run around in it. Such an overwhelming sense of sorrow, and an “abandoned” mannered society would thrive there.

Ethan Skemp: Yeah, that’s what I’m going for with the Tanglestone game, only it’s rooted in the deep mountains. The Laputa thing is brilliance, though. I would be sorry I’m not doing it, but with my “landlocked” version I’m able to get the idea of worms in the foundation and stuff gnawing in from Outside across.

Justin Achilli: Yes, saw the wormses. I also liked the idea of horrible exile from Laputa being just having your ass tossed into the ocean below. Or, you know, into some unwitting farmer’s pasture. BLATT.

Ethan Skemp: The worms thing actually emerged in play instead of being a pre-existing conceit; much of the initial ideas for the first adventure or two were taken from Aaron and Jeff’s backstories. GOOD THING I PLAN SO GUD

Justin Achilli:  Very clever.

Ethan Skemp: But yeah, the floating castle works well because it’s not attached to anything. It doesn’t even have a location. How do you lose a city? Step one: put it in the air.

Justin Achilli: And that can make for some rationale for a culture that has nothing at all to do with the prevalent one on the flying island. They were domestics, or whatever, and the PCs introduction to them is entirely alien.

Ethan Skemp: Yeah. The whole parallel evolution thing, only it becomes so strange and weird in isolation. One of the little tricks I’ve used is having characters named “Kapta” and “Sarga” because they’ve generally forgotten that “Captain” and “Sergeant” used to be ranks.

Justin Achilli: A neat element. Surname becomes patronym becomes given name or something like it.

Ethan Skemp: I’ve also been really tempted now and again to do something like a world where the major countries and nations are all founded on the worship of a particular deity, and they’ve gone strange over the millennia for being so single-minded. Like the “culture of necromancers/undertakers and their necropoli” tied to the death goddess. That is a major endeavor, though, building a whole world on a principle as such.

Justin Achilli: Yeah, I’m taking the opposite side of that angle. I have a single “God,” and the divine classes are actually servants of extremely powerful fae. So the pantheon of D&D gods is replaced with a seelie/ unseelie court that has its own set of interactions. There’s no fruity survey course of theologies, which is what gives me hives in fantasy games and lit.

Ethan Skemp: Very flavorful. Definitely brings to sharp attention the idea that the relationship between god and worshipper can be a very conditional pact.

Justin Achilli: Hmm… I should dig back into how the divine classes work.

Ethan Skemp: I don’t know why I like pantheons so much, I just do.

Justin Achilli: I vaguely remember that a divine character’s powers come from investment in his position by the faithful. As opposed to a conduit from the deity.

Ethan Skemp: Yeah. Technically they say “except invokers”, but eh. Invoker: 12th-level half-elf Moses.

Justin Achilli: But I like the idea that an entity makes a personal arrangement with his avatar or thrall. But this all amounts to just making up a new pantheon and calling it “this is not a pantheon.”

Ethan Skemp: It has its tweaks. Like how you can use a panoply of saints to create what is effectively a “pantheon” (which does offer more player customization, in that you can choose an archetype for your theology) but still focus on monotheism as a motif. The fey things allows for that level of player utility, but it has serious implications as well that do make them not necessarily the average D&D god.

Justin Achilli: Which is the Church of the Redeemer in my Belluna environment. Plus, it lets them be capricious, and not necessarily see things eye to eye with their followers. Which I suppose has a model in the Greek pantheon if we’re talking about real, historical gods.

Ethan Skemp: Yeah, basically. I like Big Gods, but that also allows me to not have them be very micro-managey. If a PC has divine powers they can choose to be special, to see the god in vigils or visions, but mostly the god isn’t looking over your shoulder all the time. In Rasenna the priesthood of the goddess of love and strength is outright corrupt, taking payments to bless loveless marriages made for political purposes. I mentioned to Aileen that they would be in need of a Fiery Redeemer, and she said “Shut up, you’re going to make me want to play another character.” All nailing tracts to doors and shit. It’s actually something I like about the pursuit of balance in 4e: you can take any approach to the divine, but divine power in and of itself is not any better than anything else. A powerful saint is still able to be matched by a peerless swordsman. Which leads itself to lots of room for interesting implications, instead of mandating a “So why don’t casters rule the world?” question.

Justin Achilli: Yeah, that’s one of the interesting economies of power that occurs from making everyone a caster.

Ethan Skemp: The thing is that in the context of the world, everyone isn’t, but players of “non-casters” are indulging in more meta-game and more creative control of the environment. Using the daily not as “a spell I can use only once per day” but as “an opportunity that I as a player choose to invoke now” is heady crap. That’s wacky stuff to be sure. It’s like the world favors the bold.

Justin Achilli: Well, that’s almost certainly true. As you climb the level structure (which now is part of the world rather than a metaconcept of bookkeeping), you have more of those dailies and they’re more significant as you keep learning them.

Ethan Skemp: Plus, the design that seems to be of the ilk of “just throw bigger and more stupidly powerful monsters at the PCs and don’t worry about it, PCs are tough” feeds the whole mechanic so that PCs are really designed to be dramatically impressive.

Justin Achilli: Yes. So a thing like the tarrasque actually makes sense. One of the consequences of this, though, is that the game continues moving away from its origins as a pastiche of the literature that originally inspired it. Now, the only thing D&D is consistent with is itself. Good thing or bad thing is a personal call, but I have to admit a nostalgia for the “paladin” of yore, who had to be human, because it was based on Galahad and Launcelot. You couldn’t be an elf paladin, because elves were of the fae realm and paladins were Christian.

Ethan Skemp: D&D is its own fantasy subculture now, but if you can get players to buy into it, though, you could do some neat things with applied limitations. For instance, a 4e Relics & Rituals: Excalibur could do stuff like “hey, no divine classes for elfs. And no primal for humans; the closest you can get is a fae pact.”

Justin Achilli: Oh, certainly. But one of the things I really like about 4e is that the options are wide open.

Ethan Skemp: There’s not as much of a lingua franca, to be sure.

Justin Achilli: So my nostalgia is just that.

Ethan Skemp: I hear ya.

Justin Achilli: Weirdly, D&D inspired MMOs, and MMOs definitely shaped 4e, but as 4e continues to grow, it once again becomes a thing that sustains only itself. It’s like a mobius torus of self-referential infinity. (And the basis of a new psionic class.)

Ethan Skemp: Well, if it draws on modern fantasy literature, it’s going to be really self-referential. Look at GRRM, Stephen Brust, China Mieville, Stephen Erikson, and of course Scott Lynch: there are all these gamers writing the popular fantasy these days. And if you go into other media like anime, everyone’s reacting to fantasy anime that’s also done by gamers.

Justin Achilli: Martin’s saga is the war of the roses, not D&D. I can’t make heads or tails of Erikson. Magic is some kind of space-room that belongs to individual practitioners? FIGHT MOAR, PLZ.

From here, the conversation degraded into me hollering angrily about modern fantasy having too many goddamn kids scampering all through it, talking older than their   age and eventually growing up to be the Chosen One or hijinxing their way into foiling the Evil Wizard’s plans. Will scolded me the other day for being mad at something that is effectively part of the genre, and if I didn’t like it, I should read some other genre, but I’m still mad about the genre that spawned Cugel and Conan being reduced to various episodes of the Little Rascals, “good-naturedly ambling into Mordor and confounding some slapstick orcs into kicking a farting Sauron down the Lidless Eye tower staircase.” But I didn’t transcribe any of that grumbling here.

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10 March 2010

Design Via Play

When I attended the Art History of Games several weeks ago, the keynote put forth the question of what it meant to view games as an art form. To my surprise, five responses down the list came the idea of whether or not a game is complete without play. Does a game need players to be a game?


Part of both design and play is deciding what you want the game to yield. You’re picking an identity for the experience.I believe – strongly, to the point of fist-fightery – that it does. The tree falling in the forest and all that.

However, with any game, the moment a player actually plays it, the experience becomes uniquely theirs. Intellectual property, code, graphics, art, rules phrasings, etc. may all still belong to the publisher or developer, but the experience of play is singular and belongs to the player or community of players, whatever the size of that community, whether it’s two people at a chess board or eleven million in an MMO.

Steering that experience is an exercise in design. While the original designer certainly (well… hopefully) had a specific goal or experience in mind, once the game has left his hands, his input on it is minimal, and probably nil. Unless the players specifically seek him out to make some sort of arbitration or additional input, the game session belongs to and is inevitably shaped by the player. A designer definitely needs to be informing his own decisions by playing his own game.

This, effectively, makes each player a designer. Certainly, it makes her a participant (or potentially an audience, depending on whether or not you view a given game as art), but when she makes decisions that shape the flow of the game, she’s designing. She’s making a consideration of preference and she’s seeking to replicate the experience of that preference.


Design and play crafts an experience. The players’ result is more important than the original design and circumstance. All the initial design provides is the springboard.Roleplayers and wargamers engage in design all the time, whether in scenario construction, worldbuilding, army construction, character creation, or monster-making, they’re designing. They may not be designing an entire ruleset, but they’re creating a unique combination of game features and functions intended to interact with other player entities and the game environment itself. Deckbuilding is design. House-ruling and kitbashing are obviously design. You don’t have to be refining “what is a hunter?” into Hunter: The Vigil or writing a mash note to what you love about Masquerade to be a designer. Almost any play will do.

The practice extends even to video games, even if the player never touches the code. The idea of character creation and advancement – that’s experiential design, shaping how the player again chooses to interact with the environment and the community. Writing a mod or add-on, for those technically adept enough to do says, states explicitly, “I want to play the game like this.” It’s one of the things I really admire about World of Warcraft and Valve: They actually look at how people are using and modding their games and they adapt the most popular or interesting of those into the actual body of “official” game code.

That’s not to say all design is good design. The parlance of “broken” rules and “nerfed features” (if they’re true statements) show that any rule, whether professionally designed or assembled by the end user, can present a play experience that is detrimental to some players even if it’s all the steez for one player. There’s a fine but distinct line separating punishing a player and challenging a player.

The other day on Facebook, a writer friend who worked on Vampire material back in the time of Masquerade dropped me a line asking a rules question about an out-of-print bit of material. Here’s part of the exchange.

 

The beauty of it is, they’re both right. The rule as written is right for the game experience in which the players have decided it best suits them, and the houserule for the large-scale LARP group is also right for its experience — at least for the time being, which the players-as-designers can overturn if it no longer suits them.

To me, this is one of the most amazing aspects of games as a medium: the great democratization of ideal and design. Without players, a game isn’t a game – and a game that denies the ability of players to use the game in a way that entertains them may soon become not a game for lack of play. Design isn’t an ivory tower, it’s a participatory process at all levels that is forever vital so long as the game is in play. It’s a little like play itself in that regard….

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2 March 2010

Requiescat In Pace


I think I dated this girl once.A great many stories revolve around defeating and killing the Big Bad Foe, which isn’t exactly a revelation. I’ve been thinking about ways to revisit this hoary old plot point, and one of the avenues I’m exploring is not new and clever ways to kill Big Bad, but to make sure Big Bad stays dead. In fact, I don’t even know that the killing is necessary in and of itself. I can probably keep that story element as a piece of history, given certain assumptions, so I’m obviously after a different sort of challenge.

Historically, separating an individual’s head from his body served to accomplish this at least part way. Superstitions aside, most of these were cases of wanting to keep an individual’s followers from rallying to a martyred leader, as with William Wallace or Vlad Tepes, but some occult aspects are sometimes associated with the act, as with John the Baptist. (And I suppose Vlad Tepes can probably fit here, too.)

What I’m really look for is a quest-type storyline that’s more preventative than overtly empowering. The protagonists don’t necessarily receive the grail at the end of the quest, they manage to stave off the occurance of some horrible thing. This is, of course, the bailiwick of many Cthulhu tales, the culmination of which is buying the world a little extra time before “the stars are right” again, but also has precedent in other fantasy fiction, as in “The Hour of the Dragon,” in which Conan’s ultimate foe is a long-dead sorcerer of Acheron raised from the dead by a faction of jealous conspirators. The reward for success is continued wellbeing, at least for the time, and makes a refreshing break from the standard model of task resolution equals item upgrade.

What about you? Have you used “And stay dead!” in any of your games or writing endeavors?

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3 February 2010

The Ghouls of Brixton

Here’s a game scenario I plan to run at some point soon. It’s an intersection of history and horror, which I think is a lot of fun, especially because it’s an opportunity to use some old Clash, Pogues, Specials, and Damned recordings as background music for the game session.

(For the record, I know Brixton’s nowhere near Birmingham. I was just riffing on a Clash song title.)


In late May of 1984, a night-mist rolled inland to Somerset, leaving in its wake a horror.

Few noticed immediately. Those who did, though, acted swiftly. Within hours, a small boat troop of SAS agents performed an insertion mission to Somerset, but only two returned. They were unable to make a final report, and could only rave about a cannibal bloodlust. Aerial surveillance of Somerset revealed innumerable corpses lying all about the city and surrounding landscape, many of which had been stripped of flesh.

Field research revealed that a blood-borne “entity” was to blame. Those “infected” became ravening monsters, losing all sense of self and self-preservation and seeking only to kill and feed on the flesh of fellow men.


The Prime Minister passed the Special Citizens’ Act in an emergency session of Parliament. This measure gave Special Branch the authority to detain – or liquidate – any citizens suspected of having a connection to the disaster. Paranoia spread as quickly as the tragedy, and hastily built detainment facilities teemed with thousands of prisoners across the country. Special Branch arrested anyone and everyone, victims of the horror and suspected conspirators alike.

It wasn’t enough. The horror spread too quickly. The detainment camps collapsed. Terrified people rioted, looted, and destroyed places suspected of being havens for the infected. The United Kingdom was a ruin.

The World Health Organization and the United Nations quarantined the island. International forces established three camps, one in Liverpool, one at Dover, and one in London, where they could evacuate those who proved to be untainted by the entity. A broadcast transmission implores survivors to make for the quarantine camps if they can make the trip.

You are one of those survivors, still clinging to life two weeks after the disaster. You and a few other individuals have convened in the basement of a block of council homes in Birmingham. The closest camp is Liverpool, just under a hundred miles away to the northwest. It’s by far too dangerous a trip to make by oneself, especially since it’s unknown what obstacles lie between here and there, but with the safety of numbers, it just may be possible.

Character Concepts


It’s mid-1984 England. Before the disaster, England was a hotbed of unrest, where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, led the UK’s Conservative Party into the Falkland Islands conflict, against the European Union, and toward privatization that favored the already-wealthy and left everyone else enraged and disenfranchised. Working-class concepts are appropriate, as are the 80s English archetypes like skinheads, punks, goths, rebellious students, revivalist mods and rudies, displaced IRA sympathizers, soccer hooligans, and privileged children of wealthy families.

This is a survival horror scenario, so we’ll be starting with utterly inexperienced characters. Build a stock, new character out of the rulebook, or give me a three-sentence character concept and I’ll work with you to put it into game terms. Don’t fret about inventory — it’s just you and what you have in your pockets.



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26 January 2010

Shotgun Blog: Five Things

You don’t pray to a saint, you pray with a saint. You’re asking the saint to pray for you. Praying to a saint would make that saint an icon, which isn’t what saints are. Saints, having led particularly holy lives, are especially effective in their prayers and have certain specialties, which is why you choose a specific one of them to ask their aid and attention.


A tiny werewolf, which dwelled duplicitously inside the hide of a possum.I saw a dead possum in the road on the way to work. Something about the way its shapeless carcass lay in the road suggested that something else was previously inside it, and had shed its possum costume and gone about its buisness. A very small lycanthrope, perhaps.

Sid Meier said that a good game is a series of interesting choices. When you make certain choices in most games, however, you preclude yourself from making other choices. Is part of a good game, then, deciding which choices you don’t want to make, and using that information to inform the choices you do make, in a sort of prognosticative play? And is it possible to play by not playing, say, by choosing to “avoid all games of chance” or “stay out of the Molasses Swamp” by never entering Candyland?

My tepid romance with Dragon Age: Origins seems to be at its end. My interest fell off rapidly when I entered the Brown Kingdom of the Dwarves, whose undermountain kingdom (eight buildings you can enter) had ground to a halt, and only I could save it. Oh, how would these sixty dwarves, none of whom seem to have jobs, survive without my timely diplomacy? To tell the truth, I don’t care.

I would love to read A Dance with Dragons.

4 comments
22 January 2010

The Perils of Production: Art Notes

Way back in the day, when I did the art notes for my first solo-developed project, I learned a valuable lesson. It seems pretty common sense now, but being a relative neophyte in the world of commercial game design, I had to make my bones the hard way. The lesson? In art notes, tell your artist what you want. Like I said, common sense, right? Not exactly.


I got what I asked for.You may remember the game, if you’re a White Wolf fan from those days. I had developed the Legacy of the Tribes supplement for the Rage card game. We’d finished design, our playtests were going well, and my art notes had come due.

I diligently dove back into the card texts, highlighting relevant sections and adding little comments to the bottoms to suggest specifics. (Tangentially, we did our card mockups in PageMaker. PageMaker! I doubt anyone reading this can even remember PageMaker.) Most of my art-note comments were vernacular, colloquial. Conversational, even.

One card in particular weighed heavily with idiom: the Zmei, a huge, monstrous, epic draconic monster out of Slavic legend. Its game stats were grotesque, representing a dire challenge and heroic coup for any werewolf pack that could bring it down. My art note reflected my naive enthusiasm. “An enormous dragon tearing some clown in half!”

Now, when I say, “some clown,” I just mean some poor fool who can’t meet his situation. A guy out of his league. Someone worthy of laughter or even derision.

The artist illustrated a clown in horrid physical straits. A clown. A literal clown.

I had asked him to paint a clown, hadn’t I?

I got a clown.

Designers and developers, remember this little clown when preparing your art notes or giving art direction. No matter what you’re making, be it a card game, tabletop rpg, video game, or piece of writing, be sure to ask your art director for exactly what you want. Imagine my face over his up there, dangling bloodily from the jaws of a mythic monster.

Honk, honk.

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