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Feb 03 2012
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design, Fiction, RPGs, WIP, Writing

Written Sketches

I recently started using Day One, a journaling app that’s sleek and fun and has a popup feature whereby the app tells you, “Okay, write something.” I’ve been using it mostly for sketching — a paragraph or two at a time just to keep the words flowing without any real thought to where they might fit. They all seem to have some commonality, and from that, I’m getting a sense for what the world they’re describing looks like, which is a sort of neat emergent feature. Well, perhaps not a feature, but more of an intersection of how the app works and what I keep scribbling into it. Here are a few of the excerpts.

“What lands are these? They are the lands we lost, as men, to time, to declivity of the soul, and to outside forces against which we failed to rally. These lands once belonged to our fathers, sustaining us on their bounty, but then we grew proud, and in our pride we grew ignorant, and in our ignorance we debased ourselves and called it culture. Ours is not a legacy of culture, our legacy is a loss of the culture that once united us.”

These words were spoken by Taraq, son of Haroun, before he turned his back on humanity and walked into the wilds, never to return. Some will say his bride bewitched him, but others know the truth: that Taraq did indeed fall in love with his beguiling bride, but that the choice to leave the realm of mankind was wholly his. Taraq has followed his wife into the life of the Good Folk, those who were ancient before even the first true Men could speak words. No more does he practice his huntsman’s craft, for now he dwells in the world instead of merely being its guest.

Looming on the horizon is a castle penumbrated in a timeless twilight. I have watched the lords descend from the castle, thralls to their dead with-lord, to pull women screaming from their beds in the village below. They take them up the icy path, into that dark-shrouded castle and their screams linger in the cold air for an eternal moment and then end. I cannot say how often they do this, these awful lords, for the dread that oppresses me makes me fear and look away.

I hate this weakness in myself. I am powerless to stand against the lords from the shadow-castle, powerless to call out their evil, and too small to even raise my eyes to them. What is the greater crime: their boldness and inhumanity to men, or my selfishness and small misery in complicity?

The folk of the undertown whisper of the rogue’s omen, that when a scandal sets the privileged against one another, low men suffer the most. In such ugly times, though, events occur after which those low men’s fortunes change. Not everyone born in a barn need be a horse, to borrow another commoner’s saying. And not every title need be granted at court.

Beneath the manor, beneath the lime and the chalk and the thousand-plus spiraling stairs that crept into the cavern within the mountain, the thing that gives horror to bloom floats, in its parallel of life, in the brackish, primeval fluid that nourished it before the time when gods claimed to have made the world. There, in that stagnant pool, it floats endlessly, glutting itself on the thought and fear of those who live in the valley below the pass. Through millions of tons of stone, it swells in metonymy with the emotional tides of Men who feel its evil and quake in idle dread.

Those who once dwelled in the manor couldn’t have known the awful, cyclopean sect that stirred beneath them when they built it, looming over the pass. Some horrible, cosmic coincidence must have been at play or else, more likely, the creature reached out with its will and forced the construction of the castle, whether through some hellish minion or some more subtle machination. Although, to what end, none may guess.

Some of this should fit easily into the Pagan Lands material, but other stuff might find a place in some Vampire work (with a little retooling). The general sense here is that whatever world this is must ruly be an awful place, with all its rotten happenings and victimizations of the people who live in it. Or maybe it’s the people themselves who are so awful, and they keep bringing ruin upon themselves. There’s definitely a feeling of loss and fear going on.

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Jan 02 2012
2 Comments
design, RPGs, Writing

Give ‘Em a (True) Hand

Something that has surprised me in the ongoing V20 work I’ve been doing is that I’ve taken a new shine to the True Black Hand.

Among the Vampire community, Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand can be an unpopular book. I’ve never been an apologist for it, and I can see what some people don’t like about it. It turns the idea of one of the most distinct Disciplines into something that’s thematically at odds with the rest of Vampire. Some of the powers get a little screwy. It has a few ideas in it that threaten to jump the shark, and the premise of the book itself comes perilously close to doing so, too — it leans on Vampire’s device of secrets within secrets a little too hard. Here’s this ancient weird sect you’ve never heard of before, and they’re pulling the strings of the other groups that you have heard of (so they’re not as cool anymore). A little fast and loose with the baseline Vampire experience, the True Hand is Vampire for people who want something a little weirder.

That said, there’s a lot it does well, and I’m really enjoying rooting around in its vaults again. In particular, here’s a list of what I like about the Tal’Mahe’Ra.

  • Perfect Vampire Tone: I’ve said this on panels and in forum discussions before, but the book absolutely nails the “wheels within wheels” conceit that makes Vampire tick. It’s a sect full of factions, and the sect itself overlaps with some of the other sects, and it even bleeds a bit into the thematics of the other supernatural types. What can you believe or trust? No one knows — and since the unknown is such a vital portion of the horror genre, the True Hand is a great sect for fomenting fear of the unknown by its very existence. It’s especially good for a Storyteller whose players know it all, being well-versed in WoD lore, because all that knowledge works against them in a dramatic way.
  • Exoticism and the Macabre: A slightly Eastern, Gnostic flavor mixed in with cyclopean tombs and the bleak resonance of the First City where vampires held sway. It’s a place where stones as old as Eden make up the halls where monsters plucked from their mother’s bosom as infants have never known anything other than servitude to Kindred — Kindred who claim to be shepherding them and protecting them. Everything they touch is twisted or becomes so, and the lament for what’s lost to their unlifestyle is either immediate and poignant or has never even entered their minds.
  • The Dark Side of Academia: There’s a strong monastic element to the Tal’Mahe’Ra, and it works wonders for Vampire. The idea that there’s such a thing as too much knowledge, that some secrets are better left unearthed, and the perils of what someone might do if only they could find out how — that’s a great motivator, both for or against the troupe’s Kindred. What is the morality of fighting to suppress information?

I’ve been scribbling notes for a True Hand chronicle I want to run, a sort of coterie-against-the-world thing that I don’t think should last too long, but would be an interesting exploration of digging some mysteries up and tirelessly hiding others. Tal’Mahe’Ra agents operating in a domain that doesn’t know they’re there but certainly doesn’t want them. When the whole of the local power structure is against you, but what you’re doing you do to protect it? That’s a theme worth telling a story about, I think

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Dec 18 2011
7 Comments
design, RPGs

The Universal RPG Play Loop

In game design, the designer wants to put the player into what’s known as a “game loop,” a repeated sequence that the player can learn and depend upon, and that helps the designer communicate the essential experience of the game. In many Facebook games, for example, the game loop is plant, harvest, build. In Assassin’s Creed multiplayer, the game loop is hide and seek. In EVE Online, each of the subsystems points back to spaceships fighting.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, of course, because it’s my job to do it and it’s my goal to keep it as uncomplicated as possible for the player. I’m not a big fan of complex systems for the sake of complex systems. I’m not a big fan of difficulty for the sake of difficulty. I think game design is at its best when it’s simple. The strength of a game is in how it allows the players to relate to one another and the systems are all vehicles for that experience. If players can find new uses or clever interactions with simple systems, I think that’s infinitely better than having them solve a difficult system, because it’s more open-ended.

So, given that I’m finishing my most recent game supplement (the V20 Companion for Vampire: The Masquerade), I’ve been going back over the material in the book, making sure that all of the material therein has an appropriate place in the loop. Tabletop roleplaying games are an interesting model because, in my experience, the loop is identical in all of them. The set dressing can change a million and one times, of course, but the ultimate expression of the game, whether you’re playing D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Dogs in the Vineyard, or Vampire, is one of situation and response. Vampire observes event. Vampire participates in (or evades) event. Consequences of action (or inaction) apply. New stimulus results and the loop continues.

One cycle of the tabletop RPG play loop

Now, I’m not saying that every game is the same, of course. I’m saying that how we play these games is a universal construct. The gamemaster presents a situation, the players respond, and the resolution occurs. This resolution leads to the next situation, etc., which keeps the loop in motion. At some point, the action concludes (at the story’s end, when the final challenge is overcome, or just when the game peters out), but every action taken at the game table, regardless of the game, has results and creates a new situation.

That makes me nervous, actually. If there’s one thing I’ve learned form 16-plus years of professional game design, it’s that nothing is so goddamned simple, and if it looks like it is, there’s something horrible about to happen and derail the whole sequence. My loop here is either too general to have much value — which I don’t think is the case — or it’s not accounting for something.

I think the simple loop does have value, because it informs both the core game and the supplementary material. If, for example, I tried to cram a resource-farming loop into Vampire, it wouldn’t work. To a degree, there’s a resource-farming loop that’s integral (vampires need blood and Willpower in order to use their powers or even just stay vital), but that loop is part of the central “situation happens, vampire responds” sequence. If I tried to force an additional interaction of “go back to your blood castle and fertilize your fang trees,” the game would take a radical departure from the expected roleplaying game sequence and the Vampire: the Masquerade experience in particular.

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Oct 05 2011
7 Comments
design, RPGs, WIP

An Anarch (Free) State of Mind

In revisiting Vampire for the 20th Anniversary Edition, I knew I wanted to go back and give the Anarchs a fair shake. The Anarchs took a beating in the revised era, largely as a result of metaplot advancements, but also because their identity at the time was missing a key compelling element. The Anarchs needed the Camarilla to remain relevant. They needed an established organization to rebel against, because without rebellion, what were they?

The other entities in the game with similar outlooks at least had cultural identities to help shape them. The Brujah are the key example here: They’re the clan of “rebels,” but they also have an historical identity tying them to Carthage and Egypt during Classical times, they have an ongoing feud with the Ventrue, and if all else fails, you can just let them be the Lost Boys.

The Anarchs don’t have that. Without the Man, they don’t exist. At least, they didn’t.

Anarchs get all the hot chicks.

That’s a shame. The Anarchs were a really great piece of first- and second-edition Vampire that lost relevance over the life of the game. I certainly have to shoulder some of the blame for that. So that’s why I feel like I owe them an empowering update.

The more I’ve been working on V20, the more the Kindred have showed their age. The Camarilla still cares about its pomp and circumstance, becoming very much Nero as, in the End Times, Rome burns. The Sabbat still wages its holy war, consuming as many of its childer in consecrated fire as it sends against the hated Antediluvians. But the Anarchs? The Anarchs had their ass kicked so bad during the Revised era that they’re still smoldering and black-eyed.

So with the ongoing development work I’m doing for the classic World of Darkness, the more writing I’ve been doing, the more the Anarchs have carved out their own niche in my mind, and I’m wanting to bring that to the supplementary material. Here’s the thing: The Anarchs are younger than the other sects, by individual and on the whole. Their rebellious politics and comparatively low numbers and power (when compared with the elders and officers of the other sects) put them on a guerilla path. To remain viable, the Anarchs need to maximize whatever advantages they can find.

To that end, it’s made increasing sense to me to have the Anarchs become the most technologically adept of the Cainite factions. With the technological and communication advancements since the end of the Revised era, it’s been the perfect opportunity for the Anarchs to grasp emergent technology as a weapon and wield it against the larger, slower, more hidebound sects. It makes sense, Anarchs using Facebook and Google+ groups to trade information, using Twitter to organize (#fucktheprince), and trading or even selling boons on a dedicated auction site. They dump scans of Elders’ incriminating documents into shared Dropboxes. They pass around cultural tokens like music and pictures on sharing services like Tumblr and they call out Kindred hot spots using code phrases on services like Yelp and Foursquare. (Smiling Jack just checked in at the Prince’s Manor.) Hell, some of the really savvy ones might have created their own apps for use on mobile devices. (A geotagged RackFinder? “The music here is good and the kine are way drunk Thursday through Saturday, so the blood is plentiful but boozy. Sunday is industry night. Bartender Ashleigh is a blood doll, so order your drink ‘dirty red’ to let her know what you are.”)

So long as there's 3G available along the way, this guy might join the Anarch Movement in your city once he has to flee his own.

There’s space for this to become silly (Smiling Jack is the mayor of the Prince’s Manor…), but when used with reason, moderation, an Anarch’s on-the-ropes mentality, and with an basic understanding that it’s all a part of a secret war among bloodthirsty predators, it’s actually a really cool way to fight the system. There’s no reason the Anarchs can’t stage innumerable Arab Springs of their own or mobilize like #occupywallst. And think what a group of Anarchs organized and skilled like Anonymous might do — assuming they’re not vampires among us already.

It’s all got me thinking: Is the idea, even, of “domain” outdated for the Anarchs? Is the new Anarch model a sort of enlightened, information-rich Autarkis state? Is each Anarch his own sovereign domain?

This last might be getting a little out there, but it’s certainly food for thought. It’d be worth exploring in a one-shot or chronicle, and can definitely alter the course of the nightly . Whatever the case, it makes the Anarchs fundamentally viable again, and no longer the whipping boy for the Camarilla (and the Sabbat, and the Kuei-jin…). It also gives a compelling reason and method for them to be fighting back from the whipping they suffered throughout the previous run of Vampire titles.

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Sep 23 2011
14 Comments
Music, RPGs

The Grand Masquerade: Succubus Club Playlist

Hey, gang:

Here’s a list of the tracks I played at the Succubus Club at the Grand Masquerade this year. It’s in alphabetical order instead of chronological, because I didn’t have enough room at my table to keep a list. I simply used the awesome power of my mind to remember what I played (okay, okay, my mind power isn’t so awesome that I remembered what I played in sequential relation to what else), so I just alphabetized the whole thing. I was specifically going for a “classic” Vampire sound to commemorate the 20th Anniversary Edition, but I mixed a few newer pieces into the set. Enjoy!

  • A Flock of Seagulls, “Wishing”
  • Aiboforcen, “Twilight World”
  • And One, “Body Company”
  • Apoptygma Berzerk, “Burning Heretics” (Gothic Version)
  • Apoptygma Berzerk, “Kathy’s Song” (Beborn Beton Remix)
  • Bigod 20, “Like a Prayer”
  • Bigod 20, “The Bog”
  • Bruderschaft, “Forever” (Kombinat Remix)
  • Combichrist, “Get Your Body Beat”
  • Covenant, “Dead Stars” (Club Mix)
  • Crystal Castles f/ Robert Smith, “Not In Love”
  • Dave Gold, “Enjoy the Silence”
  • David Guetta f/ Nicki Minaj & Flo Rida, “Where Them Girls At”
  • Deadmau5, “Moar Ghosts n Stuff”
  • Echo and the Bunnymen, “Lips Like Sugar” (Way Out West Remix)
  • Eric Prydz, “Pjanoo” (Afterlife Remix)
  • Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams” (Steve Angello Bootleg)
  • Fischerspooner, “Infidels of the World Unite”
  • Front Line Assembly, “Mindphaser”
  • Gerard McMann, “Cry Little Sister”
  • Godhead, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
  • Good Charlotte, “I Just Wanna Live”
  • Icon of Coil, “Pursuit”
  • Imperative Reaction, “Surface” (Shok’s Zeitmahl Remix)
  • In the Nursery, “A Rebours (Against Nature)”
Rotersand & Kamara, “Social Distortion”
  • Javi Reina & Alex Guererro f/ Sandra Criado, “Running Up That Hill”
  • Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again”
  • Lady Gaga, “Judas” (Hurts Remix)
  • Lady Gaga, “Judas” (R3HAB Remix)
  • Ladytron, “Black Cat”
  • Ladytron, “Destroy Everything You Touch”
  • Linus Loves f/ Sam Obernik, “Stand Back”
  • LMFAO, “Party Rock Anthem” (Kim Fai Remix)
  • Martin Solveig f/ Dragonette, “Boys & Girls” (Extended Mix)
  • Martin Solveig f/ Dragonette, “Hello” (Bassjackers Remix)
  • Metallica, “Enter Sandman” (Dirty Funker Vocal Mix)
  • MGMT, “Kids” (Soulwax Remix)
  • Mr. SOS, “Welcome to the Future” (Chew Fu’s Bionic Remix)
  • Neon Trees, “Animal” (Smash Mode Remix)
  • New Order, “Blue Monday” (’88 12″ Version)
  • Nine Inch Nails, “Closer”
  • Nitzer Ebb, “Shame” (Flood 12″ Mix)
  • Revenge, “Pineapple Face”
  • Sisters of Mercy, “Lucretia My Reflection”
  • SITD, “Hurt”
  • Skinny Puppy, “PolitikiL”
  • Sohodolls, “My Vampire”
  • The Cult, “She Sells Sanctuary”
  • The Smiths, “How Soon Is Now?”
  • The Sounds, “Tony the Beat”
  • The Vampire Orchestra of New Orleans, “Bad Things” (String Arrangement)
  • VNV Nation, “Chrome”
  • VNV Nation, “Verum Aeternus”
  • Wolfsheim, “Once in a Lifetime” (Extended Mix)
  • Woodkid, “Iron” (Gucci Vump Remix)
  • Xymox, “Obession”
  • Yaz, “Situation” (Richard X Remix)
  • Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Heads Will Roll” (A-Trak Club Mix)
  • LAST SONG: Queen f/ David Bowie, “Under Pressure”
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Sep 08 2011
9 Comments
design, RPGs

Blood Botch

One of the development principles that I’ve always held close to my keyboard is the idea that a setting and system are like peanut butter and jelly. You can have one without the other, but when they blend, the result is unique. When I had the chance to get my hands dirty with the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, that was the guiding beacon for the systems development.

Storyteller has never been a flawless system, certainly. Its strengths were that it was easy to learn, easy to use, and gave lots of room for fiat decisions that let the story return to the fore. To that end, it really is an ideal system for Vampire and the other World of Darkness games. With all of the emphasis the World of Darkness places on the story, having a system that’s easy to use and discard is a very string symbiosis between setting and rules.

"You definitely see something up there. Probably some kids going camping for the weekend." Welcome to Botchville, population: You.

That’s why, when working on system revisions, the point was to clean up and streamline the existing rules rather than to “fix” anything or rewrite it wholesale. As I was watching the feedback form the open development process, I saw a lot of very interesting comments, many of which were along the lines of (paraphrased), “Weird an fluky results belong in Vampire and are part of the classic experience.” That was remarkable to see, but the more I worked on the systems, the more I agreed. Storyteller is a mostly smoothly curved system, with occasional probability spikes that make for high likelihood of the dice causing an unanticipated result. The botch rules are a prime example of this — so I kept them. I talked to Ethan, Eddy, a few other developers, Rich, and of course the players’ community and we were all in general agreement. For V20 to evince the “classic” play experience, I could tune the botch rules a bit, but I couldn’t replace or rewrite them.

Listen to any troupe tell tales of its past chronicles and you’ll inevitable have a handful of “…and I rolled a botch and it all went to hell from there.” The bum was a werewolf, the gun went off in the Kindred’s face, the Tremere went catatonic as something nether scourged his soul, or the Nosferatu drank the Prince’s ghoul dry.

Awesome! That’s the stuff that throws a Coen brothers-like wrench into a coterie’s plans. Those are the points where the expected course of play swerves wildly. And, for a horror game, what better way to cause a thrilling feel than to upset the tipping point of what these entitled vampires expect to have happen? Sure, they sometimes got goofy, but some troupes like that. At that point, it’s a Storyteller call whether to bring a bit of levity by playing to the laugh, or to have the botch signify a truly awful development. After all, “You regain your senses only to find the walls streaked with blood, the broken body of the senator’s eldest son crushed in your rigid embrace” is one of the hallmarks of the genre and game. The math behind the dice might not be the expected curve, but when have then Kindred been able to rely on what’s expected?

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Aug 27 2011
3 Comments
design, RPGs, WIP, Writing

Odd Properties

He collects the things you find, even though you found them first.

Vampire doesn’t deal much with “magic items,” so when I use something as a sort of McGuffin in a World of Darkness game, I like it to be something with more affect than just a noun of verbing. This extends often to other games I run, in which magic items are implements with their own histories and reasons for creation, rather then mass-manufactured bonus-givers. I’ve been working on two different items recently, one for a Vampire story and one (well, a set of three, actually) for the Pagan Lands, which really got me to thinking about their narrative properties outside their mechanical properties. before long, I had a fun little list of odd properties that can be attributed to occult objects in any game or story.

1) Draws a cloud of flies

2) Emits a constant unintelligible, agonized whispering

3) Absorbs light, appearing out-of-focus and indistinct

4) Smells cloyingly sweet

5) Becomes hot when hidden from sight

6) Is covered in an unremovable layer of grime; cannot be cleaned

7) Bears a symbol long associated with heresy or unwholesomeness

8) Appears more valuable than it truly is to onlookers

9) Floats or sinks; the opposite of what is expected

10) Causes the owner’s speech to take on a musical lilt

11) Anything written in its vicinity becomes smudged, blurred, or otherwise illegible

12) Possesses a lambent nimbus

13) Kills minor plant life

14) Causes everything the owner eats to taste like ash

15) Rattles as if something was inside

16) Turns the owner’s blood black when it is spilled

17) Excretes a sheen like the oil of saints

18) Draws the attention of animals with a keen sense of smell

19) Cannot be accurately remembered or described

20) Crumbles to dust when held by a poor and pious man

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Aug 21 2011
3 Comments
RPGs, WIP, Writing

Thinking About the Nosferatu

Feels like a fiction bit coming together. Or maybe it’s the prelude to some game content? I’ll have to shape this a little more.

A roar escaped form the darkness as if it were belched from the depths of hell, riding on the fetid breath of the forgotten tunnels beneath the city. It surged past the tunnels where the Sewer Rats made their wretched havens and, to the last, the Nosferatu who dwelled beneath the streets streets knew fear — the stark, oppressive fear of the hunted. The fear of prey. Some went mad in that instant, scourged by the terror that they had previously considered it their privilege, their duty, or their curse to inflict.

In a screaming, humid moment, the Nosferatu grasped the terrible realization that, though they were vampires, something now hunted them. The notion was foreign to them, unknown and shocking. The night belonged to the vampires, the Kindred, and though the Nosferatu were among the most loathed of the vampire clans, they were still predators in the darkness. That something now stalked them was a nightmare made real, yet another foul twist for a nocturnal world that held innumerable horrors.

Dread poured over Ol’ Pitch Morris when the roar broke loose, waking him from his reverie. It made his pallid flesh crawl, spooking him so that his pen skittered across the page of his notebook, leaving a great black mark like a bloodstain.

Pitch had long thought that something out there wanted he and his fellow Nosferatu. He didn’t know what it was, or what they were, since it sometimes occurred to him that more than one “it” sometimes howled for the tainted blood of the Sewer Rats. Pitch spent his nights hunting clues that supported the idea, which he had discovered while skulking among the run-down cellars of the city. His haven overflowed with relics of vampires who had inexplicably vanished, victims or perpetrators of the Jyhad or some less definable event. All Kindred feared some sort of variously definable war or culling culling of their kind. It seemed that the undead brought dooms upon themselves, for some vendetta or supernal reckoning had come and eradicated individuals among the Damned. But the Curse of Caine always bore out and new Kindred forever emerged from the shadows that had swallowed their sires. Ol’ Pitch himself numbered only four years among the Kindred. Four long years finding blackened bones, ominous journals, and havens inexplicably abandoned, all pointing to this war of ages. And now this chthonic scream from beneath the lowest warrens the Nosferatu called their own. Was this the apocalypse he suspected of consuming the Kindred in an endless cycle, or had some new horror been birthed from the collective fears of the Damned?

Outside, in the streets above, rain fell, and that always meant trouble for the Sewer Rats. The cesspit that was the world poured all its effluence into the Nosferatu under-kingdom when it rained, from trash, muck, and the undesirable detritus that accumulated in the gutters and alleys to the unfortunate, wayward, and foolish mortals who took refuge below — when the skies opened up, it all came sluicing or crawling into the sewer warrens. The anti-cathartic rain-filth tumbling down from above and the howling hell-thing now surging up from below made for a foul time to be Nosferatu, Pitch thought.

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Jul 09 2011
4 Comments
design, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games

Managing Power of Effect via Parameters

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.

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Jun 26 2011
1 Comment
design, RPGs, Writing

Post-Morality?

Don't judge the book by its cover. Maybe this guy has something you want or need.

One of the things I enjoy about the swords and sorcery genre and about much vintage weird fiction is that it doesn’t bother itself with good and evil. The rogues and warriors are morally ambiguous, and often wicked or selfish, but both the writing and the character possesses a charm that makes you come back to their travails anyway. Sometimes the struggle is between law and chaos, while at other times it’s a less overt setting device invoked by barbarism, the decadence of society, or some sort of historical lacuna or frailty of man.

The picaresque is a great gameplay-adaptable narrative model here, in which a scoundrel (or pack of them) selfishly ambles through life, occasionally helping people or places through no conscious choice, but without the predatory motive typically associated with evil. Treasure, booze, women, weird cults, momentous forces of society, savages, customs, and weird creatures all fall before the wiles of the protagonists with often nothing more complicated than an exciting tale told. There’s no greater comment necessary. It’s just fun or exciting.

If it's not the focus of the detail, where the skulls come from isn't as important as the presence of skulls.

Moreover, in game terms, this freedom from confinement to a moral role opens up avenues of activity and problem solving. I’ve been rereading the updated Judges Guild classic Caverns of Thracia, and the way into the darkest depths of the dungeon involves four sacrifices. Now, these don’t have to be sacrifices of damsels in distress or unblemished virgins — any four sacrifices will do. Gnolls? Sure. Lizard-man? You bet. Hapless retainer? Okay, if that’s how you want to play it. Sacrifice isn’t going to fly with a paladin (probably), but for a Conan, Cugel, or Mouser type, it’s just a detail before moving on to the next action sequence or moody set-piece. It shows that these are bloody times, and that hard men drive them. Moreover, they don’t linger on the details of the sacrifice with unsavory zeal. They have no good or evil component of their own.

And a lack of moral compass makes for other dramatic elements that have their own weight. For example, what of the adventuring party that puts its torchbearers through the ominous portal first? Hardly “heroic,” but certainly “adventurous.” What about the seemingly doomed last stand against the monstrous hordes that — improbably! — survives and makes its way out of the dungeon only to pass the corpses of two other PCs who fell to squabbling over treasure and knifed each other during their exit? It completely invalidates the sacrifice in a morality tale, but it’s a perfect element of an adventurer’s story that gives a lingering redolence of gallows humor. Dark times for hard men, indeed, but high adventure doesn’t have to invoke shining knights. The Pagan Lands are like this. They don’t care for good or evil, but rather rely on concepts of empire, the melancholy of dying cultures, and the impermanence of the memory of Man. Morality doesn’t often enter the equation.

This is certainly at odds with my work on Vampire, which was almost wholly a morality passion play under my stewardship. My Frostholm proposal, similarly, revolved around turning up the morality in standard adventure gaming. Using this different focus doesn’t take anything away from those other efforts. It’s just a different exploration of game content that results in very different stories being told around the table.

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