Hobbit!

Woo!

Game Mechanics That Fail

...in my estimation, of course.

Every game has mechanics that are supposed to represent something, or are supposed to evoke a response. They reinforce player behavior, lend flavor to a game, and create fun...or they don't. While listening to the Brilliant Gameologists (yes, yet another gaming podcast I listen to now) Episode 2 I believe, the topic of Call of Cthulhu's Sanity mechanic came up. It seemed like the hosts all liked the mechanic, but in the past, running Call of Cthulhu or playing in it, I've felt the exact opposite. This got me thinking about some central mechanics to popular, often-mentioned games, games I've had a lot of experience playing and running, which...fail. I came up with three right off the top of my head. After each example, I'll suggest a fix for that mechanic, on the off chance that anyone out there agrees with me about these things.

Call of Cthulhu and Sanity Points

I think that going insane is clearly central to stories in the Mythos, but that the Sanity mechanic fails. Running the game, I feel like it gets in the way of evoking genuine reactions from players. Playing in the game, I feel like it distances me from the horrific things that are going on. The problem is that you end up marking off points, and this is a pause in what is going on, a little calculation, or some erasing, that takes what might actually be creepy or frightening and makes it into the equivalent of taking damage in D&D (which I talk about below) - you just mark off some points and move on. It works sort of like this:

GM: "Boo! You're scared."
Player: "Uh, no I'm not."
GM: "Yes you are. Mark off four points. That means you're really scared."
Player: "Ah." Marks off points on sheet. "I see. Now I'm scared."

Actually, running a Call of Cthulhu game, and then playing in another that was relatively awful, is a lot of what convinced me to work on Horror!, which I've written a bit about on this blog thus far, and may do so again once Parsec is finished and sent to the publisher.

The Fix

To fix this, I can suggest a few methods. The best one, I think, its not to tell the players how much sanity they have left. Things should get creepier and creepier, until maybe they start getting downright freakish for one of the player-characters because she's coming completely unhinged. You can pass little notes to the players to help them get an idea of what's going on and to ratchet up the paranoia as each of them hears something, or feels something, but none of them are sure what's real and what is just a symptom of their minds breaking apart under the strain. With some preparation, you can come up with frightening or evocative images or little vignettes and prepare them ahead of time to reveal at the right moment.

Actually scaring players in a horror game is probably the most difficult task a GM can have, but I think that the Sanity system makes it almost impossible. At least for me.

D20, Dungeons and Dragons etc., and Hit Points

I realize I'm stabbing a sacred cow here. You'll just have to deal.

Hit points are the least flavorful way to handle wounds that I can imagine. Getting hurt hurts. You naturally flinch, cry out, pull back, and shy away from things that could injure you. Unless you're playing D&D. Then, you're just keeping track of a total until it falls low enough for you to go from 100% capacity to unconscious. Hit Points have the power to make being eaten by a Dragon boring. Or to make being backstabbed by an assassin worthy of a yawn. In an adventure game, this is unacceptable.

The Fixes

Unearthed Arcana provides one fix for this that D20 Star Wars 2nd Edition (the one before Saga) used as well - Wounds and Vitality. So you have a pool of Vitality points that you can lose and regain quickly that aren't a big deal. They just represent getting worn down and tired and bruised. Then, you have Wounds, when you lose when someone scores a critical hit on your or when something else serious happens. As soon as you lose even one Wound, you take a penalty. When you lose Wounds, this means that the DM should take a moment to make the wound visceral. The immediate consequences make you shy away from situations that could really hurt you. Running and playing in a game that used Wounds/Vitality, I thought they were a huge imporovement on Hit Points.

Ideally, you should track every significant injury a character sustains. They should all be described vividly and have consequences for the PC. But once you start doing that, you're not playing D20 anymore.

Vampire the Masquerade and Path Scores/Humanity

Its definitely in vogue to give Vampire a lot of crap as a system, but I'm not jumping on that particular bandwagon. I played Vampire and ran Vampire avidly for about eight years or so, and enjoyed almost every session of every game. I wrote and ran huge (80-100 player) LARPS on two occasions and loved those as well. And look! I'm not even brain-damaged. (Sorry, couldn't help myself)

Obviously, the Storyteller system isn't perfect. I've never seen a system that doesn't have holes I could drive a truck through, frankly, so its all a matter of increments to me. One of the most glaring problems is the Humanity/Path system. In most of my games, Path has played a central role, and I've always had house rules galore. As written, your Humanity is just something you grind down as quickly as possible by committing atrocities at every turn. There's no reason not to (except that one Dementation power is, for some reason, resisted by your Path score). Its just holding you back. Ironically enough, the Path system, as written, has no teeth.

The Fixes

The most recent version of Vampire the Dark Ages to come out before Requiem was released actually dealt with Paths a bit better. They added rules for what they called an Aura - it is basically the sense that others get about you, whether you are a seething pustule of moral corruption or a shimmering paragon of virtue. If you had a high path score, your Aura was beneficial in social situations - it was easier to convince people to trust you, for example, or to appear human to a casual onlooker. Those with high Path scores had trouble with both.

I also added a house rule about the order in which PCs woke up at night and got sleepy as morning approached. So with a higher Path score, you got a chance to go out and accomplish things as a PC before others were even awake, and were less likely to fall asleep in a dangerous situation. This added to the Aura as incentive to actually maintain a Path score.

Of course, there was still the fun of plunging into depravity - but now there was a bit more of a feeling that you were losing something.

Brief Update

My computer seems to be in the midst of dying, so stay tuned while I find out if I can salvage it in the next few days...

Storytelling Lessons from "Heroes"

I just got the Heroes Season One boxed set as a gift, and in re-watching the series with my wife, I go to thinking about how I as a gamer can derive some advice from Heroes. The series itself is absurdly good, and in watching it a second time, it is easier to see how tightly everything fits together and how much craft went into developing such a complicated story with multiple principal characters and multiple interlocking storylines that draw together and also change as the series progresses.

Anyway, here are some things that I can take to heart from Heroes that I can apply to games that I run in the future.


1. There are many leads but no read herrings

I'm pretty sure this is a true statement. I don't recall any false leads. There are plenty of things that don't turn out the way you'd expect, but nothing that is presented as important is later revealed to be worthless. Tabletop roleplaying games take place in a collective imaginative space, but that space is imperfect. Its really easy to misunderstand, to miss something important, and so on, especially in a 'traditional' game where the GM or DM is in charge of the storyline. False leads are just frustrating. Leads that change and surprise you over the course of the game are exciting and cool.

In my own game-running style, I tend more toward not having specific leads a lot of the time. This has worked well in the past and has also been frustrating in the past, depending on the group. In the future, I'll have a lot more tools to bring to bear in running games, one of which will be to discuss this ahead of time. Do the players like going around and figuring out what the 'plot' is, or do they want the plot to be, for the most part, a given, or do they want to collectively put together a plot?


2. The principal characters are densely interconnected

This is especially important in a game where the main characters don't begin as part of a single organization or with other kinds of close ties from family or back-story. For example, in a game like Vampire (the Masquerade especially, or the Requiem), you might start out as Vampires from different clans who have never met before the first session, when you're presented to the Prince of the city, for example, or when your Sabbat indoctrination begins. Having other connections worked out, which reveal themselves early and continuously, helps all of the players justify working together.

On the other hand, I've often said that you can "justify" your character doing anything, so you might as well justify your character doing things that are interesting, cool, and move the story forward. It doesn't hurt to have a push in that direction, though, where appropriate.


3. Scenes are all there to tell you something new and important

I haven't played games with powerful scene-framing mechanics for the most part, so I can't say as much here as I'd like to. But scene should always serve a purpose, and something should be revealed, or be at stake, in a given scene. This is also a weakness with some of my games - I like scenes that are just RP between characters and NPCs, and I sometimes forget to include something important about the scene itself outside of the interaction. This can devolve as often as it is fruitful for the game. Putting something at stake in the scene could be a way to help drive things forward in interesting ways.

On the other hand, as a player I enjoy a situation where every scene isn't another intense conflict. So sometimes what is revealed can be something about another player-character, or my own character. I have yet to play it, but Luke Crane describes a mechanic in Burning Empires for just this purpose - defining different kinds of scenes when they are framed so that the group knows what is going on and can define what kind of scene they want.


4. The main storyline is introduced in Episode 1

This only occurred to me when I watched it again, but it struck me that most of the major themes and storylines of the show are introduced from the first episode. This is really cool. It isn't clear at first - you're busy wondering what's going on, who these people are, how are they connected, and so on. But there in the background, even in the foreground, are the main thematic elements, most of the major characters, and the looming threat from the get-go. When these things emerge later on in more detail, they are already unconsciously familiar.

This would be an awesome way to kick off games - include the big things that will come later without making it obvious.

This could also reflect a collective storytelling system, where the first session or the first few sessions are where the group defines what the game will be about, establishing theme and facts and so on. It would have a very different 'feel' from watching Heroes, but would perhaps be similar to the experience of writing Heroes, which is at least as cool for many of us.

A Problem With Story Games

Maybe someone in the Story Games community (not necessarily just the one 'Story Games' forum, but overall) will read this at some point and want to address it. Who knows? And bear in mind that in taking on this topic :

1) I'm talking about something I know comparatively little about

2) I have a funny feeling I'll provoke someone (but that's Ok, just look at my theology blog)

What I mean when I talk about Story Games is actually exemplified by the forum of the same name, which I have a link to on this site but you can also find here. The way I understand it is that Story Games are about Story Now, which needs a little explaining.

There are three ways one might talk about the kind of story that results when we play a game with the goal of story in mind. The first is Story Before, which is one traditional stance where the GM or DM or whomever comes up with a story, works it out ahead of time, and then invites the players to participate in it. The story is already there, it is just being fleshed out, perhaps. At one extreme is something like a video game, where the story is literally laid out for you, and at the other is perhaps a GM or DM who is good at improvising, who has an idea of where things are going and who the major players are but is open to other directions in that framework.

The second is Story After. This also happens a lot, particularly in games that I run, because I tend to like "sandbox" style games where I set up a situation, or a bunch of interlocking situations, drop the players into it and see what happens. Story After essentially means that at the end of a game or session, we look back and say "look at the story that we made!" Maybe someone writes up the session as a story, or someone keeps a game journal. In two current games, one I ran and one I'm in, there is a shared blog that the players and GM have for just this purpose.

Story Now means that the story happens during the game, that the game itself might take on self-conscious story structure elements to it, and the game mechanics guide and develop the narrative, which wasn't worked out before-hand and isn't just something that becomes apparent after the fact.

As I said above, Story Games are concerned with creating Story Now. And I think this is very cool, but it also has a weakness in my limited experience that especially came up in a conversation with a friend recently.

When you are going to Story Now, that means that no one comes in with a plan of what is going to happen. This could mean that things devolve into a random assortment of events and scenes that don't connect to each other. Kind of like the game where you tell a story where each person adds a sentence, and the story goes around and around. You might come up with a great story that way, but you also might come up with crap.

One way that I think a lot of Story Games try to get around this is to more carefully define what their game is about. For example, if I play D&D, I've bought into a genre, and I've bought into a lot of rules and conventions and so on, but the story might be anything. It might be about breaking out of a prison, or about defending a city, or about political intrigue. Granted, D&D is a combat game, but not everyone uses it for that. Or take While Wolf's games - you buy into a genre but not into a specific kind of story.

In contrast, with a Story Game, the game is not only tools to create a story, but it also tells you a lot more of what that story will be, and includes mechanics for that kind of story and not others. Rather than pick on a particular game, I'll given an example. One game might be called Prison Break. So when you play this game, you know that your Story Now will be about breaking out of a prison. If you want your game to be about Machiavellian politics, no dice. If you want a game about breaking out of prison, chances are this is a fantastic option. To me, Story Games are focused in this way.

The reason this is a problem, for me, is twofold.

1) I'm used to a completely different model of games. For example, the first game I ever bought and ran was Mythus by Gary Gygax. I used that rules-set to run games for about three years or so - using just the one book to run and play in all kinds of games. Granted, none were Story Now, but that's a lot of mileage, and I've since used other systems, D&D/D20, GURPS, White Wolf's games and so on, in a similar way.

2) I'm broke. So let's say that now I want to run a game that's about bronze-age competition between Greek heroes. Next I want to run a game that's about competition in academia that involves an insect somehow. After that, a friend wants to run...whatever else. I can do all of this with one Story Before/Story After system, but if I want the Story Now experience, each of these games will need its own system.

Like I said, this isn't a big problem, but its something that has come up - if nothing else, then because there are a lot of games that I want to buy, but can't afford them, motivating me to focus on systems that can be used a lot of ways and developing house rules for them.

Or designing my own games, though I don't really see any of them as Story Games.

So, in short, I get what is cool about them, and maybe what I really need is someone to run a Story Game for me and convert me so I can drink the Kool-Aid. For now, though, Story Now seems like it is interesting...and a barrier as well.

More D&D 4th Edition News

I got turned on to a new podcast, Gaming Steve. What brought the cast to my attention was an hour-long interview with Christopher Perkins (he's the bald one) from Wizards of the Coast about D&D 4.0. There was some information about what they're developing and thinking that I hadn't encountered elsewhere.

A lot of what he talked about is D&D Insider and Gleemax-related; more about the online gaming table, encounter and adventure-creation resources that they'll have available and so on. I have to admit that from his description, Gleemax in general seems less crappy than I'd thought up to this point. It looks like they're considering a few good ideas along with their bad ones I've already talked about (not in the order that they were discussed on the podcast):

1. Software that draws on a database of all of the rules that they publish that you can use online to build encounters and adventures. You will also theoretically be able to publish them for the community at large and possibly even sell them.

2. The opportunity to even potentially sell your scenarios and adventures, which serves as an entry-point into the industry as it has in the past.

3. A "Not Tournament Legal" setting for the online gaming table, which will be a category for things like house rules and tweaks to the game - so they can coexist fairly with RPGA and Living Greyhawk and so on. I'm not sure how they'll support these kinds of tweaks, but I'm glad that you're not bound to what is published - if all this turns out to be true.

4. Pickup games. This is cool, though something I'll probably never get involved in where D&D is concerned - too much time commitment required to have a decent game.

5. Support for discussion of other kinds of games. Again, I'm not sure how far they'll go with this kind of thing, but a general "Facebook for gamers" might be helpful. Sometimes its hard to find a game, and maybe having some kind of central hub for this kind of activity among D&D-style gamers would be good. Who knows? I fear hegemony, but I'm a pessimistic anarchist :)

6. The "completely new" rules reveal: all classes will have powers that are at will, per encounter and per day, not just casters. The power level will be equal to your character level - a 13th level character will have 13th level powers, on up to 30th level. I had guessed this from other sources, but its still interesting to know.

In general, if you are excited about the online functionality of D&D 4th Edition, check out the link above to the podcast itself and listen to it. You can even scan past the first 1/3 or so, which is also quality, but is much more focused on video gaming, which seems to be Gaming Steve's overall focus.

Design Journal 12: It Has Begun

A couple days ago I sent out the first batch of (very) rough drafts of Parsec. Now I wait while people read them and put their comments together. I wish I had more time to produce better and more complete rough drafts, but I thought it was better to get them out now than to wait for two weeks until I can start actually working on the thing again. Now I need to turn my attention to all the things I've been neglecting because of wanting to work on Parsec.

Even after I send it out, I still get ideas of how to clarify and improve it. I'm writing them down, and I'm sure that if I get responses from the ten or so people who are reading the MS right now, I'll have loads to consider.

Its been said that "better is the enemy of done" (on various podcasts - I forget who supposedly first said it - an indy game designer) and I can really see the truth of this in my own mind. That's part of why I gave myself an artificial time-limit for the work. If nothing else, it reminds me that I can't work on this thing forever.