Holy crap, the first trial run of the Mass Effect Tabletop game rocked something FIERCE. I have the best playtesters.
Check out the full gallery; it's got screenshots from throughout the session & an explanation for how you can run a web game like this yourself!
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Check it out!
Hell, test them out, just remember to tell me the results. I’ve been putting alot of work into this design for the past couple weeks, need to playtest this foundation before I start nailing down the specific details of the next stage.
If you’re in Portland, Oregon and would be up for meeting to playtest this coming weekend (or even weekday mornings), send me a message!
This post on Ben Garney's blog led me into two interesting discussions, one in the comments for that post and the other on Google Buzz. Both seemed worth reposting here.
Dagda:
I have no problem believing that social games can be good/great, while still having viral and monetization elements that’re only minor detriments to the experience.
I can also easily believe many social game devs are passionate about what they do, innovative, and excited to be reaching out to a broader audience. That you and your colleagues/competitors are smart people (likely smarter than me), ones who’re seeking to use your powers for good.
I’m just not sure, on a case by case basis, that this is what’s actually happening. That the games you see as a Good Thing are adding something to the lives of those who play it, rather than just taking something away.
More precisely, what disturbs me is that the impression that so many social games seem to focus on providing is an artificial sense of accomplishment. Yes, Diablo and Torchlight also have this as their primary “gameplay”; frankly, I despise both of them. It reminds me of the japanese “dating sim” genre- sometimes those games provide fascinating stories and engaging gameplay that centers around interacting with well-realized NPCs. But many others are primarily meant as an artificial substitute for a relationship with an actual human being.
Put differently: My untested suspicion is that most social games are like mental junk food. I’m not about to call a bag of cheetos “evil”. But if both the people making cheetos and the people consuming them didn’t see a difference between their chosen food product and some fresh fruits and vegetables, would you start to feel concerned?
Ben Garney:
So, your metaphor is that traditional games (let’s say Civ 5, Madden, and Braid for example) are wholesome and filling, while social games are junk food?
Dagda:
Precisely, except that I’d insert a “many” in before “social games”. Nothing says they have to be that way, and I’m heartened that you’re seeing a trend towards deeper gameplay.
A more on-target way to put it might be that incentive systems (gold, leveling up) are like sugar and salt. A potent way to enhance a substantive core product, but make them the core and you’re left with something of a much shallower value. Is Farmville a game? Is a candy cane food?
Ben Garney:
That brings us to the core of the issue. I agree – most social games are really light on the gameplay. But that doesn’t makes them evil – it’s just a sign of an immature market. Little kids will take sweets over a fine steak dinner. But as they grow up and their palates mature, they begin to appreciate the finer things in life. We will see the same in the social space.
Of course, some people prefer candy canes to steak their whole life. I think some gamers come from a place where they are used to fine steak and can’t understand why anyone is interested in McDonalds.
----- And from Google Buzz:
Brooks Harrel - I wound up making the longer version of this comment on the blog itself, but: The thing about social games that worries me is when their design's primary goal is to provide an artificial sense of accomplishment. 'Games' like that, I see as mental junk food: Hardly "evil", but you'll still be worried if the manufacturers and consumers viewed it as no different from eating fresh fruits and vegetables.
(To be fair, a better analogue for a normal videogame would be a burger from a family restaurant. Not the healthiest choice, but it has actual nutritious value rather than just flavor, grease, and the ability to fill up your stomach.)
Daniel Cook - I look at our beloved RPGs and one of the primary design goals is to 'provide an artificial sense of accomplishment'. It is an old technique. I'm willing to make the judgement that current social games and traditional games have about the same inherent value if we can look past the happy glow of past memories.
One thing I like about social games is the idea that they are...social. Whether the current crop accomplish that or not is besides the point. They offer a chance to ask the question "How do we make our games more social? How do we build relationships with games?" And that is 100% awesome.
Brooks Harrel - Actually, I can't stand playing Diablo 2 or Torchlight either, because those are also games that try to make artificial accomplishments the "meat" of the gameplay. Meanwhile, I have no problem with the cash system in Steambirds Survival- because your incentive system is being used to enhance gameplay that'd be worthwhile in and of itself, and your "rewards" provide new varieties of challenges, rather than over powering the core gameplay.
Food analogies always serve me well when explaining my thoughts on games, so I'll fall back on the one I touched on above: In my mind, games are to food as incentives (gold, exp) are to sugar and salt. They serve to enhance the substance of the product, but the value they add is relatively shallow. Junk food- stuff a health-minded parent would refer to as "pure sugar/salt"- is hardly going to kill you, but you'll likely be better off if you consume it in moderation. And it hardly deserves the label of "food".
At any rate, I'll readily agree that social games are by no means inherently bad- another 100% awesome thing about them is the way they're advancing the field in terms of accessible (open and simple) design.
Casey Monroe - I was a big fan of Diablo 2, so I'm curious about your thoughts on that. What specifically would you say is the "meat" of gameplay there? It's been a little while, but I don't think any of my accomplishments in Diablo 2 felt "artificial"—they all seemed to flow naturally from the mechanics of the game.
Brooks Harrel - Mmm. It's been nearly a decade since I touched that game, so I don't trust my memory enough to stand by any in-depth critique; the following is all written with Torchlight in mind first and foremost.
I'll try to quickly and clearly define terms here. My definition for "game" is an interesting challenge you learn to overcome. When I talk about the "meat" of the gameplay, I'm talking about the deepest challenges- the ones with the most layers of mastery for your brain (and not your virtual avatar) to attain, whether it's on a high-concept level (crunching numbers in your head, mulling over which dialog option to choose while the game waits) or an instinctive one (recognizing an enemy, identifying which attack their behavior indicates they're about to make, and reflexively hitting the right button for making the right counter-move).
Torchlight doesn't have much meat. There's the long-term logistical challenge of amassing power, which in practice means basic inventory management (is Weapon A > Weapon B?), choosing the right build options (is Skill A > B, C and D?), and developing a thorough pack-rat's awareness so as not to miss any loot. And there's the short-term challenge of the combat- avoiding attacks, aiming your own attacks, using special abilities and consumables in the right time/place/fashion, adjusting your playstyle (i.e. basic tactics) to take better advantage of your character build. In practice, virtually all of these aspects have the depth of a kiddie pool. Meanwhile, Resident Evil 4 took all those same game elements and created one of the deepest single-player game experiences ever.
I call Torchlight "junk food" because it makes heavy use of artificial incentives not just as a slot-machine payoff (i.e. "skinner box" mechanism), but as an artificial substitute for mastery- like how fast-food burgers inject meat flavoring into thin slices of freeze-dried meat and paint grill marks on the patty. Like real mastery, you can dispatch once-fearsome enemies with ease and pull of amazing stunts- but how much of that is because of you, instead of your virtual avatar? (Put differently: how much can be lost due to a corrupt save file?)
As the consumer, you get a direct payoff (good flavor/good game flow) and tangible evidence of your accomplishment (full stomach/powerful character). But those aren't the only things that matter about food, nor the only things that matter about games.
P.S: For a specific examination & critique of Diablo 2's design, I advise checking out http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=518
Casey Monroe - Hmm...I'm not going to say I disagree with you, I think what you're describing is an indictment of the entire RPG genre though. It can be fairly said that I'm not significantly better at playing Mass Effect 2 or Final Fantasy at the end of the game experience than I am at the beginning. My character improves and becomes more powerful, but I don't become a significantly better player--or at least, that's not the focus.
I understand that this kind of game is not for everyone, to be sure. But for comparison, I adored Diablo 2 and found Resident Evil off-putting. Is that because I prefer junk food to healthy food? I'm not sure that's true.
Brooks Harrel - I'm condemning one of the core features of the RPG genre- or at least arguing we treat it less like a food group and more like salt, i.e. something to add flavor to the "real" game experience. Of course, "genre" in this context is just a standardized game design formula, one which has seen a distressingly low level of innovation. Resident Evil 4 (not to be confused with its survival-horror predecessors), Mass Effect 2, and Devil Survivor are all welcome exceptions to this trend, producing jaw-droppingly good results by holding themselves to a higher standard in terms of deep gameplay.
As for Diablo 2 vs. your experience with Resident Evil: If I have a choice between McDonalds and a family-owned mexican restaurant that makes all their stuff by hand from fresh ingredients, I'm likely to choose McDonalds. It's not as healthy, but I'm no gourmet and don't usually like mexican food. The important thing is to be aware that something is junk food and consume it accordingly.
Casey Monroe - To be honest, I didnt find ME2's gameplay to be exceptionally deep. Same with Diablo 2. I don't think it follows, however, that the game itself is correspondingly less deep. I think that the depth in games merely comes from other sources--sources like story, pacing, etc. These forms of depth are not unique to games, but are nonetheless valid.
Brooks Harrel - I think I was still using "game" in the "interesting challenge" sense, not the "video game" sense.
But taking your point on its own: Oh yes, I agree wholeheartedly. I'll take plenty of games to task for falling short in that area as well. An action-heavy fps can have a moving, branching-paths story; a plot-heavy RPG can have great gameplay. But your audience won't call you out if you fall short in those aspects, because the precedents set by your predecessors left a very low bar. (Wait- are you saying Diablo 2's true depth was in its narrative?)
It occurs to me that I've actually got more to offer on some of these discussion points than just talk. http://bit.ly/f79qsI is a core gameplay test build for a "scrolling shooter". The idea was to have a central part of the gameplay be the RPG mechanics that had the most gameplay "meat" to them, mainly loadout choices that noticeably affected the way you play.
The first thing Stalker does is teach you to be a coward.
There's no deliberate instruction involved- it's a lesson you learn naturally, which makes it ten times as effective. The tutorials are the pack of wild dogs who maul you because you tried to shoot them, the anomalies that reward your curiosity with poison and radiation, the handful of men that kill you five times over despite the quicksave which puts you in a perfect ambush position.
With uncharacteristic speed, your subconscious gets the message: this is not a world that was tailor-made for your pleasure. The gun in your hand was not placed there by God, so that you could accomplish a mission He has laid out for you. The dangers you see are not elements of a meticulously arranged shooting gallery- they are dangers pure and simple, under no kind of obligation to compensate you for the hardships they incur.
Ten minutes into Call of Pripyat, I found my first camp. A young man squatting by the campfire referred me to the boss, who I found on the other side of a nearby cargo container. My gamer instincts relaxed as I entered familiar territory: An NPC I interacted with via a conversation tree, ready to dispense basic exposition at the press of a button.
As I asked him about the availabled missions in the area, our conversation was cut short by the sound of a shotgun blast- the dialogue box literally closed while I was still reading his answer. While I blinked in confusion, the man turned away and took cover up against the wall. Drawing his gun, he started moving back towards the campfire. I saved the game and followed him. The bandits who had just killed the guy at the campfire shot us both dead in seconds.
I loaded the game. He advanced towards the campfire. I backed away and watched as the bandits shot him dead again. When I moved closer, they saw me and muttered warnings; I holstered my gun, and they went on their way.
The two corpses at my feet were a sad thing, but I didn't really feel guilty. After all, I didn't know these guys; we were just talking. I was just relieved those bandits hadn't cared about me.
I didn't want any trouble.
I don't get nearly as many chances to stretch my game-writing muscles as I'd like. One exception was last May, during a conversation with a fellow designer who was working on a warcraft 3 arena map. The setting was described as a sort of fantasy roman empire, and each of the 15 characters had some interesting backstory (which I've included below for context. Among his intended features was a neat crowd element:
The crowd gets in on the action! The dynamic crowd will cheer, boo, chant, or roar its support based on player actions, providing a variety of special effects. For example, there are killstreak rewards (somewhat like, say, Call of Duty uses, but don't expect to see helicopters ;))
(3:43:19 PM) Dagda: It's interesting, I like the allusions to the culture/background society
(3:43:28 PM) OneWinged4ngel: Go on?
(3:43:50 PM) OneWinged4ngel: Don't just tell me "it's good." Everyone tells me that about everything I make. It's not terribly helpful feedback :(
(3:44:41 PM) Dagda: Just that all their descriptions imply that their stories tie into a larger context- with the player's imagination being free to fill in the blanks.
(3:45:39 PM) Dagda: This isn't just random archetypes, all of them have ties to a larger world
(3:46:59 PM) Dagda: It'd be interesting to have the crowd shout character-specific things via text, though I'm not sure where you'd have it appear.
(3:50:02 PM) Dagda: The Abomination, for example. Cheer: "Great ___, it's hideous!" Boo: "Inhuman creature! Someone put it down!" Roar: "What a terror!" Chant: "Eat their brains!"
(3:51:03 PM) Dagda: Gives you a sense of how your character looks in the eyes of Rulaan's masses.
(3:51:46 PM) OneWinged4ngel: That's a good idea. I shall implement it.
(3:52:01 PM) OneWinged4ngel: Come up with more lines for them to say for other characters though.
(3:52:03 PM) OneWinged4ngel: >_>
AND SO I DID. Just to reiterate, the descriptions below aren't my ideas- I just came up with the crowd reactions.
The Missionary: An evangelistic priest and explorer from a faraway, previously unknown land who had set out on a mission to spread the gospel of his monotheistic sun god to the world. Upon arriving in Rulaan, the Missionary's compelling faith formed the seeds of a revolution against the established belief system, and he was imprisoned as an enemy of the state. Now, he is forced to fight against his will in the arena. In battle, in addition to sword and shield, he wields the wrath of God itself, calling down fire from the heavens.
Cheer: "It's that foreigner!" Boo: "Give up on your false god!" Roar: "Unbelievable!" Chant: "Prea-cher!"
The Heretic: A corrupt former high priest of the Order revealed and imprisoned for committing atrocities against his fellow Rulaani, the Heretic is a master of the dark arts who bargains with the masters of the underworld for power over death. He knows the secrets of blood magic, offering of his own flesh and soul to gain dominion over the damned. Ironically, he finds that in bonds he has been freed to go about his work; few comprehend his methods, and where once he had to operate in secret, the arena presents him with a plethora of living sacrifices.
Cheer: "Foul traitor!" Boo: "A quick death's too good for him!" Roar: "Such power!" Chant: "Wipe them out!"
The Witch: A pagan practitioner of the Old Ways, the Witch is in tune with the mind of nature and the sacred feminine, and is a master of herbalism, wards, charms, and hexes. The old ways are no longer observed in Rulaan, however, and since the rise of a new organized religion, the Order, the last practitioners of witchcraft are hunted down and imprisoned. Like all prisoners, however, they too are given the opportunity to participate in the blood sport.
Cheer: "Country girl! You don't stand a chance!" Boo: "There's no place for your kind, not anymore!" Roar : "Damn, she's a tricky one!" Chant: "Witch!"
The Abomination: Amongst the exotic monsters captured from the far corners of the earth to be put on display in the arena, the Abomination is the most unique and frightening. Captured from the deepest depths of the underdark, this nightmarish psychic Abomination employs staggering psychic powers to subdue his victims, break their minds, and finally consume their brains.
Cheer: "Great ___, it's hideous!" Boo: "Inhuman creature! Someone put it down!" Roar: "What a terror!" Chant: "Eat their brains!"
The Warlock: A centurion among Rulaan's warrior mages with a penchant for cruelty, the Warlock is a master of vicious evocation magics, able to call fire from the earth, lightning from the sky, frost from the air, or even tear paths through the fabric of reality. Already wealthy and powerful, she fights in the arena for simple sport and bloodlust.
"Centurion! Show them what we're made of!" Boo: "Fraud! This can't be our lady!" Roar: "Truly the finest of our warrior-mages!" Chant: "Rulaan!"
The Knight: A lovestruck former Rulaani nobleman whose forbidden passions have cost him his title, disgraced his lineage, ostracized him from his family, and landed the Knight in prison with only one hope of freedom to reunite himself with his love: becoming the champion of the arena.
Cheer: "There he is, a lord no longer!" Boo: "An utter disgrace!" Roar: "Truly, he fights for her!" Chant: "Fight on!"
The Hero: Once a celebrated war hero of the northern dwarves, the keepers of the ancient secrets of the Way Gates, the Hero was defeated and captured in a heroic last stand, which some saw as the moment that ended a long war with expansionist Rulaan. Now, he is a prisoner of war, forced to fight in the arena for the amusement of his captors in order to stay alive from day to day, wielding the power of his mystical heritage and secrets of dwarven craft.
Cheer: "Pathetic dwarf!" Boo: "This is the best his people could offer?" Roar: "Astounding!" Chant: "Hold the line!"
The Gladiator: A thrillseeking Rulaani freeman who fights in the arena for his own personal glory, fame, and profit, the Gladiator is a returning champion of the arena who hasn't let age dull his skills. The Gladiator is a master fighter with his axe and gladiator's net, and knows how to play to the crowd.
Cheer: "He returns once more!" Boo: "Old man should just retire!" Roar: "What skill!" Chant: "Champion!"
The Savage: A proud warrior of one of the many relatively primitive tribes of ogres scatterred around the western edge of the expanding Rulaani empire made victims of genocide, the Savage was captured and hauled off to be goggled at by audiences in the arena. Channeling his fearsome sorrow and rage on those he is forced to fight, the Savage wields a towering stone axe like a wrecking ball with sharp edges, trampling foes with his sheer size and strength.
Cheer: "What a beast!" Boo: "Who gave that animal an axe?" Roar: "He's unstoppable!" Chant: "O-gre!"
The Amazon: The overextended expansionist Rulaan is plagued by barbarian raids from far corners of the empire, and perhaps the most infamous of these raiders are the Amazon women from the southern reaches. A savage warrior woman captured in such a barbarian raid on Rulaan and put on display in the arena, the Amazon is a swift huntress with a vicious killer instinct.
Cheer: "It's a wild woman!" Boo: "Come on, fight like a man!" Roar: "She's amazing!" Chant: "Amazon!"
The Madman: A relentlessly clever inventor and a homicidal maniac to boot, the Madman defines the line of genius meeting insanity. After using his technological expertise to disintegrate one of the wonders of the world, the authorities stepped up their efforts and finally managed to capture the rampaging goblin. Now imprisoned, the Madman gleefully turns over his pioneering doomsday machines to the Rulaani army in return for an endless supply of live test subjects in the arena.
Cheer: "The goblin! Who knows what he'll do!" " Boo: "Deranged lunatic!" Roar: "He's a madman, but he's OUR madman!" Cheer: "Genius!"
The Outlaw: A daring brigand and expert marksman who terrorized the roads of Rulaan, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Even now that the law has finally caught up with her, the Outlaw does not intend to give up her mission of redistribution of wealth and is planning a daring escape with the help of her allies who still walk free. Until then, however, she must survive the carnage of the arena.
Cheer: "And they said she couldn't be caught!" Boo: "Time for her tale to end!" Roar: "A true legend after all!" Chant: "Freedom!"
The Assassin: A hired killer who once stalked the upper echelons of the Rulaani courts, being wrapped up in so many intrigues came back to bite the Assassin when one of her employers betrayed her, and she was caught in the act. Now, her mastery of the deadly arts serve her well in fighting for her freedom in the fighting pits of the arena.
Cheer: "Nowhere to hide now!" (And yes, they're badly mistaken) Boo: "This is no battle!" Roar: "A deadly foe!" Chant: "Kill!"
The Wanderer: The Wanderer is a traveler from far, exotic lands on a journey to become the world's strongest warrior, testing his skills against those of the greatest fighters from across the world and learning from every encounter with a new style. Now that he has arrived in Rulaan, he seeks to once more bathe his blades and challenge his skills in the Colosseum.
Cheer: "He'll see what the Arena has in store!" Boo: "Get out of the ring!" Roar: "Never seen anything like it!" Chant: "Warrior!"
The Gambler: A devious Rulaani lord with a compulsion for betting on arena matches who, after finding himself mired in debts, finally decided that the best way to rig the game was to enter himself! The Gambler is a master of Chaos Magic, wielding unstable arcane powers focused through cards inscribed with runes and sutras. And yes, he charges up the cards with explosive energy and throws them at people like Gambit from X-Men.
Cheer: "His luck's run out!" Boo: "Nothing but cheap tricks!" Roar: "Fortune's favorite, indeed!" Chant: "Against the odds!"
So here's my bright idea for making this game available to all of you: Business cards!
All you need is eight sheets of business cards, size 2x3.5 inches; in my experience you can find decent ones for less than $5 at any office supply store or big retail outlet. Print this document onto those pages, and you'll have all 80 cards needed to play a the game! I do suggest scrounging up a d10 for each player, but a pencil and scratch paper can fill the same role just fine.
I'd wanted to share this ages ago, but my perfectionism and urge to tinker have been getting the better of me in the rare moments where I had time & energy to spare for this game. On the plus side, I can say with confidence that this delay has resulted in a better and more playable game (though there's still plenty more I can do to improve it!). Now I just need to finish an update to the manual. To bad I'm terrible at writing those. Maybe I'll just record myself the next time I explain the rules to someone in person?
Finished! Got to say, this was a fun bit of navel-gazing.
Really, the hardest thing was separating "stuff I like" from "stuff that I find myself drawing on." For example, I really dig Metroid Prime, but it hardly informs my own work- I don't make first person adventure games, at least not so far.
Edit: I've been asked a couple questions about this, so I thought I'd elaborate some here. The material on the left side of the image is what I draw on (so far as I can tell) when coming up with fictional ideas and concepts- a random character, the background for a world, the fluff premise for a game. The material on the right side is the stuff that's influenced & advanced how I think about game mechanics of all sorts. Pretty much everything on here comes highly recommended, feel free to ask if you want more details on something.
Here's the rough for the second half. If anyone can guess one of the unrevealed items, I'll give them a game-as in, I'll design one for you.
Boy, it sure is nice to come back from PAX and take a much-needed rest. Or so I assume, since I for one had to immediately dive into a 45-hour work week. I'd like to say I've now made it to the weekend and can finally get started on all the follow-ups I wanted to do. But the truth is that I'm writing this on my lunch break, because my one day off was yesterday. That day was spent getting some much-needed extra rest, catching up on a boatload of household chores & errands, participating in an experimental game of Dawn of Worlds (more on that in another post) and determinedly attempting to improve the playtest cards for Court d'Capitate (or deCapitate, or duCapitate; I'm try to make a final decision there too).
That last item wound up being my main playtest/demo focus for PAX- I spent half a day trying to figure out how I could import info from a google spreadsheet into a card template automatically, then threw up my hands and put the whole thing together manually. $5.50 at Target got me 25 sheets of 2x5 perforated business card paper, enough to print 3 complete 80-card sets (and for you to print a copy now and have enough left for the eventual stage 2 tests, where I add cards for Events and your own secret identities). There are a few quick changes I want to make to their format to help make the mechanics clearer, and a bunch of little playtest tweaks I keep stopping to add in, but I HEREBY SWEAR that I ON THIS VERY NIGHT (Edit: Yeahhowaboutno, I wound up spending the better part of three hours walking home after missing the last bus and have another early-morning shift, we're pushing this deadline back 24 hours) I will:
A-Somehow make the time to meet my self-imposed perfectionist standards,
OR
B-Deal with it, i.e. recognize that the cards are fully functional and format's all placeholder anyway, and release them along with a bare-bones version of the revised rules.
PAX was fantastic, by the way. I met a bunch of great people, ran alot of productive playtests (i.e. the type where you run into a buttload of things to improve on but the core game proves itself as solid), got to play a bunch of interesting hobby games with mechanics I'd been wanting to check out. . .I'd love to talk more about it, but I need to actually follow up with all those people first :P.
For now, I'll just say that the two best games I discovered at PAX were both tabletop games- Ascension and the Marvel Superhero Squad TCG. Both are simple card games (to the point where many cards only have a name, 1-2 numbers and a type symbol) that take a core element of the formula and twist it around in brilliant, elegant ways that make them truly fun to pick up and play. Check them out!
Here's the games I intend to run playtests/demonstrations for: Court d'Capitate, Mass Effect RPG, and Trigger Discipline. Rules-lite Divers games will also be a possibility, depending on what people tell me.
If you're at PAX and you're interested in participating, e-mail me! Also feel free to contact me if you're just interested in meeting in person; I'm always willing to help out with things like campaign ideas and so on.
Oh right, you guys still need the rules for how to *play* this thing, don't you?.
Fine, here you go.
I've been striving to crank this document out in my spare moments, which are still fairly scarce; let's just say that my last 2-week paycheck had 96 hours on it. You can thank a couple different folks I ran into IRL I ran into last week for providing the motivation; turns out they've actually been hoping to see more of this. (Seriously, it gets hard to keep making these things in a feedback vacuum. Those of you who do make those thoughtful comments are helping more than you could know.)
It's been a little surprising to realize just how bad I am at doing manuals. I have no problem explaining my games when I demonstrate them to someone in person, but when the time comes to lay out all that info in the form of a text document I tend to gloss over lots of vital details. Attempting to buckle down and lay everything out step by step produces instructions that, as someone said about an early draft of Trigger Discipline, "read like a legal document". Hopefully I've been able to put a little more natural voice into this one.
Can you tell this another one of those sleep-deprived posts? If not, you will soon.
I've gotta balance this part of the game first, but I can tell you now how those Mastermind cards will work. You each who you're playing as from several random draws, but your identity is kept secret for as long as you like. Revealing your identity grants you the benefits of your character (such as larger hand sizes, cheaper turn point costs, conditional bonuses, that kind of thing) but also makes you a target- you now have a Luck and Paranoia score, and can be targeted just like any of your Pawns. On the plus side, your hand becomes the scheme cards you're carrying, so you can reveal ones with defensive abilities.
What makes this interesting is that lots of Event cards involve characters which may or may not be one of the Masterminds a player drew for this game. If the next round's event card involves a speech by Prince Albert, and gives Prince Albert's stats as well as a fat style bonus if someone manages to whack him, and you're playing Prince Albert (and don't want anyone to know). . .well. Things are about to get interesting.
I went into Inception with a "baseless hunch" about what seeing it would be like for me, one that turned out about 80% correct. Among the expected factors: It's got a ton of parallels to Divers (enough that it'll probably be the biggest "so it's like ___" reaction I get for the project from now on, quite a feat when Divers has parallels to EVERYTHING). It gave me plenty of ideas for antagonists. It's got my mind racing enough that I'll be up all night and should definitely harness this energy towards somethings productive (like this blog plost).
The two big exceptions:
-It didn't give me many ideas about the environments for Divers. The film was too well-grounded for that.
-By having such a thoroughly explored internal logic, Inception provides a reference that helps me better understand my own ideas.
There's a few clear realizations this has currently produced. . .
Where Inception is about the subconscious and our imaginations, Divers is about our intuition and feelings.
The internal logic of the Depths (in Divers) doesn't produce a world where things having match events that could happen in 'reality'; it produces a world where everything 'feels' right. Punching through concrete with your bare hands? Clearly couldn't happen in the real world, but show it to us in a movie or comic and we readily nod along.
Instead of being semiconsciously built from our imaginations, the depths in Divers are formed through the experiences we have- from our feelings, if "feeling" is a label you give to the process of experiencing something.
Inception's world is an increasingly hostile environment that forces you to "lay low", fueling adventures similar to heist movies. Divers' world is an increasingly symbolic/fantastical/significant environment; it fuels adventures where you discover more about the world around you as you fight to better it.
I feel like I've had one element of a personal agenda with Divers, one conscious moral I built into the world's themes. It's simple: Everyone can have qualities that make them worth respecting. Any random person- a surly blue-collar worker in his early 50s, an anxiety-prone housewife, an incoherent bum on the bus- can turn out to have extraordinary depths to them, sides of their character whose virtues would never see the light of day in almost any other premise involving decent action sequences. :P
Mind you, there's a corollary: Anyone can and will have terrible, pathetic failings. Anyone can be force for ill through the Depths, be it through ignorance, denial, or pain too great to bear. That includes the same people who're worthy of respect. That includes you.
Just an open brainstorm as to how you might implement this. For a tabletop RPG, it seems like you could use a wiki-like approach to build a campaign setting full of intrigue and hidden motives; the person handling the meat of the setting serves as the admin, with others stepping up to suggest various motives/intentions/goings-on for everything from shopkeeps to nobles to the beggars in a given alley. The big design question is how you'd handle this in some kind of video game.
The approach I'd envision there is making a moderately expansive 3D world, with several different wilderness environments, some small and large towns, etc. It'd hopefully be done well enough that it'd be moderately interesting and beautiful, something you might enjoy running around in with no particular direction; at the same time, it'd all be within the bounds of normality (albeit with the landscape distilled a little, so that you've got more fancy waterfalls and so on). But you'd also provide a set of tools that users could use to modify or add to the world, providing various assets but also letting you make your own.
I can open up this toolset, go in, and add something like a small grove in the middle of a forest or a strange rock formation. I can also go much further than that, adding things like a hidden valley containing ancient ruins or an underground cave system. Other options could include things like giving a seemingly generic building a working door and an interior, and a creature creator that lets you give them all kinds of different behaviors (i.e. your little stick-man will always stay far away unless the player stands still for at least 10 seconds while the moon is full). There'd be a moderator panel I can check in with; they'd offer feedback and be the ones who'd incorporate the altered region into the world. (These moderators *could* act as quality control, but I think their main priorities would be to avoid having one user's additions conflict with another's (i.e. they'd inform you that there's already something going on with that cliff face, and suggest several similar areas to implement your idea instead) and maintain a couple of general guidelines (secrets shouldn't be obvious from a distance, though subtler clues are fine). Players should feel free to give their contributions all kind of unique quirks- winding trails of sky-blue flowers that lead to hidden cave entrances, inscriptions on walls that tell fragments of a story. . .
Another question that someone else posed and I attempted to answer. What came to mind for me was cases where a player decides, of their own volition, to keep an NPC safe when they could easily have let them die instead (and the GM/game designer likely expected them to), and the amazing dedication they can show when pursuing this self-determined goal (as opposed to the utter frustration people feel towards escort missions).
I'd frame it as a subversion, similar to fathom. You could do a 2-D side-scrolling action game with a B-movie feel, reminiscent of Metal Slug. The level opens with a shot of a diner, then monsters burst in and start wreaking havoc. Pan left (with "GO!" flashing several times, big enough to fill the screen) and we see your character emerging from the bathroom, with an exclamation point appearing over their heads as they see said havoc spill into view. A bouncing arrow points out a shotgun to the left, so you grab that and then use it (along with a jumping kick attack) to fight your way out of the diner and down the hill to an oversized boss. Except that when the boss dies, the music just stops. We see the character walk offscreen back towards the diner, cutting back to the back hallway where we first started playing. He walks over to the body of one of those background NPCs from the intro, and shows some kind of grief- whatever body language and gestures prove the most expressive for the character model. Fade to black.
If you play the game again, you'll likely notice that the woman in question dies *after* you gain control of the character, in what looked like a scripted event. And if your first action is to run to the right and attack the monster with your difficult-but-functional kick attack (which the game doesn't tell you about for another 20 seconds, so you don't know about it your first time through), instead of grabbing the shotgun first, you can actually save that character, and continue to defend them as you fight through the rest of the level. They'll die if any monster gets to them, making it very difficult to make it through to the end of the game without them dying; but it's still possible.
Perhaps you'd actually expand on the gameplay- every section of the game sees the woman doing something else while you fight the monsters, changing how you play during that section. She'd interact with elements of the apparently-static background, demonstrating alot of resourcefulness and ingenuity (though not any combat prowess). It's important to note that her efforts to help herself and you never make the game easier; they just create another slim window of opportunity for you to keep the two of you alive a little longer, and by extension give the game experience noticeable variety.
I'm not doing this because I have any love for the "damsel in distress" option, I'm doing it to deliberately remove outside incentives- where there's no rational reason to shoulder all this hardship except that you care about what happens to this person, damn it. And when you stick with that approach, you wind up getting alot more out of a life that used to be much more effortless and predictable.
Someone raised the question in a discussion I had a while back. This was my response:
I think it's important to consider what stories are, underneath all the different ways we tell them (all the mediums, plot structures, et cetera). I could bring up Robert McKee here, but instead I'll lift a quote from this piece:
This.
"Oh my god, it's like 1945 on steroids."
"Wow pretty good. I liked the speed and control and level progression."
"Nice. This is much harder [than a previous build], forces you to cope and change strategy every minute."
"I gotta say this game is tough, and I'm totally okay with that."
I was never in any hurry to get into computer game design, because you can spend so much more time working on the implementation rather than the design itself. I underestimated the siren call the 132 design process would have for me.
Milestone 1 for this game has been to put together a loadout that allows for potent playstyle customization, as the emergent result of small number of choices. This is basically a test for some of my own ideas about how to have the substantive mechanics seen in the "rpg" video game genre, without resorting to artificial reward cycles to keep the player involved. The standard here was (and is) a moderately balanced set of choices that all mattered, so that changing any one of those options has a noticeable effect on the "smart" way to play the game.
This build's aimed at milestone #2: Fun core gameplay. The standard here is for the basic, underlying mechanics to be fun enough (in and of themselves) to make for a passable endless mode. To this end, I've temporarily taken out the options to choose your loadouts; instead, it cycles to a new random arrangement once every 20 seconds.
Feedback and reactions are always welcome. If nothing else, let me know what you think about the different weapons and what sort of scores you can get.
O, what tangled webs we weave! The other vital part of the alpha playtest build, schemes represent the various individual steps of your grand master plan. (You do have a grand master plan, right?)
As you'll see, most schemes are used in murder plots. These cards all have three scores, which are added together to determine the total score in each area for the plot itself: Lethality (The target dies unless their Luck exceeds this number), Cunning (The plot is exposed if the target's Paranoia exceeds this number, and if the target was also unoccupied you must frame and sacrifice one of your pawns to avoid being executed yourself), and Style (You get this many victory points if the plot succeeds without being exposed).
Two more card types will be worked in as the playtests proceed. First, there's Events- whatever's going on in a given round, and the mechanical tweaks (and potential targets) this introduces. Each event is revealed the round before it goes into effect, so people have a chance to plan ahead.
Second, there's Masterminds- the various nefarious minds at work in the court, their identities mysterious and plans most adversarious. Each player selects one of these characters, through whom they'll act in a manner vicarious NO BAD DAGDA STOP RHYMING YOU'LL BE HERE ALL DAY. Ahem. Each mastermind grants some neat bonuses, that tweak core rules like turn point costs and maximum hand sizes; but you have to reveal your identity to get those benefits, creating an alternate loss condition where someone can try to assassinate you directly. Fun times!
First, Ron Edwards is to RPG design what Freud is to psychology- someone who's done an admirable job of raising the visibility and (in some ways) respectability of his chosen field, while doggedly insisting on theories that mix some basic, essential insights with a whole lot of bunk.
Second: Mr. Gillen, I don't disagree with most of what you've written. As an attempt to quell the "my sub-area of interest > yours" geek squabbling, it's an excellent piece (with a most noble goal). But your analysis of what a roleplaying games are strikes me as a tragic oversimplification, because it overlooks the one element of the experience that only a roleplaying game (in the literal sense) can have- an element that far too few game developers in any medium try to focus on (Ice Pick Lodge and Eric Chahi being two notable exceptions).
If I just want to roleplay, to participate in a narrative as a character that I or someone else invented, I can do that as a freeform exercise- no need for a bunch of rules and mechanics. If I just want to play a good game, there are board games and video games that offer better tactical challenges in a much more direct fashion. If I want that gameplay to include "rpg elements"- which is a label for the strategic gameplay of character advancement and optimization- then titles like Torchlight distill that far beyond what any pen and paper rpg has done. And if I want to "play" in the other sense- exploring and poking at a virtual world in a way that's not unlike a child playing with a toy- that doesn't have to involve stopping every few minutes to shoot at some wandering mutant, nor does it require that I be a character in some deep storyline.
So what's left, after you account for all of the above? Are rpgs just a combo platter, giving us smaller servings of those elements together in a single package? Or is there a chemistry between some of these ingredients that creates something new?
Screenwriter David Mamet tells us that good stories provide drama- the quest of a hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.
Game designer Raph Koster tells us that good games provide fun- the player's struggle to overcome interesting challenges, those things which prevent him from achieving a specific. . .sorry, is anyone else getting a sense of deja vu?
The unique power that's found in the experience of playing a roleplaying game is what happens when the game is the story. When the challenges a character faces and the ends they seek begin to overlap and merge with those of the player. It's not an easy feat to pull off, of course. Each medium is in a better position to leverage certain techniques to that end- video games can do more to make the challenges visceral, while tabletop games can allow players more of a hand in determining their character's goals (which reduces the work required to get them on board with the character's motives).
To steal a line from a drunken Jack Sparrow: That's what an rpg is, you know. It's not just a story, and your character, and the levels and the xp; that's what an rpg needs. Usually. But what an rpg is... what a role-playing game really is, is you living the story.
