A fiction is a belief or statement that cannot be demonstrated as truth, but that is often held to be true because it is expedient to do so. A typical example of a fiction in D&D would be that "role-playing" is better than "roll-playing," or that alignments or back stories helps players build better characters.
When I began playing D&D, I readily adopted most of the rules that were presented in the books. I accepted them on faith. Having faith is the act of giving credence to a fiction, most often on the premise that this is what others believe or because this is the way that something has always been done. In my youth, before D&D, I was taught to play games through being told what the rules were, and then bending myself, as others did, in order to follow the rules.
D&D was not my first experience with playing a game not by the rules. My parents believed that if the rules of a board game could be adjusted in a way that made a better game, that was a good thing. Thus I grew up playing adjusted rules for Monopoly, Stock Ticker, Life, Careers, Payday, Mille Bornes and Masterpiece, among other classic board games that weren't classic at all in 1975.
The decision to start adjusting D&D, when my faith could no longer sustain the rules, came naturally. In the beginning, however, my efforts to "improve the game" were undeniably new fictions that I invented to replace old fictions.
I learned the difference through the same methodology that enables science and investigation: I watched the players, I took note of their responses, I adjusted my hypotheses to reflect those responses and, steadily, moved towards game systems that did not serve my fictions, but served evidence.
I do not see other DMs doing this. And I don't know why. By and large, dungeon masters seem to be forever burdened with their baggage ~ the luggage, travel totes, trunks and bags collected over the years from campaigns they've run, and played in, and other games they've played, in addition to cherished modules, stories, scenes and I suppose over-the-game-arguments that have collected in their thoughts like the eponymous baggage car in their train-of-thought. It may be that they are seeking a sense of permanence, as though the fiction of permanence itself will provide future game experiences.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard players and DMs, both on and off the internet, swear that they will still be playing D&D in their 80s ... only to see them fall away from the game in less than a decade. But suppose that we are still playing 30, 50 or 70 years from now. Why would we create a fiction that it is going to be the same game then that it is now, or was when we started? The world, and the game with it, has changed profoundly since the late 1970s; the world is going to go on changing, and the people who live in it are going to find amazing things to do in the future, that will dwarf the nostalgic baggage cars of DMs who cannot even now let go of things past. Permanence is a fiction ... and one that brings pain, because the evidence that nothing is permanent is a loud banging on the door that defies ignoring. Every minute that DMs cling to the ways of the past, to the ways they used to play, to the patterns of D&D that "should be" a certain way, is a way of disappointment and unhappiness that will not support another 30 years of game play.
I continue to love D&D because I emptied the baggage car long ago and turned it into a lounge. The fictions that are discussed there take the form of propositions for future designs, rather than dogma. My game design is fluid, ready to be discarded if it doesn't work, but equally ready to be put implemented and kept if it proves it's worth. No design that does not carry its own weight is allowed to stay. Neither I, nor my players, are willing to carry old design ideas as baggage.
It's a shame that others do not see the wisdom in this.
Showing posts with label Agile Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agile Design. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2020
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Change, Not Plans
This brings us to the last of four posts about the principles of agile design. Throughout this mini-series within my larger agenda of game building and game design, I have stressed at each point the need for the DM to be flexible and player friendly when running the game. This is actually the fourth tenet of agile: that it is more important to respond to change than it is to follow a plan.
This does not say that a plan is a bad idea, or that it is not useful to the campaign, but the plan must never, ever, take precedence of a DM's willingness to change the processes in order to improve the overall value of the game.
At the end of the last post, I talked about players making changes to plans and how we should just go with it, as much as we can. The only way this can be done is if you are prepared to Welcome Change. Change isn't something that must happen; change itself will not make a campaign better. But if change happens, or there is reason to believe that is should happen, then don't step around it or fear it. If your players are pushing for changes to be made in your style, it is because they believe those changes matter; if you dismiss that push for change, you are also dismissing the players. You're trying to go it alone. This will not help you keep players in your campaign.
Understand, however: welcoming change means that your campaign won't be what you expected it to be when you started running. As a community, we pay a lot of lip service to games being collaborative experiences, but we are well aware that DMs are rarely prepared for their precious campaigns to suffer change at the hands of a bunch of players. DMs have worked long and hard on their campaigns and they're just not prepared to let a gang of peasants with torches and pitchforks burn it all down. I don't deny that a DM's campaign matters ~ but I do resist the characterization that players have no idea how campaigns work or how they ought to work.
This sense of "what do players know?" is less a rational conclusion than it is an invented crutch that DMs use to impose themselves above others. Virtually every game I have ever run included two or three other DMs, at least; with the first games I played, in my youth, every player was a DM, because we were all trying. It is silly to claim that these DMs don't know anything about how RPGs work.
The problem with the campaign first, players second notion of game design is that it fails to comprehend the primary goal: a working game, in which unique experiences are made possible, followed by excitement and gratification. To obtain this, the campaign, whatever it is, has to take a second seat.
At no time does this say the planned campaign won't survive in some form! It may have most of the features that it possessed in the original planning stage. Those changes that are made can be rescinded if they don't work out, while other changes that are made will be appreciated and kept. If the party works together as a group, and if the DM shares power with that party, that together the whole will continue to look for new and better ways to work together.
Here is the hardest truth that every DM and Player has to come to grips with. Processes won't make your game better. No matter what the adventure, no matter what the game system, no matter what form of RPG we play or how hard we play it, we won't improve our game mastery through practices or procedures.
We can only improve our games by having principles and values that promote a strong and friendly collaborative process. People matter. Not adventures. If you wished for the best module in the world, it still wouldn't make your game any better ~ not unless you've learned how to believe in what you're doing.
This does not say that a plan is a bad idea, or that it is not useful to the campaign, but the plan must never, ever, take precedence of a DM's willingness to change the processes in order to improve the overall value of the game.
At the end of the last post, I talked about players making changes to plans and how we should just go with it, as much as we can. The only way this can be done is if you are prepared to Welcome Change. Change isn't something that must happen; change itself will not make a campaign better. But if change happens, or there is reason to believe that is should happen, then don't step around it or fear it. If your players are pushing for changes to be made in your style, it is because they believe those changes matter; if you dismiss that push for change, you are also dismissing the players. You're trying to go it alone. This will not help you keep players in your campaign.
Understand, however: welcoming change means that your campaign won't be what you expected it to be when you started running. As a community, we pay a lot of lip service to games being collaborative experiences, but we are well aware that DMs are rarely prepared for their precious campaigns to suffer change at the hands of a bunch of players. DMs have worked long and hard on their campaigns and they're just not prepared to let a gang of peasants with torches and pitchforks burn it all down. I don't deny that a DM's campaign matters ~ but I do resist the characterization that players have no idea how campaigns work or how they ought to work.
This sense of "what do players know?" is less a rational conclusion than it is an invented crutch that DMs use to impose themselves above others. Virtually every game I have ever run included two or three other DMs, at least; with the first games I played, in my youth, every player was a DM, because we were all trying. It is silly to claim that these DMs don't know anything about how RPGs work.
The problem with the campaign first, players second notion of game design is that it fails to comprehend the primary goal: a working game, in which unique experiences are made possible, followed by excitement and gratification. To obtain this, the campaign, whatever it is, has to take a second seat.
At no time does this say the planned campaign won't survive in some form! It may have most of the features that it possessed in the original planning stage. Those changes that are made can be rescinded if they don't work out, while other changes that are made will be appreciated and kept. If the party works together as a group, and if the DM shares power with that party, that together the whole will continue to look for new and better ways to work together.
Here is the hardest truth that every DM and Player has to come to grips with. Processes won't make your game better. No matter what the adventure, no matter what the game system, no matter what form of RPG we play or how hard we play it, we won't improve our game mastery through practices or procedures.
We can only improve our games by having principles and values that promote a strong and friendly collaborative process. People matter. Not adventures. If you wished for the best module in the world, it still wouldn't make your game any better ~ not unless you've learned how to believe in what you're doing.
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
Collaborate at Arm's Length
In the last post, I talked about "agile design." Some readers will be aware that two posts ago, I also talked about agile design. With this post, I'm going to talk about agile again.
I have just finished saying that as DMs, we need to communicate more with our players about what they want, in order to determine what can work and what won't work in a campaign. I spoke about recognizing that fog of war is a secondary consideration to addressing the greater issue of determining how players respond to ideas and experiences they have in our campaign.
For those of you willing to take the risk of letting players choose the nature and species of their next encounters, it will not be long before a series of problems will emerge. Players will not want the circumstances between themselves and success lengthened or frustrated by inefficiencies. They will want the path between themselves and total power to be completely efficiently; if they feel they're in a position to negotiate, they will argue for efficiency every time. And just so we're on the same page, understand that "efficiency" for a player will be: a) as little risk as possible; and b) as much reward as possible.
If we take a stroll through a casino anywhere, and issue a questionnaire among the casino's players, asking what the casino could do to increase their personal satisfaction, the players would answer: a) make us lose less often; and b) make the pots that we can win larger.
Yet strangely, though no casino does this, not even in tiny incremental degrees, players keep showing up to participate. What does this mean?
It means that what the player says and what the player does are largely unrelated concepts. Players always want the best possible results for their investment. That is why they are players, to get the best possible results! Of course they have to get them through game play; but if we think about it, "game play" is a question of finding the best possible path towards game success. Players see questionnaires and investigations as potential angles that can be played, just as the rules of the game can be played. The DM might show weakness; if the DM does, then I want to be first in line to exploit it.
So where it comes to managing our players and learning about them, we need to be wary. This is not a contract negotiation. This is a way of turning the players onto their backs like turtles, then seeing how long it takes to right themselves.
In the end, we're going to give the players what we want. We want inefficiency in the rules, requiring innovation. We want a sense of doubt where it comes to risk-taking. But we can't do that well unless we investigate what makes the players innovate or take risks.
However, though we don't want to negotiate, we do want to collaborate, and often. Collaboration is the key to the game universe.
I was recently watching a video on Dark Souls and The Stanley Parable, which some of you will have played. I'm not going to talk about that link (and, quite honestly, I could beat Mark to death with a hammer and feel nothing at all). Rather, I'll link this video instead, which talks about why circumventing the narrator is central to the value that we find in games that enable rather than deny:
With this sort of understanding, we are right through the looking glass. This describes the awfulness and poor game thinking of pre-writing a "story" that players need to pursue. In fact, anything that the players do has the potential to just create another story, which a fast-moving DM can manage by evaluating, changing plans in mid-stream and then moving forward to build a new adventure with agility, this being, agile design that interprets what the customer, er user . . . ah, I mean player, what the player wants. Sorry, sometimes I get confused when I realize that everything that designers are doing to satisfy people in the real world is exactly what we as DMs need to do in our game worlds.
That evaluation that I mentioned, along with the changing of plans (or iterations), can't be done without collaborating with the player. Take a very common situation, one that seems to aggravate story-DMs no end.
There. The story is ruined, right? And at this point, the DM usually shouts, "You can't do that!" or "Why did you do that?" To which the player answers, "Seemed like a good idea."
Is the story done? No. Is this even remotely a problem in a flexible, inefficient role-playing game? Absolutely not. The player has just stepped up to the tee and sliced the ball into the woods. In golf, that means taking a penalty. In an RPG, the penalty is simple:
Chances are, the munchkin is now happy. Fuck the story, fuck the old man, none of that matters. The player is getting what the player wants: a fight. But let's make it a hard, brutal fight, one that nearly ends in the player's death, but at the same time promises a chance that the player will win. We're not punishing the player, we're merely supplying a reasonable penalty that promotes a certain inefficiency to the player's survival. That's all.
We could ask, "Do you find stories and old men relating them boring?" If the answer is yes, we could move on other strategies and techniques to introduce adventures. We could stretch ourselves and be creative. We could give the players what they want.
Giving it the way we want to give it, obviously. This is a collaboration, not a service, not submission. As designers, we'll try to make the player happy; but we're still going to be the ones designing this thing. Players can be made to understand that.
I have just finished saying that as DMs, we need to communicate more with our players about what they want, in order to determine what can work and what won't work in a campaign. I spoke about recognizing that fog of war is a secondary consideration to addressing the greater issue of determining how players respond to ideas and experiences they have in our campaign.
For those of you willing to take the risk of letting players choose the nature and species of their next encounters, it will not be long before a series of problems will emerge. Players will not want the circumstances between themselves and success lengthened or frustrated by inefficiencies. They will want the path between themselves and total power to be completely efficiently; if they feel they're in a position to negotiate, they will argue for efficiency every time. And just so we're on the same page, understand that "efficiency" for a player will be: a) as little risk as possible; and b) as much reward as possible.
If we take a stroll through a casino anywhere, and issue a questionnaire among the casino's players, asking what the casino could do to increase their personal satisfaction, the players would answer: a) make us lose less often; and b) make the pots that we can win larger.
Yet strangely, though no casino does this, not even in tiny incremental degrees, players keep showing up to participate. What does this mean?
It means that what the player says and what the player does are largely unrelated concepts. Players always want the best possible results for their investment. That is why they are players, to get the best possible results! Of course they have to get them through game play; but if we think about it, "game play" is a question of finding the best possible path towards game success. Players see questionnaires and investigations as potential angles that can be played, just as the rules of the game can be played. The DM might show weakness; if the DM does, then I want to be first in line to exploit it.
So where it comes to managing our players and learning about them, we need to be wary. This is not a contract negotiation. This is a way of turning the players onto their backs like turtles, then seeing how long it takes to right themselves.
In the end, we're going to give the players what we want. We want inefficiency in the rules, requiring innovation. We want a sense of doubt where it comes to risk-taking. But we can't do that well unless we investigate what makes the players innovate or take risks.
However, though we don't want to negotiate, we do want to collaborate, and often. Collaboration is the key to the game universe.
I was recently watching a video on Dark Souls and The Stanley Parable, which some of you will have played. I'm not going to talk about that link (and, quite honestly, I could beat Mark to death with a hammer and feel nothing at all). Rather, I'll link this video instead, which talks about why circumventing the narrator is central to the value that we find in games that enable rather than deny:
"If you go on a rampage in Dark Souls and kill every last friendly NPC you will actually unlock whole new side stories and dungeons and bosses. This is not simply emergent or procedural, this is intended play. If there is crafted content on the other side of your misbehaviour, then it's not actually 'misbehaviour' ~ because it turns out that murdering everyone is also the correct way to behave. What a game intends for you to do includes not only the things the fiction of the game tells you to do, but also the broader things the game permits you to do."
With this sort of understanding, we are right through the looking glass. This describes the awfulness and poor game thinking of pre-writing a "story" that players need to pursue. In fact, anything that the players do has the potential to just create another story, which a fast-moving DM can manage by evaluating, changing plans in mid-stream and then moving forward to build a new adventure with agility, this being, agile design that interprets what the customer, er user . . . ah, I mean player, what the player wants. Sorry, sometimes I get confused when I realize that everything that designers are doing to satisfy people in the real world is exactly what we as DMs need to do in our game worlds.
That evaluation that I mentioned, along with the changing of plans (or iterations), can't be done without collaborating with the player. Take a very common situation, one that seems to aggravate story-DMs no end.
DM: an old man moves up to the party and begins to speak. "I have something very important to tell you," he begins.
Typical Munchkin Player: I kill the old man.
There. The story is ruined, right? And at this point, the DM usually shouts, "You can't do that!" or "Why did you do that?" To which the player answers, "Seemed like a good idea."
Is the story done? No. Is this even remotely a problem in a flexible, inefficient role-playing game? Absolutely not. The player has just stepped up to the tee and sliced the ball into the woods. In golf, that means taking a penalty. In an RPG, the penalty is simple:
DM: Three men hear the old man's shout as he dies and rush out of the nearby doorway. They see the player with the bloody sword and the old man dead on the ground. "He's a murderer!" they shout, immediately reaching for a group of ax-handles that happen to be collected in a nearby barrel. They approach the party intending to use them as clubs.
Chances are, the munchkin is now happy. Fuck the story, fuck the old man, none of that matters. The player is getting what the player wants: a fight. But let's make it a hard, brutal fight, one that nearly ends in the player's death, but at the same time promises a chance that the player will win. We're not punishing the player, we're merely supplying a reasonable penalty that promotes a certain inefficiency to the player's survival. That's all.
We could ask, "Do you find stories and old men relating them boring?" If the answer is yes, we could move on other strategies and techniques to introduce adventures. We could stretch ourselves and be creative. We could give the players what they want.
Giving it the way we want to give it, obviously. This is a collaboration, not a service, not submission. As designers, we'll try to make the player happy; but we're still going to be the ones designing this thing. Players can be made to understand that.
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Adventure Writing
The last post has established that we're looking for a certain type of structure, which ensures both inefficiency and success at the same time. But how do we identify the tolerance level that the party has for either. It's true that there isn't one tolerance level for every possible party, but that's no really helpful. We probably won't be running with a lot of different parties and, in any case, our presence is going to skew different parties towards the same median.
The strategy for everyone to find that median is the same, no matter who is running or who is being run. That strategy is experimentation ~ and those who won't employ it are bound to be weak or abusive DMs.
Unfortunately, most of us, the writer here included, were initially trained to think that an adventure design worked like writing a book. We write the whole book, every inch of it diagrammed and sorted, and only when the book is complete do we dare present it for our players to try out. Frankly, this is pretty stupid. We keep talking about how the game is supposed to be a collaboration between the DM and the players, but then we send the DM off to work in total isolation while we wait like an audience of critics waiting to tear pieces out of the DM's solo design.
We do this because this is how modules were designed. Modules have to be designed like this because they are products, in which all the collaboration takes place between the fabricators prior to handing them over to the manufacturer. There is NO collaboration between the maker of modules and the DM, and then no collaboration between the DM and the players. It is passed down the line with the message, "This is as good as it gets; if you don't like it, tough."
DMs then try to rewrite the module a little (still solo), to tailor it for the players, but we still don't have much recognition of the players tailoring the module for themselves. At best, we have this desperate ploy: a very old story describing what most DMs do when they're noobs and don't know better. It goes like this and it's familiar: the DM has nothing planned, or has something planned which doesn't seem very good. The players speculate about what might be up ahead; the DM hears this and thinks, "That's great! I'll do that!"
Is this what I mean by the players collaborating with the DM to make an adventure? No. But we'll come back to this.
We also pre-write adventures because we think this is the only way to make them complicated and detailed, as in what happens with room #4 is very important when the party gets to #7, which has the key they need for room #9, and so on. We can call this The Myst Method. The Myst Method sucks. DMs don't realize this, but they're very tiresome to play over and over and, in the end, the players will soon become savvy enough to recognize what's happening. The key in #4 might as well have a tag on it that says, "This is very important, test it out in every hole you come to going forward until it fits in something. Thank you, the Dungeon Master."
It's a bigger surprise if the key doesn't fit anything. Except that we're still going to spend an hour of game time trying the key a thousand times.
Finally, we pre-write adventures because we don't understand design. We think this is proper and correct. We think this is how stuff gets designed. It used to be, but now every company that still designs that way has been destroyed in the market place by competitors who employ what's called "agile design."
Let's not get into the particulars ~ there is plenty of stuff online to read if you're not familiar with the concept. You may realize the last post was about agile design. At present, I want to make a point about what agile design is supposed to accomplish.
Writing the module in one go is called "waterfall design" ~ the old way of doing things. Basically, the river goes along, goes along, goes along, then it falls off the cliff and there we are. All designers used to do this; there were no focus groups brought in to question the design, no testing of the product (and no requirement to test it) and sometimes, no assurance that the product would do what it's supposed to do. Movies and other artworks, for the most part, are still being made this way. That is why so many of them suck.
Agile design is what's called "iterative." This means that it is done frequently and repetitively, until what is desired is achieved. Agile was invented for the software industry, which absolutely died on the vine when attempts were made to design it in a waterfall fashion. Now, everything is released in bits in pieces, testing it and testing it, relying very heavily on the user to fix what's wrong and improve the experience. Video game designers release an alpha version of the game, sometimes updated once, then a beta version. The beta version is then repeatedly released as it is tweaked and fixed, relying on players to identify what must be fixed. Finally, all the problems have been supposedly identified and the game is released.
Games are much more complex now, with fewer bugs, because of agile design. Back in the day, when waterfall design was normal, programs were not only crippled by bugs (rather than a few annoying things, like now, it used to be impossible to use software without continuous work-arounds for bugs), there was nothing the company could do about it. There was no proper effort to account for what had to be changed; this meant that "fixing" a program meant bringing in a completely unfamiliar team, who would have to start on the code from scratch. It was easier to burn the code to the ground and start again.
When designing your adventure, you want to be agile about it. But this will immediately produce the response, "How am I supposed to keep stuff secret from my players if I'm sharing the design?"
Easy. Don't keep it secret. Have you not noticed how game are played now? Consider titles like Don't Starve, Oxygen Not Included and Subnautica. Knowing what the adventure IS won't change the doubt players have about the die, their ability to overcome known enemies or steadily explore vast realms. RPGs have vastly over-emphasized the importance of fog, as though this is the entire game, when in fact fog is a very small feature.
What is the best part of not knowing? It produces stress from uncertainty. But if you know you're equally matched with an enemy, does that reduce stress? If you know the enemy's intentions or the enemy's abilities, does that detract from the player's level of stress? No. It doesn't. Not in my experience (which I can prove with text from game campaigns, if necessary).
The only time knowledge removes stress is when it tells the players they are certain to win or that they are certain to lose. Once a player is convinced of either, the game is lost.
So come clean. Sit down and say to your NEW players in your NEW campaign, directly, that you're thinking of giving an encounter. Warn them that it is coming. Tell them, before it starts, before their characters see it, what the encounter is going to be. See how they react. Ask them how they are reacting. Test them. Then, after the encounter is run, find out how they felt about it. Ask them, was it too hard? Was it too easy? Don't take their word literally, as they will skew their responses with a desire for survival, but ask! You can't learn anything if you don't ask.
Tell your players that you're planning to put a small, deserted keep on the edge of the nearby forest. Don't wait for them to ask a bartender: just tell them, "You happen to know about this deserted keep." Ask them how big they want it to be. How much treasure. How many monsters they'd be willing to fight to get that much treasure. How many they think they'd have to fight. Make a joke that it would have to be a lot more and see how they respond. Tell them that if they can't handle that many monsters, maybe they're not tough enough for the treasure, and see how they respond. Assure them that there is a keep. Assure them that there is treasure there. What the hell. You think it's some big secret? You think they don't know you're going to put treasure everywhere they go to fight a monster?
Stop hacking off your left arm to spite your right. Stop doing this on your own. Get your players to tell you want they'd like to fight, give them a chance to do it, assess the effect and then start to adjust your plans with the knowledge you've gained. Obviously, you're always going to be the most creative one in the bunch. You have the least to lose and you're getting experience watching them. This isn't rocket science ~ but it is about being forthcoming. You're not going to make a good game by yourself, not yet. Someday, but not yet. You've got to learn first how to design before locking yourself in a room and designing.
Sufficient, Unsatisfying
Amid the crickets, I feel we're ready to start our campaign and bring the players into an adventure. We should have a structure in mind that describes the game's rigidity. We should have an idea of how we want that game to function, and what sort of user experience, or player behaviour, that we want. I have taken the time to explain some of the pratfalls that are bound to result, regardless of your game's rigidity, and I have suggested strategies to overcome those troubles. Finally, I have thoroughly argued that what we're seeking is a degree of inefficiency in our system that will encourage gameplay, through player/user efforts to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Going forward, we need to better understand how we want to make a game that, at that same time, blocks success and enables success. Good games are those that find the sweet spot between these two goals.
In starting the campaign, we have two hurdles to overcome: we need a structure that will enable the players to have characters, and we need some sort of interface with which the players can interact. This latter, we will call an "adventure."
Note, I did not say, "roll" characters. Rolling characters is a process, not a goal. We need characters; we don't actually need to roll them randomly. We could as easily assign every player the same value digits for all their characters, absolutely balancing the abilities of every player with every other player. We're not going to do that ~ but I want the opportunity to ask, why aren't we going to do that?
Rolling the character randomly produces a user experience; we need to ask ourselves, what is that user experience and what do we want it to accomplish? The players, naturally, want to roll high, because they feel that the desired user experience is to have high numbers. If we follow some proponents of user experience, those who have little understanding of human behaviour, they would tell us to ask the players what they want and then give them what they want.
That is 100% inconsistent with creating inefficiency. Where it comes to rolling up characters, and any other random die roll, we must make the players understand that there is no promise of any kind that they can have what they want. They must accept, we tell them, to take what they can get. This may be hard. Sometimes, we will slice the ball into the woods. It sucks. Everyone hates it. Golfers break clubs. Players swear. That's how it goes.
However, in making a random character-generation system, we want to ask ourselves, how hard do we want that system to be? We can, of course, make it harder and harder until one player in a thousand can produce the highest possible score in our character-making "mini-game." We can also, however, adjust the mini-game any way that we want, to produce the highest possible experience for both success and failure. That is in our power.
To take D&D as an example, we can force the players to roll 3d6 for every stat. We can force them to roll the stats in order. Or we can enable them to roll 4d6 and discard the lowest die. Or we can settle on a standard that the total die rolls must be higher than a certain average, or that the six rolls must include, at minimum, a 15 and a 16, or a single 17 or 18, or else all six dice must be thrown again from scratch. Whatever method we use, we must make it clear to ourselves that our goal is to be inefficient, not efficient! We don't want everyone to do super-well. But we don't want to be excessively inefficient. We don't want players participating with scores so poor they may as well turn their weapons on themselves.
As well, we want that inefficiency to be more or less consistent across all the participants. We want bell-curve results. At the end, all the players should possess results that make them feel sufficiently successful, without necessarily completely satisfying them. This is what most game-makers interested in creating user experience totally misunderstand. They presume that the goal is to satisfy wishes or to force excessive hardship. No. The goal is to compel the player to look at the final result and then do what humans do: find things that they can put a silver-lining around, to make them thankful that at least that stat came out all right, because this will make them identify with a character that isn't perfect.
Super-bad stats will be hated. Super-good stats will soon become tiresome. Both will create an experience that will bear little resemblance to a human person (and yes, elves and dwarves are still psychologically human) and will therefore fail at their purpose: to create a character that will meaningfully interact with our adventure. Meaningfully? In a manner that makes the time spent in the campaign worth the player's interest.
We have the same problem with every other facet of the character's creation. Appearance, special abilities, defenses and equipment must be managed in a fashion that produces enough, but not great, results. Appearance should correspond to abilities, but not in an extraordinarily fixed standard: just because someone is super-strong doesn't mean they always fit one stereotype of how we envision super-strong. Special abilities should be weak and insignificant in the beginning compared to upgrades that will come later. Defenses should be expensive to have, maintain or endure, until such time as the player acquires greater skill and actual in-game experience. The best equipment, on the whole, should be too expensive to buy; players should always wish for something they can't have easily, as this gives them direction. In short, we're looking to make disappointment a standard, in order to make achievement measurable and, again, meaningful.
If the character generation system we're using doesn't achieve this, get rid of it or fix it. Poor character generation will produce a bad, bad user experience and the game will fail. If we do have a good system, we must be very careful how we mess with that system. Any adjustment has the potential for moving out of the groove we want ~ with the understanding that, in a complex game like an RPG, it can take weeks or even months to see solid evidence of that fail.
Most often, as a DM, I will be the first to see it; often it will take much longer for the players to understand that it's happening. For a certain type of player who is enjoying the benefits of having too much power and not enough inefficiency, the resistance against adjusting the rule can be very high and can produce considerable resentment. Always, however, I can see that the given player is isolated in that resistance; the rest of the party, not having the benefit of the flawed rule, will support my decision. But it is always a difficulty to rein in the power, which I have to do by a series of clawbacks and adjustments, since full-on stops are hard on the player. I prefer to avoid getting myself into these situations, but as someone who tries new rules all the time, now and then problems arise.
Sometimes, the whole rule has to be thrown out, much to everyone's discontent. There's nothing for it, however. The game's integrity is compromised and, overall, that inefficiency is lost. Eventually, if the correction isn't made, the campaign will die. Often, the campaign is already dead, and there's nothing I can do. This has happened to me online several times now.
That is because, I believe, my standards for inefficiency in a r/l campaign don't work as well when applied online; and yet, I refuse to change, because I don't want to offset my groove. It is more important to me, at this point, that I keep with my principles than I make things easier for online players just because the campaign moves more slowly. That may be unfair and unreasonably inefficient. I am able to recognize that.
If I am wrong, it is because I am cherishing processes and game structure, whereas I should be more concerned with the player's needs and the dynamics of DM-player interaction. I should be flexible enough to tune my game to the difficulties of the online interface. Were I able to do so, I would experience less online troubles, my games would move faster, the campaigns would die with less frequency and I could probably streamline the amount of prep and work that I'm doing. For example, I could get rid of things like CLO, encumbrance, the daily temperature and wind conditions, tactical combat [indeed, all combat] and an excessively detailed world, substituting instead more interactive role-play and puzzle mechanics. That is what I see other DMs doing who play games with participation through chat or skype.
I see online games, however, as a way to increase the degree of my complexity, and online players as guinea pigs upon which to test new rules an ideas. My goal is not to create the best possible adventures for players, but to create the best possible game design for me. My online players understand this, and as such give me exactly as much interest as they care to, since they can't feel the visceral pleasure of truly playing in my game.
This cannot be your goal, if you want your campaign to be successful. I can get new online players; you, most likely, cannot replace the r/l players you have.
Therefore, you must find the sweet spot in your sufficient-yet-not-satisfying structure. Your players must be close enough to satisfaction to deal with being unsatisfied, while feeling sufficiently empowered to believe that one day they will be satisfied. If either of these are a fail, your campaign will fail.
Once you've built the characters, you must approach your first adventure in this same manner. What counts as the bare-minimum amount of equipment and abilities to count as "sufficient"? The closer we are to the bottom of the scale, that still enables the players to believe they can succeed, the better. What counts as the bare-minimum amount of achievement that will count as "satisfying"? We can always give huge amounts of satisfaction, but we have to always be thinking of the next adventure. If we pile on the amount of satisfying once this adventure is accomplished, then our next adventure won't meet the pre-requisite of sufficiency that we want.
We always want the players to be hungry. When they're not hungry, we want to be sure they will be hungry again, and soon. Not right away; they should enjoy their full bellies a little while. But soon, we want them to be feeling that maybe it's time to be off again.
These are the boundaries in which we are making characters and chasing adventures. The actual rules and processes we create must be slaves to this principle of individual experience and effective interaction between players and the campaign. Rules and processes are important; but they are NOT why we play the game.
In starting the campaign, we have two hurdles to overcome: we need a structure that will enable the players to have characters, and we need some sort of interface with which the players can interact. This latter, we will call an "adventure."
Note, I did not say, "roll" characters. Rolling characters is a process, not a goal. We need characters; we don't actually need to roll them randomly. We could as easily assign every player the same value digits for all their characters, absolutely balancing the abilities of every player with every other player. We're not going to do that ~ but I want the opportunity to ask, why aren't we going to do that?
Rolling the character randomly produces a user experience; we need to ask ourselves, what is that user experience and what do we want it to accomplish? The players, naturally, want to roll high, because they feel that the desired user experience is to have high numbers. If we follow some proponents of user experience, those who have little understanding of human behaviour, they would tell us to ask the players what they want and then give them what they want.
That is 100% inconsistent with creating inefficiency. Where it comes to rolling up characters, and any other random die roll, we must make the players understand that there is no promise of any kind that they can have what they want. They must accept, we tell them, to take what they can get. This may be hard. Sometimes, we will slice the ball into the woods. It sucks. Everyone hates it. Golfers break clubs. Players swear. That's how it goes.
However, in making a random character-generation system, we want to ask ourselves, how hard do we want that system to be? We can, of course, make it harder and harder until one player in a thousand can produce the highest possible score in our character-making "mini-game." We can also, however, adjust the mini-game any way that we want, to produce the highest possible experience for both success and failure. That is in our power.
To take D&D as an example, we can force the players to roll 3d6 for every stat. We can force them to roll the stats in order. Or we can enable them to roll 4d6 and discard the lowest die. Or we can settle on a standard that the total die rolls must be higher than a certain average, or that the six rolls must include, at minimum, a 15 and a 16, or a single 17 or 18, or else all six dice must be thrown again from scratch. Whatever method we use, we must make it clear to ourselves that our goal is to be inefficient, not efficient! We don't want everyone to do super-well. But we don't want to be excessively inefficient. We don't want players participating with scores so poor they may as well turn their weapons on themselves.
As well, we want that inefficiency to be more or less consistent across all the participants. We want bell-curve results. At the end, all the players should possess results that make them feel sufficiently successful, without necessarily completely satisfying them. This is what most game-makers interested in creating user experience totally misunderstand. They presume that the goal is to satisfy wishes or to force excessive hardship. No. The goal is to compel the player to look at the final result and then do what humans do: find things that they can put a silver-lining around, to make them thankful that at least that stat came out all right, because this will make them identify with a character that isn't perfect.
Super-bad stats will be hated. Super-good stats will soon become tiresome. Both will create an experience that will bear little resemblance to a human person (and yes, elves and dwarves are still psychologically human) and will therefore fail at their purpose: to create a character that will meaningfully interact with our adventure. Meaningfully? In a manner that makes the time spent in the campaign worth the player's interest.
We have the same problem with every other facet of the character's creation. Appearance, special abilities, defenses and equipment must be managed in a fashion that produces enough, but not great, results. Appearance should correspond to abilities, but not in an extraordinarily fixed standard: just because someone is super-strong doesn't mean they always fit one stereotype of how we envision super-strong. Special abilities should be weak and insignificant in the beginning compared to upgrades that will come later. Defenses should be expensive to have, maintain or endure, until such time as the player acquires greater skill and actual in-game experience. The best equipment, on the whole, should be too expensive to buy; players should always wish for something they can't have easily, as this gives them direction. In short, we're looking to make disappointment a standard, in order to make achievement measurable and, again, meaningful.
If the character generation system we're using doesn't achieve this, get rid of it or fix it. Poor character generation will produce a bad, bad user experience and the game will fail. If we do have a good system, we must be very careful how we mess with that system. Any adjustment has the potential for moving out of the groove we want ~ with the understanding that, in a complex game like an RPG, it can take weeks or even months to see solid evidence of that fail.
Most often, as a DM, I will be the first to see it; often it will take much longer for the players to understand that it's happening. For a certain type of player who is enjoying the benefits of having too much power and not enough inefficiency, the resistance against adjusting the rule can be very high and can produce considerable resentment. Always, however, I can see that the given player is isolated in that resistance; the rest of the party, not having the benefit of the flawed rule, will support my decision. But it is always a difficulty to rein in the power, which I have to do by a series of clawbacks and adjustments, since full-on stops are hard on the player. I prefer to avoid getting myself into these situations, but as someone who tries new rules all the time, now and then problems arise.
Sometimes, the whole rule has to be thrown out, much to everyone's discontent. There's nothing for it, however. The game's integrity is compromised and, overall, that inefficiency is lost. Eventually, if the correction isn't made, the campaign will die. Often, the campaign is already dead, and there's nothing I can do. This has happened to me online several times now.
That is because, I believe, my standards for inefficiency in a r/l campaign don't work as well when applied online; and yet, I refuse to change, because I don't want to offset my groove. It is more important to me, at this point, that I keep with my principles than I make things easier for online players just because the campaign moves more slowly. That may be unfair and unreasonably inefficient. I am able to recognize that.
If I am wrong, it is because I am cherishing processes and game structure, whereas I should be more concerned with the player's needs and the dynamics of DM-player interaction. I should be flexible enough to tune my game to the difficulties of the online interface. Were I able to do so, I would experience less online troubles, my games would move faster, the campaigns would die with less frequency and I could probably streamline the amount of prep and work that I'm doing. For example, I could get rid of things like CLO, encumbrance, the daily temperature and wind conditions, tactical combat [indeed, all combat] and an excessively detailed world, substituting instead more interactive role-play and puzzle mechanics. That is what I see other DMs doing who play games with participation through chat or skype.
I see online games, however, as a way to increase the degree of my complexity, and online players as guinea pigs upon which to test new rules an ideas. My goal is not to create the best possible adventures for players, but to create the best possible game design for me. My online players understand this, and as such give me exactly as much interest as they care to, since they can't feel the visceral pleasure of truly playing in my game.
This cannot be your goal, if you want your campaign to be successful. I can get new online players; you, most likely, cannot replace the r/l players you have.
Therefore, you must find the sweet spot in your sufficient-yet-not-satisfying structure. Your players must be close enough to satisfaction to deal with being unsatisfied, while feeling sufficiently empowered to believe that one day they will be satisfied. If either of these are a fail, your campaign will fail.
Once you've built the characters, you must approach your first adventure in this same manner. What counts as the bare-minimum amount of equipment and abilities to count as "sufficient"? The closer we are to the bottom of the scale, that still enables the players to believe they can succeed, the better. What counts as the bare-minimum amount of achievement that will count as "satisfying"? We can always give huge amounts of satisfaction, but we have to always be thinking of the next adventure. If we pile on the amount of satisfying once this adventure is accomplished, then our next adventure won't meet the pre-requisite of sufficiency that we want.
We always want the players to be hungry. When they're not hungry, we want to be sure they will be hungry again, and soon. Not right away; they should enjoy their full bellies a little while. But soon, we want them to be feeling that maybe it's time to be off again.
These are the boundaries in which we are making characters and chasing adventures. The actual rules and processes we create must be slaves to this principle of individual experience and effective interaction between players and the campaign. Rules and processes are important; but they are NOT why we play the game.
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