Elements

Last week, I was at the Austin Game Conference. There are a lot of reports from AGC, so I won’t try to duplicate their content here. I did want to mention two things I noticed while there.

First, WoW was the invisible elephant in the room. Everyone seemed to agree not to talk too much about this millions-subscriber MMO with no real representation at AGC. In every talk, every panel, it felt like WoW’s existence was a constant undercurrent. When examples were needed, WoW supplied the examples. When those examples were given, it seemed that everyone understood them. When you talked to people, inevitably the conversation would turn to WoW. “Do you play WoW? What level is your character? Do you play on a PvP server? I quit playing WoW. I’ve started playing WoW again. Everyone at the office plays WoW.”

This game has a mind-lock on our industry, and Blizzard doesn’t seem to care.

Second, the recurring theme of the conference was, from the perspective of a first-time conference attendee, “MMOs are failing their audiences.” Or, more bluntly, “MMOs still suck.” The rant session was the clearest example of this (and I am sad that no-one transcribed my rant about writing), but Dr. Bartle’s keynote was full of this sense of stagnation and failure. The NPC panel was all about the ways in which NPCs in MMOs are terrible. Ubiq’s Vegas talk was informed by the failures of the existing crop of MMOs.

And yet… outside of the panels and talks, the doom and gloom vanished. It felt like… watching a plea for charitable donations on television, and everyone nods solemnly: “That’s terrible.” Then we return to our regularly scheduled program, and the sense of guilt and obligation evaporates. At AGC, it was driven away by (as others have mentioned) Real Money Transactions. “I’m excited about RMTs. RMTs are the future of the industry. RMTs are going to revolutionize MMOs. RMTs are going to destroy MMOs. RMTs are a huge legal sinkhole waiting to swallow us up. Our game will have RMTs. Our game will never have RMTs.”

It feels like there’s a deep divide between the practical exigencies of the business of MMOs, and the theoretical design dreams of the creative side of MMOs. And I don’t mean that in a trite “suits vs. hackers” way. This divide existed simultaneously in the same person in many of the people I talked to. I’m as guilty of it as anyone: I don’t want to re-make WoW (’but with pirates!’), and yet it’s the example I always turn to, the context for my designs. I want to create, go in new directions, innovate — but I want a shit-ton of money, too.

I believe these conflicting desires can be reconciled. I think part of that process begins with identifying design decisions made because they’re right — and let’s not kid ourselves, WoW is chock full of very, very good design decisions — and identifying decisions made because of fear. Fear of being different, fear of scaring users, fear of reviewers, fear of publishers.

If it’s a good design, those fears are unfounded. I hope.

I admit, I’m a map addict. I love drawing maps; I love the physical context a map provides. In my perfect world, I would have complex 3d printers to spit out custom terrain for constructing tabletop environments to use as maps.

It’s not just D&D and tactical combat gaming, either; I’ve reached a point where I need maps to keep any complex situation comprehensible. I’ll sketch out a map even if the game doesn’t use miniatures, and I’ll try my hardest to come up with a reason to use miniatures, if possible.

So this digital map projector is pure gaming porn to me.

I’ve been searching for a roleplaying game for about a decade. Every time I go into a game store, I check the shelves. Every time reviews show up on rpg.net, I desperately hope they’re talking about the game I want. I was always alone in my hunt because I was never sure exactly what it was that I was chasing, but I was certain I’d know it when I found it.

The other day while I was listening to Isildur talk about EVE Online, I wondered, “Why aren’t there any tabletop RPGs like this?” and then something I hadn’t been able to see for ten years became clear.

I want a science fiction game on the talkative or bookish side of the action scale. I’m not interested in cinematic heroics or gunfights. I’ve played those games, and now I want to play A Deepness in the Sky instead of Star Wars. A nerd game.

I want strong character differentiation with slow or limited advancement, suitable for campaigns spanning decades or having multiple generations of characters.

I don’t care about psionics or nanomagic or mysterious alien powers. That’s a different type of game.

I want a modern resolution system with features like assigned task difficulties and autosuccess on trivial actions, built on a good probability base that provides appropriate odds in all the common situations. I don’t want to use a calculator for anything other than figuring sales tax.

I want a somewhat fiddly tech and vehicle system that isn’t overwhelming if I try out an idea without my spreadsheet handy, with hooks directly into the dice mechanics. I want equipment to matter, but not to overwhelm personal ability. Minor optimizations and upgrades should be both possible and interesting. Ideally, the tech process will be as setting-neutral as possible. Again, I don’t really want to use a calculator, and I’d like to be able to encourage my players to tinker with the tech system.

I don’t need a setting. I need a game to express a number of different settings with a similar hard science fiction flavor.

What I’m looking for is the SF version of Ars Magica.

For the record, this game isn’t Traveller, though it breaks my heart to say so. Trav was always so close and also always so far from what I want. It also isn’t Blue Planet or Heavy Gear, but it took me a while to be sure in both of these cases. It isn’t Fading Suns, and it isn’t Alternity, and it isn’t GURPS and it really isn’t anything with a D20 system logo. My bookcase groans under the weight of all these games that aren’t the one I want.

EVE Online is having a free 14-day trial that doesn’t require a credit card or any kind of really significant registration. I’ve been interested in EVE for a while, and I’d just canceled EQ2, so I decided to give it a shot. 500MB of wacky download hijinx later, I had EVE ready to go. (Protip: don’t download from the link MMORPG.com gives you; go to eveonline.com and download the latest version. Their patcher is shit.)

The verdict so far, after a couple of days of play? EVE is a game designed for people who have lives. It is the slowest-paced game of any I’ve played. Everything has a kind of gradual fluid grace to it. You warp to a station, and select the ‘dock’ option, and you sit there for at least a minute while your ship gradually drifts into docking range.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

EVE is a science fiction MMO set in a distant galaxy. The premise: a wormhole-type-gate opened near Earth many centuries ago. Explorers went through, planets were colonized, then the gate closed, leaving the colonies stranded and forced to fend for themselves. They’ve now fragmented into five different space empires, and have recently discovered the secrets of FTL travel. Now the galaxy is connected by a system of warp gates that allow instantaneous travel between star systems. In many areas, automated security systems and regular patrols keep systems safe; however, the galaxy is full of unpatrolled, dangerous regions where pirates and raiders and paramilitary groups fight over resources.

The game is entirely ship-based. You spend a lot of time and effort on creating the perfect character appearance, only to discover that it’s used for a static snapshot that other players can look at. You do not have an avatar, other than the ship you’re currently piloting.

It’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen in an MMO. Part of that is the setting; it’s easy to make space look nice. Throw up some nebulae, a light-flare around the closest sun, and put a lot of interesting-looking geometry in place for space stations, and you have a great-looking game. But there are subtle touches, too; for instance, mining for ore in an asteroid field, in the sunshadow of a giant space-rock, and your mining lasers cause its dark side to light up momentarily, picking out all the craters and protrusions.

It’s brutally complex. Every piece of content, with the exception of the ’storyline’ mission arcs, is player-generated. The big factions that control regions of space are player-created corporations. Players own space stations. Players craft all the ships and weapons. Players mine the resources, players provide the services. The economy is a gigantic elaborate improbably complicated machine for moving goods and cash from place to place. Consider: I can place an order for an item in a system that’s hours away from where I am. I can then create a mission for someone to bring it to me, for a fee. Then I can spend those hours earning more money than the fee, while some other player hauls my stuff across space to me.

Or: I can, if I’m interested, figure out the min, max, and median price for an item in my region. Then I can move it from a low-priced place to a high-priced place, and resell. Time is the ultimate commodity in EVE, so paying an extra few thousand isk for an item that’s conveniently located right in your own system is a good deal for many people. This dynamic comes entirely from players; there’s no system-enforced pricing scheme.

EVE has no experience point system. I have killed exactly three things in a full day of playing, not counting shooting stuff in the tutorial missions for combat practice. Three drones killed as part of a relatively interesting storyline about a prototype fighter. The rest of my time has been spent exploring, mining, making money, learning to fly bigger ships, and running courier missions for items and cash.

Instead of the ‘kill stuff to get better at killing stuff’ or ‘do things to get better at doing things’ model, EVE just gives you skill growth over time. Real time. Right now, as I type this, I’m also training my Spaceship Command skill from level 3 to level 4. It has about 20 hours left until it finishes training. No, I’m not logged on, but if I log on in 20 hours, the training will be complete, and I can assign something else to be trained.

What this means is that I’m basically freed from any sort of bizarre counterintuitive setting-breaking behavior in the name of ‘leveling up’. I can go and find things to do, or just log off if I’m not up for playing, and I am not falling behind anyone. For that matter, ‘falling behind’ is also kind of a meaningless concept in EVE, because there’s nothing like ‘level’ to limit who you can play with. Everyone, even the rawest noob, has some useful function in gameplay. There’s nothing (aside from the obvious danger of getting into such a fight in a small ship) preventing a noob in a noob frigate from helping out in a battleship-vs-battleship fight. In fact, light, fast, heavily armed ships, such as a newbie might be able to fly, are pretty reasonable and useful in space battles, where the goal is often ‘get to the jump point and get the hell out of here!’.

The UI is both awe-inspiring and really frustrating. It’s a lot more robust than, say, the EQ2 UI, but it’s still on the overengineered end of the scale. From the perspective of someone writing UI for a living, I’m impressed. From the perspective of a player, I wish that it didn’t eat up so goddamn much of the screen every time I try to do anything complicated.

So what sucks about EVE?

One, it’s really damn slow. This is actually a positive for me, but probably not for most people. For example, given a mission to carry some documents to a distant system, I set my destination and my autopilot. Then I get up and vacuum the living room. Then I sit back down, and I’m just arriving in my destination system. I like it because it demands only a small part of my attention, and I’m coming to realize that the all-consuming nature of MMOs is not actually very much fun for me. I hate feeling like I should be playing more than I am. In EVE, there’s no reason to play more than you want to, since you’re not losing anything by not playing, and even when you are playing, you can do other things. If I had two computers both capable of running modern games, I could probably play EVE while playing FFXI at the same time.

Two, it doesn’t have a learning curve, it has a learning cliff. This game is hard sci-fi to an extreme I’ve never seen before in a computer game, MMO or otherwise. I have mined, and I have run missions, and I’ve bought a cooler ship, and learned some new skills. And I have no damn clue what I’m doing. I know there are places to mount guns on ships; I’ve done it. But they have all kinds of parameters I don’t get. What is a low vs. high power slot? What determines how many turrets I can mount? What does ‘charge’ mean? What are power requirements, and what are CPU requirements, and how do I get more of either resource? Do my skills affect what I can equip, how efficiently I do so, where I can put things? What do all the various modules do? I have a shield booster. What does that mean? What happens if I get a bigger one? What are the tradeoffs between installing this shield booster, and installing some kind of armor repair booster?

And that’s just ship outfitting. There’s refining, and there’s skills, and there’s station management, and corporation management, and the insanity that is the economy, and clones, and insurance, and contact management, and faction standings, and … every single element of the game is taken to an extreme of complexity and depth as to make it nearly impenetrable. My first experience with the game involved not being able to figure out how to leave a station after I’d docked with it. And the first time I opened the galactic map… my mind was blown. I have never, ever, seen anything in any game that’s even close to being as intimidating as this map. It was an ‘oh my fucking god’ moment.

Third, it’s all player content. That means that there isn’t a lot of setting depth outside the mission arcs. You will never have an interesting conversation with an NPC; hell, unless you’re getting a mission from him, you won’t have a conversation with an NPC at all. There’s implied depth to the environments — the city lights on the dark side of a planet, the apparent metropolis inside a major station, the glimpses of orbiting greenhouses through the windows of a research facility — but it’s all just implied. You can’t interact with any of it. You can’t spend your money on a night on the town, or land on a planet to pick up refugees, or explore the abandoned floors of the orbital factory. The backstory is complex but only intermittently expressed in actual gameplay.

And because it’s player content, there’s PvP. Lots of it. Of the grief-play variety. Now, I haven’t experienced this, because you can choose your level of interest on a sliding scale. In Security 1.0 areas, there’s no PvP, because attacking another player is swiftly punished by the authorities. In Security 0.5, you might end up tussling with NPC pirates. In Security 0.0, it’s a free-for-all, with no law of any kind except the good old law of the jungle. I’ve never been anywhere lower than 0.5, except briefly on a quick hop of a mission, and have never seen another player even lock on to me. But it happens, especially for anyone who’s interested in the most rewarding gameplay. The best resources are always in 0.0 space. That’s where the player corporations meet to battle. And the moment you join a player-run corp, you join all their battles, too. Enemy corps can hunt you down without real legal repercussions, as part of a declared corp war. None of that is bad, per se; it’s just the game’s endgame play, which means that if PvP doesn’t interest you, EVE’s ability to hold your interest in the long-term is going to be small.

In any case, I’m just on day two of my playing, and I’m still learning what the hell I’m doing. But it’s hard to beat the cost per hour of fun gameplay, when the game is free to download and free to register. If hard science fiction appeals to you, it’s worth looking at.

No, I’m not talking about Busiek’s (excellent) Arrowsmith.

I hate mages in RPGs, for the most part. I hate them because they always work the same way. There’s some effort made to balance the power of the mage with the effectiveness of a sharp sword. Sometimes, there’s a tradeoff made — mages get to be more powerful in exchange for being fragile. Sometimes, there’s no tradeoff; in Ars Magica, mages are just better in every way (which is okay for ArM because they’re really the protagonists of the story). But the tradeoff becomes a false tradeoff. Either the mage is strong enough to withstand combat, in which case it’s irrelevant, or the mage is not strong enough, in which case who will play a character unable to overcome challenges?

I always end up feeling like ‘fireball’ is just another kind of ‘hit with sword’. Mages and warriors are reduced to the number that represents how much damage they can fling at enemies. In the degenerative case, in D&D, there are enemies that are invulnerable to all magic, and there are enemies that are (basically) invulnerable to all weapons. The mage and the warrior become useful through the crudest kind of content design. It’s like having a door that can only be opened by a halfling appear in every D&D game. You’ll get halfling characters in your game, but for all the wrong reasons.

This led me to start thinking about fighter pilots. I like this analogy, and I’ve poked at it before in thinking about science fiction, and it leaped to mind when I considered the problem of mages.

The image of the fighter pilot from WW2 is the dogfighting RAF ace, shooting down Luftwaffe fighter planes, spinning and looping in a furious battle of agility and skill. And it has been argued that Allied air superiority during the entire continental invasion brought about the Allied victory. But… no fighter pilot ever won a battle in the war. No village was liberated, no German force pushed out of France, by a fighter pilot. The war, the real war, was boots-on-the-ground. Battles were won, in the end, by infantry and armor. And mostly infantry. Until you’re standing in the center of the village, you haven’t liberated it.

So why were they critical to winning the war?

Well, fighters were there to attack other fighters, which were defending bombers. Bombers were there to destroy supply lines and infrastructure. Supply lines were there to keep troops on the ground healthy, well-supplied, and well-armed. The troops were there to hold back the Allied ground advance.

This chain of relevance starts at ‘guys with guns march into a town and shoot the enemy and retake the town’, and develops to ‘guys in tiny death machines fly through the skies nowhere near the battle trying to blow up other guys in tiny death machines.’ In the modern era, it goes even further, with ground spotters giving laser targets to air bombers, and ground-to-air man-portable missile systems targeting fighters and bombers alike.

My idea is that mages in games should serve a similar role to fighter pilots in WW2. The presence of a mage will tip the balance of any roughly evenly-matched fight. A mage can’t take the place of guys with swords, but he can enhance or support his side’s guys with swords. All other things being more or less equal, the side with a mage will win. But the real role of mages is to counter the abilities of your enemy’s mages. The mages break off from the main fight, in a sense having their own seperate battle just among themselves. If one side’s mages are victorious, they will then be able to turn their attentions to the main battle.

Some examples I can think of, off the top of my head: the role of magic in the Black Company novels by Glen Cook; the role of the wizard in Conan the Destroyer; the (poorly executed) distinction between Netrunners and other character types in Cyberpunk games; the arsenal of anti-mage spells available in the Baldur’s Gate 2 version of AD&D; Jadeclaw’s magic-oriented magic system.

What bores me is reduction of spells to a number that’s comparable to swords. What excites me is spells as a whole different layer of combat, another axis of effectiveness that may intersect the physical combat, but isn’t really part of the physical combat.

Watching .hack//SIGN and playing .hack//MUTATION makes me want to write, and run, a game about playing a MMO. I think it might be too meta, though. I’m not sure. I like the idea of running two plots simultaneously, and allowing players to care about the game plot and the reality plot separately, to whatever degree interested them.

I disliked the Dream Park game, though. And I’ve never been super excited about the kind of game where you play yourself, only transported to a fantasy world. Possibly if, like .hack//SIGN, you never get to interact with the ‘real’ world, but are aware that it exists and occasionally get off-stage narration related to your activities there.

I was trying to read Ron Edwards’ essay, Narrativism: Story Now at The Forge this morning.

I’d love for this post to be a carefully reasoned critique of Edwards’ ideas, but alas, it is not to be. The man writes like Immanuel Kant: full of technical-sounding jargon and unnecessary elaborations that have the effect of leaving the reader sure he read something interesting, but not sure what that something was.

So I can’t form a coherent judgement of the content of the article. A suggestion for Mr. Edwards: try an abstract, try the 10% Rule, and grab a copy of Strunk and White.

I can get a sense of the point of the article, though. What is Narrativist gaming? I think of myself as a Narrativist (as opposed to a Simulationist or a Gamist), so it would be nice if I could define that term to my satisfaction.

Chrysoula has been talking to me lately about story structure. It is tempting, as a reader, to believe that novels fall from the sky, alien artifacts fully formed and ready for use. We describe good novels as ‘page-turners’, and we talk of being ’swept up’ in the story. What is revealed by these descriptions is that we don’t usually think of how stories are built. We don’t think about the girders and concrete that form the story’s foundation. We’re focused on the color of the curtains, or the style of artwork on the walls.

They are built, though. I don’t want to elaborate on the Three Act Structure here; Google it and you’ll find a thousands sites explaining it. Similarly, there’s a school of thought which believes every scene should end in disaster for the protagonist; the arguments for this structure are (to me, at least) pretty persuasive.

Stories, then, are constructed. ‘Toss some characters in a situation and see what develops’ isn’t going to generate a great story. It’s going to generate a story, sure, but not one that’s as compelling as a well-constructed novel.

The tradeoff in gaming has always been understood as: You will get a crappier story than a good novel, but it will be interactive. Players are never going to be as cool as the protagonists of a novel, but it will be as enjoyable as a novel because the players are controlling the protagonists of the game.

I assert (and here I’m getting to my definition of Narrativism) that this is a false tradeoff. I believe games can have stories that are just as good as a good novel. There’s no reason the medium of gaming should be less able to construct narratives that compel an outside observer just as much as they compel a participant.

A summary statement of my ideal Narrative game: When we’re done playing, people should enjoy telling the story of the game, and non-participants without gaming context should enjoy hearing the story of the game.

My ultimate goal in running games is to create an interactive experience that is as good as a novel. I want to be able to later relate the story of the game, and have a listener not realize I’m talking about a game. I want them to believe the game could have been a movie, or a novel.

What this means is that rather than define modes of interaction between gamemasters and players, and construct a bizarro edifice of specialized jargon to describe the levels of interaction between participants and stories, I want to think about structure.

Edwards seems to think a lot about RPGs, and not as much about stories. I expected, right at the top of his essay, in bold: ‘How to use the Three Act Structure in a game’, and a whole lot of followup discussion about what works in traditional written narratives, and how it can be imported to gaming.

Instead he spins off into what reads like a very insular, introverted discussion of what’s been tried in RPGs to date, what RPG authors are thinking about, how different RPGs are presenting narrative, and what seems to work and what seems to fail. All of which is perfectly legitimate, and completely ignores the elephant in the room: the modern novel, the modern film, the modern short story.

Narration isn’t a mystery. People are succeeding at narrating every single day. Your local bookstore is overflowing with successful narratives. Your local theater is showing narratives in Dolby Digital Surround. This isn’t rocket science. It’s well-understood and a part of mainstream culture.

And any discussion of narration in games that doesn’t start with a careful look at how narration works in other media is, in the end, so much navel gazing.

So this isn’t just a rant, I’ll present my current thinking about where to start with game narration: How can I give the players the freedom to direct their characters in each game session, so that they believe they are sovereign agents, and still cause a three-act structure to take shape? I believe it’s possible; making it happen in whatever crude form is my next step.

Some techniques I’m considering:

• Work with players to construct characters who will, by design, have a stake in the events of the story.
• Build flexibility into the story so that multiple outcomes will all serve the story’s purpose. For instance, if Act 2 must end in disaster, plan for multiple disasters.
• Improvise within an established framework. It’s important to know where the story is headed, in order to create the act structure, but the route by which one arrives at the destination does not need to be fixed.
• Plan for kinds of checkpoints, rather than specific events. The GM, acting as a director and guide, can bring any series of events to a certain kind of checkpoint. If that checkpoint is the right sort of event to drive the narrative, it will work in the act structure, regardless of the specifics. If the story demands ‘reversal of fortune; villains triumph’, improvisation should be able to bring that about without forcing the players into a required ‘boss fight’ or compelling them to walk down a certain street at a certain time.
• Think about, and construct for, pacing. This is my problem with Simulationist gaming. Good stories are well-paced. Call of Cthulhu games rarely are. I think this comes from demanding the plot progress according to a pre-planned series of events. Improvisation should be able to pace a game just like a movie or a novel.

Those are just starting points for planning and constructing, but they give a sense of what I think a good approach to Narrativism looks like.

This is a concept sketch for a game about 17th-century style court intrigue. In place of a traditional physical combat system, this game uses a political conflict system, described below. There are no rules for physical combat. Every resource which would usually be present to support those rules is instead redirected to support the political conflict system.

Political attributes
In addition to the regular traits used to accomplish actions, each character has three political attributes: Rank, Power, and Status.

• Rank is a noble title such as King or Marchioness, or a description such as Wealthy Merchant or Foreign Ambassador. Rank is generally immutable except in extraordinary circumstances. Mechanically, Rank determines how much inherent protection the character has from the manipulations of unimportant political players.
• Power is a number from 1 to 10 that indicates the strength of the character’s political movements. Power is used to overcome the protections of Rank, and to squash the actions of weaker political players. High Power is usually associated with high Rank, but this need not always be so. A King may be so weak that he cannot directly oppose his rivals, and a charismatic bishop might gain such popularity that he seems to stand toe-to-toe with a Grand Duke.
• Status is similar to a wound track. As a character suffers political defeats, he takes Status losses. When his actions are successful, he takes Status gains. A very low Status reduces the character’s effective Power until he can recover. Similarly, a very high Status can increase his effective Power.

Issues
Issues are the most common tool of influence. They represent concerns, ideas, and public reactions to policies and events. Issues have two political attributes and a list of investors.

• Visibility is a measure of how well-known the issue is. Subtle concerns among the higher class have lower Visibility while reactions to public events have very high visibility. High Visibility issues have more inertia behind them, and take more effort to influence.
• Popularity rates how well-liked the issue is among those it is visible to. Like Status, Popularity fluctuates from political maneuvers. Shifts in an issue’s Popularity affect the Status of every character who is invested in that issue.
• Investors are characters who are strongly associated with the issue. Investment is always either For or Against the issue. An invested character’s maneuvers involving the issue are stronger than an uninvested character’s, but her fortunes are also tied to the issue’s Popularity.

At any given time, there may be a dozen or more important issues in play, and at least twice as many with less prominence waiting along the edges for someone to pick them up.
Characters will sometimes find that they are already invested in an issue when they first learn of it, because it affects them or because of their other invested issues and positions.
Every important event and long-term project has an issue associated with it. High popularity for the issue makes the event or project run more smoothly, while low popularity can drive up costs or even stall a project completely.

Minions
Many political maneuvers can be performed by proxy. When a character sends a subordinate to complete a maneuver, that maneuver is resolved using the main character’s attributes and skills or the subordinate’s attributes and skills in the rare case that they are higher. Most unimportant subordinates will simply have the Minion trait instead of having stats of their own.
Characters with the Minion trait have no significant volition, and just do as they are told. These characters can be suborned, and resist with their master’s attributes. Characters without the Minion trait have the will to resist being turned if they choose.

Maneuvers
Activities in Court of Thorns are divided into Actions, which are standard RPG immediate result tasks, and Maneuvers, which are political tasks with a larger scope of result. Making a good impression on a lord you have just met is an Action. Swaying him to your cause is a Maneuver which may incorporate that Action.
Some example Maneuvers are:

• Spread a rumor about someone (by creating an issue that invests her).
• Press an issue positively or negatively (which is more effective on smaller visibility issues and on issues you are invested in).
• Directly affect someone’s Status positively or negatively (possibly with an escape clause if he takes a Maneuver you specify. Rank protections may prevent this if your Power is low.)
• Suborn a Minion and return him as your spy.
• Invest in an existing issue.

All Maneuvers must be phrased as things the character can accomplish with her existing networks of influence. Much effort will usually be spent on maintaining and expanding a character’s base of power so that she has sufficient channels to work her plans.
Maneuvers are usually enacted by meeting with or sending a subordinate to meet with other people to convince them of something. Maneuvers may involve multiple Actions or even multiple scenes of interaction, or may be resolved quickly with the appropriate skill test.

Time scale
In Court of Thorns, most political maneuvers require half a day for characters in or near the city, or a full day for characters in the country. These times assume the people or targets involved in the maneuver are readily available. If a character must send a message to a lord two days ride away, the appropriate delays apply before the maneuver takes effect. If the character must talk to that lord herself, the maneuver will take more of her own personal time to enact.

Parties
To get things done more quickly, the wealthy throw parties and gather many influential people together. While attending a party or a ball, the time required for most simple maneuvers drops to an hour if the relevant people are present.
These gatherings cost enormous amounts of money to host, and society looks well upon those who throw the best parties. To reflect this, every character is invested in their own Party issue. Party issues tend to have low to moderate visibility (because the uninvited public rarely cares) and are the subject of much gossip. Characters who throw cheap parties or throw no parties at all will find the popularity of their Party issue to be quite low, which can in turn hurt their Status.

Random snippet of thought: Rodger over at Metagame posted a while back about encapsulating mechanics within characters. His example contrasts how a Roman and a Celt might have different internal mechanics which express the same final game result.

I really, really like this idea. I wonder how workable it is generally — to create basically a game API, and allow the players to construct their own tools to talk to that API. The idea of balancing something like that terrifies me, but it’s so neat.

Periodically in conversations with Rebecca I find myself in an argument about narrative games versus free-form games. Inevitably I come down on the side of narration, because I like to tell stories and consider myself the one telling the story, with players as participants in my story.

I’m always left unsatisfied by these conversations, though, because I don’t see myself as an authoritarian GM. I don’t railroad players, and I spend a lot of time building games so the players have many different options. My FRCS game, Frosthold, was entirely shaped by the players; the whole tone and direction of the game was decided by the players, and I mostly just riffed off their decisions to put together a coherent narrative.

I don’t want to rehash my arguments for narrative control in games, but my dissatisfaction with the possible options in the argument (authoritarian vs. freeform and all points in between) reminded me of something. This morning I realized what I’d been thinking of: the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which advocates replacing the simplistic Right/Left single-axis political descriptor with a more complex two-axis political descriptor. Discovering the WSPQ was a nice revelation to me, way back when; it explained my vague dislike for being classified as either a liberal or a conservative, and seemed to better map to my perceptions of political beliefs.

And so it is with gaming. In thinking about a two axis model on my way to work this morning, I came up with a model which I believe better maps to my perceptions about gaming styles, and seems to better model the kinds of gamers I know.

The first axis could be called ‘Simulation versus Story’, or ‘World versus Plot’, or ‘Narrative versus Freeform’. It describes the kind of game being played. Is the game an open world with many places to explore, no imposed meta-plot, and a limitless number of options for the players? Or is the game a tightly-constructed story with waypoints the players must reach, and a buildup to an inevitable climax? Or is the game somewhere between these extremes, with multiple plotted paths, or a plot that exists only as far ahead as the GM can predict the players’ interests? Some questions I thought of to try to plot a game on this axis:

* How far in advance does the GM know the outcome of a session?
* If the GM writes an encounter, does that encounter always happen?
* Is there a main villain, and does he continue to plague the characters through the whole game?
* Do the players often go in unexpected directions? (and the corrolary: Does the GM permit it?)
* Does the GM mostly write setting material, or mostly write specific sessions?

The second axis is ‘GM versus Player’. I think of it as the ‘centralization’ axis. Where does the control of the narrative lie? I’m not going to take up Bryant’s question regarding the narrative control of the rules themselves, though. I propose that the rules are a constant, and the degree to which the rules are enforced is just part of the general category ‘rules’. This axis, then, describes who does the storytelling. Does the GM present all the narration, and the players control only their responses to the world as presented? Or do the players freely improvise using the GM as a jumping-off point to tell their own stories? Or is the game somewhere between, with players taking charge of their corners of the world, but the GM providing the framework to tie it all together? Some questions I thought of to try to plot a game on this axis:

* Are the players encouraged to describe things unrelated to their immediate actions?
* Does the game offer mechanical rewards for clever descriptions?
* Does the GM construct the characters’ backgrounds, or do the players have total freedom to write their own backgrounds?
* Does the game share GM responsibilities among multiple people?
* Is the setting fixed or mutable? That is, can players decide what’s beyond the mountains to fit their own interests?

(Obviously, these are not all the questions you could ask to plot games along these axes, and they’re probably not even the best possible questions.)

Thinking about my gaming style in this way, I believe I am strongly on the GM side of the Control axis, and somewhere in the middle of the Narration axis. That is, I tend to want to control my worlds, and do not surrender them to players, but I want the players to be mostly free actors in my worlds. I do construct plot, but it’s more of a roadmap than a railway line. I know that I’d like the players to go from point A to point B or perhaps C, but I don’t know how they’ll get there, and I’m willing to let them drive down back roads and end up at point D.

This makes me more comfortable with thinking about other game styles; for instance (and she can correct me if I’m wrong), I believe Rebecca prefers games that are towards the Freeform side of the Narration axis, and more strongly (possibly very strongly) on the Player side of the Control axis.

Some other examples I thought of:

* Strong Narration, Strong GM: Your basic railroad. Not necessarily bad; dungeons are typically here on the axis, and tournament games. Good for puzzle-solving game styles.
* Strong Narration, Strong Player: Collaborative storytelling where players get their own piece of the setting to talk about. I think Ars Magica’s troupe-style games, run as they are designed to be, fall here.
* Strong World, Strong GM: World-sim games where the GM has a big ol’ binder of world details at hand, so that wherever the characters end up, there’s something interesting for them to do.
* Strong World, Strong Player: Total free-form storytelling in the style of Nobilis, where any player can construct world details on the fly to fit his or her preferred playstyle, and invite other players to explore those world details. The ‘game’ is more of a meeting-point for different ideas about world, setting, and character.

I’m beginning the process of convincing myself to cancel my EQ2 subscription. This process gets easier and easier each time I do it, from my endless unplayed EQ1 subscription, through my vague depression at letting my DAOC subscription slide into oblivion, to my quick and painless excision of City of Heroes.

I have struggled to identify what I don’t like about EQ2, and it’s challenging. They’ve made a very thorough game, with few obvious holes. It isn’t a whining nerf-fest with broken PvE content the way DAOC was. It isn’t City of Heroes’ utterly bland and textureless content. It isn’t even buggy the way my short-lived experience with AO was. It isn’t ugly the way AC1 was, and it isn’t punishingly hard the way EQ1 was.

Even so, it has failed to engage me.

I think the key to this failure lies in how I play console RPGs. From the first days of playing Dragon Warrior 1 on my Nintendo and Phantasy Star 1 on the Sega, I’ve had a simple approach. I assume the game designers intend for me to accomplish some task, and I try to figure out how they expected me to do that. So I look for the NPC in town who will heal me for free, I look for the cheap inn that will allow me to recover my resources, I look for the weapon shop and compare the weapons there to my starting money (”I have 100, that costs 25. I’m supposed to buy that. That one costs 100; I’m not supposed to buy that.”).

And, more than anything else, I treat each trip out to experience gameplay as a resource management problem. Let’s say recovering at the inn costs 30 gold. Let’s say I get 5 gold per fight at the early levels. This means that I need to win 7 fights before returning to the inn, or I’m falling behind, gradually losing money. I assume the game designers did this math, too, and have tuned their game so I can win at least 7 fights without needing to replenish my resources.

So I’m always looking for an answer to the question, ‘What am I supposed to do? How is this supposed to work? What is the path through this content the designers intend for me?’

In FFXI, I can answer that question. I’m supposed to level up. To level up, I need equipment. To buy equipment, I need money. To get money, I can farm, craft, fish, or garden. Then I can apply this same analysis to each of those: How was I intended to farm? What is the right path through the crafting content? What items do I need to fish? What gardening is the most profitable?

But in EQ2, I don’t know how to do the things I’m supposed to do… and worse, I don’t really even know what I’m supposed to do. Case in point: archery. I decided it might be nice to have a bow to shoot monsters with, since I’m always frantically chasing them around hitting my ‘taunt’ ability. I can make a bow; I’ve seen the components in my list of craftables.

So I make a bow, after some degree of sweating and straining, and I’m pleased with it. It’s crappy, but I got crafting experience, which I believe is a good thing, and I got to make some new items I’d never made before. But now I need arrows. I don’t want to craft them, really; I just want to try this bow out, and crafting arrows is boring. I go to the weapon store, and find the fletcher.

He wants ungodly amounts of money per arrow. I’m astonished; I can’t afford these arrows, and moreover, I can’t imagine anyone getting enough use out of arrows to justify this cost. I ask my guild, who say that Rangers get a lot of use out of arrows… but they can use a spell to make their own arrows.

So back to crafting. I have a hope: quality while crafting seems to affect the number of items you get. If I make really nice arrows, I should get a lot of them. I start the process. The cost mounts, because there are so many steps, but I’m convinced it will be cheaper, because I’ll get 20, or 40, or even 100 arrows. Dreaming of 100 arrows, I complete the final step.

I get 7 arrows.

Keep in mind that this process took 30-45 minutes of game time, during which I had to pay attention and carefully manage a piece of UI. 30+ minutes of intense concentration * (100 / 7) = about 7.5 hours for a stack of 100 arrows.

Now I’m asking myself, ‘Ok, what the hell is the developer’s intended path through this content? What should I be doing?’ And I don’t know. I honestly cannot envision the proper series of actions to make a bow and arrows relevant to me.

You can say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t use a bow,’ but I’ve had the same experience through most of the game’s content, in every area. How do I upgrade my skills? Where should I go to fight? What should I be fighting? What quests should I do? What quests should I not bother with? What places will get suddenly, abruptly dangerous when I walk 20 more feet (I died a lot in the sewers…)? What is my class’s role? What special ability should I take, and when should I use it?

I look for answers to these questions, and I’m just left with more questions.

I think it’s a lack of discoverability. I don’t know the answers, and I don’t know where to look to find them. Did you know that you can make a waypoint to a group member? I didn’t, until someone told me how. I can’t even figure out how to set a chat channel as my default chat option in a window.

EQ2 feels like a lot of great ideas, any one of which is sufficiently complex for the whole game, and all of which are only tenuously strung together into a whole. It doesn’t ever cohere for me, form a solid, single experience.

Oh, and it lags like a bitch. It’s not that attractive. I can play HL2 and Doom3 at 30+ fps. What the hell is EQ2 doing that’s so much harder? Whatever it is, I’m not seeing it reflected in the graphics quality on-screen. FFXI looks nicer and never stutters or drops frames.

(via The 20′ By 20′ Room)

Robin Laws talks in his livejournal about ‘inactive’ players. Not players who fall asleep during games, which is a whole other irritation, but players whose backgrounds are so subtle and ‘deep’ and understated that you can’t draw them out into expressing their characters at all.

I’ve been there as a player, and been frustrated with it as a GM. My take is this: If you can’t come up with something for your character to say in a given situation, you have a two-dimensional character.

You may have a deep, profound backstory that informs your every action, but if you can’t think of a way for your character to interact with the clerk at the 7-11 while buying a pack of gum, your character lacks the complexity of the average high school kid.

Look, not everything can be about your mysterious past. Not every interaction can involve your hatred of elves. Not every conversation must inevitably turn to your obsessive weapon fetish. It’s great to have those things, and when they come into play, it’s great to make something of them. But characters are just people, for the most part, doing what people do. Don’t try so hard to make sure that your fellow players and the GM are aware of, and impressed with, your background and roleplaying ability. Use it when it’s relevant, and fall back on some more broad characteristics when it’s not. Otherwise, in looking for that perfect moment to express your character’s Big Idea, you’ll spend most of your time waiting and watching the game pass you by.

Additionally, this isn’t arthouse theater, folks. If your character idea is so subtle that you can’t actually convey the in-character reaction adequately in the context of a bunch of people sitting around a table with some dice and some potato chips, reconsider your idea. The best characters are the ones that have some obvious ways to interact with the world while simultaneously demonstrating who they are.

Two examples:

A character I enjoyed was my Shadowrun mage, who practiced vodun, and was a follower of Baron Samedi. He was easy, fun, his reactions were obvious to my fellow players, and no-one had any questions about his motivations. I consider him an ideal character; I had some general fallback in the form of his religion and his sensualist attitude towards life (yes, I will make a pass a the NPC while plummeting from the top of a skyscraper). I also had some strong specific reactions defined for him, ready in case they came up. The GM could use the specifics, or rely on my ability to generally react to any situation.

A character I hated was the mage I played in the distant past of my involvement with the IFGS. In an already kind of tacky live-combat game, an understated character was not a good idea. When you’re in a group of people who are having an argument about the relative merits of their various elven homelands, playing a character who’s insular and introspective is a recipe for lots of sitting quietly alone. IFGS is a far, far end of the spectrum of storytelling vs. action, and only the flamboyant were ever going to get any notice, but the principle is the same: I was being so subtle and understated that no-one noticed, and then I’d rant to friends about how they didn’t bother digging down to find the burning passions and hatreds below the surface. To which the only proper answer is: ‘Why the hell should they? Why is that a problem for the other players to solve, rather than a problem for you to solve?’

Now, GMs certainly have to seize responsibility for making characters relevant. Nobody wants to play spectators in a GM’s exciting world. Assuming the GM has a basic level of competence, however, and is actively working to involve the players, the rest is in their hands. PCs need to be built with two questions in mind: ‘How do I make sure others learn about the things that really motivate me?’ and ‘How do I deal with ordinary, everyday reality in an interesting way?’ Once you can answer those two questions, you’ll be fine.

First, get past the furry thing. Jadeclaw is a game about anthropomorphic animals in a fictional China. I don’t care about the furries, I don’t have any interest in defending or condemning the furries, and if furries bug you, they’re not that integral to the game, and could easily be removed with a minor effort. I’m currently running it with furries, because they don’t yet bother me enough to warrant the work to remove them.

So why does Jadeclaw work? It’s a ‘fistful of dice’ game, and I’m usually repelled by games that use more than a couple of dice at a time. The answer is deep in their design philosophy: Jadeclaw has no math.

Task resolution happens without math. Combat (mostly) happens without math. The effects of being injured are resolved without math. You never add a die to another die, and you never add a fixed number to a die.

It works like this: You have some characteristics that determine what dice you roll when you want to do something. Your career, your race, your skills, special traits you’ve purchased with character points, all contribute dice. So to swing a sword at someone, you might have a d10 from your skill, a d8 from your career, and your Speed stat of d6. You roll d10, d8, d6. Your opponent rolls a similar motley collection of dice, and whichever of you has the highest number on any die succeeds.

Task resolution is really fast. Particularly if you have prepared fistfuls of dice to grab, your only chore is finding that highest number. Rather than have static ‘difficulty numbers’ where you need to beat, for instance, a 10 to leap from a rooftop to another rooftop, Jadeclaw rates even static challenges in terms of dice. That jump might be an easy 2d6, or a very challenging 2d12. Because the possible lowest roll for any challenge is always 1, any amount of skill is sufficient to attempt any challenge with some chance of success. This neatly works around the D&D problem of some challenges being simply beyond most people, and lends a more cinematic feel to the action.

There’s a price for this simplicity and ease of use, however. It’s called the Bonus system, and it’s terrible. When you have a bonus — for instance, when you’re attacking someone from behind, you have a bonus to attack — you increase the size of your dice. A d10 becomes a d12. A d4 becomes a d6. And (here’s the tricky part) a d12 becomes d12, d4.

Bonuses increase the size of every die in the pool, but d12 is the maximum die size. So a bonus applied to a d12 is pushed down to the next available die, and if there is no additional die, it becomes a new d4. In some cases, this is easy:

d10, d8 + bonus = d12, d10

In other cases, it’s less obvious, but still pretty straightforward:

d12, d6 + bonus = d12, d10 (because the bonus increases the d6 to d8, and the cascade off the d12 increases the d8 to d10)

And in some cases, it’s ridiculous:

3d12, d10, d8 + bonus = 3d12, d12, d10 + 3x cascade off the d12s = 3d12, d12, d12 + 2x cascade = 5d12, d6

And that is not something you’re going to be calculating quickly in the heat of battle. Where helper software for any other game might do math for you, helper software for Jadeclaw would be most useful telling you what the hell to roll. And god forbid you get multiple bonuses, each applied sequentially.

Penalties, at least, are simple; you roll twice and take the worst of the two rolls. Statistically very different, but so much easier to manage. Bonuses work the way they do, of course, because they have the potential to add more dice, and increase the maximum possible roll, both of which are independently valuable. Nevertheless, figuring out a bonus is the biggest time-eater in a Jadeclaw fight.

There’s another weakness, and one I’m not sure has ever been addressed to my satisfaction in any game: Movement. Movement in games is always my least favorite system, because it fails to model a football game. Football is my gold standard for movement: can I react to you moving past me? Can I change directions in response to your actions? What if I sprint past you and you want to turn around and tail me?

The two problems are ‘necessity’ and ‘interruptibility’. Do I need to move in this system? Can I prevent someone else from moving past me? D&D3e offers the attack of opportunity for the second problem, but doesn’t do much for the first. A 3e combat involves a lot of shuffling sidesteps to get a bonus for flanking, but once that’s in place there’s little incentive to do more than just stand there whacking each other. In fact, you’re penalized with additional free attacks against you if you try to move once you’re ’set up’. It gets the interruptibility, at the cost of static combats where people are unlikely to leap off a banister or weave through opponents to reach a goal.

Trying to model the wuxia genre is a particularly difficult problem because fights in wuxia are all about motion. Every exchange of blows is followed by each combatant moving, looking for better position. At the extremes of Crouching Tiger, combatants are essentially flying around the battlefield striking one another as they pass. Dodging blows causes movement; the environment provides countless options for movement, whether it’s backflipping off a tree, running along a wall, or leaping from above to strike.

Jadeclaw gives advantages for movement; ideally, you want to be behind your opponent, and you don’t want your opponent to be able to get behind you. Unfortunately, the scale of movement is so small that either you can never accomplish this, or you can always trivially accomplish this. Also, while some of the special martial arts maneuvers require movement and terrain, they’re very specialized, and don’t give much advantage relative to their difficulty to obtain. Sure, you can add your Jump dice to your attack if you backflip off a wall, but you need enough prerequisites that it becomes questionable whether your character creation resources were well spent — or whether you might have been better off simply increasing your ‘normal’ attacks, which don’t require walls at all. Jadeclaw’s answer to interruptibility involves anticipating the need to interrupt someone well in advance of doing so, which is useful in limited tactical situation (such as defending a narrow pass, or aiding someone’s retreat) but in normal combat, mostly seems unused. Why waste your single action on standing around waiting for your opponent, when you could close with him and hit him?

I’m not going to say it’s broken, because I don’t have enough data yet. For one thing, I believe the game is intended to be played on a hex map, and my battlemat is a grid. That will certainly alter movement somewhat, as circling completely around someone will require 6 moves, instead of 4 (assuming diagonals, which you kind of have to assume in order to make grid movement work). For another thing, we’re still exploring the options. Movement might be more common if, for instance, combatants were using the ‘retreat’ option, where you get additional dice for defense if you agree to back up a step.

All of which is to say, it’s a well-considered approach to the problems of system usability and cinematic combat, but it has some flaws which may or may not be crippling. After several weekends of GMing continuous D&D3e combat for hours on end, it’s at least a change of pace.

Me too! Me too!

1. What is the first RPG you ever played?
Do CRPGs count? If so, oh, probably Curse of the Azure Bonds (AD&D 1st edition) or Bard’s Tale or one of the early Might&Magics. Curse of the Azure Bonds is definitely the first thing I finished and remembered clearly and replayed obsessively. If CRPGs don’t count, I think my first chance to play in an actual RPG (instead of read about them and read them) was also AD&D– but I owned GURPS before that.

2. What RPG do you currently play most often?
D&D3e.

3. What is the best system you’ve played?
Exalted, I think.

4. What is the best system you’ve run?
Personally? A heavily pre-prepped BESM one-shot. I don’t run a lot. And when I do I always seem to be drawn to the marginal systems rather than the heavy duty ones. Oh hey, I remember really liking Whispering Vault. And Nobilis.

5. Would you consider yourself an: Elitist/ Min-Maxer/ Rules Lawyer?
Groupie.

6. If you could recommend a new RPG which would you recommend? Why?
Nobilis for comic book fans.
Exalted for gamers.

7. How often do you play?
Whenever I can harass somebody into running a game. Once every couple of weeks, usually.

8. What sort of characters do you play? Leader? Follower? Comic Relief? Roll-Player/ Role-Player?
I play the curious sensitive one who pushes the buttons that need to be pushed to make the plot happen. Usually.

9. What is your favorite Genre for RPGs?
There are a lot of genres I haven’t had a chance to play in, like steampunk and extensive cyberpunk. Mostly, my experience is with fantasy games, and horror. I guess I’m much more of a fan of story than genre at the moment. I’d like to do steampunk sometime though.

10. What Genres have you played in?
D&D fantasy, quirky fantasy, post-apocalyptic fantasy, science fantasy and horror.

11. Do you prefer to play or GM? Do you do both?
I like to play. I also like to be a GM but it never seems to work out very well because I enjoy playing so much and many of my fellow gamers prefer running.

12. Do you like religion in your games?
Yes.

13. Do you have taboo subjects in your games or is everything “fair game”?
I’ll make considerations for individual players, but otherwise everything is fair game.

14. Have you developed your own RPG before?
Partially.

15. Have you ever been published in the Gaming Industry? If so…what?
Nope!

As you steal, so shall it be stolen from you:

1. What is the first RPG you ever played?
D&D, orange box. I saw some of the big kids at lunch get out the box from the game cabinet at school, and the minis, and lay out this really, really complex map (it was B1: Keep on the Borderlands). I had no idea what was happening, but I needed more of whatever it was.

2. What RPG do you currently play most often?
D&D3e.

3. What is the best system you’ve played?
I don’t know. See question 11. I’ll have to say Ars Magica.

4. What is the best system you’ve run?
It really depends on what I’m trying to do. I love Ars Magica’s magic system. I love Torg’s resolution mechanic. I like how D&D3e models tactical combat. The new World of Darkness system really spun my wheels when I ran my annual Halloween game with it. Right now I’m digging Jadeclaw’s combat system. Best overall? Gonna have to give the cop-out answer and say: the epic fantasy game I ran with a revised variant Amber system.

5. Would you consider yourself an: Elitist/ Min-Maxer/ Rules Lawyer?
Depends on my mood. There’s something satisfying about really using all the rules as they were intended, especially in very complex systems. And I have no pretensions that what I’m doing is aaaahrt. It’s just entertainment, and I win if people are entertained. But let’s say ‘elitist’, since the other two categories don’t really fit.

6. If you could recommend a new RPG which would you recommend? Why?
New RPG to someone who isn’t a gamer? D&D3e. It’s got a really gentle introductory curve.
New RPG to a gamer? Well, take a look at Jadeclaw (and get over the furry thing, if necessary). It has a kind of neat mechanic that works better than you’d expect. And also, if you’re sneering at World of Darkness because you remember the bad old days of Vampire, wipe that sneer off your face and check this game out. It’s like they took an old broken down car and rebuilt it into a rocketship.

7. How often do you play?
Once a week, more or less.

8. What sort of characters do you play? Leader? Follower? Comic Relief? Roll-Player/ Role-Player?
See question 11. Generally I play competent losers, or angry people.

9. What is your favorite Genre for RPGs?
I don’t really know. I am a scifi junkie, but oddly don’t run many scifi games. I like clever fantasy settings with a lot of detail, but my patience for generic fantasy is running low. I think, based on the constant lure of it, and based on my interest in the historical, I’m going to have to say Ars Magica and 1920s Call of Cthulhu. I love doing research to build versimilitude.

10. What Genres have you played in?
All of them.

11. Do you prefer to play or GM? Do you do both?
I don’t play games. Seriously. I am a terrible player. I don’t know why. I love to GM, but as a player I feel restless, confined, bored, irritable, pushy, and nervous. So I don’t really play games, unless friends pressure me into playing some idea they’ve concocted.

12. Do you like religion in your games?
I… have liked religion in games. If it’s appropriate to the setting, absolutely. And when it’s appropriate, I bring it on like gangbusters. My Torg game involved killing angels, and the gods make an appearance in my FRCS game every 5-10 sessions or so.

13. Do you have taboo subjects in your games or is everything “fair game”?
That’s up to the players. I don’t, but they usually do. We work this out ahead of time, for the most part.

14. Have you developed your own RPG before?
Many, many times.

15. Have you ever been published in the Gaming Industry? If so…what?
Not really. Or, well, for some definition of the ‘gaming industry’ and some definition of ‘published’.

When I watched Ocean’s 11, my first thought (as it often is when I watch something cool, or read something cool) was ‘I’d love to be able to run a roleplaying game like this!’ It seems like the perfect setup — a team of highly competent career criminals executing a clever and daring plan. You can almost hear the dice rolling as they use their various unique skills to solve problems.

When you try to implement this kind of thing as a game, though, you get what I call the ‘cyberpunk syndrome’. Anyone who’s played in any of the cyberpunk genre games will probably know what I’m talking about. The players sit around making a plan to break into the high-tech high-security compound. They plan. And they plan. And they plan. Six hours later, as most of them have one by one wandered off to watch TV or take a nap, the last couple of die-hards are still arguing about whether they should cut the camera in the hall, or feed a looped tape into the security system.

It’s boring. Everyone knows it’s boring. It’s not surprising that most Cyberpunk and Shadowrun games inevitably devolve into ‘who’s got the biggest guns?’ — at least when you’re presented with some bad guys and told to shoot them, you get to do something.

And yet, the lure of Ocean’s 11 is still there. It feels like it should be the perfect game.

This led me to come up with a solution for caper games. The first thing to realize is that players are not authors. They don’t control the environment as well as the protagonists. They can’t make convenient holes in the security system, or adapt a situation to work out for them. They’re going to assume there is a correct solution, and they’re going to try to find it. In non-interactive formats, the author just creates that solution, and causes his characters to find it.

The second thing to realize is that players will appreciate a clever plan as long as they get to participate in it. They don’t have to construct it to like it. Players enjoy executing each others’ plans as much as they enjoy creating the plan themselves.

My proposed solution is: The role of Danny Ocean is played by an NPC.

That is, the GM constructs both the problem and the solution. The players are given specific tasks to accomplish, and leeway to accomplish them in the way they see fit. For instance, a player might be told his role is to cut the power to the building at precisely 9:00 PM. He might do this in a number of ways (see Ocean’s 11 for some thoughts on how to do it); he’s free to figure that out himself, to come up with his own section of the plan. What he doesn’t get to do is say, ‘Wait, why are we cutting the power? Do we need to do this?’

As each element of the plan is executed, the plan proceeds forward. The consequences of failure at each step are pushing more danger, conflict, and tension onto the next step of the plan. For instance, failure to knock out the guards at the door of the vault means that the break-in team will have to fight or talk their way past the guards. Failure to take out the power means that the acrobat will have to avoid the automated laser sentries as well as climb the wall and dodge the razorwire.

The other nice side-effect is that you can hide the plan in its entirety from the players. That critical last twist that made both Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 12 so interesting can be obscured. In fact, you can hold back each task until it’s time to execute it. So the player knows he has to shut off the power, but doesn’t know why — because the breakin team hasn’t been told yet. The plot unfolds just as it would in a caper movie, with the viewers boggling at the complexity of the plan and its masterful execution.

For more work, you can create multiple plans, or multiple plan-segments, and offer them to the players to choose between. This way they still have plan input, without the six hour trauma of constructing the plan themselves.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Maybe your group loves those marathon planning sessions. As someone who’s been the bored GM in those situations, I know that I don’t, and that I’d given up on caper gaming until this idea struck me.

It doesn’t need anything at all
It just begins, an endless stream
Tracking down fragments of a dream
And all that we remember is
lost…

So we keep searching
for all we want and all we are
and is it endless? are we voiceless?
can we be free? we make choices–
reaching for a border we can
cross…

So I guess I’m going to be posting some of the random thoughts I have about games, gaming, and game design. Enjoy.