Verbal Spewage

A while back, I did a store visit in Oakland, CA. During that visit, I was in a discussion with someone on the future of roleplaying games who took position that RPGs were growing more specialized and that the era of rules systems that catered to a wide audience had passed. He pointed to the 4^th edition of Dungeons & Dragons and the World of Darkness game systems as proof. For D&D 4e, he claimed that the system was focusing on tactical combat given the specialization roles classes have that players must choose from at various stages of progression. World of Darkness, he claimed, eschewed combat in favor of social conflicts. I have to ask if this was true and if so, how the weight of so many genres and subgenres haven’t fractured the market out of existence. So, why was his argument not on the level?

For starters, one of the problems with the argument is the nature of storytelling. There are two types of plots: those of the body and those of the mind. Of course there is infinite variety therein, but this is the base from which storytellers work. Human experiences are bound within these two realms. As such, it is impossible to write a rules system that only caters to a specific type of story. This isn’t to say that mechanics can’t be designed to support a certain play style, only that no system can exclude story types.

The game rules provide a guideline for method to resolve the most common actions that will crop up in the course of play. Everything else is a result of the story players wish to tell. Thus, the reason for why people create house rules. Those are situations that derive from the one thing a game cannot control: how people tell their stories and the implications personalization implies. In effect, this is beyond the scope of the rules. Players are given a sandbox full of tools, but they get to play with them as they desire.

Another reason why the argument doesn’t hold up is how players use settings with novels that support the product line. For instance, the Dragonlance line is a romance. Not only was it branded as such, but the novels also supported this thought. The adventures players set in that world do not have to make use of any mechanics that support such play, however. Nothing in a rulebook beyond the core mechanic requires players to actually use the rules for any given situation. Then again, there is nothing preventing someone one of using the world, but translating everything enjoyed from that setting into a game system they prefer instead. Here are some examples of that issue: don’t want a world with wizards, ignore spellcasters. The gods aren’t real in your version of the world? Remove any miracles priests could work.

This brings me to the reason why I feel D&D 4e is too limited in design. Too much emphasis is placed on the role of combat in play. It’s one thing to have a cinematic system, such as d6, Tri-Stat dX, and older rules-light versions of Dungeons & Dragons. It is quite another to reduce the discussion to how the classes work in combat and to offer predominantly rules and templates for specialized roles in battle. Very little focus is given to noncombat events. While story is effectively outside the scope of rules (e.g. game masters often do not roll plot lines off a series of tables), it isn’t subject to a game mechanic to resolve an outcome. D&D 4e ignores story, it doesn’t exclude it.

On the other end of the scale my interlocutor placed the new World of Darkness game line. According to him, that system focused on social conflicts more so than the physical variety. This too rang hollow. That said, he pointed out the lack of a unifying guide to combat for the disparate settings using the same system when compared to the old rules line. The core books aren’t concerned with a more tactical style of combat in comparison to the more wargame-esque system of D&D 4e. It is the purview of other books for the game, however.

In a compartmentalized system like d20/OGL games, it is easy to cherry pick the rules one wants to use to define the play experience. For a game like the new World of Darkness, it isn’t so clear when the compartmentalization is already done for players. That’s why there are so many books dedicated to specific topics and the rules that support those ideas in relation to the core game (or genre in the case of books for Mage, Vampire, etc.). In fact, four books focus on combat, all of them as part of the generic line of books designed for use with any of the genres (or a “normals” campaign). Contrast that with the books published for D&D 4e. Unlike the nWoD books, most of the D&D volumes are combat-oriented with the exception of setting guides (few in number, indeed). Both systems do represent opposite ends of gaming design philosophy.

Another reason why the argument didn’t sit well with me is the existences of point-buy systems. They have a tendency to be genre free. If systems that catered to multiple styles of play are part of a bygone era, why do lines like GURPS and HERO System still remain in print along with interest in games like the d6 System, Tri-Stat dX, and BESM? Even if they offer a build-as-you-go system alongside genre-based supplements, the options presented speak to the power and appeal of games that emphasize the players’ creativity over that of the systems’ authors. The work of the authors becomes new ways of envisioning how to use the toys at one’s disposal. It shifts the writer’s role from a dictatorial creator to a co-creator on par with the player.

Finally, there is the question of market share. How can any company create enough products to garner a base without becoming a niche or destroying its base by segmenting it? Perhaps the guy wasn’t aware of the problems TSR faced in the mid-90s when it had too many game worlds in print at the same time. The sheer number of themes that were available fractured TSR’s base and flooded its market until the sheer glut harmed the company’s margins (amongst other issues). As such, it doesn’t make sense to design multiple worlds catering to too many genres when several can be covered by a few worlds at most. The lesson was learned and the d20 Modern and D&D 3^rd Edition lines worked to accommodate as many play styles and stories possible without resorting to an inordinate number of game worlds – just too many books, for some people’s tastes. In fact, there were three core D&D worlds produced by Wizards of the Coast with two licensed by WotC to third-parties and limited runs for Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time and Blizzard’s Diablo II (two books each). The d20 Modern game had period books, but only two that could be seen as genre offerings: an urban fantasy setting and a revisit of the conspiracy fair from the Alternity line.

The lesson learned, and followed by virtually every successful company, is a core system that then has its roots hidden by the trappings of rules that simulate genre staples. Not only does this lower the learning curve for a company’s fans to move from one world to another, but also proves that a sandbox needs to be whatever its occupants want it to be. The experience is beyond the scope of rules, just like the story. Players who like a particular mechanic will find away to express plots of mind and body as suits their tastes, making one system work for all occasions. Fans of Alternity (1998) proved this by creating material for fantasy gaming using that system’s core mechanic.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Basic Margins of Error

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Anatomy of Game Design: The Technology Involved

Up until this point, I haven’t spent any time on the common tools of table top gaming: dice and cards.  For the most part I’ve been avoiding probability on purpose.  Work has gone into examining how important game balances along with systems that are impartial.  But the tools for how to achieve this have been left to the wayside.  One of the reasons for this is the sheer complexity of the material.  As I hope to show in this piece, game design is an act that is far from rational and masochistic all the while being somehow rewarding.

The first, and least complicated feature, is linear probability.  One rolls a die and the chance of anyone number resulting is one out of however many sides there are on the die.  The standard six-sided die gives a 1 in 6 chance.  Pretty simple, right?  If you are designing board games or other fairly simple random systems, that is all you need to know.  Fortune is a harsh mistress and the universe hates you.  Okay, that is a bit snarky.  The universe does not hate you; it just does not care because you give up all power (and choice) to random, stupid chance.

In a standard deck of playing cards, the chance of any one card coming up is 1 in 52.  What about a particular suit, color, or digit?  1 in 2, 1 in 4, and 1 in 13.  Great, now what, you ask?  What is the chance of drawing a specific hand in a game of five card poker?  1 in 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48 if nobody else gets a card first.  And, yes, that is the easy stuff.

Fractions suck for a lot of aspects of ratio in probability, though.  Unless you are expressing a very large value, like the chance of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery, you are better off sticking with percentages.  Less conversion that way for those of you who have not descended into this madness.  Not to mention the ease when multiple systems of probability collide and you are forced to do a lot of math.

Knowing things like how likely a sequence will occur or the chance something will appear by a roll or random draw makes design easier.  Remember, chance is not your friend.  Just because you have a good idea of how likely a situation will occur in the rules as invoked by probability does not mean you can count on it happening at all.  That said, it does tell you how much you have to pay attention to it during play.  As a result, knowing percentages of any particular value arising in your randomizer is crucial.  Below is a list of percentages of dice and a standard deck of playing cards for any one result to occur, values are approximate.

d2:  50%          d3:  33.3%       d14:  7.14%     d%:  1%

d4:  25%          d5:  20%          d16:  6.25%     1 card:  1.92%

d6:  16.6%       d7:  14.29%     d30:  3.33%     1 suit:  25%

d8:  12.5%       d12:  8.33%     d34:  2.94%     1 number/face:  7.69%

d10:  10%        d20:  5%          d50:  2%          1 color:  50%

These numbers can be added for games that use ranges rather than discrete values.  For example, a four or less on a d6 is 66.7%.  Depending on the situation, that represents the chance of success or failure.  That said, these are linear mechanics and only reflect single-die or discrete probability systems where multiple rolls are distinct and independent of one another.  The use of dice in Risk, for example, use this model.

For other uses of multiple dice, one must employ the bell curve for determination of the most likely, or frequency of, results.  To do this, begin with the average of the dice used: (x + y) / 2, where x = the lowest value and y = the highest where each face of the die has a unique, sequential value.  The formula does not work for dice with repeating values on a single die, because multiple results with the same weight form their own frequency distribution (bell curve) on the die.  This will be covered another time.

Let us stick with some familiar dice rolls to see the frequency distribution in action.  The most familiar use of the formula for beginners to familiarize themselves with the problems inherent in probability mechanics is the roll of two six-sided dice.  The two most common results are throwing doubles and getting the number 7.  This is because both happen one sixth of the time.  There are 36 possible outcomes from using a pair of d6s: 1,1; 1,2; 1,3; and so on.  One can find the answer by adding up the values for each combination, which may be necessary in the case of doubles (or just look at the numbers of sizing question), or take the average found using the formula from the previous paragraph: 3.5.  So for 2d6, the average is 3.5 x 2, or 7.  The 3d6 roll for attributes common in Dungeons & Dragons or OGL games has the average of 10.5.  This is the most common results for Ability Score generation.  Okay, there are a few things point out.  I am well aware that the OGL rules use a 4d6, throw out the lowest value rule.  That said, the range of likely values has historically been 9-12, or ± 1.5 from the mean.  This, for the more mathematically inclined is half of the standard deviation for the 3d6 roll.

A strange thing about that 10.5 value is that it is also the average roll for a d20.  Granted, this is a linear expression for each throw the die, but over the course of the campaign (a series of ongoing scenarios for RPG neophytes) a lot of rolls are made using the d20 (this is the core mechanic).  Hence, it averages out to 10.5.  The bonuses for experience in regards to level advancement moves the average result further afield so that a 10th level fighter, for example, has a mean of 20.5 when making an attack roll.  Using the 4d6, drop the lowest skews the mean towards 12, just below the threshold for positive Ability Score adjustments.

Some games use probability in conjunction with target numbers.  These represent the breakpoint in a system where the difficulty of an action determines what a player must roll or exceed in order for the action to succeed as plan.  One such system that uses this method is BESM Third Edition.  The d6 System does this by using a dice pool, which means the action is determined by a collection of dice adjusted up or down in quantity before rolling against the target number.  The average adventurer has a 3d6 pool for an attribute and easy tasks have a target value of no more than 10.  Difficulty levels scale in increments of five, marking their upper and lower bounds.  Depending on the situation and the like, it is possible to roll 50d6.  Or, to reduce the number of dice needed, one can just roll a few and take the average for each die not rolled, rounded up.  What the system does is essentially give players a 1 in 3 chance per die per difficulty level to succeed in completing a task (e.g. a die is required for each level of difficulty to maintain the 1 in 3 chance).

Let us look at something more complex.  White Wolf uses d10 dice pools.  They are not as easy to figure out.  I spent two days trying to use my own limited knowledge of probability to deduce the formula without any success before giving up and searching for someone else’s answer.  I felt a bit dumb when I realized that what I should have done is figure out the chances of failure based on the number of dice thrown.  All you need is one die to read 8 or higher to succeed in any given task.  That is a 70% chance of failure on each die.  When you throw 2d10, though, failure drops to 49% (.7 x .7 = .49).  If you try to measure success this way, it looks dismal to roll multiple dice (.3 x .3 = .09).  But it does not make sense that way unless you are trying to determine the likelihood of rolling only successes.  This proves you can figure out results by their negatives.

What did I do wrong?  In this instance, I forgot that each die was mutually exclusive.  The system is interested in the number of successes, not the totals on each die.  Furthermore, unless the task occurs over time and needs multiple checks for success, it does not matter how many successes are achieved unless they result in what is called “exceptional success.”  With five dice, that has the probability of .243%, meaning it probably will not occur.  This is the chance if one ignores the 10-again rule where 10s are rerolled for extended chances of success.  That basically gives you the chance to roll even more dice.  The same is true of rote actions.  These are events people are trained to do without thought.  As such, any failure is rerolled once.

Unless one is at a casino, the theoretical aspects of all of this do not matter.  Most dice are not made to have the tolerance precision casinos require, let alone a surface conducive to protecting that precision.  The theoretical is a benchmark, but the dice and a kitchen or coffee table skew the reality of the rolls.  So what the designer shoots for is an ideal situation that approximates the outcomes experienced by players.  Playtesting is crucial for this reason.  The more people who contest the rules, the better the feedback to ensure the math supports the experience and tolerance of the formulae used to create uncertainty.

Consider deck building games.  Depending on the number of cards one uses, the frequency of any one event to occur decreases as the number of cards in the deck increases.  This is why players include multiple copies of a card in their decks.  An important lesson here for any fledgling game designer is the probability mechanic involved.  For game like Magic: The Gathering, the limitation on the size of a deck means that players must balance the number of resources required to bring any one card into play with the need for cards that allow the player to act on their turn every turn of the game.  The general formula used is one third resource cards and four of each card that allows a player to perform some action.  The action cards also have their own frequency distribution with fewer resource intensive cards to further ensure a player has usable cards in his hand.

More complex aspects of probability will be discussed later.  For now, it is sufficient to show how basic aspects of cards and dice work for game design and how to use them to create the balance one seeks.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Precision Games

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Anatomy of Game Design: A System for Every Occasion?

Oakland, CA, Sept. 7, 2011 – I got to do something I hadn’t done in years: attend a baseball game. This probably wouldn’t strike any fans of the game as a big deal, but having not lived in the region for seventeen years and being the first game I’ve been to in fifteen years when on leave from a deployment to Bosnia, the significance changes. Even better: the seats we had were behind home plate. Now, I suspect that like most people who are fans of the game, walking on the field is a joy, especially in front of a crowd. Imagine doing that on Little League Day in your uniform for your team that season. Add to this spending time in the stadium while the home team and their opponents practice with only ushers and concessions people in the stands with you, all while you haven’t entered the school system just yet. Yeah, I’m that guy.

Due to astigmatism, dysgraphia, and light sensitivity, I stopped playing the game. I didn’t stop enjoying it, however. I take the time here to lay out my association with baseball because of what I noticed for the first time on this particular day. Perspective is everything and a lot of things are lost when you view a game from different angles or on television.

Baseball, as the saying goes, is a game of inches. From the size of the ball and width of the bat to the motion on the ball’s trajectory, the game is won or lost on the minutia generated in the space of the strike zone. But what happens as the ball crosses the plate is tempered by the shifting of the seven players behind the pitcher; and, more importantly, those of the catcher and the batter. It’s what the seats behind home plate revealed that I never noticed before. The obfuscation of distance by camera lenses or seats elsewhere in the stadium; the slight shifting of feet. How a catcher shifts his feet determines what bases he can throw to if necessary to prevent a runner’s advance. In addition to when the batter swings, his feet also affect the outcome. What a player is capable of affects the strategy pursued.

Basketball is another game of precision that uses finesse and momentum to defeat the opposing team. Angles are of great importance as the hoop is just large enough to allow the ball to pass through without any difficulties and have a margin of space. This margin helps to prevent a halt in play as well as to provide a range of angular attacks to make guarding against scoring opportunities require as much skill as trying to circumvent those defenders. Short of driving to the hoop, players target the rectangle on the backboard indirectly to score. As physically moving opponents is a violation of the rules, players get as close as possible to each other without committing a foul all while being as fleet of foot as possible.

Not all games of precision require timing or as much movement, however. Golf is one such example. This is a game of precision that requires patience. It isn’t about concentration as much as it is intuition. Players try to drive the ball as close to the hole as they can in the fewest strokes, but it’s how they position their bodies that affect accuracy as much as the clubs used to get there. Here, the chief skills are gauging the angle and power behind the flight of the ball. The rest is trusting that one’s body will generate the natural swing to ensure the desired result.

Reducing the amount of physicality again, we come to the game of pool. Depending on the type of billiards game played on the table, the amount of calculation needed increases. Calling the pocket and following a strict sequence of which ball can be struck by the cue ball first brings in the need to calculate not only angles for bank shots, but where to strike the cue ball. Using English changes the way one has to think about bank shots and what energy must be imparted into other balls. As one improves in skill, it becomes easier to place the balls on the table closer to what one has in mind when they stop moving. Such skill requires precise control of aim and power.

In baseball, a pitcher’s ability to put spin on a ball works like a pool player’s use of English. The way such energy is imparted on the ball affects its motion to curve, rise, or sink from its projected trajectory. The movement is inches of difference. Batters try to read a pitcher’s body and the ball to adjust their swings. The motions are small, the time to process the information in a blink of an eye, but the consequences are huge.

Fencing, sometimes referred to as physical chess, works in a similar fashion in regards to minutiae and adjustments, but rather than trying to redirect the momentum of the ball, both competitors jab points smaller than cue sticks at one another. Like basketball, fencers can’t physically move their opponents. They’re not allowed to touch other than to shake hands after the match. Movements are small and quick. The point is to get one’s opponent to fall for a feint that lets you get past any defense by throwing it out of whack.

Games that utilize chance rely on precision for the same reasons such skills are necessary in the aforementioned sports. Game designers don’t have the luxury of leaving their work to chance. The purpose of playtesting is to add defined limits while avoiding zero-sum states. The obstacles that delineate the game have to create a balance that preserves the game while promoting the use of a skill set. Any exploitable weakness in the rules has to be rooted out and brought to heel. Even if a game or scenario starts with me at a disadvantage to you, there must be a condition I can reach to achieve victory. If not, I won’t play again.

There has to be a value to incentivize me to repeat an experience. Short of sex and death, there aren’t a lot of thrilling items out there people are likely willing to cheat or try again. Without diving into too much Freudian psychoanalysis, it’s the twin drives of the pleasure principle and thanatos that provide a nearly infinitely repeatable set of experiences. It’s a safe bet that most people like not dying. What’s even better is getting as close as possible without crossing the boundary and bragging about it. Sex is the same, except we don’t’ discuss it in polite company; society frowns on that sort of thing. The longer you can stave off the inevitable, the better it feels.

How does this tie into gaming? The goal is to outwit your opponent, but the greater the struggle, the better it feels. This is because the brain releases the same chemical that gives people a sense of pleasure. The closer you get to losing only to defeat your opponent, the greater the high. It’s cathartic. The terror of loss drives us to compete while it seduces us to fail. The simulation protects from harm as much as it gives a semblance of the real thing. But the rules must be narrowly defined. For baseball, it’s the strike zone; basketball, the hoop; fencing, a narrow point; and pool, a cue and six pockets.

It seems counterintuitive to define things so narrowly. But, the tighter the controls, the more creative players must become. Roleplaying games seem to break this heuristic, but let’s examine it a bit closer. The genre is akin to programming languages in that both are defined in how they function. What matters is how a person uses the definitions to create. The rules of an RPG are often reduced to keyword terms that embody a host of rules. In library science and information theory, this is called a controlled vocabulary. How a search can be conducted or information is stored is restricted to a predefined set of terms that determines how information is stored and indexed. For instance, the phrase “roll Attack vs. AC 30” tells a d20/OGL player several things. Gamers used to this system know an Attack Roll is a twenty-sided die adjusted by various factors. In this case, it’s against a fairly high target with its own set of variables. The concept behind Armor Class (AC for short) is the measure of a creature’s or character’s protection from physical attacks. But, like the Attack Roll, AC is a complex concept. When it’s learned, a player knows how to rate an opponent’s defense and what sorts of command codes can be used to rewrite his opponent’s adjustments. That’s because the higher level concepts like AC are roleplaying equivalents to object-oriented programming.

Classes and objects are created from the basic code words that instruct a computer how to execute commands. The more a programming language looks like a natural language, the more instructions the computer needs to translate it into zeroes and ones. The core mechanic is a root command. An attack roll is a root command. A character class is, well, pretty self-explanatory in this light. Yet, the components that go into a class aren’t as necessarily unique. In the system resource document for the d20 game, Wizards of the Coast gave the barbarian and thief classes the ability to sense traps and avoid them. Paladins and clerics both cast divine spells, though both have their own lists. This trend holds true for other game systems as well.

Let’s go back to that game I attended. The significance of my observations is in the precision of the root code (literally) embedded in a player’s feet and a pitcher’s hand to impart some sort of motion to spin the ball. These subtle differences in position change the programmed physics of the basic unit (body or ball). Pool is an excellent example as well, because any English applied to the ball is the player’s instruction code. The ball-as-computer executes what it is told to do. Any errors that result inform the programmer he needs to debug his work to find what he did wrong. This is what game designers do to preserve the balance of their work through playtesting. Like any writer, they have to master the spin they put on events to convey the intended messages with minimal errors from one mind to another so that the concept and math are preserved.

Why is this important? Consider this bit of advice on page 171 of White Wolf’s Armory Reloaded: “Describe everything…the players should know what’s around their characters, so that if they want to use the scenery as cover or weapons, they can.” It’s like a programmer missing a key word or two; without the relevant information a coherent picture cannot form and the intended results cannot be achieved. Precision means adjustments are possible. Precision means an experience can be repeated with variations to keep things interesting, like cheating death. Stories don’t throw curves that you can’t see coming. How big those curves are is another question in itself.

The game I saw ended with the Oakland Athletics winning 7-0 against the Kansas City Royals. Guillermo Moscoso nearly threw a perfect game up until the eighth inning. Oakland’s victory came from precision of pitching as much as from hitting that day, verging on a historic event in baseball. Memorable experiences from games stem from a similar form of excellence: a well crafted set of rules that challenge without frustrating.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Experience Points

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Anatomy of Game Design: Basic Margins of Error

Experience points are one of the most ubiquitous features of the roleplaying genre, so much so that the concept has spread to other formats of play and life. But what is this abstract concept being measured? Or to paraphrase an old expression, what is the measure of a man’s worth? In modern terms, this is the difference between a seasoned professional and an apprentice. But the number of years in an industry does not denote true mastery of a trade. Where one works and the intensity of the work performed makes the difference.  So, the reality is that how long a trade is practiced is not necessarily as important as how often. Experience points serve to make the distinction between a dabbler and a true practitioner.

In game terms, when does a character transition from novice to journeyman to expert to master of his profession? In a level-based game, is this second level, third? How many points for a point-buy system to mark these stages: 20%, 30%? In the real world, the boundary between amateur and professional is effectively 10,000 hours, excluding hobbies this is mostly achieved with a Bachelors degree. Different games take different approaches to reach this point, but most gamers refer to it as the “sweet spot.” This is the point in the game where the challenges and the characters’ abilities are essentially equal. The characters are not so powerful that they can defeat the biggest monsters/threats around, but they also do not fear the weaker opponents that serve as cannon fodder. Some systems have tried to cut out all of the rigmarole it takes to get to that point. Doing so misses the reason this spot exists.

A back story only informs the motivation for why a character chose the path to become an adventurer. The lowest tier of play is the origin story for the character’s development of his skills and powers. As most systems provide leeway in what abilities can improve over time, the development of the base powers of a character has huge implications future choices. A trend in some game lines has been to bypass these levels as if they are just a tedium best avoided. The goal here is to cut to what makes characters “cool” and mark that as the point of entry into the game. While this is injurious to all players, novices are hurt the most. What they lose is the association of character growth in fiction to that experienced by characters rising to the higher levels of power that have become associated with most film heroes.

Experience points serve as a way to measure how successful a character is in applying his various talents to ever-increasing pressures that refine and test his mettle. Players use these rewards, too. They are the boons for creativity. In fact, many games have guidelines for noncombat awards as well as for good roleplaying. This is where fiction meets the game. Readers are rewarded in fiction for sticking with a story mainly by getting to do something we all wished we could do at some point or another: know what someone else is thinking or feeling.

Here, then, is where the problem begins: cinematic styles of mechanics do not denote that a game must follow a film’s format, but neither do they discourage such lines of thinking. In fact, it is far better if such a game does not follow the format. To understand why this is, one needs to pull back the celluloid curtain on flim’s narrative structure. Like all forms of storytelling, the method often taken is to begin in media res. Film differs in that it establishes the character’s normal world so that an audience is given a sense of what skills he already possesses and what constitutes his normal world. Within the space of no more than fifteen minutes (films generally run 85-120 minutes), the film gets underway by thrusting the protagonist into the plot. Aided by dissolves, match cuts, sound cues and the like, time is compressed enough to move the story forward and preserve the narrative. Stage plays do the same thing in order to tell a story in two hours. Nearly all of the characters in these stories are experienced, however. For their relative situations, they know everything they need to in order to meet the challenges in their paths.

What these two forms of story have in common is their ability to raise in us the emotions of pity and fear. As Plato claims, they are essential to drama. These characters are experts who have not fully mastered themselves or their crafts. Any of this beginning to sound familiar? This is the coveted “sweet spot” in a game’s system. It is the place where characters become cool and possess the ability to become awesome, or die in a blaze of glory. That is the moment of catharsis in a stage or screen production. In literature and roleplaying games, there are often smaller resolutions until the final chapter or thereabouts (especially in a protracted campaign).

So, what are those lower tiers of play all about then? They provide a player with the unique opportunity to really get to know the character and the direction he or she wants to develop that character. Not much unlike how an actor works to envision a role. The players are learning as much as their characters of what their future expertise will be. This is a salient point as the genre measures a character’s potency and regulates how (and possibly when) it grows. All of this leads to the next point: the fallacy of the classic narrative.

There is a persistent myth of the self-made man that pervades our culture. It is not that such a feat is impossible, but rather that it is highly improbable. No one develops in a vacuum. Games that establish this as the threshold perpetuate this fallacy. There is a political component to this myth which makes it so appealing: greatness is inborn, not made. This lie robs players of storytelling potential which would benefit them immeasurably. To fully debunk this myth would require an entire book. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: the Story of Success. What these lower levels do goes beyond shaping the character or a player’s envisioned direction for the character. They expose the heinous crime of how greatness develops.

Now how do experience points accomplish this? That depends on the system. The games that impose levels do so to maintain a mathematical model. The d20/OGL games do this as some abilities and powers rely on levels to scale numeric values to represent increases in mastery. While the player can choose to improve some aspects of his character independently, some items are hardwired into the levels themselves. As such, the player’s choice to gain a level in one class over another affects what is gained and how much control the player has in customizing the nuances. In other systems, especially point-buy, each ability is improved separately (which can be more costly) and has a level or threshold point for power gains. This may give players greater control over a character’s abilities, but it still uses the level mechanic to make the math work. Regardless of the method, the points mark and limit the transition points.

The next problem to address in this work is how do characters acquire the points that help fuel the changes over time? This question seems more controversial amongst gamers than most other issues as it represents and affects styles of play. For instance in games that have experience rewards for individual creatures, the question is whether the total is for killing the opponent or defeating it in other ways. The rule books are not always clear on this and can be as fuzzy as how much noncombat successes should be valued. Computer games make this a moot question as there is only one way to handle monsters: kill them. But does defeat mean death? Does a chess player kill his rival after getting him in checkmate? Would this mean Batman would be stuck at first level in an RPG for his refusal to kill? This last point is just as valid as superhero games exist and the epic levels of OGL play represent the same thing in the fantasy genre. So, there must be a way to reward play that does not involve combat, such as solving the combat problem like a puzzle.

Batman, Superman, and Oliver Twist have several things in common, then. All three learn to survive in their respective environments in order to rise to meet their challenges without having to necessarily maim or kill to get there. Oliver learns how to survive the orphanage system and later the underworld Fagin inhabits. Bruce Wayne has to become an orphan and overcome the loss of family to gratuitous violence he witnesses and the subsequent emotional trauma it causes. Clark Kent goes through the awkward stages of life in a world of the mundane as he grows to realize he is an orphan as he discovers his powers set him apart. With the exception of Superman, these characters develop their abilities based on their environment. Oliver rises above evil partially because of his tenacity to confront what he feels is unjust (he slips from time to time, which makes him a heroic figure). Bruce Wayne conquers his inner demons and turns to spirituality and martial arts to keep is rage in check (heal the mind, heal the body). Clark Kent learns to control his powers and adapt to the culture rather than subvert it (with great power comes great responsibility). All are challenges. All three characters are rewarded. What makes them heroic is not where they come from, but what they become through their experiences. It’s safe to assume in at least two of the three cases the 10,000-hour rule was at work. And, if they were RPG characters, they didn’t skip the levels that are not “cool.”

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Anatomy of Game Design: The Case for Subsystems

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Anatomy of Game Design: Precision Games

Probably one of the most important aspects of game design in the roleplaying genre is that no one die mechanic can handle everything as is. This is not to say a system cannot use a single die, but that the core mechanic cannot handle everything. There are a finite number of formulae one can employ in a game system before it becomes unwieldy. Likewise, too few and it can degenerate into predictability. There is a way to avoid both of these extremes: subsystems. They can be resolved by using the same die roll, but some twist on how those dice are read applies. In effect, a special case in the game.

Perhaps one of the easiest subsystems to spot is the damage roll. Even if a system uses a single die, damage does not require a threshold to be reached to determine success or failure. The roll denotes the severity of the attack. This is a derivation from the core mechanic

The singular purpose of a core mechanic is to impartially determine success or failure of any action. That is what an attack roll represents. The same can be said to apply to other tasks as evident in games such as the d20/OGL system, GURPS, West End Games’ D6 system, and the HERO system. All of these systems have core mechanics to resolve outcomes, but they rely on subsystems to complete actions initiated through the core mechanics. Why is this so?

Perhaps it is easier to conceive of game mechanics as tools. The core mechanic is a general, all-purpose tool. It is meant to do the heavy lifting of the games mathematical model. Subsystems fine tune or address special case situations which stretch or threaten to break the simulation. The importance of this cannot be stressed enough. Too much reliance on a single mechanic requires a lot of explanation for each special case or risk a reliance on player arbitration to prevent the system from exhibiting holes or faults. All systems have their limitations, of course, but their limits should be the edge of the “physics” of the environment represented, making it easier for players to judge when something attempted should be considered verboten.

If, as a designer, your aim is to construct a storytelling platform, the reliance on just a core mechanic is an appealing choice. It is also riskier. A handful of probability mechanics may require a steeper learning curve for the rules, but it is the trade-off for a well-defined game. This last point bears repeating in other words: this genre is still a game. While some of the play is in the language and the imagining of the tale, the rules should also accommodate fairness to give players an equal voice/weight in the story’s unfolding narrative. Games that lack enough tools to ensure impartiality are more likely to fall victim to power struggles amongst less experienced players than their subsystem-laden counterparts because of the more free-formed nature of such simulations.

The irony here is that new players need more rules to get a feel for how RPGs are supposed to support a narrative’s reality, but the subsystems that help players do this and grow accustomed to the relative scales of power between one set of abilities and another can be daunting. Give players a more simplified system and they are likely to be overwhelmed by the amount of work required to keep the game (and story) constant, sort of like the terror of the blank sheet some people face when they try to begin a piece of writing. This is why subsystems are vital. By keeping the number of mechanics to a minimum, games can be balanced so that the interactive element of the game is not needlessly overruled by the math and vice versa.

Subsystems might compartmentalize the system, but they make it easier to learn the concepts that make sandbox games so much fun and versatile. One can view subsystems as training wheels for the neophyte, but their true purpose is to alleviate strain on the core mechanic and fine tune the outcomes possible in the wake of the use of the core mechanic — for better or for ill.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Combat Basics

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Anatomy of Game Design: Experience Points

One of my biggest pet peeves with debates about roleplaying games is what I feel is a misconception of this genre of play.  The notion that combat is the point of the game because of the number of rules devoted to the subject overlooks why, in a game, combat receives the lion’s share of space in the rulebooks: probability mechanics and a reduction of arguments by the impartiality of those random factors.  Combat is pure chaos.  The dice rolls and all of the mitigating factors that weight in on whether damage is inflicted or not is why there are so many pages devoted to the subject.

To understand combat and its role in the game requires a bit of a retread on material already covered: roleplaying games sprang from wargames.  It’s important to keep this in mind as many of the complexities behind adjustments to hit or miss were imported into RPGs.  The changes went beyond weather, lighting, and terrain however.  As the genre matured, more rules were added to give a mechanical weight for maneuvers players described that were intended to sway the outcome in their favor.  All of these additions were mathematical reflections of storytelling for one of the most chaotic parts of roleplaying games.  The additions also limit the potency of such actions.

Outside of combat, there are few rules that help guide the storytelling process.  A key reason for this is the logical and straightforward way in which stories work.  Rolls are only needed when a conflict or uncertainty occurs.  Eventually, whenever tension requires resolution.  And that is all combat is: a series of resolutions to tension.  The doubt of the outcome and its resultant excitement drive combat scenes to a conclusion.

When you consider the rules of the system, it makes sense to focus on why combat gets most of the space in a game’s rulebook.  This is not to say that other aspects of the game are less important.  Rather, this focus on combat reveals how changed of a situation it is.  It’s the inherent weakness in human emotions and competition that, even for the purpose of telling an engaging story, prevent us from separating the excitement of winning from that of a thoroughly engrossing story.  Hidden behind this is the survival instinct to survive an experience where two opponents trade blows.

The trading of punches is all combat is at its base level.  Nobody wants to do that for long if they have other options available and one’s life is at stake.  This led to the armor and arms race.  If I was engaged in single-man combat, rest assured I would wear whatever minimizes my opponent’s attack and use the most powerful weapon I could get my hands on.  I suspect many people would do the same.  This also explains why gamers go to such great lengths to describe their character’s attacks and any subsequent bonuses they can squeeze out of them.  In the most simplistic system, the only modifiers are those found in wargames and adjustments based on levels.

Spells, weapons, terrain, combat prowess, armor, and physical discrepancies between opponents are all forms of basic components common to game systems.  The only things they govern are the most blatant questions one is likely to encounter in combat.  Is this sword portent enough to overcome that piece of armor?  Will this spell negate that terrain’s effects?  Beyond this, the rules for combat are case-by-case adjustments often rooted in nuance and special cases or exceptions resultant from rules confusion, contradiction, or conflation that imbalance or halt game play.  Those qualities are for advanced, or tactical, play where a greater emphasis is placed on what techniques and their counters are available in the rules.  These questions do not make the game any easier or harder; rather, they inform players how interpretive the math is.  In a basic system, one describes whatever is desired, but it is purely for theatrics.  The bonuses remain unaffected without gamemaster fiat.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Money and Economics

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Anatomy of Game Design: The Case for Subsystems