05.19.08
Posted in My Games at 6:43 pm by Christian
War Dice is a tactical battle game for your road trips, plane rides, or anywhere else. All you need are a few six-sided dice, a sheet of paper, and a pencil and eraser (and a friend to play with), and you’ll be all set to let the Dragonfolk, the Lich Queen’s Army, and the Horde battle it out.
The game is short: 3 pages of rules, 3 pages of units, and 1 page of special unit powers. It’s easy to learn, but there are a variety of tactics resulting from the base rules.
I first created this game for Vincent Baker’s Game-Game challenge, way back when (I called it GodslaughteR then). I had originally envisioned it as a tabletop game, where you actually represent the units with dice. After finishing the Anima Prime beta, I had some time to look it over, and realized how neatly it can be played on a simple sheet of paper instead, where you draw the units with squares and allocate numbers.
So, there you go, enjoy, and let me know how you like it 
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05.18.08
Posted in Gameplay at 10:44 pm by Christian
The other night at the dinner table, Aidan (my four-year-old) decided that each of us should tell a story. When my turn came, I told the following.
Once upon a time, there were two mice. They went looking for cheese. They looked in the cupboard: no cheese. They looked in the oven: no cheese. They looked inside the TV: no cheese. (And so on.) Finally they were so hot that they decided to cool off in the fridge. And you know what they found there? Cheese!
To get this out of the way: repetition is a great tool for children’s stories, and he cracked up every time I said “no cheese.”
Now, to get to the point of this post: the story was completely spontaneous. But did you notice how it had a conclusion that was satisfying to the whole story? It worked out very well: the mice were searching in vain, but the act of searching made them hot, which led them to the place where they could fulfill their goal.
This post also is brought to you by my recent five-session game of Primetime Adventures, during which I played a whole “TV Story” season about mysterious events and dark conspiracies in the trenches of World War I. I’m not able to go into details here, but as a producer (GM) of the game I had no idea where the story was going, and I pulled a lot of things out of thin air as we went along. And yet the game had a very satisfying ending that pulled all of those initially random things together.
The important ingredients to wrapping the story up neatly in both cases were:
- Active characters with a goal
- The pursuit of the goal and its consequences
- Things in the fiction that work a certain way
- An ending that ties these three together
Now, I didn’t know how it would end when I started it. The ending came to me as I was telling the story. I feel comfortable jumping into a story without knowing how it’ll end because I’ve figured out that more often than not, something will present itself as we go along. That notion not only comes from my roleplaying experience, but also from writing three NaNo novels and from telling Aidan stories every night. (NaNo is shorthand for the National Novel Writing Month, during which participants write 50,000 words in one month. Doing it spontaneously, without too much worry about planning or structure, is a liberating and very educational experience.)
Let’s talk about the individual pieces of the spontaneous story puzzle some more.
Active Characters with a Goal
In order for a story to happen, you need active characters. If everyone just sits around doing nothing, not much would happen. However, for a story to have focus, the main characters need to have one or more goals that they pursue. This creates a structure for the narrative and gives you ideas about what the characters could do next. That allows you to be spontaneous in the story you’re telling, because it always gives the characters something to do that’s meaningful.
In roleplaying games, characters usually have implicit goals (“adventuring”) or explicit ones (“Win back my lost empire”). I’m a big fan of explicit goals, and I think that every good story game should have instructions on how to come up with good goals that work for the characters within the confines of the game.
The Pursuit of the Goal and its Consequences
This is the heart of just about every story out there. The characters act, and consequences follow. Whether we’re talking about Othello and Iago, Aida and Radames, Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, or Eddard Stark and Cersei Lannister, the heart of a good (and dramatic) story revolves around the consequences of the main characters’ actions. The consequences impact and lead toward the conclusion of the story. If what the characters do has no impact on the ending, it’s going to be not very fulfilling (which is fine for stories that are about the futility of life, war, or whatnot).
The thing about spontaneous stories, whether told, written, or roleplayed, is that you can figure out the consequences as you go along. More often than not, something cool is going to pop up if you just let your characters act in pursuit of their goal.
Things in the Fiction that Work a Certain Way
Notice how it was important for the mice story that they were getting hot, and that the fridge would cool them off. That’s an example of a thing in the story that works a certain way, which drastically contributes to how the story is going.
There are plenty of other examples from all kinds of stories, and they’re not just limited to physical objects. They include social rituals and conventions (see many historical stories, especially “court intrigue” ones), laws of physics, laws of magic, and so on. When you have a unique “thing” in your story, it often pays off to explore its full implications during the course of your story–not as a replacement for active characters with goals, but in support of them (see Zelazny’s stories, for example, or most other great speculative fantasy, including science fiction).
The one roleplaying game that puts this story piece out there the most is definitely Shock: with its minutiae. Minutiae are exactly the things about the setting that influence events and support the story development without taking it over. Joshua obviously knows how stories work.
Tying It All Together
Once you’ve got all of the above in place, you’ll find a way to tie them together. When you’re roleplaying, that works best if every player on the table can contribute to this, whether directly in the game or through making suggestions to each other.
Part of that might require some thought. That’s not the same as a prepped or planned game, though: Primetime Adventures‘ “commercial break” feature works great here; you just decide to take a five minute break from the game, during which everyone can ponder a little what to do next and how to fit the pieces together. In between sessions, you can think about it all some more, if you’ve got a more complex and long-lasting game going. Again, that doesn’t mean planning out what happens: just think about possible connections, and then develop them in play as they come up.
Games That Support Spontaneous Stories
While you can do all of the above in almost every game using techniques (that is, the way you interact with the game and with each other), some games actually have mechanics that help you with it. I already mentioned Shock:, which does a great job of providing them (this includes minutiae, but also story goals). Sorcerer’s Kickers provide goals for the characters and force them to be active, while the NPCs and other things listed on the back of the character sheet provide “things” to interact with and areas of consequences. Contenders has built-in goals and consequences as well.
I’ve tried to set up Anima Prime in a way that specifically promotes this type of spontaneous playing as well, as I’ve talked about in the Spontaneous Play essay included with the game.
Overall, the message of this post is: If you set up your story with a few simple guidelines, you’ll be able to work it all out as you go along.
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05.14.08
Posted in Game Design at 8:10 pm by Christian
A few weeks ago I sat on an RPG design panel with Jake Richmond, Travis Brown, Matt Schlotte, and some other folks, including Rob Heinsoo, lead designer of D&D 4th Edition. During the panel discussion, Rob explained that he often goes around at conventions and asks people, “So, what’s your game about? What do characters do in it?” (That’s a great set of questions, by the way.) And when the answer is, “It’s this great game where you can do ANYTHING!”, he cringes.
Some people in the audience were a bit confused. They said things like, “I don’t understand, in the game I’m designing, you really CAN do anything!” Rob then went into lack of focus and related issues, but I want to discuss this from a bit of a different angle.
In fact, I’m going to design two games right here, right now, in a matter of seconds. Don’t believe me? Watch this:
Game Alpha has one mechanic: “You describe what your character tries to do, and the other player tells you how it turns out.”
Game Omega also only has one mechanic: “You determine everything about your character and everything else, except for the impact of her actions on characters played by other players.”
Voila! Now we have two games where you can do anything. I don’t need skill tables or probability curves. I don’t need dice or cards or tokens or whatnot. I now have not one, but two vastly different games that allow me to play anything I like.
If you’re going to tell me that these aren’t really games or not really playable for some reason or another, I’ll offer in return 12 years of chat- and post-based online roleplaying experience on my end using these very two games (okay, so I didn’t really design them on the spot after all). I’ve had very successful and entertaining runs with them, superior actually in my time/fun ratio to my years of playing AD&D 2nd Edition.
Now, back to the game the people in the audience are designing. What do their mechanics add that mine don’t? That’s the fundamental question of roleplaying game design right here. For each mechanic you add into your game, I’m going to ask: Why is this better than just letting the acting player or another player make the call? What kind of impact does this have on handling time, story development, gambling excitement, social dynamics, and so on? And why is this desirable?
Once we’re on this same page, we can have a productive discussion about your game design, because due to my aforementioned background in so-called “freeform” gaming, this is always my starting point for any design.
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