Category: Game Design

Do I even want system collage? And do I need it?

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

Talking on Story Games about my earlier post on system collage, Eero Tuovinen asked me:

What kinds of games do you two play, where these matters become a concern? I know that [other person in thread] plays modern D&D, and I can sort of see how programming-like version control could be marginally useful if I was crazy-strict about RAW, played with rabid rules lawyers, and played with a lot of different people all the time and I absolutely had to be able to produce and publish an official-looking alternate game text with my homebrew additions so new players could precisely pinpoint how I’ve rejiggered light radius and missile combat penalties in my campaign, alongside other rules. Is it like that for you as well, Rob?

No, it’s not, and that’s interesting.

I’ve run 5e, and I’ve run BW as well, but mostly I run mechanically simpler things. I’ve run a lot of DW (although not for a while), and currently I run a LotFP hack. The vast majority of my past and current players leave it to me to police the rules. (You can see this in the Same Page Tool for Immergleich — I’ve told them I’m hacking all the time and often just making things up)

So, why do I want this system-collage community? Do I actually want it? Maybe, and maybe because:

  • I have had good times strictly applying complex rules, particularly BW but also 5e.
  • It’s been a while since I wanted to use a whole system as-written by someone else. I want to run exactly the game in my head, to learn about game design, and thus how to make that game happen better in future. Hence either I must design from scratch or I must hack.
    • (That said, I don’t usually hack as much as I have done with the LotFP rules. I’m hacking them so much because they do very little that I want.)
  • I sometimes use complex subsystems in simpler games. When I do, I want to run them as written. If I don’t run them as written, then why bother with the complexity?
  • I want the game to support me, so if I find a mechanism on the web I want a good version in front of me, neatly integrated into my other materials. I don’t want a printout of the two blog posts that contain have half of it mixed with with design commentary and the designer’s autobiography.
  • … at the same time, I’d want the option of having design rationale mixed right into the rules. Hacking is much easier when you know the why. Markup systems (like Markdown and Latex) make this practical; precise-layout tools (like Word and InDesign) don’t.
  • I want to be able to tell my players “This is what I am doing. This is the ruleset I am applying.” and give them a document. They don’t have to read it (although I will probably insist that they touch it, nod, and say “yes”).
  • I want to be clear with myself what I’m doing. Clarity leads to better learning, and thus better future practice. Self-awareness is powerful. And if I know what I’m doing, I can explain it to others.

Looking over that list, I wonder if the problems I actually experience, whether at the table or while doing specific prep) are not much to do with what I’m asking for in the OP. It could be I am looking in the wrong place.

Design-aware System Collage, Part Two

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

Let me weaken my earlier position on OSR design:

The OSR is clear that that (1) is indeed the norm – the assumption is that every OSR GM is hacking a lot. And not just minor details – lots of people are radically changing core classes, skill systems, initiative order (see the comments on Troika’s here in Patrick Stuart’s comparions of British OSR games), …

We can split up my intent with (4) to get:
4a — A good game scene produces dozens or hundreds of small composable game chunks – e.g. classes, abilities, spells, monsters, all ready for GMs to put quickly into their games, even though said games aren’t all using a common rule base.
4b — In this scene, the norm is that changes and new material, especially those, are presented in a form that’s easy for others to make concise new documents with.

The OSR is strong at (4a), partly because RnR tells the GM that they need to be actively maintaining key game properties, live, all the time. Many things (in particular verisimiltude, as in your example, and handling time) are thus the clearly responsibility of the GM. GMs thus know that they can’t rely on their source documents (especially when they’re making a collage from two games and five blogs) to guide play in those respects.

The OSR is weaker at (4b), because printed books and PDFs are still the primary form of game artefacts. There are some nice things to fork-and-edit (e.g. the ACKS SRD in Markdown in a Git repository), but they’re the exception, not the rule (and I don’t know if there is much activity around that ACKS version – there seem to be no active forks).

The “weakest at 4b” has two effects I can see:
* Composing rules to make “my version” is messy – copy-pasting, thinking about formatting.
* When I do compose-and-change, it’s not obvious how to feed changes back in a form that others can use.

I suspect that it also reduces the number of minor tweaks and fixes that are published in an accessible form – things too small for a blog post, that might make it into a forum comment, but most likely will just hang around in someone’s house rules.

The OSR is also weak at (not listed), in that its heavily focussed on OD&D and close derivatives. Although I have enjoyed D&D, and my current game is on a LotFP base, I don’t have very much affection for the D&D rules, nor that many of the prominent play assumptions. I am looking for something different.

An rpg scene around design-aware system-collage

~ robdalexander ~ 1 Comment

Over on G+, Abstract Machine asked:

If you could change one thing about the RPG scene what would it be?

To which I replied

A significant subscene where assumptions are:
1. The norm is that a GM hacks games a lot – that every GM is a designer in search of a few unique games that they and their players like
2. Design matters – good game design can lead to better games, and in particular to different games
3. Published materials are permissively open-licenced and available in a form ready for hacking and collage
4. The natural form of a ruleset-in-play is a collection of components put together by a GM – not a printed book with a fixed layout.

…and somehow they’ve found a way to ensure that despite the above:

5. People get credit for their contributions, often financially.

The OSR is very strong at (1), but often rejects (2) and is not ideal on (3) because it’s often under the OGL (which is quite restrictive in places and is an obscure niche licence that no-one outside gaming understands).

The post-Forge scene is often strong at (2), but often rejects (1) as a consequence. Indifference to (4) follows from that.

Everyone seems obsessed with the “not” of (4). I get that, but its not always helpful.

 

Notes on a game design philosophy – player motivation

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

There’s been some discussion of my previous post at Storygames and on reddit. One request was for a  “200 word elevator pitch” version. So, after some thinking and revision, here is such:

Players judge RPGs (rulesets, sessions, campaigns) based on the pattern of rewards they experience or anticipate. To design good games, you need to design for these rewards. The whole picture is incredibly complex, so you need to focus mostly on individual rewards and only a little on their interactions. The two most powerful types of reward are social (e.g. approval of your resourcefulness, creativity, or just fun-causing) and game-experiential (e.g. feeling fear, power fantasy, wonder at the imagined environment). Other rewards include the technical (e.g. rules mastery and enjoyment of applying procedures), and the game-external (e.g. learning to lead a small group, learning to converse better).

All of these rewards can be immediate (they are just enjoyable right now) or meaningful (they are rewarding because they have value for some larger aim beyond the game), or both. Meaning rewards are powerful, because of that link to larger aims and thus to the goal of “living a good life” as the player defines it. Meaning rewards are harder to arrange than immediate ones, but if you can tap into meaning, you can piggyback on the power of all our evolved drives. This is maybe where the most powerful games come from.

Notes:

  1. As the title says, this is part of my “Notes on a game design philosophy”. It’s not meant as a comprehensive theory of all players; it’s meant a model I can use to think better about design.
  2. My main motive for writing about design is to expose my internal model so that it can be criticised. One corollary of this is that I’m only going to talk about stuff I understand — I’m not even going to mention things that don’t (yet) fit.
  3. I’m pretty sure that the above is right, as far as it goes. I may, however, have missed something important. Exception — note the “maybe” in the last sentence. That is something I conjecture, but am not convinced of.
  4. Edit, about 10 hours after first posted: added “beyond the game” to first sentence of second para. Adds clarity, and brings it to exactly 200 words.

What happens in RPG sessions? How the fuck do they even work?

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

Here, I am trying to externalise my mental model of how and why rpgs “work” — “why people, including me, play them and want to play them”. I don’t think the below is startlingly original, nor do I think it’s complete. But by writing it down I can expose the insides of my mind to the criticism and commentary of others, which is useful for learning.

I’ve written this in a way that can apply to GMed and GMless games. Details will differ, but the space of rewards is basically the same.

What do we do?

We do banter-like storytelling

and/or

Continue reading “What happens in RPG sessions? How the fuck do they even work?” →

Decontention — when there are too many players, and none of them are demonstrably bad

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

For Immergleich, I set a hard limit of four players in any one session. I find that having five players makes the game noticeably lag compared to even the four player version. In contrast, I don’t notice much subjective slowdown when moving between three and four.

This raises a problem — if more than four want to play, who gets to? First-come-first-pleased is an obvious choice, but that’s too arbitrary. Instead, I propose a ranking system, where all the players in one rank get places before any in the rank below them. However, because I am a genius, even the ranking system has ranks. First:

  1. People who had the opportunity to state their availability e.g. via a Doodle poll (and thus enabled me to arrange a session at all) and took it
  2. People who did not have such an opportunity
  3. People who had such an opportunity, and cast it to the four winds with a mocking laugh

And then, within each of the above:

  1. Wanted to play in the last session, but were bumped (or willingly dropped out to let others play)
  2. New players
  3. Wanted to play in some previous session, but were bumped/dropped out, and haven’t played since
  4. Didn’t play in the last session
  5. Played in the last session

If we end up with an excess of players at the same rank (e.g. there are two at rank 5 for the last available slot) then tiebreak is first by total sessions played ever, and then random.