On the Cost of Advantages

Christopher Rice over on Ravens and Pennies is in full rant-mode regarding the cost of advantages, and he’s right.  Go over there and read it.  Done? Great!  The only problem I have with his post is that, in my opinion, he doesn’t go far enough.  I’ll explain in a minute, but let me first shout “Hear hear!” for a bit.

The Dogmatic GURPSer

GURPS is a great system, but I often feel there’s a fetishization of the rules as written at times.  Because we have the ability combine any power or trait to give us exactly what we want and there’s a certain amount of cleverness in doing so, we like to show off our achievements.  A lot of GURPS fans will smile if I mention the psychokinetic blueberry muffin.  People like it because it reminds them that GURPS can do anything.  “Yes,” we say, “GURPS can stat up a psychokinetic blueberry muffin.” And, by implication, your system, whether it be D&D or Call of Cthulhu or Rifts or Shadowrun, cannot.

Except that’s wrong.  That was true in the 90s, but it’s not true anymore.  See, I can give you a psychokinetic blueberry muffin in Nobilis too, or Fate, or any number of those hip new indie games.  Why?  Because they’ve stepped away from this idea that everything has to be balanced around combat.  But GURPS hasn’t.

Is that psychokinetic blueberry muffin actually balanced?  If you brought it into a DF game?  How well would it do?  In an Action game?  What about a Monster Hunters game? How about a wuxia game?  A game of intricate fantasy politics?  What about a cyberpunk game?

We seem to have the opinion that if it’s in a GURPS book, if it has a price-tag and appropriate modifiers, then when we’re finished applying everything, GURPS will have magically “balanced” it for us, and everything will be great, by definition.  But the systems above don’t require all the complex math GURPS does to achieve the same results, and you’ll note that the psychokinetic blueberry muffin is often a bad fit, so what gives?

What is Balance?

For most GURPSers I talk to, balance is like air: they just breath it, and they don’t really notice it, until it’s gone, and then they throw a fit.  Most of them live in DF, Fantasy worlds, Action, or similar environs where GURPS works well. There’s a lot of balance there, so they have no complaints.  “It works for me.” But I live in the airless worlds of sci-fi, with its unusual scenarios and extremely advanced tech, and let me tell you, from out here, GURPS doesn’t look so inherently balanced anymore.

Let me show you what I mean. Let’s envision a cyberpunk game that circles almost exclusively on netrunning.  The players are all a bunch of hackers who join up in cyberspace to hack into mainframes, gain access to secret files, and piece together the Big Conspiracy.  Sounds fun, right?  We can use material out of GURPS Cyberpunk and the Cyberpunk issue of Pyramid.  I actually have something like this in the works for later called Cyberscape, so for me this isn’t exactly hypothetical.

So, you’re a player in this.  What sort of character would you build on, say, 200 points?  You’ll need a lot of Computer Operations, Computer Programming and, of course, Computer Hacking.  You might even expand out into social engineering with Fast-Talk, Acting and Administration (to understand the org structure).  You might invest in Expert Skill (Computer Engineering), Connoisseur (Computers) or Electronic Repair (Computers).  You might even consider Expert Skill (Conspiracy Theory) and Intelligence Analysis to put it all together.  And do you know what all of these skills have in common?  They’re all IQ skills.  A hacker is a deeply intellectual character.  So intellectual, in fact, that you might as well buy down your ST or your DX, perhaps even take Overweight. Of course, we can say that these count against your disadvantages, but these will rarely impact your gameplay.  If your buddy takes Short Attention Span, Confused and Shyness, that impacts his ability to be a good hacker.  If you take -2 ST, -1 DX, and Fat, it doesn’t impact your ability to be a good hacker.

How balanced does GURPS look now?

I find most people don’t really understand balance because it’s a complex game design issue, and most people aren’t reading Raph Koster or Sirlin for fun.  They “know” balance when they see it.  Let me propose a description, then: when you play a game, you want to have a series of challenges that invoke interesting choices.  Those choices need to be more-or-less equally interesting and multiple paths towards achieving your end need to be equally interesting.  Ideally, your choices should create an interesting emergence that takes a while to fully learn and explore.  It is seeing this emergence crop up and this sense of succeeding while learning and exploring that, ultimately, makes a game fun.

A poorly balanced game is one where an obvious solution begins to emerge too early.  7th Sea is all about stats.  Scion is all about Epic Dexterity.  Exalted 2e is all about Perfect Defenses, who has the most motes and tedious, interminable rounds of endless combat full of increasingly exhausting stunts.  People turn away from these games (or hack them, consciously or unconsciously) because they’re not fun.  A game of GURPS Cyberpunk where it boils down to “Who put the most points into Computer Hacking” is similarly not fun.  It’s not balanced because there’s only one strategy that works, and the players who hammer on that strategy over and over again win and those who do not lose.  Lame.  A well-designed D&D game where your particular build is as viable, but completely different, from your other party members’ builds, and interact interestingly with the designs of the monsters that you’re facing, forcing you to adapt to a new style of play to defeat these particular monsters?  Fun.

Of course, fun is entirely subjective, but just like art has basic guidelines of what tends to work and what doesn’t, so too does game design.  It’s art, not science, but if you understand that core principle, it’ll serve you well. I know it’s a controversial one, especially since many people don’t like the gameplay that D&D creates, but the principles I outline above don’t necessarily have to create a D&D-like game. The same principle applies to a deeply social game where you get interesting and unexpected interactions between characters because of their social background, their class, their beliefs, etc and you need to master those interactions to achieve the outcome that you seek, and so on.

What is GURPS?

GURPS isn’t a game.  It’s a system (It’s more Gary’s Mod than it is Half-Life).  It’s a structure of building your own gameplay, but you have to understand that the system has strengths and weaknesses.  It’s very well geared to handle “man to man” combat, as that was the system it grew from.  It handles DF and, over the years, Action like a champ.  But it doesn’t handle Supers, epic Sci-Fi, cyberpunk, political games, etc, as well out of the box.

That means you need to be able to adapt GURPS to the game you want.  And you can!  It says so right in the book, and that’s what Christopher is ultimately talking about, which is why he’s right.  I might quibble on the definition of balance, but the heart of what he says is dead on.  You price your advantages based on what you need out of your game.

Of course, GURPS is a few more things, which partially explains the fetishization of system: It’s universal.  That is, what works in a cyberpunk game works needs to work in a supers game, more or less.  This worked better in the 90s, when we mistakenly believed that all RPGs were basically the same, and has been blown apart in these crazy Indie years, which rightly point out that there are far more gameable genres than we accepted in the 90s, and pricing DR or Broadsword skills are pointless in a cute slice-of-life game about a psychokinetic blueberry muffin, or in a highschool musical-drama, or in a game where everyone is playing the voices inside a bum’s head.  Nonetheless, it’s the system we picked, and for our purposes it works for the genres we generally apply it to.

So, we’re forced to work at least somewhat within the system, to color in the lines because a system is sort of like a language: We use it to communicate our ideas.  For example, I was able to explain the balance problem to you using the cyberpunk genre and to use the mechanics of GURPS to show you where it doesn’t work.  And I can solve it using accepted GURPS practices too: I can set a limit on where you can spend your XP (“This is physical XP, this is mental XP”), and I can set limits on the kind of disadvantages you can have (“You may have as many mental or social disadvantages as you want, but no more than -20 points worth of physical disadvantages”).  This is called the “Buckets of Points” solution, and its in one of the pyramid articles.

But note that it’s not in the core rules.  Kromm didn’t look within the system to find a fix to that sort of problem, but instead created a new one.  This is the core of what Christopher is talking about: You can’t always find a solution inside the game.  Sometimes, you have to apply it from without, which means, in this case, making up an advantage wholecloth.

The Economic Of Points

This still leaves us with the problem of “How much should X cost?” The answer is not found within the system, though you are free to use it, and most people will accept it.  The answer is found within your heart and the heart of all of your players.  Your cold, dead, miserly heart.

See, GURPS is ultimately a game about budgets and resource management, at least when it comes to character creation.  How much do you really want that advantage?  Would you be willing to accept these terrible disadvantages to pay for it?  Or maybe give up these other advantages for it?  Given a limited budget, how many points would you pay for X?

Would you pay 15 points for Combat Reflexes?  Yes, most people would say yes.  Would you pay 25 points for Extra Attack?  Most people would point out that 6 levels of weapon skill is just as expensive, and gives you +3 defense and +6 attack when you’re not making a rapid strike.  Okay, but would you pay 5 points for an Extra Attack that you could use up to 3 times a day (-20%) while wearing a unique(-25%) magical (-10%) amulet (-30%)?  Some players might take you up on that.  

So, this isn’t to say to that modifiers don’t work, but what about when you’re coming up with something entirely new?  How do you price it?  You price it based on what you would be willing to pay for it.  A too-expensive trait will be rarely taken (which is why some traits are so expensive, because the GURPS team wants people to take them rarely), and a too-cheap trait will be taken all the time (which is why some traits, like HT and Combat Reflexes, are so cheap, to encourage you to take them).  GURPS tends to frown on abilities that could easily short-cut most classic, 90s-style adventures (like Warp), and supports abilities that improve survivability.  There are a few advantages that improve survivability but most people won’t take them because they’re too expensive (Regrowth) or largely flavor (Unaging), which is why some people complain that they cost too much, while other advantages could short circuit your adventure but are relatively easily in the reach of the players (Like Mind Control, which is why people say that it’s too cheap).  Given that the Rules as Written gets it wrong, I wouldn’t worry too much if you get it wrong.  Let your instincts and your sense of “What would I be willing to pay for this?”guide you.

Some GMs make the mistake, though, of thinking that these point economics will inherently prevent problems.  They won’t.  If an advantage is problematic, it’s problematic at any point cost.  For example, if mind reading will ruin your cozy mystery, then the answer is not to charge more for it, but to disallow it.  GURPS also really recommends only allowing certain traits, which is something a lot of GMs (especially novice GMs) tend to forgot.  Someone always wants to “allow everything!” and then are surprised when the game falls apart.  An expensive trait might be rare, but it’ll still be present. If you allow Warp, you should be aware that someone might take it.  If you’re not okay with that, don’t allow it.

This sort of thing is what Chris means with “Trust your gut and playtest.”  You’ll see the same sort of fluffing around in my Psi-Wars, and you’ll definitely see it if you read between the lines on Kromm’s work, or PK’s work.  They look at something and if it’s completely new, they’ll eyeball it, give it a cost and move on, often based on experience.  You can do the same.  And if you’re wrong? It’s not the end of the world. You’ll learn  and gain more experience and move on.

I think the real reason we fetishize rules is that they give us an excuse.  We can hide behind them.  When a player demands to know why a trait is so expensive, we can just shrug and say “It’s GURPS, ya know, waddyagonnado?”  But it’s not just GURPS, it’s your game, and you can, and should, do with it what you want, what you need, to make that game great.  If that means you took a risk and it didn’t work out, then the next game will be better for it.  Once you understand that rules are just tools, and that even the best systems are flawed, but there for  you to use to build gameplay, then your games can really begin to soar.

Ken and Robin have a patreon

My dear and faithful readers, I haven’t had the chance to get around to some of my favorite topics, like demonology or history or GURPS Cabal, but all of them have their roots in my misspent youth scrambling for whatever scraps of the Suppressed Transmission that I could get.  Kenneth Hite helped inspire many of my campaigns and I often quote him.

 At some point, I’ll get around to my own Apprentice Consulting Occultist series. Lo and behold, on a great and joyous day, Kenneth Hite started a podcast with Robin Laws. Robin literally wrote the book on game-mastering and his excellence in tightly focused game design joins my pantheon of inspirations with Sirlin and Raph Koster’s “A Theory of Fun” for how I work on and design my own games or campaigns.

 So, if you like my stuff, I recommend listening to them on Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. And if you like their stuff, if I may finally get to the real point of this post, they’ve launched a patreon campaign. I’ve already bid my dollars in support of these giants of the RPG industry, and I encourage you to do the same. Thanks for your time, dear and faithful reader. I return you back to your regularly scheduled force sword duels.

Breaking Down a Campaign Framework

I’m always creating page after page of RPG material, but I seldom follow through far enough to create something truly publishable.  I’m always getting requests for my notes, and I always have to demure because they’re really little more than “What is necessary to run my specific game.” In a few weeks, I hope to change that record and kick out the first bit of an actual GURPS campaign framework.

That pre-amble out of the way, allow me to make a few definitions.  What the hell is a GURPS campaign framework?  It’s what I’ve decided to call books like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, GURPS Action and GURPS Monster Hunters.  They provide everything you need to run a campaign except the specifics on plot, character and setting (but further provides guidelines on all three of those). Said differently, a campaign framework provides a distillation of the GURPS rules necessary for rapidly building characters, sessions and interesting gameplay for a particular genre.

This blog post will break-down what I think a campaign framework needs, but to do that, you must permit me one more definition, and to make that definition, I want to show you another definition: Philip K. Dick’s definition of science fiction:

I will define science fiction, first, by saying what science fiction is not. It cannot be defined as ‘a story set in the future,’ [nor does it require] untra-advanced technology. It must have a fictitious world, a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society… that comes out of our world, the one we know:
This world must be different from the given one in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society…
There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation…so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition.

[In] good science fiction, the conceptual dislocation—the new idea, in other words—must be truly new and it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader…[so] it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification, ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create…. The very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create—and enjoy doing it, [experiencing] the joy of discovery of newness.

So, to be clear, Philip K. Dick doesn’t think Star Wars is science fiction!  Does that mean that Mr. Dick is a… jerk?  No, I don’t think so.  It doesn’t mean his definition is wrong either.  It’s not prescriptive so much as descriptive of what he’s trying to do.  He’s not being a snob, he’s outlining a model that explains what he’s shooting for.  “All models are wrong, some models are useful,” as the saying goes.

With that in mind, I want to offer a definition of a role-playing game, not because I feel anything that falls outside of it is “not really roleplaying,” but because it defines what I’m trying to create: A role-playing game is a confluence between the tension created by interesting mechanical gameplay and interesting narrative choices.  To unpack that: When people say they enjoy “fluff,” they mean they enjoy the inspiration and complex choices created by an interesting narrative.  When people say they enjoy “crunch” they’re describing their enjoyment of the complex choices created by interesting gameplay mechanics.  These two sides often argue, but I think they miss the point that RPGs are designed as the wonderful peanut-butter-and-chocolate mixture of rich narrative mixed with complex gameplay.

GURPS itself provides neither.  There is no GURPS setting and there is precious little GURPS gameplay (Nothing stops me, rules-as-written, from taking telepathy and ruining all the mysteries in a police procedural).  Rather, it provides us with the tools, the “design language” to create our own settings and gameplay (Nothing stops you, rules-as-written, from creating interesting consequences to the use of telepathy, and littering the world with dangerous psychics, anti-psychics, technological mind-shields, or drug-induced nightmarish “mind-traps.” BOOM!  Interesting gameplay for a police procedural involving telepathy).  Many GURPS veterans have created rich campaigns all on their own.  But a campaign framework does a lot of that work for you.  You don’t need one, but you’re effectively creating your own, so why not build it out enough that anyone can use it?

A GURPS campaign framework defines the “fluff” of its campaign mostly in broad strokes.  The specific setting doesn’t matter as much.  Monster Hunters works as well in Los Angeles as Cairo as the hills of Kentucky. But a campaign framework does depend on some setting conceits: Monster Hunters exists in a world where magic and monsters are real, monsters and magic works in a particular (and specific) way, and things like genetically engineered super-soldiers are real (though rare or secret).  Likewise, the specifics of characters are left to players and GM, but the framework outlines the details lightly.  Dungeon Fantasy has wizards, and wizards tend to have problems like being excommunicated or feared, while Knights tend not to have any actual, defined status, and so on.  Similarly, it doesn’t really define the specifics of a plot, but you can infer what sort of plot you might have.  What a campaign framework mostly does is set up the premise.  Once the premise is established, then we can build gameplay.

And building gameplay is the primary focus of a campaign framework.  When I see people discussing these frameworks and building their own, they always start with templates.  This is a mistake.  Before you can build templates, you must understand niches.  Before you can understand niches, you must understand the pulse of gameplay.  The first framework book to write is always the second released: Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons; Action 2: Exploits; Monster Hunters 2: the Mission.

“A game is a series of interesting choices”
-Sid Meier

To understand gameplay, you must pick a focus for that gameplay.  Said differently, when the dice come out, what are the players doing?  What sort of choices do the players make?  Good gameplay creates a series of interesting, interrelated choices that creates an emergent narrative that, ideally, emulates the sort of genre we’re exploring.  A game meant to emulate a heroic shonen anime should have a variety of interesting tactical decisions that, when chosen in an optimal way, naturally result in explosive, emotion-laden power, tangled relationships and exceedingly dramatic and dynamic battles full of people flying around and blasting each other.  A game meant to emulate Game of Thrones should have interesting choices that result in betrayal and heroes bleeding out in gutters while cynical villains slip back into the shadows to win a morally-grey victory in an uncaring, medieval world.

The first step, then, is to focus on a mechanics mission statement.  What do the player characters do by default?  Kill monsters and take their stuff?  Conspire to hide magic from the world while advancing their own political and mystical power?  Seek out new life and new civilizations while boldly going where no man has gone before, followed by sleeping with new women and punching out new alien warlords?  Once you have that, the next step is to pull out additional detail in our gaming fractal.  Killing monsters and taking their stuff, obviously, involves at least two parts, the killing and the taking, and might infer a few more, like knowing which monsters to kill, or where to find the stuff.  After we pull out these elements, we can keep or discard as we please.  Taking a monster’s stuff likely involves selling it, but most players don’t associate mercantile skill or deep haggling mini-games as a serious element of Dungeon Fantasy, so we remove that.

Once we understand what our game is about, we can start building the actual nuts and bolts of gameplay.

Obstacles consist of four things: Dilemma, Choices, Consequences, and Rooting Interest.
-Robin Laws (Paraphrased)

Once we know where are gameplay is, we need to decide what it looks like.  Gameplay will generally consist of facing what Robin Laws, above, calls obstacles.  The most important elements are, to me, the last three, and starting with the last first: Rooting Interest means you must explain why the heroes care.  Dungeon Fantasy does this easily by pointing out, helpfully, that the monsters have stuff and you want stuff.  Moreover, the monsters are trying to kill you and most people are interested in not dying.  Games like GURPS Action have a harder time establishing rooting interest, and tend to require fluffier reasons for doing what they do.  Nonetheless, there should always be a benefit for success, or what some people in the biz call “Risk vs Reward.”

“Failure is boring – the credible threat of failure is very exciting.”
–Amanda Lang

Next, we need our series of interesting choices.  This ties in with consequences.  There must be multiple ways to achieve one’s goal, and they must all be equally interesting (this is what game designers mean by “game balance”), but that doesn’t mean they must all be the same.  Different tactics should involve different risks and different, long-term consequences.  Those consequences can be short-term or long-term or both, and the consequences needed necessarily be negative.  Much of chess’s gameplay choices turns on positioning: to capture your piece, I must move my piece to the captured piece’s spot.  This fundamentally changes the board, and might expose my piece to counter attack, or open up the field for further attack against you.  D&D 4e and Gumshoe use resources, which means you can expend a great deal of power to defeat a threat now, at the cost of being unable to defeat another threat later on.  Call of Cthulhu allows magic at the cost of sanity, which means the use of game-winning powers will likely result in a permanent reduction of your hero’s power.

Ideally, our choices involve several of the above, allowing the heroes to way the risks against the rewards and the potential fallout of a course of action, and those consequences shape future choices (This is the “sequence” that Sid Meier refers to).  This creates our emergent play.  As my D&D fighter rushes forward and lays down an area attack on several foes, this has the consequence that I’m no longer near the other PCs, but all of those enemies have been effectively “pinned” near mine, which keeps them from attacking my allies, but means they’re highly likely at attack me, which might be dangerous to myself.  I’ve made a choice, and gained both rewards and consequences that will affect the next turn (My position, my expenditure of a resource).  The enemy will react to my new position and my new vulnerabilities differently, which means I may be swamped by enemies, or might have them scatter.  Then, I have a new set of choices that didn’t exist before, limited by the fact that I’ve already expended some of my power (a condition that didn’t exist before).

Once we’ve defined those choices, we can determine which traits interact with them and what general paths our choices tend to guide us along.  A combat character who tends to focus on strategies of survival and focusing enemy attention on him is following a “tank” strategy.  That’s his core toolkit, the set of choices he intends to maximize.  A combat character who intends to focus on removing his opponents before they can remove him is following a “striker” or “sniper” strategy. From these strategies, we can start to derive our niches, and from those niches, we can derive our templates.  And from our templates, we can write a template book.

This works because we have determined what makes each core game mechanic interesting, and how these templates interface with them, and what traits matter and why.  Monster Hunters, for example, has two major gameplay arenas: Finding the monster and killing it.  Each template has alternate strategies for finding the monster, and each template has means by which to kill it, and these overlap.  The Crusader has just enough skill to find the monster, and then has overwhelming lethality with which to destroy the monster in a full, frontal assault.  The sage, on the other hand, prefers to linger in the research phase, trying to determine what the monster’s weakness might be and use that against him.  Both can team up to allow specialization and magnification of one another’s strengths, but this too creates new vulnerabilities, and doesn’t address additional issues and potential consequences (Remaining hidden from both the world and the monsters you hunt is a vital part of monster hunting, and requires a different strategy).

Once we’ve built our core gameplay, all that remains is to make sure it’s attached to the rooting interest of the players themselves.  Base motivations can work, but tying everything into a deeper narrative is what makes RPGs far more compelling than mere Monopoly, Parcheesi or Stratego.  But that’s an article for another time.

The Three Things an RPG System Provides

RPG.net another RPG communities abound with commentary on the “real purpose” of RPG systems, which are “good” and which are “bad,” and what one needs to craft a well-designed RPG system.  Many of these arguments, it seems to me, stems from not just from conflicting views, but conflicting definitions and conflicting needs.  After all, what Mary Sue gets out of an RPG might be different than what Bob gets out of a game, which might explain why she thinks D&D 4e is great, and he thinks she’s mad.

After years of listening to the commentary and studying different systems, I’ve found three elements that an RPG system can (but doesn’t have to and doesn’t always) provide, and I think the arguments between the unknowing proponents of these three things explain many of the contradictions found in RPG tastes.  Before I begin, I want to make a few things clear.  First of all, these elements are provided primarily by the system.  RPG settings and fluff play a distinct role too, but for the purposes of this discussion they’re of secondary importance, namely providing a support role to the system. Any well-established publisher can tell you about the importance of excellent artwork, marketing, layout, editing and writing in the selling of his product, but we’re just discussing game-design here.  Second, unlike some other theories, this isn’t about “flavor,” and these three elements are not mutually contradictory.  Some games place a greater emphasis on one or another, and not every game has all three, but games can certainly contain all three if they wish, and not every gamer needs all three.  This is not a case of “Which sort of gamer are you?” but “Do you like this element? Yes or no?”

1. Systems provide a social contract.


Social Contracts have become a bit of a buzzword among RPG designers, but I think that’s appropriate, as they’re a key element of game design.  A social contract is an agreement, unspoken or otherwise, on the appropriate behavior between the players (including the GM) and the game.  These might include elements like:

• “The GM’s word is law”
• “Let the dice fall where they may”
• “No PC will die meaninglessly”
• “The story matters more than anything else”
• “Everyone brings a snack.”

These can extend quite broadly, and where an RPG’s social contract ends and a group’s social contract begins is often hard to define, but (for example) few RPG systems will dictate that every player should bring a snack, but they might dictate that PCs will not die meanginlessly.

In this context, I mean that an RPG system needs to help the players define their setting, characters and rules of play in clear and well-defined terms so that everyone is on the same page.  When RPGs say things like “Rules are a conversation between players and their game master,” or “the rules are there to prevent arguments about who shot whom when and who would win a fight,” they’re referring to social contracts.  In a well-designed system, if I define my character as “the greatest swordsman in the world,” then he should be the greatest swordsman in the world.  This fact should be clear to me, to the rest of the players, to my game master, and in the narrative.  If this sort of design isn’t possible (for example, it violates the premise of the game, which might involve relatively simple people, or a setting where swordsmanship isn’t particularly important), a well-designed system will make this clear to me, directing me in a more useful direction.  In a poorly-designed system, I may discover that, in fact, my “world’s greatest swordsman” isn’t all that great, or the GM and other players might not realize what I’m doing and be utterly surprised when my character devastates a group of enemies that the GM thought might be a challenge.

I’ve stated that all of these elements are optional, but this one isn’t.  A game without a well-defined social contract always falters and creates a toxic environment for players trying to create a shared imagination-space.  While few players actually discuss “bad” RPGs as failing in regards to a social contract, such games inevitably create controversy and strife.  Such games can be enjoyed, but only when a strong game master or group replaces their social contract for the one provided in the game.  Arguably, every group should be willing and ready to provide their own social contract on demand, and thus a flawed social contract often goes unnoticed, but a game should still try to provide a clear vision of its goals and premise, and it should stick to said vision.  It must remain consistent throughout its execution, to prevent arguments amongst players.  While a game master can replace such a social contract, doing so puts extra stress upon the GM and suggests that the book itself might not be worth the money paid for it, while a well-defined social contract has no downsides.  Often, when you hear people complain about roll-playing vs role-playing, or complaining about “twinks” or the like, they’ve often had a bad experience due to a poorly-crafted social contract system.

Nobilis exemplifies a system with a top-notch social contract system.  The core of the system revolves around writing out the rules of how you see your character working down on a piece of paper, and manipulating those social contracts to achieve your ends.  The entire game, from character creation to the evolution of the story, revolves around discussing the implication of the rules set forth explicitly by players and game-masters.

Vampire: the Masquerade is a fine example of a system with a broken social contract system in that it has rules and attributes that violate their stated premise.  The Conscience mechanic, in particular, creates a contradiction between what it says it does and what it actually does: In principle, a character with a higher Conscience refrains from committing wicked deeds because he has a good heart, according to the description of the trait.  In practice, Conscience acts as a savings throw against losing one’s Humanity when committing vile deeds, and thus characters low in Conscience are punished more harshly for committing wicked deeds (and thus less likely to do so), while high Cosncience characters are punished less harshly for the same, creating the exact opposite effect: Conscience is defined as a trait possessed by those unwilling to commit wicked deeds, but is best taken by those willing to commit wicked deeds.  This sort of mismatch between description and mechanic captures perfectly the problem with broken social-contract systems.

2. Systems provide inspiration

Game-masters and players have but a limited scope of creativity and imagination.  RPGs provide a unique experience by combining the creativity of the players, the GM, the vision of the developer and the emergent properties of the system to create a story and a sequence of events that none of the above would create on their own.

RPGs can provide inspiration in numerous ways.  Dice and cards provide random outcomes.  Systems encourage and punish certain behaviors, thus shaping play.  The interaction of simple systems and small choices create unexpected, complex results.  Beyond that, a well-written and a beautifully illustrated RPG can inspire stories and character concepts that might not have arisen from the group without outside assistance (thus blurring the line between fluff and system in this case, though the system needs to reflect said fluff, but see point 1 above).  More directly, some RPGs even offer charts filled with events, brutally descriptive attack results, or random characters, or even write your stories and characters for you.

Unlike social contracts above, this element isn’t strictly necessary, though most RPG systems include at least a random element to encourage unexpected results that surprise everyone involved.  A system that provides a great deal of inspiration saves the game master a great deal of creative effort and can surprise everyone involved, for good or for ill.  This means such systems can have the drawback of unpredictability, taking some control out of the hands of the GM or the players, or creating unexpected results.  Most games get around this by making such randomness optional and giving players and the game master the ability to impose their vision over random events, if they see fit.  On the plus side, a very inspiring system can make up for weaknesses elsewhere.  Many of the most broken games I’ve seen have a steady following based on the sheer beauty of their artwork and the way in which the character concepts or the setting speaks to the players.  An inspiring system can be a powerful tool, in the right hands.

When players discuss systems with poorly-implemented or absent inspiration, they often use terms like “boring” or “front-loaded.”

Maid exemplifies inspiring systems.  It has random character creation, random events, random story seeds, and charts and charts and charts of random tables for just about everything. As a result, one can sit down with absolutely nothing and have a game up and running in 10-30 minutes.  In another direction, Exalted offers a distinct and evocative setting and character concepts, with elements like Limit Breaks, Willpower and Stunts encouraging unusual behavior, unexpected events and descriptive gameplay that might not have existed without the rules within the book.  Everway represents a relatively simple, diceless game that nonetheless manages to create unusual situations and inspires with its Fate Deck.

Opinions will differ hotly on uninspiring systems, but I find Wushu and nWoD’s combat system particularly uninspiring.  In the former, your skills and character descriptions matter little beyond the bulk of your word-count, and you simply roll until you’re done rolling, meaning that neither the dice nor the rules do any of the heavy lifting when it comes to telling a tale.  The new WoD has a similar problem in combat, with most choices and tactical options representing a waste of time, and most combat boiling down to the superior combatant winning, the randomness of the dice changing nothing except “by how much did he win?”

3. Systems provide gameplay

This element provokes the greatest contention between different views on RPGs, in my experience, particularly since the word “game” is nebulous and poorly defined.  Many people use it to mean a pleasant and unpredictable pastime, which RPGs certainly are, but in this context I’m referring to specific scenarios with win/lose conditions and a sequence of interesting, varied choices that shape your ability to win or lose, where the quality of the game is often determined by the scope of the options you can explore.  Simple games, like tic-tac-toe have a narrow scope, quickly mastered, while complex games, like chess, have a much wider, and more “interesting” scope.  In this context, gameplay is a celebration of system for its own sake.  Gameplay explores the options and abstract ideas laid out by the system.  When players discuss “min-maxing,” “game balance,” “crunchy,” and “builds,” they’re usually referring to the gameplay element of the system, most often combat (which is usually the core “gameplay” element of most RPGs).

To be explicit: This element is not necessary for a good RPG.  One can have an inspiring game with a very clear-social contract where one player takes on the role of an elite swordmaster, and the other takes on the role of his halfling man-servant, and it’s quite possible for both players to enjoy themselves.  You include this element explicitly for the enjoyment of people who like messing with gamplay.  It’s a genre like any other, and as such is subject to tastes: Some people like romance and some people do not; by the same token, some people like crunchy, detailed gameplay, and some people would rather just tell their story.

The most abused and misunderstood aspect of this element is the term “game balance.”  Game balance exists to ensure that the many options offered to achieve win conditions have equal applicability, provided one uses them correctly.  If a game has only one or two winning strategies, then the game quickly loses its appeal.  Game balance ensures that multiple perspectives and approaches allows for a dynamic and unexpected experience, thus maintaining the interest of the players.  Said differently, “game balance” is about balancing alternative gameplay strategies against one another.  It’s not about anything else.  

For example, game balance does not apply to “inspiration.”  The elements in a random chart do not need to be balanced against one another.  There’s nothing TO balance, since their sole purpose is to provide interesting ideas to the GM and player.  Balance might be required in the sense that everyone gets to draw from the same deck, roll on the same charts or roll with the same dice, but this returns us to our gameplay concern of ensuring that gaining access to the “right” deck, chart or cards doesn’t short-circuit the gameplay that the players are exploring.  

This applies to social contracts too: Some would-be designers argue that “game balance” is about equal air-time, but a moment’s reflection shows this isn’t true: Nothing in a system regulates how much of the plot revolves around a character, or how often a player is allowed to speak.  Some argue that it means that all PCs should be equally awesome, but if the “awesomeness” of various character classes is clearly defined, then players might willingly choose “lesser” character classes because they wish too.  All a well-designed social contract needs to do is carefully outline what the player is getting himself into.  Moreover, “awesomeness” generally applies to the “core conflict” of a system, the win/lose conditions as outlined in the gameplay, and thus this returns us once more to our “Systems provide gameplay” concept.

Likewise, when players discuss how “broken” or “imbalanced” a game is, they often mean this element, referring to poorly-designed gameplay, though “broken” can sometimes refer to a lack of proper social contract.

A game with well-designed gameplay has a clearly defined set of win/lose conditions, not necessarily in the classic sense of “if you lose, you’re out of the game,” but in the sense that players will have a goal that they’re trying to achieve with the design of their characters.  Moreover, such a game will have multiple, alternative strategies to achieve this win-condition, and will provide “interesting” choices.  This final is, necessarily, subjective, as good game-design is an art, not a science, and is thus subject to taste, as any art is.  Some people prefer simplistic gameplay, while others prefer complex.  Some prefer resource management while others prefer playing the odds.  This article is too brief to go into the full depth of game design theory, but a good primer might be a Theory of Fun by Raph Koster.

D&D 4th Edition exemplifies the sort of game that centers itself around gameplay.  It establishes as its core win/lose condition “killing monsters and taking their stuff,” and centers all the player’s choices, from their class to their race to their feats to their choices in the midst of battle, around this central conceit.  Arguably, it does this to the exclusion of all else (particularly inspiration, as it provides precious little support for events or ideas outside of dungeon crawling), but such games don’t have to work that way.  Legends of the Wulin has a similar laser-like focus on combat (in this case, on kung fu duels), but provides considerable support and inspiration for evocative games via its Secret Arts and Lores systems.

Scion might exemplify a game with terrible gameplay, depending on how you interpret its design goals.  If one views it as a game about super-heroes of modern-myth fighting Titanspawn, then its gameplay elements quickly fall down, with certain strategies far outshining others, with gameplay elements existing (seemingly) solely as traps for the inexperienced, and with advancement dictated by one’s willingness to spend experience on a single trait (Legend).

Bringing it all Together

What makes up a well-designed system necessarily varies from user to user, depending on their personal tastes, but I think most of the best-designed RPGs contain the above elements in some degree.

• A well-designed system must have a clearly defined premise and it must remain consistent throughout its explanation of its rules.  Traits and mechanics should do what they say they do, and the game must clearly communicate with its readers, so that all the players of the game have a similar understanding of what to expect from teh game.
• A well-designed system often provides inspiration to the game-master and player, usually by creating emergent gameplay through a mixture of tactics including randomization (dice, cards), a system of rewards and punishments to shape player behavior, and an evocative and inspiring setting.
• A well-designed system may provide unique gameplay centered on a series of interesting choices that a player makes in an effort to achieve a win condition and/or avoid a lose condition.  These choices should be sufficiently varied and balanced to maintain the players interest throughout (at least) the extent of the campaign.

These three elements are distinct, and while they can help one another (well-explained and consistent rules are a boon for explaining complex gameplay as well as establishing a social contract), they require different things and each pursue different goals.  Other than well-written social contracts, none are strictly necessary, but neither are the elements mutually exclusive, allowing a skilled game-designer to include all three, should he wish.

Lady Blackbird Extended

So, with Cherry Blossom Rain out of the way, what is my next big project?  Well, some time ago, I discovered Lady Blackbird and handed it to Bee (Go ahead and look at it.  I’ll wait.  Done?  Great!).  In my experience, Bee doesn’t want to plan a session.  She hates that!  She just wants action and adventure and awesomeness now.  She comes to a game with vague ideas of what she’d like to see happen, and then she simply lets the pieces fall where they may, improvising with her players to guide them to her scenes, but if something else awesome comes along, she plays with that too.  She doesn’t like to play systemless, though.  She enjoys throwing the dice and seeing how pretty they are, relying on unusual results to feed her story and, in a habit she picked up from 7th Sea, she loves to hand out drama dice or action points.

Lady Blackbird is perfect for this.  All of its rules are literally printed on every character sheet, and Bee, as GM, needs to know none of them.  All she needs to know are these three rules:

• The difficulty of the roll is between 1 and 5 “successes.”
• If players fail, she has the option of hitting them with one of the 7 problems listed on their sheet (Hurt, tired, lost, etc)
• She can hand out drama dice in the form of a pool of dice players can use to boost their rolls (actually, that’s not a rule, but Bee does it anyway, and it works well with the game).

That’s all she needs to know.  The players take care of everything else on their own.  Even better, the game is, in fact, a standard adventure that she can play through, complete with suggested difficulties for various problems the players might encounter.

However, if you want to do anything but run the game with those 5 pre-generated PCs, or do an adventure other than that listed in the book, then you’re basically on your own.  Thus, while Bee loves the system because it suits her so well, she has no interest in tearing apart the mechanics to make her own characters or to create her own adventures (she’s refined the art of the lazy GM, and lazy GMs do not redesign systems from the ground up).  So, I’m going to do it for her.  I promised this as her birthday present, which coming from a published writer, is worth quite a lot ^_^

You know, presuming I actually finish.

Now, I’m not the first one to try to expand Lady Blackbird.  The writer himself took a stab at it, and other people have done their own work, but I think most of them are going about it in the wrong way.  Lady Blackbird has a few key features that appeal a great deal to its audience.  

First, it’s very simple.  You don’t have to shuffle through a giant skill list to figure out how to make your character.  This is the first place I think the Lady Blackbird Companion goes wrong: It lists every Trait its writer could come up with alphabetically.  How are you going to build a character like that?  Will you sort through the entire book, looking for something to build your character?  

Second, Lady Blackbird doesn’t really describe its setting.  John Harper very cleverly gave us some common tropes, and then implied the rest of the setting.  He tells us in a few paragraphs that the world is shards of land orbiting a pale star, and instead of space, we have sky, plied by steam sky-ships.  Beyond that, we only know there are imperial nobles because Lady Blackbird is one.  We only know there are slaves because Naomi is an ex-slave, and we only know about goblins because of Snargle, and we only know about Flamebloods and Sky-Squid because they are mentioned in the potential challenges.  The Lady Blackbird Companion tries to fill in the blanks for you, but the whole point of Lady Blackbird are those blanks.  Do we really need to know, say, the culture of the goblins?  We can guess well enough on our own, thanks.

Finally, the real beauty of Lady Blackbird is the fact that it already includes all the challenges you need to run your adventure, and these challenges double as scene-seeds.  Because it includes the challenge rating for a fight against a flameblooded sorceror, you find yourself pondering how you might get the players to a point where they would battle a flameblooded sorceror, for example.  None of the works I’ve looked at (which, granted, hasn’t been exhaustive) do this.  Instead, they expect the GM to come up with all of that on their own because most people who are writing Lady Blackbird material, other than the original author, come at this from a work-intensive, traditional GM perspective.

So, we’re going to take a two pronged approach to our task.  First, we’re going to research the traits, tags, keys and secrets, cobble together our own, and create a list.  Unlike in the Companion, though, we’re going to sort them by categories: Professions, Qualities, Backgrounds, Magic and Races.  That way the player can look through, for example, the profession list to find what his character’s job might be, the backgrounds to explore what his history is, and round him out with a few Qualities.

Then, we’re going to make challenges for everything I can think of: Different regions mentioned in passing in the book, The various houses, the different kinds of sky-ships, the different races I come up with (including Goblins), the various conditions the book lists on the character sheet.  These challenges will be sorted together in themes.  For example, I’ll find a large, beautiful picture that might represent Nightport, then create a list of challenges that one might find in Nightport, with possibly a few keys, secrets and traits that might be unique to Nightport.  In this manner, I’ll offer the reader not only the potential skeleton of a story, but I’ll also tell him a great deal about Nightport implicitly, rather than explicitly.  That is, by reading the challenges associated with Nightport, he’ll get an idea of what Nightport might be like.

In this way, players should be able to construct their own characters quickly, and Bee should be able to simply flip the book open to some interesting part of the world or some interesting concept, start grabbing challenges, and just run the story.  If I play my cards right, it should be the great book of pick-up games.

GURPS: Create! Don't Convert!

A fond pastime of many GURPS-heads is the famed conversion: Take your favorite game, or better, your favorite book or movie.  I’ve mentioned before that I’m no fan of this process, and I think it’s a waste of time.  Since I’ve picked up Dark Space, I thought I’d expand on why I feel that way:

• Impossibility of Accuracy: As Byler pointed out once, you can’t possibly get the feel of 40k correct because even the source material conflicts.  In the fiction, Space Marines are gods of war, each requiring anti-tank weaponry to defeat.  In the tabletop game, anyone with an assault rifle can take them down, it’s just harder than taking down a normal soldier.  While this is a glaring example, the same holds true for many sagas, whether it’s Star Wars, Aliens vs Predator (remember when a single Alien was a big threat?  And then, in Aliens, it takes swarms to take down 5 soldiers?), the Matrix, the Wheel of Time, or whatever else it is you’re interested in.  Thus, no matter what you do, you’ll always have someone who disagrees.  So why stick to the inconsistent source material anyway, when you can make your own?  Nobody will look at the knights of Dark Space and say “That’s not the way they’re supposed to be!”
• Simplicity of Rules: 40k uses an entirely different ruleset than GURPS does, with different assumptions.  The same can be said of other games, like D&D or Rifts.  Trying to convert them over quickly becomes a headache for entirely different reasons.  Rather than worrying if a bolter is exactly right, it’s much easier (better!) to simply grab Gyrocs with HEMP rounds and call it good.  In a conversion, someone will complain.  In a creation, nobody cares, and you’re free to use the material that’s already there, making things easier and faster.  Rather than fighting GURPS, you use its strengths to your benefit
• Beg, Borrow, Steal: When you convert, you must slavishly stick to the source material, taking the bad with the good.  When you create, you’re free to do your own thing.  40k is a terrible RPG setting, because it’s designed as a tabletop wargame.  Space Marines simply don’t go adventuring!  But, in Dark Space, I can say that Knights do.  I can also completely change the aliens you face, bringing elements from other genres and stories I quite like, making Dark Space less “Fantasy in Space,” and more “Transhumanism with Medieval Overtones.”
• Enjoy the Adulation of Friends: If I published GURPS 40k, Games Workshop would sue my pants off, and rightly so.  If I publish GURPS “It’s totally not 40k,” it’s much harder for them to claim that I’m stealing from them, because I’m not.  I’ve allowed myself to be inspired, but I’ve done my own thing.  And, as a result, I can not only publish, but people will enjoy the unique twists I’ve placed on my material.  It’s true, I lose some name recognition, but you immediately gain that again when you slap “Inspired by” on it.

Emergent Narrative and the Problem with MMOs

So, whenever players start to argue over which RPG is better, invariably someone claims whichever game is more “Fun” is the better game, and then someone demands to know what “Fun” means, and invariably, people claim that fun is too nebulous to define.

I think that’s bollocks.  Raph Koster, in his “A Theory of Fun” defines fun as “a learning experience.”  Sid Meier describes games (which are presumably fun) as a “Series of Interesting Choices.”  I like both, but I’ll go further and put both together: Fun is the interactive study of emergence.

Humans like complexity.  We like it in our music, our art, our poetry and our humor.  When something is too simple, we quickly grow bored of it (a stick figure), when it’s too complex, many of us can’t comprehend it, and it becomes gibberish (Picasso, who often did things like attempting to convey 4 dimensions on a 2 dimensional surface).  The ideal varies from person to person, but we want to see as much complexity as we can comprehend unfold before this. This is the core of what Raph Koster was trying to say in his book, and “a series of interesting (interactions)” is precisely what creates emergence.

All good games have good “mechanical” emergence.  Consider Weapons of the Gods.  In every turn, you have many variables to contend with.  Your martial arts interacts with your opponents martial arts.  Your chi values vary, forcing you to change which style you favor.  Your river rises and falls, forcing you to make new choices.  The patterns constantly change, forcing you to adapt.  You don’t know for certain what will happen next turn, but being able to predict it is the key to winning, so you struggle to understand.  That is, you have fun.  The same is true of D&D, GURPS, Yomi, Chess, Go, and so on.  It’s not true of World of Darkness, as you can generally predict what will happen during any extended roll (for example, combat), so it stops being interesting and becomes the mechanical equivalent of a stick figure.

So why would people play WoD?  Or, worse, Risus, Wushu or others?  Partially, some of these players are very simple.  They take delight in simplistic games, like Tic-tac-toe and Hangman.  Large books filled with rules and complex interactions scare them, the way Picasso scares most of us.  But others, the majority I’d say, would argue that “mechanics get in the way of a good story!” which is certainly a sentiment I disagree with, but actually the point of this post.  RPGs provide another form of emergence: Narrative emergence.  In addition to having fascinating mechanics, most RPGs have fascinating, complex stories.  Through a series of simple choices, the players find themselves lost in a world of intrigue.  The princess in love with the hero cannot marry him because she is betrothed to a wicked man that the hero cannot (should not) kill because he is the key to defeating the dire Necromancer who is, in turn, a life-long friend of the hero, and interested in supplying the hero with power and aforementioned princess!  What’s a hero to do?  We struggle through the interesting patterns of the narrative which, because it stems from the players themselves, seldom becomes too complex or too simple for a group’s enjoyment.

From this, we have “roll-play vs role-play,” the enjoyment of tactical emergence vs the enjoyment of narrative emergence.  D&D encourages a great deal of the former and little of the latter, while WoD is the reverse.  I personally don’t see why both can’t coincide, and thus I enjoy WotG.  Many indie games follow suit.

MMOs and CRPGs generally excel at tactical emergence. They offer us complex systems and encourage us to unravel them.  City of Heroes and Dragon Age have hundreds of possible builds.  Most MMOs rely on an interesting mix of characters, and limits the number you have going in, requiring group and tactical (in a more classic sense of small-unit combat) management.  They tend to fall down on narrative emergence, though.  Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft has the same story every time you play through it.  Mass Effect and Dragon Age have some flexibility, but I’d be hard pressed to call  it true emergence.  The closest we see to true narrative emergence in a computer game tends to come from simulation games, like the Sims, which often have unsatisfactory narratives as they fail to follow “dramatic” conventions (which matter just like artistic conventions matter.  People enjoy particular tropes.  Simply randomly dropping lines and shapes on a canvas does not generally create beautiful art, and randomly generating events does not create interesting stories.  Stories follow rules, just like art does).  A few RPGs try to get around this by being more simulationist: most of the Ultima games and Eschalon try to do this, but in the end, their stories are the same each play-through as well, and the simulation just leads to funky tactical emergence.

Thus, this is my goal: to find a way to create narrative emergence in a computer game.  It must be different every play through.  It must have a series of interactions that result in ongoing fascinating complexities for the player, and they must have a general shape that is appealing to the player (the Heroic Journey, for example, and romance should feel like romance).  I can see now that I’ve been trying to create this for a long time in my previous games, and, in an epiphany, I finally have a name for what it is I’m trying to do.

Yomi

I’ve followed Sir Lin for quite some time now. He’s probably the best game-design theorist I’ve ever read, and if you care anything about game design, I think you owe it to yourself to check him out.

One of the coolest things he’s discussed has been “Yomi,” which means “reading your opponent’s mind.” Any skilled gamer knows that understanding your opponent’s thought process is a sure way to victory, and the struggle to understand him is one of the great pleasures that makes gaming fun. Is your chess opponent bloodthirsty or defensive? Is the guy across the table from you at the poker game bluffing or not? Coming out of the blocks, will your DoA opponent go straight for an attack, will he block, or will he grapple?

The classic “Yomi” game is probably Rocks-Scissors-Paper, but while many game designers grasp this intuitively, they fail to understand deeper meanings behind this idea. Rocks-Scissors-Paper is essentially random, since it doesn’t really matter what you choose. There’s no “strategy” behind the choice, and the choice isn’t “interesting.” You could achieve equally good results simply rolling off against one another. But, as Sir Lin points out, if you make a certain move more valuable than another, you suddenly create an interesting game.

Try it: Play Rock-Scissors-Paper to 8 points. “Rock” is worth 2 points, the other moves are worth 1 point. Suddenly, Rock has a “center of gravity” that draws players to it. If you can use Rock, you should. However, given that Rock is the most useful move in the game, Paper becomes an obvious choice, because your opponent is so likely to choose Rock. However, if Paper becomes an obvious choice (due to the fact that everyone is trying to beat the guy who simple-mindedly picks Rock), then scissors becomes the killer app. Of course, if you use Scissors, you leave yourself vulnerable to an opponent choosing Rock.

What kind of person is your opponent? Is he straight-forward and prone to brute-force solutions and thus likely to choose Rock? Is he thoughtful and aware of the game enough to realize that Paper is likely the better choice? Or is he a gambler and likes to “run with scissors?” You need to understand your opponent, and suddenly a simple, random game becomes a complex game of psychology with just a single rules change.

Sir Lin has turned his love of Street Fighter and this idea of “reading your opponent’s mind” into a card game called Yomi. Check it out! You can play it on Lackey using the guide here (Hey, who knew that a system designed for illegally playing Magic online would have such a fun, legitimate use). Roomie and I have been playing (He likes Satsuki, and I’m partial to Geiger currently). Give it a shot, let me know what you think.