Tag: General Gaming

The Frame vs the Game

Sometimes when I’m looking at my statistics, I notice that I’m getting a number of views from a particular source, such as a blog.  These are usually GURPS blogs (special shoutouts to Dungeon Fantastic, GURB and Let’s GURPS for sending traffic my way) and I noticed one I hadn’t seen before called the Disoriented Ranger. It seems my post on the Riddle of Systems triggered some thoughts from him.  It’s not really a rebuttal, so much that the post inspired him.

The thing that inspired him is a comment I often make about “the game” of D&D being about “killing monsters and taking their stuff,” vs other elements that other games do better. He wonders if D&D needs those elements and slides into a discussion on metanarratives and how RPGs are a sort of “controlled language,” which is an interesting discussion.

But it did get me to thinking about how many people reject the label of D&D being “about killing monsters and taking their stuff.”  He doesn’t seem to, not explicitly, but I do think about it.  And while I was thinking about it, I came across an idea that I wanted to offer you to sort of show something I think is critical to understanding the bounds of RPGs, what they do, and why people often get into arguments about whether a game is “broken.” It’s a conversation about what the game of an RPG is, and what isn’t “the game” of an RPG. It’s an arbitrary distinction as you’ll see, but it’s useful for having a particular sort of conversation about RPGs.

What is a game?

This is where things already begin to go horribly wrong, especially since a “game” is hard to define.  What I want to do is set an arbitrary definition, one that I think a large segment will agree with and the rest, I ask you to humor me, because while you might not agree with the model, the model is useful for what we’re discussing.  It creates an interesting distinction.

For our purposes a game is a series of interesting choices and options, a sort of constructed theoretical space through with a player can mentally explore by making a series of interesting choices.  The game of an rpg is that mental space which the rules put most of their focus on.

Rouges do it from behind.
Necromancers do it with the dead.
Barbarians do it better when they’re angry.
Clereics pray so they can do it.
Rangers do it with two hands.
Fighters do it hard and sometimes with chains.
Druids do it with animals.
Bards do it with music.
Wizards read books to do it.
Sorcerors do it spontaneously.
Illusionists pretend to do it.
Enchanters convince you to do it.
Psions do it with their minds.
Monks do it with out wearing a thing.
Mindflayers do it with tentacles.
Shadowdancers do it in the dark. -Ned the Undead, OotS Forum

When I say “D&D is about killing monsters and taking their stuff,” I mean that the game of D&D is mostly focused on killing monsters and taking their stuff.  The bulk of the page count, the majority of interesting options, focus on choices you make in how you want to go about killing monsters and taking their stuff, and in how you want to overcome the obstacles that the GM places between you and killing monsters and taking their stuff.

Most of D&D’s rules concern themselves with combat, dungeon exploration, trap evasion, etc.  Most of your character creation options, magic spell choices and loot mechanics (for example, the fact that there’s loot and that you get it by killing monsters and raiding dungeons) centers on how you choose to interact with the game.  The rogue chooses to use stealth, perception and physical agility to bypass most traps and monsters and, during combat, to outmaneuver opponents and attack them from a vulnerable state, for example. A barbarian will choose to attack straight forward with rage and strength and a giant weapon.  These are alternative approaches, alternative strategies, to the same problem of “How do I kill monsters and take their stuff?”

Okay, What’s a Frame

A frame, in this context, refers to a framing device, a narrative concept where you wrap the actual story you want to tell in a different story.  An example might be that we’re reading a horror story, but the events of the horror story are told through the personal experiences of the journalist who tracked down the horror story in the first place.  It is, if you will, the story around the story.

You can think of RPGs as having narrative “framing devices” around their central core gameplay. A common D&D example of this might be:

You’re in a tavern.  There’s a mysterious stranger in a shadowy corner.  He offers to sell you a map to {the dungeon}. You buy the map and you go to {the dungeon}. {Gaming things happen}. You return and sell loot.

But frames don’t have to be boring.  They can be terribly interesting in and of themselves. For example, the frame might be:

During this darkest hour of a kingdom, as the vile forces of the evil Orc warlord Gutterash gathers on the plains beyond, the magical princess Feylana falls ill with some malefic sorcery, cast by Gutterash’s ally and traitor to the kingdom, the former vizier Alistair von Evilstein.  However, the good wizard of the kingdom may know of a cure, but it requires the blood of the dragon found in the dreaded {dungeon}. Others have tried and failed to plumb its depths, here are the maps they drew. And so, the heroes begin their long and perilous journey to {the dungeon}. {Gaming things happen}. The heroes return, haggard but triumphant, bearing not only the necessary dragon’s blood, but also an enchanted blade and a tome that outlines the keys to Alistair von Evilstein’s power, and where those keys lay {in other dungeons of course}, which offers the kingdom hope of stymying his wicked rise.

They can be as detailed and nuanced as you want them to. They might even include their own “gameplay elements,” in that the GM might ask you to roll for something during them, or he may offer you choices that affect the rest of the campaign or change the tenor or themes of the eventual “actual gameplay.” And this is where, in my experience, the conversation tends to break down: for some people, the “actual gameplay” of a particular RPG is the draw, but for others, the frame they put around the “actual gameplay” is the real draw.

A Metaphor: JRPGs

Consider, for a moment, the time-honored gameplay of your typical JRPG.  The “game” is pretty obvious in these: you have characters lined up on one side, and bad guys on the other and you both take turns whacking one another or using items or trying to run. If you lose it’s usually game over, and if you win, you get loot and experience. What characters you choose, how you build them, and what monsters you face, all determine your preferred tactics.

A JRPG fight

This is “the game,” but most JRPGs aren’t just an endless stream of such encounters.  Such a game is possibe! But they tend to be rare.  Instead, they wrap them in a frame: you walk around, you explore, you talk to people, or alternatively it can be beautiful, hand-drawn pictures with dialogue beneath them (like a visual novel) or it can be vivid cut-scenes. The purpose of all of these are to provide narrative context for all of the combat-based gameplay (for example, introducing you to the personality and agenda of the boss you’re about to fight, or the peril of the princess you’re trying to rescue).

A visual novel

These frames can have their own gameplay elements, such as choices you make, or the opportunity to explore which can be rewarded with more combat-oriented gear, or the chance to “romance” on of your companions and get an, um, rewarding cut scene.  These “frame gameplay elements” can become outright mini-games: if they themselves can hold the players’ attention and they also have “builds” and “rewards” that allow the player to explore that specific “game space,” then they begin to rival the “central game” in value to the player.  Taken together, these can make for a pretty complex and rich experience:

So, we might begin with our visual novel frame, have some action, have some additional visual novel exposition, break it up with some minigames and dating sims, go back to exposition, then more combat, then more cut scenes, etc.

How people interact with these will vary, and you run the risk of cluttering your game or drawing attention away from what was meant to be the core of your game.  What if your JRGP combat is boring, but the visual novel compelling, so people grind through the combat so they can see more of the visual novel?  What if they really like the dating sim or the strategy layer, or the card game, and want to focus on playing that all the time?  This isn’t necessarily a problem for a computer game: people can play it how they like.  It does suggest maybe that your core mechanics aren’t very good, or that you’ve built a disjointed, broken-up sort of game that different people experience very differently, with everything but the bit they like getting in the way of their fun.

There’s sort of this conceit that because the core gameplay is the most important, and the core gameplay of JRPGs are traditionally combat-oriented, that combat is necessary or “more prestigious” than the rest, which can only be “frame.”  However, I would argue that if your combat sucks but some other element rocks, maybe you should make a different game.  Visual novels, dating sims, card games, strategy games, breeding games, etc, are all perfectly fine games.  If your “frame” is the most interesting part of your experience, maybe it shouldn’t be “the frame” at all.  Maybe it should the game.

The Frame is the Game? 

Addressing the disconnect

Tabletop games are a bit less forgiving of this sort of thing than single-player games because they’re fundamentally cooperative.  A pretty good example of a game with a divided focus might be Shadowrun, which is primarily about “killing corporate goons and taking their stuff,” but has these magical and hacking “mini-games” that, for some players, are more interesting than the core draw of the game.  In a computer game, they would just play characters that focus on those mini-games, but at the tabletop, their gameplay actively intrudes on other people’s gameplay because it takes time away from people.  One of the core elements that I understood came out of the indie Gameforge scene was the notion that you should know what your core gameplay is about and focus on it, and I highly recommend that.

For many RPG groups, the frame is the game.  This is especially true of overtly broken games.  A hopefully uncontroversial example of a broken game would be the classic Palladium Rifts game, which “has a great setting but terrible mechanics” as people love to say.  This dichotomy is largely born out of the fun people have in the frame.  Like many games from the 90s, it offers some sops towards “frame gameplay,” like non-combat skills, but the bulk of the game and its rules all turn around fighting monster or soldiers or soldier monsters or aliens or whatever.  This part is broken, with classic examples of weird, arbitrary and highly exploitable rules that tend to break suspension of disbelief, wildly unbalanced classes that make creating cohesive challenges difficult, and tedious gameplay that turns into slug matches where two fighters just use the same attacks over and over again until the other person runs out of MDC. 

Why would people like the game? Because of the context of their game.  They loved the imagery of oppressive Chi-Town with dogboys sniffing out psychics and stealing gifted children from wailing mothers while hackers, mystics, mutants and rogue scholars lurk in the underground, waging a resistance against the forces of intolerance and oppression, while exploring a dangerous, wild world of resurgent magic, high weirdness, apocalyptic ruin and uncharacteristically violent, shapeshifted baby dragons.  I played in many games where the core gameplay was dispensed with entirely and, if you will, the game turned entirely into a visual novel.  For these sorts of people, claims that Rifts (or whatever game) isn’t broken, because they had a good experience with the game.  They’re not deluded, they’re not crazy, they’re not fanboys, they’re just interfacing with the game differently, in a way that cuts out the parts they don’t like.

I’m not going to tell you that it’s wrong to play a game this way.  The point of many posts I’ve made in this vein is not that this sort of gameplay is wrong, but to highlight that this difference exists, that the frame is not the game, and that when people like me complain about the game, we’re complaining about the game, not the frame. I’m also trying to encourage you to see the difference and if you’re the sort that prefers the frame to the game, to realize what you’re doing, and once you do, I want you to ask yourself this question:

What is the core gameplay actually doing for me?

Is it okay to run D&D were no combat takes place?  Sure! No gaming police are going to take your books from you, but I have to ask you this: why are you using a game where 90% of the rules are about combat?  Wouldn’t your game be better supported by more closely aligning it to the actual gameplay that you find cropping up at your table?  (The examples below aren’t meant as necessarily to be replacements for D&D in this context, just a few RPGs I know that fit the description.  I’m sure there are better, more precise examples out there).

 By all means, keep D&D at your table if it provides you with value.  For many gamers, while the core mechanics might no longer be interesting, the book’s artwork and setting conceits provide inspiration, and the mechanics provide a sort of shared language that they can all understand (“My character is really strong!” “How strong?” “A 16.” “Oh, so really strong, but not like the strongest ever?” “Yeah.”).  Running D&D this way is a bit like “running Harry Potter” where everyone has access to those books and has sort of system they’ve agreed to, and they’re “playing” the game.  It’s fine and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

But there people who sort of lock themselves into a familiar space.  They want to do something fundamentally different than what the RPG they have on hand really does, but it’s all they know, so they sort of ignore the game and run what they’re going to run while “fighting the system.”  Don’t do that, man.  If you’re trying to do something specific, trust me, there’s a game out there for you.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

Yeah, I’m really behind.  That’s Modern Warfare 1, not 2.

When I first saw this game sitting on a shelf, I was immediately interested.  I generally disdain Call of Duty (seriously, how many WW2 shooters can you make?) but I’ve always been fascinated by modern, networked, high tech warfare, and so I’d wanted it for a long time.  As I’m beginning to prep for a return to my military sci-fi game, I figured it was time to indulge myself and pick it up from Steam.

Two thoughts really stand out: I see why many gamers bemoan the state of gaming today.  Modern Warfare is very short (like, 5 hours), and at points feels like I’m on a carnival ride just checking out the sights and occasionally shooting at them when my NPCs aren’t killing everyone for me.  On the other hand, it’s spectacularly cinematic, and some of those missions are utterly memorable (my god, Prypriat was so awesome).  Sean Punch, editor of GURPS, argues that these sorts of games are designed for the wealthy, on-the-move gamers who have gobs of money from working solid jobs, but very little time.  CoD is the ideal game to sit down with for like an hour, enjoy wildly, finish in under a week, and then buy the next big thing.  For gamers like me, who love to explore a game again and again, it’s a slight disappointment.  Totally worth, say, $20, but not the $50 they originally asked, IMO (not unless I’m going to play multi-player alot).

Second thought: It’s amazing how much shooters have advanced.  I remember playing some Call of Duty with Walter, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t have some of the life-like features that Modern Warfare had.  Certainly the games I cut my teeth on didn’t.  Wounded guys will pull their pistol and keep shooting at you, or they’ll drop a grenade as you pass and then expire (these guys are particularly jerks).  Bad guys under fire will sometimes lift their guns over the cover and just spray blindly.  You can pick up grenades and throw them back.  Crouching in grass (especially when you’re in a gilly suit) really does help hide your character.  Everything works pretty much like you’d expect it would.  The absolutely coolest additions, though, by far, was the inclusion of air support and the ability to call in strikes.  That, to me, is iconic of modern warfare.

So, fun.  And definitely a great source of inspiration.  Just wouldn’t advise paying top dollar for 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.