What D&D doesn’t offer me

I’ve been keeping track of the D&D5E playtest stuff, liking some of what they’re doing, but also taking a hard look at why D&D, for me, never really goes as smoothly or nicely as I’d like. It mostly comes down to what I want out of fantasy, and how efficient other games are at hitting that, in a way D&D isn’t.

Generating Interesting Stuff in Play

There’s basically two methods that end up being the default ways in which D&D gets run.

First, the dungeon (equally, the sandbox world), where the action is mostly contingent on the players choosing to travel and explore. The thing about this is that going too fast can get your characters killed, going too slow is boring. It’s definitely a tradeoff but definitely punishes either end and makes for a high learning curve. A lot of the action that happens in these often turns out to be when things go wrong – whether that’s a simple plan gone to crap or a series of unlucky rolls. Note that rogue-like videogames pretty much fulfill this same gameplay space.

Second, the branching path story. This is exactly identical to what most videogame rpgs are right now, except they have an advantage in that (well designed) games never leave players poking around not know what to do for long periods of time – there’s characters who give you quests, submenus that help you remember what you needed to do, etc. All the sort of fussing around that happens in a tabletop game (“Is this character really important or not? Will they betray us? Are they telling the truth?” “Look, he’s the waiter, he doesn’t matter, ok?”).

What I want instead

Mostly what I end up interested in is exploring a world in terms of flavor if not endless almanacs of details, and seeing (and playing) different characters with interesting goals and motivations and personality – with fun action fights.

When you’re digging through an area trying not to die, the details take precendence over flavor, and when most of what you encounter is trying to eat you, there’s not a lot of room for interesting motivations or personality.

Likewise, branching path games don’t give you a lot of room to have your characters’ motivations or personality make much of a difference.

In a lot of ways, what I end up wanting from D&D is better supplied by other games. I’m thinking the next time I run D&D I will have to have a hack to basically establish scene framing and skip this whole dungeon or prepped encounters things altogether.

Momentum and modern game design

Time to refine a word I’ve used in the past – Momentum.

Before I used it to talk about the flow of play, thinking it came mostly from the group dynamics of the people playing. I think it’s better stated this way:

How often and reliably can everyone playing experience and participate in the fun of what this game is about?

Now, an important shift I had to make, was that I thought Momentum initially as a result of group dynamics, and it is, but I didn’t think back to the fact that the group dynamics (“how do we play this game?”) come from the text.

A lot of rpgs simply don’t have good rules to facilitate momentum for their play – individual players and groups have to make up the difference and become “good roleplayers” for basically kludging together something that was missing key components.

We see this a lot of times in rpgs when groups spend a lot of time, sessions, months even, meandering around and unable to get a solid grasp on not just what “the characters” in the most abstract sense do, but what do THESE characters, Mr. X, Ms. Y, Mr. Z, do in THIS situation? This isn’t an issue of learning the rules, this is an issue of the core focus of play being absent, and the result of a game failing to give people tools to even know which direction play is supposed to go in, much less facilitating that process.

No momentum.

This is basically the point that I think is the defining line between modern rpg design and “broken wheel” design – can the game effectively communicate what play is about and give tools so that a group can reliably hit what is fun for this game?

When you’re having fun, things go by quickly – it has momentum and a lot happens in play. When things are dragging, nothing gets done in play. When the D&D team brought up “20 minutes of fun in 4 hours”, that’s a place where we’re talking about failure of momentum.

This is why games like Riddle of Steel or Apocalypse World tend to get labeled, “traditional” but in fact are very, very different experiences than most traditional games. This is also the reason why nearly any traditional game becomes 1000x more functional and entertaining when you throw a Flag-based reward mechanic on it – it becomes a way for the group to hone in on what play is about and to engage it meaningfully. (Flip side, it’s also why games that reward, “showing up” above actions in play, tend to suffer this problem of stalling out.)

This last year of doing 1 hour games has really taught me that the two aspects of play that define the entire experience for people are 1. Logistics to start (how hard is it to learn, how much set up including character creation, conveying concept & setting, etc.) and 2. momentum in play.

If you can’t reliably deliver fun in 1 hour (really, in 15 minutes), your game just isn’t working.

Thou Art But A Warrior

Thou Art But A Warrior is being re-released as a stand-alone game.

Thou Art But A Warrior is an rpg about Muslim knights during the downfall of Islamic Spain – it uses the rules from Polaris with some extra pacing rules.

Go check it out!

One Reason Why…

Right now, if you go to Twitter, you can search the hashtag “#1reasonwhy” and see a lot of discussion about sexism keeping women out of creating games (and larger, participating in game culture).

This came out of a discussion where Luke Crane asked, “Why aren’t there more women game designers?” and Filmina Young and other women rpg designers started breaking down the fact that women face more hurdles that men do not – ranging from the difference between criticizing someone’s design vs. attacking you, to being groped in gamer spaces to simply the lack of support.

This was, initially, speaking about tabletop rpg design and publishing, but of course, when it went viral, it mostly shifted to videogames, which are the bigger market. That said, it’s full of thousands of examples (both women talking about their experiences, and misogynistic men so kind as to provide examples of exactly what they’re talking about…) and even then, as Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat pointed out – the videogame industry has been much more open and kinder to her than the tabletop social space.

These problems are NOT NEW. Go look, listen, and consider these questions:

- What women voices are in your gaming circles?

- If any of the problems are news to you, why? How did you manage to not hear about this for so long?

- What conversations have happened in the past, and what issues did women bring up? If women were absent from the conversation, what does it say about the participants deciding the discussion about women would work without actually having women participate?

- What changes can men make, individually, and as groups – organizations, conventions, companies or forums that would STOP this behavior?

Tenra Bansho Zero: Wait, I like this scenario…

Finally got to reading the included “playset” with the game – basically a nailed down setting bit for people to play in.

Normally I hate specific setting stuff in games – either lots of dry almanac style information that you have to crack open and think hard about to make useful, or lots of completely meandering history that is too convoluted and disjointed in it’s own ways. I had saved reading this towards the end of going through the book because I’m so used to being disappointed in this stuff.

Here, TBZ homes in on a simple, important issue – only talk about what is relevant to leading to current conflicts. In 21 pages you get few states to work with, but basically in 11 pages you get a good focus on one, with an idea of what it’s recent struggles are, what direction it’s going, what threatens it, and who are the folks in power that might save or damn it.

Like a good character, it’s got a direction and motivations driving the whole land and it’s politics. The characters are also laid out with their own goals and desires, and any one of them would be equally as entertaining as a PC as much as an NPC, and since they’re left without stats, it’s pretty easy to swing them either way. What helps is that no one is a clear villain – everyone’s got an understandable motive.

Under each section describing something or a character, they give suggestions story/situation ideas to jump into play with.

Primetime Adventures: Resonator!

We’ve finished the most recent campaign of Primetime Adventures, which we’ve been playing a lot of over the last 3 years.

This campaign was basically an 80′s anime combiner mecha show, basically built around 80′s Cold War except in space… with giant robots and aliens, of course.

One thing about PTA that remains always awesome is the way in which even when you fail a conflict scene, and it emotionally hits you in the gut, it’s still fulfilling in the way good stories close well even when they’re not happy endings.

PTA’s mechanics work into this:

1. Players create Issues for their characters. These become the driving points of conflict so what we see of the characters is more around their issues of growth or failure in doing so.

2. Conflicts are built differently in PTA. Most games demand a conflict roll when you do certain activities (“Climb a high mountain, difficulty 15″), while PTA instead asks, “Is this something interesting and meaningful to the story?”

In this way, a bunch of things that might be logistically important (“We spend 2 weeks crossing the desert”) but rather un-interesting as far as the story focus goes, gets skipped over. The time and the spotlight is instead spent on mostly things that matter to the group (“The question is not whether we get out alive, of course we do, the question is whether I can regain her trust…”).

3. The narration trading aspect also plays into this – success/failure is one metric, but who gets to describe how it goes down is another.

Because the reward system is based on good input, not success or failure in the fiction, the only real driving motivations in how you narrate something are a) what entertains everyone else and will get you fanmail, and b) where you yourself want the story to go (what entertains you). So what drives the results of a failure is not “what would really happen”, as much as “what way can (success/failure) FIT with this particular situation we’ve put together?”

PTA is very much a game that shows better questions result in better answers, and teaches you to be better at both.

Violation: Rape in Games

Just found out about this book of essays on the issue of rape in games (videogames, tabletop rpgs, etc.):

Violation: Rape in Games

(Sidenote: I’m going to read this at some point, but that cover is fucking foul.)

Anyway, the general questions it posits, I pretty much put in the same category I do racism and other things that show up in games – that gaming is not a special medium different than other media in regards to how these things appear – they reflect the culture of the people who create the games and the people who play them, as much as books, tv, music, movies, comics, etc.

The only major difference is that while rape in media often is an act of aggression – whether that is portraying violence against a character as a way of showing punishment, a form of excitement, or devaluing them as a tool to push a plot point, rather than saying something meaningful, it’s not directed personally like fictional rape BETWEEN players. (I count GMs as players in this fashion)

And it comes down to the same two points that I often bring up in these discussions about problematic stuff in games:

1. How is this fun, and why did you think it would be fun to add to the game?

2. Did everyone know this was going to be part of game play or a potential topic in game?

Nearly always, people have blustery bullshit derails that never really address this, because the unfortunate real answer is almost always, “I didn’t think at all, it was fun for me, and even though I say I think it’s totally ok and cool, I made sure to SURPRISE people by throwing it in because I know if I talked to them about it ahead of time, they would have probably shut it down.”

I mean, what would you think if your friend opened your wallet, “borrowed” $100 without asking first and then told you after being called on it they thought it would be ok, even though they had plenty of opportunities to ask you and chose not to?

Or worse than that, “It was fun for me and you needed to be taught a lesson.”

In the end, people always show you what they’re about, regardless of what they say.

And of course, it’s not like this aggression is formed in a vacuum – who gets targeted for this behavior are the same people who are targeted for aggressive behavior in real life. And the rationales and reasoning is often the same as well.

Rape in games reflects the same issues of violence, kyriarchy and rape culture in society in general – as much as any other media form.

I look forward to reading this and seeing what others have found, though it’s not like “change society as a whole” is something anyone can come up with an easy answer for.