The Monsters in your Worlds

There’s an interesting thing about “monsters” (aliens, robots, spirits, whatever) in your setting – how do people in the world react to them?  This doesn’t just define the tone of the setting, but it also affects whether people have any means to dealing with them, how well they can plan/work around the beings and so on.

Here’s four ways to set that dial:

Familiar

Familiar monsters are ones the world knows well.  If it’s controllable, the creatures are used towards society’s benefit – griffons as mounts for knights, sandworms that make psychic power drugs, etc.  Uncontrollable monsters, or threats, are fought, warded off, using whatever means are available – maybe that’s just big walls, garlic hung over doorways, forcefields, magic talismans.  Your entire society or setting might be shaped around these creatures.

Effectively the monsters are like tigers or wild animals in our world – we know of them, if they’re dangerous we have sense to respect that, but it’s not the wild fear of something completely unknown.

If the monsters are intelligent, they’re effectively another culture to deal with.

Familiar Monsters have the benefit of making your world very different than reality, though the monsters themselves become mundane.  Notice that this doesn’t mean society is necessarily in power OVER the creatures – you might have a world where a horde of rampaging robots follows a never-ending storm seasonally – no one can stop the horde, but they can close the gates and wait out the annual Sweep.

– How do they impact the world? Has the culture or mythology changed because of them?

– Does society make use of them?  Does society need to avoid them? Obey them?

– What are practical changes that come out of this? Trade? Survival? War? Business?

Unfamiliar

Unfamiliar Monsters are either rare overall, or just happen to be rare in the area you’re in.  Unlike familiar monsters, society is poorly equipped to deal with them – they have rumors or only partial information at best, and none of the necessary tools or organization to deal with them effectively.

Unfamiliar monsters work pretty easily for creating the classic “monster” – a threat that people cannot deal with well and it requires heroes to even resist them.  The flipside of it is that you have to have a good reason why people haven’t figured out how to deal with them yet.  If the same monsters keep showing up, then they’re not going to be unfamiliar for long.

– What kinds of things can the monster(s) do that people aren’t ready to deal with?

– Why is the monster unfamiliar?  What needs to happen to change that?

– What sort of myths, rumors, or straight up projections are people applying to the monster?

Unheard of

Monsters that society simply has never heard of before.  No one even has rumors or stories about them.   Whereas people might be able to figure out which rumors about vampires work or don’t work because they have those rumors, an unheard of monster is simply an enigma you have to learn as you go.

This could be the ancient evil that has been locked away for thousands of years with no surviving records about it (or, usually, the heiroglyphs on the temple that seals it away that you just opened…), or it could be something that is kept unknown by some kind of conspiracy or cosmological reason – such as invisible death gods that each are waiting for our time to come up and so on.

– Why is the monster unheard of? Has it been hidden? Is there some kind of magic involved?

– If the monsters are not trapped, what have they been doing? How have they affected the world, or history?

– Is there any projections people might throw upon the monster, mistakenly? (“It’s really an angel, see…”)

Unprecedented

Unprecedented monsters are absolutely new to the setting.  They haven’t existed previously.   This might be a sentient AI you create, or some kind of horrific reanimation experiment or a magical construct.

Society not only lacks means of dealing with these things and whatever they can do, there’s the strong possibility that they may break our understanding of the rules of the world or physics.   There’s a good number of horror movie killer/monsters that effectively do this – it’s not like everytime you burn someone to death they come back as a dream-hopping murderer, it’s a random, new thing and no one totally knows what the rules are and how it works.

– What happened to bring this thing (or things, plural) into existence?

– Do they break the physics or “rules” of the setting in some way?

– What do they want? Are they driven by a primal need, a misunderstanding of how the world should be, or perhaps some kind of violent twisted idea?

What’s it mean for your game?

I’ve seen a lot of games turn weird when the expectations of what the monsters are, or should be, aren’t aligned at the table.  Sometimes this comes down to people complaining about “bad roleplaying” or “metagaming” but a lot of it is “What SHOULD be the expectation of how we treat things in our game world?”

The other part of it, too, is that a lot of game settings don’t ask the next step of what are the implications of some monsters existing or doing what they do in the world?  The common parallel is magic – “If we have easy access to magical healing, how does anyone die of disease anymore?”

Consider how the monsters shape your society and world, and make sure the players know what to expect out of it.

Also – what if different creatures occupy different categories? How do you respond and what does that mean?  You might have a sci-fi game full of aliens and robots and that’s all Familiar, but space zombies would be Unprecendented… and what does that mean for your setting?

You don’t have to slot every creature into these categories (especially if you’re playing a game with a giant book of monsters) but you should take some time to consider what role monsters play in your game, and if there’s any key ones around which the game revolves as a whole.

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Loops vs. Grind

I try not to do too many “pure theory” posts, but recent gaming and some conversations with Quinn Murphy, has given me some thoughts I think are key mostly to design, though given the way a lot of RPGs work, that also influences how you run a campaign in the long term.

Moment to Moment Fun

Bungie, the developers of the Halo videogames, are often quoted as pointing out their design method is to try to make a few seconds of fun, then keep doing that, over and over, until you have a full game.   This is emphasizing the moment-to-moment kind of fun, and videogames are quite good at it.  Tabletop roleplaying games have this too, even if the moments are more “minute to minute” rather than seconds.

The trick in this, is identifying what is supposed to be fun in this experience.  Videogames will have stuff like, “Running and jumping on things is fun!” “Making things explode is fun!” while tabletop RPGs have a different focus such as, “Being Spiderman is fun!”, “Smart tactics in battle is fun!”, “Showing courage in the face of adversity is fun!” and so on.

The problem is, of course, while videogames can focus on the literal moment to moment – where what you have your character do constantly is the “kick off” of the fun, in tabletop, it’s a structured conversation – you say things, the other players say things, and this mediates back and forth to create the actual experience.

And that experience isn’t coded into a computer that will reliably do the same things over and over, so you have to design procedures that allow groups to consistently get to the thing that is fun for this game.

What is the moment to moment fun supposed to be for your game?

What do you have in the rules to support that?  What choices are players required to make?  What input are they supposed to give?  What does the system/rules do to create that?

Play Loops

Beyond the momentary fun, you talk about larger loops of decisions, rewards, and experience.  This is actually the place RPGs have had the biggest effect in game design – the idea of leveling up, gaining resources, and long term play in this manner is pretty much a big thing which has ported over to many other games.

Play loops are on larger scales than moment to moment – we can talk scene to scene, over several scenes, over several sessions.  You can have several loops working inside each other or parallel.  Figuring out how fast a loop should complete and what decisions or actions it encourages is critical.

When it’s done right – you’re rewarded for doing the thing that is fun, so it’s doubly reinforced.  When it’s done wrong, too slow, or against the grain of the point of the game, then it’s a grind (see below).

Focusing play or nothing at all?

A key consideration RPGs have to take into account is managing the fiction – how do you keep the group contributing and pushing the imaginary events and conflicts into the ways that make for the goal of that you want with your game?

This is the baseline issue of whether your RPG is well designed or not.  Unfortunately, many games simply lack this and it becomes “style” or “experience” to find ways to make up the difference, which is why a lot of games have problems and fall down a lot – if you can’t consistently meet and create at the same fun spot – the fun is sporadic or absent.  If you are working to get to different kinds of fun, you can be fighting against each other and again – sporadic or absent.

A clear loop of procedures allows people to more consistently hit the expected fun zone, which is why a lot of narrowly designed games, or even boardgames or videogames have eaten up a lot of the RPG crowd as time goes on.  The more reliable fun, wins.

Grind

The difference between a loop and a grind is fun vs. boredom.  When a loop is kicking off fast enough, and in the right way, you have a great reward loop. When a loop is taking too long, or is about doing something that isn’t fun or the point of the game, you have a grind.

The easy example might be to point to videogames.  In Final Fantasy games,  you mostly fight and explore.  That’s pretty much the core fun of those games.  But they started including mini-games, which, instead of being side extras, became things you HAD to do as part of play.   Now you have to learn a different game, that is different than the core experience… and often put in lots of time.  If it happens to be a game you like – great.  But for many, it turned into a grind.

This is true also of loops that take too long.  Fighting the monsters might be fun, but fighting the SAME monsters, over and over, for hours on end, without any changes to the situation, isn’t.   Videogames fall into this pitfall because they often use it to artificially extend playtime without having to add real content.   RPGs usually fall into this category by designing for campaign length play that people aren’t able to fit into their lives.  The loop has to close sooner, and change the variables (difficulty, give you new options via powers, etc.) or it becomes boring.

This is actually a massive pitfall for RPGs.  You have a slow moment-to-moment play, commitment times are usually 3-4 hours of play, weeks on end, months on end, and you can’t really play alone.   Having a grind is killer to sustaining play.  If you don’t have a reliable loop of what play is supposed to be, effectively all play becomes a grind, because the struggle is just in coordinating to play in the first place.

A useful question to ask about loops for any game you design, or play is: “Will I ever see this happen?  Under what conditions?  Is this reasonable to ever expect?”

If you can’t keep a group together for more than a month or two, do you need to buy tons and tons of supplement books for high level play?  Do you need a mega dungeon?  Do you need to prep for months of campaign?

What is the expected rate of this loop turning over?  What actions does the group have to take to make this happen, and how likely are they to do so?  Is this fun enough to make it worth it?

Go Make Me A Sandwich – Breaking in to the industry

GMMAS has great posts, often, and this one is for women breaking into the industry.  This first part hits a key point of publishing everyone can use, and something I point out quite often:

…There are so many tools now that allow people to self-publish exciting and polished games that just plain didn’t exist when I started dabbling in self-publishing nearly seven years ago. It is absolutely possible for a one-person operation (like yours truly) to make and publish games that people want to buy.

There’s also the issue of economics. Simon Rogers of Pelgrane Press wrote this fantastic look at the economics of publishing from the standpoint of one of the “big dogs”, and it’s a great look at why freelance writing is not well paid, and why it’s not ever going to be well paid in the current market. The fact of the matter is that very often, a tiny self-publisher with a tiny audience can shoestring a game of their own and still make more money than they’d make freelancing for one of the big companies.

The giant indie push from the Forge back in 2003-2004 wasn’t telling people to self publish to be part of the cool kids club, it was telling people to self publish because otherwise, the money is shit.  How much you get paid, whether you get paid on time, a year or two later, or never at all, all that is pretty much a big deal.

Bigger Plates Don’t Fix Small Pies

The existing RPG market is just too narrow and small to support anything more than that.  It was the problem detailed by Ron Edwards in The Nuked Applecart and played out repeatedly over the last 15 years in indie RPG publishing.  The folks who have optimized to this arena usually pull a few thousand dollars a year, with a few stars pulling something like $20,000 a year after nearly a decade of games and promotion… in other words, still not great money.

And the issue is the same as it was more than 10 years ago – many people are planning their business around business needs, but “pursuing legitimacy”.  If you want to be a “REAL” publisher, you need to push out X amount of product a year, have X amount of full time employees, have books in X amount of stores, etc. etc.   Given the tiny space of the market, none of that makes sense for most of the publishers.  On the bottommost line for ethical interaction, you have to wonder about businesses that are effectively planned to NOT pay their workers, and how one can consider that a legitimacy to pursue…

 

Community Radio: Strangeness on the Airwaves

Quinn Murphy’s Community Radio, the Nightvale-with-the-serial-numbers-scraped-off RPG, is now available for sale.  It’s a great short game, going for $3 a PDF.

Monster Defined Settings

One of the best ways to set up a fantasy setting is to have a single monster, or class of monsters, that changes the way everything in your world works.

Years back, I had this idea of a giant flying beast, wingspan large enough to cover valleys – it flew slowly, it never stopped flying, and any human caught under it’s shadow – died.   So all of human society was built around having these roofed way points and hiding spots for when it would come around.  The point was that the monster forced everyone to have to crowd up and deal with each other more, exacerbating personal drama between the characters in the community – pretty similar to how zombies work in a lot of zombie stories.

Videogames like Final Fantasy X also did a great job of presenting an uber-monster (“Sin”) that the entire society, religion and world was revolving around.  Recently, anime like Attack on Titan have become popular – again, a single type of monster – the horrific Titans, altering how everyone lives.

I remember seeing an RPG.net thread where they talked about a city built around a captured Tarrasque – it constantly would regenerate, so they could keep harvesting bits from it…

It’s a fun exercise to create a fantasy world that is different with a simple starting point and creates some interesting pressures and problems beyond “army of undead/orcs” or “random lich/dragon” problems.

Signal Boost – Justice Points – “Dragons Aren’t Real”

Justice Points is a podcast I just got into, but the most recent podcast has my friend Tanya talking about I Need Diverse Games.

Towards the end of the podcast, there’s a pretty great conversation about games that try to deal with discrimination, but then fail to understand that racism has particular experiences to culture – the racism of the real world, Post-Atlantic Slave Trade, is not the same kind of racism (such as dealing with colorism) you’d get in a setting dealing with racism against elves.   This is a common issue I find in media – these really ugly and clumsy attempts to do parallels to racism, but effectively still operate on real world racism without even understanding how/why that works.

The tabletop RPG example I think of the most is the Anima RPG, where in the history lore, it had a part close to “the people here aren’t enslaved despite having darker skin”…which the game had zero note about skin color to slavery previously.  Or the first edition of Diaspora which had “Kill the White Devil” Aspect applied to “Savages” (which, to their credit, the publisher apologized and removed).

It’s so jarring and weird when modern racism bits are inserted into games or settings which… basically have no reason for it otherwise.

Updates and a request for help

I try not to do too many posts here about my personal life, since, I figure folks are here to hear about gaming.

I know a lot of you supported me in 2013 when I first got diagnosed and thank you for the support.  My recovery hasn’t been as fast as I had hoped, and I’m still struggling to make rent and move on.  I’ve put together a video about some of the experience and what you can do to help your friends or family who might be going through cancer or surviving a serious health crisis.

If you can help support, it’d be much appreciated.  Thank you again.