| Writing Games |
[Nov. 30th, 2009|01:01 am] |
Recently I've had several people asking me about game design. Some of this has been since I finished "Masterpiece: Iron Crane Chef," but a lot has been beforehand. I'm not going to go on here about my experience writing games, but I did want to talk a bit about what I do when I sit down to write an adventure, whether for a home game, a living campaign, or a professional product.
Rule 0: Make it Fun
Rule 0 comes from the 3rd ed. D&D Dungeonmaster's Guide. Before I even talk about Rule 0, I want to give due credit to that book: the 3e DMG is the most essential gaming book I've ever come across for anyone intending to write or run a game. I don't care what system you're using or what kind of game you're playing, that book is required reading. It talks about every aspect of design philosophy, play styles, and group interaction you could think of, most of it without referencing mechanics except to use as examples. Go and get yourself a copy: it's only $1.48 on Amazon so money should be no excuse.
Anyway, Rule 0 states that fun comes before everything. If anything isn't fun, change it so it is! Most game books make a similar claim, though they usually state it is story comes before everything. This is different. While D&D is often knocked for not developing story sufficiently, it is correct in acknowledging that story is subservient to, and in support of, fun.
This comes into play when designing for games because everything you do should be weighed against, "How will this make the game more fun?" If it's not fun, cut it out. This can be tricky when designing for different or unknown groups, who may find different things to be fun than you or your play test group do. I recommend using modular design, where each encounter can be expanded or skipped over with a single check or two, so that the GM can adjust on the fly based on her players' reactions.*
Rule 1: Everybody Wants to be Cool
Games are not novels. Novels generally have one protagonist. They may have multiple heroes and may tell multiple characters' stories, but they're usually about one person. Consequently, whatever happens in the novel, whether good or bad, is to make that character's story interesting and engaging; in other words, cool. RPGs, however, are about multiple characters. Not every character is the same type of hero - some are champions, some are support, some are anti-heroes - but every character deserves the game's respect. Imagine Star Wars giving the same credit to Leia, Chewbacca, and C3PO as it does to Luke (and to a lesser extent, Han). That's what a good RPG needs to do.
As a game designer, you need to plan those moments for PCs to be cool. For combat characters this is easy. Put in a few fights and something cool is bound to happen at one of them. In fact, I believe this is one of the reasons D&D is so popular: because you have to create a combat character in D&D, and most challenges are combat-based, you're bound to be the star at some point or another.
This is not always viable in other games, however. Many Whitewolf characters, for example, are based around non-combat abilities. The lethality of l5r makes repeated combat challenges a dangerous and unpleasant prospect even for combat characters. Thus you should strive to create challenges appropriate for multiple character types. Better yet, you should create challenges that have multiple solutions. The computer game Fallout 2 is a phenomenal example of how to do this. Shadowrun is an entire RPG based around the "multiple solutions" approach.
Rule 2: Build Memories
Think about your favorite gaming moments. Chances are they were rarely the things we normally think of as the climactic highlight of a game. One bit of feedback that's always stuck with me came from lex_of_green at the end of a Mage campaign.
Alex’s Mage campaign ended last Wednesday. We saved the world, discovered the 10th sphere of magic, and Awakened the entire population of earth. That isn’t important. I play Exalted. Saving the world is… uhhh, how do you say “par for the course” without using a golf metaphor? “Normal”? Saving the world is normal.
The not-normal part is that we all wound up happy at the end. That’s never happened to me before. Usually there’s a certain weariness – an emptiness left over, like in order to save the world, you have to break yourself. Zee says that the one thing you can’t give for your heart’s desire is your heart, but I don’t think I ever listened properly. Zee also says that yellow is a pretty color and that she’s never wanted to eat her dice. Psh.
My character figured out how to stop compulsively sewing wings on dead squirrels, and her mom baked us all a batch of homemade cookies. More characters in huge, epic stories need moms with cookies, I think. Or inventor fathers with books full of limericks. I hadn't intended to do so, but I accidentally stumbled onto something significant in that campaign, though it took someone else to point out what had happened. We're gamers. We're used to saving the world. That's not what gets us playing. But how many times has a campaign finished and your character ended up happy? Not just for meeting some goal you decided he had but because he did something that made him happy?
We don't remember saving the world because we've done it dozens of times. We remember the things we do differently. We remember a character ending up happy because it happens so rarely. We remember character deaths because they are unique events (and hence they must, must be significant or they become very much not fun). So when you design an adventure and think of those cool moments, think in terms of stories people will want to tell over and over again. Those moments don't have to be accidental; you can make them.
Rule 3: Work Backward
Okay, you have a list of cool things you want to include an adventure. What now?
Now you figure out how to make them happen. I like to start at the end, with a point I know I want the PCs to end up in (i.e. a fight on an oil tanker as it explodes one section at a time) or a reward I want them to be able to earn (i.e. a prominent Crane-trained chef as their personal servant) and work my way back. This is accomplished by asking questions. Why are they fighting on the oil tanker? How did they get there? What will happen if they win? Or lose? What must they do to become the chef's patron? Why are the PCs the ones who have to do it?
As you answer the questions, try and connect the answers to the other cool things on your list. Before you know it, you have the outline for an adventure.
Rule 4: Let Players Enjoy Their Rewards
There is exactly one spell that I hate in D&D. Just one, but I hate it with a deep, burning passion. What spell is it? Antimagic field.
I hate it because it deprives players of their magic items and it prevents them from using their powers. Magic items and power are the main rewards of D&D. They're why you go adventuring: phat lewt and XP. When a GM sets up an encounter with an antimagic field, she is immediately revoking the main resources the players have been developing. That's not fun.
Nothing is more frustrating, as a player, than an auto-shutdown. Anything that says, "You can't use this ability your character is based on and that you've been working the entire campaign to develop," makes the game less fun for whatever player just got kicked in the gnads by it.
Auto-shutdown effects are lazy game design. They say, "I can't find a way to make this challenging other than to make you weaker." Think of stealth missions in fighting games where you instantly lose if an enemy sees you. No one is playing a fighting game to play stealth missions. In fact, you've been playing to get better and cooler fighting abilities, then along comes this mission that prevents you from using any of the fun stuff you've spent all game developing! That's what you do to your players when you shut down their abilities.
If you've designed a challenge that can be instantly solved by a rare ability, don't try to negate that ability. The player who invested the resources in obtaining it should be allowed his moment in the spotlight (see Rule 1). This is not a case of instantly beating the challenge; he's been preparing to beat the challenge the entire campaign, even if he didn't know it, by getting that rare ability. Likewise, challenges should changes as PCs develop. That antimagic field should never be placed over a pit just to stop PCs from flying over it with spells or magic items; they get access to fly at 5th level because by 5th level they should be facing more advanced challenges than pits.
Rule 5: Ask Your Players What They Want
The best adventures are the ones that you'd want to play in, but sometimes you get tapped out of ideas. At that point, ask other players. I'm working on another l5r mod right now that's inspired by a certain genre. The first thing I did? Ask other l5r players (who aren't involved in the campaign), "What sorts of things would you like to do in a [genre]-type game?"
* A note on gender pronouns: Far too many game books have started with disclaimers or explanations of why they use the pronouns they did. Some were offensive (D&D 2e), some were confusing (D&D 3e), and some were vastly overcompensating (White Wolf OWoD). In my game design I use an arbitrary system for clarity's sake: I always refer to the GM as female, single players as male, and multiple players as male and female. This has less to do with equality and more to do with avoiding confusing duplication and switching of pronouns. Suck on that, political correctness. |
|
|