Writing CRPG Characters

I've come to have very strong opinions about how characters should be written in CRPGs.

Here's the rule: the character needs to engage with the player.

This is a funny thing about a CRPG. The game can have terrible writing and unbelievably poorly written characters... as long as the characters properly engage with the player. Similarly, even if you have wonderfully written characters voice acted by legends, if they don't properly engage with the player, they're background noise.

So here's the exercise:

Don't write a backstory. None of your characters have any backstory.

Now your writing will radically improve.

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In order for a character to feel real, they have to exist in the same time and place as the player character. They have to talk to the player character. Negotiate, exchange ideas, come to a shared understanding of the world they exist in and their places within it. Their relationship has to evolve.

Backstories are poison to this, because a backstory exists in another time and place. Dripping a backstory into the player's ears as they earn relationship points doesn't establish a shared reality, doesn't involve negotiation or an exchange of ideas, doesn't improve the character's understanding of anything, and rather than evolve the relationship, it happens after the relationship evolved!

Some games try to bring the backstory into the present. This is possible, but it's more likely that you'll screw it up.

The basic rule is that you should never close loose ends without opening at least as many.

Most character backstories come into the present to close off loose ends - essentially ending the backstory and closing out the character. I have no idea why this is common, but it's just the worst approach.

Since I've been playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, let me give some examples.

(Keep in mind that this game is written abominably.)

There's a warrior you'll use as your primary tank. I think every player uses her. Her backstory is that she's just so gosh-darn pretty that she was adopted by the religious order of beauty. She got angry with everyone telling her she was pretty, and quit.

Seriously.

Her "loyalty mission" is a character from her backstory showing up, fighting her, and scarring her face. The end. She's apparently no longer pretty and apparently the church no longer cares about her. All the loose ends are tied up and her character is now in limbo. No more interests, no more goals, no more looming threats, no more opinions.

There's another character that's undead. Her loyalty mission involves figuring out who killed her and, again, tying all the loose threads up so she has no more plot.

There's a character that's a ranger. His loyalty mission? Murdering innocent trolls because a troll killed his family. Again, it's tying the loose ends and closing the story of his life.

There is one character that qualifies, that passes the "loose threads" test. That would be the dumbass barbarian poseur.

Her backstory is that she ran away from her tribe because they didn't respect her. Her loyalty mission? Earning your respect and her self-respect at the same time by hunting a monster and taking the lead against it.

That's how you do it.

You and her are in the same time and place, discussing something happening in this time and place. It's not a monster from her past, it's just some random monster-of-the-week threatening your kingdom.

You and her are negotiating and exchanging ideas, finding a good balance between her heritage, her need to prove herself, her desire to belong, and the very blunt threat of a giant monster.

She grows as a person, having proven herself to herself. She's a little less of a poseur, and has found a place that accepts her.

You and she have an evolving relationship: you're no longer just 'a baron of some land I happen to be on', but her adopted tribe leader. A more fun and unusual relationship than the normal "strangers->friends->lovers" route!

I won't say her character is good or interesting. It's written with all the subtlety of a freight train... falling on another freight train...

But the structure of her character beats is solid, and therefore her character seems to exist and be a part of my story. She didn't close any loose threads off, she just joined my story as a living, growing person.

Could you adapt the other character beats the same way?

Sure. If the fighter's beauty is so great, let her lure in an ever-increasing volume of ever-richer and ever-more-aggressive suitors. Eventually it gets out of hand, and you have to choose: do the two of you get married in name only just to keep the suitors off, or does she carve a scar into her own face to stop them from coming?

It's not great writing, because the premise is dumb, but it's a situation that exists in the present and evolves your relationship to each other.

---

If we look at other characters from other games, we can see the same basic premise.

Did you, like everyone, like Garrus? Well, guess what? He's the one that followed these rules. His character beats were always about something happening right now, he grew as a character, you negotiated and exchanged views with him, and your relationship steadily evolved.

Did you like Aeris? Well, guess what? She followed these rules.

Did you like Celes? Well, guess what? She followed these rules.

Even characters like Solas, weighed down by a ponderous backstory, are popular not because of their backstory, but because of how they bring their backstory into the present. How their backstory creates more problems, more loose threads... rather than resolving any.

I think there may even be some compelling characters whose names don't end with S. Try to find some, and see whether they follow these rules. I think they will.

So, my take:

1) Character beats should take place here and now, about things that matter here and now.

2) Character beats should involve debating, exchanging ideas or opinions, not just listening.

3) Character beats should evolve the character. Remember that weakness is strength, and that their place in the world is changing.

4) Character beats should evolve your PC's relationship with the character.

If you follow these guidelines, even if you write terribly, you'll at least have a compelling character!

At least, I think so. Let me know what you think.

Stats, Classes, and Fantasy Races

In Ye Olden Days of RPGs, you would roll stats straight. Only then would you start thinking about who the character was. You would choose a class to leverage whatever decent stats you had, and you might choose a race to push your understrength stats into a viable range. So the races and classes were less about building a character you wanted to play, and more about coping with brutal random chance.

These days, we build our character stats along whatever paths we want. There's no need to cope with randomization, but we still have the same fundamental structure. We've gotten used to it, but it's pretty bad. The added complexity doesn't serve any real purpose aside from making the game's high-level play be almost entirely about knowing which stats and classes and races interact in which ways.

If we want to make our game more approachable, that is a useless kind of skill. We want our players to excel at playing the game, not excel at setting it up.

This is a common concern, and many modern RPGs reflect this tendency. We've begun ripping out stats or classes or both.

But there is power in the gap between stats, classes, and races. The way they augment each other is quite dense and interesting. Just ripping out those cornerstones means you lose all that depth!

Without the resonance between the layers, you end up with a very shallow approach and extremely straightforward builds.

Easy example: Skyrim. No stats or classes, just a few skills. Worse, improving any skill is incredibly expensive, since the enemies scale with the number of skill points you earn, not your maximum combat skills. This means your approaches are going to be both extremely basic and extremely focused. Moreover, many approaches seem viable at first but at midgame peter out entirely - for example, pure archers don't end up working out, and having to fall back on melee means you're better off just building a melee character.

A few recent games have tried to keep the complexity of stats, class, and race, but they tend to end up feeling mishmashy and sodden. Pillars of Eternity is a good example: their attempt to make all builds viable results in all builds feeling largely the same.

Statistically speaking, that's what they have to do. Otherwise you're back where we started: learning to minmax would be the primary player skill, rather than learning to play.

Is there any other approach?

Sure! Here's a simple idea:

Stats and classes, basically normal setup. However, the stats don't give bonuses. Instead, they are capacity.

For example, if you have 8 strength you can carry 8 points of gear. Say, leather armor (6 points) and a broadsword (2 points). 10 intellect? You can focus on 10 points of passive skills. Say, detect hidden (3 points), monster lore for crits vs monsters (4 points) and deflect criticals (3 points). 6 points of spirit? You can equip 6 points of spiritual gear/enchantments/spells. Magic deflection (4 points) and a ring of sparks (2 points).

This is just one idea, but the core here is that stats don't have to offer statistical effects. By splitting the class and stats into orthogonal concerns, we can give both a much wider range. A magician with a high strength might seem like a waste, but in practice it allows her to carry 3 staves and 4 wands. She can just pull the right one out in any given situation!

It also allows for midgame optimizations. You want to shave a point off the strength price of that spear? It might be more important than giving it a magical +2 damage bonus! You want to merge a bunch of magic rings into a single artifact set with a lower total spirit cost but ruin them as separate objects? Sure, sounds good!

Races? Sure. Lower the price for specific categories of gear. Elves get bows one point cheaper. Dwarves get armor one point cheaper. Maybe you have a family heirloom? It's not great, but it's super cheap for you alone. No need to modify the stats!

In addition, I find this just flat-out makes for more memorable characters: their equipment variation will be cleaner and sharper.

If you're only controlling a single character, this kind of approach is a bit iffy. If you make it light enough for a beginner, it will usually be uninteresting after a session or two. Make it heavy enough, and people will forget their setup after a week away. But if you're controlling a party, it's very easy to make it work out.

The lightweight approach combined with gear serving specific roles means that players can tell who a character is and what a character does at a glance. Even after a week away, the gear will still be easy to see and you can slip right back into the flow of things. If you're worried about stagnation, a steady trickle of new gear variants or abilities that change the prices will keep things swirling nicely.

Anyway, I thought I should mention it.

Stats vs classes vs races: it was originally built for a completely different purpose. It's ok to not do things that way. It's ok to reinvent the wheel.

Just make sure your new wheel turns, or you'll end up with an oversimplified pile of mush.

Nonlinear RPGs

Linear RPGs and open-world RPGs are not the same.

Linear RPGs allow the player to chew on things for as long as they like, then poke the sleepy plot into delivering the next big chunk of content. This has a lot of pros and cons.

From the dev's perspective, the pros are powerful. Since the content is gated and carefully scripted, the dev knows exactly who the player is playing, exactly who is in their party, exactly how strong they are, exactly where the plot is, exactly what they've seen and haven't seen. No matter how long the player spends on the Shining Plains, they can't buy anything better than a cutlass and a fireball spell.

In addition, the player has a very crisp trigger. They know how to poke the plot into action: fight the boss, cross the monster bridge, say "I'm ready" to the queen. This action is always very obvious and voluntary, and the player will trigger it when they are ready to experience the next content chunk.

These two things combined allow the devs to make sweeping content chunks. When you cross the monster bridge or fight the boss, things change. There's cutscenes. You're fighting your way out of a dungeon. One of your party members leaves, another one arrives. The world is blown up and there's no way back to where you started...

It can be precise and moving, because you know exactly what the player is doing and who they have with them. It can be big and bombastic because the player explicitly volunteered to go through it.

Open-world RPGs don't have these advantages, because the majority of the world is already available from the start. A player moving from point A to point C isn't really "volunteering" to experience a big plot event at point B. Hell, you don't even know who they are or who's in their party, not when you're creating the content.

Because of this, open-world RPGs typically have hundreds of tiny threads of content instead of large content drops. They also adapt the combat challenges by level-scaling.

Both of these leave the experience bland and featureless in comparison to a linear RPG with its more nuanced challenge curve and bombastic, personalized plot events.

Linear RPGs have downsides, too. The big, obvious one is that their appeal is limited. If you don't like the shoes you're stuck in or the way the plot is going, well, that's too bad. If you want to start over, you'll have to go back through the same shit again, there's no fast way to move through those chapters aside from being more efficient with grinding.

There have been open-world CRPGs since before "CRPG" was a term, but they only came into their own when computers became strong enough to convincingly render the world and its responses to you. This became a more reliable method of drawing the player in than the limited appeal of a carefully-written linear storyline.

Big, splashy, personalized stories were left on the cutting room floor... but I think it's a mistake to assume they're gone for good. Not only is there power in the stories they tell, there's power in the fundamental pacing of a linear RPG. The way the content unfolds is really strong.

What if we could come up with a new RPG subgenre that keeps that power but adopts the freedoms of an open-world approach?

I call it "nonlinear" RPGs.

Imagine if we were going to write Mass Effect as a nonlinear RPG instead of a linear one. The characters and stories would feel the same, but they would silently adapt to the player's choices. Not just "paragon vs renegade": wildly veering so that even the basic setups could be avoided or inverted. Maybe you play a smooth talker with a good record, and you convince the council to take immediate action against the Reapers and the traitorous Spectre. Maybe you play Han Solo, and just buy a crappy ship on your own and fly off to have carefree space adventures.

If it was an open-world game, these would be viable. You have that level of variability in the recent Fallouts, for example. But Fallout doesn't have the heavy "WHAM chew chew chew WHAM" feel of a linear RPG - it's more like wading through vanilla pudding.

In order to make stories adapt to your choices, you have to write variations for every choice the player can make. If you have one big story (like a linear RPG), the cost spirals out of control very quickly. So open-world RPGs use lots of tiny, independent stories. It gives the player feedback and tells them the game accepts the way they're playing their character, but because they're small and have so little effect on the game world, you can write their variants cheaply.

Fortunately, linear RPGs don't need that responsiveness nearly as much. The linear RPG already knows how you're playing your character: they provided it.

But... that's where we need to go to find the kernel of what comes next.

If we want a linear RPG to let the player play a wide variety of characters in a wide variety of ways, we need to have the game respond to those variations.

A linear RPG's "gateways" are always crystal clear. A boss. A bridge. A queen's speech. The player trips them whenever they decide they want to, and the game moves forward.

It's easy to create random events. It's even easy to chain them and thread them so you have repeating villains or escalating challenges. It's easy to make random maps and random subquests. (There, I just cut twenty pages from this essay.)

But what isn't easy is to make the experiences adapt to the player's choices and hit hard without being annoying.

Killing off a character or blowing up a place or putting you in a long dungeon sequence is really, really annoying if it isn't done well. It's not about build-up or epicness: it's about suitability.

In a linear RPG, the characters and places and factions all exist to tell a story. Each one represents a major arc or a piece of an arc in the fundamental pattern of the game.

In Mass Effect, Tali's character represents the attempt to take back your future from the mistakes of your parents. Garrus represents the failings of The System to deal with things, and the lure to work outside it. Wrex represents the struggle to provide a future for people that actively seem to not want one. And Liara represents blue nerd ladies that want to have sex with you.

OK, not every character is equally interesting, but they all have arcs that thread through the games and give you a gateway into the beating heart of the story line. The planets, too, represent tiny pieces of those arcs, allowing the arcs to exist in the game world concretely, instead of as a talking head. Factions like the Spectres and the Council also push the plot arcs along in a powerful, immersive way and create a multi-planet threat to hook things together.

And this is our method.

We aren't generating storylines. We are generating random content, sure, but it's anchored into the characters, factions, and scripted plot events that are the best our universe has to offer. Our random content offers a foundation, a stage for those core ideas to dance on.

One of the issues of open-world games is that the player can choose to be anyone, and it's very hard for the game to figure out what the player's self-image is. Thus the frolicking, daisy-picking assassins in Elder Scrolls games. The game tries to guess which plot arcs will be interesting to you by placing them in places those kinds of characters are likely to go.

But our games have a party, and our party members embody specific plot arcs.

If I'm interested in how the system fails us and what happens when we work outside it, I take Garrus. If I'm interested in the fate of the ancients, I take Liara. If I'm interested in struggling to build a future for people that don't want your help, I take Wrex. Not as a conscious choice, but because I am drawn to their characters right from the start.

Of course, the party structure of existing Mass Effect games wouldn't work, since you basically have everyone all the time and nobody ever leaves or comes back.

It's easy enough to replace that structure with one where the player only has a crew of three or four, and they frequently leave to go on some arc-related personal mission you can't help with. (Of course, you'll meet up with them later when the next piece of the arc comes around...)

This means our arcs have to be written with a bit of flexibility. While the core arc has a specific chain of events (for example, Mordin's plot involves rescuing a research victim, helping her, then distributing a fix), it should also contain a number of background events suitable for A) seeing Mordin repeatedly and getting to know him even if you don't trigger his join event, B) filling out random content with evocative situations (his commenting on the evil bug monsters, for example), and C) Mordin's background work after he's joined and then left and then is kicking around waiting to join again.

With these elements in place, the player would "naturally" be attracted to the local NPCs that seem the most interesting. Which will, of course, be arc characters suitable for adding to the party. Once the party is filled up (with maybe one spare), the others are too busy with their personal situation to join your team right now.

Don't choose to take Liara? Well, Liara will also show up in other space stations or on other planets, chatting about how she's chasing down a new lead on an old ruin. She may even have a small sidequest for you. And, if any of your party members leave for a while, you'll suddenly find she's pretty easy to recruit!

Now that your party is known, the next time you trigger a major content burp (fly to a contested star system, argue with the council, defeat a boss, etc) it'll be laced with the next arc events for your party of characters.

Not tiny drips and drabs, either: the next content batch is a big, bombastic event. A whole new set of planets, characters leaving and arriving, crashing your ship and fighting through a jungle...

This is also easy to mod. You can introduce additional characters with their own arcs pretty easily. Although the character arcs don't really overlap, they do exist in the same space: Mordin's arc introduces a mad science lab where genetic monsters are running amok, but it's inside a planet dedicated to Tali's next big arc element, where she's investigating the whole planet for suitability as a home world. Other elements are also laced in. Some are minor arc elements, some are completely random, but all can be laced together using a simple keyword system and a bunch of NPCs or audio tapes referring to other places. Those can easily be generated randomly.

Right now, we think of RPGs as either a world to play in or as monolithic stories. Instead, we might think of them as a bunch of opportunistic stories that piggyback on characters, factions, and places to assemble their setpieces.

... anyway, I cut about fifteen pages out of this long-ass essay. Hopefully it's not too hard to read.

A Scaffold That Grinds Away

Last essay I talked about grinding. I did that to set up this essay, in which we talk about "writing" for open world games, especially RPGs.

In classic oldschool RPGs, there's a whirl of four kinds of gameplay, but each kind is very dull. Talking to folks, exploring maps, managing powerups, and fighting: individually, each of these elements is weak. Even combined, they're pretty weak.

A lot of RPGs have tried to become more interesting by changing out one or two of those elements for more interesting variants. That never seems to work. Why?

Look, RPGs are about the grind. There's no way around it. Even when you decide to stop grinding and fight a boss, you're still doing the exact same play, just with a different goal.

And that's the secret.

The power of an RPG isn't in the gameplay, it's in the pacing. You can grind as you like, and then when you're done grinding, you can easily prod the sleepy storyline into feeding you the next bit of content, the new grist for your grinder. New monsters, new target numbers, new setting, new people, new party dynamics.

All our effort has been spent on more realistic characters, lusher settings, better gameplay, adaptive music... but we've never really talked about new ways to feed the player.

We need to talk about grist.

How to make it, how and when to feed it to the player, how to tell how well they're absorbing it.

The term "roguelike" comes to mind. The computer generates the dungeons, and you walk endlessly through them. That is a roguelike's "grist": the neverending parade of dungeons. At first glance, you may think that's a linear RPG's grist, too. Maybe even an open-world RPG's grist. But it's not.

An RPG lives or dies based on the experience of spending time in that world. If we think like that, we can see that our grist isn't dungeons or random quests or generated characters: our grist is experiences in the world.

These are the things the game feeds us as we move forward in linear RPGs. A new town, new people, new plot elements, new character dynamics, new monsters, new world map, new dungeon, new background music, new spells, new equipment, new boss at a new level.

The difficulty is that grist has a flavor. If you deploy this stuff randomly, the player will get a mouthful of garbage. Arranging plots and characters and places and dungeons and monsters and bosses can't be done randomly. It has to be done sensibly.

I think there are three simple ways to choose sensible grist.

One is content packs. If you go to an icy place, you get an icy town, icy people, icy monsters, icy plots... the downside is: the more you do this, the less replayability and variation there is.

Two is arcs. By creating a progression across several grist packs, you can build a sense of permanence. IE, being chased by an imperial task force across three planets will give each planet's grist pack a connection to your experience, even though the planets are individually quite random.

Three is player response grist.

This one is important.

A big part of my enjoyment of old RPGs is having an "understanding" of how the major party members and NPCs "felt" about any given thing. The canon responses were limited, but I would fill in the gaps on my own. Essentially, I could write fan-fiction in my head as I played the game, imagining the characters responding to the random crap the game threw in my way. "Oh man, are you kidding? Another group of ten zombies?" grumps Lucca. "I will handle this group," Robo bleeps.

These stupid internal vignettes were a big part of how I enjoyed these games. My personal response as a player could be mirrored into the game world by the characters, discussed and properly contextualized.

I don't know how many players are like this, but it's important to me, so I'd like to talk about how to let the game help me do those things.

Dragon Age is an example of how to do this explicitly. The characters will frequently comment on random happenings, they banter among themselves, it feels very organic. However, in the end, this actually limits how freely I can shape the story of these characters.

None of the characters can have bad days, because their banter clearly shows them not having a bad day. None of them can have romantic relationships with each other, since their banter shatters that idea, too. None of them can become jealous, angry, happy, sad. None of them can find something interesting, or repellent, or confusing, unless the devs programmed them to.

Back in ye old days, the characters were unchanging, but they were blurry little pixel people who said maybe three lines outside of their personal arc events. You could imagine them doing or feeling anything you like, because they were too small and blurry to prove you wrong.

As our tech improved, we brought the characters into focus, but we left them as unchanging marionettes, simply increasing the number of personal arc events. When I drag Liara and Garrus around a starship for an hour, they never have any opinions or emotions, never feel anything, and I can see it very clearly due to the high quality of their modeling and voice acting.

Sure, games like Dragon Age try to get around this by filling the game with more voice acting and emotions, scripted by the devs. But that works against my enjoyment in many situations. I can't evolve the story as I grind the gameplay, because the devs don't know which direction I'm trying to take it.

There is a way to improve this situation. A surprisingly straightforward way.

We can see it in relatively mainstream games like Fire Emblem. Fire Emblem's devs don't know what sort of people we'll want to hook up with what sort of people, but they give us a mechanic where people that talk to each other in battle will advance their personal arcs. Not everyone has an arc with everyone, but it still allows the game to reflect the player's storytelling impulses.

As an even more mainstream game, we could use the recent Saints' Row or GTA games, where you can always just call people up on your phone to hang out with them. While they don't have programmed emotions while they hang out with you, you can drag them around into pretty diverse situations and they'll react interestingly - both due to their personality and due to their screwy AI that makes them freak out at random moments.

It's not hard to imagine scaling this up by offering more methods to guide the NPCs to behave in specific ways, either long-term or short-term, to reflect the player's personal story.

For example, a version of the GTA framework where the two people you call over will have an event together after they've left, and you'll get notified of the new social situation. A quick text with a picture of the two of them standing on top of a boat, for example. The event can be determined by how much money you made while they were following you around, or how much adrenaline you spawned, or how much damage they took, or where it left off...

Or let them get drunk or high as you pass them various inventory items. Or you can bring up something from their past by showing them a photo or taking them to their old house. Or you could just let the player freaking select how they want the NPCs to feel from a menu.

Wedding this kind of shaping into the grist of an RPG should allow-

Oh, yeah, grist. We're still talking about grist.

The player selects how the characters evolve. That can easily be limited so the characters stay "in character" and/or lined up for their long-term arc. Even with that limitation it's a powerful way to let the player trigger tasty grist.

When the player pushes a character to act in a particular way, why not have that character drag in a bunch of other content based on that? You get the berserker drunk and leave him stumbling around the rooftops, you're going to have a story event where he's caused trouble. It's a good excuse to introduce local law enforcement, a rich person whose roof got broke, people chatting about the weird, shadowy figure which must have been a werewolf stalking through the city at night, and several options as to how to break your buddy out of jail.

This is "piecemeal" content. It can be injected into almost any setting. If the town is big enough to drunkenly jump from roof to roof, it's big enough to support the subplot. It doesn't mean anything in the long run, although the NPCs you introduce here might recur later in other contexts. You can just throw it in and have fun.

Of course, the subplot should have variable long-term results - change the opinion of the town, change your karma rating, etc, who knows.

Fundamentally, this kind of random content is not too hard. Certainly not as hard as generating a good dungeon for a roguelike. The difficulty lies in making sure the actions the player can choose in order to reflect their personal take on the story can spawn these events without seeming overly random.

All of the moments that introduce grist in existing RPGs are already like this. You get new grist when you step on a trigger, and normally you can tell what is a trigger and what isn't. We're talking about the same exact situation, except that the content we introduce is generated instead of scripted.

The challenge is whether we can make that generated content "flow" from the player's situation. That applies for this piecemeal personal response content, but it also applies for arc content and content packs.

...

Well, in the end, I'd like to talk about how to set up the grist properly.

In my mind, we can radically improve RPG design by spitting grist in based on content pack chunks, arcs through multiple chunks, and introducing grist based on the actions of the player... as measured by actions we allow specifically to let the player choose how they want characters to develop.

What do you think?

"Tough Moral Choices"

These days, every RPG pitch is exactly the same. A grim, dark world where death waits around every corner, every decision could be your last! Face tough moral choices in this epic fantasy adventure with four hundred hours of gameplay!

OK, all of those pitch elements are bad. Briefly:

We can tell how grimdark your setting is from your art samples, sell us on something unique.

We can tell how epicfantasy your setting is from your art samples, sell us on something unique.

Tell me what in your game supports hundreds of hours of play, because hundreds of hours of empty fetch quests is what I assume.

Death and deadly decisions mean nothing, because we can save and load pretty easily. Also, it's bad gameplay to kill the player off for choosing poorly: don't offer a choice if one of the options is just flat-out wrong.

But by far the most egregious of these claims is the idea of "tough moral choices".

This is an incredible combination of poor gameplay, poor writing, and avoiding responsibility for the content of the game you're making.

First: poor gameplay.

Choosing between a few canned options is extremely dull gameplay. This is especially true in modern games, where unique characters are expensive to make and full voice acting makes every line expensive.

In older games, you would usually be presented with "moral choices", but the game rarely judged what you did. For example, in Fallout 2 there was a string of events where you could sleep with a farmer's daughter, then be pressured into marrying her and taking her with you. The game doesn't really care what you choose to do, it simply gives you a variety of choices, many of which are based on the core game features (gunplay or stat/skill tests) rather than being strictly canned dialog.

It isn't expected that you'll have the farmer's daughter in your party. But she was very cheap to create: her graphics are (I think) identical to other NPCs, and her dialog is very limited. That was acceptable, because it was true of all the party members. If she is in your party, there's a lot of things you can do with/about her, all due to the in-world mechanics of how party members are handled.

But today, it'd be a huge deal - you've got to give her a 10,000 polygon face and 8 hours of voice acting and an interesting back story because she's a party member! You've got to make sure that every player gets her on their team or you're wasting that cash!

Basically, "tough moral choices" are poor gameplay because choices are poor gameplay. "Tough moral gameplay" is a better thought: players should be able to make their moral choices through core gameplay, or should have direct core gameplay intertwined with them. Not small loot rewards or people liking them more - that's not core gameplay.

Second: Poor writing.

When you start every scenario thinking "what's the good, neutral, and evil path?" you end up with an extremely dull, repetitive set of quests where the player always chooses the same path.

This sabotages your writing in a lot of ways. Firstly, it makes you create canned paths through every scenario. This sabotages the tension and uniqueness of the scenarios, and it's deeply wrongheaded. The biggest thing you need to understand is that the player chose to enter a scenario, and that is a big clue as to what they want to accomplish.

For example, there's a mugging. The player steps in. You immediately know you don't need the neutral or evil paths. Nobody neutral would step in, and nobody evil would step in just to make it worse. That's nonsense.

Do you hear me, Bioware: not even a Sith would step into a robbery just because they wanted to make the situation worse!

It's easy to write a situation such that you know what a player is trying to accomplish when they step into it. If the situation does have good and bad paths, rather than offering a popup choice, make the points of entry different: if the player talks to the nice people, he's obviously trying to help the nice people, and if he talks to the baddies, he's an asshole. You can even make the context command for starting the sidequest literally pop up your goal before you hit the button: "Press A: Try to intervene".

Once you have gotten the player to commit to a "want", you have a fulcrum. You know what the player wants, so you can simply offer him different ways to get it - many of which can be integrated into the core gameplay. Are you going to try to talk the robbers into leaving? Bribe them into leaving? Threaten them? Kill them? Hypnotize them? Bluff them? Grab the victim's hand and run? These are all much better role play options than "make the robbery worse because you're a really bored cartoon villain".

Of course, this thinking can also go awry. When you come up with canned paths based on gameplay, they can end up serving the same purpose and causing the same damage as your ethical choices. Every scenario must have a warrior, rogue, and wizard path? Just as bad.

And the same solution applies. If your player waltzes up to a wizardy challenge, they are choosing the wizard path before they even see a dialog box.

These things can even be automatically generated. Can you imagine how much more interesting algorithmic quests would be if you could enter them in several different ways, each of which represented a different moral or gameplay approach?

Third: Poor authorship

Perhaps the biggest problem I have with the "moral choices" thing is that it is a cheap copout that lets you avoid putting anything of value into your writing.

When you try to brainstorm for all the things a player might do in a situation, you are throwing away your authorial intent. You can't say anything if you need to say everything.

If you want the player to be able to do anything, give them gameplay options to do that. I wasn't faced with a "steal?" popup box in Oblivion or Skyrim. Instead, I was just permitted to steal. And, since it was integrated with the game world and other mechanics, I could come up with a lot of different schemes. Wait until night, or sneak behind them, or lure them out of the room then dash back in, or put a basket over their head - lots of options. And the game didn't judge me much, aside from small mechanical considerations like not being able to sell stolen goods (even in another town?!) and sometimes having the target hate me afterwards (even if they never saw me?!)

Although neither of those games has much authorial intent in it, the ethical options are nicely integrated into the play of the game rather than limited to popup boxes.

Games that offer both freedom and authorial intent are hard to come by. Planescape: Torment is a good example, as is Grand Theft Auto Anyofthem. These are games where the developers had something they wanted to say. Maybe it was worth hearing, maybe it wasn't, but they got it across by saturating the game in character. The world is full of interesting things that have some kind of impact, not generic doodads and setpieces. The characters all have personalities and act according to those personalities.

The interactions with the world echo with the authors' intents - in Planescape you can hear thoughts about the hollowness of the world and the struggle to live here anyway. In GTA you can hear thoughts about worthless bro culture vomit.

Anyway, the point is that these games let the authorial intent shine through most of the time, and the games are renowned because of it. The "moral options" within these games are largely couched inside the gameplay and progression, and the game doesn't judge you much when you delve into them.

So what do we do?

If you want moral play in your games, I recommend putting moral play in your games.

A good, easy example of this is the new Fallout Shelter mobile game. The game allows you to control the lives of a lot of people, and you have a lot of options as to what to do with them. A lot of players create outrageous vaults full of bizarre immoral stuff, but the game doesn't judge them much. Most players probably have relatively 'normal' vault cultures, but they still make a lot of moral choices about how things need to unfold. For example, who has to stand guard, who gets to train up, who gets to have kids, and so on.

Now, no game is a blank slate. The mechanics of Fallout Shelter radically tilt the kinds of cultures players are likely to express. For example, anyone can train up to max stats in about the same time, but children do not really inherit much of the stats of their parents. This means that there's no point in breeding for stats. But, contrarily, children do inherit their parent's appearances, so there's a lot of pressure to breed for appearances.

I don't know whether Fallout Shelter's devs thought of these pressures when they designed the game, but the result is very different that an alternative would be. Say, if only children could be trained to increase stats, and children inherited the adult stats of their parents. Then there would be a situation where every generation was better than the one before it, and bloodlines would be extremely important. Would it be better? Worse? It'd be different, for sure.

Diving straight into eugenics is a powerful example, and I kind of went for the jugular. Few things are as morally sensitive as "breeding humans", but it is exactly what Fallout Shelter is about. I think a more careful game could have been made to teach the dangers of that kind of thinking - without compromising the open play. Having mechanics that emerge from eugenic practices would not interfere with the player's freedom, but it would make them think twice about exercising too much control over people's personal lives.

And, of course, Fallout Shelter has a lot of moral constraints built into it. Children and pregnant women are invulnerable to hazards. Nobody ever gets sick, or angry, or dissatisfied with their life. Nobody needs to rest. Nobody ages. And nobody dies without your permission.

The point is this: your "moral choices" are better off as "moral gameplay". By allowing your player to affect NPCs in ways that cause emergent behavior, you can allow your players a lot of freedom without compromising your authorial intent or writing. You can express yourself more clearly, because you can embed your authorial intent in the rules of the game!

You may have to let go of some of your railroad, though. Linear main quests never survive an encounter with an experimental player.

But, uh... linear main quests suck, so that's fine by me!

Good Bad Game Design

Skyrim is designed really badly. It's also designed really well.

For an RPG, Skyrim is hilariously bad. The characters are incredibly dull, the places are bland, the voice acting is generic to a hilarious extent, the graphics are uninteresting, the fighting is uninteresting.

Compared to non-open-world RPGs such as the Mass Effect series, Skyrim falls short on every measure.

Despite that, more people still play Skyrim than still play Mass Effect 3.

See, in that dry, generic, empty world, there is space for the player. Even in vanilla Skyrim, there is an endless variety of options. You can go in any direction, stumble across any number of little challenges, see any number of sights.

Yes, all the directions are boring. All the challenges are boring. All the sights are boring.

So why is it fun?

Something about a Role Playing Game that most people seem to forget is that the player gets out what they put in. Most RPGs have very generic protagonists. The game may offer you good and evil options, but even they are quite generic. Closed-world games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age supplement this with interesting characters: Shepard and, uh... Medieval Shepard... have no personality on their own. But you define a personality by surrounding them with characters that do. You build the personality of your hero by choosing their companions. Even if you just choose the companions you happen to like best, you are defining your Shepard as someone with a very similar personality to you.

If you offer enough secondary characters and constrain the number you can choose, you can allow a player some freedom to "put in" their personality and "get" role play out of it. Shepard has a character because you mentally justify why these party members are her favorite. You also get some characterization out of the choices you're presented with in the game, but I'd argue that the party member choice is the most compelling. At the very least, it's continuous and ongoing, rather than a one-off, so it wriggles in your brain and forces you to continually imagine how Shepard feels about how things are going.

In an open-world RPG, parties are rarer. Games like Fallout and Skyrim technically have a party mechanic, but it's very vague, and the characters you can add to your party have almost no impact, personality-wise. Is this a weakness?

No, not at all. In an open-world RPG, you "put in" actions rather than choices. Sure, there may still be choices. Maybe those choices are critical for planting the seed of personality.

But the continuous actions of play are where the character grows and blooms. Trying to sneak through a house or barracks. Deciding to shoot from afar. Deciding to rely on your dull party member to defend you. Looking for a secret inside the waterfall. Opening a creaking chest in the dark. Reacting to the sudden appearance of a pack of wolves.

Unlike a closed-world game, these events are all contiguous. Sometimes they move faster or slower, but they are almost never The Event You Should Be Having. Your avatar is living every second of this adventure, and it is developing in tandem with your actions. You are free to do anything and, in doing anything, you are free to be anyone.

Compound this with mods that change the world, and now you have even more options.

I think these ideas are important.

"Role play" requires the player to feel like the avatar exists. One way to do that is with pieces you painstakingly create for that purpose - a bitter choice, an amazing sight, an interesting companion. Another way to do that is to simply provide a world for the player to live in.

Anyway, I was going to go on and talk about the same "bad vs good" design in other kinds of games (comparing Space Engineers and Kerbal), but I think that's more than enough for today. Let me know what you think.

Content Reuse and the RPG

A few genres of game rely very heavily on content. Adventure games are the most notable: many locations are only seen once, dialog is rarely repeated, and each puzzle element is unique. In fact, the basic gameplay of an adventure game is intended to gate and pace your progression through the content: there's not any significant statistical or skill progression, it's all about moving through the content.

This makes it a constant balancing game: how fast do you encourage players to move through the content? Do you let them skip cutscenes, even though the cutscenes are literally a third of the game? Do you let them fast-travel, even though walking through the setting is a huge part of the game? Do you let them get hints in-game, even though being confused and searching through previous areas is a big part of your content pacing strategy? And, of course, all of this depends on how dense, layered, and interesting your content is.

Role Playing Games are another genre that burns content to provide game. RPGs progress much like adventure games, and sometimes they borrow from each other. But, fundamentally, RPGs are about pacing and gating using mechanics instead of puzzles.

Method 1: Grinding
Fights are a common gating mechanism, and they are decided mostly by stats. You gain stats by fighting, both intrinsically (level-ups) and through secondary methods (buying better gear). Player skill does matter to some extent, but it can always be offset by more grinding.

Method: Hunting
Like an adventure game's "pixel hunt" challenges, maps in RPGs are embedded with resources to uncover. These are not puzzle elements and are almost never needed to proceed: instead, they simply exert pressure to slow the player down, convince them to spend time searching the setting more carefully. In most cases, this is a bounded and easily managed challenge, so the content stretching is a controlled factor... unlike a pixel hunt, where it could take a completely random amount of time to accomplish per player.

Method: Sidequests
Sidequests are usually manually programmed, but the amount of effort and content it takes to create a sidequest is relatively small. Nearly all sidequests are either fetch quests or kill quests, and literally just hook into the first two methods of extending content. Sidequests do change the context of that content slightly, so they are more efficient extensions than simply leaving the player to walk through the same content again without a goal. Sidequests can also highlight specific high-density content areas and serve as an introduction to confusing or overly dense areas by anchoring you on a single objective even when there are dozens of potential distractions.

Method: Minigame
A minigame such as a card game can add to a player's play time by literally making them play a different game for a while. It is rarely hooked into the core game in any meaningful sense, but as far as tricks to extend play go, it's a good one.

Method: Algorithmic Maps
Randomly generated maps extend gameplay considerably. The content required for generating maps is still considerable, but it is chopped into tiny pieces and combined over and over into theoretically infinite variations. On the plus side, this is a great way to hook a player directly into the content extension system without actually needing very much content. The downside is that it isn't nearly as potent as carefully crafted contiguous content: you won't have the carefully laid out, carefully scripted interactions with real-feeling characters and places since it's all chopped up.

Most algorithms have a method to insert larger chunks into the game. Nethack will drop preconfigured levels on you from time to time. You might see a character over and over throughout several randomly generated maps, each time evolving slightly. You might have a radio contact whose story evolves independently of the maps you pass through, but affects them somewhat. There's a lot of options to thread in dense, contiguous content among the chopped-up level pieces.

The issue
The issue right now is that most RPGs are stretched out too much, and along the wrong axes. We've gotten very good at using the aforementioned content stretch techniques, especially since the advent of the MMORPG. Too good: every RPG is full of so many sidequests and collectables and minigames and random maps that only a tiny, tiny fraction of players ever reach the end.

When an RPG boasts that it takes 40 hours to do "just the main questline", you have to consider whether their priorities are in the right place. We're looking at a game built on content tourism: the heart of the game is to visit interesting places and interesting people. If it takes more time to interact with them than it would in real life, you've stretched that out too thin.

I think we need to consider other methods of stretching, and stop pulling quite so hard in the one direction we've been pulling. None of these methods are new: they are simply hard to put in an MMORPG, so they were avoided in non-MMORPG RPGs as well.

Method: Adaptive Content
Right now, all our content is "fire and forget". The NPCs we meet will give us a quest, we'll do it, and we'll go on our way, never to see them again. Our towns serve as a hub briefly, but then we move on and never really come back. Revisiting NPCs is extremely rare.

Rather than focus on creating more thin towns and NPCs, it's worth considering making fewer, denser asset that can be stretched further without fraying. Make it so every NPC can join your party. Make it so you never leave your hub town, you just evolve it piecemeal. Make it so that NPCs can have relationships with other NPCs.

The key to this is to embed stretching methods straight into the content from the start. Rather than creating a town that exists to be traveled through, we're creating a town that exists to be gripped by the player's time. We want to let the player sink time into our town, our NPCs.

One method is to allow the player to grind NPCs - level them up, change their gear, and so on. The more you make this pay off, the better - we can easily learn from "raising games" like Pokemon. Another method is to let the player socially adjust NPCs - changing how they dress or act, where they live, who they spend time with, who they like, etc. It doesn't need to be player-centric: having the player able to hook NPCs up with other NPCs is actually more powerful because we are squaring the content rather than just linearly extending it. A cyclic method of bringing NPCs into the highlight is also valuable, such as birthdays or aggressive sidequests.

Similarly, the town can be grown and altered, has lots of weather effects, holidays, etc. We can learn from farming games such as Harvest Moon on this front. These should be tradeoffs rather than a linear progression, and we should allow the player to undo and redo the allocations to experiment in a bunch of directions. The city needs to have a powerful personality, but also needs to have statistical effects depending on how it is arranged. Using this in conjunction with more complex NPCs can extend both of them.

Moreover, these also stack with our well-established stretching methods. NPCs which create new challenges depending on their mood, place new collectibles, adjust maps...

Method: Reusing Content
I think short RPGs are also more powerful than people give them credit for. I'd like a bunch of 6-hour RPGs over one 50-hour RPG. But creating enough content for an RPG and then having it be only six hours long is a huge waste.

Well, now we have a lot of ability to reuse content. Instead of content being developed and used solely by one team, we have a good baseline of content available to everyone.

Each game is short enough to be achievable by even a relatively unskilled group. Because they can share assets between them, each one has a much lower content creation load.

They can focus mostly on creating the personality they need to create: the unique NPCs, the stories, the layouts, the missions. The trees and roads and minor NPCs and so on are all inherited from a common repository.

This is the "RPGMaker method", I guess you could say. Except that RPGMaker came out at the wrong time and has the wrong feel. A new tool would be 3D (2D RPGs are niche) and have a much stronger, more adaptable content system. Basically, Unity or Unreal if they had a really good RPG plugin: applying morphs and recolors to content, plugging it in, scripting up dialog... yeah, it's viable.

Method: Sharing Content
The big thing coming down the road is obviously player-created content. There's a lot of different kinds of content: mods, content packs, custom quest lines, character sharing, guilds, role play events. From a dev perspective, it's almost entirely free, depending on how much tech support and policing you want to do.

This is a neverending stream of content. If it could be harnessed, you wouldn't need to ever stretch content! In fact, you have the opposite problem: content swamping. Like Spore. Too much player content shared too aggressively means that everywhere you look is a dense collage of context-free content spam.

I personally think we'll see a growing amount of "contiguous player content". Right now, player content is treated like randomly generated content. It's chopped up and recombined largely at random, presented with little context. But that's a stretching mechanic, and we don't need it any more. Instead, we can focus on allowing players to create a flow of experience, a thread of content as they prefer, and sharing the whole thing with interested others.

Let me repeat that:

Randomly generating levels is a method of stretching a small amount of content to fill a large amount of player time. We don't need to randomly include player-generated content into our randomly-generated levels, because we will never need to stretch player content. There will always be plenty more.

Instead, we should generate levels unrandomly. Unstretched, uncompressed.

Anyway, maybe food for thought.

Suitably Casual

I've found that playing RPGs on the phone is nearly impossible.

Well, to be more precise, it's extremely easy to play them when I have the time. When I was stuck in my parents' house for holidays, I could play RPGs quite well - long stretches of nothing better to do. So this is not an interface issue, it's an issue of time. My normal play habits involve ~20-30 minutes stuck on a train. Too short and too loud to get immersed into an RPG.

Instead, I play casual puzzle games such as Threes.

I like Threes well enough. But I miss the depth of character and world that comes with RPGs.

On a computer or console, the RPG is structured with a specific kind of pacing. We've polished that pacing until it sparkles, but it's becoming clear our standard RPG pacing won't work in small bursts. At least, not for me.

Rather than creating "a casual RPG", I'm thinking about ways to deliver the same characterization, world weight, and personalization that RPGs offer. But in small bursts.

One way to do this is Animal Crossing. The casual play of Animal Crossing and every game like it is compatible with short play sessions, and as you play you will slowly come to know and have feelings for the various other citizens of the town.

The play of Animal-Crossing-style games is largely maintenance. That is, there are various timed resources and you wander around collecting them. In some of these kinds of games, the timers are realtime. If you want to play for a long time, you start to explore areas you usually ignore. In some games, the timers are in-game, and the game world can easily be advanced - for example, farming games. In this case, the play is broken up into chunks of your own choice.

I prefer the latter idea, because I know how long I have to play. If I have a lot of train ride left, I might decide to tackle two days. Or, I might decide to do the maintenance stuff and then spend some time wandering around doing optional things. If I have less time, I'll naturally be able to focus on what I need to get done, and then end off naturally by going to sleep as my train arrives at my stop.

This player-selected duration is powerful, because not only does it allow me to pace myself based on the time of my travel, it also allows me to pace myself based on my current mood. If I'm impatient, I can push from day to day. If I'm feeling dreamy, I can wander the world without advancing time at all.

Fundamentally, maintenance-based gameplay is not the style of play I feel compelled by. In addition to not feeling as interesting as I'd like, maintenance gameplay is also contextually limited: it doesn't feature any significant travel or change, so the world can never be pushed into my head. It can make me enjoy characters, but the world will always feel tenuous because I'm stuck in a single spot where nothing really changes.

A game like Threes takes another approach: it's a skill-based puzzler. The puzzles are 2-5 minute affairs, and you just keep repeating them.

I believe the concept of a puzzler can be adapted to allow for character and world development. But it can't be pure. A pure puzzle (like Threes) can't really have characters and worlds hung behind it. The pure puzzler doesn't entangle easily: it has nothing to do with other characters or specific places. It's pure logic.

So there are impure puzzlers. "Fuzzy puzzlers".

For example, Phoenix Wright games feature extensive character development and are a lot of fun. They are not ideal for commutes because their pacing is too heavily structured: I can't deviate from the pacing depending on my mood or my allotted time, and the viable break points are too widely separated. Also, the world development is pretty scarce, largely because it's just not a focus.

The core idea is good. A puzzler that involves interacting with weirdos as its core mechanic. Phoenix Wright has terrible gameplay, all considered: there's only one path forward and it's basically a test of how well you can read the developers' minds. But the terrible gameplay is simply a gating mechanism to pace the content. It makes sense to have a strict linear progression when you exist solely to show off your fun characters.

That style of gameplay doesn't allow for customization, though, and that's a core piece of what I want from my theoretical game. It's either going to need generative questlines or an open world. Or both.

In an RPG, the fundamental pacing idea is good. You have several different gears in your gear box: safe exploration, tense exploration, grinding, pushing... each can be entered and exited depending on my mood and my judgment of how my customization is going. Maybe I need to grind a bit more before I push forward, for example.

The choices given to me are not absolutely perfect. There's no maintenance cycle, and the exploration segments are limited by the maps and scripted sidequests available in a region. For example, tense exploration turns into grinding, and no more tense exploration opens up until you push past the next boss. That's actually good in a console/PC game, because it keeps you moving forward. But in a casual game?

Well, there are some games that are a hybrid. The Rune Factory games are RPGs with cyclic maintenance and almost unlimited exploration sections. Huge worlds, low endurance, and lots of NPCs that actually change over time give them a good longevity. But Rune Factory is not what I'm looking to make. The customization is too low, and the worlds are underdeveloped. In addition, the days pass with alarming finality, so it's difficult to adjust a cycle to fit your mood and allotted time. Lastly, the actual interface is not very well suited to phones.

Interface is very important for pick-up-and-play games. Awkward interfaces are fine if you've got at least an hour to let your fingers remember what's going on, but in a commuter game you've got to have an interface that feels really easy. This is true both in how the player interacts with the game, and in how the game presents itself.

RPGs tend to be "local focus". That is, you are an entity in the game world and you can interact with things inside a given radius. But a phone is fundamentally a "global focus" - everything on the screen is as easy to tap as anything else on the screen. This is a big change. For example, a Rune Factory field is full of random plants you've chosen to plant. You plant them by walking to the specific meter of dirt you want and then plopping them down. But on a phone, planting a field would feel more natural if you just tap the meter you want. In turn, this means your fat fingers have to be able to accurately tap a specific meter, which means displaying fewer meters...

Normally, RPGs just accept their sub-par controls and have shitty controls on phones. I'd prefer to go with global control. So there's a challenge to create something where you have global control AND customization AND interesting character development AND interesting world development AND flexible play.

... I don't really have an answer, yet. But I'm working on it!

NPCs and SCREEEEN TIIIIIME

I've thought a lot about NPCs in games, and one thing I tend to forget to mention is that there are some very simple guidelines. Follow the guidelines, you tend to get great NPCs.

The most basic thing to keep in mind: in order to care about an NPC, you have to see the NPC do things.

More basically, "screen time = appreciation"

There are a lot of games where the NPCs don't have much screen time, and you are expected to "choose" who you like best. Who you want on your party, or want to talk to every day in town, or whatever.

This is really the wrong approach. If you show a bunch of options and ask someone to choose, they have to choose based on stereotypes.

It's better to never give the player a choice.

Wait, let me explain a bit more.

"Screen time = appreciation" is a powerful concept. Let's look at Final Fantasy VII, since most people will be familiar with it. Let's think about which woman your teenage-boy self had the biggest feelings for. Just bear with me if you weren't a teenage boy, the point is easiest to make like this.

The three prospective crushes are Tifa, Aerith, and Yuffie.

After playing the game, Aerith was the one everyone remembered and felt most fondly for. That's not because of her design: a painfully quiet girl in a demure dress can't visually compete against the lure of Lara Croft. I mean Tifa. Even in terms of personality, Aerith has nothing going for her - she's got no personality at all. Tifa and Yuffie both have personalities - one reliable, one annoying, both better than the play-doh brain of Aerith.

But the player's preference for the NPCs doesn't come from their visual design or their personalities. It comes strictly from how much screen time they have.

Aerith has the most screen time by an order of magnitude. Also, the quality of her screen time is very high. Not only is she usually the core focus of the cut scene, the cut scene is also usually about her. Tifa, on the other hand, often participates in cut scenes as one of the group rather than solo, and is often focused on resolving the current situation instead of building herself up.

"Yuffie has solo screen time, and everyone hated her!"

Yup! Her screen time was followed by a long stretch of the player having to wade through annoying shit with the only reward being a return to status quo. So players hated her.

But although the setup made people hate Yuffie, they did remember her. They did care about her. They did appreciate her in line with her screen time. It's just that their appreciation was of the "arrrgh youuuuuuuuuuu" nature, rather than the more positive feelings assigned to the others.

...


All the characters in all games follow this same basic rule, as you can easily find out just by looking. The reason I used FFVII is because of the clarity of the situation: Aerith is worthless as a character. She has no personality, no arc: you could replace her with a lamp and the story wouldn't change in the slightest. But she was suuuuuper popular.

Because of screen time.

Similarly, Yuffie was quite unpopular.

Because of screen time.

Obviously, the design of the character does matter some. As does what they are actually doing on screen. Also, they have to actually be doing something of their own volition: just having them participate in battles doesn't really count.

Anyway, this basic assumption can be used to really change how you design characters, and you can see that in, say, the Dragon Age games.

Dragon Age games feature a lot of incredibly uninspired character designs, but everyone likes the characters because they feel real. You know why they feel real?

SCREEEEEEEN TIIIIIIME

The characters banter with each other on the road, say character-specific combat lines, and spend an inordinate amount of time talking about their backstory if you go to camp. Combine this with a selection of character-specific missions, you have a good amount of screen time for each character. There's a lot of little details that turn "passive time" (wandering around, battle moments) into small amounts of screen time, which is powerful.

Moreover, you have a balanced amount of screen time.

Unlike FFVII, Dragon's Age gives every character a specific amount of specific types of screen time. Maybe there's 130 lines of banter dialog for each. Maybe they each have 3 sidequests. Maybe they each have 13 backstory conversations, all paced identically. Maybe they inject an identical amount of personality into their combat shouts.

Because of this balance, everyone appreciates a lot of different Dragon's Age characters. I even found myself appreciating characters I doubt I would have cared about in another game, such as the painfully generic templar or the old lady sorceress. Similarly, I found myself siding against the characters I would have picked as my favorites if I was just shown a picture and a catchphrase.

Why?

Say it with me-

screentime

The characters have balanced screen times, so I have an appreciation for all of them.

This does falter a bit here and there. You still tend to settle into one primary combat party (a huge flaw in all modern RPGs), and that affects your affections. Also, there's a ton of really dumb backstory. While it does give them more screen time, it is distractingly stupid.

But those are flaws I think could be addressed.

Anyway, that's my rant on screen time.

Characters in Noncombat RPGs

Last essay I wrote about a mechanic that can be used in noncombat RPGs. Because the noncombat conflict gameplay is so slow compared to combat, you need to have a tighter relationship between it and other kinds of gameplay.

But there is another big problem with noncombat RPGs: stakes.

To be more clear, players judge the characters in an RPG based on how they face death and challenge, how they respond to threats, and what they want to accomplish. Most NPCs are brought together to try and save the universe, and that's a big part of why the player can respect them. There is usually one NPC that's on board for some other reason (money, escape, duty, simple friendship), but their motives are usually considered "lesser". In fact, their character arc is almost certainly to develop the same world-saving impulse as everyone else.

Well, in our NONcombat RPG, you probably aren't trying to save the universe. It's possible to cram universe-saving into the setting, but it usually ends up feeling rather hilarious: "saving the universe by repairing damaged factories!" "Saving the universe by dancing!" It's, uh... pretty forced.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be about saving the universe.

I said before that we should look at our standard game stuff and try to figure out what it accomplishes, so we can find other ways to accomplish the same things. Typically, I explore different kinds of gameplay. But the framing of the narrative is also a piece of the game. It also accomplishes something.

It gives all of the characters the same moral and thematic backdrop. Because we can see how they respond to the same questions, we can see their distinct nature.

Nearly all of the characters in Mass Effect echo the central conflict of the Reapers. Tali's species created the Geth, then tried to exterminate them before they could become a threat. Mordin chose to keep the dangerous Krogan suppressed, and explores the ethics of that. Garrus explores the nature of laws and law enforcement, which first appears to be an echo of your human culture's interests, but then appears to be an echo of your larger fight against the Reapers. Liara's endless hunger for information and gradual descent into amoral infobrokering mirrors the Reapers' own hunger for new information. Ashley's racism reflects the Reapers'... well, it goes on.

It could be that the Mass Effect designers didn't realize they were doing this kind of echoing. If they were obsessed with oppression and the nature of power, their own obsession would have been reflected into the characters. It's hard to tell just by looking whether it was on purpose or on accident.

Dragon Age is similar. The characters are all meditations on the nature of undeserved/corrupting power. Again, it's hard to tell whether it was on purpose, or just because the devs were obsessed with that concept.

This is common. In FF6, the characters were obsessed with the concept of identity. In Chrono Trigger, they were obsessed with the nature of change and endings.

The overarching plot explores this concept as well. It is a capstone: all the characters shine their lights on the concepts in their own way. You pile them up and the capstone makes them hold together.

The fact that it's a save-the-world plot is just a wrapper. It's a convenient wrapper, because it A) gets the player a bit pumped and B) allows you to pull a bunch of characters together without too much effort. It's the "you're all in a tavern when..." of computer games.

The question isn't "can we make a noncombat game about saving the world". The question is "can we create a plot with a theme that holds the characters together, and make sure the player finds it compelling?"

The answer is yes and yes, but it requires some thought.

Let's think about our tiny little game design about people who run around and repair broken space stations. Due to the nature of the conflicts, our theme would probably be best as "complexity is a tradeoff". In turn, our characters would explore this concept in their own way.

This could be as simple as "this character has OCD and is obsessed with organizing minutiae", but that's a poor way to design a major character. They aren't just sticking to a theme: they're exploring it. So they generally have an arc related to it. Sometimes an arc works as "they reverse their issue" - cowardly to brave, loner to team player, etc. But those are traits everyone empathizes with, so it's easy to get inside the character's head. Obsessing over details is typically a distancing trait, actually pushing the character further away from both the audience and the other characters. Therefore, the best arc is not "stops being OCD", but is instead something that directly relates them to other characters. For example, goes from having an obsessive crush on the robot party member (no bacteria! No fluids!) to a more gentle romance with a completely different character.

This kind of arc explores how obsessing over details and minutiae affects his or her life. This is how the most compelling characters are created.

All the characters need to have that kind of thought put into them.

And the game's overarching plot also needs to have that kind of thought put into it.

As the capstone, the whole universe needs to be exploring the tradeoffs of complexity and simplicity. It could start small: many of the causes of breakdowns are bacteria that are really hard to get rid of, bacteria that constantly adapts to changing environments and eats plastic, rubber, glass, buckyballs, whatever.

This should be combined with a civilization groaning under its own complexity. Millions of trade agreements and billions of trade routes. Cultures with complex rules of interaction to keep people safe from each other. Governments that sign budgets, laws, and treaties into being but literally cannot understand them, as they are far too complex and apply too broadly.

The culmination would be a coup against the government. However, rather than being on one side or the other, the player party is just trying to keep people alive. By this time, the player should be able to "read ahead" and tell what kind of breakdowns are going to occur, and show up with just the right goods to repair everything. The civilization becomes largely cut off from itself as things collapse, but the player can tell various settlements to ship various things to various places, dragging the fractured system back into alignment, restoring everything to how it was. Then end on some kind of hopeful note.

This is a relatively good theme. Moreover, it gives us an easy chance to recruit NPCs by the bushel. Any NPC that lives anywhere where anything breaks down could have an interest in signing on to your crew, as well as anthropologists, entertainers, wannabee politicians, explorers, merchants: all have some interest in joining your ship.

And all of them have something to say about the tradeoffs of complexity.

Designing Noncombat RPGs

In my last essay I talked about parts of the RPG experience I love. In the one before that, I talked about how we can put aside standard gameplay tropes if we understand what player experiences are created by that gameplay and do it another way.

Now I'm going to combine the two and talk about a noncombat RPG.

There are few "noncombat RPGs". They are never very good, because the entire idea of an RPG is based around combat.

Sure, all the gameplay loops orbit the concept of combat. Even above that, the way we consider fantasy worlds is through the lens of combat.

For example, I can simply swap combat out with something that is almost mechanically identical. Poker, for example. But the RPG will still end up bad, because the concept of poker players saving the universe is laughable. It actually runs deeper than that: our concept of travel within a fantasy world is linked to the idea of combat. How we judge the merit of characters is based on how they face danger and death, not how well they play poker.

You could make a comedy RPG like that, perhaps. A dance-off RPG. But if you want a reasonably serious RPG (not necessarily dark, but not a straight comedy), you need to deal with this weakness.

As tempting as it is to swap out combat for, say, cooking, you can't do it. You have to rebuild your experience from the ground up. You have to start with cooking, then think about how to build the loops, how to build the experiences, how to build the interactions, how to portray the NPCs...

Let's design a Mass-Effect-like. A game which "feels like" Mass Effect, but has completely different core play.

Our noncombat Mass Effect is about making the horrifyingly complex systems of the science fiction future work. The party repairs, plans, retrofits, and extends infrastructure. They work for the Central Planning Office. We'll call our game CPO for the moment.

The core loop is dealing with specific problems. Rather than cement everything too early, let's just mention some categories of "enemies" you might face: damaged parts, missing parts, misconfigured systems, incompatible hardware, incompatible software, archaic software, daisy-chain failures, missing procedures, and annoying people.

Right away, I can see four basic categories: hardware wrangling, software wrangling, red tape, and people/groups. I can also see various kinds of challenges within those categories: something broke, something crashed, something's missing, something's misconfigured, two things are incompatible, something failed because something else failed (detective work), etc.

Can this be made interesting?

Well, mechanically, anything can be made interesting. The question is whether it can be presented in a meaty way. The big draw of combat is that everyone can feel it. Even if it's presented like an oldschool RPG where someone steps forward, moves slightly, and then steps back, you still understand that there's a monster getting whacked.

There are two things we need in order to make CPO's core loop interesting.

The first is a good presentation. I think this is quite possible. Watching large machines turn on, lights come back, vents start working on the clouds of smoke, water start spraying... these are actually pretty good. You can really feel a sense of accomplishment when you repair a broken thing. This can be further punched up if lives are at risk - genuinely at risk, not just some color text. If you do badly, people will get injured, die, become homeless, or otherwise suffer. Work fast!

The second thing we need is a flexible system. It's easy to make a puzzle game out of this kind of situation - you have a bunch of pieces and you need to arrange them. However, the strength of an RPG's combat system is that it is very flexible. A variety of team builds can take on a variety of challenges in a variety of ways. Even if something is sub-optimal, the team can pull through if you spend a few more resources.

So this isn't a puzzle. Instead, the compromised systems are like enemies to be pounded. You don't just replace a component of a damaged factory: you assault it with ongoing repair attempts. If you have suitable components, it's like having an elemental advantage and your assaults will be much faster/more effective. If software is incompatible, attack with with programming hacks until compatibility is established.

Moreover, in most cases there's cross-compatibility. If software is incompatible, replace hardware modules until you find one with compatible software. If hardware is missing, write software to rebalance outputs and route around the missing piece.

Although I like the realtime combat systems we see these days, it makes more sense for these actions to take many hours or even days. While the player can wander around in real time, the "combat" turns are much slower. This means the exploration loop is actually tighter than the combat loop, because you can explore a whole space station in far less than one turn of "combat".

This is obviously a bit of a concern. Normally you would have combat be the core loop and you would fall into it many times during the explore phase, each time executing a complete combat.

We require a bit of a different approach if we want to do it this "slow loop" way... and we definitely want to do it this way. Aside from combat, there are very few immersive activities that take less time than walking around. Figuring this out would let us build a huge variety of "inverted RPGs" where the core activity iterates more slowly than the support activities.

To make this work, we have to create offramps from combat into exploration, then from exploration back into combat.

Functionally, this means that as you explore a place, the details of the place change. This is obvious: you are changing the place with your repairs. Moreover, the people who live in the place (or the weather or whatever) are also changing over time as their condition progresses.

Exploring becomes less about discovering new terrain, and more about discovering and taking advantage of these changes. Did someone regain consciousness? If so, you can ask them how the vent systems work, and get an "extra attack" in your combat against it. Did one of your people score a "critical hit" on some incompatible software? If so, use partial compatibility to help fuel your assault on the reactor repairs.

Exploration is no longer exploration, it's "resource management" - finding new resources.

With that in mind, we can expand it. Resource management includes blunting or evading new resource drains. It includes deciding to spend resources in a new way (for example, giving a colonist expensive medical treatment if his condition worsens). It includes moving resources - bringing supplies to your NPC team mates, or switching out which shipboard reactor you're using so you can swap out the nuclear core...

In turn, we begin to see this double-loop emerging. There's a lot of resource management happening on the "fairly fast" level. Perhaps each "combat" turn takes four hours, and at the end of each turn you can choose to wander around if you like. The resources supporting you may change a bit, but the big issue is the very predictable ongoing consumption of resources. Power from a limited power bank. Oxygen from a limited life support system. Food from a limited cabinet. These are resources you will wrangle between turns - negotiating for more oxygen, switching to backup power, going on limited rations...

By changing how our resource management system works, we can completely change the feel of our game and get a really good heartbeat going.

For example, we have a bank of 3D printers to print hardware components for us. Hardware work is therefore limited by the max output of these printers. However, you can also "prep". A turn (4 hours) spent prepping will add output to the total, allowing you to stockpile parts for really big job. These parts cannot be kept: they are special-purpose. So most of the time, you'll be working within the constraints of the printers, but it's flexible if you have time and good planning skills.

Hackers will want to combine their efforts with that of the shipboard computer. But that's a limited resource. Programmers only require a computer assist when using an advanced move, such as password cracking or database filtering. Rather than being a specific cap amount that is available, using the computers aboard the ship takes electricity - and not on a linear progression. Getting 10 points of computation is much more than 10x as expensive as getting 1 point.

Of course, electricity is obviously also a component. You have two shipside reactors, but the power output isn't fantastic and you need to keep swapping out fission cores, which takes a turn (4 hours). It's obviously nice if you can pull power from the facility you're repairing - colony reactors are much more powerful. But if the problem is that the colony's power is not working right, well!

But maybe the colony has computers, or 3D printers. Maybe the colony has batteries that you can charge up.

You can see - we can mix the resources you bring with the resources available on site. And they change in predictable ways turn to turn, so you can optimize your efforts.

It's beginning to sound like a fun game to me. You land at a dark space station, go aboard with suits. One party member spends every turn ferrying oxygen to the others, while they struggle to repair the power systems. One is elbow-deep in the reactor, the other is underneath the main breaker, swapping out conduits. The power system comes up, and you watch their faces look up as the lights shudder to life. They high-five.

The station is full of smoke, which causes the newly-resurrected life support to seize up. You use the station power to hack the central database of users, so you can program a new "smoke compatible" life support mode - one turn per action.

Twelve hours have passed, and you can finally take off your life support suits. You're all pretty tired from your twelve-hour shift, so maybe it's time to sleep. Some other party members from your ship step in to keep working while your "A" team sleeps.

They discover some colonists in cryo pods...

That is the basic format: turn-to-turn resource management combined with extended activities. You don't even need a hard party number cap, because party members use resources. It's self-balancing.

In current RPGs, resource management is long-term. You horde potions and mana and health over the course of a dungeon. We've inverted that: the resources are short-term. Each turn is a question of how to arrange them, how to refill them, how to spend them.

The way the two loops relate has been changed. Previously, the combat loop only had one "off ramp" - combat ends, you go back to exploring.

But our combat loop is slowed way down. Our players will take too much time to loop through until completion.

So we have to offer many off ramps. Combat doesn't "end" in exploration. You shuttle back and forth between the two.

The connection between the loops is much tighter, which should make the game quite immersive.

And that's the start of my design.

Dissecting the RPG

One of my big interests is RPGs such as Mass Effect, Dragon's Dogma, etc. But these days, I find that the gameplay is seriously getting in the way of the experience - for example, Dragon Age is poisoned by its slavish adherence to standard RPG gameplay and progression.

When I break down what I like about various RPGs, it resolves into two things.

Pacing

First, I really do like the pacing of RPGs, especially with the modern realtime combat systems found in every big-budget game since Oblivion. There's a really powerful pull to this combination of exploration, combat, looting, and optimizing.

I've done a lot of work trying to figure out how to get that same feeling "on the cheap", and I've discovered that there are very specific systems you need to implement. Obviously, you need all four loops. You can actually use as many variants as you want. Most RPGs have three exploration systems: dungeon, overworld, and city. Most also have several kinds of optimization - gear, leveling, skill/spell, item use. Dragon's Dogma, known for its particularly tasty combat, has three kinds of combat situations: free-for-all, anti-titan, and magic. They are actually very different - not different roles within the combat engine, but fundamentally different kinds of combat.

That's not enough.

I've made loads of prototypes with those constraints, but they didn't keep me in the groove. It turns out, what you need is hooks between them. You can't just drop the player from one to the other without warning, and you can't totally rely on the player to switch loops when they get a bit bored. Instead, what you do is set up a world where you are more likely to switch loops (or want to switch loops) if you do a specific kind of thing in this loop.

For example, if you're exploring a dark cave, that's exploration-loop. As you peek around a corner and see a crowd of cave spiders, you know that the combat play is not far away. You can choose to engage combat - and normally you will. But you can also prep, sneak around, back away, choose a first strike, try to pull just a few...

Even in a game like FF6, with random encounters, you would plan your explorations based around the number of steps you were taking. You headed for a tough boss? Don't waste a step. You trying to level? Wander around the entrance, run home when you run out of magic. And everything inbetween. While the encounters were random, the pattern of encounters was not.

Basically, the player can switch loops, but it's only at off-ramps. It's not just that one loop changes the stats in another: it's that when and how you set up your loop changes is gameplay. Perhaps the most important gameplay.

Characters

Well, Rogue has that same gameplay, and that's the reason it's got such longevity. But I like Mass Effect better than Rogue. I enjoy RPGs where you have party members. The more personality they have and the more interactive they are, the more I like the game.

I like Mass Effect because I like hanging out with the team. Dragon Age has some of the dullest gameplay and character design around, but I like it because the characters are all very interactive.

There's a combination of elements. One is that the NPCs are quite distinct, and feel distinct all of the time. In Skyrim, you can get NPCs to follow you around, but they don't have any significant personality. In Mass Effect, every NPC feels very distinct: distinct personalities, distinct visual designs, distinct voicework, and distinct combat roles. You never forget who you have in your team. You never mistake racist human lady for psychic human lady - they feel completely distinct.

Another element that makes me care is that the NPCs have social interactions - with you and with each other. They are not only distinct, they also exist within the world. Classically this has been backstory exposition, but I think that's an unnecessary holdover. I think social interactions and judgments are far more efficient and effective: Mordin's singing makes more of an impression on the player than his history with krogan genetics.

Social interactions are largely unexplored. At the moment, the three types we have are backstory exposition, random chatter, and loyalty/romance quests. I think there's a lot of room to add in more kinds of social interaction, but it needs a light touch. This is not core gameplay.

The last element that makes me care is the feeling that I can shape them, and perhaps that they can shape me. The most obvious example of this is leveling and gear selection - changing how they fight. But there is a lot more potential.

Part of it is the potential of the character. The path you choose locks away a path you did not take, and just knowing that other path existed makes it clear you've affected their life.

In Old Republic, nearly every character has a very distinct light side and dark side path. I can't play dark side, it's just too badly written, but just knowing that there was a dark side path made me feel that their light side path had more weight. The characters felt more important to me because their lives were changed because of me. Not "oh, the HERO changed their life", but "oh, the PLAYER changed their life."

These big forks are probably not necessary. I think small things are probably more important than big things, although we haven't really gotten that far. Let me give an example:

In Mass Effect, nearly every character is a potential romance target. But once you have chosen a lover, nothing really changes.

Imagine if once you chose a lover, they would ask you to be a bit different. For example, they might steadily redecorate your quarters. They might ask you to wear the NC-7 helmet because it looks soooo good. They might be more upfront about asking you to take specific side missions, or give you optional objectives that are substantially harder. All based on their personality.

For example, you go to explore a new world and Tali might ask you to avoid getting shot: if you get shot, she has to acclimatize to that planet's bacteria. Garrus might ask you to wear specific armor he likes. Liara might ask that you not make anyone angry in conversation, because it gives her an empathic headache. Doing or not doing these things would have no real statistical effect: this is to make hanging out more interesting, not to give you statistical perks.

If all of the NPCs made these kinds of requests, it'd be annoying to try to play the game. However, at this point you've shown that you like a specific NPC enough to spend your fictional lives together. That's permission to be a bit more aggressive with their personality and interests.

Notice, none of these are "loyalty missions". They're not linked to the core plot progression. They just make hanging out a little more interesting.

Anyway, there are a lot of options on how to make NPCs more interesting using these kinds of ideas.

I needed to write this essay before I could write an essay on redesigning the open-world RPG, so that's this essay done. Hopefully you enjoyed reading it.

Generating Playable Star Trek Plots

I've talked about creating science fiction tabletop games, using the example of Star Trek. One of the things that comes up a lot whenever you do this is how you can create enough MEAT.

Fantasy games have grown a kind of plot progression out of long practice. Fantasy stories you read in books don't have the same pacing at all: a fantasy game features a huge amount of content that would give an editor fits. Dozens of pointless fights, considering which sword to buy, exploring each dungeon room one by one... this is the meat of a fantasy game.

If you've ever tried to run a science fiction game, you probably noticed that it was pretty hard to get enough meat. The plot either felt full of filler, or moved too fast. That's because you were probably using the same structure as a fantasy game. Science fiction plot lines can't really support that - there's no monsters to slay, no real advantage to exploring every room.

Science fiction plot arcs require a different approach. And we haven't really figured it out, because we haven't spent forty years perfecting our craft.

But I do have a guide that might help. Here is my guide for creating science fiction arcs that last 1-3 sessions - "Star Trek" plots that play nicely and have meat.

The Noose
The players always need to be under pressure in a science fiction plot. Players used to a fantasy plot know enough to move the plot forward even with relatively little pressure, but nobody is that used to science fiction plots yet. The noose is a crisp and looming deadline to force them forward.

Nooses should have a concrete time span and failing to deal with them is the lose state. Players might be able to push nooses back, but they can't ever reduce the noose's effect. The noose is all-or-nothing, high-stakes. The situation may also get worse as the noose approaches, but the noose is specifically the looming deadline.

Noose examples include: the disease will kill everyone on the planet in 2 days. The Klingons will declare war in a month if you don't find their lost ship. The vote happens tomorrow and the majority of the senators are planning to vote "no". The space wedgie will cause life support to fail in six hours.

Personal Mire
My planned gameplay revolves around people, and therefore the NPCs need to be the terrain of the game - half like a dungeon map, half like a monster fight. To make this easy for the GM to plan out without needing a ton of advance work, I recommend "constellations" of NPCs - groups of NPCs that are related to each other around a specific topic.

For example, the "impending new order" constellation would feature characters from the old guard and the new order and some conflicted bystanders, and their relationships would be clear. You could leave most of the characters in the wings until you need them, not bothering to create any details until you need them to play a role.

The idea is that any given NPC would belong to two or more of these constellations, and their motivations would intertwine. This adds some complexity to the things the players do, and create some nice terrain for them to be wary of. It also creates a lot of hooks that are easy to turn into complications, twists, and major NPCs.

Complications
Normally, solving the noose is pretty straightforward. If there's a disease, you need to research the cure. If there's a lost ship, you need to track the warp trail. If there's a vote, you need to convince people to vote your way.

Complications are what make the situation a lot more difficult - they are reason that the actions that should solve the situation either can't be performed or produce a bad result.

Complications usually give the noose emotional resonance, and should generally be themed to give a strong, unified feeling.

For example, the disease turns out to be a nasty engineered bioweapon, which makes curing it much more difficult. The next complication might be that the weapon was created by the locals, and they don't want that revealed and certainly don't want to help you fix it. The next complication might be that the creators died of the disease and can't help. These complications are loosely themed - they're about plans going awry, smaller evils blooming into larger ones.

Other Examples: The Klingon ship was kidnapped by a space godling. The senators you need to convince are stranded on an ice planet. The space wedgie is making time judder backwards and forwards randomly.

Twists
A twist simply changes the lose state. It either replaces the noose with a new noose, or it reverses the noose so that your efforts have been working against you, or it makes everything you've done feel very different now that it's over.

Examples: the vote needs to fail to keep their society stable. The "missing" Klingon ship is an ambush. The space wedgie was trying to protect you from a warp core breech.

Twists don't need to be clever. This is not about creating clever plot lines - it's about creating meaty plot lines. The twist either adds more meat, or makes the meat you already ate taste funny.

B-plots
The B-plot is actually an integral part of science fiction plots, although it may not be immediately obvious. See, the function of the B-plot is to create emotional resonance with the primary plot.

Most science fiction primary plots are about something big - a starship, a disease, a political movement. But in the end, the plots are an excuse to show how people live and act in those situations. The B-plot is the easiest way to lure the players into that kind of close emotional connection.

The B-plot is often "unrelated" to the main plot, at least in terms of causality. However, it reflects the human judgments and lives of the main plot. So, your B-plots should shadow your complications and twists. Since your complications and twists should be loosely themed, the B-plot will likely match many of them at the same time, and offer a human window into a world of big things going wrong.

Typically a B-plot is introduced before the first complication - often before the noose. It exists first even though it is an echo or window onto those larger events.

For example, if the vote is being screwed up because the senators are stranded on an ice planet, you'll start off with a B-plot that plays with that. Perhaps it's about planning a vacation, or the life support going on the fritz, or being unable to get off the ship, or having family visiting.

If the twist is that the lost Klingon warbird is actually waiting in ambush, the B-plot might be about your Klingon crewmember being proud of his culture's obsession with honorable combat, or it might be about an officer training test where everyone dies in an ambush: the Koboyashi Maru sequence. B-plots don't have to be clever or hard to connect.

However, B-plots do have to offer some meat. Think of them as a sequence that doesn't require the GM: when the GM is busy with a particular player, this is something the other players gnaw on.

Therefore, the B-plots should be things where the players can spend some time expressing themselves or their characters, and should involve some die rolling or content that A) doesn't require the GM and B) dictates how things go for them.

For example, the Koboyashi Maru B-plot. It isn't just a line you feed them. You say "this is an officer test." You walk them through it once or twice. But there's a table of results - if your leadership is this, this happens in the first segment. Roll weapons fire, check to see what happens in the second segment, and so on.

A concrete reference as to what can happen lets the players compare their performances to each other, and makes it easy for the GM to give various bonuses or penalties according to their efforts without having to spend a lot of time thinking up new things.

In another example, if the B-plot is that someone's family is visiting the ship and being annoying, assign a family member to every other player. Now whoever is free can be an annoying family member to anyone else who's free. Moreover, you can also get incidental synergy - if the same player is playing the goofy father and the lead starship engineer, then the goofy dad and the engineer get along oddly well. That's fine.

The whole point is to offload the content creation to the players. You need to seed it, of course - tables, NPC character sheets, whatever else is needed. But then the players run with it, try it in different permutations and different places. This lets them control the pace of the play rather than dumping it all on you, and is similar to how fantasy players might mull over what powers to buy on next level-up.

B-plot participation should be worth XP and/or in-game resources. The people who do best at Koboyashi Maru get a commendation point, for example.





Anyway, those are my thoughts.