Death and the PC

So, this reminded me about the concept of death in games.

Death is, like turn-based combat, a relic. It's inherited from the wargame era, just like turn-based combat. Everything is simple when it boils down to death: if you die, you have lost. Otherwise, you've won.

Obviously, we've gotten more nuanced and complex. Nowadays, most combats in a game are not threatening death. They're threatening resource damage. You get fewer rewards, or have fewer hit points, or use up some of your spells, or whatever. Typically, only bosses and other major combats threaten death these days, and even then many GMs will bend over backwards to avoid it. Video games similarly reduce death to a bare slap on the wrist - death as a major punishment just doesn't happen much any more.

Some people say that this is because games and GMs aren't "hardcore" enough. I say it's because death in combat is a stupid concept. It's a binary pass/fail. There are certainly games where death should be a problem, but most games would benefit from carefully considering whether death is even something that should pop up, let alone as a primary threat that pops up multiple times a session.

Not every game has to be about death. In fact, not even combat-heavy adventure games have to be centered around avoiding death. There are many alternatives that allow you to play completely different kinds of games that carry completely different messages within their mechanics and allow completely different stories to emerge.

For example, the article I linked up top is about a wacky game. By saying that you can't die, and instead things just get worse, they allow for the players to do crazy stupid stuff instead of sticking to sensible actions. And I think that's great. It's one example of how you can do a game where win/loss is not so... binary. After all, the point of challenges in a role playing game isn't simply to win, but to play a role while facing the challenge. If you "lose" because that's what your character would have done, isn't that a win?

I think the concept of turns and death are both things deeply rooted in wargaming culture, where victory is statistical. One of the most interesting things you can do when designing a game is try to throw them away. You don't have to center your games around combat, either: there are plenty of interesting games hidden in the less testosterony parts of our lives.

For example, you could make a game about high school friendships, romances, and coming-of-age issues. You could do a lot of fun, complex rules and build deep, interesting narratives... even though combat and death are unlikely to be mechanical threats.

Fundamentally, you can create a role playing game around any sort of situation where people are being people and there is some kind of conflict. You could make a game about small businesses striving to resurrect a local community. You could make a game about adding content to an on-line video game. You could make a game about dance-offs. Or cooking. Or being weather gods. Or fashion.

The complex mechanics of combat serve primarily as a scaffold to make players comfortable at playing their roles within the game. Traversing the scaffold builds investment, interconnections, memories... it helps to create the character, and to make the player comfortable in being that character.

But any scaffold of similar complexity can do that, and noncombat scaffolds can lead to radically different stories emerging.

Judge!

I think the next big social innovation will be leveraging individual judgment.

Last time I mentioned this, somebody spent two paragraphs calling me nasty names. But I'm talking about a fundamental shift in how we participate in the world. Our citizenship within the world.

There's only so much we can do on our own. Right now, we're in a phase where we're learning to communicate things to each other on a grand scale. There's no way I could personally discover all the things in my social media streams - even if I spent all my time sifting through the internet, I'd never find a tenth of the brilliant things that the 1000+ people I listen to have collectively found. I don't spend all my time sifting through the internet, but I still see all these things, because I have 1000+ sets of carefully chosen eyes happy to share what they have seen.

And, of course, I share what comes to me when I think it is vaguely interesting. It makes me a decent citizen of the network.

But this - sharing input rapidly and easily - can only stretch so far. Already, the vast majority of the content that gets shared with me flits by before I even see it. The highly concentrated stream of brilliant observations is too much. Just this tiny corner of the internet has too many people seeing and saying too many interesting things. It is physically impossible for me to keep up.

And it shouldn't be necessary. There's no reason for one human to try and contain the whole internet. The point isn't to be superman, the point is to be a good citizen.

Right now, being a good citizen involves adding new finds and, equally important, sharing good finds someone else found to amplify them so that people like me are more likely to see them. I admit I find reshares to be as irritating as they are useful, but they are a critical part of the network "thinking". Reshares are like neurons firing, amplifying and processing an important bit of input.

It's only a very minor step to automate this. The only real barrier is that humans like to think they are in charge of every bit of data they see see. We aren't, we never were, and if we accept that, we can think about using other people's judgments much more fluidly.

There are two easy examples of what I mean.

The first is this: I'm walking to work. I get in line at a coffee shop. I get a ping from a stranger. They ask me to buy them a coffee and a scone, and they'll meet me a bit further along my path and pay me for them.

This is basically impossible right now. It'd be really tough to coordinate that even with friends. And, thinking about it as a person living in today's world, you wouldn't just buy a stranger coffee and scones, not unless you were aggressively hitting on them. But... in a world where human judgment is shared fluidly, I would have no trouble with it. I would know the stranger could be trusted to pay me, and I would be fine with it.

The second example is this: I want to get lots of cool music and science in my mailbox. But I admit I just don't get excited viewing music and science projects on hubs like Indiegogo. There's a flood of them, and very few of them catch my eye, and after sifting through them for half an hour I feel burned out and tired.

It would be nice if I could set up a "bid match" system, where I could attach myself to someone who actually loves looking at those kinds of projects. If they donate, I get an email with a big green button that says "MATCH DONATION!"

This really isn't about being lazy. It's about participating fluidly in a network of humans and machines. The two easy examples are easy examples, but if you dig even an inch deeper you can see how this could radically change the way human society works. It allows humans to leverage themselves and each other so much more fluidly and easily.

Was there a disaster? Imagine how quickly and fluidly everyone could respond if everyone could see what everyone else was saying. "This way clear", "Need sand bags!", "Stuck on roof! Help!"

Or just a personal disaster? We're already seeing the rise of the "the friend of a friend I follow on Tumblr has cancer and..." fund. This makes it faster and easier. Yeah, I imagine there are more people with cancer than there are friendly strangers willing to help pay. But when that becomes clear, it will become undeniably obvious that the health care system needs an overhaul.

How about not a disaster? Just a flash crowd? Getting together to play games in the park.

Skill support? Danielle has a new company that needs a web site, and is willing to pay X or stocks or whatever. Things like Monster don't hold a candle to hearing, from a friend, that somebody they trust could use twenty hours of your help. Someone researching zebrafish? You have a friend of a friend who knows everything about zebrafish.

This will be the next big social revolution. Fluid networked judgments.

Tabletop Design

I've been thinking about mechanics.

For example, tabletop games. Most tabletop games use a descendant of the wargame rule sets - turn-based combat-heavy rules. Even the ones which have simultaneous turns are usually still turn-based. I've talked about this in some detail before.

Rather than simply thinking about other kind of rules, it's worth thinking more about these time-tested paints we've all used a thousand times. The fundamental mechanics of nearly every tabletop game are the same, but they have very different feels depending on how things are weighted and, of course, the kind of world you've set it in. Ideally, the world and the rules should support each other perfectly.

Sometimes, a world is born out of a fascinating rule. But, more often the rules are built to support a fascinating world. And that's easiest to do when you are working within a scaffold: a painter does not invent a new paint for every canvas. Instead, they master painting and use whatever paints serve the work.

With that in mind, it's worth examining the various "paints" we might use to support worlds we have invented, stories we want the players to tell. I don't even think they have to be described in detail - if I did, they would require a post each. But we'll go over them briefly.

The battle rules are, in most cases, the heart of the game. There's actually a few paints hidden here.

One is the amount of time each battle takes, both in terms of turns, and in terms of how much real time the players spend per turn. Generally, battles with fewer turns tend to focus more on proven fundamentals, so characters in those games tend to have to choose between unlimited basic techniques and limited high-power techniques, and that's the fundamental point of combat. Battles with more turns tend to play more tactically, letting the players experiment and play with long-term effects. These basics are usually true even if you're using a miniatures map.

Of course, systems with battles that take more time tend to also focus more on battling. It may be that shorter battles are better simply because you want to spend more time on other things.

Battles can vary in terms of information inequality. Some systems, every decision you make is in full awareness of the outcome. Other systems, the players are desperately slogging through a statistical fog. This can be from things like simultaneous turns, but it can also be from simple randomness such as having to roll to hit.

Lethality matters, of course. Generally the players are always going to be quite lethal. The question is whether the enemies are going to be lethal. A lot of systems, the players are expected to win every battle pretty handily. These systems tend to have a lot of statistical fallbacks and make up for it by having epic boss battles. Other systems, every battle is a desperate struggle that could go badly for one or more players.

Another factor worth considering is how much your combat "mixes" with the rest of your game world. Some games pull stuff from the outside world into combat, allowing players to plan things out such as planting explosives, messing with the guard's communicators, using giant cranes to crush the dragon, etc.

However, in most situations it goes the other way. The consideration is how much attrition you put into each battle. Attrition is not simply how difficult it is to recover hit points, but also how many resources in general you must expend during a fight. If you have a "short battle" system your characters will typically expend a lot of limited-shot abilities. The reigning systems of the day don't much like attrition, so it's usually pretty easy to recover wasted abilities.

Moving steadily out of the path of battles, you run into the idea stats and stat progression.

The more complex your stat system is, the more meat the players have to chew on. More complicated stat systems are suitable for longer games with more experienced players, while simpler systems are more suited to pick-up games and newbies. Some people prefer simpler stats as a matter of preference, but I find they don't offer enough traction for longer games with experienced players.

Stat progression and customization is also critical. The two basic methods are equipment and level-ups. The more complicated and branching the options are for these, the more meat there is to chew. Generally, games match statistical complexity and augment complexity.

As we get further from battle again, we start to enter the noncombat mechanics. The biggest choice here is where the blending happens between rules and role play. For example, most games have social skills such as fast talk, intimidate, and so on. However, in practice the players role play social situations as much as possible before turning to a skill roll. Similarly, they may have stealth, or mapping, or so on, but in general most players appreciate the GM explaining what they see and letting them approach it from a role-play perspective instead of rolling for everything.

Some games mix it more freely, such as giving the players slightly nebulous advantages if they call on various traits. Some games create a more complex rule set and draw the line more crisply. It depends on the approach you're going for. Some games have a lot of skill stuff, especially if they are set in the future and have things like piloting, hacking, repair, market research, etc. Fantasy games tend to have noncombat situations that can be resolved primarily by role play. Creating a complex skill framework for a fantasy game can result in a really complex framework that ends up not mattering very much.

There are some other "paints", but they are more tightly integrated with world design. For example, can your heroes retreat safely from extended conflicts? Can they rest safely in the wilderness and recover their spent energy? Can they rely on magical solutions, help from strong authority figures, and so on?

These decisions sound more like world design than rule design, but in truth the boundary is pretty blurry. If you can convince a god to come down and handle the dragon, then that's going to effect your battle plans as much as if you have to expend resources every time you fight.

Anyway, I think that's most of the paints you might use. If you have any thoughts, I'm interested to hear them.

Turn-Based RPG

I was thinking about computer games where you control a party of heroes.

One of the things I always felt was difficult about these systems is balancing status effects. Status effects always felt extraordinarily irritating to me. All of them. I've never seen a status effect I thought made the game more interesting, with the exception of reflect.

The core problem with status effects is that they are essentially time fees. They force you to spend precious actions fixing them. There's not much difference between being turned to stone, blinded, stunned, paralyzed, KOed, killed, berserked, charmed, confused, muted, toaded, etc. If they have any effect at all, they basically make that character useless until you spend time fixing that character. So they "drain" your action time until you "spend" some action time to fix them.

Sure, they vary in details. They can be healed in various ways, and some are "high-functioning" states (such as berserking a warrior), but the details don't really make them feel interesting to me. When I run into a status-effecting enemy, the basic thought is "how fucking irritating. I'm going to spend half this battle treating status effects rather than fighting."

So... how can you make a status-effect-ridden RPG interesting?

Change how time works!

Every phase (no turns, just phases) you can command only one hero to take an action. This uses up all her action points. The more action points she has, the more powerful her attacks are (and perhaps the more high-level attacks open up).

Every phase, every hero gains an action point - two, if they are not available to be commanded due to an enemy-inflicted status effect.

Battles are longer, and multi-phased. Rather than distinct random encounters, you would face an unending trickle of enemies as you explore, push through, and defend positions. Action points carry over throughout this.

So if a character is, say, swallowed by a fifteen-foot slime monster, that character cannot take any actions. But that's not so crippling: you can only make one character take an action per round, anyway. While he's incapacitated, he's gaining action points at twice the normal rate. So when you kill the slime, he's freed and now has a bank of action points that make his next attack ten times as strong as normal.

Of course, you can also do ongoing attacks. The warrior might be told to attack a skeleton knight. It's not just a one-shot attack, but an ongoing fight where damage is dealt every phase. The warrior gains no action points while he does this, but it deals ongoing damage and keeps the skeleton knight busy...

Straightforward and, I think, probably kind of fun.

What's Up With Kickstarter?

Some people I generally respect really hate Kickstarter. They cite all sorts of reasons, such as the fact that less than half the projects get funded (that sounds high) and that only half of them deliver exactly what is promised (that also sounds high). They call it "the new reality TV" and so on.

Firstly, let me be clear. Kickstarter is just the gorilla in this game, not the game itself. There are plenty of other funding platforms that do more or less the same thing, such as Indiegogo, Rockethub, etc. We'll be talking about Kickstarter because everyone is familiar with it.

Second, there is probably a bubble here. Like in the nineties, there was an internet bubble. But when the bubble popped, the internet didn't go away. It just became integrated with everything we did. A technology bubble "popping" isn't the same as, say, a housing bubble or stock market bubble. So even if this bubble pops, it doesn't mean crowdfunding is going away.

Crowdfunding is here to stay because we can now talk to each other at a speed and depth never before imagined in the history of humankind. When the bubble pops, it'll simply be that crowdfunding has become commonplace enough that it's no longer a spectacle.

Which is, I think, the reason many people don't like Kickstarter. They see it as a spectacle.

So, let's talk about the things they hate.

They hate the low delivery rate.

That's valid, but it's also a misunderstanding. This is not a mall. This is not a market. This is not an investment brokerage.

I have chosen to simply accept the low delivery rate, and adjust my donations accordingly. As a patron, you should never have such a stake in a crowdfunded project that you will actually suffer if it falls through. That's foolish.

Some people choose to try to enforce a higher delivery rate. I think this is a misunderstanding. Who would do the enforcement? Who could afford to? The moment you tried to make a host responsible for the project's successful completion, you've raised the bar to the level where nobody could ever be a host. Or, at the very least, only the most slick and corporate projects could be hosted.

The way it'll work out is much the same as in any other marketplace. You have some people who stick to the safer bets, buying from established teams with a good record. Others will sponsor newbies with iffier projects, accepting the higher risk rate. And accepting that they will probably fail.

...

People also hate the chaos and pageantry of Kickstarter.

But the chaos and pageantry that some people are offended by? That's what being young is.

It'll mature. Until then, bitching about how immature the market is sounds like "GET OFFA MY LAWN YOU... oh, wait, yer my grandkids! GET OFFA MY LAWN ANYWAY!"

Gripping Turn Based Combat

Turn based combat bothers me a little. See, it originally evolved for war games. Giant maps in your basement covered in little tanks and fake trees. The whole point was that it allowed you to play a game with waaaay too many moving parts and rules.

Now we see it in many other places. For example, computer RPGs. So we're using a system developed to keep details under control in the absence of a computer... on a computer that can keep details under control anyway. That's the definition of irony, according to a song I once heard.

Today I was also thinking about gamefeel. Turn based systems are usually about choosing which tactic to use. Considering how awesome it feels to take a turn is normally not high on the list of considerations. But what if we were to do just that?

What could we come up with if we wanted to do a sort-of-turn-based combat system while focusing on it being responsive and fun to use?

It's an interesting challenge. The play has to respond to the player's touch sharply and tightly, but you have to have depth and skill involved. The player has to be able to see exactly what is going on, and his actions should become second-nature enough that he does them automatically to express his wishes, rather than having to think about traversing menus.

I'm also arbitrarily writing off the idea of a detailed grid map, mostly because I think the grid map is too tightly linked to our concept of a turn-based game, so using it would limit our creativity.

I think an answer is in the initiative system. I think everything can boil down to initiative. Who gets turns, when. Moreover, how many turn-order phases your action can execute for before being interrupted.

Imagine that every battle's centerpiece was a giant turn order wheel. You could clearly see who gets to go, when. Let's say Anna is fighting two goblins.

Anna sees herself, and she sees the goblins going after four turn-order phases on the wheel. She has a few options, such as "attack". She mouses over attack, and sees an arrow from now forwards in time on the turn wheel, shooting past the goblins and a few ticks further. Simple, right? On the goblin's turn, they do much the same. Press attack, choose a target, watch it resolve, watch the wheel spin.

Well, on her next turn she decides to do "flurry", a more advanced attack. The arrow once again flies forward on the turn wheel, but this arrow is not properly an arrow because it does not end. Instead, every two or three turn-order phases there is a hack mark and it fades out after twenty or so phases to indicate it will continue until the chain is broken. Once she selects this and selects a target, she will automatically attack that target every time there is a hack mark until she is interrupted or her target dies.

Barry is a knight, and he comes in specifically to help her with that. Barry's ability is to intercept attackers. He selects "guard" and then selects her. Now, when an enemy attacks her, Barry is in the way. Moreover, Barry's next turn happens the turn phase after he intercepts an attack, or the turn phase after Anna's ongoing attack stops.

Alternately, Chad might cast his "freeze" spell, which has a long refresh rate but causes a target enemy's turn to be delayed for quite a long time as well. There are plenty of other tactical options - tradeoffs as you manipulate the wheel.

I think this has some merit. It's very clear what is happening, when. There are a lot of fun tactical tradeoffs, and the control is easy and, if properly implemented, crisp and clear.

... Maybe I'll even do a demo of it, if I can drag myself away from the demos I'm already doing.

Fun Magic

Lets talk about magic, especially in computer games.

The core of this essay is that magic is only interesting and useful if the effects are interesting and useful. You can come up with all sorts of zany spells, but if they don't change the game world in an interesting way, the player isn't going to care.

An obvious example of this are JRPGs such as the Final Fantasy series. In these games, the player is normally only able to play adaptively in battle - the exploration phase is typically just a stock map that doesn't change to suit the player's play style. Because of this, the spells are limited to those which are useful in battle or in prep for battle.

Moreover, there's almost always a "best" approach because of the way the battles work. Use a specific element against an enemy weak to that specific element. Use a specific spell when you take a specific amount of damage. Players can express themselves by playing differently, but this usually means "playing suboptimally" and therefore is not a very good way to let players express themselves.

Western RPGs are often more open-world, and therefore the magic often allows you to affect the world in general. The most noticeable times this happened were in the earlier Elder Scrolls games. In the more recent ones, the noncombat spells have been steadily degrading, but you still typically get lock-opening, invisibility, jumping, cause rage, and a number of other spells that have no real in-combat use but are fantastic at all the things outside of combat.

I started thinking about an RPG where you are a mage and there is no combat. Your magic is entirely limited to things which are useful outside of combat. I thought about how you might be able to do that.

In the end, I came up with a number of things you can set up in your game world such that they can be interestingly affected by magic.

1) Adding physics to combat. The difference between ice and fire is not that some enemies are weak to ice and some are weak to fire. The difference is that one encases you in a physical material while the other one causes the status effect "AGH I'M ON FIRE". Using physics in combat normally necessitates real-time combat in some way. A simple and good example of physics in combat is the Valkyrie Profile series, in which (depending on the game) juggling, repeatedly downing, and limb-striking enemies all have very different results.

2) Open world exploration. Do not cement paths, but instead allow the players to roam anywhere they can get the physics to work out. They can get on top of houses, sure - if they can figure out how. That might be a jump spell, or it might be summoning a crate to stand on. However, in these cases your spells that modify player movement should be high-level and not available right away.

3) Destructable/constructable environments. It can make it very hard to enforce a plot or reliably ambush the player, but allowing them to destroy or construct walls, roofs, floors, furniture, etc can really lure players into investing a lot of time in creating delicately polished variations on spells which do just that. So what if there's no balance?

4) Information environments. Embedding information/sensory details into the world can really make the world a lot more interesting. An easy example is a secret door. It's hidden - you can't see it. But once you know about it, the visual changes and you can see it. Another easy example is a locked door. Locking is not actually physics-based, it's just a piece of information which changes the behavior of the door. Allowing these things to be tweaked with magic can give the player endless fun, especially if he can create them and watch other players or NPCs try and figure things out.

More complexly, information environments can designate who owns specific goods or rooms, whether someone has a bounty on their head, hook a trap up to a sensor, create a trail of quest breadcrumbs that lead to the cool treasure, create a complex lever puzzle to get to the cool treasure, create trade agreements between cities, establish a road, create a destiny link between two people... and all of these can be affected by the player if you let it, allowing the player to construct the world on a much deeper level than they normally could.

5) Body physics. This includes projection (moving the camera to another location), possession (changing bodies), polymorphing (changing your body into something else), and so on. However, it also includes sub-body events such as having a wide variety of status effects (wet, painted, sneezing, broken arm) and affecting specific pieces of gear (heating armor until it glows, lighting hair on fire, etc).

6) Linked state modification. An example of this would be if your world was actually a light and dark world overlaid on each other and the player would sometimes switch between them. A fireball in the light world might resolve into a block of ice in the dark world. As the player builds the world they will find a lot of interesting balancing acts going on, especially if they can cast spells to shunt things from one world into another. For example, a fireball followed by shunting the ice from the dark world into the light world for a double-whammy.

Anyway, those are just quick thoughts. The core point is that spells can only be as interesting as the world they inhabit.