Monster Design

Having fun playing around with my tempo-based game touched on in the last post.

You really get a completely different feel for monsters depending on the system you use. A lot of people design monsters "in generic" - for "any system". Or, more or less equivalently, they design monsters for a standard combat system (d20-ish).

But if you have a different set-up, you can have very different monsters.

For example, take the humble zombie. Talking about "rrrrrhhhh..." slow zombies, not one of the scarier fast ones we see these days.

In a generic combat system, you'd design a zombie by saying something like "low speed, high health... takes half damage from bladed weapons... let's give it a chance to bite on a successful attack..."

In my tempo game, a zombie is more of a dangerous puzzle piece than a simple enemy. This makes sense, as that's the role slow zombies play in most non-tabletop-RPG settings. They're a horde you have to struggle with.

At tempos 1-4, the zombie cannot attack, only shamble, which increases the tempo as they close in. At tempo 5, the zombie can attack. Although their attacks aren't hugely powerful, zombies have a few advantages. First, if they attack someone who has already taken their turn, they get an extra die on their attack. Second, if the target has already been attacked by a zombie, they gain another die. Third, if they choose a zombie to go next, that zombie gains an extra +1 on their attack. This stacks.

So if there are 5 zombies and they all go in a row, the last zombie has +4 to attack and, if the players have taken their turns, perhaps two extra dice. This makes him very dangerous.

This means the players have to take a couple of precautions. Against small numbers of zombies, you want to try and keep the tempo low. The zombies will raise the tempo, but they can't actually attack except on tempo 5. So if there are five zombies and you pass them the baton at tempo 1, only the very last zombie will actually get to attack. The other four will have to spend their turns closing in. (In a cinematic shot, this would be the players jumping when they see a zombie, and backing into another zombie.)

The edge of the turn is also critical. Players will generally want to let the zombies go at the beginning of the turn, to avoid the die bonuses. This means wrangling to be ready to give them control at the beginning of the turn.

If there are a lot of zombies or the players don't want to maintain a low tempo, they'll need to be sure to break the zombie attack chain. This can be done in a variety of ways. A tempo trap can grab you a turn as the zombies reach a certain tempo, but since the danger is in them staying at tempo 5 very long, counters are a better option. Take your turn when they attack you, and even if you give the baton right back to them, their bonuses are lost.

Zombies don't have very high health in this game. It's not a prolonged assault by N zombies. Instead, it's a matter of killing them off fast enough to survive (often with a continuing flood of incoming zombies). So attacks which hit multiple enemies or allow you to take another attack after killing an enemy are great in this situation.

The whole point of the tempo system is not to lock the players into a specific role, and this is a good example of what I mean. In this situation, none of the players are required to play striker or healer or buffer or anything. Instead, the focus is on taking actions while not screwing up the tactical situation. All the players will want to contribute by keeping the tempo low, which limits their tactical options but doesn't write any of them out of the combat.

For example, a rogue wouldn't rush in and perform his close attacks, because those are high-tempo attacks. Instead, the rogue would hang back and use a pistol or maneuvering abilities, since those keep the tempo low. The rogue is still perfectly useful, he just has to focus on one side of his character rather than the other.

Zombies are just one example. Virtually every enemy can be made into an interesting tactical situation. Combining enemies into packs is also very interesting - and sometimes actually less dangerous.

Zombies act to raise tempo and cannot do anything at low tempos. But ghost-class enemies like banshees lower tempo and (in the case of a banshee) perform best at low tempos. So if you combine them into a pack of zombies-and-banshees, their tempo control conflicts and they trip over each other, tactically speaking.

This can even be done by including NPC ally effects, such as fire support from a nearby city, or a holy blessing that does nothing but spend its turn gently healing a small amount of health while lowering the tempo.

And all of it is a steady learning curve. You don't just jump in with summons and tempo traps and complexity. You jump in with zombies. You begin to understand as you play, instead of having to have someone around to go "wait, you need to take your half step like this so you get a +1 next round when I do this..."

You grow into that complexity.

That's sort of what I'm thinking.

Tempo and Initiative

I've been throwing around some basic tabletop RPG rule ideas in different settings and with different parameters, and I'm starting to settle on an approach.

I'm really enchanted by the idea of each person choosing who goes next in the initiative lineup. IE, everyone gets one turn per round, but whoever is going now gets to choose who goes next from those that haven't yet gone.

I think this is one of the most brilliant mechanics to come up this century. However, to make it interesting, you need to make turn order matter in a more complex way than "earlier is better".

I've tried a few ways to do this, but I think the ideal method is to have a shared value that can be pumped. Lemme 'splain.


In this game, there is a concept of "battle tempo". Each battle's tempo ranges from 1 to 5, as marked by chits in the center of the table. At tempo 1, most of the combatants are at moderate ranges and combat is marked by deliberate and measured attacks. At tempo 5, the combatants are embroiled in a frenzied, zero-range melee.

Every player's actions are separated into those that raise tempo, those that lower tempo, and those that require a specific tempo. The classes are all close-combat classes, but they accomplish these things in very different ways.

For example, at tempo 5, a rogue's extreme short-range speed makes their melee attacks brutal and their defenses quite good. At tempo 1, rogues use maneuvering, stealth, and thrown weapons/pistols. But rogues need to be careful in the middle tempos, because they aren't close enough to get inside the enemy's range and aren't far enough away to have room to maneuver.

On the other hand, consider a knight. She doesn't have any additional passive defenses - she doesn't take less damage or have more health. But she has a number of active defenses. For example, she can "press" with her shield, closing range and forcing an enemy to target her at a significant disadvantage. This is a good way to raise the tempo (by closing) without actually using an attack.

This means that the knight might act at tempo 4 with a press, drawing the attention of a ghoul and raising the tempo to 5. Then the knight might pass the turn on to the rogue - since it's at tempo 5, the rogue attacks the distracted ghoul (or another enemy) with perfect speed and high defense.

On the other hand, if it's at tempo 3, the knight might do the same, but pass the turn to the ghoul. The ghoul, forced to target her, attacks and does little. This increases the tempo to 5, and the ghoul is forced to pass their turn to the rogue, since there are no other people left this round.

I think this has a lot of potential, especially in the world I've designed for it. Most enemies fall into one of two categories in my world: ghosts (which reduce tempo when they act) and ghouls (which increase tempo when they act). Since you can rely on the enemy to move tempo in a specific direction (and have specific abilities at specific tempos), you can actually pass turns to them with the knowledge that they will give you your turn back at a higher or lower tempo, useful for your plans...

Fight

I had a bit of a chat and a bit of an essay and thought about it, and I realized something:

Nobody likes playing the support characters.

Nobody picks endurance if they have a choice. Speed, range, stealth - anything but a tank! Similarly, nobody wants to play a healer. I mean, sure, if the party needs one, you'll take it for the team's sake. But nobody goes "wooo! Stand around and get hit!"

Both tanks and healers are support roles. In oldschool games, tanks were combined with offensive capabilities that made them acceptable ("warrior"), but that's steadily been eclipsed by the concepts of strikers and glass cannons. The classic D&D "cleric" was a combination of both support roles - boring healing combined with boring damage-sponging.

If we dissect party combat roles, we can see that most party combat games have a few specific tactical concerns.

1) Dealing damage. Often, there are multiple types of damage, or damage of varying focus. So you can have a lot of different "damage-focused" classes that are all unique.

2) Tactical manipulation. The most obvious is the tank, who draws the enemy fire, since he's so much better able to survive it. However, there are plenty of others, such as the rogue that gets free movement, or the skirmisher who gets a second attack if his first kills an enemy, or even just someone who can dominate turn order.

3) Statistical manipulation. The obvious example is a healer. However, boosts and hexes of all kinds apply - berserkers, mage armor spells, leadership bonuses... these are most common in MMORPGs, but have migrated into all sorts of other games.

My hypothesis is that tanks and healers are not boring because of their role: they are boring because they are a boring version of that role.

In most games, the classes are split into a few simple categories. Tank, striker, support. A lot of effort is put into making tank and support interesting to play, but there's an easy way around that issue: don't have them. Come up with new roles. Roles that are all interesting right from the start.

So, fun challenge: can we create a tabletop RPG where the character classes don't specialize in any of those three groups? Where all the classes have all three kinds of utility? But, of course, all the classes still have to feel different and interesting and mesh well in combat.

I think one key would be in allowing the players to migrate between tactical roles on the fly. So Anna and Barry might be dealing damage, while Jacob and Kelvin are doing tactical manipulation. Of course, these aren't the same at all: Anna is burning stats to deal out massive damage to one target, while Barry is providing baseline disruptive damage against the mooks. Jacob is drawing enemy fire while Kelvin is popping the initiative stack so that the enemies can't get their team attacks working.

And they all have the same base amount of HP and armor.

Hmmmm.

Exploratory Games

I'm reading a few threads about the new Mage setting (the only White Wolf setting I liked). A lot of people seem to dislike it because the new mage traditions don't have the same "bite" to them. They're all carefully explained in detail, but they don't have the same pull as the original traditions. Which were basically real-world stereotypes.

I can't speak to this personally - I haven't read the new Mage setting at all. But I can say that the original traditions were opportunities to explore facets of belief that you normally wouldn't have much chance to explore. Sure, I had an unreasonable love for the Sons of Ether. It let me explore the nature of mad science and the line between genius and insanity. It was interesting, when I was college-age.

But other players preferred other traditions. They had other things they wanted to explore, like the relationship between death and life, or the nature of truth. And the original traditions were set up to allow that.

This was the one thing White Wolf did well. Their rules were shit, their writing was stuffy and stilted, but they built factions which allowed every player to explore the part of humanity they felt like exploring. In all their systems, that was the real focus. That was why you would pick Malkavian, or whatever - you felt like exploring that facet of humanity.

I'd like to talk about this concept a bit more.

It's commonly understood that science fiction is actually highlighting the time it was written. So we get Metropolis (1927) which was about factories and unions. And we get The Matrix, which was about the internet. And we get District 9, which was about faltering socioeconomic structures... these things were commentary on their time. And they packed a punch because of it.

Sometimes you get something like Ghost in the Shell, which is a bit more visionary. But, by and large, science fiction is about pulling out the thorns that are poking us today and holding them up to the light.

This is very similar to what mage traditions allowed you to do. Essentially, roll-your-own science fiction. Minus the science.

So it got me thinking.

One of the things I do when I design a game is I try to make sure it highlights a nugget of human condition. I want every game to have, at its core, something with a feel to it. Like looking across an expanse of gray-tone rules and seeing a bright red or blue blotch. Nothing explicit, just something that the players will automatically incorporate into their game without even realizing it.

This is very similar to what White Wolf used to do.

You can't do it quite as aggressively as science fiction can. You can't do a District 9 or Ghost in the Shell game. Well, you can, but you'd have to be very, very careful, because the thing they want to say is mired in the actions characters happen to take.

To make it a proper game, you'd have to pull those things out of the realm of scripted interactions and into the realm of incentives. You can't simply have bad guys that pound on the idea that humans are not as inviolable as they think. You need to have the players participate in that same conversation.

For example, Solid State Society has a conspiracy where a gifted hacker works with the elderly to forcibly adopt abused children, wipe their memory, and replace those memories with happier memories involving their new grandma or grandpa. The ideas explored with this plot are complex and there is no simple answer, no simple right or wrong. It's a fairly compelling bit of science fiction.

But it's not a very compelling RPG setting. The whole thing is plot, is script. You can't just port it over.

Instead, you need to create a rule set or setting where the same kind of philosophical explorations can be made by the players. Don't force them to do it... just allow them to do it.

And that's where the difficulty comes. How do you design such a thing? Is it possible to design such a thing on purpose?

Well, it doesn't have to be a masterpiece. None of White Wolf's games were masterpieces - in fact, they were all total shit. But they have that kernel of depth to them - they let the player explore a part of humanity. Whatever part is currently poking their mind. So they are rightfully popular.

You could do the same thing with a Ghost in the Shell game. Allow the players to pick memory manipulation as a skill. And if they go crazy with power, fine - that's part of the game. That's part of exploring what it all means.

Hm!

Heroes that Build

I've always wondered about tabletop games where the heroes are actually constructive forces. Normally, heroes are surgeons. They help by murdering large numbers of unhelpful things. They help by destroying. Well, at least surgeons stitch you up afterwards - so heroes are not even that nice.

Many of the games I've run featured the players in constructive roles as well. For example, having to build a base in addition to simply killing orcs, or having to make major policy decisions since they are considered arbiters of the Jedi order or whatever. It's fun to create, to alter without destroying. Here are some of the things I've learned and want to try more of.

1) Classic means of determining alignment mean very different things in a game where construction, socializing, and policy are major elements. Even if the game still features a lot of combat, the whole alignment scaffold is based entirely around the idea of fire-and-forget activities.

You need to expand that to focus on ongoing tasks instead. For example, you might have an architect alignment, where the hero wants to build the solution. Or a leader alignment, where the hero wants to guide the solution but has better things to do with his time than get his hands dirty. There are many ways to do this, and some systems have done some things along these lines, but it's good to make it explicit and focused on the game world you're creating.

You can go without this kind of scaffold, but the reason I call it a scaffold is because it is one. It gives the players something to stand on until they build their presence in the world. So I am generally in favor of some kind of alignment/personality scaffold.

2) Balance between classes and characters can get difficult. Characters that are better at different kinds of challenges mean you tend to have one or two active players and the rest are sitting on their asses. That's not a good way to run a tabletop - it's the Shadowrun Difficulty.

You have to build your world such that the constructive challenges work in much the same way as combat. That is, there are many roles, but everyone is always engaged. You can even borrow the framework completely if you're feeling uncreative, just port it over wholesale.

Some people might instinctively back away from this kind of rule scaffold, thinking it limits the player's options. However, it serves the same purpose as a combat resolution mechanic does.It's no limit on role playing things, it's just a way to rapidly and interestingly deploy against varied challenges in the same way as when you would decide to take on those orcs.

3) Constructive play gets world-heavy. You end up with huge amounts of stuff accomplished. In an ordinary tabletop RPG, only a tiny fraction of the people you interact with ever come up again. In fact, you end up killing most of them, if you include monsters as people. But in a constructive game, you're actively building things, and that means you get more and more people, places, and history building up.

To keep this light and fun, you need a system for recording and referencing the world-building. I usually used cue cards with the character (or thing) drawn on one side and notes taken on the other. That works relatively well.

It means a lot when someone your players helped shows up to help them, or even if player character downtime is spent hanging out with people you rescued. Players can really get a feel for the fact that they helped build this world. They really feel heroic, on a level that +500 XP and a cache of gold doesn't convey.

Cross-pollination and Spaceships!

So, I was thinking about a spaceship game. I started thinking - instead of abandoning ships as you buy your way up the line, how about if you could just replace large chunks of it? There's never a feeling of abandoning the ship for something bigger - you're just growing the ship incrementally. A new saucer section, a new spine, a new crew frame, etc.

Then I realized this was essentially the same as a party-based RPG. The various big hunks of ship are party members, and the tweaking you do within each section is similar to equipping and skill-leveling.

So I began to think about cross-pollination. What mechanics could be taken from each side to create a fresh feel for the other side?

The first thing I thought of is that a starship's pieces do not act independently. Normally, you control all the pieces with a central command system that either simply assumes each system performs at peak or allows you to distribute points of energy between them.

Imagine if you had a party-based RPG - let's say, one where the party members are AI-controlled. Like Mass Effect, minus Shepard. Imagine if you had some measure of energy. Call it "command points" or "point points". Assigning these on the fly changes which characters take the lead, which characters use special abilities and limited resources, and so on. (You could also do this in a classic JRPG game, but it would be a bit clunkier.)

The idea is that you don't have a lot of time to give orders. There's no pausing. You can indicate locations (an attack flag, a retreat flag, etc) and alter the command point configuration, but the battle itself progresses quite fast, so choosing individual skills and aiming them would be too slow.

One of the big effects this would have is that the party members could be much more specialized. In fact, you could have much larger parties with much more specialized participants. The space elf doesn't charge forward when you give him command points - he heals and buffs. He takes potshots at low command levels, but if you want a charge, give the command points to the space orc.

Taking the party as a cohesive unit could be interesting.

Going the other way, the ship can also take on elements of the party mechanic system. In the bluntest way imaginable, you could just give each section of the ship its own commands in each turn of combat. If you do this, then each part of the ship has to have a diverse baseline of capability plus some specialties. This would be an interesting challenge from a design standpoint, but it could end up being even more interesting than as a party mechanic because a ship has crew. You could funnel crew between the various sections to enhance their capabilities, boost their repair rate, or avoid losing too many crew to a nasty missile volley.

Speaking of damage, what if we applied ship-style damage to RPGs?

Right now, RPGs basically ignore damage. If you're above 0 health, you're fine. But what if we introduced damage - if a character is wounded, they become less capable, at least until they patch themselves up.

The problem with this approach is that it is a positive feedback situation, where once you start getting damaged, you're in trouble. But we could balance this out by making all the characters gain energy (not health) when a character is damaged. This means that the other characters would be able to act at a much higher level when their teammates are injured. Depending on balancing, this could even mean that the party getting injured actually makes the team stronger, at least for this fight.

Of course, once you're out of combat, that adrenaline wears off and you're still injured. Now you've got to think about whether you can just bull through, or whether you need to back off, stealth a bit, recover a bit. Switch out the injured party member with a reserve...

Hm!

Cross-pollination is fun.

The Nature of a Stage

Let's talk about stages in a video game.

Let's start by talking about the difference between an old game and a new game. The most obvious difference is that in a modern game, you're generally regenerated 100% after each fight.

This difference is not as straightforward as you might think, but it is a good place to start.

If we imagine the power level of the party as it fights through a stage, in a modern game the curve goes up. The party gets stronger as they move through the stage, with occasional dips for minibosses and heavyweight encounters.

If we imagine the power level of the party in an oldschool game like Doom or Final Fantasy 1, it goes down. Occasionally it might pop up a bit if you find a resource cache, but in general the encounters wear on you.

This difference... is unfortunately not entirely straightforward. For example, in Final Fantasy 1, you actually are gaining power as you fight enemies. It's just that you're gaining long-term power while losing short-term power. This is a typical RPG situation.

So let's consider stages in a slightly different light: as treadmills or one-offs.

Treadmill stages are stages that can be farmed. For example, in an RPG you might exit a dungeon and re-enter it to farm the enemies. Or you might just get into umpteen million random encounters. This grinding is very much like an MMORPG - the stages are not really part of the plot, they're just parts of the world that maybe have some handwave towards being part of the plot.

It doesn't matter whether your power level goes up or down as you get into fights in a treadmill stage. Instead, what matters is how much time you spend to raise your long-term power level, and how unique/useful your level-ups (equipment, loot, etc) are.

One-off stages are stages that you can only visit once. If they are part of the world, once you've gone through them they are typically husks without any particular challenges. The point of a one-off stage is to squeeze as much out of them as possible in the limited amount of time you have with them.

Nearly all shooters are like this - you want to find the various caches and secret collectibles scattered throughout the stage, and you only get to go through the stage once. FTL has an interesting take, where you have to plot the least efficient path through the sector you can, while still not getting caught by the marching wall of death that moves ever right.

One-offs can also squeeze in the opposite direction, where you need to get through and hit the objectives while losing as few resources as possible. This is exceptionally rare outside of survival horror, but it is possible.

There are a few other pieces to designing a stage. So, let's hit them quick.

1) Is this a one-off stage or a treadmill stage? If a one-off stage, the stage can be built to have a progression (pieces of it explode, collapse, etc) while if it is a treadmill stage it has to remain relatively static.

2) Is the stage the challenge, or is the stage where you prepare to meet a final challenge? You don't actually need a boss if the stage itself is the challenge.

3) Is the stage window dressing, or does the aesthetic/conceit of the stage actually influence the nature of the stage's challenges and progressions?

4) Are the encounters bite-size servings or are they part of an ongoing challenge? If they are part of a cohesive challenge, they need to have long-lasting effects.

5) Is the stage progression interesting enough that the player cares? This is both the variety of the challenges and the way the plot unfolds.

6) Can the player interact with the stage itself, or is the stage just rails the player travels down? This means - can the player express himself by interacting with the stage? Not can he open doors or flush toilets, but can he actually change the way the stage plays out some? This can be taking alternate approaches (sniping from the rafters vs rushing in) or in altering the stage itself (using rockets to blow away walls like in XCOM).

There we go. Next time, we'll talk about party composition!