Category: Better Gameplay?

Only a year or two after I started GM’ing seriously, I got involved in Interactive Fiction (often abbreviated as “IF”) writing with a cyberpunk adventure game called Orchestra. My crummy setting naming skills and limitations of the platform I was building it on notwithstanding, it received generally positive feedback from the people who came to play it, and the things that players recounted to me really shaped the way that I run my games to this day.

The first, and most pressing, constraint of the digital narrative experience is that it is nigh impossible to account for all the situational variables as your storyline becomes larger and more complex. Creating meaningful opportunities and implementing gamification are major components of this. Tabletop games tend to do a good job with game elements, but I see a lot of GM’s fail to give players good options in character progression.

When writing Orchestra, I found that writing game and narrative blended naturally into one combined process. There was a level of interesting interaction between game elements and narratives; players can work in their own explanation for how things happened and the only thing I had to do was create the basic impetus for a few events.

One of the things that IF does well when mixed with game elements is provide players with a sense of direction; the game elements fill in the gaps that otherwise would go unnoticed due to an inability on most writers’ behalf to actually write specific responses to every possible outcome. Players are able to visualize their avatar in such a way that they tell the story to themselves as it unfolds, and this is very similar to how characters in a tabletop game will build a story and persona around their players’ perceptions.

The obvious thing that this suggests is that these game elements can and should be used to encourage deeper character development.

What does this mean? I’d say that it means that we have to be very careful when evaluating how we plan and run our games; it’s not just the act of writing a story, but encouraging players to use their characters as agents in the story. If we are to reach the largest possible audience, especially along the fringes of the people who currently play tabletop games, at the table it is critical to encourage the idea of the character as an agent in our players, stressing both the ability and constraints that a character has.

Likewise, I’ve found that my players’ favorite experiences come when the rules of the game don’t matter anymore, and they have become entirely immersed in the narrative; even when a character is killed or injured, the presence of a world with limits and opportunities is as important as the ability to execute a list of actions written on a character sheet. Unfortunately, this means that there’s a lot of potential work for a GM, and, as with any planning, stuff can go off the rails quickly, but a lot of this can be mitigated by considering what to plan and how to encourage players to follow paths that their character would take so that they can be satisfied without necessarily operating in a vacuum of direction that makes it difficult to respond to changing events.

The game should grant agency. I’ve always felt that the role of the GM is to work with players to build a story that’s interesting and fun for everyone, but I often see GM’s who just tell stories that the players want to tell or that they want to tell. Using plausible restrictions on players’ characters forces them to think inside the rule of the world, and it actually serves to humanize their characters. This makes it easier for players to connect with the non-player characters and events of the game, and gives them an idea that the universe that the events are taking place in exists as a coherent concept.

When we think of our favorite characters in fiction, almost all of them are constrained in a fairly major way by the world around them; their abilities are used in conjunction with the challenges they face to tell their journey, and as a GM it is possible to give players a memorable and satisfying experience in this way.

I think one of the things that stood out to me most when I applied things I learned writing IF to the tabletop was player perception. If I could align my users’ expectations with my work, or vice versa, they enjoyed the content more. If they expected to be a Bourne-esque supersoldier, I had to include things that allowed them to jump to that conclusion, but when I did they felt like my work was theirs in a vivid and experiential manner.

For comparison, one of the most frustrating experiences I ever had as a gamer was from EA’s reboot of Syndicate during the single player campaign. While the gameplay was actually far better than I expected, I was constantly frustrated by my lack of agency in the story. One of the deadly sins of storytelling is countermanding player expectations. While Kilo stood back and let events unfold, all I wanted to do was to get back into the action, and when major choices in the story came up he almost never wound up aligned with the people that I would have aligned with.

Giving players agency was as simple as learning what their expectations were; giving myself a little insight to the situation let me figure out what players want to do. When I run my games, I try to get an insight on what my players do. The paladin in shining armor will never strike a downed enemy, while the ruthless rogue will always throw in an extra stab for good measure. Because of this, I can plan narrative events that allow players’ characters to show their personality in an environment that responds to them—in the paladin and rogue example, adding a decision point involving incapacitated enemies gives players a chance to make a moral decision that would often be overlooked by staunch adherence to the combat rules of a system.

Engagement is key whenever one designs an entertainment experience. As a writer, I can testify for the fact that something that is boring won’t get read. Great games are made by people that recognize this concept and apply it to its fullest. The core principle behind engagement is the idea that players should always be focusing on the current action or a future action.

Current action is perhaps the most simple to design around. Stuff blowing up, immediate concerns, and high stimulation environments can provide a great and simple way to create a current action. This works in most cases; when someone comes under fire in a military game they are immediately pulled into the task they are doing, even if they’d been doing a slow march for the past kilometer or so of Altis. These actions are the simplest to plan and act around because of the simple fact that there’s no consideration needed to get them to work. If one wants to have an explosion, they can create it. There’s no requirement for things to be pre-scripted or dynamic, and to a certain extent actions don’t even have to be responsive in order to gain the player’s focus. Even if a player intentionally ignores something, say, running straight through an artillery strike, the addition of more action to the scene will provide something for the player to think about. These environmental current actions provide a cheap but meaningful event, and give the player something to do in downtime or as a brief respite from challenging segments-pausing on a ledge outside a window as a guard finishes his cell phone conversation can be just as engaging as being in the center of a firefight if the developers and writers play their cards right.

Current action can also take the form of actions that the player is undertaking. Picking a lock or hacking a computer in Fallout 3 can be just as engaging as having a mine go off underfoot. If a game can lead a player to undertake actions that are meaningful to them within the context of the narrative or as an exercise unto themselves, then it is still successful at creating an engaging experience even if the actions themselves lack a meaningful base of stimulation to keep players constantly assessing and reacting to their environment. However, player-driven current action cannot be discounted as a powerful force; if the player is bored with the setting, narrative, and aesthetics of the game but is enjoying the simple action of fighting monsters or matching jewels into rows of at least three, they are still engaged in the game.

Let’s take the Hitman series as an example. While they tend to shy away from having constant action, there are few cases where the player is disengaged, because the player is always working toward an objective. Future engagement is an important factor in a lot of player interactions with games, particularly more cerebral ones. This is where things like predicting, planning, and conceptualizing come in, and Hitman’s a particularly good example because it relies heavily on all three processes.

Predicting is a more advanced form of the situational awareness exploited and used by environmental stimulation. The action of predicting is itself engaging; the player is taking in information and figuring out what they believe will happen. For instance, if a guard is reaching for a pack of cigarettes, he will likely go out for a smoke. Not all players really think this through, which is somewhat of a shame, but the players who jump the gun on this are typically still focusing on current stimulation in the environment and are likely already engaged. Figuring out how opponents and threats act is a core element of the predicting component of future engagement.

Planning is the application of predictions; at this point players have begun to figure out what they will do. Most players plan, even if they skip straight to it from the predicting phase. It comes directly prior to the actual execution of an action, and involves a somewhat complex process of weighing options and future actions that is beyond the scope of this article. However, the important thing to remember about planning as future engagement is that the first steps toward action are likely to begin at this point, and it is often used in conjunction with a rote action (such as moving) toward the goal of achieving whatever action is being planned (kicking the guard off a bridge).

Finally, conceptualization is future engagement at the moment at and directly following execution of an action. It’s a reaction to the events that have occurred in order to figure out what will follow. Whether the player’s actions went as planned or not, the conceptualization is the immediate recognition of the events that have occurred and represent a return to the prediction phase. This is when they begin to study their environment and figure out what happened before they continue with their actions. Games that focus a lot on foresight and planning but don’t allow for sufficient time can become too busy, and become confusing or frustratingly difficult.

However, it should also be noted that engagement doesn’t always have to involve taking up all of a player’s mental capacities or even focus their attention; if they can willfully participate in the game’s events without them feeling cheapened as artificial, they still matter enough to keep players engaged. A thief in Skyrim who’s maxed out the stealth tree probably doesn’t have to be keeping too close an eye on the detection meter as they creep up behind a brigand. Competitive games can also do this well; Audiosurf and other rhythm games are examples where players can often operate on “autopilot”, and be thinking about other things while mechanically completing the necessary tasks. This partial engagement is not necessarily something desirable as a core goal of a game, but it can still offer something to a player, even if their mind is wandering away from the game.

In short, engagement is important for game designers. The same things that lead to it can cause confusion or frustration, but without it a game becomes incredibly boring. Engagement comes in two forms; current and future, which can also be analogized to environmental stimulation versus intellectual stimulation. At the end of the day, a highly successful game will utilize many forms of engagement to satisfy all a player’s desires for an engaging experience.

As a guy who has spent much of his gaming existence running D&D games, I suppose it makes sense that monsters get my creative juices flowing. Long before I got into the business, in the days of 2nd Edition AD&D, I scooped up every one of the Monstrous Compendium Appendices for the cool and weird creatures they contained. I’d read those books with the same focus and dedication I showed a novel. I’d pour over their mechanics, pull threads of story from the fluff surrounding the guts, and chuckle at the prospect of dropping a maggot golem or a batch of clockwork horrors into my next game. For me, monsters did more for my imagination than a campaign setting ever did and I looked at them as windows into the possible worlds of my favorite roleplaying game.

My love for the monstrous has not abated now that I make up stuff for a living. I still salivate at the thought of writing demon entries in a monster book, wring my hands about how I should layer in these story threads when confronted with a new or existing monster, and cackle as I come up with some nasty bit of tech that both captures the monster’s story and promises to vex even the most cunning players.

As fun as monsters are to design and use in a game, there are some considerable pitfalls too. For a long time, I felt that monsters with magical abilities should have long lists of spells or complex mechanical design. In 4E, it was all too tempting to keep adding entries and stuff to overflowing the action buckets so that it could deal with every conceivable situation. While this could make the monster interesting, more often than not it simply wound up making the creature unplayable in the game. A DM confronted with a page-long stat-block would drown in options and I found I would miss traits or action outputs in play since I would have to sort through the menu to find the thing I needed.

I have had many monster design conversations over the years, but two stand out. The first one was a Wizards of the Coast freelancer panel at Gen Con a few years ago. James Wyatt led a discussion about how to make monsters in 4E more engaging and memorable. Of course, some of the discussion zoomed in on common errors that pop up in monster design, but he brought up a great point about a few monsters in the MM. He pointed to one in particular. While fully functional, the design revealed nothing about the creature’s identity, place in the world, or, really, anything to set it apart. You could name the creature a human meat-dancer and no one would be the wiser. The goblins, however, all shared a common mechanical device, goblin tactics, that, in play, reinforced their identity in the game world—tricky, elusive combatants. The take-away from this is that mechanics and story are not separate entities and story should inform the mechanical design for an RPG. Obvious stuff, but in the Ivory Tower of mechanical design, especially for a game with lots of moving parts, it’s easy to become lost in the numbers.

The second conversation was with Steve Winter. I was in the office at my borrowed cubical and working on something for D&D Next. Steve, having been steeped in D&D for more years than I should say, has seen it all. I was talking to him about a D&D Cyclopedia game that I ran at a show a couple years ago and told him that I marveled at the game’s ease and simplicity. I had cut my teeth on an earlier version of that game (the Red Box), but hadn’t really touched it since I “graduated” to AD&D. Steve mentioned that what made that game so wonderful was that to run an encounter with a monster, you needed to know a couple of numbers (AC and HP) and the monster’s trick. This idea has stuck with me and I’ve thought a lot about how awesome it really is. A monster only needs one or two cool things to come to life in the game. When I ask you what’s the distinctive thing about dragons, you probably go straight to the breath weapon. When I ask about trolls, regeneration comes to mind. The beholder has eye rays. The wraith drains life force. Skeletons take half damage from piercing and slashing weapons.

That’s all these monsters need. Everything else in the stat-block is clutter, mechanical baggage the game system demands for coherency and consistency. Hit points, Armor Class, and if you’re playing a game that uses them, Defense/Saving Throws are nothing more than an elaborate timer for how long the monster sticks around. Speed? Damage for attacks the creature is never going to use? Skills? All that stuff just obfuscates the thing that makes the monster interesting. Of course, games like D&D demand these stats, so what I’m saying is heresy I know.

But imagine how much simpler the game would be to run if it just dropped the baggage and embraced what’s actually happening in play. A monster’s lifespan in combat might be measured in rounds. And the players’ efforts might just reduce the number of rounds based on their choices. An attack with a weapon (any weapon) would reduce the rounds by 1. A spell might reduce rounds by its level or half its level if it affects an area. The monster has a very short menu of things from which the GM picks each round. Maybe the dragon lives 10 rounds and can use breath weapon once and natural weapons twice. And when the dragon uses all of its actions, it gets them all back. And then the players and GM describe what happens at the table as a story. You could probably run this without dice, but if you need randomness, a d6 would be enough. Success on a 4 or higher. Boom. Done.

OK. I am stepping back from the ledge. I know this goes way, way too far and probably offends the sensibilities of people who like the granularity of big RPGs. Admittedly I’m one of them too. I like to pretend that the difference between a 16 and 17 AC is meaningful. I cling to the idea that there should be mechanical differences between a battle-axe and a sword. But this was an interesting thought experiment. I’m glad you stuck it out with me. Until next time, roll some dice, kill monsters, and tell awesome stories.

One of the things I’ve often been asked as a somewhat experienced GM who’s run games with lots of players is “How do I get girls interested in my games?” It’s an interesting question, and one that is really quite painful to a lot of the tabletop games hobby, since we do miss a lot of the female market share. Part of the reason that we miss out on that market, however, is that we explicitly hound female gamers, trying to get as many of them as possible, without remembering the core principles of gaming.

Gaming is, first and foremost, an enjoyable activity. I don’t entirely buy into the premise that we enjoy what society tells us to enjoy, but there is truth in that certain demographics participate in certain activities more than others, and gaming is an alternative to other leisure activities. If someone wants to go and hang out and get their clothes-shopping done (to use a horribly cliched example) while chatting with a friend, they’re not going to necessarily prefer to go and roll dice while chatting to a friend. The role of leisure is often overlooked in modern day studies of the human experience, but gaming is far from the only way to meet the need, and women often prefer to do things with their preexisting friends, enjoying something which to a mainstream American male seems like a task to complete efficiently and without joy or socialization.

However, gaming is also an investment. When I had a prospective player who I didn’t particularly want to have join my game, I’d talk about reading stuff for my games. Saying “Yeah, I went back and re-read all 1000 pages of Eclipse Phase back in January” works well as a loyalty test. It’s a difficult hobby, and while I don’t think there’s anyone who participates in it who thinks that games should all be shortened to five or six pages, you also need to consider that anything too complex represents a pretty respectable amount of knowledge and learning, and even if you have a GM handling most of the rules and players only need to learn thirty or forty pages worth of rules and content, players still wind up with a lot of responsibilities.

You want to make sure that all players at your table are valued. This isn’t as difficult as a lot of people think, but it’s also not something that most people do naturally. If everyone wants to get together and have the gaming equivalent of a drunken brawl, but consider whether you’re doing it to hang out with your friends or if it’s really the gaming experience that matters. This is why a lot of games actually last a session or two and then fizzle out; they’re a means of hanging out but they don’t actually generate value for the players other than the experience of hanging out. If someone doesn’t want to hang out with you just for the sake of hanging out, especially in our society which tends to be rather gender segregated in terms of our social activities, you need to consider the fact that you need to offer something more than just hanging out. A lot of people say “well, cater to women,” but that’s also a fallacy. What are you going to do, paint all your books pink? Not only is that so shallow as to border on the offensive, but it’s an entirely wrong viewpoint. Consider what your game offers, and what a prospective player wants. Don’t make gender the main goal.

At the same time, it’s also important to look at the subjects and topics you’re discussing. Avoid sexually charged topics, and remind players to keep their behavior civil. Particularly with men, a lot of players don’t understand sensitive topics. When they’re talking about “Charisma scores” and the attractive elven waitress, they’re directly alienating female players. Having worked in a service industry, I’ve been able to see the way that a lot of my female coworkers were treated by male customers, and quite frankly it’s disgusting. You don’t want that at your table.

It helps if your gaming group is socially defined. I have never had a group in which the players have not been friends and acquaintances with each other. If your social circles are predominantly composed of people of a certain gender, your games will be also. Don’t hunt outside your social circles to meet an arbitrary goal, like saying “I have to get a girl for my D&D campaign.” I’ve had luck with introducing gamers outside my social circle to my games, of both genders, but you don’t win someone over by saying “We want to play with you because you’re a girl.” Barring the creepiness factor, it’s important to remember that humans are intelligent, and seeing that one’s presence is exclusively for the sake of novelty is a major turn-off. Even if you don’t know each other, do activities outside gaming that are less rigorous. You don’t need everyone together to go see a movie and have a night out, and you can have a lot of fun and improve your game by having social activities outside gaming.

A final note is to look at the convoluted definition of a traditional tabletop roleplaying game. There’s a large crowd of tabletop gamers who approach the hobby with a rules focused mindset because they were first and foremost raised on video games. I’m one of these people. However, people who had their first meaningful gaming experience within tabletop games tend to be more interested in story and narrative, more along the lines of acting, than in the actual game itself, and from case studies I’ve found that my female players are almost always more concerned about the narrative than about the rules, while the opposite is true of my male players, in a rather neat 1:2 ratio either way.

In short, the failure within trying to get women interested in games typically comes from approaching them as “women,” as if there’s some mystical difference conferred by a second X chromosome. Look at them like any other non-gamer, and remember that who a person is cannot be summed up by a stereotype or statistic.