Realism Stinks, or What It's All About

I hate when games are realistic.

Rather, I don't enjoy games that make an attempt at simulating realism in place of the experience the game actually wants to provide. The question for a game isn't whether or not it adequately presents a feeling of realism. The question is whether an element of a game believably represents the type of gameplay the designer wants to impart.

"Is this what the game's about?" in short. It doesn't have to be the crux of the game, but the element has to serve the play.

If the game includes chupacabras in the bestiary, that means the designer wants you to fight a chupacabra when you play.For example, I have always been frustrated by the inclusion of the Computer skill in the various World of Darkness games. The fact that the rules support a specific sort of challenge involving the use of computers, in my opinion, sends the wrong message. That message is, "This is a setting in which people who use computers are a significant facet of the setting." All of the sudden you open the floodgates of things like vampire hackers, cyber-werewolves, and the sorts of loosely computerized tangents that occasionally rear their heads on things like CSI. Never mind all of the trappings of  gothic literary fiction and the turgid emotional landscape of eternal living death -- it's time for a shadowrun.

 (You know what else used to crack me up? Dodge as a skill. Especially when interpreting the skill through the rules for skill improvement. You could spend experience points on Dodge... which meant that you were actively practicing getting out of the way of some stuff. Is there a special place you go to hang out and dodge? A gun range, maybe?)

Anyway, back to the point. I'm not saying that there's no place for computers in a Vampire story. I'm saying that vampires doing things with computers doesn't need to happen so frequently or with such a broad range of outcomes that it needs rules to allow vampires to interact with computers. Maybe a story suggests that there's a computer with critical information on it. If the Storyteller needs the players to have that information, they get it. No dice rolling. No dice pools or modifiers or rolling and putting Willpower into it -- if the players need the information and one of them thinks to say, "I look it up on the computer," then, okay, they get the clue off the computer.

Too often, designers overlook this, especially in skill-based systems , or in modern games that, as a result of the design, assume that if it can be done in the modern world, rules need to exist so that players can do it via the system. In many cases, it's just not discriminating design. It's kitchen-sink design, and it ends up making extra work and diluting the experience of play. At best, the system is going to lie, created but unused, in some forgotten drawer of the game. At worst, it's going to derail play of the optimal game experience with minutiae or a tangent that undermines the game's true goal.

The second-edition Vampire Players Guide had tanks, lasers, and military aircraft. The developer wanted your vampires to have fights with tanks and helicopters.When you build a system into a game, that means you as the designer want the system to be used. If you want your vampires hacking away at their computers, you make a Computers system for vampire hacking. It's like Chekhov's gun: If you write a play and put a gun in it, you're stating implicitly (and eventually explicitly) that the gun is going to see use. If you don't want something to happen in a game, don't build it in there.

The other side of this principle is true as well. If a system exists, it exists because that's what the designers want you to do. Aion has skill-based crafting that results in occasional failure of the crafting character to produce the item. Logically, then, the designers of Aion want you to fail sometimes, and thus want you to lose items (thereby sending you back into the world to seek more items). EVE Online wants you to lose a ship every now and then, and eventually wants you in open conflict with other players, especially via corporate or alliance warfare. Age of Conan and Lord of the Rings Online want you to spend a lot of time playing their preconstructed content, and though you can do it with other players, they don't want to mandate that you have to or even encourage you to do so. It's easier to solo than it is to play through content as a group, so that's what they want most of their players to do.

Bear that in mind when you create house rules or write your own games. If it's not part of the game, don't include it. Make it "realistic" only if verisimilitude is key to the play of the game.

Revisiting the Origins of the Experience

I ran the pink box about two weeks ago, good ol' Moldvay basic. For those around the table who didn't have access to the plundered artifacts of my pernicious youth, Goblinoid Games' excellent Labyrinth Lord suited their character creation and reference needs perfectly. In fact, I'd say the two are almost identical, with the exception of a few spells and monsters and the prices of equipment.

How did it go? Fifty percent party kill.

You know what first-level characters don't look like? This.I had taken one of Christopher B's excellent one-page maps and thrown a few cursory details at it, taking several of the pink box's suggestions to heart: A variety of critters occupied this dungeon. That is, I didn't construct the thing laboriously with a careful plot and a monomonstrous tenant. This wasn't "the goblin cave," nor was it "lair of the lizard men." In my brief setting sketch, it was a mountain-bound dwarfhold that had recently been infested from below by all sorts of nefarious critters. It was a nice enough scenario, feeling enough like a story to lend the delve purpose more than just bashing away at whatever came the party's way.

Four players participated, using first-level characters. I would have liked more, but as busy as we are these days, someone always has a lunch meeting. The intrepid adventurers didn't bother with hirelings or retainers, either. To be honest, I think it skipped their minds. At least half of them weren't alive when these rules were first published, and the other half play current games or incarnations of D&D, so the fact that you all but need dragon fodder at low levels slipped their mind.

We played for only an hour, but it was certainly enough to see the rules in operation. I enforced encumbrance, the recommended time-elapse increments, and light source bookkeeping. The exploration didn't happen quite as I'd have liked it to, but I always have this problem during dungeon crawls: I draw a little more or a little less on the map than what the players would probably see in that time increment. In fact, this was a core divergence from the pink box as written -- we used minis to represent movement and location, and we used them with an assumed scale equal to that of 3.x and 4e D&D. As written, the basic rules assume a much more painterly experience, with the DM describing what the players see and the woestricken mapper interpreting the DM's narrative onto graph paper. I ran it the opposite, adding rooms and hallways as the party progressed. No harm, no foul, really, but it did feel more tactical than the quasi-fairy tale feel that I remember my old RPG sessions having when I was but a rusty scuppernong.

I don't know what a rusty scuppernong is, either.

This is what gaming art looked like in 1981, and I really wanted to recapture some of that nostalgia and wonder.Anyway, I also used the morale rules as written, and two rooms worth of goblins panicked and ran before any member of the party took a single point of damage. One goblin ran into a room that harbored a double-handful of skeletons -- and that's where two members of the party met their unfortunate ends. Of course, the party had no cleric and the magic-user had already used his solitary magic missile on a goblin earlier, so nine skeletons were bound to give them estimable trouble.

Some highlights of the experience:

• In practice, the magic-user mirthfully waded into combat after using his sole offensive spell, which I was glad to see. It ended up killing him, of course, but the point is that he was participating.
• The comparative simplicity of the combat rules made running the conflicts a breeze. Tactical movement was just a question which monster to which players stood adjacent -- movement had no impediments or circuitous routes concocted to avoid opportunity attacks. People just moved where they wanted and tossed dice, and it was fun.
• In preparation, I liked reading all that vintage advice that showed the roots of the hobby, and evinced how the designers wanted the game to be played. Treasure, for example. The designers recommend that some monsters have no treasure, and that large troves of treasure exists in other places. Effectively what this does is encourage the PC party to choose their fights. They don't have to kill every monster in the joint, because treasure also gives experience, and because if they do fight every monster in the joint, one of those monsters will have a lucky attack and murder at least one of them. The morale rules help them almost as much as combat, ensuring that some of those monsters will run away and thus spare them precious hit points. It becomes much more of a resource management game than I'm used to thinking about, and the suggested narrative is actually more dramatic than the old gray pink box usually gets credit for, in that you're supposed to go into the lair and slay Grendel and his mother, not every goddamn rat in the cave and Grendel and his mother and the poor crazy Dane down the well. It's actually noteworthy how closely CRPGs emulate this, in retrospect.
• Random treasure was fun. I can see it getting frustrating over the long-term if you somehow end up as "that guy" and always dice the least possible treasure rewards, but it was fun to laugh about in this short, controlled session.

Some lowlights:

• Mapping and movement. My fault.
• Not enough distinguished the PCs from one another. The magic-user was effectively a fighter after using his trick. The dwarf was a fighter. In fact, given the old-school way in which we rolled characters, the players were statistically most likely to roll fighters, because they might be unable to qualify for anything else.
• The monsters felt too similar to one another. Obviously, this changes past first level, but the only things really distinguishing goblins from skeletons were a single hit point and no morale.
• Playing purely randomly was fun, but didn't really scratch that campaign or "amateur thespian" itch. Again, this all occurred in a very short window, but I wanted to feel more like an actual story was taking place and not just a loose paragraph of justification tossed in at the opening of the action. Character progression, NPCs, meeting a "named" antagonist, etc., all would have contributed to this, but such a short session, while evocative of the overall gaming experience, didn't really have enough of a chance to blossom in my imagination as greatly as I would have enjoyed. This isn't a failing of the game, necessarily, but it does indicate that this isn't an endeavor to be casually undertaken. You have to invest in the fun and let the feeling flourish.

Life At First Level: The Ghost of John Rittenhouse

For the uninitiated, Rittenhouse is one of our programmers.

NaNoWriMo

I'm of that prophetically doomed school of writers who are a sad, deluded people who all too often strangle their creations during their birthing because they try to craft them too completely as they issue forth from the font of genesis.

That's why I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. I want to participate in the spirit of the challenge and just write the words as they happen, without slowing myself to rearrange them into what I think is the proper phrase or sequence at the moment. Just let the words fall where they may, and sort it all out when the draft is done.

I don't know why that's so antithetical to me. I'm not a writer typically given to sharing works in progress. When people see much of what I write, it's because it's in a state fit for consumption. Every now and then I break from that tradition, just to solicit a bit of feedback or stress-test a squirrelly idea, but mostly, all my craft happens backstage and appears only when it's ready to receive visitors.

That's why I'm really excited about trying this experiment. Again, I'm wanting to cleave as closely as possible to the spirit of the exercise, so I haven't done any pre-planning outside the rudimentary creation of ideas. I have three, but I want to wait until I actually start writing -- until NaNoWriMo actually kicks off -- to see which idea fights its way onto the page. That's not necessarily the best way to approach writing, but I'm trying to shake off the bad habits and tethers with which I've voluntary yoked myself.

I encourage any aspiring writer to take advantage of the opportunity. If you're in Atlanta, I've set up a NaNoWriMo write-in at the Independent on November 2nd as a sort of kick-off. Feel free to drop by and scribble with us. The event is here if you're a Facebooker.

Bottleneckery

So much happening. It's affecting how frequently I'm posing new stuff here.

I owe readers the fourth installment of Hell Harbor. The voting concluded and the choice is clear, I just haven't had a chance to finish the new segment yet.

Likewise, I'm supposed to get chapter four of Demimonde put up. That's just a question of cutting and pasting and formatting. Maybe it's just a problem with the fourth chapter of things around here.

You know what else is still languishing? The final portion of the Kanban technique for GMing. Al I have are notes. That's not a post. That won't fly.

Since I received my invitation to Google Wave, I've been raring -- raring! -- to see how it hosts tabletop play across geographical boundaries. I have these three ideas I want to dig into: Pink-box exploration of a homebrew setting, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy powered by Arcana Evolved, and the Great Pendragon Campaign. I especially want to see if Wave will work because with my wife working most nights, I'm home with Madeleine, and after she goes to bed, I'm rampant. Are you on Wave? Drop me a line and yell at me to get off my duff and commence to running a game.

On the video game front, I'm playing through Aion for work. After seeing this, I'm looking forward to Dragon Age. And I also have this weird itch to bust out Guild Wars, largely driven by the awesome art for Guild Wars 2.