The Inalienable Right to be Cool

Ultimately, there's no need to have a player rolling dice for something that's not an essential part of the game. You use dice to create a moment of tension, when the outcome of something is in question. When the outcome is mandatory or inconsequential, though, resorting to that die roll adds nothing. At best, it's a minor thrill to tinker with the game piece. At worst, it's a frustrating punishment levied by fate.

Instead of using dice to govern skill use, I've been working with the idea of characters possessing, effectively, rights to effect the use of certain skills. Here's how it works.

Being in the band is a right, not a privilege, using this system.If a character puts a point into a skill, that's his way of telling me, "I would like to do something in the game that involves this skill." That's cool -- that's communication between player and gamemaster by using the system as feedback. After all, if a player didn't want to use the skill, he wouldn't have put his points in it.

Thereafter, I make a point of using that character's skill in a situation in-game. A character who took a point of, say, sailing -- he gets to navigate a craft through a dangerous channel, right a listing ship, or launch a rowboat before the galleon sinks. A character with the Drive skill might outmaneuver a pursuer, overtake a fleeing adversary, or thread the needle as a garage door threatens to lock him out of the warehouse. The Computer-savvy character intercepts a damning digital communication or finds the rival's location using a property search database.

The skills don't even have to be literal uses. The sailor character, for example, might recognize a curious knot used to bind a captive and know how to undo it or learn thereby that one of the captors is a fellow seafarer. The driver might perceive the smell of burnt clutch and realize the adversary has escaped. The computer guy knows that the hardware the rival is using to protect his hideout is susceptible to an electrical surge.

The benefit is that the character has the opportunity to feel cool and have a unique interaction with the story. It's just a detail, something that doesn't redirect the flow of the story as the vampire suddenly decides to, um, "hack into the police database" or "create a biotoxin" or "make my own dragonsbreath rounds." The other players don't have to sit idly by as he spins up a tangential minigame. The story doesn't lose its direction and the action progresses without undue lingering over details and set dressing.

You automatically succeed at doing this. It's part of what makes you who you are.It's also a great method by which a gamemaster can inject vital clues into mysteries and intrigues. In all but purely abstract combat games, specialized information needs to flow to the players, and it's tremendously empowering to have it flow to my character in a way that I've described as being his interest or forte.

Also notably, the player effectively has the right to use the skill. He doesn't rely on dice to tell him whether or not he exhibits the characteristic he paid to have. It's a non-system system, a way to grant benefit to a player without having to rely on the whim of mechanics or externalities to convey it.

It needs to be used in moderation, of course. Too many of these little defining characteristics become overwhelming, intrude on niche protection, and again steal the spotlight.

This doesn't fit perfectly into every system as written. It takes a little tweaking to use in the World of Darkness, as a few combat skills and abilities that make Disciplines function are part of the core and the "automatic" skills can't be evenly extracted. Still, these "guaranteed" skills can instead become Merits or even specialties. D&D as well relies on margin of success for some skills to define effects for abilities that call upon them (like feinting and jumping). With a bit of tinkering, though, this player-empowering system can fit into almost any tabletop ruleset.

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.

The Butterfly Effect

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about when I suggest that enjoying the world with other people is a paramount component of modern gameplay.

Active Storytelling

At 2008’s GDC, I attended a presentation on the storytelling techniques in Bioshock hosted by 2K Games President and Creative Director Kenneth Levine. The focus of the presentation and its subtitle was “Empower Players to Care About Your Stupid Story”. It’s a critical point, especially from where I sit at both the conjunction and divergence of the tabletop and video gaming design disciplines.

Levine mentioned that at one point, as developers, they had about 400 pages of background material for Bioshock. Four hundred! Equally as important, by launch, they had pared that brick down to about ten percent of the original — and bloated — doc size.

Although the initial idea seems like it might not support a whole game, the story in Flower is pretty compelling.I was glad to hear this. This is a great example of subtractive design as applied to story design, and a practical application of understanding the medium. Let’s face it: Many designers really want to write fiction, but the way in the reader reads fiction is emphatically not the way a player plays a video game. So in many cases, when a game touts “immersive story,” what it means is “this script is a goddamn brick, so get ready for some cut scenes.”

Players don’t want that. Well, most players don’t want that. Some players certainly enjoy reading world lore or watching cut scenes, but the important thing to remember is that a game is not a novel. You can’t dump a pile of on-screen print text upon a player and expect him to like it.

To this end, game designers, whether of the tabletop or video game ilk, need to understand how people are playing their games. If you’ve played World of Warcraft, you’ve almost certainly taken a quest — and you’re likely to have skipped the bulk of the quest text and looked at the bottom for, “Yeah, yeah, yeah; bring how many rat pelts to whom, now? And how good is the magic stick you’re offering?” And for all of the content-is-king philosophy at Blizzard, the way the game is designed actively doesn’t want you to read the quest text. You level up by gaining experience points, and your experience points come from killing monsters. In fact, the more quest text you read, the more you’re holding yourself back from playing the game as designed, because that’s time you could be spent killing monsters.

I don't need any quest text. I'll kill a hundred of these for you no problem, no NPC motivation necessary.I don’t mean to unfairly indict Blizzard here, because almost everyone’s guilty of this legacy method of storytelling. No one’s found the sweet spot yet, especially in the video game market. A notable few games have achieved a singular storytelling experience, but they’re just that: singular. Braid, for example, and Flower, and my darlings Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. They’re outstanding anomalies, they haven’t become the standard of the medium. Tabletop games are a different sort of beast entirely, as they depend solely on the gamemaster or storyteller running them, but in those cases, the storyteller becomes a surrogate developer (and thus inherit the developer’s responsibilities to storytelling). White Wolf’s “renaissance in gaming” is an early example of this, and though the mainstream gaming tastes have moved back a bit toward system-focused games, no few other titles push story to the forefront, such as In a Wicked Age.

Now, what this all boils down to is the admonition against bombarding players with exposition. They’re players, not passive ingesters of prose blocks scripted by what amounts to a tyrant. They want to play. That’s their role in the equation. They need to participate.

How to accomplish this?

If what you want to do is tell a story, write a story: Let’s get this out of the way first. There’s no shame in telling a story. It’s a noble calling. And if what you want to do first and foremost is tell, well, write it. There’s little interaction in telling, so don’t shoehorn your story into a format that requires interaction to be vital.

Players want to feel clever and empowered and have the action revolve around them.Destroy, destroy, destroy: This is my infant daughter’s mantra, and it’s a good guideline for story in games as well. Details are cool. They’re what make little “tokens” of memory that players associate with playing the game. Too many details are like that junk drawer in your kitchen, though. They’re clutter. They keep you from getting to the detail that’s really potent or poignant. Throw them out. Keep only what you need to tell the story. You’ll feel positively Orwellian in your condensation of the story to its vital elements.

Let the world narrate: You don’t need bricks of text, third-party exposition, or reams of world history. What’s important is here and now. What do the players discover with their senses? Do they see a unique piece of art, hear a moving piece of music, or witness some stirring event? These are the sorts of current-event details that a game experience thrives upon, but they allow a player to act or react to them. Look at the art direction in Bioshock. Listen to the little fragments of sound that you discover as you move throughout the world. These entries in the “world scrapbook” tell the story of the world without thrusting themselves unavoidably in the player’s face. Vampire’s creation myths, are another great example of this. They’re flavor, tantalizing bits of maybe-history that pepper the world without assaulting the characters with a history book full of details they don’t need.

Players need to interact: With the world in a video game or with the world and each other in a tabletop RPG or MMO, the whole point is that the players can do stuff. Let them do it! The story goes on the back burner any time a player wants to do something cool. This isn’t to say the story is unimportant — it’s very important — but if it’s the most important part of the game, well, you need a word processor and not dice or a game engine. Without the players, you don’t have a game.

Players want to extract, solve, overcome, and be cool: As above, let them. Let them pull one of those interesting details about the world or story out of their encounter. This way, you’re not just ramming story down their throats, you’re giving them rewards for interacting. Maybe an individual overcome in a combat challenge holds a vital clue. Maybe an object the players investigate rewards them with a unique new ability or a bit of understanding.

Ultimately, the story of a game is the vehicle by which its purpose is communicated. You need some story there to knit the characters together and to give them a goal to accomplish. Any more than that and you’re forcing them into the role of passive consumers.