NeoGrognard

I play RPGs because I like the experience. It’s just that simple.

I love fantasy. I love Howard and Moorcock and I love Miéville, VanderMeer and Abnett. I love Hellboy, Watchmen, 300, and The Umbrella Academy. I like my fantasy brutal and inventive, if not downright out there. I’m also a fan of history and the drama of relationships, but the brutal and inventive are definitely driving. Since most RPGs present stories that are punctuated with forays into a tactical or narrative combat systems, RPGs give me what I need.

Now I’m extremely comfortable with my need for pretend violence. It’s better than our ancestors’ lust for real violence, to be sure, and fantasy within itself is natural and harmless. Stephen King once described his muse as this “basement guy.” I think mine is a psychopath scribbling on walls. But one of the great things about RPGs is that people can adjust the themes based on what they like and dislike. There are plenty of games that don’t end up play out like Beatrix Kiddo chopping up the Crazy 88s, I just don’t run them. I love this about RPGs and its one of the main reasons why I think it’s a superior form of gaming.

At the same time I quit FarmVille because I was sick of that experience. Now I really didn’t want to be a farmer in the first place, it’s sort of the antithesis of my thing. Strangely it’s always somewhat fun to click on some pixels and watch something bright, dramatic, or unexpected occur. Let me do that a bunch of times, and it becomes hypnotic. I really do believe most video games are based on this strange little fact about human behavior. For me, after a while if the pixel monkey doesn’t dance in a new and pleasing way, I’m going to hurl it off my back, no matter how much I’m addicted to the pretty lights. It’s just that simple.

Many people just want the hypnotism. 60 million people playing FarmVille regularly just confirms that. I think turning your brain off and enjoying the hypnotism of clicking pixels is often a way to escape from either the drama or tedium of work and family for a few minutes. But I also think it is because these players are starving for some really good gaming, but I’m probably biased by my own tastes for experience.

You remember that friend, the one who was opposed to 4e because of its digital tools? What’s he playing now? Not RPGs. He is playing consol games, he’s playing WoW (really, he’s playing WoW). In fact, he hasn’t played an RPG since 2006. His charges against 4e were trumped up. He was done with RPGs anyway. He keeps on buying books though, mostly Pathfinder, but he never plays. I think he is also starving for good gaming, but often only because he’s refusing to eat. I’m still unclear as to why, but if I have to hazard a guess, RPGs were not providing the experience he was craving. Computers were. Weird.

Alright, maybe neither of those analyses is fair. Maybe FarmVille and being a kook give them the same experiential kick that kicking down a door, beating up monsters, and amassing treasure gives to me. Brain chemistry is strange, and the behavior it makes even strange. People used to wear hair shirts don’t you know. (Wow, I’m still not being fair, am I?) How about this – my friend and the millions of people who play FarmVille do what they do because each gives them an experience they want. My friend gets to be grumpy about something, and the FarmVille player gets to turn his or her brain off for a while. Honestly I’m not being judgmental here; both can be very worthwhile experiences.

Jesse Schell (the guy who talked about gaming beyond Facebook at DICE 2010) believes that it is the goal of the game designer to create great game experiences. When we do this, we can’t create the experience directly (we all experience things differently), instead we do it though the design of the game by way of a game’s four basic elements: aesthetics, mechanics, story, and technology. In many ways both the marketing of games and programs built for the retention of game players depends on making sure these elements and the experience line up. This can be hard for any game, but take a game like D&D where over the course of its lifetime there have been changes in all four of its elements, you can begin to understand why each edition has its adherents and its detractors, and begin to put their passion for their favorite form of the game into perspective. For some it’s enough to make them poke at pixels for the rest of their life.

If you're are interested in more about what Jesse Schell thinks about game design, you'll want to check out this book. It is insightful and very entertaining read.

But I think there might be a better way. I think D&D in any edition does al lot of things well. But, because its main goal is to create the experience of a fantasy world, in its particulars, it often falls short of its goal. There are just things that it doesn’t deal with very well. Most DM’s just ignore those facets of creating a fantasy world, but I think of those holes as design space.

Take those old D&D Mattel games. The funny thing about it, they could be interesting parts of a D&D game. Labyrinths have always been hard to pull off in D&D, mainly because its elements are not designed to create the experience of a labyrinth. Though D&D seems all inclusive in the creation of a fantasy world, you just don’t have the tools to pull it off. I think the solution is to create a mini game.

To be honest, the more I play 4e, the more skill challenges in their current form bug me. I think they are a fine form of mini game that can handle some types of events, but they are far from a panacea, and they are often treated like one. Since their creation, they’ve gotten more complicated and convoluted. I would rather have a number of simple solutions, pleasing in their own elements, and that did a better job of creating the experience we want the game to have.

For instance, here is one I’m working on right now. My Days of Long Shadow campaign is now in its paragon tier. During the heroic tier there was a lot of getting lost and the meddling of powers beyond the pale. All through heroic, the PCs get an idea that they are a small peg in a rather large universe, but they may be able to use that knowledge to their advantage and stop the rampaging army of hobgoblins from destroying their home. Upon their return home, they will become the right-hands of the local lord, accomplishing tasks critical to the struggle and working as field marshals for their lord’s meager army. Much of this new phase will run like a normal D&D game. There will be foes to fight, treasure to gain, and secrets to uncover. But at least part of the session will involve the moving of troops and the clash of arms. I could create a complicated skill challenge, but I just didn’t think that it could create the feel I was looking for. Instead, I created a mini game—or at least the first draft of a mini game.

A very basic map for my campaign's war mini game.

In its current form it’s a small war game. With each day of game time, the PCs get a number of armies and resources they can move and manipulate. Scouts gather information. Battles are fought. Armies can be decimated and routed, and in many times during the game, the PCs adventuring actions can affect the battlefield and event on the battlefield affect the normal adventuring play of D&D. The players accomplish this by spending resources and moving armies along a hex map. The DM, of course, controls the opposing army. It’s designed to have each day’s events on the battlefield wrapped up in 10 minutes to a half an hour, then the play area is put away and we are back to typical D&D.

You see, the experience I wanted to make (the PCs being field marshals in a war) could be accomplished with a skill challenge, but not well. But there are plenty of games that perform that task admirably, so I drew inspiration from those things, and discarded the “official” tools. And while I will not swear off of skill challenges entirely—I think they have their place—when taken by themselves, they are the FarmVille of resolution engines: an adequate and seemly satisfying placeholder for a better game experience.

Well, it is nice to have placeholders. They are rough cuts. We just need to polish them.