This is a perennial issue, and perhaps ties for first place with designing a combat system for rpgs. Since a large portion of the action in an rpgs revolves around conflict, and much of that conflict is direct physical conflict with pointy pieces of steel or high velocity lumps of lead or even higher velocity packets of photons, combat takes a lot of ink, digital or otherwise. Discussions on making magic systems in Fate on G+, for example never seem to be absent for long.
The other thing that takes up a lot of the page count of rpgs is magic. This is probably because a large proportion of rpg gaming is still essentially fantasy based in some fashion, and thus, magic systems take a lot of work. For purposes of discussion, I won't lump in rubber-science technology or superpowers or psionics in with magic, even though in play, there is often no real difference in use or function. That, though, is part of the problem in my mind. The second part of the problem comes from the first, in that, even though much of the function and use are the same across genres, there is in large part a materialist and particularly modernist flavor to all of it in a philosophical sense.
What I mean is this: the powers, whatever the game genre, are essentially analogues for the machines and systems that we are familiar with now; guns, cars, television, cell phones... On the flip side, magic ever since classic D&D has almost always had wizards as the back up toolbox that could do any number of possible things, but much of their use in a game that was rooted in tactical miniatures games, was to be the substitute for the artillery, which is why the majority of magic systems in rpgs have some form of blasting, zapping, incendiary, and explosive spell. Even some of the more interesting spells meant for nothing but killing your enemy (e.g. stinking cloud or cloud kill) resemble a mustard gas attack.
What is interesting, is how little of that I actually find in pre-modern literature...
Now it is not surprising that more recent games still carry over the tradition of the fireball and lightning bolt spells, since so many have D&D style adventure gaming somewhere in their design DNA, and thus a tactical war game idea about how magic works. Furthermore, it is not surprising that from the war game roots with budgets of points made to balance armies, you get balanced levels and wizards that (in a better or worse fashion) are likewise balanced with the rest of the troops in power. There have been many ways in which this power has been balanced either by equal levels and level matched numbers of spells, or scales of effect. Possibly the first major deviation from that was making the limiting factor some kind of "mana" system by whatever name, in which magic is more flexible, but limited like a battery, with the wizard being the battery and the spell using so much charge. But this is still essentially, a mechanistic, materialistic approach to magic, and thus I stand by my notion that this is really not very interesting as magic. I know, I know - Arthur C. Clark blah, blah, suitably advanced technology, blah. He was an engineer, and an atheist. Not a given, but a pretty fair bet that he would, as it turns out, think of magic like an engineer.
Once more, how little of that I actually find in pre-modern literature...
Now I am not suggesting that anyone cannot play with that kind of magic system, nor even that anyone can have fun doing it. Even I can, so that is not my point. My point is that there is a difference between a cheap pseudo-meat fast food burger, and a Red Robin burger, or a perfectly cooked fillet mignon. There are magic systems that merely fill a place and some that do much better than that. I can look at how some other games have tackled magic systems and discover ways that those designs feel very different, and the stand out. Call of Cthulhu feels much more authentic in how it does magic, and there is very little that prevents a perfect neophyte from using a spell of unspeakable power without understanding the cost, and nearly all magic has a cost beyond merely eroding sanity. This design approach makes magic feel like something other, and somehow more dangerous than a mere (yawn) fireball. Ars Magica of course has a lengthy intro to the philosophy of what magic is and how it works from a worldview that is feudal and spiritual rather than mechanical. Magic is not limited quite so much like a battery (though there is a bit of this in the design), and the capabilities have at least as much to do with the spiritual position of the magician to the object as with the mechanical effect. For instance, you cannot raise the dead with magic, since life and death are above the sphere of Man.
What it comes down to in my opinion, is that good fictional magic, just like good fictional science fiction, should bow to verisimilitude, and for magic systems in rpgs to have no relationship to pre-industrial thinking is to make poor fiction. So there are a few things that I think are essential to making a good magic system that makes for meaningful fiction in an rpg. For an excellent discussion on this elsewhere, go HERE. My take is in the same ballpark, and I certainly found it a useful discussion from the indi side of game design.
1) I think that Tolkien had a better view of magic in that he discussed it as arch-natural rather than super-natural. In other words, magic is the highest peak of nature, or the essence of a thing without flaws. This very much flies in the face of a Clarke assumption (held by many modernist worldview gamers who nonetheless still like magic in their games no matter the genre). Clarke could not reconcile magic as reasonable because he assumed that it was a force that broke the laws of nature rather than transcended the limits of a flawed nature.
So with that idea in mind, and linking it to the realization that magic in actual human history has been conceived to be present in the nature of things themselves rather than separate, in a game, I assert that magic should not be a separate force but a force intrinsic to what is meaningful about that thing. More specifically, if we are using a game like Fate, aspects give you bonuses because they are not only what you are about, but because what you are about is magical in that way. This kind of magic is not the flashy-bangy technologic magic of artillery wizards, but it has more verisimilitude to magical societies.
2) Magic should not be limited in a precise mechanistic fashion, run by energy like a battery, or interruptible like electricity or a radio wave. It should work on some much deeper and more potent level, and should be less about material constrain than moral or spiritual constraint on the wizard. Whether this is power granted by a more powerful force (a la Faust), or at a cost in ability (a spell may require the loss of an eye, a la Odin), or it may have a condition related to the spell (the sleep will be permanent and unbreakable except on condition of true love's kiss).
In fact, the same general kind of fire magic used by a wizard may have slightly different constraints based on the context of when and where it is cast. The basic effect may be for the wizard to summon a fire salamander out of a jar of burning coals, but the cost when cast inside a smithy may be very slight but that they cannot cross the threshold to the outside, while done in a tavern, the salamanders may light everything they touch on fire if you choose to summon them.
I will have to write up more later, but this at least, should give some kind of flavor to the magic in game that has more verisimilitude.
30 March, 2016
28 March, 2016
Easter!
Alas...
Work kept me stupid busy, impeded by stupid comm problems for Easter.
...but...
MARANATHA!
Work kept me stupid busy, impeded by stupid comm problems for Easter.
...but...
MARANATHA!
27 March, 2016
Why this Blog?
A little over two and a half years ago, I was in Afghanistan, working 84 hour weeks for months at a time. A "grown-up" life seems to leave little time for games, and the value of play on creativity, in spite of being studied and identified as valid and important, is still not held in serious regard it seems by most adults. That hours and hours of TV is considered OK but serious thought about games is not is probably worth a whole different discussion. Watching bootleg TV on my downtime was not something I found to be especially refreshing or creative. Suffice it to say, that while I had months working in the middle of southern Afghanistan, I spent a fair amount of time when I was not at work thinking about ways to hack some things that I didn't quite enjoy anymore about rpgs.
Over the last twenty odd years, GURPS had become my go-to rpg with an odd and end other here and there. Over time, a few things had begun to consistently bother me though. Hazardous action, and combat in particular are of course long time staples of rpgs, but I didn't like that the most immediate action for dealing with most conflicts was lethal force, even in circumstances where violence was far from believable. The mechanics however reward direct and decisive results without necessarily mechanically generating consequences. I love that GURPS evolved beyond venerable games in providing advantages and disadvantages to put solid grounding for personality and motivation beyond mere action effectiveness. I hated that disadvantages were often gamed as point mines to squeeze extra points to get an extra point of Dexterity (to be more action effective). I hated that action and combat, while staples of fictional conflict, may be a few moments or even a few minutes of game time, but take many times longer (sometimes an hour or more) to resolve in real time. The breathless pace of cinema or even a good book are lost in even best practice die rolling, record keeping, and turn waiting. I was trying to find complicated probability matrices to make an ideal one roll resolution for any action so that I could focus on narrative. I wanted narrative consequences to dangerous and lethal action. I wanted the flaws of the character to be what drove the motivation for heroism rather than mechanistic power-gaming. I wanted story that felt as satisfying, at its best, as watching a movie or reading a book can be. I wanted story.
So I started digging, and looking to see if I could find anyone else who had tried playing with those same kind of ideas.
What I discovered, was the indi game design community. I discovered that I was not alone in being interested in the question of whether games could be more than just a diversion... more than a throw away entertainment... whether games could be art.
Several months before, I had read an article in a video game magazine that discussed that very question in regards to that medium. It talked about Shadow of the Colossus, and Journey as two examples of video games that met that criteria. Journey in fact, is designed quite intentionally to reflect the Hero's Journey model by Joseph Campbell, and to give a complete emotional experience that comes from making that journey as a player. While electronic games have in the last couple of decades begun to take more and more design cues from film, I had not at the time I read the article seen that level of intent taken for tabletop games. But electronic games lacked the social interactivity that was also an interest to me of games.
Jenova Chen, creator of Journey, wrote about games as a grad student. His bio notes his frustration about "games losing their appeal as he and his friends age. While studying in film school about the history of media, Jenova realized that to mature a medium, a wide range of content is required to satisfy audience's various emotional needs. Jenova wants to be part of a movement to expand the range of emotions video games can communicate" as a more fully expressive medium. He cites the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian psychologist that studies happiness, motivation, and creativity. He studies and writes about, among other things, Flow,the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.
I did not discover the work of Csikszentmihalyi till later, but while I was in Afghanistan, my daily news review was followed by reading The Brilliant Blog about learning, neuroscience, and creativity. I felt that I was getting mentally slow and dull. I also spent that year exploring ways to challenge that, including my first experiments with nootropics and brain games. All of these things formed a kind of stew that was on the back burner of my brain.
And then, one night after work, sitting in my dust scented tent, I found the unassuming back door.
There not only were other people thinking about story in table top games... not only asking about whether games could provide something more satisfying than a throw away distraction... not only interested in both games and art, and games as art... but they had been discussing it for years. I came a decade late to the party. But they were out there. They were trying to start parties with more people elsewhere. They had a vocabulary for what they were discussing.
There were rpgs that did not even have mechanics for combat or action scenes. And they were good.
I went to college to study theater, and came out with a minor in English lit and communications as well. I cut my reading teeth on fairy tales and mythology. That there were games where themes, throughlines, dramatic reversals, and mythic journeys were not just the inspiration but were the way the mechanics were designed to reveal was just what I had been looking for without having the benefit of others to figure it out. There were other writers who were thinking of games in mythic terms as well, like Witney Beltran, who in her doctoral studies in mythology/psychology and play, suggests that "one way to keep the mythic knowledge and stories of cultures [alive] is through narrative play via analogue and/or digital mediums." She is one of many that I have discovered in the last two and a half years taking this idea and running with it.
I'm interested in game design now, because role playing games, as a creative medium, share many elements with books and film, yet are unique in this: rpgs are the only medium in which players are both audience and author at the same time to one degree or another. What they lack in hard lined vision, they trade for social investment. Players get out what they put in, and at the finest, they get a story experience that is more than the sum of the parts. Obviously, that is not a given every time, and perhaps not even most of the time, but it can be sometimes. I am looking to make something that can evoke or reveal something through this artistic vehicle about ourselves... about others... about the world... about the myths that make us human. But I want to have fun doing it too.
I'm not really sure just what the tight focus, or purpose of this blog is yet. I know that I have ideas about a number of things. Some of those things converge in odd ways, but they matter to me in the convergence. I know that I want to sharpen the easy creativity that I recall having as a child. I know that I want to sharpen the edge back onto writing that has become clumsy. I know that I want to have the sense of playfulness that lightened my heart when I was very young. I know that I also want to explore things that blow my mind now as an adult but would have been incomprehensible as a child. I know I want to challenge other ideas without feeling that the person holding them feels threatened. There seems to be some kind of convergence, though I cannot say its name yet.
I don't know what will come of this attempt at blogging. I don't know if anyone else will ever even read it but me.
But I hope that what I am looking for are the tracks of that pale stag dancing through the woods off the map...
Over the last twenty odd years, GURPS had become my go-to rpg with an odd and end other here and there. Over time, a few things had begun to consistently bother me though. Hazardous action, and combat in particular are of course long time staples of rpgs, but I didn't like that the most immediate action for dealing with most conflicts was lethal force, even in circumstances where violence was far from believable. The mechanics however reward direct and decisive results without necessarily mechanically generating consequences. I love that GURPS evolved beyond venerable games in providing advantages and disadvantages to put solid grounding for personality and motivation beyond mere action effectiveness. I hated that disadvantages were often gamed as point mines to squeeze extra points to get an extra point of Dexterity (to be more action effective). I hated that action and combat, while staples of fictional conflict, may be a few moments or even a few minutes of game time, but take many times longer (sometimes an hour or more) to resolve in real time. The breathless pace of cinema or even a good book are lost in even best practice die rolling, record keeping, and turn waiting. I was trying to find complicated probability matrices to make an ideal one roll resolution for any action so that I could focus on narrative. I wanted narrative consequences to dangerous and lethal action. I wanted the flaws of the character to be what drove the motivation for heroism rather than mechanistic power-gaming. I wanted story that felt as satisfying, at its best, as watching a movie or reading a book can be. I wanted story.
So I started digging, and looking to see if I could find anyone else who had tried playing with those same kind of ideas.
What I discovered, was the indi game design community. I discovered that I was not alone in being interested in the question of whether games could be more than just a diversion... more than a throw away entertainment... whether games could be art.
Several months before, I had read an article in a video game magazine that discussed that very question in regards to that medium. It talked about Shadow of the Colossus, and Journey as two examples of video games that met that criteria. Journey in fact, is designed quite intentionally to reflect the Hero's Journey model by Joseph Campbell, and to give a complete emotional experience that comes from making that journey as a player. While electronic games have in the last couple of decades begun to take more and more design cues from film, I had not at the time I read the article seen that level of intent taken for tabletop games. But electronic games lacked the social interactivity that was also an interest to me of games.
Jenova Chen, creator of Journey, wrote about games as a grad student. His bio notes his frustration about "games losing their appeal as he and his friends age. While studying in film school about the history of media, Jenova realized that to mature a medium, a wide range of content is required to satisfy audience's various emotional needs. Jenova wants to be part of a movement to expand the range of emotions video games can communicate" as a more fully expressive medium. He cites the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian psychologist that studies happiness, motivation, and creativity. He studies and writes about, among other things, Flow,the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.
I did not discover the work of Csikszentmihalyi till later, but while I was in Afghanistan, my daily news review was followed by reading The Brilliant Blog about learning, neuroscience, and creativity. I felt that I was getting mentally slow and dull. I also spent that year exploring ways to challenge that, including my first experiments with nootropics and brain games. All of these things formed a kind of stew that was on the back burner of my brain.
And then, one night after work, sitting in my dust scented tent, I found the unassuming back door.
There not only were other people thinking about story in table top games... not only asking about whether games could provide something more satisfying than a throw away distraction... not only interested in both games and art, and games as art... but they had been discussing it for years. I came a decade late to the party. But they were out there. They were trying to start parties with more people elsewhere. They had a vocabulary for what they were discussing.
There were rpgs that did not even have mechanics for combat or action scenes. And they were good.
I went to college to study theater, and came out with a minor in English lit and communications as well. I cut my reading teeth on fairy tales and mythology. That there were games where themes, throughlines, dramatic reversals, and mythic journeys were not just the inspiration but were the way the mechanics were designed to reveal was just what I had been looking for without having the benefit of others to figure it out. There were other writers who were thinking of games in mythic terms as well, like Witney Beltran, who in her doctoral studies in mythology/psychology and play, suggests that "one way to keep the mythic knowledge and stories of cultures [alive] is through narrative play via analogue and/or digital mediums." She is one of many that I have discovered in the last two and a half years taking this idea and running with it.
I'm interested in game design now, because role playing games, as a creative medium, share many elements with books and film, yet are unique in this: rpgs are the only medium in which players are both audience and author at the same time to one degree or another. What they lack in hard lined vision, they trade for social investment. Players get out what they put in, and at the finest, they get a story experience that is more than the sum of the parts. Obviously, that is not a given every time, and perhaps not even most of the time, but it can be sometimes. I am looking to make something that can evoke or reveal something through this artistic vehicle about ourselves... about others... about the world... about the myths that make us human. But I want to have fun doing it too.
I'm not really sure just what the tight focus, or purpose of this blog is yet. I know that I have ideas about a number of things. Some of those things converge in odd ways, but they matter to me in the convergence. I know that I want to sharpen the easy creativity that I recall having as a child. I know that I want to sharpen the edge back onto writing that has become clumsy. I know that I want to have the sense of playfulness that lightened my heart when I was very young. I know that I also want to explore things that blow my mind now as an adult but would have been incomprehensible as a child. I know I want to challenge other ideas without feeling that the person holding them feels threatened. There seems to be some kind of convergence, though I cannot say its name yet.
I don't know what will come of this attempt at blogging. I don't know if anyone else will ever even read it but me.
But I hope that what I am looking for are the tracks of that pale stag dancing through the woods off the map...
25 March, 2016
3+3 Questions for Game Design and Criticism
I found an interesting list of questions by Goethe regarding criticism that I thought was interesting as an addition to Jared Sorensen's three questions for designers.
Goethe's questions for criticism are:
1) What is the artist trying to do?
2) How well is it done?
3) Was it worth doing?
Sorensen's three questions for design are:
1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?
I think that both sets of questions are really useful for thinking about side by side when considering games as art.
Goethe's questions for criticism are:
1) What is the artist trying to do?
2) How well is it done?
3) Was it worth doing?
Sorensen's three questions for design are:
1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?
I think that both sets of questions are really useful for thinking about side by side when considering games as art.
16 March, 2016
Games and Art and Myth
I really like Jared Sorensen's three questions for game design.
1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?
I keep mulling over aspects for my political build in Fate through the lenses of those three questions. I have changed my mind a number of times, but at this point I am thinking about the aspects that I want to really define the kind of stories that this build is intended to make. So, I want a sense of history to this... the feeling that the faces and events are part of a much larger tapestry. I want something that explores the themes of history, and legacy, and sacrifice.
I have not read Greg Stafford's game Pendragon, but I read about him playing with a group that included his son, and every time the characters came in to meet with King Arthur after a quest, they saw him aging and still the throne to his right was empty, and he and the Queen without a child as the land crumbled around them, slouching toward the fatal battle of Camlann. Over months of play, Stafford's son mostly ignored it until one day, it clicked, and they saw the tragedy of Arthur for the first time. They went from simply having a good time, to feeling a deeper sympathy for the man that was Arthur.
In Stafford's words: "Roleplaying is a way for humans to interact with our deep, hidden mythological selves. They are a way to feed our souls."
Notorious designer, John Wick wrote about running his players through the ringer in one supers campaign that he describes in his book Play Dirty, For 19 months, his villain defeated a dozen different characters. Only one of them died in the game, but John milked every last drop out of the character builds to make the players quit thinking mechanically and really pause to think about what their characters stood for. One was a Wolverine style combat monster who wrecked super villains left and right... until John had him go berserk in a crowded public street and the civilians were the collateral damage. Another masked vigilante had a very prim and proper grandmother who did not approve of the tramp running around beating people up... and died of a heart attack when a villain paralyzed her and unmasked her in front of grandma in a restaurant. A third very noble hero retired after falling in love with the girl who turned out to secretly be a super villain who he pulverized before unmasking her. One player spent six weeks (that is game sessions) in prison on a life sentence because he knew too much about the mastermind. The player never gave up, and when the characters finally sprung him after the murder of the one hero that John killed in game, John asked him what he was going to do, and he described putting the cowl on and the players, who all had each others backs now, went after the BigBad that had given the characters and players so much grief... and they caught him, arrested him, and turned him over to the law with all the evidence. The players who 19 months before happily played a game about casual mayhem made a sober team decision to choose moral restraint.
Robin D. Laws has often asserted that role playing is the only art in which the author and audience are one and the same.
I find these stories interesting because while they only exist in imagination, I am seeing a closer and closer relationship between games and art, and I have for a long time thought that art inspires us to follow where our head navigates. I like the idea that the whimsy of games and art can weave together to reveal something to us about ourselves or the world or other people. It may not all the time, or even most of the time... but what medium of art ever does?
So I have no idea if I achieve that in what I am designing. But that is what I want to shoot for, but I like the idea that thoughts in play can make for better thoughts in work.
1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?
I keep mulling over aspects for my political build in Fate through the lenses of those three questions. I have changed my mind a number of times, but at this point I am thinking about the aspects that I want to really define the kind of stories that this build is intended to make. So, I want a sense of history to this... the feeling that the faces and events are part of a much larger tapestry. I want something that explores the themes of history, and legacy, and sacrifice.
I have not read Greg Stafford's game Pendragon, but I read about him playing with a group that included his son, and every time the characters came in to meet with King Arthur after a quest, they saw him aging and still the throne to his right was empty, and he and the Queen without a child as the land crumbled around them, slouching toward the fatal battle of Camlann. Over months of play, Stafford's son mostly ignored it until one day, it clicked, and they saw the tragedy of Arthur for the first time. They went from simply having a good time, to feeling a deeper sympathy for the man that was Arthur.
In Stafford's words: "Roleplaying is a way for humans to interact with our deep, hidden mythological selves. They are a way to feed our souls."
Notorious designer, John Wick wrote about running his players through the ringer in one supers campaign that he describes in his book Play Dirty, For 19 months, his villain defeated a dozen different characters. Only one of them died in the game, but John milked every last drop out of the character builds to make the players quit thinking mechanically and really pause to think about what their characters stood for. One was a Wolverine style combat monster who wrecked super villains left and right... until John had him go berserk in a crowded public street and the civilians were the collateral damage. Another masked vigilante had a very prim and proper grandmother who did not approve of the tramp running around beating people up... and died of a heart attack when a villain paralyzed her and unmasked her in front of grandma in a restaurant. A third very noble hero retired after falling in love with the girl who turned out to secretly be a super villain who he pulverized before unmasking her. One player spent six weeks (that is game sessions) in prison on a life sentence because he knew too much about the mastermind. The player never gave up, and when the characters finally sprung him after the murder of the one hero that John killed in game, John asked him what he was going to do, and he described putting the cowl on and the players, who all had each others backs now, went after the BigBad that had given the characters and players so much grief... and they caught him, arrested him, and turned him over to the law with all the evidence. The players who 19 months before happily played a game about casual mayhem made a sober team decision to choose moral restraint.
Robin D. Laws has often asserted that role playing is the only art in which the author and audience are one and the same.
I find these stories interesting because while they only exist in imagination, I am seeing a closer and closer relationship between games and art, and I have for a long time thought that art inspires us to follow where our head navigates. I like the idea that the whimsy of games and art can weave together to reveal something to us about ourselves or the world or other people. It may not all the time, or even most of the time... but what medium of art ever does?
So I have no idea if I achieve that in what I am designing. But that is what I want to shoot for, but I like the idea that thoughts in play can make for better thoughts in work.
14 March, 2016
Design Journal II: Geography and Politics
I am thinking through just what how much narrative weight to give to geography in my design. Furthermore, how much mechanical weight would it need then, and what mechanics would best support that idea?
At a glance, I am looking at some other design takes on political games, and none of them include geography as an element, and I'm sure that these games work well enough for the lenses and filters the writers chose. However, I have been thinking about what sort of game I want to play for a long time, and through to the current incarnation in a Fate framework, I keep coming back to the land as the stage for the play, and the stage the players play on matters to the kind of stories I am looking for.
I mean, imagine right off the top, Dune without the starkness of Arakis.
In real history, geography matters... a lot. Russia is a vast country and was even before the Soviets began gobbling up even more, but much if Russian history in the last two hundred years (and longer) has been shaped by the need for a port that didn't freeze in the winter. This was critical because in order to keep up with the advance of the industrialized world, it behooved Russia to not be land-locked into a backwater. The Russo-Japanese wars contributed to Japan taking control of Manchuria which was the springboard for the invasion of China decades later. The Soviet bear licking it's chops after the appetizer of eastern Europe in 1945 was not lost to the rest of the allies who saw it ready to gobble up some or all of Japan after the Japanese were defeated. More recent scholarship has given credence to the notion that the atomic bomb was at least as much to stop the advance of the bear as to beat the Japanese. All for want of a port...
When the Roman Republic went to war with Carthage in the Punic Wars, what started as a local squabble in Sicily, brought Rome and Carthage on opposite sides initially to settle things. The initiating powers were ultimately eclipsed by the Republic and the Empire who clashed for the first time, but not for the last. Ultimately, of course, multiple wars led to the fame of Hannibal, the Carthagenian who unimaginably marched an army including war elephants over Alpine passes difficult enough to traverse for experienced climbers, to harass the Romans for years before his defeat. That story matters in large part because Sicily was a cosmopolitan island crossroads, and the Alps an absurdly imposing obstacle.
Denmark and Sweden sit at the mouth of the Baltic Sea. In the era of the Hanseatic League, proxy wars with pirates were fought partly because control of the mouth of the sea gave the trading edge to whoever could safely enter and exit into the North Sea, and from there, on to business with ports in the rest of Europe to the warm and sunny south. Just add some chrome. Times change, people don't. And landscape matters to how people maneuver.
I have also recently been reading the book Revenge of Geography which I thought might be another fun study to add while I'm writing. So far there are lots of interesting points, including more on Russia. Being a huge country of vast steppes in the south and vast forests in the north, it faced the conundrum of being mostly indefensible whenever it wanted to expand civilization out of the forests into the warmer and more farmable southern expanses. Sure it could grow wheat down in the Ukraine, but then it had wave after wave of barbarian horsemen pillaging it over and over again, which aspect of geography led to a more aggressive expansionist way of expanding civilization. The book argues that the need to push back the frontiers for safety was part of what shaped the brutality of the modern Soviets. Greece is a mountainous region with very limited space or soil to grow grain, but suitable for growing tougher olive trees and grape arbors which grow in more marginal conditions. Also, the region is just full of excellent harbors. Becoming far reaching, inquisitive maritime traders with ships laden with wine and olive oil seems to have been destiny.
England and Japan, both island empires at some point, became so because they faced the choice of being annexed or relegated to insignificance by their larger neighbors if they did not take to the seas. They had both the benefit of a maritime buffer for safety, but not at such a distance that they could not easily trade with their neighbors if they became capable naval powers. The opportunity to enjoy the safety to grow, the need to capably expand and control other territory by a variety of means, and the access to the thassaline highway all made them the nations they became.
Now I want a good many other things to provide lenses and filters for my game, but this does explain why I think geography should not be left out, and furthermore, why it makes the stories better because it provides very tangible motives and methods and locations for interesting action.
At a glance, I am looking at some other design takes on political games, and none of them include geography as an element, and I'm sure that these games work well enough for the lenses and filters the writers chose. However, I have been thinking about what sort of game I want to play for a long time, and through to the current incarnation in a Fate framework, I keep coming back to the land as the stage for the play, and the stage the players play on matters to the kind of stories I am looking for.
I mean, imagine right off the top, Dune without the starkness of Arakis.
In real history, geography matters... a lot. Russia is a vast country and was even before the Soviets began gobbling up even more, but much if Russian history in the last two hundred years (and longer) has been shaped by the need for a port that didn't freeze in the winter. This was critical because in order to keep up with the advance of the industrialized world, it behooved Russia to not be land-locked into a backwater. The Russo-Japanese wars contributed to Japan taking control of Manchuria which was the springboard for the invasion of China decades later. The Soviet bear licking it's chops after the appetizer of eastern Europe in 1945 was not lost to the rest of the allies who saw it ready to gobble up some or all of Japan after the Japanese were defeated. More recent scholarship has given credence to the notion that the atomic bomb was at least as much to stop the advance of the bear as to beat the Japanese. All for want of a port...
When the Roman Republic went to war with Carthage in the Punic Wars, what started as a local squabble in Sicily, brought Rome and Carthage on opposite sides initially to settle things. The initiating powers were ultimately eclipsed by the Republic and the Empire who clashed for the first time, but not for the last. Ultimately, of course, multiple wars led to the fame of Hannibal, the Carthagenian who unimaginably marched an army including war elephants over Alpine passes difficult enough to traverse for experienced climbers, to harass the Romans for years before his defeat. That story matters in large part because Sicily was a cosmopolitan island crossroads, and the Alps an absurdly imposing obstacle.
Denmark and Sweden sit at the mouth of the Baltic Sea. In the era of the Hanseatic League, proxy wars with pirates were fought partly because control of the mouth of the sea gave the trading edge to whoever could safely enter and exit into the North Sea, and from there, on to business with ports in the rest of Europe to the warm and sunny south. Just add some chrome. Times change, people don't. And landscape matters to how people maneuver.
I have also recently been reading the book Revenge of Geography which I thought might be another fun study to add while I'm writing. So far there are lots of interesting points, including more on Russia. Being a huge country of vast steppes in the south and vast forests in the north, it faced the conundrum of being mostly indefensible whenever it wanted to expand civilization out of the forests into the warmer and more farmable southern expanses. Sure it could grow wheat down in the Ukraine, but then it had wave after wave of barbarian horsemen pillaging it over and over again, which aspect of geography led to a more aggressive expansionist way of expanding civilization. The book argues that the need to push back the frontiers for safety was part of what shaped the brutality of the modern Soviets. Greece is a mountainous region with very limited space or soil to grow grain, but suitable for growing tougher olive trees and grape arbors which grow in more marginal conditions. Also, the region is just full of excellent harbors. Becoming far reaching, inquisitive maritime traders with ships laden with wine and olive oil seems to have been destiny.
England and Japan, both island empires at some point, became so because they faced the choice of being annexed or relegated to insignificance by their larger neighbors if they did not take to the seas. They had both the benefit of a maritime buffer for safety, but not at such a distance that they could not easily trade with their neighbors if they became capable naval powers. The opportunity to enjoy the safety to grow, the need to capably expand and control other territory by a variety of means, and the access to the thassaline highway all made them the nations they became.
Now I want a good many other things to provide lenses and filters for my game, but this does explain why I think geography should not be left out, and furthermore, why it makes the stories better because it provides very tangible motives and methods and locations for interesting action.
12 March, 2016
Design Journal I: Looking at Fate from the inside out
Design decisions in setting the dials
I'm working on designing for Fate, and so I've been breaking down the system to its screws and gears.
By default, Fate Core has 47 discrete mechanical elements to keep track of: five aspects, three stunts, two refresh, ten skills, twenty skill points, and two two-box stress tracks with three consequence slots. Fate Accelerated has 32 discrete mechanical elements to keep track of: five aspects, three stunts, two refresh, six approaches, nine approach points, and one four-box stress track with three consequence slots. So an ideal goal in designing an equally simple, elegant setting for Fate, is to have no more than 32-47 discrete mechanical elements to build from.
If you break down stunts into further quanta, you find that the default character in Fate Core has two physical and two mental stress boxes, with the potential for up to two more of each. However this breaks down into a base of three shifts of physical and three of mental for a total of six stress shifts before getting to consequences. If the character has a third stress box in one or both, they have a total of twelve shifts, and if they have four stress boxes in each they have a maximum of twenty shifts of stress. Six, nine, twelve, sixteen, or twenty shifts… that makes the potential for a lot of granularity if you break down Resources into individual stress boxes, and makes it possible to connect Resources to treasury and storehouse type stress or conditions depending on how you design it. That was a key issue in my decision to break up stress into individual single stress boxes; see FST 60.
So, what's the point?
As a mechanics light system, Fate requires a whole lot less to digest the crunch, and a whole lot less bookkeeping than say Pathfinder, or GURPS. That is neither bad nor good in and of itself, as both of these are very well designed games, and both have a lot of thought behind their extensive mechanical crunch. It is however a difference that is very important to my present taste in games, as spare time is much more precious a commodity for me at this time in my life. But here's the problem; I am working on designing a political game and Fate is the engine I want to use. However, a political game can be very much a very large wheels-within-wheels affair, and the level of mechanical complication could potentially add up very fast. That is something I want to avoid which is what brought me to dig Fate in the first place, and yet I want the ability to account for many of those wheels within wheels anyway because I like verisimilitude.
So how do I get the big machine without big maintenance? How can I get something that feels as big as reading Dune or A Distant Mirror or watching Game of Thrones?
Currently I have copies of two published Fate world books that beat me to print on settings that include a political angle (Romance in the Air, and House of Bards), but fortunately, they each fill a different niche, and neither one fits the niche that I want to design for. The first assumes nations are important to the narrative, but they act in a distant canvas backdrop shaping the context for personal drama. The second puts the point of view characters in the position of wheeling and dealing for influence in the districts that compose a large city. I am looking for the middle ground with the faces and factions that push the action across the broad canvas. As such, I need to address issues of not only personal and party political power, but all the tools of power from diplomatic to legal, from production to foreign trade, from spies to warfare.
The dials for this build are five aspects, five stunts, three refresh, and six approaches one of which includes a separate stress track. In addition, there can be a number of extras in play at any given time that may regularly change, and multiple issues that are shared by some or all.
The prime movers in my design thinking should be the factions with their associated faces, and the treaties, accords, and compacts that provide soft leverage in the game. Through these should be backed by the various tools of power from the soft power of diplomacy and trade to cajole, to the hard power of spies and armies to threaten, all backed by the factional agendas and signed treaties. I did not want to have a massive amount of book keeping (I don't want a tabletop game about number crunching) but I wanted lots of options available on an ad hoc basis since cities and states have a lot more than individuals.
I chose five aspects for many of the reasons that Ryan Macklin discussed in Fateful Concepts: Character Aspects. However, I knew that I wanted to create a stronger funneling mechanism for conflicting agendas which is why two treaty aspects each of which more or less inverts the more conventional crossing paths aspects in the default phase trio by creating links of conflict rather than cooperation. Another design benefit of this decision, is that it dovetails nicely with the fact that the stunts dial is increased above standard, while the refresh dial is still default; there had to be a way to create more opportunities for compels to fuel the fate point economy, and at the same time, it encourages more use of the create an advantage action which is in my opinion, the most narrative oriented action which encourages more colorful story moments.
The resource stress track seemed to be an important consideration as I wanted to provide a more solid mechanical hook to hang the concept of abundance and destitution; this needed to be something that feels realistic and sometimes antagonistic in political decisions, without requiring a lot of mechanical book keeping. A full treasury can directly add to your power to bargain, trade, and wage war, while the lack of resources can mercilessly drive your people into a morass of despair, desperation, and anarchy. Mechanically in game, this also provided a neat way to essentially pay for ad hoc extras that are more or less equal to a stunt or aspect in play for that scene or season, and can then be disposed of to clean up the book keeping until you want or need them again unless you pay to keep them active in play. An active trade fleet, assassin, or diplomatic mission, or army should be able to do a little more than the single use of an aspect or one refresh stunt, but still be disposable. Thus, they are paid for by a combination of a successful created advantage supported by resources depending on their level of capability. They should be disposable, so that other players can screw with you by pirating your ships, and sending your diplomats heads back home in a basket.
On the other hand, another factor in my design thinking, was trying to think of how to crack the nut of a problem that I had from the very first time I tried to make a political game: the players almost immediately resorted to war as the most expedient method to get results. In reality, war is costly and should as one Prussian general observed, be kept as diplomacy carried to its furthest extreme. I wanted keeping armies to be a headache unless you really had burned all your other bridges. By making armies expensive to keep, and factions and faces essentially free, the players will naturally discover that they can get more done for less that way… unless they have no more leverage with factions and faces and are backed into a corner. War is very possible here, but costs a lot to keep up.
One thing I did not want was a vast amount of mandatory book keeping that has no immediate effect in a scene, but still give the feel of real capability and consequences in each arena of decision making as represented by the approaches. That is why I settled on fire and forget or fragile economics, warfare, etc. Armies, caravans, gold mines, and even patriotic movements are all as maintainable as you want and easily disposable when you have no more interest in them by making them largely ad hoc aspects introduced by create an advantage, and maintained by resources or simple overcome actions as long as you need them. More important examples of the same can be promoted to stunt level elements which essentially equate to a permanently accessible invokable aspect in mechanical terms.
I plan to add more of my design thinking as I go.
I'm working on designing for Fate, and so I've been breaking down the system to its screws and gears.
By default, Fate Core has 47 discrete mechanical elements to keep track of: five aspects, three stunts, two refresh, ten skills, twenty skill points, and two two-box stress tracks with three consequence slots. Fate Accelerated has 32 discrete mechanical elements to keep track of: five aspects, three stunts, two refresh, six approaches, nine approach points, and one four-box stress track with three consequence slots. So an ideal goal in designing an equally simple, elegant setting for Fate, is to have no more than 32-47 discrete mechanical elements to build from.
If you break down stunts into further quanta, you find that the default character in Fate Core has two physical and two mental stress boxes, with the potential for up to two more of each. However this breaks down into a base of three shifts of physical and three of mental for a total of six stress shifts before getting to consequences. If the character has a third stress box in one or both, they have a total of twelve shifts, and if they have four stress boxes in each they have a maximum of twenty shifts of stress. Six, nine, twelve, sixteen, or twenty shifts… that makes the potential for a lot of granularity if you break down Resources into individual stress boxes, and makes it possible to connect Resources to treasury and storehouse type stress or conditions depending on how you design it. That was a key issue in my decision to break up stress into individual single stress boxes; see FST 60.
As a mechanics light system, Fate requires a whole lot less to digest the crunch, and a whole lot less bookkeeping than say Pathfinder, or GURPS. That is neither bad nor good in and of itself, as both of these are very well designed games, and both have a lot of thought behind their extensive mechanical crunch. It is however a difference that is very important to my present taste in games, as spare time is much more precious a commodity for me at this time in my life. But here's the problem; I am working on designing a political game and Fate is the engine I want to use. However, a political game can be very much a very large wheels-within-wheels affair, and the level of mechanical complication could potentially add up very fast. That is something I want to avoid which is what brought me to dig Fate in the first place, and yet I want the ability to account for many of those wheels within wheels anyway because I like verisimilitude.
So how do I get the big machine without big maintenance? How can I get something that feels as big as reading Dune or A Distant Mirror or watching Game of Thrones?
Currently I have copies of two published Fate world books that beat me to print on settings that include a political angle (Romance in the Air, and House of Bards), but fortunately, they each fill a different niche, and neither one fits the niche that I want to design for. The first assumes nations are important to the narrative, but they act in a distant canvas backdrop shaping the context for personal drama. The second puts the point of view characters in the position of wheeling and dealing for influence in the districts that compose a large city. I am looking for the middle ground with the faces and factions that push the action across the broad canvas. As such, I need to address issues of not only personal and party political power, but all the tools of power from diplomatic to legal, from production to foreign trade, from spies to warfare.
The dials for this build are five aspects, five stunts, three refresh, and six approaches one of which includes a separate stress track. In addition, there can be a number of extras in play at any given time that may regularly change, and multiple issues that are shared by some or all.
The prime movers in my design thinking should be the factions with their associated faces, and the treaties, accords, and compacts that provide soft leverage in the game. Through these should be backed by the various tools of power from the soft power of diplomacy and trade to cajole, to the hard power of spies and armies to threaten, all backed by the factional agendas and signed treaties. I did not want to have a massive amount of book keeping (I don't want a tabletop game about number crunching) but I wanted lots of options available on an ad hoc basis since cities and states have a lot more than individuals.
I chose five aspects for many of the reasons that Ryan Macklin discussed in Fateful Concepts: Character Aspects. However, I knew that I wanted to create a stronger funneling mechanism for conflicting agendas which is why two treaty aspects each of which more or less inverts the more conventional crossing paths aspects in the default phase trio by creating links of conflict rather than cooperation. Another design benefit of this decision, is that it dovetails nicely with the fact that the stunts dial is increased above standard, while the refresh dial is still default; there had to be a way to create more opportunities for compels to fuel the fate point economy, and at the same time, it encourages more use of the create an advantage action which is in my opinion, the most narrative oriented action which encourages more colorful story moments.
The resource stress track seemed to be an important consideration as I wanted to provide a more solid mechanical hook to hang the concept of abundance and destitution; this needed to be something that feels realistic and sometimes antagonistic in political decisions, without requiring a lot of mechanical book keeping. A full treasury can directly add to your power to bargain, trade, and wage war, while the lack of resources can mercilessly drive your people into a morass of despair, desperation, and anarchy. Mechanically in game, this also provided a neat way to essentially pay for ad hoc extras that are more or less equal to a stunt or aspect in play for that scene or season, and can then be disposed of to clean up the book keeping until you want or need them again unless you pay to keep them active in play. An active trade fleet, assassin, or diplomatic mission, or army should be able to do a little more than the single use of an aspect or one refresh stunt, but still be disposable. Thus, they are paid for by a combination of a successful created advantage supported by resources depending on their level of capability. They should be disposable, so that other players can screw with you by pirating your ships, and sending your diplomats heads back home in a basket.
On the other hand, another factor in my design thinking, was trying to think of how to crack the nut of a problem that I had from the very first time I tried to make a political game: the players almost immediately resorted to war as the most expedient method to get results. In reality, war is costly and should as one Prussian general observed, be kept as diplomacy carried to its furthest extreme. I wanted keeping armies to be a headache unless you really had burned all your other bridges. By making armies expensive to keep, and factions and faces essentially free, the players will naturally discover that they can get more done for less that way… unless they have no more leverage with factions and faces and are backed into a corner. War is very possible here, but costs a lot to keep up.
One thing I did not want was a vast amount of mandatory book keeping that has no immediate effect in a scene, but still give the feel of real capability and consequences in each arena of decision making as represented by the approaches. That is why I settled on fire and forget or fragile economics, warfare, etc. Armies, caravans, gold mines, and even patriotic movements are all as maintainable as you want and easily disposable when you have no more interest in them by making them largely ad hoc aspects introduced by create an advantage, and maintained by resources or simple overcome actions as long as you need them. More important examples of the same can be promoted to stunt level elements which essentially equate to a permanently accessible invokable aspect in mechanical terms.
I plan to add more of my design thinking as I go.
06 March, 2016
There's the rub...
“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”
This is not the only reason behind this blog... but it is one of the corners.Cheers!
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