Content of an RPG

[LordSmerf]

As to your second point.  Playing before game design is possible, but you run into an interesting conundrum, or you do in my experience anyway.  The system i'm currently spending most of my time in was an outgrowth of D&D2e, except that no one could figure out how anything worked.  What the group ended up with was a system in which you essentially rolled d20s and the DM decided if you were successful or not...  Now this worked fine for what it did.  It told stories.  It was all about story and character development.  The problem was that this was unduplicatable in the form it was played due to the fact that there was no framework of numbers for other people to use.  Remember that people play games for different reasons, and like the architect designing a building for a specific purpose, we design games with a specific focus.  Now, that focus can be side-stepped and changed and all that, but if the users are required to change too much to get what they want then they may just get something entirely different (like Wal-Mart not buying a 4 bedroom home for their next store, but build a new building instead).

I'm going to give you fair notice, i'm about to use the Three Levels teminology, so if i'm not making sense check it out.

Since we design for a specific audience/play-style it is important to realize that some games are specifically designed for the Second Level.  In fact the system i'm running through its formative phases right now was specifically designed for the metagaming present between Player manipulation of the numbers and the effects of those numbers on the gaming world.  It's a game that you specifically play in the meta sense.  You manage pools of dice and there is not a very clear tie between the real world and the numbers.  The numbers are part of the fun.  On the other hand, as i've mentioned before, some people play for story and character developement.  These people do not need any sort of serious numbers management.

I guess to some degree you can play before you have finalized anything, and maybe that's what your were saying and i just read too much into it.  You have to have some sort of system of numbers in place to play unless the numbers mean nothing, and if the numbers mean nothing then they don't really need to be recorded in order to duplicate the experience.

As for malleability ini games, i agree.  You have to be careful in how malleable you make something.  The solution i'm currently looking at is Systemic Modules.  There is a module for each major game focus (Combat, Diplomacy, Magic, etc...), and each module contains expansion rules in order to make things more focused in that arena.  The combat expansion adds damage tracking and initiative systems, the diplomacy system adds social standing and detailed rules for manipulation, the magic system adds complex spell customization and all that.  You can play with all or none or one or however many modules as is appropriate for your group.  I'm still experimenting with this, but so far it looks pretty promising.

Thomas

[Jack Spencer Jr]

This seems like a leap in logic. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to know how you got to this conclusion.

Thinking too much, I'd imagine.

I was looking as the relationship between written RPG and actual play. While the physical book or written word can be appreciated for it's own merit (undeniable but not very helpful to our conversation here) where an RPGs real art is found is in actual play. Like the work of O.G Whitmore,* who had written many mystery novels that kept people guessing. What he had done was draw on his experience crafting such potboilers and presented the tools he had used to write to aspiring mystery writers, who could then uses his guideline to hopefully craft engaging mystery stories. Whitmore had to write to be able to pass on advice on how to write.

Therefore, to write an RPG, the instructions of how to play, it is best to have played the game so that one can draw on the experience of how the game transpired, what problems arose and what solutions were found, to the players who will eventually play the game.

However, this feels like the chicken & egg circular logic. You need to play to write the game, you need to write the game to play. Obviously, what seems more likely is that the game is playtested as it's written, like how MLB was written along with the EXEC, and then a well-developed game will be written. Or such is what I seem to have hit upon. I seem to get a feel that playtesting is a last stage in the development, but I'm suggesting it should be a major part of a game's development from day one.


*A ficticious work and person, obviously. Substitute you favorite how to write book if you like.

[Shreyas Sampat]

I'm starting to think that it's essential for game design to happen in two stages: play design and rules design.

Play Design is about the content of the game.  This is what the people put in the house: the furniture, the colour of the walls, the smell of baking that seeps through the floor above the kitchen.  Colour feeds into this, as well as Social Contract issues, attitude, many of the black sheep of the game design realm.

Rules Design is about how to encourage the play that you've designed.  The manipulative architect is working here.  But without a plan for what room will do what, he can't do anything.  So first he sits down and thinks about the people he wants to live in his house, and then he builds the house to they will love it.

Thomas, I disagree that you can always replicate play where "the numbers mean nothing"; play design is all about numberless play.  Still, you can't just open your eyes and play like Sorcerer unless you know what Sorcerer is about.

[LordSmerf]

Thomas, I disagree that you can always replicate play where "the numbers mean nothing"; play design is all about numberless play.  Still, you can't just open your eyes and play like Sorcerer unless you know what Sorcerer is about.

I'm sorry, you are correct.  Please continue to call me on the overuse of hyperbole, it's something of a vice.

I do agree with Jack on the playtesting as an integral part of design during design.  That's something that i just kind of fell into in my first major design undertaking.  You pick a Play Design concept, but that has to be playtested.  Beyond that, you must integrate a Rules Design into your Play Design, and that will involve a lot of playtesting and work, it may even require a modification to your Play Design...

I'm not entirely sure that i agree with the idea that game design happens in two stages, but i'm not willing to come out and say i disagree with you.  Yet...

Thomas

[Mike Holmes]

However, this feels like the chicken & egg circular logic.

It does to an extent, though I can see where you're coming from. It's just not practical to start with nothing, unfortunately. So we work from what we know, speculating on what will work.

What it argues for is writing as little as possible to play, playtesting, fixing and adding, playtesting, etc. Repeat until done. Which is a sensible model I think.

Mike

[Harlequin]

(The conversation has drifted away from there, but I'd like to go on the record as saying that the disconnect above was less due to what I was saying than to the limitations of the metaphor I used.  Analogies do that.  The subtle manipulative architect is at work in all the games we know, just as all good painters 'manipulate' the viewer, and it hardly 'gets lost on us' or removed through play.  See my examples here.  Such things rarely get shifted aside even as people change other things to suit themselves, and exert a powerful effect.  That being said, I really like the current direction of this thread, in particular the idea of designing for change in usage.)

One idea was briefly discussed in the thread about When The Drift is the Fun Part, which again possibly misuses Drift in much the same way this thread is.  That thread was more joke than content, but nonetheless the idea of design resiliency is something I think we could bear to explore.

In that case, it was a board game, not an RPG, so concepts will have a limited mapping.  But the core of why I found it a highly resilient game is one of the things that might map over reasonably well.  We found it extremely forgiving for three reasons:

- As a trading-based game, the valuation of the game's currencies was 'pinned' to the game rules only at a couple of points.  Primary value always stemmed from what the players wanted to do at the time (short and long-term both), and their private valuations of it.  As such it was able to eat up any changes which cascaded into changes to the values of commodities, as people changed their own valuations to reflect this and carried on.  The game equivalent of how robust a free market is to a sudden new gold mine being found; values change, but the fun of playing the market itself is, if anything, increased.

- It had a lot of currencies and a lot of goals one might wish to accomplish with them.  Exploration (needs engines, fuel), versus construction stockpiling (needs radiators and metals), versus shipping the construction stockpile onsite (probably different engines, and a lot of fuel), versus science (needs pure cash and extant tech).  This enabled the first point, above, to function - the game really does develop a market.

- It had an incredibly high level of interdependence.  Going to war anywhere shy of the very endgame would, frankly, be fatal.  It's basically constructed such that, to start with, everyone has not-quite-perfect control over one of the commodities; it can be had without you, generally through one player who basically serves this backstop role, but you produce it a lot more cheaply.  Together with the shifting valuations described above, what you get is a series of heartfelt but shifting alliances.  This, too, is very robust in the face of any changes to the game itself, because all we really expect out of this is a basic structure, not a particular setup of relationships.

As a fourth point, the Sim element of the game (forgive me if I consider calling it the Baseline) was strong enough that what was sensible or nonsensical drift, from a Sim standpoint, was always easy to see.  It had a strong internal consistency to guide things.

Trying to translate this over into RPG terms, I can see some of the same principles applying.  Multiple valuations of things, multiple desires with those things, and interdependence relationships.

D&D character classes, anyone?  The value of each (fighting, sneaking, magic, healing) changes as we play, but they all have value, and each player (in a classic one-of-each kind of party) has near-control over that resource.  If this kind of classic party gets dropped into alternate circumstances, it shifts priorities, adjusts, and the game carries on.  Which may actually be why this model is so good, not only in the recent 3E craze, but throughout its history, at being adapted to whatever style of play is locally desired.

Certainly I notice that something like, say, Continuum, where everybody has essentially the same main ability (Spanning) and only varies in the secondary ones (skills), feels less resilient to shifting its mode of play.  That's really interesting...

You could also apply this perspective to other things than 'character ability,' because there are naturally other currencies or values to be measured.  In a Nar game, for example, the highest value is on Premise and Theme, so you could guess that a Nar game which - even in its default setup - supports a good breadth of Premise material, and has rules which make players explicitly interdependent in the resolution of its Premises, would be fairly resilient there.  I'm not sure I can think of a good example, here, but Wraith comes to mind as a game which tried for a high interdependence on the resolution of Theme, by having one player play another's Shadow.  (IMO it lost out by constructing things such that the default party had forces driving it apart much stronger than those keeping it together.  Player interdependence was shattered by total character independence.)

That's one example of a mechanism which might help us design for change... whatever the thing is that play here most values (whether it be victory in a Gamist design, resolution in a Nar design, or immersion in a Sim design), make (a) multiple such conditions such that they're likely to vary, either over time, by situation, or among players, and (b) give people near-control over things that other participants need in order to reach those endpoints.  If these two things are true, then the design may benefit from a little bit of the same resilience to change I observed in Rocket Flight.

Any other thoughts?

- Eric

[Mike Holmes]

Makes a lot of sense to me. To me, resiliency sounds like having redundancies built in. Such that if one support structure fails that another picks up the slack (and we're back to the architecture metaphor). And also that the structures are elastic so that they can take some stress from bending.

Mike