Since the Elegance and Deliberateness thread is now closed, and upon reflection is seems that I was breaking off from the original discussion, I've decided to start my own thread. To recap:

First are the six steps of art as described in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. For those unfamiliar with this, the steps are:

• 1 Idea/Purpose: The impusles, the ideas, the emotions, the philosophies of the work...the work's "content."
• 2 Form: The form it will take..will it be a book? A chalk drawing? A Chair? A song? A sculpture? A pot holder? A comic books? [A rolplaying game?]
• 3 Idiom: The "school" of art, the vocabulary of styles and gestures or subject matter, the genre that the work belongs to...maybe a ganre of its own.
• 4 Structure: Putting it all together...what to include, what to leave out...how to arrange, how to compose the work.
• 5 Craft: Constructing the work, applying skills, practical knowledge, invention, problem-solving, getting the "job" done.
• 6 Surface: Production values, finishing...the aspects most apparent on first superficial exposure to the work.


We're focusing on the first two steps, which McCloud focuses on as potentially the driving foce of the art in question.

But what you're discussing here is content in RPGs. This is a fairly tricky topic, IMO. It's almost like talking about content in a writing program. The programmer creates the program for writing, but it is up to the end user to actually utilize it in writing stories and, ultimately, the content.

Most development in RPGs I've noticed have been step 2 driven, making statements about the art form of RPGs more than any content form. Universalis is probably a prime example since it challenges may old notions of how an RPG "should" be. It makes a statement about the art form itself in this way.

But this is not to say that the game designer cannot add content or guide the eventual content of the RPG by way of the design

Hi Jack,

Because roleplaying games are, in fact games, where in(or outside) of the McCloud scheme would stuff like Drift kick in?

Chris

I think drift is just outside of these six steps since McCloud was talking about comics, not an interactive medium. I have yet to read Reinventing Comics, which may have something in there. Drift is probably, when talking about steps 1 & 2 concerns at least, the players having a different step 1 concern than the designer did and as such, restructuring the system to meet their concerns. But this assumes a step 1 content reason for Drift. House rules in general, at least to sort I have seen, have usually been at the craft or structure level. "Doing D&D better," anyone?

Lately, I have been looking at RPG design like constructing a building. The RPG building have the common foundation: RPGs are an activity concerning a shared imaginative space.* The RPG system develops concensus among the participants for what is in this shared imagined space, the Lumpley Principle. The system can also act as inspiration for adding things to the shared imagined space, but this is merely an extention of the Lumpley Principle. Providing inspiration is just a particular way to develop concensus. This is the common bedrock all roleplaying is built on. What we often thing of as the roleplaying game is a structure that is built on top of it.

The structure will be different depending on the designer's purpose. Just as an architech will use a different design when building a four-beroom colonial or a Wal-Mart. But, once built, the structure is then in the hands of the end-user who may have a different purose. The end-user may convert the large fron family room into a shop for a business or convert the upstairs or downstairs into separate apartments.

This purpose I'm refering to includes GNS. I don't think of it in terms of GNS since have been finding the categories somewhat difficult lately. What I refer to as purpose is not a single word but, most likely an essay. A list of design specifications. "Fireplaces in the living room and master bedroom; full bath upstairs, 1/2 bath downstairs, etc." or "Heavy-duty illusionist play until a combat situation occurs in which case play shifts into combat tactical wargame. etc."


* This definition obviously includes items we can all argee are not RPGs. That's OK. My purpose here is simply to define RPGs at their baseline for the purpose of understanding, not to construct a dictionary definition with a water-tight definition that states what RPGs are while not including what is not RPGs.

I'm not sure I spot a question here. (Grin.)

I think I would extend the architecture model slightly, again based on stronger views of the designer's influence on play. Lumpley Principle sure, but the game has a strong effect on what consensus the players reach.

In the architect analogy, I'd ask whether a really good architect could design a family home which didn't just "suggest" that putting a Wal-Mart in it would be awkward, but did something more subtle and manipulative as well. Let's say the architect wanted to build a home which would not only tend to suit a family of 4-6 people, but wanted to build one which would tend to help that family get their kids enthused about school, reading, and doing crafts.

So he builds a TV nook with slots for a stereo and all the trimmings, in a really comfy room... but it faces a back corner so there isn't much room to sit there, the room is situated where it won't get much light during the day, and the room is far from the kitchen and bathrooms. But he puts gorgeous built-in bookshelves in a big, sunlit room, which divides up naturally into a couple of spaces just the right size for a loveseat or comfy chair. He makes the area where a kitchen table would most naturally go, also well-lit, with lots of storage drawers and cabinets right nearby (including some the size of big posterboard or newsprint rolls), and ready access to a sink. The master bedroom is the most comfy, but the smaller bedrooms get windowseats with a small built-in bookshelf in each one.

It won't always work. Some families will put plants in the TV nook, take out the crafts cupboards and watch TV in that space, and put soccer trophies in the little shelves in the kids' windowseats. But if you assume that the architect makes a thousand of these, the odds of it making a difference and imparting his message are pretty good, and his subtlety and skill at the craft become the question.

Which is, indeed, the question. His uses of space, lighting, travel distances within the home - those are our uses of contrast, realism issues, layout, and the like tricks. And I think we really are working our way toward a better-understood bag of such tricks...

- Eric

Interesting. I actually think i'd take the manipulative architect idea even farther. The architect may not even provide an obvious location for a TV. There's no room that looks like it will go well there, there is no coaxial cable run through the walls and therefore nowhere to plug the TV into. Then, he includes books and art/craft supplies with the house. I think this is the form that most RPGs end up taking. The actual rules and setting details that are supplied provide a focus for the game. Sure you could work out a place to put that TV and rewire the house, but you'd probably be better off just buying a different house entirely...

LordSmerf

I have to jump in with a voice of disagreement with the above. When it passes subtle, it becomes intrusive. Many families won't buy the house. Many gamers won't buy the game. Those who do will complain about having to deal with the metaplot everywhere. The architect must remain a quiet voice in absentia or he will be ignored - remember, per Lumpley, the one area where the social contract completely denies the rules a voice, is in the group choosing to give the rules power to begin with.

Of course there is a limit to how overt you can get without alienating some group. But what about the family that doesn't want a TV, and specifically wants lots of shelfspace and crafts-space? This house is more suitable to them than the more subtle approach. It's an interesting balance. Is this architect building a general house in order to attract all buyers and to influence whoever buys the house into reacting a certain way? Or is the architect instead trying to design the best possible house for a specific type of buyer? I think that's the reason that homebrewing systems is so common. The comparison to building could easily liken this to remodeling. Building something for everyone is generally difficult, whereas building something that is highly specialized and focus is pretty simple...

LordSmerf

Eric,

There are a lot of people here who think that Smerf (whatinthehellis your real name anyhow) is absolutely right. Me being one. That is, no game is going to cater to everyone, or we'd all be playing GURPS the generic universal game, right?

So that means that all games focus to some extent.

Now, you can try to make your game appeal to some larger crowd by making the game more "open", in theory. But in quite a bit of practice this leads as often to people not knowing what to do with the game. I mean, if I don't have an idea of what sort of game I want to play, I sure as hell am not going to use GURPS, right? Because it doesn't give me any direction.

The most popular RPG, D&D is about as narrowly focused as you can get. It's about overcoming (c'mon, who we kidding, killing) monsters taking their stuff, getting more powerful, and moving on. Far from making people feel limited, most people are comforted by the notion that it's easy to determine what to do with the game. It's "grabby" in its Creative Agenda.

What's not "grabby" is "you can do anything with it". I mean, even in a fantasy world, it's typically either like D&D in that it's about killin monsters, or it's about "well, you play characters in this fantasy world, and you can do 'anything' you want in it". Well, games with the latter lack of focus either get played like D&D, or they don't get played.

The point is that there are a ton of failed designs out there where the architect made his house with too few details. And the people he's selling it too, look at it, imagine what they might do some, and move right down the road to the furnished apartment.

Are there some players who won't want to play a particularly focused game? Sure. But like I said, you can't appeal to everyone. Make the game at least appeal to someone.

Thus you see designs here like SOAP which is played in hour long sessions. Is that limiting? Yes. But it actually makes people like the game more. In InSpectres, you play the same plot segments out every session. Boring? Far from it.

Focus is a good thing. In the theoretical parlance, a tight Creative Agenda.

Mike

Harlequin wrote: Lumpley Principle sure, but the game has a strong effect on what consensus the players reach.

In the architect analogy, I'd ask whether a really good architect could design a family home which didn't just "suggest" that putting a Wal-Mart in it would be awkward, but did something more subtle and manipulative as well. Let's say the architect wanted to build a home which would not only tend to suit a family of 4-6 people, but wanted to build one which would tend to help that family get their kids enthused about school, reading, and doing crafts.

Hi there,

I think people's use of "Drift" is, well, drifting a little.

For instance, customizing a game in terms of mechanics is one thing, grading perhaps imperceptibly from not-worth-bothering-to-name into altering those mechanics' literal function. Another thing is customizing (for instance) setting or aspects of the options, such as one does when playing Sorcerer (e.g. the score descriptors). I can see the former as a means of Drift, although not necessarily Drift per se, and I don't consider the latter Drift at all.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: For instance, customizing a game in terms of mechanics is one thing, grading perhaps imperceptibly from not-worth-bothering-to-name into altering those mechanics' literal function. Another thing is customizing (for instance) setting or aspects of the options, such as one does when playing Sorcerer (e.g. the score descriptors). I can see the former as a means of Drift, although not necessarily Drift per se, and I don't consider the latter Drift at all.

Hi John,

You're making a hell of a lot of sense. I hope that people can see that the widely-held view at the Forge that coherent game design is desirable does not contradict your points at all - in fact, I'd suggest rather the opposite, that your points are one of the primary design/aesthetic considerations for making a coherent game.

Best,
Ron

Boxes.

To use the analogy, the foundation of the building has to be steady, and support...something. The walls need to be sturdy, and contain the whole so that it will not fall, and the elements you don't want are kept outside. Or rather, the dimensions of the space make the edifice what it is in a gross sense.

But then, yes, the interior should be made as malleable as possible. If we could have walls that could be moved at whim, wouldn't that be cool.

The extent to which the inner partitions should be malleable will be a design decision. Too malleable, and they'll be meaningless. To rigid, and they'll prevent any originality.


The problem with the metaphor is, well, its a metaphor. What are walls in a game design. To get back to game design, the idea is to creat coherent boxes that constrain play at some level, but leave the internal play to be "whatever you want". Just how big the box is, will be a design choice. All I've ever said is that you can make the box too big. You can also make it too small, I suppose, but I can't think of a design that's done this.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: You can also make it too small, I suppose, but I can't think of a design that's done this.

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: Then I realized that an RPG written should be, in some way, a method of capturing play so that others can replicate it.

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

Mike Holmes wrote: 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.

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.

Shreyas Sampat wrote:
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.

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: However, this feels like the chicken & egg circular logic.

(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

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