Start Making Sense: On why Realism and “Making Sense” are Essential
Posted by Joshua on Dec 22, 2011
Over on his Hack & Slash blog, blogger C argues that realism and “making sense” are terrible and always make games worse. Far from being terrible, realism and making sense are essential for fun. Even in such an abstract game as Tetris, the pieces have to “realistically” fit where blocks of that shape in the real world would fit, and realistically maintain their shape as you rotate them, and the controls have to “make sense” in that the left arrow moves them left, the right arrow moves them right, and the down arrow moves them down. None of those things had to be true, since it’s just a computer game, but the fact the code makes them true, makes them behave the way you’d expect, is part of what makes the game fun. Games are learning tasks, and learning things that don’t make sense is frustrating and un-fun.
Here’s part of Hack & Slash: On why Realism and “Making Sense” are Terrible
Making things more realistic ruins games. Changing things to have them “make sense” destroys fun. I’ve written and designed computer games before and the most important lesson I learned from those experiences was to design fun mechanics and make the game about that fun. Jeff Vogel talks about it here. Every time someone suggested a way to make the game ‘more realistic’, it never failed detract from the game. Add armor damage and wear and tear on weapons causes tedium. Make the monsters fight each other causes endless messages and rooms full of dead creatures. How about at a table? Making people remember to eat, go to the bathroom and feed horses? You’ve insured that the players recite a list of items at various intervals. Sounds super fun, right? – C, the Hack & Slash blogger
C is confusing complexity with realism. I agree with what C says later on completely, in that player agency is crucial, and that “In a game, an enjoyable activity comes from making choices with significant consequences.” I even agree that the various activities in the game ought to be fun individually as they’re played. But C draws the wrong conclusion from this. The problem with the things that C identifies as detracting from the games is that they represent a bad trade-off of extra complexity vs. the extra amount they help you in making choices with significant consequences, not that realism and making sense are bad things for a game. The problem isn’t that they are realistic, the problem is that they are minor extra decisions (when to stop to eat, how much food to carry) that require constant bookkeeping to figure out the consequences.
If C’s diagnosis were right, and all that was necessary was that the activity in the game be fun in and of themselves, then you could improve any game just by substituting some more fun sub-game for any less fun activity. Poker is more fun than rolling a die to see if you get a high number, so just resolve combat by playing poker. Othello can substitute for social interaction. Etc. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t make any sense, and it isn’t realistic. It’s not realistic in the specific sense that the decisions that you make in gaining victory in the sub-system are nothing at all like the decisions you would make performing the activity that’s being abstracted; Tetris is a blast, but a computer racing game where how well your car was doing in the race was a factor of how well you were playing Tetris (turning the wheel left and right to move the blocks, shifting to rotate them, stepping on the pedal to drop the block) would be stupid. You might even have fun playing the Tetris part, but the car moving around the track is just distracting window dressing. The game is improved by adding realism to it, by having the car turn left or right based on turning the wheel and accelerate by pressing the pedal. It might be further improved by adding a shift lever that changes the way the virtual car responds… or that may be a step too far, and whether it’s an improvement or not can depend on the player’s tolerance for complexity and steep learning curves. What’s not true is that this added realism would detract from the game, and every step towards more realism makes the game worse. Note further that from a purely game rules point of view, it doesn’t matter at all whether turning the wheel right makes the car turn to the right, or to the left, or for that matter whether the facing of the car is controlled by the foot pedal, while the wheel controls acceleration. As pure game elements representing decisions and skills to be mastered, they are equivalent. The reason that one particular choice is fun and any other choice is just goofy is that there is one choice that’s realistic in that it allows you to directly map your understanding of the real world into how things will work in the game world; this is the essence of empowering the player to make meaningful decisions rather than just arbitrary game-optimal ones.
Take a step back for a moment. Given that the point of the game is having the players make choices with significant consequences, what is at issue is how best to empower the players to make meaningful choices. Often, if not always, the best way to do that is to make the game more realistic, to make the salient aspects make more sense. Empower the players to make good game choices by designing the game so that good choices based on real-world knowledge and reasoning come out to be good game choices. On the flip side, for the love of Mike don’t go bananas and add meaningless choices or rules that have you doing twenty minutes of bookkeeping for every 10 seconds you get to think about making a choice: that’s bad design whether you add the rule in the name of realism, game balance, or any other desirable quality in a game.
Commerce… in Spaaaace!
Posted by Joshua on Apr 21, 2011
Here’s a quick take on doing commerce in Zap!
Space Trucking
For simple “Take this cargo and deliver it” runs, roll the Cargo Bay power of the ship vs. Difficulty 13 for how far (how many scenes) you have to travel before you deliver the cargo and get 1 Wealth Point payoff. You can use the usual rules for combining powers to boost your roll by narrating how your shticks such as Merchant or Smuggler improve your chances. The presumption is that this is the best deal you can currently find, and that you’ve cleverly arranged it so that you’re not going out of your way to do the delivery; that is, wherever you find yourself after that many scenes of travel is the destination for your current cargo. This kind of commerce is incidental to whatever goals you’re pursuing, and should be relatively risk-free; it’s just background texture that give you extra wealth for bothering to make up some details of your merchant activity.
Special Delivery
If you’re hired specifically to take cargo X to place Y, that should be the basis of an adventure, and the GM should make up the details and the payoff in WP. This would be the meat of a campaign like Firefly, where the PCs are trying to scratch a living.
Space Trading
If you want to be more of a wheeler and dealer, and actually accumulate wealth, then you would buy and sell commodities. You decide how valuable a cargo you want to take on (expressed in terms of Power Level), and the between you and the GM you make up the details of exactly what might be available at your location. You then pick the power you want to use to acquire it, such as Cargo Bay, Smuggler’s Hidey-hole, Wealth, and apply any narrative “juice” from combination with other powers and shticks to roll against the cargo’s PL roll; if you meet or beat the roll, you get the opportunity to purchase it at the value the cargo rolled. If that’s acceptable to you, you take it on and make a note of the purchase price; the power you used is now committed until you sell the cargo somewhere. Subsequently, wherever you go you can try to negotiate a deal to sell it. Roll the cargo’s PL combined with any narrative juice vs. the Wealth power of the location (depending on the scope of the campaign, this could be a whole planet, a settlement, or even an individual); if the cargo wins, they want to buy it and their offer is whatever they rolled. If that’s acceptable, they get the cargo and you get a profit (or loss, if you’re desperate) in WP of the selling price vs. the purchase price.
The upshot of all this is that you have considerable leeway in how you trade, and pretty large scope for using your powers and shticks creatively to make trading more interesting and improve your profits, while keeping the amount of book-keeping low (no tracking how much space cargo takes up, what your exact current wealth is and if you can afford to purchase the cargo, what prices various planets have offered in the past, etc.).
- Valuable cargoes are harder to acquire, but have a bigger margin for profit; cheap cargoes are easier to get, but have smaller profit margins.
- Poorer buyers are more likely to want what you have, but usually will offer less for it; richer buyers are pickier, but more likely to pay more.
- There’s an “opportunity cost” to keeping goods until you get the best possible trade.
- Gains from trade can be much more than just getting paid for delivery, but it’s possible to lose wealth if you’re unlucky or trade poorly.
Zap! or Kapow in Spaaaace!
Posted by Joshua on Feb 7, 2011
Since Dan’s interested in changing his Warhammer 40K setting using SavageWorlds over to Kapow! I need to get cracking on writing up a minimal set of the genre-specific rules for changing it from supers to space opera.
Broadly I think these are the areas that need tweaking:
Equipment
For superheroes, equipment other than vehicles is just an explanation of some heroes’ powers. For most SF settings, gear matters and players care about it (and upgrading it). Tentative rule: an item of gear is a power, with its own dice rating, but most gear requires that you have an appropriate Shtick to use it to full effectiveness; roll only 1 die if you don’t have a Shtick that covers it. E.g. a Blaster might be d8, d8 but you only roll d8 if you lack a Shtick like Soldier or Gunslinger to justify it. Some characters might still take a full-fledged Power where the explanation is gear, such as a cyborg with a built-in laser, bought with the usual power rules.
Vehicles
Vehicles will have their own Scope appropriate to the vehicle, so a groundcar would be Scope: Planetary Region, while a in-system shuttle might be Scope: Interplanetary, and a star-cruiser Scope: Interstellar. There will probably be more Scopes, so you can make distinctions between FTL where travel between nearby stars takes a couple weeks, a couple days, a couple hours, etc. Movement will be rated in terms of Scenes. One of the things I’ve noticed about travel in RPGS, and in SF RPGS in particular, is beyond a certain point unless travel is insanely dangerous (as in wandering monster rolls every 6 hours) players tend to stop caring about how long trips take; a journey of 10 days is not really any different from a journey of 100 days… both will be blipped over with the exact same hand-waving. Zap! will address this by requiring that you play out, or at least describe, a scene aboard the ship for each unit of distance traveled (size of unit determined by scope). Hopefully the scenes will be interesting, since the point isn’t to punish players for wanting to travel longer distances, but to give the act of travel texture so that the trips become more memorable and make longer trips seem longer because you can expect to have and later remember more incidents happening during them.
Maintenance
Similarly, and along the lines of my musings in Clarke’s Law and SF Roleplaying, to make tech seem a bit less magical, we’ll give equipment maintenance ratings (and maybe Advantages/Disadvantages like Low Maintenance/No Maintenance and High Maintenance/Constant Maintenance) that will also be expressed in terms of Scenes that need to be spent playing out or describing maintenance being done, or else it starts having chances of degrading or malfunctioning. Scenes will probably require that a character with an appropriate Shtick make a roll, with failure or mishap resulting in having to spend extra money or get replacement parts. I think this kind of thing is pretty important in SF…even in squeaky clean futures ships like the Enterprise require a ton of work to keep in repair, if the number of episodes where something goes wrong or needs replacement prompting them to make a landing and get in trouble is any indication. Again the idea is to make sure that there’s some “spotlight time” devoted to players, particularly those who’ve focussed on Shticks like Engineering, doing the things that define this as SF.
Aliens
We’ll just be using the Template rules from Argh! to handle alien races that have unusual abilities. We’ll probably also use the Argh! Templates for characters, but with new names if needed (e.g. Magician -> Technician).
Commerce
I’d like to come up with a simple way of handling commerce and trade, since that’s often important to star-faring SF. Again this is probably going to be expressed in terms of Scenes rather than tables of trade goods and prices, perhaps with some notion of trading off travel distances and risk vs. profit.
I think that’s the gist of it… but I’m open to suggestion on things I might have overlooked that would be important to an SF campaign that aren’t already covered.
Kapow! Quick Hit
Posted by Joshua on Mar 29, 2010
Last night wasn’t scheduled to be a Kapow! session, but since there was some confusion due to skipping last week’s session to finish Russell’s Gradulfiad arc, Dan didn’t bring his game, so Kapow! it was. Since both Redline’s and Public Defender’s players were absent, I sidelined their plot threads; also, because the players were starting to use Out-of-character reasoning about a mysterious conspiracy tying all the threads together, I took the trouble to disabuse the players of that notion. While it would have been amusing watching them chase their tails for a little while, I know from bitter experience–bitter I tell you!–that if you let this group of players start to get paranoid it’s a death-spiral for the campaign. Telling them flat out that it was just separate plot threads that coincidentally all started at once because it was the beginning of the campaign will save heart-ache down the road. That left tracking down whoever had killed and cut the heart out of the young woman in the park according to the forms of an ancient Inca ceremony.
In the interests of GTTFM (mildly nsfw), while the group was discussing a road trip to Connecticut to consult with the only other expert in the US who could have accurately reproduced the ceremony, a news flash came on the TV: a scantily-clad woman with a 20′ albino ghost anaconda had taken a bunch of children hostage at the Public Gardens and was issuing a challenge to Akela, the Jungle Gal. No, really I had that part planned all along…the villain came to the US to confront Akela, so there was no reason for her to skulk around waiting for them to find her.
The group raced to the park to confront the villain, who revealed herself to be a rival of Akela’s from the jungle village that had (partially) raised her… Nusta, the daughter of the witch doctor who taught Akela her secret jungle recipes. She had come to America to hunt down and punish Akela for her cultural misappropriation, abandonment of the People to side with the Outsiders, misuse of the secrets entrusted to her by the traditions of the witch doctors, and generally being a pain in the ass all those years growing up and overshadowing Nusta. This, of course, pushed all of Akela’s buttons, and she was ready to offer a truce and to show Nusta that the Outsiders really weren’t all that bad and that she was just helping people as the witch doctor would have wanted… until the others reminded her that this young woman had cut the heart out a girl in the park just the other night in order to summon the demonic snake that was menacing the toddlers. And so the fight was on!
The fight went reasonably well from the point of view of play-testing some of the system. We tried out the new way of handling actions in turns (basically having to declare all of your attacks at once if you’re making multiple attacks, instead of making one, waiting to see if it worked, making another, etc.) and it did indeed speed up people’s turns so play went around the table quicker. The rules for disabling powers got a workout when it turned out that Nusta was quick enough (and people were rolling rather poorly) that they were having difficulty tagging her straight-out. First the Wraith disrupted the ghost snake, then Harbinger managed to take away Nusta’s spear, and the Wraith drained her Super Speed. Akela finished the fight magnificently by combining her powers with her jaguar’s to KO her rival. It really did feel like it was straight out of the comics, at least to me.
As she was being hauled away by the police, Nusta vowed that this wasn’t the end of it, and the pharmaceutical companies that were going to tear up the jungle around the village searching for medicinal ingredients would be stopped. Of course, this left Akela further conflicted. Ah, complications.
One thing thing that, unexpectedly, some people found confusing was how the increasing die-sizes work. The problem is there’s no such thing as a d14, d16, and so on, so unless I force everyone to use an electronic die-roller I have to fudge the progression. The progression d8, d10, d12, d8+5, d10+5 was deeply counter-intuitive to the less rules-crunchy types, so much so that I’m considering whether to replace it with d8, d10, d12, d10+d4, d10+d6… All in all, the shakedown continues to go pretty well, I think. I hope the others chime in with their impressions.
Superheroes, not Superbowl
Posted by Joshua on Feb 8, 2010
Lat night we ran another session of Kapow!, my superheroes rpg that we’re playtesting, and I take it as a good sign that despite the fact that before we started a couple of our players expressed interest in watching the Superbowl half-time show, once we got going they forgot all about it. We had our first big set-piece battle, and it went really well I think. Everybody was engaged and involved, and despite the fact that it went for most of the session it felt fairly fast-paced and like they got a good amount done. They were facing off against the big boss and her 64 minions, so the fact we managed to wrap it up at all is good.
The group had tracked Alexandra LeGrande to a warehouse where she was training her army of Glammazons, and scouted it out to find a secret lab underneath. They decided to split their forces, with Harbinger (intangible scout) and Public Defender (Force Fields) sneaking in through the storm drains to confront and delay LeGrande, while Namaste (super-yogini), Akela (jungle girl), the Wraith (power-draining mystery man), and Redline (powered-armor/motorcycle multi-form) burst into the warehouse above to round up the Glammazons and prevent them from just running off.
The fight between LeGrande and Harbinger and Public Defender went particularly well, from my point of view. Once she revealed her supervillain persona, Olympia, and began chucking her pentathalon-themed weaponry (exploding discus, “switch-blade” javelins, and big old hammer) it became evident that one or two on one they were just no match for her. She KO’ed Public Defender in the first round, which really bummed him out until I reminded him that by the rules he’d be out for a maximum of three rounds or until one of his teammates revived him, whichever came first. Harbinger then spent his turn reviving him, which meant that he couldn’t stay phased, but managed to avoid her attack anyway and they were both back in action.
Upstairs the fight went pretty much as expected, with the heroes easily clobbering multiple Glammazons per round, though the Glammazons did manage to at least hinder them, and in one case managed to pile on enough to score as a knock-out on Akela…but her jaguar Nushka was able to revive her easily enough. The Wraith’s exotic power-drain power proved to be the most effective at dispatching large numbers of agents quickly, though Namaste was no slouch in that department either, just using her strength and acrobatics. Akela’s heightened senses allowed her to detect that the group below were having trouble, so she, Redline and Namaste headed down to the lab, leaving the Wraith to deal with the remaining Glammazons.
Once the full group (more or less) was assembled, they managed to combine their powers and take Olympia down, though she did get a good shot in, disabling Redline’s Super Strength with a javelin through his suit’s shoulders. Basically it worked exactly as designed: a boss significantly tougher than any individual was defeated by the heroes using team-work in a straight slug-fest, and once they had cleared the decks and gotten together it went only two rounds…no slow war of attrition in Kapow! It could also have easily gone the other way, I think; if she had been able to take one or two out and press the attack so the group couldn’t afford the time to revive them they wouldn’t have had the numbers needed to overcome her higher defense and she might have been able to defeat them all and capture them or escape.
It was also very gratifying that Wendy at least thought the villain was really cool, and seems to be looking forward to her escaping custody and facing them again some time in the future. Don’t worry, Wendy, you haven’t seen the last of Olympia!