House Systems and Forced Fits

Regarding a previous post on why I don’t repurpose discarded sub-systems, Chris Angelucci asks:

What does this mean for companies with "house systems?" Will any game concept end up being a forced-fit?

I’d argue that mostly this doesn’t become the case, for a couple of reasons. House systems are often created by an RPG company’s key designer, who then goes on to design, or influence, later iterations. The core rules think like that designer does, and so do its later expressions. So while you might not like Joe Green’s take on superheroes, or think that the JoeGreenRules fit that genre well, they’re likely internally consistent.

On a related point, the design concept is, explicitly or otherwise, to do the JoeGreenRules take on a new genre. The core audience for a rules platform wants to see what happens when it’s applied to space opera, or swords ‘n’ sandals epics, or whatever. They’re invested in that game and way of thinking already, and want to see a game that arises in the meeting point between the game rules they know and a genre they know. White Wolf fans aren’t necessarily looking for the platonic ideal game about modern fairies, so much as they probably think the ideal game about fairies will be Changeling—a variation of the core rules and approach they already dig.

To cite a counterexample, the Ars Magica rule engine might not have been the ideal basis for Rune, the game of hyper-competitive, Viking mayhem I did for Atlas. But given that the concept itself was so far removed from anything that had been done before, and that it was a stretch for our timeline and playtesting resources, it was the right choice practically. To invent a new core engine, and make that work, and then make the GM-swapping, point build encounter superstructure also work on top of that, lay beyond our time budget.

If the call to adapt the Rune video game had come just a few years later, the D20 license would have been in play, which would have served the pragmatic aspect of the project and been a better fit. We’d likely have been able to draw from a bigger playtest pool and could maybe have sold enough copies to justify the long development window its ambition required.

Carts and Horses

Apropos of a previous post, Josh W asks: How often do you find yourself budding systems off and turning them into other distinct games? If it happens often enough, how do you deduce the design through-line that subsystem fits?

For reasons implicit in your second question, this happens to me exactly never. I’ve certainly created sub-systems only to realize that they don’t fit the design through-line. Usually they interpret the design goals too literally, or are disappear down a rabbit-hole of unnecessary simulation. Because of this, they are also usually flawed in and of themselves and thus go to the great discard pile in the sky.

Never have I accidentally created a rules subset that would work fine, if only I were working on a different game. In my view, building a game and its core activity around a nifty rules idea is a recipe for disaster. Start with the activity you think will make for engaging play, then facilitate that with rules that enable it in as simple and elegant a manner as possible.

Sometimes I do encounter games that feel like they sparked first from a system idea, with the core activity yoked in to serve it. If it even has a clear core activity. When you ask a designer to describe his game and he starts with a game mechanic, that’s a warning sign of a game designed from an abstract rules concept outwards. (Or maybe he’s just lousy at pitching.) For a few categories, like abstract games, design from sub-system out may be desirable. Often, though, you'll get the feeling during play that you are working for the rules rather than having them work for you.

Uncrossing the D&D Setting Streams

Reverance Pavane, regarding my earlier D&DNext wish list:

Forgot to ask about what you are looking for in an official setting...

I don’t so much have a single clear preference as an awareness of the difficulty the D&DNext team faces in harmonizing the streams on this one. You want DMs to create their own worlds from the set of assumptions the rules build into any D&D game—there are wizards and gods and orcs and demons and this particular spell list and so on. At the same time, a canon of lore has accumulated around D&D, so that its audience expects certain characters, places and situations as part of their experience. Obvious examples: Sigil, the drow and their Underdark cities, and the roster of demon lords that slightly shifts with each new take on the setting. To many fans, these are as much a part of the D&D feel as magic swords or the fireball spell.

3E’s original vision had a vaguely defined Greyhawk (which each DM would make up as he went along) as the default world, with the classic settings depicted in walled-off supplements. 4E split the difference a bit, leaving the material world undefined but concretely populating the otherworldly spaces.

A unity edition suggests a breadth of approach, giving fans of the classic settings the tools to play around in them, and kitbashers the leeway to disentangle the intellectual property elements from the rules. Perhaps the team will find a way to treat past continuities in parallel, so you can adventure across the Forgotten Realms in original, reboot, or rereboot modes. A take on setting that is, if you will, officially unofficial.

So, where setting is concerned, my hoped-for keywords would be familiarity for current fans, accessibility for new ones, and flexibility for all.

Community, Comedy & DramaSystem

Benjamin Hayward asks:

After watching the first season of Community sequentially, I was struck by how much it's characters resemble Dramatic Heroes much more than Iconic ones in their decisions despite the show being advertised as a sitcom. Reading the DVD box reveals all. The show is supposedly about how attending college changes the characters through the lessons they learn. In this way, the characters all slowly change throughout the season, with some doing so more than others in each episode. Have you watched enough of Community to comment on how Drama System might fit it? Or perhaps how Drama System might fit serial comedy in general?

I haven’t subjected comedy to the same analysis that I have drama and the procedural, so consider these thoughts provisional. Blame Aristotle for losing the treatise on comedy that originally accompanied The Poetics. If only he’d backed up to a USB drive!

Comedies tend, like procedurals, to threaten the characters’ status quo and then return to it. The leads aren’t solving external problems as the iconic heroes of procedural stories do. Iconic heroes encounter disorder and tame it. Comedy protagonists tend to instigate disorder (often by pursuing an internal flaw, just like tragic heroes), which continues to spiral out of control in response to their efforts to control it. Finally the disorder reaches a culmination. The hero, undone, confronts his flaw and all is forgiven and order restored.

The equivalent of the procedural would be the slapstick or physical obstacle: the accelerating conveyor belt, the clock hand from which the hero dangles, the damnable road runner who won’t be caught. Moments of character comedy play out just as dramas do—there’s a petitioner who wants something, a granter who does or doesn’t give it to them. Because of these similarities you could play a sitcom format with DramaSystem—though I’m not sure who really wants to. It’s easier to be funny by riffing on a putatively serious game than to keep the jokes flying on purpose.

Community creator Dan Harmon sets out to subvert sitcom conventions and as such bends his characters much further out of their original molds than the audience’s comfort level might permit. This becomes all the more apparent after Season One. Still, you could argue that whatever changes the characters go through, or surprising qualities they reveal about themselves, the study group itself—the real community the show’s title refers to—is restored to harmony at the end of each episode.

Cthulhu and Me

Benjamin Hayward asks for my cthredentials:

You've been posting often about H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu on Twitter, Facebook, and here. Would you mind doing a blog entry talking about your first exposure to, favourite part of, interest in, and history with H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos?

I am among the first wave of readers who caught the Lovecraft bug from gaming. Call of Cthulhu came out when I was in high school; I bought it right away and was soon off to the Orillia public library to track down their copy of the Arkham House anthology The Dunwich Horror and Others, with its Lee Brown Coye cover. When Sandy Petersen’s game helped spur a resurgence of interest in Lovecraft, I grabbed the paperbacks as they showed up in the small Ontario city of my birth.

The story that I find most brilliant, innovative and influential as a piece of writing is “Call of Cthulhu”, with its documentary realism and disorienting, stories-within-stories structure.

The one that scared me the most was “Whisperer in Darkness”, perhaps because I mentally set it in an area I knew well from my childhood—not New England, but the stark landscape of Ontario’s Muskoka district. I also retain vivid sense memory of my first reading of the subtle and brilliant “The Color Out of Space.”

Lovecraft interests me on a couple of levels. The kid in me loves the outlandish details of its creatures. The geek responds to the quasi-continuity he builds as he adds to his corpus of stories, so that knowledge of one informs one’s responses to others. The group collaborative aspect with his peers is also appealing—and the reason the mythos sits in ambiguously in the public domain for anyone to play with. I appreciate him as an exponent of intellectual horror: it is as much about our fundamental aloneness as the fear of being torn apart by a star vampire or hound of Tindalos. In his mature work he is also a top-notch stylist, marrying prose to content in an uninhibited way we could use more of today.

For all of these reasons, I am glad to get to dip my toes in the icy Lovecraftian pool, both with works for Trail of Cthulhu, such as The Armitage Files, and as editor of the upcoming Shotguns v. Cthulhu fiction anthology for Stone Skin Press. There are also some other short fiction projects in the offing, which I’ll announce when the stars are right.

Branches and Consequences

Cosmicgoose is back with another question. If I may take the liberty of paraphrasing (and I may, because this is my blog and here there is no law save for my iron will) he asks:

In Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering, you talk about possible story branches from the characters' success and failure, and how it helps to think ahead about what these might be. In the case of failure, should you plan for characters to suffer additional negative consequences, or is the sting of losing bad enough?

Ideally, you want some but not all failures to bring about lingering negative consequences, and some but not all successes to bring positive ones. In a compelling ongoing story, those consequences arise directly from the story and make themselves self-evident. If you fail to claim the island you sailed for, you lose the queen's favor. If you succeed in capturing the magic sword, you now get to use it against your opponents.

To complicate the equation, sometimes successes ought to provoke negative side consequences, emulating the costly victory: you take the hill, but with heavy casualties. Likewise, a failure might, in a surprising twist, lead somewhere helpful. You get beaten up and captured, in the process learning something about the bad guy's plan.

Too few consequences and a session's episodes seem weightless and disconnected from one another. However, if every event brings about a lasting outcome, they will pile up and bog down the developing storyline. After a while, you and your players find it hard to come up with fresh ideas for consequences. It becomes difficult not only to bring all of them into play, but simply remember them all.

Some of my game rules tell you, as part of the resolution system, when consequences attend to an action. HeroQuest and DramaSystem both do this. During in-house testing for the latter, I had to junk any early version of the procedural system because too often led to a single result—player victory, with a negative consequence. Having fixed that, they crop up enough to add interest and weight, but not so often that the weight becomes burdensome.

The Two Fundamental Elements of RPG Design

Or, How To Design RPGs the Robin Laws Way (Part One of Several)

I've been asked to describe my process of RPG design, so let's kick off what will surely be a series of posts illuminated by your further questions. Should this need be said, this is my process and not a commandment for others to do likewise. If it sometimes seems like I'm making Olympian pronouncements it's because qualifiers are boring and I will have no truck with them.

Sometimes I pitch a game to a publisher (Feng Shui, Mutant City Blues, Ashen Stars); other times I am presented with a brief and asked to develop an approach (The Esoterrorists, Rune, HeroQuest.) The distinction between these two starting points is not always clear-cut.

The first step is to refine the initial brief, by identifying the design throughline and the core activity. Without the second, resulting game will be hard to pitch to gamers and to play. Without the first, it has little reason to exist in the first place.

The core activity I've talked about before. It tells you who the characters are and what they're doing. You're heroes fighting to shape the turning of an age in a world where myth takes on fantastic reality. You play troubleshooters for hire on a war-ravaged fringe of an interstellar empire. You lead an isolated tribe of raiders at the dawn of the iron age.

The design throughline is the central concept underlying game play, and your reason for creating a new rules set (to the extent that you are.) The game evokes the spirit of Jack Vance's stories of the Dying Earth. Or streamlines investigative play, so that the solution to mysteries depends not on finding clues but putting them together. Or provides a simple framework for the building of dramatic storylines.

Essential Elements of a Player Character

A question over the transom from blog reader The Cosmic Goose:

When you sit down to create a new character, be it for a story or game, what aspects do you consider core to that character’s persona? Its emotional and spiritual, so to speak: the place from which the character moves, that influences their choices and decision making process? Background is certainly a part of this, but I find that its almost an afterthought. Background tells you why the character is the way he is, but not the more basic question of what or who he is. This is all from a gaming perspective, of course.

As the truism goes, Cosmic, character is action. We experience a character through what he does and, to a lesser extent (in forms that allow for interior monologue) thinks.

So to create an interesting gaming character you have to have some sense, broadly speaking, of what he is going to do. This is why it is so crucial for an RPG to come with a built-in default activity: exploring the spaceways, rectifying paradoxes in the timeline, solving eldritch mysteries, or killing monsters and taking their stuff. If your GM hasn’t clarified what your character will be doing, find out before you create him.

(An older school of roleplaying would have it that the willingness to undermine the game’s core activity represents true dedication to characterization. This “my character wouldn’t do that” syndrome came about for a particular set of historical reasons I may talk about later, but by now has clearly established itself as dysfunctional.)

So, knowing what your character is going to do, find as compelling, unique and urgent a reason to have him do that as you can. In certain GUMSHOE games, this is hardcoded into the character creation system as the character’s Drive, allowing you to grab a core motivation off the shelf. For other games you'll need to create one.

Then work outward from there, developing the backstory that adds detail and perhaps an origin to the Drive. Everything from his appearance to his gear to his special powers can arise out of this.

This covers you for the procedural narratives that are roleplaying’s bread and butter. For dramatic characters, stay tuned for my upcoming DramaSystem, as seen in its debut game, Hillfolk.