Tag Archives: Design Process

The Four Structures

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Every failure has made me a better designer. Seeing the fail states if games, either in playtesting or after publication, has shown me a dozen different areas where I can hone my craft. Recently I decided to step back and look at the broader patterns which highlighted four different core design structures that need to be carefully tended in order to produce a compelling outcomes.

Every game can be viewed as a combination of four distinct structures, and the balance of effort among these areas will vary greatly depending on the nature of the project. How you combine these elements is an important decision for any designer and it’s worth your attention. Two of these structures (System and Setting) are well trod territory, but I rarely see mention other two (Situation and Subtext) and wanted to share my framework more broadly.

System consists of the rules and procedures of play. This is all about how you play the game, and how the person at the table will interact with the fiction you create. Rules mechanics and resolution systems all fall into this structure. A weak system tends to result in a game experience that depends on the personal competences of the participants in order to create a compelling play experience. The expression of a game “so good that we never touched the dice” dice stems from weak systems.

Setting consists of the fictional context for play. A setting can be as broad as a galaxy, or as small as a tiny pub where everyone knows your name.  Setting often represents and existing genre of fiction, but there is plenty of room for innovation in this realm. A weak setting feels bland and generic. There is no flavour to play, and the narrative is shallow.  Indistinct character personalities and lack of immersion into your roles are symptoms of weak settings.

Situation consist of the inciting incidents and the purpose of play. This is all about why you are playing the game, why your characters matter in the setting, and why the system will help them shape the narrative. A weak situation feels aimless and undirected. The participants have no strong direction or guidance in how they should be acting or what they should be doing. If the players are purely reactive to the GM’s plot or the fiction feels “on the rails” it’s a sign that the situation isn’t giving motivation.

Subtext consists of the deeper meaning and symbols associated with the game. Every game is a reflection of the real world in some way, and the subtext is all about intentionally crafting the messages and politics encoded in play. A weak subtext feels unintentional or unimportant. The participants are driven to achieve their practical goals, but those goals don’t align with the player’s personalities or passions. If a game that feels uncomfortable to play, or seems to accidentally perpetuate harmful philosophies, it might be a sign that the subtext is unintentional in nature.

An example in action. My first game was titled the Spark Roleplaying Game and it was a mixed bag. The system was fairly robust and moderately well implemented in hindsight. It didn’t have a single cohesive setting, but did give some amazing tools for creating your own settings at the table as a group. The lack of a singular setting led to very weak situations and only allowed for the simplest of subtext. The game had all of the basic functionality necessary to play, but that game itself wasn’t compelling  enough to stand out from the crowd.

The 8 Structural Questions.

Consider answering these questions to explore how these different structures fit into your own game projects.

1.       What does your system encourage players to do at the table?

2.       What is the most important mechanic, rule or procedure in the system, and why is it key?

3.       What about your setting is mundane, relatable and human?

4.       What about your setting is wondrous, fantastic, and exciting?

5.       What is the situation that encourages the players to interact with each other in play?

6.       What is the situation that encourages the players to interact with the setting in interesting ways?

7.       What kinds of player behaviours are encouraged by the combination of system, setting and situation?

8.       What is are implications, morally or politically, of those behaviours?

The Status of Spark

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I wanted to provide a bit of a status report for the Spark RPG project. I know that I have been relatively quiet on here, and thought that you might appreciate an update.

The Open Beta that I launched in 2012 taught me a great deal. Playtesting did an excellent job at pointing out what portions of the text required major overhauls though I feel badly for the players who suffered through the earlier iterations. The reworked collaboration and conflict mechanics are finally producing the game play experience I desire.

This fall, I observed a 4 session blind playtest from a local group, led by one of my assistant editors (Mark Richardson). This test showed me that the game did too good of a job encouraging conflict, without encouraging cooperation between characters. I reworked the relatively negative “baggage” questions into more positive ties between characters. It also highlighted the danger of vocal players drowning out the quieter ones during the collaborative process, so I added more guidance to counter that fact.

After that point, I sent the text to my editor (David Hill) for the revision first pass.  He did a masterful job, as expected, in pointing out problems with the text. I’m particularly thankful that he identified a piece of the text that was disrespectful of mental illness. I reworked that section to be far more inclusive because of his help, and the game will be better for it.  Beyond that, he showed me the places that required elaboration and example text.

Over the holidays, I threw myself into the task of incorporating all of the revisions and writing some additional setting content. This current version of the text comes to 32K words in length, including all three settings. I have it back in David’s hands so that he can do another editing pass for me.

I am presently working on organizing my kickstarter campaign, tentatively scheduled for March of 2013. With luck, I will be able to make at least my minimum goal and publish the thing.

Spark RPG Open Beta – Version 3.5

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Hello everyone,

I have definitely learned a great deal during this open beta process so far.  I want to explain the evolution of the game before I point you at the last version of the open beta text.

 

Version 1

The extensive feedback and the original AP from The Walking Eye podcast led me to restructure the text, to provide extensive example text and generally refine the game. Version 1 showed me that the world-building component of the game is one of its strengths. It also pointed out that some of the mechanics encouraged the wrong kinds of adversarial behaviours in players. This led to some major revisions to the text, which I managed to get out a few days before GenCon.

 

Version 2

Version 2 was a more solid version of the game. I reorganized the text and integrated much of the advice directly into the procedures of play. I also wrote a running example of play in the the setting creation, character creation and gameplay chapters. This version had slightly cleaner formatting, but time pressures kept me from tinkering with it too much.

My GenCon 2012 experience was a real eye-opener. I was able to get 3-4 playtests of version 2 at Games on Demand rules with mixed results. All of the tests of the Setting creation process went amazingly well, even with players who had little exposure to story games.  I ran into some challenges with the gameplay sections though. The mechanics _worked_, but there were far too many moving parts for me to effectively teach the game in that context. I realized that in a 2-hour time-slot, I spent a major portion of that time teaching the rules rather than actually playing the game.

In the last of these game sessions, I was fortunate enough to have Timo of the Jankcast  playing in my game on the Saturday afternoon. His excellent comments forced me to give an honest and critical look at the game.  The core mechanics, which I originally designed several years ago, were showing their age. While playtesting helped me refine the system and I had many excellent mechanics in there, the overall structure wasn’t serving my design goal for Spark. That is when I came to the decision to rip out the core resolution system and restart it from first principles.

Version 3

Saturday night I sat down with my text, crossed out the Collaboration and Conflict sections of the text, and got to work. The new system that I wrote up is much more elegant and does actually reinforce the desired behaviour of challenging your Beliefs.  I chatted at length with Timo, where he looked over my proposed version of the text and gave me his thoughts.

I brought this version of the rules with me the next day when I ran a 4-hour playtest of the game for the crew of The Walking Eye. That game session, which you can find as a bonus episode of The Walking Eye , was a blast. It gave me much needed confidence that I was on the right path.  You can find that episode here!

 

Version 3.5

Over the last month, I have used all of the GenCon feedback to create a new revision of the open beta of the game.  Version 3.5 is now freely available right Here.   This will be the last version of the text that I will post as part of the Open Beta, but I will extend the beta until November 1st 2012.

I would really appreciate any feedback and playtesting that you can provide on this last version. I want to make sure that this revamped version of the game is as solid as possible.

Thank you all.

Narrative Oracles

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I know it’s taken a while, but I am back to the discussion of inspiring creativity in games. My last post on this topic dealt with Creative Constraints, where people built off the restrictions in a game system to create something new. This time, I would like to discuss Oracles.

Oracles are nuggets of information without context, that you can interpret for your game. As a group, you interpret the oracles use them to build some kind of cohesive context. The astounding work, “In a Wicked Age” by Vincent Baker is likely the earliest and best known work using this little technique. That game includes oracles like;
*A hermit priestess, practicing obscure deprivations.
*A fallen-in mansion, where by night ghosts and devils meet.

The group gets to use these evocative descriptions to build a cohesive setting. Our monkey-brains are remarkably good at pattern recognition and quickly build webs of associations. It turns out that with a few seeds of inspiration, we can quickly build a narrative. So long as the descriptions are open to interpretation, they can be very helpful.

Be sure to check out Houses of the Blooded for another interesting use of Oracles.

Edit: And of course, the playsets in Fiasco are full of Oracles which lead to such inspired play.  Thanks to @Linneaus for reminding me.

 

 

 

 

Software Choices

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Good software is nearly essential for producing a good roleplaying game book.  Over the years I have made a series of choices between different software packages and I thought I might explain my reasoning. Perhaps this may be useful to some of you.

Brainstorming:  I am currently undecided between using the technical solution (Freemind) or simply resorting to pen and paper for this function. I haven’t quite internalized a separate “brainstorming” step in my game designs, so I tend to use this in an ad-hoc fashion.

Writing the Draft: I started using the very nice open-source program Celtx which is a remarkably versatile media pre-production program. That one is particularly good for screenplays and movies, but I managed to get it working for my game writing. Easy to learn and freely available, it was a good choice.

That was when I found that Literature and Latte had released Scrivner for windows.  I picked up the program and fell absolutely in love. It’s a logical system for organizing and shuffling content without the fiddly bits involved in word processing software. Excellent as an organizational tool alone, it also supports the writing of content.  It comes with a a two-hour long tutorial and costs about $40 USD, but well worth the price. It’s telling that this is one of the few pieces of commercial software I currently use.

Editing: My go-to word processor is the open-source program Libreoffice at the moment. While I have access to MS Word and WordPerfect, I like to support the free program. Despite a few aesthetic disagreements, I have found the program to be robust and it fulfills my needs at the moment.  Some of the technical decisions, such as the use of frames, work quite well.  As a supporter of the open-source movement, I appreciate the use of open standards.

That said, I do fall back to MS Word on occasion.  Turns out that word 2007 has some extremely handy automated tools to point out passive phrasing and a host of similar stylistic problems. It’s also the default file format for writing, so sometimes it must be used.

Art: The open-source domain has continued to treat me well when it comes to art. I use the excellent and intuitive program Inkscape for all of my vector art.  I have replaced the proprietary Adobe Photoshop with the excellent and free program The GIMP.  Both of these are of professional quality and free

That said, I fully realize that some closed-source software can be worthwhile.  One program in particular, Corel Painter, has earned my praises.  I know that it would take me months of continuous practice to learn how to use the program effectively, but the incredible versitility has impressed me.

Layout and Publication:  I have the hardest time in choosing the best programs for layout and pdf production.  Picking an excellent closed-source PDF Editor was easy (PDF-XChange by Tracker Software). The challenge was in picking the ideal layout program for my purposes. I am torn between sticking with the open-source Scribus or invest in the proprietary Adobe InDesign.

Adobe InDesign is aboslutely the industry standard and is objectively the best program of it’s type on the market.  Everyone uses the program, printers expect it and tutorials abound.  It’s also a closed-source program with a price-tag of $699 USD.  That is certainly not a casual purchase, especially for a new publisher.

The open source competition is Scribus, a program with its own challenges.  The consensus within the Forge and Story Games appears to be, avoid the program. There is a significant learning curve and the help files/tutorials are quite poor. Adding to that, several professional graphic designers have mentioned some key deficiencies in the program. I put in days of effort learning the bloody program and the effort paid off; I am now able to do my own rudimentary layout. I used Scribus for “A Sojourn In Alexandria” in Gamechef 2010 and it worked well enough.

 

I hope that someone finds this information worthwhile.  I would love some discussion on the layout programs in the comments, if you kind reader(s) would like to help. Thank you.