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[sgt-nerd]

Cargo Culture

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Today we're going to talk about cargo cult game design.

First, terminology: After some people in Melanesia first encountered things like airplanes, they understandably didn't know how they worked. They knew the planes would bring in all sorts of goods and cargo after people built things like airstrips, landing fields, and so on. It was as though these people who'd arrived had discovered a way to summon damn near any sort of goods. To try and bring the goods for themselves, they would replicate what they'd seen the other people do. They'd go through the motions, but without fully understanding the reasons for it.

They weren't stupid, but they lacked critical elements of information. Similarly, a lot of times people will copy things they've seen working, but without knowing why.

We talked earlier about the figuring out the intentions behind your rules. If you're going to borrow rules from somewhere else, it's important to figure out why the hell they used those rules.

One of the biggest sources of cargo cult game design is Dungeons and Dragons. This ain't exactly a shocker, since D&D was the first real RPG on the market. Every RPG that exists owes some amount of debt to Gygax, even if they're designed as a reaction against D&D.

It's taken a long time for games to really start to move out of the shadow of D&D, and even today people design games in certain ways because that was how D&D did it (though which edition of D&D varies).

The thing is, original D&D was a designed around a very specific style of gameplay. Today a lot of people think of D&D as being generic fantasy, but while Gygax borrowed a lot of shit from different books and stories, he had a tight focus on what the game should do.

And it's right in the goddamned name. It's Dungeons and Dragons. You go into dungeons and fight monsters. You also haul out loot. The original game had you get most of your experience by hauling gold out of the dungeon.

The game revolved around resource management. You lasted as long as you had spells and hit points. Weight was tracked carefully. Thieves could only pick a given lock once. Random monster rolls pushed risk vs. reward gameplay.

But when you take those rules out of that context, when you toss 'em into another kind of game without thinking about it, they can fuck your game right up.

For example, let's look at those lockpick rules from older editions of D&D. Now, part of the reason you had lockpicking was because you had a lot of thieves in fantasy fiction. Bilbo, the Grey Mouser, L. Ron Hubbard... But it's used in a way that actually enforces the tone and other mechanics of the game. If you pick the lock on a chest, you get whatever treasure’s inside. But if you fail, you either have to lug it out of the dungeon (reducing the overall amount of loot you can carry), abandon it, or break the chest open (possibly wrecking the Magical Coffee Mug of Zandalur). Risk, reward, and resource management.

Under the influence of D&D, a lot of other games have lockpicking rules. This is partly to justify the existence of thieves/rogues. Jerry wants to play a rogue, so goddammit, the rogue has to have something to do. But the game designer thinks only getting one shot at the lock is unrealistic, or maybe he isn't as into resource management for his game. So, he lets the rogue try over and over again until he gets a lucky roll.

Well, now so long as the rogue can possibly make the check, he eventually will.

There are ways to make this interesting, of course. Time crunch is the easiest. Having interesting penalties for failure (you made some noise hammering at the lock, and someone’s coming!) But a lot of games don't bother with that. Published adventures for 3rd edition D&D often had locks that needed picking, but it was pretty rare for there to be any real penalty for failure. If you can't really fail, what the hell's the point of rolling? Either give the rogue a reason to want to get it first try, or don't bother having a roll.

Instead, ask why you needed lockpicking in the first place. What does it add to the game? What /can/ it add? How can it be used well? If it can't, then toss it. If it can, then change the rules around until it is. Make sure that your gamebook tells GMs when to use the skill and how to roll it into the game's fiction.

You also see cargo culting with World of Darkness. World of Darkness was one of the big rivals to D&D in the 90's, and a big departure from the D&D model in a lot of ways. So it's natural that a lot of games, especially urban fantasy ones, borrow from it. So you get dice pools, race/faction combos, and other bits lifted straight from Vampire or Werewolf without any thought to why it was used in the first place.

Sometimes a rule's just bad. 1st Edition D&D had special modifiers for women. That pretty much always leads to shitty sexism and junk science biotruths. The barbarian couldn't associate with magic users (Whoops, I guess Mary can't play with the rest of the party; she hates Jose's wizard). In 3.5, you have the no-fail lockpicking I mentioned earlier, and the rules for drowning straight up didn't work if you ran them as written. You had feats like Toughness that were literally designed to be bad so to trap people who didn't know the game so well.

But you still get people copying bad rules design because that's what D&D did, and that must be how roleplaying games are supposed to work.

Here's one that works in D&D's original rules space, but gets put into a lot of games where it doesn't fit: Combat is the majority of the game. It makes sense in D&D (where the rest of the game was mostly puzzle solving to get around traps or find cool ways to use magic items), but you see it even in games that are supposedly designed around social skills and roleplaying. If your game is supposed to be about diplomacy and political maneuvering, you probably don't need to devote three quarters of your rulebook on how to hit fightmans with sword. If most of your game is out of combat, devote your rules space to whatever the fuck the players are actually doing with their lives.

Again, look at what rules you're using that have been done before. Ask yourself why they were done. If you can't come up with a good reason, you might need to figure out if it's actually going to work in your game or not.

Nerd company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

For All Intents and Purposes

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Today, we're going to talk about your intentions in the rules.

A lot of the time, people make rules in their games without actually thinking about what those rules do. I've already talked about Doing the Math and making sure the rules actually work that way, but sometimes you have to ask why you even have a rule, or why you don't have a rule.

As an example, the game Extreme Vengeance talks a lot about how armor isn't cool, and how GMs should penalize players for wearing it, because it's not a good fit for the genre (80's/90's action movies). However, it still has armor rules to allow them to reduce damage. If you don't want players to use armor, do not give them rules for using armor. Just tell them armor won't help, or that heroes don't use armor, because that's the kind of story you're trying to tell.

It goes back to Setting Expectations. The rules you have available are a kind fo expectation the players have. If you have rules for armor, they expect they're supposed to be able to use armor. If you have rules for magic, they expect that they're supposed to be able to do magic. If you don't want players to be able to do these things, then don't put them in the player-facing rules.

Or maybe there are things you want players to be able to do. Maybe you want swashbuckling heroes who can swing on chandeliers and cut their initials in their opponent's shirts. But do your rules allow them to do it? Do they encourage them to do it? I talked about this a bit in GM May I, how rules that seem intuitive can end up making cool scenes impossible. It's okay if you have some high risks involved in doing cool things, but you need to also have cool rewards. If there's no benefit to sumersaulting off an ogre's back to cut down its master vs. just doing a standard attack, then players are less likely to try it.

Do you have attributes or ability scores? Things like Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wits, etc. that inform a bunch of other things players can do, like skills, saving throws, or attacks?

Why? Do they fit the game? Are all of the attributes or ability scores being used well? Is there a clear dump stat? Why? I'm not saying you can't use attributes or ability scores, but you don't need to. Just because other games did it doesn't mean yours need to. If you do use them, you don't need to use the familiar ones. What's actually appropriate for the genre you're emulating?

How many skills do you have? Are they all things you see players rolling over the course of a game?

Try this. Write out a sample adventure you see people playing in your system. See what skill rolls would be called for. Anything that doesn't come up, consider cutting. If it only comes up once or twice, consider cutting it as well. If you still have attributes, you can do it as a simple attribute roll. You can also rely on backgrounds, things like that. You don't need every conceivable skill a human could possess in your game.

In future columns, I'll talk about this in more detail, as well as about cargo cult game design. For now, I'll leave you with this.

Ask what your game is supposed to be doing, and make sure your rules support it. If they don't, you need to have a long hard look at those rules.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

Lights, Camera, Action Points!

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In a lot of games, you have special points you can spend for things like bonuses and rerolls and the like. Used well, and it is a powerful weapon in your arsenal to control the pace and tone of your game. Used poorly and it can undermine everything you're trying to do. We'll call them cool stuff points, because the help encourage players to do cool stuff.

First, let's talk about what cool stuff points can do. As mentioned, sometimes they give bonuses. Spend a point and get an extra +2, or +1d6, or +10 to a roll, depending on your dice system. Sometimes this has to be declared before you roll, and sometimes you can do it after you roll. If you have to declare it, it makes it a lot more uncertain. Maybe you could have succeeded without the bonus. Maybe you fail anyway. But it makes it much more likely for the points to be wasted. That's not necessarily a bad thing—the chance of failure is why we have rolls, after all. But it can be frustrating, especially if the points are hard to come by. On the other hand, if you use the bonus after you roll, you're much less likely to waste it. You'd only use the bonus when you were pretty sure the bonus would bump it up to a success. This makes it a lot more predictable, but it does take some of the tension out of the decision. Either way, this can make it easier to do things that the players might otherwise have trouble doing, or even let them do things that would normally be impossible.

Sometimes cool stuff points give you rerolls. This can help make your players more likely to take risks. If they fail, they get a second shot at it. It can give some extra survivability when they can reroll saving throws or dodge rolls, and it can make it more likely for difficult rolls to succeed. It's similar to getting a bonus, though it doesn't make it possible to succeed beyond what they normally could.

Sometimes a point gives more direct survivability. In the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, Fate Points can be spent whenever someone's character would die. Instead of dying, the character suffers some other survivable fate. Maybe they're captured instead of kills, or they're left abandoned on the battlefield, but it leads to an interesting situation where they can keep going, instead of being out of the game. In Paranoia, the clones are effectively cool stuff points you use to bring your character right back into the game. In Savage Worlds, you can spend bennies to make soak rolls and cancel out incoming wounds. In games like these, the points are a direct barrier against death. So long as you have them, you're not out of the fight. When you run out, you're in dire straits and it makes the game much more tense.

In some games, you spend points to make cool stuff possible. Sometimes you have specific abilities that require one of these points in order to work, like a psionic blast or a super power. Sometimes it's more general, like being able to declare there's a rope and a chandelier for your swashbuckler to use, or that your childhood friend happens to be in the same bar you are. The characters can use their points to directly power their ability to do cool things beyond what the normal rules allow.

There is one final thing these points can do in some games. They can be used as experience points, being traded in at the end of a session. This is a terrible idea, and I will explain why.

In the first four cases, the points serve a very important purpose. They encourage the players to do things, generally the aforementioned cool stuff. Maybe it's because they know they can get a bonus or a reroll to make success more likely. Maybe it's because they know they have more chances at survival, thanks to either rerolling a bad roll or spending a point to avoid death. Maybe the point is exchanged directly for them to do cool stuff. When you let them trade them for experience, you are effectively penalizing players who use them for any other purpose. You are incentivizing them to hang back and avoid taking risks. At the end of the day, you want your players taking risks and doing cool stuff.

Think back to every fun story someone's told you about an RPG. I'll bet you that at least 90% of the time, it was a player taking a chance and having something cool happen. Or maybe something disastrous happen. But it started with players trying something out.

Encouraging them to hoard points is worse than not having the points at all, because it encourages them to avoid risk, to avoid doing anything interesting, to hang back and let other players take chances. It penalizes them for doing the cool stuff. You want them to do cool stuff, whatever that means in the context of your game. It might be fighting mobsters, it might be getting past traps, it might be political intrigue, but you want them to be active participants.

Of course, that doesn't mean just throw points into the game without thinking about how else you're using them, especially when they have multiple uses. You need to think about how many they have and how they can get them back.

You want to make sure that the different uses are all valuable enough that players want to spend them. Getting a bonus is good, but if the other use is "don't die" in a highly lethal game, your players will probably save them for the second use.

In this specific case, whether it's a probelm is going to depend a lot on how often they expect to die. In a game where players have good odds of survival, they might just keep a point in reserve, where one where every encounter ends with a player character going down is likely to see all points saved up to get them back on their feet.

Warhammer Fantasy RPG has an interesting way of dealing with this issue. I mentioned Fate Points earlier. You also have fortune points that are equal to your fate points. Fortune points get you rerolls and a few other benefits. However, spending a fortune point doesn't affect your fate points. They refresh every day. Losing a fate point, though, reduces your fortune points, and you don't get them back automatically. You have to earn them back, generally by doing big heroic things. It lets them have both types of point. Players are still encouraged to use their fortune points without needing to worry about not having fate points later on.

Speaking of giving them back, there are a few different ways to go about it. Some games have you get them back whenever you rest. Some have it based on the gaming session. When D&D 3.5 introduced action points, it had them come back when you leveled, which made them very scarce. As mentioned above, fate points in WFRPG never come back. You have to earn more through adventurning, and that happens fairly rarely in the game. In games like FATE or Savage Worlds, you can get cool stuff points for playing up your character's weakness in a way that makes the game more interesting, or by doing particularly cool and clever things.

The flow of cool stuff points will help direct the flow of action. When players are full up on cool stuff points, they'll be willing to try lots of things, to take risks, to be badasses. When they run low, they'll be more cautious. If they know they'll get their cool stuff points back the next day, they'll be more willing to spend them, where if they know it'll be a long while before they get more, they'll be more inclined to save them up.

If you want a game that's more constantly tense, then you want to use fewer points or make them harder to get back, or both. If you want a more action-packed game with the players taking lots of risks and swinging from chandeliers and the like, then give out more or make it easier to get them back.

And you don't need to have cool stuff points. They're a great tool, but it's perfectly possible to have a great game without that specific mechanic. Think about them in the context of the rest of your game's mechanics. Try them out, mix them up and see how they affect the flow of the game. Remember, there's no substitute for basic playtesting to see how everything fits together.

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