My Resolution Was To Write More

And so I'm trying. I haven't written since October!

So I started NaNo, failed that. It sucked. Then the holidays came, and I sort of got in a slump. My goal is to make up for that, at least somewhat. Ugh. RN isn't dead though, it's just on life support.

Since this is the blog post least likely to be read by returning readers, I've decided to write about something maybe more personal than normal. It will be also more scattered than normal, and believe me, I know my posts are already pretty scattered.

I love drama.

This isn't a new discovery for me. I like interpersonal relationships, and I like hearing about other people's feelings. It's fairly natural, if a little effeminate, for me to enjoy drama.

So a while back, in November, my RP group was thrust into a crunch scenario. The players were forced to make a bad decision - either turn themselves into international criminals, or start a war between two countries. I may talk about the overall campaign later, but it's this decision that is the most important one. So far they've gone on the path towards starting the war, and there may come a time where it may be impossible to stop that. But for now, they aren't 100% hedged in that path.

The drama regarding this decision was amazing. I got hours of quality, GM-free player interaction where they fought, argued, and talked over one another in order to debate all of their possible options.

In character.

It was epic! Everyone had an awesome time and felt good about what was going on. I mean, they didn't feel good about the circumstances, but everyone felt like they had something to contribute, because they all had opinions on what they should do.

As a GM, I love it when my players are excited about their game. Drama is just one way of doing it, and it isn't even the easiest option.

Drama is especially hard because a lot of roleplayers don't take the game seriously. It's hard to have someone who thinks entirely in meta terms to think about how their character feels about something.

Since I tend to attract the meta types of player, it's a little harder than normal for me to instill this sort of drama. At the same time though, it's hard for me to find 'real' roleplayers that actually want to sit down and play a game rather than use the game as a chatroom.

Still, in the end I enjoy character interaction as much as anyone. Roleplaying is about being a group of characters in a scenario, not a bunch of character sheets plowing through a dungeon. To me, roleplaying is about using that character sheet to form a character that has real strengths, real weaknesses, and who we can establish a deep and intricate personality with.

It's rare to really get that same level of roleplaying spirit in a group, and so I really enjoy it when it happens.

I dunno, this post makes no sense, but it's okay. I'm allowed to ramble in my blog a little, right?

No, Really Really, Morality is Not Subjective

No, I don't think this time is going to be a preachy moral article. It's about morals, sort of, though.

In roleplaying games, alignment, or 'percieved alignment' for those games without alignment rules, is sort of a big thing. Some games just gloss over the topic (returnergames) while others, most notably D&D, make it a big, game-altering deal to be of a particular alignment. This article is about the more hard systems of good and evil, and how ridiculous some GMs can be.

Good and evil in the type of D&D way are pretty poorly defined, and even though more recent books have more clearly explained each alignment, players and GMs continue to misinterpret such principles as 'lawful good.'

The first thing to think about in any morality situation is intent. The intent of a person is 99.9% of what determines whether an act is good or evil.

A character who accidentally does just about anything, without being aware of the consequences of the action, is not performing an evil act. A character who accidentally causes the death of someone is not performing an evil act. How many paladins have you heard fall because of unintentional consequences of their otherwise noble decisions? The answer: A lot.

The intent of the action determines pretty much everything behind it. If the paladin happens to put his sword in the closet, unaware that a pixie is hiding out in there, and inadvertently hacks off one of her wings, he is not going to fall. He might fall if he was mean about it afterwards, depending on the whims of the GM, but if he was like, "zomg im sorry :(" that should be enough to say, the paladin isn't performing an evil act.

If a character does something that is evil that they do not realize is evil, it is still (probably) not an evil act. For instance, a heroic character is deceived by an illusion into thinking that a town of innocent people are actually treacherous monsters that are threatening the town. If he kills the people (deceived by illusion) it would probably not be considered an evil act. There's a situation like this in Baldur's Gate 2, where the players and a group of paladins are hit by illusions, and both groups think the other group is a bunch of hostile monsters. When you win, you find out that the enemies are paladins, and you go and find the guy responsible (a red dragon, which you can choose whether or not to pwn its face). This is not an evil act - unless the players were to be like, "oh, well I would have killed them anyway." This changes the intent from killing hostile, life threatening monsters to killing a group of benevolent do-gooders. Intending to kill good guys is almost always an evil thing.

So looking further at intent, we get into the morally grey. What if two countries are economically dependent on a particular resource, and there isn't enough of it to go around, and so they go to war over controlling the resource (after negotiations prove impossible). The individual combatants in the war are almost assuredly not performing evil acts. The politicians might be, depending on how critical the resource is.

Using a more fantasy example, say a village is struck with a terrible disease, and the only way to cure it is to make medicine from the roots of a really ancient tree. At the same time, there are druids who guard the tree and the forest and wildlife that would die if the tree were dug up. Inevitably there's going to be blood there, and it's a pretty morally grey decision as to who is in the right. Neither side is doing evil, even if we may side with one group or the other.

Back on the subject of things that would cause a paladin to fall or that would be considered vaguely evil, is actions that are obviously stupid. If a hero knows that what he is doing could result in harming innocents if he screws it up, then yeah, that is probably evil or would cause a paladin to fall. There's a little bit of grey area here too, but not a whole lot. If the paladin is climbing a tree to retrieve a magical arrow he fired, and there's a chance that the branch could fall and if someone was walking under it they could get hurt, the paladin is probably not doing anything evil, even if the branch does break and someone gets hurt. If we escalate a bit, say a hero is fighting a monster on some dangerous terrain. If the hero moves to safer ground and continues the fight there, it might endanger innocent lives (due to fireball explosions or whatever). This hero is totally doing something that would make a paladin fall, especially there are consequences. Again, if the hero doesn't know that innocent people are around when he makes the tactically superior decision to relocate, then he is obviously not doing something evil, though.

Lastly, good intentions are not 100%. If a crazy person believes that a village is actually shapeshifted demons (because he's told, whatever) without doing any investigation, and rolls out and starts murdering people, that's evil, period. Obviously if he finds out they are demons, and they are a threat, then he is totally justified in cutting them down.

On that last point, though - slaying demons is not always a good act. Demons that are harmless, or that seem to not want to mess with people, are not 'free xp'. Slaying a sleeping red dragon who has no history of terrorizing humans is an evil act, even if red dragons are traditionally evil.

That's really something that is overlooked a lot in fantasy - killing is not something one should just take lightly. It's one thing to fight in self defense, and it's one thing to protect people from evil creatures. It's not okay to go hunting for orcs or goblins or whatever.

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Lawful good is a pretty misunderstood alignment (right up there with neutral evil and true neutral). Lawful good does not mean a character is a pacifist or an idiot. It means that they hold a (good) ideal or belief, and maybe follow a good religion and live in a nation with good laws.

A lawful good character (even a paladin) does not have to be 100% honest at all times. It's morally wrong to lie, and it might even be morally wrong to decieve people. However, if it serves the greater good, not telling the bad guy that your kingdom plans on invading next week is completely understandable. When the rogue lies like a politician to save your party, it is not against a lawful good character's alignment to shut their mouth, shrug their shoulders, and be unresponsive. It is against their alignment to lie, but in the situation where it could lead to the safety of an entire kingdom, it is probably okay if a paladin makes a suggestion that the rogue "is a pretty honest guy" or "couldn't make this kind of thing up."

Evil is even less understood. Believe me, I know. The best way to sum up evil characters is, they are like players. Ha.

Seriously though, evil characters simply want what they want. Most evil characters are not chaotic evil and do not do evil things just for the sake of doing evil. Most (neutral) evil characters want power, money, or prestige. They will steal or murder people to get at what they want, but that doesn't mean they always will. Evil isn't dumb either, and the bad guys most likely aren't going to kill the good guy king and steal his daughter and run off to the castle to wait for a good guy to show up - unless the bad guy was strong enough to handle the entire king's army when they attack his castle in retribution.

When I make an evil character, I give them goals, motivations, and reasons for doing things. Then, because they are evil, they use evil means to get at those goals.

Evil means isn't the only option to an evil character. If it's easier to get at something they want by doing good deeds, an evil character is totally capable of doing good things. Evil isn't like good - it's the absence of morals, not the presence of them. That means most evil characters have no qualms about doing 'good' things if it gets them what they want.

There can be evil characters devoted to being evil, such as lawful evil religious zealots or chaotic evil morons. These characters are pretty cool and wacky, but rarely do they feel dangerous like an evil character who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Fortunately, most lawful evil characters aren't so devoted to doing evil that they won't do 'good' things.

To sum it all up:

Being a good guy is about wanting to do the right thing, as much as possible.
Being a bad guy is about getting what you want.

Selfish motives are always evil, and selfless motives are always good.

Keep that in mind, guys!

Screw the Rules, I Have Good Design

This is a super nerdy article totally focused on making games. I've been irritated lately by things that follow this mold, so it's only natural that I mention it. If you're not a super nerd planning on making your own game someday, you can probably skip this. It has some value for GMing though, since a lot of GMs make house rules.

One of the thing that annoys me in game design is when people insist on making things a certain way because they need to conform to existing, previous design decisions.

I don't quite think I can explain this very well, so I'll use an example to illustrate.

Waaaay back in the 90s there was this popular fighting game called Mortal Kombat. A lot of you guys have probably heard of it! The characters in MK were very similar. They all had the same normal moves with the same hitboxes, and they all had the same number of special moves. One characters had an exception (Johnny Cage's groin punch). This game was really, really not that fun design. Most of it was about playing the best character (probably Sub-Zero; Scorpion had an anti-projectile teleport though, making it not so clear-cut) who had slightly better versions of the same watered-down moves.

Mortal Kombat never really strayed from this design much. Characters continued to have very similar basic attacks and fairly similar special moves. Although different characters became the best, it was still clearly in favor of characters that had broken gameplay elements or slightly better versions of the same boring special moves.

By contrast, around the same time, there was Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition (CE for short). CE was an older, more busted/abusive version of SF compared to the newer versions of the game (HF, Super SF2, ST, and HDR) but it was much more refined than Street Fighter 2. The moves in CE were very different from each other. Ken's low medium kick was vastly different than Sagat's in both reach, power, and utility. Projectiles in the game fired at varying speeds, recovered at different times, and had very different amounts of hit stun and damage. Special moves had radically different properties as a whole - Bison's torpedo (psycho crusher) behaved much differently than Honda's torpedo (sumo headbutt) despite being similar moves.

SF2 would definitely be the harder game to balance. It's had a lot of iterations whereas each Mortal Kombat game, with the exception of 3, has had only one (3 had a version called Ultimate Mortal Kombat, with a lot of new characters and the same basic gameplay). While MK was never really ever balanced at all (MK vs. DC sure isn't) it would have taken the developers much more effort. Why didn't they?

The problem really is rules. Moves in the old MK universe (not sure if this is entirely true but I suspect it still is) follow a certain design guideline. Moves deal x amount of damage if they're a certain kind of hit, and put you in a certain type of stun. Moves that knock you up or down or launch you around all launch you in a certain way. Rather than fine-tune these values, the MK designers set up a bunch of guidelines for how they'd make abilities, and just sat down and made a bunch of skills and threw them into the game. This is from what I have seen still the case even in the more recent MK games, although there's a lot more types of attack now so there is more diversity.

This isn't really for fighting game design though. It's far more of a pen and paper or MMORPG type of design. D&D 4th suffers from it a little bit, and Returners FFRPG has a lot of it there. These systems are good uses of rules to create lots of cool things, but Returners in particular is kind of bad about having not enough flexibility (particularly in the equipment area).

There's another type of design that totally throws rules out the window. In fact, this is pretty much the entire design behind SF2CE and most SF games in general. This design says, design a lot of broken stuff, make your characters really unique, and hand the broken stuff out, a few to each character. This is also the method WoW uses, notably. After you've totally thrown your game on its head you can then adjust things.

Most games use this method, and it is also bad. The main reason it is bad is that you can very easily create metagame shifts - if you give some class something you don't think is that bad and it then becomes overpowered, many people will switch to playing that class and abusing the tactic you gave them. Even worse, when you fix the imbalance (nerf it!) people get pissed.

The only way this design strategy is even sort of good is if your players can easily adjust to changes. A good example of doing this is Guild Wars. When skills get changed, GW players can easily change out their skills for different ones and there are numerous quality build options for any given class in both PvE and PvP.

A bad example of this is World of Warcraft. Classes are forced to take skills (or be less effective) so nerfing them is generally bad stuff. For instance, if one were to nerf a rogue's crippling poison so that it was less effective, the rogue could not change that ability out. While there is some ability to change talents, any change to a class can resonate strongly. Also, talent changes cost the player valuable gold and are quite expensive, especially for lower level players who are more likely to make mistakes.

A really bad example of this is Ragnarok Online. In RO, if you mess up your character's build with an errant misclick, it costs you real money to fix. Prior to the introduction of the cash shop, which lets you spend real money for things in the game, you could not fix these errors at all. One misclick meant you'd need to delete your character and make a new one. If the developers ever change the way the game is played by altering skills or adding new equipment that forces you to re-stat your character, you have to pay real money to fix the problem or delete your character.

The moral of this story is really to never play RO.

So there's a third way to design, and it involves rules but only sort of. It's way harder to start but way easier to balance. That method is using a design skeleton. It's a made-up-ish term and I feel sort of nerdy using it. Oh well.

What I mean by design skeleton is that you take a base character and give him some things he can do no matter what. This stuff should be common to everyone - some classes or characters might not have these traits in favor of powerful other tricks but the basic character skeleton is shared by all characters as a default.

To illustrate this somewhat I'm going to bring up a game that no one actually played, Tabula Rasa. In TR every character could use a ranged weapon with a certain base amount of skill, so everyone could defend themselves. They could also melee with their ranged weapon too. These abilities were NOT sub-standard. I made a support character (healer type) and I had a significant number of weapon switches, including shotguns and rifles. I did not even use my class specific weapon and instead relied on basic guns as backup to my class powers.

Even better in my opinion is that every class in that game had some access to self heals in the form of repair kits and modules to repair damaged armor. The healer classes were way better at it and could do many things like area effect repairs and large single target repairs, but everyone could recover from lots of damage if they took cover and used repair kits.

This did not exclude my healer class or the combat classes. My friends played assault classes, and I was able to greatly aid them with my repair packs and 'magic' spells, which were better than the assault characters' repairs and magic, and let them focus on shooting things with their assault class guns. Still, there were times when my repair kits weren't needed and my mana was low, and I happily pulled out my rifle or shotgun and did some blasty.

This design is absolutely awesome. I especially liked the fact that assault characters could aid themselves if I couldn't get to them, either due to reloading (med/armor/shield packs took a long time to reload, so if you ran out of uses in the pack you'd have to wait a few seconds) or because I wasn't close enough. The main failings of TR was a bad beta filled with bugs (which led to bad PR), and characters that weren't unique enough. The end game classes were really sexy, though.

With a game design like TR's where baseline characters are able to function, you have more wiggle room for broken design elements. I would take it one step further, though.

Another really good example of design skeleton is hidden in World of Warcraft. That element is the "PvP trinket." Once per couple of minutes, any character can use this trinket to get out of a control effect for free, and it protects them from control effects for a very brief period. Every character has equal access to this trinket for very minimal effort. I know it's one of the cheapest items to buy with honor points, although I got mine for getting ranking (which was also very easy).

This trinket lets people break free of chain fears or stuns for a moment and gives them a chance to turn a battle around. It doesn't give them a complete pass, since it lasts only a few moments and has a long cooldown. This means you've got to use it intelligently, but it means that if you fight against a complete stun lockdown or fear/charm chain, you've got a few seconds to break free and stop them from keeping the lockdown going. This means you've always got a shot in a fight - a rogue can't ambush you from behind and stun you forever with no way to fight back until you die (It's worth noting that rogues in particular are kind of good at re-stunning you immediately after it runs out, but warlocks can have a hard time dealing with the trinket).

Other good examples include universal mobility options. These options need to have counters, but things like dashes, flying, multiple jumps, or whatever are pretty good at forcing the fight to go in different directions. A player should always have the avenue of escape if it's a fight they can't win. On the flip side, these options should not be entirely uncounterable. A good example might be a stamina meter so that dashes cannot be used to just flee forever. Another good example might be snares/movement slow that some characters can employ to keep others from fleeing.

Within this design structure you do need to look at all the pieces though and design counters around them. For instance, if you have absolute methods of escape such as teleportation, you need to design a counter to that, such as a class that can lay down anti-teleport fields or has a debuff that cancels teleporting skills. To that end, you also need to be able to counter those elements, so the anti-teleport field needs to be small enough to be escapable, or needs to be able to be destroyed. The teleport debuff should be able to be removed by friendly players, and so on. This creates strategy elements that enhance the game, rather than subtract from it.

Another important thing within the design skeleton is giving people abilities which obsolete elements of the design skeleton. If you give everyone a dash for escaping, some characters might get a better dash ability or a flight or double jump. These characters probably won't use their dash very much in favor of using their other skills. Another better example is the repair kits one, where normal characters can use repair kits to heal themselves, but healers can do a much better job on both other characters and themselves. These things are perfectly normal and natural elements, and should be encouraged.

If you make characters decent without needing special powers, you'll find people that will experiment a lot more with those special powers. This is good, fun, and enhances your game. And when you make changes, people won't feel as much like their character is useless, because even without their special powers at 100%, characters can still contribute.

This does not preclude the use of easy 're-skill' options that let players fix their characters. Always, always let players fix their mistakes.

Please Select Your Character!

I get in debates all the time about how to make a character in a roleplaying game. Most people I talk with suggest that concept is the most important thing about a character and that everything else should fit around it.

I dislike this theory. I'll be talking about RP-oriented characters here, so mostly pen and paper characters. However, if you roleplay in other games such as MUDs or MMOs or whichever, this is also valuable information.

My belief is that one must take a balanced approach to character building. You can't be happy with a character if your guy or girl isn't fun to play in game terms. You'll also be less happy if your character isn't interesting in roleplaying terms. Separating roleplaying even further, your character needs a good, interesting personality and enough backstory to look into as the game progresses.

The first thing I recommend is a style. You don't want it to be too specific, but you want to help shape what your character's class and abilities will be, and give you an insight into their personality. If you have no idea on your character's personality, skip this step. We'll come back to roleplaying design in general later, so this is just a kicker to get you started.

Your style is mostly your character's general attitude (cocky? shy? smart? funny? wise?) combined with a few little things about what your character does in adventuring (hack things with swords? magic? sneakyness? diplomacy?). Don't be too specific at this step. No backstory, period. If this step results in you being only able to pick one class or build or whatever at this point, you've gone much too far.

Build is the next important thing. If you're not good at this step, ask someone who is. I cannot stress this enough - it is a total pain in the butt to go through a whole campaign as a character whose abilities you decide aren't fun.

First, eliminate anything that doesn't fit your character's style. This step should be pretty obvious. If this narrows your choices down to one thing, ask yourself very seriously if that's what you want. Then ask your pro minmaxer friends if it's a good idea. I've been asked before if some top tier build or strategy would be good by roleplaying friends before. I explained very indepth that it was, and why it was. They went on to make characters that they had a blast playing.

Anyway, even if you think you're a pro minmaxer it's good to ask friends for advice anyway. When I wanted to make a particular character, I asked one of my good pro minmaxer friends if it was a good idea, and he talked about his experiences and how he thought my idea would not be fun. In the end his advice helped me make a choice that I would enjoy.

Anyway, through trial and error (talking with pro friends) you should come to a character class and spec that you will be happy with. Most roleplayers scoff at me when I suggest this step. However, when I go over this step with roleplaying friends they come to me and say how fun playing their character is. When I go back to the people who scoff at me, they are playing their concept characters and being like "well I like my character, but I don't really like this or this" to which I reply "well you should have taken these abilities instead, and it would be more fun for you."

So after you have your style and basic idea for character and a concrete (set mostly in stone) build, you get to the fun parts. You can do the next two steps in either order.

What is their personality? Now that we know their skills and such we can think more clearly on who they are as a person. What drives them and motivates them?

One of the big tests I do for each player in my PnP games is to have them sit down and do a MBTI type analysis (in character) such as the one on humanmetrics.com. Even if the end result isn't exactly what the player is expecting, letting them answer the questions helps put them in the mindset to play that character better. All of the players I've run this through have said it's an amazing tool as long as they're not being held to exactly what the test says. That's not the point, though. The point is to aid you in 'thinking in character.'

As with the build portion you'll want to probably ask people about this sort of thing. The GM will be able to give you advice here but that's more important for our last step. Other players will be able to say "this sounds fun" or give you suggestions for your personality.

The last step is backstory and justifications. This is the fun part for me. It's fun to minmax, sure, but it's much more fun to make up why all the minmaxing actually occurs. At this point we know your characters' abilities and probably their future ones too. We know a lot about their personality, although maybe we don't if you skipped step 3 (you'll need to do it after this).

Go over everything your character can do and ask yourself, "why?" If you can't figure out exactly why right offhand, come back to it. This should be organic, really, and it can take place during Step 2. If you've got certain skills you picked out, ask yourself, "Why did I learn them? Who taught them to me?" If you've got certain powers or abilities, ask yourself exactly why they are what they are. What do they do outside of the world of game mechanics?

This is the best time to hook up with the GM because he can give you tons of details about your world. If this is a MUD/MMO environment, get with a fellow player who knows a lot about the game world. If you do this then you can more easily integrate yourself into the game world. It gives you more hooks because people don't have to interact directly with something about you - they only have to be interested in some other aspect of the already existing game world, letting you get involved more easily in roleplaying.

The other trick is that in a pen and paper world you can actually create parts of the game world this way. The GM most likely doesn't have his whole world designed, so any bit of it you want to include into your game helps his job a lot. Unless he is the DM of the Rings, anyway.

Lastly, after our four steps, we want to finish up. Add some finishing touches to your personality or backstory, and fine-tune your abilities to better match up to your character's history. Sometimes this involves making small sacrifices in ability, but don't worry about that as much as you should worry about the overall concept. Talk with your powergamer friends about any choices you make (sometimes seemingly small choices are huge) and talk with your GM about any tweaks to your character or backstory.

Every little bit you let your GM know keeps him in the loop. More importantly, it lets him know you're excited about playing, and that helps keep him motivated. When I have players that are really into my game and want to do things in it, it really motivates me to make new and cool stuff for them to explore and discover.

I'm going to go over my player group now because literally all of them used this method and all of them are extremely excited about the characters they are playing.

Fejn is a samurai who hears the spirit of the sword. Her people live in the forest, and hear the spirits of the trees, but not Fejn. She listens to the heart of the sword, instead. The spirit of the blade guides and protects her. In game mechanics she is a dual wielding monstrosity that can handle literally any threat, and she has tons of HP, too.

Maximillion (yes the 'o' is intentional) is a young, naive engineer who grew up under a family of traders. He's curious about the world and incredibly optimistic, and his gadgets are always handy to have around. In game mechanics, he's incredibly number crunched and he has the potential to do the highest single hit damage of any character. He also produces a number of different gadgets, each with some gamebreaking special effect in the form of either buffs or debuffs.

Seanna is a blind mage from the same people as Fejn, and she is relatively naive compared to most mages. She has impressive magical talent, though, and is a natural expert at all forms of magic, both offensive and defensive. In game mechanics, she also deals ridiculous damage from the main types of magic available to her class, and is reasonably durable despite being a 'squishie' type of character. Her blindness is done in the sake of minmaxing but creates awesome character drama.

Kalenreth, or Kal is a wolf-man thief with ties to the local thieves' guild. He's got a skill for literally any scenario, thanks to his guild training. He's a big loudmouth but his mouth is equally good for getting him out of a jam. He's relatively loyal to his party but his first loyalty is to the thieves guild. He won't hesitate to do whatever it takes to get the job done. In game mechanics, he's got a skill for everything, he's nimble and hard to hit, and he often supplies the party with stolen goods.

Spencer, although that's not actually his real name, is a bounty hunter. His goals don't really mesh well with the rest of the party, but in Spencer's player's case that's sort of the point. He creates a lot of interesting drama, and his practical advice often tempers the rest of the team to consider things they otherwise wouldn't. In gameplay terms he's also an offensive beast, but he has flexible damage types and control effects added in, giving him some added punch to make up for his less-than-Faen/Max single hit power. He can also use his control effects while still tearing stuff up, which is highly effective.

Eddie is kind of the exception. He's an older sorceror with the power to summon incredible creatures. He's the most powerful class in gameplay terms but he is kind of a wallflower. Still, he has fun playing his character despite being kind of a wallflower player. He built his character mostly around being strong but has no idea what is strong. He is by far not having the most fun out of all of my players.

Thus! You should use this method whenever possible! It will let you make fun, enjoyable characters and everyone will have an awesome time playing with you.

Game Mastering Recap

So I've been toying around a lot in City of Villains (not Heroes, same universe though) with the new Mission Architect. For those of you that haven't heard, it's basically the coolest thing that a game designer has ever added to a game since the introduction of a gui interface. I've been spending a lot of time messing with it, which means, yeah, I haven't updated very much, lol.

This is not just a normal patch we're talking about, here. This update allows players to create their own user-created missions and stories and upload them directly to the CoX game servers. Other people can search for and play your content, and give feedback and ratings. You're even rewarded a little if people like your stories.

This content is also full-blown content. You enter into a number of instanced areas, each with customized spawns, dialogue, objectives, and everything else.

As we all might imagine, there is a ton of bad content, some content that exploits the system to get better experience and loot, and a small number of actually interesting and fun stories to play. That's just the nature of the beast, really. Most people have no idea what to write and Mary Sue the hell out of most of their stories.

So, in true Redefining Nerds fashion, I've decided to do a slight recap on some of the things essential to good story writing and moreover good game mastering.

Many ages ago I wrote an article about pacing. Pacing is really important. You should, in general, slowly curve up your difficulty. You should also not do a large string of 'cool' things with no breaks or buildup. Use smaller events to build tension for larger ones, and use larger events as "oh crap!" climaxes. Don't try to include super climax battles at every turn. At the same time, pace your stories so that people don't get bored with your plot (or encounters).

The characters you create should be memorable. Try to give them a little flavor, and a little feeling. You should also give them easily identifiable character traits, so that they stand out. Don't dump readers/players in the middle of your story - introduce the characters you've spent your time making slowly, so that people can learn to like them and understand them. The characters should have real feelings and motivations, and real flaws and failings. They should be human, because we remember those people better. Don't make characters that are larger than life and fantastic. Make them smaller and more readable. (If you're making them ridiculous for humor or shock value, by all means, go for it.)

As I mentioned earlier, you can't dump people in the middle of a story. Lead them into it, have them discover things, and slowly work your way towards the big moments. When you tell a story, it's a learning process. You can't throw big events with no context at people because they get confused or bored. Stick to small things to tell bigger things. Little details and clues along the path get people running like rabbits after them, wanting to know more. Slowly guide them to bigger and bigger carrots, give them a few teases here and there and you'll have some loyal readers.

Plot twists are essential to good writing. Never have a story go perfectly according to plan. Always make something go wrong and more importantly, make it go wrong in a way that makes the reader/listener/player understand what might be done to change it. Sometimes a windfall should occur too, to give the player some unexpected boons. Never make the story be too predictable. Luke got his hand cut off in Episode 5 for a reason - because having the good guys win all the time is too easy and predictable.

With regards to game design specifically, don't make enemies that are overly challenging. Playtest your stuff thoroughly and guess and check at how much damage the enemies and players might deal. This is more difficult in MA but in pen and paper it's really easy if you know your players well. Slowly scale up the challenges, but don't make things too hard that people can't finish your story. If your team spends too much time on a boss fight or worse yet, wipes, you've failed to do your job as a writer. Putting in a 'double elite boss' spawn in MA is really bad. Don't do it. If you absolutely have to make super hard fights in your story, spread them out so that they're beatable. Don't make enemies that absolutely force the players to fight a particular way - unless you're very good at establishing precedents about how the players should think in a fight.

That pretty much means don't do it except in a pnp game, by the way.

Anyway, that's all for now. Good luck, and happy writing!

(Also, for any non-CoX players reading this, my global handle is predictably @auspice if you should like to contact me)

Simple sugars and complex carbohydrates

I AM BACK and I have internet now. So mostly daily updates again! Most likely, I won't be updating on Sundays, but I should be writing something pretty much every other day!

I've been reading many things on GMing, but nothing to do a good article on yet. So stay tuned for that.

I also have some things to say about interacting with people but I have been way too preachy lately. I feel like if I preach too much, I'll sound like a religious zealot or something. Maybe I already do?

So, today I'm going to talk about simple things. Simple things are good. Complexity is not so good.

Did I just say that?

Complexity is not actually a good thing. Let's say we have a MMORPG system where it is a pretty big opportunity cost to change your build. Let's further say that this system is highly complex and has many different possible choices for your build. A good number to suggest is thousands. I realize that many complex games these days have millions of possible builds, so thousands is actually sort of less complex.

In any game where there are numerous different build options, there are bound to be several best options, and that number is often a tiny fraction of the thousands or millions of possible options. If you chose a poor option, either because you were trying something you thought might be good or because you just liked the cosmetics of the option you chose, you may be stuck with that option or at least be forced to spend in-game money or resources to change it. This is a frustrating and bad outcome.

As an example of an 'almost balanced' complex system, let's look at the fighting game Arcana Heart. The original Arcana Heart has 11 different playable characters, and 11 different magic types. Each character can use all 11 magic types, but you can only pick one magic when you go into a battle. This gives us 121 different options, which is a lot. It is not thousands, but it is a lot - enough that our brains cannot quantify easily all 121 choices.

Some characters are strictly better with certain magics. The plant magic, for instance, only works with a certain few characters because it gives them some interesting mixups. Other characters can't really use the plant magic very well. Some characters benefit a lot from the wind magic for escape. Some characters get some crazy combos with time or fire magic. If you pick a sub-optimal choice of magic for your character, you will be at a fairly significant disadvantage. The characters themselves are reasonably balanced with each other, and the magics are for the most part very balanced. But because each character and magic interact differently, some choices are intrinsically bad.

Because there are only 121 choices, probably around half the choices are at least somewhat viable but even a 50% batting average is kind of bad. Considering there are probably only 2-3 good magics per character gives us around 30 or less high level options in a game with 121. What if Arcana Heart was an MMO, and you were locked into your choice of character and Arcana at the start of the game? People that chose Kamui/Dieu Mort would be out of luck.

Notably, City of Heroes uses a game system similar to this. There is no 'fix' for bad powerset selections, except to make a new character. Most other MMORPGs use some form of respecialization - you can't pick a new class, but the classes are more or less balanced around the 'top' builds, and that is a lot easier to balance than trying to balance every possible build selection.

So the reason why complexity by itself is bad is because it leads to bad choices. In a game like Street Fighter for instance, you can only choose one character from a very small list. Typically, these characters are balanced against each other for competitive play, so if you play Vega or Fuerte in SF4 (some of the worst) you have a pretty good chance if you understand your weaknesses. In a more complex game like Marvel vs. Capcom 2, picking a bad team is pretty much giving the match away (unless your opponent does too), even if you are significantly more skilled than your opponent.

The other reason why complexity is a bad thing is because complex systems are harder to learn. This can be a good thing, because learning is fun. However, if learning is too hard, we give up. Take WoW for instance - it has a very complex talent tree system and a very large list of equipment to wear. However, we don't really need to learn all of that right away, and by the time we realize our talent build sucks, we probably have enough gold to fix it a few times. Also, if our build sucks, the base class is still fairly good all on its own.

By comparison, take a look at Arcana Heart again. AH is a complex game all on its own. When we have to select a character and magic though, we probably have no idea what we're doing at first. Even worse is that it takes typically a lot of playing the game before we even understand what things like the plant or poison arcana are even good for. My circle of friends would not have even thought the dark arcana (probably the most flexible in the game) was good unless I had shown them how to use it properly.

So when we suggest that complexity is good, what do we actually mean?

Obviously complexity is not entirely bad. I really like complex systems (I play Guild Wars, lol) and think that dissecting complex systems is fun. What we're really looking for in complex systems is 'depth.'

Depth is a property of games that occurs when there are a large variety of interesting things to do in that game. If the game uses its system to create interesting and meaningful challenges for us to overcome, we tend to enjoy these challenges more than things that are 'just hard.'

A good example of depth is StarCraft, although I bet you guys never saw that coming. SC has only three races and a few core mechanics, but those mechanics interact deeply with each other in the form of numerous units and buildings that were meticulously balanced over a number of years. Even though SC has a lot of bugs/undocumented features in it, these bugs actually enhance gameplay at the high level and have been left in. SC has so many different types of interaction that it is pretty much impossible to memorize them all. Players such as Boxer, who are not as technically skilled as some of the younger prodigies today, still perform amazingly well because they are flexible and adaptive to many unusual interactions that occur in the match.

SC is a good example of how to use complexity to achieve depth. SC is very complex. It has a number of core mechanics, but these mechanics are put to use in dozens of different units. Each unit has a different purpose, and there is a lot of strangeness into how they interact. This strangeness is good and leads to many deep and interesting strategies.

A good game that is not very complex, but is pretty deep is checkers. Checkers has been solved by computers, but playing a game of checkers against a human usually leads to a lot of interesting plays with both players thinking very long on which move to make. Checkers only has a very small number of moves with only 2 different types of piece. However, it is very deep.

The reason for this depth is because of 'emergent gameplay' or the idea that certain mechanics working together cause an end result that is "greater than the sum of its parts."

However, I do not have a lot of time to write about this concept, so you are left with why we should not make things we do or say overly complex.

Until next time!

Playing in Character

So, before I begin, I need to pose a more gameplay oriented reader question: Is it more fun to play a character with a "class" or "job" where you have a pre-defined role you're supposed to play like a mage or warrior? Or is it more fun to play a character who is only limited by 'skill points' and doesn't fall into a specific 'role' unless you build them to be?

My observations are that people in classless systems tend to create 'classes' within the game. Paladins tend to be created in classless games almost as a given. People like the idea of archetypes, of 'healers' and 'warriors' and 'mages.' I've also noticed that people in classless systems tend to play more balanced characters that tend to have wide skill spreads and aren't as good at any one thing. I've also noticed that in classed games people tend to band together by class, and label other classes in a particular way, "all rogues are like that" and so on. My thoughts are that only hardcore nerds (this is not an insult, I'm one of you) like classless systems more than systems with clearly defined roles.

I have no way of knowing all of this for sure, and as of the moment I can't find any studies on it. So I am polling my readership, which is somewhat unscientific, but I figure it's as good a place as any to start.

So on to the actual topic for today - character design. The question at the beginning had a little bit of bearing on this, because it's my firm belief that people like easily defined traits in their character. Edward the paladin is heroic and honorable and honest. Emma the sorceress is shady, but seductive and powerful (or maybe she's introverted, nerdy, and has a brother complex).

When we create a character either for a story or a game, we create them with a bunch of goals and ideals in mind. The desire to do something is a great way to make a character immediately interesting. If we know that a character's main goal in life is to lose his virginity, we already know a lot about him. We know he's probably kind of shallow and immature, and probably young too (older guys who haven't lost their virginity probably don't care that much about it). We also have a lot of room to develop him into a much better character - he has a lot of areas he can probably grow in, such as his respect for women or his self-confidence.

Actually, since I was referencing a specific character (Jim, from American Pie) why don't we take a look at his design? He's kind of introverted and shallow, and also pretty gullible. But after the climax (heh) of the movie, Jim has matured into a more interesting and respectful guy. Sadly, the movie injects a lot of slapstick that gets in the way of his development. The sequel is probably a lot better about developing him as a character when he turns down Nadia to chase after Michelle, realizing that there's more to a girl than just her looks and how 'easy' she is.

Interesting characters, by and large, are made interesting due to quirks. They don't even really have to be flaws per se, but little things that you remember. One of the major criticisms of Twilight (more the movie than the books) is that the main character has so few personality quirks. In a story where most of the characters have few quirks, the characters that do have them tend to stand out more. Still, memorable characters tend to be the ones with odd habits, or have unusual motivations for doing things.

Real character depth can't come from quirks though. Although we may remember a character who smokes a lot, talks with a lisp, or is oversexed, the characters we latch on to are the ones with goals and motivations. One of the things I use in writing to flesh out characters is to establish the character's belief system. This lets me better say things like "oh she wouldn't do this," or whatever. It's important that we define these beliefs beforehand, though. A selfish character who does something unusually self-sacrificing is really alarming unless we've established some belief he has that causes him to do this self-sacrificing act.

One of the big things I tell players of role-playing games is to make sure they feel comfortable playing the role of the character they are in. I had a player who had an 'evil self' that started off in his backstory as purely evil, and then slowly changed to 'end justifies the means' evil. And when he couldn't really act the part very well even then, I told him in future games that he should play things more comfortable to him.

Similarly, writers need to avoid writing in characters they don't understand. If you create a character in a story, you should be able to put yourself in that character's mind, and understand the beliefs and values that they have. Make sure you do this when you write in a character! Villains in particular often seem shallow and boring in fanfics, and often are evil 'just because'. Even worse are heroes without any clear motivation, who oppose the bad guys 'because they're bad.'

I'm definitely not saying that there can't be heroes and villains in a story. Pen and paper games tend to be better with less moral dilemmas (not none, less) because real people want to be doing the 'right' thing, and feeling like you did something 'bad' is not very fun. Some players like exploring the depths of human morality and emotion and don't mind being confronted with serious moral issues. These players are very rare and are most likely not playing in your campaign. As for fanfics, morally grey is certainly fashionable, but a good guy who does bad things walks a fine line between being interesting and irritating.

The trick then is to create good guys who are lovable and who we can relate to, and whose thoughts and moral dilemmas match those we might have, if we were in their shoes. Our heroes need to be a little larger than life of course, but if they're too big they look fake. When people feel like they have walked a day in the life of the heroes and understand their internal trials and troubles, that's when you know you've really created a memorable character.

In the same vein, villains need to be realistic too. We might like them or we might hate them, depending on what you (the author) intend them to be. But when they think out loud and when they speak with the heroes, they should feel genuine, like they truly believe the cause behind their actions. A villain's motivations should make sense, too. The evil mastermind bad guy shouldn't just be bad because that's what bad guys do. Even the 'chaotic evil' type guy can have complex motivations for things (I wouldn't make these guys the 'end boss' though).

For really good examples of chaotic evil bad guys that are actually sort of interesting, I recommend the Seven Swordsmen (the chinese TV series, not movie) as the villains there are fairly well done. It also shows some really nice morally grey stuff and shows long-term character development over the course of a lot of episodes. It does kind of move slowly, but IMHO it's worth it as the heroes in that show really are human, with human failings while the villains are for the most part complex and interesting characters with real goals.

Other great morally grey things to look for is anything by Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) as he is really big on asking the reader what is right or wrong. His stories are really thought-provoking and give you a lot of thought about who is really right.

In the end though, I think that almost any bestselling fantasy novel (yeah, including Harry Potter) is good for showing us what our 'heroes' should look like and how believable our villains need to be. I'd give some examples but sadly, most of the stuff I read ends up sort of morally ambiguous and not really good at showing how to portray 'good guys' and 'bad guys.'

A word of warning, for those of you who think I am totally lying about all this. There are characters that break the rules. Solid Snake in particular is practically a character without flaws and he is one of the most beloved characters ever to grace a video game console. This does not mean you can create a Solid Snake-like character (or any of the Devil May Cry male leads, etc.) in your story/fanfic/game/whatever and have it succeed. There are a couple reasons for this.

The first is that a badass character tends to get old. There's a reason why Dante and Nero are mocked all over the internet for being ridiculous, and why the 'badass main character' is considered a trope. It's overdone, we've all seen it. Some people get lucky, mostly because they were the first people to get it right. Even if you do it right afterwards, most likely you will just be accused of copying someone else who did.

The second is that they have games and visual action to highlight how awesome they are. When John Matrix (the main character of Commando) is storming onto the screen mowing down bad guys with his M60, he seems pretty awesome. However, without the camera and acting and special effects, your badass guy (or girl) just isn't going to be as badass. Dante is cool because you can play as him and destroy dozens of guys without getting hit while looking totally awesome at the same time. In a fanfic or pen and paper game, an exact copy of him is just not the same thing.

Do not let the success of others lead you to believe that characters without real quirks (eating pizza and being required to show off are not real quirks) can appear in your storyline. If you create characters like these, I recommend only using them in parody or humor stories rather than serious stories.

PS: Despite my criticisms, DMC4 was probably my favorite game of 2008.

Anyway, character design is tricky business, and I don't pretend to be the best at it. Certainly Hideo Kojima knows better than me! In the world of video games and web comics and other visual art media, there is a lot more to know and I know almost zero about it (my visual styles tend to be really boring). However, I do know a fair bit about what makes an interesting character, and I know how to convey a realistic villain or NPC ally to players.

Hopefully you learned a little here, or at least your opinions were reinforced some. If not, there's always the comments section ~

Driving a Train - GMing Part 2

So today's article is on GMing or more precisely about railroading.

Being a GM means you are the director of the story. You paint the highway that the players drive down. That highway needs to go in one direction, and it's in the way you want.

You might think I'm advocating railroading here. I am.

I've run no less than 3 truly open-ended games in my GMing career. Most of my players didn't have anywhere near as much fun as the games where I dropped my players in a fixed scenario, gave them a goal, and said "Go." I didn't have as much fun when I wasn't making up regular scenarios either. In fact, even the scenarios where I basically forced the players down a path, they had more fun compared to the times where they scratched their heads without any real goals or aims aside from getting rich. It turns out that railroading is actually way better, and giving the players too many options is bad.

Yeah, I know I'm challenging the status quo here, so I should clarify. I'm sure like, half the GMs reading this hate me now, haha.

As a GM, it's your job to provide content to the players. You're the painter, the architect of the story. If the players don't have any goals to do, they get bored and stop having fun. Sure, they might have some lofty IC goal for their character, but generally most players are not smart enough to actually plan ways of achieving it. Your goal as a GM is to give the players goals to accomplish, while simultaneously fulfilling their desires of progress towards their eventual personal goals. In this way, you need to railroad them. The key, of course, is that you give them things they want to do.

Most players will play ball with you and just follow the goals you give them. But what if they do not? What if some players what to do something else? I have had situations as a player where I wanted to do things other than what the GM wanted. It was very annoying to me to have the GM say, "no you can't do that" basically. So you should definitely accomodate the players as a whole. If one player does not want to go with the group, you should talk to the players as a whole and find out what they do want to do. If the majority wants to do something else, it's okay to ride off the rails. You may need to take some time to plan the next part out, but you should do that. It's more fun if players are not forced into things they do not want to do.

You might say, well that is not railroading. Of course it isn't, because we are allowing the players a choice if they really don't agree with the choice we give them. But in most cases we should give the players a clear path to follow because without us as GMs to guide them, most players will wander like lost kittens.

Okay, I lie because I have done a fourth semi-open ended game, which had mostly scripted adventures but had several open-ended segments. This game eventually ended up mostly run by what the players wanted to do. I was so impressed because they were actually able to drive the game, and had clear goals for what they wanted to do. I got inspiration to do more open-ended games but since then, all of them have failed. So there may be strange player groups that are very goal oriented and make plans. You should let them run the game, haha. It is quite fun when a player calls you late at night and gives you many suggestions for what they want their character to do next week. It makes your life a million times easier as GM. But this is usually not the case and you will have to plan for less ambitious players. Be careful that you do not slight the really ambitious types. They have fun by making their own way, and most of the party would be totally fine to tag along.

If you get two ambitious players, beware! Either they will work together and try to 'undermine' you, which is fine, although some GMs might not be able to deal with that so well. But if everyone is having fun, it is probably fine. But most often the two ambitious players will be in conflict. It is very rare for two characters to completely agree in their plans for world domination (or whatever) and so there will likely be conflict. You may have to moderate this or perhaps you can change your campaign arc to better reflect the two players' power struggles. You may also have to split your group, which may take a lot of your GM resources. If such a conflict occurs it may be best to talk things over with them and try to get them to work together.

If you make a goal for the players you should not try too hard to give them a path to the goal. Some of the players will think of very creative ways to achieve your goals, and that is of course fine. You should allow them a lot of leeway to think of these things, because that is probably fun for them. Obviously, you need to take common sense into this because you shouldn't let the players get away with too much. Sure it is fun for them at first to get away with lots of things but then it gets boring too. The trick is to never use player logic - always use your own. However, if the rules say one thing, then obviously you should follow the rules, unless you really disagree with them. Real life can also create some disagreeable things. Make sure that you overwrite either game physics, player logic, and real life as appropriate in order to make things go smoothly. But obvious and most important is that you not stifle everything the players try to do. If they think of something creative and you just say no every time, they will get frustrated. That's kind of bad.

The flip side of course is that some player groups are kind of unsmart so you should have a number of 'easy' solutions available. It is quite possible to put NPCs organically so even if the players don't know anything, they can get gently pushed to the next clue, which leads to the next one, which puts them on the right track. Little subtle pushes like this are better than plot hammers that say "GO HERE AND DO THIS." I have however had to plot hammer some players. It's okay, not everyone is a genius, but everyone is entitled to have fun roleplaying. Try not to make too much fun of someone if you plot hammer them. I almost always make fun of my players when I do, though. I feel bad, you should not do this.

Last on our agenda though is whether or not we are having fun. I personally have fun most of the time when GMing, assuming the players are doing things and going through my adventure. I also like it a lot when players try to cheat the system or explore the world in some neat fashion because it makes me feel like I am doing a good enough job that they want to think of some neat way to 'get me' or something. It's fun for me. I don't know what's fun for you though. If you're not having fun because people keep "cheesing you" in some way, maybe you should think over whether or not you should GM. Remember that it is okay when the players win easily, as long as it doesn't happen all the time (boring =/= fun) but winning easily is okay some of the time. Don't retaliate on players because they 'get you' sometimes. The worst thing you can do is design something really hard to 'get them' back.

One time I was GMing with a group of players and they were going to undertake a difficult battle in defense of a group of magic users. The magic users' enemies (demon summoning magicians) were very numerous and the players could only really strike at strategic targets, if they tried to win the whole fight they would be overwhelmed. The battle was very long and thought out. Instead of fighting it though the players decided to drive out a few hours and contact another faction who happened to be opposed to demon summoning as a general society rule. The other faction was a large nation and had a large military, and I had already established a small outpost with a company of soldiers in a reasonable vicinity - close enough that they could intervene before the defense would need to be made. The soldiers moved in on the demon summoners and burned their stronghold to the ground. There were over a hundred soldiers against a few dozen demon summoners, and the soldiers had weapons to fight the demons so the battle was won easily.

In the end the players did not fight any battle, but I gave them EXP - I actually gave them more than what they would have made if they fought the battle. I was so surprised they would think of this, and it worked with established precedents I had set up elsewhere in the campaign. They cut the adventure a little short, but I gave them more EXP. I told them that they chose an option I had not thought of, one that was very smart and solved the problem without any losses for their friends or for themselves. How could I not give them more EXP?

But in this scenario I had practically forced it upon the players to defend the mages. I introduced a NPC mage who asked the players for help, and while they were trying to help with a minor thing, a demon summoner had attacked. The players managed to help out the NPC anyway, even though more demon summoners attacked. The players captured one, and successfully interrogated him using psychic powers and found out about the attack ahead of time (the players were intended to stay at the mage town during the attack, but due to smart play they found out beforehand). The players were basically railroaded into the plot hook, but once they took the hook, I allowed them to solve the story in whatever ways they wanted.

I have another scenario where I was a player. I was playing with a particular GM who had trouble dealing with our party composition. In particular he had trouble dealing with me. I handled a lot of the player finances and tried to get money for upgrades to the people that needed it. Our party was very team-friendly and the GM could not handle that. He posed one very nasty boss fight that was heavily taxing and not fun. It took many many rounds of combat, like 15 or more, in order to win this battle. He thought that because we 'got him' so many times that he had to make an impossible boss, and it almost was. We nearly wiped many times during the fight and our healers were barely able to keep people alive. It was really awful. Everyone agreed that fight was horrible. Do not do this to your players, it is anything but fun.

It's like driving down a highway instead of driving a train. Just make sure they don't drive off the road too much!

So in short, we should not actually 'railroad' the players in the sense that we should force them to go in ways that they don't want. But we should railroad the players into the story by default instead of just letting them do whatever. Sometimes players can think of things to do, but most of the time, they suck and don't make good goals for themselves.

In closing, I would like to present you with the open ended example scenario. My players were given relative freedom to do whatever they wanted. And so they did! One decided to do boring things for money. One decided to 'train' constantly. One decided to go to bars and hit on girls. One decided not to show up!

I think the player who chose not to show up sums up the success of this campaign. Always provide direction for your players, because most of the time, they are not very genius. You are the GM! You make things fun!

# of ambitious players ever: 3, all of which were referenced at least indirectly somewhere in this article.

Mastering the Game - GMing Part 1

There's a lot of articles about game mastering on the web. I am sort of sad at the content in most of them. Most articles I read seem to think that the person elected to GM is either a novice who has never GMed before, or a retard who shouldn't be GMing anyway. Most guides have some silly idea of how to construct an adventure, and a million really boring plot hooks. Everyone other than Palladium Books has no idea how to instruct someone in the ways of GMing.

I absolve Palladium Books from all guilt - their GM's Guide is actually pretty good even if you've never played Rifts and never intend to.

A lot of people decry the 'really bad' examples of GMing, especially railroading and Monty Haul gaming. Obviously these extremes are bad, but saying that they are bad does absolutely nothing to teach us what to do. I'm going to, in more than one article, explain some of the fine arts of GMing in as much brutal detail as possible.

The first big hurdle to GMing, and the one that is the absolute most important thing, is that you should know the game you are playing. No, I don't mean know how to make characters and how to make attack rolls. I mean you should know exactly how everything in the game works. This is not always possible, but you should start by knowing perfectly what each of the players are capable of, alone and in concert. You need to be able to understand the synergies that occur between each of a player's abilities, and also the synergies between the players.

I know a lot of you are looking at me like "I have to know -everything- they can do?!" I do not think this is an unreasonable thing to say. I really think you should know everything in the rules, or at least everything that will be available to the players in the future. However, you should at the very least know what the player party as a whole can do, in exact detail.

The next question all of you are probably asking, is "why?" I'm sure there will be some arguments here about how the game rules are just guidelines, and the point of the game is to have fun. Believe me, I know this better than most. The first reason why you should know everything there is to know about the game, or at least to a massive degree more than the players, is so that the players don't have to. Your job as the GM is to run the game, to provide fun to everyone else. If you can answer the players' questions quickly, more time can be spent roleplaying and having fun.

Knowledge of what all the players can do in relation to the game also has another point to be had too. If you know exactly what all the players can do, you can design adventures a thousand times better. Knowledge of player abilities lets you give the players a multitude of solutions to a potential problem. Let's say your adventure path involves the players breaking into a manor and stealing a valuable item. Sure, they could charge in and kill everyone and take the loot, etc. But if you know one character has Stealth and Lockpicking and another character has Research, another has Ettiquette, etc. you can really tailor your adventure by letting the player with Research get floor plans to the manor. The player with Negotiation can get invitations to a party at the manor so the player with Ettiquette can get in and run distractions for the Stealthy thief who breaks in and steals the loot. A party mage can detect and notify the thief of possible magical wards and traps, and so on.

This is obvious stuff, and I'm -sure- you're thinking that, but the challenge can be geared very specifically to work in a way you want it to. What's the difficulty in scaling the manor walls? What about picking the locks? If you know the party's abilities you can plan that sort of thing in advance. Sure, they might charge through the door, and that's cool, but at least you were ready in case they got creative.

Combat is the most important reason you need to know though. A certain GM I played for did not know the rules for fly-by attacks in D&D 3e, and I had to tell him that the way he was playing it was wrong. In much the same way, you should know how immediate actions, opportunity actions, and other jargony terms work. You should know how all of the players' abilities work, so that they can make good use of them during the battle. Knowing all of the players' powers isn't so you can design a drop-down list of counters to them, but rather so you can make them feel useful and strong while at the same time presenting a good challenge to them so that they feel accomplished at the end of the fight. That's the difference between being a knowledgable GM and one that is unpracticed - encounters are too hard or too easy. Both are bad!

As soon as one of my players picks a class or ability, I look it up. I also ask them why, so I can hear a decent justification. Not all of us have the advantage of players who will give out all their plans for their character, but the player's justification gives us a good idea of where not to look when trying to find something abusive. I might give the player's explanation a cursory glance though.

To take an example from D&D 4e, say a player warlock chose the Star path on the basis that"Dire Radiance combined with the figher and paladin taunts gives bonus damage a lot of the time." Dire Radiance is a warlock ability that lets the warlock attack an enemy for low damage. If the enemy moves towards the warlock after being hit though, they have a chance to take some additional damage. Since the fighter and paladin taunts basically force foes into melee with the tank character, they have to take damage from Dire Radiance too. But Dire Radiance says "moves towards the warlock." This means that characters can push or pull enemies with other skills to force them to take damage, so it's worth looking for other things that can move characters around besides taunts (the paladin taunt is probably the most exploitative thing you can do with it, though, as an fyi for 4e DMs).

This was just an example, if a lengthy one, about the thought process you need to go through. Whenever you see an ability, the first thing you should do is read the entire text of the ability. The flavor text generally doesn't matter, but it may put some ideas in your head for story ideas later. The important thing is the functionality. After you've read over the ability and its flavor, you should read over the functional text again. Omit the flavor so that you can readily put in your head what the ability does exactly.

Simple things like "gives a +2 bonus to two skills" is easy enough to learn, but "if the target strikes you before the start of your next turn, you make your riposte against the target as an immediate interrupt: a Strength vs. AC attack that deals 1[W]+Strength modifier damage" is a little more complex (that's a damn level 1 rogue ability from 4e btw, wtf). We need to know a whole ton of stuff just to sort out what's going on in that attack. We need to know what constitutes the start of your turn, what an immediate interrupt is, and all that Strength vs. AC nonsense. I would also question the word riposte too, but it's actually not a technical term used by the game system. I'd look it up anyway - you never know.

Once we know exactly what all this technical stuff means, you know exactly how it works. A turn is based on initiative rolls, and it's pretty much impossible to get more than one turn in a combat round. You don't take extra turns otherwise, so extra attacks like this one aren't considered a turn. Then we know that the attack is an immediate interrupt. That means it actually happens before the opponent's attack even goes through. Once the interrupt fires, the opponent gets to continue attacking unless the riposte killed him or otherwise kept him from attacking. This ability also isn't triggered by anything except an attack, so anything that isn't an actual "attack" in its description won't trigger the ability. This ability only works against the target you hit with the initial attack, and not on any other targets. Because immediate actions can only be taken once a round, you can't do this more than once, nor can you couple it with other immediate actions of any kind in the same round. You also can't trigger it during your turn.

Whew! That's a lot of information, but now we know exactly what that skill does. We will never be surprised when it goes off, or maybe we will, but we won't be caught with our pants down when the player tries to say that it interrupts the opponent's action and it never goes off. This knowledge keeps us in control as GMs. It also lets us know what kind of abuses the player might put us through.

Keeping the GM in power is important. It's not because we need to have power trips, but it is because you cannot allow the players to rules-lawyer you. Oftentimes there is a niche clause in the rules somewhere that prevents a rules-lawyer player from running circles around you. If it is there, you need to find it. If players come up with some awesome synergistic combo that IS allowed in the rules, you should have feasibly seen it coming, because you looked at every little ability the players have.

This allows us to act within the game rules and not make up random, on the fly judgments about "you shouldn't be able to do that, I think it's dumb" or whatever. If you have to change something because your players abused it, it makes you look bad and often affects your mental state while GMing. If you made a decision about something ahead of time, then the players see that you're prepared and in control. I know about both sides of this coin firsthand, believe me.

One time in a game I was running I got into a minor conflict with a player about the function of thermal imaging. The player was right in this case (we actually had to look up the real function of thermal imaging to prove the case, as it wasn't really clear in the book) and it caused a small conflict about the outcome of the situation for the players. In the end it settled down, but I looked bad and unknowledgable.

On the same note, I've run numerous games where I have made many modifications in the name of balance. I talked over many of the changes with my players and explained why I felt what I did, and the majority of them agreed with the majority or all of my changes. Later on, when it became apparent that a particular skill was 'must-have' even in the changed rules (it was left unchanged as I felt it was more or less fair) I had to look it over and decided it gave too much benefit and retroactively changed it. While several of my players were using the skill at the time, they agreed with my decision because it was clear I had put a lot of thought into my other design decisions as well.

So this first article about GMing in depth is about knowledge. You need to have it!

Collection and other goal-oriented things

I was listening to the GameSpot podcast a while back, and the guys fielded a question related to challenge in games. The caller explained that games' challenge should not be 'watered down' to make the game more accessible to casual gamers. Furthermore, he claimed that the only fun to be had in games was defeating particularly difficult boss fights.

This opinion is in stark contrast to the opinion of my girlfriend. Her favorite thing to do in games is collect things. She likes things where there are many different objects scattered randomly throughout the game world, and she likes exploring to find all of them. She thinks that overly challenging bosses can be fun when you win, but if a boss is too hard it is just frustrating and will cause her to give up.

I, personally, find fun in exploring the game engine itself. I like finding new ways to do things, and I tend to get bored fast if I find something so abusive it degenerates the game. I tend to look at overly challenging bosses in a couple of ways. If the only barrier to victory is precision (you must do X boring thing over and over as perfectly as possible otherwise you get hit) then I tend to really hate those games. If it's strategic, where there is a formula for victory, I find a lot of fun in finding and implementing that formula, even if the execution is also difficult.

Anyway, the collection thing is what I wanted to focus on today. For some reason, we seem absolutely enamored with the idea of going out and getting things that have little to no ingame value to us. XBL has Gamerscore, which 'rewards' you for achieving random things within a game. But... this Gamerscore does nothing - we don't qualify for any sort of promotion or get to trade in gamerscore points for products on XBL. It's just there for cool points. So why do people go out and play games just to get gamerscore?

Another big example for me is games where doing collecting gives you an ingame benefit up to a certain amount. I am pretty excited about collecting a string of jellybeans if it means I get to do the EX Jellybean Throw after collecting 500 of them. However, if there are 2000 jellybeans in the game, I am pretty likely to give up after collecting 500. My girlfriend, however, will at least attempt to get all 2000 jellybeans.

Why is all of this fun? Why is it even important? Well, there are a few things we can really take from implementing collections in games (obviously this is not so important for writing).

The first thing that I think is very important to collections is to establish patterns for how you hide things. Most game designers of the ancient days did not understand this, but it is pretty often in modern times to see patterns in these things.

An example of patterns might be showing the player some clue (a small pickup, or coin, or some other item) in a place they think to be inaccessible, so that they search around trying to get to the clue. Once they get there, they find themselves on the road to a secret. This is very common in Half-Life 2, for instance.

Another thing that is important in developing collection quests is to make them meaningful. As I said before, I like being able to cherry-pick collection quests to only get the good rewards. If the quest rewards me periodically, I'll be more apt to keep going too. Bonus points too if the later rewards don't completely make the game trivial. It's not very fun to get the golden rocket launcher of infinite ammo and just blast through the last 15% of the game (this is subjective, but taking all challenge out of a game is usually unfun).

It's also really important that collection quests not be extremely frustrating. Hints or guidelines inside the game can help a player know how many objectives are left in each game area and possibly give small clues as to their location. The more cluttered the game areas are and the less help the player receives, the less likely the player is to find stuff in your game.

I guess the end goal is that collection quests should not be tedious. If they take a long time to do, that's fine, but a trail of breadcrumbs of sorts can really ease off the frustration. One of the things that caused me to avoid looking for secrets in HL2 was that I never really needed them. At best they would give me a little ammo or armor that I was short on, but many times I came across secrets that I didn't need at all.

So back to the player side of things, why is collecting stuff so fun? Is there some sort of magical rainbow land that people go to when they get all of the hidden packages in the game? Or is there some unusual region of fun left to be explored?

Leave comments, because I'm curious!

Pacing in Stories and Games

This is an article about a lot of things, but all of them are related to the time in which things happen. In stories or games, it can be really unnerving to have plot points that are timed improperly. It makes no sense when many climactic actions occur one after the other. This is particularly true in games where the final boss is actually not the final boss and it's really the final final boss in charge... who is actually just a minion for the ultra final boss. Plot twists like having the perceived villain be a puppet are interesting if used properly, but all-too-often it is overused in games, especially amateur ones.

This article is a guideline for writers, designers, and GMs alike who want to create more exciting storylines for people to experience. I'm intending to look back on it as I start GMing my own RPG campaign. It's advice that I think is useful no matter what kind of world you are creating. If you paid attention in literature class in college, this may be obvious for you. Most of you probably didn't take literature though (hard, subjective courses with lots of essays - bad!) so hopefully this is new stuff to a majority of readers.

The first step to proper pacing is a plot hook. A story should never, ever, ever start from a dead stop. We should see the main scenario and be interested in the characters we are first introduced to. This is why in Star Wars we see Leia and Darth Vader before we see Luke. Luke's introduction into the story is boring, but we get to see interaction between Vader and a variety of characters. We also get to see Leia and the droids deal with a pressure situation where the Empire has them at the throat.

In Final Fantasy VII, the gameplay starts off with a bang when Cloud and co. raid Mako Reactor 1. The intro scene for FFVII is very high energy and exciting, especially considering it's an RPG and RPG intros tend to be really boring and unfun (see also Eternal Sonata's first 5 hours). Originally I thought FFVIII was going to open similarly with the SeeD raid on Galbadia but it turns out that doesn't happen until an hour in.

All good adventures also start with a good reason to get the players involved in the story. They have to care about what's going on, or it will take more work later to get them excited about the adventure. I am pretty guilty of not hooking my players until later and hooking them in through the rising action and/or lull points. This is a bad habit! Bad! Bored players stop showing up to your games!

After the plot hook, and after every tension peak should have a slight lull where we get to gather our senses and think about things. High energy moments need some space so that we get to absorb the situation. If we have a big string of high energy suspense moments, we get bored and the tension loses its shock value. This is a good time to introduce backstory or paint pictures of things. It's also a good idea in games to allow the player(s) to free roam a bit and do some of their own exploring.

One of the things to do during plot lulls is to give little information tidbits. These lead to things you've already planned ahead for in your writing elsewhere. The leet writer term for this is foreshadowing. That way, when Padme reveals that she's really Queen Amidala, you can be like "Oh, I totally knew it!" For a bad example of this, Leia being Luke's sister is foreshadowed almost nowhere else in the Star Wars movies (yeah, there's a little dialogue between Vader and the Emperor in Episode V) and when it happens it's actually a pretty big shocker, like wtf was Lucas thinking? But when Padme reveals she's Queen Amidala, it's a bit of a shocker, but there's more precedent and we connect better with the situation.

Before the next tension spike we need to have rising action. Rising action should be a natural transition between the lull after a tension point and the next tension point. Occasionally it's okay to have an occasional 'OMG' moment where stressful moments come out of nowhere. It is not okay to do this constantly over the course of your storyline.

For a good example of how not to do this, play Final Fantasy IX, where every climax seems to come out of nowhere and the rising action leads to almost nothing (really boring plot revelations). At least the ending is sorta done right. Generally the reader/player should make enough discoveries or plot revelations to reveal the next climax, such as the bad guys are moving here and we need to stop them, or Shimamura is (or isn't) sleeping with Komako, oh noes!

Mad props if you get the reference there.

Anyway tension points return somewhat to the area of plot hooks, where we have a moment of high energy. However, a plot hook can be brief and doesn't have to be high energy (it just has to be interesting) but a tension point has to be tense. That's kind of the point. When Sailor Moon faces off with the monster of the day, that's the tension point.

In much the same way, your writing has to come to a head and you're gonna have to involve the reader or player(s) in what's going on. We know the bad guys are probably going to lose, but that doesn't mean we can't present them as being threats. In Episode VI when Luke and Vader fight, it seems plausible, even real, that Luke would be beaten by Vader or perhaps even give in to the Dark Side. While we know deep down that Luke will win, the previous movie even set a precedent by making Luke lose (!) to Vader in a previous duel. This creates a lot of tension for this final climax between good versus evil.

In games it's pretty cool because making a battle hard for this purpose is okay because bosses should feel challenging. If you're a GM or game designer, bosses should never be free walks - consider any free walks you give the player(s) to be a small failure and learn from it. Obviously at the same time though, a battle should never be impossibly challenging (hopefully that's obvious!).

The main point though is that you get an encounter that is tense, interesting, and enjoyable for readers or players. And most importantly, don't overuse. You can't get people excited over and over - you gotta pace yourself.

Some things I should really mention - too much character development is usually boring. I like to have something happening often enough that we get to naturally develop characters instead of having them talk about themselves to each other. Character development in general is very very good (ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL IN WRITING) so it is perfectly okay to have a paragraph or two here and there with people talking about themselves to each other, but you should never lose focus of the goal of moving the story forward.

As a game designer it is especially important - never bore the player with walls of dialogue. Always move the game forward and try to keep the player involved. Obviously you can use dialogue to achieve this but too much is not so good. For a good example of Too Much Dialogue, play a Final Fantasy game. Any one of them will do, even VII (although VII is probably one of the best about moving the story along). Actually, almost any JRPG will do for this purpose. For a great example of pacing in general, play Metal Gear Solid or any of its sequels (except ACID and 4; I've never played those so I can't give my hearfelt reccomendation).

Yeah, I haven't played MGS4.

The flowchart for a good story should have a plot hook at the beginning, then a slow rising action to a tension point, followed by a lull into another rising action into a tension point, and so on. The tension points should vary in magnitude (you can only blow up a city so many times before it gets old) and sometimes you can skip lulls or rising actions. In general though you should not, and there should always be a pacing gap between tension points. Also of equal importance is that lulls should not last too long, or the reader/player gets bored.

Also, if I insulted your favorite game or movie, I should note that pretty much all the references I made here are pretty good games and movies (Yes, even Episode 1). Eternal Sonata is a pretty good game overall, even if some of the plot is really convoluted and it suffers from some pretty bad pacing and poor balancing. Final Fantasy IX is one of my favorites in the series despite its awful use of shock value plot points. Final Fantasy VIII is one of my least favorites in the series (pre-XI) but is still a pretty quality game with a great love story and good character design. I think that both FFIX and ES are really good examples of bad pacing, though, so if you're looking for counter-examples to say FFVII (which has awesome pacing), FFVIII (also great pacing), and the MGS series, those are probably some of the worst examples of pacing I've seen in commercial video games. I've seen far worse in indie games (Sonny comes to mind).