The Danger of Nostalgia

It must have been cool to live in the 1940's and 50's and experience the original Batman and Superman comic books. Imagine being there, and experiencing their introductions first-hand, in a world that never saw them before.

It was cool growing up in the late 70's, and experiencing the golden age of roleplaying games. Going to the hobby store every week, and picking up a new game covering a new era or fantasy was cool and exciting.

I love my nostalgia, and I even love the new incarnations of Batman and D&D - but there is a danger here. Who is our generation's Batman-style hero? What new roleplaying game defines today? Repeating the past is just that, you take a new spin on an idea that has been around for a while. The danger is you are giving up the chance to create something new, something that has meaning today, and something that reflects on people's dreams and feelings now.

On the negative side, how many more superhero movie and RPG reboots do we need? I'm sure every generation would like their own spin put upon the Joker, Superman, and three kobolds in a room - but really, where is that something new? What monsters are we afraid of? What heroes do we want to be in return?

There are new ideas and heroes out there, one could say World of Warcraft defined its generation in place of an RPG; and Jack Bauer of 24 was our hero. Both of those pulled from the past for themes and inspiration, but they were new creations for our generation. You do get into the question of, "Really, what can you say is new?" Everything builds upon our past, and you can say the superheroes of today were based upon the Greek gods of ancient times. We subconsciously borrow our legends, our experiences define who we are, and we create the new from the old.

There is nothing wrong with reinterpreting the past and enjoying it. The danger comes when that is all that you do. For creative people, and creative gamers, we have to answer our generation's call when we hear it, and take a new course into uncharted lands. The next great superhero, the next great RPG, and the next great thing waiting to be discovered is just over that hill, waiting for you to find it.

Don't let the past slow you down.

Buffet Game Worlds and Be-alls

There is a trend in MMOs and roleplaying games to create "be-all" game worlds. These worlds contain a little bit of everything, such as a European area, Egyptian area, Gothic horror area, and so on - just like a buffet with a little bit of every food you can imagine. The world is everything to everybody, and has something for everyone. It is a challenging goal to make it all work together, and it represents a strategy to appeal to every gamer, no matter what the interest. The world taken as a whole is like a giant theme park, with adventure zones covering every possible era of fantasy history, adventuring concept, and sociological structure.

Good examples of be-all world design are Blizzard's World of Warcraft, the original D&D Mystara campaign, and even Paizo's Golarion world setting. In each of these worlds, there are areas covering any type of culture and adventure area imaginable. Of course, the MMO games are a bit more limited in what they can do, but you can see the influences of the buffet-style world clearly in the variety of zones and cities in the game.

Put aside the realism argument against worlds of these types, of course they are not realistic and not based on anything - this is fantasy. The best analogy in a way is the 'real world' with its variety of cultures and lands, but an important difference is that these game worlds typically borrow from every era of history, and create their little version of it in a geographically limited area. Everything works together, and sort of all gets along. A good explanation for why this is so often goes, "Contact is limited between the cultures."

SBRPG never envisioned designing a be-all world for the setting the gaming group creates. Each game world is unique, has a single flavor, and is a one-shot affair. Of course, you can go ahead and create any world you want, and are not limited to fitting in the new creation into an already crowded map. You lose the ability for one group of adventurers to journey to new lands, but then again, every world you create is a new land itself, and any new lands in them are truly unexplored and fresh.

A dedicated game world towards one type of adventure, such as Gothic horror, only lets you play in that theme. The upside is that there are no distractions or escapes either, there is no hopping over to the super-magic kingdom for help curing vampirism, or grabbing a bunch of steampunk weapons to take care of Count Dracula. You are stuck dealing with where you are at, and players need to focus on the world within the theme it was created in. It is a trade off, you lose the buffet of themes and lands, but you gain a focus and detailed world within one unified game world.

All-in-one world design also has the risk of turning the play experience into a Disney-world experience, like a theme park where you go on different rides, experience different zones, and never really feel there is a unified whole to the world. Be-all are fun worlds to create and play in, but sometimes I appreciate a world designed carefully around one theme, focused and coherent, and purposefully not trying to appeal to everybody.

The danger of trying to please everybody, yet pleasing none applies here - some worlds do it, and many others do not. Then again, if everyone else is trying to create that perfect be-all game world, wouldn't yours be different if you didn't? Do what you love, focus on one thing, and do it well.

Verbal Combat

One of the interesting parts about online roleplaying inside of MMOs is watching player creativity. Since characters in MMOs have varying levels and gear, when two players want their players to fight, it isn't always fair to just /duel and be done with it. Players have come up with interesting verbal combat systems using chat alone. Here's how it works:

"My elf thrusts with his rapier, lunging in a fierce attack!"

"My paladin dodges to the side, the rapier cleanly piercing his cloak, leaving a one-foot gash in it. In return, he spins, and swings his hammer low."

"My elf notices that, and plants a foot on the hammer as it swings by, backflipping ten feet away. The landing left him off balance, so he takes a moment to right himself."

"My paladin charges...."

George hates these fights, and thinks they are lame. I enjoy watching them, and all the creative moves players come up with, even if they are sometimes silly. Needless to say, they are strange affairs, and if handled improperly, lead to misunderstandings and fights. Watching people mature enough to play through is rare, but always fun.

Good verbal combat involves a tiny "loss" if you dodge an attack, such as the gash in the cloak, or the elf landing off balance. These little losses add up, and good verbal sparring actually increases the amount of the loss, or the amount of risk generated in accepting it. It is an interesting price to pay for avoiding a blow, and even taking a blow can be considered a loss after a while. Great players will fight on after one or two blows, and usually the third time is the knockout.

As a fight goes on, one side or the other will 'know' when they are defeated, and prepare for the end. Usually, these fights don't end in death, possibly a wounded escape, capture, or some other meaningful loss to RP. Perhaps the 'story' that led them to fight will be 'won' by the victor, and then revenge will be plotted, and another epic fight setup sometime in the future.

Verbal combat has never really been done too well outside of MMOs. There are a couple of pen-and-paper systems that rely on verbal stunting, and other systems that award dice for creative combat moves, but none really that setup the rules for verbal fights, tell people of the way it works, and then let them go to town. It is an interesting invention inside of the limited world of MMOs, and worth understanding from a purely self-built game mechanic point of view.

Action Heroes

We just finished watching the 80's classic Robocop last night, bookeneded with the new Captain America movie the day before. Both movies are actually similar in many ways. It is interesting to examine the movies and the eras, and the popular types of action heroes through the last few decades. These impact players of roleplaying games, players like to emulate what they see on the big screen, and the big screen defines popular culture for the current generation. Let's look at the last three decades of action movies (loosely), and relate these to roleplaying games. Note that I am pulling from a wide swath of movies, and there will always be exceptions during a particular period. These heroes may have existed before their time, but they were at their heights of popularity during the times mentioned.

The 80s - Idealists: Action movie heroes during this decade generally fought for ideals. Despite everything that happened to Robocop, he still adhered to the concept of service and justice beyond the treachery, dystrophy, and future shock around him. Ideals, and sacrificing for the big picture were considered heroic ideals, possibly spurred on by the ideological conflict of the Cold War. Heroes lived for the big picture, and sacrificing for the big picture defined heroism.

The 90s - Lone Wolves: The movie Die Hard changed everything with action movies, and the lone wolf was born. While still motivated by the larger ideals, the lone wolf fought for more personal reasons. The system was corrupt, and a personal victory defined heroism. There was a subtle shift from self-sacrifice to self-righteousness here, the larger than life hero was right because he or she was powerful, smart, and wronged by the system. An ideal can't solve the problem, only the hero can.

The 00s - The Monsters We Became: If a villain and hero stand around saying "you made me" and increasingly justify their actions because of each other, you are firmly in the 00s or action movie hero. You see this a lot in the new Batman movies (the '88 Batman was ahead of its time here too), the TV series 24, the Punisher, or any number of other movies and books. The action hero is now the monster, who's actions are justified by the horror unleashed by the bad guys. This type of hero is popular partly because of current events, such as barbaric acts of terror in real life, wars, or other real-world events that cause the culture to seek vengeance. It is always hardest to pin down the era you are closest to, but this is my feeling about current movies and trends, and pretty close to the actual action-hero culture.

These hero-types extend down into the types of heroes players play in roleplaying games, everyone wants to be inspired by the big screen, so players can subconsciously mimic their big-screen heroes. You can see this in the "lawful good - vanquish evil" parties of adventurers in the original D&D, the lone wolf heroes of Vampire: The Masquerade, and the I-am-a-monster character builds of DnD4, you can see some of the influences from pop-culture into the world of roleplaying games.

Granted all of this is a very loose analogy, and it is very difficult to talk about since you are literally covering 30 years of popular culture and gaming, but the influences are there. The influences do extend down into how roleplaying games are written and sold, and which ones become popular. Games speak to their audiences, and audiences pick the games that speak to them. Be mindful of the era a roleplaying game was written in when you tear apart its design, and also the movies, books, and television shows which were popular during the time. Roleplaying is fantasy fulfillment, and the fantasies the game satiates are directly related to the time the game was written in.

Generic Character Designs, Good?

There's a fun and fascinating quote over on the Wikipedia page for Mission Impossible (TV Show) that mentions the creator of the show deliberately told the writers not to focus on the character's backgrounds, keeping them semi-generic so the focus could remain on the caper. Watching the series on Netflix, this seems to have extended both backwards and forwards in time, none of the characters had a real history to them, and they never really developed meaningful relationships with each other or others outside their group.

To some, this seemed surface and shallow. Leaving these characters as almost generic stereotypes was dramatically unsatisfying, as you could never see someone's daughter, or have two of the cast members have a continuing romance. You could never make any real deep connection to the characters (though many did), and the dramatic payoff from normal human interactions never happened.

In another sense, keeping these characters as generic stand-ins for an anybody made the series more approachable to the audience. In a sense, if the team's resident disguise person was an 'anybody' - that anybody could be you. In a sense, superheroes in their modern 'reboot' incarnation are the same way, they are almost generic ideals that people can imagine themselves as being. The fantasy fulfillment of being a superhero drives the popularity of these figures, and since any one of them could be rebooted with a different origin - that origin could just be you.

Another reason for keeping the characters generic and stereotypes of specialist was the format. Episodic television that could be picked up at any time was a lot easier to get into if the characters had generic roles, and you can see this in use in many television shows, such as Star Trek. Kirk is the dashing captain, Spock is the logical science officer, and Scotty is the hard drinking engineer. These characters as well are pretty generic is a sense, and they start each episode more-or-less anew.

Stop, pivot, and apply this to roleplaying games. In an 'episodic adventure' role-playing game, why would we need characters with detailed back stories and continuing story lines? The old-school D&D fit this model well, with most fighters being fighters, and most mages being the same as each other. Your party's thief was your combination con man, sneaky guy, and trap specialist. Any thief fit this role well, and there was no need for backgrounds or future histories. Your class was your role.

Shift forward to modern roleplaying games, with detailed character builds, backgrounds, and huge arcing story lines written into modules. These are all very dramatically satisfying, excellent for novelizations, and definite crowd pleasers. But in a sense, they are less optimal for episodic adventures. All of a sudden, not all thieves are the same, we need to worry about character builds, and my thief may not know how to pick locks. Your character's applicability to a role depends on your character build, which makes the game less appealing to those looking for quick episodic content.

Do detailed characters take away from the plot? You could make an argument here, if a majority of the rules for a game are for character builds and options, the focus of the game shifts to 'hero building' rather than 'adventures.' Are you building a character to solve problems, or encouraging the player to solve the problem. Does my build limit the ways I can solve a problem, be it combat, social, or puzzle? This all can be summed up by the question, 'Who is solving the next problem? The character build or the player?'

Does detailed specific character builds reduce a players connection to the game? Not exactly, but the strength of the connection between the player and the character is very strong, just like the connection between a reader and a character in a novel. But one could say the player's connection with the game's concept is weakened a bit. Since not anybody can be a hero, these people have to come from specific world, backgrounds, and skill sets - since I as myself will never have access to these, my connection to these fantasy worlds and situations will be weakened somewhat.

It's a fascinating thought, and one with interesting applications when designing role-playing games.

Get There From Here

If there are four words which describe a game design philosophy succinctly, for us, they have to be "Get there from here."

Back in Maine, they had a saying, "You can't get there from here." Maine's coast is a maze of inlets, islands, rivers, and confusing roads. You can have two towns 10 miles apart, and it takes 50 miles of driving to get from one to the other. Tourists asking for directions would often be told, "You can't get there from here" in such situations, where they were hopelessly lost, and needed to backtrack a long way to get where they were going.

"Get there from here" is the opposite, and in game design means, "You can get the same or similar play experience easier, faster, and with less hassle using another game." Take basic dungeoneering, for example. If I were to play a simple "explore the dungeon and take the treasure game" with a new group of players, would I use full-featured game such as Pathfinder or d20 SRD, or a simpler retro-clone such as Labyrinth Lord? For me, the answer is simple, I would use Labyrinth Lord. The game is simple to understand, fast to roll characters up in, and simple to play. More importantly, it simulates 90% of the "dungeon action" I am looking for with this group, without going into complicated areas like skill points, thousands of spells to read, and a huge framework of character creation rules. Labyrinth Lord "gets there from here" a lot easier than other games, when all I am looking for is the basic dungeon experience.

We will often break a game down into its core activities, and then separate out all the rules and fluff. You isolate the core of why you are playing, and then contrast that with other games that do the same thing. If the other game is simpler, and gets you to the fun faster, that game does a better job at delivering the fun. Of course, if you are a fan of a rule set, "get there from here" does not change that, but it is important to understand the complexity you pay to reach the fun you desire. A lot of games don't understand this math, or it gets lost in a sea of expansions and options.

"Get there from here" can also be applied to rule design. Does the rule system you are building for a game deliver the intended outcome simply and without too much trouble? Or does the rules subsystem require a huge complicated procedure that could be optimized and streamlined? If the point is the complexity, that is one thing; but if the fun of the game is elsewhere, why spend the time when a simple rule will suffice?

Virtual Tabletops

Just found a cool virtual tabletop site over at Roll20.net. Paizo also announced their own Virtual Tabletop, and Wizards has just cancelled their VTT project. We used to run demo sessions of SBRPG via virtual tabletop a long time ago, so these are cool and interesting for us. They are definitely cool, and allow groups of players around the world to play together.

I have heard the largest problem was not the virtual tabletop, but finding games and joining them. Running an online pen-and-paper game is a lot of work for a referee, and at any one time, there are few referees to run games with. If there was some way of making this task simpler, maybe through prepackaged modules for use with a VTT, this would be an easier thing to get going. Another idea is to run a 'drop in and play' game on a regular schedule, but you would need a community and forum to put that together with.

You don't need an automated system, like a MMO, where players can join, have random encounters, and play without a referee. Automated play leads to automated players, and you need that one-one-one between players, the referee, and the rules. When you get into a system that was programmed against you, the natural human response is to test that programming, break it, and beat the game. With a referee, it all changes, and the magic of social interaction happens.

I would love to run a couple games of anything via VTT, and I may do so in the future someday.