Kamikaze Midget

I've been doing some thinking about the real differences between the tabletop and the computer/console for a gaming experience, and I think I might be onto something.

First thing to start with is the idea that a medium affects the things you can do with it. This is assumed by pretty much any storyteller ever: the medium affects the story you can tell. The story you deliver in a book format is different than the story you can deliver in music, which is slightly orthogonal to the story you can tell in epic poetry, etc., etc. Creative types -- people with stories to tell -- find a medium that they can speak through and try to tell you stories through that medium.

That's basic fiction theory, of course.

The fact of the matter is that the tabletop and the computer are different mediums of game-playing as well (as are cards, or dice, or board games, or whatever). They affect the kinds of games you can play with them.

When you're playing a video game, your options are limited, but that doesn't matter to you. The "raw fun unit" of a videogame is control. It's like figuring out how to use a tool: your mind communicates something into the world, and as a result, things happen. Cause and effect, basic physics, the potential for you to advance (get a high score or approach the "complete" game) -- it's all based around "I tell you to do something, and you do it" kind of control. In a videogame, if you reach a dead end, you just press buttons until something happens. This is pretty impossible in any kind of table-top game.

What's unique to the table top, is freedom. Your options are unlimited, which is why you can't just try all your options -- you effectively have more options than you could ever try. It's also why we need a GM -- a judge -- to tell us what happens when we take an option. A human hand can guide the events much better than a dispassionate, raw physics engine (or heavy simulation).

In my mind, a "pure tabletop game," using the medium to it's greatest advantage, would focus entirely on that freedom. This means it would be necessarily fairly rules-light and abstract. It would be modular and easy to design for, allowing individual GMs to fully master their own games, and to make them distinct. It wouldn't be tied to a genre or a playstyle. It may be tied to a central resolution mechanic -- what to roll when you want to do something, and how that roll is modified.

I don't see 4e very strongly focusing on that freedom (not that any other edition necessarily did more or less -- talking about 4e as 4e here, not in comparison to other D&D's). It's codified, complex, defined, genre-specific, obsessed with combat and the minutae of pushing around plastic toys. It's tethered to that, and limited by that.

I don't think most games use the medium to the best of its ability. Indeed, some of the best (GURPS? T20?) pointlessly tether themselves. It's easy to have complexity, after all. Simplicity is difficult and doesn't really sell books.

But if D&D and the tabletop in general want to dodge the slow bleeding death from a million little digital cuts, they're going to need to accentuate that freedom, that unique capacity to "do anything." Replace the powers system with the stunt system in 4e. Make GURPS less modular, more cohesive. Leave videogames the "make a choice between two things" territory, and embrace "do as thou wilt."

In fact, the tabletop has been mired in ways to limit freedom. That won't survive. If players want to choose between limited options, videogames are much easier, and much more satisfying. The tabletop needs to hone it's own unique contribution: the ability to go wild, go off-script, and blaze your own trail.

More thoughts later, more than likely.

PS: Pic is supposed to be evocative of a setting I'm kind of half-working on called Infinite Skies. It's conceived of as a D&D setting entirely on floating islands above a planet of choking dust where giant mechanical deities lie (and occasionally stir). The central idea in that setting is one of "freedom:" something that can only be unique to table-top games.

So, the current main game in my mix is Okami. I picked it up for the Wii a few weeks ago, though it was out on the Playstation 2 long before that.

It's a great game for a few reasons, and I was hoping it would teach me a bit about art design in games: it is a highly stylistic game that draws on Japanese watercolor paintings and traditional Japanese folklore, and one of the main gimmicks of the game is that you get to draw on the screen with a brush that makes stuff happen. Draw a bomb, you get a bomb! Slash through an enemy, and an invisible sword slices through them!

It is teaching me something about that, but it's also bringing up a topic that is a bit closer to D&D's home: dungeons and magic items. Specifically, how to interlink them, to make them useful to each other and depend on each other. In other words, how to set up a dungeon designed around a reward that actually changes your abilities (rather than just enhancing your abilities).

This isn't exclusive to Okami. Indeed, though Okami does it REALLY WELL, it's actually the hallmark of games going back at least to the 8-bit, battery-backed memory period. I'm sure there are more that do this, but the ones that stand out in my mind are Megaman, Metriod, and, the feather in the cap, the Legend of Zelda.

In Megaman, you get to choose your level, and once you beat it, you get a weapon upgrade that lets you use a special attack (the special attack of the robot you just blew up, of course). Your versatility and suite of powers grows steadily, but also strategically: each boss robot has a weakness against another boss robot's weapon, and each weapon has a slightly different firing pattern, meaning that in some stages certain weapons are more useful than in others

In Metriod, the levels are all interconnected and undivided -- the game flows to make a fairly seamless whole -- but regions have their own themes, as well. In certain areas you're going to need certain weapons, certain upgrades, and certain abilities that you acquire there, and going forward, you can use them to access things out of reach before.

And in Zelda, each "dungeon" has its own new toy from Batman's Utility Belt that you find, and use there extensively, and use against the boss there, and then use going forward to open up new regions of the game.

Of course, in Okami, you have brush techniques, but Okami also manages to dodge the "binary solution" issue that can sometimes crop up in Zelda games or the like: you use the item only in its home dungeon, and then never again.

And in D&D, what do you have? A lot of open-endedness. 3e had random treasure tables, so the DM might not know what he's giving out before he rolls it. 4e has treasure parcels, so the DM definitely knows ahead of time, and the players might, too, but the rewards are generic: items that deal damage, or gold to spend on other items that deal damage.

What Okami, and Zelda, and Metriod, and Megaman can teach us about dungeon design is this: Reverse the process, make the dungeons about the rewards found in them, and make the rewards change the game.

Consider when you get the Hookshot in Zelda, how that opens up the world and gets you to new regions that you couldn't go to before, or when you gain the Freeze Beam in Metriod and can suddenly use your enemies like stepping stones -- not to mention all the new doors you can open up (literally!).

There's nothing that changes the game plan like that in D&D.

Or rather, there is, but it's not part of your rewards. Instead, they're relegated to magic.

There's a lot of magic that historically does this to the game, but there is one famous category: It's those old bugaboos, the travel magic. Flight, teleportation, even spells like knock that just open doors. In 3e, these spells aren't bonuses, they're required for play. In 4e, these spells aren't bonuses, but they're effectively optional, relegated to Rituals. These are problematic for many DMs because they give the party brand new resources and ways to short-cut challenges that the DM may not be expecting (in 3e) or may be superfluous detail that the DM does not want (in 4e).

Certainly, we can do better.

We can apply the "adventure videogame" philosophy to our own dungeon design.

We can reward players with these new capacities in worlds specifically designed to take advantage of them, with dungeons that are themed around these powers, in order to teach them how the powers are to be used.

Here's a few simple ideas that should help you in implementing this in your own game:












There ya go! Basically, the first five steps are all about how to treat the ability in the world: a useful, if unusual capacity with limitations that the world assumes you can use to do unique things with, both out of combat and in combat. The sixth step tells you to construct a dungeon around the usefulness and limitations of the ability: effectively, a training ground for using it, complete with enemies (and a boss monster!) that teach players (and their characters) what the ability can and can't do. After the dungeon, they're set loose on a world that has a lot of potential uses for their new ability, things that they couldn't access before (and perhaps things they were frustrated about not being able to access before).

In a sandbox-style game this opens up new areas of exploration, much like crossing the mountain range into the next valley opens up the next valley for exploration (but on a presumably more dramatic scale). In a narrative-style game, this opens up new locations and characters for the ongoing story, and can help resolve problems that the PC's are faced with early on ("how are we going to get the MacGuffin if we can't fly over this gap?").

In any game, this takes abilities that have the capacity to change the way the game is played, and assumes they will be used, without entitling a player to their use. Players must earn the right to ignore challenges, most specifically by facing challenges that teach them exactly what they'll be able to ignore, and what they'll have to still deal with, even with their new powers.

Hopefully, this puts the gears in your head turning. Take a look at some 4e rituals, or some 3e spell categories like teleportation, flight, divination, or even powerful healing like regeneration or raising. Link together some "combat magic" with some "noncombat magic," and keep the package something anyone can gain -- fighter or rogue, too. Stick 'em in a dungeon that makes use of 'em, and enjoy yourself.

Comments, as always, desired and appreciated.

So, it's been a while since I've updated the blog.

There's a reason for that.

The reason for that is this. It's still very much a work-in-progress, but you can see already there's a bunch of stuff there.

I'm going to be changing the focus of the blog, too. FFZ is still a project of mine, but this space will more be for big-idea game design musings. It won't be D&D specific, though D&D, as always, will provide some good examples of what I'm talking about. In fact, a lot of it will probably concern videogames and game philosophy in general. Of course, FFZ will still make regular appearances as well.

I'll see if I can't get some examples of what I'm talking about up there tonight. If not, it's comin' soon.

For now, take a look at ALL THE STUFF that FFZ has already. See what you like, what you don't, give me some feedback, and we'll see where that airplane takes us.

Here we have the Mystic and Pyschic jobs, and the Status rules.

These things all revolve around Statuses in FFZ: buffs & debuffs.

The Mystic is what was, until recently called "The Witch," (though it preserves some of the overtones). This one specializes in transformation status ailments -- blindness, turning you into a frog or a zombie, and generally making your body into her plaything. Similarities in FF history include a lot of the "tactics" jobs, such as the "Mystic"/"Yin-Yang"/whatever of FFTactics. As with the Astrologer, the way FFZ handles statuses means that they can contribute something even to battles where your enemy can't quite be turned into a frog.

The Psychic is a little different. Though it uses the "psychic" from X-2 International as a sort of inspiration, it more fills an FFZ-specific niche, splitting the main "status ailment" jobs in two. Because FFZ jobs are so short, and because everyone will have a sub-job, no one job can really have mastery over such a key game element. The Psychic uses mental trickery and alteration, charms and illusions.

And, of course, to support these two jobs, the Status document gives you an overview of every status ailment that appears in FFZ. Like with the items, it's not an exhaustive list, but hits the high points.

I'm thinking next time we'll see some of the tech exploration: the engineer, the vehicle rules (chocobos and airships and submarines oh my!). I'm thinking you'll also see the Breaker, which, like the psychic, is a job that mostly exists because 15 levels don't give you a heap of openings for awesome abilities. Three quesses what that guy specializes in.

In this update, we look at the Alchemist and Astrologer jobs, and view some of the items your characters will be using.

The Alchemist was a bit hard to design. I wanted to preserve FF's "mix" mechanic, because it's so distinctive, but it was running into troubles in implementing it at the table. Great charts of item combination are pretty exhausting (not to mention page-consuming), but a random system wouldn't preserve the idea of a formula that is key to the Alchemist's flavor. The solution wound up being informed by the Stash abilities. The idea of using free items was good, so I had the Alchemist combine those free items with the elemental crystals (which are crafting items for characters) to produce a new effect (taken from the various games).

The other major issue with the alchemist was HOLY CRAP, THIS GUY WAS OVERPOWERED IN THE FF GAMES. Anyone who knew the mix list and put in the time harvesting those rare items was going to have a big payoff in the Alchemist. Unfortunately, at the table, a list and "item farming" are pretty unrealistic. I had to be very choosy about which mix abilities to include in the Alchemists' suite, and they don't have many of the more maniac abilities that alchemists from the FF games had...

...at least, not by default. New mixes are easy to introduce, after all, and having a unique item be used in a one-time mix for a tremendous effect isn't a big deal, as long as you can't repeat it.

The Astrologer suffered from a bit of a different problem...the curse of a CRPG "debuffer:" pointless in the battles that really matter.

Solving this problem reached into FFZ's philosophy about ailments, actually: immunity in FFZ isn't really "immunity", it's more "trade it for damage" (or a Delay, or some other thing you can drop). A boss may be "immune" to Instant KO, but what that really means is that if you hit the boss with Instant KO, maybe he just takes massive damage instead. And anyone else can still be hit with the actual Instant KO.

Astrologers won't be useless. Anyone who wants to pick up a few extreme gravity abilities or alter time and spce, they'll be good in every battle for something.

Items were kind of fun. I've got many more items than I put in that document, but jotting them down there helped me categorize FFZ's award system (the XP/AP split, the purpose of Gil, etc.) I like the idea of items as a gil-sink. Have a few extra coins laying around? Buy more items! Quantity won't hurt anything!

So without further adieu, you'll find this info, and the stuff that has come before, in My MediaFire folder.

Direct links:
Alchemist
Astrologer
Items