pawsplay

Not every great book turns into a great movie, and just as evidently, not every great movie turns into a good video game. Each medium, from silent movies to flash movies, has its own unique characters. Therefore, it should not be surprising to reflect that in the case of RPGs, some stories are more gameable than others, and indeed, system matters.

Any kind of story involving a solo character has to be altered for an RPG. Even if you only have one GM and one player, the narrative process is different in first person than as an author, standing outside the game, and the interactive process means the GM can not simply lead the player through an odyssey. Similarly, stories involving characters separated by time and distance are problematic, since the characters are unable to interact and hence the structure of an RPG works uncomfortably with them. Things improve immensely if players can interact using the game rules in some fashion even when their characters are apart, but it is still a difficult issue to address because of the moving spotlight.

Action-oriented, character-driven, scenic, comedic, horror, and romantic stories work relatively well in RPGs. Erotic stories and moral tales are hard to pull off, because creating those emotions interpersonally is very intense, hence the lack of soft-core porn RPGs, serial killer RPGs, and RPGs centered on identifying and preventing child abuse. Existential stories, surrealism, and the like are hard to pull off because they are often predicated on alienation, whereas RPGs are predicated on identification and immersion. Hence, you would have to engage in pretending to be someone who is disengaged, which is certainly doable but makes the game more work and may make it harder to share the experience. I can read existential terror or a nihilistic crisis right off a movie screen our in a book, but it's hard to peel that off a person in front of you and then know what to DO about it.

GMs and players don't often have months to develop an entire milieu, the way a novelist or playwright might, and there is no backtracking to pull the world together if certain dramatic needs are identified later. Thus, genre-based games, games based on licensed properties like Star Wars, or games that are sequels or new editions are easier to game than truly original work. From a new player standpoint, games that use familiar tropes and a familiar world are more accessible than very strange situations and a strange world. At the same, a game set in something too familiar is boring, because the imaginary reality is not as stimulating to create. Thus, an ideal RPG setting tends to have a modernist theme or a post-modern "playing with text" kind of feel, as opposed to being a fairy tale, a piece of surrealistic fantasy, a docudrama, or a realistic psychological portrait set in the real world. If we want to think about a cop with PTSD, we are often as, if not more, satisfied reading about it than imagining ourselves as that cop. To make it interesting, we have to put the cop back on the streets and into danger, turn him into a vampire, or decise a less likely but still realistical scenario like a moral redemption or emotional decay to explore.

Similarly, characters should be easily grasped, since the players will have less time to acuaint themselves with each other's characters than the fictional characters in a book. A novelist might write that two characters are best friends and put their relationship in display at the beginning of the story, but in an RPG, the players would have to develop the backstory in conjunction with the GM to get a similar result. Thus, stereotypes are the norm in gaming. That should not be read as an endorsement of lazy, offensive, or trite stereotypes, but as an acceptance that recognizable character types are a good starting point. Complex, unusual characters need to have ways of interacting with the world, hooks and styles and habits, that are memorable, so we can become familiar with them over time. RPG characters should have really good names.

The supremacy of fantasy and superhero genres is probably not just an accident of history and geekdom. The genres are self-sustaining because they make for good games. Both involve team play, in which vast geographic differences can be used if the characters are sufficiently mobile, while powers such as telepathy can make it possible for characters to be apart but interactive. Since dialog is snappy and pithy, and themes fairly tight, the moving spotlight is not much of a problem. Both are action-oriented and romantic. Both are morally fierce. Both exist in a world that resembles Earth, but fantastically transformed. And you never need to justify having a really, really good name.

I'm in the final stages of assembling my PDF. If you have never done such a thing before, you probably have only a slight sense of the actions that lead up to that phrase. For me, the process went something like this.

A while back, I had an idea for a Pathfinder-compatible, PC-oriented product, basically some character options to add on to the game. First, I thought carefully about the scope of the project. I also had to devise a design philosophy; what power curve, what campaign assumptions, what style, what kind of players would be interested, and so forth. Then I sketched out an outline and wrote up some rough sections of the book. Eventually, I had a pretty good idea of the structure, and I put out the call for art for each section. At that point, I had to settle on a house style of art, to make sure my project didn't look like a complete mishmash, which meant ruling out some perfectly good artists and clip art that just did not go with the style I was looking for. Considering the scope of the project, my rates were necessarily low and I opted to purchase only a lease on using the art, not the rights to it, and I decided to take care of the art early on rather than later, in order to give the pierces time to trickle in and solve any issues with art suitability.

Then came the process of finishing out each section in painstaking detail. Meanwhile, one section disappeared and two new ones appeared, based on what I was able to make work in terms of design. I asked one piece of art to be altered and for some minor touchups to be done, and had to get a batch of art resent in a file format I could use without a design studeo. I learned more about my word processor than I ever thought I would need to know, and I performed some layout experiments. I spent a couple of hours reviewing every plausible font. I experimented with image resizing, cropping, contrasting, and positioning within text.

Eventually, the main writing work was done and I was looking at editing. I carefully reviewed my work to see if I used OGC that needed to be included in my copyright notice. Along the way, I found pronoun problems and cut-and-paste errors, and I went through the whole thing again because I was paranoid about more. I struggled with using second person voice versus the Pathfinder standard of he or she in class descriptions.

And now I'm almost done. I need to retouch the writing on one of the sections, then badger people I know or random strangers on the Internet to help me proof, for free, and run some playtests. If that works out, it's time to put it all together and stare at the thing. I just printed some tests of the layout I like and decided on a font size, with the help of my assistant (namely, the other parent of my children, who has the misfortune of being a gamer married to a part-time designer).

In the meantime, I've emailed three sites to get instructions on how to get set up to sell through their PDF shop. I've also sent an email to a publisher about one of their OOP products to get a clarification on their copyright notice and Product Identity in an OGL product (yeah, that's going to get a reply).

Still mostly undone: clip out some banners to advertise the product on on various websites.

Talking about plot in an RPG tends to bog down the discussion, since no one can agree on what it means. That is why, when I am talking about designing a scenario, I prefer my own, more specific vocabulary that is agnostic as to whether a game is more open-ended or programmatic. The basic elements are:

Premise - The idea, theme, or text of a game. No particular outcome or meaning is predetermined. An example of a premise might be, "Defeating a gang of roving brigands that threatens the community."

Conditions - The starting event, situations, times, and places.

Trajectory - What is likely to happen, starting with what is likely to happen if the PCs do nothing, and what is likely to happen if the PCs do several likely things

Planned Events - Encounters, essentially. Events that the GM has planned to introduce at logical points. Note that they are planned, but again, not predetermined. Sometimes plans have to change.

Thus, a "sandbox" game is fairly open as to premise but has well-defined conditions. Trajectory and planned events may be devised in advance or improvised. A linear, or programmatic, game has a fairly clear premise. Conditions may be sketchy, but the trajectories are carefully established and the planned events are fairly well-defined.

From this vocabulary, we can easily construct what constitutes the dreaded railroad game, wherein the PCs are pushed along by the GMs will. In a railroad there may be a strong premise or a weak one, but it doesn't matter, because it's unimportant. Since the PCs' choices are irrelevant and their actions arbitrary in the face of the GM's will, the premise is empty. Conditions could be anything; we'll never find out, because the GM will keep the PCs constrained in time or place. The world needs not even the slightest level of detail because it is only as big, in practice, as the eyes and ears of the PCs. The trajectory consists of one path, from which the PCs may not deviate. The planned events are not simply planned, they are enforced. Thus, we can see that the design of a railroaded scenario is degenerate in every important respect.

Reposted from the forum.

The advantage of a linear-type, programmatic game is that you are more likely to get the players to the volcano because that is what you have planned for. The advantage of the open-ended, sandbox type is that you are more prepared if things do not go as expected. Aimless randomness and railroading are both bad; they both represent degenerations of the aims of a RPG. I always come back to this: at the heart, RPGs are about meaningful choices. To be meaningful it has to be a real choice, and it also has to have real consequences. In the case of "stuff happens," the problem is that all the outcomes are pretty arbitrary, whereas in a railroad, the problem is that the presented options are all arbitrary.

Navigating between too much freedom and too little is an important task of the GM. Generally, in my view, this is best accomplished by offering the right amount and kind of information to let the players make informed decisions (or relatively informed decisions, if they are to be surprised in some way down the line), and by understanding what motivates the players and their characters. Where exactly you fall on continuum between mostly linear games and mostly freeform games is ultimately a stylistic choice, provided you are able to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of game design, railroading and futility.

There are perils in knowing too much about RPGs. I tend to take RPGs more seriously than most people. Not more serious in the sense of curing cancer or feeding my family, but more serious in the sense of an RPGs being an expressive art form. I don't say that pretentiously, in fact, I have a fairly serious axe to grind with some corners of the RPG industry I would consider a little pretentious. What I mean is that RPG design and play is a form of communication and a skillfull endeavor that speaks to the human spirit. Game-as-art is very different than novel-as-art, although it has some aspects in common with poetics and drama.

It is simply this: when somebody says something about RPGs, my mind looks through a quarter century of gaming experience involving dozens of games (probably a dozen or more superhero RPGs alone), my own attempts at design, and conclusions hashed out in many, many RPG forum discussions. My worldview, on the subject of RPGs, is complex, and I can no more set aside my understanding of RPGs than a jazz pianist can set aside their sensitivity to music. To me, the world of RPGs is full of so much information that it is a language unto itself.

When I speak to someone to whom RPGs are "this game D&D I started playing a couple of years ago," there is a definite risk that I or this person may aggravate the other. I try not to be excessively philosophic when speaking with someone whose interest is obviously more casual. There are only a few people in this world, relatively speaking, who know their Vance from their Anderson, their Villains & Vigilantes from their Mutants & Masterminds, their steampunk from their Victoriana. Rather than dwell in frustration, however, I always strive to help receptive souls discover a wider world, a place outside their usual Friday group or the local gaming store. Some RPG writers are among the most creative people you could know, and to experience their art is to experience their mind.

So, bravo! Though I occasionally find myself in the serious category, the fact is that I love RPGs and consider them some of the most fun things on Earth.