[Game Design] Raph Koster and Designers as Drug Pushers

[I'm A Banana]

Raph Koster is a game designer. He builds virtual worlds. And that link has him talking about game design and web sites. What I want to do is tease out some of the salient game design points in that talk, and bring them to bear on D&D. So distill what you can and talk about it below. Show me what's cool about what he's saying. I'm going to spoiler-block my own observations to not overwhelm on the first post.

[sblock]

Games are made out of games. Look at the latest big cool game. It’s a giant game. With small games you play within it.

So, basically, an amalgam of simple subsystems make up a game. When playing D&D, every d20 roll is it's own little "game" you can win (fail to beat the DC) or loose (beat the DC), and each little game has an effect on the whole D&D game....cool way to look at it. Also bears on the individual adventures for a campaign: each adventure is a little game within the game. Each campaign is a little game within the game.

Games, and each individual game, has to be FUN. We game designers obsess about making all of those micro bits entertaining.

This is interesting. Each "minigame" should be fun. Every d20 roll, every adventure, every campaign, every bit and piece should cause enjoyment and be fun (whether you win or loose, the fun is what makes you want to keep trying).

Fun is something moderately well understood. It's chocolate and orgasms: a drip of morphines down your brain stem. We are in a sense drug pushers.. but fun arises because of characteristics:

* Understand a pattern,
* Poke it,
* Learn how it works,
* Master it.

That’s how games work. Then when you master it, that moment... WOO HOO. Then you get your little drip of drugs.

Hahaha, awesome. Game designers are drug pushers, searching for that next morphine high. Poking the pattern of D&D (the d20 roll), learning how it works, and mastering it causes joy. It's chocolate and orgasms.

There is interesting empirical research on what kinds of fun are. This is from Nicole Lazzaro:
* Hard fun: tough problems for you to solve.
* Easy fun: aesthetic delight. "that's really pretty".
* Visceral fun: rollercoasters, where your stomach falls out.
* Social fun: games are always played in the company of other people. Schadenfreude. GLOATING! It’s fun.

Games mostly focus on hard fun.

He's talking about videogames here, but I think D&D has an interesting combination of these. It's a lot of social fun, a lot of easy fun, just by the nature of "fantasy tabletop game." It requires a crowd of people and it lets you play out fantasies, making you pretty and awesome. Visceral Fun seems to be that kind of emotional investment in the game, where the story and the characters become very attached to you. Hard Fun seems to be one of the big contentious issues in D&D between the editions: grognards often complain that 3e coddles players and isn't hard enough, while adopters may say earlier games were mean-spirited in a way that didn't challenge and just peed in the cornflakes, so to speak. Every edition HAS the hard fun, but the way it's presented and the true consequences for it do change from "listening at the door can mean an ear seeker will destroy you" to "the challenge is to find out if you should listen at the door in the first place."

Here are the magic ingredients:
* Where should matter.
* When should matter. What page you came from previously. What your past interactions are.
* What you are buying should feel different.
* What you do it with should matter... what tools you bring to the problem. It matters whether you’re coming to this with a sword, or a bow... users should feel the difference.
* What you're buying it FOR should matter. You need variable feedback. Did you do it well or poorly?
* In games it matters sometimes that you don't get what you want. That’s what drives return visits...
* Finally, if you fail, the game needs to smack you on the head and say, you idiot. Fun comes from LEARNING. Failure is very important.

So, what should matter in crafting a D&D campaign? I'm not sure what he means by WHERE, but here's some ideas:
* It should matter where your characters have come from, what their past actions are. The future should be based on the past.
* It should feel different. Try a different genre or a different challenge or a different monster or a different villain or a different campaign. It should come from what has gone before, but it should be different from what has come before.
* There should be different methods. "A sword or a bow." Both can accomplish the goal, and it shouldn't be the same way of solving it with both.
* What you're doing it for, variable feedback. Did you save the princess from the dragon? Did you save the KINGDOM from the dragon? Did you only manage to save yourself from the dragon?
* Sometimes, you don't get what you want. Sometimes, the villain gets away. Sometimes, the McGuffin slips through your fingers.
* BUT, there's always the fun in learning. You know you can get the McGuffin and slay the villain, you just need to keep trying. There needs to be that knowledge that you haven't lost it all, you're not utterly destroyed, there's accomplishments to be had if you can puzzle it out.

A verb is an objective. The goal. In a game it might be destroy, or capture. Commerce, it might be buy. Social, it might be connect. But this has to be a repeatable activity. If people don't care to come to it over and over, then it will fail.

So what's the verb in D&D? Could almost be a whole thread about this...

It has to involve skill. You need to be able to do it better or worse. Purchasing on eBay is compelling - you figure out tricks! Sniping. Evaluation. In order to learn, you have to feel like you're growing more competent.

Fun comes from a growth in competence.

Aha! Now we come to D&D's own reward system...a growth in competence. As you gain levels, XP, magic items, your character gets more competent, and as it does so, it becomes better suited to overcoming the challenges that the world throws at it.

I'm not so sure this angle affects D&D players much, other than the number-crunchers who focus on optimization. But it definitely affects characters. Perhaps it could affect players...what growth do they have? What skill can they contribute? Narrative games have the skill of "being a good storyteller" (even the players need to be able to do this in good narrative games). Combat-heavy games have the skill of "being a good number cruncher" (if you're not, the CR/EL critters will kill you).

Social media is about cooperation, but the core of games is competitive. As soon as you give people a ladder to climb, they'll climb it. Ratings. Metrics of contribution. Other people need to see it to measure against it.

Levels in a nutshell! This is the carrot on the stick.

Everything you have done must matter. The system needs to remember that...The last interaction you had should matter. When interacting with tech, it should be like chess. Whatever the feedback was from the device should change the situation. Can you tell what you did, did anything? The feedback? In terms of interaction design, you should never start a given encounter without there being context. What has the user already done? The user should be able to prepare for the encounter. They need to be able to come to it to prepare for ways of taking on the challenge. Tooling up before battle, if you like.

Most D&D players and DMs follow this pretty well. It's verisimilitude, the idea that there's cause and effect. The idea of Railroading is basically the idea that DMs can run roughshod over this feeling that what the players do matters. Oddly, that's the same feeling players can get when faced with "gotcha monsters" like the Ear Seeker or the Rust Monster, or when faced with high-level encounters that kill you in a world without resurrection: the idea that it doesn't matter what you do because dumb luck and twists you couldn't expect screwed you over and killed your character and they can do it again. A lack of player agency is the problem in both situations, and both situations suffer from DM power trips (in the one case, their story overrides your action, in the other, their monsters beat your characters).

A given verb that you supply, like buy, is a hammer. You need to give users lots of nails. If they like buying, they might apply it to all kinds of different things. Buying membership. Buying a one day experience, a friend, an event. There are lots of kinds of hammers, too... users should come to any form of interaction design, and choose from an array of tools with which to solve a problem. Connecting to someone on a social networking site: lots of ways. Intro emails, referrals, forums, groups, a multiplicity of ways of reaching that goal. The system should give different feedback based on how you did it.

If the verb of D&D is "adventure," then the different adventures and campaigns are lots of nails. If they like adventuring, they'll adventure to do all kinds of different things, and there's many kinds of adventurers, players can choose an array of classes and races to solve the problem. And D&D should give different feedback depending upon how they did it.

If the players choose a druid to slay the dragon, it should be different than if they chose a fighter to slay the dragon, and the reaction to the townsfolk should be different and the ultimate consequence should be different.

Again, a lot of D&D games already embrace this principle. The idea that the characters should have an influence on the world, that the players should influence where the game goes, is pretty well embraced. Players choose the plots to follow, not DMs.

You can do this in game design, you can have stat measures on how hard something is to achieve. A challenge rating for your interface. We do this: we graph as you move through game levels. We track the difficulty rating as it goes to see how many people will make it to the end. A game that only has one outcome is boring. An interesting thing about a lot of services is that they drive you towards succeeding, you succeed, and then it's the end. Games have learned that this is boring. When you buy something it should tell you alternative endings. Greater challenges. Secret discounts! Sometimes you should get a pleasant surprise.

Again, I'm kind of left wondering where player skill comes into D&D in a big way. Success is a roll of the dice, so it's more like gambling. But since players choose the tactics and the plot threads, they have some control (or, at least, the illusion of control). Where do they get these pleasant surprises and secret discounts? What are the easter eggs in a typical D&D game? There can be more than one outcome in D&D (and the good games try for more than one outcome), but the outcome is kind of dependent upon chance.

Low risk activity for high reward is bad for fun. When we build services, you really want users riding right at the edge of what they can actually accomplish.

Is this true in D&D? Or do players pretty much go along for the ride, making small contributions to the flow and coloring the outcome, but generally existing at the whim of the DM?
[/sblock]

General summary? It seems like D&D, at least in the recent edition, doesn't have a lot of "hard fun." Player skill is kind of minimized into two basic formats: either you're good at giving others at the table passive fun (you are good at telling a story and making a character live and breathe), or you're good at crunching the numbers (you're good at building a character's stats and making him a formidable numbers wall), or some combination of that. But even that can be glossed over by an attentive DM. This leads to a lot of passive fun in D&D, watching the story go by, contributing to it in small bits, and generally just enjoying the fantasy universe at your fingertips. The bit about overcoming challenges is important, but your personal skill doesn't matter as much as the factor of luck on the d20. Levels represent the character's skill, and more levels mean you can do more things and take on more challenges and grow as a character, but they don't allow the player to learn much.

This feeds into how videogames can compete with D&D. If most of the fun of D&D is imagining you're in a fantasy world, then videogames fulfill that need *better*. At least for everyone except DMs (and DMs have always been in the minority among D&D players). And, as MMO's come out, they also can fulfill the social enjoyment of D&D. This doesn't leave D&D with a whole lot to add to the universe of fun. You can get your morphine drip from another pusher.

Then, the "challenge" of D&D is the luck of the die roll. It's not about what players can do, it's about what characters can do. Good games still allow player contribution, but it's limited to two basic skills: number-crunching and storytelling.

Again, I'm struck with the idea of how much player skill it's possible to get in D&D and still have it be a game that encourages that skill, that education, instead of discouraging it. It's easy for players to get discouraged -- railroading and gotcha monsters have historically done it quite often. How do we challenge the player skill in a way that doesn't make them just want to give up and go do something easier?

Discuss!