What is your Game About?

[Hussar]

I was listening to the Open Design podcast a week or so ago, Episode 3. Great podcast. In it, they interview John Wick about various tidbits and whatnot. Now, a bit of a disclaimer. I listened to this a while ago, so, I've probably got the details wrong, but, the gist of one part of the interview stuck in my head. Even if I have the exact details wrong, just work with me.

In the interview, Mr. Wick was talking about how people approached him at cons and other places and asked him how he approached game design. His answer was, "What is your game about?"

"Well," goes the answer. "It's a post-apocalyptic game."

"No," answered Wick. "That's the setting for your game. What's your game about?"

"Driving across the wastelands in high powered cars while doing this and that."

"Again, no. That's what you do in your game. What is it about?"

"It's about hope," finally comes the answer.

"Ahhh. Do you have a Hope stat?"

What stuck in my mind is how he was drilling down to the essence of the game. Boiling away everything until all you have left is a couple of descriptive words that should be so central to the game that they have mechanical import and effect. It's a great idea, IMO.

My immediate thought was this is something I should apply to both campaign design and to adventure design. Start with the basic concept, before you pick system, before everything else. Boil down what you want the game to be about. From that decision, everything else should flow.

And, it shouldn't really matter if you are at the campaign design level or an individual adventure, although, thinking about it, the approaches would likely be a bit different. I'm not likely going to make unique mechanics for each adventure, but, I probably would for a given campaign, for example.

But, even at the adventure level, the choices you make should all flow from those core concepts.

For example, if I decide that I want to make an adventure about exploration and discovery, I have to make sure of some pretty key elements. First, there better be something to discover and somewhere to explore. But, also, I should make sure that the discovered thing will be discovered, or my adventure would suddenly be about exploration and frustration.

As I approach the design of this adventure, I would write down that core concept or concepts and start graphing out a web of ideas, just brainstorming at first - finding concepts that go with or concepts I don't want to explore.

I don't know. Maybe this is how everyone else does it already. I've never thought of designing adventures or campaigns this way. Ejecting all mechanical ideas first and starting with a more abstract concept just isn't how I've approached adventure building, when I've approached building things with any real method at all.

Just chucking this out for your edification. Have you listened to the podcast? Whatcha think?

 

[Umbran]

"Ahhh. Do you have a Hope stat?"

What stuck in my mind is how he was drilling down to the essence of the game. Boiling away everything until all you have left is a couple of descriptive words that should be so central to the game that they have mechanical import and effect. It's a great idea, IMO.

I haven't listened to the podcast, but I don't seem to agree with what you're saying here.

Great short stories are often about one thing. But longer works are multi-layered, about many things, have many themes.

And I am not generally on board with having the themes necessarily mechanically represented. While sometimes this works out well (say, in Call of Cthulhu's sanity), often times it distracts from the theme - I don't want my fictional themes to be about the numbers on the sheet. I am usually against statistics that tell the player what their mental state is, for example.

 

[Nagol]

That sort of describes how I design campaigns.

Decide what themes to explore in the campaign such as "growing into power", "order out of chaos", "reclaiming what has been taken", or "defenders of the realm".

Pick a genre -- low fantasy, high fantasy, pulp noir, war, crime, swashbuckling, pulp horror, comedy, comic book, etc.

Pick a backdrop -- fantastical, historical period, modern, early future, far future, pulpy, comic book, etc.

Pick a system that supports that theme, genre and backdrop.

Potential large campaign arcs get a similar treatment. Define the underlying theme: "treachery from within", "outside menace", "something lost that must be found", "things man was not meant to know", etc. Build an initial plausible situation that supports that premise and see what, if anything, the players can do with it.

Individual adventures usually do not get this treatment. Adventures may be attached to an adventure arc and have a form defined therein, or they may be interesting locales and situations statically asigned to the world.

 

[Ariosto]

Some consideration of theme is important, but I think the example takes a wrong turn for an RPG design; the first two answers strike me as much more appropriate. The GM's proper concern is with the milieu; it is up to the players to play their characters. A theme in terms of environment and expected kinds of activities is pretty much a necessity; Dungeons & Dragons is different from Farms & Families.

My view is that, as in the case of real life, "what it's all about" is a personal matter. If the game fundamentally is about role-playing, then the interpretation comes from the role's perspective: "Where" (meaning in what circumstances) are you now? Where are you going? Where would you like to be? What do you value?

To dictate some independently objective answer is to leave that foundation behind and adopt an observer's role: that of author or audience.

That, to my mind, usually raises issues of game design not well addressed in RPGs because they are not meant to address them. Considering Call of Cthulhu, one might note that on closer examination what is presented is not really horror, despair, hope, joy or such. Those are among the potential responses to events, responses that vary from persona to persona and player to player, and from event to event (even the outcome of which is not preordained).

Moreover, although CoC is primarily "about" confronting sanity-wracking and deadly monsters and mysteries, it is hardly confined to a continuous diet of such affairs. There is a difference between theme and plot.

 

[Storminator]

So this isn't really tied to what you're talking about Hussar, but here's the strange idea I got from this thread: Define the setting, define an adventure, pick the perfect system for that adventure, make your PCs and play. For the next adventure... pick the perfect system for that adventure, even if it's different from the first system. Reimagine the PCs in the new system and play on!

Keep the characters, keep the setting, change the rules as appropriate.

I'm sure that's relatively insane...

PS

 

[I'm A Banana]

John Wick Gets It!

Great short stories are often about one thing. But longer works are multi-layered, about many things, have many themes.

But they still have one over-riding theme. LotR, despite all the digressions into horse flanks and ents and poetry, is about destroying evil. The Illiad is about rage. Paradise Lost is about human weakness. Blah blah blah. Even longer works have a cohesive theme that threads through them, if they're good.

I mean, you can probably get away without it in D&D, but the over-arching thing that your game is ABOUT makes a stronger narrative experience, IMO. If you're going for a more sandboxy world-simulation or pure "kill the bad guys" game play, it's not that important, but it makes the story you tell very strong.

Ultimately, I think that's where TTRPG's are at their strongest.

I also like that he tied it directly into mechanics like that. The theme of the game is reinforced in the elements you play with, so if your mechanics don't represent your game's meaning, the message gets diluted.

That's why rations, weight, and hp were important to the first few editions of D&D characters: the game was about survival.

That element has changed...I'm no longer sure what the game as a whole is about (maybe "Action?"), but D&D's modular nature means you should be able to add stuff that reinforces your game.

 

[Pseudopsyche]

I recently finished listening to the podcast, and that interview also caught my eye (well, ear). Note that it's not 100% clear that "hope" was the "right" answer or that even if the game in question is about hope, that it should have a hope stat. The anecdote ended as the OP described, but I imagine that a reasonable response might have been, "No hope stat, but the campaign setting is more about helping communities stave off despair than it is about finding loot." But honestly, I think "driving across the wastelands in high-powered cars" is more evocative than "post-apocalyptic" or "it's about hope."

My first thought after the interview was to wonder what Dungeons & Dragons is about. You could make a decent argument that the game lives up to its name: it's about exploring dungeons and slaying dragons. Over the years, the terms "dungeon" and "dragon" have become increasingly figurative, but I would argue that the game still focuses on exploration (of fantastic locations) and combat (with fantastic foes). Of course, plenty of people include elements besides exploration and combat, but these emphases guide the game's design.

 

[Ariosto]

This is a tricky topic in part because there are no precise boundaries among game forms. Where (taking the scene back to the early 1970s) does the war-game end and the role-playing game begin? For that matter, what (if any) difference is there between a war-game and a merely "war-themed" game?

Such questions really matter only to the extent of getting participants' expectations and assumptions on the same page. Philosophizing over Diplomacy is of negligible practical relevance because the rules are about as stereotyped, as trivially agreed upon, as those of Chess.

 

[kitsune9]

I was listening to the Open Design podcast a week or so ago, Episode 3. Great podcast. In it, they interview John Wick about various tidbits and whatnot. Now, a bit of a disclaimer. I listened to this a while ago, so, I've probably got the details wrong, but, the gist of one part of the interview stuck in my head. Even if I have the exact details wrong, just work with me.

In the interview, Mr. Wick was talking about how people approached him at cons and other places and asked him how he approached game design. His answer was, "What is your game about?"

"Well," goes the answer. "It's a post-apocalyptic game."

"No," answered Wick. "That's the setting for your game. What's your game about?"

"Driving across the wastelands in high powered cars while doing this and that."

"Again, no. That's what you do in your game. What is it about?"

"It's about hope," finally comes the answer.

"Ahhh. Do you have a Hope stat?"

What stuck in my mind is how he was drilling down to the essence of the game. Boiling away everything until all you have left is a couple of descriptive words that should be so central to the game that they have mechanical import and effect. It's a great idea, IMO.

My immediate thought was this is something I should apply to both campaign design and to adventure design. Start with the basic concept, before you pick system, before everything else. Boil down what you want the game to be about. From that decision, everything else should flow.

And, it shouldn't really matter if you are at the campaign design level or an individual adventure, although, thinking about it, the approaches would likely be a bit different. I'm not likely going to make unique mechanics for each adventure, but, I probably would for a given campaign, for example.

But, even at the adventure level, the choices you make should all flow from those core concepts.

For example, if I decide that I want to make an adventure about exploration and discovery, I have to make sure of some pretty key elements. First, there better be something to discover and somewhere to explore. But, also, I should make sure that the discovered thing will be discovered, or my adventure would suddenly be about exploration and frustration.

As I approach the design of this adventure, I would write down that core concept or concepts and start graphing out a web of ideas, just brainstorming at first - finding concepts that go with or concepts I don't want to explore.

I don't know. Maybe this is how everyone else does it already. I've never thought of designing adventures or campaigns this way. Ejecting all mechanical ideas first and starting with a more abstract concept just isn't how I've approached adventure building, when I've approached building things with any real method at all.

Just chucking this out for your edification. Have you listened to the podcast? Whatcha think?

I like that premise. I can see that if I want to make a central theme in campaign, I can probably introduce a mechanic to drive home that part.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm not sure I can get behind the idea in its entire, but it is at least a useful tool, an excellent question to ask yourself when designing a campaign.

Especially if you're experiencing writer's block.