[RPG Theory] The Mechanics of Excitement
Jul. 8th, 2008 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stevekensonAt the gym this morning (I do a fair amount of thinking and wool-gathering while doing mindless cardio), I wondered about how D&D 4e designers chose to tackle the “issue” of martial-type characters (i.e., fighters) having more options in combat to presumably remove the constant “I attack again!” litany and thereby make D&D combat more exciting.
It seems to me a potentially significant element of RPG design is “how do you make somewhat predictable events exciting”? That is, when you’re dealing in fairly established fictional tropes, how do you make your game something other than “going through the motions”? Like most things in RPGs, it seems there are both mechanical and story-based (narrative) solutions:
• Randomness: Probably the most common way RPGs inject excitement is through randomness; usually the use of dice in action resolution. Most actions in RPGs are not fait accompli, they turn on the roll of the dice, which may or may not favor Our Heroes. There’s always a chance of failing at a particular task, making that rolled critical success all the sweeter for the risk of failure. The trouble with randomness is that it’s, well, random, and often results in anti-climax or just plain dumb outcomes. A streak of bad luck can ruin a player’s fun, not to mention a character’s long-term survivability. Many games address with with mechanics to temper the game’s random elements, such as various flavors of “hero points,” but then the risk is making the random element effectively toothless, because savvy players can always mix-max their points to get around the down sides.
A particularly brilliant example of tension-building randomness is the Dread horror RPG: Rather than die rolling, the game uses a tower of blocks (like in Jenga); to take a significant action, you have to pull a block from the stack. If you knock the stack over, your character dies, goes mad, or is otherwise removed from the game. This lends weight to the choices characters make and tension to the game much like a good horror story... who’ll be the next to go?
Another example is one![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stannex told me about the old SAGA card-based system: he ran a Watership Down style game with it. Rather than a central Fate Deck, each bunny (character) started out with his or her own set of cards, but all the discards went into a central pot for redraws. Thus, things start out somewhat stable and predictable (there’s a limited range of cards in each personal deck) but, the further the bunnies went from home and safety, the more and more unpredictable things became!
• Options: In the spirit of “anything can happen” inspired by randomness, some games keep things interesting by providing lots of options, ways of approaching solutions to problems (up to and including combat, quite often). Some have very open-ended systems, relying on players to come up with imaginative ideas for applying them. Others provide a lengthy catalog of options players can choose from; the powers of D&D 4e and Exalted are examples of this. The latter tends to have a more “tactical” element to it, knowing the “killer combinations” and most effective choices from the full range of options to achieve various goals.
• Plot Twists: The primary narrative technique of making things exciting in an RPG is—not to put too fine a point on it—to just make them exciting! That is, the Gamemaster uses theatrical and narrative techniques to make the game exciting and fun for the players. You use engaging descriptions, vivid action sequences, handouts and props, plot twists and reversals, all the items in a GM’s bag of tricks to enhance a game. This is one of those elements you can’t really build into the system, it depends too heavily on a skilled GM who knows, for example, how to make a villain challenging and someone players love-to-hate without pushing too far into frustrating and just plain annoying because they can’t beat the guy.
• Genre Enforcement: Some games use different systems to “enforce” the tropes of the game’s particular genre; Call of Cthulhuu has Sanity Loss, so there’s a clear mechanical system for characters going mad, and therefore reasons for players to avoid SAN loss and actions that cause it. Of course, said actions are also nearly always necessary to successfully overcome the threat in the story. Classic Lovecraftian Catch-22. In Call of Cthulhu, you are going to go mad (or die) it’s just a matter of how long it takes... The Madness Meter in Unknown Armies and the use of Will in Godlike to handle things like “shell shock” are similar.
Marvel Super-Heroes used its brilliant Karma system to reward heroic and comic-book approriate actions and to punish acting out of character. A personal favorite of mine was the rule that, if you had a team Karma Pool, and anyone on the team killed someone, everyone lost out! This, the game said, was the in-game reason why the other X-Men always tried to hold Wolverine back!
• Delayed Gratification: One way in which some RPGs keep players from jumping right from Point A to Point B is by saying you have to go to Point E, and you can only get there by first going through Points B, C, and D in order to achieve your goal. This deliberately stretches out the process. Indeed, most RPG combat systems are means of delayed gratification. Rather than resolving the whole fight with one die roll, there are many in a back-and-forth struggle. Torg did this with its “Dramatic Skill Resolution” wherein you had to complete a series of steps (A through D) but you couldn’t always complete a particular step on a particular turn (its letter had to come up on the Drama Deck flip that turn) and there was the potential for setbacks and complications. The “Skill Challenge” system of D&D 4e is similar in some respects, turning what might have been a single check into a series of them where more of the characters can participate over a longer period of time.
What are some other ways RPGs make sitting around a table rolling dice exciting?
It seems to me a potentially significant element of RPG design is “how do you make somewhat predictable events exciting”? That is, when you’re dealing in fairly established fictional tropes, how do you make your game something other than “going through the motions”? Like most things in RPGs, it seems there are both mechanical and story-based (narrative) solutions:
• Randomness: Probably the most common way RPGs inject excitement is through randomness; usually the use of dice in action resolution. Most actions in RPGs are not fait accompli, they turn on the roll of the dice, which may or may not favor Our Heroes. There’s always a chance of failing at a particular task, making that rolled critical success all the sweeter for the risk of failure. The trouble with randomness is that it’s, well, random, and often results in anti-climax or just plain dumb outcomes. A streak of bad luck can ruin a player’s fun, not to mention a character’s long-term survivability. Many games address with with mechanics to temper the game’s random elements, such as various flavors of “hero points,” but then the risk is making the random element effectively toothless, because savvy players can always mix-max their points to get around the down sides.
A particularly brilliant example of tension-building randomness is the Dread horror RPG: Rather than die rolling, the game uses a tower of blocks (like in Jenga); to take a significant action, you have to pull a block from the stack. If you knock the stack over, your character dies, goes mad, or is otherwise removed from the game. This lends weight to the choices characters make and tension to the game much like a good horror story... who’ll be the next to go?
Another example is one
stannex told me about the old SAGA card-based system: he ran a Watership Down style game with it. Rather than a central Fate Deck, each bunny (character) started out with his or her own set of cards, but all the discards went into a central pot for redraws. Thus, things start out somewhat stable and predictable (there’s a limited range of cards in each personal deck) but, the further the bunnies went from home and safety, the more and more unpredictable things became!• Options: In the spirit of “anything can happen” inspired by randomness, some games keep things interesting by providing lots of options, ways of approaching solutions to problems (up to and including combat, quite often). Some have very open-ended systems, relying on players to come up with imaginative ideas for applying them. Others provide a lengthy catalog of options players can choose from; the powers of D&D 4e and Exalted are examples of this. The latter tends to have a more “tactical” element to it, knowing the “killer combinations” and most effective choices from the full range of options to achieve various goals.
• Plot Twists: The primary narrative technique of making things exciting in an RPG is—not to put too fine a point on it—to just make them exciting! That is, the Gamemaster uses theatrical and narrative techniques to make the game exciting and fun for the players. You use engaging descriptions, vivid action sequences, handouts and props, plot twists and reversals, all the items in a GM’s bag of tricks to enhance a game. This is one of those elements you can’t really build into the system, it depends too heavily on a skilled GM who knows, for example, how to make a villain challenging and someone players love-to-hate without pushing too far into frustrating and just plain annoying because they can’t beat the guy.
• Genre Enforcement: Some games use different systems to “enforce” the tropes of the game’s particular genre; Call of Cthulhuu has Sanity Loss, so there’s a clear mechanical system for characters going mad, and therefore reasons for players to avoid SAN loss and actions that cause it. Of course, said actions are also nearly always necessary to successfully overcome the threat in the story. Classic Lovecraftian Catch-22. In Call of Cthulhu, you are going to go mad (or die) it’s just a matter of how long it takes... The Madness Meter in Unknown Armies and the use of Will in Godlike to handle things like “shell shock” are similar.
Marvel Super-Heroes used its brilliant Karma system to reward heroic and comic-book approriate actions and to punish acting out of character. A personal favorite of mine was the rule that, if you had a team Karma Pool, and anyone on the team killed someone, everyone lost out! This, the game said, was the in-game reason why the other X-Men always tried to hold Wolverine back!
• Delayed Gratification: One way in which some RPGs keep players from jumping right from Point A to Point B is by saying you have to go to Point E, and you can only get there by first going through Points B, C, and D in order to achieve your goal. This deliberately stretches out the process. Indeed, most RPG combat systems are means of delayed gratification. Rather than resolving the whole fight with one die roll, there are many in a back-and-forth struggle. Torg did this with its “Dramatic Skill Resolution” wherein you had to complete a series of steps (A through D) but you couldn’t always complete a particular step on a particular turn (its letter had to come up on the Drama Deck flip that turn) and there was the potential for setbacks and complications. The “Skill Challenge” system of D&D 4e is similar in some respects, turning what might have been a single check into a series of them where more of the characters can participate over a longer period of time.
What are some other ways RPGs make sitting around a table rolling dice exciting?
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Date: 2008-07-08 08:38 pm (UTC)• Variety in resistance: One of the chief reasons that protagonists (i.e. PCs) fall into the trap of "I hit him again" is that the opposing force in their contests provides no functional variety in its resistance ("I use my AC to avoid getting hit again"). Even 3.x, with all its tactical richness, provides little in the way of rich resistance variety. Whey the heck should PCs "work to make things interesting" when the antagonists' resistance is so bland? There's no economic reciprocity there! The PCs, in fact, are giving only what they are getting!
It seems to me that well-balanced, nicely flowing games (role, or board) deal with the inequity of actor-richness in two different ways:
- If your resistance is largely homogenous and abstract, then raise your protagonists' action choice up to the same level! If your protagonists deal with conflict narratively, with no tactical concerns, then it matches the variety of opposition, and more smooth flow is achieved.
- Provide more variety in resistance, based on the tactical choices of your protagonists and your antagonists. HERO does this by having each action taken by an actor have consequences for their own actions and for their resistance to the actions of others. On a simple level, this has a fairly noticeable effect, but it's not all that rich. DnD4e's "powerz" menu does a striking job of affecting not only actors ability to act, but also to resist! Suddenly you have powerz that cause shifts, movement, healing surges! Wow!
I've seen a lot of referee advice that says, essentially, "be flowery when you describe your results; this adds excitement to the game". I'm not sure that I agree with this. Maybe what you need to be, actually, is flowery when you describe resistance, because that's what's in direct opposition to the protagonist's activity. I will try to put this into practice. Rather than embellishing the results of my players attack ("Ohhh! Your sword took a huge chunk out of his left shoulder! He is bleeding and staggering and shrieking in terror!"), I will try to interpose during the die roll more ("Ooohhh! He sees you attempting to get close and clock him with your sword! He bobs! He weaves! He desperately attempts to raise his shield to meet your blow.... ahhh! not fast enough! horror! he loses how many hit points?")
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Date: 2008-07-08 09:05 pm (UTC)