This is a lengthy full-play demo of Subversion, which is probably the most exciting video game release of the next year:
World of Love 2010: Chris Delay from Mudlark on Vimeo.
I also recommend checking out the Subversion Design Diaries at Introversion’s website.
And if you haven’t played their first game — Uplink: Trust is a Weakness — then you’ve been missing out on the best hacking game ever made.
A person is going to make a cake. They have five or ten pounds of really good, premium quality cake flour. However, something inexplicable happens in their head when they’re putting it together, they think: “Sure, I can use this really good flour and have a really good cake, or I can stretch it a little and make it only a little less good by substituting a cup of sand for a cup of that really valuable flour…”
Corrollary disease: “This flour is soooo good that if I add a lot more of it, the cake will be that much better.”
DADHACKER
(2002/12/30)
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: The meme that D&D is all about “killing monsters and taking their stuff” is a caustic one.
In recent years, however, this meme has only gotten stronger, largely due to the design methodology flowing out of Wizards of the Coast. (Although there’s certainly a feedback-loop between WotC and the echo-chamber CharOp branch of the fandom which exacerbates the problem.) Pointing to the core design of 4th Edition is trivial, but it can also be clearly seen in the growing predominance of My Precious Encounters(TM) in WotC’s adventure design both before and after the switch to 4th Edition.
Wizards clearly thinks they’ve identified some really awesome flour, and they’re just going to keep pouring more and more of it into their cake mix.
In Treasure Maps & The Unknown I mentioned that setting “kill all the monsters” as the default goal of an adventure inherently funnels everything in the game through the combat system, drastically narrowing the range of potential gameplay. More generally, I’ve talked in the past about the fact that D&D used to support a “big tent” of playing styles and gameplay options and that WotC’s quest to “fix the math” and “find the sweet spot” has systematically shrunk that tent.
Unsurprisingly people left outside of D&D’s shrinking tent have been turning to other games in droves, reportedly allowing Pathfinder to tie or out-sell D&D in recent months. (A level of competition D&D has never experienced except when it was briefly out of print during TSR’s near-bankruptcy.)
But I digress. For right now, I want to delve a little deeper into the significant, debilitating effects of setting “kill all the monsters” at the sole pinnacle of D&D gameplay.
EXTRA CREDIT: CHOICE AND CONFLICT
Let me start with this:
The video is very well done, but if you don’t want to watch the whole video, allow me to summarize the key points. It’s talking about the importance of choice (“good games feature choice at every moment”), and in order to better understand choice it breaks player actions down into several categories:
1. Autonomic Actions. (Breathing, keeping your heart beating, etc.)
2. Reactions. (Pulling your hand away from a flame.)
3. Calculations. (Decisions based solely on reason: A choice between options in which there is a clear correct answer. For example, buying a game for $40 instead of $60 when it’s the exact same game. Or, in a more complicated fashion, choosing not to place your hand on a hot oven.)
4. True Choices. (Requiring the overcoming of internal conflict.)
“Without internal conflict there is no choice, only decisions.”
Or, to put it another way, true choice requires you to have two objectives which are put into conflict with each other. You have to choose whether to pursue Objective A while risking or abandoning Objective B, or vice versa.
The problem with many games, as the video points out, is that the player is frequently presented with only a single objective (or several objectives which don’t conflict with each other). At that point, there is no choice: There is only the calculation of the best possible method of achieving your objective and/or the testing of physical skill in order to achieve that outcome.
One type of choice you see in many game is an “incomplete information problem” — where calculations are turned into choices by forcing the player to make the decision before they have enough information to make a reliable calculation. (Tangent: You’ll occasionally see discussions where people claim that you can’t have meaningful choice unless the players are completely informed about what each choice means, but this is not generally true. And it’s only specifically true in the case of a complete tabula rasa in which the choice is nothing more than a random number generation — but such tabula rasa states are so utterly unlikely in any sort of real gameplay that it’s not really worth wasting our time fretting about them.)
The other type of choice, and the one I’m most concerned with here, is the “incomparable”. This is often found in character creation systems, where you have to choose between two options which cannot be directly compared with each other.
“The problem with many games,” as the video says. “Is that they mask calculations as incomparables.”
The example they point to is World of Warcraft, in which the talent trees of character advancement appear to contain a multitude of choices. But experienced players know that these talent trees conflate down to just a handful of “best builds”. Why? Because virtually all of your choices on the talent tree are aimed at increasing your DPS or your healing output.
In other words, the “choices” on the talent trees are not fundamentally different. They are all ways of achieving one particular goal, and therefore there will almost certainly end up being one or two “best ways” to achieve that goal (calculation).
CONFLICT
You see where I’m going with this, right?
When you focus the entirety of D&D on combat mechanics, you are simplifying the game down to a single goal. The effects of this are clear:
First, it creates a market for “best builds”. More than that, when certain builds become sufficiently “best” they effectively break the game: You either play those builds or you’re being outclassed by those who are playing those builds. (If you’re supporting multiple goals, on the other hand, the problem is lessened: There may be a “best build for X”, but since X isn’t the totality of the game it doesn’t invalidate other character builds. Which isn’t to say that you need to toss concept balance out on its ear, but it does significantly reduce the pressure to turn everything into identical, bland pablum.)
Second, you can “fix the math” all you want in an effort to make all builds equal. It doesn’t change the fact that you’ve eliminated meaningful choice from the core mechanics of your game. (It should go without saying, of course, that you can eliminate large swaths of meaningful choice while still leaving some choices intact.)
In short, you are reducing your game to a mere calculation.
CHOICE
In considering the importance of choice in game design, take a moment to ponder the meaningful distinction between Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe. (The former has meaningful choices; the latter is a mere calculation.) Or the distinction between War and Poker. (The former is pure chance; the latter has meaningful choice.)
With that being said, of course, choice isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of game design. For example, we embrace an element of chance in poker just as we embrace it in a typical RPG’s combat system.
But I do believe that, when compared to other games, choice is peculiarly important for roleplaying games. Because, in my opinion, choice is the defining quality of roleplaying games. I think the best definition of “roleplaying” is, in fact, “making choices as if you were your character”.
So when you begin removing choice from a roleplaying game, you are removing the entire reason for playing an RPG in the first place.
How much should a single character be allowed to accomplish in 1 turn?
What you’re looking for is a sweet spot.
On one end of the spectrum, you have: “That guy is able to do way too much before I get another turn.” (Munchkin Quest suffers from this, as described and fixed in my house rules.)
On the other end of the spectrum, you have: “I’m not able to do anything interesting this turn.” (Imagine a game of Monopoly in which you could either roll the dice to move or buy the property you landed on, but not both. The balance would not be appreciably altered, but I suspect the game would suffer nontheless.)
The reason games use interrupt actions — such as attacks of opportunity — is to widen the tolerance of the sweet spot: It allows you to design turns that are long/large enough to maximize the potential for “I can do something fun with my turn” while simultaneously preventing the “why can’t I do anything to stop him from that long sequence of actions?” problem.
The disadvantage of interrupt actions, however, is the complexity which arises from tracking the triggers which allow those interrupts to be used. (Attacks of Opportunity in 3rd Edition gave you a single interrupt action, but had a very lengthy list of possible triggers. Swift actions were later added to the game, giving you a plethora of interrupt actions to choose from; but these almost universally had the trigger of “whenever you want to do it”, which is very easy to keep track of. 4th Edition simplified the list of triggers for Attacks of Opportunity, but drastically increased the number of different interrupt actions in the game and gave most of them different triggering conditions — thus radically increasing the complexity of the game.)
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Imagine a 3E-style combat system in which every character gets a single standard action each turn. In addition, they have a single interrupt action which they can use at any time. (For example, to hit someone running past them or trying to run away from them.)
(If you wanted to keep full actions, you could allow them to be taken by any character using their interrupt action on their turn.)
The point is that you don’t define any trigger conditions for those interrupts: You don’t need to keep track of them (or try to avoid doing them). You simply use them whenever you want to and can do whatever you want with them. Theoretically, this would give you the flexibility to respond to actions on the battlefield as you choose, without the difficulty of trying to keep in mind all the possible trigger actions.
Certain effects could vary the number of interrupt actions a character has. For example, a haste spell might simply grant a character an extra interrupt action. (Although on a similar note, you’d probably want to prohibit spellcasting with an interrupt action. An added layer of complexity, but probably necessary for balance. There are almost certainly some other wrinkles to work through if you wanted to use a system like this.)
One of the key concepts of “(Re-)Running the Megadungeon” is that the goal of the adventure is not and cannot be to “clear the dungeon”. Such a goal would be as meaningless as a World War II game in which the goal was, “Kill all the Nazis.”
(I suppose, in a general sense, you actually could hold such a goal. It would be something like the ultimate instantiation of the hack ‘n slash campaign: There’s a dungeon over there. Go slash at it for awhile. The important thing, however, is that one cannot reasonably expect to achieve that goal. That’s just not going to hack it.)
The loss of this clear-cut goal is problematic because “clear the dungeon” has long since become the default tactical solution for virtually every scenario in D&D. Oh, it’s usually gussied up a bit. But you’d be surprised at how often everything boils down to “clear the dungeon”. For example:
There’s nothing terribly wrong with this formula, of course. As you can see, it can be easily mapped to any number of potential crises. It has the virtue of being easy to set-up (Bad Guys X are trying to do Bad Thing Y and they can be found at Bad Place Z). And the players generally know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing (“Wipe them out, all of them”).
However, it does have the rather unfortunate side-effect of inherently funneling everything through the combat system, drastically narrowing the range of potential gameplay. And when you attempt to apply this default formula to the megadungeon it creates two major problems:
First, it’s a grind. If your goal is to “wipe out all the bad guys” in a dungeon filled with bad guys, then the megadungeon boils down to a very simplistic dynamic: You go into the dungeon, empty as many rooms as possible, and then retreat. Then you go back and you do it again. And again. And again. And again.
Second, the formula is inherently designed to use up material, whereas your goal with the megadungeon is recycle, reuse, and remix material. And the more you restock the dungeon while your players are trying to destock it, the more of a grind the whole thing becomes.
SETTING A DEFAULT
Having set aside the default mode of “clear the dungeon”, what are we to replace it with?
It’s not unusual at this juncture for someone to say, “Exploration.” Go poke around in the corners of the dungeon because you’re curious about what might be hanging out down there.
It’s not a bad suggestion, per se. But in my experience, exploration for the sake of exploration can be rather aimless. It lacks the necessary specificity to function as the driving force behind a campaign. I suspect this is because it doesn’t provide a strong enough criteria for decision-making: If you’re standing at an intersection in the dungeon and your goal is merely “to explore”, does it really matter which way you go? Not really. You’ll be exploring whichever way you go.
But “exploration” remains a compelling concept. Is there a way we can make it a more clearly defined goal?
Gold.
Here I once again find myself looking back to the earliest versions of the game, when the default method of play was not “kill the monsters”, but instead “find the treasure” — i.e., exploration geared towards a more specific end. And, notably, a specific end which — unlike “kill the monsters” — doesn’t pre-suppose the tactical and strategic means of success. (“Kill the monsters” implies blasting them with spells and poking them with pointy bits of metal. “Find the treasure” might mean killing monsters… but it could also mean sneaking past them, negotiating with them, distracting them, hiring them, tricking them, trading with them, or any number of other possibilities.)
TREASURE HUNTING
“Find the treasure”, in its most generic form, may not be terribly compelling. But it is sufficient for reliably getting the PCs to the entrance of the dungeon (and universal enough that it provides little meaningful constriction in terms of the types of characters that can be created; of course, there’s also no reason why a player couldn’t find a more unique goal for their PC).
Before one simply writes off “find the treasure” as bland pablum, however, consider that in its more specific forms “find the treasure” has served as the basis for some of the great stories of our time (or any time): Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Maltese Falcon, The Hobbit, The Illiad, The Golden Fleece. They’re all stories about treasure-hunting.
And OD&D builds a method for building towards that specificity right into its rules for procedural content generation: Treasure maps.
If you’re randomly generating treasure troves using the OD&D guidelines, then most intelligent foes will have a 10-15% chance of having one or more treasure maps. These can, of course, take many forms. (The Judges Guild Book of Treasure Maps supplements included everything from journal entries to scribbled notes to careful exemplars of cartography.) But the point is that a treasure map points you towards some specific treasure: You are no longer just poking around for gold in the general sense; you are specifically seeking for “the Tombe of Aerthering who is called DAMNED” (to take one example).
SPECIFIC DUNGEON GOALS
Moving beyond that, the point of setting a default goal (like “find the treasure”) is not to limit the game, but rather to provide a baseline to ensure that gaming happens. The point isn’t to say “you will go treasure-hunting”, but rather to say “if you can’t think of anything better to do, we’ll default to treasure-hunting”.
More generally, once you’ve used your default goal(s) to get the PCs into the dungeon complex, more specific goals will generally tend to accumulate on their own. In my Caverns of Thracia game, for example, a deep grudge quickly settled in against the minotaur who kept cropping up on an irregular basis. (He had killed or maimed more than a dozen PCs, so the grudge is probably understandable.) There were cheers at the table when he was finally cornered and killed in a recent session.
Have we arrived back at “killing the bad guy” as a viable megadungeon goal? Sure. (You didn’t think I was advocating for combat to be taken out of D&D, did you?) It’s not necessary to completely abandon the “there are bad guys, go get ’em” formula. But it may require a little more subtlety than that mail-order course on strategy from Palpatine University might suggest. “Wipe them out, all of them” might cut it if they’re the only guys in the neighborhood, but picking a fight with every humanoid tribe in the region because you want to put the cultists on level 4 out of commission probably isn’t a great idea.
Which begins to move us in the general direction of a more general precept: While it is necessary to maintain some sense of mystery regarding the depths of the megadungeon (as drawing back that veil of ignorance is one of the rewards for playing in a properly compelling megadungeon), it’s also important to foreshadow those depths by revealing certain details. These details, in turn, become goals for the PCs to achieve.
(The methods by which this foreshadowing can occur are essentially limitless: For example, the PCs may know that Black Donagal fled into the depths because they saw him do it. They may learn about the minotaur court by questioning a prisoner. They may find a map indicating the location of the Hall of Golden Maidens (if only they could identify one of the landmarks on their map). And so forth, not to mention divinations and magical visions.)
At this point, we can successfully return to the idea of “exploration” as a meaningful goal. Because while “exploring for the sake of exploring” is unfocused, exploring because you want to find the Tunnel of Black Rainbows is more than specific enough.
But we don’t have to stop there: The features of a megadungeon are people, places, and things. And all of these features can be foreshadowed and, thus, become goals. And out of people, places, and things every story in the history of the world has been told.
The default gets them playing. But once they start playing, there’s no limit to the things they can find or the goals they can discover.
The spam filter on the new site keeps catching various spammers all using the same scripts. This one, attached to dozen different posts over the past week, keeps catching my eye:
Love to read such things, they always interest me and usually I have a question: why?
Why, indeed.
Every time I read it, it passes me into a little state of self-reflection, which is intriguingly shaped by the random post to which the spammer has attached it.
