A few years ago Monte Cook posted an essay on his website called “Ivory Tower Game Design“. It raises some very important points, but over the years I’m afraid I’ve come to find it deeply annoying because whenever somebody links to it or quotes from it, I can almost guarantee you that they’re about to completely misrepresent the essay’s entire point.

What Cook basically says in the essay is, “Instead of just giving people a big toolbox full of useful tools, we probably should have included more instructions on when those tools are useful and how they can be used to best effect.”

But the vast majority of people quoting the essay instead snip some variant of “we wanted to reward mastery of the game” out of context and then go ape-shit because D&D3 deliberately included “traps” for new players.

The methods of selective quoting vary, but they all basically look something like this:

“Toughness [is] not the best choice of feat.”

OMG! WHY WOULD THEY INCLUDE A SUCKY FEAT LIKE THAT?

There are two problems with this.

First, the full quote is actually, “Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it’s not the best choice of feat.” And then the essay goes on to further clarify its meaning: “To continue to use the simplistic example above, the Toughness feat could have been written to make it clear that it was for 1st-level elf wizards (where it is likely to give them a 100 percent increase in hit points). It’s also handy when you know you’re playing a one-shot session with 1st-level characters, like at a convention (you sure don’t want to take item creation feats in such an instance, for example).”

In other words, Toughness is a special purpose tool. When used properly, it’s a useful tool. When used improperly, it’s a wasted feat slot. The designers felt like people should be smart enough to figure that out for themselves, but the point of Cook’s essay is that it probably would have been better to include more usage guidelines.

Which ties into the second problem. The larger fallacy here is the belief that you can allow for meaningful choice in any kind of complex system without having some choices be inferior to other choices. This is something I discuss with more detail in “The Many Types of Balance“, but the short version is that in order to achieve this faux-ideal of “every single choice is just as good as every other choice, no matter what combination of choices you make” you need to severely limit either (a) the flexibility of character creation, (b) the scope of gameplay, or (c) both. As a goal, it’s not only without value, but it will significantly cripple your game design. It’s like demanding that a2-a3 and the King’s Gambit both be equally valid openings in Chess.

So the next time you see someone misquoting Cooks “Ivory Tower of Game Design”, do us all a favor and link them here. Maybe it’s not too late to nip this bit of false truth in the bud.

You know the story I never need to read again? It’s the one where some vigilante comes to Gotham City and says, “I’m going to use guns and kill criminals. ‘Cause I’m a bad-ass and I’ve got the guts to do what Batman can’t.” And then, ya know, something goes wrong: A kid or a cop gets caught in the crossfire. It turns out the “criminal” was actually innocent. Commissioner Gordon won’t stand for it. Batman says, “Stop being a dick.” Whatever.

Throw in a quote about “staring into the abyss” if you want to get really “edgy” about it.

(And, no, changing it to a flaming sword doesn’t make it “fresh and exciting”. Cut it out.)

This story has been D.O.A. for awhile now, but the recent Battle for the Cowl mega-plot in the Batman comics uses this plot (I kid you not) three different times.

What really cements the creative bankruptcy involved here, however, is that Battle for the Cowl exists specifically because Batman is missing. And Batman is missing specifically because he broke his own rule and fired a gun. Which means that there was actually an opportunity here to take this tired, weary story and breathe a little fresh, legitimate life into it by using it to explore and comment on the decision that Batman had made.

Unfortunately, all three of the writers involved were too busy beating this dead horse to notice the opportunity that was passing them by.

While some ivory scraps can be scavenged from the tusks of beasts, most ivory is mined. In an age long lost, behemoths trampled the land beneath feet which could crush the metropoli of this modern era. Their cylcopean corpses, buried now in vast elephantine graveyards beneath the surface of the earth, have left behind vast deposits of ivory.

The mines themselves are fantastical, but so are the crafts which this mined ivory allows. In the real world, one cannot find slabs of ivory as tall as a man (or taller). One cannot pave royal throne rooms with it. One cannot carve life-size statues from it. Nor can one marvel at the Ivory Palaces of the Seven Island Caliphates.

Video games are the only medium in which longer length became an inherent selling point. Is it any wonder that even their best narratives are generally bloated, flaccid, and poorly paced? And then combined with bland, repetitive grinding gameplay activities?

You can see a similar pattern in the serialized novels of the 19th century: When authors are paid by the word, they have an incentive to produce more words. But this impulse, at least, was counteracted by the fact that their readers still wanted a good story and weren’t particularly concerned with length.

Only in video games do you see media consumers focusing on length-of-play as an important feature in and of itself.

A couple years ago I thought this trend might actually be reversing itself as Final Fantasy XIII came under criticism for being too long. But it doesn’t seem to be sticking yet.

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.)