Tagged: storytelling

monster loves berv

I defied my usual $3 game-spending limit to pick up Monster Loves You! (MLY) yesterday as part of a Steam sale. As a text-driven story/roleplaying game, it seemed like I might be able to glean some further design insights for Collegia. And I have! Some positive and some negative:

  • Clearly-defined stages of progression: these set the player up well to prepare for the tests that come between. It’s a highly approachable framework, but it does come at the expense of some of the player’s ability to choose their own path through the game. Any failed or unconventionally-approached test ends the game prematurely, creating an incentive to follow a prescribed path through. It might be more promising to explore these as optional forks, letting the player choose when they investigate them rather than forcing them into a decision.
  • Explicit role of chance: I like very much that MLY is clear when it’s rolling dice against your statistics. I never felt like there was anything that was thwarting me behind the scenes, which stands starkly at odds with King of Dragon Pass. There’s something to be said for hidden mechanics, but they come at the cost of potential frustration when they’re not understood or they work against reasonable expectation (i.e. hitting that 1% roll of a d100).
  • Complete visibility of statistics: MLY is upfront about its numbers, with each stat being represented on a scale of 0-100. The player always knows exactly where they’re at and the room they have to move in either direction. This is great in assessing the most promising option when presented with a set of skill checks, but it feels a little artificial and gamey to me. To know that my ferocity is maxed out might keep me from pursuing further tasks that would boost it, leading me away from the character that I had been building. I think it would be an improvement to maintain numerical ratings, but hide the numbers and instead label them for the player, e.g.: “developing, middling, exceptional.” In that case, even if a stat is maxed out, the player doesn’t necessarily feel that game impulse to stop developing it.

The biggest thing that I’d like to avoid in Collegia is the rush for certain outcomes that I feel MLY promotes.  For me, it quickly became a game not about roleplaying but about maxing out a statistic or chasing a single path all the way to its end. And then, in the next iteration, I’d choose a different target and repeat the same rather uninvolved process. I feel that character is a priority for me, both in the roleplaying experience of the game and the stories that might be told within it, and I want to make sure that Collegia supports that. MLY was a nice change of pace and provided some interesting contrast, but again, deep down inside, I am glad that nobody’s quite nailed what I’m thinking of.

onward still

Ha! It looks like I’ve spent this entire week on D&D. This game’s still a long way from combat-ready, but I’ve taken all the notes I think I possibly can on the various twists and perversions of the undead. Y’all ready to lose? (your limbs and your weapons and your ability scores and maybe even your faith…)

What remains to be done is primarily encounter tuning. Balancing ACs and HPs and damage, yes, but more importantly giving the party options that go beyond simply deciding who to trade blows with: terrain features and unexpected synergies and conditions that change over time. The experience of hacking away at a skeleton is so interchangeable and can be had in any number of games; I need to not only balance the numbers but use them to support something greater. I want the players to be able to explore these encounters in a way that could only be done with the personalities and histories and abilities of their characters. To have their experience be one unique to this party and, moreover, these players. It just wouldn’t be worth all this prep time if the adventure weren’t a dynamic one that we all brought something to; a story written in active collaboration.

I may be the teller, yes, but the story is all of ours to write. My duty, perhaps, is to ensure we’ve only the best of inks.

action storytelling

With the Trifecta reunion less than a month away, I’ve resumed work on a small D&D adventure I started back in the fall. I want to keep it small in scope, quick to play, and fairly constrained in terms of possible adventure outcomes. This might sound like a bit of drag if you’re accustomed to my group’s usual tendency to spend the majority of our time on character development and broad-stroke storytelling; the end is often agreed-upon rather than achieved, per se. But with this approach, some gamier aspects of the framework are lost: the more we rely on explicitly-shaped narratives, the less we’re living in the tension between dice rolls and enjoying outcomes completely unanticipated by everyone involved. I feel that D&D, as written, sets these elements against each other: the ultimate goal of a rich, collaboratively-developed story is slowed down by the numbers-heavy nature of combat. My goal with this outing is to streamline the party’s encounters so that, even though they’ll rely on the existing numbers-driven systems, they’ll play out quickly and decisively; there’s no fun in rolling again and again to hit a high AC enemy that can’t do any damage to you. And, perhaps more loftily, with the right degree of tailoring applied to each of these encounters, I hope to tell the story primarily through them. I want the characters to define themselves through explicit action and for the story to gradually sink in through experience. What I want, essentially, is the PnP RP version of Dark Souls.

One of the things that really made Dark Souls stick out for me is the subtlety of the storytelling. At no point during gameplay does the player trigger an expository cutscene; at no point does any NPC go on at length about their motivations or the history of the world. All that there is to be gathered is hidden away in item descriptions, tiny snippets of dialogue, and the very way the world itself is arranged. The hasty player will miss out on most of this, but it waits just beneath for those who look to discover. Though you spend most of the game simply fighting enemy after enemy, narrative depth exists for those who pay attention to what sorts of enemies exist in what locations, what strange deformations they might have, and what sorts of items they drop. These sorts of delicate touches are what I hope to borrow for my D&D game.

Streamlined combat, I think I can do. A series of innovative and challenging encounters? Probably. The real challenge comes in stringing it all together, in telling the story without ever telling the story. Letting the story sink in through experience and through continued existence in the world. Letting the players seek their own depth and find their own reward. Can I write well enough to pull this off? Hm. We’ll just have to see.

a story of space pirates

Running heavy from the latest run of trade and less-legitimate acquisition, a cargo freighter is forced to make an emergency landing due to a sensor malfunction. The nearest sizeable body, and that upon which they land, is the carcass of a colossal space whale, fortuitously serving a second purpose as a food source. However, not all is as straightforward as it seems: the brown alien discovers strange behaviour on the part of the ship’s android; he is bringing back far too much meat and somehow tainting it before it is served to the crew. Bringing this to the crew’s attention, though, the alien is found lacking proof and, having approached this matter in an taboo and terribly cohesion-breaking way, is strapped into a piece of machinery and sent drilling into the core of the whale to die.

Some days later, the android returns late from a meat-gathering mission, battered and broken and unable to communicate his recent experiences. As the crew attempts to discern what’s happened, a rumbling is felt from beneath as the whale carcass begins to break apart. The chaos is amplified as the re-emergent alien crashes his machinery into the ship, sending the crew and himself drifting out into the vacuum of space. The android, however, manages to summon up enough strength to bury his face in a crate of harvested food, now run through with his fully germinated spores, and indulge his sensors with one last blast of his specially grown techno-psychotropic.

This is, in greatly reduced terms, the story that I and the other trifectants told today using our developing story system. Playing with three players over several rounds set us up for a much tighter story, but what really made today’s session unique was that the players generated every element of the story from scratch. After each round of storytelling, we would create a new set of events tailored to the events that had already transpired. This led to a much more coherent and tightly woven story; things built very well on each other and we never ran into an event that was difficult to integrate. In more deeply involving the players in the crafting process, we created something much more specific and, arguably, much more satisfying.

This may sound like a problem solved, but it’s critical to keep in mind that all players today were practiced storytellers with a lot of familiarity with one another. The question that emerges is where the balance might lie between this near-ultimate freedom and mechanical tailoring to ensure that less confident storytellers have an accessible and enjoyable time as well. Can rich, intricately woven, personal stories be told from pre-determined elements? That’s the hope.

summerfall

The sudden advent of summer weather coincided beautifully last night with a friendly feast, the sort wherein, after a hearty meal, delectable dessert, and much conversational ebb and flow, the guests assembled find themselves wanting some sort of focus. An activity, perhaps, to revitalize and aid in digestions. And so I attempted to field a modified prototype of my storytelling game.

It was a strange tale, one of vile prophecy, eerie bird-women, and an unstable mystic. Playing with a group as large as 9 meant that there wasn’t as much chance as I’d like for collective consolidation of story elements; the tendency was simply to continue developing whichever thread seemed most ripe at the time. As such, it was a little frayed in places, but it came together surprisingly well and we ended up with a relatively coherent story. As an after-dinner activity, I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

But the quieter moments of my day have been spent turning mechanical ideas over and over in my head again. Minding the balance between freedom and accessibility, how many options should players be given? Is there room for player-generated additions? What, exactly, is the best way to keep a story wound tight upon itself?

As I reflected the other day, I think the only way to know is to start picking options and running them. Tomorrow’s a session with the trifecta and, given how well the game went over last night, I feel good about being able to scrape a similar testing group together in the future.

Thought begets play begets more thought. More of both, most certainly, to come.

story boars

Collaboration is an interesting beast. On one hand, you have so many different ideas that may or may not fit together and run a considerable risk of stalling yourself out trying to suit multiple visions. But on the other, you have so much more perspective, so many more proposed solutions, and so beautiful a synergistic momentum: one idea sparks another and together you build and you build far beyond where any one of you might have ended up on your own.

Building on recent discussions with Hadge and Anbrewk, Ceej and I spent a few hours this morning hashing out a framework for a card-driven storytelling party game. The lot of us have enjoyed a number of homebrew extensions to the D&D ruleset wherein the minutiae of dice rolls and statistics were largely forgone in favour of stories told in broader strokes. We’d work in some randomization and the creativity of the group and come away with some big events and a collective sense of satisfaction at having done our characters justice. Could this experience be boiled down and packaged up in such a way that it might appeal to non-gamers and gamers alike? Can we tell interesting stories without hours and hours of prior world-building and character refinement? I think so.

I’ve just finished writing up a preliminary ruleset, which I’m quite curious to hear the group’s collective feedback on. It uses predefined story elements to provide a foundation for extemporaneous storytelling, which is then selectively built upon until the game draws to an undoubtedly stunning conclusion. I’m excited not only to field test this ruleset but also to begin fleshing out potentially interesting story settings (how many unique sci-fi settings can I make? ha!). We’re a group with a lot of ideas and a burning desire to explore them. I’ll let you know how this turns out.

worldwarm

Listening today to a podcast interview with Calvin French (one of my current favourite devs and terribly charming to boot; do check out The Real Texas), I was reminded once again of how important world setting and story can be to an overall gameplay experience. It’s too easy to forget sometimes how immersive and wonderful a well-built world can be, and I’ve caught myself overlooking this aspect in attempting to build a game from its mechanics up.

I’ve continued playing For the Frog the Bell Tolls despite some frustrating mechanics purely to gain further insight into its unique setting. It’s delightful, really, and it’s a shame the gameplay isn’t stronger, as there will undoubtedly come a time when the cost outweighs the benefits and I put it down for good. But for now I forge on, chasing the fantasy. So what is this threshold, this membrane between gameplay and setting that leads me to sink far more time into mechanically unrewarding games than I do written fiction? Perhaps it has something to do with the direct and active immersion of games: you are acting within a world (however minimally) rather than simply looking through a window onto it; your participation is necessary for your perception. Even if the character isn’t “you,” per se, you were an integral part of their story. I still get flushed and whimsical when thinking about my experiences playing Earthbound.

Certainly a rich world isn’t necessary for all games. Would Three Body Problem be better if the chasers were personified? Absolutely not! Sometimes unadorned mechanics are just the best way to present a certain experience. But any game in which the player has a certain degree of freedom to explore, to poke at the edges and look behind things, is one where a little thought put into the world can go a long way. A well-made world can engage you while you’re in it and change your worldview when you’re not; it lasts beyond the constraints of play.

I’m just meandering here. But I wanted to write this down. Mechanics are a good place to start, but there is more to a game than its function. The medium of games is not a purely mechanical one, it is as well one of sight and sound and imagination. I ought not forget that.