The insidious theory at the heart of games

The majority of modern game design is motivated by the Content Theory. That is:

"The goal of a game is to deliver entertaining content to players as smoothly as possible."

This basic assumption underlies everything about a certain philosophy, and it has some insidious implications if left unexamined.

I define content as everything that the player can experience. There's two types. You interact with  Gameplay content in order to achieve one of multiple outcomes. Based on that outcome, you unlock Reward content. This includes mechanics (A new spell, a shotgun), narrative (a cutscene), and art and sound (the enemy explodes in slow-motion with a satisfying "SPLURCH"). Content is entertaining if the player wants to keep experiencing it.

A game designer's job is to make sure the player experiences as much entertaining content as possible, and as little unsatisfying content as possible. To ensure this, content should be delivered smoothly, to make sure that the player is motivated to keep consuming it. Game designers strive to eliminate downtime, backtracking, and filler content. Losing is generally not entertaining content, so save systems minimize death and repetition. The game should be carefully designed to make sure no-one gets frustrated, lost, or confused, carefully guiding the player through either direct orders, physical walls, or subtle environmental cues. The ideal is that every playe experiences every piece of entertaining content. Addictiveness is the holy grail.

The direct effect of this theory: Everything is made for you. 

Obviously, the goal of almost every work in every medium is to make the audience glad they experienced it. The difference that comes with games is that the audience is also the protagonist. In a movie, comic, book or play, everything is made for a third party watching in from

 the outside. In a game, everything is made for the main character.

Everything you (the main character) can possibly do is content. That means everything you can do will be fun and rewarding, and you should do as much of it as you can. There are no secrets you're better off not knowing. No relationship will ever be bad for you.  There's no enemy that you shouldn't attack, no place you shouldn't go to, no goal that isn't worth achieving. You should kill every enemy, fuck anyone who's available, talk to anyone who'll talk back, make every promise they'll let you make and pick up everything they own when their back is turned. All these things are content, and the purpose of content is to be consumed and reward you for consuming it.

Geraldine Gamer travels to Death Mountain. The villagers at the base warn her that it's a terrible place that she should stay far away from. She knows they're full of shit: because it exists, it was put there for her entertainment. Now, a movie audience might well be entertained by seeing Geraldine become hopelessly lost and only barely escape with her life. In a game, because Death Mountain is made specifically for Geraldine herself, she knows it will be tailored to provide an entertaining experience for her personally.

They tell her it's a long and arduous journey up to the peak. She knows that the journey was tailor-made to offer a smooth, enjoyable experience to someone with her exact abilities. If she doesn't have a jump button, there will never be a need to jump. If getting up the mountain was long and arduous, the game would have failed to smoothly deliver content.

The villagers wail that all who enter come back broken and twisted. Geraldine knows that everything in the world exists to reward her personally. If she can enter Death Mountain, then it must be gameplay content, which means that she'll be rewarded for completing it. Including something that didn't exist to entertain and reward the player would be bad game design.

Thus, game designers must constantly bar your way with their left hand while waving "Come hither" with the right. The left hand tells you that the way is dangerous, that this enemy is too terrible to fight, that you're a crazy maverick who's breaking all the rules. The right hand reassures you that you're actually doing the right thing. That enemy was made to be killed by you. This is the way you're meant to go.  Keep going, you'll be fine - nothing can actually hurt you.*

Part 2: The alternatives.

*A piece of directors commentary on Half Life 2 muses on how hard it was to convince players to drive through a bunch of "KEEP OUT" signs on the side of a cliff.

The Burnout Bar

Everybody in the blog-o-sphere is going crazy for Monsterparts, and I can't blame them. It's about kids solving mysteries, which is my fetish. I was inspired by his treatment of HP to create my own system: an extended death save that slowly grinds you down into the dirt.

One of the reasons to play as kids is that kids are shit at everything. They get tired, they break down, they fall over and can't get up. This system is designed to capture that sense that every action is taking something out of you. After sprinting, leaping, stabbing, falling, getting blown up and shoved and punched through walls, you will not be as good as adventuring as you were when you skipped rosy-faced into the monster's lair.

The burnout bar combines insanity, wounds, HP, exhaustion, and damage over time into a single system. I designed it for kids, but it's good for any game where you want slow exhaustion and quick death. Here's how it works:

Everything that wears you down adds something to your burnout bar. That includes psychological trauma, running, acrobatics, stress, lack of sleep, carrying heavy loads, getting drunk, falling down pits, being beaten, shot, stabbed - it all adds a dice worth of exhaustion to this bar. Something only a little tiring, like climbing up a building, might be a d4. An exhausting act, like getting stabbed, might be d12 or more.

Here's a good rule of thumb for damage: Think "How many times could you do this before you'd fall unconscious?" If it's about twice, use a d20. Four times, d10. 

You can see by the stick figures along the side that exhaustion takes its toll. At 11, you can't run - only stagger wildly. At 14, you have to crawl. At 17 you're on the ground, using all your effort just to drag yourself an inch. At 20 you're unconscious. You might also need to roll over exhaustion to succeed at anything that would get harder as you grow tired. Say, thinking clearly, using your strength, stuff like that.

Here's the sting: Whenever you're attacked by something that could kill you, roll over your exhaustion on a d20. If you fail, you die. That's it. Every single dangerous attack could kill you. If you succeed your death roll the attack missed, or maybe hit you somewhere non-vital; you can keep going, but the effort of dodging it has worn you down that little bit more.

Attacking itself is just uses whatever system you're most comfortable with; just substitute exhaustion for HP damage and roll for death if the attack has a reasonable chance of killing you. Here's a D&D example: Sally punches Jake. She rolls over his AC, and does d6 exhaustion damage. The DM judges that Jake couldn't be killed by that punch, so he doesn't roll for death. If Sally had grappled Jake and held his head underwater, it might have been a different story. The golden rule is: If you think this attack has a reasonable chance of killing this character, roll for death.

Special armor would negate the need to roll for death against specific weapons. If you have a bulletproof vest, you don't have to roll for death against bullets. Gas, poison, knives, garrotes and anything that could get past the vest would still be deadly.

 The best bit:

 You can actually track the source of each piece of damage. Each piece of damage can then be healed in a specific way. How deliciously chunky is that?

For example, you can see here that detective John McClane suffered some psychological trauma from seeing people die. By talking it out with his friend Al, he was able to heal that damage specifically. He might be able to heal the jetlag by getting a good nights rest. Something like a broken leg, though, would obviously need a splint. There's no such thing as a heal spell in this system; everyone can heal everything using common sense and real-world knowledge.

Whenever you heal some damage, figure out how many points of Exhaustion you have in total and put an arrow there. John McClane was up to 18, but healing brought him back down to 14. He puts an arrow there to show that he can still walk.

That's not all; your wounds can keep damaging you. The line underneath the type of wound is there for status effects; anything that's going to keep damaging you in future. You write down what condition will trigger the exhaustion and how much damage you'll take at that point.

For instance, McClane jacked up his feet by walking through broken glass.The line underneath shows that he'll take d8 damage "While walking", until he can heal that wound. If McClane was stabbed, he might take d6 exhaustion every half-hour as he bled out. If he became claustrophobic, he might take damage every time he entered a small space.

For most systems

The arms along the side show that stronger characters get a bigger bar. Wizards & weaklings would start at 0. Thieves & average joes get the extra bar underneath, labeled with a white arm. That means they have four points to burn before they start being exhausted and have a chance to fail their death save. Fighters & strong characters would start at the bottom of the black arm bar, with 8 extra points total. No matter what system you use, you can hack this in by splitting all characters into weak, normal, or strong.

For Monsterparts

You can be 7 to 14 years old. Add one point to the under-bar for each year of age after 6. So, a 7 year old can go through one point before they have a chance of dying, while a 14 year old gets the entire bar as a grace period.

The older you are, the tougher you are. However! As you grow older, your mind becomes more and more clouded to the true nature of the world. That's where your age modifier comes in.

You add this number to any rolls concerned with seeing and understanding the dark truth at the center of everything. Mostly, it would be used as a perception check: You have to roll over a DC in order to actually see the monster (5, 10, or 15, depending on how unimaginably strange it is). Older characters may also have to roll in order to stop themselves forgetting crucial details and falling into the foggy delusion of adults: getting dressed for school, putting on their bag, and smiling as they wade into the black lake at the center of town.




This isn't finished yet: I'm still not sure if the numbers are right. The danger is that falling unconscious at 20 might be too soon; Ideally, I want the slow build of Call of Cthulhu. I've also drafted one for the d100, but that seems like too much.

I might get a chance to playtest it sometime and check my math. If I do, I'll clean it up and put it in a character sheet with stats, age, and the Anti-Hammerspace Item Tracker.

Hex - the basics

I doubt now that I'll ever make Hex into a full-fledged system. Who needs another D&D? I think I explain the basics of a D&D-like system pretty well in a single page here, but even in clarity and simplicity I'm beaten out by projects like Old School Hack and the 52 pages. There just isn't a real need for it anywhere but at my table.

This isn't a post of despair: just a quick note to let anyone who's just gone through the archives what exactly happened to the "Hex" image I posted all that time ago. I'm sure no-one was worried, but it's important to close off loose ends.

What's wrong with your baby?

1. Absolutely nothing. Stop worrying.
2. At night it crawls to the highest point it can find and lies there, crooning softly. It won't stop or sleep until it can get there. If you try to stop it, it'll just keep butting it's head against any barriers until you remove them. On the d4th night, a black shape swoops down and takes it.
3. Its teeth are sharp. It leaves a ring of blood when it breastfeeds. It won't eat or drink anything but meat and blood.
4. It gets sick of hanging around the womb and eats its way out of you.
5. You can't cut the umbilical cord. The baby slowly drains your strength through it. Over a matter of days, you weaken as it becomes bigger, until you swap places and it nurtures you as its stunted child.
6. The baby is perfectly healthy, but its skin is always cold. It never makes a sound, just watches you constantly. If you leave it alone in a room, you come back to find the room has changed in strange, impossible ways.
7. You give birth to a knot of blind snakes and mud, twisted in the shape of a child. Some black magic has swapped them for your true baby.
8. Born with no eyes, just a smooth skull. It sings haunting melodies in the night. Some nights, you hear a refrain singing back from somewhere far away.
9. Sickly and weak, with thin, papery skin. There's a hive of wasps inside its brain. Sometimes they come out, through it's nose and ears, to gather small trinkets and return with them.
10. During the birth, three ragged elves arrive with long knives, planning to kill it. They don't speak your language.
11. During the birth, three richly-dressed elves arrive with gifts: A strange drug, a knife, and a knot of silk in a noose. They don't speak your language.
12. It bonds to you and grows, fungus-like.
13. Your significant other made some bad deals. An old man with two iron stakes stuck in his eyes arrives for the child. If you refuse to let him, he'll remove the stakes, ripping off his old man skin to become a raging wildfire that will swiftly consume everything around it. If your baby is set alight, it will instantly burn to become a perfect sculpture of ash, and the fire will abate.
14. It does nothing but scream constantly as the most wretched fluids of the earth pour from its every orifice, just like every baby.
15. The baby never stops bleeding, but has no wounds. You slowly grow weak from blood loss. 
16. Twins. One is disemboweled, with her organs wrapped around her sibling. Before they can be disentangled, the organs constrict and draw the still-mewling twin inside the open torso of the dead baby. As her chest seals over the living baby, her eyes open. She is bloated, but alive.
17. You are unable to feel anything but blinding, irrational hatred for it. If left alone with it for a long period, you'll need to save to avoid doing something terrible. 
18. Over the course of a night you give birth to 2d20 babies and a few gallons of tar.
19. It can't stop shaking. The shakes intensify until it's as if it's being thrown around the room by an invisible force.
20. Baby? You've never had a baby. What are you talking about?

Still alive & making games

I'm in the middle of a Uni course at the moment, but I'm making a game. You can catch just the tiniest, tantalizing sliver of it here:

http://philome.la/Jack_D_Mc/character-creation/play

I hope y'all don't mind, but I have a lot of thoughts on videogames that I might start posting here, in lieu of the typical RPG fare.

Vampire Orgy

I've made a card game! It's about having a threesome when one of you is secretly a vampire. You can help spread awareness of this serious issue by downloading the pdf here, printing it off, and playing it with two of your friends.

It's a stressful game. As a human, you have to open yourself up to one of the people across from you, knowing one of them will kill you. Your only information is their actions, body language, expressions. You think you have it figured out - then your guy does something weird, and you're flung into panic. Terrifying uncertainty.

After being human, playing the vampire is like putting your feet into a warm bath. You know who everybody else at the table is, and you know they're just warm meat waiting to be eaten. But if you show that for a second, it'll be obvious who you are. In playtesting we went through a string of games when the vampires lost every time, because the humans had gotten good enough to identify that visible relief when you first see the vampire card.

So, you have to act uncertain. Try to pretend you're as helpless and terrified as everybody else in the game. All the while you're desperately trying not to smirk.

It takes about ten minutes for a round, and you need exactly 3 or 6 players. If you ever play it, send me a comment, I'd love to hear how it went.

Neanderthal

Sorry for the radio silence, gang. I've hung up the DM spurs for a while, and I'm playing in a Caveman Campaign run by a friend of mine, Matt Groves. So, I thought I might take a break from telling you what's cool about my game to tell you what's cool about his.

A C-C-Caveman campaign, you say? What's so cool about that?

1. You rise from the dirt with nothing. No clothes, no weapons, no equipment. Anything you want, you have to make with your own two hands. Kill a boar, strip its hide for armor and tie a tusk to a stick to make an axe. Tie vines together for a rope, use a strip of fur as a sling. You want bows and arrows? You better find a master craftsman to invent that shit.

Whenever you get an item, roll a craft check: d6+int+a bonus for good materials. Write that number next to your item. Whenever it gets damaged badly - say, if an enemy gets a good hit against your armor, or they attack your weapon directly - roll d6 as a save. If it's over your craft number, it breaks. If it's under, it's safe - but subtract one for next time.

This strips D&D right back to the primitive basics. Brutal and primitive, your fists are your first and last defense  You have a very small amount of shit, and you care about all of it. This is the spike you tore off that giant cactus - this is the armor you made from the bones in the dinosaur graveyard. Everything is personalized and unique.

It works because no-one else has anything either: you can't buy anything, and most of the battles are fist VS fist. This puts the focus on using the environment - throwing sand in their eyes, pushing shit onto them. Punching does a d4, a crafted weapon does a d6, a great weapon does d8. You might want to downgrade the hit points by a bit.

2. Everything is based on something tactile. You need things like eyes or tongues for spell components. You get experience by eating the brains of your foes. The end of every battle is marked with a bloody frenzy as you start ripping into the bodies of the fallen.

(Pro anatomy tip: Human bodies comes with two "Club Bones" that make perfect weapons.)

Leveling up involves smoking rare herbs to enter the magical level-up plain and commune with the gods. Classes are basic: Wizard spells should be fiddled with to become more like subtle tricks than obvious magic.The ability to start a fire is a good level 1 wizard spell, for instance.

3. Everything was cracked out of the clay mold just the other day. The land is still molten; mountains move, gods walk. There are no cities, trade routes, or civilization - just straggling tribes surrounded by crazed wilderness. Anything could be over the hill. Forms are still fluid, the way they are in creation myths; many animals still talk.

4. Megafauna, megaflora, everything is enormous and archetypal. The trees reach forever, and the most dangerous enemies are the beasts; massive and untamed. Dinosaurs are still here, of course, scattered and dying but still terrifying - the dragons of the setting.

5. We've started creating a tribe (An all-woman amazon outfit called "The Furies", using wolves like motorcycles). Recruiting members, finding a place to live, figuring out how to build a lair and what to make it from; it's the primitive basics of the stronghold, stripped down to the cool shit. 

That's what makes it so good in general. Everything in D&D stripped down to the most basic form, and made as tactile as possible. It's simple and brilliant, and you should definitely try it sometime.