EDITED BY JANNA SILVERSTEIN
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COLIN MCCOMB, KELLY PAWLIK, AMBER SCOTT, MICHAEL E. SHEA, MICHAEL A. STACKPOLE, RAY VALLESE, WILLIE WALSH
TO GAME DESIGN
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Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design
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Table of Contents
DESIGN
1. What is Design? | Wolfgang Baur .............................................................. 9
2. Designing RPGs: Computer and Tabletop | Colin McComb ................ 22
3. The Process of Creative Thought | Wolfgang Baur ................................. 28
4. Design That Matters | Wolfgang Baur ..................................................... 35
5. Seize the Hook | Rob Heinsoo .................................................................. 40
6. The Infinite Onion: Creating Play Depth | Wolfgang Baur ................... 52
7. Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games | Colin McComb .............. 56
8. How and Why d20 Changed RPGs Forever | Kelly Pawlik ................... 66
9. More Empty Rooms: Simplicity, Playfulness, and
Deliberate Omissions in Game Design | Wolfgang Baur ................... 71
10. Covenants: Genre Expectations and Mechanics in
RPG Design | Jeff Grubb ........................................................................ 79
11. Designing Magic Systems | Michael A. Stackpole ................................ 83
12. Location as a Fulcrum for Superior Design | Wolfgang Baur ............. 88
13. Worldbuilding | Wolfgang Baur ............................................................. 94
14. Myths and Realities of Game Balance | Monte Cook ......................... 103
ENHANCING ADVENTURES
15. Crafting a Dastardly Plot | Ed Greenwood ......................................... 109
16. Taking Character Advancement to a Whole
New Level | Amber Scott ..................................................................... 116
17. Challenge and Response | Wolfgang Baur .......................................... 121
18. Designing Situations | Michael E. Shea ............................................... 128
19. City Adventures | Wolfgang Baur ........................................................ 136
20. The Underdark | Wolfgang Baur .......................................................... 143
21. Maps, Monsters and Bottom-Up Design | Wolfgang Baur ................ 147
22. Monster Hordes: Epic Heroism vs. Smooth
Skirmishing | Wolfgang Baur .............................................................. 154
23. Hard-boiled Adventures: Make Your Noir
Campaigns Work | Keith Baker .......................................................... 159
24. What Makes a Night Arabian | Wolfgang Baur .................................. 165
25. The Mystery of Mysteries | Nicolas Logue .......................................... 168
26. The Anvil in the Dwarf ’s Soup: The Place of Humor
in Adventure Design | Willie Walsh ................................................... 174
27. Using and Abusing Misdirection | Wolfgang Baur ............................ 179
28. Stagecraft: The Play’s the Thing | Nicolas Logue ................................ 183
WRITING, PITCHING, PUBLISHING
29. Shorter, Faster, Harder, Less | Wolfgang Baur .................................... 191
30. Buckets in the Sandbox: Non-Linear and Event-Driven
Design | Wolfgang Baur ....................................................................... 196
31. Collaboration and Design | Wolfgang Baur ........................................ 203
32. Pacing | Wolfgang Baur ......................................................................... 209
33. Playtesting | Wolfgang Baur .................................................................. 217
34. The Role of Editing | Ray Vallese ......................................................... 221
35. Promises, Promises: The Art of the Pitch | Wolfgang Baur ............... 226
36. Failure and Recovery | Wolfgang Baur ................................................ 232
37. Why Writers Get Paid | Wolfgang Baur .............................................. 236
38. Talent Won’t Save You | Wolfgang Baur .............................................. 240
39. The Magic Bullet for Publication | Wolfgang Baur ............................ 245
40. Creative Mania and Design Despair | Wolfgang Baur ....................... 247
Game Design
9 What is Design? h Wolfgang Baur
What is Design?
he most obvious question when it comes time to think about game
design is not, as you might expect, “What is design?”
The question I get most often is how to design, in particular how to
approach the mathematical and mechanical elements of design. Some of
that is addressed elsewhere in this volume.
The second most-common questions have to do with how to go about
pitching design to a publisher, how to refine and playtest a failed design,
and so forth.
To my mind, the first question—defining game design—is maybe less
practical but is clearly more important to understanding what it means
to design well and what it means to create novelty, excite gamers, and
publish a breakthrough game or setting. If the work you do on design is
entirely a matter of mechanical refinement, pitching, and playtest, you
can be a successful game designer. You can be even more successful if you
think about the underlying nature of design. I might go so far as to say
that newcomers wonder about how, but veterans dwell on what and why,
especially in those cases where the why seems to be
,did. It wasn’t meant for the core hobby audience,
necessarily, and it was meant to make you think about what roleplaying
games are. Ars Magica, with its troupe style play of multiple characters in
an upper and lower class, did the same sort of thing, restoring the class
structure of the medieval era, with a fantasy spin. Another Tweet design,
and a more commercially successful one.
These are game designs that broke new ground and changed the way later
designers think about their work. More recent examples of this abound in
the indie RPG space such as Microscope or Fiasco or Dungeon World, but
also in more traditional RPGs from Numenera (Monte Cook, Monte Cook
Games, 2013) to Night’s Black Agents (Kenneth Hite, Pelgrane, 2012).
I
Design that Matters
Wolfgang Baur
4
36 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Defining Success
But again, I’m talking about commerce when I should be talking about art.
I don’t mean something created in a coffee shop or some studio apartment
by half-literate painters or anguished emo videographers. I mean stories
and entertainment that withstand the test of time. For medieval fantasy as
a genre, those include The Lord of the Rings (books and films), Jack Vance’s
The Dying Earth, and Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. Probably Michael
Moorco*ck’s Elric and Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions.
Looking at current writers, I’d put my money on Rothfuss’s The Name of the
Wind and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy to still be in print 50 years
from now.
These are the stories that work in the fantasy novel world. What are the
RPG equivalents? The hobby is rapidly approaching the 50 year mark (in
2024), but let’s just look back over the last 30 or 35 years and see what has
been revised, rebuilt, shared, and made into canon. What are the core D&D
adventure series? I’d argue that they are the GDQ series by Gygax, the
Dragonlance adventures by Weis and Hickman, and a few one-shot bits of
brilliance like I6 Ravenloft and Zeb Cook’s Dwellers in the Forbidden City
(which gave us the yuan-ti and the lost city adventure). Probably Tomb of
Horrors and the Saltmarsh series as well, based on recent 5th Edition D&D
releases by Wizards of the Coast.
Since these are games rather than novels, we see the signs of art in
mechanics and setting as much or more than we see character and plot as
crucial. The introduction of the drow, of draconians and kender, of yuan-ti
and tasloi are all elements of these designs that have become central to
what we think of as high adventure, sword-and-sorcery gaming. Beyond
D&D, some of these iconic fantasy tropes have since been swiped by World
of Warcraft and other MMOs, just as minotaurs have been swiped from
Magic: the Gathering and Dragonlance. Imitation and shameless swipes are
signs of huge artistic success for a game designer and worldbuilder.
So we have one metric of success. Another, of course, is whether your
adventure modules spawn ongoing fiction (as Ravenloft has done), and
whether your design’s mechanics have been taken up by later adventure
writers, and whether you have created a whole new category of adventures.
But Is That High Art?
Praise from one’s peers and impact on future generations are definitely
outward signs of success, but I think I’m still not being quite as pretentious
as I could be here.
The praise and future impact are outward signs of the real success of
those adventures. But I’d argue that those are symptoms of the designer’s
high art, and that the real reason the adventures are praised is how they
37Design that Matters h Wolfgang Baur
work to appeal to us as gamers, emotionally and in narrative terms. They
give us everything we want from our fantasy and then a little more.
That “little more” is tough to nail down. Sometimes it’s an unforgettable
character (like Strahd). Sometimes it’s an unforgettable place (like the
Vault of the Drow). Sometimes it’s a matter of the choices that the heroes
are asked to make during play or the sheer challenge of the environment
(Tomb of Horrors). If it were easy to pin down, it wouldn’t be art, now
would it?
Mostly, though, I think that great game design opens up new vistas of
imagination for our play, offering new places to explore, new roles to take
on, and an emotional connection to those imaginary people and places that
we return to often.
Some might argue that this is a function of the DM and his group of
players, and that’s true. But as a counterexample, consider the Lady of
Pain from Planescape. She’s a figure of mystery and the heart of the setting,
and the DM doesn’t actually get to play her that much in a properly-run
game. She doesn’t say anything. But I say she is a figure of art precisely
because she is mysterious and her history largely unknown. Planescape
is about mystery and layers of meaning and proxy wars among gods. If
the central figure of the central city were just another big-statted brute or
high-powered wizard, that character would have been a design failure. As
it is, the Lady of Pain is an iconic figurehead who makes the setting what it
is just by her presence and influence. That’s smart design. That makes you
think a little about the campaign, and what might be possible in Sigil. It is,
in other words, inspiring.
Good design aspires to be more than mere story or mere mechanics.
I think any designer who simply puts together a setting, sourcebook, or
adventure to amuse is doing himself and the gamers who buy that book
a disservice. While it’s probably overkill to make everything in an RPG
attempt to serve some higher art, designing without any attempt at a point
of view and a deep impression is a sorry bit of hack work. There’s plenty of
that in the RPG field already—I won’t name names, but you know the sort
of hackfest and munchkinism I’m talking about. Why design for the lowest
of the low bars?
Instead, good designers set up a memorable coming-together of friends
against something a bit frightening. They strive to give the DM tools to
make a mark on gamer’s memory. Without shooting for the moon in a least
a few sections of a book, you’re just grinding out generic power fantasy
clichés, which seems very sad work to me indeed.
38 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Let Me Tell You About My Character
I want all of my work to make an impression beyond entertainment. I know
that the pay is going to suck. I don’t care, because I like to think (and maybe
I flatter myself) that a good adventure is a chance at joy, and a chance to
laugh, and a chance to shiver when the beasts of ravening darkness come.
We remember how it almost turned out all wrong, but one hero stepped
forward and made it work out. Maybe a game is intense enough to keep us
lying awake at night, thinking of the options for the next session.
This is why gamers are notorious for “Let me tell you about my
character” stories—because when RPGs work right, they are memorable
and people want to share that memory with friends. It’s not always possible
to convey the magic to those who weren’t there, but it makes me happy
that RPGs have that power, the strength to make us say, “That was so
very cool. Let me tell you how it was . . .” That shared experience is what
amazing design and strong DM skills get you. And that’s what I shoot for
in my designs. I want to give a DM the tools to make his or her players
say, “Wow!” Not just, “Yeah, we killed monsters and took their stuff ,” but,
“That was the best adventure you’ve ever run.”
Ruthlessness and Personality in Art
To get there, you have to surprise people a little bit. Throw a curve
ball. Make an encounter work inside-out. Turn a brawl into a hostage
negotiation. Threaten the player characters’ favorite mentor, barmaid, or
magic shop owner —someone they already know. And make it personal.
One of the lessons I learned repeatedly as a DM and that does translate to
design is that you do the players no favors by taking
,it easy on the player
characters (PCs). Yes, they may get lots of loot for little effort. In the long
run, though, that’s boring. Dilemmas, close calls, and villains who will
do the vilest thing you can imagine are the ones that stick in a player’s
memory. Be ruthless when you design. Cheat a little to threaten what the
player characters value, the way that Wrath of the River King threatens the
party’s gear and magic items.
They may curse you in the short run. In the long run, though, they will
remember the hard times and the difficulties they overcame. Ruthlessness
is required for your design art to thrive. Cowardice in design means always
balancing everything, always giving the PCs an easy way out, always
making sure that there is no chance of real failure. That’s a recipe for
boredom, and I don’t recommend it.
Finally, show your personal fears and quirks in design. Those are elements
that should not dominate the adventure, but they make it distinctive rather
than just another auto-generated corporate hackfest. My ex-wife often
praised a hedgehog gardener NPC from many years ago, because he was
39Design that Matters h Wolfgang Baur
a hub that the party could return to again and again for information in a
hedge maze dungeon. I’m still not sure quite what she saw in that NPC, but
he was one of those personal quirks that worked, because folks hadn’t seen
it a hundred times. For another example similar to this one, Meepo the
kobold in the Sunless Citadel (Bruce Cordell, Wizards of the Coast, 2000).
But my point isn’t really about small and harmless NPCs—it’s about making
it possible for players to make choices outside the kill-loot-level-up cycle.
For instance, players seem quite charmed by the inclusion of wandering
sheep and goats in my own 5th Edition D&D intro adventure, The Raven’s
Call (Kobold Press, 2014). Why are wayward sheep charming in an
introduction? Because they are clearly something that shows things have
gone wrong nearby, that their shepherd may be in danger, that there’s a
need a for heroes to step forward and find out what happened. Or also
in a similar vein, the great feast scene in Courts of the Shadow Fey for
5th Edition (Kobold Press, 2019) is designed as a lavish and truly bizarre
festivity where all the player characters can make friends and enemies
very quickly. People tell the stories of their bard’s shining moment (or
their hard-bitten dwarf ’s angry toast and ejection from the feast hall)
because it’s fun, and because it stands out against a backdrop of many
somewhat-similar combats.
In other words, the oddball elements, the easily-mocked NPC that has
inner charm, is part of who you are a designer. Give players opportunities
to match wit with the witty, to outwit simpletons, to sing a silly song. Give
your adventures room to breathe, to laugh and stumble and fart around a
bit. Don’t forget that the best bits of an adventure session are the one created
by the game master and the players, and remember that your design should
be handing them exactly those opportunities by the bucketload.
There’s a fine line between quirky and dumb, of course. Some mechanics
are too quirky or complicated to work at all. Some stories are too niche or
too weird to function. But consider a fantasy like Miéville’s Perdido Street
Station. It is powerful and successful because it wasn’t like what came
before them. Take creative chances; it is the only way to make sure your
design work is noticed and rewarded likewise. If some of those creative
risks fail you completely, that’s part of the price of trying something new.
Fall down six times, stand up seven.
40 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
his chapter discusses principles I apply when I design new games.
Since the focus of this volume is on roleplaying game design, most
of my examples are from roleplaying games I love. I was the lead designer
of the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons (4E), so the examples will often
go into considerably more detail when they relate to 4th Edition. But in
my experience, I’ve found that these principles apply well to most types
of game design: card games, board games, miniatures games, roleplaying
games, and even video and computer games if you’re lucky enough to get
in on early design.
I’m most concerned with the mechanics of game design. If the game you
want to design is like most other games, it will have a theme, physical or
digital components, and written rules. The game’s mechanics will consist
of a set of carefully defined gameplay actions, component interactions,
and information structures outlined by your rules. You can approach
each game mechanic on its own, as something to be tinkered with and
improved, or approach a mechanic as it interacts with all the other
mechanics, the theme, and the components.
I’ve broken the essay into three nuggets of advice that more-or-less apply
to the beginning, middle, and end of the design process.
First, design a game you want to play but can’t because no one else has
designed it yet.
Second, don’t be satisfied with your design until you’ve found the key
mechanical hook that captures the game’s theme, creating an experience
that’s something like the experience being portrayed by your game.
Third, understand and follow through on the full implications of your
game’s mechanical hook.
T
Seize the Hook
Rob Heinsoo
5
41Seize the Hook h Rob Heinsoo
1. Design a game you want to play but can’t because no
one else has designed it yet.
Corporations design products around what they think will sell. So do
some writers and some extremely talented game designers. That may be a
savvy move, particularly when you’re deservedly confident in your creative
powers and your ability to overcome designer’s block and the obstacles
that surface within every design. If you’re starting out, or if you are more
strongly motivated by internal creative pressure than business sense, you
may be better off paying attention to the moments when you think about a
game you want to play but realize that the game does not exist.
That moment may come while you’re playing a game you love, then
realize that it would be a better game if it had a different setting, different
victory conditions, or had been designed for several players instead of
only two. This process of riffing on what’s already good is what I call the
“Rolling Stones approach” to innovation, after the manner in which Keith
Richards and Mick Jagger used to write songs together. Richards would
start by picking out a tune they knew and liked, then they changed the
song until they came up with something that sent them on a new path.
The Rolling Stones approach can work but, for me, moments of
innovation come more often when I’m thinking about a particular group
of people I want to play a game with. I get a clear vision of the game we
would have the most fun playing together. Then I realize that the game I’m
picturing doesn’t exist. It’s a good feeling: Now I can design it!
This social framework for your design vision can be a valuable tool.
Writers learn to consider their audience, to think about the people they are
writing for as if they are reading their work aloud to that chosen audience.
As a game designer, you may be a just a bit luckier than a writer, because
nearly all games are already group efforts or social experiences. It’s a bit
easier to know exactly who you are creating your game for: you and some
friends who enjoy playing games with you.
Phrasing your goal in this manner is more important than it may sound.
Our subconscious minds and insecurities trick most of us into giving
up on creative projects too easily. Unless you’re entirely certain of your
abilities, that fear of failure can get worse when you envision your new
game as a published product. Unconscious comparisons between your
developing work and the published games you already love may erode
your enthusiasm for your work. You’re
,less likely to get derailed if your
immediate goal is to create a specific game you’ll be able to enjoy with your
friends. You’ll be able to figure out how your game can step out into public
later. When you’re starting, focus on capturing the joy you felt when you
realized that the game you wanted to play with your friends was something
you would have to design yourself.
42 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
2. Don’t be satisfied with your design until you’ve found
the key mechanical hook that captures the game’s
theme, creating an experience that’s something like the
experience being portrayed by your game.
Let’s unpack this advice one piece at a time before analyzing some
examples of mechanical hooks that worked.
The Key Mechanic
The key mechanic is the most important element of a game design, the
piece that sets the game apart from other games. In the best-case scenario,
this mechanical hook ties so directly into the game’s theme that it helps
evoke a thrill (or other emotion) related to the experience that the game is
based on.
Different genres of games have varying amounts of access to this best
possible version of the mechanical hook. Some great board games, like
chess, poker, and Reiner Kneizia’s Ingenious, a color-tile playing game,
aren’t about anything other than their mechanics. But most of the best
roleplaying games marry theme and the mechanical hook. The roleplaying
experience lets players create a compelling story together. The shared
experience becomes truly memorable when the mechanics perfectly
reinforce the game’s core story.
“Don’t be satisfied,” he says . . .
Here is the good news: Once you start really working at designing games,
you’re going to come up with playable material. Really. If you’re reading the
Kobold Guide to Game Design, you’ve probably got enough experience to
come up with ideas that will hang together well enough for dice to roll and
pieces to move.
The potentially harsher news is that it could be a lot harder to get your
well-themed mechanical design to be actual fun to play. There are a fair
number of published designs every year that are clever, elegant, funny,
or beautiful. But when you’re done appreciating their aesthetics or their
touches of clever design, the problem is that they’re not that much fun.
Designers who self-publish are probably most vulnerable to this problem,
since the glow of getting a design to work can easily eclipse the fact that
other people don’t have as much fun playing the game as the designer does.
The single most common mistake is the same mistake writers make:
getting fixated on an early idea or draft that seems to work so that you don’t
look for possibilities that might be better. It’s not easy to stay open to the
possibility that a good, early idea is in truth holding you back. But that’s
not the only angle you’ve got to cover. There’s also the chance that ideas
43Seize the Hook h Rob Heinsoo
you’re pretty sure are bad are somehow concealing worthwhile alternatives,
somewhere behind their ugly surface.
As part of my creative process, I try to change my perspective about
ideas I’m pleased with. I imagine that I’m tapping into a view from
somewhere else in the multiverse. “Imagine I live in a world where this
idea isn’t the best possible solution. What other solution could there be?”
Or “Imagine that this stupid piece of the game is somehow a good idea. If
that were true, what would the consequences be? What would have to be
true to make this a good idea?” When the trick works, new ideas that were
eclipsed by earlier notions come out of hiding. The husk of the old idea
falls behind.
Match the Mechanics to the Experience and Vice Versa
Despite your best efforts, there’s always a chance that the moment-to-
moment fixes you discover through playtesting lead your key mechanic
away from the original vision or theme of the game. This may not be a
bad thing. If you’re serious about doing excellent game design rather than
about designing the perfect incarnation of one specific world or theme, it’s
possible that your newly mutated key mechanic is worth saving and that
your original vision needs to change.
To use a blunt example, if your game about arena fighting ends up
feeling bloodless and hyper-rational, you might have created a mechanic
that suits battles between well-programmed AIs and their serially
inhabited robotic armor.
I experienced this situation when I was working on the dice-and-cards
system that became Inn-Fighting. I was originally designing a gambling
game that would be played in taverns alongside Three-Dragon Ante. But
that stopped making sense. The mechanic started working when I realized
it wasn’t just that the game was played in taverns, the game was also about
people fighting in taverns. Much better.
Key Mechanics that Work: Setting the Characters’ Limits
Call of Cthulhu (CoC) is not my favorite game. I may be the only former
Chaosium employee to say that I’m no fan of H.P. Lovecraft. But when I
think of game mechanics that hook the players into the precise mindset
of the characters they’re portraying, I think of CoC’s Sanity check
mechanics. Sanity starts high for most CoC characters. Like the people in
Lovecraft’s books, PCs start knowing little of the world’s true masters. But
as characters encounter traces of the supernatural and creatures from the
Mythos, their Sanity steadily degrades, even if their “successful” checks
prevent them from going into catatonic shock or psychotic reactions.
44 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
For a real-world analogy, you can compare CoC’s Sanity mechanics to
a statistic I love hearing quoted about veteran mountain climbers. People
speak as if the number of times a climber has summited Mount Everest
without oxygen is a good thing. Let’s call it like it is: You don’t want to be
on a climbing rope with a guy who has gone to the Top of the World and
sucked vacuum three times too many. Likewise, the longer a CoC character
manages to dodge the shoggoths, the more certain they are to break down
and take everyone along with them. These aren’t the kind of hit points that
come back.
So what can CoC’s sanity mechanic tell you about your own designs?
First, it highlights the possibility that the themes of some games are best
captured by limitations on the heroes. Most fantasy/adventure games focus
on empowerment, but if the theme of your game is horror or final despair,
it’s possible that enfeeblement mechanics may be called for instead. The
trick is making sure that the game remains fun to play.
Many indie RPGs frequently dance along this tightrope. Some games
nail desperate emotional states with grinding-you-down mechanics.
They’re not exactly the type of game you want to play often and that’s
usually deliberate. Personally, I prefer the indie game AGON: Competitive
Roleplaying in Ancient Greece by John Harper. I mention AGON because
it contains a subtle version of character limitation even though it’s about
high-powered Greek heroes who slalom through the monsters and myths
of the ancient world.
I didn’t understand AGON when I first read the rules. I noticed that
as heroes took wounds in a given combat, they got weaker and weaker,
becoming less likely to be able to dig themselves out of that fight, a death-
spiral effect that many games blunder into. What I didn’t pick up on
right away is that there is a survival mechanism: A PC can climb out of
mechanically hopeless situations by swearing oaths to the other characters
and the gods. In other words, a Greek hero who wants to survive and
conquer all enemies becomes more and more obligated to other characters
and competing mythological entities. Heroes don’t take permanent
wounds; they take permanent obligations. It’s a mechanical hook that
shows that heroes’ careers will be complicated by demands they could not
have foreseen, demands that may place them at the mercy of one or all
,of
their comrades. As a roleplaying incentive it captures the complicated lives
of the Greek heroes wonderfully. And it’s more fun than going insane.
45Seize the Hook h Rob Heinsoo
Key Mechanics that Work: Shaping the Game’s Reality
Let’s look at a more conventional roleplaying game experience, a game
that was mostly (but as we’ll see, not entirely) about empowerment. Steve
Perrin’s Runequest is the game that started the Basic Roleplaying system
that gave birth to Call of Cthulhu. Runequest (RQ) was a streamlined
system that had at least three subtle but effective key mechanics that came
together to portray Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha, a world permeated
by the magic of ancient and eternal gods.
Runequest started with the assumption that every player character was
capable of magic. In the late 1970s gaming industry, dominated by class-
based systems in which most of the characters could only use swords and
bows, RQ’s battle magic system allowed every character to use points of
Power to cast buff spells, minor or better-than-minor attack spells, and
(praise be!) healing spells. In Glorantha, an adventurer who didn’t know
any magic was a deliberately crippled roleplaying experiment.
As an adventurer grew into a Rune-level character worthy of initiation
into the mysteries of the gods, they had to sacrifice points of Power to gain
rune spells. Magic wasn’t just a free gift—truly powerful magic demanded
sacrifice. Compared to the ever-escalating power curves of games like
AD&D, RQ demanded sacrifice and cosmic responsibility as you rose in
power.
And lastly, RQ modified its skill-based system with a groundbreaking
book named Cults of Prax that detailed the myths, rituals, and beliefs of
the worshippers of a dozen of Glorantha’s hundreds of gods. Alone, the
myths and rituals would have made the book a wonderful work of alternate
anthropology, but each cult write-up included battle magic and rune
magic that was only available to worshippers of the gods. Suddenly RQ’s
skill-based system had something that functioned like other games’ classes,
but grounded in the game’s deep cosmology. Nowadays it seems like
standard stuff, but in the late ’70s, Stafford’s Cults of Prax was the first RPG
product to take this tack—it created the player-oriented splat-book that
came to dominate the Vampire: the Masquerade line, the rest of the White
Wolf menagerie, and countless other games including both 3rd Edition
(3E) and 4E D&D.
Roleplaying game splat books mix story and mechanical elements to give
specific characters both powers that are fun to play and a heightened sense
of their alternate selves. That sounds an awful lot like my goal of the perfect
mechanical hook. In a sense, RQ opened any game that could support itself
with supplementary material to the possibility that the mechanical hook
could be repeatedly reinvented, a ritual act of publishing that shapes the
industry and our game shelves.
46 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
3. Understand and follow-through on the full
implications of your game’s mechanical hook.
Sometimes a game’s greatest strength is ultimately the reason it fails. A few
good games might have been great games if they’d had the time and vision
to grapple with the full consequences of their key mechanics. I’ll discuss
three opportunities that can become problems if you’re not careful.
Roleplaying Games Have Two Types of Participants
Roleplaying games have two types of participants: players and DMs. If
all your effort goes into making a key mechanic that helps players have a
great time but screws up the game master’s life, you’re not likely to find
many groups playing your game. Unlike many other games, RPGs may
require you to balance key mechanics aimed at players and key mechanics
aimed at DMs. Of course, mainstream games have usually focused on the
player’s experience. Few mainstream RPGs have done much to provide key
mechanics for DMs. Indie RPGs have recognized that hole and introduced
any number of games that transform the experience of both player and
game master.
In this respect, 4th Edition D&D acted more like an indie game. We
wanted to create a game that offered new key mechanics for both the
players and the DM; innovating for one while ignoring the other wasn’t
going to be enough.
Third Edition D&D’s key mechanics for players and DMs had set the table
for us. Third Edition’s most significant advance was to treat both player
characters and DM’s monsters with the same mechanical rules. In previous
editions, only the player characters had Strength and Wisdom attributes.
Monsters were ad hoc creations of the game’s publisher, with very little
advice for DMs who wanted to create their own monsters. “Wing it like we
do” would have been accurate advice for previous editions.
Third Edition D&D advanced the art by showing that PCs, NPCs, and
monsters could all be handled with (roughly) the same system math. DMs
could spend their rainy-day-away-from-the-table time by leveling up
monsters and designing NPCs that were every bit as detailed as PCs. It was
an excellent system, although a bit strange because the arbitrary hit dice
and attack bonus assumptions of earlier editions hadn’t been revised; they’d
just had a rational system of transformations applied.
Fourth Edition D&D took another look at what 3E had accomplished and
decided that it was not necessary to treat PCs and monsters by exactly the
same rules. After all, the PCs were the pillars at the center of the campaign,
playing every week. New monsters showed up every encounter. If the PCs
were doing their jobs right, few monsters lasted more than one encounter.
So the work that DMs and the Wizards of the Coast’s research and
47Seize the Hook h Rob Heinsoo
development (R&D) staff was putting into getting monsters just right with
the detailed math of 3E was in many respects wasted work. There was a type
of simulation occurring, a simulation that appealed to many, but the game
wasn’t necessarily benefiting, and DMs were either suffering or intimidated.
So 4E took the attitude that the DM’s role had to be easier. The amount
of information the DM needed to memorize or have on hand had to be cut
down. Monster stat blocks needed to be simplified so that the DM didn’t
have to sift between minutiae that hardly ever turned up and important
game-play mechanics.
For DMs, the key mechanic of 4E D&D might be summarized like
so: Hit points and attack bonus progressions were no longer arbitrary,
so encounters played somewhat predictably at all levels; and role-based
monster design helped DMs create fun encounters and adventures much
more quickly. I’m not going to get more detailed about the DM-package
which, to an ever-increasing extent, is backed up by the electronic
resources available on the Dungeons & Dragons Insider Web site.
So what, then, of 4E players? They were offered a key mechanic that
has turned out to be more controversial. I was tired of my 3E experience,
when my favorite high-level Fighter turned out to be only as effective
as his careful selection of magic items. The spellcasters in the 3E system
called the shots and, although the game’s storylines felt consistent, many
campaigns stalled out about the time that the spellcasters’ increasing power
made the other classes irrelevant.
This could have been solved in many ways, including a radical rebalancing
of spells’ power levels. The solution James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and I were
excited about was to give every PC an ongoing series of choices of interesting
powers. Most every time you gain a level you select a new power or a feat.
Every combat round you have an interesting choice of which power or
powers to use. This was my nirvana of gritty combat options created by
exciting, exceptions-based design.
In my case, the vision owed a good deal to RQ and to Robin Laws’ Feng
Shui, another example of a game in which every player character could be
,counted on to fight using interesting powers. Add exceptions-based design
tricks learned from Magic: the Gathering, Shadowfist, and other trading
card games. Add some lessons from computer games on ensuring that
every character has a role in the party, and you’ve got a fair picture of 4E’s
major non-D&D inspirations.
Do Your Resources Meet Your Key Mechanic’s Ambitions?
We would never have set out with a design centering on 4E’s key mechanics
working for a company smaller than Wizards of the Coast. Exceptions-based
designs take time and skill to design. Then, they take time to playtest and
48 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
develop into balanced options. As a rule, most RPG companies can’t afford
true mechanical development. Most companies pay something for game
design, trust the designer to test the game as much as possible, then pay
an editor to work things out as best they can while putting the final book
together. 4E’s key mechanics wouldn’t have worked for a smaller company.
One of my favorite games-that-didn’t-quite-work-out proves this point.
Robin Laws’ Rune (no relation to RuneQuest) published in 2000 by Atlas
Games, is a brilliant design stunt hinging around a key mechanic in which
players take turns creating deadly adventures with an exceptions-based
points system. Each player is a deadly Viking warrior, the type of savage
bastard who becomes the stuff of legends if he doesn’t become worm food
first. The game’s current game master isn’t just trying to help the other
players have fun; the game master tries to score points by doing as much
damage to the PCs as possible.
This picture of unbridled competition, an unapologetic contest between
the players and the DM, perfectly embodies the grim worldview of those
chilly Northerners. Does the game get major points for a key mechanic that
evokes the theme? Oh yes, hell yes! I love many styles of gaming. In one of
them, I cherish buying powers with points and destroying my enemies. So
I’m just the type of competitive player who grooved on the concept of an
RPG that alternated pitting players against the rest of the group like Loki
vs. the rest of the Asgardians.
But there was no way that the game could be developed so that all those
point-based player and game master options actually make sense. Rune was
playtested, but playtesting isn’t enough. I started marking up my copy of
Rune with arrows pointing up and down for things that I guessed needed
cost revisions. Soon I just couldn’t take it anymore: too many arrows up,
a few arrows down—there was no way was I going to be able to introduce
a game that was all about competitive play and point-buys when the
point-buys were broken. So the exact type of player who was going to love
Rune because of its key mechanic couldn’t deal with the game because
there was no way to deliver on the key mechanic’s promise.
If your mechanical hook sounds great but you can’t pull it off, your game
can only succeed as a work of game literature. A few people may buy your
game to have on their shelves because they think it sounds damn cool. But
they’ll be disappointed when play isn’t as cool as the concept.
But if you’re a roleplaying game designer, the ironically good news,
specifically for you, is that you may not have to worry as much about
questions of balance and development as other types of game designers.
Most roleplaying games can afford to care less about balance than games
like Rune or Magic: the Gathering because most roleplaying games allow
players to cooperate. When one player character exceeds all others in a
49Seize the Hook h Rob Heinsoo
cooperative game, the others tend to rely on that character. Then they
come up with game-world reasons why that character or power is so
much better than anyone else. Eventually, people write game world novels
that assume the power imbalance is the natural order of that world, and
so it goes, until someone comes along and rebalances or re-imagines the
magical order. Obviously this isn’t ideal; you’d probably rather understand
the implications of your mechanics rather than be surprised at the worlds
that come out of them. But so long as your mechanics are fun, RPGs are a
slightly more forgiving medium where balance is concerned.
Know When to Moderate
Even if your key mechanic is good, you may want to temper its impact
on your game in cases where there are secondary play styles that could be
allowed to coexist with your primary player pattern. Perhaps this applies
most to games that are revisions of earlier games. This may be on my
mind because of my experience with 4E, since I’m having trouble thinking
of other game designs that have the same issue. Or maybe the principle
is a lot easier to see in your own work than when you’re assessing other
people’s designs.
Yes, I love the effect of the power choices offered to every 4E player. As
a key mechanic, it did exactly what we’d hoped for the game. But I regret
that the original design didn’t manage to implement a simpler class, or two,
so that a few players could play a game that didn’t require them to choose
between lists of interesting powers. There are D&D players who don’t care
much about the full list of interesting powers that are available to them.
Sometimes they’re just into the roleplaying. They’re definitely into joining
their friends at the table, rolling some dice, cracking good jokes, and still
making a positive contribution to the party’s survival. A simpler class, or
piece of a class, would give those players the ability to join the table and roll
the d20 without caring about which power they were using.
Given that D&D is endlessly renewed by the publication of player-oriented
splat books, the smart money is on the likelihood that someone will address
this gap in player-experience some day.
Know When to Cut
You’re starting out as a designer. You’ve got a design career ahead of you.
You don’t have to pack all your good ideas into one design, or even into
three designs. This matters even more when your key mechanic needs
space to flex its wings and your other ideas hinder the key mechanic
from taking flight. You may have to dial down aspects of your game that
arguably could have been just as good as the focus material that supports
the key mechanic.
50 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Again, D&D offers an example that’s ready to hand. Once upon a time,
early in 4E design, the powers PCs acquired from their character class were
only part of the equation. Racial powers were supposed to match character
class powers for impact on your character and the game world. Throw in
more powers in the paragon path and advantages that characters gained
through feats, and you had an overcrowded character sheet.
As we fleshed out the character class powers, we recognized that class
was capable of handling all the heavy lifting. Class powers mattered and
made sense as the principal way that players thought about their characters.
Racial powers still worked, but it turned out that they could still have a big
impact on the game if each PC had only a single exciting racial power.
Fair enough. But not all of us had accepted the biggest consequence of
the move to interesting character powers. The major source of 3E character
power that had to be severely pruned in 4E was magic items. We had some
good ideas for how magic item powers might work: They worked too well!
Yes, magic items are an important part of D&D, framing many adventurers’
aspirations, allowing players to fine-tune their characters, and pumping
up the sense of the world’s fantastic history. But the character classes were
already doing a great job of throwing around awesome magic. When every
character has the choice of dozens of interesting powers, there isn’t room
for magic items’ powers to compete with character class powers.
I’d never been a fan of the way in which non-spellcasters in 3E could
end up defined
,as composites of their magical items. And since I knew
the choice was between compelling character powers and a full arsenal of
magic item powers, I focused on making character class power compelling.
Cutting good ideas doesn’t dispel them forever. If you keep track of your
drafts and flag worthwhile ideas that have to be cut, you’ll often be able to
use the ideas in a later design. Cutting a good idea can pay off when it is
competing with too many other good ideas. Give all the elements of your
design the amount of attention they deserve and you’ll have several designs
to your name instead of one overstuff ed curiosity.
A Strong Hook and Strong Follow-Through
Find a mechanical hook that thrills you. It may come to you in a bolt of
inspiration. It may come to you after many false starts. Either way, keep
searching until you find something that you suspect will set your game
apart from all others.
Then follow through with the hard work that provides your hook with
a full game to live in. Yes, even with the best mechanical hook, it’s going
to take a lot of work to finish a game. The good news is that if your hook
really is good, it’s likely to make your work easier, opening new approaches
and ideas that keep you entertained. If you end up feeling like you’re doing
51Seize the Hook h Rob Heinsoo
drudge work, you should ask yourself whether the work is necessary, or
whether the audience will also be bored.
If the finished game ends up sitting on your shelf, scarcely played,
you probably didn’t succeed. If the game turns out to be something you
and your friends play often, even with simply playtest components,
you’re either a skillful game designer or (much less likely!) a charismatic
demagogue. Either way, you’ve got potential.
Every design will teach you new tricks. Like writers who return often
to pivotal themes, successful game designers have a way envisioning new
ways of using key mechanical hooks; what worked once can work again, if
phrased in a way that the audience perceives as new.
The worst outcome is that you give up before you finish your game. You
learn less this way.
The best possible outcome is that you will design a great game, then
manage to launch it out into the wider world. If you enjoy that best
possible outcome, guess what happens next? Pretty much the same thing
that happens if your game design doesn’t quite work out: You start your
next design, taking what you’ve learned and doing your best.
If you’re having fun, keep designing. The world continually surprises
itself by its need for great new games. With a good hook and some hard
work, you’ll help.
52 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
ome game designers would have you believe that they are powerful
authorities with a lot of secret knowledge about the world. And it’s
true that game designers are generalists with good math and language
skills, and skill with both syncretic work and reductive analysis. But design
is a process of invention, and so it always proceeds by fits and starts.
If there were a simple formula for it, everyone could do it. So all that
deferring to authority is a bit of a scam.
Here’s the truth: Sometimes, I don’t know what I’m doing with a design.
And that’s okay, really.
This is a normal stage of design, the stage I think of as playful discovery.
It’s not that I don’t have ideas (ideas are the easy part!). It’s that the ideas I
have don’t work together smoothly. For instance, the character motivations
don’t all click in the backstory. Or an encounter is sort of boring tactically,
or it playtests badly. The things that I find exciting may be elements that the
playtesters find pretty routine or even too easy. Resource management may
be completely out of whack. Nobody’s first draft of rules is perfect—not
Richard Garfield’s, not Sid Meier’s, not Gary Gygax’s. No one’s.
Design as Layering
A large part of the design process, for me, is about making the pieces fit.
I call this process layering, or lacquering, or making connections in the
design. Build a prototype game. Playtest. Fix. Iterate.
S
The Infinite Onion:
Creating Play Depth
Wolfgang Baur
6
53The Infinite Onion: Creating Play Depth h Wolfgang Baur
There’s no substitute for spending time with a design and working it
from many angles. Over time, you find more and more of the plot holes
in an adventure, or more of the mechanical holes in a new subsystem, or
more of the power-gaming rules abuses when a new creature or type is
combined with existing material. The more complex the game is, of course,
the longer this process takes.
With adventures, I usually think of “outline, revision, first draft, playtest,
second draft” as the minimum requirement. That gets me a manuscript
that has enough interest on every page that a publisher can hand it to an
editor and get something out of it. I’ve written faster in the past and I have
always regretted it.
Playtest Types
I’ll make one further statement on process: hands-on design is just as
important as mediated design. That is, you can’t always count on editors and
playtesters to find the flaws that you care about. They’ll find most of them.
They’ll find flaws you would miss. But whenever I can make the time, I like
to playtest the material myself, as well as having it playtested externally.
An external playtest is always (rightly) lauded as more likely to find the
gaping holes that a designer mentally “fills in” during his own playtest runs.
That is, he applies the rules that are assumed to work a certain way, or adds
in the unwritten NPC reactions crucial to an encounter setup.
Those are flaws you won’t find yourself, so I think external playtests
are crucial for revealing your blind spots. For instance, they helped
pinpoint the need for improvements to the investigation/clue structure in
a mystery/investigation adventure some years ago; adventures that lean on
information as heavily as mysteries almost always benefit from putting the
clue sequences in front of different groups, and seeing when and how the
story threads succeed or collapse. The extensive playtests for both Tome
of Beasts and Creature Codex led Kobold Press to tweak the power level of
those monsters to higher than the official guidelines called for—because
the playtesters were consistent in their feedback that monsters designed to
the Monster Manual standard were simply not challenging enough for the
intended audience. We made a deliberate call to toughen the difficulty based
on that constant, repeated, and tested feedback. Other playtests have caught
errors in story logic or character logic, map mistakes, and setting lore.
There are some limits to the utility of playtest feedback, of course. The
example of this that springs to mind for me is the three-edition classic
adventure, Courts of the Shadow Fey. It features over 100 possible NPCs,
and playtest feedback often asked for additional information about some
of the minor ones. But from a design perspective, adding 10 or 20 pages of
NPC details does not improve the play experience; it takes away the game
54 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
master’s chance to improvise and make the game their own. A certain
weight of additional detail can distract from the most important NPCs and
other areas of focus. So that feedback has not been heavily implemented;
a few NPCs got additional details, but most of them remain with a few
character elements or a story hook, and leave the discovery of the details to
the group that chooses to make that minor NPC a larger part of the story.
There’s no way a playtest can or should push you as a designer into trying
to overwhelm the reader with detail.
The Perfect Game
But doing a playtest myself gives me another kind of data. It tells me what
isn’t working in the “ideal game” that I am striving for with a design. That
Platonic ideal of a game is sometimes a spark that inspires me (such as
the clockpunk of of
,the city of Zobeck), or it can be an attempt to match
a particular genre tradition (such as the use of faerie lore and storytelling
tropes in Wrath of the River King).
In an adventure, this is usually tone or theme or roleplay elements that
external playtesters may or may not pick up on. In a rules set, it’s usually
about gauging player reaction to a new mechanic. Is there excitement or is
playtesting it a chore? How much sizzle does that mechanic really bring to
the game? Even a boring mechanic can work flawlessly in mechanical terms.
But if it’s boring me at the table or cycle times are too long, I need to know.
This is a long-winded way of saying some encounters are written in
rough form knowing that they must be rewritten, trimmed, expanded,
and improved. But every encounter and every rewrite should bring the
resulting design closer and closer to that ideal that a designer carries
around as a target for a particular project. Sometimes I get very, very close
to that target indeed. Sometimes I miss by miles.
And the difference between the two is usually time. Rushed projects
almost always lack the connections between parts that make the whole
worthwhile. Whether those are mechanical connections or story
connections doesn’t matter. Anyone can string together a set of dice tables
and character generation systems. Anyone can put together a quick set of
location descriptions and monster stats. But to rise above the level of “just
another rules set” or “just another crawl,” there needs to be a little more to it.
What-If Design
The time I spend examining design permutations and drawing new
connections is the game of what-if. What if the spellcasting mechanic
feeds back into the hit point mechanic? What if the mounted rules use
the same action points as unmounted combat, but in a new way? What
if the arch-villain changes over the course of the story, jumping body to
55The Infinite Onion: Creating Play Depth h Wolfgang Baur
body? What if the stories are all set in a shared world that ticks to a devil’s
timetable? What if the King of the Fey got really, really angry, and the only
way out was to placate his even more evil sister? What if…
So that’s where layering comes from for me. Asking “what if ” 100 times,
and throwing 90 of them away. There comes a point where the number of
choices is paralyzing (usually fairly early in a project). And there is a point
where the number of choices is really already determined, and it’s a matter
of trying to keep things pointed in exactly the right direction.
Once rewrites start to feel like I’m drifting from the goal, I know I’m
done with a project, and it’s time for editors and developers to take it
further. When “what if ” turns from a tool into a problem, and each new
“what if ” starts to annoy me, it’s done.
While I suspect I have the right answer, I want playtests to support that
view. If they show me that players are getting out of the design what I
hoped, then further “what ifs” will degrade the value of the design. Further
playtest may overload it with features, subplots, backstory, subsystems, or
chrome that seems valuable.
That temptation to overdesign is deadly; you wind up with lots of design
junk. Avoid adding too much stuff. Good games are pretty simple at their
core, and good adventures are not too convoluted. Leave exposition and
backstory to novels and films. Concentrate on action, connections, and
setting that gives players exciting things to do.
Conclusion
When people ask me about the process of design, that’s where I start. Take
two or three or ten ideas and see if they connect in new and interesting
ways. Layer them together with what-ifs, test that in playtest, and repeat.
Good design isn’t a road with milestones that you can tick off until
(ta-da!) you arrive at Done. This is why publishers who manage creative
types like artists and designers sometimes go quietly mad. It’s not easy to
wrap a schedule around layering and connections.
In my experience, good design is more like an infinite onion, layers of
junk and variables, and better and better approaches to a goal. A goal that,
in most cases, you never quite reach. But that’s the joy of it.
56 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
early every game you’ll play has a dispute resolution system.
Dominoes uses a simple numerical comparison; Rock-Paper-Scissors
has an elementary matrix; checkers and chess follow prescribed rules to
determine who takes what piece and how. For role-playing games, chances
are that you’re looking for something with a little more heft. Any time you
create a system, you should keep your end goal in mind: What do you want
your system to do?
If you’re looking for speed, a quick-and-dirty combat system is for
you—but you’ll have to accept that rules lawyers will find loopholes and
exceptions. Of course, you’ll want to minimize those holes, but if you
spend your time designing a system that closes off every workaround you
can imagine, you’ve just removed “quick-and-dirty” from the equation and
are instead creating a real combat simulator—and that’s well beyond the
scope of this chapter.
Likewise, if your preferred combat includes a battle map, detailed
movement, and careful placement of miniatures, you’re looking for a
more representative combat system. You’ll want to add a variety of rules
supporting movement types and how they relate to combat, and more
detailed discussions of attacks, armor, defense, and damage. In short, you’re
looking for a way to create an engaging and in-depth combat system.
For either route, you’ll need to create some basic parameters. I’ve
included an example system at the end of this chapter. Feel free to use it or
modify it as you see fit.
N
Basic Combat Systems
for Tabletop Games
Colin McComb
7
57Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games h Colin McComb
Your first concern is meshing your dispute resolution with the rest of
your game system, to make sure it flows naturally and smoothly. If you
use dominoes as your character generator and skill checks, you should
seriously consider the use of dominoes as your combat resolution as well.
Having five different ways to resolve issues may be entertaining to design,
but it’s a nightmare to play (unless you’re playing Calvinball, in which case
all bets are off ).
You may want to design the combat first and generate the rest of your
rules around your combat system; that’s fine, but be aware that you will
need to test, re-test, and smooth your gameplay with each new addition
to the rules you create. Your elegant system may turn into a lumbering
monstrosity if you don’t exercise caution; every variable you introduce has
the potential to throw the whole thing out of whack, and bolting new pieces
on to address those unbalancing issues introduce issues of their own.
Attack System
Here’s a checklist to help you generate your own basic combat rules set.
First, you’ll need to establish how to hit.
• Determine your resolution system. Deadlands uses poker chips and
playing cards. Dungeons & Dragons uses a d20 primarily. Amber
uses storytelling and ranking comparisons. Shadowrun uses dice
pools with target numbers, with players rolling large numbers of
dice to match or beat a 5. What’s your method? Remember that you
want your combat system to be portable across your design, so pick
something that has broad applicability. Is this an opposed check? That
is, do both the attacker and the defender take part, or is the attacker
the only active participant for each check?
• Figure out your probabilities and outcomes. You don’t need to be a
mathematics genius to know basic statistics. You do need to know
the basic probabilities of your chosen resolution. For example, do
you know the average roll on a d6? What about a d10? What about
flipping a coin? (Answers: 3.5, 5.5, and 1:1. You should also know that
probabilities and odds are two entirely different creatures. See the
sidebar
,on page 60.) Once you’ve figured out the probability for your
system, make the average your base chance.
• Your base chance is an attempt by an average person using average
weaponry to hit another average person with average defenses.
This number may go up or down in your system depending on the
modifiers you choose for this number—but remember that the more
modifiers you include, the slower your system will run. If you want
your characters to be superheroes, your chance for success will rise—
say, to 60/40. Conversely, if you want a grim system where failure is
58 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
expected (such as Call of Cthulhu), or a system with frequent lethal
hits (such as Bushido), turn the success rate down to 45/55 or even
40/60.
• Pick your modifiers (if you want to include any). Your modifiers can
be either positive or negative, and can include:
մ Character traits, such as strength, speed, wits, proficiencies, skills,
and experience level.
մ Attack types, including ranged, melee, armed, unarmed, to
subdue, or to harm.
մ Weapon modifiers, including reach or range, damage type (or
damage type as compared to specific armors, since certain
weapons are more effective against certain types of defenses; note
that damage type in this instance is used purely for calculating
to-hit modifiers), magical or technological bonus, or size.
մ Target’s protection, including magical, armor, speed or agility, or
natural protection. You may also consider defensive modifiers,
such as Parries or Dodges in the Basic Roleplaying System as part
of your combat system; this is a great way to include the defender
in an opposed check, if you so desire.
մ Movement/mounted modifiers, such as horseback, from a car, or
in flight.
մ Other modifiers, such as concealment, surprise attacks, terrain
type, or any other modifiers that you think would be appropriate
to your system. If you’re aiming for a level of significant detail,
you may also choose to provide a modifier to target limbs and
extremities.
• Test it! Make sure that the system can scale as your players become
more proficient, and that more skilled characters can hit more
frequently or more accurately than less skilled characters.
ODDS AND PROBABILITIES
Odds are measured as chances against compared to chances for;
probability is total chances compared to chances for. For example, let’s
say you have six cards. Five of these cards are black and one of them is
red. You have five chances of drawing a black card and one chance to
draw a red card. Thus, your odds of drawing the red card are 5:1 against
(or 1:5 for). To calculate probability, you simply take the entire pool
of cards (6), and ask how many red cards are in that pool. Thus, your
probability of drawing the red card is 6:1
59Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games h Colin McComb
Timing System
Next, determine your timing system. That is, who attacks and when?
• What is the unit of time? How long does each segment of attack/
defense last? Timing determines how much action each player can
realistically take in his or her turn. Make this time too long and you’ll
have players complaining that they could do so much more than
this in real life; make it too short and they won’t have any time to
complete an action.
• How much action will you allow? When do players declare their
actions, and what sort of actions can they perform? What proportion
of each time segment do you allot for each action? Fifth Edition
Dungeons & Dragons allows a move and an action, with certain
skills and abilities providing additional bonus actions. Your actions
in a turn can include attack, spellcasting, extra speed, aiding a
companion, and more. You can create something similar, or allot
action points with a set cost for each action the character wants to
perform. If you choose to use action points, you’ll need to include
Action Point expenditures for each action the characters might
undertake. You can generate your own system as well, but be sure not
to overload it with possible actions: create broader categories so you
can generalize specific actions into those categories.
• How do you determine the order of action? Do you require an
initiative roll? Random draw from a deck or stack? Choose a method
that is similar to your resolution system. Again, you can choose
modifiers from the list above for appropriate action modifiers: speed,
magical or technological bonuses, luck, experience level of the
characters, and so on.
• Outline the order of actions. Do you require players to announce
their action before or after the order of attack? Do certain actions
(such as speech) take precedence over all others, or do they depend
on the player’s order in the order of action? This is a judgment call
you’ll have to make depending on the style of play you want for your
combat system.
• Test again. Make sure the action flows the way you want it to flow,
and make sure that your testers enjoy it as well. Take notes and iterate
your system as necessary.
Attack Scale, Duration, and Defense
Now that you’ve determined your dispute resolution system and your timing
system, it’s time to begin the action: shots fired, spells cast, melee engaged,
enemies grappled, or disengagement and flight from the foe. This is where
you find out if your system works in dealing and returning fire—but before
60 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
you can dish out the consequences of this action, you’ll need to determine
a few other factors about the sort of attacks the players are making.
• Personal attacks: Does this attack affect only one person or thing,
regardless of who else is nearby? Any melee attack with an ordinary
weapon would fall under this umbrella, though certain attacks with
larger pole arms or swords might hit more than one target.
• Combined effects: Can the attackers combine their attacks or lend
support to each other to improve the damage, such as with the Help
action in Fifth Edition D&D? If you allow this, you need to make sure
that these abilities do not chain together to create an unstoppable
team—aiding a comrade in combat should come at a cost to the
helper, whether in speed, his own defenses, or his turn to attack.
• Area of effect attacks: These attacks cover a broad area and can
potentially damage more than one person. Is this splash damage,
with the damage reducing the further one is from the center of the
attack, or does it deal damage equally across the area? A fireball from
Dungeons & Dragons covers a set area, while a lightning bolt from the
same system travels in a straight line; those standing to the side of its
effect receive no damage.
• Duration of the effect: How long does this attack deal damage? For
example, is it like an acid attack, that keeps eating away at the target,
and when does it stop dealing this damage? If damage is ongoing, it
might affect the target’s attacks, spellcasting, further defenses, or even
incapacitate the target altogether. The effects you choose can have
undue influence on the course of combat, and players may focus on
weaponry that emphasizes ongoing damage to the exclusion of all
others if you do not limit the effects.
• Defenses: Does the target have an additional chance (beyond the
dispute resolution system) to evade damage or reduce the damage?
For example, are they allowed saving throws against a breath weapon?
GURPS allows for “Active Defenses” like Dodge, Parry, and Block,
and the difficulty of the check has nothing to do with the success of
the attack. You could go this route, or you could choose to have an
active opposition. That is, the attacker rolls to hit, and the defender
rolls a defense, and the person who succeeds by a greater margin wins
that particular contest. You might also consider an attack matrix, as
used in En Garde!, in which the players plot out attack routines and
then cross-reference against each other’s attacks
,to determine the
outcome.
61Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games h Colin McComb
Consequences of Combat
Finally, you’ll create the results and consequences of the action. This
portion will mesh closely with your character generation and equipment
rules, because it corresponds closely with what your characters do and
carry, and how much damage of any sort they can sustain before they die,
fall unconscious, automatically surrender, or otherwise end the fight. Some
considerations include:
• Permanent damage: This is damage that will take time to heal, absent
magical or advanced medical techniques. This is damage intended to
maim, kill, or otherwise cripple the target. Most weapon damage falls
into this category: If you hit someone with an axe, you are most likely
attempting to end their life, and the damage you do reflects that.
• Temporary damage: This damage is of the blunt weapon, unarmed
combat, and subdual variety. The target can shake it off, heal within a
few hours, and be otherwise functional without the aid of additional
healing. Grappling, punching, striking, and kicking by non-expert
martial artists, or striking with the flat of a blade or a sap, generally
results in temporary damage. You may want to create your system in
a way that each attack that deals temporary damage also adds a small
amount of permanent damage. A shot with a blackjack still has the
potential to cause brain damage.
• Character modifiers: Certain types of damage may target character
traits: weakening, disorienting, making it harder for the character to
attack targets. Use this damage type carefully and explain thoroughly
whether it is permanent or temporary. The effects of a knock to
the head can fade, while brain damage is significantly harder to
heal. Likewise, a pulled leg muscle can slow a person down for a
short period, while a knife to the Achilles tendon does longer-term
damage. The various editions of Dungeons & Dragons provide for
“conditions,” effects that limit movement, open vulnerabilities, or
create penalties on various attack, defense, or skill rolls.
• Movement modifiers: Speaking of knives to the Achilles, your
damage may include ways to cripple or slow opponents. Some
damage will be permanent, as noted above; some might be as simple
as caltrops in the boots, requiring opponents to take off their footgear
or suffer a movement penalty. This kind of damage segues into
equipment damage.
• Equipment damage: Sometimes characters will want to target their
enemy’s equipment, or a piece of machinery, or a door, or some
other inanimate object. The rust monster from Advanced Dungeons
& Dragons is a classic example. You may want to include a summary
of how equipment and inorganic material suffers damage and
62 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
how to repair or replace it. Again, this may generate too great an
encumbrance on your rules, slowing them down, which is why I
come back to the next step.
• Test! You want to be sure that all of your damage is consistent with
the style of play you want. Do you want quick and fatal combats, with
potential one-shot kills? This is fine if your character generation is
not a long and laborious process; however, if you expect your players
to become involved and invested in their characters, you will want
to ensure that they have at least a decent chance of survivability in
a combat appropriate to their experience level. Remember that all
combat requires record-keeping, and the more caveats, modifiers, and
damages you include, the slower your combat system will run.
Your consequences should include instructions on recovering from each
specific damage type. If the target cannot recover from this damage, or the
damage requires extensive rest, recovery, or repairs, it’s essential that you
outline this as well.
The most important goal of your system is the reliable entertainment of
your players. Your combats shouldn’t be punctuated with cries of “But that’s
not how it works!” or “That could never happen!” Your players should be
so engrossed in the game that they are willing to overlook the occasional
hitch and bump; if you’ve managed that, then you’ve done a good thing.
Congratulations and good luck.
Our System
I created this system in under a day, using only the advice in this chapter
as a guide. In the interest of full disclosure, I violated the cardinal rule of
this essay and haven’t tested this rule system. If you’re planning on putting
a system together for widespread public use as the base of your RPG, you
really should put more time into testing and design.
Goal
Our goal is to create a moderately involved combat system for a near-future
campaign setting with increasing but not automatic lethality. We want
something we can play relatively quickly—that is, a single combat won’t eat
game night—but not so quickly that we have to invent the actions and the
outcomes ourselves. In other words, we want the system to provide some
guidance. We’re not looking for exact positioning of all the characters—we
can use our imaginations or a simple whiteboard to keep track of where we
are and what we’re doing.
63Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games h Colin McComb
Dispute Resolution
Our basic system uses d100 (2d10) so that we can correlate the results of
any attempted action with a percentage chance. We can also roll d10s to
generate smaller increments of actions, skill traits, and so forth. Using
firearms, attackers must roll above 55 (that is, they have a 45 percent
chance), modified, for their attack to have a chance of hitting. If the target
is wearing armor or moving, the rate of success drops dramatically. A
target who’s weaving and dodging is a lot harder to hit than one who’s
running in a straight line, and we’ll make modifiers to suit that.
Unarmed or melee combat requires an opposed roll, referencing the
appropriate melee/unarmed skill, with a base (unskilled) chance of 40
percent; whoever succeeds by the greatest margin wins that contest.
Attack System
Because we’re using d100, our average roll will be 50.5. We want an
opposed check only for close-quarters combat, with both the attacker and
the defender taking part. We will offer combat modifiers for the following:
Trait bonuses
Our character generator is a point-buy system, based on an average 50
ability, with the players using points and swaps to generate scores above
average. We’ll offer non-cumulative bonuses to unarmed combat for an
Agility trait 60 and above (reserving the damage bonus for Strength 60 or
above). We’ll also offer bonuses for ranged combat with the Reflexes trait
above 60.
• 60–69: +5
• 70–79: +10
• 80–89: +15
• 90–99: +20
• 100+: +25
Improved Skills
We offer three different levels of skills. Our skills include attack and
defense modifiers. Our list of skills includes but is not limited to: Quick
Draw, Pistols, Long Arms, Submachine Guns, Karate, Judo, Wrestling,
and Bareknuckle Brawling. Our unarmed combat skills will allow defense
rolls as well as attack rolls. Characters must purchase skills, and then may
purchase ranks in those skills.
• Proficient: +5 to roll
• Skilled: +10 to roll
• Expert: +15 to roll
64 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Armor
Armor includes Kevlar Vests and Body Armor. Kevlar grants a +15 to
defense against firearms, and -5 to movement checks. Body Armor is +25
vs. firearms and -15 movement.
As noted above, we will allow the target defense against unarmed
and melee attacks by using the various unarmed skill styles. Movement
modifiers include:
• On-foot:
մ Walking: -5
մ Jogging: -10
մ Running: -15
• Mounted (bicycle, motorcycle, horseback)
• In-vehicle (speed)
մ 10–30 mph: -10
մ 30–60 mph: -25
մ 60 mph+: -40
Range modifiers will depend on the weapon; long arms will have a better
modifier for distance shooting range than pistols, and pistols and shotguns
will be far superior in close quarters.
Timing System
Our
,system will use a ten second action round, and characters will have a
number of Action Points (AP) that equal (Reflexes + Agility)/100, rounded
to the nearest 10. Actions will have an AP cost ranging from 1–10 AP, and
may be reduced by certain skills or traits. Unarmed attacks cost 2 to 4 AP
each; using a gun 3–6 AP; movement 1 AP per 10 feet.
We want to keep our combat fluid, so we don’t require the players to
announce what they’re going to do ahead of time. Instead, they have a
chance to react to what the other players are doing.
The combat round works on the countdown method. That is, at the
beginning of each combat round, every participant announces the actions
he wants to take, rolls a d10, and adds his AP and any surprise or initiative
modifiers he might have. This number is called the Action Score. The
highest scorer goes first (a tie goes to the higher Reflexes), performs his
action, and subtracts the AP expenditure from that action. If his Action
Score is still higher than the others, he can go again; otherwise, the highest
remaining Action Score takes a turn, subtracts the AP cost for a new
Action Score, and play continues in this fashion.
65Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games h Colin McComb
Attack Scale, Duration, and Defense
We can make a variety of damage available. In addition to guns and
knives, we’ll have grenades and rockets, both of which will cover
diminishing splash damage in a radius. We’ll have personal attacks, both
armed and unarmed. We will not allow combining effects for combat
except for melee combat—when, for instance, two attackers combine to
hold and then hit their target. Our system considers most kinds of aid
like this to be more disruptive than helpful (if someone is trying to wrap
bandages around your arm or inject you with a stimpack, it’s going to
throw off your attack).
As mentioned above, we will have active defenses for unarmed combat,
and a chance for the target to dodge, parry, or block unarmed or melee
attacks with an opposed roll; the person who rolls the greatest margin over
their chance of success wins that contest. We’ll add damage bonuses for
high Strength with these kinds of attacks.
We will also allow appropriate defenses against area effect damage,
requiring modified checks against Reflexes (for example, to duck out
of the way of shrapnel), Agility (for example, to dodge behind cover),
Fortitude (for example, to resist acid or poison gas), and so forth. These
defenses and the durations of their effects will be specifically outlined in
our equipment lists.
Consequences
We will be including the various forms of damage outlined above in our
system. We want to be able to beat enemies unconscious, to blow up their
cars and their houses, to cause damage in all its myriad forms. To do so,
we need to establish what it takes to bring a person down.
66 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
n August 1, 2000, one of the most important events in
roleplaying game history occurred: the Player’s Handbook for the
third edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released. Excitement for the new
edition was high leading up to the release date; the new game was rumored
to be a sea change over the decade-old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
2nd Edition rule set. In addition, more attention was paid to this release
because it was the first edition ushered into existence by the design team
at Wizards of the Coast, who had purchased D&D along with all of TSR,
Inc.’s other properties in 1997.
What set Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition (D&D 3.0 and later D&D
3.5) apart from its forebears? Why was it set to become one of the most
important roleplaying game releases in the relatively short history of the
hobby? To answer that, we need to get a bit of context.
One of the biggest barriers to entry to RPGs for new players is simply
understanding how to play. Games like D&D have a lot of complex
interlocking systems. D&D 3.0 was the first edition of the game to be
released with a unified mechanic, dubbed the d20 system. Past editions of
D&D operated under a mess of different mechanics, which came into play
depending on the in-game circ*mstance.
O
How and Why d20
Changed RPGs Forever
Kelly Pawlik
8
67How and Why d20 Changed RPGs Forever h Kelly Pawlik
I Have to Roll What, Now?
In first edition, if the Player Characters (PCs) got into a fight, the players
rolled a d6 for initiative for their “team” after declaring what action each
party member wished to take. (We won’t get into the further complexities
of AD&D initiative; that could be the subject of its own essay.) Then each
PC or monster rolled a d20 to hit, which would be compared to a table to
determine the attack’s success or failure. The core rules of the game didn’t
have rules for non-combat related skills; the gamemaster (GM) would
have to rule whether or not the noncombat action was a success based on
whatever criteria they decided.
In second edition, the most basic method for determining initiative in
combat was to have each player declare their PC’s action, then the “team”
would roll a d10 to see if they acted first (by rolling the lowest number,
naturally). The players would then have to decide amongst themselves
the order in which they acted. To resolve an attack, a PC rolled a d20 and
subtracted the result from their THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class Zero) to
determine the strongest armor class (AC) they could hit. That result was
then compared to the AC of whatever they were actually attempting to hit.
If their opponent’s AC was that result or lower, the attack was successful.
Non-weapon proficiencies were an optional rule wherein the PC needed to
roll under a target number on a d20.
One Die to Rule Them All
In comparison, the core of the d20 system is dead simple: in order to
accomplish any task, the player rolls a d20, adds whichever modifiers apply
to the task at hand, and compares the result to a target number, called
a Difficulty Class (DC). If the result meets or exceeds the DC, the PC
succeeds at whatever action they are attempting. To carry our example from
above on, if the PCs in a d20 game get into a fight, each player rolls a d20,
adds the appropriate modifiers, and gives the result to the GM who orders
the initiative from highest result to lowest. The initiative order largely stays
the same from round to round, barring any PC or NPC actions taken that
change it. When a character wants to attack a creature on their turn, they
roll a d20, add the appropriate modifiers, compare the result to the target’s
AC and, if it’s the same or higher, they succeed! The same holds true for
noncombat skills, saving throws, specialized combat maneuvers, everything.
No longer did you need to roll over a target number for some tasks, but roll
under a target number for others. In the d20 system, in order to act, you roll
a d20 and add the relevant numbers; the higher result is always better.
Like a lot of RPGs, d20 games can be great learning tools. Unlike other
games which generally work well to teach language and comprehension
skills, playing d20 games can make a player great at addition. The nature
68 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
of the d20 system means that there are a lot of numbers to add together,
especially as PCs move into higher levels. This can be a benefit; players can
learn to add all of their modifiers together and give the GM a result really
quickly. I’ve seen players crunch the numbers like human supercomputers
in no time flat.
The game was streamlined on the GM side of the table as well. The d20
system uses the same Lego® bricks, if you will, to create a PC, an NPC
scout, an owlbear, a pit trap, a palm tree, a sandstone corridor, or an
apparatus of Kwalish. The application of the central mechanic to all aspects
of the game makes it easy for a GM to create or alter existing game material
to suit their group and the story they are trying to tell as a collective.
,changing as gaming
culture changes.
So, I’ve come back to the question of what constitutes design more
and more. I’ve had certain lessons brought home to me through sheer
repetition and observation. I think I’m ready to make a stab at an answer.
T
Wolfgang Baur
1
10 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Defining Our Work
When we sit down as game designers and think about the work we do,
there are a few things going on. We are imagining a particular audience
with a particular set of expectations, from the reading level required to
the style of game we’re considering. We think about commercial elements
and audience appeal: What will draw players in? And we think about
immersion and replay value: What victory conditions or encounter
descriptions are most compelling?
When I am designing a game, I am thinking about what set of rules will
create an engaging experience of play for the intended audience in a new or
existing mode or style of play.
DESIGN IS . . .
Design is its own discipline, but it always borrows and builds on other
modes of creative work. Design is:
• art
• mathematics and probability
• literature and language
• geography and history
• the building of a field of play
• the encouragement of repeated patterns of behavior
• iterative rule-making to improve player competition
• rule-making to require player cooperation
• a fusion of exploratory play and mastery over time
• the study of player psychology and the conscious manipulation
of behavior
The nature of game design is that it requires understanding many
related fields. It’s both a matter of syncretic thought and analytical or
reductive thought. That’s part of the appeal; in some games your work
is a matter of pure geometry and probability and event timing, such as
the creation of board game rules or arcade game rules where the shape
of the play area and the appearance of resources and objects must be
precisely calibrated to retain player attention, provide frequent stimulus,
and permit a variety of successful strategies. In other game types,
you must explain victory conditions, customs, landscapes, tools, and
characters. These are less about timing and geometry and more about
engaging a sense of wonder and discovery as the player uncovers layers
of the setting and new challenges in the game.
If you find yourself wondering whether you are solving the right
problems, consider the list here and see what other approaches to the
problem might cut through to improve the heart of the play experience.
11 What is Design? h Wolfgang Baur
Design, then, is the creation of play experiences at a remove from play
itself. That is, as the designer, your work enables new experiences in play
for others. If you are doing it exceptionally well, you are inventing new
game genres and new play styles; that is, entirely new methods, styles, and
systems of play. You use technology, art, and your own vision of what it
means to play to create that new game. Design includes the creation of new
spaces to explore, and the creation of new rules and systems to govern play.
Each type of design—new rules, new experiences, and even new modes
or play styles—requires a separate set of skills.
New Rules
This is the simplest and most important element of game design: What are
the rules of the game? What tactics do they enable? What odds do they set?
What behavior do they promote or discourage? What emergent properties
derive from the rules? Are the rules extensible? Are the rules complete and
self-contained? Can the rules be summarized? Can they be programmed?
What victory conditions do they require? What are the consequences of
failure? Are they easily grasped or do they require examples? How easy is it
to cheat? How do they encourage repeated play?
Most of all, do they reward the player for skill, for mastery? Or are they
essentially functions of time and money spent? Both approaches may be
correct for different audiences; not every design need be a game of skill, as
most games of chance so amply demonstrate.
New Experiences
Games allow us to imagine the impossible or at least the exotic, so fantasy
and other genre games should enable new experiences: dragon riding,
interstellar trade with hostile species, assassinations in the Middle Ages,
or the exploration of a society of undead. Even a relatively straightforward
driving game needs to provide a complete experience of speed, control,
and competition.
This property of game design is especially crucial for franchise games
that derive most of their attraction over time: sports games, or new
editions of existing titles, or the expansion of a major IP. It’s vital that a
designer can do “same but different” to keep a well-loved series, setting, or
property fresh and engaging.
New Modes of Play
New modes require an ability to imagine new styles of play: alternate reality
games (ARGs), first-person shooters, roleplaying without a dungeon master
(DM), or coop board games. New rules and systems are required to support
those new styles of play—but for the most part, these new systems are
12 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
variations on existing systems. It’s rare that a truly original rule shows up,
such as the deck construction rules that made Magic: the Gathering (MtG)
a breakout hit. The other rules of MtG (resource management and attack/
defense) were mostly variations on existing rules in other game styles.
If you can generate an idea on the level of MtG, refine it, and bring it to
market, I’ve certainly got nothing to teach you. On the other hand, most
of roleplaying and massively multiplayer online (MMO) game design is
something else: the creation of play experiences within an existing rules
framework or an existing game engine. That level of design is an area of
the craft I’ve practiced for years, finding the pivot points within a complex
body of rules and the richest veins of exploration and story potential in
a setting. This is what makes definitions of design so difficult; it’s many
different types of work.
To me, design is less about engagement and immersion than it is
ultimately about play. The time spent making decisions before, during, and
after the game is only partly immersive. Certainly, game design assists a
player’s immersion through the careful choice of rules and components,
art for game boards and game pieces, cards, animations, flavor text. But
in many games the visual and tactile elements are little more than set
dressing. For example, the European style of game design (and the Hasbro
style for card and roleplaying games, to a lesser degree) focuses primarily
on rules design; art, graphics, and flavor are added later and may be fairly
arbitrary. That approach works extremely well for board game games and
card games, and less so for story games and roleplaying games.
Design is a Bit Like Mind Control
Design is the conscious work done to manipulate the behavior of the
game’s players. This sounds worse than it is. You’re trying to design choices
and how those choices are presented to the players.
A more realistic wording might be that game design is a function of
human attention: getting it, directing it, and keeping it. A well-designed
game commands the player’s attention at frequent intervals, directs that
attention to turns or events, and keeps that attention through various
means such as social reinforcement, reward systems such as experience
points (XP) and leveling, and even the timely appearance of in-game
resources and materials (spawning for video games, the return of long-rest
powers in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons).
The better you understand the mindset of typical players and DMs, the
easier it is for them to engage with your design. The more esoteric or niche
your design, in other words, the less players will react as your design might
expect them to. This is the nature of niche RPGs: they tickle the fancy of
a minority of gamers,
,The
d20 system was the Minecraft™ of RPGs nearly a decade before Minecraft
was released to the world.
An interesting, and hopefully intended, by-product of the unified ruleset
is that the d20 system makes it easier for a player to transition into the role
of the gamemaster than other systems, including earlier editions of D&D.
Prior to d20, running a game seemed like an arcane art performed by a
high-level magic-user. How else could one be expected to memorize the
panoply of rules elements required to hold a fictional world together? With
the d20 system, everything operates in the same fashion; as long as the GM
has a group of players, a book of monsters, and an idea of the Difficulty
Class of the challenges presented, they can run a reasonably satisfying game.
Furthermore, with a more robust set of noncombat skills and challenges,
it’s easier than ever to get the party out of the dungeon and into much more
complex social situations for those groups who crave such things.
All of the above doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few potentially
negative aspects to the d20 system. The system lends itself well to games
of exploration and tactical action, but requires a bit more work by both
the players and the GM if the game they are playing doesn’t feature those
aspects prominently. Predictably, the system also works better in the hands
of people who have achieved some mastery over it. There are options,
often character options, which can be chosen in the game that appear to
be reasonable at first glance, but turn out to be traps as your PC progresses
down their career path. Knowing which options are actually good can
be the key to character survival, depending on your play group and GM,
of course. The system mastery aspects of the d20 system can also lead
to more character optimization (or as my group calls it, minmaxing) by
certain types of players, which can be fun in one group, or it can suck all
the enjoyment out in another. At high levels, the math in d20 system games
tends to break down. Characters have so many bonuses they can string
together that NPCs, creatures, and other challenges tend to fall behind,
which can make it difficult for a GM to challenge a high-level party without
69How and Why d20 Changed RPGs Forever h Kelly Pawlik
outright overpowering and destroying it. The math heaviness and extensive
use of conditional modifiers can also work against players who aren’t so
great at adding up all those different modifiers. It can cause them to hold
the game up as they try to figure out what the actual result of their roll is. I
have personally seen players who have created spreadsheets totalling up all
the modifiers for all of the actions they regularly take.
Into the Great Wide Open
Another aspect of the d20 system’s importance in the annals of RPGs is the
fact that it was released under the Open Game License (OGL). D&D 3.0
came with express permission from Wizards of the Coast to use the rules
for other commercial products. Indeed, the day that the Player’s Handbook
was released, third-party publishers were ready with d20 products available
for sale. This was a far cry from the early TSR days of D&D, when releasing
a ’zine purporting to contain material usable in your campaign was apt to
provoke a cease-and-desist order in response. The initial thought behind
the OGL was that third-party companies and homebrewing hobbyists
would use the rules to create D&D 3.0 adventures they could then sell to
other enthusiasts. This did occur, of course, but the OGL was also used for
much more ambitious projects.
Under the OGL, numerous designers released complete games, some of
which ranged far from the system’s original high fantasy conceits. Green
Ronin Publishing brought d20 to superheroes and romantic fantasy with
Mutants & Masterminds and Blue Rose, respectively. Goodman Games
birthed such games as Broncosaurus Rex, a weird-west-meets-dinosaurs
mash-up, and Etherscope, a dystopic mash-up of Charles Dickens, George
Orwell’s 1984 and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. There are dozens if
not hundreds more, not least of which is Paizo Publishing’s monolithic
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, a direct response to Wizards of the Coast’s
release of D&D 4th Edition and its much less user-friendly Game System
License (GSL).
A System for Players and Designers
The impact the OGL has had on the RPG industry simply cannot be
understated. Thousands of products have been released under it. This
has the benefit of making the system nearly ubiquitous, which brings us
around to my final point.
I won’t be so bold as to unequivocally state that d20 games have been
more played than any other RPGs—I don’t have that data—but I will
make the assumption that they have. This is potentially great news for
game designers. Before designing a new system from the ground up, a
designer would do well to see if modifying the d20 system suits their
70 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
vision. The core system has the benefit of hundreds of thousands of play
hours, resulting in plenty of online discussion, which means that more
development time can be focused on the portions of the game that don’t
adhere to standard d20 or that change problematic aspects of it. It also
means that a new game has potentially more of an initial audience, who
may be more interested in a new game because they don’t have to learn a
wholly new system.
The d20 system has remained popular for nearly two decades for the
simple reason that it is both well-designed and it is unavoidable. There
aren’t many people playing RPGs today who don’t know how to play
a d20 game. That core mechanic of rolling a d20, adding modifiers,
and comparing to a DC has been used by Wizards of the Coast in the
subsequent two editions of D&D which, of course, includes the juggernaut
fifth edition of the game. I’d wager that years from now, when a sixth
edition of the world’s oldest roleplaying game eventually funnels out of the
pipeline, it too will feature a modification of the d20 system.
71More Empty Rooms hWolfgang Baur
’ve been thinking a lot lately about the twisted but oh-so-human
compulsions that game design sometimes reveals in our
hobby. Gamers and game designers as a category seem to include a
statistically-above-average number of collectors, completists, rules lawyers,
and know-it-alls—the people who can tell you every iteration of every rule
and every character over 10 or 20 years of publications. On the one hand,
this is wonderful, and collecting, rules knowledge, and strong memories for
detail are all positive character traits—to a point. Taken to an extreme and
sometimes beyond that extreme, gamers and game designers seem to drift
well out of the range of usual human pastimes and into obsessive-compulsive
behavior. In the worse instances, our community must find ways to
address members who spout off with toxic, entitled, crude, or anti-social
behavior. When some of our positive characteristics cease to enable joy and
entertainment, and instead become off-putting, self-defeating, and harmful
to friendships and sociability, everyone should be concerned.
Game designers are certainly on the front lines when it comes to
understanding human nature, rules systems to reward certain options
or playstyles. Indeed, some games display a particular flaw as a virtue
(collectible card games, I’m looking at you). I’m here to tell you, there’s
room to do excellent game design without completeness, without rules
expansion, without a need for encyclopedic design. Indeed, each of these
elements should be part of our hobby, but there’s a dangerous tradeoff in
going too far. Let’s consider the options, and what we gain and lose when
we privilege either completeness or simplicity in design.
I
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9
Wolfgang Baur
Simplicity, Playfulness, and Deliberate
Omissions in Game Design
72 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Space
,and Emptiness in Games
I have relatively few regrets as a game designer but one of them is not
putting enough empty rooms in an old Pathfinder RPG adventure: the
“Fortress of the Stone Giants” in the Rise of the Runelords adventure path
was loaded with monsters and encounters and, yes, a fortress full of giants.
Packed with them and their allies, in fact. And this looked great on paper,
until I read the write-up about it that said, “No room for the party to rest,
fight after fight, sort of grindy,” and that comment really struck home.
Part of what I loved about early D&D adventures was the combat and
the thrill of finding treasure. And then there was the third element: pure
exploration, the sense of wonder, the thrill of discovery. All the talk about
how to design a fun game, and all the emphasis on providing a design with
a sense of mastery from power characters—that’s not wrong. But it misses
something important. Tabletop RPGs at their best allow us to explore
wonderful, glorious, and profoundly weird environments. There should be
room for oddness that doesn’t involve combat.
Puzzles. Runes that don’t figure into a key or a lore check. Statues of
forgotten figures, strange shrines that stand mute, and places that give
players the creeps, without ever checking hit points off a character sheet.
That’s mystery. That’s space for imagination. (And yes, also a place for the
party to rest up, heal, and recover spells). Combat after combat, encounter
after encounter, the sameness of a combat-heavy approach turns to ashes
eventually, just as a diet of nothing but ice cream gets old pretty fast.
Designers should make way for wonder.
More than that, smart designers should plan for it. And it is entirely
possible to plan for that sense of wow and awesome. Games are about
rules, but they should also be about the unexpected, the epiphany, the
sudden realization that, “Hey, I just noticed . . . ” There should be room
built into RPG environments to accommodate that. It’s up to the designer
to place those hooks for others to discover.
So consider this my plea for more dusty corners in RPGs and more
open territory in rule sets. Here’s why and how to expand that beyond
adventures to other rules areas.
Creating Space for Play
Our compulsions are a problem. Too much combat, too much emphasis on
magic or melee or treasure is a mistake. Those are the foundation stones
that are important and obvious, and it’s easy to overuse those tools because
they are the ones we know. Allow me to propose five additional tools, each
of which allows for a wider field of possibilities and encourages players to
try something crazy and entertaining. They aren’t the only ones possible,
but they are a start toward a richer form of design.
73More Empty Rooms hWolfgang Baur
1. Playfulness: Design the elements of your game world, adventure, or
sourcebook that are impish, trickster-ridden, confusing, contradictory,
or at least puzzling. If everything is straightforward, if every
relationship between monsters and villains is straightforward, life is
less interesting. What if the river troll has an unrequited love for the
elf queen? What if the dragon is allergic to gold? What if the bridge is
sentient, or made of floating teacups, or the bridge is rigged to collapse
when a large mass (say, a giant’s very large mass) steps on it? What if
the orc is a bard with a silken voice? What if the cleric of the sun god
is also a werewolf, and the treasure of the dwarves is cursed by the god
of greed? Don’t throw away or subvert all of the traditional tropes of
fantasy; that’s just a mess. But consider designing something off-kilter
and letting the GM and players find the humor and potential in it.
2. Breaking the Rules: Some monsters and some treasures should
simply ignore the standard rules. They should be rare, but nothing
says “wondrous magic” like an item that does something the rules say
is impossible. Be sure to include a limit to the item, lest it take over
a campaign: the fading charges of a bygone era, the single-use item
powered by a great wizard’s soul, the holy avenger blade that lasts only
until it slays the big baddie, then crumbles to rust. Alternately, include
such overpowered or laterally-powered items in a one-shot adventure
such as a convention scenario or something written for online pickup
games (like the Prepared series, or Eldritch Lairs). Even in a one-off,
players will delight in things they shouldn’t have.
3. Simple Side Systems: A reward system based on speed, status, stealth,
highest poetry or history skill check, best arrow, or enchantment
magic could all be pretty simple to build. I included these sorts of
challenges as part of the Birch Queen’s Fair in Wrath of the River
King, and players seized the opportunity to shine in the skills that
have always been part of their character, but that were never given a
moment to breath in melee.
4. Rewards for Laughter, Leadership, or Teamwork: Games are fun.
Why the heck don’t the reward systems in more games explicitly
reward teamwork or laughter or the most entertaining player at the
table? True, maybe the entertainment is its own reward. And maybe the
player who diligently writes up the session notes each week is satisfied
with her contribution in thanks and kudos. But as game designers
we really should be able to gamify the rewards. I would love to see a
leadership mechanic that rewards the player who always rounds up the
troops for game night with an in-game henchman, a hireling, a title, a
Diplomacy or Intimidate bonus, a morale bonus, or something similar.
Out-of-game behaviors affect our enjoyment of the game but are rarely
74 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
recognized. Games encourage certain behaviors (I call it “mind control
by design” elsewhere in this volume). We should be broader in what we
encourage and offer rewards for more out-of-character behaviors than
most RPGs currently do. Speaking of which . . .
5. Treasure for Kindness, Mercy, Stealth, or Healing: The rules for any
RPG reward certain things in the game. Those rewards force certain
behaviors. For D&D and Pathfinder and a host of others, killing or
defeating monsters is the primary road to advancement, so characters
kill and defeat monsters. I’d be delighted to see more games that offer
XP rewards equal to or great than the monster-killing rewards for
saving the hostage, showing mercy to the defeated black knight, and
healing the ancient sage struck down by the black knight. Likewise, the
player who solves the puzzle or puts together the clues should reap a
tangible reward. I’d like to see rewards for stealth, seduction, fast-talking,
character knowledge, or solving mysteries built into certain adventures.
All of these get some nod from existing fantasy RPGs, but . . . it’s shaky
at best. We can do better.
All these cases would need to be made clear to players in the setup (“This
adventure is about stealing the Dragon Orb of Harkesh without being
caught.”) and rewarded in the final with XP and advancement. I know it’s
easier to design a dungeon crawl with monsters and treasure. But we should
design more variety in play styles to attract a broader range of players.
The Price of Too Much
In addition to those five thoughts for new tangents and variety in design, let
me argue for a moment against the sheer weight of our hobby’s core rules
and mechanics. Consider the strength of three versions of the Dungeons
& Dragons RPG. The first version comes in Player’s Handbook, Monster
Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide—completely inaccessible for a
beginner, and daunting even for the casual RPG player. The second version
of D&D is the Starter Set, a much more approachable boxed set with
slim-but- colorful booklets and a highly playable introductory adventure.
The third option is to watch people play on Twitch streaming, as a more
accessible form yet—you don’t need to throw dice, just enjoy
,others playing
a video-friendly version of the game. The larger rules volume is always
harder for beginners and, like every hobby, RPGs need new players and a
welcoming approach that anyone can master. I think the advantage here for
the beginning player in the Starter Set or a weekly Twitch stream is pretty
obvious, so I won’t belabor the point, but why limit this to beginners? An
entire movement of RPG design in the indie realm and in rules-light system
such as the Fantasy Age RPG have ditched masses of hardcovers for a few
thin books.
75More Empty Rooms hWolfgang Baur
The question is, why?
First, let’s understand that a portion of the appeal of gigantic books of rules
and masses of complexity is that exactly: they discourage newcomers and
casual players. The rules are a barrier to entry; they say you can’t join our
subculture unless you are willing to prove your seriousness by reading
these tomes. At a certain age, I think that’s no barrier: if you have a lot of
time on your hands, reading the big books of rules is a delight in itself.
Better than that: Having read and mastered a complex set of hundreds of
pages of rules provides a sense of achievement and mastery. It feels great
knowing that you have figured out the “Massive New RPG Rules Set.”
But what does that barrier cost us? Why do gamers sometimes graduate
from simple beginner boxes to complex shelves of books—and then
abandon them for simple systems with strong adventures? I think the
answer may be that, at some point, the game’s design complexity and the
burden of completeness makes it harder to find players because the rules
themselves are so off-putting.
The hardcore will always want the more complete and complex system
with all nooks and crannies covered. But that approach makes the game
harder to play, because there’s more lookup time. It stifles further growth
in the hobby, because if everything is covered in the basic rules, there’s
no point in writing clear, modular expansions of the rules. Or rather,
an approach centered on completeness stifles individual expansion: it
seems that people will always publish splatbooks and add-ons, but if the
core rules are complex enough, the amount of homebrew rules needed is
smaller than otherwise.
Some people will argue this is a virtue: homebrew rules are sometimes
poorly thought-out, unbalanced, or full of bookkeeping and drudgery. But
I’d argue that generating your own monsters, spells, and variant classes
is part of the joy of RPG play: the people who play by core rules only are
missing some of the fun.
People abandon over-designed systems for simpler ones that give them
room to breathe. An over-engineered car may be perfectly safe or the
fastest car on Earth. Neither of those options is likely to appeal to anyone
as a commuter car. That commuter car has a drink holder and a radio, and
gets decent mileage at a price someone wants to pay. An RPG system that
offers some complexity without completeness hits that sweet spot as well.
And that sweet spot is different for different players at different times in
their gaming careers.
76 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Paralysis as the Price of Complexity
Finally, there’s the design problem of decision paralysis. I’ve seen this
mostly in high-rules-investment and rich-options games such as D&D 3.5
or the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, where it stands in marked contrast to
the retro Old School Renaissance (OSR) and 5th Edition D&D games I’ve
been playing lately. A player’s turn comes around, they look at their dozen
powers—and they dither. And they can’t decide. And they haven’t thought
through their actions or made a plan for their turn—because their turn is
going to be complex.
By comparison, other games say, “Roll 3d6 to hit!” or “Roll damage for
your spell and mark it off your list!” The constrained nature of the choices
of a simpler rules set mean that a player is never confronted with many
options during a combat or even during a roleplaying encounter. There
are fewer tools available in their toolbox, so making decisions about which
tool to use are easier. And allocating resources and making the right player
decisions is part of the cognitive burden of an RPG, in addition to staying
in character and exploring the environment. The more options you have,
the harder it is to be sure that you are making the right call.
If your game is simpler, it’s easier to make the right call. That’s the great
advantage of the streamlined rules sets. You spend less time managing
your character, and more time interacting with the game master or your
fellow players, getting into your character, poking around looking for
treasure, or thinking up a clever scheme to outwit the bad guys. It’s a
tradeoff; you’ll have fewer choices when it’s your turn to act. But you’ll also
have more freedom to try something outside the rules.
The Price of Simplicity
Not everyone loves simplicity in RPGs, of course, and it does come with
its own problems. So let’s consider the rules-light approach to RPGs
for a moment. It has its own virtues and problems. Many indie games
provide only the most basic resolution mechanics, and assume that players
can sort out any special cases. The Dragon Age RPG, the 5th Edition
Dungeons&Dragons Starter Set, and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game
Beginner Box all assume that the first boxed set will just get you started.
Rules are present, but minimal. If Steve Jobs had designed an RPG, it would
look a lot more like one of these. With rounded corners, peerless use of
typefaces and layout, and dice offered as $10 optional accessories, probably.
Designing for lighter weight rules means designing more for general
cases and ignoring corner cases. You can see this clearly in the Cypher
System or Fantasy AGE System, where everything uses the same resolution
mechanic, and (for Fantasy AGE) attacks are made unique through the use
77More Empty Rooms hWolfgang Baur
of stunts. The stunts provide variety and excitement to the mechanics, and
interest in the results of a die roll, but they don’t show up every turn.
Compare this with a Pathfinder power, which always has the same
effect, and must be chosen from a class list (decision paralysis again), and
then multiple effects must be resolved. It just takes a lot longer for a player
to complete their combat turn in Pathfinder than it does in some other
games—albeit with stronger sense of simulation and accuracy. And that
longer wait time between your turns means two things: 1) combats feel
slower because each player spends more time waiting to act, and 2) players
can stop paying attention at the table when it’s not their turn. The higher
the per-turn complexity is for each player, the more any given RPG bogs
down at the higher levels when more decisions are required.
Simplicity as a Disastrous Problem
So where’s the problem in simplicity? Simply put, more elements of the
game must be adjudicated by a GM or done on the fly. The rules don’t cover
it, so . . . make it up. This is appealing to some players (mostly veterans and
those who enjoy improve or freeform gameplay), and it is annoying others
(often newer players, but also those who prefer complete rules coverage to
avoid arbitrary decisions by a GM).
The greater problem in simplicity is that the game can feel shallow and
your options as a player or a GM are limited. There’s no robust skill system
in AD&D. This is a great opportunity for roleplaying the fast-talker, but
whether it works or not is purely up to the DM’s ruling or a house rule.
As another example, there’s no support (or no absolute requirement) for
using miniatures and grid maps in many RPGs. This is great for speed of
play (try it and see) but terrible for providing a richness of tactical options.
Some players love the ability to model the combat space, and use it to
their advantage or to pull off incredible heroic moves. Anyone coming to
a relatively minis-poor
,game like Cypher System, Fiasco, or Call of Cthulhu
may rightly bemoan the lack of complete tactical support and the paucity
of combat options. It’s ridiculously simplified compared to a game like
Champions, or Pathfinder.
Depending on the audience, of course, that’s either a strength or a
disastrous failing.
Conclusion
Simulations and storytelling, whimsy and completeness, are all elements
of a successful RPG design. Where a design falls on that spectrum of
completeness versus simplicity, and where it falls on the spectrum of
combat-simulation versus tactical richness versus narrative power is always
a choice for the designer.
78 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Consider expanding your range of options and leaving hooks and
tools for playful mayhem or humor in your game levels, adventures, or
settings—and leaving some empty rooms simply as a source of mystery and
room for exploration.
A crowded and complete design might be just what you want. But
sometimes, the players remember that one room where nothing happened.
79Covenants: Genre Expectations and Mechanics in RPG Design h Jeff Grubb
have a colleague who does not care to play Call of Cthulhu. No, really.
For those unaware, Call of the Cthulhu is a classic RPG from Chaosium,
Inc, a horror roleplaying game set in the universe created by H. P. Lovecraft
and other pulp writers. It has gone through seven editions and remains
extremely popular, particularly among game designers. But my colleague
does not care for it.
And the reason they give for this is that they “refuse to be scared.” That is,
playing a horror game implies there will be horror, from brain-wrenching
entities which melt the mind to vampires who consume the soul to visceral
terrors of warped and damaged flesh. So, yes, horrific. And my colleague
doesn’t buy into that —they don’t agree with a basic principle of the game.
But this highlights one of the unwritten rules of roleplaying, of the
forming of an agreement or covenant between the players and game
master. Sitting down at the table, whether they are playing a horror game
or a fantasy game or a superhero game, carries with it some implied
requirements on the participants. It is part of the cost of playing the game.
And good game design supports those covenants.
Some of these covenants are broad-spectrum, and apply to most games
in general, regardless of genre: Don’t be a jerk, listen to the DM, play by the
rules, and of course, have fun. Those pretty much apply to all games, and
a lot of non-game social actions as well. Others are specific to a particular
group, table rules like “Whatever you say, your character says”, or “No one
I
Covenants
Genre Expectations and Mechanics in RPG Design
Jeff Grubb
10
80 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
checks the books for stats during play”, or even “The DM does not pay for
pizza.” Both sets of agreements, spoken and unspoken, are valid, but in
addition to these types there are genre covenants which are baked into the
design of the game itself. The rules promote particular types of behavior
that apply to the theme of game, and are supported by the rules themselves.
Let’s go back to Call of Cthulhu for a moment. In most roleplaying games
like Dungeons & Dragons (more on that later), the characters grow more
powerful over the course of play. The longer you play, the tougher you get.
Call, on the other hand, carries with it a counter-intuitive vibe: the longer
you play, the weaker you become. This is through a mechanic called sanity.
When you are confronted with horror, you lose this precious resource,
and if you lose too much or too fast, you can pick up phobias, manias,
and more dire insanities. Over time, this tends to make characters more
mentally fragile in the face of horror and, as a result, encourages players to
be more cautious.
In short, playing the game makes you scared. It is one of the “rewards” of
the game. If you don’t want to be scared, to feel the concern that your next
step may take you over the edge, may take you out of the game entirely,
you may not want to play the game. And the sanity mechanic supports the
sense of unease you want to see in a horror game.
It is not just the sanity mechanic. The characters in Call of Cthulhu are
very fragile. Hit points never get particularly high, guns are deadly at close
range, and the typical monster is even deadlier. The Great Old Ones can
wipe you out in a single attack if they have not reduced you to a quivering
pile of mental jelly first. In effect, over time the rules encourage more
caution, more careful thought, and the realization that at any time things
can go horribly, horribly wrong.
In a word, fear.
Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, is Epic or Heroic Fantasy, and
its rules reflect larger than life heroes who grow more powerful over time.
Your ability to take damage is greater, the amount of damage you can deal
is greater, and magical weapons, usually gained through play, make you
even more powerful. The game generally (but not always) has a happier
ending than Call of Cthulhu, such that the question of what do with such
powerful characters is a valid concern.
Yet that has not always been the case. In the earliest incarnations of
D&D, the players had that same fragility as Call of Cthulhu, in that they
may be confronted, on a random die roll, by a powerful monster that
they would unable to handle. Oddly, in those elder days, the “dungeon”
was once the safest place possible for these weaker characters. From the
original rules, the dungeon-dwelling monsters were less powerful on the
upper levels, deadlier on the deeper ones. Stay to the upper levels, and you
81Covenants: Genre Expectations and Mechanics in RPG Design h Jeff Grubb
could survive long enough to journey into the depths. In the wilderness, all
bets were off, and you could encounter a collection of stirges as easily as a
flight of dragons.
That lethal tendency changed over the newer editions with the addition
of challenge ratings. Now, instead of the DM throwing very tough monsters
at you at any time, the DM will not hit you with anything you cannot
supposedly handle. These later editions of D&D are more survivable and
encourage play that will allow the heroes to grow more powerful and play
the game longer. Note that there is a cohort of players who are offended
by this evolution, and prefer the OSR (Old School Revival) versions of
TPKs (Total Party Kills). That’s OK, but if the covenant is not functioning
properly (fans of later editions playing under earlier rules) the results can
range from comic to tragic.
This controlled lethality is part of the covenant of D&D, and is reinforced
by its mechanics. Your challenges will be challenges, but you can expect
to rise above them. Yes, bad dice rolls or poor choices can doom you and
your party, but ultimately, the mechanics favor heroic actions and epic
adventures. You are rewarded for being an active participant in the world.
One more genre to talk about: super hero games. This genre has a lot of
tropes attached to it, with one of the primary ones being that heroes, are,
well, heroic. Yes, there is an entire subgenre of anti-heroes and non-heroes,
but the core is pretty much of the Superman/Captain America mode, and
successful super hero games reinforce its metarule though its mechanic. In
Marvel Super Heroes, the first of the various Marvel RPG licenses, this is
through the Karma system, a spendable experience point that rewards for
“correct” action and punishes for “incorrect” action. In the Marvel gaming
universe, you can be violent and destructive, but you end up paying the
price for that by not having the points necessary to modify the die rolls
when everything goes south.
As a result, you are expected to be heroic, and the game system rewards
you accordingly. When you sit down at the table, that is an unspoken
convention of the game. In
,a super hero game, you follow the patterns set
down and expected for super heroes. For an epic fantasy game, you follow
those tropes. And for a horror game, you agree to be scared.
And for good games in those categories, the mechanics reward those
assumptions. Yes, you can have a swashbuckling game fighting Deep
Ones, a game of gritty super-powered anti-heroes, and an “old-school”
fantasy game with TPKs aplenty. But to do so, you’re best off changing the
mechanics that support those unspoken beliefs. Sanity may be less effective
(or absent entirely) in our swashbuckling versus Deep Ones campaign, and
the player characters more resistant. Similarly, our “grim and gritty” super
hero game can keep Karma, but change the way it is awarded to provide
82 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
more latitude for the darker universe it operates in. By recognizing the
unwritten rules, the covenants of genre, you can design to support them.
Ultimately, players come to the table with expectations based on the
genre the game resides in. And in fulfilling those expectations through
mechanics that support that vision, you, the other players, and the DM
have entered into an agreement of shared fantasy. A covenant that forms
the basis of your gaming experience, strengthened and supported by its
game design.
83Designing Magic Systems h Michael A. Stackpole
ack in the late 1980s, I attended a computer game developer’s
conference put on by Electronic Arts. I’d been invited to go by the
folks at Interplay Productions because I was working on Wasteland at
the time. I remember sitting in a conference room, where everyone was
introducing themselves. Again and again, the programmers said, “I had
this really cool way of handling [packet exchanges or some other bits and
bytes stuff ], so I designed this game.”
I remember thinking that having a cool programming trick was
insufficient reason for designing a game. A game should be more than just
data manipulation.
When I look at magic systems in games and novels, I get the same feeling
as I did at that conference. Too many people see magic as a great vehicle
for special effects. The flash and the bang are what they focus on, which
means they have a magic system that simply does not work. This is truer
in novels than games, since game designers need to make a stab at having
numbers add up, but even being forced to do the math is not enough to
save most magic systems from being lame.
Magic is, at its base, really very simple. It’s all about probability and
temporality. Consider the following example: A piece of kindling wood has
a high probability of burning. A wet piece of seaweed has a low probability
of burning. Magic, then, would be a way of raising the probabilities so
that either item will burst into flames. Clearly, in a well-balanced system,
making the wood burn will require less of an effort than making the
seaweed burn.
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Temporality comes into play in a slightly more complex way. If you want
the stick to burn now, that requires one level of effort. If you want it to
combust completely—releasing a lot of energy—right now, that would take
an entirely different level of effort. If you want it to ignite at a particular
point in time—a delayed now—we have yet another level of effort. And if
you want to permanently enchant something, that requires a lot of effort,
whereas having the enchantment kick in only some of the time—like
beneath the light of a full moon—or when acted upon by outside forces, it
might require a bit less of an effort.
Once you have a grasp on these basic concepts, you realize a number of
things. First, every bit of magic in games and books adheres to probability
and temporality—though not always very elegantly. Second, most magic
systems fail to sufficiently balance effect with effort. Third, the window
dressing is just that: window dressing.
A quick look at something as ubiquitous as magical weapons shows how
this works. A weapon that is “plus 2 against Dark Races” is just a weapon
that has been enchanted, so there is a 100 percent probability that it will
do greater damage to Dark Races. A sword like Sting, from The Lord of the
Rings, has a permanent enchantment that causes it to glow in the presence
of Orcs—100 percent probability of glowing for an infinite amount of time.
The third point, the one about window dressing, is where most designers
(and writers) begin to head off the rails. They tend to think that what
they’re doing is unique and wonderful. It might well be. The fact that it is
different from what others have done does not separate it from probability
and temporality, however. A designer may decide that his magic system is
based on the magic user’s ability to subdue and exploit demons into doing
his bidding—thereby accomplishing the effect he wants. Having a demon
tear enemies apart is really no different than casting a fireball that smokes
them; the magic simply raises the probability of death for the target to
100 percent. The mechanism by which death is dealt may make the game
flashier, but the fundamental blocks upon which the magic system is built
remain the same.
The big fail, when it comes to magic system design, comes in the area of
balance. As I noted above, bigger and better results require greater efforts.
The bottom-line balancing mechanism in magic systems is limited use. The
simplest example of this method is that any magic spell is consumed when
it is used. This is consistent whether the mage employs a prepared item,
or casts (and then forgets) a spell, or must dutifully make a sacrifice and
worship a capricious deity to be allowed to use a spell again. The slightly
more advanced method is a spell-point cost system, where the mage incurs
a cost (Strength, Vitality, Life/hit points) to cast spells.
85Designing Magic Systems h Michael A. Stackpole
I’ll admit a marked preference for the advanced method. It makes
the cost of magic readily apparent to players and readers. In my Crown
Colonies novels, firearms are fired by magic, and combatants, depending
upon their stamina and skill, can fire a limited number of shots before
they fall exhausted. Using larger weapons, like cannons, can literally kill
gunners by draining them of strength. In that world, any magic use results
in physical damage, like bruising. Because the effects are cumulative,
characters have a chance to contemplate what the results of their continued
action are likely to be, and face a choice between being heroically dead, or
alive and disgraced by running from combat.
In any magic system, a balance must be struck between effort and effect
for the system to be entertaining and provide dramatic tension. While
a simple spell-point cost system works well to establish this balance, it
lacks some of the more interesting window-dressing aspects that provide
mystery and wonderment to games. Moreover, providing means to
lower the costs for a desired effect rewards experienced characters and
quick-thinking players—good things to do in a game.
For the sake of draining complexity from what follows, I’d like you to
imagine a magic system in which everything in reality falls into one of five
elemental groups: Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Wood. Rather obviously the
five groups could be expanded, but we’ll work with a limited palette for this
series of examples.
Ideally the groups in your design would be drawn from elements
intimately woven into your world.
Things which could be employed to mitigate the cost of a spell are:
Components: Any component that could logically be used in an
enchantment would be placed into a group. For example, a salamander is
often considered a creature of fire. Let’s say, in your world, healing spells
are also grouped as fire because they rekindle the spark of life. It would
be possible, then, for a
,wounded warrior to consume all or part of a
salamander and, for the next couple of hours, the effects of a healing spell
would be increased.
Balancing that positive effect could be accomplished in a couple of
different ways. For the next day and a half his sweat would exude a faint
scent of salamanders, which attracts lizard-men and drives them slightly
crazy. Or, remaining in the magical realm, while he has salamander in his
system, he’s far more susceptible to spells based in water, the opposition
force to fire.
Style: Mages educated by one school of thaumaturgy might have greater
skill in casting certain classes of spells. For example, an Academy on an
island might turn out mages really good at water-related spells, providing
a natural advantage with them but difficulty with fire-based spells.
86 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Conversely, a student who studied under a Master whose cave is on an
active volcano might have learned a lot about fire, and not much about
anything else. So, casting spells and using components with which the
mage is most comfortable will cost less, and is balanced by an increased
cost (or decreased level of efficacy) for spells from outside his wheelhouse.
Knowledge: Spells can be grouped in other ways from the elements.
When I was working for Flying Buffalo, Inc., I created the 8 Cs of Magic.
All spells broke down into one of eight classes: Combat, Conveyance,
Clairvoyance, Construction, Conjuration, Curative, Communications
and Concealment. It would make sense for a murderous mage to have
concentrated in Combat and Concealment, whereas a kindly mage might
have focused upon Curative magic. Having skills in these general areas
would demand that the magic system is integrated with any skills and
experience systems in the game.
A package deal is a logical grouping of magics that work well together for
a particular occupation. A sailor, for example, might know spells that splice
ropes, can reconstruct spars, and help in navigation or moving a becalmed
ship. Providing access to those spells at a more proficient level would make
sense, especially in a campaign setting where roleplaying is rewarded over
roll playing.
Arcana: Arcana would function a lot like Components, but are best if
handled with a significant degree of mystery and delayed effect. Let us say,
for example, that a mage knows a symbol for fire from the ancient language
of the Thaumaturges (a nearly forgotten race of mages who were giants
and heroes and who died out because of a massive war between them). He
knows that if he draws it over the site of a wound in salamander blood, it
really boosts the effect of his healing spell.
The balance here is that its employment—which is likely learned through
experimentation—has unintended consequences. The patient, for example,
might become far more susceptible to the cold. They might develop a skin
condition which involves scaly skin. These would all be things which, when
they come to a head, will generate a lot of drama.
Preparation: Having a character take the time to prepare potions, spells,
and enchantments outside of an adventure is something I favor. This is
likely based out of my learning to play RPGs through Flying Buffalo’s solo
adventures. Being able to spend money, buy components, combine them,
roll some dice, and come up with a magic item is a great way to kill time
between games. While a Game Master will have to supervise (or trust) the
player creating these items, it’s a great way for the player to experiment.
To whit, he can report to a DM what components he used, how much
time (and gold) he was spending on the effort, and what his intended goal
for the concoction was. He makes any die rolls the DM calls for, and the
87Designing Magic Systems h Michael A. Stackpole
DM can note the result. In this case, he’d tell the player whether or not
he’d succeeded; and then would note for himself any added/unintended
consequences of the effort. A smart DM will also note why he modified the
result so, if the player likes it, he can work to duplicate the effort.
Timing: Werewolves are the perfect embodiment of this factor. Great
magic, but it only works at certain times.
Location: Oracles, shrines, temples, ancient ruins, and altars can be
locations where magic can be strong and used more easily. Conversely,
hostile environments might limit or even negate magic use.
By combining any or all of the above mitigating factors, a designer can
create a pretty robust magic system without getting overly complex. By
just giving a mage a spell-point reduction equal to his level number for
any factor that applies (with everything costing at least one point), simple
addition and subtraction is all that’s required to make it work. Conversely,
increasing the spell-point cost if they want to push things for a greater
result also works.
The Whiff of Death: Magic, and truly ambitious efforts at it, should
always contain a chance of injury or death. Spell-point systems have that
built in, for the most part. Most systems also allow for a saving throw
mechanism within certain spells—either for the target to avoid damage, or
the mage to increase damage. Failure to make such a roll by the mage, or a
spectacular success by the target in avoiding damage, can and likely should
rebound harshly on the mage.
Random dice rolls are not the only way to introduce this element. Say
a mage finds an artifact which allows him to cast spells at a reduced cost.
With research he may pinpoint spells where it will be especially effective.
Likewise, he might uncover spells where it harms him—though not many
players will heed veiled warnings couched in terms of legends. Setting up
story-based balance points does require more work on the DM’s part, but
builds more mystery into the world.
Effective and fun magic systems can be dressed up any way you like.
By balancing your system, not only do you prevent it from overwhelming
your game, but you give your players more mysteries to unravel, which is
always entertaining. And that, after all, is what makes gaming magical in
and of itself.
88 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
ome adventures start with a villain. Some start with a monster list
or a big event meant to Change Everything about the campaign.
Those are all fine ways to start design for a setting and a story, and I’d say
they work for fiction superlatively. But for RPGs on the tabletop or on the
screen, sometimes those elements are second.
Yes, the main ingredient for me to design a worthwhile adventure is a
worthwhile location.
Why Location?
There’s a simple reason that location matters so much in an adventure
design: It’s the only story element that a game designer really controls.
The heroes of the story are controlled by the players; they can go and do
anything, do everything out of sequence, fight all the roleplay encounters,
and talk their way out of all the fights.
They probably won’t. But the players are definitely out of the designer’s
control. They lead the adventure plot points through their decisions, but
they aren’t something you need to consider at the highest level.
The DM, by contrast, controls all the non-player characters and
monsters, a cast of characters that you as the designer have a lot of say over.
The villain, the henchmen, their motives, their stats, and their locations
are all determined by your design. Based on my own experience, many
Dungeon Masters don’t run them as written. They improvise. They tweak,
they mold and rename to match their own home game, to shoehorn it
in. That’s fine—well, that’s great, actually. They’re making the experience
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89Location as a Fulcrum for Superior Design h Wolfgang Baur
better for the players. But the voice, the impersonation, the details of all
those characters, even their tactics, stand or fall based on how the DM
,feels
about them. Sometimes he’ll run them by the book, sometimes he won’t.
The setting, though—well, that’s different. As the game designer, you
control the maps, the area descriptions, the flow from one encounter to
the next. The dialogue, the choices of plot by PC and villain—those aren’t
yours to command. But the sequence, the map, and the locations are all
elements that are the foundation of an adventure and that most DMs rarely
change. (Why buy a cool castle or dungeon with a map if you need to
redraw the map?)
So, how can a designer make the most of this control over setting?
In three ways: the ideal adventuring location must be exotic, it must be
plausible, and it must be worthy of heroic investigations.
Exotic Lands
Damn few gamers want to see the wide-open prairie grasses or the well-
kept crops of a peaceful kingdom in their fantasy game world. They’d
rather brave the fetid Last Swamp, a place infused with the ghosts of a
slaughtered army, or perhaps fight their way up the Snowy Mountains, a
chill place with towering cliffs where heroes can leap from cloud to cloud
on their way to the giant’s castle.
Going someplace where normal people would fear to tread does two
things from the gameplay perspective: it proves their character’s heroism
by daring to go somewhere difficult, and it gives the whole venture, in the
end, an air of accomplishment.
Now, I’d argue that the accomplishment is almost entirely illusory. Do
any but the most anal-retentive and novice of Dungeon Masters bother to
track every pack of rations and enforce every penalty of climate, disease,
and terrain? Probably not—there are monsters to throw at the players! But
having strange scenery does provide some degree of heroics in those who
venture there, and it makes it easy for the DM to increase the threat level
with lava, avalanches, and other location-based elements.
Choosing a locale with some style is a smart design choice. It’s loaded
with peril and totally subjective, but I think it’s fair to say that making your
fantasy setting bold and brash pays off in what it implies later: the cover
art, the combat setups, the terrain effects, and even the sense of a journey
and exploration of the frontier or the wilderness—all great themes.
Exotic People
Exotic locales are much more than just geography, of course: Different
cultures, classes, and lifeforms can all lend an air of the exotic far more
effectively than the desert climate or the Fire Swamps of Bajor.
90 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
For instance, modern gamers certainly prefer the exotic over the
homegrown, and designers tend to place modern-day adventures in exotic
lands as well. That is, a gang of Masonic elders and redneck mercenary
PCs might enjoy Vegas or Cairo more than Muncie or suburban Dallas.
Yes, it might be fun to add vampires to your hometown and play that out,
or nuke Miami and see what sort of mutant apocalyptic landscape your
players might enjoy, but those are exceptions. Most players would rather
visit Victorian London, Communist China in the Cold War, or the Incan
Empire at its height. Go big in the real world.
And do the same in fantasy. The heights of the Elven Court, the
mysteries of the dwarven Cantons, the world of cloud pirates, or an empire
ruled by vampires—there’s no reason that fantasy shouldn’t immediately
grasp hold of strange cultures, customs, languages, and people. Yes, the
scenery is fun to describe, but this is smart design for other reasons as well.
It provides incentive to explore, to ask questions, to learn the ways of this
new place, to not make too many assumptions. An exotic environment
rewards players who are curious, not just those who have optimized
their damage per strike. A player can be both a tactical mastermind and
intensely curious why the halfling empire has never been conquered from
without. Provide both elements as a designer, and the DM is grateful and
the players are enthralled with the setting.
Plausible
While I’ve just finished praising the exotic, I’ll now contradict myself.
The exotic is a tool, but it is so very easy to abuse. Fantasy has stereotypes
for a reason: Those stereotypes work, they are grounded in the fantasy
traditions of literature and gaming, and they are accessible to newcomers.
Yes, dwarves love beer and elves drink wine, dwarves are smiths and elves
are archers and work mithral and ancient magics equally well. The trouble
many designers get into is an overemphasis on weird for the sake of weird.
There’s a point where flights of fantasy turn into Alice-in-Wonderland
oddities that are . . . disturbing? Hard to describe, certainly.
Now, if you’re going to cut against the grain on those stereotypes as
a designer, more power to you. But I’d offer two cautions to anyone
discarding stereotypes in order to make the adventure more exotic. First,
the farther away you move from the tropes of your genre, the more original
you are, then after a certain point, the less anyone will care about your
wild originality. The audience will follow you to new and wonderful; most
will stop at the border of weird. Indeed, fantasy gamers are inherently
conservative in their fantasy tastes.
Humans in general and gamers in particular want “same but different”
rather than “wildly original” in their stories and entertainment, and
91Location as a Fulcrum for Superior Design h Wolfgang Baur
roleplaying games are no exception. The most original creations may be
more acceptable to your audience if you give them a new name and a
standalone role in your world: deryni rather than psionicists, kender rather
than childlike kleptomaniacal halflings.
After a certain point—and as the designer must know where that point
is—your dwarves aren’t dwarves anymore, they are uvandir.
Likewise, if every city is a shining wonder of magic and pure eldritch
power, the DM will wonder why he paid good money for a boring utopia
of mega-magic. You need to change up the scenery in an adventure to keep
it interesting. Slums can be exotic and exciting, full of their own customs,
their own hierarchy, their own ability to make noble, well-fed adventurers
feel like fish out of water. Or if the PCs are all gutter urchins, perhaps a
visit to the harsh, orderly orphanage of the Knights of Undying Light will
change things around; being asked to stand vigil all night will play havoc
with a young guttersnipe’s usual nocturnal habits.
The idea for all these directions is simple. Give the Dungeon Master
someplace new, someplace that must exist in a fantasy world, and do a
better job of describing how it works and who its people are and what
they want than the DM could do on his own. Give that world a sense of
both strangeness to make it exciting and a sense of familiarity to keep it
accessible—greed, familial loyalty, and the urge to power are universal
constants, for example. This is what I mean by plausibility in setting.
It must be simultaneously different, and yet not so strange that the
players cannot come to grips with it. A setting built on the customs of
Mesoamerica may be fascinating (see Empire of the Petal Throne, for an
example), but it will never be a mass market success, and the audience able
to appreciate will always be a small one.
Make your story universal enough that everyone sees their own life
reflected in it. Even if the orphan is a gnome and the city is gold rush
camp in the ruins of a dwarven settlement, the collision of a child without
anyone in the world and a place driven purely by money should still
connect with DMs and players who have seen something of the world.
The role of setting can ground the larger issues. The orphan isn’t in
trouble unless the environment itself is hostile—so make sure that it is
visibly hostile. The more you emphasize two or three elements of the
setting—through read-aloud text, through maps, and through NPC or
area descriptions—the more likely it is that the DM will pick
,up those
elements and relay them to the players. A few short details can make all the
difference to bring the setting alive.
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Worthy
Finally, there’s the matter of worthy settings. What the heck do I mean by
“worthy” locations? This one’s the hardest to define, but let me see if I can
sharpen up the concept.
Heroes only get so many chances to go on an adventure. Many characters
in RPGs die horribly, and even in a game with raise dead and resurrection
as everyday occurrences, there are still disintegrations, dragon’s acid blasts,
and lava pits that leave nothing to raise. And gamers only have so many
hours to spend gaming so, as the designer, it is incumbent on you not to
waste either heroic lives or player time.
Make those settings count. A dragon’s lair should be feared for miles
around, not unknown and unremarked. A dark lord should live in a
kingdom or at least a fiefdom of his own, because his evil seeps into
everything around him. Hiding a dark lord in a dank basem*nt somewhere
is just . . . an underwhelming milieu. Think Hollywood, in other words. If
you’re planning a finale for an adventure, consider your setting the way a
Hollywood location scout would consider it.
What’s most effective for the adventure you’re trying to tell: the squalid
tavern down along the moldering docks, or a charred jungle full of the
haunting cries of ghostly parrots, or a madcap festival of halflings, half-
besotted and half-stuffed with food while devils scheme around them? Any
of those might be the right setting for a different type of adventure. Think
about where you’d set the final scene—and then go one better.
Here’s where worthy become a little tricky, as location bleeds into plot
and character. If your villain is found at the top of a crumbling keep, then
make sure that keep has connections available for the DM to hook into his
party. Perhaps they found an earlier clue that one member of the party is
related to the bloodline that built the place. Perhaps the wizard’s skill with
the arcane revealed that the site is metaphysically dangerous: Too much
magic here may release something buried under the castle walls, something
ancient and worse than their present foe. Perhaps the castle is where the
paladin or his squire fought to defend his order against overwhelming
odds, and lost.
In other words, an ideal location has some connection to things greater
than the characters themselves: to their family, their institutions, religions,
history, and even their place in the metaphysical world. This is why Joseph
Campbell goes on about the hero leaving civilization behind, going into
darkness, and returning triumphant. The place the heroes go must be
worthy at that mythic level: It must be where ancient blood was spilled,
sacrifices were made in a great cause, where the gods themselves reached
down and changed the course of war and the course of history. That sort of
setting is a frame worthy of the deeds of the current player characters—and
93Location as a Fulcrum for Superior Design h Wolfgang Baur
if you’ve designed it right and the DM is on the ball, that sort of setting
creates a frame worthy of new heroic tales. Make that setting rich, and
deep, and you’ll be surprised at how DMs and players respond. Never think
of location as just window dressing, or just a sequence of squares and fields
of fire. Never design it as an afterthought.
Make it worthy, and the adventure itself will resonate with that sense of
depth and importance and heroic story. That’s location’s role in design.
94 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
orldbuilding is an enormous topic. In fact, all forms of it can be
distilled down into a few principles: setting, characters, logic, and
throwing rocks into ponds.
Ponds, you ask? Yeah, they are a useful analogy for scoping this sort of
work. Bear with me. I have five more general points to address first.
Point 1: Gaming Ain’t Fiction
The worldbuilding I did with those fiction writers tends to be all about the
telling detail, building the world from the character out (or building the
character from the setting), directing reader attention to just the parts that
matter, and so on. None of this works for gamers because, as a designer,
your first audience is the DM, not the players. Even if the DM likes the
worldbuilding, you have little control over how it gets bent, twisted, and
mutilated to suit a homebrew or a corporate campaign setting, or some
combination of the two. So your worldbuilding had better be bulletproof.
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Worldbuilding
Wolfgang Baur
13
“To make a Secondary World . . . commanding Secondary Belief, will
probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special
skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are
attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement . . .
indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.”
—JRR Tolkien, On Faery Stories
95Worldbuilding h Wolfgang Baur
What do I mean by bulletproof? You need to hit a very particular sort of
middle ground. For fantasy settings, it needs to be the-same-but-different,
a tricky target if ever there was one. If you build a clichéd set of elven
havens, hobbit shires, and dwarven mines, nobody will give a damn. They
have seen it before. Likewise, if you build something so odd and exotic
that the only way to understand it is to read it all, play the simulator, and
chart some graphs, well, not many people will follow you there either. For
settings like Colonial Gothic, Day After Ragnarok, Numenera, Over the
Edge, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Empire of the Petal Throne, or Blue Planet,
you may have a small but devoted hardcore following. That’s the best you
can hope for.
The trick is that you must offer a core concept that’s easy to grasp and fun
to play once the shiny-cool factor has worn off . Bulletproof worldbuilding
starts with a big idea that is so cool, other people will import it wholesale
into their homebrew. They will make room for it in Eberron, the Realms,
Greyhawk, Freeport, or Midgard. This is easier to do with an adventure
or region than a whole campaign setting. What’s that big idea? That is up
to you; it’s your world. But if you look at the Free City of Zobeck or the
Empire of the Ghouls, it is pretty obvious what the setting hook is. Your
hook should be just as clear.
Point 2: Genres, Action, and Big Ideas
What do you want the world to do for players and for the DM? Ask that
question when you start worldbuilding. What it does for the designer or
the corporation should always be secondary.
Think about your goals and touchstones in genre terms. Is it steampunk
or power fantasy? Is it dark fey kingdoms or low-magic intrigue? You know
the kind of big choices I’m talking about. This approach has limits: most
genres are already familiar to the reader.
You might try melding multiple genres, but you will weaken the
setting if you try to do too many things at once. If you want a historical,
ethnographic setting (drawing on, say, samurai Japan or mameluke Egypt)
you are looking at a lower magic world. If you want a Manichean world of
pure white and black, with heavy emphasis on magic, ancient gods walking
the earth, and wizards in different colored robes, that’s tough to build with
a gritty, low magic approach. Choosing one of these approaches enables
certain heroic actions (gunpowder, or combat feats, or chaos magic) and
eliminates or reduces others. Druids and rangers in an urban campaign
can work, but it’s a lot harder to make it to work well. Every choice carries
wide-ranging consequences.
Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series melds genres well, blending Napoleonic
nautical fiction with dragon fantasy. Likewise, Harry Potter melds the
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traditional English schoolboy story with traditional fantasy. The goal is
to find two genres that complement each other. Other examples include
the nautical and space-faring fantasy of Spelljammer, the Cold War and
Cthulhu mythos in Delta Green, or the combination of planar/time travel
and Hong Kong action in Feng Shui.
You can create your world large enough to contain multitudes, as in the
kitchen-sink approach of Eberron and the Realms. This creates problems,
which I’ll get to in a minute.
I use an alternative way of thinking about big ideas in worldbuilding,
namely that worlds are verbs. You can describe city streets, architecture,
and the typical tavern all day long, but what matters in gameplay are the
actions of the inhabitants and the resources of the setting. Are the NPCs
cowardly? Make it plain that no one but the PCs is going to save this town.
Are the NPCs too bloodthirsty? Make it painfully obvious that they’re
going to war and a lot of innocents will die, unless the PCs stop it.
Think of the main type of action that you want to enable (whether that’s
pulp adventure, sword and sorcery, or musketeers vs. necromancers). You
can build places, organizations, and characters that support that conflict.
With that idealized action in mind, you can quickly find whether a cool new
idea helps your setting or just muddies the water. It’s a streamlining tool.
There is a time to be coy with your readers, and to give yourself room
for future growth in the setting. When you are laying down the foundation
conflicts of the setting is Not That Time. Spell it out. If someone asks you
for the two-sentence description of “What is it all about?” you better be
able to give it.
Point 3: Hide Your Work. Bury It Deep
Science fiction writer M. John Harrison said:
“Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent.
Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing
(indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability
to fulfill their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do
everything around here if anything is going to get done.
“Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great
clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place
that isn’t there.
“A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is
there. It isn’t possible, and if it was the results wouldn’t be readable:
they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a
hallowed place of dedication and lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the
psychological type of the worldbuilder and the worldbuilder’s victim, and
makes us very afraid.”
97Worldbuilding h Wolfgang Baur
Fairly harsh. He’s largely right, as far as fiction is concerned. You don’t
want big data dumps in a novel or short story, though many writers find
they need to do worldbuilding in text that never appears in their novels
(this is the origin of the Silmarillion and many other works). Those
notes are cut early, but they have served their function: to help the writer
map out the logic of the setting. In good fiction, the reader shouldn’t be
burdened with that.
Games aren’t fiction. In an RPG, the requirements are different: the
world-building in Empire of the Ghouls isn’t necessary to the adventure. It is
necessary to the DM, who needs tools and backstory to carry an adventure
when it goes off in unexpected directions. A novel or story controls the
reader’s point of view; a game session doesn’t and can’t control the player’s
point of view, so there needs to be some kind of fallback.
Setting up fallbacks goes on with good worldbuilding. A lot of material
fades into the background. A DM reads the sourcebook or skims the
relevant material on an institution, class, or society, and uses that to power
the storyline, either through their adventures based on the backstory, or
through published adventures in whole or part. Worldbuilding should not
be dropped on players in big lumps. Dropping it on DMs in large, weighty
tomes seems to make everyone happy: it defines setting for the designer
(allowing you to establish shared ground), it explains material that the DM
wants for context, and it doesn’t interfere with the player’s focus on their
characters and heroic action.
But it can be a problem. A DM showing off his worldbuilding to players
who just want to get on with the story does not serve his audience well; he’s
too self-centered to address the characters as the primary source of action
and drama in the campaign. Do the worldbuilding you need to set up a
story, then do the same thing novelists and story writers do: bury it deep in
a research file.
If you do, you will have the satisfaction of knowing all the secrets. The
players just want to skim the cream of all that work, just as readers skim the
surface of setting in a novel. Readers and players are there for characters
first, setting second. As a freelance rule of thumb, keep your backstory and
worldbuilding down to 10 percent of the total word count of any adventure
if you can.
Point 4: Logic of the Setting
Internal consistency is crucial. The logic of the setting should be ironclad.
Once you set up the rules, never break them. If the moon goddess is
the villain in your campaign, keep her that way. Switching her into a
sympathetic role halfway through loses all the credibility you have built up.
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The upside of consistency is that players know what to expect. The
downside is a smaller palette to play with for any one world or campaign.
You may love both historical simulation and anime, but combining the two
won’t work to either’s advantage. At best, different kingdoms operate under
different rules or expectations (the way the Moonshaes are quite a different
tone than Waterdeep, or that the Southlands are not Zobeck).
This kitchen-sink approach is the default for the main D&D settings
(despite my earlier grousing), and it’s not entirely bad. Every DM finds some
part that appeals to them. The weakness of the kitchen sink is that, by trying
to appeal to everyone, every one of its flavors becomes muddied. The players
will want to use elements from all over the setting. Your Aundairian wizard
knights will stand arm-in-arm with Khorvaire’s undead captains and the
Silver Flame’s prissy paladins. If you mix styles and flavors too often (within
the same adventure, say) you dilute the overall campaign tone. Certainly, it’s
a price you might be willing to pay; just be aware you are paying it.
The Empire of the Ghouls has a simple, consistent logic: it is all about
cannibalism, about sick hungers and undead power-mongers and the weird
ecology of the underdark. Switching into a light-and-fluffy or humorous
tone won’t work, even for a single encounter. That undermines all the work.
This doesn’t mean that your players won’t find humor in the scenarios,
NPC names, their own actions or failures. That is not the same as throwing
in a goofy stoner pseudodragon, an undead hobbit minstrel, or a set of
exploding smiley-faces. While those might be fine in an April Fool or
light-hearted adventure, you need to know the logic of your adventure and
stick with it throughout.
Point 5: Empire of the Ghouls
Speaking of the Imperium, how did that worldbuilding start? What is the
logic? It is a strange setting, so I’ll just say a few words about it by way of
an example of worldbuilding logic. This is a case where the origins of the
setting are pretty well established, as is the reinvention of the setting, its
growth and its continuing popularity.
The logic of Empire derives from something that Dragon magazine
editor Roger Moore said to me in 1995, namely “Wouldn’t it be neat if
ghouls or something ran the Underdark?”
To which I said, “Heck yes, the undead should definitely be kicking
drow butt. I’ll write up a proposal.” Little did I know how obsessed
,I would
become with it (four drafts, I think, to keep the word count down). Or that
it would take a year to write. Or that it would be so well received. It’s dark,
what with the cannibal, claustrophobic, drowning, and generally morbid
elements that permeate it. Looking back, the mood at TSR as the company
was going bankrupt may have been a factor.
99Worldbuilding h Wolfgang Baur
In design terms, the setting has a fun “what-if ” logic, giving ghouls
more power, more magic, a society, civilization, and culture. “Kingdom of
the Ghouls” (Dungeon Magazine #70) did a lot of that in its 22,000 words
or so. The logic of the premise is easy: ghouls gain food or offspring every
time a foe falls. They march and work tirelessly. They fight with a paralytic
touch and with power equal to drow or dwarves, but without needing silly
things like clean air or water. In a hostile environment like the underdark,
their undead state is a huge advantage. The neatness of low-resource
society makes the ecology work, and the weirdness of it clicks in neatly
with the tone of the underdark generally. The premise has a logic that,
even at the time, felt like it just needed a lot of imagination and polish and
detail. But the core laws or premises were unshaken from start to finish.
The ghouls seem likely to succeed in their dreams of conquest. Naturally,
they also reflect a lot of things that I layered on as important to the
flavor, such as remembering their prior lives (giving them access to skills
and magic of the surface), tying them to shadow energies, advanced
necromancy, and a martial and quasi-feudal social structure.
When the time came to revisit the theme but with all-new characters and
setting for Midgard, the Kingdom became the Empire, and the tropes of
the undead merged with tropes of imperial conquest. The society has been
around longer, the scale of the empire is bigger, and the goals are more than
just the conquest of the underdark. They now have domesticated animals
(giant carrion beetles), an underclass (the beggar ghouls), a more complex
lifecycle (with bloated, sated, and bonepowder ghouls), and professional
legions to fight for the imperial center. The class system is still fairly fluid,
and clawing your way to the top is most ghouls’ goal. But the society is
more complicated and interesting: multiple strange cults, more varied
equipment, specialized magic, the slave system with deadmind powder and
guardian wraiths, the backstory of consolidation of the Hundred Kings,
and so on. The mechanics are different, the flavor is much richer, but the
logic beneath it all is based on the same what-if.
I’m confident that the adventure itself could have been published without
the backstory chapter. Working up that level of detail is great. Much of it
is not visible to the PCs except though Knowledge checks and discussions
with NPCs. Both are narrow channels. One of the beauties of publishing
with Kobold Press is that I provide all the additional material that people
want. Maybe not all of that backstory will work its way into each DM’s
adventure, but it’s there for everyone if they need it.
The 3rd Edition D&D worldbuilding for ghouls was fairly small
(one society in detail, relatively small territory). It went larger with the
5thEdition version (Kobold Press, 2020), with more emphasis on allies,
religious cults, trade, specific subclasses and PC races of the underworld,
100 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
and so forth. This is a natural progression for a successful setting; over
time, the lore and foundation leads to new questions, new adventures, and
new design ideas that are gleefully adopted, while the elements that were
less successful in the original are quietly dropped or eroded away in later
editions of the world.
At Last! Pond-Oriented Worldbuilding
Finally, back to throwing rocks into ponds. I imagine the pond as the size
of the worldbuilding project. The rock is the place where the party arrives
and changes the world in some way. The trick is to write only the section
where the rock lands, or at least to accommodate any option. You can do
this in one of three ways:
1. You can shrink the pond into a rock-sized area (that is, you narrow
the size of the setting)
2. You can guide their hand (railroading the plot)
3. You can offer the players a huge pond, so that no matter where they
land, the effect is a small splash (a commercial, kitchen-sink setting).
My recommendation is you keep it small to start.
The world really only needs to be big enough to envelop the actions your
players take, and to show the first ripples. Think about how many areas
you need to detail/fill with water for a world to work like that. Ideally, it’s
just the space right under the rock where the players meet the world, plus
little ripples nearby. In fiction, that’s exactly the amount of worldbuilding
you need, as John Harrison suggests, since the author guides the reader’s
viewpoint every step of the way. In gaming, you need a margin of error
to account for player actions and decisions. For most campaigns, you
get the most dramatic campaign with a narrow focus. Any splash seems
larger in a smaller pond than in the ocean. With a narrow focus, the only
worldbuilding you need to do is what the DM and players need for a very
limited time period: the first few adventures in a campaign setting. For
the most powerful impression, avoid the kitchen sink. Stick to a particular
genre, a particular conflict, a particular kingdom, and make it matter.
Set-up
I recommend setting clear limits on character types: ask players to stick
to a subset of the core classes. Barbarian, ranger, druid, and bard define a
setting—and so do fighter, paladin, cleric, monk, and wizard. If you make
31 flavors available, be sure that your players will try to use at least that
many (“I’m a half-dragon Aundairian wizard with halfling scout levels”). I
101Worldbuilding h Wolfgang Baur
exaggerate, but not by much. Likewise, you may get a more focused party
(and tighter connections to other setting elements) if you restrict PC races
to human plus one or two others. Zobeck, for instance, is really about
humans, dwarves, and kobolds. Everything else is a bonus.
Tight Focus
Most of what constitutes “worldbuilding” in RPG products is padding,
things that give a sense of the setting without being in any way useful to
anyone during play. Padding makes it sound more negative than it really is;
flavor, short fiction, and epic histories all add to the reading experience, to
the broader understanding of the setting, and to the DM’s fun in running the
game. Just because something isn’t “useful” doesn’t mean it’s not fun. You can
build a huge pond with waterfalls and bridges and duckweed and streams.
But don’t be surprised if your players stick to their own little lily pad.
As a hobby, worldbuilding eats up as much time as you want to devote to
it. If your time is limited, direct the vast majority of design time squarely
at the gameplay elements, such as flashy feats, deadly monsters, dangerous
terrain, new spells. I don’t just mean crunch, of course: plot twists, planned
set pieces, intriguing handouts, lines of dialogue that reveal crucial
information, or the details of traps and treasures are critical ways to show
what the world is like. As long as the players will see it, it’s worth your time.
If you have time left over to write a creation myth, a centuries-long history,
a set of extinct creatures, or a lost form of magic, great.
To avoid either overdoing the backstory or undercooking the flavor, nail
your worldbuilding early. Use a one-sentence bit of logic for the world or
each major region. Keep a set of actions in mind that fit into that narrow
tube called “Playtime at the Table.” Know your big idea, your tone, and
your story goals, and let things proceed from that. If you are good at
improvisation, I would say spend your time on plot and
,but they still scratch an itch that goes deep into the
13 What is Design? h Wolfgang Baur
human id. This usually means an appeal to the reptilian drive to conquer,
control, and master the world around us, to derive status and overcome
enemies, to find food and resources for our tribe and family. Killing things
and taking their treasure is—to my mind—a gaming variation on the
hunter-gatherer culture that defined human existence for 99 percent of our
species’ existence. No wonder it’s so compelling; it is bred in the bone.
Setting Plus Mechanics
Let’s consider the value of setting and mechanics for tabletop roleplaying
games. The two are often discussed as if they were at odds, as if a player or
a DM should favor “crunch” over “fluff ” (both rather misleading terms)
or—more literally—mechanics and rules over flavor and story elements.
This is a tragic mistake, because good design is not about choosing a single
design dimension and pursuing it until even the most hardcore fans grow
AMATEUR AND PROFESSIONAL DESIGN
Game design is work done at a remove, that is, at a layer of abstraction
away from simply sitting down and playing a game yourself. In particular,
the work of design needs to consider the needs of the audience, rather
than your own needs as a gamer, to be successful. Sometimes these
two will overlap heavily—that’s certainly the case for DMs and many
freelancers in roleplaying game design—but it’s not always the case.
Conflating your needs and your audience’s needs makes you a less
effective designer. And the more you cater to your own needs as a gamer
rather than to the needs of your audience, the less professional and
generally more “indie” your design will be. There’s absolutely nothing
wrong with indie game design, but it proceeds from an assumption
that the audience is the niche player and the designer is an auteur. A
wonderful style when done well, but not the only way to succeed.
This distinction between your game preferences and the audience’s
needs is crucial to create the strongest work. When you no longer
see yourself as DM or audience, but design with them in mind rather
than only for yourself, you’ve reached a certain turning point in your
career. Some game studios see this as a failing and assume that if you
are not a member of the target audience you can never understand
that audience. This is patent nonsense; most of the great video game
designers today are not playing twitch games, but this does not stop
them from designing such games. I had been designing professionally
for several years before I figured out this distinction between audience
and designer. At that point, I stopped arguing over trivial points of
personal preference (well, mostly) and started looking for techniques to
hold two audiences (DM and player) instead of one (myself as a DM).
14 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
bored; it’s about striking a compelling balance between competing needs
for an enjoyable play experience for different audiences. Design in this
sense is about making the right trade-offs.
In terms of the role-playing game audiences (and most designers and
fans alike agree that there are several), I’d argue that generating a satisfying
play experience for these types of games requires design of the rules and
the setting in parallel. Games that fail to generate a sufficiently compelling
setting will attract tactical gamers and home brewers, but will not engage
a wider audience that is interested in exploring a setting, specific character
tropes, and telling long-form heroic tales. Games that enjoy a rich setting
but fail to deliver rules that appeal to mechanical tinkerers, tweakers, and
tacticians will likewise limit their audience, and furthermore will make it
difficult to support the setting with expanded rules material. It’s narratively
compelling but lacks the mechanical rigor of a game that rewards
long-term engagement and rules mastery.
Doing both well delivers the experience players want, but many designs
fail on one leg or the other. If you can use an existing and well-supported
rules set, you save yourself a great deal of trouble at the possible expense
of fine-tuning the mechanics to suit your story and setting needs. If you
decide to build out rules first and foremost . . . Well, that’s the subject of
another essay in this collection. A broad scope rules set is achievable,
but tighter focus generates stronger play experiences. That is, if your
mechanics need to cover everything from horses to spaceships and psionics
to demon summoning and gigawatt lasers you may wind up with a game
that lacks an audience, because it doesn’t quite make up its mind as to what
it wants to be. Most successful RPGs specialize in certain time periods or
genres, and indie games in some cases specialize in a particular plot line
(operatic drama, zombie survival, or religious orthodoxy) or assume a
particular cast of characters (Dr. Frankenstein’s servants, or mice).
Why is that? Because part of design is knowing to what degree you’ll
need to integrate setting and rules. If you already assume zombie survival
as the default setting trope, you need weapons and survival gear rules,
but the characters probably won’t spend a ton of time using diplomacy
skills. You can spend your design time more profitably outlining the stages
of zombie infection or variant chainsaw rules. Different games demand
different emphases. Board games are at one end of a spectrum where rules
carry the burden of play. Card games are somewhere on the rules-heavy
side. Miniatures gaming, MMOs, and roleplaying games lean further into
the setting side of things. Failure to provide enough quests and backstory
is unforgivable in a roleplaying-heavy style of play. Failure to provide short,
crisp, and complete mechanics is unforgivable in a board game.
15 What is Design? h Wolfgang Baur
What style of play your audience favors decides how much time you spend
on the core rules and how much time you spend developing the setting.
Defining the Boundaries, Choosing Your Players
All too often, roleplaying game designs try to do far too much, and for years
the industry largely abandoned the introductory book or box set that can be
read and implemented by a new player. (It’s made a huge comeback in the
past decade with some high-value, highly effective intro sets, including the
massively successful mass market 5th Edition Dungeons&Dragons Starter
Set, and even the Starfinder RPG Beginner Box.)
Those introductions set up the principles of gaming for people who
knew nothing about roleplaying; their “what is design” core goal was to
make difficult games accessible and to provide some sense of mastery to
newbies. That’s a very difficult design task and depends on a sharp eye for
what carries a player into the game, engages them, and moves them on to
master the next elements quickly. Defining the boundaries is crucial: You
need to provide enough material for a player to get started while providing
enough depth so that a veteran player isn’t bored.
I’d argue the task is largely impossible. For generations, the core RPG
books were newbie-hostile, and largely assumed that you had already
mastered basic roleplaying concepts. The 5th Edition D&D rules set has
managed to keep its core rules lighter than many previous editions and made
them incredibly accessible through online sources such as D&D Beyond and
the Roll20 Compendium. Most players learn these games from someone
who already knows them; in the past that was a friend or neighbor, though
now it might just be someone on a Discord server or other virtual space.
Watching streaming play is a great way to learn for many; it’s easier to learn
any new skill by watching someone else perform it first.
The first thing to do with a design is figure out who you want as
your player. That single decision will inform all others after it, from the
components of the game to the complexity
,tone, and ignore
the historical, the mercantile, and the mechanical sides of worldbuilding.
The easiest method starts with a single village, city, or kingdom.
Deliberately ignore the rest of the world until the party asks about it or
is ready for it. “I’ll tell you about that next week” is always an acceptable
answer. Invent the ancient empires and the lost form of magic when the
party is ready to go find their dungeons and loot them. Then have the
new magic burned into their brains by the last surviving ghost of their
archmagi. But leave the epic sweep out of all your initial plans. Epicness
shows up on its own soon enough, if your villains and their current plots
get most of your attention.
102 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Conclusion
Players find a world irresistible if it offers them immediate hooks to act
heroic from the first time they gather together, and just enough detail
to keep them coming back. DMs love a setting if it offers them endless
stories to tell, without the minutiae that just clutter their ability to keep a
campaign moving.
Action is your secret friend in worldbuilding: set (real or figurative)
boulders on top of cliffs, leave levers for the DM and players to pull, string
high-tension wire between the major factions—and trust that the gamers’
experience will do the rest. Your ultimate worldbuilding goal is always to
create a powder keg that the heroes inevitably explode or preserve through
their actions.
103Myths and Realities of Game Balance h Monte Cook
ame balance is one of those things that game designers, aspiring
game designers, and hard-core players talk a lot about. In many
ways, it’s easy to see it like the Holy Grail, Tanelorn, or some other quest
object that heroes strive for but few ever reach. Like such quests, it may be
that the value is in the quest itself rather than the end goal. In other words,
it’s the journey and not the destination that counts.
If we’re going to examine game balance in a roleplaying game, however,
the first question that needs to be raised must be, is game balance even
possible? Is there such a thing? I think if we’re going to examine this topic
honestly, the answer is, actually, no. (Or rather, yes, but not in the way that
most people mean—I’ll get to that in a bit.)
That’s right. I’ll say it: In the sense of roleplaying game rule design, game
balance is a myth.
But how can I, a game designer with more than 20 years’ experience,
write such sacrilegious words? Let’s really look at what we mean. Say that
the most brilliant of all game designers put together a game with the goal
of true game balance.
He’s smart, so he keeps it simple. He carefully designs every class/feat/
skill/superpower/whatever in the game so that it is perfectly balanced with
every other class/feat/skill/superpower/whatever. He still has the problem
of the game being out of his control. Some players are “min-maxers” and
will simply take what he’s created and find the loopholes that others won’t,
creating unbalanced options and characters that are better than others.
G
Myths and Realities
of Game Balance
Monte Cook
14
104 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
OK, let’s assume the game designer is so talented that he closes up every
loophole and plugs every hole, so whether you’re a newbie or a talented
rules exploiter, there’s no combination of options that’s better or worse than
any others. (In effect, the designer’s made it so that all choices result in
virtually the same character.) Now the game is truly balanced, right?
Except—it’s still a roleplaying game. It’s still open-ended, based on the
players’ imaginations and the DM’s prerogatives. What the characters
choose to do is not going to be balanced. Some will choose to ignore their
combat options and focus on their character backgrounds while others
use their abilities to their fullest. Even if everyone around the table had
exactly the same character, how the characters are played will be ultimately
unbalanced. Worse, a DM might (accidentally or intentionally) allow one
player special privileges that unbalance the game. Or even if the PCs are all
more or less equal, he might throw challenges against the players that are
so insurmountable or so easily overcome that the game isn’t fun. It doesn’t
even hold the players’ interest.
There’s no amount of game mechanic balancing that can overcome such
problems.
But What is Game Balance?
At this point, some readers may be thinking that I’m being pedantic, just
arguing semantics. But since the game is meant to be played, ignoring how
players use rules when striving for game balance is an exercise in futility.
When people talk about balance in game design, they are often talking
about two fairly different things. The first is balance between characters.
The idea is that all of the characters should be “balanced” with each other;
every character has equal power. The second is balance between the
characters and the rest of the game. A character who gets an ability that
allows him to overcome difficult—or impossible—challenges easily makes
the game unbalanced. Likewise, the reverse: A game with challenges that
are far too difficult for the characters is also unbalanced. The first could be
considered a measure of fairness and the second a measure of fun.
The first case—character vs. character balance—can be boiled down
to how much one player (not character) can do in comparison to other
players. The ultimate currency in a roleplaying game is “time to shine.”
A character designed to be a terror in melee gets to shine when his
character cleaves through a number of foes in battle. A character skilled
at locks and other devices shines when he opens a locked door or disables
the mechanism that closes walls in on everyone. And so on. One could
certainly argue, then, that a game that’s balanced gives every player/
character a moment to shine and that these moments are about equal in
time, importance, and fun.
105Myths and Realities of Game Balance h Monte Cook
A common mistake, then, is to balance characters based on a single
option—combat prowess, for example. If all characters have to be equally
good at the same thing, you end up with characters that are mostly the same.
This is fine, but you risk a certain kind of dynamism with that approach.
Since you’re only focusing on one aspect, you’re not really balancing the
game. You’re balancing one aspect of the game.
Nevertheless, most games make certain options far more interesting,
appealing, or exciting than other options. This could be considered
unbalanced. I’ll start by pointing the finger directly at myself. The Third
Edition of Dungeons & Dragons made combat exciting through a number
of different options and mechanical subsystems. A player could devote a
lot of time developing characters good at certain aspects and not others,
and finding new and intriguing options. A player interested in locks and
mechanisms essentially had two skills to focus on, both using the same
mechanic. While the melee fighter’s moment to shine might last an hour or
more with involved round-by-round detail, the lock expert makes a roll or
two and is done.
Of course, this was intentional. We knew that most players were interested
in combat, and combat makes it easy to produce exciting action sequences
that are challenging and engaging for a whole group of people around the
table—much more so than picking a lock. If we had decided to make every
activity as involved as combat, it would have made the game cumbersome.
Still, this all means that as game designers we intentionally “unbalanced”
the game in favor of combat. We left it up to the DM and the players to
balance combat with non-combat activities as they wished. For some, the
game would be nearly 100 percent fighting. For others, interacting with
NPCs, with the environment, or with each other would equal or even
outshine battles, but that
,wasn’t a matter of balance for the rules.
The second type of balance, dealing with characters and challenges, may
seem related, having to do with characters being either too powerful or
not powerful enough. At its core, though, such balance is a different issue
because it has less to do with the players and more to do with the DM.
After all, it’s the DM who is responsible for providing challenges for the
characters—and the DM has no boundaries or limitations. When DMs
complain about unbalanced characters running roughshod over their
campaign and how that’s the fault of the game, there is a misunderstanding
of the role of the DM. You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. If the PCs wipe
the floor with the vrock, give them six vrocks next time. Or a nalfeshnee.
It really is that simple. For every spell, there’s a counter. For every monster,
there’s a tougher monster. If the players raise the ante by creating characters
who are too powerful, the DM can simply use the sliding power scale of the
game (which has no upper limit) to bring things back into balance.
106 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
What’s more, the DM is also the arbiter of the rules at the table and can
disallow options. Ultimately, it’s the DM who truly understands what’s going
on at the table, not some game designer thousands of miles away. No matter
what the designer does or doesn’t do to balance the game, it’s a moot point.
An illusion at best. It’s what the DM does that provides the balance.
The Gamers’ Social Contract
So here’s the real secret of game balance: There is such a thing, but it
has very little to do with rules and game designers. It emerges from the
cooperation of the people sitting around the table. It comes from the
players and, in particular, the DM. It all has to do with mutual trust.
When people sit down at my game table, I expect two things from them.
The first is that everyone is responsible for making the game fun for all
involved. The second is to trust the DM to provide a fun and balanced play
experience. This is the gamers’ social contract: the agreement that everyone
makes, consciously or unconsciously, at the beginning of every game session.
With the idea that the two axes upon which the wheel of balance turns
are time to shine and reasonable challenges, the DM can provide both in a
way that the rules never could. A really good DM can run a balanced game
where one player is a 20th level demigod and another is a 1st level farmer.
All he has to do is make sure that each player has fun and each character
has something interesting and challenging to do. I’m not contending that
it’s easy—on the contrary, it’s very difficult. That’s why good game designers
try to provide tools for DMs to make running a fair, balanced game easier.
Well-designed rules make it easier for the DM to judge what he should
and shouldn’t do, and maybe even protect him so that when he makes a
mistake, the game doesn’t go wildly off the rails.
For the DM to provide a fairly stable play environment, however, the
players have to trust him and have to agree not to use their own position
at the table to undermine or circumvent his actions or otherwise spoil the
game for others. So it’s not just about the DM. It’s about the entire group.
Getting players and DMs to understand the social contract is the key to
true game balance. The first rule of every RPG should be, “Don’t be a jerk.”
This rule, if adhered to perfectly, would likely eliminate almost all balance
problems of any stripe. The players should trust the DM to ensure that no
matter what happens and no matter what choices they make, the game
will be fair and fun. The DM should be able to trust that no one’s going to
intentionally try to break the game.
Enhancing
Adventures
109Crafting a Dastardly Plot h Ed Greenwood
ometimes, roleplaying campaigns can be like the lives of drifting,
directionless teenagers: This adventure (purchased by the DM from a
gaming company) happens to the players, and then that one (also bought)
befalls them, giving them until the next gaming session to prepare for,
yes, yet another ready-bought adventure.
So brave adventurers get hit with X and then with unrelated Y and then
with also-unrelated Z.
All of which hardly seems much of a recreational getaway from
one-darned-thing-after-another real life, does it?
Nor is it really much of a “campaign,” which in its older, military (and
tabletop military gaming) sense, meant a series of battles and skirmishes that
made up the same unfolding conflict in a particular country or “theater.”
The Whys of Adventuring
To put it another way, a heroic life—an adventurer’s life—has direction,
meaning, and purpose. Mere warriors may just fight to resist whatever
the world hurls at them, but adventurers set out to remake (or at least
influence) the world around them by striving, through battle and
diplomacy and other deeds, to Change Things. That is, to alter the land
they’re in, and perhaps the region around it, by what they do.
So adventuring player characters, if they seek to be heroes—or tyrants
or criminal kingpins, for that matter—seek to be agents of change. Change,
that is, they hope to control or at least steer, to reach goals they find
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desirable (as opposed to overthrowing kings only to end up transforming
several happy, prosperous neighboring realms into a vast lawless and
devastated bandit territory, roamed by opportunistic monsters and
inhabited only by the desperate who are unable to flee the area).
Awash In A Sea of Plots
Enter plot. Which can be said, in its simplest form, to be the script or
outline of a story. A bestselling novel, unless it is gang-written by a group
of writers all playing tug-of-war with each other, will probably have a single
plot. It may be convoluted, and it may be festooned with subplots and
diversions, but a professor examining the finished tale should be able to
discern and write down the plot of the book.
Which can often be reduced to a string of statements following this rough
model: “Protagonist (major or viewpoint character), finding self in this
situation/dilemma/challenge, seeks to do or achieve X, but faces Y, so Z
happens.” Though there may be several protagonists (or a major character
set against several minor ones) at work in the same story, and much conflict
between them, a plot can be derived from all the narrative sound and fury.
This is not necessarily the case in roleplaying adventures, where many
plots may collide. Every player character can be a major protagonist, and
follow—or try to follow—their own plot. Some of them may make things
up as they go along, rather than devoting much time to strategies or tactics,
but if they’re pushing for specific things, what each of them does can be
labeled a plot.
Not to mention the metaplot, or over-arching situation and chain of
unfolding events (these countries are at war, World War II in particular, and
“as our story begins, the Allied forces have just been swept from the face
of Europe, and—”) described by the DM when providing the background
setting, and the various dark and devious plots of the non-player character
villains (also played by the DM) seeking to frustrate the PC heroes.
Shackled by Story
Unlike a novel or short story, where the goal is to entertain but there’s only
one ringmaster (the writer) choosing the road to that fun that the tale
takes, roleplaying sessions should allow and encourage the players to shape
the unfolding story. Their entertainment is lessened when DM-provided
carrots and sticks are too obvious, and slain—or at least forced into gasping,
staggering life support—when the sequence of events feels railroaded.
There’s momentary satisfaction in smashing down a door, finding the
Lost Gem, or finally shoving your sword through the Dread Death-headed
Dragonmage,
,but lasting satisfaction in roleplaying is felt by players
when they achieve something meaningful, when they change the world
111Crafting a Dastardly Plot h Ed Greenwood
in some small way, or take a clear, gloat-worthy step toward achieving an
ambition. Players want to have an important or even dominant hand in the
storytelling, and how a DM structures unfolding play should give player
characters choices and something important—that feels important, even if
it’s not saving the entire world, every time—to do.
Until a DM knows the motivations of individual players very well, player
characters are rarely going to do what a DM wants them to do. Novice
DMs may write out endless “flow charts” of “if players get the gem, then
this, but if they don’t, then that” possibilities, but it’s more fun for everyone
to keep that to a minimum. (Ever seen a sports game made up of teams
that haven’t practiced together beforehand? Often chaotic, but usually
wild fun.) If the metaplot a DM has worked out absolutely must reach a
particular outcome (this king dies, that castle gets destroyed), the DM
should work out three ways this outcome can happen before play begins,
and if PC actions look likely to prevent that outcome, adjust matters so the
PCs are distracted or pinned down doing something major and important
(so players don’t feel cheated) in one place or with one NPC while the
outcome occurs in another place.
In short, fiction plots are set but roleplaying plots must stay flexible, and
are best kept hidden, so the players either know or feel as if their characters
are determining the plot.
Often by foiling the dastardly plots of other characters.
What Is A Dastardly Plot?
So “what the villains are up to” make up the “dastardly plots” that provide
resistance to PCs in most fantasy roleplaying campaigns, forcing them into
adventures, and are the plots that concern us here.
Yes (cackle), bring on the railway track with bound captive, the mustache
to twirl, and the scheme to endanger the World As We Know It. Those sort
of dastardly plots.
Any scheme hatched by a villain, from a ruse to frame PCs for a petty
crime and so take them away from blundering into, or stopping, other
schemes already being enacted by that same villain, is a dastardly plot.
Something as small as a secret, unwritten agreement among trade rivals
not to price-war with each other at a village market, or something as great
as treason against a wizard-emperor who is to be not only deposed, but
slain, destroying the stability of magic over half a world and unleashing
long-bound (and therefore ravenously hungry) dragons from their lairs.
Those greater plots last longer and have more influence on play.
They mean more, present stiffer challenges, and of necessity are more
complicated and take more time to uncover and (try to) thwart. As a
result, they are what most people mean by dastardly plots. The silent non-
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compete agreement over the melon cart may be just as nasty or profitable,
but it’s just not in the same world-shaking league.
Yet merely defining dastardly plots is hardly the point. We need to get at
what makes any plot juicy and memorable, what makes it bring a campaign
to thrilling life and get players excited and eager to either join and further
the plot (overthrow the hated monster tyrant and free all the human
slaves!) or to uncover and shatter it (the rebels are really shape-changed
monsters and if they overthrow the king, they’ll eat us all in the bloody
civil war that inevitably follows!). So we’re after the desired elements of a
truly dastardly plot.
That is, the features of the sort of plot we want to create—if we’re the
DM or players in an intrigue-filled campaign whose characters are trying
to craft their own plot—if we want to have some lasting fun and build
some memories of real achievement, by either following and successfully
carrying out our plot, or expose and destroy a foul plot and take care of the
dastardly villains behind it.
There is, mind you, no perfect plot, no single truly dastardly plot. If
there was, everyone would know it, it would already have been done over
and over again until the few survivors arranged things to guard against it
ever happening again, and it would therefore provide us with almost no
entertainment at all. So you’ll find no Perfect Recipe here. What you will find
is how to stock a kitchen with juicy ingredients to craft your own killer plots.
The Truly Dastardly Plot
A truly dastardly plot has both mystery and menace. It must imperil and
challenge the PCs (or the PC foes, if PCs are behind the plot), and it must
surprise or attempt to mislead them or at least have unknowns they must
figure out (by investigations that will inevitably draw them into adventures
most people would prefer to avoid, the traps and encounters that are the
meat and drink of the fighting side of a roleplaying game).
A dastardly plot shouldn’t be easy to figure out. If it’s obvious due to the
situation (the very elderly king is dying and six factions all vie to grab the
throne, each led by, or controlling as a puppet, someone of royal blood
who has a claim on the crown), then it should incorporate some Plan B
and Plan C contingencies, fallbacks to be put into operation when things
go wrong. (If the dying king anoints one royal as an heir, and it’s not the
royal of your faction, kidnap and hide that heir right away, keeping them
incommunicado and powerless and spreading rumors of their death the
moment the king dies—but keeping them to use if your preferred royal gets
killed in the strife that follows.)
These contingencies should all have been arranged beforehand by
someone who thinks deeply or deviously enough to impress the players
113Crafting a Dastardly Plot h Ed Greenwood
(once those players begin to see what’s happening), and more importantly
to enable the plot to survive collisions with the hostile plots of others.
Oh, yes, other hostile plots galore. In any robust fantasy roleplaying
campaign, a DM will arrange to have at least two, and usually four or more,
plots on the go all at once, even before any PC plots get hatched and going.
There’s nothing wrong with plunging players into a bewildered state
where they thought they knew everything that was going on in the happy
kingdom their characters have grown up in, but realize that skirmishes,
battles, disappearances, robberies, and monster sightings are suddenly
occurring all around them with bewildering rapidity and in astonishing
numbers, and they haven’t a clue why, what triggered all of this, and which
way to jump and swing swords next, to try to restore order. Or even to try
to figure out who’s a friend and who’s just a smiling foe.
A superior dastardly plot—obvious or not—should also involve some
conspirators whose identity or whereabouts are unknown, and perhaps
some impostors (so when PCs triumphantly kill the Pirate Lord, they
discover the next morning that the real Pirate Lord is laughing at them just
as triumphantly from halfway across the kingdom, and they’ve really killed
some poor wretch—perhaps the realm’s Chief Justice, or a kindly noble
who has long sponsored the PCs—who was magically transformed to look
like the Pirate Lord). Look at the number of Shakespeare plays that involve
mistaken identity and impostors. Look at why so many of his characters
pretend to be someone else. Some of the reasons are silly, but some can
readily be re-used. These sort of deceptions—or any deceptions—tend to
make plots last a lot longer, lead to lots of confusion and running around/
adventuring possibilities, and force players to think or speculate as well as
hack at whatever’s nearest.
Don’t Forget to Spice Things Up
Which brings us to the specialized ingredients in our plot kitchen; the
spices, if you will. (No, this isn’t the “sex” chapter; this time, we’re talking
a different sort of seasoning.)
,DMs, know thy players: players planning on
spinning plots of their own, know the NPCs or other players you want to
deceive or defeat.
What do they find irresistible? Do they like—or hate—puzzles? Being
frightened? Can or can’t they resist chasing anyone who runs away, or
hacking at any slithering, tentacled monster they see lurking in shadows?
Maybe they long to be accepted as truly noble by the snooty nobles, or
have the princess say “yes” to their entreaties. Perhaps they want to swim in
rooms full of gold coins, or have the power to control all the merchants in
a kingdom, to set fashions or own powerful locals so those powerful people
leap to obey their every calmly-murmured command.
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Find their buttons, then craft plots that push those buttons. Or as an aunt
of mine once put it, “Make those marionettes dance!” Tailor your plots to
what your players or in-game foes want more of or can’t resist.
That doesn’t just go for the lures that will drag others into your plots; that
goes for the rewards the plots should yield them along the way.
Like a movie director, you’re trying to arrange things so the action will
arrive at moments when the players around the gaming table shout in
triumph, or sit back grinning in satisfaction. When they solve the riddle, or
finally catch and kill the marauding bandit, or (please forgive the cliché—
things are clichés because they work over and over again, remember)
rescue the princess. It’s your campaign, after all. The only people you have
to please are your players (or fellow players). When they get bored with
rescuing princesses, it’s time to stop. (And be sure to slap them with a
few double-crosses along the way, such as discovering the hard way that,
unlike the others, this particular princess is a megalomaniacal tyrant, and
“rescuing” her has set her free again to terrorize the world and everything
in it, and it’s all your fault.)
The important thing is to know what your players—all of them, because
tastes may vary widely from one end of a gaming table to the other—will
find to be satisfying rewards. Give them those rewards. Not too easily or too
often, but often enough that they want to come back for more battering each
gaming session. You are, after all, doing this for them (it is to be hoped).
When We Grow Mighty
Yet when we have triumphed again and again in adventures, and risen
to become the meanest you-know-whats in the valley, what then? If no
Masked Terror of a foe can ever hope to match us, what plots will then
seem dastardly?
The easy—and so, too often used—solution is to build a super-monster,
a godlike colossus of a Leviathan Uberdragon, so we go toe-to-toe against
someone simply stronger. This forces us to get allies, or trick the Uber-Foe
into a situation where we can collapse the castle onto it.
However, there are two less popular and therefore more attractive
alternatives. One is the Temptation Plot, where we the successful veteran
face something that tempts us into folly (godhood? An emperorship?). A
lure that may fool us into overreaching, so longtime foes can rush in and
crush us when we fall or are made weak.
The other is the mirror of how we must fight the Uber-Foe. It might be
called the Uber-Conspiracy, or Fighting Many Tiny Foes. It’s when many
nobles, or merchants, or monsters in an area all work together to be rid of
us, and we find ourselves betrayed by those we thought were our allies, or
too weak to ever dare to challenge us, or whose numbers we never thought
115Crafting a Dastardly Plot h Ed Greenwood
we’d ever face in seemingly endless succession. The time when we must
either find some brilliant new road to victory, or learn the old, old lesson
from before we were mighty: it’s time to run away, if we would live to fight
another day. (When Conan once more loses it all and flees into another
land to start all over again, alone and coinless.)
What We All Want
In life, everyone searches for meaning to it all, for some guidance or some
sign that we’re doing the “right” things, or what’s right for us. We want to
succeed, and we want things to make sense. To have a plot.
Yep, we want life—and the lives of fantasy characters we play—to
have plots. Yet easy and clear isn’t satisfying. To have some real sense of
achievement, we must clear up doubt, solve mystery, and overcome some
stiff challenges. We have to struggle against dastardly plots—and win.
So our truly dastardly plots can’t be hopeless, unsolvable, or unbeatable.
Yet they must be formidable. They should have twists and surprises,
misdirections, and blind alleys, and yet offer clear moral choices (so the
characters involved, and the players behind them, can feel right about what
they choose to do) and tactical choices (we can’t be everywhere at once, so
we have to choose to rush to the deserted castle or the dockside tavern—
which is the Masked Terror more likely to visit?). This lets some failures
along the way not be all our fault, yet lets us own the successes because we
chose to go up against the Masked Terror at all.
And because the world needs someone to go up against Masked Terrors,
and they seem in all too plentiful supply, choosing to do so can never be bad.
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hen the dice stop rolling and the adventure draws to a close, your
characters have undergone a change. Their experiences in the
world might have altered their opinions, their skills, even their appearance.
Leveling up doesn’t have to be a mathematical exercise that happens
off-screen (though it can be, if that’s what the group enjoys!). Advancing
your character can be a rich and enjoyable part of the game that adds depth
to the world.
Character advancement is the in-game representation of how a
character’s abilities grow throughout the campaign, but it can also
represent the mental and philosophical development a character
experiences. Considering the role character advancement holds in your
game—its purpose, its components, and its application—can add nuance to
your characters and an extra dimension of reality to your world.
Why Character Advancement?
The mechanic of character advancement exists for several reasons. First,
most major tabletop roleplaying game systems are predicated on the idea
that characters will continue to advance in some way. Challenges have
ratings to indicate what level or relative power the characters have to be to
stand a chance. Some challenges can only be faced when the characters are
strong enough—at least, if the characters want to have any hope of surviving!
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Second, character advancement adds realistic elements to the world. In
real life, people grow and change through their experiences. In addition,
character advancement might require seeking out a trainer or a book
of instruction, or finding special equipment. These satellite aspects to
character advancement help flesh out a world.
Third, character advancement makes players fall in love with their
characters. Working at something and getting better at it over time
is a powerful experience that players can enjoy vicariously. Even if a
character’s skills and abilities don’t change, the adventures they have can
change their world view and personality. Their backstory grows richer,
their personality more developed and rounded. Advancement helps make
a character feel “real.”
Not all systems treat character advancement in exactly the same way, but
most have common elements.
Components of Character Advancement
The brave warrior who learns a new sword-fighting technique, the clever
rogue who stumbles on an invisibility cloak, the interstellar explorer who
forges a friendship with an alien captain—all these characters undergo
advancement in a different way.
From a rules perspective,
,characters advance when they change their
skills and abilities. Characters may become stronger or smarter, learn to
use a new weapon, or develop or enhance innate powers, such as magic.
Many game systems deal with this type of advancement via the rules.
Equipment is another method of advancement that many systems deal
with in a structured way. Intelligent, legendary, and magical items can have
a profound effect on a character’s abilities. Even ordinary equipment can
widen the range of what a character can do, especially in combat.
It’s worth noting here that character advancement doesn’t have to
mean an increase in power. A character whose strength diminishes, who
can no longer control an innate power, or who loses a valuable item can
experience a great deal of growth and development. While rules most often
presume advancement goes in one direction, it’s worth considering what
you can add to a game by designing in a more flexible scale.
Characters also advance through their backstory, beliefs, and quirks.
A character may begin play with a simply sketched background that the
player develops over time. The farm kid leaving home to see the world in
session one might tell the rest of the party about their frequent mysterious
dreams in session eight, and might tie those dreams to their deceased
warlock grandfather in session twenty. The ability to develop a backstory
and flesh out a character’s attitudes and quirks through play can contribute
to the feeling of a growing, living person.
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Finally, as characters face serious challenges and overcome them, they
gain “experience” in both a game sense and a character sense. While a
player might add random details and powers to a character, it’s more likely
the player uses the events of a session to inspire the character’s growth. If
a character rolls a critical success on a dramatic leap across a chasm, the
player might put points into an acrobatics skill next time they level up. This
feedback between the world, the character, and the player can create great
roleplaying opportunities and make advancement feel natural.
In addition, the events of a campaign can have a deep and immediate
effect on characters. For example, the characters have spent months
hunting down an evil villain, only to see him escape at the last minute.
Each player then has to decide how their character reacts. Do they shrug
it off? Vow to hunt the villain down? Lament their own weakness? These
reactions shape and define a character, building their advancement
through their experiences. This can be the most powerful type of character
advancement of all, as an imaginary figure becomes more nuanced and
realistic through their interactions with the shared world.
With all the different elements of character advancement available,
and the numerous reasons why character advancement is necessary in a
campaign, you might feel overwhelmed. Giving out experience points at
the end of a session used to be so easy! With a little thought and planning,
though, character advancement can elevate your game into something
truly special for players and DMs alike.
How to Make Character Advancement Part of Your Game
The game system you’ve chosen likely has a method for attaining
advancement, whether it’s through killing monsters, amassing wealth, or
kissing cuties. Now you can think about ways to expand and enhance the
process of leveling up.
Character Choices
The easiest way to develop and define a character is by putting choices in
front of them and seeing how they react. Characters change when events
happen to them, but they also change (often more profoundly) when they
make events happen. Sometimes, players get into the mindset that the
game world is something they can’t change or affect in any lasting way—
that’s the DM’s job.
Instead of rushing the party to the table where the strange old wizard
waits, have a tavern server ask for their orders. When a character stops
at the space bazaar to pick up a new laser pistol, describe the different
models available for purchase. Making small decisions can help players
get comfortable with the idea of their characters having opinions and
119Taking Character Advancement to a Whole New Level h Amber Scott
perspectives on the game world, which can then change as the character
advances. Making small decisions is good practice for when the characters
are put in truly demanding situations—like whether to return the corp
CEO’s stolen money or spread it out among his interns.
Tie Advancement to Campaign Goals
As you plan your campaign, think about what challenges you’d like
the characters to face and put the tools they need in their path. When
character advancement is tied to your campaign plots, it can feel natural
and rewarding for players to face and overcome those challenges.
For example, if you want the characters to fight a dragon, you might
put a dragon-slaying sword at the end of a difficult dungeon. An ally
the characters rescue and befriend later in the campaign might have
specialized knowledge of dragons. A warrior character who seeks out
a famous trainer later discovers that the trainer knows dragon-fighting
techniques. At each stage the characters grow stronger, gain equipment,
and learn about the world in a way that positions them to face the big
threats in your campaign.
Tie Advancement to Character Goals
Think as well about the characters’ goals, and use those goals to drive
advancement. Just as you can set the characters on a path to face your
campaign challenges, you can set them on a path to face their own personal
challenges. Check in with your players as they get to know their characters
and develop their backstory. Encourage them to set short- and long-term
goals. A character whose goal is to avenge the deaths of their parents might
eventually realize that goal near the end of a campaign. A character whose
goals are to avenge their dead parents and own a fancy sports car will see
one of those goals realized much sooner.
As you design each stage of a character’s advancement, consider intangible
rewards as well as increasing game skills and abilities. Meeting a contact,
learning a hobby skill, striking up a friendship or romance, and learning
about the world can all expand a character’s personality and worldview.
Let the characters’ advancement develop naturally. Few players will have
their character’s personality detailed, backstory laid out, and advancement
path plotted from session one. More likely, a player will change their mind
about the kind of character they want to play, changing their class or
abilities as the game progresses. Backstories change and personalities go
off in unexpected directions. Roll with these changes as much as possible.
Put in opportunities for the character to interact with the world, make easy
choices and hard ones, and decide on new goals to strive for. Working with
the player in this way can enrich the game experience for everyone.
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Build Time For Reflection
Don’t be afraid to let characters enjoy their successes. There’s a reason
leveling up or downtime usually happens off-screen. Characters (and
people!) need extended periods of time where no adventures take place
and nothing dangerous is happening in order to focus on training and
improvement. Build downtime into your campaign and give characters
ways to reflect on and appreciate what they’ve been through.
How the world reacts to the characters’ actions can also give them a
way to develop intangible attributes, such as their quirks and biases and
philosophies. Grateful villagers could hold a feast for their heroes, an
employer could give the characters personal mementos in addition to
their rewards, or the characters could see their exploits on the news. These
types of situations make the characters seem part of a real, reactive world,
,while also giving the players a chance to think of how their characters are
reacting to recent events.
Pace Yourself
Once you start thinking about the different ways you can create
opportunities for character advancement and how those opportunities can
enrich your game, you might be tempted to dump all of them in at once.
It’s easier to start small and build up characters in a way that feels organic.
After you’ve added plot hooks and new equipment and dozens of small
choices to the game, it’s harder to reverse.
As you and your players get more comfortable with the interactions
between character goals, campaign goals, and character advancement,
encourage your players to share details of how their characters level up.
Some groups run short downtime sessions in between full adventure
sessions where everyone has a chance to describe the day-to-day lives of
their characters. You might enjoy keeping a journal of your character’s
training and growth, sharing the entries with the group. Or the group
might like contributing to a virtual bulletin board as a way to organize
character goals, campaign goals, visual references, and memories.
Experiment and see if any of these methods work for you.
Character advancement is a rewarding dimension of roleplaying. It’s fun
to see characters grow and change, become more powerful, and take on
more dangerous threats over time. By considering the role of advancement
in your game, figuring out the different ways characters can improve, and
tying advancement to choices, goals, and pacing, you can make leveling up
a more exciting and meaningful part of the game. Keep practicing these
skills and soon you’ll level up as a designer and a gamemaster.
121Challenge and Response h Wolfgang Baur
hen I’m thinking about challenge in design, it ain’t about challenge
rating (CR) or experience points (XP) totals.
The fundamental unit of adventure design for RPGs and MMOs is the
encounter, just as the fundamental unit of text in fiction and screenwriting
is the scene. Until you master the encounter, your adventures or quests will
always fall flat. Isolated, episodic, unconnected encounters can grow dull
and repetitive, but surely not every encounter needs to connect to a larger
plot or narrative. So, how to construct encounters organically, and let story
or sandbox options grow from the base up?
One way to think about encounter design is in purely mechanical terms.
You don’t know anything about the Dungeon Master who will run an
encounter, or the players and characters who will try to beat it. But you do
control the presentation of the challenge and how it works out.
That is, you can present a stimulus to the game and predict the likely
paths players will take to overcome it. If you predict the player actions
well, you can avoid discussing cases that are best left to the DM to decide,
and you can offer follow-ups, which can be the difference between an okay
encounter and a great one. I’ll discuss follow-ups in more detail at the end
of this essay.
The setup could be as simple as saying, “You see a goblin” or as complex
as, “You find a heavy, locked book in the abandoned room.” Those two
particular examples show two extremes on what I call the Action Spectrum.
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The Action Spectrum
The easiest way to think about an encounter’s place in the spectrum is,
“How likely is this encounter to kill a character immediately?” It’s an
assessment of threat. Another way to think about it, though, is, “How
does this encounter further engage the characters in the plot?” The book
discovery mentioned above seems innocuous, but it might score very high
on the killing-PCs scale if the book title is Rituals of Diabolism and the
book is found in the chamber of the king’s mistress. And the book has a
silent magical alarm, and so on.
Encounters on different portions of the action spectrum require different
challenges and setups. Let’s run through the six most common types, from
highest to lowest action.
1. Combat
Everyone knows what a combat encounter is: any situation you have
to fight your way out of. This could be an ambush, a duel, a toe-to-toe
slugfest, an arena fight, or a running battle through difficult terrain or
long stretches of dungeon or castle halls. These could all be discussed in a
separate design essay on combat encounter design. But because they are
the most common and most familiar type of encounter, I’ll pass over them
for now; they are vital encounter types and deserve a full treatment on
their own.
2. Threat and Negotiation
Though we usually think of combat as the most exciting type of encounter,
I’d argue that the encounters with the greatest tension are actually the threat
and negotiation encounters. I call them “almost-combat” encounters; they
are hostile but one or both sides hasn’t quite decided it’s worth fighting.
In this situation, the challenge presented to the players is someone
or something that is powerful, non-threatening, or interesting enough
for them to hold back from attacking immediately. A party of first-level
characters meeting a demon might fall into this category, or a party of any
level encountering elves in the woods, or a PC on watch who hears a voice
in the woods but cannot see the speaker.
In these cases, the encounter can be designed to maximize the fun by
obscuring the difficulty level (such as the hidden speaker), by providing an
unexpected foe (the elves), or by clearly signaling to the players that they
are overmatched (such as the major demon and the minor heroes). Combat
that could wipe out the whole party may make the players do more
than hesitate; they may wet their pants in fear, offering bribes or other
concessions to get out of a fight. You have to lay it on pretty thick, though,
to get that reaction. Most players assume that any monster they meet is
meant to be destroyed. Finding out the hard way that some encounters can
123Challenge and Response h Wolfgang Baur
overmatch the party is an interesting twist. The hidden speaker is usually a
conduit for negotiations with a Big Bad Guy, offering terms or threatening
dire reprisals if the party does not cooperate. It’s common for the players’
reaction to default to either tricksterism or heroics.
By “tricksterism,” I just mean that the party uses social skills, bluffs, or
a well-constructed lie to make the BBG’s minion go away, or even reveal
information that the party needs (see Information Gathering, below).
They outsmart the voice through conversation and leverage, threatening
something or someone dear to the villain. This can result in a standoff or in
the hidden speaker making a few somewhat hollow threats. The encounter
ends without a strong resolution, unless the hidden speaker actually does
return with reinforcements, or carries out whatever threat he claimed
would befall them.
Heroics, by contrast, is great for keeping the spotlight on one or more
players, but it should come with a price. The hidden speaker may have
ranged attacks that can’t be countered, he may unleash hellhounds when
the party defies him, he may follow through on his plan to annihilate the
paladin’s beloved warhorse. By no means allow heroics to come cheap;
it makes the villain less despicable, and it cheapens the players’ efforts.
Heroics are the response that you might want out of a particular encounter,
but that does not mean that the players should be rewarded for making the
right play. On the contrary, things should get more difficult for them. This
is why they are heroes, after all.
3. Chase
While chasing down a villain is a great action scene in films and books, it’s
a lot less so in video games or RPGs. Movement is inherently less exciting
than combat, unless the movement involves lava, rivers full of crocodiles,
or rafts sailing down deadly rapids.
That being the case, make sure that when you challenge
,a party of heroes
to chase down a villain, it really does require big successes. Work up the
average party success rate with, say, a Ride or Climb check (Athletics or
Acrobatics in 4E). Then make sure that 60 percent of the party will fail any
given check. In three or four rounds, you’ll likely be down to a single hero
trying to catch the pyromaniac/diabolist/slaver. Then, require a secondary
skill to bring him down, such as a Jump from one horse to another, an
attack while climbing, or a confirmed critical skill check.
While players can turn down the chance to participate in a chase scene,
it’s relatively easy to goad them into it. A phrase like “The orc courier takes
the wand from the dead necromancer and sprints toward the boat by the
river” is a good start. A phrase like, “You make the Spot check just in time
to see the orc captain slip into the darkness. He’s heading toward the main
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army camp!” might be even better. You know your players’ hot buttons; use
them shamelessly to start a chase.
4. Terrain and Devices
Traps, environmental hazards, alarms, and even watchdogs can fall
into this category. The challenge is that the terrain can harm the party
or summon watchers if the PCs aren’t careful. It’s lower on the action
scale because the party can always choose to walk away; there’s no active
threat. The best solution is to always pair a terrain, trap, or device with an
engineer, gong-ringer, or monster that is at home in that terrain.
One type of terrain is usually plenty, though you might place obstacles
within that one type. Put rocks and whirlpools in a rushing river, for
instance, or put some islands of safety in a pool of thin-crusted magma.
Don’t forget your terrain in the heat of running an encounter. The two
easiest ways to be sure everyone knows about it are to mark it on the
battlemat or to use an index card or other terrain stat card. Hand it to one
of your players if you like. Finally, you can combine terrain with most of
these other types: a chase plus terrain is especially entertaining, and so is
stealth plus terrain.
5. Stealth
The stealth encounter type is all about tension and release, so you need
to ratchet up the danger one notch at a time. Each time the party gets
past a guard or a monster, they are putting one more obstacle between
themselves and eventual escape. Each time they blow a Move Silently check
or inadvertently trigger a magical alarm, the odds increase that they cannot
recover by silencing the area or knocking out a minion.
Work with this. Put weak creatures at all perimeter pickets, and put
stronger creatures on patrol paths or in chokepoints. Make the characters
aware that their disguise or magic is fraying after a combat; eventually, all
that blood spatter will give them away.
Time is a powerful addition to stealth encounters. Stealth takes time and
caution; time pressure prevents the party from dawdling and beating the
encounter through dull, repetitive, but effective tactics (scry, invisibility,
silence, etc.). When dawn comes, when the army awakes, when the
temporary damping of the magical wards is over, the party will be discovered
and must flee or fight. Remind the players of this time limit frequently.
Some groups do this all the time. Call of Cthulhu adventurers probably
spend at least 60 percent of their time in various forms of information
gathering, from witnesses, books, court records, letters, and the like. In
Dungeons & Dragons, the value of information is still high (wouldn’t
you like to know exactly what monsters are in the dungeon?), but most
125Challenge and Response h Wolfgang Baur
play-group styles minimize the role of reconnaissance because it is time-
consuming and/or involves only a single player.
This is foolishness on the players’ part, but unless they have a military
background they may not realize just how profoundly dumb a lack of
recon really is. One possible solution is that the deadliest encounters come
with what I think of as an antechamber or waiting room encounter. This
is a meeting with a creature or clue that says, “Big fight ahead! Figure
it out; it won’t be a cakewalk!” Yes, you are signaling to the players that
an encounter is deadly. Eventually, one hopes, they’ll figure this out for
themselves before they lose a lot of PCs.
For instance, if the party must defeat a batch of evil druids, they might
have an earlier encounter with three or four ettercaps who serve the druids
and who are all too eager to brag about their masters’ strength. More than
that, though, it’s best if these pre-encounters mention the numbers or
the general invulnerability of the foe. You might not give details, but if a
minion brags that his master walks through arrow fire and cannot be slain
by mortal hands, the party may choose to spend a few spells or skill checks
figuring out the likely immunities and resistances. If not, well, you’ve given
them fair warning; let the heroes’ corpses fall where they may.
There’s a second problem with these sleuthing encounters: they’re
often dull—poking at documents or deciphering dusty script or quizzing
some archivist. How do you make the actual information-gathering scene
interesting? While divination and class abilities like Legend Lore or Gather
Information can make these scenes mind-numbingly mechanical, it need
not be so. Open Design adventures make frequent use of player handouts,
because having something tangible focuses player minds on that element of
OPEN DESIGN EDITOR BILL COLLINS
COMMENTS ON CHASES
“Impromptu chases can be fun especially when it looks like a villain/
enemy/opponent is about to get away, but someone wounds them—
improbably and from a distance, but it works. The difficulty with a chase
scene in d20 is magnified by the rules which suppress a free flow of
dialogue to get the players standing on their feet and the adrenaline
pumping. I ditch initiative and ask players to declare actions from left
to right. Spells can enable easy escape or capture, so if the option is
there, I include a couple of lesser individuals in the chase who the party
can catch and interrogate later, and who can bear the brunt of a web
without the PCs feeling cheated out of a clever move. Rules lookups
during a chase scene really are anathema.”
126 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
the story or mystery. Your own handouts are easy to throw together with a
very small bit of prep work.
And of course, documents can have guards, owners, and keepers
who must be appeased or outwitted. You can force the party to seek out
lorekeepers, scriptoria of arcane knowledge, or wild-eyed hermits who
have survived meetings with such foes.
Unfortunately, this runs close to the realm of rampant clichés: everyone
is a bearded wise elder, or the tome is dusty and hidden in a dungeon or
ruin of some kind. Consider using an unexpected lorekeeper character to
hold the vital clue. For instance, if the survivors mentioned above are a
maimed paladin and his tiefling mistress, they’ll make an impression. If a
talking polar bear was once a member of the evil druids’ order and has now
been banished—well, he’s not the average conversationalist, especially if the
party needs to climb over pack ice to question him and placate him with a
few tasty seals.
Discovery and Reveals
While the “Ah-ha!” moments can be really satisfying from a campaign
arc perspective, they do not necessarily occur at moments of high
drama. They could be very dramatic (and certainly I’d recommend that if
possible), but they could just as easily fall into the party’s lap, kicking off
or redirecting an entire adventure. Adventure hooks, clues, and climaxes
can all fall into this category.
For instance, learning the identity of a smuggler or the awful fate of a
young noblewoman could easily come from reading a book, intimidating
a witness, or bribing a courtier. The information itself
,has a huge effect
on the storyline and future PC actions, and you want these scenes to be
successful ones to keep players engaged. But in terms of spell-slinging,
sword-thrusting action, not so much. Don’t underestimate the preparation
required for these scenes; if they flop, your adventure might have to be
shelved, or you might need to do some hasty improvisation. Consider the
likely Q&A, and just how much information the players need to follow the
story elements.
Follow-ups
My “Madman at the Bridge” city encounter is a fun “ticking time-bomb”
encounter that starts with a drawbridge that is stuck open, and some
misbehaving machinery. The PCs are sent to fix the problem and find some
missing engineers.
127Challenge and Response h Wolfgang Baur
But, of course, this scenario quickly spirals out of control, with alchemical
fire, insane clockwork guards, a gnomish plotter and his undead servants,
and so on. The final encounter starts as a simple fight against a kobold
zombie, then escalates to include the gnome wizard, and then escalates
further when it’s clear that the entire structure the party is standing in is
about to suffer a massive boiler explosion that will destroy the bridge and
maybe a chunk of the city and some innocent bystanders.
This adventure winds up as rather more than a simple Turn Undead
check. By going from an easy victory to a fully engaged party to a party
with more threats than it can deal with, you put the players under ever-
increasing pressure. Typically, that’s where a good group of roleplayers will
thrive and come up with some clever solution to the overall problem. A
bad group will fall apart and the mission will fail. I’d recommend that you
let them fail, especially if they did not do research, information gathering,
scouting, or character preparation for the major fight that is clearly
approaching. But adventure failure is a topic for another day as well.
Conclusion
While combat encounters get most of the glory, you can make other
encounter types more prominent and more successful to improve the
overall strength of your campaign. By pushing players in social situations,
dilemmas, and nonstandard challenges in addition to a healthy diet of heroic
combat, you give every class and every player a wider range of responses. Or,
the way I prefer to put it, you give players more ways to be heroes.
128 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
amemasters often like to have a focused structure when preparing
and running RPGs. At the same time, we love playing tabletop
RPGs because they’re so wide open. Anything can happen. Anything does
happen. The lack of a prescriptive outcome is one of the reasons we enjoy
the game as much as we do. Yet the lack of clear structure when preparing
for such open games can be paralyzing.
When we gamemasters find a structure or a pattern that works
reasonably well, we often grab onto it with both hands because it helps
break out of this paralysis. We know what we need to do and how to fit our
game into that structure.
The third and fourth editions of the most popular fantasy roleplaying
game had a greater focus on combat mechanics than other aspects of
the game. Thus we developed a structure around those mechanics. We
balanced encounters, built exciting combat arenas, and planned how
monsters would behave tactically. Published adventures even showed us
on which squares we should place our monsters in a given encounter. We
knew that battles would take a fair bit of time so we ensured we didn’t have
too many of them planned out for our session and kept other scenes short
so we could fit in all the battles we had planned.
The fifth edition of the game steps back from this focus on tactical
combat and places more emphasis on the larger story of the game. There
is, however, still an underlying structure to this edition of the game. The
fifth edition core books describe the three pillars that make up the game:
combat, exploration, and roleplaying. We have a new structure to figure
out how many scenes we can run in the time we have, design them around
these three pillars, and plan a game.
G
Designing Situations
Michael E. Shea
18
129Designing Situations h Michael E. Shea
With careful planning, a game like this can be a great deal of fun. If
we’re sly we might even get away with such a linear game and make it feel
like the characters had choices at every turn, though the choices we gave
them won’t affect our list of scenes and the type of gameplay they focus on.
Maybe interrogating a goblin gives the players a surprise round when they
enter the goblin king’s throne room but—make no mistake—they’re still
fighting the goblin king.
A focus on the three pillars while designing an adventure is now a
common approach to build our adventures, but it isn’t the only one. There
are other ways.
A Focus on the Situation
For a moment we’re going to let go of the three pillars and our list of scenes.
We’re not going to outline where our game is going to go. Instead we’re going
to design our adventure around a situation and what makes sense given that
situation. We can pick a location where the adventure, or the bulk of the
adventure, might take place. We can fill that location with the inhabitants
that make sense for the location. We can ensure there’s a goal or motivation
to bring the characters into that situation. While running the game we lay
it all out in front of the adventurers and see how things turn out.
We don’t build scenes or know how parts of the situation will be
approached in this style of adventure design. We don’t separate scenes into
exploration, roleplaying, or combat. The players choose how their characters
navigate the situation and we figure out how the world reacts to them.
Example: The Goblin Caves
We’re going to start with a simple example dungeon from a common
fantasy RPG trope: the goblin cave. This time, instead of outlining this
goblin lair room by room with a predefined expectation of what happens
in each of these rooms when the characters arrive, we ignore the characters
completely and ask, “What is going on in this goblin cave?”
This goblin cave might have two entrances (more on the value of
multiple entrances later). It might have two dozen goblins, three captured
humans, and a pen of three worgs in it. A hobgoblin overseer manages
the goblins. He hates his job. The goblins conduct raids on the nearby
tradeway but the hobgoblin is on the lookout for a particular woman with
a particular tattoo on her neck. If he finds her, he is to bring her alive to his
boss at a nearby ruined fortress.
The caves have store rooms, a prison pit, the boss’s quarters, a dirty mess
hall and barracks, and the worg pens. Off of the mess is a hidden, trapped
shrine to goblinoid god of tricks. The hobgoblin’s quarters have a secret
room where the hobgoblin boss keeps some of the best loot.
130 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
So we have a location and some idea of its inhabitants. Now we have to
think about what is going on there.
The hobgoblin chief spends about a third of his time away from the cave
with three of the more stealthy goblins and his own pet worg, Gryme.
A couple of different goblin raiding parties of roughly four to eight
goblins are out hunting and raiding caravans. Another four to six goblins
regularly guard the entrances to the caves while the rest are either sleeping,
harassing the prisoners, or doing some other form of work within the caves
themselves. The goblins are easily frightened when overpowered but are
confident in large numbers or when their boss is at their back yelling at
them. The guards are typically lazy and unperceptive but the worgs have
keen senses.
We can throw a few interesting twists in here too. Maybe one of the
goblins is smarter than she appears and is actually a spy for another
goblin clan. Maybe one of the prisoners is a retired assassin wanted for the
murder
,of a beloved lord. Maybe there’s a section of the goblin caves even
the goblins don’t know about. The underground river that feeds into the
goblin caves comes from a forgotten underground temple to the dwarven
god of iron. A local dwarven ironsmith known to the characters might
know about it.
The characters are sent to stop these goblin raids, find out why they’re
better organized than usual, and rescue some missing travelers.
All of this leads to a situation. We have a location with lots of nooks and
crannies. We have a group of inhabitants with some complications of their
own and some idea of their daily activities. We have a goal.
Now we’re ready for our adventure. We don’t know how the characters
will accomplish their goals. We don’t know where they’ll start or what
scenes will take place in any sort of linear order. There are no predefined
combat encounters or combat arenas. There are no clearly defined roleplay
scenes. All of the three pillars will likely take place, but the players and
their choices determine how it actually turns out.
The Heist Model
This style of adventure structure closely resembles the heist model in both
gaming and storytelling. In a heist, an idea we’re defining loosely here, our
heroes gather information about a location, plan out their approach based
on their goal, execute the plan, and adjust as things go awry.
This heist model fits well in our fantasy RPGs too, regardless of the goal.
Sometimes the true goal is to steal something, but it can just as easily be to
rescue someone, to acquire information, or to kill a villain.
When we think about our games in that structure, the idea of building a
situation instead of a series of scenes makes perfect sense. As the GM, we’re
131Designing Situations h Michael E. Shea
the ones who build out the location, fill it with the inhabitants that make
sense, add complications, and adjudicate the story as it plays out. We work
with the players to help define the goal and outcome. Then we help the
world react as the characters interact with it.
Sprinkling In the Three Pillars
This is the point where we start to consider the three pillars again. As we’re
building out the situation, we can modify the setup to ensure that there are
opportunities for the characters to use all three pillars. In our goblin cave
example there are lots of opportunities to fight goblins so we don’t have to
worry about combat. As characters capture goblins there are opportunities
for roleplaying as well. Putting in a goblin spy, a disgruntled hobgoblin
boss, and a former assassin as a prisoner means we have other interesting
opportunities for roleplaying. We can stick an angry dwarven ghost in
our forgotten dwarven temple that the characters can talk to or fight. The
dwarven temple and the secret rooms in the caves give characters good
opportunities for exploration. They can learn lots of interesting bits of
dwarven history from the statues carved into the walls or beautiful mosaics
on the floor.
Instead of building scenes based on these three pillars, we use the three
pillars to tweak the situation we’ve already developed. It’s only at this stage
that we consider the characters. While building the initial situation, we lay
it out regardless of the characters. This lets our players decide how they’re
going to approach the problem. If they want to kick in the front door and
start cracking goblin skulls, have at it. If they want to sneak around or talk
their way through things, that works too. Our whole game has a new level
of flexibility we might not ever recognize if we write out our adventure
scene by scene ahead of time.
The Dynamic Environment
When we develop situations like this, we also should keep in mind that the
situations are dynamic. The monsters aren’t all sitting around waiting for
the characters to show up and kill them. They’re going on raids and having
meetings with other villains. They’re having a feast. They’re sleeping. They’re
going to the bathroom. When we’re developing a situation like this, we might
keep these options in mind. We might even make a random list of these
events to make the whole situation unpredictable. Our characters can learn
what is going on by watching their patterns. They can see the hobgoblin
raiding parties going out for a night-time attack. They can watch one of the
guards go behind his favorite tree for his morning constitutional. They can
see the drow emissaries arriving and how the goblins suddenly learn the
value of cleanliness. These events make a location feel alive.
132 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
If we’re writing such situations for publication, we can do the heavy
lifting for the gamemasters (this is our primary job, remember) and write
out lists of actions the inhabitants of a location will take. We can write out
random event lists the GMs can use to shake up a location as well. These
random lists mean even the GM doesn’t know exactly what is going to
happen, which can be great fun for them as well. Here are ten example
events we might throw into an occupied area:
1. A squabble begins
2. Food gets delivered
3. Someone falls asleep
4. A target practice contest is held
5. Someone starts a card game
6. An animal breaks loose
7. The boss’s boss shows up
8. Something’s on fire
9. A prisoner escapes
10. Someone needs to use the privvy
If we’re putting together such situations just for our own game, we might
not get so detailed. It’s enough for us to know what is going on at a location
and come up with the details as the game unfolds at the table.
Shaving Off the Results of Bad Rolls
When we’re running situations like this, we’re likely to rely more on skill
checks than the outcomes of battles. When we run a battle, the group rolls
dozens of times to determine the outcome and much of the result comes
from the choices the players make during the fight.
Scenes that involve skill checks, depending on how we run them, can
have a much greater variance in outcomes because the results tend to be
based on fewer rolls of the dice. Fighting a hallway full of guards might
result in two or three dozen rolls, but the result for attempting to sneak
past them might be based on only one roll.
When we’re designing scenes and running them at our table, it’s good
to consider this high variance for skill-focused outcomes. “Fail forward”
is a popular term in story-focused RPGs that we can use here to offset this
high variance. If the characters are attempting to sneak past the guards and
fail, maybe they don’t alert all of the guards who come running down the
hall with spears held high. Maybe they sneak past all of the guards, but one
decides to come back for another look.
When we’re running these scenes, shaving off bad luck can help the
situation play out a bit more dynamically. Realistically, combat in one room
of a keep would be loud enough to alert the rest of the keep. But in our
133Designing Situations h Michael E. Shea
scenes, it’s more fun if the sounds aren’t quite so loud or the occupants of
the keep not so observant so that the scene can switch back to sneaking,
exploring, or talking through other situations once the battle is done.
Or maybe, just as the last hobgoblin falls in the common room, a goblin
servant happens to walk through the kitchen door, eyes wide, holding a
pig’s head on a platter. Now what?
The main point is to remember that the high variance of single-die
results during exploration and roleplay scenes might require that we shave
off bad luck so every situation doesn’t end up with the characters fighting
every enemy at the front door to a location.
Two Entrances
While we don’t have as clean an outline for designing our adventures as
the scene-by-scene pillar-based outline, here are some ideas to ensure our
adventures have the flexibility to let the players navigate them however
they wish.
One such example is to include at least two reasonable entrances into any
,location. I say “reasonable” because sometimes we might trick ourselves
into including multiple entrances when really there’s only one reasonable
one. The front gate to the hobgoblin keep might be an entrance but it’s
unlikely that the characters will choose to walk up, knock on the door,
and start collecting the arrows that rain down on them. In addition to the
front gate, the castle might have a ruined watchtower on its south-western
corner and a sewer entrance that empties into the nearby river. Both of
those sound like potentially reasonable ways to break in.
Our goblin caverns example could have three entrances. The underground
river might lead out of the front cave. This could be the entrance the goblins
themselves use. The second could be the forgotten dwarven shrine. The
third could be a chute from the rocks above that the goblins use to draw
the smoke away from their fire in the common room. Any of these three
entrances could be useful and offer different ways the characters might
approach the situation. These aren’t false choices either. They’re not tricks.
Each can lead to an entirely different story when the adventure occurs.
When you’re designing a location, either for your home game or for a
published adventure, consider including multiple entrances.
Internal Factions
Likewise, we can always enrich the situation by including factions among
the inhabitants. One of the earliest known and most popular fantasy
adventures included an ogre mercenary paid by nearby goblins. The ogre
and the goblins didn’t necessarily have the same motivations, which was
something the characters could exploit.
134 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Even in situations full of enemies, there are factions we can include that
the characters might exploit. There are disgruntled employees, potential
up-and-coming leaders waiting for a void to open up above them, multiple
gangs forced to work together, jilted lovers, spies for other factions, rival
ideologies among cultists, and more. Our heroes can learn about these
factions and drive a wedge between them instead of just killing everyone.
Like the situation, we don’t have to consider the characters when we put
these factions into place. They’re just part of what is going on there. How
the characters learn about these factions might require a little thought.
These factions aren’t any good if the characters never learn about them.
Usually some information gleaned from interrogations can reveal some
of these factions. Tattoos, journals, banners, insulting shanties; lots of
things can reveal a faction among one’s enemies. Even a look between a
king’s bodyguard and the queen might be enough to tell the characters that
something is going on here that they might exploit.
We need not plan out factions too carefully but, like including multiple
entrances, they’re a good use of time when planning out an adventure or
writing one for publication.
Injecting Good Luck and Bad Luck
Sometimes events take a turn no one expected. Even when the characters
have scouted a location, marked the common activities, and come up
with a good plan stuff happens. Randomness changes the courses of lives
continually in the real world, and there’s no reason it can’t do so in our
fantasy worlds as well. We can use this to our advantage by choosing the
random event that ends up being the most fun.
Maybe the boss’s boss comes to visit right when the characters are about
to ambush the location. Maybe a huge snowstorm hits the area. Maybe the
characters arrive just as the hobgoblins are awoken for a surprised drill to
protect against potential attacks by adventurers. Maybe those goblins found
an old crypt beneath the caves and released a clutch of angry specters.
We can inject good and bad luck at the right times by changing up the
feeling of the adventure. Are things going particularly well? Maybe it’s time
the hobgoblin’s brother comes to visit with his retinue of veterans. Have
things been going poorly? Maybe it’s time the characters found that secret
shrine filled with holy healing light. Oscillating upward and downward
beats, as veteran RPG designer Robin Laws discusses in his book Hamlet’s
Hit Points, is the way to keep players hooked in the story.
Unforeseen events make a location feel alive. They add in the element of
unpredictability that forces the players to change their plans mid-stream in
order to complete their goal. If all of the plans went perfectly, they wouldn’t
be much fun.
135Designing Situations h Michael E. Shea
If things seem too straight forward, maybe it’s time to inject an
unforeseen event.
One Tool in Our Toolbox
We need not build all of our adventures around the idea of situations. This
style is just one we can add to our RPG designer’s toolbox. Thinking about
a location from a high level, what it is, what it was before, who is there,
what are they doing, and why the characters give a damn, can help us build
a dynamic location for a particular style of gameplay. Other times we may
want to return to our more prescriptive style where we have a better idea
what will happen scene to scene and where things will go. Deciding that
on-the-rails style adventures should be tossed away completely is as foolish
as considering them the only way to run our games. Tabletop roleplaying
games give us the freedom to build entire universes with our friends at the
table. Our approach towards these games need not be any more limited
than the worlds we develop.
That said, stepping away from the design of particular scenes and raising
our focus up to an entire situation can build a dynamic environment that
gives our players the freedom to choose how they want to face the world
around them.
136 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
ove it or hate it, the standard first adventure in D&D is still a
traditional crawl, even if it isn’t set in a dungeon, caverns, or mines.
Adventures in the Demonweb Pits, in a dark lord’s castle or palace, or even
in a forest areall dungeon crawls: they offer free-fire zones for heroes with
massive spells, burst lances, heavy explosive crossbows, and what have you.
I always enjoy the subcategory called “city adventures” because they
break the established rules of the D&D combat arena. Unlike dungeons
and other secluded locations, city adventures are constantly interrupted by
the presence of bystanders and busybodies, by the forces of the law, and by
villains hiding among the innocent. They can be wildly unpredictable.
The classic fiction example is Lankhmar and the adventures of Fafhrd
and the Grey Mouser, but there are plenty of others in the core D&D
setting: the city of Greyhawk, the city of Sigil in Planescape, everything in
Waterdeep, Ptolus, and Freeport. In a certain sense, the biggest cities define
the settings, and adventuring there is a logical extension of the dungeon.
City Types and Party Types
To start, you have to decide what kind of adventure you’re really dealing
with. A city adventure can be all about expectations of behavior. As the
designer and DM, you set that standard through what you describe.
If the city adventure is set in a standard human city, that’s one thing. If
it’s a dwarven settlement or even a kobold mining camp, the parameters
for expected behavior are different. It is partly the ability to figure out what
is and is not allowed behavior that makes such non-human city adventures
L
City Adventures
Wolfgang Baur
19
137City Adventures h Wolfgang Baur
(well, all city adventures) fun. Dwarves might have a high tolerance for
dueling in the streets or halls, as long as the duel is conducted according
to the proper forms. Kobolds might not blink at ambushes, but might also
have different ideas of proper behavior during daylight hours.
Weigh the Party
Ideally, a city adventuring party always includes one or more characters
who have social skills, Knowledge (Local), enchantment and stealth
,and length of the rules set to the
likely elements in an introductory adventure. If you can deliver what your
player base wants, your design’s odds of success increase hugely. Ignore the
hardcore audience if your target audience is newcomers and vice versa.
They want contradictory things from your design, and you can only please
one of them.
Victory!
One element we rarely consider consciously in RPG design is the victory
condition, though it is the single most important rule in almost every other
type of game design. Without a well-defined victory condition, a game is
not a game—and yet roleplaying games violate this principle. Or do they?
16 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
I’d argue that one way to strengthen an RPG design is by creating a set
of victory or advancement conditions that reward continued or frequent
play. Dungeons & Dragons isn’t remembered for this element of design, but
it has exactly this element: It grants levels to player characters. And there’s
a general goal of advancement in every RPG. I’d take this further and say
that good adventures and setting all make implicit promises of what victory
looks like. It’s often no better than “stop the drow and save the kingdom” or
“prevent Doomsday,” but that’s certainly a goal.
Even if your game has frequent rewards rather than a single overarching
victory condition, I’d recommend that your find those reward moments
and make them clearer, brighter, and shinier. It is almost impossible
to reward players too much or too often in video games (positive
reinforcement works). Use it in RPGs, not just in the form of gold and
magic, but in the form of status, prestige, unique treasures, followers and
admirers, and a sense that the heroes matter. What’s the point of defeating
dragons if you still can’t get a beer at the pub? Make sure that heroes are
acclaimed and rewarded both in and out of character.
Your Invisible Ally in Game Design
In RPGs, game design is broader than in tabletop board games or even
than in video games, because as a designer you must also enlist the DM as
your ally.
There’s no RPG without a DM willing to run your system or your
scenario, so you need to succeed in inspiring those who will spend the
money on the system and setting, spend the time on mastering world and
rules material, and spend the effort to construct and tell their own stories
in collaboration with a gaming group. Not to mention cleaning up the
house and putting out the cheese and drinks every week.
This is why writing dull-but-effective mechanics is a fairly big failure of
design. If you lavish care on the mechanical elements to the exclusion of
flavor, no one will bother to wade through your case-style rules to actually
play the game. Most DMs will be looking for an implied setting or set of
heroic tasks at the very least, and most prefer a rules set that explicitly
supports a particular world and/or style of play.
Likewise, if you worry only about the flavor and setting and fail to
bulletproof your mechanics and rules, you may well inspire someone to
play it, but disaster will ensue as soon as the game hits the table. As soon
as the ludic experience of actual play falls apart around them, they will
(rightfully) abandon your game system or house rule the worthwhile bits
into another set of mechanics. Go too far in either direction, and you risk
indifference on the one hand and an unplayable morass on the other.
17 What is Design? h Wolfgang Baur
What makes a roleplaying design work, then? If I knew the answer and
could make it plain I’d be a very wealthy man. The answer is complicated,
and depends on three factors: audience expectation, surprise and
originality, and what I will call heightened play.
Audience Expectations
To absolutely no one’s surprise, gamers are a diverse and rowdy lot
who want a lot of conflicting things in their games: total simplicity and
immense play depth, great setting and easy customization into new forms,
wild genderbending freedom and the comfort of familiar, conservative
assumptions about the nature of high fantasy, science fiction (SF), or the
like. Also, they want something they already know by heart that they’ve
never seen before.
For the most part, you should ignore audience expectations.
You heard me. As a game designer, you will be asked often and loudly
to deliver “same but different” game designs. That’s fine if you are starting
out or if you are getting a toehold in the field, and it is absolutely part of
the gig to know what the audience wants. However, if you really want to
make a name for yourself, you’ll fail to impress by just meeting audience
expectations. This is clearest when you look at the career arc of most of the
major pen-and-paper designers, but it’s also true for video game and board
game designers. Expanding on an existing design is a good way to keep
Marketing happy, provide sales for a publisher, and cater to a fan base. It is
not, in and of itself, a bad thing at all, and I’ve done plenty of such projects
over the years, some of which I’m quite proud of.
The projects that really get you recognized as a designer, though, are
the ones that don’t cater to expectations and that get you out in front of
what an audience asks for. No one asked Luke Crane, “Hey, give us an RPG
about sentient mice with a sense of honor!” And yet the Mouse Guard
RPG was the entirely deserving winner of major accolades and a lot of
fan enthusiasm in 2009, and the game has been a definite success by indie
standards. Likewise most other hits for smaller publishers, such as Chris
Spivey’s amazing Harlem Unbound or Rodney Thompson’s heist game Dusk
City Outlaws. Creating a core setting and a set of mechanics that supports
it is the way to go.
Go big if you can.
Surprise and Originality
Perhaps I belabor the obvious when I tell you to give gamers what they
don’t yet know they want. Underlying that, I believe that what gamers
really want beyond a faithfulness to a game’s premise is a sense of surprise
and originality. There have been dozens if not hundreds of major RPG
18 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
systems in the last 45 years. There are thousands of board game designs.
Why do another one? Because sequels suck, and because there’s a chance
that you’ll do it better than it’s ever been done.
Originality and surprise can take many forms. Reskinning an existing
rules set to serve a new master is one road to success; look at Blue Rose
and the underlying True20 rules, for example, or the way that the Call
of Cthulhu rules set has been reskinned in novel ways to support Basic
Roleplaying, the Elric RPG, and others.
Dominion certainly reinvented the way card games work by fusing the
deck construction of Magic: the Gathering with a non-trading-card-game set
of components. Originality may mean fusion of two disparate elements.
Alternately, you may find a new mechanic that enables a whole new form
of roleplaying, or a central conceit of how the gameplay progresses around
the table that leans more in a particular direction toward story gaming,
tactical gaming, or even family gaming. Wonderful! Design your heart out,
and I hope that gamers everywhere embrace the new paradigm.
While on the one hand I do want to encourage designers, I have to sound
one pragmatic note of caution as well: Unless you are self-publishing, you
probably won’t start off with an opportunity to go big. Most publishers
won’t gamble everything on an unknown designer with a neat idea unless
there’s very good evidence that you can carry it off. In board games, that
means your game playtests insanely well. In RPGs, it usually means you’ve
got a track record of smaller titles and achievements. In video games, it
usually means you’ll spend years supporting senior designers before you
ever have a chance to lead an A-list title.
But watch for your chance, and keep notes for what you’ll do when and
if an opportunity
,spells,
or psionic powers that allow a party to go around breaking some of the
expectations with relative impunity. The party trespasses and commits
murder in most city adventures, and it’s your job as designer to make sure
that this doesn’t derail the adventure entirely. If the party is all barbarians,
clerics of the war god, warlocks and druids, they may not be the right
group for a city adventure. On the other hand, just because there’s a bard,
rogue, or smooth-talking paladin available in the group doesn’t mean that
the rest of the party should be ignored.
Contained Violence
The default tool for a party trying to solve problems and defeat villains in a
city adventure—combat and mayhem—is not part of the code of accepted
behavior in most cities. You either need to hide the combat from the citizens,
contain it, allow it, or eliminate it entirely. Here are a few strategies.
Cheats
Anyone can place a city adventure in the sewers, in the mayor’s jail, or in
an isolated wizard’s tower. Essentially, it’s a standard dungeon with a more
convenient trip back to town. These aren’t the adventures I’m talking about,
though sometimes it’s good to have some locations where you expect big
combats to take place. I call those locations “ghettoes,” in the older sense of
the word: a place where a minority must live by law, whether they are rich
or poor, as in the ghettoes of Venice or Prague.
Ghettoes
Noir crime novels often put their bar brawls, daylight murders, and body-
dumpings in the “bad part of town.” There’s no reason not to use this same
dodge in fantasy cities. If your players pretty much expect combat every
session and their PCs prefer to beat answers out of prisoners, they may
not be the ideal party for city adventures anyway. But make sure that the
informers, witnesses, crime lords, monsters, and vile cultists all live in an
identifiable part of town. For good examples, I recommend reading the
Thieves’ World books by Lynn Abbey and Robert Aspirin, or any of Fritz
Lieber’s Lankhmar stories.
138 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
In the Free City of Zobeck, the kobold ghetto is a place that no respectable
human or dwarf visits often, and it is a crowded, dangerous place, full of
various kobold mine gangs, silver syndicates, followers of the Red Mask and
related cults, and perfectly respectable clockworker kobolds who serve as the
protectors and stewards of the city’s many gearwork doors, bridges, gates,
lifts, and scullions, and devices. All kobolds, though, hold themselves as a
breed apart, and are instantly suspicious of anyone who comes to visit them.
While they can pass unnoticed among the rest of town as servants beneath
anyone’s dignity, no human or dwarf can visit the ghetto without becoming
an object of curiosity. This makes it all the more interesting to force PCs to
visit, because it means that the kobold rulers instantly take an interest in
whatever the party is up to. Any combat in the ghetto is quickly hushed up
by the kobolds; people disappear there all the time, and when kobolds die
at the hands of outsiders, well, no one wants to talk about that either. It’s the
perfect place to stage a huge fight that everyone denies after the fact, because
it is out of sight of respectable society.
Stealth and Limited Combat
Other city adventures are conducted quietly, by night, in disguise or under
false pretenses. The party gets to fight incredible monsters because they do
it out of sight, and then slip away before anyone asks any really awkward
questions such as, “Why is there a zombie on my doorstep?” A party
actually caught or even just recognized doing stealthy thefts, break-ins,
kidnappings, or sewer expeditions at midnight will have a much tougher
time explaining themselves to the watch than a group caught in daylight
working with a disguise or fast-talking their way in.
Players often overlook the recognition part, but it’s the equivalent of
robbing a bank and leaving in your own car. Famous heroes who aren’t
wearing full helmets or hoods will be recognized at some point. Then the
awkward questions come up again. No high priest of the Sun God wants to
hear, “Why, exactly, were you in the City Morgue at the witching hour, your
Holiness?” first thing the next morning.
Sometimes the fights are unavoidable: the wererats come up out of the
sewers, the steam golem starts rampaging through the Arcane Collegium,
the angels of death fly down from the Death Goddess temple. Stuff
happens. Heroes get an opportunity to save everyone very publicly. These
fights are good city combat scenes because the party has a free pass to kill
monsters, as long as they’re saving more of the public than they might
harm accidentally. I’ve always found that paladins, rangers, and certain LG
clerics respond really well to these super-hero type scenes. Make it clear
that there are bystanders to save.
139City Adventures h Wolfgang Baur
Pure Investigation
These adventures are not about combat at all: murder mysteries might
feature an arrest, but that’s about it. Solving a theft or a kidnapping might
likewise be done without requiring the party to participate in more than a
single combat. These adventures are more properly mysteries than purely
city adventures, but the two genres play well with each other.
City Law and Order
The big difference in many city adventures is the ever-present town guard
breaking up fights, preventing spellcasting, curing villains, arresting people
before the PCs can question them, and so on. City adventures benefit when
it’s not just the PCs who are trying to solve the city’s problems. Ideally, the
city watch and the PCs work at cross-purposes a bit, to make the adventure
tougher to solve.
Permission for Mayhem
Sometimes, the threat to a city is clear, grave, and immediate, so the prince,
mayor, or council gives the PCs free rein to kill the city’s enemies. There
might be questions about this later if they abuse the privilege, but basically,
they have a warrant from the law to do what needs to be done. It’s the
simplest solution to allow parties to cast Meteor Swarm in the town square.
A careless party may start fires, kill innocent citizens, or just drag in the
wrong suspect for torture at the hands of a LE ruler. Just because they have
permission doesn’t mean acting like they’re still in a dungeon is smart.
Even this fairly relaxed approach to PC limits can feel constrained. It works
best for high-level characters. They have a lot more power, so even being
slightly constrained feels like a bigger imposition.
Shorten Combat
There’s a second category of limited combat: the fight that ends when the
Town Watch breaks it up. If a villain cannot be defeated in four or five
rounds (or however many you decide), he doesn’t need to get away with
magic or a chase scene. Instead, the watch comes and arrests him or arrests
the party.
Use the Innocent
People in a city will do things that bring them to the party’s attention
that you can use to speed up the plot, slow it down, or derail it altogether.
Urchins will spy on the party and report back to the villain. Busybodies
will tell the party about the illegal dwarven still in the basem*nt. Someone
will try to steal the paladin’s warhorse.
140 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
People in the city have Big Plans, and most of them aren’t related to the
party’s goals at all. I looooove derailing city parties this way, with events
described at the start of a session. For example:
• Beggars and bards looking for a handout (or do they know
something?)
• Heralds carrying invitations to poetry readings by important nobles
• Bells ringing for temples or funerals (who died?)
• Processions by the victorious King’s Own Hussars
• Muggings unrelated to the plot (but PCs will often want revenge!)
• Explosive market fairs (the Alchemist’s Gathering!)
• Civic and religious holidays (the Anointing of the Mayor, the Blessing
of the
,Fleet)
• Arrival of dignitaries (the elven ambassador and his new wife)
Cities are active places with their own agendas. To avoid derailing a
campaign completely you might want to allow the party a Knowledge
(Local) check to realize that some of these are normal events and unrelated
to the adventure at hand.
City Characters
In a dungeon, it’s easy to assume that the majority of monsters are evil or
at least dangerous. In a city, the majority of characters nearby are totally
unrelated to the adventure. How the heck is the party supposed to find
the villains, much less defeat them in combat? That’s often one of the main
challenges. Here are a few of the tricks I like to use in city adventures to
keep the party guessing.
Paladins and Watch Captains
One of my favorite “bits” for city guards, especially guard captains, is the
party nemesis. This honorable sergeant has his eyes on the PCs as no-
good, unemployed vandals and mercenaries. He is always tailing them,
questioning people who talk to them, warning others about their shifty
ways, and generally making things difficult for the party. Ideally, he’s tough,
street-smart, and has a high Sense Motive and a strong Will save, to see
through Bluff and Diplomacy and to avoid Enchantment spells. A ring of
see invisibility is a plus.
Nobles, Rogues, and Witnesses
You can also make class and status work for you in city adventures, to
divide the party. Cities are full of feudal lords and knights who expect a
certain amount of special consideration, and who don’t expect to answer to
lower-class adventurers at all. Likewise, a city’s poor or struggling rogues,
141City Adventures h Wolfgang Baur
smugglers, and whor*s may not feel comfortable talking to lordly paladins,
holy clerics, or even to hyper-lawful monks. A bard might be either low-
class or high-class, but either way, some ultra-lawful character might object
to the trashy entertainer and prefer to talk to the honest dwarven sorcerer-
scholar. Use NPC prejudices to offer a ready excuse for every PC in the
party to take point in talking to important NPCs.
Make sure that some of the witnesses or suspects in a city adventure
are not the sorts of people who will talk to everyone in the party as
equals. Making a smelly, scraggly druid sit in the palace kitchen seems
like punishing the player for his character type, but if you spend a couple
minutes of the party’s palace visit giving the druid a chance to talk to the
palace rats, everything usually works out. Because city life is partly a matter
of status and hierarchy, you can make this a chance for high-status characters
to strut a little, and lower-status characters to subvert the social order.
Player characters invariably ask witnesses to provide information. This
seems like a great well of free information, but it’s mixed. People forget
things, people are greedy, and people are unreliable witnesses at the best
of times. Never mind when they are charmed by vampires, extorted by
wererats, fading from an illness, or just plain terrified of the local Red
Wizards. Roleplaying is built in to many of these encounters. Design your
witnesses so that half of them want a side quest or other matter taken care
of before they talk. The other half will talk freely, but some of them will
lie, cheat, or settle old scores of their own. Sense Motive is helpful in these
situations, but it shouldn’t be a cure-all. Most practiced deceivers should
have high Bluff ranks.
XP for City Adventures
City adventures tend to have lots of roleplaying encounters, skill encounters,
witness side quests and the like, and few straight up combats. For this
reason, you must design in story awards or encounter-based awards for
acquiring information to keep the pace of level advancement reasonable.
I go further than that. Before the game begins, make it clear that you will
award XP during city adventures for avoiding unnecessary combats (unless
the party is all evil or chaotic PCs). Fighting the town watch should always
count as a defeat for the party in an encounter; no XP. This goes a long way
to getting the heroes to act heroically in city settings—because the players
know that the rewards are there for them, even if they don’t fight more
than once per game session. It also means that fleeing the Town Watch can
become a frequent story element—after any fight or after finding a major
clue that offers big XP, the party will be quick to leave the scene, so as not
to lose that XP award due to a confrontation with the watch.
142 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Conclusion
A city adventure is different because (unlike other adventure types) it isn’t
about combat, but about information and precision actions. It demands
different skills from players and designers and a greater emphasis on NPC
interaction and legal niceties. You need to manage combat spaces to make
the core D&D problem-solving tool part of the fun. Maintaining that tension
between civilization and carnage is what makes a great city adventure.
143The Underdark h Wolfgang Baur
The Underdark
Wolfgang Baur
20
he word “underdark” has existed since about 1978, when Gary
Gygax first mentioned it in “D1–Descent into the Depths of the
Earth.” Since then, it has been expanded, most notably by Kim Mohan
in the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide, by Carl Sargent with the Night Below
boxed set, and by Gygax himself with the rest of the amazing D series.
Bob Salvatore, Thomas Reid and others expanded it in the Forgotten
Realms novels. (And not to show false modesty, I’ve done my share in both
Kingdom of the Ghouls and Empire of the Ghouls).
What keeps us coming back to it? The underdark succeeds as a setting
for adventure because it pulls on three threads that gamers love: deep-
seated myth, the easy grind, and the outsider heroes.
The Mythic Underdark
The classic underworld caves and caverns are the parlor to the afterlife, one
step away from hell, the River Styx, or the Cerberus-guarded gates. It’s not
just Western myths that go this direction: Egyptian and Chinese hells are
underground, and the Aztec entrances to Mictlan, the land of the dead, are
within the cenotes and caves beneath our feet.
Freud could explain this as some sort of primal urge to return to the
womb at death, but really, we’re talking adventure gaming. Humans have
a deep-seated image of land underground as an abode of the gods and the
dead. That’s worth playing with as a flavor element, just as mountaintops
and deep forests have their own resonances. So work those resonances:
river crossings are creepier if the boatman is a bit reminiscent of Charon
T
144 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
(and passage back is dicey in any case). Advance that hell hound as far as
it will go, and give it the chimerical or two- headed Template, or whatever
strikes your fancy.
Players expect a little bit of eeriness in the underdark: choose your
favorite flavor, such as dark fey, decayed undeath, fishy aboleth or kuo-
toans, or even the classic drow fane. Push it a little harder: tie the ghouls
to Orcus or the Death God, or give the dark fey a black queen who drives
them to steal children and leave changelings behind. Give the aboleth
secrets of the gods that existed before man, and magic that leads directly
to massive power and complete madness. Then send them on the classic
Joseph Campbell hero’s journey: leave the civilized world behind, enter
darkness, and return triumphant from beyond death and darkness. That’s
the mythic value of the deep dark. Everyone knows it will be a rough trip,
and they half-expect the worst of monsters. Give them ghoul dragons and
variant daemons and lich drow and suzerain quickling plague otyughs.
The players will complain about the nastiness. But they will brag about the
adventure for years afterwards, if their character survives.
Underdark as Wilderness
Darkness, wet, food, and eternal night—it’s possible to run the
,underdark
as a form of survival campaign, slowly losing equipment, food, and health
to disease, rust, and decay. Ropes rot. Food spoils, and straps and supplies
run out. What mushrooms are safe to eat? Ask the druid, and hope he has
the ranks in Knowledge (Nature) or Survival to avoid the poisonous and
hallucinogenic varieties.
This campaign depends less on the underworld as portal to the afterlife or
on big monsters than on logistics and wilderness fights over long stretches.
Each encounter is more or less a stand-alone affair, with hours or days
between them, just like a wilderness campaign. To create worthy challenges,
you need to design groups of monsters who work as a sequence of fights
near one another. Single monsters always need to have a CR above the party
level, because the group will be at or near full strength for each encounter.
DEATH AT THE GATES
The other part of mythic feel that I like for the underdark is not to
everyone’s tastes. Characters who die too close to the gates of Hades?
They stay dead, though they linger briefly as ghosts until they can pay
Charon off. Underdark deaths are permanent. Raising the stakes this way
makes a difference, but it’s only fair if the players know about it. Make
sure some NPC tips them off early in any adventure in which you plan to
follow this direction.
145The Underdark h Wolfgang Baur
There are exceptions, of course, the same ones as on the surface: cities
and other settlements. Wherever a group of monsters lives together,
encounters can pile on top of each other. While the typical underdark city
may have evil drow, demons, and ghouls in it, it still needs some form of
dictatorial law and order to make it a livable city. Without rules (no matter
how vile), the resources needed to sustain a large population do not flow
into the city, and the whole place falls apart. A party is safer in a city of
monsters than they are out in the tunnels and empty caverns between
those monstrous cities. Even in the cities, murder is only a crime if you kill
members of the elite.
This makes the underdark an easier wilderness to grind through than
the surface. Tunnels mean you never get lost or miss important sites. The
monsters are all evil, and there are no consequences for slaughter, most of
the time. There’s no civilization to hold people back from bloodlust. Unlike
most wildernesses, you never need to worry about getting caught in bad
weather, floods, or forest fires. At the same time, it can be wilderness unlike
any other. Some players expect a sort of mega-dungeon. That’s the wrong
way to look at it, in my opinion. It’s a wilderness without rest, without
rules, without margin for a lot of error.
What works best for me is to provide natural hazards to remind people
that they are out in the black depths, but to keep it hyper-real. To make
non-mythic elements resonate with your players depends on what you
know of their fears and phobias. Do they hate darkness? Drowning? Tight,
enclosed spaces?
Force them to swim in the dark through a narrow tunnel. Do they hate
heights and fear falling? Put them up on the ceiling in a cloaker city above
an Abyss that makes Krubera (the real world’s deepest cave) look tame.
Acidic waters, noxious gasses, cave-ins, and constant monster encounters
can all channel the party in certain directions. You can literally seal a
passage behind them, and force a march for miles seeking another exit.
Most players think the underdark is a great place to visit for XP and big
adventure, but they all get a little nervous when the mountain collapses and
they are shut in with all those miles of monsters. “Dropped into the deep
end” takes on a new meaning. Suddenly, the trek is a lot less appealing.
That’s the wilderness reaction you always want: the sound of pants-wetting
fear when the party realizes they’re trapped, they’re out of resources, and
they’re many, many miles from home.
In the underdark, that is a lot easier to achieve.
146 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Heroes as Permanent Outsiders
The third thing to remember about an underdark campaign is that pasty-
skinned, half-blind surface dwellers are not really welcome. They aren’t
drow, or kuo-toans, or illithids, or ghouls. They’re the normal ones, but
every race around them is profoundly weird in their own way—and none
of them trust surface types.
Even if they don’t fight the PCs, no one does the party any favors.
Getting help, supplies, or just a safe place to rest for a few days is a lucky
break. There is no backup anywhere.
The prejudices and hatreds of the underdark races against one another is
nothing compared to their hatred of those who see the sun. Unless a party
spends some resources on Disguise, alter self, and so on, they are always
immediately recognizable as “not from around here.” That matters if they
run into a big city or even a small outpost of monsters that they can’t fight
their way through. Diplomacy and Bluff are useful even in the underdark.
When you need to talk your way through the aboleth force gates, it is
harder if everyone hates you to begin with.
There’s a silver lining to the constant scorn and hatred the PCs attract
in the underdark: friends are treated like gold. Svirfneblin are welcome
because they are merely wary. A group of deep dwarves or even xorn might
be friendly, and can become useful allies for a party with no one they can
trust. The pressure of always fighting and skulking means that an honestly
kind reception or an act of generosity will stand out a lot more from an
NPC in the underdark. Make that work for you; remind the party that not
everyone and everything is evil inhuman scum.
Just most things.
Conclusion
The underdark appeals exactly because it plays into some deep, dark fears
and because it is an innately hostile place. That’s what defines heroic action.
Any DM who makes things easy on the party is making a fundamental
mistake about the nature of the classic underdark adventure. Yes, there is a
sense of wonder at the strange world below, but it should be a wonder laced
with fear and respect from the PCs.
The underdark is at its most powerful when it is both consistently
strange and hostile, and it rises above an easy place to find monsters.
147Maps, Monsters, and Bottom-Up Design h Wolfgang Baur
Maps, Monsters, and
Bottom-Up Design
Wolfgang Baur
21
he one lesson that I never seem to learn is that maps are not
something that can be done after the fact in a skirmish/tactical game
design. And drawing those maps always, always, always makes me think of
some cool new twist for the encounter.
For example, during the design and most particularly during the playtest
of Wrath of the River King, various elements of text and maps needed to
be improved. A particular monster could take cover in the trees—and
that hadn’t been addressed. A spellcaster in another encounter was far too
vulnerable to ranged attacks in an early draft; giving the caster a tree for
cover helped and fed into the tone of the encounter as well. In other areas,
the maps needed a clearer “start area” for the heroes—the maps were open
on all sides and some playtesters wanted clear drop zones.
None of that was edition-specific, of course. In a playtest for Midgard
Sagas for 5th Edition, one of the players decided to swim out to the barge
where the ogres were reloading their ballista. This was a truly heroic but
thoroughly dumb move that I hadn’t anticipated. Leaping from the bridge
to the barge suddenly seemed like a good option to consider, and other
acrobatic options enhanced play. In every case, a simple, skeletal design was
improved by a designer run-through or a full playtest. The point here is that
it’s fine to put your material into playtest very early on—and you may find
that in many cases, it opens up new directions or offers a chance to make the
T
148 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
creatures, conditions,
,or locales stand out. As a designer, that sort of iterative
improvement is what GMs and players are paying for. Never think that your
first, second, or third draft can’t be improved by contact with the tabletop
and play in the hands of friends or strangers who report back to you.
The Value of Maps
What maps do, of course, is force a designer to make some tradeoffs. You
only get one map for an encounter. You only get one map for a Midgard
Sagas or an Eldritch Lair or a Prepared! encounter—and in 5th Edition,
some encounters are presented without a map at all, or just a sketch to
assist theater-of-the-mind style play. The limitations of page size and
budget really do bump up against what you want the encounter to do.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing for an organized play format, a
DMs Guild throwaway, or a deeply considered and heavily test free-form
approach that leaves more design options on the table: you’ve still got only
so many maps and illustrations to work with.
So, you pick your favorites, or the ones that really need the maps to
work. In the tabletop D&D adventures (and in virtual tabletop encounters
in particular), there’s an assumption that every encounter needs to have a
map. I’ve bucked the trend in Wrath because there’re so many roleplaying
and skill encounters, but it’s still 15 maps, some of them very simple, and
others very complex indeed.
There’s a method to good maps. The person whose map turnovers always
impressed me most when I was editing Dungeon were the ones from Chris
Perkins. They were crisp and complete, with a legend you could read, all
areas neatly labeled, lines that met at corners, solid black for the earthen
sections of the dungeon, and so one. About a million times better than
my typical map turnover. But being clear and legible and having a full
explanation of what the various symbols on your map mean is only half the
battle. The other half is that the map should encourage a variety of tactics
and playstyles. The “Madman at the Bridge” encounter in Midgard Sagas
for 5th Edition pushes the approach of piling encounters on top of one
another in rapid succession, with no down-time between them.
The whole point of that combat sequence is to build up tension and to
wear down party resources so that the finale is, well, explosive and takes
place when party resources are thin. Things can go horribly wrong, of
course—that swimming PC I mentioned earlier should have been out of
the adventure due to the player’s own stupidity, but it was a GenCon game
and his party tried to pull him to shore—exposing themselves to additional
ballista fire—so it all worked out in the end. The point is, each encounter is
just a few feet from the next, turning an empty city street into (effectively) a
dungeon fight.
149Maps, Monsters, and Bottom-Up Design h Wolfgang Baur
The goal for other maps is quite different. You may want to channel
the party onto a narrow cliff side path, or have them leaping along tree
branches, or climbing up and down crates and barrels in a warehouse. But
as long as you have considered the map ahead of time and tested it out,
you’re serving the needs of the tactical-gamer audience. They love hazards,
difficult terrain, cover, and options for flanking or charges. Empty terrain is
dull, dull, dull.
Which isn’t to say that you can’t please exploration-oriented players
and storytelling players with a good map as well. Planting a chandelier to
swing on or a set of scrolls to protect from fiery immolation gives more
cinematic-and knowledge-oriented players something to work with as
well, and many a villain may decide to give a nasty little monologue before
using the terrain to effect an escape. Build that into your design right from
the start, and your BBEG’s escape from the battlements will flow more
smoothly both as a story element and as a tactical one. For instance, a
creature in a castle may leap off the highest tower, land in the moat, and
swim to safety. This happens more smoothly at the table if the designer has
already determined the falling damage into the moat ahead of time, the
swim speed of the escaping foe, and the creatures that his splash riles up and
that then attack pursuers on the following round. Piranhas or crocodiles are
traditional, but there’s no reason not to try enormous killer frogs, electric
eels, or even a water troll. A little preparation can make this a seamless
getaway—and standing by the side of the moat giving a little monologue
while the party fights to keep their heads above water and somehow burn the
troll(s) should be a scene worth remembering as well.
In other words: Stats are nice, but tactics are priceless.
For more on maps and map design, see The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding
(Kobold Press, 2012) and Jonathan Roberts’ chapter, “Here Be Dragons: On
Mapmaking.”
Bottom-Up Design: Know Three Things About Your Monsters
All this discussion of playtest and terrain leads me to a larger point. My
adventure designs start with an outline, but they don’t end there. Things
change mid-stream, and some monsters become more important, some less
so. In particular, you may find that your group will want to occasionally talk
to the monsters they meet. It’s true that for every encounter, your setup helps
determine whether initiative rolls and a fight happen immediately. But it’s
often more satisfying for experienced players to talk to the monsters first.
For that, you need to have at least considered a sentence’s worth of
material. Think a bit about how each creature fits into the larger picture.
A design need not have a full family history, quirks, and lore about every
monster. But you would do well to include three things about every speaking
monster. The three things are a name, a relationship, and a purpose.
150 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Name
The name is obvious in some ways, though you’d be surprised by how often
you’ll find monsters, even major foes, without a name. This is a huge design
mistake, because that tiny little element makes a huge difference.
The presence of a name is an invitation to the DM. It says, “Other
monsters can talk about this one by name, in tones of fear or respect or
contempt.” It says, “This monster can introduce himself and banter with
the party during combat or urge on his minions.” Having a name means
that you are promoting that monster to higher billing in the adventure/
movie; it’s not an extra or a walk-on. I mean, can you imagine a dragon
without a name? What a horrible waste of potential!
The reason to give a name is actually broader. The players control when
and how they encounter monsters. That is, they decide whether to press on
to the next room or retreat. As a result, they might meet a mid-level baddie
when they are exhausted and trying to find an escape route or a bolt-hole
to heal up for an extended rest. In those cases, they might be willing to
haggle or intimidate the monster that they would otherwise crush.
In the end, giving monsters a name saves the DM from coming up with
one on the spot he might regret later. “Bloodlips” might sound okay at first,
but . . . surely something better is likely to come up after some thought.
Relationship
Monsters also have relationships, and I don’t mean they have girlfriends.
I’m speaking of intelligent monsters who are accountable to the bosses
in an adventure. The monsters may have rivals, lovers, or minions of
their own. This matters, because a monster with friends or enemies has
something to say if a parley breaks out. You don’t need a flow-chart to
realize that a minion knows less and is easier to intimidate than a mid-level
boss. A major devil may just be a mercenary to the main villains, but he’s
got an agenda of his own. Giving each monster a position in the hierarchy
can help you later if the PCs question him. It’s not something you need to
make a big deal out of in the design, but you should have a slot for him
,in
the rankings.
Purpose
Finally, monsters have a purpose beyond fighting adventurers. They
serve themselves (seeking food and treasure), they serve others (as slaves,
minions, henchgoblins, trusted advisors, hired assassins, what have you),
and they serve powerful causes (a nation, a cult, a church, a genocide, a
vision of power, a coup). Some monsters will just attack to kill the heroes.
That’s fine for the majority, but eventually the game grows pretty stale if
every encounter is a fight.
151Maps, Monsters, and Bottom-Up Design h Wolfgang Baur
This is easy to fix if you’ve thought through the facts of everyday life for
those monsters. Those monsters who are less devoted to a cause might
break and run sooner, and those who are purely mercenaries might be
willing to change sides. The lowest kitchen servant might be tired of the
constant beatings. He might even make the offer to betray his masters or
their cause . . . and suddenly the story-oriented “talky” players will really
want to run with that scene, while even the most tactical powergamer will
appreciate the value of inside information from a turncoat. Suddenly that
lowly goblin is a lot more interesting than his AC and hp might indicate.
Make sure to give at least a quarter of your monsters the option to do
something with the party other than fight.
So this is design from the bottom up. Yes, you must have a big, powerful,
interesting villain (a topic for another time). But it also pays to consider the
rank and file, the middle-ground monsters, and the least powerful servants
who hear everything. They are rich in roleplaying and story options; they
can provide clues and hints exactly because they are less of a threat than
the big combat guns. It’s still up to the PCs to decide not to slaughter every
foe, but I’ve found that even relatively bloodthirsty players will stop when
it’s clear that the foe is frightened or treacherous, has information, and
has a name. Faceless hordes are easier to kill than creatures with even the
thinnest personality.
Making Monsters Monstrous
Not many monsters should be cowards willing to sell out their cause. Most
should be tough grunts, silent undead, or whatever creature type works for
the adventure.
This is where the use of minions and large numbers of foes in 4E provided
a design opportunity that I still miss occasionally. The vast majority of the
foes were purely cannon fodder for the skirmishes. But the elite and solo
monsters were surprisingly durable against a party, and (unlike in prior
editions) they could easily retreat and act as recurring foes. It’s was just
a matter of the math; they had so many hit points that they can retreat
without fear of dying on the way to the door. 5th Edition D&D retains some
of this higher-HP margin, though perhaps dialed back a touch. Spiking to
higher HP is still the easiest way to make sure a villain can retreat.
I digress. Let’s cut to the bottom line here.
152 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
What Does All This Mean For 5E Design
Compared to Earlier Editions?
What terrain, maps, and focused monsters mean is that means that
recurring villains and recurring monsters to work in the style of Wrath of
the River King for 5th Edition, or for any adventure where some monsters
are meant to show up repeatedly, you’re going to need to set up elements to
make a villains’ presence resonate. Here’s a simple checklist that will help
expand a single big bad into a larger, more impressive figure.
Build a reputation earlier: Minions name-dropping a boss or NPCs
starting in fear when a particular name is spoken (“Shhhh! The White
Witch has spies everywhere!”) can make a villain impressive before the
party ever seems them.
Distance the villain: Prep the map to offer outs, cover, minions, and other
obstacles between heroes and vour arch-villain. Make it difficult to close in.
Shorthands and calling cards: Give the villain various evocative names
and titles, give them touchstone powers, and provide ways to make it clear
that a villain has been there before the heroes arrived.
Tilt the combat odds: Players look for every advantage; villains should
at least have a few things working in their favor, such as guards, alarms,
guardian animals or servitors, a hearthstone that summons infinite fire
elementals, etc. Truly powerful villains can be a fight that PCs don’t win
unless they have planned a way to keep a foe from escaping or summoning
reinforcements. Again, terrain and options for escape are crucial.
Make information count: If the party knows that the River King’s servants
can easily escape by reaching water, it changes their approach to combat. If
the party hasn’t figured that out, well, tough luck.
All this affects story elements as much as tactical elements. When a
monster can recur throughout an adventure, each time with a new set
of minions, each time escaping. This drives players nuts. It’s even more
effective if you’ve set up some taunting quips as parting shots from the
villain as he escapes. Again. And when they finally run him to ground, they
may well find it a lot more satisfying.
Shift, slide, and escape: This is also where heroes with an emphasis on
movement powers and spells comes into their own. A cooperative party
with decent abilities can usually keep one foe from running at will. The fey
of River King—with their teleportation powers—can actually escape these
nets rather easily, which makes them perfect recurring foils for the party.
153Maps, Monsters, and Bottom-Up Design h Wolfgang Baur
Extra XP for recurring villains: Ok, you’ve gone out of your way to make
some villains tough to pin down and tough to defeat. The talking bear,
the green knight: these are characters the party may meet repeatedly and
yet never defeat. so there’s an argument that the victory should not just be
more satisfying on a story level, it should also deliver greater game rewards.
I’d argue that a recurring villain is worth a extra story XP if he reappears
once or twice, and more if he reappears more than twice. If you want to
plan out villain story arcs very tightly, you might even grant milestone
levels when some of the biggest foes are defeated.
Conclusion
I consider this entire approach to be design based on the encounter and the
monster, the smallest discrete units of adventure design. Those small units
can connect through the relationships of the monsters, their reappearance
and their mutual betrayals, to be a more complex and satisfying set of
enemies for the party. This approach is frustrating to the players in the
short run, and much more satisfying in the long run, than a simple top-
down villain and his faceless swarms.
154 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
ou know the classic scene. Conan lifts his broadsword and wades into
battle. He slashes down foes by the handful! Hail Crom!
In books and films, the epic stand against overwhelming odds is a
fantasy staple. On the tabletop, it’s a rarity. While 3E D&D characters can
have Cleave, the Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) says they shouldn’t have
too many opportunities to use it.
Page 49 Says “No Way”
Third Edition has a chip on its shoulder about using too many monsters
to challenge the heroes. It calls out the problem in the DMG encounters
section, page 49, where it says any encounter that has more than twelve
creatures relies on monsters that are not a sufficient challenge. And thus,
the table lists no ELs for large groups of foes. This is problematic for
heroic fantasy. Feats like Cleave depend on having large numbers of weak
foes. The 3E suggestion to avoid encounters with more than twelve foes
eliminates at least three fun encounter types, namely nuisance encounters
(a gang of thieves), mooks-as-terrain, and the fun of massive, epic brawls.
It eliminates the “defying the odds” brand of heroism. Mass epic combats
Y
Monster Hordes
Epic Heroism vs. Smooth Skirmishing
Wolfgang
,Baur
22
“No one will remember today except that two stood against many. I ask
you, Father Crom, grant me victory, grant me revenge. And if you will not
grant them to me; then the hell with you!”
—Conan the Barbarian (1982)
155Monster Hordes: Epic Heroism vs. Smooth Skirmishing h Wolfgang Baur
are not encounters for every game session, but occasional swarms of brittle
or weak foes should be part of any decent campaign. They can play to PC
strengths, and they can give a major villain an army of minions that at
least look impressive. The rules solution to making large numbers work is
to use swarm/mob rules (e.g., the mob scene in Castle Shadowcrag) or to
streamline the die rolls as needed. The DMG is right in one regard: large
numbers of foes can slow down combat to a crawl, and they are a challenge
to design properly and to DM properly. Here are some suggestions for
making epic battles worth the extra effort.
How to Handle Hordes
The DMG prohibition is meant well, because it is meant to maintain a
combat challenge. It’s limited advice; weak undead in particular are useful
in droves because they can burn off Turn attempts. A large number of
monsters aren’t meant to be a combat encounter at all. Instead, it is a
roleplaying encounter in which the numbers are just a threat or scenery, or
the numbers are part of the terrain, meant to keep the party from catching
up to the fleeing master villain. This is certainly the case in Six Arabian
Nights, which has at least two adventures where bystanders or crowds of
monsters make encounters more challenging.
Crowds are useful tools, but how can you make them work in practice?
One Stands for Many
My favorite trick is to have three or seven kobolds attack a single character
and key their attacks off a single die roll. I roll one d20, and then stagger
the results up and down. If I roll a 14 and the kobolds have a +1 BAB, the
middle roll is 15. Staggering in sets of three might mean a result of 12, 15,
18—meaning that one kobold hits an AC 17 fighter, or two kobolds hit an
AC 15 rogue, and all three hit the AC 12 wizard.
For a set of five attackers, I might stagger in sets of two. The same roll of
14 and a +1 BAB would yield a result of 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19. The AC 17
fighter is hit twice, three hit the AC 15 rogue, and four hit and likely kill the
AC 12 wizard.
This approach has the advantage of being fast, and you can attack three
melee characters with minimal die rolls (three for monsters with a single
attack form). In the case of monsters with multiple attacks (claw/claw/bite
being the classic example), you can still go through a round of monster
attacks with just nine attack rolls against three PCs, rather than 27 or 45.
The downside is that the monsters do have a “good round” or a “bad
round” against each PC. If your one roll is high, the PC might be hit by four
or five foes in a single round, taking lots of damage and possibly multiple
saves. If the roll is low, a single foe or none might hit the PC. It’s a crapshoot.
156 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
I like this effect, as it reflects a horde either overrunning a hero from all
sides, or hesitant and fearful, but it is more dangerous for heroes. One attack
roll of 20 can lead to multiple confirmed criticals and a dead hero in a hurry.
The Swarm Subtype for Mobs
Whether it’s masses of rats, zombies, or villagers, the Swarm subtype works
pretty darn well. Treat the mob or menace as a single creature. When it
takes enough damage, it stops acting like a mob and returns to individuals.
This mechanic is especially nice if you have Good-aligned players
driven by an urge to protect the innocent. You can twist the knife if the
mob contains women, children, and innocent bystanders caught up in the
moment. The NPCs might be wracked with guilt (giving clerics or others
a chance to console and absolve them), and the PCs might feel bad about
having to stop the mob with fire and sword.
Cleave and Be Damned
Declare a house rule that anyone can cleave a creature of 4 CR lower than
a character’s class level. They are not getting much XP at this point, and
there’s precedent in the old 1E rule that creatures below a certain number
of HD could always be cleaved.
Single Point of Failure
Mobs should usually have a single ringleader or officer. If the party can
reach him (which should be difficult) and kill him, they may break the
morale of the rest. Worst case, if the party inflicts heavy damage, the mob
leader may decide to cut his losses and sound an orderly retreat while
dragging some unconscious PCs with them as hostages. Give the party a
head to chop off, but make sure that it’s not a hydra. One leader who may
or may not be in line of sight is plenty. Make it clear that there is a single
“big” leader (who could be a Small size evil gnome, but you take my point).
As long as that second creature is a single foe, the party can try to knock
him out with a spell or focused melee efforts. If that second creature is a
group of monsters spread around the battlefield, there’s no way to easily
contain the big guys’ special attacks or firepower. For more experienced
players, I’d recommend making the leader hard to Spot, possibly magically
hidden, or disguised. Some leaders should be cowards exactly because they
know they are prime targets.
Flee!
The best solution is to describe and show the whole horde but functionally
only use 15 or 20 foes. When those enemies are defeated or the single point
of failure dies (and the heroes remain undaunted), the 50 or 100 others
lose heart and retreat. They might trickle away at first for a round, then
157Monster Hordes: Epic Heroism vs. Smooth Skirmishing h Wolfgang Baur
mostly disappear, then outright throw down their weapons and surrender,
depending on the party’s style. Intimidate checks are appropriate for
convincing a foe to surrender.
Crowd Rules
I’ve written crowd rules a couple of times, in Al-Qadim, for the Book of
Roguish Luck (Malhavoc Press), Castle Shadowcrag, and elsewhere. A
simple movement penalty is a great start: if the crowd is hostile, the party
should always count as flanked, and it should always count as difficult
terrain (imposing a movement penalty). Think of a crowd as terrain that
separates the heroes from the Big Bad. Using a crowd as a grappling foe
works. You may want to permit Intimidate checks for a hero to force the
crowd to part for him.
If the mob is truly fast-moving, require Balance checks or a hero suffers
trampling damage underfoot. This sounds a little strange, until you
remember that death by trampling in a mob happens in the real world all
too often.
Beyond mechanics, remember the important flavor element and describe
the feel of the bloodthirsty mob. This can unnerve a player; describing
“12 orcs with spears” is setting up bowling pins. Describing a tribe of
“50 hobgoblins advancing as a phalanx, spears leveled, large shields
interlocked,” is something else. Crowds can be menacing, dragging people
down to be trampled to death. Crowds with weapons are called armies.
Make them sound dangerous; the weight of numbers is a heroic challenge.
How NOT to Handle Hordes
Some approaches to mass combat are sure to fail, and others must be
handled with extreme care. Here’s some to avoid.
“Unhom*ogeneousness”
Trying to run a crowd of goblins or ogres with different ACs, weapons,
or initiatives is a mess. For all hordes, standardize everything, including
hit points. These are faceless evil minions; differentiating them is
counterproductive. All flying monkeys of Oz are identical for game
purposes. Hordes should be faceless.
Waves of Foes
A party that meets a few enemies, fights them, and then draws in more and
more foes from the surrounding barracks or caves is more likely to end with
a TPK than the party that sees all the foes at the Black Gate at the same time.
The problem is that once the players commit to the fight, even smart
,players
are reluctant to retreat. The size of the horde must be obvious from the start.
158 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Strong Mooks
Masses of foes should be pathetically weak. I suggest a CR at least 4 below
the party level (and 5 or 6 lower is much better). They should be slow, and
have terrible attack rolls, and low damage. Why? Because they will quickly
separate PCs and have eight attacks per round against them. A horde
encounter lasts more rounds than a normal, one-strong-monster encounter
because it takes longer for the party to fight many foes. Their magic can’t
turn the tide, even if it can burn off masses of enemies.
If your mooks are too strong, the PCs can’t kill a single one quickly.
The HP total for a single more-or-less average foe should be in the range
that the party’s best fighter can dish out in one or two rounds. The fighter
should knock down at least one foe per round. With 20 foes, the fighter will
knock down half in ten rounds. It’s heavy going.
Nothing But Numbers
It’s easy to get lost in the initiative and number-crunching with masses of
foes. Roll dice, determine damage, roll again, and keep it moving.
This is a mistake.
Every round choose half the combatants for “flavor duty.” Describe
how those ghouls work together to drag a paralyzed PC off the field,
licking their lips with long forked tongues. Or describe how a half-dozen
spears all jab at Sir Abelard the Paladin—and all miss, turned aside by his
magical armor. Remind the party every round that they are outnumbered.
Sometimes, that weight of numbers will convince a party to withdraw, or
to use better tactics than “we fireball and charge.” This need not be entirely
a DM thing. If you have a player you trust with that sort of description
(i.e., someone who won’t bend descriptions to favor the players), give them
the assignment of providing a 10-second burst combat description for
one PC each round. That way, everyone gets some glory, and you can keep
crunching numbers.
Conclusion
There’s no reason not to occasionally throw mobs of stuff at the party. Players
will soon learn that sometimes that mass of crocodiles should be avoided.
Smart parties will find a way around some hordes. Sometimes that mob of
foes can be outwitted instead of outfought (illusionists and bards live for this
crowd-based stuff and even clerics can use enthrall to good effect against a
mob). Sometimes a party just wants to wreak massive havoc with the feats
and area spells that do exactly that. If you set it up properly, you can make
a great impression without completely bogging down your game.
159Hardboiled Adventures: Make Your Noir Campaigns Work h Keith Baker
Hardboiled Adventures
Make Your Noir Campaigns Work
Keith Baker
23
n the past, your players have done their share of dungeon crawls.
They have slaughtered armies of orcs, defeated dragons and lich kings,
and received accolades from king and peasant alike. But you’re tired of
traditional fantasy.
You feel like something harder and darker . . . less Lord of the Rings and
more Thieves’ World or Sin City. Perhaps you’re in the market for some
hardboiled fantasy.
“Hardboiled” is a genre of crime fiction, the realm of Sam Spade, Philip
Marlowe, and the Continental Op. In a hardboiled world, little is what
I
When I was a boy, I heard a voice in my dreams calling me to battle the
forces of darkness. When I could lift a sword, I made my way to the Temple
of the Sun and trained to fight fiends and monsters. But I was touched by a
force more powerful than the sun itself . . . love.
Lilith was married to the bishop, and her tales made me question my
faith. I never doubted her stories, not even when I drew my blade across the
bishop’s throat. It was only then that I found out that Lilith was sleeping with
another priest, that I was just a tool to be used and discarded. I escaped to
Lankar, but I’m still wanted for murder in my homeland.
Today, I’m a sword for hire on the streets of Lankar. Love cost me my faith
and my honor. But I still have my pride, and any job I take, I’m going to
see it through. I’ve sworn never to enter another Church of the Sun, never
to return to Alaria, never to listen to a damned dream, and above all else,
never to let love lead me astray again . . .
And Lilith just walked through my door.
160 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
it seems, and corruption and violence are the norm. First and foremost,
this sort of campaign needs close collaboration between player and DM.
A hardboiled adventure is a shift from the “kick in the door and take
the treasure” model, and if your players don’t want to explore a different
tone and style of play, you’re not going to be able to force it on them. So
consider the following subjects, and discuss them with each player.
Everyone Has A Past
Hardboiled heroes are flawed individuals. They may be remarkable people
with exceptional skills, but they are scarred by loss and failure.
The story that opens this essay is the background for Lucas Caine, a 1st-
level fighter. Mechanically, he’s not actually a fallen paladin; that is simply
part of his backstory. He has lost his faith in divinity and love, and all he
trusts now is his sword.
Lucas still has the spirit of a hero, but it is wrapped in bitter cynicism;
it’s in adventuring that he will potentially find comfort and possibly
redemption. When you are setting up a hardboiled campaign, work with
each player to develop their backstory. This helps both of you. It gives you
hooks to use in developing adventures.
For example, Lucas has a strong motivation to take part in any adventure
that involves corrupt or evil priests, especially clerics of his old religion.
Bounty hunters could come after him for the murder of the bishop. And, of
course, his old lover could appear, begging him to help her. Does she have
an explanation for the past? And even if she does, can he trust her again?
Just as it helps you create stories, it helps a player get into the mood of the
game and sets his expectations. This isn’t about creating the perfect shining
knight; this is crafting a character who lives in an imperfect world. By
challenging the player to think about his flaws, to consider why he’s on the
mean streets, and whether he spends his evenings drinking alone or in the
halfling bordello, you help prepare him for the adventures that lie ahead.
Discuss the following things with each player.
What was your greatest mistake? “None” is not an acceptable answer;
in this sort of story, no one is perfect. This could be the murder of an
innocent man or an early career as muscle for a criminal gang. It could be
something as simple as trusting the wrong person, failing to listen when a
friend was in need, or giving in to greed with disastrous consequences.
Aside from creating story hooks for the DM, the goal is to learn what the
character regrets and why. Does he want vengeance or redemption, and is
either one actually possible?
Where do your talents come from? If the PC is a wizard, how did he first
come to learn magic? If he studied at an academy, why isn’t he still there? If
he had a mentor, what became of her?
161Hardboiled Adventures: Make Your Noir Campaigns Work h Keith Baker
As before, the goal is to add depth to the character and learn his reasons
for adventuring. The classic hardboiled detective is a former cop who
became a private eye because of insubordination, betrayal by a partner, or
fall from grace. If he’s a fighter, was he once a city guardsman? A soldier in
the army? A mugger? How did he go from there to become an adventurer?
What’s your motivation? While hardboiled heroes are typically flawed
individuals, they stand out in a grimy world because some positive force
drives them—something beyond mere greed. Professional pride, a sense
of honor, a desire to see justice done in a world where the forces of the law
won’t provide it... something that
,keeps him from becoming as soiled as the
world around him.
Vices
The classic detective is a hard-drinking man, but the PC might prefer
gambling, paid companionship, or brawling to release tensions. Explore this.
If the PC likes to drink, does she prefer hard dwarf whiskey or fine wines?
Does she like to carouse with dozens, or drink alone to numb her pain?
Sex and Love
The gaming table isn’t always a place for a serious discussion of sex. Not
every group can handle mature issues. However, sex, love, and lust are all
powerful forces in hardboiled and noir tales. Even something as simple
as knowing that Belgan the dwarf has a weakness for redheads is useful—
because when that tiefling walks through the door with trouble in her eyes,
you know to make her a redhead.
So see where you can go with this. What does the character find
attractive? Does he have casual affairs, or is he only interested in serious
relationships? Does he have a love of his life and, if so, what became of
her? Some hardboiled characters are after more than money; done right, a
character arc about saving a damsel from the mean streets can feed neatly
into a character’s history.
Big Risks, Trivial Rewards
In most D&D campaigns, PCs typically acquire vast amounts of wealth,
digging up treasures from ancient ruins or stealing the hoards of defeated
wyrms. In hardboiled tales, money is usually tight; rent, gambling debts,
and drinking money are actual concerns. The protagonist has it tough, but
because of his professional pride he only works for a fair wage. Unlike the
police, he won’t take a bribe, and while he may consort with criminals he
doesn’t stoop to their level; he takes honest pay for honest work.
The hardboiled approach to money means throwing out any preconceived
notions of fair reward. A platinum piece is just as impressive to a 10th-level
162 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
character as it is to a 5th-level character; the PC may be tougher, but
experience doesn’t magically bring wealth. The world around the PCs
also reflects this; NPCs will be more susceptible to bribery, and a wealthy
aristocrat may be more dangerous than a fighter of the same level, because
his money lets him pull political and legal strings.
Perhaps the adventurers will fight a dragon, but he won’t be sitting on a
pile of gold. Instead, he will be running a thieves’ guild, and all his wealth is
spread throughout his operations. He has access to a fortune if he needs it,
but an adventurer can’t just show up and take it from him. This may mean
that the PCs have less magic items, or it may mean that they can’t afford to
buy magic items but still obtain a few over the course of their adventures.
While the adventurers may not receive vast amounts of gold or ancient
magic, there are other rewards to be found. Favors are vitally important; if
you help the First Blade of the Assassin’s Guild, his friendship may be far
more valuable than a +1 shortsword. Reliable sources of information and
trustworthy allies are both rare commodities, treasures gold cannot buy.
The Ugly World
In The Big Sleep, Captain Gregory describes himself as “as honest as you
can expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style.” That is the hard
reality of a hardboiled campaign. It is a world where greed and lust are
ascendant while honor and integrity are distant rumors. If the City Watch
isn’t actively corrupt, it often has its hands tied. Characters will spend a
lot of time mingling with disreputable characters, and while there may be
honor among thieves, it is never a sure thing.
The backdrop of an adventure is just as important as the individual
characters the PCs meet. Whether it is set in Los Angeles or Sanctuary, the
flavor of the city is important. What is the dominant industry that supports
the town? Who are the major moguls? Every critical NPC should have
secrets of her own, hidden agendas that will shape any adventure she takes
part in.
Before the campaign begins, sketch out the goals of the major players
within the city. Are two crime lords competing for control of the brothel
industry or distribution of illegal potions? Is the local reeve trying to expose
the excesses of the local lords—something that will end in brutal retaliation?
The goals could also include communities or groups in addition
to powerful individuals. What are race relations like? Is there an elf
underclass, freed from slavery but still considered inferior to humanity? Is
the orc street gang as bad as they say, or are the orcs scapegoats imported
by a mogul to distract the people from his true agenda? Are there any truly
devout clerics in the town, or is religion just an excuse to milk the faithful
for tithes?
163Hardboiled Adventures: Make Your Noir Campaigns Work h Keith Baker
Moving from the big picture down to the table view, players should see
just how grim the world is in the everyday details. Life is cheap, and bad
things can happen to good people. The trusted barkeep who provided the
PCs with information is killed in a pointless brawl. Adventurers may deal
with the rich and powerful, but they should also see the squalid side of
things—the parts of the city where people will kill for copper.
In combat itself, things shouldn’t be pretty. A hardboiled DM won’t
just say, “You hit him for eight hit points and he falls to the ground.” A
hardboiled DM will describe how a villain’s hands clench around the blade
as he tries to pull it from his chest, how the blood spreads across his hands
as he spasms. Killing someone with a sword is an ugly business, and people
do not usually fall to the ground without a sound.
Make death scenes big. Think up some last pleas and curses ahead of
time. Bring out the girlfriend or children of the thug to scream at the PCs.
And when players are seriously injured, consider the nature of the injury,
and the scars it will leave behind. It’s an ugly, dangerous world, and the
players should never forget it.
The Role of Alignment
The alignment system does not always work in a hardboiled scenario.
Player characters should ideally be better than those around them . . . but
they may still be forced to do terrible things. Likewise, in a scenario where
trust is a critical concern, detect evil shouldn’t result in PCs being unwilling
to work with a vital contact.
The simplest answer is to remove alignment from the campaign;
however, as it is integrally tied to many magical effects, this isn’t always
easy to do. A second option is to use alignment as a general guideline of
behavior, but to say that “faint” alignment auras have no effect; they cannot
be picked up with detect spells and don’t make a person a valid target for
things like holy weapons.
This means that a holy word spell is a powerful tool against undead,
outsiders, and evil clerics, but it has little effect on a normal creature with
10 or fewer levels or hit dice. You could also take this a step further and say
that normal creatures never produce alignment auras—so a holy sword has
no additional power when used on a mugger or a swindler.
164 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Hit the Books
While these ideas should give you something to work with, the best thing
you can do is to read the stories yourself. Raymond Chandler, Mickey
Spillane, and Dashiel Hammett are all titans in the genre, but there are
more recent alternatives. Frank Miller’s Sin City brings the hardboiled style
to the graphic novel, while Stephen Brust and Glenn Cook make the jump
from present day into fantasy. The atmosphere is the most important thing
to look for; everything else can be adapted. The Maltese Falcon is the story
of a group of amoral people fighting for possession of a priceless treasure,
but change the black bird into the preserved eye of a mighty archlich, and
you have a valid adventure with a big fantasy element at its heart.
So pour yourself another shot of mead, strap on your sword,
,and head
for the streets. There is an arrow with your name on it and a woman you
wronged waiting at the tavern. If you survive the day, you may be able to
put right that terrible mistake you made. But first, you’ll have to survive.
165What Makes a Night Arabian? h Wolfgang Baur
What Makes
a Night Arabian?
Wolfgang Baur
24
inbad, Scheherazade, and Saladin. Cinematic action. Deserts, camels,
and full-blooded horses. Rocs, cyclops, and a phoenix. Harems,
star-crossed lovers, and forbidden romance. Ghuls, genies, bandits, and
moustache-twisting viziers.
What really makes an adventure Arabian? How do we define a subgenre?
How much is rules, and how much is execution?
It’s Not Mechanical
What makes an Arabian adventure work is not rules; it’s the story and the
flavor that matter. It’s the glory of huge treasures and quick death beneath
the sands. It’s a change of tone and scenery.
That is hard to design well. Anyone can put a sphinx in the desert
and run a combat. But why is the sphinx there? What questions can she
answer? Is she an oracle? Does she love an androsphinx, perhaps even
pine for him? Now we’re getting somewhere. Having focused, controlled
backstory that drives player action to the center of the story is the trick
to a successful Arabian adventure. Grand, sweeping plots should be
distilled down to their essences. Creating new rules or monsters is useful
if it supports the scenery and simplifies the action. Creating fun, exotic
people and setting them in motion quickly helps a designer capture the
storytelling side of the Arabian Nights.
Great, you say, how do we weave this carpet of compelling, exotic story?
One strand at a time.
S
166 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
Clear Heroes and Villains
Other campaign worlds stress shades of grey; a fantasy Arabia shouldn’t. The
appeal of Sinbad or the Thief of Baghdad is that you know where you stand.
Sinbad will sail into terrible danger and escape it through cleverness and
bravery. We know the lover who recovers great treasures to win the hand of
the Sultan’s daughter is going to make it. It is the journey that matters.
Villains make straightforward attacks on heroes without too much
dissembling. They aren’t skulking—well, the assassins are—but many are
quite clearly big bad evil dudes. No misunderstood villains; they really
resonate as the power grabber, the manipulative vizier, or the rapacious
bandit who really does want your money. All of it.
Player Character Attitudes
Antiheroes are out. Rogues and rascals must have hearts of gold,
bandits must have honor, and all true heroes must keep their word. To
do otherwise is shameful. No one—least of all the Sultan—will trust a
shameful oathbreaker.
Indeed, the original Al-Qadim setting included oathbinding genies
as part of the setting, whose task was to magically compel dishonorable
characters to keep their word. This sense of personal honor, even for the
poorest PC, may drive a party of heroes more than gold.
This is something you need to know about the audience as a designer
and know about your players as a DM. Will they go help star-crossed
lovers? Will they choose the right thing over greed? Are they idealists or
pragmatists? Once you know, you’re in great shape. My assumption is that
if you want to play in or run an Arabian Nights setting, you have at least a
bit of a heroic streak, rather than being purely mercenary.
What About the Rubies?
All this is not to say that player characters can’t be greedy. But wealth is a
consequence of correct, heroic action. It is not a goal in itself.
This is the hardest thing for players about Arabian adventure: gaining
and losing treasures in a hurry. I think a great Arabian campaign hits
the heights and the gutter fairly often. Sinbad shipwrecked constantly.
Douglass Fairbanks’ thief only pretended to be a prince, but he was able to
best true princes for love. PC heroes probably aren’t fighting for love (it’s a
tough motive to pin on a party of 4 to 6 characters at once…), but they are
able to rise to the Sultan’s court and return to the status of peasants in the
arc of a campaign.
I think it is entirely in character for a first-level Arabian adventure to
hand the party an insanely expensive, pure white warhorse—and then to
lose it after just a session or two, to a hungry efreet or a conniving horse
167What Makes a Night Arabian? h Wolfgang Baur
thief (who later offers it back to the party in exchange for a quest). This is
what Fate can mean on an individual level: quick changes of fortune are
part of the atmosphere.
Strange but Familiar
We understand the desert raider and the caliph as stereotypes, enough that
players and DMs are not adrift with the culture. Stereotypes work for us,
providing anchors to start from. It is fun to trade warhorses for war camels
when the underlying logic of the setting is similar, with a few tweaks
around the sacred status of hospitality, the nature of religion, and the role
of the elemental forces in the wilderness.
Arabia is the D&D world’s version of Spring Break: you go there for a
change of scenery. For this game, you don’t want or need to understand
the difference between Shiite and Sunni, or the difference between Persian
folklore and Arabian folklore. You just need to know whether the fire
mages are on your side or not, and maybe a few simple rules of behavior:
the bond of salt, the times of prayer, or the correct way to speed a camel
through the desert.
Nested Stories
For the advanced designer or DM, the nested nature of some Arabian tales,
using flashbacks and stories-within-a-story, could yield excellent results.
In game play, this is easy to do: when the party visits the oracle or the
storyteller in the market, they hear the start of a story. Play out the primary
combat or scene within it, and then return to the main story. The same
thing can be done with a mirror or dream—you fill in the outer shell as a
framing device for the core story.
Or you may decide that it’s more literal, and characters are whisked away
by genies from the present day to the founding of the Sultanate, or the Age
of Giants, or a roiling typhoon around a zaratan. They complete an entire
adventure before the genie whisks them back to report to the Sultan.
Conclusion
Arabian adventure requires mastery of tone and the simple presentation
of the exotic. Clothing, sensory details, monster selection, and all other
elements of the setting are important to convey a culture that is familiar
enough to be playable, but strange enough to appeal to our sense of the
exotic and wondrous. Little bits of extra storytelling will win you big points
with players interested in an Arabian theme, and the subgenre makes for
an excellent break from traditional fantasy.
168 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
The Mystery of
Mysteries
Nicolas Logue
25
body in the alley or floating in the river turns out to be the daughter
of Baron Zargaard, and not just another indigent nobody. The
Baron wants answers. He wants his precious Becca’s killer brought to
justice. The task falls to the PCs.
Actually, the task falls to you, Mr. Dungeon Master, and good luck . . .
because a good mystery, while it may be loads of fun for the PCs to unravel,
can be a nasty tangle of a knot for you to tie. So let’s get to it.
Step One: Planning the Crime
First, let’s look at a few cardinal rules to whipping up a conundrum for the
party to solve.
1. K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Stupid!
A lot of DMs overthink the whole endeavor when they sit down to craft
a mystery. The basic component of a mystery is nothing crazy; it’s just a
question that needs answering. Someone is killed, or something is stolen,
or something apparently impossible occurs. The PCs don’t know how it
happened or who is responsible. They need to find out. It’s that easy. Start
with that. We’ll add plenty of spice later.
2. Think Like An Investigator
Your PCs will
,do this, and that will be their experience of playing the
adventure, so you should do the same as you design it. Remember, an
investigator looks for clues that point to suspects (How was the person
A
169The Mystery of Mysteries h Nicolas Logue
killed? When? What traces of evidence were left behind by both victim
and murderer? Did anyone see anything?), then investigates the suspects
these clues point to (Who had a motive for killing the victim? Who had
the opportunity to do so?). Make sure the trail doesn’t run cold on the
investigators. Leave some clues behind. Provide a list of possible suspects
who have motive, opportunity, or both.
3. Think Like a Killer
Plot the demise of the victim as if you wanted them dead personally. Be
smart. Don’t get caught. How do you kill someone and make sure nothing
points to you? Do you manipulate someone else into doing your dirty work
for you? Do you make it look like an accident? Do you dispose of the body
(no body, no crime)?
Do you leave clues at the scene that frame another person who also has a
good motive for killing the victim? Do you concoct an airtight alibi?
Think like a murderer. If you do your job too well, you’ll need to
backtrack in order to not break Rule No. 2 (leave a few clues behind), but
this is unlikely. There is no such thing as the perfect murder. Just watch a
bunch of episodes of Law and Order or CSI and you’ll see just how hard it
is to get away with it when a dedicated and competent team of investigators
is hunting you.
4. There are Exceptions to All These Rules
It’s true! Look at Blood of the Gorgon. The murders that kick off this
adventure are byproducts of the villain’s larger plot and not his main goal at
all! That’s definitely a hard turn away from your standard mystery, but it’s a
fun turn, and it creates a great mystery. Remember, in a mystery, things are
never what they seem.
Step Two: Fine-Tuning the Plan
Great, so we have the basics in hand. Let’s look at some nuance. All we’ve
discussed so far applies to mundane mysteries, though these concepts can
extend to cover the supernatural. Now let’s consider that pesky subject of
magic as it concerns mysteries in D&D.
1. Plan for Divination
If your PCs are high-level enough to cast some interesting divination spells,
the mystery might very well be solved before it begins. That’s no good. So
what do you do about this problem? There are two schools of thought here.
The first is to disallow or otherwise render useless divination. (“The city
is in the midst of an omen-storm that blocks the use of divination magic
for the duration.”) Lame. The second is to give the PCs carte blanche to go
170 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
divination-crazy and let them solve the mystery in the time it takes them
to cast a spell or two. (“Another body . . . no problem. Just let me restudy
my spells so we can go kick the snot out of the killer.”) Even more lame. I
don’t like DM fiat, so I never disallow anything, really. Let the PCs use the
divination magic they earned or bought. That’s part of the game, and part
of the fun.
But if the PCs know about divination magic, so do the villains. Don’t
let divination magic be a problem for your adventure. Instead, make it
an opportunity to add new levels to the mystery. A smart villain thinks
of what questions a PC might ask a higher power and finds ways to
circumvent them.
• “Who killed so-and-so?” If the party has access to the ability to ask
such potent questions and receive answers, then it’s up to the villain
to take this into account and make sure someone else strikes the
killing blow. If a PC casts zone of truth, the villain just needs to get
sneaky with his answers or make sure he can answer them truthfully
without incriminating himself.
• “Where were you the night of such-and-such?” “I was at a party.” Smart
villains make sure their alibi is true. They show up at a party and get
seen while their shadowy hirelings, a slow-acting poison, or a trap
dispatches their quarry across town.
• “Do you know who killed so-and-so?” “No.” A truly devious villain
works through many buffers and cat’s paws and never meets face-to-
face with the actual killers or even learns their names.
2. You Get Magic Too!
Magic is friggin’ awesome. Use it to the fullest. In Blood of the Gorgon we’ve
used fantasy to create murders that are wildly difficult to solve. Look at how
we used magic to twist and turn the crime. The gorgon’s blood infects the
“killers,” who then produce blood doppelgangers (or commit the crimes in
their sleep), and they don’t even know they did it! Now that’s awesome. How
are the PCs going to figure that out? Great stuff. When designing mysteries
for D&D, pull out the stops. The PCs get an arsenal of clue-finding spells, so
you go ahead and use yours to the best of your ability.
Spells like nondetection, Mordenkainen’s private sanctum, misdirection,
false vision, and undetectable alignment are villainous staples, but let’s
take it a step further. Think outside the box. Want a way to turn the PCs’
divinations against them? Let’s look at how you can make detect evil blow
up in the party’s face. A villain casts magic jar and trades souls with a key
witness or other NPC, maybe even a red herring framed by the clues.
When the PCs cast detect evil on this patsy, they’ll get a positive result
(thanks to your sinister soul mucking up his body). Provoke a fight and
171The Mystery of Mysteries h Nicolas Logue
abandon this patsy’s body when he’s nearly dead. Case solved, or so the PCs
think, all wrapped up in a neat package that you put a ribbon on for them.
Justice is served and the streets are safe . . . until you decide to kill again.
3. Misdirection is Better than Magic.
Never use magic to cover a crime when old-fashioned legerdemain can
do the trick. Pesky spells can pierce illusions. Sure, it might be a great idea
to use disguise self to sneak up to your victim, but if someone bothers
with a dispel or a true seeing, then the jig is up. Villains who can pull off
a great disguise on skill alone, or cover up a crime without resorting to
spell-slinging, are the most dangerous. The mere presence of a magical
effect or aura is a big red flag to an investigator right away, and suddenly
a death that might have been passed off as an accident becomes a definite
homicide. If you feel like using magic, make sure you use something that
can’t be traced or even identified as magic, unless you feel like dropping a
pretty potent clue at the PCs’ feet.
Step Three: The Master’s Touch
Okay, so we have the basics and some thoughts on dealing with magic. Let’s
move on to the real nitty gritty: techniques for crafting a truly awesome
mystery.
1. Small Pieces of a Greater Puzzle
Clues! It’s all about the clues! PCs love finding ’em. You love hiding them
between the cracks. Clues rock! But what makes a good clue?
LET THINGS SLIP
As the DM, you might think that it’s good to “compete” with your
players by holding out on clues, throwing lots of red herrings out,
keeping the NPCs really tight-lipped, and generally making the mystery
part of your game unsolvable. This is a recipe for disaster. Whenever you
sense frustration rising, as DM you should be willing to let something
slip, or offer a clue, or nudge them in the right direction. Mysteries are
meant to be solvable, and as DM, you know your players best. Don’t let
them get so frustrated that in future they avoid all mystery adventures.
Plots are always much easier to understand from the DM side of the
table, so be sure to give lots of (small) clues. And small is important
here; if the clues give everything away, you’ve stolen the players’ sense
of accomplishment. Always make sure that they put together the final
pieces of the puzzle themselves, even if you help them a lot with the
first few elements of the mystery.
172 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
First and most importantly,
,presents itself. Chance favors the prepared mind, after
all, and there’s no reason you can’t work on your rules design, setting
design, board game rules set, or video-game treatment and story arcs even
if there’s no publisher in sight. Investing some of your time and energy
into these sorts of “trunk projects” that you keep close to hand may pay
off very handsomely when there’s an open call, a staff job, or just a hole in
a publisher’s schedule. Maybe you can wow them with material generated
right then (it does happen), but think how much better prepared you’ll
be if you have a notebook or a hard drive crammed with good material
awaiting development.
Heightened Play Experience
The part of design I think is most fundamental is that of the heightened play
experience. This is where I think good designers split from great designers,
where immersion, story, mechanics, and originality all come together to lift a
game from the glut of similar experiences to something special.
19 What is Design? h Wolfgang Baur
And it’s devilishly hard to describe, but I think it boils down to concise
language, escalation of conflict, and super-saturated style.
Conciseness: Part of the heightened play experience is a matter of
emphasis, of honing down the language, the backstory, and the character
descriptions into just a few key details that can be communicated quickly
by a DM to players. The temptation for many beginning designers is to
rattle on and on (and being paid by the word creates incentives to just spin
up the word count quickly). Even many professionals are in love with the
sound of their own keyboards clacking away. Resist the urge to just slather
a design in text. Or at least, slather a design in text and then be completely
ruthless in paring it back to the essentials.
Escalation: At the same time, a great encounter design and a great
adventure design both need to make every fight, every roleplaying
encounter, and every trap and treasure matter. If it starts with a
kidnapping, it had better end with mortal peril. If it starts with a plague,
that disease had better be the fault of a villain or demon who can be
confronted. Escalation is a critical element in gaming. If an adventure starts
slowly (and it’s okay if it does), it still needs to gather momentum over
time. Even throwaway encounters should increase tension and emphasize
the mood. To design for this means that you are looking at every character
and encounter and trying to find a key element that is easy to communicate
in the moment when the heroes encounter that element. Backstory is a
waste of time for players in most fantasy adventures. Meeting non-player
characters (NPCs) is much better because it provides personal stakes and
connection—and it is especially compelling if that meeting increases the
level of tension in the scenario.
Saturation or Pulp Roots: Third and final, every single encounter should
be in a super-saturated style. In photography and art generally, saturation
refers to the depth or vividness of hues or pigments. They can be thin and
watercolory, or they can be thick, saturated pigments like oil paintings. As
a genre game designer, screw subtlety. It looks great on paper, but most of
the time, it fails to translate across the medium of a DM to players. What
you want is a richness of experience. The green knight shouldn’t just be
green; he should be wearing leafy armor, and his helmet crowned with
oak leaves, and his eyes turn to acorns. The demon lord shouldn’t just
have horns and fire and claws; he should have horns of black poisonous
smoke, with claws of adamantium, a whip of fire, and his entire body an
embodiment of coals and wrath.
Some might argue that this approach is garish, pulpy, and lowest-common
denominator. I’d counter that subtle plot elements only work in a narrow
range of genres, and that SF, heroic fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror are
almost never the playgrounds of literary niceties or a gentle gathering of
20 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
clues. No one is paying you to design an adventure full of things they’ve
already seen, and your imagination is supposed to be providing gun-fu
rocket fuel that turns a weekly dicefest into a memorable session that leaves
the GM grinning and the player itchy to play again. Few players request that
the level of exaggeration and wildness be turned down in a session.
This isn’t just a matter of description, though saturation in art usually
is about the surface. For super-saturated, the depth of character, plot, and
location should also be dialed up. Villains can twist moustaches, sure, but
what you really want is a villain who rages against the world for a reason,
not just because he’s evil. He hates the order of paladins. Evil should be
specific, not generic. Locations should be filled with devices for stunts and
action, not with bland furniture and clichés. Nobody goes adventuring to
be bored. A dangerous level should always be available for some impulsive
character to pull.
Yes, super-saturated design taken too far is over-the-top pulp stupidity.
But the risks are greater if you fail to provide enough meaty adventure
than if you provide too much. Consider the classic adventure Dwellers in
the Forbidden City: It invented the yuan-ti, the aboleth, and the tasloi, plus
gave us a whole lost city in a volcano’s caldera. Over the top? Not really.
The monsters are so rich and classic that they have survived five editions of
Dungeons & Dragons (well, not the tasloi), and the setting is one that works
time after time. The approach of pulp fiction is that everything should stand
out, subtlety is wasted, and excitement is preferred over introspection.
Games are a vibrant, participatory medium that demands action and color;
don’t waste your time trying to make them into something else.
IMMERSIVE PLAY
In design circles, there’s a lot of discussion about immersion and its role
in video games, from talking about flow (everyone’s got a theory—a few
with actual data to support them!) to more obscure discussion about
related topics like reward ratios, reading saccades, Skinnerian response,
interface design, you name it. For the purposes of our discussion of
online and tabletop roleplaying games, immersion is the sense that a
player is deeply invested in their character or part in the game, and that
they are playing that role with a sense of connection. Immersion seems
like a red herring. It’s different for every player, and as long as designers
provide a wealth of options, and graphic designers and animators
provide compelling images, gamers with either powerful imaginations
or just casual interest will find a role they like and take to it.
Immersion is important but not central to design. Immersion is a
consequence of good design practices at a different level.
21 What is Design? h Wolfgang Baur
Conclusion
To understand games, you must study and master both the flavor and
mechanical pillars of RPGs or your chosen specialty. You must pitch big
ideas rather than incremental updates, because the incremental projects
will keep your name out there, but will never gain you a reputation for big
thinking. And of course, you must be prepared with a treasure chest full of
design ideas for the day when a big opportunity presents itself.
The basics of game design are a variety of related areas of expertise, all
used to create new rules, envision new play environments, and to generate
entirely new modes of play in new gaming genres.
Within the RPG field, make sure your design supports concise rules
and description, a planned escalation of tension, and a flavorful, saturated
environment that compels players to engage with the setting and foes.
22 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
y now, we’re all familiar with computer role-playing games (CRPGs)
even if we haven’t played them all: the Baldur’s Gate series, the
Fallout series, Divinity: Original
,a clue is specific. It should point to
inconsistencies with the apparent circ*mstances. Every clue should tell
the PCs something, but a given clue doesn’t necessarily need to tell them
anything particularly useful by itself. It’s when the clues pile up that the real
answers come and the fuzzy picture of the murder starts to come into focus.
2. Control the Clues
Make sure the first clues you give the PCs offer them a lot of possible
suspects, and maybe even mislead them. Read any Sherlock Holmes story
and you’ll see that our super sleuth gets it wrong more often than right
early in his investigations. He barks up a few wrong trees and, after he
exhausts these avenues of investigation, he gathers more clues that throw
a different light on the ones he discovered earlier. Now he’s got the real
culprit in his cross-hairs.
You need to control the flow of information in a mystery adventure. You
also need to make sure the nuggets you leave hanging out there early on
don’t give away the real killer or point to your adventure’s mastermind in
any direct way. Send the PCs fishing for red herrings, lead them on a wild
goose chase for a while, and then cough up more clues to get them back on
track. Keep the party guessing. Just give them enough info to keep them
hungry for more answers, and they, like starving rabid dogs, will devour
your mystery and enjoy every damn minute of it.
3. Clues Aplenty!
Make sure you have a ton of clues to toss out there. Don’t make the PCs’
success or failure hinge on one crucial clue that they need to make a DC
30 skill check to discover. This is a sure-fire way to watch your mystery
turn into a train wreck. Even with reasonable DC skill checks, a party may
miss the obvious or spend too long on a false trail. Have back-up plans
in case the PCs miss a bunch of important hints. Maybe a witness, afraid
to come forward before, appears later in the game with a crucial piece of
information, and then gets killed for helping the party. Bam! Drama and a
helpful little hint.
4. Don’t be Afraid to Improvise
Best-laid plans can explode in your face. Don’t panic, don’t fret. This is
a roleplaying game, not a novel. There is no way to predict what your
PCs will get up to. That’s the fun of this artistic medium. It’s like improv
acting—anything can happen. Think on your feet, and find ways to make
your PCs’ actions part of the adventure even if they are waaaay off the
beaten path. Don’t be afraid to change the facts as you go.
If the PCs won’t drop a red herring, or even invent one all their own,
find a way to tie that red herring into your mastermind’s plot. Maybe
173The Mystery of Mysteries h Nicolas Logue
RESURRECTION
Designer Ben McFarland on resurrection:
“There’s also the option of dominating the killer, the option of modify
memory to eliminate his memory of killing the person, and the option
of having the mastermind later kill the proxy killer (to eliminate a vital
link in the chain of evidence).
“And, in a world where raise and resurrection are available, I’d have
killers who are intent on keeping people dead do things like . . . kidnap
people and hold them for a few days while both alive and dead, to make
determining the day of demise uncertain without more magics.
Remove a portion of the body when killing the victim, preferably
the tongue but the whole head if you want to keep identification slow.
Without a whole body, investigators can’t raise dead, they have to
resurrect—and that’s more expensive. They also can’t speak with dead,
which will help foil those who might be hunting for you.
Use an open game license (OGL) material like thinaun, (from
Complete Warrior, page 136) which captures the soul in the weapon as
the person is killed, to prevent that person from coming back or talking.
“You’ll want to do all three to both the victim and the proxy killer,
which should break most of the chain of association between the victim
and your primary killer.
“High-level magic can also use things like baleful polymorph followed
by an unfortunate drop into a pit of hungry dogs, a butcher or bait shop
delivery, or a furrier of some sort. Not only is the killer unaware of his
murder, but he has no idea that you gave him the victim. Again, without
a body or an idea of time of death, investigators are forced to use true
resurrection . . . and that’s not cheap, or necessarily all that available,
depending on the faiths in the area and their attitudes on death. (Take
a look at A Magical Medieval Society from Expeditious Retreat Press for
some ideas on how much coinage a noble’s manor might generate.)
“Really high-level magic can do things like trap the soul, but that’s less
killing and more long-term imprisonment.”
the red herring, terrified she’ll be arrested for a crime she didn’t commit,
does some detecting and churns up some facts on her own. Conversely,
if the PCs figure things out too quickly, go ahead and throw some more
smokescreen at them. Heck, go ahead and switch masterminds on them if
you want. Remember, it’s not cheating if it makes the game more fun for
the PCs. Don’t worry too much about “reality” or adhering too closely to
what you prepared. Keep the mystery going.
174 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
ebster’s dictionary defines “humor” as “that quality of the
imagination which gives to ideas an incongruous or fantastic turn,
and tends to excite laughter or mirth by ludicrous images or representations.”
“Fun” says Merriam-Webster, is “what provides amusem*nt or enjoyment.”
Some players profess a dislike for humor in RPGs although they can
share anecdotes of humorous situations that have arisen in games. It is
almost as if humor is an accidental quality so remarkable that it is made
memorable simply by arising. I would contend that not only is humor
a valuable addition to an adventure, it should actively be designed in. I
further contend that there is perhaps more already included in scenarios
than people may have noticed.
Humor, where it is used, should be a tool to color and enhance the
adventure. It can come in various shades.
Mild humor may be used in the characterizations and reactions of NPCs,
and can really fix the NPC in the imagination of the players. For example:
“Ah, deary me!” the stablehand says, stamping the snow off his heavy
leather boots. “Cold weather indeed! There are several brass monkeys
looking worried out there today, sirs!” He grins and waggles his bushy
eyebrows in your direction, head bobbing mischievously.
Off-stage humor is usually between one or more NPCs perhaps unaware
of being under observation. It can be mild or coarser, as the speakers don’t
know they have an audience.
W
The Anvil in the
Dwarf's Soup
The Place of Humor in Adventure Design
Willie Walsh
26
175The Anvil in the Dwarf ’s Soup: Humor in Adventure Design h Willie Walsh
[In Trollish]
“You don’t remember Horsebreath, do yer?” “Naww! Before my time.”
“He was a good ’un. Once et nearly a whole dwarf from the toes up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. All he left was the beard.” “What happened to ’im then?”
“Wizard. Went for us, all offended like.” “Big ’un?”
“Naww! Wizards all do one size only! Had a big magic fire stick, tho.
Round here someplace.”
“How’d you get ’im, wizard I mean?”
“Wizard’s ain’t strong, like. So I sat on ’im. Stuffed the dwarf beard in
his gob ’til he stopped wriggling.’”
So-called “silly” humor doesn’t appeal to everybody. It does to me, though:
Entry #35 from Adventure Journal of the Red Knot Company:
“In the second chamber of Ulick the Mad’s lair, Roghar’s temper was sorely
tested again, this time by a trap. He was already in bad form over the
illusionary monsters in the ante room and, in his typical barbarian way,
he was itching for something to hit. The rogue barely had a chance to give
the place a cursory glance when in walked Roghar, looking for trouble.
He found it in a hidden pressure pad in the floor that clicked audibly as
he trod
,Sin 2, Bioware’s Dragon Age or Mass
Effect series, and many, many more. Likewise, the tabletop RPG market
has exploded. We can see a number of comparisons between the two
industries, but they’re not as similar as they may appear. I’ve worked in
both industries, first as a tabletop designer for TSR and later for Paizo and
Monte Cook Games, and then on games like Planescape: Torment, Fallout
2, and Torment: Tides of Numenera, and am now working on my own titles
with 3lb Games. If you’re a tabletop designer looking to get into CRPGs
(or vice versa), I’d like to share what I’ve learned about the differences in
designing the two media.
The first thing you should know is what you’re working with. The
primary reference manual for the design of a computer game is called the
design document. The design doc outlines your system’s rules, your game’s
mechanics, lists and descriptions of places, creatures, and people. It also
contains art requests, sound descriptions, and guides for game music to
help the composer set the mood. Each and every feature of each and every
area requires specific and detailed information in order to create a playable
game and an immersive atmosphere for the players. Unlike tabletop
rulebooks, the design document is constantly changing and evolving as the
game’s development progresses. It will not be final until “feature lock,” the
B
Designing rpgs:
Computer and
Tabletop
Colin McComb
2
23Designing RPGs: Computer and Tabletop h Colin McComb
point at which the game’s producer decides that nothing else will be added
to the game, and all resources come to bear on testing the soon-to-be-final
product. (This is an ideal situation. The truth is that in most studios,
at some point in development, the creation of the game becomes more
important than updating the documentation—but by then, the design doc
will have served its purpose as the launching pad for the game.)
For tabletop designers, the best way to imagine this is that you are
building all the components of an RPG at once: rulebook, player’s guide,
creature guides, and the campaign setting, combined in a single document.
The design document can frequently run into many hundreds of pages,
especially for a game of any length or heft.
It might appear that there is a vast difference in the design between the
two media. In certain senses, this is even true. However, in my experience,
this difference can be summed up in two areas. The first is detail; the
second is human intelligence and intuition.
First Answer: Detail
“You enter a 10-foot x 10-foot room. There is an orc here. It is guarding a
treasure chest.”
That’s pretty simple, right? In a tabletop game, sure. But if you try to give
this description to an artist and a programmer, they’ll come back at you
with a long list of questions.
For example, the artist will ask:
• What’s the context? Is this in a dungeon, a house, a tower?
• What does the entrance to the room look like? Is it an archway, a gate,
a curtain, or a door? If it’s a curtain or door, what’s it made of ?
• What does the room look like? Is it made of wood, stone, or metal, or
something else? What’s in the room?
• What does the orc look like? What is it wearing, how tall is it, how
muscular? What weapons is it carrying, and what armor is it wearing?
• How does the orc attack? Are its movements fluid and sweeping
or broad, hacking attacks? If the artist has to animate attacks and
movement, this information is required up front.
• What does the treasure chest look like?
This assumes that you’ve already defined the game style (first-person
shooter, over-the-shoulder, third-person isometric RPG), and that you
have previously established your basic game systems and monster stats in
the design document. Your programmers will need to know:
• Are there any constraints on the player’s actions in the room? What
are the clipping paths for the character—that is, where can the
character move?
24 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
• What artificial intelligence (AI) set should the orc use: hostile,
helpful, neutral?
• Are there any variations in the orc’s routines? Does it have dialogue
files attached to it? Are there any action cues for the orc’s behavior?
Does the orc move around the room in a pre-scripted or random
sequence?
• Can the player open the treasure chest? How? Does it require a key?
If there’s a lock, can the player pick it? What sort of container is it?
What does it contain?
• Should the program consult a random table or is there a specific set
of items inside?
You get the idea—it’s complicated, deep . . . and this is just the start of
the questions you must answer. A computer game designer must imagine
the details a game master (GM) can invent on the fly without the benefit
of a targeted group of players and under the supervision of the rest of the
development team. This puts the designer at an immediate disadvantage.
The designer’s job is to get out of the way of the game—but first: to create
the story; populate that story with friends, enemies, and other assorted
creatures; assign treasures, quests, and keys; build the puzzles; and generate
an internally coherent game system. In short, it’s similar to tabletop design,
but it’s much more intricate and involved. There’s a reason we see huge
designer teams on larger AAA computer/console titles. A team includes
narrative and character designers, level designers, item/shop/placement
designers, mechanics/system designers, each of them focusing on a very
specific part of the game play. While they may step in to help other design
teams, most have a specific core competency, and they own that part of the
game. What sort of benefit do we see from this attention to detail?
• We remove the necessity for a human game master, allowing players
to play games alone if necessary.
• We can run complex equations more quickly. No longer do we need
to rely on a single die roll; we can build intricate character/attack/
defense systems that combine a variety of traits and skills to create a
more realistic experience.
• We can run combats that might take all night in a tabletop game in a
matter of moments and create immediately comprehensible tactical
situations.
On the other hand, we do see some serious drawbacks, and we as players
have largely conditioned ourselves to ignore them or play around them.
For instance, AI is only as smart as its inputs. The antagonists, though
carefully and lovingly scripted, cannot act beyond the bounds of that
scripted behavior. They cannot change their tactics to react to a surprising
use of a spell or item by a player (though modern design works hard to
25Designing RPGs: Computer and Tabletop h Colin McComb
cover these contingencies). The game may not even allow such deviation.
Even if you want to do it, you just don’t have the option. In real life, you
can use a screwdriver, for example, to turn a screw, to defend yourself, as
a drumstick, or to reverse it and use it as a hammer, though these latter
three uses are not recommended. In most computer games (with a very few
exceptions), you generally have only one use for a tool: its designed use.
Computer games require chokepoints and a way to create the illusion of
free will. If the players of a computer game decide to ignore the primary
portion of the adventure, they’ll soon find themselves with nothing to do.
Further, they usually must gather keys, items, or complete puzzles in order
to unlock other areas of, for instance, a town. Locking these areas makes a
difference for character advancement, for tutorials to teach the player how
to navigate the game system, and for game balance—not to mention the
necessity of loading massive areas into the computer’s memory—but they
are strictures that make little actual sense in terms of the game world.
Second Answer: Human Intelligence and Intuition
“You enter a 10-foot x 10-foot room. There is an orc here. It is guarding
,a
treasure chest.”
Sometimes it really is that simple. Do the players need to know the
texture of the wall? Do they need to understand the light source in the
room? What if they want to know why the orc is guarding the chest? If
they do, the GM will be more than happy to make it up for them. The
great advantage to tabletop gaming is that the depth of the answers to the
questions depends on the imagination of the game master. You might call
this “distributed design.” Rather than spending precious words outlining
every possible scenario, the designer can lay out a basic framework and
trust in the game master to fill in the blanks in the manner that best fits
each individual campaign.
This allows the designer to write more, to fill the pages with broader
information and extend the reach of the adventure. Freeing up these pages
opens the possibilities for serious and far-reaching epics, with potential
detours across the whole of the campaign world. The tabletop designer’s
job is to ensure that the adventure adheres to the rules laid out in the
system, to create an entertaining story, and to provide the tools necessary
for the game master to run the game.
Yet our adventures still require us to create the illusion of choice for
the players. If we want the game master to use our adventure, we need to
outline plot hooks, story devices, and even mechanical inducements to
lure the players into this web. If these fail, then at some point the game
master may simply have to tell his players that the direction they want to
go destroys the adventure he has prepared.
26 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
What benefits accrue from tabletop gaming? It provides a broader, more
potentially interactive experience. Instead of being forced into a single
overarching storyline, the players can scrap the idea of the adventure
altogether and strike out in a new direction. The game master may choose
to integrate portions of the published adventure as necessary, but the
players have far more choice in the fate of their characters. They can help
create the direction of the story.
Tabletop RPGs offer better social aspects. Though online gamers can use
headsets and communicate directly via voice over IP (VOiP) technology,
the interaction is not the same. Computer games tend to require a sense
of forward motion, a feeling that the players are making headway toward
resolving their quest. In person, gamers are allowed to relax, to make jokes,
to react to each other’s physical presence and share the joy of the hobby.
The game doesn’t end at a predetermined point, and the end of an
adventure flows easily into next week’s session. The players don’t need to
wait 12–18 months for a sequel, if one ever arrives at all.
Lastly, smaller audiences mean more material. It’s no secret that the
computer game market dwarfs the tabletop market. Ironically, this frees
up creators in tabletop gaming to try new ideas, test new mechanics, and
imagine countless worlds—the bottom line is smaller, so the reach can be
greater. By contrast, AAA-tier computer games now routinely cost $50
million per title or more, sometimes spending many millions on marketing
alone (though the vast number of indie games don’t cost nearly that much,
of course). With this much money involved, most developers can’t even
touch the envelope, let alone push it.
The drawbacks to tabletop games are visible and glaring. They require
a group of friends and a scheduled time; it’s rare and difficult to have a
pickup tabletop RPG session, but a computer game is ready any time the
player is.
The systems in most tabletop games are by necessity less powerful and
less involved. Math, plotting, movement, scoring, and other record-keeping
can bog down a game in no time if we designers aren’t careful. We need to
keep the rules comparatively light and the systems comparatively anemic if
we’re to allow our players to make any progress at all.
We have to rely on words to paint our pictures, while computer
developers have teams of hugely talented artists to launch their ideas into
full-colored glory.
We have less reach and influence in the broad market. A tabletop game
that sells 100,000 copies is a breakout success, while the same number at a
computer development house might result in layoffs or even the closure of
the studio.
27Designing RPGs: Computer and Tabletop h Colin McComb
As computers become more powerful, we will likely see a growing
ability in games to react to personal play styles and offer more open-ended
adventures (a number of sandbox style games, like Grand Theft Auto, Red
Dead Redemption, the latest Assassin’s Creed games, or the Divinity series,
for instance). The MMO world has already begun to replicate the social
aspects of games, and while they cannot yet replace the actual physical
presence of your friends, chances are good that someone’s working on that.
Does this mean that tabletop designers should try to emulate computer-
based designs to lure that market back to tabletop? Or should we make a
more permanent move into the computer game industry?
Ultimately, this is a decision that each designer will have to make for
him- or herself, but regardless of which segment of the industry we choose,
we should focus on delivering the single best positive gaming experience
for our customers, to the best of our abilities.
28 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
reativity is at the heart of good design, but it’s an overused and
sometimes over-mystified word. The work of creativity is different
than analytical or physical work, but it’s still a process that can be mastered.
Here’s one take on it, based on my own experience and that of a rather
different mind.
This essay is a summary and interpretation of David Kord Murray’s
Borrowing Brilliance (Gotham Books, New York, 2009), which tries to
systematize and demystify creative thought for the engineering and
technical professions. In particular, Murray believes that creative thought
can be taught and that you can become better at it with practice. I think
almost any writer or game designer would agree; the proof is simply that
creative work improves in quality over time. This is why, for instance, first
novels are held to a lower standard than later work.
Here’s my take on what Murray’s approach means for game design and
especially adventure design.
Origin of a Creative Idea
Creativity never happens in a vacuum. Everyone builds on what came
before, and how you approach the work can make a huge difference in how
good the final result is. For instance, some designers believe that creativity
is paramount and pursue the True Weird as their goal; they believe that
originality is the highest (perhaps only) goal in creative world. Others
C
The Process of
Creative Thought
3
Wolfgang Baur
29The Process of Creative Thought h Wolfgang Baur
find value in expanding the work of prior designers through canonical
worldbuilding. These are two wildly different approaches. Both are
generating creative work of different types. Others pursue the Truly Elegant
solution in design, seeking minimalism or clarity above all other goals.
Some seek the True Challenge or True Balance or other goals in their work.
Regardless of which ideal you pursue as the height of creative work, here
are the three stages that represent the origin of creative ideas.
1. Defining the problem
The first step is understanding what it is that you need to solve. For
engineers and programmers, this is usually relatively straightforward:
Identify the problem space, research it, understand it, and describe it. For
game design and other less engineered pursuits, this stage is the creative
brief. That is:
• What are you being asked to deliver?
• What audience will you address?
• What is the project outline?
• What are the design goals?
Revisit the concept of the creative brief from the prior chapter for a
working definition,
,or consider your own design ideals if you are not
working from a brief. Knowing roughly where you are headed is one way
to focus your work and avoid blind alleys and wasted effort.
In either case, you need to define a vision of what you’re after. This
can be a commercial proposition as well as a creative one. For instance,
you might be looking to address entry-level players with a high-action,
low-roleplay set of basic mechanics, or you might be trying to engage an
experienced audience with a story-rich capstone adventure that builds on
prior work.
Know what are you after creatively and commercially, and define it for
yourself at the start. Why? Because how you define the problem determines
how you will solve it. Knowing the problem is knowing the foundation of
your creative process.
2. Borrowing ideas
If you think you operate in isolation from other designers, gamers, and the
culture at large, you’re mistaken. And worse, if you don’t look at similar
problems and systems, you are undercutting your chances of a successful
design. You can get creative raw materials this way because, for all creative
work, your materials are ideas. This isn’t to say you swipe text and settings
and so forth. Build up a library of resources that are both close and distant,
and learn the options you have.
30 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Second Edition
When looking to use ideas you find useful, it’s best to borrow from distant
sources. Generally speaking, if you are writing a Dungeons&Dragons
adventure, then swiping from other D&D adventures makes you a thief,
whereas borrowing an element from board games or MMOs makes you
smart. Borrowing from much more distant sources like theatre or history
makes you a creative genius. Research the field, and then go far beyond that.
I’d like to say that Open Design did this better than anyone else; the well of
inspiration that patrons brought to a project was global, came from all levels
of experience, and was simply much broader than any single designer—
even one at the top of his game at Wizards of the Coast—could have hoped
to match.
That approach has been widely adopted throughout the industry in
the years since Open Design started (and became Kobold Press). While
other companies likely adopted some of this out of the collaborative nature
of open-source creative work, Kobold Press maintains that approach
to this day. The Creature Codex monster book (2018) for 5th Edition
Dungeons&Dragons featured 46 entries submitted by backers, and these
were vetted through large-scale playtests similar to those run as standard
practice. The role of extensive playtest is in the company’s DNA, and has
become far more common in tabletop RPG design work from companies
large and small. This can only strengthen the final result, and it blurs the
line between designer and fan in interesting ways. See the chapter on
playtesting for more information.
It’s worth mentioning here that creative work in this style goes back to
an older formulation of creativity. That is, I believe true creative work is
not about the artist or the designer; that’s a modern aberration based on
copyright maximalism and the notion of the auteur or the lone genius. To
me, working with shared worlds and collaborative designs, this equation of
creativity with an individual is largely nonsense. Individuals are products
of their times and their culture and, most of all, are heavily influenced by
their peers.
I take an attitude a little closer to the sciences. That is, creative work is
about the work, which must copy and improve on what has gone before.
Rules sets are a foundation. We build on them. Settings and shared
universes are a culture that designers work within and build to improve.
The creation of a better gaming experience is the goal, not the creation of
artistic reputation.
Finally, it’s worth saying that it’s best not to fall in love with an idea or
concept but to view the options fairly dispassionately. This is not to say
that you shouldn’t be passionate, but that there’s a stage where you have
to set that passion aside. If you are blindly in love with a particular idea
or concept, then you’ve stopped being creative with it and it becomes
31The Process of Creative Thought h Wolfgang Baur
locked in place. In my view, you need a certain critical disdain or at least
objectivity toward ideas, an ability to abandon them.
3. Combining and connecting the borrowed ideas
The real magic of creative work, to me, comes in the unexpected
combination of the many notes, concepts, and materials you gathered in
stage two. This is where you combine Hollywood-style narrative arcs with
tax software (as Intuit did). Or you combine the insights of poker with
economics (as mathematician John Nash did). Combine geology with
biology and the theories of Thomas Malthus (as Charles Darwin did). Or
combine political science and network analysis (as Nicholas Christakis and
James Farrow did with their work on social networks). In each case, two
different worlds at the start are a single element of thought by the end.
In the case of game design, finding such synergies might mean
combining genre elements with non-genre elements, combining classical
rhetoric with social skill challenges, or combining ancient saga plotlines
with science fantasy elements.
In each case, the core element of successful creative work requires
reframing your point of view to approach the original problem in a new
way: Reverse your encounter, change subgenre, combine history with pulp,
and so on. Brainstorm and jam pieces together to make them fit a narrative
or to apply a matrix or triggers to a sandbox. For me, this usually means
taking all the notes from stage two and puzzling how they fit together.
When they seem to create something greater than the sum of the original
parts, you’re on the right track. When there’s a sense of “Oh yes, that will
work,” you have found a new solution to the age-old problem of making
something old into something new.
Evolution of a Creative Idea
While creativity requires posing a problem, gathering ideas, and putting
those ideas in unusual juxtapositions, it also requires time to ferment
and time for your own take on the material to gestate. To me, the raw
materials often seem like insoluble lumps at first—until suddenly they
don’t. Suddenly they seem like pieces of a whole. That requires incubation,
judgment, and iteration of your creative approach—the next three steps.
1. Incubation
Puzzling with the elements doesn’t always get you very far. Take some time
to allow combinations to settle into a solution. The first three elements of
creative thought are about the inputs to your subconscious, but it’s foolish
to try to force everything to snap together in a massive rush. It might
happen, certainly, but often it won’t.
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You might think of this as a creative block, but pushing the design process
too quickly leads to errors that later need to be torn out. I find it more
valuable to pause in your design process, to sleep on it, and sometimes to
put it aside for weeks. Isaac Newton is the extreme example: he waited 15
years between the time he framed the problem before he came back to the
calculus. But that’s the pace of subconscious thought. I find that the best
solutions are the ideas that spring to mind when I’m half-sleeping, or are the
result of the classic shower inspiration—which is odd when you consider it.
Why is creative thought advanced when you are focused on the mundane?
It’s an element of the psychology of creativity; this is how your
subconscious brings up possible ideas and solutions. In the early stages you
are jamming ideas and possible solutions into your mind. The output from
the subconscious requires you to turn off the stream of conscious thought
and let other thoughts through—daydreaming thoughts. Sometimes that
process is the flash of an
,instant, and sometimes that process is very long. It
can, however, be helped, in an unusual way.
You can create opportunities for creative output by putting aside your
hurry and work and activity. Talk a long walk and think. Turn off your
TV, radio, your favorite MMO, or anything that requires conscious
thought or diverts your attention. Ideal activities are the ones that rely on
muscle memory or at least no conscious effort, such as biking, knitting,
meditation, or driving. It only looks like laziness; in fact, you’ll find some
of your biggest breakthroughs happen this way. Time spent away from
hammering the keyboard can be time very well spent.
2. Evaluating the work
Having a flash of insight is terrific (and it feels so good!), but it’s not nearly
enough. You need to get really critical of the results of that insight and
hold it up to comparison and evaluation against alternative solutions.
That is, your stage of creative judgment should identify both the strengths
and weaknesses of a solution. Brainstorms are a start in the earlier
stages of combining, but you need to winnow out the best elements and
discriminate between the viable and the foolish. Have a Steve-Jobs-level
mania for what’s strong and what’s weak. If something about a design
bothers you, figure out why.
Strong opinion and ego in design play in here; you will disagree with
others, and that’s normal. To win those disagreements, you need to identify
not just that a given element is good, but why. How does it play into the
whole? How does it solve a design problem? How does it improve the play
experience? Or worse, how does it destroy the play experience? The creative
process isn’t about accept/reject based on your opinion. It’s a debate.
33The Process of Creative Thought h Wolfgang Baur
I’d say that the projects that work with public or blogged design
outlines, group discussions and public playtest cycles suss out weakness
and find sources of design strength better than publishing methods that
rely on a small group of purely in-house designer, developer, and editor,
or even small teams of designers, writers, and quality assurance. While
sometimes a major company may stick with an in-house team for reasons
of confidentiality, speed, or security, this is not without trade-offs. The
weight of many minds focused on results—or even just the knowledge of
impending peer review—makes for sharper design because it finds more
of the weaknesses and addresses them from many angles. Consider being
fairly open with your design process if you are comfortable with that level
of review and critique. Blogging, in-person design meetups, and Patreon
are all ways to discuss your work before it goes to publication.
3. Enhancing the work
The last stage is enhancing and iterating on the design solution you have.
At this point, you eliminate the weak spots and enhance the strong through
development and editing, ideally based on playtest results from the judging
stage. Remember that creative thinking is about risk-taking; doing the
same stuff will look the same as everything before.
A creative work will look a little odd; don’t sand down all those corners,
but find ways to enhance them and make sure that the novelty is still
accessible to gamers who haven’t seen it before. Your goal is recombining,
re-borrowing, restructuring. Iterate until the final is a seamless whole.
For designers, this iterative approach offers several advantages. It means
you can talk to your design team (if you have co-authors), your editor,
or your Patreon audience about creative design in stages, and you can be
self-aware enough to realize you haven’t figured out what problem you are
solving, or you are circling around and around in the research/borrowing
stage without ever moving on to combination and incubation. It means
that in collaboration you separate out stages; you can narrow the focus to
a discussion of the central problem or a discussion of what approaches to
borrow, or you can brainstorm to combine and resort ideas. They are all
separate things.
Likewise, particular parts of the process can be judgment meetings
where the results of brainstorm and incubation are explicitly weighed
and kept or discarded. Same with playtest discussions and sharpening the
design. By then, it’s clear that it is too late to introduce new raw materials
for recombining unless you want to iterate the whole design process again
(which you might).
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Making the Creative Process Work for You
Every person comes up with ideas differently and works with them
differently, but these stages of creativity are fundamental. For my own
part, I’ve found it useful to consider these stages for most projects that
involve new material or a new approach. It’s a way to time your progress.
(“Have I defined the problem statement cleanly? Maybe it’s time to start
borrowing ideas.”) In the borrowing ideas phase for D&D projects, I
might busily review elements from 1st Edition AD&D, from demons
and fey in mythology, from 17th century rhetoric, from operatic history,
from biology and natural history, and even from theatrical staging/
scene trickery—whenever I can I cast a broad net, because I find my
own creativity pumps up when I move into recombining, outlining, and
juxtaposing elements. And though I’ve been through the muddle in
the middle many times, it never hurts to know that it’s a normal stage
of creative work. Soon enough comes the enhancing stage, drawing
connections out between previously unrelated encounters to maximize
shock value, to draw out the themes of the adventure—and just to make
the whole as epic as it can possibly be. Editors are your natural allies in
drawing out the implications of your work and finding its contradictions
(see Ray Vallese’s chapter on developmental editing).
I’ve found it helpful to consider my roadmap to the creative process,
some of it obvious, other bits less so. What’s important about it is that
identifying the stages helps you make a realistic schedule for your design
work, helps you focus on what design problems or resources are most
helpful at the beginning, middle, and end, and realizing when it is time to
move from one stage to the next. Having a schedule and stages like this
helps you consider what stages of the project you might want to spend
extra time on to get the results you want. Writers and designers can spend
hours talking about their process (instead of applying seat of pants to seat
of chair and writing!), and I’ve done my share of procrastinating.
Now I have a better name for that—incubation—and I have a better
sense of when it might be most useful: after borrowing ideas, before
judging the work and enhancing it. I’m certainly glad of the results I’ve
seen in my own work, and I hope that by ordering your own work into a
sequence like that, you’ll find your design work is faster, more organized,
and more powerfully original.
35Design that Matters h Wolfgang Baur
n the past, I’ve talked a bit about taking fantasy seriously, about making
sure your design is plausible and meets genre expectations. That’s
important, but it’s not the seriousness I’m talking about here. When I say
that a really good designer should at least be attempting art some of the
time, I’m not saying that every adventure or every rules set needs to be
considered in light of the human condition. That’s ridiculous, pretentious,
and generally a waste of your time and your reader’s money.
However, like great fantasy novels or films, a great designer should
at least be aiming at something beyond entertainment. Jonathan Tweet
certainly did this with Everway—a game intended as an easy entry into
RPGs—which came in for a lot of criticism (and poor sales) based on its
visual and mythic style. But it was an attempt to broaden the audience
for RPGs mechanically, to use a more collaborative and softer resolution
system than D&D
