The Times, They Are A-Changin'

Over the past few years, I've seen a certain change in my interests. Both in how I spend my time and how I regard life in general. For instance, since summer camp '12, I value time with friends much more highly than I did before that time.

I don't play as many video games as I used to. When I was fifteen, I was playing at least eight hours of WoW every day. These days, I'd often rather be working. Sure, I still play several hours of video games every week (and the fact that I'm counting "per week" should tell you something), but I also value my time spent reading things on the internet. It's not as glamorous, say, as killing Ragnaros, but reading news is just something I enjoy now.

Today I was thinking about RPGs. Since getting Edge of the Empire (and playing it, what, twice?) I've realized the golden age of RPGs in my life has passed. I'll likely never again spend several hours each week planning, discussing and playing RPGs like did in 2009-2011 (or whenever it actually was). These days, my game time is spent playing board games. Rightly so, there are several reasons I enjoy them perhaps more than RPGs.

• I don't have to prep/write anything

• I don't get upset when the week gets cancelled, because it's not a personal blow to my ego

• Other people can bring or play board games, keeping the variety level high

• Board games are games, whereas RPGs are more like a group activity

That last part might be a little contentious. A few years I would have been extremely offended by such a claim. I argue that it's true: RPGs have no winner, no clear goal, no real competition (depending on the system of course). RPGs fail to meet the exact definition of a "game." I'm not suggesting they aren't fun. Oh contraire! Many of my best memories came from playing Savage Worlds. Many in-jokes were created that have lasted to this very day.

There are certain things that can be done with one medium that simply cannot be done in another, but lately we've seen some interesting developments in the world of board gaming that has made them draw ever-closer to the beloved RPG. In fact, video games jumped on that bandwagon years ago. These days you can't shake an AR-15 without hitting a handful of military shooters, racing games or third-person shooters riddled with all manner of RPG mechanisms. Whether it's Call of Duty's amazingly fun ability to level up your soldier, unlocking new guns and perks or The Last Of Us's slow trickle of parts to upgrade your favorite weapons, the systems are here to last. Rightly so, they reward players for continued investment. They get to tweak the game in the direction they want to take it. Go ahead and try to play Unreal Tournament 2004 again, I dare you. Without the ability to level up, the player is left with an overwhelming feeling of "why waste the time?"

Can board games do the same thing? The venerable Hero Quest was Milton Bradley's answer to Dungeons and Dragons, creating a whole new genre of board game: The Dungeon Crawl. Since 1990 that genre has seen notable entries such as Lego's Heroica and Fantasy Flight's Descent, my personal favorite dungeon crawl. These games have variable amounts of customizability and player agency in regard to their character's progression, but it's a very small amount compared to a full-fledged role-playing game.

The real question is, "how much farther can we go?" board games have only really come into popularity in the last ten years or so, due in part to the fact that they've become sophisticated and interesting enough to hold the attention span of young people. For many of my gamer friends, being a gamer extends to games in all mediums, not just ones made of pixels. There is no exclusivity, and no need for it.

What new mechanics could board games borrow from RPGs, or even video games? Games like Risk Legacy introduced the novel concept of permanently changing the game board. Descent has a progressive campaign system that allows players to "level up" their characters between adventures, including purchasing equipment from shops between quests. There's a level of permanence that has previously been unseen in this world of cardboard and paper.

I'm very curious to see where the we can go.

Runaway Train

I have friends who compare running RPGs to hanging onto the front of a freight train and trying to quickly lay down track before they derail completely. I find that this comparison is only true for people who are just starting out writing this type of game. After a few sessions, the GM will get better at writing stories that aren’t so rigid and strict. In fact, people smarter than I have written very informative articles on how to structure an adventure for maximum playability.

When I first started writing, I very much over-thought the whole process. I had a complicated array of if/then “switches.” Completing quest A would yield different results if the players had previously completed quest B, and still different results if they'd completed quest C and B together. In time I learned that I was exerting myself for no meaningful gain. Work smarter, not harder, as the saying goes. Anyway, wasn't this supposed to be fun? Programming a game in a word processor is laborious and draining. Many times, content was skipped completely, meaning that I'd wasted effort. Something had to change!

This is another big departure for regular writing vs. RPG writing; the fact that stuff can get skipped. Only in an author's wildest nightmares might a whole chapter get overlooked. So much character development and plot, gone. Just like that. How could a story retain its shape? How could you have a finale? What if somehow the finale was skipped? This is why RPG writers have to employ something called nonlinear writing.

It's not as strange as it sounds. If you've ever thought about the process of writing a script for a movie, it merits comparison.

A few years ago I was completely in love with the idea of becoming a big-shot Hollywood film director. Because my obsessions are a little more “advanced” than some people, I like to learn everything about something before I move forward. During my research (a fancy way of saying watching every “making-of” on every DVD ever made), I learned that most movies and television shows are shot completely out of sequence. That is, the script is carved up into discrete, filmable chunks and then shot out of order. Lord of the Rings is famously known (by me anyway) to have filmed the very last shot in the whole movie during the first few weeks of principle photography. The actors hardly knew each other at that point, and now they had to act as if they had just finished throwing the ring into the Crack of Doom.

"Was your name Shane or Sean?"

Like movies, it helps if the author can think of the story as a series of discreet scenes. Unlike movies, RPG scripts are not written as a whole and then carved up later. It's much easier to have a strong overarching narrative that connects separate “scenes” together into a whole. This way the players can visit the scenes in almost any order and still get a grip on the overall story. So what if they skip the fight with the cave troll that was supposed to happen early on? The GM can just make it come in later and use it for the last fight of the game. Problem solved.

The Master is a Slave

This image is blatant pandering to
my sister in law

Continuing from my previous post, another thing that makes RPGs so different from board games is the notion of a Game Master. I realize that phrase might make some people shudder away in disgust and exclaim, “that's just too nerdy for me!” but I implore those people to continue reading anyway.

As far as I can think, there's nothing quite like having a game master (or GM) running the game. In video games the player is limited by the bounds of the game itself. If you walk to the furthest reaches of the map, you'll find an invisible wall that blocks the way. Books and movies are different because the reader or viewer is effectively on rails for the entire duration. The experience is passive instead of active. This doesn't make it better or worse; just different. The audience has no control of what does or doesn't happen on the screen; they're simply along for the ride.

Meanwhile, sitting at a table with a person who is the author, narrator, voice and personality of the characters is something to behold, especially if it's done well. If a player decides to travel to the farthest reaches of the planet, it's the GM's responsibility to have something suitably surprising waiting there for him to find. This is why I keep stressing the importance of imagination in games. If imagination is limitless, the world is limitless.

Now you can start to see where the difficulty of creating this kind of game can be. In a previous blog I mentioned that RPGs come in books. Most of the time a portion of the book is devoted to explaining the world (also called a “setting”). Essentially a setting is an elaborate list of Do's and Don'ts. A setting could take place in the Wild West, except with strange and grungy magic. It could be like Men in Black. It could be based on My Little Pony.

This guy knows what I'm talking about.

However, people are wild and unruly creatures who desire above all things to get their own way. This was one of the first things I learned when I jumped headfirst into running my first game. It can be frightening; I had spent hours trying to anticipate what a group of three players might do inside a single tavern. Within two minutes of playing they were already doing things I hadn't thought of. This is something I think every writer should experience just once; people like to break things. Look at what happened within a few weeks of the new Star Wars game coming out; people got inside the game and found ways to break it, giving themselves an advantage.

You see, when a person sits down to write a story, they have time to ponder and caress their words and characters. They can carefully sketch and sculpt their style and narrative to suit a certain purpose. This is one of the reasons it takes so long to write things. Compare this to RPGs, where the writer can prep as much as they want but still be fairly unprepared for the game. It doesn't matter how much time an author spent describing the perfect woman; when suddenly asked by a player if she's ever killed a man, all preconceived ideas are quickly called into question and the author has to stop and think. It's this very unpredictability that makes the game both a blessing and a curse.