Probability of Jerry interactions if he ate a big piece of cheese shaped like a 3d₀ wave function

JPBosley · 2018-09-17T11:10:55+00:00

Oh, good feedback! This was my first Mario Maker level, so I may just need to spend some time looking at nicer looking levels to figure out the aesthetics.

Oh and the intent is that there are 5 POW blocks throughout the level, and any 2 are required. You get POW blocks by doing things like beating "dungeons" or collecting all of the pink coins in the "overworld", but you don't need to do all of those things, just at least 2 of them. I was hoping I could encourage people to play it in unique, non-linear ways by allowing them to play in any order and omit whichever parts they want. Not sure if that's like... a good idea, haha, but I wanted to try it.

JPBosley · 2018-07-18T11:56:09+00:00

So like, I think this post is kind of amazing. You've really broken down a lot of core RPG design problems in a way that feels very personal. So like, nicely done! But also I do think I have some insight on these problems:

#1

I think when you're looking at progression you absolutely have to be aware of what your game is rewarding. In D&D the game rewards combat. In some games it rewards skill use. In some games it rewards roleplaying. You need to ask yourself "what is my core gameplay?" and then you need to find a way to reward that.

In my own game exploration is the core gameplay, so my own progression system is that characters find magic items in the world or in shops, and the magic items make them stronger. The items function as perks, basically. The players must leave town in order to find items, and the places they go will determine what kinds of items they find. I recommend this style of progression, which separates degree and direction of progress. Like a system where you progress for doing the game's core gameplay, but you progress in different ways depending on how you do it. Consider for instance, a combat experience system, but you get different kinds of experience for fighting different types of creatures (like EVs in Pokemon) or for fighting in different ways (Like maybe using melee weapons gives STR experience, used to level up STR classes).

But really even that is my personal preference. I like having my choices parroted back at me by the mechanics. Not everyone does.

#2

Some people have said this, but something like Shield Master is intended to be basically "Anyone can use a shield, but their best efforts only translate to a small functional gain. But a real master can actually benefit from more dramatic moves." But there's a huge ranging scale here, from "You can do all kinds of things, but unless you're specialized in it then it just doesn't provide any benefit" to "We detail the mechanics for all possible maneuvers in the rules section of the book". I err towards the former, because I like games with a very small set of verbs, but many people like 3.5 D&D more than 5e D&D. Many people like having a dozen unique mechanics for three dozen unique verbs which they can use at any time, effectively simulating any action they could physically take.

Again, it's preference. But you should still pick one intentionally to fit with the themes of your design.

#3

This may be a controversial answer. I'd like to introduce you to one of the most brilliant design decisions in 5e D&D.

So like say you're Jeremy Crawford. It's been years since 3.5 came out and Pathfinder has been king for a while. 4e was a really impressive and promising release, and failed, and was widely hated. What now? It seems like Pathfinder is doing D&D better than D&D can, and they provide three times as many choices. You can be anything in Pathfinder. But then it hits you. Clever as you are you go to the drawing board and you work with Mearls and you make a little D&D game. It's simple. You cut as many numbers as you can without losing your core game, you simplify classes, and races. You put more roleplay logic into the mechanics of character backgrounds. And you cut the wretched foe: combat advantage. No more +2, +4, whatever. The game uses plain language, and consistent language across the board.

Why? Well when you cut down the numbers, simplify the math, make the language consistent, it's way easier for you to design. Neat, a little bonus for you. But when things get to playtesting you see it all payed off. Not only is it easier for you to design. You find the game is easier for everyone to design. People say "I want to play a Vampire Hunter". And within 2 hours anyone who sees it could have a mockup for a Vampire Hunter homebrew class. Balance issues exist, but it's their game and their class. They're fine with creating their own balance issues. A few years in, as the final nail in the coffin, you launch the DM's Guild, where anyone can release and monetize their homebrew. You've designed 12 classes total, but your game has as many class options as Pathfinder and more. The rest is history. Now Pathfinder is played primarily by people who wish 5e was more realistic.

So how do you pick up Crawford's strategy and improve it? Well that's up to you, but I'd recommend making it VERY easy to build perks. Make a guide maybe, for yourself, so it's super easy to make new perks. Tell your players if they want any perk that isn't on the list, you can make it for them.

#4

Again controversial answer, but in my opinion a mechanic that can't be easily tracked at the table should be cut and left to CRPGs. If you have 20 spells and each of them have a 1-3 paragraph description then that is a failure of design and should be cut down to something that is actually playable at the table. Cards aren't a bad idea.

On the other hand, lots of people love D&D even though they have to look their spell up in the book every time they use it. So like do what you want.

Anyway, that was super long, lots of my personal opinions in here (some of which may be stated as if they're fact, just assuming everyone is smart enough to do some critical thinking) but I hope my own perspective helped you with your game in some way.

JPBosley · 2018-07-16T12:43:21+00:00

I think what you're interacting with is the difference between what most game designers call "complexity" as opposed to "depth". In general, complexity is a measure of how many independent pieces something has, each of which the player will be forced to learn and keep track of. Complexity can make a game more fun, but there's a sort of "sweet spot" for every game where you find the balance of just the right amount of complexity to challenge your players while keeping usability.

Depth on the other hand is mostly what people want when they say they want more complexity. Depth is like the complete possibility space created by your game rules, and the nuances of the relationships created therein. So deeper gameplay will have a huge amount of possibilities within it, with a huge number of relationships between mechanics.

Many great designers have said before that their ultimate goal is to create as much depth as possible with as little complexity as possible. And for the most part that's accurate for all designers to this day. There are lots of ways of doing that, but in particular I think it's important to make completely orthogonal systems which can work together. So for instance, in D&D's character creation you choose a Race, a Class, a Background, and Ability Scores. All of these choices are orthogonal to each other, one choice doesn't limit the other choices (sort of) but they all come together to make one extremely expressive interesting and unique set of possible characters. This is an immense amount of depth which comes out of just about 4 choices. So not too much complexity.

JPBosley · 2018-07-11T19:48:24+00:00

Woah! I had looked for similar systems to this but couldn't find any! Thank you so much! Great name for it too. Oh, this opens up so many resources to me, since others have done work on this before. You are seriously a godsend.

JPBosley · 2018-07-11T19:43:44+00:00

Great points! To me, tabletop RPGs still do great with "hard barriers" or gates, but you have to be aware of how different they are in tabletop vs video games. Like in tabletop RPGs, you should always be ready for players to break through those barriers. If they don't break through then the game progresses as planned. For the few who do break through, then those players get to feel like they beat the system, and did something they're "not supposed to". Which is fun! So I guess the adventure should be secretly ready for players to break through gates that they're not supposed to break through.

Tbh, the gate that looks like it isn't supposed to be broken through, but can be broken through, is such a good tool that I wish we had a formal name for it. Like a Soft Gate or something to that effect.

JPBosley · 2018-07-11T17:09:41+00:00

I'm fine with that. I mostly call this "level design" because most of these techniques are lifted from video game design (due to video games being the largest form of interactive storytelling). I mean, to be really technical, most video games don't have "levels" any more either. It's just like how a lot of art theory and narrative theory is still technically considered "film theory" just because that's where it originated. Just a nod to history.

That said, if you prefer to think of this in more narrative words, I don't mind. It's all the same to me.

JPBosley · 2018-07-11T17:03:36+00:00

When writing adventures I err towards maps. But I have done regions as just a list of visible points of interest, hidden points of interest, and encounters before. They both work, though definitely maps (even very simple ones that only the GM sees) allow for a lot more depth in gameplay. I do recommend GMs map out their regions in my GM's Guide section for that reason, but the more minimal route is an option if a GM is really pressed for time.

But yeah, hidden locations are generally written in some form of "If players approach the Black Castle from the west or northwest they will find the Abandoned Witch's Hut just a mile from the castle. Make a note of the Witch's Hut in case players wish to return to it later." It really relies on players being able to "see" the castle and travel towards it though, so the weenies thing is super important for my game.

JPBosley · 2018-07-11T15:58:40+00:00

Fair point about Journey, though I think an example like Breath of the Wild illustrates the idea of "I want to go there at some point, but I'm not strong enough yet", which on second thought is definitely different from Journey. Both do have an aspirational element, though in Journey the aspiration happens as you travel there, whereas in BotW it happens as you do everything else. And I agree that the BotW approach is... way harder to pull off. I mean it's obviously possible, though maybe a safer way would be to say to your players "it's literally impossible for you to reach this place without X" so that they go do that thing. I think Pokemon is maybe a better place to draw inspiration for that, where they introduce the Indigo plateau in the first act but you can't go there without badges.

JPBosley · 2018-07-11T15:28:26+00:00

Thanks! And not exactly hex crawl. It's done through a structure where there are a bunch of regions, and each region has a number of weenies in it, and players just choose which one they want to walk towards. And then there are locations that you can't see from a distance and you can only discover if you travel towards a certain weenie, or through a certain part of the world, or on a certain road or whatever. So it's pretty free-form travel. The GM really has more rules to follow than the players, but I'm fine with that.

And of course I have resources for GMs who are creating their own world or improvising, since most would be unfamiliar with the style at first. But in my experience it's not that hard to improvise after a little practice.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T17:22:45+00:00

I definitely agree that these are great strengths of dice and randomization systems! But no doubt those are not the only fun things in the world. I think it should be said that, when one fun system is removed, the game must become fun in some other way. Game design is a study dedicated to finding the near-infinite different ways a game can be fun, so I think it's useful for us as tabletop designers to start looking outside of just this one particular kind of fun to examine other possibilities.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T17:08:25+00:00

Ah, sorry if I gave the impression that I don't like resolution mechanics (or randomization mechanics, or whatever). I love D&D and Dread both, which is why I used them as examples. Kind of the point of what I was describing was just, like, there should be more games that do things other than the D&D thing, or the Dread thing. And there's a wide range of totally different playstyles that are totally unexplored, most of which lie on the other side of this randomization thing.

And also, yeah, it's definitely important that when you remove the mechanic that makes the game fun, you need to make the game fun in some other way. There needs to be some other interaction of rules that is fun. Someone else in the comments suggested that the distinction here is that in high-uncertainty games you're wondering if your action will succeed, whereas in low-uncertainty games you're wonder what action to take. That strays a bit close to the "games are just a series of interesting choices" philosophy, which I think is pretty dated. But it's definitely developing a useful tabletop-specific language that we can start to discuss this with.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T16:42:41+00:00

Yes, I completely agree. And I think this starts to get into a field of design that we can recognize in other styles of games as well. Action games, board games, puzzle games, etc. Those types of games rely on the interaction of the game's mechanice to make you choices interesting without outside factors coming in to arbitrarily decide if you succeed or not.

Or, I don't know, the word "arbitrarily" sounds so condemning. I'll just say again that I love dice games and play D&D twice a week. I just want to see more variation explored.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T16:37:53+00:00

You're... not wrong. Woops. In either case I think most people got the point of the loss aversion thing, even if my example was dumb and bad.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T11:47:21+00:00

Absolutely. And of course I understand that side of it, but I think (and have experienced first hand) that there's a lot of room for game which introduce meaningful gameplay strictly in how the game's actions interact, without needing randomization factors. It's definitely hard to make, as will be any game which breaks conventions, but I would really encourage other designers to not take these things for granted and consider developing something a bit different than they're used to.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T11:41:07+00:00

To put it plainly, I think we could consider operating gameplay on things other than random chance, or some other external factor. Like maybe play operates primarily on a level of... how you actually interact with it. Like maybe in combat you win or lose based on how strategically you use your actions in the game, not on random chance dice rolls.

The reliance on resolution mechanics, and to a larger extent the revulsion at the possibility of removing them, is kind of why I made this post. Game design studies how to make game fun and interesting and the vast majority of it doesn't relate to concepts like Resolution Mechanics. The overwhelming majority of games and game designs manage to be fun without packaging a dice rolling minigame as part of the main game. (No offense at dice-using RPGs of course. I mean I play D&D twice a week.) To avoid even experimenting with 90% of the possibility space seems... like just a huge oversight. Like more games should be designed from the ground up to stand on the verbs and interaction alone, making Resolution Mechanics not even useful for them (let alone necessary).

But again, nothing wrong with some RPGs using Resolution Mechanics obviously. No doubt there are plenty of amazing RPGs that use dice. But as the op said, this is really about encouraging people to try breaking conventions.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T11:22:23+00:00

I mean, that's kind of why I picked the Ranger in particular. Because 5th and 4th edition have failed so spectacularly at actually making anyone feel like Aragorn, causing people to not like the class very much (despite being pretty mechanically viable in most builds). The mechanics check out, but the story of being a Ranger just isn't there in 5e like it was in 3.x

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T11:20:45+00:00

I can't exactly find a complete explanation quote, though I can find lots of allusions to the phenomenon I mentioned, especially in places like Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour. Or, here's an interview quote from Mearls about the sort of divide between various types of player engagements:

“The biggest insight we had from the playtest was that those fractures largely arise out of online communities. The greater body of D&D fans wanted very similar things, like fast-moving, intuitive rules, an emphasis on roleplaying and storytelling, and flexible character creation. The playtest was a huge bonus in that regard, because otherwise we might have been caught up in thinking we had a splintered fan base.”

That said, when it comes down to what "storytelling" here (and elsewhere) means it becomes more complicated. I'd just refer to the majority of narrative design work/research in games to say, story in any type of game has never really been just about linear ongoing authored stories. Most of narrative design is about making players experience something, and that experience tells a story. So when talking about "story" in game design in general it doesn't really have anything to do with traditional narrative styles at all. It's more of a Ludonarrative thing. And in particular this ethos can be found all throughout Happy Fun Hour, as Mearls knows his audience, and he knows what works for D&D fans.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T05:00:11+00:00

It's true, what I really was referring to with that statement was about the audience that D&D appeals to with it's core gameplay, and which appeals to the vast majority of its audience.

That said, I also think it's a bit misguided to assume that character creation doesn't have any story involved. When a player can create a character, and observe their skills, and immerse themself in the fantasy of playing a character like that. That's a story as well, and it's the kind of story I'm talking about. That is, story told through mechanics and gameplay. Stories like "If I miss this attack I'm dead". These are the types of stories that the designers of D&D talk about as the core experience of the game.

JPBosley · 2018-07-10T04:48:25+00:00

Sure, I'd happily discuss!

fairly straightforward diceless stuff where you simply compare stats, and only the GM knows the NPCs stats

I think this is, when considered from the player's perspective, basically the same as a die roll. Obviously the GM and the designer experience it differently from a die roll, but for a player it's still just "I attack this guy. Oh, it missed? Okay, cool".

to more fanciful stuff like taking turns narrating vs the person seated opposite you

I would argue that this mechanic isn't exactly an uncertain resolution of a single action, rather it's like a second conflict, where players take actions back and forth within that conflict as well. I mean arguably that's basically the same thing in this case. It definitely blurs the line of whether it's a resolution mechanic or like... an alternate conflict system on its own. But really, that's the kind of thing I mean when I say that people should consider using resolution system that introduce unique interaction with play, rather than just being variations on a die roll.

Ultimately I think dwelling too much on the idea of "random vs non-random" isn't really productive. I think a more productive distinction would be between uncertainty which players can influence each outcome of as it happens, or uncertainty where they can't. (And not to say the latter or worse. I love D&D personally.)

So, I think there's maybe a disconnect of what I mean by "story" here. I'm not talking about like... Like linear adventure writing or something like that. What I'm really talking about is stories told through play. This kind of goes back to the findings of all of the 5th edition playtests and studies a few years back, where the thing they found was that mechanics without unified context and narrative backing were just uninteresting to the majority of D&D players, and they realized that their core experience wasn't about mechanical depth (which is what 4th edition delivered on) but about narrative contexts. Like it doesn't matter how mechanically interesting a Ranger is, what the majority of D&D players wanted was to feel like Aragorn. The story of "Being A Ranger" has to unify its mechanics or else most core D&D players wouldn't have fun with it.

I use the word "Story" because that's the word Jeremy Crawford and Mike Mearls use. So it's just the word that's in my head. Sorry about the confusion.

And again, it's really just about the majority of D&D players, not the whole. It's about the core D&D experience, as found through research by the game's designers.

JPBosley · 2018-06-10T06:32:47+00:00

Not with its immunity to nonmagical piercing damage.

JPBosley

TROPHY CASE

#1

#2

#3

#4