The Dragon's Talon

This is a response to a blog post on Gamasutra by a man named Steve Mallory, a designer I know through the ‘net who makes some good points about narrative design; read the original post here…

True authorial control… Now there is a scary phrase to use in front of your producer…

True authorial control is taking your player and asking them what they want to do today, rather than telling them what they are allowed to do.  Is that wise? (continue reading…)

As a bard, one single tale can be made to fit a wide variety of different uses. Certain elements can be built up or glossed over depending on your audience and the message that you are trying to convey.

This goes beyond stories having multiple interpretations and actually hinges on changing the story to suit your purpose; you reduce a tale to its skeleton and then flesh it out in such a way that it conforms to your vision.

As a writer, it is typical to build the story to meet the structure of the medium and suit your own strengths, but the story is fixed in both of these cases, with the same events being told in the same way. As a games designer, you can often drop in multiple endings or optional side-quests, but you are essentially just writing static chapters which you can swap in and out.

This is a far cry from a bardic tale, where the same story can be told a hundred ways to reinforce a hundred different moral truths or to better suit your audience. The tale of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, could be told as a bawdy commentary on the rashness of youthful love or a sombre account of how true love requires great sacrifice. Alternatively, you could go with Shakespeare’s version and put it all in.

The point is that a game requires that the developers make a single choice from the list and stick to it, but is this the only way? Can we not give the player a choice of tales and let them pick one? Since games are so interactive, why not let them change their minds as the game progresses?

As long as Verona looks the same way and Romeo does not suddenly change gender or species, we are not looking at any new art-assets. The dialogue might be problematic, but only if you decide to give the whole game VO.

Perhaps the trick is not to shoehorn this adaptive narrative into a game, but to create the game and the games story around it. Minimise or even remove dialogue and you suddenly remove a large stumbling block. Without any dialogue, it suddenly gets easier to localise too. The onus is suddenly on the writer and the narrative designer, rather than the artists. The central narrative, the skeleton if you will, is just a series of narrative checkpoints, with the player taking an equal role to the writer in choosing their path.

It sounds a little complicated, but does it sound that new?

No… The more I think about it, the more I see that it has already started. Left 4 Dead was the first step in this direction and suddenly I get the feeling that it will not be the last…

Last week, my manager approached the design team about a game on a very short time-scale, asking what we needed.  Considering the story requirements, I said that we needed a narrative designer and a whole lot of creative freedom.  Then I put myself forward for the narrative designer role.

I expected a fight, maybe even a refusal.  I didn’t expect to be given the job… (continue reading…)

In many ways, I suppose D&D represents the ‘mass-market’ face of tabletop roleplaying.  It was the first big hit, the one that started the ball rolling, so it always got the benefit of the doubt.  It was also good at adapting to its audience.

At first, it was a dungeon crawling Lord of the Rings game; it was (well, inspired really) the EssexMUD of its day.  Soon it opened up to let you play around a little more with who you were and the world you played in.  AD&D came out, adding more rules and letting you tweak your character even more; we are either looking at the Meridian 59 or perhaps even Ultima Online level here.

Once it hit Third Edition and later 3.5, D&D went from a geeky pastime to mainstream.  Many complained that it was dumbed down (look, thAC0 had its place, but I for one will not weep for it) and you could say that legitimately, but it would be more accurate to say that it was simplified.  At last, D&D had reached its Everquest stage – it was mass-market, it was no longer a niche geeky thing to do, people played it who were not ready to call themselves roleplayers.  It was smooth, it was accessible and the core mechanics were abstract enough that it could challenge GURPS as a generic ‘base’ system.

And then there was Fourth Edition…  For decades, MMORPGs had borrowed from D&D and then the Fourth Edition seemed to take its tithe from them all.  Everything is there, it makes sense and you can almost put the tables away.  As a dungeon master, I can read off some tables and then leave the books to one side.  This is the World of Warcraft of the tabletop scene.  There is no more Vancian spellcasting or thAC0.  There are no long lists of spells to pick from each day or different systems for every player’s basic attacks.  This is as close as a tabletop game will ever get to World of Warcraft.

But I leave it to you to decide if this is a good or a bad thing; some people like a little complexity, some people don’t, so find your own truth…

Over at WoW.com, there is a post about “Why Blizzard should make authenticators mandatory on Battle.net accounts” and it got me thinking about just how many online accounts the average gamer has.  Taking myself as a typical gamer; they might have two MMORPG accounts (one P2P and at least one one F2P), one Steam account, they probably have a paypal account, online banking, a couple of forums accounts, maybe something like a Bioware account that they use for playing NWN online, perhaps even a VPN login for work.

All of these will need passwords, so the average gamer would have one or two usernames (which will likely match the account name) and reuse the same couple of passwords for most of them.  They will probably choose simple passwords like their favourite sports team, wife’s name, kid’s name, some even use their character’s name, maybe drop the date or year of birth on if it asks for some numbers…

I keep literally dozens of passwords in my head to avoid this, using tricks like non-English words, nonsense-sounding strings of letters, etc. but I know that one key-logger could compromise all of these.  I could probably reclaim the accounts, but the hacker would likely have stripped off my characters’ gear to sell for gold, bought stuff using my credit card and, if I am really unlucky, downloaded a pre-release and DRM-free copy of the game we are developing at work.

Now a keyring authenticator for each of these would possibly be a bit irritating, but you get the idea; one extra security step on the critical ones would be a ten-second speed-bump at login and a major roadblock or even a dead-end to the hacker who only has my password.  Of course, not everyone needs one, since some people are bigger risks than others, but the only fair answer is a blanket requirement.

Suddenly, I think I agree with WoW.com – those authenicators should probably be mandatory, since you never know which clown with Guild Bank access got got scammed.  And it is not just Blizzard.  My internet banking uses one, so why not paypal?  If Battle.net has one, why not Steam?  It sounds like nannying, but we’ve all heard the old maxim; better safe than sorry.

Last week, we continued learning about archaic speech. It was another very patronising lesson, but you just keep coming back…

This week, we will learn a little about insults, so let’s put a nice safe break in. Only continue reading if you are sure that you want to…

(continue reading…)

Last week, we started learning about archaic speech. It was a very patronising lesson, but you seem to have come back…

Today, we will learn about oaths and curses. We will touch on religion, some slightly vulgar words and imagery that might border on violence involving sexual acts and anatomical impossibilities.

(continue reading…)

Inspired by my post about playing female characters online, I got thinking about gender roles in RPGs. I don’t believe in women’s things and men’s things, but there is a tendency for people to drift toward certain stereotypes. You probably don’t think about it when you are actually playing a game, but CRPGs do give us stereotypes. Arch-mages are men with beards, clerics are dour men and dwarves if they are NPCs and women if they are PCs. Fighters are men or else women trying to prove themselves better than men, rogues are slimy men or halflings who think they are cassanova.

I played a woman in some MMOs and people used to give me stuff, both in my guild and in pick-up groups. It was never overtly ‘have this because you are a girl’, but I saw so many examples of ‘I don’t really need this, so you might as well have it’ when I was playing a female character and never saw it with male ones. Do people think that a female rogue is more in danger of having substandard equipment?

Playing Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights, the original storyline has two love interests; one is male and one is female. The female interest seemed very much an equal, but very emotional (especially for a paladin) and conflicted. The male interest was stoic and protective, resolute in spite of his troubled past.

I suppose you play to your market. Given the things I have done, the evils to my gender, while working on a game for girls, I cannot really hold it against them. When your market is projected to be mostly men and boys, you play up the wish fulfilment. When (like World of Warcraft) you reach close to equal numbers, you make sure that the genders both get some heroes and heroines.

So you want to try some archaic speech in your roleplaying, be it MMOs or tabletop games? I will try to offer some help over the course of this series of articles which might help.

First of all, ask yourself if it is really a good idea. If you are playing a barbarian, you only really need to yell ‘Krom!’ a few times. On the other hand, done well with a character who justifies it, it can be a great idea. Think of Shakespeare; Romeo spoke in couplets, Hamlet too, but they had style and class. Dogberry, in contrast, was not the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ type.

(continue reading…)

I am a man. I can’t say that I have ever really wanted to change that. It is not like I have ever gone out in women’s clothing, I have only ever passed myself off as a woman once online, but… people look at me funny when I say that I often play women in games and I am not talking Tomb Raider or Bloodrayne.

My initial reason for this was simply ugly male models in MMOs. Oh, and the fact that I experimented in the bazaar in Everquest and noticed that my female toon tended to make more money than my male one.

I never really ‘played’ a female character in Everquest, so it was D&D Online where I first toyed with joining the distaff side. The male elves looked kind of indistinct and naff, like wiry old men rather than long-lived graceful creatures. The female ones looked a little bit busty, but I put that down to Lara Croft syndrome.

For the first three levels or so, all was fine. Even my female guild-mates accepted me as a female character, but it never got strange. As the guild started to fall apart, I ended up with pick-up groups. Oh dear… Misogynists and idiots abound in any MMORPG, but they seem attracted to pick-up groups. I think anyone playing a female toon who didn’t take off their armour and dance was assumed to be a real woman, to the point where even my protestations were assumed to be playing hard-to-get. In the end, that was what killed the game for me.

But why? Why do people assume that men never play women, even to the point of flirting and inappropriate emotes? Roleplaying is all about being something you’re not, right? I mean, I am not an elf or any good at spoting and disarming potentially-dealy traps either, but people can cope with that particular issue.

I suppose the issue is that people expect you to stick to those truths that you can manage. In D&D stats, we are all level 0 commoners or maybe (in certain cases) level 1 experts with lots of ranks in profession and craft. (some of us could stat ourselves in systems like Shadowrun, but that is another article) Since they offer multiple races in most games, people won’t ever assume that an elf is played by a 120 year-old perpetually-young aesthete, but gender… gender is inviolate…

Why?