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…)

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…)

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.

It is something of a ‘girly’ thing to many players, but I have grown to like romantic sub-plots in my RPGs. It is not so much the romance that I get into (though I do love films like The Princess Bride and I did like the Leia / Han Solo relationship in Star Wars) so much as the emotional connection it inspires.

The ones that stand out for me (playing as a man) have to be Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Knights – both by Bioware – because they forced me to care about someone. There are other tricks to make you care about a character – Minsc in Baldur’s gate was funny and endearing, which made me want to keep him alive – but romance is the most sure-fire way to make a player want to make a difference.

It is curious that I don’t really feel the same way about romance in tabletop RPGs, but that could just be the party I was in; at one point, the only women in the party were my girlfriend (now wife), my sister and a pregnant friend. Any romantic sub-plot I could have witnessed would have been a little strange. (none of the men were the kind to have romantic interests in characters of other men)