Useful hints for Gaming

[andrewducker]

I'm currently reading a fantastic article on AI design that has some great tips that apply to pretty much any kind of gaming experience. Here's my favourite so far:

The most useful data we got from our playtests was a list of things to avoid
At the top of that list is Subtlety
If it isn't totally obvious, it's too subtle
Even if you make something as obvious as you can possibly make it, half the people will miss it the first three times they see it
In Halo the Grunts run away when an Elite is killed
Initially nobody noticed so we had to keep adding clues to make it more obvious
By the time we shipped we had made it so not only does _every single_ Grunt run away _every single_ time an Elite is killed
but they all have an outrageously exaggerated panic run where they wave their hands above their heads
they scream in terror
and half the time one of them will say "Leader Dead, Run Away!"
I would still estimate that less than a third of our users made the connection

I wish people had told me that 10 years ago. I never would have bothered with half the intricate plots that were completely wasted until I hammered home what was going on.

GM (Jumping up and down): Evil McNasty then stabs the player's friend in the back while twirling his moustache.
Smarter than the average player: Hmm, I'm sensing that Evil isn't as nice as he seems. From now on I'll keep a closer eye on .... Ooh! Gold!

Comments

[broin.livejournal.com]

Which is one of the reasons why the literary analogy for gaming is bad, bad, bad. :) The GM is not a 'narrator'.

You can't throw clues at the players and expect them to figure it all out, like Morse or Poirot. Nor can you direct a story without player involvement. Nor can elements like 'theme' and 'mood' be engineered by only one participant, ie, the GM.

Mystery plots particularly suck. God how they suck. Unless you can get the players narrating (InSpectres) or change the outcome constantly, depending on what the players explore (which I do). But that runs the risk of having the players become bored because in a sense, their explorations don't matter.

I'm working on a lil' project called SPIRAL, which is sort of my response to Call of Cthulhu. Imagine all the layers of mystery in a show like Twin Peaks were listed, like dungeon levels. Ok? Now imagine the investigators had levels which quantified their ability.

So the town mights have 5 levels of mystery:

1: There's a town and it's spooky. Visitors are level 1 too.
2: If you've lived there for a while, or heard the stories, you're level 2. You get the feeling not everyone in town is human.
3: Maybe they're demons. Or shapeshifters. And the mayor's peculiar too.
4: Eek, most of the citizens are mayor-spawn!
5: And next stop, Chicago!


The 'Mystery Level' determines the stats of NPCs (monsters get tougher and smarter the closer to the end of the mystery one gets, yup?) and gives bonus dice to PCs (once protagonists get involved in a mystery, they're more and more likely to find everything out).

And I'm hoping to come up with rules/guidelines for running mysteries based on player suggestion, a bit like a more structured, campaign-based InSpectres.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, you're right, mysteries do tend to suck badly. Thriller's are possible, and I have had players work things out, but you can't depend on it and there's just too much suckage if players are flailing wildly around.

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the conflict which is important in games is moral conflict. Get players to define themselves morally and then make moral choices which highlight differences in the group and outside of it. If their moral choices then have effects on the world outside of them then you've got plenty of intra and extra party interaction going on. Throwing in combat and quests keeps them going along between the inter-player arguments.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Buy yourself Sorceror for Christmas. =)

Yup, I agree. Moral choices are a fantastic thing to debate/explore in games.

As Sorceror puts it, have all the characters describe themselves on an agreed moral measure: how civilised they are, how honest they are, or how independant they are. Add demons, which represent the dark end of this scale and which provide easy solutionss to problems... instant quandaries.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

This made me guffaw mightily. I've never played Halo, so I couldn't say how obvious it is, but the reportage on it strikes me as hysterical.

As to your Evil McNasty example, that made me guffaw too, but maybe we need to trade some players. Mine are (justifiably, but still extremely) paranoid:

GM: Goody McWhitehat says "Here, friends. I will gift you with magical weapons and a map around all the traps. And allow me to stand in front of you, as you are being shot at, and I would not want you harmed."

Players as a group: "What's THIS guy's game? We watch him closely and ignore whoever's shooting at us, because if we look away from this guy, he will doubtless attempt to kill us all."

That said, I think there are different standards for video games and RPGs. I don't see anything inherently wrong with mystery RPGs -- if the players know they're getting involved in one, and do so voluntarily.

My favorite thing in RPG is that moment when the penny drops, when you finally put two and two together and get five. I'm biased toward mystery games because I'm running one, and because I like them myself; I designed my game to be full of penny-drops moments. And yeah, sometimes you have to make it obvious, but if everyone's paying attention, and everybody has been TRYING to solve the mystery, then that satisfaction's still there. You just need players that LIKE baroque, detail-heavy plots and want to unravel them.

Though spicing things up with gratuitous head-bashing from time to time helps too.

[andrewducker]

Oh, there's nothing wrong with mystery RPGs. And I've happily thrown mysteries and confusion into games. I just try to make sure that the outcome isn't entirely dependent on the players spotting the mystery. So if they fail to spot the huge clues, it just makes things harder for them later on, rather than having them stuck completely.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I tend to run things so if the players miss a clue, it comes around again with the situation escalated, so it's harder to miss, both because it's bigger and because it should remind them of the previous clue. That's worked reasonably well – at least, I haven't had to kill them all off yet.