On the Other Hand

Babymoon

Jan 252012

The Roddler - a $4495 stroller... for morons, apparently

Part of the reason I started blogging again was to document our experiences with our first child. I haven’t really done that so far since we’re pretty much in waiting mode. We’re due on April 22nd and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to prepare for. We’ve been receiving a steady stream of boxes as friends and relatives purchase items off our Amazon baby registry. We have a crib, a changing table, and enough receiving blankets to swaddle a t-rex. Neither of us are of the mind that having a kid requires thousands of dollars of specialized gear, but I think my wife (hereafter known as Cuttlefish) enjoys it the way I enjoy opening a new piece of geeky hardware. We’ll eventually need to set up the nursery; but, initially, Cupcake will sleep next to us in a little co-sleeper extension that sticks off the side of the bed. After that, she’ll graduate to a bassinet. We’re not sure when, but we know we have time to decide these things.

Then there are the mental adjustments. Many new parents read dozens of books – and some of them build detailed plans for how they’re going to raise their kids. We’ve read a few – enough to know that you have to learn by doing. No plan survives engagement with your first born – and any high-minded goals are likely to be eroded by the realities of all the little changes we can’t see on the other side of the birth event horizon. We have some directional goals… In general, we aspire to a Free Range Kids approach. The idea that kids in a first-world country, raised in a family without extremes of poverty, mental illness, or other disfunction, will generally turn out ok makes sense to me. I’d like to avoid the trap of worrying myself so much that I can’t enjoy having a family. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids talks about this a lot. At the other end of the continuum is Brain Rules for Baby. This is more typical of the “do this or your kids will suffer – or worse… not go to college” approach to child-rearing writing. I really liked his other brain rules book – and there’s some interesting stuff here – but I’m not sure how much to worry about. We have some guidelines – probably no “screens” (TV, Computer, iPad) until 2, nurse for about a year, get them on regular food and skip the baby food thing – but who knows what this will look like in reality. We’re discussing things like bike helmets (if we let them climb trees, isn’t that more dangerous than toddling around in circles in the driveway on training wheels? Are helmets “better safe than sorry” or giving into over-protective paranoia?) and how not to lie to them (we can play the Easter game and hide eggs, but they’ll know the Easter Bunny is just pretend). But, it’s all just talk right now. Would I really let my kid ride down the street without a helmet? (doubt it). When it comes to telling them to their face that Santa isn’t real will I falter? Who knows….

Essentially, we’ll do our best and learn as we go. We’re both good people – relatively careful and empathic – and we’re just going to have to trust ourselves to figure stuff out. We’ll take all the well-meaning, unsolicited advice with a grain of salt.

Meanwhile, there’s not much else to do but wait and try to enjoy the last few months in our lives that it will be just us. Starting in a few months, a piece of us will exist outside ourselves… forever. For the first few years, continual preoccupation will make daydreaming about game design and six hour video game marathons a rarity – so I’m getting my fill now. To celebrate these final days of just the two of us, we’re headed to the big island of Hawaii for a few days of whatever we feel like.

I’ll probably think about game design and read a science fiction novel…

The Roll of Randomness

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Jan 222012

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wendycopley/

Last post, we compared uniform to normal distributions in table-top dice rolls. I made the case that D&D mechanics are inherently frustrating because of swingy, infrequent die rolls. I wrote half a post on how randomness fits into game design when I stumbled onto an article that said it better than I ever could. It’s a long read, but it’s worth it.

What is the point of randomness in games? What role does chance play in crafting a fun play experience?

Modeling complexity: For systems that are too complex to model in detail, adding some randomness helps the simulation. To paraphrase Moltke: “No plan survives engagement with the enemy.” Some randomness – especially in how different contingencies are introduced (as opposed to success or failure of individual tests) – can help inspire player creativity and adaptability.
Normalizing skill levels: The more chance is a factor, the more of a opportunity an unskilled player has to beat a skilled one. With the right balance, an inexperienced player can win in the short term. But, over a long enough timeframe, skill will always win. Randomness regresses to the mean, and skill will tilt the balance. There is virtually no randomness in Starcraft and, if you’re ever logged into a public game only to be crushed in minutes, you know why this can be a good way to broaden your player community outside a hardcore few.
Game design shortcut: Designing a closed-loop, balanced rule system is extremely difficult. Virtually all deterministic rule sets will reduce to an optimum strategy, which will emerge over time. Introducing randomness can slow the migration of gameplay to these optimum strategies; chance keeps less optimized strategies relevant. To quote the Blight or Bane piece: “Chess has been refined over centuries, pondered by millions of minds. Good luck to you in devising a game of equivalent depth.” (For an awesome exploration of the strategic depth of chess, listen to this Radiolab. The whole thing is excellent – especially the opening segment on the tension between creativity and rules – but the segment on Bobby Fischer’s Game of the Century starts about 16 minutes in. You can play along with the narrative of the game on this site. The way Fischer tightens the noose after his opponent takes the bait is beautiful.)
Break stalemates: Systems that are extremely well-balanced can use a small amount of randomness to tilt things in one direction. For games designed to be extremely balanced, a small random seed is enough to change strategies and outcomes.
Introduce Intermittent Variable Rewards: There’s a lot of research demonstrating that this is a powerful tool to keep players hooked. But, it’s powerful mojo that tends to lead toward the game design dark side. A little can introduce some fun tension, too much and you create games that aren’t fun to play but that are hard to put down (especially for a very specific type of person). If you’ve ever asked yourself “WHY AM I STILL PLAYING THIS!?” and thrown the controller/keyboard/slot machine down in frustration – and wished you could get all those hours back – the game probably used too much of this element (along with the sunk cost fallacy - I’m looking at you, Everquest).
Introduce Strategic Options: Providing ways to influence chance opens up the design space. Magic: The Gathering players influence probability by how they build decks and through the inclusion of “Tutor” cards that allow them to get powerful cards into play. A large element of D&D strategy is getting pluses to that all-important To-Hit roll. Overcoming randomness and chaos with good strategic planning can make for a very enjoyable play experience.
It gives the players something to do: Rolling dice is fun. It’s a physical activity that draw’s attention to the table. Good table-top games should have a physical component.

I’m left with the intuition that randomness should only be introduced when absolutely necessary. When used poorly, it creates more problems than it solves and leads to weird design cul de sacs like “rubber banding” (when true randomness generates streams of failures or successes that feel unintuitive to players, some developers cheat and “correct” randomness back to what feels right to the player. Again, I’m looking at you, Everquest – except in that case the game was designed to punish players for playing the game in a way the developers didn’t intend. Unfortunately, that link is lost to time.) Used properly, it can help us fill in the missing pieces of our games.

Still, will it feel like a fantasy adventure game without the dice?

Swinginess: 1d20 vs. 2d10

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Jan 072012

Finally, I get to a post about mechanics…

I mentioned last time that d20 is a really swingy mechanic. By “swingy”, I mean that the dice rolls feel subjectively like they are all or nothing. Either the attack hits, potentially triggering an effect or even getting a crit, or it misses completely. My proposal is that swingy mechanics are disproportionately frustrating because they introduce excessive randomness in the plan-play feedback loop. Some randomness is fun, but 1d20 combined with an additional damage roll introduces too much opportunity to destroy the best-laid plans of both PCs and Game Masters.

The distribution of a d20 is uniform (Wikipedia’s stats entries are largely worthless to non-mathematicians, taking simple concepts and obfuscating them in academic jargon). This simply means there is an equal probability that the die will land on any number, 1-20. To turn this uniform distribution into a weighted probability, we assign a target number to hit. The more numbers that fall within the target, the greater a chance to hit. The baseline is generally 10 for Player Characters. This means that for any given roll, there is a 55% chance of success.

This is a nice, straight-forward mechanic that has worked fine for generations of gamers. Over a long enough timeframe, it provides the right proportion of successes to failures. Unfortunately, this timeframe is often longer than a single encounter – and sometimes longer than a single gaming session. If a group manages to get two 10-round encounters in, assuming one to-hit roll per round, a player can easily have a string of good or bad luck that’s outside the desired probability of about 55%. This is why Perico and others discuss accuracy as one of the most abused mechanics in D&D. Missing sucks, and virtually all powers (and player agency) are gated by this single roll. So, players naturally optimize around it.

An alternative, suggested by a friend in my gaming group, is to simply roll 2d10 and add them instead of 1d20. Two 10-sided dice added together creates a normal distribution from 2-20. This means there’s a higher probability of rolling a number near the middle than at either extreme. This is because there are multiple combinations that add up to 10 (1 and 9, 2 and 8, 3 and 7, etc.) and only one that adds up to the extremes of 2 and 20 (1 and 1, 10 and 10). The probability of rolling either of these is only 1% (whereas 20 shows up 5% of the time on a d20). If we keep the target number at 10, will simply changing from 1d20 to 2d10 help reduce the chances of a string of swinginess? I ran a simulation using Excel and a few thousand RANDBETWEEN() functions:

This table shows the number of times each result was rolled over 10 rolls. The X axis is the die roll result and the Y axis is the number of times that result came up. You can see the uniform distribution for 1d20 and the normal distribution 2d10 (2d10 results are clustered around the middle). If we compare hits and misses vs. a target of 10, we get:

Half of the 1d20 rolls hit and 70% of the 2d10 rolls hit. Already things seem a little less swingy. But, I ran this simulation a dozen times and this pattern didn’t always hold. It was still easy to get strings of good and bad luck, but in general 2d10 yielded more consistent results than 1d20. Ultimately, we know that the probability of a 10 or higher roll on 2d10 is about 2.5% higher than on a 1d20 (and the longer simulations below bear this out). But, what we’re trying to determine isn’t the effect over the long term. We want to understand the impact on the play experience of a single session.

Let’s look at the effect this will have on damage. Hitting more consistently will result in higher damage over time. For this simulation, I used a weapon that does 1-12 damage. I used an average damage of 6.5 instead of the RANDBETWEEN() function since damage rolls introduce another layer of swinginess. I created number series both without crits on a 20 (6.5 damage) and with crits on a 20 (18 damage to simulate max damage plus some amount of extra dice). This created the following trend:

Crits make a big difference in the damage output of 1d20. Without them, 1d20 can’t keep pace in a single combat with the reliability of 2d10. What’s also notable about this is that long, flat lines indicate a string of misses. In this example, the PC would miss consistently for three rounds in a row (rounds 4-6) on the d20. While the ending damage is relatively close, 2d10 would be less frustrating because the player got to contribute something every round (not to mention triggering on-hit effects). We’ll need more data points to see how this works out over time. Let’s run the same simulations over 25 rounds (3-5 battles).

Differences between the shapes of the distributions are becoming more obvious.

2d10 is hitting more consistently.

2d10 and 1d20 are neck and neck in damage. 1d20 tends toward chains of misses and jumping ahead due to a crit, whereas 2d10 provides more consistent damage. This cycle – lots of misses balanced by highly-effective hits – is the essence of swinginess. Finally, it gets more interesting when we look at results over the long haul. Here’s the simulation over 100 rounds, or about 10-15 battles:

Here the bell curve is obvious. But, look at all those crits with 1d20 (not to mention all the ones)!

As expected, the gap between 1d20 and 2d10 has narrowed over time – though 2d10 is still slightly ahead.

1d20 has pulled into the lead for damage with all those crits. In an earlier version of this post I set the crit value at 12 instead of 18. It turns out this is an important dial to turn in keeping damage balanced between the two methods.

As I mentioned earlier, these long-term results aren’t really what we’re curious about (though they help us understand the long-term effects of our short-term optimizations). We’re still not really “capturing the fun”. My intuition tells me that missing sucks and hitting rules. Every miss detracts a bit, and every hit adds something. Crits add a lot. So, what if we produce a “Cumulative Fun” model that subtracts one for each miss, adds one for each hit, and adds three for each crit (does a crit make up for three misses? Seems about right). Here’s how that cumulative fun comparison looks over progressively larger sets of rolls.

We finish the battle at same level of fun.

A string of misses starts to drag down 1d20.

1d20 is bouncing along the bottom.

Like the stock market, a downturn can really effect your future earnings. 2d10 clearly pulls ahead in the long run. If we take our assumptions to be true – a failure is about as frustrating as a success is fun and a crit is about three times as fun as a regular success – then over time, rolling 2d10 clearly trends toward more fun than 1d20. (I suspect the negative impact of a miss is actually higher than this, but I’ll save that for another post). For a single session, the more swingy our mechanic, the more rolls per encounter we need to balance it out. A swingy mechanic and slow fights leads to considerably less fun. To get the mechanical feedback we’re looking for, we need to make more rolls per battle and normalize the distribution of results.

This analysis just scratches the surface and doesn’t take balancing into account. WotC has moderated some of the frustration of misses using mechanics like on-miss effects and the reliable mechanic. There are also implications like the effect of a +1 – each plus is much more powerful with a normal distribution than with a uniform distribution because of the size of the standard deviations – especially around the middle numbers. What are the long-term effects of only critting 1% of the time instead of 5%? Some players might really miss this (and it limits the design space for crits – though some folks think that’s a really good idea). Can we apply this rule selectively? Since 2d10 grants such a different feel than 1d20, maybe it can be selectively applied to particular classes or powers – much the way some weapons use 1d12 and others use 2d6. This breaks the D&D unified mechanic; but, as we discussed in an earlier post, breaking with the past is exactly what we’re trying to do.

Here’s my Excel spreadsheet if you want to mess around with it: Swinginess_and_Frustration-1d20_vs_2d20

Burgers

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Jan 062012

We discovered Snake River Farms frozen burger patties last year when we needed something quick for a BYO Meat BBQ at a friend’s place. They quickly became our go-to meal on Wednesday nights, after we got back from the gym – delicious, fast, and… well… high protein. We kept with them even when we realized that each patty has 750 calories. Topped with sautéed mushrooms and provolone cheese the total load was best not to think about. But, eventually we had to admit that they left us feeling pretty gross – bloated and tired. The patties have so much fat that they’re almost impossible to cook. Either the grill bursts into flame or the kitchen gets covered in grease – even with a screen over the pan. Finally, when black smoke started boiling out from under the lid of my Weber from all the accumulated fat, I decided to find an alternative.

It turns out making a basic burger from scratch is absurdly simple. My basic recipe:

Sauté a medium minced onion in a little olive oil until soft – 5-10 minutes over medium/medium-high
Stir in a few minced garlic cloves right at the end and remove from the heat
Let the aromatics cool then add them to 2 lbs. of grass-fed ground beef
Top liberally with salt and pepper (I use close to a tablespoon of coarse salt)
Add a generous dash of worcestershire (again – probably about a tablespoon)
Blend with a fork – don’t overdo it, you want the meat to be fluffy
Gently form them into relatively flat patties (about 1/4 lb – so 8 patties from 2 lbs. of meat). Store extras by separating them with foil, plastic wrap, or wax paper and putting 2-per sandwich bag in the freezer. You can cook these just like store-bought burger patties.
Grill or fry 3-4 minutes a side over medium-high heat.

We toast little sandwich thins for the buns and top with fresh, sauteed mushrooms and provolone (unpackaged mushrooms sauté better because they have more moisture – mushrooms in sealed containers tend to be dry). We’ll often also have sliced avocado and a small salad on the side.

I tried hacking this recipe a bit using recommendations from this article on the NY Times, but the ground pork made them almost too much (I used sausage which was probably my mistake).

Rule 0 is Broken

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Jan 022012

[I need to stop making claims about what I'm going to write about next. Twice, now, I've promised to cover some different approaches to structured mechanics and twice I'm writing about something different. But, at this point so early in the process, I need to go where the inspiration takes me. There will be a time for focused attention on actual systems.]

Rob Schwalb’s latest post on Skill Challenges is a great example of the “story comes first” approach to game design – and it kind of pressed my tirade button. To be completely clear, I love Schwalb’s work. I also have absolutely no problem with story-based games. But, in the case of Skill Challenges, they’re a bit of a bait-and-switch – a highly structured mechanic that get’s trumped by the whim of the DM…. and I’m off on another INTP journey to make my point.

Well-designed games often use a balance of strategy and tactics. In this case, I’m using “strategy” to describe how an individual plans to play and “tactics” to describe how that strategy is executed – planning vs. playing:

Magic: The Gathering – deck-building vs. tabletop play
Orcs Must Die – trap selection and placement vs. the real-time waves
Dominion - brilliantly blends both elements at the table
World of Warcraft – spec, gear and enchantment planning along with wiki-crawling at work to plan that evening’s session
D&D – character building vs. tactical combat and table roleplay

There is an exciting feedback loop between planning a strategy and seeing how it plays out. When it works, it leads to great moments of quiet nerd awe as all the pieces fall into place – the Perfect Combo. Or, other great experiences – pulling off moves despite a fataly flawed strategy, just getting lucky, or failing despite a perfect plan – Dumb Luck. When things don’t work out, it provides fuel for another strategy session – what gear do I need? What card should I try? What build will work better? This loop is repeated over and over in great games.

In D&D, players spend a huge amount of time on their characters. They plan the perfect build and agonize over every turn at the table. Even non-optimizers are planning around the play experience they want to have – they’re just doing it in a way the rules don’t support. So, what happens when a carefully-crafted plan fails or succeeds because of the infamous Rule 0? It throws a wrench into this positive feedback loop and sacrifices long-term fun for the immediate needs of the story.

Alexander Macris over on the Check for Traps blog expressed this best*:

However, in order for a campaign to effectively create a sense of agency, the players must be able to make real (not faux) choices that have meaningful consequences on the players and their world. And that’s a requirement which is, for instance, in direct opposition to storytelling, or making sure everyone has fun.

DM fiat destroys player agency. What’s the point of all my planning and thought if it can be overturned at the DM’s whim (even if it is in my favor)? If I invest heavily in Arcana because I like the idea of extracting secrets from an ancient library and the player next to me says “I use Athletics to climb to the high bookshelves and find the secret book” and he succeeds and I fail, I’m going to be annoyed. Not only because he succeeded, but because it devalues the way I’m imagining the scene in the library. Maybe the DM should have said no, in that case, but that woud violate another important value of the story-telling genre.

Highly detailed combat rules that may or may not be enforced and structured Skill Challenges that can be thrown out at a moment’s notice make for a frustrating play experience. Deterministic rules in one part of the game and arbitrary rules in another (and occasionally mixing the two unpredictaby) isn’t good game design.

Are we playing a game or just making shit up as we go?

Some of this is a natural outgrowth of the things D&D doesn’t do well. D20 is a really swingy mechanic and combat takes a really long time. If I only get six or eight turns an evening to express my brilliant strategy and the dice just don’t go my way, it’s incredibly tempting to fudge. And, as we discussed in the first post, anything happening “off-stage” doesn’t really have a mechanic to reflect it – there’s nothing for the players to do but sit around talking about it.

So, we’re left with the Skill Challenge – which we may or may not use – and may or may not make sense – and which is really just a bandaid attempt to create a universal mechanic to cover all of the things the tactical mini rules missed. Creating something better will require challenging some assumptions, killing sacred cows, and making hard choices about what activities we want to include.

*This is a fantastic series of posts which appear to be in danger of disappearing. Grab them now or get the cached copies from Google before they succumb to bitrot.

Master of the game

Judging the game

It’s not your story

Aligning Player and Character Motivation

gaming No Responses »

Dec 312011

Map courtesy of http://fantasticmaps.wordpress.com/

I’ve been trying to avoid too much commentary on Dungeons and Dragons. That horse has been beaten into jelly by now. But, I still stay involved in the community and I’ve noticed that one reducto ad hitlerum seems to keep popping up. It usually starts with the phrase “D&D has always been about…” or “What D&D really is…” or “You can’t have D&D without…” (or even “D&D is many things to many people…”).

As various parties acquired the D&D brand over the years, they probably also imagined acquiring a loyal customer base, all ready to purchase new experiences and merchandise. Instead, they got a bunch of deeply-held opinions on what D&D is and the subsequent nerdrage. Vicious, hateful nerdrage. When the small, vocal, community was unhappy, they engaged in all-out attacks against the creators. They wanted to destroy their business. The Internet nerdrage spiral of doom doesn’t derserve any more space here; but, the short version is, the D&D brand is an albatross. The weight of history and the impossible task of meeting the needs of adolescent nostalgia are too much for any brand to survive.

That’s why we need to create something different – something without all the D&D baggage. We’ll build on the past (as everything inevitably does) to create a different kind of adventure game. Instead of designing an infinitely extensible system that tries to be all things to all people, we’ll create a focused play experience. We’ll find the fun without worrying what we’re supposed to be. We’ll also acknowledge that things change. The game will evolve and grow over time. We won’t get everything right the first time and we’ll come up with new ideas. We’ll design just enough to get us started and allow ourselves to become smarter and more experienced in the future.

Where do we start? What play experiences do we want to model? I put together a quick, unsorted list of potential systems. That’s just five minutes of jotting things down – we could come up with hundreds more. Where do we focus?

We’ll start again with our players – the group gathered around the table on a Sunday afternoon. Last post, we decided that we want a fantasy adventure system. Any meaningful in-game activity should be reflected in the mechanics. If the characters are doing something interesting, the players should be doing something interesting. While we want the opportunity to play character-driven stories, plot should arise from gameplay and not the other way around. What adventurous activities do the players want to imagine themselves doing?

Do the players even want the same thing as their characters?

There’s often dissonance between what a player wants and what their character wants. In story-driven games, characters are supposed to care about whatever the plot demands of them (“rescuing the princess”). Dungeon Masters spend hundreds or thousands of hours crafting plots and macguffins for the characters to pursue. Roleplaying games are built with a strong bias toward the story taking precedence. In some circles, if a player isn’t into the story – if they don’t want what their character wants – they’re “doing it wrong”. Playing to level up or acquire an item is almost… distasteful. That there is so much written against this behavior (essentially, “Keep your WoW our of my D&D”) is a good indication that it’s what many players actually want. But, it drives the classic D&D grognards crazy*. To a player, their character is by far the most interesting thing in the world – the backstory and environment is just a playground. It gives them an environment to 1) plan how to be awesome, 2) be awesome via gameplay, and 3) acquire rewards that will allow them to be more awesome in the future. Planning, building, playing, and levelling up a character is fun, and will be at the heart of our game. In our ideal design, player and character goals are aligned. Player investment in the plot and the world should grow organically through gameplay. Story investment will enhance the fun without being an a priori requirement. RPGs are awesome, but that’s not the gaming itch I’m trying to scratch. I’m attempting to avoid this debate entirely by sidestepping the” RPG” label. “Fantasy Adventure Game” does a better job of capturing my intent, but it has an unfortunate acronym.

Back to our adventurous activities. The short list of the kinds of things I’d like to imagine doing:

Exploring the wilderness
Discovering and exploring ancient ruins and dungeons
Searching for and harvesting resources
Battling monsters
Finding treasure and other rewards
Learning new abilities and becoming more powerful
Learning tradeskills and crafting useful things
Discovering ecosystems and cultures
Establishing camps and growing them into villages, towns, and cities
Trading with other players
Establishing trade routes between settlements
Going on long journeys and coming back a different person

For each of these activities, there should be a game. If we can’t model the activity, we shouldn’t include it. The act of smithing a sword should involve planning, gathering, playing, and reward. Exploring should have a “fog of war” and different challenges that players can optimize (or not) around solving. Since each of these activities is very different, we can’t expect the same mechanic to cover them all.

I’d wanted to get into some of the different approaches to mechanics in this post, but it’s already getting a bit long. I’ll jump right into that in a part 2.

*This dissonance between DM and player motivation is fertile ground for some thought…

Alleys of Ballard

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Dec 292011

I don’t remember when the running dreams started, but I’ve been having them for a long time. In that hard-to-describe dream-like way, the sky is close and the surroundings are quiet and there’s always a feeling of peace.

Awake, I’ve always hated running. I’m a 20-year aficionado of High Intensity Strength training and I still think a brief, intense, infrequent weight workout should be the core of any fitness routine. This type of workout is unpleasant. Even after all this time, doing a set of leg presses to failure is one of my all-time least favorite activities – requiring all kinds of mental games to keep me motivated. It also requires a lot of recovery time – about a week between workouts. This is sufficient time for the body to repair and get stronger. It’s also enough time for motivation to decline. It’s hard to build up momentum and consistency – and the relative importance of each workout is higher. Missing one is a bigger deal and poor performance or bad days are bigger setbacks than with more frequent routines. This high bar for every workout coupled with the unpleasantness of the training made every Wednesday a day of dread.

Also, while the weights were keeping me strong, protecting me from injuries, relieving routine aches and pains, and helping control my weight, I still wasn’t feeling very good. My energy level was low and I wasn’t getting any of those wonderful effects you’re supposed to get from exercise – particularly mental acuity. The actual health benefits from exercise are gained from a very moderate level of activity. More than 20-30 minutes a few times a week won’t make you live any longer or prevent illness. But, I wasn’t even doing that. I felt heavy and tired and grouchy.

Time for an experiment.

I wanted to find some kind of moderate activity I could do a few times a week to see whether I started feeling better. I walk a lot already and it doesn’t really help. I love to swim, but the logistics of the pool are just another barrier to entry – limited hours, crowded lanes, and the weird passive-aggressive politics of sharing space with people doing different routines. I needed something I could just do at any time. Moderate exertion for 30 minutes a few times a week shouldn’t require a health club membership, heart rate monitor, or extensive equipment.

So, we’re back to running. There’s nothing more basic than stepping out your front door, pointing yourself in some random direction, and taking off. I’d run quite a bit as part of my triathlon phase and it pretty much verified all of my biases. It was unpleasant, I went through several small injuries, it made aches and pains worse, and it catabolized about ten pounds of hard-gained lean muscle.

But, this time I thought I’d approch things differently. A lot of the past unplesantness of running had come from the way I’d been training. I used to set distance and time goals, and the run was one of four workouts a week in preparation for a triathlon. I was always pushing, pushing, pushing.

Last year, my wife read Born to Run, and we’d discussed it quite a bit. I also read the actual study in Science and became really interested in the concept of barefoot running. I’d been wearing Vibram 5-Finger shoes for a few years and had even experimented with some short runs to test the theory. Attaching a nerdy element like barefoot biomechanics to an activity does wonders for keeping a geek motivated.

So, I put on my Vibrams, my old tri tights, and a headlamp. I set a watch timer for 15 minutes, pointed myself northish, and shuffled off into the cold December night. My goal was to run for 15 minutes away from home, then turn around and come back at the beep. I paid no attention to my pace or the distance, instead paying attention to how I felt. I would run at a pace that was plesant – never pushing harder – always staying within a comfort zone. I followed some techinques I picked up from a three minute video on “Chi Running” I found on the Internet. My goal was to enjoy myself.

It was magical.

The experience was very close to my dreams. The stars seemed fat and close, and the night was secret and peaceful. My watch went off before I knew it and the run home was equally plesant. If not for my burning calves and sore feet I could almost have kept going.

The next few days I was extremely sore – especially my calves. But, I ran again as soon as I thought I could. I kept this up – running when it felt right and just enjoying myself – and I monitored my moods and energy. Sure enough, I started to feel better. I was sleeping better, had more energy and motivation, and improved mental acuity. My feet and calves adapted and were no longer the limiting factor in my runs. I started looking forward to running (a very weird experience) and the additional energy even made me dread my weight routines less.

Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I mapped my route on Google maps. It turns out I was running about 3.2 miles in 30 minutes – about a 9.4 minute mile. A week later I was up to about 3.5 miles – or about 8.6 minute miles. Nothing revolutionary – I used to run 7 minute miles for tri training – but this was effortless. More than that, it was fun.

I don’t think there’s anything magical about being barefoot – there’s correlation if not direct causation. Bare feet make maintaining a safe, correct, stride more instinctual. It’s also much easier to keep a slower, manageable pace and to limit distances. I’m more likely to stay within my limits so I’m less likely to hurt myself or push too hard. There’s also something about the feel of pavement directly under your feet – I feel really close to my neighborhood in some way – like I’m really living here.

Exploring without the grind of a goal changed everything. I love my runs. My favorite time is at night (My one small investment was in some inexpensive reflective suspenders). I have no set route – I pick a direction and look for alleys. Alleys seem like secret paths – they have a unique character that helps me stay in that mindful dream state. I’m amazed at all the places I find, the secret corners within a couple miles of my house.

I’m a little over a month in with maybe ten 30 minute runs under my belt. I consistently feel better in all the little ways moderate exercise is supposed help with. It’s like I stumbled on to some secret that’s been right in front of me the whole time.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/subsetsum/

Roleplay vs. Rollplay

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Dec 272011

In my last post, I wrote that the game as played should come before the game as imagined. While that’s a useful control for wild brainstorming, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Before we even start thinking about mechanics, we have to determine what kind of game we’re designing. If we figure out what the end-state looks like, we can use it to guide our design decisions.

I want to play a fantasy adventure game. Each player has a single alter-ego – their character – that performs their actions in the game world. There should be session-to-session continuity as well as both character and world development over time. Characters have an impact on the world and vice-versa. It should be a cooperative game, though some level of competition between characters can be a fun element. Characters grow in power as they are played and will face challenges of greater scope and difficulty. How the character is built, played, and developed determines what they are effective at and what their weaknesses are. Different builds should play differently at the table – they should feel different, with mechanics that reflect what the character is doing in the game world.

Which brings us to the RPG component and the discussion of “roleplaying vs. rollplaying”. Do we even want to play a roleplaying game? Are you interested in expressing the inner drives and motivations of your imaginary character? Or, do you prefer a more mechanical approach? Your preferences have a big impact on how you imagine the game and what the mechanics should try to capture. It’s not binary, of course. Most games are somewhere on the continuum.

This is an area where a lot of table-top RPG players have, I suspect, some cognitive dissonance. Similar to the baker example, many players daydream up all kinds of interesting characters – and they imagine that’s what they’d like to bring to the table. But, in my 30+ years (on-and-off) of playing table-top RPGs, I have never played with a group that followed deep, character-driven stories. I have also almost never seen a player act like their character. When they do, it’s almost exclusively for comic effect. More often, players meta-game their character’s quirks: “my character is too dumb to know that”, or “my character is evil so he’s going to act like a dick”. So, while players say they want to roleplay, my experience and observations suggest it’s not to the degree they might imagine.

Of course, some of this is the fault of the system. Fourth edition has virtually no rules to support roleplaying. It’s up to the players to do it in a free form way. But, I suspect what most players really want is character-driven stories without requiring player acting. Your character’s place in the world and their quirks and dispositions help drive the conflicts that in turn drive the over-all story. This is a subtle but critical difference from the type of roleplaying that says a talkative player with creative storytelling skills can’t engage in in-game dialog because his character doesn’t have sufficient Charisma or Diplomacy skill.

There are a broad range of preferences on this. While, I’ve never played it, Burning Wheel looks like an outstanding system for generating fun, character driven games. However, If I’m true to what I enjoy, I’m more in the rollplay camp. My avatars are usually some version of me projected into the game world. They have different (better!) abilities, and maybe a personality quirk or two to add some spice. While I like interesting characters, I prefer more mechanical gameplay. I enjoyed the top-notch voice acting in Mass Effect, but I actually skipped a lot of it so I could get to the next action scene where I was doing something. I tilt toward the WoW and Diablo side of the above spectrum.

So this brings us back to a fantasy adventure game with mechanics that enable character-driven play without requiring players to act or limit themselves at the table. This is, unapoligetically, a rollplaying game.

Note, I’ve made no attempts at defining actual mechanics. We could be talking about a deck-building card game, a board game, tokens on a hex map, or abstracted dice rolling. Our goal is to design mechanics that reflect the feel of the thing they represent. Next time, we’ll take a look at a bunch of different dichotomies in mechanics: unified vs. specialized, fiddly vs. streamlined, clunky vs. elegant, strategic vs tactical, simulationist vs. abstracted… as well as the gamut of possible fantasy adventure activities we could create play experiences for.

Understanding Opting Out of Christmas (for non-opter-outers)

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Dec 262011

I stopped observing Christmas about fifteen years ago. The why isn’t really important; I’ve never wanted to change anyone’s mind. My intent has only ever been to opt-out. I didn’t realize how hard that actually is. People have a tough time wrapping their heads around the absence of any kind of tradition or observation at all. The pressure to compromise is relentless, and over the years it’s turned me from a passive resistor to something of a scrooge.

A compromise is about give-and-take. If someone’s love of something is equal to or greater than my dislike, then a compromise is reasonable. This is why we now have a tree and exchange stocking stuffers on Christmas morning. I do these things gladly because it makes my wife happy. But, I’m often asked to “just play along” in a way that seems harmless to the person asking, but would actually lead to a betrayal of principles that are really important to me. Polite rejection on my part usually leads to gentle, apologetic debate of my (presumed) principles. “It’s not about religeon, it’s just about the giving… It’s not about the gifts, it’s about family…” etc. Every year it is a steady patter of a hundred tiny stones knocking me off balance and putting me on the defensive – asks for small concessions with nothing offered in return. It makes me grouchy.

Of course no one means to do this. They just get caught up in something they love and honestly don’t understand how to relate to someone who doesn’t want to play along – at least in some way. So, rather than explain the why*, which usually leads to battling a hydra of reasons I really should be celebrating, I want to talk about the how. What is and isn’t a compromise or an imposition? What are the simple rules for dealing with that dark spectre lurking in the corner of your family or holiday party?

Rule 1: No gifts. This includes secret Santa, random drawings, cost-limited “it’s just a tiny thing – under $20″. No. Gifts. I won’t belabour the psychology, sociology, and economics of gift giving here, but I have very good reasons for this. This is a really tough one for people – especially parents and grandparents. People so badly want to give something that it falls into the compromise zone. My desire to be gift-free is about equal to their desire to give me something. Just know that, unless it is a really really thoughtful gift, I am probably already thinking about how to get rid of it. Tchochkeys and gadgets are as likely to wind up at Goodwill as they are to add to the clutter around the house. If you really want to give me something of value, respect my beliefs and refrain from sending me anything… and don’t be passive aggresisve and make me feel bad about it (ironic that I can make other people feel bad by not accepting a gift – kind of puts the real purpose of gift giving in perspective…) If you’re worried that I’ll feel left out during the gift exchange, refill my drink and say you’re glad I’m there. My cheerful participation represents a compromise and it’s nice to know it’s appreciated.

Rule 2: Cards, letters, and photos are awesome. I love seeing people’s annual family photos. I love the annual “year in review” montages. Getting a card from someone I haven’t seen in a while that says “just thinking of you” is a really great feeling. That people choose Christmas to do this doesn’t matter to me – it’s like a yearly reminder alarm. If you want to send me something, send me a card with a photo and a note. I tape them to the ‘fridge and genuinely enjoy them.

Rule 3: No holiday-related hassles. If it’s something I’d be doing anyway, it’s not a problem. Getting together with friends; video chats with family; soggy, crowd-free hikes up Pacific Northweast trails; I have no objection to any of these. They’re ways I would spend my time, holiday or not. If they happen to have a holiday theme to them – so be it. However, anything that requires work, planning, or logistical headaches is off-limits. No running around picking up decorations, accompanying someone on their last-minute shopping, battling grocery store crowds, cooking a huge Christmas dinner, or any other kind of holiday make-work (especially the annual guilt-fest of charitable giving and volunteerism – yes this includes toys for tots and the salvation army. I do enough charitable giving on my own schedule, my conscience is clear). For me, the negatives of these types of things have no positive to balance them out. Avoiding these hassles is one of the core benefits of opting out.

Rule 4: No travel. This is another tough one, since it’s a time of year when families try to get everyone together. But, holiday travel sucks. I don’t need to belabour this – it just does. Without an annual reminder it can be easy to let too much time slip by. But, Christmas is, logistically, the worst possible time to get together. Instead – pick a different time of year. We try to do Thanksgiving (equally sucky for travel but it’s a reasonable compromise), but with two sides of the family to consider we need to be deliberate in planning time with everyone. I won’t travel around Christmas unless the need is truly dire.

Rule 5: Kids will not change everything. I’m not going to drop deeply-held beliefs the second the baby is born. I know it’s going to involve more compromise, but raising kids is probably the most important time to stick to your guns and defend a belief. We don’t know exactly what it will look like, but a couple things we already agree on: No Christmas wish lists, no flood of presents, and no Santa. I know we’re setting ourselves up for a major battle here – if every relative sends one tiny thing, the tree will be overflowing with presents. If that’s the case, most of the gifts will go in storage until their birthday. Instead, we’ll have stuffed stockings and a tree, and will find a fun way to spend the day together. Rolling your eyes at this is incredibly insulting. Ignoring our desire to build a deliberate belief system in our children and showering them with presents anyway is also insulting. I’m probably going to lose this battle, but I still intend to fight it.

That’s all I can think of. Five simple rules. If the details are too much, just remember the simplest interpretation: I just don’t observe it. It’s like Columbus day. I don’t begrudge your Christmas. I enjoy running by the lit-up houses and how the office completely empties out. I’ll meet people who care about me halfway, but I’m going to hold the line on all but the biggest issues. Give me my space, respect my beliefs, and know that I don’t resent your happiness.

Honestly, I like it when people I care about are happy.

*I’ve never met anyone who actually cares.

The D&D Play

gaming 1 Response »

Dec 212011

I recently ended a rekindled relationship with Dungeons and Dragons. After a couple exciting years of 4th Edition, the whole thing started to feel like work. Enough bits have been transmitted on the problems with 4e D&D, so I’m not going to beat that dead horse here. Truth is, I think it’s a great system. But, it’s just not a system that I’m very interested in playing. I’ll write a bit about what I think D&D is good at, then spend a lot more time (over several posts) ruminating on the type of game that I’d like to play.

In many ways, 4e D&D is similar to a stage play. It’s good at stringing together scenes with a small number of actors and flexible sets. The scenes, for the most part, are small-scale tactical combats. A majority of the rules support this gameplay mode. Like a play, it’s difficult to show things outside of the constraints of the stage. Anything that happens off stage is implied via the scene. Travel is implied through montages, large battles are impossible and are instead handled via small-scale excerpts, and long-term developments in the world are communicated via exposition. Like a play, it’s also all about the stars – the player characters. The play exists to provide a backdrop for the characters and to make them look awesome. Since this is the game’s primary vehicle for expression, there are deep options for characters’ growth and development. It’s all about the challenges the characters face and how they develop and grow. If you want to play a series of loosely-linked, small-scale combat scenes, where the characters shine and grow, then 4e is a great game.

But, there are other aspect to heroic fantasy that I enjoy. Travel, exploration, physical adventure (climbing cliffs, sailing ships, etc.), trading, crafting, building and defending a keep, espionage, intrigue… the list goes on. The core mode of 4e doesn’t support this well. There are lots of well-meaning attempts to add extended modes to support this type of play, but virtually all of them fail. Rituals are almost never used; and Skill Challenges – despite heroic effort on the part of the community – are a failure. Mountains of 3rd party system extensions feel equally tacked-on.

These extensions to the core system don’t work because they aren’t games. Going back to first principals, table-top games are a bunch of people gathered together doing something. A game has to have mechanics – fun mechanics – that give the players something to actually do. D&D has deep mechanics for character advancement and small-scale tactical combat. These involve strategic elements like character building (sorting through powers, exploring how they combine) and tactical elements – positioning minis, rolling dice, and managing various resources. Extended rules for things like overland travel fall flat because players aren’t doing anything – they’re not playing a game. Rituals are an idea – the subject of a conversation. Skill challenges are a series of the most uninteresting dice rolls imaginable (a single roll to hit a single number – a flat probability curve with limited player agency).

Neogrognard (Stephen Radney-MacFarland) calls this “the game as it is imagined”. In his example, one player wants his character to be a baker and takes a feat for that profession. A second player also wants to be a baker, but instead of using one of his feat slots, simply says “I’m a baker.” Since there’s no mode where the player actually plays a game about baking, the second player made the better choice. Extended rules like skill challenges are about the game as imagined. Without solid, well-designed mechanics – ones that include tension, player agency, and actually doing something with your hands – these imagination exercises are just rumble strips on the way to the next tactical combat scene.

I’ll close this post with a nod to Shigeru Miyamoto, legendary game designer for Nintendo. Many of the elements that have become iconic to his games – Mario, mushrooms, etc. – were added after the game was designed. Miyamoto focused first on how the player interacts with the game system and the world. Art and story were added later. The game as played takes design priority over the game as imagined.

To play the kind of fantasy adventure game I’m imagining, we’ll need solid mechanics for handling all of the cool stuff happening off-stage. Fortunately, there’re ample examples of fun ways to model these things in the table-top game world.

Older Entries

On the Other Hand

Babymoon

The Roll of Randomness

Swinginess: 1d20 vs. 2d10

Burgers

Rule 0 is Broken

Aligning Player and Character Motivation

Alleys of Ballard

Roleplay vs. Rollplay

Understanding Opting Out of Christmas (for non-opter-outers)

The D&D Play

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