Games, Design, Culture, Politics...

“I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something here.”

-Michael Tolkin’s screenplay for Robert Altman’s The Player

Scott Jenning’s take on the Infinity Ward drama seems pretty spot-on to me, and linking it here means I don’t have to write all that.

I can’t just post a link, though, that’s not who I am, so allow me to provide some commentary.

In the tradition of “why smart people do stupid things,” here’s my take on the recent behavior of EA and Activision, both garnering a lot of deserved attention for gutting and axing creative teams and studios with a proven track record.

It’s the IP.

Games make so much money, the industry is so big and growing so fast that we sometimes forget there’s anything else. A common reaction to Activision’s behavior is “Those guys made BILLIONS for Activision!” When you’re making literally billions of dollars, why chase after more?

Because making games is risky. It’s nowhere near as risky as making a movie, in general the rule holds that if you assemble a great team and give them the resources they need, they will make a great game. And if you market the shit out of something, it will sell. Do both and you have a legitimate hit and a successful franchise.

But a lot of games never see the light of day, and even a hit game can cost many tens of millions of dollars. EA and Activision might make a billion dollars, but at the cost of a few hundred million. They’d much rather be making even more billions at almost no cost.

That’s what a strong IP is for. If you have Mario in your stable, you can make billions just by selling Mario-branded T-shirts and pillowcases. Nike probably has to keep making shoes…probably…but their product is the swoosh.

EA and Activision are very happy to pay some developers a few tens of millions, maybe even more, if it means a franchise that generates hundreds of millions every year. But once a franchise is established, what do they need the developers for?

The guys in charge at EA and Activision don’t make games. They’re just business guys. All they do is make decisions. The act and process of making a game is very far removed from their everyday, even though their everyday is ostensibly about games. But really its about sales. Selling the games other people make. Marketing and positioning and making deals.

When a game is a hit, a lot of lip service is paid to the devs. But the guys getting the lion’s share of the money naturally believe they are the ones primarily responsible for the success of the game. Were it not for their funding, their marketing, their decisions, you’d have no game, no hit.

But dealing with developers is messy. They want to be treated like creative people, they want control over the product they invented, and they would like to get paid. So they become the enemy.

It’s not simply that the Publishers, who typically own the properties the developers invent, feel like the developers are replaceable, they fundamentally believe the game itself is irrelevant. They view the game like a movie or a song. It’s a product. Its job is to create demand for the brand. Because they believe they can extract money directly from the brand. Nintendo puts Mario on something, it makes them money. Nike puts the swoosh on something, it makes them money.

Once the game has created that demand, the game ceases to be critical to their strategy. They need to make more games, they realize this, but the purpose of more games is to keep demand for the brand high.

Medal of Honor is not a very strong brand, I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made off Medal of Honor lunchboxes, but there’s some. There’s some. And the guys at Activision probably have plans for lots more. That’s why you create a new business unit, it’s code for “we want a team of people thinking full-time about how to spin this brand into every product imaginable.”

So the IW guys have a new studio to start, and we have Medal of Honor toothbrushes to look forward to. The system works!

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The game is called Dungeons & Dragons, not Dungeons and Dragons and Big, Fuck-off Armies, so I understand why we’ve never seen any robust system for handing a War from Wizards of the Coast. Probably they don’t see it as necessary and I don’t disagree with them. It’s certainly possible to play the game, as it stands now, every week for 10 years and never exhaust all the possibilities of story and mechanics. But I like Warfare in my D&D and to that end, I have designed my own system.

There was no system for D&D3, so I designed my own for Eden Studios. With the help of two other talented designers (Lizard, and my friend Doug Sun) we produced The Book of War which was a kind of snapshot of my feelings of both warfare and the design behind D&D. In other words, it was ridiculously complex and probably unsuited for anyone other than someone really dedicated to the idea of running a war. For that guy, though, I think it was pretty good.

But War has always been a part of my D&D campaigns, and I love almost everything about D&D4, and so wanted a new system that reflected the design of D&D4. It took me several attempts and I had to play a lot of D&D4 and get to the ideas behind the design. I experimented a lot on my players and listened to them and noted what they liked and what they didn’t, until eventually I hit upon this system, which I present here, for free, under the Creative Commons license.

I’m putting it up free because while I think there might be some money to be made in a full book, I have other things to do. It’s my hope that people will take the spreadsheet that builds units and create lots of units and post scenarios and whatnot. I ask only that people who post new content link back here and follow the license rules, attributing the original work and author. If some publisher wants me to flesh this out, I’m open to the idea. But I think there are enough good designers out there that you wouldn’t need me.

Navigation

1. Mustering

2. Events

3. Events in Play

4. Battle!

5. Units

6. Revisions

The Reference Sheet

The Unit Builder

Axioms

Here’s what I took for granted. The unquestioned assumptions of the system.

1. Resolving a Battle must happen as part of a normal Encounter. It cannot be something the players and the GM do outside of normal play. In other words, while the PCs fight Monsters, as normal, a Battle wages around them.

2. A player who’s not interested in a Battle should not be required to participate. Not everyone comes to the table because they want to be a part of The Battle of Five Armies, and it’s important for GMs to realize this. You may be enthusiastic about a big conflict, but it is fundamentally a paradigm shift, and one not all your players may want. I advise all GMs to be sensitive to this.

3. It cannot be its own game. The players are all already playing D&D, a very complex game. It must function, therefore, like an add-on. Not a completely separate game.

4. The Battle must affect the Encounter, and the Encounter must affect the Battle. They are not two unconnected things.

5. It must feel like D&D4. Simple, robust mechanics designed to support a lot of narrative flavor.

My group and I had our first real test of this system last week and I am sufficiently happy with the results that I’m posting the results here. I do not consider this final, I consider this…barely an Alpha. I believe this could easily be used in any tabletop game with a focus on combat.

The system is actually very simple. Most of the text below is just to give you, the reader, context, and help you use my example in your own game. Because this was the very first test of this system, I kept it deliberately simple. I believe you can do some amazing stuff with this framework, but this was just a simple battle.

Warfare is broken into two phases. Mustering and Battle.

Mustering ->

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Dan O’Bannon died yesterday. I knew this was coming, I’d been reading about the guy a lot recently and in interviews with him I thought, “This is not a dude long for this world.”

I’ve reading about him as research for a book I’m working on called Magnificent Failure: The Most Influential Science Fiction Movie Never Made. O’Bannon was one of a team of 5 artists and designers brought together by a visionary director to work on a movie that was never finished, never really begun, in spite of months of preproduction. That team would go on, together and seperately, to define the look and feel, the themes of Science Fiction films over the last 30 years more than any of the directors we associate with those films. Lucas, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, these guys didn’t create the worlds they presented to us. They hired these 5 artists to create those worlds for them. Continue reading…

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There was a point very early on in the development of the last game I worked on where the director of the project asked me to write an imaginary trailer for the rough outline of a story we had.

In doing so I realized that while the story we had imagined seemed like it would “work,” meaning give the player context for his actions, in trailer form it was boring as shit. It was formulaic and, on paper, completely uninteresting.

How did the story I believed in turn into something essentially content-free? I methodically looked for an answer. I went to several trailers and studied them. Each revealed the same problem but the one I use as an illustration is Ronin.

Ronin is a great movie, I love it. John Frankenheimer is a master of that stuff, Robert DeNiro, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean, Jean Reno, Jonathan Pryce. Great cast. That’s what made Ronin’s trailer appealing. The cast, the director, the execution. On paper, it was a generic thriller about a bunch of dudes you don’t know anything about and the trailer doesn’t give you any reason to care. But Robert DeNiro…suddenly you care.

That was the takeaway from the trailer lesson. Most trailers are content-free on paper. What makes them pop, what attracts your attention, is the execution. You can’t, in other words, just hit the random item button on TVTropes.org once for every 5 minutes of movie and then congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Continue reading…

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In July I wrote a design spec for an iPhone app for D&D4 and posted it on RPG.net.

Four months later (today) some dude posted in the thread and said “I made it,” and linked to the app.

http://cordax.net/i4e Continue reading…

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