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The goal of the manifesto is simple; rebuild the network. Create a simple guide that, if used, if made popular, will result in a healthy and robust network of tabletop RPG players. We’ll get into what that means below, but let’s start with the manifesto. It’s simple.

1: A curious person is a new player

2: Playing is more important than learning.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. If we take these statements as axioms and put them to work, we will rebuild the network of gamers.

A Curious Player is a New Player

If people see you playing, if people see you reading, painting miniatures, if people hear you talking about the game and ask what it is? Tell them. Tell them it’s fun, it’s social, you get together with your friends and roll dice and kill stuff. You laugh, you have fun, and you come out the other side with intensely memorable experiences. Use references they’ll get. It’s like the Lord of the Rings except you get to be Gandalf. It’s like a video game except you don’t sit in a dark room staring at a TV.

Don’t be afraid to reference things people get. There’s nothing wrong with saying it’s like a movie, or like a video game. These are massively more popular forms of entertainment. If you feel  compelled to push the idea of “cooperative storytelling,” well, I can’t stop you. But regardless of what kind of game you play, I think this is the wrong way to sell RPGs. It’s at best an arcane idea and probably abstruse and misleading. People don’t know what ‘cooperative storytelling’ means and might not even realize they’re doing it while it’s happening. Let them discover the storytelling aspect. All RPGs have it. But people already know they like playing games, they don’t know if they like telling stories and it’s not your job to convince them they should.

Don’t wait for them to ask to play, invite them. Someone who asks you what you’re doing, even if they do it while seeming to look down on it, that person just overcame their natural tendency to keep their mouths shut, and tried to cross the divide. Meet them halfway. Don’t wait for them to ask! Ask them! They’re already curious!

If they say “no thanks,” let them. One of my friends thinks another of my friends is a douche because he spent 5 minutes trying to get her to play with us while she was trying to work. That was a long five minutes for her, after she’d already made herself clear. Respect their answers. If they say no, but you think maybe they can be converted, let them stew. Let them think about it, don’t bug them. No hard sell, we do this for fun!

This can be tough because if we all just always invite everyone who seems interested, many groups would very quickly get too large. But I think we can agree that we’d all be better off, happier, dealing with the problem of Too Many players, rather than Too Few. The first step, then, is to ask the curious person to become a new player.

Playing is More Important than Learning

When someone sits down to play with you for the first time, they don’t want to be intimidated. Stacks of books, charts, lots of choices that don’t mean anything to them yet, it’s confusing and it gets in the way of the goal: play. Even if your favorite game is a pamphlet you bought off someone’s website and then printed out yourself, the player who sits down with you for the first time doesn’t want to read that pamphlet, doesn’t want to make choices about their character, they want to play. You may think “but this game is so simple, there are only 4 choices to make in character creation!” That’s fine; if they like playing the game, they can make their own character and their own choices next time. But the first thing that happens when a new player sits down is they get to play.

Even if you did everything in your power to make it as easy to play as possible, a new player would still have a lot to learn. Remember that for a new player, everything is new. Including even the idea of getting together with your friends to play games! They’re going to be intimidated. It’s your job to make them feel welcome. The new player is going to be learning everything, they’re going to be learning you, learning the group, learning how everyone behaves and what’s expected. That’s a lot and we haven’t even gotten to the rules of the game yet! The goal, then, must be to maximize play, and learning through play.

How do we do this? Easy. Make sure new players have everything they need when they sit down for the first time.

• Dice
• Pencil and Paper
• A pregenerated character, preferably one that has cool stuff to do, but is not too complex. Don’t go overboard.
• A mini, if appropriate. You’d be surprised how many new players key off things like the funky dice, or the cool miniatures.

Once you’ve done this, you’ve just gotten started. Now you have to be a good GM and a good group of players, but the Manifesto can’t do that. That’s not its job. Just make sure the new player gets to do things, preferably right away. Helping a new player have fun is a short-term sacrifice for you and your friends, for a long-term payoff. It’s an investment. For this one night, it’s ok that you’re not the star of the show. Let the new player be cool. If the new player is intimidated by all the attention, let the new player watch for a while. Either way the goal is the same; make sure the new guy has fun.

A group that gets large may need to have more than one GM, more than one group, evolve into a collective where you show up and don’t know who your GM is going to be or which of the 20 players you’re going to be gaming with, but that’s how it used to be! That’s how RPGs were originally played in 1974, that’s how the phenomenon grew. We play now because those ur-players followed this manifesto without ever writing it down. They derived it. And for a long time the network was healthy.

The network grew to the point where it was so large, and the game was so popular, that eventually in the mid-1980s when the hobby exploded, people who weren’t full-time geeks became gamers and those people once they got into college and shortly thereafter felt weird talking about gaming to normal, non-gamers. People shut up, started playing in groups of 4 and 6 in private and saying “I play RPGs” meant you were weird. The network suffered.

But that was 20 years ago and while the damage that period did to the network was pretty bad, geek culture is now mainstream. There are more of us now than there are of them. Let’s go back to inviting new players. Let’s get the hobby back where it was, and then take it farther. Don’t wait for your favorite designer, don’t wait for the license holders and corporations, just follow the manifesto, and the network will repair itself.

Let’s make new gamers.

Popularity: 14% [?]

I’m now officially a week behind in posting my fantasy novel to my other blog. I’ve got a little work to do on the next chapter and I delayed because I got distracted by…Nethack.

When I interviewed at Pandemic Studios in 2003 they asked me what my favorite games were. At the time, my answer was; Halo, Homeworld, Starcraft, some other game I can now not remember, and Nethack. Of all of them, Nethack was the only one that raised an eyebrow. “Why Nethack?”

“Well, because I’ve been playing it for 10 years and I’ve never beat it, and I still find new amazing things.” That was 7 years ago, so when I busted it out last week it’d been 17 years since I started playing. (more…)

Popularity: unranked [?]

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here and there are two reasons for that. First, this blog was mostly an experiment to prove to myself I could attract an audience, and I proved that to my own satisfaction. The more time I spent on the site, the more readers I got, and I learned how to tailor posts and subject matter to my audience, and how to write to attract a larger audience. So to that extent, the experiment was a success.

I did not and do not intend to stop blogging, however.  Rather I’ve been sidetracked by two big projects, one of which is the second reason and very writing intensive.

I’ve written a fantasy novel. Fantasy, because like SF, it’s one of my genres. But it’s basically done now and in the last stages of revision before I start promoting it with its own website and seeking an editor or agent.

So that’s one reason no updates. Another is that a lot of my Geek Thinking has been aimed toward a kind of Grand Unified Theory of RPGs that follows up on my articles about Adventures in D&D. But I think I’d been giving my Video Game readers short shrift and so wanted to do some video game writing for a while. But I’ve been hesitant to write too much about video games, because it’s my chosen profession and you have to be careful what you say.

But screw that.

I rented the new Red Faction game on the recommendation of a friend and I found that, like him, it revitalized my interest in the Open World genre pioneered by GTA.I and a whole swath of really talented people worked on the Mercenaries series of Open World games. Many of those people are still there, but the experience left almost all of us with a bad taste in our mouths.

It’s easy, when you’ve had a really negative professional experience like that, to associate it with all many of factors that weren’t really to blame, and Red Faction showed me that it wasn’t the genre I was sick of, I really loved the Open World genre. I just hate the Mission Structure we seem stuck with.

There were a lot of things about Red Faction I liked. Even though the characters are modeled like the ‘roided-out thugs from Gears of War, they were human. They seemed more human in motivation than a lot of video game characters. Volition executes on the Reluctant Hero formula well. The main character actually has a sympathetic expression on his face. That had to be hard to achieve. He doesn’t walk around in the opening scenes with a “I’m a bad-ass” look on his face, he has a “Oh man what now? I just want to live in peace” look which is a lot more subtle and hard to do. At least in video games. Artists in other media don’t seem to have a problem in this department.

The destruction was great, and visceral. Games work best when they trick you into thinking you’re smarter than you actually are. When I’m Sam Fisher, I think I’m smart because I found a way to take down that guard without using my pistol. When in fact there was almost no way to fail regardless of what I tried. When I’m Gordon Freeman, I think I’m smart when I panic and run in a random direction that just happens to be where the Content lies. But in fact that was the ONLY way to go.

In Red Faction, I felt smart because I’d look at a building and guess at how it was constructed, where the best place to put a charge was. I could walk around inside the buildings and look to see which walls were supporting all the weight. I created my own challenge, my own minigame by seeing how few charges it took to blow up a building.

In fact, it was probably all illusory. It may not have mattered where I placed the charges.I loved the vehicle design in Red Faction, someone obviously had a lot of fun making sci-fi Tonka Toys for Mars. They were both futuristic and workmanlike. They seemed both fantastical and plausible. Reminded me a lot of Ron Cobb’s work.

The run-and-gun was solid, though not remarkable, and “solid” is still better than most of the GTA games. I still think Mercs1 has the best run-and-gun I’ve seen in an Open World game. Mercs2 suffered, I think, from the designers and gameplay programmers being far more segregated and specialized. The gameplay coders had a lot more influence on the design in M1 and it shows.

The problem I had with Red Faction, and it’s a problem with a lot of games like this, is the Mission Structure. Not its specific Mission Structure but the concept of mission structures in the abstract.

That there are mission goes without saying, doesn’t it? Players need clear objectives. They also need clear motivation. Mercs1 had the first, but lacked the second and as a result a common complaint was that players just followed the blip and often had no idea where they were going or why. In Mercs2, the story provided those answers but since the story boiled down in some critics eyes to “you get shot in the ass” I think a lot of players immediately tuned out. I do not blame them.

The problem with Missions is explaining them to the player. So far, the only solution people have found in these games is a massive infodump whereby you stand there and listen to someone speak in what is not actually English, but a highly specialized language only found in video games. Your character, typically, remains mute during this process, just like in real life. Failing a mission in Red Faction is a big deal because you have to go back to the mission giver and go through the whole process again.

I cannot stress this strongly enough. This is not fun. Sitting through a mission briefing even ONCE is not fun, and it’s not playing the game. I used to think we could trick the player by making it entertaining. Using movable typography and animated infographics to distract the player from the fact that he’s sitting through a PowerPoint Presentation.

Players want to play the game. Some of them may put up with other stuff, some of them may enjoy things like PowerPoint Presentations, but the only thing all players have in common is their desire to play. We, as developers, should consider it our mission to identify the play, and strip out everything that stands between it and the player. That’s not always possible, but I think we can do better.

I was really enjoying Red Faction until I failed a mission. I didn’t mind failing, I’d behaved foolishly and should have failed. But when I saw that I had to go all the way back to the mission giver AND sit through the briefing again, I turned the PS3 off and have not turned it on since. Writing this post has reminded me of why I liked it and I may pick it back up.

According to the info I saw from both Lucasarts and EA, the average gamer is in his mid 30′s. He has a job, he has disposable income and unlike the stereotypical teenaged gamer, he’s not a hostage to the game he buys because it was the only game he could afford this quarter. He has a lot of options. Not only the expensive, AAA titles like Red Faction, but also instant-gratification downloadable titles he can immediately begin playing with his friends.

Shadow Complex, one of the best games I’ve played this year, is burdened with completely unnecessary story and dialog, but it is otherwise extremely lean and as much fun as games three times the price. Hard for a game burdened with Red Faction’s mission structure to compete. At least with me.

So what’s the answer? Red Faction and Mercs and many other games use a Mission Structure where you must go to the mission hub, talk to someone, and sit through a PowerPoint Presentation.

Games like WoW use a Quest-based system that’s essentially a textual version of the Mission Structure. You talk to someone, read some text, and go on your mission. The difference being, often missions are exclusive. You can only be on one. Whereas you can accept many quests at once. And the quest system allows you to click on someone, immediately accept, and go back to playing. You trade context (“I have no idea what’s going on”) for minimal downtime outside the play experience.

I think we can do better. I’d like to see a Scenario-based system whereby you explore the world and discover something is happening in this location. Verbing. There’s something to see. If you watch, you will probably get an idea of what it is. Two factions fighting, someone trying to sneak in somewhere, someone hiding from someone, someone being brutalized or arrested.

That’s interesting because it’s something happening and something you can immediately interact with. If you talk to someone involved, you get a short…short…tête-à-tête with the NPC involved in what happens, and a quest in your log.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“I dunno man, someone went crazy inside the hospital and just started shooting.”

*bing* New Quest added to your log. Investigate the crazy dude in the hospital.

Look at that. Short, to the point, elegant, and plausible. No one talked like they knew they were in a video game and the player got what he needed without a slide show.

There may be games that do this, and I just don’t know it or didn’t notice it because I wasn’t paying attention at the time. I think games work best when you don’t even see the design choices. But I first remember seeing this idea pitched by my colleague Rob Lo when we were both working on Mercs. I don’t think I really understood what Rob was proposing from a ground-level “what is the player’s experience” or “how do we implement this” perspective, but I remember it being confusing to a lot of people. I think this is because we’ve taken the existing frameworks for granted for a long time.But I think this is the ideal content structure for the Open World. The Open World is all about going anywhere and dealing with what you find there. The whole concept of briefing rooms or mission hubs is completely antithetical to this.

I think we’ve yet to see some of the best work done in the genre, because everyone’s still reacting to GTA. I think Crackdown tried something like this, but it was nascent. I remember driving through several areas very quickly pursued by the bad guys and randomly accumulating missions I didn’t understand because I’d just passed some invisible barrier that presumed I was on foot and therefore had the time to figure out what was going on.

It was confusing, but at least it wasn’t a PowerPoint Presentation.

Popularity: unranked [?]

This will be the last thing I write about traditional tabletop gaming for a while, I want the topic to lie fallow and give my non-tabletop gamer readership something to come to the site for, for a little while. Probably a review of Bruno come Sunday night!

If you were in high school when D&D came out, you’re 52 now. The overwhelming statistical likelihood is, if you played in High School or College, you don’t play anymore. Because of the time and commitment it takes to participate in this hobby, it’s fundamentally a game for teens and 20-somethings. Getting 5 people together on a regular basis who all have careers and families, to play a game that requires at least one of them spend a few hours preparing outside the game, is tough no matter how you slice it. So a moment’s thought will reveal why it’s easier to get everyone together when you’re kids, or in college or your mid 20s, than when you’re in your 40s. (more…)

Popularity: unranked [?]

Gentile or Jew
O ye who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Ah, February. When a young man’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of…spice! The spice must flow!

If you’re reading this, then you’re invited to come OrcCon at the LAX Radisson on Saturday, February 14th. There to plot and scheme to control the universe’s sole source of the geriatric awareness-spectrum narcotic, melange. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. He who controls the spice…you know the rest. What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day?!

We do this every year. I run the tournament, I also play (I may win, but that hasn’t happened yet), and I award a prize at the end. Often, though the tournament is over and everyone’s been playing Dune for several hours, people want to keep playing and so just start a new game.

The Dune Boardgame, published in 1979 by Avalon Hill, is my favorite boardgame. It is my favorite boardgame, based on my favorite book, of which they made one of my favorite movies. It’s hard to describe why I love this game, without getting bogged down in descriptions of rules, which no one wants to read and which I do not want to write. So, in general terms; (more…)

Popularity: 73% [?]

I played the classic GW game Blood Bowl for the first time today, after watching two experienced players play. These are my first impressions. At some point I’ll be an experienced player and my attitude will change, much of this post will be obsolete, but it can be fun to look back at how you felt after the first time you played a game. As I’ve said before, I don’t mind looking foolish. I think part of being a good designer is entertaining otherwise foolish notions and seeing where they lead. So there’s a lot of absurd, ex cathedra statements in here, but that’s my style. Who dares, wins.

Blood Bowl is a cross between a board game and a miniature wargame. (more…)

Popularity: 75% [?]

My friend and fellow designer Scott likes to tell the story of an interview he gave a design applicant wherein Scott asks “What’s your favorite game?”

That’s a popular question in game design interviews. When I was asked what my current favorite games were when I interviewed at Pandemic, I said;

1) Halo
2) Starcraft
3) Homeworld
4) Nethack

And then had to speak intelligently about them. This may seem like a bullshit thing to ask in an interview but in my experience you can tell a lot about someone based on what they say when they speak critically of their favorite games.

The applicant apparently says his favorite game is Super Mario Brothers. A fine choice and a game that’s been the subject of a lot of critical discourse about game design. So naturally Scott asks the guy “As a designer, what do you think makes Super Mario Brothers fun?” And the guy sits there and hems and haws and gives no answer and for this and other reasons, did not get the job.

“If you’re applying for a job as a game designer at a console company,” Scott said to me, “you should at least be able to come up with SOMETHING about your favorite game, in this case a game that also happens to be the best selling console game of all time.”

As a designer, I find it very easy to get wrapped up in mechanics. Balance, flat choices, false, choices, predictability, how we explain things to the player, stuff like that. But as video games get away from the Gameplay Is King model and wash up on the shores of Experience Is King island, I spend more time thinking about what makes a game fun as distinct from inventing interesting mechanics that further gameplay.

It’s easy to see why Super Mario Bros. is fun, though being as popular as it is, it’s also easy to overthink it. The game boasts a few very simple mechanics; run, jump, shoot a fireball; allows the player to do them whenever he wants, in any situation, and then designs hundreds of levels through which the player gets to use his mechanics, each time in a very slightly permuted way.

Running and jumping and shooting fireballs is fun. Letting the player run and jump as he pleases, trying out different strategies is fun. It’s simple, don’t overthink it. The brilliance of the game lies in their adherence to that core gameplay. When they deviate from it, the audience often doesn’t follow them.
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Popularity: 30% [?]

The Game Story Series, Part V

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: Central Conflicts | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

Greatest in both senses; large, epic, and excellent. I’m talking here about the best story I’ve ever encountered in any game of any type I’ve ever played. RPGs, Computer Games, whatever. The game is Legend of the Five Rings, a collectible card game, and the story is the Clan War that ran from 1995 to GenCon 1997, and this is the last in the Game Story series.
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Popularity: 28% [?]

As I suspect thousands of people are in the week after Gary‘s death, my friends and I played OD&D last night.
My friend Jim is 50 now, and was 19 in 1975. He played with Dave Arneson a couple of times when Arneson was out here at Conventions. He was in Lee Gold’s group (which he describes as being many large groups all amalgamated together) when Lee started Alarums & Excursions. Playing with Jim is, no shit, playing with part of gaming history.

So Jim shows up last night after I suggested we play OD&D in memory of Gary with his original D&D “books.” By books here, I mean pamphlets. This was before AD&D, this was before the boxed sets we all grew up with. This was the original.

Jim was running the game section (because no one else wanted to) of a military shop in SoCal when D&D came out in 1974. Jim was already a wargamer at that point, playing games like Panzer Blitz. He loved fantasy and when D&D arrived he quickly became part of the phenomenon. He was in his late teens, just out of high school.
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Popularity: 42% [?]