D&D: The Lost Art of Adventure Writing & The Death of the Hobby
Movies, as I’ve written about here and as you’ve probably read elsewhere, are a crap shoot. Even with bankable talent and a proven IP the odds are slim you’ll provide a substantive return for your investors.
I say video games are different. Unlike movies, there’s a known formula. If you want to make a great game, put together a great team (this includes management). If you want a hit, market the shit out of it. EA proved that you could market even a crappy game and people would buy it. Put the two together and you’re going to get a great game that makes a lot of money.
I think tabletop RPGs are the same way. The secret to success in RPGs, however, is Organized Play. If you support your game at tournament and conventions, if you give players a reward they can’t get anywhere else, you’ll build a very successful property.
The problem with this, as you have guessed, is that few companies have the wherewithal to support a game with the big network of volunteers necessary for Organized Play. I’d hoped Upper Deck would give it a shot, they dropped the ball. I’d hoped Decipher would give a shot, they dropped the ball. Yadda hoped Games Workshop yadda ball. Companies don’t try and fail at this, they just don’t try.
In the absence of good Organized Play (and I have no idea if the RPGA counts, they seem to be half-assing it) we need Adventures.
The way you show your player base how to play the game you’ve designed is through adventures. One great 128 page adventure is worth more than 3 DMGs full of GM advice.
If you look back in the 80s, you’ve got a lot of games very similar to one another, and then Call of Cthulhu. Call of Cthulhu was very different from its brothers, but yet was very successful. If you didn’t know better, looking back, CoC would seem incredibly niche now and you’d guess it was one of those games that was read, not played.
But CoC sold amazingly well. Why? Because they had the best adventures out there. Well-written, well thought out, lots of great player-handouts. Top notch. CoC was a game a lot of gamers, especially in that era where there was D&D and Traveller and not much else, would have scratched their heads over. “How do I run this?” Chaosium showed them. Removed all ambiguity.
The current owners of D&D, Wizards of the Coast, landed their boats in 1997 a few months ago and established a beachhead there with some e-support for D&D. It’s a few bucks a month. The quality of their tools is, overall, pretty good. But playing around with it, you see where their priorities are.
They think the value of their product lies in the rules they’ve created, the content they’ve developed using those rules. This is a very 1997 attitude to have, and not surprising from a pen-and-paper company. It’s not an industry brilliant young web-developers are flocking to. Even these primitive tools are light years beyond anything their competitors provide.
Rather, I believe the value of their product lies in people playing the game. If they were right, that the value of their product was in the content, then more content would equal more value regardless of the number of players. Whereas the converse is demonstrably true; more players equals more value, regardless of content. Do whatever you can to make it easy for people to play the game, build a network, and then extract money from the network.
For instance, I can make a character using the new D&D4 e-tools. The character editor is great. I cannot, however, share this character with my friends. I cannot browse through other people’s characters, looking to see which are the most popular, saving me time.
Nor are there any such tools for a GM. I can build an encounter, but I cannot share it, publish it, vote on it, favorite it. No user generated content, in other words.
We expect this kind of ball-dropping from tabletop companies, in fact we’re so used to it, I don’t think most people, even those used to other sites with lots of user generated content like Youtube, even realize WotC has dropped the ball. They just take it for granted. At this stage, just something that works is wildly beyond most players’ hopes.
A subset of the conspicuously absent is the user-created Adventure. I think I know how WotC thinks about this stuff, because I worked there and I’ve seen the same attitude with a dozen companies, including Pandemic and EA. They want control over everything, they’re afraid of what happens if users have the power to do anything. But the only kinds of success we ever see in these ventures are the ones where the users can do whatever they want and you provide them with the tools to enable to cream to rise to the top. It’s ok if 99 people create and publish “The Demon-whore of Cockgobbler Hill.” That’s fine, who cares? Don’t get worked up about it. If it’s as awful as you guess, it’ll sink to the bottom. And if it’s actually good, ironic, funny, whatever, then who cares that the title is whatever. All that matters is that people are able to create stuff, and easily find the good stuff from amongst the dross. Because after 99 Cockgobbling Whore-demons, you’re going to get a Night Below and suddenly your subscriber base rockets because you’ve got something people want to play.
I don’t think relational databases are hard to manage. We don’t need something like the Music Genome Project where you get 250 clones of Robin Laws and 250 clones of Ken Hite and have them all dissect every adventure so the D&D version of Pandora can recommend things to you. You just create something like the “People who liked this liked…” which is a simple relational database that produces stuff like iTunes eerily good Genius addon.
Though, if you’ve got Robin and Ken sitting around anyway, you could go the Rottentomatoes route and have both. “Users liked…” and “people with taste liked….”
WotC went through a period, mostly concurrent with D&D3, where they tried to offload the burden of adventures, never super profitable, onto third party publishers using the OGL. At least, that’s how it was pitched to the top brass there by Ryan Dancey. If you knew Ryan, though, and paid attention to what he said in other venues, you knew Ryan was really tricking WotC into opening D&D because he didn’t like the idea of D&D’s fate being tied to the success of one company. But I digress.
As it turned out, other companies didn’t give a shit about adventures and so the OGL solved no problem and maybe created a couple.
During this period, and here we segway into the title of this post, a friend of mine and I tried to start a third party company for the express purpose of creating great adventures. What I learned through failing to get anything off the ground changed my perspective on the entire history of the hobby.
At the time, years ago, I was a designer on the Mercenaries series of video games and the experience of being a designer on an Open-world (think, GTA), physics based game was, I thought and still maintain, the perfect training for editing D&D adventures.
In an Open World video game when you design a mission you have to make it “bulletproof” meaning you have to imagine every possible thing the player might do, because the whole point of the game is providing him a framework wherein he can do whatever he wants. After accepting the mission, he can fuck off to a completely different part of the world. He can kill the NPC he’s supposed to save. He can let the truck smuggling weapons reach its destination. What then?
Running D&D for 20 years prepared me for this in, I think, a unique way and being a designer on the game prepared me, I felt, for editing D&D adventures. A neat little feedback-loop. So what happened?
I learned that there was no shortage of people with really good ideas for adventures. They’re out there. The problem arose when otherwise talented writers faced my Open World editorial experience. The result was pretty brutal. “What happens if?” “What if the players don’t?” No, this is too long. No, the players won’t understand it. No, we can’t go this long without some action.
I see the same problem in the adventures WotC is producing. Very talented writers and designers, but their adventure writing skill comes primarily from building really fun encounters. Lacking any context for these encounters, the players might as well be playing Descent.
So much of the WotC adventures are taken up with tortured plotting, unnecessary characters, backstory no one can gain access to and would not care about it they could. They’re just a mess. They’re detached from the traditions and institutional knowledge built up over the 1970s and early ’80s. The encounters are fun. The adventures are primitive.
We often hear people singing the Doom Song over the Death of the tabletop RPG biz. And usually it boils down to “seems like as I get older and get more responsibilities and a career and a family and coach soccer, fewer people game.” Well, yeah. Whereas I have seen with mine own eyes kids in High School today who could be playing WoW of CoDXXII or Free Realms go crazy over D&D. That gene is out there as much now as 20 years ago and nothing scratches it like D&D. Yeah, I know.
So what’s going on? I don’t think most people consider how critical the success of the hobby is to the existence of good GMs, and an environment that creates and nurtures them. Nor how such GMs produce each generations great adventures.
Way back in my post on D&D0, I talked about how the original iteration of the game was so Rules Light as to be practically Rules Free and that a good game, therefore, required a GM who could be fair, logical, inspiring, theatrical, a good leader, a good writer, a worldbuilder, an actor and a student of geek culture and pop culture. That’s rough.
It meant not many players would make good GMs. It also meant that those who were often learned their craft from those who went before. It was like learning a trade in the middle ages. Back when people still had trades.
Lastly, because it was 1976, you had to do it all yourself. There was no web, no PC to get you onto UseNet, you couldn’t download a map or an adventure, you were FORCED to do it yourself. So people did. And through the process whereby thousands of would-be GMs learned their craft from the GMs that went before them and built their own worlds and their own adventures because there was no other choice you got a whole generation of really good GMs and from there, I think, the great adventures came. Adventures that started out as Tournament games and got played a hundred times and refined before being actually published. Guys who ran so many games they ended up working at TSR because that’s how you did it.
As I said elsewhere, the release of subsequent editions of the game has been a steady march away from GMing as Art Form and toward GMing as Science. Each edition came with more rules, which meant less GM Fiat, which meant mediocre GMs could run a decent game. But with that and the advent of the web and so much free content we lost that engine that produced great GMs and therefore lost the source of great adventures.
Quod erat demonstrandum. No new generation of great GMs means no new great adventures, means fewer and fewer players. The Death of the Hobby.
If this can be combated, I know of no way to do it other than putting Adventure Design in the Cloud. Distributed computing. The Bazaar, not the Cathedral. In other words, make the players do it. But give them the tools not only to make adventures, not only make them easily, not only make them and post them on the DDI site, but allow people to vote on them, favorite them, edit them. Improve them. Until eventually the top 10 adventures on the DDI site rival the best adventures we’ve ever seen.
Technology must be the solution, for technology created the problem. Were there no internet, no web, we’d still be rolling our own more often than not. Creating maps instead of downloading them. Making our own house rules instead of reading about house rules on RPGnet.
WotC has the tools to fix the problem, they just lack the perspective and, perhaps, the will.
End of Line
Popularity: 38% [?]
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...Recently
May 28th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Given that 4e focuses on encounter design, a way to flowchart encounters and share that as an "adventure" would probably be a good first step. Your average 4e DM probably thinks they’re a solid encounter designer and could easily be induced to share.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
I’d considered that.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
I compltely agree. (Not surprising really) D&D has steadily moved towards the DM as the facilitator and away from the DM as god. Both 3e and 4e have rules for just about everything, from line of sight (pick a corner, draw a line, hit the space) to how exactly weather affects you. This is a result I think of trying to uplift mediocre DMs to some sort of average. (I also think it’s an outgrowth of the desire for all D&D games, no matter where they’re played, to be in essence identical so players can plug into the network no matter where they go.)I loved 3e, and I like 4e, but I’m finding both games to be a little too controlling over the physics of the world. They don’t leave much to DM fiat at all.The game we were working on at Upper Deck (codename: Chocolate Rain) was definitely lighter than 3e and we made a concious effort to include more GM white space. I really wish we’d had the chance to get it out. (For Trek, Terminator, Heroes (which was the original goal), or even Dark Tower) The OP goals were ambitious, but ultimately UD decided that it was better to risk $20 million for the 10% chance to make $100 million than to risk $100 thousand for the 80% to make $5 million.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
I wonder if there’s a way to take the GSL and basically create an entire Wiki of adventures for 4e. That might be the way to do it.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Hyrum, I think D&D3, inarguably the most robustly designed RPG ever, taught us all a lot of bad habits and we bring them to 4E. 4E is incredibly easy to run on the fly, improvise. It doesn’t have anywhere NEAR the level of robust rules 3E had, but instead depends on predictable System to let the GM improvise rules as he goes.
It’s just that we all went so deep into 3E, I mean we created companies around it, that I think we lose sight of how much simpler and GM empowering 4E is.
In fact, my next post on this matter is about how D&D4 is so much fun to GM, it becomes dangerous.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
I agree, 4e is worlds better than 3e. It makes it fun to run games, something that became a huge chore in 3e. I look foward to your thoughts.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Great post, and I think it’s really true – when we can create and share user-generated encounters, monsters etc (and not just on ENWorld.org) then we’ll see a similar jump forward to what happened in PC games when the mod scene got going.
And don’t forget, that mod scene brought up some absolutely brilliant PC games.
If WotC could pull that off, I think you’re right to say that it’d increase their subscription base, not lessen it.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:07 am
You know, that’s a great analogy. A whole generation of game designer was raised in the mod scene, I see it all the time.
Hell, when I interviewed at Pandemic they asked me if I’d ever written a mod for a game and whereas before they asked that question I considered it something I knew nothing about, I was instantly struck by the fact that I’d designed an entire game using Bungie’s Marathon tools and used it as the combat system for my own SF RPG! I’d been a part of the scene and didn’t even realize it.
And the mod scene has evolved directly into the casual game market in a perfectly linear decent. The middleware exists now for virtually anyone with dedication and vision to make their own video games on a perfectly average PC.
There’s every reason to believe this could happen in RPGs. Enable the users to create their own content, improve other users’ content, using sophisticated tools designed for that purpose, and then get out the way.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:25 am
So I’m a big indiehead, and from my perspective… you’ve got some serious blinders on, dude. The games I play don’t have ‘adventures.’ Play does not use content generated away from the table, because content generated at the table, through play, is fantastically superior 99% of the time to what some dude in Des Moines created late at night and posted to Facebook.
I think you’re right that "technology is the answer" but instead of social networking internet sites, consider the social technology developed in indie games that enable and support at-the-table content creation. The adventure is quickly obsolescing. We just don’t need them any more than helicopter pilots need new railways built.
May 29th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
@Josh: I disagree. Part of the shift to a socially-networked hobby is that those adventures become more important due to their being standardized experiences to compare again. In this respect they perform the same job that raids in World of Warcraft do; they provide an independent frame of reference for people that are otherwise strangers to reference and work with when playing. Content at the table will cease to matter because, thanks to things like the upcoming Google Wave, the table will become virtual by default- and thus wholly within the realm of online social networking.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Brad, here’s where I disagree and agree with you at the same time.
YES, adventures can provide a common foundation through which disparate players can gain some sense of unity, that they are "doing the same thing" or "playing the same adventure." Call it the Keep on the Borderlands Effect (or these days, Keep on the Shadowfell).
HOWEVER, as far as common frames of reference go, adventures are not the only option. Over in indieland, situation and relationship maps, to name two "technologies," fulfill the same function — and they produce some fantastic play. Call it the <a href="http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/index.php?game=roach">Regina Sutton Effect</a>. These tools create the same sense of shared experience across disparate players, but also liberate the players to create stories far closer to home and more personally relevant and resonant.
"Writing adventures" — creating compelling conflicts of interest, filling in atmospheric details, portraying characters with sympathy, and wrapping all that up in a nice, pretty package — creates better GMs and better storytellers, absolutely. You can have one guy do all that by himself and then unveil his masterpiece, or you can have everybody do it together, at the table. The old GM-auteur methodology cultivates one good GM at a time; new tools allow us to cultivate the entire table.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Josh, the indie model doesn’t work at the scale we’re talking about; that’s why it never caught on- it’s too much like work for the common gamer. If it can’t be done cold (no prep) and stupid (no prior knowledge), then it won’t be done at all. The adventure module shifts all of that to the GM, and if done right keep what prep and prior knowledge is required to a bare-bones minimum, so that players can just sit down and get on with playing. Modules work for mass-network play; the indie thing doesn’t- those looking for it already have a superior model in the ruleless freeform forum-based RP groups.
The future will remain with the paradigm started by D&D <I>because that is what the majority of RPG hobbyists wants</I>, and that means adventures.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
If you don’t know of it already, you should check out Strolen’s Citadel.It is a website that receives and posts rpg related ideas, monsters, and adventure hooks. Its not system dependent, but has a rating system and there is some really interesting ideas on that site that can be plugged into any game system.I’ve personally found some cool stuff I’d like to use from reading the site.strolen.com
May 30th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Josh, the indie model doesn’t work at the scale we’re talking about; that’s why it never caught on- it’s too much like work for the common gamer.I call BS on this.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I’d call BS on equating mass market appeal with success, but that might seem rude. Instead I’ll say that we have as much data about Matt’s idea working as we do about Josh’s (ie, executions so far haven’t worked), and ruling out one or the other (assuming they’re really talking about different things) seems premature.There’s a very large gap between a camp that views the current state of storytelling in the first world as a market to be mapped and tapped, and one that sees it as a horrible accident to be set and mended. Both want to co-opt what they believe to be the true nature and happiness of as many people as possible, but dogmatic differences lead them to anathemize each other. They see their values as already having acted to judge the enemy: group A says that D&D is "boring" or "soulless," but group B counters that everything else is "unpopular" or "abstruse."The utility of demonizing or dismissing either side is questionable while the problem is still unsolved. The ultimate refutation will be measurable (even, if possible, unquestionable) success in the modern field, so until someone achieves that (I think we can agree that no one has), the jury remains out and all avenues should be tried. Just because everyone’s accustomed to things being one way doesn’t mean that way is right, and just because you think your way is right doesn’t mean everyone owes it to you to change.I will say that playing World of Warcraft of late has given me a great deal of confidence in people’s ability to enjoy doing things that others might call "too much like work." And it has seemed to me that for some people, chess is work but acting is not, and for others the reverse is true. (And that’s hardly a perfect dichotomy: some people like running and some people like swimming and some people like reading and yadda yadda.)But even as I say that, I struggle to not set my mind too firmly in one direction, because what we need is fewer analogies and anecdotes, and more surveys and studies. The great thing about publishing and selling things is that it can be a kind of self-funded research ("The Financial Success of Product X: Left- and Right- Brained Consumption in the North American RPG Market"), but inevitably an uncontrolled, haphazard and scattershot one. There’s a great deal to be learned about what sort of people compose the target area…and I have no idea where the money would come from! Does Digipen fund research?
May 31st, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Buzz, 35 years of TRPG existence, as well as the continued dominance of D&D as well as its CRPG and MMORPG knockoffs (Diablo & WOW being the D&Ds of those media), not to mention the weight that the RPGA has in D&D design, says otherwise. The common gamer wants to show up, sit down, play His Guy for a few hours and then go home; he doesn’t care about setting, or about role-playing, or any of that Indie Rock Pete crap- he’s there to play a game, not to do creative work, and that’s why the indie model gets curb-stomped.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:26 am
…yeah.
Hey there, Nick! You seem like a reasonable person to converse with!
Absolutely neither "side" (and the dividing line between the sides is murky at best) has a monopoly on what works — especially when you consider that the definitions for what ‘works’ and what ‘success’ means are hugely malleable. There are a ton of tools and techniques available to roleplayers and to the roleplaying "industry" — and some of them work better than others for different goals. The only thing I mean to say here is that selecting one and calling it THE solution is just silly, whether you’re fingering Adventures or R-Maps or whatever. Certainly THE solution is a combination of tools and techniques selected by context and preference.
July 6th, 2009 at 11:40 am
I think that the reason video games can make money more predictably than movies is because the creative talent in games is an order of magnitude less expensive than the creative talent in movies. The unions and agents—for good or ill—are the explanation. If EA had to pay as much to develop a game as Paramount does to release a movie, games would be just as big a financial crap shoot.
July 6th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Well, no. If they had to pay that much, they couldn’t make the game. EA routinely spends $50mil on a game, if unions increased that by, say, 4 fold, it’d be financially impossible to get a game done.
You could argue that the arrival of unions and incredibly high-priced star talent would force a change in how games were made but at that point we’d be talking about a substantially different industry.
And my point, ultimately, is that unlike movies, you can accurately predict which games will be good and which games will make money. I don’t think unions and stars is the reason this is impossible in movies.
July 15th, 2009 at 7:31 am
Where WotC’s DDI will not go the web will. Despite the barriers put up by the GSL this website has given players and DMs a way to share their character builder PCs with each other.
http://iplay4e.appspot.com/characters
I learned about this site by following James Wyatt’s (D&D dev guy) twitter account: http://twitter.com/aquelajames
He posted his PC up on it here:
http://iplay4e.appspot.com/characters/viewSheet?xsl=jPint&key=agdpcGxheTRlchELEglDaGFyYWN0ZXIYv4AIDA#agdpcGxheTRlchELEglDaGFyYWN0ZXIYv4AIDAbuild
Now, the site doesn’t allow for voting and it isn’t beautiful but it shows what people want and will use. And yes its free for now.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:47 am
[...] Gaming | SquareMans D&D: The Lost Art of Adventure Writing & The Death of the Hobby D&D: The Lost Art of Adventure Writing & The Death of the Hobby | SquareMans I honestly don’t understand folks who think that because their business model worked yesterday it [...]
July 23rd, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Ah Matt you expect to much from these folks, designers are only game bums with a job. As far as writing good adventures, you have heard me say I never player a published adventure because they were all crap….. Ok, that is not completely true, I did play some Tunnel & Trolls and Fantasy Trip solo adventures, and I to love the Call of the Great Giant monster that drives you insane and eats you. But almost all of the written adventures have lacked the needed ease of play and most of all heart to make them worth my time.
Most of them have pages of data that spell out every copper piece and rusty weapon the player will find, but no reason as to why care about the outcome of the adventure. They lack the story line to drive the players or the story on. So, like most folks they fall back on the numbers…hey, the rules are great.(hey…did I just defend your argument?)I remember, like most other games the great moments in RPG as desperate battles against complex and powerful foe, and a willingness to sacrifice all to overcome the "Evil". My Dwarf held the bridge against the horde of monsters as the party escaped with the captives. My wizard final strikes his magic staff to weaken the Lich and allow us to win the adventure. yada, yada, yada ….All roll players have these moments…because we had our heart in the game.
Once it becomes you job, it’s a need to make money that becomes important. "What will sell?", "We need to control our Brand", and god forbid less someone steal our ideas, we will not have a job. The best comes when they keep it simple and let the players drive the fun. Anyone remember playing an Alpha or Beta game of Magic the Gathering for the first time?
I am lucky that I have and have had the honor of playing with some great game masters and thus played in some great games. But, to be great, they have to have heart.
July 28th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I tend to agree with Brad when it comes to the single point of focus being the DM. In this person lies all of the things that it takes to walk around in the world. Many of us who DM like to refer to ourselves as the god of our world (note the little g) and in that sense we ensure that there is a substantive and self-perpetuating ecosystem for the people which we have adventuring therein. I think that one of the things that gives me such a following in my games relates back to a point that I made upon another post concerning my games.
" I write stories about a world and I incorporate the players into those threads. That said they have the right and are encouraged to go anywhere that they like within the world. I have actually played games where if you wandered out of the area that they wanted you to be in then you and your party became lost and wandered about till you passed out and then woke up back in your room at the inn. "
My observation is that the more transparent all of the elements of your melieu are the more people will desire to return to it. If they have to read a book to kick in a door then they will likely move on to some other pursuit, because it is entertainment after all.
The point that was made of now web nor usenet nor source for maps existing in the past is a very good and subtil comment that underlies a great many reasons that RPGs have diminished in the world of the computer. Not that the computer games have better stories – often they do not, but you can walk around in there and not have to know allot or spend 18 minutes determining who got surprised and when you get to attack. I think that the point which Brad makes here is that the level to which DMs researched their worlds, drew out their maps, hand painted source documents and prepared the experience for their players has diminished due to the ease at which generic information has become available. Simply this, people can see and feel the love that is poured into a game melieu and this level of commitment, if clear and concise will propell them to advance therein.
Thank you
Visit me at my blog above or deeper in the Aether at the aetherealplane.com
September 9th, 2009 at 6:02 am
You mention this Bazaar or market where people can create and share ideas.
The open source comminity now has several such projects. Take a look at Maptool from rptools and the various 4e frameworks that you can load into it.
YOu can design your dungeon and host it on a server. Players then connect to it; there’s even some rules automation of some of the more onerous things like tracking "marks".
It has quite a nice community, with the "good stuff" as you say rising to the top. Ppl have also done all sort of clever things such as connecting it to a projector for Face to Face play. U can project onto a desktop, some guy even found a way to move the "virtual" pieces on the "desktop" with via a wii remote and infra red pen.
Moreover the tools are written in Java so you can run it on Mac/Windows/Linux. There’s a lot going on out there already. As for myself I may concider a virtual table top game, whereas I don’t have the time to trapse around town looking for a Face to Face, but each to their own.
Also I think the "Starter Pack" and the Character creater released by WotC are truely excellent. I’m very impressed with the Char maker, and it’s a lot of fun; it also seems a lot more polished product than some of the licenced software that’s been done by Atari…..It doesn’t all have to be us and then, get involved with the maptools community and see what you can come up with.
WotC do seem tobe taking ages over their version, but my guess is they know if they screw it up, it could sink the ship.
Here’s another idea. How about make it so that when you finish you character in the maker, it can print out to a 3D printer. This means you can have the *exact* looking character you want instead of a generic one. There seems to be many possibilites out there to expand the game to be honest.