Enhanced physical interactions with the gameworld

Okay, okay, so how many of my posts start with 'Okay, okay'?

Okay, okay, I know its been ages since my last post.  (How many start like that?)

Okay, okay, sorry but this blog has become less about pure P&P, and more about game design in general.  As this next post concerns MMOs not over-the-table shenanigans.  How many more posts are like that?

Well, the above are purely rhetorical questions of course.  Stuff your answers.  I'm trying to run a business and this eats into my recreational blog time.  I have also threatened repeatedly to start a blog purely about MMO design, which I will no doubt do at some point, but right now I barely have enough spare thought for one recreational blog let alone two, or three or four (as I'd ideally start blogs for MMO's; sandbox action/adventures; FPS etc. etc.).  Seriously, I intend to do this in the future.  I intend to launch a mother-of-all game design blogs and break it into sub-blogs covering design parameters / initiatives anent my favourite genres. I may even be so arrogant as to call it the The series... i.e. The MMO, The FPS... etc. etc.  And it will be about lessons learnt in respective game design re those genres, with notable examples.  And also about evolving genres, improving gameplay, etc. etc.  But all that's going to have to wait, I have a business to run.

So I'll keep this short and sweet.

I've been playing Rift recently.  I like it.  It's like WoW but better.  It's a good distraction from the trials and tribulations of reality (a little too good at times, exerts quite a pull, like the gravity well of a collapsing super-giant).  Anyway, enough to say it is still HEAVILY FLAWED.

As I have mentioned previously I believe (at least I've said it in my head enough times) that a major evolution in MMO game design would be enhanced physical interactions with the game world.

It is not enough to roll out the same tired old formats.  And there are a few directions that need to be followed before we see a serious evolution in the MMO genre.

Firstly, take a lead from Shadow of the Colossus - if you're going to portray massive monsters, make players hacking away at their ankles futile (unless you want to pay homage to Achilles).

Secondly, get some real physics in there.  Even if you have to compartmentalise the world - instance it - in order to cut down on the processing power.  But provide real physics and real interactions with the physical world.  Which segues nicely on to...

Thirdly, let players dextrous enough, with light enough gear (cloth or leather in typical Fantasy MMOs) climb up structures, cliffs, buildings... and enter into skylights, chimneys, holes cannons have made, whatever.  I'm fed up with my 68th level rogue with 3000 agility being unable to scamper about on rooftops or evade capture by taking 'The Thieves' Highway'.

With such enhancements to the physical interactions of the game world we provide for situations like: throwing enemies off of tall buildings / cliffs / ledges.  Many fantasy MMOs have spells and abilities with a 'knock-back' function, and I hate it - HATE IT! - when they cannot be used to send an enemy off a cliff - or similar high castle.

I appreciate some of the mechanics and gameplay behind the reasons why - but largely don't agree with them.  If you as a player mistakenly send an enemy over a ledge into a volcano where they are consumed by lava and are thus unable to retrieve the object you wanted for a quest (which they had on their person, and took to their fiery grave) then you're an idiot.  And you fail the quest.  Simple as that.

When my 68th level rogue with 3000 agility is confronted by a rocky cliff of seventy degrees (which is actually a barrier between zones) I should be able to climb the damn thing!  It makes no sense that I can't.  There are other ways to inhibit or prohibit journeys which don't break down the verisimilitude of the gameworld.  How would I do it?  Let the character climb the cliff if they have dexterity and gear suitable for climbing.  But if you don't want them to succeed - or rather you want to make it very, very hard - have the cliff be home to some terrible flying beasts which will literally pluck the player from the cliff face and fly off with them, dropping them in a nest of ravenous hatchlings!  And that's just off the top of my head.  How cool would that be in a game?  To have your character a) unable to fight (or severely impaired and limited to weapon types) when climbing - perhaps just short one-handed weapons like knives, and they must remain static whilst doing so... and b) have monsters which are literally capable of picking them up and flying off with them!

Water rarely holds much of a threat for players (despite a minor breath issue).  Yet in real life water is a potentially terrifying place because you can drown, you can tossed around by currents, and its home to myriad things that are far more agile and dangerous in water than you are.  Capturing this kind of reality - or at least moving closer toward it in an MMO - is a must-have step toward inducing fear and tension and thus creating a sublime gaming experience that far outstrips that which is currently available.

This post has been brought to you IMHO.

Death in P&Ps...

Okay, so I just watched a video of this GM talking about how he intends to kill one of his player characters tonight.  And I can't say how much I disagree with this notion.  And it stimulated to write this post.

First off, let me categorically state that I am utterly opposed to planning to kill one of the player characters.  That seems like killing for the sake of it.  Like its some power-trip for the GM.  It has no place, IMHO, in mature gaming.  And if a player found out that you set out to kill their character - that you had that objective in mind before you even started the game - I don't think they'd be particularly happy with you.  For a start, a GM has ultimate power, above all the gods, and so killing a player is easy, if thats what they want to happen.  But as a wise man once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

The only time I would condone planning to kill a PC, is under these particular circumstances.  And I've found it works really well to build tension.  Sometimes when I'm running a game, one of my experienced players can't make the full session (I tend to game on occassional long weekends these days as mentioned in a previous post), but want to come along for a few hours one evening.  If this is the case, and if it fits the game, I ask them if they mind if I kill their character.  And I dont tell the other players this is going to happen. In these cases, having a player turn up for a cameo - especially at the beginning of the game.  With the other players thinking the cameo player is there for the full session, it comes as a terrible shock when the cameo PC dies after a few short hours, or in the opening scene.

Or perhaps the cameo player rocks up mid-game.  Whatever the case, I let the other players believe that the cameo player (I never openly refer to them as that) is going to be there for the rest of the game.  They're just a regular player.  And wham, I kill them off within a few short hours and it brings shock and tension to the remaining players and their characters.  -Man, this guy is serious, he's not pulling any punches!-  It works great in any game, but especially horror games which hang off their atmosphere more than any kind of roleplaying.  Some genres are more forgiving than others for allowing comic asides.  My advice is to avoid them in games where you want players to feel fear and dread.

So apart from that specific example, where you pre-plan with the player's approval that you're going to use their character as shock-tactics to instil fear into the surviving party members, by having them think you're that brutal.  I do not condone planning to kill of a PC.  It's just to easy anyway.  You're the GM, you decide what happens.

So when do I kill off PCs?  Death can be a tricky concept to manage in P&P games.  On the one hand, players invest a considerable amount of time and effort in developing and playing their characters, so you don't really want to go round slaughtering them willy-nilly.  That said, you also don't want them to think their characters are 'immune to the plot' as John Wick puts it.  As a GM you often tread a fine line between wanting to kill the PCs to maintain realism and tension, and not wanting to kill them so at least the majority of them experience the full story.  After all, much of GMing is about crafting an immersive world in which the players contribute to the story.

I'll happily kill off a PC if the player is repeatedly doing something stupid.  Not heeding the warnings, trying to take on too much.  Generally playing unrealistically.  This has happened a few times in my games.  On one particular occassion, in a fantasy game, the players were tricked into opening a daemonic gate.  As the rift between worlds began to form, one particularly reckless player said he dived in.  I looked at him sternly, hopefully coveying with my expression: "are you freaking nuts?" and gave them once chance to reverse their decision.  They repeated they wanted to jump into the gate.  So I took them to oneside, described in detail the experience of doing so and what unimaginable horrors awaited them on the other side.  I then gave them an extremely hard sanity check to flee.  They MADE their sanity check but refused to budge!  I shook my head in amazement and led them back to the table.  I then announced to all the players the results of this one reckless player's actions.  And descibed how bits of him - by all means not all of him - just some random bits, were emitted from the gate a few moments later, bubbling, hissing and still writhing, as if some warped fragment of life still possessed some of the parts, a quivering cheek, a blinking eye torn from its socket.  And some greasy loops of intestine which defyed gravity in the vicinity of the gate, and hung there, ejected the last of its faecal matter.

In my next post, I'll talk about some interesting ways you can handle death.

My treatment of magick

First off, I always write 'magick'.  I learnt this from Crowley.  But I am referring still to P&P.
Secondly, in order to support my notion of  'story comes first', I have always strived to create the richest possible backdrops for my games to take place in. Regardless of system (no longer an issue, because I use my own) or genre.

In fantasy games, one of the things that frequently frustrated me, was the almost commonplace and throw-away nature of the concept of magick and spell-casting.  This, to me at least, sucked a lot of the atmosphere out of magick.  Magic-users in many games, being as about as unusual as bakers or blacksmiths.  So for my gameworld I set about sewing rich threads of magick into the tapestry of the land.

First came my historical understanding of what magic was, and it is this which I will begin by imparting.

In my games, magick is essentially a dialogue between sorcerers (the generic name for spell-casters) and intelligences that exist in dimensions beyond our own.  By 'our own' I mean those typically inhabited by the players.

And for you to understand what I mean by this, I need to really explain a philosophical concept I have concerning the nature of reality - and this applies to the real world as much as it does any gameworld.

On the one hand I believe that in all likelihood what you see is what you get.  There are no gods, no afterlife, nothing spiritual.  That said, you can kind of leave the subject alone, it requires no more thought.  And that provides one with plenty of opportunity to consider other possibilities.  And one concept that intrigues me is as follows.

And it goes a little something like this:

If one considers that potentiality - i.e. the potential that something might exist is a dimension of sorts, than this could have been the trigger to the big bang.  There was a chance that something could exist, so in one flavour of reality, something did exist, and in realising itself suddenly came into being.

And just as the big bang brought into existence the three physical dimensions we inhabit, and the fourth we call 'Time', then so it also brought into being all the other dimensions that theoretical physics claims may, or must exist.  And the probable many others we (as an inherently limited species) haven't a clue about.

So just as humans have evolved to inhabit and be aware of (to some extent) these four dimensions (we can call them 1,2,3 and T), we can sumise that we may rub shoulders with some other dimensions, and perhaps are even influenced by some we have no real grasp of.

And if you consider that a possibility, then it naturally follows that some other 'intelligences' may also have evolved to inhabit and appreciate other subsets of dimensions.  Some may overlap with ours, and some maybe so far removed from ours that never the twain shall meet.

In this model of the universe, it is not necessarily far-fetched to imagine that some intelligences have evolved which inhabit and largely dominate most dimensions.  To us, these beings would seem as gods.  And to stretch the notion one step further, then one can also describe a Supreme Being as that entity which incorporates all dimensions.  But we really don't need to go there.

Lets then apply this philosophical (dare I say theological) model to the archetypal P&P gameworld.  All of a sudden we are presented with the notion that 'Dream' can be a dimension, and even 'Luck' can be a dimension.  In my games, intelligences can utilise the dimension of Dream to converse through symbol and allegory with other intelligences.  And by studying such symbol and allegory a perceptive man may unlock some hidden secrets of how the universe works beyond the remit of his regular dimensions.  To the uninitiated such feats would appear as magick.

In the history of my gameworld, this is the case.  Gods (read: complex intelligences inhabiting many dimensions) reproduce not in the physical way that corporeal beings do, but by 'evolving' such lesser beings to appreciate (and thus be privy to) extra dimensions.  As such, magick is thus a route to eventual deification.  However, the journey is long and arduous and frought with disaster and the vast majority of sorcerers die before ever attaining the knowledge.

In the history of my world, the first age is known as the Age of Ancients, or the Age of History and although I have never set a campaign or run a game which operates in this first age, it is a backdrop to all of my games.  In this age, people were primitive, tribal and magic had not yet been 'discovered'.  One such tribe, known as the Eidemak, employed a soothsayer / witchdoctor type character to advise of matters spiritual.  During a routine hallucinogenic ritual, he and his apprentice witnessed what they referred to as a Falling Star.  A meteorite, which tore across the heavens and slammed into the earth.  Thanks to the use of their hallucinogens, the passage of this meteor was forever marked indelibly on their minds' eye.

The soothsayer sent his young apprentice out into the snowy wastelands to track the passage of this Falling Star to its resting place.

The star was in fact a method employed by higher intelligences of raising the conciousness of primitive folk such as these, and it contained two materials, a mineral substance, which later became known as Arcanite, and a metallic substance called Star Iron.  In conjunction these two materials served to warp and enhance some subtle dimensions which rubbed shoulders with these physical planes.  And notably that of Dream.  So as the young Eidemak - as it is lost in the history of my world if the name of the people was Eidemak, or it was the name of the apprentice, specifically - gathered up some samples of this meteor, he opened himself up to the realm of Dream and using this channel strange intelligences whispered to him each night as he slept, and taught him secrets about the world.

By the time he reached home, he had become the land's first sorcerer, able to bend reality (albeit not very ably initially).  And so it came to pass that magick was brought to the world.

So thats the first thing I did.  Explain magick.  But in doing so, hopefully I have kept some mystery.

So in the history of my gameworld, all magick can be traced back to these simple origins.  And from there I draw out a family tree of notable sorcerers.  Across the two subsequent ages when magick evolved rapidly, different schools of magick came into being, with notable exponents and originators.  Essentially, what I did here was give a slight nod to D&D and expand massively (on what I believe to be their failing).

In D&D you have spells like Tenser's floating disc, and Milf's magic arrow.  Or something like that. =)  I can't remember exactly, its been a long time.  Because I used the Rolemaster system, I had all the RM spell-lists as the basis for magic in my world, and what I did was create particular and specific personalities to support those spells.  i.e. I have an infamous NPC called Ladumon (of the 2nd Age), who is generally accepted to be the originator of all spells which distort physical dimensions, i.e. teleportation and bags of holding are all down to him.  I have effectively created a Who's Who of Sorcerers for my games.  So any spell a player casts has a history and ultimately an author.  This I have found to be extremely useful in helping to create a rich backdrop, and thus atmosphere for the magickal aspects of my games.

This also provides players with an opportunity to craft their own spells.  Following a school of thought, a particular style of magick, and the teachings of the Past Masters in that school gives them a direction in which to further evolve that school.

The other thing I did with magick is use Presence (Charisma) as the defining stat for sorcerers, and also made magickal aptitude extremely rare and marked by heterochromia (a difference between the colours of each eye, i.e. left eye blue, right eye brown).  This makes sorcerers 1) rare, 2) unusual to look at, and 3) mightily charismatic so you can't ignore them when they walk down the street.  This later element is not always an advantage.  As charismatic people are noticed and thus generally find it hard to blend into a crowd.

What I have found is this approach has certainly spiced up the roles of sorcerers in my games.  All of a sudden magic-using isn't just another character-class option.  It scintillates.

Its in ways such as these that a GM can create mood and atmosphere and ultimately get one step closer to the desired objective or painting the richest, most enthralling picture of an alternate world possible.  And a world that players buy into effortlessly.


I love it when that happens.  As this supports something I mentioned several posts earlier.  Part of the joy of roleplaying for me is setting up a scene and sitting back and listening to the players discuss it.  By providing players with the richest possible tapestry, its far easier to do this.

My recommendation then for those of you wanting to run your own game.  Know your world.  Populate it with well-wrought characters and events.  Create a timeline and well-defined settings, and give your players as much information (that they would be privy to) as possible.  Its like an author knowing their characters, so that when they write dialogue, that dialogue is believable.

This gives me an idea for two new posts:  1) General tips on running a game. 2) General tips on writing dialogue.  All of which under the ever-present IMHO caveat.

Why I like P&P so much...

P&P is the generic term I apply to Pen & Paper roleplaying games.  Like Dungeons & Dragons et al.  For the record - and perhaps because it will provide you with some kind of vague insight into my character - I cut my RPG teeth on D&D.  I started roleplaying at the tender age of 10, with Basic Dungeons & Dragons.  Subsequently I played Expert D&D, AD&D to second edition.  And then in no particular order: MERP, Rolemaster, Spacemaster, Dark Space, Call of Cthulhu, Shadow Run, Paranoia, Toon, Cyberspace, and a bunch of others I can no longer quite remember.

But for me, P&P is all about the narrative, the atmosphere, the story, the freedom you provide the players to do (or attempt) whatever they wish.  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

And it is for those reasons that I now use my own game system.  It is very loosely based on Rolemaster, just because IMHO RM delivers the most encompassing, and in my experience flexible system across multiple genres.  (I have never played GURPS).

Anyway, my gamesystem bears little resemblance to RM these days, I still use a few basic RM tables, but I have essentially distilled RM's (and its genre variants) 1000s of pages into a handful of tables (predominantly combat orientated).

More importantly what I have done is created a world (to focus purely on my Fantasy exploits) with a history that now covers six Ages.  A change in Age being a significant event which shifts the world in a new direction.

My, that was a long and largely unnecessary introduction to this: Why I like P&P so much...

No other form of entertainment provides such a collaboration between auteur and audience.

P&P sessions have provided me (and hopefully my players) with some of the most memorable scenes and experiences ever.  I can look back and recall numerous instances of high adventure, tension, humour, excitement and disaster that have been delivered by P&P which easily rate among the best books I've read, films I've scene, video games I've played, etc.  And made all the more potent because I was either playing in those games, or (more typically) was GMing them.

One of the things I hope to achieve with this blog is to give you some insight into the techniques I employ to deliver those moments.  Some of which will be by illustrating specific elements I have used (like the Oneironaut pendant).  And some will be by discussing what I have learnt form other games, what works well, what doesn't work so well.  And much of it will be at a meta level of game design.  i.e. no specific events, or elements, but general 'best practices'.

Though one should always bear in mind:  no matter how grandiose I might sound from time to time, the one over-riding caveat to all this is that it is very much IMHO.