Incidental locations and random treasures

Another thing on the MMO front is that I amazed at the lack of out-of-the-way locations independent from the main quest lines.  With so much land (and sea... and other realms) for adventurers to explore one would think that designers should be spending more effort on making such exploration exciting.  What I'm talking about here are things like random cave complexes (i.e. not ones quests lead you to, where you have to do something) but just a little place off the beaten track, perhaps populated, perhaps not.  Perhaps one will reward you with a long forgotten treasure, perhaps one is long ago abandoned.  Perhaps one has subsequently become the lair of some horrendous beast (not one you are sent to destroy) but one you stumble upon through your wanderings.  An underwater cave full of the bones of some massive long since dead, prehistoric beast.

During my days playing WoW I did spend some unrewarding (in terms of the actual game, but strangely rewarding in terms of the atmosphere my imagination lent it) time journeying around the areas way of the beaten track, where no quest-giver will ever send you.  In all those travels I found two strange locations.  One was a little cottage out by the sea, which appeared lived in, but was vacant when I got there.  I hung around for awhile but nothing ever showed up.

Another location was a deep cave system, quite spooky to wander around, which appeared utterly vacant but was still quite haunting and actually gave me the spooks a little bit.  When I later researched these locales online it transpired that both were intended to be quest locations but the quests never got written - or at least for some reason were not included.

In an MMO I'd like to see far more of this stuff.  Far more sidelines and off-the-beaten-track areas to explore.  Exploration is a huge fun factor in these games and yet the games themselves often do little to provide for it.  And things like quest helper utterly kill the sense of exploration, reducing the game to a simple matter of following waypoints on the map.  Pretty much ensuring that the vast majority of players simply won't bother going off the beaten waypoint.

Instead, fill the sea with underwater sea-caves and islands with strange totems, or other peculiar locales.  With clever modular design of things like cave systems, it should not be too hard to do.  I'd even think about employing talented beta-testers to provide them with a simple dev kit for the creation of such places, leveraging User Generated Content where possible to cut down on the man-hours and costs associated with populating the world with dozens if not hundreds of peculiar little out-of-the-way locations.

I'd like to present a world to the player in which no matter which way they travelled, there'd always be something interesting to see, and somethings to interact with.  Reward players for their explorations, with not just items but also a sense of adventure.

Talking of items, another thing that most games fail at is random treasure.  Stuff you find just lying about the place.  With so much history and so much activity, you think there'd be all sorts of hidden caches and dropped items laying about the place, and so there should be!  With varying degrees of difficulty in terms of how hard they are to find.

Again this will reward people for exploring, and leaving no stone unturned.  Random treasures could range from:

• Items dropped by slain adventurers / monsters.
• Hidden caches of treasure left behind by those long since-dead, or died before they could recover them.
• Ancient artefacts unearthed by recent war, catastrophe or construction.
• Pirates' treasure.
• Thieves' stashes.
• Buried treasure.
• Grave-robbed treasure.

And if one thinks about it for more than 2 minutes I'm sure several other types of treasure will emerge.

Between incidental locations and random treasures just wandering around a fantasy MMO world should be fun.

Experience Points & reward in short games

Just to focus on mechanics for a moment.  Though this does require some back story.

So, back in the day:

In the early years of my roleplaying 'career', I generally participated in more than one game per week.  By participated I mean either played or GM'd.  There was usually one 'serious' game going on, and a least one 'filler' game, generally more humourous.

The 'serious' games were generally long-running, involving at least one major session a week (maybe on the weekend) sometimes more if all the players could make it and we could squeeze it in.  But these were back in the day when I (and the majority of the players) were in our teens, and so can afford the luxury of defining our recreational time to a large extent.  This meant that games could (and often did) go on for months and even years.  It was really the golden age of P&P for many of us, and playing games under these circumstances meant that the mechanic of Experience Points (or XP) could be used to full effect.

For those of you 'in the know', and by that I mean have some experience of P&Ps, you'll appreciate that XP has two major uses in a game.  Firstly, it is the point-accrual system which influences, in most systems, how rapidly characters develop their skills and abilities.  Although game systems vary, most games award XP for things like: killing monsters or opponents, attaining significant goals in the plot, discovering new areas, accomplishing some major feat, and for actually roleplaying - and by that I mean playing true to your character.

This last factor is especially important, and a device I use frequently to ensure players do not corrupt the atmosphere by suddenly talking about last nights episode of Family Guy, just when I'm trying to create some tension.  Or by acting on some piece of knowledge that they as a player are familiar with, but which their character would have no knowledge of.  And more subtley such aspects as being true to the philosophy of their culture, or profession or hidden agenda or... you get the idea.

As a GM, I award XP in two major ways: On the fly, i.e. in the moment.  If a player performs something miraculous, or comes up with a gem of an idea, or plays in character in a particularly significant way, I'll maybe right then and there slap an extra 500, or a 1000 XP on them.  This can be done swiftly, without much chance of jeopardizing atmosphere, and I have learnt is generally a good way to keep players in check.  Reminding them what they should be doing.  The reverse is also true.  A player plays out of character: minus 500 XP.

I also, in campaigns, do a roundup at the end of each session, and reward points for monsters killed, special acheivements, blah blah blah.  This is a chance for players to speak up and tell me what they think they did well, and I'll go round the table bestowing points.  It also serves as a good device for recapping on some key moments in the narrative of the game, and for the players to re-live some cool scenes.

The trouble is, long gone are the days when I could get the same group of players together, once a week, for several months or ideally longer, to play out a fulfilling campaign.  These days, my P&P fraternity have to arrange highly focused P&P 'long weekends'.  Running these games requires a far more episodic approach to constructing the gaming narrative.  Generally we start gaming on a friday evening, play as far into the night as we can manage, resume after breakfast on saturday - continue for as much of the day, and as far into the night as possible; resume after breakfast on sunday, and so on.  Typically rounding up on sunday evening, or if we can arrange it, we carry on through the monday as well.  This gives us on the whole around 30 hours to game in.  So under these circumstances, the classic system of awarding XP to control behaviour and award good play is largely irrelevant, as such episodic games don't benefit from the multiple sessions of a campaign, characters don't develop in that way, i.e. from session to session... and so the inter-game mechanic of XP award and reward is irrelevant.

Thus, some while ago I began to ponder how best to make use of XP in these short, episodic games.  I.e. How to use XP intra-game.

The mechanic I developed is (loosely) thus:


I still award XP in and for the ways mentioned above.  But now I allow players to take 1% of their awarded XP and use it to modify dice-rolls, in-game.  Thus, a player, mid-session has earnt 3500 XP.  This equates to 35 'luck points'.  i.e. being able to 'luckily' modify the dice in their favour.  They can use this 35 all on one roll.  Or spend it a bit at a time.  (I should point out at this juncture that I run games using percentage dice - d100).

I developed this mechanic for the last game I ran, and it worked very well, because not only did it condition players to operate in the right way, stay in character, be true to the atmosphere of the game.  By allowing them to occassionally influence the dice, they sometimes, when needed, we able to perform miraculous feats which made for some memorable scenes in the game.

For a later post I will be discussing an interesting mechanic I have just been made aware from game-designer John Wick's YouTube videos on the Game Design Seminars he runs. They're a couple of years old, but I've just discovered them, and there seems to be some interesting stuff in there.  I'm just about to resume watching his episode 2...

You can find John Wick's stuff here.