We open on Gotrek Bouldercoat arriving in the town of Cheers (yes...) on his quest to find a rare and endangered flower. He sees Allowydd the fortuneteller upon entering the town, and he stops to ask directions. After securing lodging and hitting a dead-end with the herbalist (deus ex), he follows up with Allowydd, who said her mistress might be able to help him with the flower. When he describes the flower, Allowydd realizes she recognizes it as a flower that is used by some fortune tellers and seers to induce a trancelike state; She tells him that she knows where it can be found, and they agree to leave in the morning to find it.
Setting out into the hills and up to South Mountain, they begin to feel uneasy, and Gotrek notes that the forest is too quiet to be natural. When a strange, unpleasant odor begins to intrude, Allowydd reaches out with her sight to see if she can identify the source, and gets a glimpse of cowled figures with some sort of monster chained and doing their bidding. Even less sanguine about going forward, the pair decides to return to town, hoping Allowydd's mistress might be able to help identify the creature and the figures controlling it.
All is not well however, as they exit the forests to find the nearest farm in flames. Rushing in to see if they can help, they find the savagely mauled corpse of the farmer, and hear cries from inside the burning barn. Gotrek bursts into the building, seeking through the smoke and flames for the source of the cries, and finds the farmer's wife and child trapped in a horse stall. He extricates them, and assists them out of the barn.
Meanwhile, Allowydd has reached into what's left of the dead man's memories, and finds another glimpse of the cloaked figures as they goad their monster into killing the farmer. She helps Gotrek see to the farmer's wife and daughter, then the pair sets out for town as nearby farmers rush to stem the growing fire from reaching their farms.
Once in town, they try to discover what happened, but the woman is too distraught to be helpful, so Gotrek speaks to the local gendarme while Allowydd returns to her mistress, hoping the wizened fortune teller might be able to give some insight. Unfortunately it is not to be, as she finds her mistress in agony, her eyes a mass of blood, moaning over and over again that she was not supposed to see.
With no leads and a growing fear, Gotrek considers going to see a recently made friend, and Allowydd is left to seek answers of her own.
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
22 April 2016
Mage Blade: Skills, Skill Trees, Dependencies
So I wrote much of the following in a G+ post yesterday, and I figured it'd be a good piece for a blog post, so I'm taking the original and expanding on it here.
This is also, sadly, the very first Mage Blade post I've made since starting this blog. Happily, it's back in my active RAM because I've just begun a weekly game of Mage Blade. It's been a rough start since I decided almost on a whim to get this going... But that's good, because I'd previously been waiting for the game to be "ready", which is kind of synonymous with "perfect"; It's never gonna happen, so I might as well get moving on it.
So I am noodling around with the idea of creating... skill trees, for lack of a better term. Right now, Mage Blade has a flat distribution of skills. It looks kinda like this:
- 2P/1G
- 1-5 Weapon Skill*, 6-8 First Aid, 9-12 Armor Maintenance, 13-15 Vigor, 16-17 Tactics, 18-20 Military Lore
The first part refers to the skill point distribution per year. 2P means 2 Path skills, 1G means 1 Generic skill point. Normally you'll roll a d20 for each Path skill, and select your skill from the results in the second bullet. Now, the exception to this is denoted by the asterisk by Weapon Skill; This means you don't roll 1 die, and you automatically get 1 point of that skill. So for this list (taken from the Soldier Lifepath) you'd get 1 Generic skill point, you'd get a single point of Weapon Skill, and you'd roll a d20 to get a skill from the list, assuming you'd taken a single year. If you took multiple years of the Lifepath (which is normal) you wouldn't get the focus skill each year, so you'd roll an additional 2 dice per year after the first.
If you were a Soldier for 10 years, you theoretically might have:
If you were a Soldier for 10 years, you theoretically might have:
- 5 Weapon Skill
- 3 First Aid
- 4 Armor Maintenance
- 3 Vigor
- 2 Tactics
- 3 Military Lore
..assuming that you rolled perfectly average results across such a small sample size. Skills max out at 10, so you've got a fairly competent soldier here.
Unfortunately, despite having odds which shouldn't have had it happen, I've got two characters in my current playtesting group with the Vigor skill maxed out and then some. (they had to re-roll the excess points). Vigor represents your basic knowledge in how to move and use your body to best effect; It's a close analog to the Athletics skill you see in a lot of other games, and covers tasks like lifting, climbing, running, swimming, etc.
I consider it a problem that brand new characters have maxed out any skill, especially without having taken special effort to do so. Some of this, I know, will be fixed by rebalancing and diversifying the skills listed for each Lifepath, but it still perturbs me, so I've been considering solutions ever since we finished creating the characters.
The first solution that occurred to me is to have this skill have a special rule, where its effective value cannot exceed the value of the attribute it's rolled with. It's not a bad solution, but I don't think it's a particularly good solution, either.
The skill tree solution I'm considering would encourage skill diversification, without really penalizing specialists. The way it would work is that certain skills would be considered root skills, which would have sub-skills associated with them. The root skill would have a maximum value, after which you'll need to start diversifying into the related sub-skills. Some sub-skills may also have prerequisites.
Considering Vigor, it would be considered a root skill, and might have a maximum value of 4. If you rolled Vigor again once maxing it out at 4, you'd need to select a sub-skill, Running, for instance, which would now have a value of 5. If you rolled Vigor subsequently, you could choose to increment Running again, or you could choose another sub-skill at a value of 5, such as Swimming. Sub-skills would then be advanced as normal, once purchased.
If you were doing a Vigor-related task that did not match one of your existing sub-skills, you could then use your existing Vigor skill to cover that, such as climbing or lifting and carrying.
The interesting question is whether or not you'd be able to train up sub-skills without having the root skill. I think the answer would be yes, but on a case-by-case basis. I don't think you could do Running without having Vigor, but I do think it'd be possible to be a swordsman and have no skills in fighting without a sword. (Later edit: No I don't. That's stupid. Learning to fight with a sword will by necessity increase an overall skill in fighting, even if you find yourself without your weapon of choice.)
Which then begs the question, could you then get the root skill from the sub-skill? I'd say yes; Even as a pure swordsman, it wouldn't take too much effort to learn to apply your skills to more general fighting situations, so it seems like it should offer some discount or a way to pick up the root skill at a rating greater than basic.
This also sort of suggests that you might be able to transfer some skills to related skills. If you were a master swordsman in the sword-and-shield style, some of that should translate into learning how to use a longsword, shouldn't it? What about if you were an expert climber; could you translate some of that into an acrobatics skill, above and beyond the points contributed by the Vigor root skill?
So, points for discussion:
- What are your thoughts on being able to max out a skill as a beginning character, in the first place?
- What do you think about the ideas of root skills and sub-skills presented here? Should all skills be part of a similar framework?
- What are your thoughts about skills giving a discount to training up related skills?
27 May 2015
Deep Thots Bout Vidya Games: Dynamic Room Detection
WARNING: ESOTERIC, NON-LANGUAGE/PLATFORM-SPECIFIC GEEKERY AHEAD
So, it's no secret that I like to design games. Finishing those designs is a different story, but I do enjoy the process, and I'm always super excited when I start a new project.
I'm thinking right now of dynamic room detection in tile-based games. Sometimes, you want to do something to a "room", rather than to individual tiles. How do you get the game to recognize what is a room, and what's not?
I have semi-dynamic room detection in Ion Trail. As part of ship design, you place room control nodes in the upper left corner of the room, and it detects the dimensions of the room, and tells the tiles which room they're a part of. It has to be a rectangular room, but it makes layout much easier.
But what if you didn't have to do that? What if you wanted non-rectangular rooms? What if you wanted something where you could change the layout in-play? That's what I want to discuss here.
Now, the system I have for Ion Trail, the pre-placed Room Control Node (RCN) upon starting the game immediately tags the tile it's on, and then uses that tile to start a cascade process of pinging the other tiles. It cascades down and right, which is why the RCN has to be in the upper-left node. It prevents any sort of duplicate processes gumming up the works. The tiles identify adjacency, and whether the adjacent tiles are across a wall. If they're adjacent and not across the wall, they name themselves part of the triggering RCN's room, and return data which is used to calculate the height and width. It's a pretty elegant system, if I have to say so myself.
But it's utterly inflexible. While I could add the ability to place the RCN in-game, it would still require proper placement, and rectangular rooms.
Now, I've been playing Prison Architect lately, and they've got a neat solution; manual zoning. You create zones, which are also rectangular. The zones have the ability to detect adjacent zones, and consider themselves part of the same zone, which allows for non-rectangular zones in play. They can detect if the tile beneath them is valid (indoor outdoor) and whether or not specific items are within their boundaries. It's elegant, but not without issues of its own. Forget to manually designate a zone, and no matter how many showers and drains you've got, the game will completely ignore it. This is a feature as well as a drawback though, as it can allow you to dezone cells and cause prisoners to move to another part of the prison, and similar operations.
But I still want something more. The zoning is nice, but not universally applicable. I just want something that tells the game, and the player, that this is A ROOM.
I think the solution lies in the tiles themselves. Each tile is an object, and thus should have a unique identifier. These identifiers can be sequenced, which can allow for a hierarchy. This'll be important in a minute.
So, okay. How do tiles determine if they're part of a room? First off, I want to differentiate tiles from empty space. Empty space is still potentially part of the playable space, but is irrelevant for room detection. So, there's some triggering event. Maybe the creation of a tile, maybe periodically during the game, whenever. It triggers on a tile. That tile then looks in all directions for other tiles. If it finds a wall, it will ignore tiles on the other side of that wall. If it finds a tile that's not walled off, it activates the search process for that tile. If the tile is already searching, it will not try to reactivate the process. The initial tile will set it's object ID (oID) as the RCN. Then, whenever two tiles that are actively searching talk, they'll compare their oID to the current RCN. If a new tile's oID is lower than the current RCN, then the RCN will be changed to the lower (older) oID.
So there's this cascading process. Eventually, you'll have all of the tiles in a given area (walled off) in "search mode". How do they know when they're done? Maybe once a tile has activated search, it'll drop into a wait mode; during wait mode, the tile will compare its FCN value to the FCN value of it's FCN, which will keep updates moving toward the oldest value. When there are no more tiles in search mode and they're all in wait mode, they should all be pointing to the oldest oID object as the RCN. Here's the rub. They're all waiting, nothing is going on as the RCN isn't updating... But each individual tile only knows it's own state. The RCN doesn't actually know which tiles are part of the room, though the RCN and all of the other tiles know who's in charge.
Does the RCN keep some sort of matrix, to keep track of all of its tiles, and their states? This seems problematic, as each tile will have to have the potential to keep this matrix... and when does the matrix get updated? When the room search is complete? We still don't know how to tell the RCN that it's done. The matrix could tell it that, but that means that there'd end up being multiple matrices being generated during the room detection, which would mean that, when each tile updates its RCN, the matrices would have to be merged. It'd be unwieldy fast.
So, okay, back up. Maybe the RCN doesn't know which tiles are which? Say there's a value on the RCN called v_roomstat. A tile will look at this value, and compare it to its own status; If the tile's status is searching, and v_roomstat = searching, it'll do nothing. If they don't match, it'll update that status to match it's own. Which means every tile that is waiting will try to tell the RCN that the room is waiting, and every tile that is searching will try to tell the RCN that the room is searching. Eventually, they'll all agree, and the value will stop being changed. When the value has been "waiting" for a designated period, the RCN will know that no more tiles are searching.
This is problematic only in as much as there might be an issue with multiple change operations being pushed simultaneously. That'll depend on the platform that the program is running on. Since this is still a thought experiment, we'll assume it's not a problem right now, and move forward.
So, we've got a blind RCN and a bunch of tiles that know who the RCN is. This is somewhat useful, because a thing can happen to/on a tile, and the tile will be able to communicate to the RCN to tell what happened. But how do we do things to the room as a whole? That's the primary purpose. We can call on ALL tiles, and pass the RCN as a parameter, so only the tiles that point to that RCN will actually run the function, but I think that would use a bunch of resources unnecessarily, even if it's only for a blip of time, as each tile was like "Who, me? Oh, never mind." Maybe we go back to that matrix idea, again, except we only really need the oIDs of the tiles, so an array should work fine. So, the RCN, once all of the room tiles are done searching, turns them all off (so status is now idle) and now generates the matrix. We'll probably have to do the all call at this point, but only the one time per room detection, not every time we want to do something to the room.
But still, how do we populate the array? An array is a list of values. You access the items in the array by calling the array and the index of the item. Depending on the platform, you can possibly just create a dynamic array, and pop each tile onto the end of it as it reports in, but I don't think this solution is ideal. In Ion Trail, it was easily done because the RCN could just call an itemAtPosition function incrementing the x and y values through a a pair of for-loops, and pop them into place on a pre-generated array, since it already knew the number of tiles in the room. As this never changed, It was done once at the beginning of the game, and never again. Obviously that solution won't work here, since we've got to allow for non-rectangular rooms, and an unpredictable number of tiles.
I think it might be worthwhile to use a linked list, instead of an array, since it allows for dynamic changes a lot better. The RCN would be the head of the linked list. We already know it's the oldest tile in the room, so we can use the oIDs as a list, starting with the oID. Any older tiles would simply not be called. Incrementing the oID call, look for the RCN value. If the RCN value matches the room, then pop that tile onto the end of the linked list. Then, when you want to do something in the room, the RCN calls the function, then sends the order down the linked list, until it hits the tail, and terminates.
I think that's workable. I want to go home and try it now... I guess I'll let you know how it goes.
So, it's no secret that I like to design games. Finishing those designs is a different story, but I do enjoy the process, and I'm always super excited when I start a new project.
I'm thinking right now of dynamic room detection in tile-based games. Sometimes, you want to do something to a "room", rather than to individual tiles. How do you get the game to recognize what is a room, and what's not?
I have semi-dynamic room detection in Ion Trail. As part of ship design, you place room control nodes in the upper left corner of the room, and it detects the dimensions of the room, and tells the tiles which room they're a part of. It has to be a rectangular room, but it makes layout much easier.
But what if you didn't have to do that? What if you wanted non-rectangular rooms? What if you wanted something where you could change the layout in-play? That's what I want to discuss here.
Now, the system I have for Ion Trail, the pre-placed Room Control Node (RCN) upon starting the game immediately tags the tile it's on, and then uses that tile to start a cascade process of pinging the other tiles. It cascades down and right, which is why the RCN has to be in the upper-left node. It prevents any sort of duplicate processes gumming up the works. The tiles identify adjacency, and whether the adjacent tiles are across a wall. If they're adjacent and not across the wall, they name themselves part of the triggering RCN's room, and return data which is used to calculate the height and width. It's a pretty elegant system, if I have to say so myself.
But it's utterly inflexible. While I could add the ability to place the RCN in-game, it would still require proper placement, and rectangular rooms.
Now, I've been playing Prison Architect lately, and they've got a neat solution; manual zoning. You create zones, which are also rectangular. The zones have the ability to detect adjacent zones, and consider themselves part of the same zone, which allows for non-rectangular zones in play. They can detect if the tile beneath them is valid (indoor outdoor) and whether or not specific items are within their boundaries. It's elegant, but not without issues of its own. Forget to manually designate a zone, and no matter how many showers and drains you've got, the game will completely ignore it. This is a feature as well as a drawback though, as it can allow you to dezone cells and cause prisoners to move to another part of the prison, and similar operations.
But I still want something more. The zoning is nice, but not universally applicable. I just want something that tells the game, and the player, that this is A ROOM.
I think the solution lies in the tiles themselves. Each tile is an object, and thus should have a unique identifier. These identifiers can be sequenced, which can allow for a hierarchy. This'll be important in a minute.
So, okay. How do tiles determine if they're part of a room? First off, I want to differentiate tiles from empty space. Empty space is still potentially part of the playable space, but is irrelevant for room detection. So, there's some triggering event. Maybe the creation of a tile, maybe periodically during the game, whenever. It triggers on a tile. That tile then looks in all directions for other tiles. If it finds a wall, it will ignore tiles on the other side of that wall. If it finds a tile that's not walled off, it activates the search process for that tile. If the tile is already searching, it will not try to reactivate the process. The initial tile will set it's object ID (oID) as the RCN. Then, whenever two tiles that are actively searching talk, they'll compare their oID to the current RCN. If a new tile's oID is lower than the current RCN, then the RCN will be changed to the lower (older) oID.
So there's this cascading process. Eventually, you'll have all of the tiles in a given area (walled off) in "search mode". How do they know when they're done? Maybe once a tile has activated search, it'll drop into a wait mode; during wait mode, the tile will compare its FCN value to the FCN value of it's FCN, which will keep updates moving toward the oldest value. When there are no more tiles in search mode and they're all in wait mode, they should all be pointing to the oldest oID object as the RCN. Here's the rub. They're all waiting, nothing is going on as the RCN isn't updating... But each individual tile only knows it's own state. The RCN doesn't actually know which tiles are part of the room, though the RCN and all of the other tiles know who's in charge.
Does the RCN keep some sort of matrix, to keep track of all of its tiles, and their states? This seems problematic, as each tile will have to have the potential to keep this matrix... and when does the matrix get updated? When the room search is complete? We still don't know how to tell the RCN that it's done. The matrix could tell it that, but that means that there'd end up being multiple matrices being generated during the room detection, which would mean that, when each tile updates its RCN, the matrices would have to be merged. It'd be unwieldy fast.
So, okay, back up. Maybe the RCN doesn't know which tiles are which? Say there's a value on the RCN called v_roomstat. A tile will look at this value, and compare it to its own status; If the tile's status is searching, and v_roomstat = searching, it'll do nothing. If they don't match, it'll update that status to match it's own. Which means every tile that is waiting will try to tell the RCN that the room is waiting, and every tile that is searching will try to tell the RCN that the room is searching. Eventually, they'll all agree, and the value will stop being changed. When the value has been "waiting" for a designated period, the RCN will know that no more tiles are searching.
This is problematic only in as much as there might be an issue with multiple change operations being pushed simultaneously. That'll depend on the platform that the program is running on. Since this is still a thought experiment, we'll assume it's not a problem right now, and move forward.
So, we've got a blind RCN and a bunch of tiles that know who the RCN is. This is somewhat useful, because a thing can happen to/on a tile, and the tile will be able to communicate to the RCN to tell what happened. But how do we do things to the room as a whole? That's the primary purpose. We can call on ALL tiles, and pass the RCN as a parameter, so only the tiles that point to that RCN will actually run the function, but I think that would use a bunch of resources unnecessarily, even if it's only for a blip of time, as each tile was like "Who, me? Oh, never mind." Maybe we go back to that matrix idea, again, except we only really need the oIDs of the tiles, so an array should work fine. So, the RCN, once all of the room tiles are done searching, turns them all off (so status is now idle) and now generates the matrix. We'll probably have to do the all call at this point, but only the one time per room detection, not every time we want to do something to the room.
But still, how do we populate the array? An array is a list of values. You access the items in the array by calling the array and the index of the item. Depending on the platform, you can possibly just create a dynamic array, and pop each tile onto the end of it as it reports in, but I don't think this solution is ideal. In Ion Trail, it was easily done because the RCN could just call an itemAtPosition function incrementing the x and y values through a a pair of for-loops, and pop them into place on a pre-generated array, since it already knew the number of tiles in the room. As this never changed, It was done once at the beginning of the game, and never again. Obviously that solution won't work here, since we've got to allow for non-rectangular rooms, and an unpredictable number of tiles.
I think it might be worthwhile to use a linked list, instead of an array, since it allows for dynamic changes a lot better. The RCN would be the head of the linked list. We already know it's the oldest tile in the room, so we can use the oIDs as a list, starting with the oID. Any older tiles would simply not be called. Incrementing the oID call, look for the RCN value. If the RCN value matches the room, then pop that tile onto the end of the linked list. Then, when you want to do something in the room, the RCN calls the function, then sends the order down the linked list, until it hits the tail, and terminates.
I think that's workable. I want to go home and try it now... I guess I'll let you know how it goes.
05 May 2015
MMO Design Noodling, part 2: Living Economy and Ecology
Read Part 1...
So, this is going to be based in some thoughts I had many years ago, but I'm going to try to incorporate some more recent reading in my thoughts as I go.
Star Wars Galaxies was probably the first time I really thought about it, but what strikes me as the biggest problem with MMO economies is that they're completely open. Money (and in some, equipment/materials) flows into the system infinitely. Theoretically it also flows out of the system in the form of money sinks, crafting, breakage/loss, but in practice, the influx is always much, much faster than the outflux. The reason for this is players. Players will find ways to maximize gain and minimize loss. They'll hoard money and equipment, and learn to not lose equipment that isn't easily replaced (such as valuable weapons/armor/etc). The result is inflation on a massive scale. Certain base-level items will always be available for cheap in most MMOs, because the game ensures that NPC merchants will sell stuff that new players can afford. But once you start wanting to get past the basics, you usually need to start dealing with the player-based economy, whether it be through auction houses, 1-on-1 trading, player merchants, or whatever, because you can't buy the top of the line equipment from NPCs; It has to be quested for or crafted by players.
For instance, in Ultima Online, you could purchase a house for a relatively small sum. But if you wanted to actually put it somewhere, you were generally out of luck, unless you happened to find a decaying house and camp the spot until it fell down, or using player griefing to keep others from refreshing their house. Eventually, if you wanted a house, you'd have to but a pre-placed one from someone else, which meant that the demand was massive, the supply was completely fixed, and as the amount of money that was static in the system increased, the prices soared to exorbitant levels. I'm not going to lie; When Age of Shadows came out, promising empty land for housing, I spent $100 of real world money to buy 5M gold and bought several housing deeds, which I distributed to my trusted lieutenants. It was worthwhile for me to spend real money to get extremely difficult to acquire in-game assets. Though I stopped playing the game a year or so after that, I don't regret the purchase, despite the TOS violation.
So how do you fix this? My thoughts were to have a semi-closed economy. Resources like gold and materials would flow into and out of the player system, but there'd be a finite amount of those resources. Once a resource in the "pool" got low, it would flow into the system more slowly, until eventually it was depleted, or it was refreshed. Money is the easiest resource to demonstrate this.
So, if an NPC pays you to escort him safely to a town, that money enters the system from the pool. If you stick that money in a vault somewhere, it becomes static, and doesn't exit the system. If you pay for a service from an NPC, then the money exits the system, goes back into the pool, and can be put back into the system from another point of access, like maybe a dragon's treasure trove. If players start to hoard large amounts of gold, then NPCs will begin to have less to offer. Eventually, the money may become mostly static, until something changes, such as a raid on a rich player's holdings, or perhaps that player, hearing of such a raid, hires a force of NPC guardsmen to protect their vault.
One thing that I've considered is that as the player-base grows, then necessarily money will grow thinner, even without deliberate abuse. That's why I'm thinking of a semi-closed system. As the player base grows, the pool will grow to accommodate. There may also be a sort of trickle effect, perhaps to reflect the mining of precious metals and the minting of coin.
There are obviously ways this could be abused, which I'm still considering. I'd probably need to consult with people who've made a "career" of exploiting game mechanics to really cover my bases, as I've usually been one to play within the rules as much as possible.
So, how does all of this relate to a living ecology? Well, the ecology is a big source of the materials needed to build and play within the world. If you chop down a tree, you get wood which you can use to build houses, furniture, carts, weapons, and various other pieces of equipment. But you also have a tree stump, and one less tree. The normal system employed by MMOs is to have resource points which can never be depleted, or only temporarily. Trees which can be chopped for wood, and an hour later are refreshed so can be chopped for more wood. Mining nodes which yield 2-5 units of ore, every hour or so. This contributes to the same inflation problem you see with money. The system's normal way of dealing with this is to make the equipment you can make fairly low in value, until you've invested a massive amount of time building a few dozen swords, or what have you.
My thoughts on this are to make the endeavors take longer, but produce more. You take 10 minutes to chop down a tree, it's gone. But you get a whole tree's worth of wood. You spend an hour mining, you're going to get a lot of ore that you can then smelt... If you make a sword, you're not going to bang one out every 5 seconds, but when you've made one, you've also made some significant strides forward in your knowledge, and the sword won't sell for less than the cost of a meal. So there will still be the crafting grind, but in the end it'll take a similar amount of time, but a lot less individual items, and the associated equipment.
And the tree you chopped down? Plant a sapling, and it'll grow back in a comparably accelerated time (it's not going to take several real days of work to create a sword, but it will probably take several real hours) If you don't replant, then somewhere in a deep forest far away, another tree may begin to grow, but that will take significantly longer.
Extending this past wood and ore, things like climate, weather, seasons will have an effect on the recovery and growth of animals and plants. If you kill a lot of wolves, the rabbit and deer populations may grow, and conversely reduce the local plantlife. If you kill lots of deer and rabbits, the wolf populations may move away, die off, or start attacking human settlements. If you cut down a lot of trees, the wildlife in that area will become more scarce. If you never re-use the metal from old swords to make plowshares, you'll have to delve deeper and deeper into the earth to find more ore.
In the end, what I'm looking for is a world where player decisions matter. Players being selfish will eventually create a world bereft of natural resources. Players being good stewards of their lands, and learning to reduce, reuse and recycle will find themselves with more natural resources. Eventually, you may find some players at odds with others over how to treat the land. Eco-terrorists living in the deep woods, declaring themselves as defenders of the wilds, preying on the industrialists who send in their logging teams and their mining operations. In a more balanced place, industrialists will reuse materials, replant the forests amd promote animal husbandry.
I know that UO and SWG both tried something similar, and ran into issues. There was some suggestion that some of the issues were related to hardware limitations, but I doubt that was all of it. What I'm proposing is a bloody complicated system, with lots of small interactions that could eventually snowball into larger, unexpected problems.
So now that I've rambled at length, I'm turning the floor over to you. What problems do you see with the sort of system I've proposed? What solutions do you think might work? How would you address the problems I'm trying to address here?
So, this is going to be based in some thoughts I had many years ago, but I'm going to try to incorporate some more recent reading in my thoughts as I go.
Star Wars Galaxies was probably the first time I really thought about it, but what strikes me as the biggest problem with MMO economies is that they're completely open. Money (and in some, equipment/materials) flows into the system infinitely. Theoretically it also flows out of the system in the form of money sinks, crafting, breakage/loss, but in practice, the influx is always much, much faster than the outflux. The reason for this is players. Players will find ways to maximize gain and minimize loss. They'll hoard money and equipment, and learn to not lose equipment that isn't easily replaced (such as valuable weapons/armor/etc). The result is inflation on a massive scale. Certain base-level items will always be available for cheap in most MMOs, because the game ensures that NPC merchants will sell stuff that new players can afford. But once you start wanting to get past the basics, you usually need to start dealing with the player-based economy, whether it be through auction houses, 1-on-1 trading, player merchants, or whatever, because you can't buy the top of the line equipment from NPCs; It has to be quested for or crafted by players.
For instance, in Ultima Online, you could purchase a house for a relatively small sum. But if you wanted to actually put it somewhere, you were generally out of luck, unless you happened to find a decaying house and camp the spot until it fell down, or using player griefing to keep others from refreshing their house. Eventually, if you wanted a house, you'd have to but a pre-placed one from someone else, which meant that the demand was massive, the supply was completely fixed, and as the amount of money that was static in the system increased, the prices soared to exorbitant levels. I'm not going to lie; When Age of Shadows came out, promising empty land for housing, I spent $100 of real world money to buy 5M gold and bought several housing deeds, which I distributed to my trusted lieutenants. It was worthwhile for me to spend real money to get extremely difficult to acquire in-game assets. Though I stopped playing the game a year or so after that, I don't regret the purchase, despite the TOS violation.
So how do you fix this? My thoughts were to have a semi-closed economy. Resources like gold and materials would flow into and out of the player system, but there'd be a finite amount of those resources. Once a resource in the "pool" got low, it would flow into the system more slowly, until eventually it was depleted, or it was refreshed. Money is the easiest resource to demonstrate this.
So, if an NPC pays you to escort him safely to a town, that money enters the system from the pool. If you stick that money in a vault somewhere, it becomes static, and doesn't exit the system. If you pay for a service from an NPC, then the money exits the system, goes back into the pool, and can be put back into the system from another point of access, like maybe a dragon's treasure trove. If players start to hoard large amounts of gold, then NPCs will begin to have less to offer. Eventually, the money may become mostly static, until something changes, such as a raid on a rich player's holdings, or perhaps that player, hearing of such a raid, hires a force of NPC guardsmen to protect their vault.
One thing that I've considered is that as the player-base grows, then necessarily money will grow thinner, even without deliberate abuse. That's why I'm thinking of a semi-closed system. As the player base grows, the pool will grow to accommodate. There may also be a sort of trickle effect, perhaps to reflect the mining of precious metals and the minting of coin.
There are obviously ways this could be abused, which I'm still considering. I'd probably need to consult with people who've made a "career" of exploiting game mechanics to really cover my bases, as I've usually been one to play within the rules as much as possible.
So, how does all of this relate to a living ecology? Well, the ecology is a big source of the materials needed to build and play within the world. If you chop down a tree, you get wood which you can use to build houses, furniture, carts, weapons, and various other pieces of equipment. But you also have a tree stump, and one less tree. The normal system employed by MMOs is to have resource points which can never be depleted, or only temporarily. Trees which can be chopped for wood, and an hour later are refreshed so can be chopped for more wood. Mining nodes which yield 2-5 units of ore, every hour or so. This contributes to the same inflation problem you see with money. The system's normal way of dealing with this is to make the equipment you can make fairly low in value, until you've invested a massive amount of time building a few dozen swords, or what have you.
My thoughts on this are to make the endeavors take longer, but produce more. You take 10 minutes to chop down a tree, it's gone. But you get a whole tree's worth of wood. You spend an hour mining, you're going to get a lot of ore that you can then smelt... If you make a sword, you're not going to bang one out every 5 seconds, but when you've made one, you've also made some significant strides forward in your knowledge, and the sword won't sell for less than the cost of a meal. So there will still be the crafting grind, but in the end it'll take a similar amount of time, but a lot less individual items, and the associated equipment.
And the tree you chopped down? Plant a sapling, and it'll grow back in a comparably accelerated time (it's not going to take several real days of work to create a sword, but it will probably take several real hours) If you don't replant, then somewhere in a deep forest far away, another tree may begin to grow, but that will take significantly longer.
Extending this past wood and ore, things like climate, weather, seasons will have an effect on the recovery and growth of animals and plants. If you kill a lot of wolves, the rabbit and deer populations may grow, and conversely reduce the local plantlife. If you kill lots of deer and rabbits, the wolf populations may move away, die off, or start attacking human settlements. If you cut down a lot of trees, the wildlife in that area will become more scarce. If you never re-use the metal from old swords to make plowshares, you'll have to delve deeper and deeper into the earth to find more ore.
In the end, what I'm looking for is a world where player decisions matter. Players being selfish will eventually create a world bereft of natural resources. Players being good stewards of their lands, and learning to reduce, reuse and recycle will find themselves with more natural resources. Eventually, you may find some players at odds with others over how to treat the land. Eco-terrorists living in the deep woods, declaring themselves as defenders of the wilds, preying on the industrialists who send in their logging teams and their mining operations. In a more balanced place, industrialists will reuse materials, replant the forests amd promote animal husbandry.
I know that UO and SWG both tried something similar, and ran into issues. There was some suggestion that some of the issues were related to hardware limitations, but I doubt that was all of it. What I'm proposing is a bloody complicated system, with lots of small interactions that could eventually snowball into larger, unexpected problems.
So now that I've rambled at length, I'm turning the floor over to you. What problems do you see with the sort of system I've proposed? What solutions do you think might work? How would you address the problems I'm trying to address here?
23 April 2015
MMO Design Noodling, part 1
Introduction: I've done a lot of thinking about this over the years. MMORPGs used to be, at one point, my primary source of entertainment.
My resumé:
This list is roughly chronological, which is somewhat telling. The MMOs that are most influential to my preferences are the first few, UO and SWG foremost. They definitely shaped what I consider an MMO, and what I want out of an MMO. We'll start there.
What I want: For me, an MMO is another world to live in and explore. I don't want the experience dictated to me, and I don't want to be constantly retreading ground where thousands of others have been before. I want it to be lived in, not a theme park where you're running from one ride to the next. Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies almost exemplified that ideal for me. EVE Online, were it not a ships-in-space game, would be an even better example.
Don't get me wrong. I don't actually dislike City of Heroes or even World of Warcraft. I've played both extensively and enjoyed them for what they were. But they're not what I really want out of an MMO, and they are excellent examples of what I don't want, which is theme park instances of infinitely retreaded content. Sometimes they're excellent content, but eventually it all starts to run together.
Let's get a bit more specific, though.
Dynamic Content: This is probably the hardest thing to do in a game, ever. But this is probably the biggest thing for me. I remember running around as a 20-ish Paladin in WoW, with my beer-keg-onna-stick. 5 levels later, I'm done with it, and I see another 20-ish Paladin with that same beer-keg-onna-stick... that's supposed to be a unique weapon, crafted just for me. I knew it wasn't unique when I got it, but the point remains. Before that, we "rescued" a town, just after someone else rescued it, and right before another group rescued it. It's fun only so long as you can ignore or pretend that you and your friends are the only heroes in the land.
Dynamic Content would create one-off unique experiences. They may end up being slightly generic a lot of the time, but at least you're not going to have the next group of heroes wandering into the area rescuing the same village you just did. There are a couple approaches to Dynamic Content which can actually work side-by-side, so it's not an either/or decision.
The first is content that is generated upon need based on a bunch of variables. An example might be a farmer with a bunch of variables defining resources he has. If he gets low on a particular resource, he may generate a request to get some of that resource. How the player chooses to get it is then up to them. That same farmer might have problems with bandits raiding his farm, so he'll generate a request to get rid of the bandits. Once the bandits are no longer a problem, maybe a bunch of wolves move into the area, so he may generate a request based on that.
The second approach is player-generated-content, and this one dovetails best into the various things I want in an MMO. I'm not talking about quest-creation tools like you found in City of Heroes or Saga of Ryzom, though those are pretty bad ass. The problem with those is that they're mechanically divorced from the rest of the game world. What I mean is that players should have some mechanically supported way to drive activity in the game, such as putting requests up on a message board. Such requests might be a smith wanting to buy ore, a miner wanting a mine cleared of threats, or a merchant needing goods moved from one place to another.
Living World: This obviously dovetails strongly into the above. I don't want a world where everything stays the same. This is a reason why, given the skills, the team and the budget, I would still never pick a licensed IP. I want the players to be able to shape the world to their collective will, and IP owners and fandom might get a little... cross about that.
I mean this on a pretty epic scale. Like, so epic that it might actually turn out to be completely impractical. The setting will have cities, but those cities will be capable of being conquered, burned to the ground, rebuilt, abandoned. Governments, countries, all will be capable of being taken over by players, and run as they see fit. The world on Day 1 will look very, very different from the world in one year.
I also mean it on a much smaller scale. You'll be able to build a house, set up a shop, and eventually build a tidy little mercantile operation, utilizing other players to help with tasks you can't or don't want to do. Maybe you'll build it in a prosperous city, where you'll have the protection of guards and laws, as well as regular traffic. Maybe you'll find a crossroads somewhere for your endeavor, which might in time lead to the birth of a village.
These are just the key concepts I want in an MMO, but there's a lot more, in terms of systems, gameplay and world design I want to talk about.
Next time, I'd like to dig more into the idea of a virtual world, economy and ecology, and how they all tie together.
What are your thoughts? Which MMORPGs have you played, which were your favorites, and why?
My resumé:
- Ultima Online
- Star Wars Galaxies
- City of Heroes
- World of Warcraft
- Saga of Ryzom
- Dungeons and Dragons Online
- EVE Online
This list is roughly chronological, which is somewhat telling. The MMOs that are most influential to my preferences are the first few, UO and SWG foremost. They definitely shaped what I consider an MMO, and what I want out of an MMO. We'll start there.
What I want: For me, an MMO is another world to live in and explore. I don't want the experience dictated to me, and I don't want to be constantly retreading ground where thousands of others have been before. I want it to be lived in, not a theme park where you're running from one ride to the next. Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies almost exemplified that ideal for me. EVE Online, were it not a ships-in-space game, would be an even better example.
Don't get me wrong. I don't actually dislike City of Heroes or even World of Warcraft. I've played both extensively and enjoyed them for what they were. But they're not what I really want out of an MMO, and they are excellent examples of what I don't want, which is theme park instances of infinitely retreaded content. Sometimes they're excellent content, but eventually it all starts to run together.
Let's get a bit more specific, though.
Dynamic Content: This is probably the hardest thing to do in a game, ever. But this is probably the biggest thing for me. I remember running around as a 20-ish Paladin in WoW, with my beer-keg-onna-stick. 5 levels later, I'm done with it, and I see another 20-ish Paladin with that same beer-keg-onna-stick... that's supposed to be a unique weapon, crafted just for me. I knew it wasn't unique when I got it, but the point remains. Before that, we "rescued" a town, just after someone else rescued it, and right before another group rescued it. It's fun only so long as you can ignore or pretend that you and your friends are the only heroes in the land.
Dynamic Content would create one-off unique experiences. They may end up being slightly generic a lot of the time, but at least you're not going to have the next group of heroes wandering into the area rescuing the same village you just did. There are a couple approaches to Dynamic Content which can actually work side-by-side, so it's not an either/or decision.
The first is content that is generated upon need based on a bunch of variables. An example might be a farmer with a bunch of variables defining resources he has. If he gets low on a particular resource, he may generate a request to get some of that resource. How the player chooses to get it is then up to them. That same farmer might have problems with bandits raiding his farm, so he'll generate a request to get rid of the bandits. Once the bandits are no longer a problem, maybe a bunch of wolves move into the area, so he may generate a request based on that.
The second approach is player-generated-content, and this one dovetails best into the various things I want in an MMO. I'm not talking about quest-creation tools like you found in City of Heroes or Saga of Ryzom, though those are pretty bad ass. The problem with those is that they're mechanically divorced from the rest of the game world. What I mean is that players should have some mechanically supported way to drive activity in the game, such as putting requests up on a message board. Such requests might be a smith wanting to buy ore, a miner wanting a mine cleared of threats, or a merchant needing goods moved from one place to another.
Living World: This obviously dovetails strongly into the above. I don't want a world where everything stays the same. This is a reason why, given the skills, the team and the budget, I would still never pick a licensed IP. I want the players to be able to shape the world to their collective will, and IP owners and fandom might get a little... cross about that.
I mean this on a pretty epic scale. Like, so epic that it might actually turn out to be completely impractical. The setting will have cities, but those cities will be capable of being conquered, burned to the ground, rebuilt, abandoned. Governments, countries, all will be capable of being taken over by players, and run as they see fit. The world on Day 1 will look very, very different from the world in one year.
I also mean it on a much smaller scale. You'll be able to build a house, set up a shop, and eventually build a tidy little mercantile operation, utilizing other players to help with tasks you can't or don't want to do. Maybe you'll build it in a prosperous city, where you'll have the protection of guards and laws, as well as regular traffic. Maybe you'll find a crossroads somewhere for your endeavor, which might in time lead to the birth of a village.
These are just the key concepts I want in an MMO, but there's a lot more, in terms of systems, gameplay and world design I want to talk about.
Next time, I'd like to dig more into the idea of a virtual world, economy and ecology, and how they all tie together.
What are your thoughts? Which MMORPGs have you played, which were your favorites, and why?
24 January 2012
What makes CHARNEL unique?
Before you ask, I do always write it all in uppercase.
The thing that sets CHARNEL aside from any other game, at least to me, is the horrible nature of it. It's not just a bit grim, it's really awful.
As an example is one of the gods of the world.
The Burned God.
A figure splayed out against the sun, burned black. His flesh is cracked and weeping. His head is thrown back but you can't quite tell whether it's in unimaginable agony or rapturous pleasure. From his face, his charred hideous face, comes the white gleam of perfect teeth revealed in a grin or a grimace or perhaps the lips were simply burnt away.
And this is one of the gods that people call upon for protection. Well, protection when they really need it and they sacrifice to him the rest of the time to keep him away and hope in their secret hearts that it works.
The world is a horrible place in CHARNEL. I know this is probably a tired comparison but imagine the world of The Road. Now imagine it has been this way for generations. Now imagine the dead are also rising and there are cannibals coming to take away everything and everyone you love.
Sometimes I'm not sure why I even like this as a setting idea when it's so bleak and nasty.
And then I imagine the one man with a sword, going out to hopefully make the world a better place. Striking down the cannibals and striking down the necromancers and putting his blade to the throat of the world and demanding a new one.
It's a story about survival, about heroism and it's a story about doing what needs to be done to make the world a better place no matter what the cost.
Does that sound interesting?
The thing that sets CHARNEL aside from any other game, at least to me, is the horrible nature of it. It's not just a bit grim, it's really awful.
As an example is one of the gods of the world.
The Burned God.
A figure splayed out against the sun, burned black. His flesh is cracked and weeping. His head is thrown back but you can't quite tell whether it's in unimaginable agony or rapturous pleasure. From his face, his charred hideous face, comes the white gleam of perfect teeth revealed in a grin or a grimace or perhaps the lips were simply burnt away.
And this is one of the gods that people call upon for protection. Well, protection when they really need it and they sacrifice to him the rest of the time to keep him away and hope in their secret hearts that it works.
The world is a horrible place in CHARNEL. I know this is probably a tired comparison but imagine the world of The Road. Now imagine it has been this way for generations. Now imagine the dead are also rising and there are cannibals coming to take away everything and everyone you love.
Sometimes I'm not sure why I even like this as a setting idea when it's so bleak and nasty.
And then I imagine the one man with a sword, going out to hopefully make the world a better place. Striking down the cannibals and striking down the necromancers and putting his blade to the throat of the world and demanding a new one.
It's a story about survival, about heroism and it's a story about doing what needs to be done to make the world a better place no matter what the cost.
Does that sound interesting?
11 January 2012
Introducing me, David Pidgeon
Hello, my name is David Pidgeon and I never finish games. It's true, I have a long list of games that I'm 'currently working on' and always seem to be coming up with more ideas.
Let me introduce you to some of my 'games in progress', some of which have been in progress for... well, years.
Dirty Princesses:
This is the big one. I've been working on Dirty Princesses for about four years now and it's still struggling to really show on paper. Dirty Princesses is the game of Princesses going on perilous quests to prove that they have what it takes to eventually be Queen. It's a game about adventure, growing up, expectations and kick-ass Princesses, all set in a fantasy world. The eventual published plan for it involves custom playing cards and beautiful illustrations, but I should probably finish designing the rules first.
The Life of a Falling Star:
A rather elusive game, existing more as concept than as actual game. This is about, in the far flung future, humanoid bio-weapons who only live for one year going on insane and 'impossible' missions while being awesome and shooting lasers from their eyes and starting to have feelings.
G:
G is a solitaire game designed originally for a contest that I actually finished in time. If you want to, you can read it here. It's about a solitary and lonely astronaut living in space, dealing with isolation and sudden intense danger. It's still up for playtesting and definitely needs some improvements.
CHARNEL:
This is only new, but it's a dark fantasy game about surviving in a horrible world when the gods don't care about you, the air is full of ash, the dead rise from the earth and the raiders are coming over the hill. It's like apocalyptic fantasy and the apocalypse is only just starting.
Those are the games that I'm most excited about right now. I'll be posting about them all in more detail further down the track.
I have decided that this year is the year to work on games. Not just come up with ideas, not just toy around with them, but to do the work required to make them playable and then find ways to test them and then improve them and then play them some more. I want to finish at least one of the games on this list and make it publically available for consumption.
I know I can do it.
Let me introduce you to some of my 'games in progress', some of which have been in progress for... well, years.
Dirty Princesses:
This is the big one. I've been working on Dirty Princesses for about four years now and it's still struggling to really show on paper. Dirty Princesses is the game of Princesses going on perilous quests to prove that they have what it takes to eventually be Queen. It's a game about adventure, growing up, expectations and kick-ass Princesses, all set in a fantasy world. The eventual published plan for it involves custom playing cards and beautiful illustrations, but I should probably finish designing the rules first.
The Life of a Falling Star:
A rather elusive game, existing more as concept than as actual game. This is about, in the far flung future, humanoid bio-weapons who only live for one year going on insane and 'impossible' missions while being awesome and shooting lasers from their eyes and starting to have feelings.
G:
G is a solitaire game designed originally for a contest that I actually finished in time. If you want to, you can read it here. It's about a solitary and lonely astronaut living in space, dealing with isolation and sudden intense danger. It's still up for playtesting and definitely needs some improvements.
CHARNEL:
This is only new, but it's a dark fantasy game about surviving in a horrible world when the gods don't care about you, the air is full of ash, the dead rise from the earth and the raiders are coming over the hill. It's like apocalyptic fantasy and the apocalypse is only just starting.
Those are the games that I'm most excited about right now. I'll be posting about them all in more detail further down the track.
I have decided that this year is the year to work on games. Not just come up with ideas, not just toy around with them, but to do the work required to make them playable and then find ways to test them and then improve them and then play them some more. I want to finish at least one of the games on this list and make it publically available for consumption.
I know I can do it.
10 December 2011
Unchosen: campaign world creation
The steps to create a campaign world for Unchosen should be relatively simple, but able to guide the creation of a variety of worlds and situations, all with fairly robust options. Obviously, much of this will rely on the players ability to engage creatively with the process, but the process itself should be able to reliably assist with creating compelling content.
So, the first thing to determine will be… What happened? What was the apocalypse that we find ourselves post? The most obvious is of course some sort of nuclear war or other such that left the world an irradiated wasteland, with mutants and other horrors lying in wait for the unwary. What are other options? Economic collapse is an underutilized cause of the breakdown of society, although it obviously fails to contribute to monsters and mutants. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it will create a different flavor of wasteland than others. What about an alien invasion that leaves the surface a ‘scorched earth’, with the few survivors and various alien beasties to contend over what few resources were left behind in the wake of the invasion. Perhaps it’s some sort of supernatural apocalypse, a la the Dark Tower novels, and the world has simply “moved on.” There are a number of other options, each of which will create a very different feel to your wastelands.
Next comes the question of… how long ago was the… whatever it was? It’s got to be enough in the past that it IS in the past, but are there still people who lived through it, or are the events of those days lost to myth and stories passed down through generations? This will also have a fairly profound effect on the flavor of your world. Have the people learned to adapt to the hardships of this new world, such that survival of the species isn’t so much in doubt, or are things still so rough that a hard-won niche carved out of the wastes could be wiped away in an instant? Perhaps it’s so long ago that things are beginning to recover, and places can be found where the veneer of civilization is deeper than just the skin.
Once you’ve answered those two basic questions, you’ve got the basis to begin hanging details on. Before we move on though, remember that post-apoc is usually flavored like a western in a lot of ways, though there are lesser and greater extents to which this can be true. Generally, settlements are rough and small. Resources are limited, even if they’re not downright scarce. Strangers aren’t necessarily unheard of, but an outsider is rarely welcomed with open arms. There are usually broad expanses of rough, dangerous and lawless terrain between these settlements. Bandits, restless natives and creatures red in tooth and claw roam these badlands, ready to take from anyone unlucky enough to be weaker than they. Sometimes there will be beauty, but it’ll usually be stark, dangerous beauty, the sort that is all the more rewarding for being both unexpected and surrounded by death. Men and women both are wary and can be treacherous. Trust is rare, but when it’s earned, it’s worth more than water or gold.
After getting a feel for the world, it’s time to nail down some specifics. Mostly what I’m talking about here is locations. There’ll be a list of archetypal locations, some of which simply will not fit in with what you’ve chosen for your setting. Obviously those options should be avoided in this step. What you’re going to be nailing down are locations that your characters have been to, maybe even where they’re from. You don’t necessarily want to create every little junktown and cluster of shacks that your characters may have passed through since beginning their journeys, but you’ll want to detail some highlights, such as important settlements where they may return, or places where significant events occurred.
Some examples of archetypal locations: A junktown, an abandoned Ark, a technological enclave, a slaver’s camp, an old military depot, the ruins of a once-great city, a slaver’s camp, the wreckage of a large vehicle, a trade hub, a tribal village. Some of these locations may be mixed and matched for more interesting locations. Several of them may even be used more than once, though obviously each should be unique in some fashion. If they’re not unique, there’s not much reason to detail them out. 3-5 locations should be good for most groups, though you should make sure that a origin location is included for each character. As you have not created any characters at this phase, this may be somewhat difficult. It’s perfectly okay to come back and create a new location if none of these feels right for a given character once they’ve been created.
Next, it’s time to start getting an idea for the Chosen. It’s likely that, having come up with these locations and possibly sketched out a few ideas as to events that occurred at these locations that you’ve already begun to form a collective picture of your Chosen, which is the intent. An important thing to keep in mind is that the Chosen is probably the most important aspect of the game that will be created before play, because he or she is the catalyst for everything that happens afterward. Your characters will be defined partially by their relationship to this powerful figure.
Where did the Chosen come from? It’s not important to have a solid location in mind, but it’s important to answer this question. Sometimes, the answer will simply be “I don’t know.” Perhaps the Chosen was secretive about their past. Perhaps you want the questioned to be answered in play. It’s also possible that the answer you come up with here will turn out to be an utter lie. The answer isn’t as important as the simple fact of addressing the question. Much of the rest of the background of the Chosen will be similarly defined. Other questions to answer are: What is the Chosen’s name? Is the Chosen a man, a woman, maybe even a child? What was their personality like? Was he the strong silent type? Did she have a silver tongue and use her beauty as a weapon? Was the Chosen death walking, or a negotiator who never missed an opportunity to solve some dispute or another? It’s a good idea to have someone take notes of all of the conclusions about the Chosen. Each person can and should take their own, but centralized notes will make it easier to keep a shared idea of who and what the Chosen was.
This next part is crucial: What was the Chosen’s quest? Every Chosen One to walk in out of the wastelands has some noble or personal goal by the time they start gathering followers. This quest will become a central theme during play, as the actions of the players will address it either by pursuit or neglect of the Chosen’s quest. A litmus test for a good quest is that it should inspire, either by being some grand vision that others can share, or simply by being a stand for something, something that can become a symbol for others. Canonical examples include saving their people from some disaster, vengeance for wrongs done, rescue of kidnapped loved ones, or to return some lost aspect of civilization. Even this may end up being a lie, but don’t decide anything about that during preparation. All efforts to address the quest should be done during play. It should be assumed that your character buys in to the quest in some fashion, be it grudging, fanatical, or anywhere in between.
That’s the final step of setting preparation that needs to be done before you start creating your characters. Many of the items sketched out here will be expanded upon during character creation, and that is by design. By the time you have characters and are ready to play, you should have a pretty solid idea of who the Chosen was, and some of the adventures you’ve shared with them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)