Earlier, I discussed how certain roleplaying systems exemplified certain gaming orientations. To an extent, this is a very peculiar notion. More specifically, it’s a very basic shorthand. After all, mechanics can never force your actions. But the way mechanics are set up can really impact the way the players think about the game.
Queen of Demons is the second book in the Lord of the Isles series, printed in 1998. David Drake continues to show that he knows his craft, with this sequel giving a suitably dramatic follow-up to the beginning of the epic. This time I wasn’t skeptical at all, and I was right not to be. That musty scent of genuine historic fantasy setting, cobbled together from the corpses of bits of real history, takes life once more.
I’ve never particularly been a fan of horror games; they don’t weird me out, they don’t make me feel gross, and they don’t frighten me. Amnesia, Slenderman, FEAR, they’ve all struck me as sort of disappointing. They have occasional moments of “OH SHIT SOMETHING JUST HAPPENED!” followed by a lot of feeling in control. But I played one game recently which left me with a unique sense of both horror and dread I’ve never felt playing a game before. That game was SCP Containment Breach.
Warning: this whole post contains minor spoilers of the first 15 minutes (and the basic concept) of the game.
Here are some videos of me playing SCP: Containment Breach
I first heard of Brandon Sanderson five and a half years ago. My favorite author, Robert Jordan, had just died, leaving his epic fantasy series (The Wheel of Time) unfinished forever, or so I thought. Sometime later, it was announced that his works would be completed by Brandon Sanderson, an author I had never heard of. I was cynical from day one.
It turned out that I couldn’t have been more wrong. The final three books had all of the flair and detail of the original 8 or 9. But more, they succeeded in a lot of ways that Robert Jordan’s books never had. Robert Jordan’s worldbuilding was spectacular, without a doubt. And because of that, his scenes are naturally brought to life. For the most part, this bleeds into every scene. His particularly defining scenes stand out strongly, and give you chills, between the leadup and the delivery. But (especially as the series goes on) you start to realize that he seems to feel more comfortable designing worlds and establishing plot than actually writing scenes.
Enter Brandon Sanderson. Brandon Sanderson’s books always seem, to me, to suffer from a lack of planning. But his scenes are packed with so much urgency I feel like I’ve forgotten to do something.
Reading his books after reading his WoT adaptations was a bit disappointing. Brandon Sanderson seems to suffer a bit from BSG syndrome; he’s not a finisher. His universes are all very interesting, his characters are great, and the way he writes scenes makes you want to keep turning pages long after you’ve fallen asleep. Each chapter brings new intrigue and drama to his world, as you, the reader, learn more and more about the world as his characters do as well, but every time they learn something, their situation seems worse (either because it gets worse or because they realize how bad it is) You start to wonder how he’s going to tie up all of the loose ends as things get worse and worse and worse and all of a sudden only 20 pages remain in the book and you think ‘is there going to be a sequel?’ and then — BAM! — somebody becomes a god/demigod/super hero and solves all of the problems with a few effortless strokes.
WARNING: The following reviews contain minor spoilers
Names are hard. You want to make sure that the people and places you’re creating sound believable, and you don’t want to keep repeating the same things over and over (unless there’s a name like Michael in your game world, in which case you should probably just name everyone that since that’s how it works in real life). I’ve made and seen some pretty funny mistakes with naming things, so here are a few of the things I’ve learned…
In my last post, I talked a lot about what roleplaying is, and – surprise! – it wasn’t just one thing! That is part of the beauty of roleplaying, it’s full of options. What are these options?
Well, first, we have the three qualities talked about before:
Roleplaying, Storytelling, Mechanics. To keep in line with the existing literature on Gaming Theory, I have slightly renamed the categories I used in the previous post. I have renamed ‘Mechanics’ as ‘Competition’ (it goes by ‘gaming’ in GNS Theory, but I find that to be a bit ambiguous of a term); it essentially refers to how much of the experience of the game is rooted in competition. Storytelling will be referred to as ‘Narrative’, and Roleplaying will be expanded slightly to ‘Simulation’. Simulation refers to how much of the setting goes to recreating system-internal realism. Note that this realism does NOT have to be actual realism. For example, many unrealistic things happen in Star Wars, but there is an assumed set of rules which governs things like lightsabers. Any given game will have a balance of the three, like so:
Growing up I am relatively sure that I was introduced to the Mad Max movies in reverse order. Like many people the first one I saw starred Tina Turner and featured the line “Who run Barter Town!” This also happens to be the one which most people have seen if they have seen any of the three films (at least that’s what I have observed in my own experiences). Next I saw The Road Warrior and learned to “just walk away from the gasoline.” Of the series this is the one that people either haven’t seen, or didn’t realize it was a Mad Max film until later. Finally I saw it. I saw the original. I heard the gospel of the Night Rider, and I saw Mad Max. Now that I’ve built up some drama I’m going to go ahead and ease the tension with a simple categorized review.
When discussing game mechanics we need to remember that there is more to gameplay than just the on-screen interactions. There is a real-life interaction happening during every single game you play, and it occurs between you and the controller. When designing a game you can’t just take this for granted, and it is actually an interaction which deserves a lot of thought. How you want your player to interact with the game world can determine exactly what system your game should be released for as well as whether or not you will need an extensive controls tutorial to educate your players.
Before getting started on your game you should ask yourself, “What control systems do I have access to?” This is an important question because each controller type places hard limits on potential player actions. By this I mean that every controller has a different number of buttons which players can press (or nobs/joysticks to fiddle with, but we can pretend they are just a bunch of buttons), and that number of buttons acts as a ceiling value for how many actions you can offer to the player. On one end of the spectrum we have the single-button, single-joystick Atari, with the Xbox 360 controller being somewhere in the current middle, and near the end the current rendition of the computer keyboard. To be more specific: A Nintendo controller has eight buttons (A, B, Select, Start, four directions on the D-Pad) while a computer keyboard can have around 84-102 buttons. This means that if you were to assign a single action to a single button that the Nintendo can support eight individual actions where the computer can support at least 80 different individual actions.
Much like with Jason’s article, this is not meant to be an exhaustive discussion of how to run a game. It also isn’t meant to be prescriptive. Like it says on the tin, I want to share with you how I go about running games these days. Curious about success through brainstorming and improvisation? Keep reading.
I had always thought of David Drake as a military sci-fi author. He has a long history of writing exactly that, with Hammer’s Slammers and Northworld being the examples I’m most familiar with. So when I came across Lord of the Isles while browsing his wikipedia page, I was a little surprised. A renowned sci-fi author tries his hand at epic fantasy?
I shouldn’t have been skeptical. Continue reading
Fistful of Wits 