Environmental Storytelling

It’s tough to judge games. So much of it can be determined by where in the game you are, who you interact with, and what happens to you. Even if you don’t have fun, the staff involved in it are skilled at making it an enjoyable experience for the majority of people. Generally, you can feel whether a game went well or not (especially as you become a staff member), but if you asked me what the best five games I’d ever played was, I wouldn’t have a concrete answer. Game writing is a cumulative process which I’ve learned from playing games, reading articles on the Story Board tumblr about games, and talking about games (a lot!), and every single game contributes to that process. However! There are two games I’ve played over the past 6 years that I believe have introduced a completely new method of storytelling to Wayfinder Adventure Games, and have deeply and profoundly impacted my view on what can be done in an Adventure Game. These two games are A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes by Zach and Penny Weber, and Out of the Frost by Kate Muste.

A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes

A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes is a very strange game. While perhaps it’s similar to games run in Wayfinder’s history (a subject I’m not an expert on), it is vastly different from what we think of in modern terms of gamewriting. It’s set in a small village on a small island (very similar to Edo-period Japan), where a group of British-inspired sailors have washed on shore and caused all sorts of mayhem. The bear they brought with them killed the guardian of the forest and ate its heart, transforming into the new guardian spirit and driving the spirit world of the island into disarray. Horrible diseases (including red string, black eyes, and smallpox) were ravaging the population, and only the spirit doctors could help the people of the village return harmony to nature. It was a game about community, interpersonal support, the magic of nature, and the feeling of something absolutely unknowable happening to you. Production made more than 30 tiny puppets and statues which represented the various minor spirits of the forest, and lit them up with glowsticks and LED lights, creating the illusion that the forest is full of teeming, glowing magic. The sound of tinkling chimes and rushing water played across the entire campus, creating the illusion of strange forces at work. And the flow and game mechanics were unlike anything we’ve done since.

An important game convention was the use of disease. Everyone had a metal water bottle with them that contained about a dozen small slips of paper, rolled up into balls. Whenever the bell in the main space would toll, everyone would pull a slip of paper out of their bottle, and gain the new symptom of the disease. This might mean drawing eyes on your knuckles, tracing a new red line across your skin, or acting like you’re slowly going blind. This was the main antagonistic conflict of the game, as players feared and were tortured by the strange magics that consumed them. While the spirit doctors could help, their resources were limited. It created an atmosphere of terror and desperation as everyone’s health slowly decayed.

The flow of the game was also strange. When we traditionally talk about flow, we talk about it temporally – that is, events which unfold through time. A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes, although presented temporally within the game submission, is more accurately talked about spatially – how groups of people travel to locations, what they seek to accomplish by being there, and then how they travel back. The flow structure in the game submission breaks it down into 4 hour-segments, and describes how locations and the characters in those locations change over time. In A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes, a spirit doctor (a PC, mind you) would take a few willing villagers to go hunting for a particular spirit in order to accomplish a particular piece of magic. Larger objectives, that carried the fate of the game’s inhabitants, were hunted out by larger groups of people. At one point, players had to lead the Box Spirit (a mindless being that was the only creature that could carry the seed of flame) up a very large hill by shouting and distracting it, creating lures that could trick it along. This flow wasn’t concerned about whether or not this would happen, or how long it would take. It was one possible path for the PCs to engage in, and if they failed to complete it before the end of game, oh well! Such are the trials and tribulations of life.

If I was running this game, I’d be terrified over the ending. The danger of a spatially-oriented game is that there’s no actual way to conclude it without just interrupting a bunch of people. But, in true Wayfinder fashion, everything turned out amazingly. There were two endings in two locations across the land, both of them super exciting and beautiful, and it started raining at the end to boot! Which added a beautiful, mystic quality to the emotion of the ending that left everyone exhilarated and filled with hope. Playing in that game truly felt magical. One participant sat on the bridge by the lake the entire game and just watched the world go by, and for him that was more than enough. The game wasn’t about creating a narrative which players moved through over time, it was more interested in a series of interactive locations which together, built a narrative.

Out of the Frost
Out of the Frost was the third Frontier ever run, at the Hudson Valley Sudbury School in February 2015. For those of you unfamiliar, Wayfinder Frontier Events are a series of off-season one-day events that are focused on a small production budget, low cost of admission, and character-based storytelling. When I want to tell people about what Frontier games are like, Out of the Frost is my premier example. Unlike A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes, the production for this game was practically nonexistent. If I wanted to, I’m confident I could run it again in my own house, with the random scary masks I have lying around. The premise of the game is simple – a research base has been abandoned, and you’re the rescue party. A freak snowstorm has trapped all of you in the base, and things are about to start going seriously wrong. In another beautiful (albeit frustrating) instance of Wayfinder weather, a freak snowstorm forced the event to end early, and the game was started several hours in advance.

The flow of the game was very simple. Horrific spirits called Hazard Ghosts slowly began appearing, tormenting the players and passing them notes which indicated the madness setting in. If you died (generally from suicide, or another player turning on you), you became a ghost, who needed to work with the few living humans in order to cure the diseases tormenting them. Ghosts could speak with humans, but couldn’t talk about or acknowledge the Hazard Ghosts. The only flow points in the entire game were three points where three main SPCs (the mayor, the head of the CSIS, and the head doctor) were flowed to die. These players would then come back at the very end (when things seemed most bleak) and rescue the surviving players, bringing them home.

This game is far less complicated, both mechanically and flow-wise, than A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes. However, in its simplicity a valuable lesson can be learned. This is a horror game about fear, about the ways people react when put in horrible conditions. As the game went on, the lab complex became a nightmarish parody of survival. Small clumps of people were clinging together, holding hands and communing with the dead. Hazard Ghosts were shrieking and mocking human speech, creating an atmosphere of paranoia and despair. People were wandering the halls aimlessly, lost and broken, looking for hope. The sun set through the white clouds of the incoming blizzard, lighting the main room with an eerie blue glow. Under these conditions, the game became about genuine, earth-shattering terror, caused by being pushed to a breaking point. It was, and I mean this in the absolute best way, a circle of hell brought to earth.

But what’s the connection (besides the use of small pieces of paper to communicate horrific mind-melting disease)?

The Connections
Both of these games featured an entirely new Threat, something which none of the participants had ever encountered before. In the vast, vast majority of games we run at Wayfinder, the focus is on interpersonal conflict. The bad guys show up, with claws and axes, and the good guys (with swords and spell bolts) must use violence to take down this evil. This is a very good storytelling structure, and it feels good for the players. It’s nice to know that darkness can be stopped with the swing of your sword! In the games we write this way, violence is central to our narratives. The only way to defeat the Big Bad is with a swirling storm of swords, the only way to hold off the monsters is with magic and talented tactics. When non-violence is presented, it’s as an exception to violence, it’s the idea that instead of hurting our enemies, we choose something else. In both of the games I’ve discussed above, we instead discover what I’d like to call False Violence, contained within a game that’s all about environmental conflict and storytelling.

These games are deeply, profoundly rooted in atmosphere. You can have a lot of fun if you just wander around and look at what’s going on. Everything in game feeds into this atmosphere, and the enjoyment of the game is rooted in becoming immersed in the texture and sensation of the world. In addition, the conflict experienced in these games are themselves environmental. The monsters aren’t something you can overcome with weapons, they’re woven into the very fabric and conventions of the world. The Hazard Ghosts of Out of the Frost are immune to literally anything you could do to them. They exist as part of the environment, and like a blizzard or an avalanche you have no hope of stopping or controlling them, and must deal with the consequences. The spirits of A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes blur the line between playing character and prop. What’s the difference between having a scene with a spirit made from a few bent branches and a scene with someone pretending to be a spirit made from a few bent branches? The game was fundamentally about environmental storytelling, where the process of discovery and adventure is provided by the world around you. In addition, the diseases are an example of environmental conflict. They’re an evil force working against you and making your life harder, but just like the Hazard Ghosts, you cannot fight against them.

Both of these games also contain False Violence. While in a traditional Adventure Game, violence is the tool you use to solve your problems, in both of these games violence doesn’t actually help accomplish any of your goals. Violence is used to hurt people and to try and defend yourselves, certainly, but it doesn’t actually keep you any safer from the monsters that are hunting you or the diseases that are eating away at you. Violence becomes an activity performed, instead of a tool applied. This is fascinating to me! In a game about environmental conflict (man vs. nature), players seek to develop new tools to solve their problems. In A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes, the players can call upon their environment, and the spirits that live in that environment, in order to help them solve their problems. While there is a primary antagonist of the game (the Head Priest, who believes the disease is a beauty and should be encouraged), stopping him isn’t going to solve anyone’s problems. In Out of the Frost, a far darker game, there’s no hope to be found until the absolute last possible second.

Great, great, that’s cool. How do we use this to improve our games?

What We Can Practice
So, frankly, I’m not sure how to mimic the atmospheric and visceral power of these games, although I’ve certainly been trying. I’m going to identify what aspects of these games led to the scenarios described above, and some tips and tricks I’ve picked up while aping these games that creates for enjoyable experiences.

Firstly, I want you to read my article about Part 1 to Intro Gamewriting, and apply the concept of a Premise very, very heavily to this game. Firstly, both games had extremely powerful theses. Zach and Penny describe the themes of A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes as “This is a story about whether or not humanity deserves to live. It’s also a story about the terror of dying when there’s nothing to fight, the weariness of being surrounded by death. It’s a story about tragic love, about shipwreck and disease and the cruel but arbitrary patterns of nature. About the line between Us and Other, and how we cling to the superiority of civilization, no matter how baseless it might be. It’s also a story about a ghost bear.” In Muste’s own words, “The game [Out of the Frost] was very much meant to push people to their breaking points in a cabin fever-y kind of way.” The game also carried strong themes of madness, frustration, isolation, and eldritch horror.

Secondly, I want you to imagine the sensual experience of playing this game. If you wander into the game, what does it look like? What do you see? Are there any smells or sounds that linger with you? Work into your production lists things that can contribute to this atmosphere. Having colored gel lights or black lights can add a unique vibe to the game, as can ambient music or even cooking food. One cool aspect of A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes is that orange lights and candles were used for locations associated with humans, while cool-colored and black lights were used for spirits. This created a natural association between the mundane, soft beauty of the human world and the exciting, alien world of spirits. If you intend on running a game that is so heavily dependent upon mood and aesthetic, be ready to work with Production an absolutely huge amount. When I’m running a game like this, I reach out to Production months in advance, and see what’s feasible, what’s not, and what ideas they have of their own to contribute. As an SIT working with Zach on running A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes, I remember extensive production meetings between him and the Sets & Props heads, which was vital for making the game as beautiful as it turned out to be.

Thirdly, I want you to be thinking about Mission statements. While one of your Mission statements can definitely be “soaking in the aesthetic”, the players should have lots and lots of other things to do in order to make the game enjoyable. In A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes, each team has objectives and desires which propel them from scene to scene. Across the entire campus there were interesting and engaging spirits to interact with, and when in doubt, they always had the symptoms of their diseases. Out of the Frost had the madness spread by the Hazard Ghosts, the struggle of trying to find a way out of there and communicate with the outside world, and the mystery of trying to figure out what exactly happened here before the base was abandoned. A few people had weapons, and those weapons were used extensively against each other in fits of rage and delusion, requiring other people to heal them. In both games there was also a heavy, heavy focus on inter-character relationships. Love, spurned love, friendship, family, and mentorship were all common throughout both games.

These games also require something which can be a huge challenge for newer gamewriters – immersive mechanics. In both games, small slips of paper were used to create the illusion that some external source was influencing your existence, and added uncertainty and mysteriousness to what the future would hold. Other examples of environmental mechanics that lead to immersive storytelling are having an area covered in traps for rogues to deal with, and having the air outside the main space be toxic and require limitations on how you interact with it. All of these mechanics impact play on one level or another, and change how you engage with the world. The reason why both of these games make heavy use of the spirit realm is because spirit costumes are already an important mechanic in our systems, and exploring that is very intuitive for the games we run. It’s not necessary for a game heavily rooted in environmental storytelling to make use of game conventions, but including ones that are immersive and change the tone of play really allows for some deeply profound gameplay.

Finally, think about the spaces of your game, and how they interact. Out of the Frost was able to work so well because we had about half a dozen different rooms in the property we were using, which made everything feel isolated and claustrophobic. You could never tell what was going on everywhere at the same time, which allowed information and madness to travel slowly. The game would end much faster and feel much less dynamic in a space with only one large room. A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes had many, many locations, spread out across campus, along with the paths between those locations being decorated and marked. While a game like a Tavern scene really only needs one location, an environmental game needs a diverse environment.

Conclusions
Now, this isn’t really a new or unique way for games to be written. I’m sure that what I’m describing would seem entirely natural to a gamewriter from 15 years ago, for instance, and I’ve heard of (and written) games since that connect thematically to this style. What I’m hoping for this article to do is shine a spotlight on a very unique game structure and nature, and how that can help us create better games on our own. My hope for this previous summer is that Silence Blooming, the game I ran with Jeremy Gleick, continues this tradition and provides a new step to the nature of environmental gamewriting.

Written by Jay Dragon
Posted 1/16/18

Spooky Scary:

How Horror Games Tick

Late at night, JJ Muste and myself were staying up late after a Living Legend event I ran, and we were talking about horror games, and what makes them fun. We were bemoaning the lack of structure for how to write a horror game. JJ compared it to “a cake we keep making even though we don’t have a recipe. We just keep throwing eggs in and hoping it works!” While we’ve produced a number of really good horror games over the years, we’ve failed to come up with a common pattern between the games besides the fact that they’re scary, and I’ve played in one or two games that just failed to do anything for me. This article hopes to lay out a coherent structure for writing the flow of a horror game, and how to make that interesting for the players while keeping things scary. But first, before we can discuss that, we need to figure out what exactly a horror game is..

What’s a Horror Game?
A horror game is a game where players are put up against the unknown, and feel scared about it. Most adventure games have conflict against the unknown – every time people run away from a monster, they’re playing their own little horror game. What makes a horror game different is that the tools the PCs have to fight the horror just aren’t good enough. Often, the PCs don’t have weapons at all, like in Perfectly Normal Game by Thomas Gordanier, or The Secret Light by Roy Graham and Deanna Abrams. In other horror games or games with more horror elements, the weapons the PCs have do absolutely nothing against the monsters, like in Silence Blooming by Jay Dragon and Jeremy Gleick or Slow Nova by Mike Phillips.

In addition, the game is scary. There’s probably monsters, who look and act in especially uncanny or spooky ways. There’s possibly torture, strange and haunting sets, and occasionally gruesome special effects.The best horror games offer a variety of different terrors for the players’ amusement. In The Secret Light, there were monsters in the woods, torturing blood mages, a room of magical scrolls that forced you to do terrible things to yourself, and a disgusting “truth eel” made of jello, which participants had to eat. This combines textural, visual, visceral, and physical horror together to create tableaus of terror. The “horror” of a horror game is the meat and potatoes of the adventure. I encourage you to check out scary stories, watch some spooky videos, and really think about what is it that you want to be so scary. Put a lot of work and thought into your Sets & Props and Costuming lists, and be sure to communicate with those staff members carefully, in order to capture the tone of the game.

But what do you do, now that you’ve got those scary concepts? How do you string together the terror in such a way that the PCs can maintain a healthy level of fear throughout the game, without burning out or getting overwhelmed? The answer to that, I believe, can be found in the following 5 Act Structure.

The Five Act Structure
There are 5 acts to a horror game, 5 sections which guide the flow of play. All horror games have these acts, and the trick to making a successful game is balancing them and giving them all room to breathe. I’ve played good horror games where the first act was 5 minutes, and I’ve played good horror games where the 4th act got lost in the shuffle. However, knowing that these acts exist will help make the game work well.

Act 1: Setting the Stage
Horror games need a feeling of something normal, before things get crazy. Maybe the campers are sitting around a fire singing songs, or the scientists are hard at work in the lab. Giving players time to sit around and act through what their lives are like without the horror helps them appreciate the chaos and terror of the future. People during this act are uneasy, knowing that something is coming, but having no clue as to what. It’s generally a good idea to give this act time to breathe, and let people really get into the normal parts of the world.

Act 2: Building Anticipation
During this act, things start getting a little weird. The scientists bring in the alien egg from outside, or you can hear laughter and howling in the woods and people want to go investigating. This act builds anticipation for the horror to come, and gets people ready to be scared, without overloading them too quickly. The PCs don’t get to see the horror yet, they just get to know that something bad is coming. This doesn’t have to be a long act, and there’s been plenty of good horror games where this act barely exists. However, I think it’s a valuable part of the game.

Act 3: Pandemonium
The horror has arrived everyone, in full force! The campers are running around being chased by killer clowns, or the aliens have burst through the airlock and are terrorizing the scientists. Often, during this part of game people have no clue what’s going on. This is a chance to really buckle down and enjoy the horror of the game. Get chased by monsters, get tortured by wizards, wander through grisly tableaux! This is a chance for players to really revel in their fear and discomfort, and this act of the game is where the biggest and flashiest horror lies. While it’s easy to make this the vast majority of game, people will eventually get bored of running around screaming and will want some way to improve their situation in life.

Act 4: Looking for Help
The horror doesn’t ratchet down. Things keep being just as scary as they were in act 3, but circumstances have changed. One way or another, the players feel like they have a way out of this mess. Perhaps they’ve learned about an exit from the clown dimension, or they intend on detonating the spaceship’s reactor, killing all the aliens before they can reach Earth. The players have the capacity to improve their situation. This doesn’t mean defeating the horror, by any means (although it can), it just means that the PCs feel like they have some agency, some ability to influence the world around them. The solution they seek shouldn’t be easy – it should be painful and potentially unlikely.
This is a great time for some Terrible Choices. Do you stab your friend because the clown told you to, or do you try to run away and get tortured yourself? Do you abandon your friends to escape the spaceship, or do you help them onto the pod at the expense of your life? PCs don’t have a lot of agency in horror games – often the most they can do in a situation is scream and run away. The Terrible Choice gives them the chance to impact things without losing the sensation of fear. Terrible Choices are good throughout the game, but they can add a scary touch to even a traditional flow diamond.

Act 5: Trying the Solution
In the final act, the players have the chance to implement the solution they’ve been working on. This will be some of the players booking it for the woods, frantically intoning the magic ritual, or finally making contact with the outside world and radioing in a nuclear strike. This solution doesn’t have to work. Maybe the clowns catch them when they run, or the aliens rip them to shreds before they reach the detonator. Regardless, this sets the stage for game to be called. It allows the players to feel like they’ve done their best, and that all that scariness was worth it.

Other Flow Structures
Silence Blooming, an Advanced Game run this summer by myself and Jeremy Gleick, made use of an unconventional flow structure that went against the three act structure. In Silence Blooming, players were unable to talk, and there was an active pressure that made the players unable to work together to develop a solution. This meant Act 4 and Act 5 impossible to occur. Instead, we developed an event which would allow for the game to come to a satisfying conclusion, and cut the game off once we felt it had run for a sufficient amount of time. However, even though there was no organized Act 4 and 5, we built in the capacity to escape the game, which allowed for individual players to achieve their own personal Act 4 and 5. In this way, the emotional satisfaction of the 5 act structure is more important than strict structure. Players want anticipation, revelry, and the chance to escape.

Boo!
Hopefully, you’ve learned a fair amount about what makes horror fun, and how to implement it. Horror games aren’t easy! But if you have plenty of faith in your staff, an active imagination for the spooky, and an understanding of how to allocate and budget out the fear, you’ll be able to put together a great horror game in no time. Now get out there and get writing!

Additional Resources
http://www.aijcrnet.com/journals/Vol_2_No_4_April_2012/16.pdf, a great comprehensive review of what horror is, examples of horror from throughout time, and a discussion on the demographics of a horror audience

Drawn With Courage…:

Starting an Intro Game

Intro games are, far and away, the most common form of game we run at Wayfinder. Of our 14 unique games run in 2017, 9 of them were intro games, and 8 of them were held at day camps. If you want to get a game run, especially if you’ve never written a game before, the most surefire way statistically is to write an intro game for a day camp. They’re also the perfect way to get started writing games – they follow a comfortable formula and have a dedicated group of staff who spend an entire week, minimum, helping ensure your game runs well. So, knowing this, why is it that people don’t write more intro games?

Misconceptions
There’s a stigma within the Wayfinder community, especially among older campers and some staff, that Intro Games are somehow “lesser” than advanced games. Because the audience is younger, there’s less time spent at camp, and people tend to get less invested, there’s an idea that Intro Games aren’t “good” unless they’re run at an overnight camp. When Jeremy Gleick and I ran The Horned King in 2016, many staff came up to us afterwards and told us they were excited to see it played in the future at an overnight camp. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the game was written for Woodstock Day School, and that the work and preparation we put into the game was intended for the audience we had.

There’s also the popular misconception that, because the audience is younger, they won’t care as much. That’s absolutely not true. After every intro game I’ve ever run, the kids completely lose their minds. They can’t wait to tell you about all the amazing fun they had, playing in the world you’ve built and fighting the threats you’ve created. Putting work into Intro Games absolutely pays off, and you really can change participants’ lives.

Finally, there’s the idea that Intro Games have to have lower production expectations, or don’t get as much production work. As anyone who has played in a game Colin O’Brien has worked can attest, this is absolutely not the case. Having a full week to develop and work on scenes, props, costumes and weapons gives production the incredible ability to really build amazing things. I’ve seen a heart that exploded and covered a kid with fake blood, a tree with a radio built inside of it indoors, a giant alien space-shrimp with huge claws, stilts, and a massive head, and a full set of matching silver blades inscribed with powerful runes and with leather-wrapped grips. Intro games can really look amazing, and there’s a lot you can do with them.

Okay, I hope by now I’ve talked you into writing some fun intro games. But, you might ask, how do I do that? Where do I even begin?

The Premise
The core of any Intro Game (well, really any game at all), at least in my perspective, is the Premise. This is the beating heart of the game, the source from which you draw your power. Whenever you’re in doubt, whenever you feel unsure about where to go next, consult your premise and remember your roots. A premise is composed of multiple parts, which I’ll break down. Not all of these parts need to be clearly articulated – I know many gamewriters who don’t really care about all aspects of the premise, and in fact wouldn’t dream of writing any of this down. But, if you’re just beginning, it’s a good exercise to familiarize yourself with what you should be thinking about. Plus, this gives you a good time to get your creative juices stirring! The Premise is made up of four pieces – the Thesis, the Aesthetic, the Mission, and the Elevator Pitch. As you’re working on your game, every time you’re not sure where to go, you can always check back in on your Premise, and have that guide your choices. These shouldn’t dominate how you write your game – if you decide halfway through that your Thesis should be totally different, that’s great! This is your dream-baby. I just want to give you the tools to help guide your dream-baby, when you’re lost and don’t know where to go.

The Thesis
This is such an important topic in talking about a Wayfinder game, that Dylan Scott has already written an article about it! If you haven’t read it already, I definitely would here, before you go any further. That’s a perfect breakdown of what your Theme and Thesis actually is, and how to apply it in a game.
The Thesis is the message of your game. What are you trying to communicate? Often in intro games this is something simple – “love defeats hate”, “magic is dying” or “we are strongest when united”. Just because a message is simple, doesn’t mean it’s not resonant. In my game Debts Collected, the thesis is “There must always be criticism of power”, and this manifests within the game in multiple ways. The Big Good is a force of revolution and change, but in turn must be overthrown and revolted against.

The best implementations of Theses are those that don’t have a clear cut answer, or ones that can be explored in multiple ways. If the Thesis of your game is a question, like “What does it mean to be a family?” You can approach that from multiple directions. Perhaps the Big Bad is a cruel and nasty parent-god to the people of this world. Maybe there’s a team made up of orphans, who have created their own family, or there’s another team made up of a genuine blood-related family who all love each other very much. There’s no solution to the question, but players are invited to meditate upon different meanings of family, and come to their own conclusions in the world.

Sometimes, you’ll find it hard to state your Thesis. That doesn’t mean it’s muddled or confused (which is something you should be careful about!) but it does mean you should look at what you’ve already got, and see what you can develop. I’m still not sure what the Thesis of The Horned King was. There’s themes about a last, desperate stand against evil, about hope against the darkness, and the way you must sacrifice everything in order to triumph. There’s no clear way to boil that down’ to a catchy phrase (and we certainly didn’t try while we were writing the game) but it permeated everything we did and worked on. Some could even argue that the Thesis of The Horned King isn’t a moral at all, but was instead a mechanical experiment in the nature of “boss fights” and escalating conflict within a game.
Don’t view the Thesis as a law you have to abide by. View it as an inspiration, or a starting point to grow off of.

The Aesthetic
In addition to establishing the Thesis of your game, you also want to develop a cohesive aesthetic. An aesthetic is “the set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist”. This refers to both the artistic vibes of your game, and the general mood of the adventure. When you talk about aesthetic in a movie like Mad Max: Fury Road, you’re talking about the color palette (oranges and blues), the appearance of the world (ramshackle cars, cobbled-together outfits, flamethrower guitars), and the landscape (bleak, inhospitable, without hope). In an adventure game, these things are reflected in the production lists and the world and group backgrounds

Often in Intro Games, people will say that the aesthetic is “High Fantasy”. This is a loaded and complicated term. It generally means Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer-style European cultures with bright colors and armor, and a culture based around a feudal society with a noble caste. This is all fine and good, but you’re going to get much deeper if you really poke at and specify what kind of fantasy you’re really talking about.

For example, The Horned King, while very traditionally fantasy, had a distinctly Northern European and Low Fantasy vibe. There were British sailors, German witches, and a Prussian military. The titular Big Bad, the Horned King, was inspired by the Chronicles of Prydain and Germanic Folklore, with a large man with horns and a demonic appearance. In general, there weren’t any wizards in magic robes or noble knights, favoring instead soldiers, witches, thieves, and sailors. Even though there wasn’t a distinct aesthetic, there was a cohesive visual language that was connected throughout the production expectations and the world background.

In Luminites of Uliark by Jack Warren, the aesthetic is wildly different. It’s all about one word – Superheroes – and on every level it seeks to emulate that, within a fantastical setting. There’s magic crystals giving powers to teams of heroes who each guard a particular part of the world, there’s villagers in game who exist only to be protected and saved, and the major antagonists are all classic superhero nemeses. Participants built their own masks before game, and also each team brainstormed an arch-enemy – who costuming quickly built and worked into game. While it made use of the bright colors we expect from an Intro Game, it did so on purpose – everyone’s brightly colored because they’re all superheroes.

Even if your game is set in Generic Fantasyland, think about what kind of fantasy you’re trying to weave. Is it a Conan the Barbarian sort of world, with ancient liches and covered in crumbling ruins? Is it like the Dark Suns setting in D&D, where powerful wizards rule empires of sand, and psychic spellcasters struggle to survive? Or is it like He-Man, full of dramatic heroes and skull-faced villains? You can also draw inspiration from real-life cultures (respectfully!) – maybe your world of artifice and invention draws about Indian culture and appearance, your tiny duchy is based on 1700s German kingdoms, or your game about warring empires draws mythology from traditional Japanese Shinto faith. If you do, remember to be respectful! It is inappropriate to use religious symbols (like bindis or war bonnets) from still-living religions, and including gross stereotypes is never okay.

The Mission
The next part of your Premise is the Mission of your game. This isn’t really something I’ve discussed with others before, and I think many people wouldn’t consider this even a part of game creation. However, I’ve found this is an essential part of designing other nerd activities, like Tabletop RPGs and video games.
The Mission is what you want your players to be doing in your game. This is how you want your players to feel, what you want the stakes to be like, and what you want them to accomplish. It is easiest to express your Mission through your flow and your game conventions. A Mission can generally be laid out in terms of verbs, where people are doing things. Some aspects of the Mission in an Intro Game are pretty easily laid out in general terms – you want them to be fighting, and you want them to be roleplaying. However, you can (and should) get much more specific than that.

Mission statements should be fun, and what those are determines where the fun in game is. If you have the Mission statement “Summoning and Dealing with Genies”, that means you want to have flowed-in moments in game where participants get to do that, and you want to reward them for doing that. If you have the Mission statement “Casting Cool Spells”, that means you want to give the participants chances during Flow to cast cool spells, and you want to give them lots of cool spells to cast!
Almost all Intro games have the following Mission statements:

Engaging with Characters
Becoming Empowered
Experiencing Adventure

These Mission statements are the core of what we try to do at Wayfinder. Players should be given ample opportunities to accomplish all of these objectives, and in an Intro Game, they should be rewarded for doing so.
In addition to the Mission statements listed above, The Horned King could also have been said to have the following:

Participating in the Ritual
Preparing Tactics and Executing Them
Feeling Unsure and Betrayed
Fearing the Horned King

Every single moment in the flow sought to accomplish one of these four Mission Statements, often with more than one at once. The appearance of more and more powerful monsters over the course of the game allows players to Prepare and Execute new tactics, and continue to Fear the Horned King as the danger ramps up. The Rat King throwing off his disguise and killing the target of the ritual forces the participants to Participate in the Ritual (because now they need a new ritual target), makes them Feel Betrayed, and helps them Fear the Horned King.

I know this is a lot to juggle! Fortunately for you, most of this should come naturally. When you figure out your Mission, all you have to think about is what you think is going to be fun in your game, and how those feed into the Aesthetic and the Thesis. There’s a hundred different things your players can be doing in an Adventure Game, and you can easily pick out the ones you think will be most fun. When you’re writing flow and you don’t know where to go, ask yourself, “how can I advance my Mission?” and I’m sure something will come to you.

The Elevator Pitch
An Elevator Pitch refers to a short paragraph that you can use to explain the crux of your game, theoretically in the time it takes to ride an elevator. The Story Board, in their infinite wisdom, has asked every single gamewriter to include a form of an Elevator Pitch in their story submission. This Elevator Pitch helps to get people excited about your game. It’s really hard for someone to care about a game when it’s just a big jumbled mess of ideas up in the air. Telling someone “I’m writing a game that’s like Mad Max in the Greek Underworld” (Marathon Wakes by Mike Phillips) immediately gets them so, so psyched. If you can’t sum up your game in an Elevator Pitch that’s shorter than four sentences, you either need to try harder or make your game simpler. Below I’ve included some Elevator Pitches from various games (both mine and other’s)

“Uliark is no ordinary fantasy land. Swords still clash, castles still crumbles, and the crowns of kings still glimmer in the sherbert sunset. But the heroes of this world are not knights or wizards. Uliark is a land of superheroes. Uliark is the land of the Luminites.”
Luminites of Uliark by Jack Warren

The Short Version: It’s high fantasy golden-age superheroes: the game!

“It has been 85 years since the last time the sun set over Orinas. The Horned King, who consumed the goddess of the night, has marched his armies across the world, destroying and devouring all in his path. Only a handful of cities have survived, defenders of light in a broken world. They have gathered together, to perform a ritual that can once and for all defeat the dark lord, and return the stars to the sky.”
The Horned King by Jay Dragon and Jeremy Gleick

The Short Version: Everyone has to work together to defeat the biggest, evilest, nastiest guy you’ll ever meet.

“In the Everlast, the Realms of the Gods, trouble is brewing. A great divide between the pantheons over whether tapping into the powers of the Heart of their realm is worthy and important, or foolish and dangerous, is coming to a breaking point. As the Gods come together to meet and discuss this issue, tensions are high, and it may take only one small push for heaven itself to descend into war.”
Paradise Marches to War by Jeremy Gleick

The Short Version: Everyone’s a god, and the gods are all gonna fight against each other.

“Stripped of its fertility, the once peaceful world of Edlria has become a sunburnt and scorched wasteland of chaos and death. An army of the last remaining heroic mortals must rise to the occasion and complete a quest given to them by their Gods: to save the God of Life. She was torn from their realm by The God of Death and brought to his dark and twisted kingdom, Marathon. They must descend into the darkness and into the Kingdom of the Dead to rescue the God of Life, before Edlria itself can not be saved.”
Marathon Wakes by Mike Phillips

The Short Version: Mad Max heroes go to the Underworld to save Persephone.

As you can see, everyone has their own style when it comes to writing story blurbs and elevator pitches. But all of them are exciting, and all of them convey the previous three portions of the Premise (the Thesis, the Aesthetic, and the Mission) perfectly.
What now?
Now that you’ve got the Premise of your game all sorted out, come back next week for an exciting discussion on Flow, which many people consider to be the hardest part of writing an intro game. We’re gonna make it easy!

Written by Jay Dragon
12/27/17

Location, Location, Location:

How to Create Your Setting

Every story, whether it’s a novel, a movie, or an adventure game, has a setting. Maybe that setting is a whole new world, with strange beings and stranger magics, or maybe it’s a complex network of planets in the distant future. Maybe it’s an apartment complex in Chicago! No matter what kind of story you’re telling, it has to be set somewhere.

What do my players need to know?

World-building for an adventure game is very similar to world-building for any other story. You need to keep the same ideas in mind: structure, clarity, internal consistency, and so on. But there’s another challenge to keep in mind, one of perspective. For an adventure game, you’re going to have other people playing in your world, so you have to figure out what they need to know, and then how to convey it. So what, then, do they need to know?

They need to know everything. Surprise!

Your players are going to be acting as characters who live in this created world full-time. They need to have an understanding of how the world works. They need to know the geography, the politics, the social dynamics, the hierarchies, the major figures, the culture, and so on.

Going through this a couple of times, you learn quickly that people aren’t good at processing vast information dumps like that. As such, it’s important to figure out what matters most and concentrate on that. You can come up with all those details in your head, and you can mention them during world background, but they’re not what you need to focus on.

Does the game’s plot revolve around a succession crisis? Then give an in-depth explanation of how the monarchy works. Is it set at a boarding school? Focus on the social dynamics of the upper- and lower-classmen. Each story has different things that matter most about its setting. If you can find these defining characteristics and emphasize them, you’ll get a much stronger and more coherent setting.

Another interesting issue is that of misinformation and lack of information. World background can become an interesting exercise in releasing information calculatedly, which is a fancy way of saying “lying to your players”. I ran a game where I told my fantasy society all about their gods and how much they worshipped these mythical beings, which resulted in a lot of surprise when the gods showed up in-game and turned out to be conquering aliens from another dimension.

You can also use diverse world backgrounds to play with expectations. I co-ran a game that involved two cultures locked in a Cold War-like conflict with each other. We separated the players into two separate groups, and then gave them each different, propaganda-fueled information about the opposing side. Each side thought the other was a horrifying wasteland, and that they themselves were clearly the heroic protagonists of the game. When during the game the two armies were forced to work together against a much larger threat, the ensuing culture clash and misconceptions drove a lot of fascinating interactions.

What do the characters know?

The answer to this may be the same as the answer to the previous question, but not always! Many of our games are fantasy or science fiction adventures, in fictional worlds we create. In those cases, yes, the characters know all about the King of Mars and his sweet rocketship. But what about games set in the modern day, in secret societies or cults, or with various cultures?

In these sorts of worlds, many of the players may have characters who are otherwise ordinary people, and don’t actually know about the dark magics and demons they’re about to wind up involved with. In cases like this, games with secrets and mysteries, you have to strike a careful balance. You want to give your players enough information so that they know how to deal with the magicks and murder of your world, but not so much that there are no surprises. It’s a fine line, but an important one to keep in mind.

Often in worldbuilding for modern-day settings we talk about the idea of the Masquerade. This is the idea that the majority of people in the world have no idea about the secret world of vampires, or wizards, or ninjas, that goes on when they’re not looking. The masquerade is equal parts ignorance on the part of the normal people and careful secrecy on the part of those with power. An important consideration when doing modern-day setting design is the relevance and stability of the masquerade. Is this a world where vampires are openly accepted? A world where wizards are on the cusp of discovery? Are there people who wish they could wield their powers openly? How much do “ordinary” people know?

How do I know if my setting is working?

If you’ve ever been to camp, you know that half of World Intro is taken up with the infinite sprawling telemetries of Q&A. Campers love asking questions, and will often ask things that catch the gamewriter entirely off guard. When you’re caught up in creating a setting, it’s easy to get bogged down in details, and miss some huge inconsistency that worked its way in. But rest assured, a camper will ask about it five minutes into the Q&A, and you’ll have to come up with an answer on the spot. Sure, you can handle that by being a master of improv, but there’s a better way.

Once you think you’ve got a solid idea of how your setting works, find a friend you trust and sit down with them. Make sure it’s someone who doesn’t know anything about your game yet! Now explain the setting to them, in as much detail as you plan to do for the campers, and see what questions they have. A fresh mind looking at your world will be able to spot things that probably slipped by you. They also might raise fascinating new ideas that hadn’t occurred to you, which can be great inspiration for character concepts, PC teams, or even flow points!

So, to recap:

1. Figure out the core of your setting.

What elements of the setting matter to the story? What are the central conceits that matter most to the characters and define the story? Figure out those characteristics, and focus on them. Make them shine, and make sure you understand them in detail. But remember that too much detail can be as overwhelming as too little detail is disappointing!

2. What do your players and characters know?

Figure out not just how the setting actually works but how your characters think it works. Their perspective on your world can define their worldview, and, characters with vastly different perspectives, or operating with false information, can lead to some neat developments.

It’s also an important thing to keep track of in a story—unlike in a game, the person controlling the character knows more than they do, so you have to make sure a character isn’t spouting knowledge they shouldn’t know.

3. Q&A time!

Get a friend (or better, a couple of friends) to come over, and then explain to them everything about your setting. Then have them ask you questions about it. See what comes up! You might be surprised at how much new material you wind up with… and how many holes you have to patch.

Later on, we’ll go into more detail about how to create settings and worlds of specific kinds, like high fantasy or urban magic. Write on, worldbuilders.

Original Post 12/13/13

Choose Your Character

How to figure out who the PCs should be in your game

So you’ve got an idea for a game. Cool! You’ve got a setting, you’ve got some game mechanics, you might even have the beginnings of a flow coming together! But hold on, there’s one vital factor you might not have thought about: who, exactly, are the PCs?

Figuring out who your PCs are is one of the most important (and often overlooked) steps of the gamewriting process. Remember that the PCs are the center of the game, no matter what kind of game you’re running. They’re the ones who should be empowered, who are being entertained, and should get the message the game is trying to express.

So: who are your PCs? Here are three major things to keep in mind when picking your PCs.

1) Stake

Your PCs need to have a stake in the conflict. If the core of your game is about defeating a dragon that’s terrorizing a countryside, and your PCs are a bunch of teenagers with magic from across the sea, those PCs will wind up asking why they’re the ones fighting the dragon. Instead consider having your PCs be the survivors of a village that the dragon burned down. This might seem obvious, but there are plenty of games where this isn’t the case.

In general, the more you can make your PCs emotionally invested in the core narrative of the game, the more active they’ll be. Give them a reason to go on those fetch quests! So when choosing your PCs, look at the conflict of the game, and at the actions of the villain. Who has been affected most by this? Whose lives will be changed the most? Is it the farmers? The local nobles? The schoolchildren? The forest spirits? Make them your PCs.

I remember running into that problem as a player in one of my first games. My PC team’s plotline was all about our conflict with our neighboring tribe (who had maybe stolen our gods?), but as soon as the teens from the magic school down the lane crashed the party, our whole narrative was forgotten in favor of helping them defeat some dark elf queen that we’d never heard of. I came out of the game frustrated and mostly annoyed at the schoolkids–why did we have to help them, anyway? And what about my tribe’s missing gods, huh? If there had been a reason for my tribe to have been invested in the elf queen’s storyline–or if the gamewriter had put more thought into choosing PCs–that could have been avoided.

2) Interest

The PCs also need to be interesting! If you spend your whole world background describing all the sweet werewolves and vampires and anthropomorphic spidermonkeys that exist in your sitting, but then the PCs are the local clergy, they’re gonna be grumpy that they don’t get to be the cool thing. In general, your PCs should one of the most interesting groups around, for whatever reason. That doesn’t mean there can’t be someone MORE interesting (your big SPC Dragoon Knight or whatever), but consider giving that Dragoon Knight an entourage of PC Dragoons-in-Training to be her squires.

An important element of interest is making the different PC teams interesting to each other, and finding the most interesting conflicts between them. If your setting has tensions based on race or societal class or type of magic, you should do your best to make sure that’s reflected in the PC teams. That way, when the PCs have their big meetups at the top and bottom of each Diamond, there’s plenty of opportunity for interesting roleplaying and competition between the PCs.

It is worth remembering, of course, that this is somewhat a question of casting. There are always some players who really would just rather play the everyman farmer trying to survive, caught in the crossfire of godlike warriors. But those players tend to be rarer, especially among our younger set.

3) Agency

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the PCs need to be the ones with agency in a game. Agency doesn’t necessarily mean direct power! Horror games, for instance, generally have almost entirely powerless PCs. But even then, the PCs have the agency to choose where to run to, or how to survive. In your more typical fantasy game, the PCs are the characters who have the agency about who and how to fight.

This also applies to constructing your flow. Make sure your PCs are the characters who are in a position to make the important decisions about where the story is going, especially at the end. It’s perfectly fine to have SPCs telling them where to go to make their decisions a reality, but the PCs should still feel like they were the ones who made those decisions. By the end of the game, the PCs should feel like they were able to make some change on the world, and do something that actually mattered. This ties back into the question of stake–did they successfully accomplish that thing they were emotionally invested in?

So, to recap:
Make sure your PCs have are invested in the conflict of the game
Don’t have the PCs wishing they could play someone more interesting
Put the PCs in the position to have agency within the game world
Choose wisely!

original post 1/8/14

Flows for Algernon

What actually happens in your game?

Tonight we’re talking about the structure of an adventure game. The individual scenes that compose it must spring from your imagination. But because games which are well-organized tend to run well and games which are poorly organized don’t, it’s useful for us to think about the order of events and plot it out.

We refer to the plots of our games as “flow,” and I don’t claim to know why. But I have some handy explanations I’ve made up for myself:

• To remind us to go with the flow
• Because the plot has to be malleable and accept and build on player actions.
• Because it is often easily mapped as a flow chart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Technically, in a flow-chart, that middle square should be a diamond, but this is a blog about making elves and goblins happen, not programming.

We’ll talk about, in concrete terms, different flow styles. We’ll start by talking about the Diamond Flow and flow diamonds in general, then move on to the looser kinds of action that we often see in games for more advanced players.

THE DIAMOND FLOW

There is a singular game structure we use, with some variation, for almost all of our intro-level games. It is the product of decades of trial and error, with regards to plotting out adventure games, and the result is a very stable flow which runs for a (comparatively) predictable length of time, ensures player activity at every stage, and can reliably carry both the meaning of a story and the immersion of its players.

Here it is:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note the annotations on the left. Anytime the players are in the same place, then diverge to perform separate objectives, then reconverge, is referred to as a “diamond.” Most games (or game segments, in the case of intro camps where there’s both a night game and day game) consist of two of these diamonds stacked on top of each other, book-ended by exposition on one side and a conclusion on the other. This satisfies a classic western trope where the heroes must overcome three trials– the two diamonds, and the bad guy– and conveniently tends to take somewhere between 90 and 150 minutes, depending on the land, the players’ initiative, and mid-game decisions made by SPCs about how to spend the time.

Note that the first diamond has three objectives, or “facets,” and the second diamond has only two. Really, a diamond can have any number of facets, with a few considerations:

• A diamond can’t really have one facet. A game where the players never split up, but travel in one massive mob? There will be fewer opportunities for each player to be empowered, their individual game experiences won’t feel unique, and roleplaying in a large crowd can be difficult because the focus is so diffused.
• The more facets there are, the more opportunity there is for player empowerment. It just makes sense that if there are more riddles to answer, duels to fight and items to steal in a game, more players will have a chance to be the one who beats them. But also, in transit along the path to an objective, smaller groups are easier for PC Leaders to empower.
• Every facet of the diamond requires a commitment of personnel. You have a limited number of SPCs to work with. When you consider that (A) at a camp with newer or younger players, every group needs a PC leader to chaperone them and make sure they’re both having fun and making progress and (B) most quest objectives involve fighting/riddling with/evading some kind of SPC, a diamond with more than 5 or 6 facets starts to look unwieldy, and a diamond with more than 8 is just plain inadvisable.

So, that flow is an incredible formula for success. But it looks kind of rigid, doesn’t it? I bet you’re thinking of some elements of a game you’re writing or have an idea for that don’t quite fit into the equation I’ve presented. And the truth is, for more advanced players, Wayfolk who have seen a handful of games, this style of game can begin to feel stale. Just like any connoisseurs, they begin to recognize the underlying foundations of this style of story, and it can seem repetitive to them.

I know that when I first started feeling this way, I wrote a bunch of games that jumped off of the deep end and didn’t follow a diamond structure at all, and I think that the tendency of gamewriters who get bored of the diamond flow is to run straight for the diving board and go head first into uncharted waters (mixed metaphor, shaken, not stirred).

Of course, my deep end games didn’t get accepted, and with good reason: They were chaos. The flow was lopsided and it was unclear if there was enough activity in the game to actually keep the players occupied. All of which is not to say that non-diamond games don’t work; but that they’re way harder to devise and communicate. So before we talk about freer flow games or (shiver!) scenarios, let’s talk about…

ADAPTING THE DIAMOND

So the classic diamond flow is pretty predictable. It’s closed-ended, which means that to get to the end, every point on the flow must necessarily end in success for the players, and one side will certainly triumph over the others. What if you want the fate of the world to be actually hanging in the balance? You can add a separate flow for the bad guys. But if those bad guys are sympathetic? Well, maybe you have two (or more) teams with their own flows… in which case you can still use the familiar diamond flow model, twice. Having certain scenes overlap will ensure that both groups are aware of each other.

But things become more interesting when you give two teams overlapping objectives:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this example, we’ve got two overlapping diamonds, where teams will be heavily competing for most of their objectives. This is exciting, dynamic, and most importantly, unpredictable. Unpredictable for your players, but also unpredictable for you, the game writer– which is not the best. There are lots of ways to take this open-ended diamond and put controls on it to make the game go more smoothly.

First, remember what I said before, about every point in a basic diamond necessarily ending in success for the players? Well, when you introduce a real chance of failure by having players compete (rather than merely defeating monsters who know to work with them as scene partners)… you have to introduce FAILURE PATHS: if there’s no way forward for a player team that just got whupped, they’re going to either disengage and stop having fun, or go harass the team who has the thing they want until everyone is dead.

Building a way for them to recover and move forward into each scene that they might fail is important, and if it gives them a slight boost that raises their chances in future conflicts, that keeps the game interesting. You could have a whole game about villains being forged by oppression, just by giving out evilish powers and transformations for failing to get objectives.

Second, depending on what you envision for each scene that’s in conflict, you can give specific orders for your SPCs. Maybe Blue Team should succeed at winning by the pond and it just makes sense for Red Team to take the objective at the parking lot. By giving your PC Leaders, particularly, specific ideas for how those scenes should go, you can pre-plan certain elements of the game– leaving that one last objective as the tiebreaker.

Third, we have to accept that, the more complicated a flow becomes, the more susceptible it becomes to being broken entirely. Diamonds are hard and unyielding, but occaisionally, we manage to shatter even the most basic of flows. In the above example, at any point, one team could simply wipe out the other and game will be over way ahead of schedule, before any of those cool scenes could happen. We should identify the flaws in our flow and make note of them, so that our SPCs are wary and we can create backup plans for the inevitable.

 

FREE-FLOW GAMES

So sometimes a game flow is so complicated that a chart would turn into a sloppy mess of arrows. Sometimes the story itself is too post-modern for a beginning, middle and end with three trials and a classic flow diamond. Sometimes the game’s overall goal doesn’t fit it, either– do you map out all 32 diamonds the PCs can find in the world, when they need to find at least 10 to end the eternal winter? You do, but not in diamond flow format. What about when, despite the PCs being grouped up, they’re all individual characters with their own sheets, personal objectives, and goals? Well, then you’re adrift on the sea of innovation. Thankfully, though, we’ve been experimenting with these types of games for a while, and even if we don’t have a map for you, we’ve got some guiding stars.

First and foremost, ask yourself the question when you look at the game, over and over: Does everyone have enough to do? Look at every group, every character. List the things they have available to do, in game. Note, conservatively, how much time each activity will take. If some of them are optional, count those for only half, or a quarter, of the time they’d take. Are there two hours of gameplay there? If there’s less, they might be able to make their own fun, but you should consider adding more. Having more than enough to do, on the other hand, will never hurt a player in a game.

As a second piece of advice, please consider the ending of your game. How do we know when it’s over? Can you create a scene that puts a nice tidy wrap-up on the game to finish it off? If possible, most players should be present for that moment.

GOING ROGUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rogue games have fallen somewhat out of favor, for whatever reason, in recent years, but in a rogue game, the vast majority of PCs are roguish characters, and the objectives are almost entirely stealth and wit based– part of the difficulty of mapping flow for games like these is that, rather than being reactive, responding to threats, the heroes are actively seeking wealth or powerful items, and the challenge of the game is how to get those things.

You’re setting up bowling pins for them to knock down. You may have a solution in mind for a puzzle, but the PCs will likely find alternate routes to their goals… which is to be encouraged.

So the first question is: Is there enough stuff worth stealing in your game? And the second: Are the security measures in place sufficiently interesting and engaging for the players?

POLITICALLY CORRECT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve had a rash of political games, where the players are all high-status characters with their own objectives and motives, trying to use influence and subtler methods to get what they want.

Schedule out the event that the players are attending. If it’s some kind of council, give them an agenda, and make sure it has plenty of recesses and space for player input. There is a tendency in these kinds of games for the highest-status characters to dominate the scenes, and breaking it up both adds time for conspiracy and for the other players to pursue their goals.

Give players bargaining chips. It’s well enough to have goals, but if they’re forced to accomplish them on charisma alone, only the better-spoken players have a shot at achieving their objectives. If, however, they have leverage over other characters, “off-stage” resources, or even just connections outside of their group, they have much more freedom in how to go about playing the game.

Link players into other people’s objectives, and give them reason to care about them. That way, if they accomplish their goals, they’re still an active piece on the chessboard.

STAYING ALIVE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Survival-Horror is another popular genre that defies classical attempts to map out flow. Because, ideally, players have scattered and are running through the woods in terror or hyperventilating in some hiding place, it is hard to give them a pre-ordained sequence of events. But it’s still important to ensure that there is predictable player activity in game!

Force them to venture out. Fear will motivate people to huddle together in one brightly-lit place, which good monsters will know to avoid. Give the PCs objectives that require them to leave comfort and safety behind– whether it’s to fetch more logs for the dimming fire or to find clues as to what’s going on or to run for a chopper that can whisk them away. You need to give them compelling reasons to become vulnerable.

Or, you know, you could just turn out the lights. Give them a safe haven and then tear it away mid-game. The point is, there should be a sense of escalation of fear, and some distant hope to reach for. If it’s hopeless, people stop being afraid and begin to make peace with their characters’ demise, which is anathema to this game style. For these games, the flow is more about pacing and creating opportunities for scares than controlling player actions or outcomes.

GAMEWRITING IS HARD

Writing a good game is difficult, as it requires a strong grasp of organization skills, the logistics of employing all the players during game, and an ability to imagine fun plots and scenes. But it’s important not to get overwhelmed by all the intricacies. When it comes time to put pen to paper, focus on one scene at a time, and get your friends to help you look over the broader picture. You’re going to have to explain what happens in game multiple times, so work through it with them.

Good luck!

Original post 1/7/14

Why We Write Games

Did you enjoy your holidays? Because the Story Board Blog is back, and will continue to post thought-provoking and helpful essays, hints and tirades about the art of writing adventure games, right up until the deadline for story submissions.

Tonight, we set out to ask ourselves: What’s the point? Of game writing? And to answer that question, we have to ask another: What’s the point of playing in adventure games?

Obviously, there are a lot of answers to these questions, and I’m hoping to make you think, when you’re writing your game, about why you’re doing it. What do you want for yourself? What do you want for your players? But if I had to take a stab at the biggest and best reasons… well, I’d come up with three, and coincidentally, they’d all start with the letter “E.”

Adventure Game Objective #1: Entertainment

The easiest answer to the question “Why play adventure games?” is “Because they’re fun!” As game writers, we definitely want people to enjoy and to be entertained by the game we’re writing. And ultimately, the process of writing the game should also be fun!

What are the best ways to ensure that a game is entertaining? Well, in general, audiences like to experience familiar material as though it were new again. That’s the reason that storytelling is so full of tropes, and that most stories of a specific genre and medium have similar structures and content. A game which is too abstract for the audience to relate to may disengage their interest, but a game without any innovation at all will feel like tired, oft-tread ground. What’s most important, perhaps, when writing a game, is to keep the audience of the game in mind– advanced players will likely want to see something zanier and less familiar, but new players need to have a foothold into your world because our brand of roleplaying, itself, is new to them.

Adventure Game Objective #2: Empowerment & Evolution

All of Wayfinder’s promotional pamphlets and flyers say something along the lines of “Find the hero inside!” and that’s because of a philosophical stance that our community takes on the purpose of roleplaying. There’s actually a good deal of scientific consensus that role play is a vital part of human growth. Children naturally develop roleplaying games with one another as a form of emergent play, which helps them to understand both the roles they could grow to fulfill in their adult lives and to learn empathy– by identifying the rational and emotional truths behind the actions of others.

We’ve come to believe, however, through direct observation, that this kind of personal growth isn’t just accessible to young children, but people of all ages. Because Wayfinder’s sword and magic systems are uniquely designed to enhance verisimilitude and immersion, when you’re in character, even if your rational brain is aware that everything is a game… your lizard brain doesn’t quite understand. It thinks, when monsters approach, that you’re really in danger, and it’s really putting out adrenaline in preparation for fight or flight. You can run faster, in character with a demon on your heels, than you can in your ordinary life. You can also talk more smoothly as your character, even if you’re usually shy, and – because for two hours or so, the boundaries you use to limit yourself are lifted, because you’re pretending you’re someone else.

Of course, it really is you doing all that awesome stuff. So if there’s anything we want people to take away from our games, it’s this: You’re more capable than you think you are.

We’ll talk more about how to empower players later this week, but at the most basic level, you have to look at your game and ask yourself, “Is there space for people to prove to themselves that they can do things they’d never have a chance to in real life?”

Adventure Game Objective #3: Expression

And, lastly, a goal of gamewriting, as with all art, is to express an idea, philosophy, question, emotion, or some other ephemeral and nuanced thing. Audiences enjoy taking part in what amounts to a dialog about these things, and they’re emotionally and intellectually stimulating.

Some game writers begin the process of creating a game with their themes, and that’s a pretty good way to do it, so long as you hide your symbolism until it’s too late to avoid. But even if you just wrote a series of fun-sounding scenes with as many cool ideas as you could, I’ve got a surprise for you: Your game has latent, unintentional symbolism! We gave you a crash course in media analysis very briefly in our last post. Give it another glance over, if you’re not sure how to do this, and then look back at your game. Maybe even invite a friend to discuss it and its themes with you. And then, once you’ve isolated those factors, tweak backgrounds, scenes and flow to further support those ideas, so that you can have a game united by a few fluid strokes of genius.

Why do YOU write games?

There are many more answers to this question, and we want to hear from you! What’s motivated you to write a game? Which of these objectives do you most heavily favor? What big, important objectives did we miss?

Theme in Adventure Games

What is a “theme”? What is a “thesis”?

A theme is an idea that comes up a lot in a creative work. A thesis is the central idea around which a creative work is based. There are more comprehensive definitions available in dictionaries both online and off, but these definitions will serve us for now. Themes and theses are meant to work unconsciously – we should not even be aware of them as we experience the work.

Alright, you’ve defined it, but can you give me some examples?

Absolutely, nameless construct of this essay. A good example of a theme can be found in the Disney movie The Lion King. In the beginning of the movie, before we’re even introduced to any named characters, we see the iconic “Circle of Life” song and sequence. For those who aren’t already humming it in their heads right now, here’s what it sounds like:

It’s a nice opening song with beautiful visuals, sure, but what is it telling us about the story that’s not obvious? How is it working on our unconscious minds? Obviously, the song is about the titular circle of life. We are born, we consume, and we die, and in our dying we are consumed by others, either directly in the case of the antelope, or indirectly in the case of the lion. This is the thesis of the movie. In The Lion King, it is a note that is sounded again and again – there are natural cycles, they are inherently good, and we are all a part of them. Implicit in this thesis is the idea that going against our natural cycles is evil. This aspect of the thesis comes up later in the movie, with Scar, who takes over the pack from his brother Mufasa when by the natural cycle of inheritance it should pass to Simba.

But let’s dig a little deeper and take it beat by beat, see if we can’t dig out some themes. The first thing we see is a montage of animals waking up and getting ready for their big day. We’re still getting used to the art style, so they give us some time. The dawn imagery cleverly suggests the idea of beginning to us, appropriate since this is the beginning of the movie. I wouldn’t say that it’s technically a theme, but it is smart. As the first English words in the song are sung, we see the image of a mother giraffe and her baby, entering the sunlight. This image begins to implant in our minds the idea of “growing up”, which is a huge theme in the movie. Disney is all about visual cues for their themes, and this seems like an important moment, so let’s take a look at that:

Warm colors, some muted and some vibrant, notably muted in the mother (shouldn’t she be in full light too, if the baby is?). Let’s look at a later frame from the opening:

 

 

 

Woah! A bunch of the same warm, reddish/brownish colors show up here, and they’re quite muted in Simba’s mother. We don’t consciously know it, but by this point in the movie, we’re already familiar and comfortable with the themes of growing up, being a child, and caring for your family, and they’re already coded to the colors of a lion.

I could go on with some of the other images in the opening sequence (for instance, the images of the ants contrasted with the zebras and the birds contrasted with the elephants introduces us to the theme of largeness and smallness, later brought to a comic point by Timon and Pumbaa) but I won’t. You get the idea.

That’s all well and good, but how does this apply to me?

Slow down there, buddy, I’m getting to it. As a game writer, your job is very different from the job of a movie producer or animator. You have to worry about the fun of upwards of eighty people, not just your singular viewer, and all of those people are not just watching the story, but enacting the story, choosing what direction it goes in. They ARE the story.

Doesn’t this make theme and thesis less important?

No, dummy! It makes them more important. If we as game writers want our players to have a good time (and we do), we need to provide them with a game that is fun to play. What makes a game fun? A lot of things, one of which is coherence. If a game takes place in a coherent world, filled with coherent ideas, it feels real, and it allows the players to lose themselves in it more fully. When a player loses themselves in the game world and experiences tragedies and triumphs that feel real, it provides a powerful, cathartic experience. It might even make them cry. This is fun. Trust me.

Two of a game writer’s most powerful tools in creating a coherent world are thesis and theme. Communicating a thesis and some themes to your players lets them know what you were thinking about when you wrote it and what your intentions were, so when they go off into your world, they won’t create something out of place. In fact, if you communicate your thesis and your themes effectively, they will actually go out there and make them stronger for you. A good game writer can get her players to write her game for her.

How? TEACH ME YOUR MAGIC, WIZARD.

Gladly! Let’s begin with the most obvious method of communicating a thesis:

Tell them.
Seriously. When me and Mike Grant and Josiah Mercer were running Apocalypse Camp, we came right out and said it. “These games are about the apocalypse. The world has a good chance of ending upwards of three times in these three games,” we said. Well, something like that. It was called Apocalypse Camp, after all, there’s no hiding it. So we came right out and said it.

For some game writers, this might be a bit too obvious. If you choose to go with the “tell them” method or not, there are other things you should be doing to communicate your themes and thesis.

Put it in your teaser.

If you choose to have a teaser (and why not?), it’s a wonderful way to get some ideas across about your game before your players are even at camp. If you want everyone to be sad in your game, make all the characters in your teaser sad. If you want the world to be full of adventure, make your teaser a fun, exciting action story. If you want everything in your game to be tinged with delirious, manic energy, write your teaser so it’s shifted just off normal in an energetic way. There are obviously a million ways to experiment with this, just remember that the teaser is the earliest introduction to your game that most people get. Use it well.

Put it in your production lists.

This is a huge one. If you want to be able to control the visual look of your game, you NEED to communicate well with the production departments (we have a blog post about that coming up, in fact). Humans understand things differently if you communicate them through the different senses. If you just tell someone something, they’ll understand it with their conscious mind (literally their forebrain), but if you SHOW them something, they’ll understand it with their unconscious mind (literally their hindbrain). For instance, if you want to communicate to your players that one group is snobby and entitled while the other group is down to earth and working class, put the first group in fancy clothes and wigs and the other in coal-dusted working clothes and bowler hats (or whatever the equivalents are in your world). If you want your players to understand that the Demon Crystal is evil, make it huge and black and spiky. If you want your players to know that a particular group of knights is not to be messed with, give them really huge weapons. If you’re having trouble communicating a particular theme or thesis to your players, talk to production about it. They will probably have some good ideas. They are very, very talented people who were hired specifically because they have a unique, well-developed visual sense (which is something that we, as writers, often lack).

Put it in your world background, group backgrounds, and character sheets.

This one is pretty tricky, but probably the most important. You don’t want to be too obvious about it, but you also don’t want it to fall completely by the wayside. Try making things implicit rather than explicit. What does this mean? In this case it means showing things rather than telling about things. One of the all-time great examples of thesis in a game was Brennan and Griffin’s game, Graduation Day. The main thesis of that game was “Magic is Dying, but Friendship Heals.” In running that game, Brennan never explicitly said the words “magic is dying”, but he let us know in a million subtle, clever ways. There were fewer magic users in the world than there had been in a long time. Many magical societies had already crumbled. The Gardenborne, a group that represented evil conformity and old seats of power, were gaining ground financially and influentially. To top it all off, the literal incarnation of Hope was literally dying. At the same time, it was very clear that the most important thing to our characters was our small, tight-knit families that we had constructed from the ruins of our shattered lives. The Academy was all about friendship as a group, and each character sheet emphasized the importance of our friends. By the time game started, we all knew what was up, but because Brennan had never explicitly said it, we didn’t know it with our minds; we knew it with our hearts.

Ultimately, what I’m saying to you is, every single thing in your game has to reflect your thesis, and as many things as possible in your game should reflect your themes. However, you should avoid saying it out loud, even to yourself. I have a playwriting professor at my college that says you should never write down summaries of your characters until you’ve written the whole play, because if you write down “ERIC: 23, architect, is in love with Ashley” suddenly Eric is dead, trapped on the paper. Eric’s love for Ashley will no longer hold any truth for you because you’ve tacked it down and examined it like a butterfly with ether and pins. I believe that the same can be true for game writing and your thesis and themes. At least while you’re writing it, allow the thesis to evolve and become full of meaning and complexity for you. Feel free to act more mercenary when you’re actually in the field. In fact, sometimes, a literally stated thesis can act as a lightning rod for a game gone wrong that needs quick rewriting in the moment. My point is, use these tools carefully, because they are powerful, and also so weak that you might break them without realizing.

Happy game writing!

Oringinal Post 12/11/13

Three Character Sheets to the Wind

Since we just had a conversation about characters, now seems like a good time to talk about character sheets. Character sheets are useful for some types of games, but in others they only serve to limit characters and gum up the works. How can we as gamewriters determine whether character sheets will be right for our game?

Are character sheets right for me?

Essentially, your game should have character sheets if you determine that there is information that needs to be communicated to a group of players smaller than their PC team, in order to achieve any of the goals of the game. Those goals might include making the flow of your game work properly, pushing any of your themes, or any other goal you might have.

If the information needs to be communicated to everyone, use your world background. If it needs to be communicated to a group, use a group background. If it needs to be communicated to part of a PC team, but not the whole PC team, even down to just one player, character sheets are the way to go.

But what should a character sheet have on it?

Good question. A character sheet should have everything that you want to determine about the character before the player picks up the process of developing him or her further.

That’s pretty vague.

I know! I’m about to go into some specifics. Stop being so hasty.

Character sheets often include biographical details for the character written in a prose style – things like the character’s name, where they were born, who their parents were, if they have any siblings, etc. Unless one of the characters relatives is in the game, or some biographical detail turns out to be a plot point in the game, this is flavor material.

WHAT?! But that’s like 90% of all character sheets everywhere!

That’s true. A lot of gamewriters like to give their players a lot of flavor to work with when creating their character. It’s important for gamewriters to remember that they cannot control every aspect of their game, as much as they might like to, especially in terms of characters. At some point, they have pitched the ball, and it is up to the players to catch it. It just depends on how much “spin” a gamewriter wants to put on the ball, as it were.

A character sheet MUST have what is necessary to make events continue to happen in the game, i.e. to make the game run. For instance, if it is necessary for some PC to know that she is the secret heir to an ancient queen, for the moment when the mystic asks if “any of you brave adventurers have royal blood”, that is something that must go on a character sheet. In a less structured game, where the plot depends on characters having goals and trying to achieve those goals, character sheets are essential for obvious reasons – each player must know their character’s goals so they have something to do in game. The same is true for the opposite reason: each player must know if their character has something to do with any other character’s goals, whether it’s to thwart them or help them be achieved.

But how do I write them?

Good question! Thank you for your patience.

When writing character sheets, it’s often helpful to have some kind of standard format – whether it’s something as simple as putting the name at the top and then a page of prose detailing a character’s life, or as complex as having five different fields that must be filled in with short phrases, or something in between. The more thought that is put in to the structure of your character sheets before you start writing them, the easier they often are to write.

For specific character sheets, it can be easy to lose track of the character concept you started with, as you get distracted with interesting bits of backstory and characterization. As such, I often find it helpful to try to sum up the character’s core or tone in a single pithy opening line, like “you’ve been hurt before, and this time you’ll get things right,” or, “you’re a woman on a mission, and nothing’s going to get in your way.” As in all things, while being artsy and experimental can be fun, clarity is vital to actually accomplishing your goals.

How about some examples?

You got it, buddy! Let’s start with a classic: Graduation Day. If you go onto the Wayfinder Experience Wiki article for the game, you will see that some brave souls saved and typed out their entire character sheets after the camp. This wiki, though tragically in need of some serious updating, is a great resource for gamewriters, by the way.

The character sheets written for Graduation Day follow a very simple structure: They start with the character’s shadow name in bold, then a field for the character’s age, also in bold, and then a field for the character’s real name. What follows is about a page of prose detailing the character’s life from their birth to the moment of the beginning of the game. This obviously gave players a lot to go on in terms of further developing their characters and their relationships to their teammates, and since the game followed a fairly standard diamond flow, further elaboration on their goals was unnecessary.

Other games have made use of character sheets with more structure. Auctoritas, the most recent Winter Game, had sheets that each had four fields: Name, Relationships, Wants, and Has. The first two are pretty self-explanatory. The last two were essentially lists of goals and resources. Since these formed the majority of the gameplay, they were extremely necessary to explicitly state. There was sometimes a short prose description of the character, when it was deemed that some of the goals and resources needed linking up into some kind of narrative, but most of the time, that was it. The players were set loose to create the kind of person they want to be, using information from the world and group backgrounds.

Most games we run do not make use of character sheets at all. Players are left to make up their character without any flavor information from the gamewriter. This is a completely legitimate way to write excellent, interesting games. Players are surprisingly good at picking up on flavor of your world and creating characters to match.

Whether or not to write character sheets, and what type and to what extent, depends entirely on the needs of the game in question. And keep in mind, these examples are only meant to provide a framework. Feel free to experiment, by all means. Good luck in your submissions!

Original post 1/10/14