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

Casting a Mold for Empowerment

If you’ve read the previous entries here on the Story Board blog, you’ve already heard about empowerment, why and when it’s important, and even how to accomplish it. In this entry, we’re going to look into this last point in a little further detail: what goes into basic empowerment in our games? We consider here primarily your traditional empowering adventure story: when it comes to horror games, and some other kinds of advanced games, there may be other considerations, or empowerment itself may not be the central purpose, but for the straight adventure story and usual intro game, there are some important things to evaluate if you want to strengthen the impact of the game. To fit together every piece of a basic empowering adventure game, three layers have to be judged and designed: the challenges, the characters and the players.

Perhaps the simplest kind of empowerment is that of success. The simple feeling of accomplishment can have a hugely powerful impact. But, it’s not quite so simple as winning. Which sounds like a more impressive accomplishment: stabbing the world-dooming villain two dozen times, or traveling across the realm, collecting the six Crystals of Power from their ancient guardians, besting the trials of the Gates of Evil, completing the ritual to drain the villain of his incredible powers, and then stabbing the world-dooming villain two dozen times? The key to what makes a victory empowering isn’t always the significance of the problem you solve: often it’s the challenges you face to accomplish it. Even a small mundane task can feel huge, if it must be solved by hard and thorough effort. What makes a task challenging, then? Well, not so fast. A difficult challenge for one kind of character might be a flick of the wrist for another. What is challenging depends entirely on the characters’ abilities. But, there’s good news: you aren’t just writing challenges. You’re also defining the characters who will be completing them, and one cannot be considered without the other.

By building the challenges of your story and your characters together, you ensure that the two of them suit one another: the powers of the characters must be similar in scope to the requirements of the game, or the challenges may either be easy and uninteresting, or difficult enough that the PCs do not feel like it was their contribution which saved the day as much as it was the actions of an SPC or presence of a plot item.

Similarly, the challenges that the characters face must be the same kind of problem that they are prepared to complete. One of the most effective challenge-designing tools in our arsenal is narrowing who can solve it: If a character is one of very few people (or even the only person) able to complete a vital step in the story, no matter how small, then suddenly just picking a lock or relaying the message of a spirit can give a player a moment where they feel extremely important.

The Wayfinder Magic System is already designed with this kind of balance in mind. In addition to Rogues with lockpicking and Clerics with spirit magic, there are lots of other abilities that will allow one or a small group of PCs to serve as a vital hinge in the story, but only if the gamewriter sets things up for them: Rogues cure poison with their antidote; Artisans can remove hexes; Mages can Dispel Magic; and Clerics can speak with the dead. With a bit of creativity, almost any ability can be made into a vital tool to empower the small subset of PCs who selected it, such as a single Rogue with Escape Artist able to escape and free their friends when all of them are captured. Though don’t forget: if a vital plot point has a specific solution for a PC to provide, make sure you have an SPC able to solve the problem for those days when it happens that no PC takes the vital ability. (Remember, SPCs: always let the PCs solve a problem first!)

Let’s consider two perspectives of how one can build challenges to match characters, and characters to match challenges.

When it comes to game mechanics, Rogues’ array of abilities are such that they they almost always need challenges designed to their class abilities if they are going to feel useful or roguelike. On the small scale, this can be accomplished by something like a locked chest. On the large scale, the rogue-based challenge is a maze of traps, locks, and oblivious patrolling guards who must be snuck by, knocked out and trapped. In this particular case, it may be difficult to set aside the space and the flow such that only the right PCs are present to face the challenge, but when it can be done, it may make the most exciting heroics that one can set up for any Rogue PCs.

But this kind of challenge-to-character matching can extend beyond game mechanics and into story and background as well. When a group of heroes are said to be specially trained to fight a certain kind of monster that is widely known in the world, it doesn’t matter if their game mechanics and abilities are no different than anybody else’s: when they slay such a monster, they know in character that they were the ones with the training and skills to do it. Focusing this idea down to an even narrower point, you get the idea of a chosen one (or chosen few), making PCs fit the challenge not because they have the skills to fit the challenge, but simply because the story says they are destined to. This kind of challenge matching can be very effective and very simple, but one must be wary to keep the difficulty of tasks balanced: the use of story for this purpose runs the risk of an accomplishment being completed without a sense of effort (simply due to destiny), or even worse, of a character who is “meant” to accomplish a certain task actually being less effective at completing that task than other players in the game.

When it comes to presenting characters with challenges that suit their skills, it is possible to to push the bounds of the character’s expectations of themselves to make an empowering scene. While often it is frustrating and disappointing for a character to face a task which falls way outside their skill set, under some circumstances it can be emotionally intense and highly empowering instead. If a mousey, non-combative scholar is handed a weapon and told to go fight the dark lord’s armies, they may feel pushed around by the story, and forced to act against their character’s personality or abilities. But, if that same mousey non-combative scholar is presented with a situation where their loved ones are in danger, and they find themselves with the opportunity to take up a weapon to defend them, that moment of pushing beyond the character’s surface can make an incredible moment for the player. Pushing a characters’ boundaries is a tricky task to accomplish, which usually stems most effectively from a character having to decide for themselves to become something more, rather than a character being told to act differently by the story.

Throughout all of this construction of character and challenge co-design, we must remember that behind every collection of words, costuming and equipment is a player, and every player is different. To some extent, this is a problem of casting, not of gamewriting, to be addressed in the preparations for game and not the submission, but there are some things that are important to keep in mind even early on in the writing process.

Every player is different. Everybody has different interests, and different preferences, and everybody reacts to the weaving of the stories of games in different ways. If a game contains only one kind of challenge and empowerment, it might be very effective for some players, but not for many others. It is important to pick not just one venue of empowerment, but to consider several, and be prepared to cast players into the roles that they will get the most out of, not just in terms of personality-based interest in a character, but also in terms of the events that that character may go through over the course of game.

One example of this is spotlights. There is a difference between a character being important, and everybody else knowing that the character is important, and the latter isn’t always necessary to achieve empowerment. Sometimes being in the spotlight just makes players uncomfortable, and for some players just knowing that they were vital to solving the problem, even if others don’t realize it in game, is just as or even more empowering.

There are a lot of ways that peoples’ play styles can differ. Consulting your players, your surveys, and the counselors working the event can help you get a look at what kind of things you might want to consider modifying or expanding on in your story. In the end, this mostly means that you ought to include a variety of forms of empowerment in any game: it will strengthen the effect of the story for all of your players.

Gamewriting has lots of different elements, and empowerment, while very important, is still just one of them. If you picked any one post in this blog, and made it the centerpoint of everything you’re thinking about in your game submission, you would probably end up with a pretty lopsided game! This post, like most others, isn’t a list of hard and fast rules, but it is a collection of important ideas that you should definitely keep in mind when working on your story. What challenges will be faced in your story? How will your characters be prepared, or unprepared, to deal with them? And how does all of this suit the spread of players you’ll have lining up to be heroes and villains and everything in between?

Original Post 1/13/14

Written by guest writer Jeremy Gleick

Storywriter’s Guide to Dealing With Production

Being a storywriter is a crazy, exhausting, and magical experience. The magic lies in seeing a world and characters who have previously only existed in your head come alive for the adventure game. Having strong production for your game can transport the players to an unrecognizable world, full of beautiful sets, transformative costumes, and badass weapons. However, for this to happen you need to work with your Production department, which is not always as easy as it seems! Here’s a guide to dealing with us that will make our jobs easier and your game the best it can be.

BASIC TIPS:

-Have your lists completely finished before load-out from the office, AT THE VERY LATEST. This will always ensure that you get exactly what you want for game from the office. It’s okay to add in small things during camp, but allowing your Sets and Props staff to plan starting on or before the first day of camp can never go wrong!

Example: When already at camp, it’s okay to add a quest item – a golden cup or a bloody dagger. We probably brought those anyway or can make them quickly. It’s not okay to add a big scene, like a palace, or a big item, like a newly made dragon sword that glows red at night.

-Don’t be afraid to dream big. Don’t worry, we are more than willing to talk you down if you’re asking for something impossible. Tell us what your ideal big scene or awesome prop would be (before camp), and let us tell you whether or not we can make it. We are there to make things for your game and often having a challenge is fun and exciting! With big-ticket items, though, be they an elaborate costume or a large, complicated prop, be prepared for alternatives and always give Production advance warning. For us, planning is half the battle and things go better if they were planned before camp started.

-We are artists! Tell Production about your world, your story, and the flow. Instead of (or in addition to!) asking for ‘a room with a table covered in green fabric and candles’, ask for ‘an altar to the god of nature, who is a benign forest-themed god’. The more information and context we have, the more we can make sure the scenes fit your vision of your world. Once we know the specifics of the scene and how it fits into the context of the game, we can apply our creative energy to making it look awesome. Knowing what will happen in a scene or what will be done with a prop makes it much easier to make a good scene or a good prop. In general, err on the side of more information, not less, but be prepared to be flexible about specifics and construction. We will almost certainly have ideas that you won’t about the aesthetic of the game, just because it’s our job to approach the game from a visual standpoint. Which leads me to…

-Try to work out an overall aesthetic. Is your game medieval high fantasy? Arabian nights themed? Post-apocalyptic science fiction? It’s good to decide on an overall look for the game that can inform the sets and props as well as costumes and weapons. If you don’t have a strong feeling about how your game looks, talk to the Production head(s) and see if you can figure something out. Good questions to consider: what do basic colors signify in your world? What is the level of technology in your world? Are there any meaningful symbols you would like us to create? Is there a real world culture you could compare your game’s culture to? Do you want your game to look like a specific movie or video game?

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Tips for Costuming:

– At the beginning of the summer, contact the Head of Costuming Department (if they don’t contact you) so that they have the opportunity to do prep work for your game if necessary. Also check in with the costume head for your camp; some costumers have the skills to create or modify costumes during camp, but you need to have a conversation with them beforehand.

-Start off with an overall aesthetic for the world, different countries, or factions. Then, if you have ideas, get specific for the group descriptions. Color is a great place to start, but don’t depend on it! Descriptors like ragged, elaborate, geometric, militaristic, simple, layered, & regal will give your costumer a better sense for the “feel” of the group & will lead to more interesting costumes. When people are grouped together they usually don’t have to wear the same color! Feel free to add in pictures to describe the aesthetic. Don’t be shy about asking what you want for your game, but always prepare yourself to be flexible.

-Other good things to add to the costume list are:

* the status that SPCs should appear as (low, high, godly)

* any costume changes that happen

* which costumes are highest priority! Costumers often have to be flexible with the lists & never follow them exactly. Additionally, with the time constraints at camp it’s helpful to know what is most important for the game.

* on a similar note: any costume items that are plot important! Please include their use in the game.

During camp, changes can be made, especially when cast lists are changed. Just make sure the costume team knows as soon as possible!

If you are running a big production game, like sequential games (Legendary and Apocalypse camp), Finale, or Omega, consider basing the groups on the costumes that are available, not the other way around. This happened at Apocalypse camp this year and it worked excellently! For the alien group, the costume team set out the costumes & the story team used those as inspiration for the different races. If you involve the production teams in the game writing process, the camp will go more smoothly & look it’s very best. Once again, this is done best with early communication with both the Department Head for the summer, & the specific camp.

Tips for Sets and Props:

-Not sure where a scene should be? Ask us. Believe me, we are all pretty tired of setting up the main space at Ashokan as the main scene. Every Sets and Props head I’ve talked to about this has ideas for spaces we don’t use as much or ways to make them look new and different. The main space and dining room are tricky because the campers spend lots of time there and so it’s familiar – consider using spaces that we don’t get to see as much during camp, or put an unexpected scene in a familiar place.

-Technology is tricky. Even if they are small items, make sure to inform Sets and Props before camp about anything that uses technology. The lighting, speakers, and fog machine that we have at the office are generally the least reliable resources we use and sometimes require someone to start game late or not play at all in order to operate them. Basic lighting for scenes is not a problem; having a weapon that lights up when it tastes blood or creepy sounds that start when people walk into a room are more complicated and will happen more easily with advance notice.

To recap:

-Have your lists done.

-Work out an aesthetic for your game and individual groups. If you don’t have one, work with us.

-Communicate clearly before camp about any big items.

-When meeting with us, err on the side of giving us too much information about the items that you want.

-Drink water! (unrelated but important)

Original post 1/16/2014

Guest writer Molly Ostertag

A Good Tease

So this year we’re bringing back teasers as a requirement for game submissions, which means it’s time for a crash course in the whys, hows, and which-end-ups of making a good game teaser!

First, the basics: what the heck is a teaser? To quote our Gamewriter’s Glossary, a teaser is “a short story, document, poster, video, or just about anything else that serves essentially as an advertisement for a game. They are generally distributed online before the camp the game is to be played it, to help build hype and interest in the game. They are also usually exhibited before or at the start of Intro to Story to get the players excited for that workshop.”

Alright, sounds good! But how do you go about building that hype? Well, there are a lot of different approaches to teaser-making. The main thing you want to decide as you set up your teaser is how much information you’re going to reveal. Teasers fall on a spectrum of information. At one end you have things that are incredibly cryptic, and work by giving the audience a lot of questions they want answers to. At the other end, you have teasers that spell out the premise of the game, which work by letting the audience know what kind of game they can look forward to. Both are totally valid options! It’s also possible to release multiple teasers for a single game, running the gamut of options. I’m going to run through the teasers I released for Ghosts of Eden, Winter Game 2011, each one doing a different style of teasing.

Establishing Tone

The first teaser I released for Ghosts of Eden was this sweet poster. Check it out! I think it is pretty neat. The kerning on the title is messy, though. Dang. But it’s pretty dang minimalist. Not a lot of content going on there. What do we actually learn from this poster? Not much! Space, I guess? What looks like a tiny space station floating between the Earth and the Moon? And that’s pretty easy to miss on a casual glance. So what we have is: this is probably a sci-fi game, on the darker end of serious. Not much beyond that. It does have the most important info, though–the game name, the writer’s name, the rough date, and the website URL. That way people who see the teaser can follow the link and hopefully go register!

Mostly this poster exists to establish tone. Isolation, mystery, the empty vastness of space. These elements made up the core of the emotional tone for the game, which I wanted to establish early to get people in the right mindset. It’s pretty far to the “no information” end of the spectrum! But that’s probably okay, as it was a teaser released way early. It could also be posted all over the place–we put this up on the website, on the forums, at the top of every survey. It gave things a nice coherent identity!

Establishing Setting

Next up, I released a series of news articles, one every few weeks leading up to game. Each one focused on a different element of the setting, introducing ideas and elements of background that would be important to the game. None of them gave the full premise of the game, but each was packed with lots of information. Close readers could figure out even more about the game’s elements, but still nothing spoiler-y here.

The news stories also introduced important characters like Adrian and Sam Branson, putting them in the minds of players well before Story Intro. At this point we’re somewhere in the middle of the information spectrum–players know a lot about the world of the game, plenty of background, but nothing yet about the game itself.

These teasers also showcase a common teaser format, the in-setting document. Other common in-setting teaser documents include leaked emails, found footage clips, wanted posters, journal entries, and so on.

Introducing the Premise

Finally, a week before game, I posted this video online. Assembled from actual Virgin Galactic ads and some footage filmed on my balcony, it pretty much spells out the whole premise. Adrian Branson has launched a human-habitable space station! A whole bunch of super-smart teenagers from all over the Bay Area will be going up to visit it as the first people there! Get hyped!

Of course, it still didn’t include the minute one twist (all the adult chaperones dying the minute they arrived on the station), but it still got people thinking about who they’d be, what the station would be like, what they might get to do there. At this point, people getting teased have a reasonable idea of what to expect from the game. By the time people arrived at camp, if they’d been following the teasers, they’d be pretty jazzed for game! It is important to remember, though, that not everyone sees the teasers, so you can’t rely on them to convey info to your players. Anything vital in your teasers should still be gone over at Story Intro. (Or just showcase your teasers at the start of Story Intro!)

The Narrative Moment

The one major teaser format I didn’t use for Ghosts of Eden happens to be the most common one–a short scene, written out in text. These can fall just about anywhere on the vague-to-infodump to spectrum, be short or long, and can even come in multiple parts. All the same questions still apply, though. How much do you want to reveal? What questions to do you want to leave your readers thinking about?

An important thing to include, no matter what your teaser format, is what makes your game unique. Why should players be excited about your game specifically? Not every teaser needs to spell that out, but if your teaser is about a shadowy dark lord scrying on a heroic band of adventurers, that’s not really going to catch anyone’s eye.

That was what Dylan and I had in mind when we wrote our teaser for Factory Town. The setting itself at first brush was pretty generic–wizards and warriors and demons and faeries. But the backstory and pitch made it a lot more unique than that, as well as the focus on the bleak tone of day-to-day life in a small industrial town. So we chose to foreground those elements in our story teaser. This was also our only teaser, so we wanted to make sure it really conveyed everything we needed it to!

Teasers 2.0

It’s also possible to do something entirely new and experimental with your teaser! Done right, you can build a whole lot of hype and blow peoples’ minds. Done wrong, no one will even really notice what you’re doing. That’s what happened with my failed attempt at a teaser for Weapon of Choice, Operation Starfall. I attempted to run an Alternate Reality Game on tumblr, with people playing the members of a secret organization dedicated to fighting some of the villains of my game, but despite the best efforts of my SITs to promote it, no one really wound up playing along. I didn’t establish any kind of link to Wayfinder until a month into the game, by which point no one was really interested. C’est la vie! Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did, if you try something new and cool.

Bringing it all Together

There are a whole lot of options for what a teaser can be! It can be a poster, a piece of text, a video, or something weirder. It can be a short story, an in-world document, or just an abstract promotional piece. It can establish tone, introduce the world, or give the full premise. How much you want your teaser(s) to reveal is entirely up to you! Your goal is to get people excited, and there are a lot of different ways to do that. Make sure that whatever you do, you end it with the game’s name, your name, the event it’ll be played at, and the Wayfinder URL! A teaser’s not doing any good if no one knows what they’re being teased for!

Remember too that you can have as many teasers as you want! You only have to include one with your submission, though. Feel free to have it be a simple narrative for now, and if you have plans to do more elaborate teasers, make a note of that. We love teasers!

Finally, here’s one more sample teaser, my favorite one I’ve made to date, a video teaser for Quinn Milton’s Music Box (Penultimate Camp 2009).

Happy teasing!

Original post 1/5/15

The Big Finish: ending your game

“GAME!”

The shout goes up and everyone cheers and collapses into hugs, eager to tell their friends stories of their epic adventure. But hold on, let’s wind back a few minutes–not far, just a few–how did we get here? Today we’re going to talk about one of the hardest parts of gamewriting: endings.

Like all stories, every game has to end somehow, and there’s an art to it. In this post I’m going to lay out some ideas as to the philosophy of endings, run through the various types of game endings, talk about some common pitfalls to avoid, and give you some practical pointers.

Philosophy of Endings

So what makes a good ending? What makes an ending satisfying? Think of your favorite story climaxes, grand finales. They’re a summation of everything that came before, everything that built up to that point. The hero confronts the villain. The traveler accomplishes their goal. The tragic atoner finds redemption. Endings bring together the themes, setting elements, characters, and goals, combining everything into a grand climax.

The unifying idea underlying all of these endings is that they revolve around two things: choice and change. The protagonists make a choice about some kind of change, and then strive to enact that choice to see the change made manifest–or not! Of course, those ideas run through just about every part of most stories, but the ending is the moment when that choice is forced and the change is determined. This is absolutely true of Wayfinder games, or at least the ones with satisfying conclusions.

“Hold on,” you say, “what are my day camp PCs choosing to change when they defeat Dark Lord Maximus?” In most Intro Games, the villain is the one seeking to change the world (usually by conquering it), and the PCs are making the choice to reject that change and stop it. To enact their choice, they’ll have to confront the villain and prevent them from manifesting their change.

Many game endings are more complex than that, with less literal changes. In advanced games, characters are often fighting each other over different ideas of change. Sometimes they’re changing the world, sometimes they’re changing themselves, sometimes they’re changing others. Often it is only through the act of self-sacrifice (choosing to change oneself) that the players can emerge victorious. Even heroes who seem to emerge from their journey unscathed have had a drastic change of perspective, which is why returning home after an adventure can be so difficult (see: every fairy tale ever). Some games are more about personal change, and others are more about changing the world–both are totally okay, but you should have a clear idea about where in that philosophical spectrum your game falls, and that should be reflected in your game’s final choices.

Games with satisfying endings foreshadow that choice throughout. That might mean telling the PCs up front that they’ll have to choose, or it might mean showing examples of similar choices. It’s important to give an alternative choice, otherwise it’s not really a choice at all, is it? In the case of intro games, that often takes the form of making it clear exactly what the villain’s victory would mean for the world.

It’s also important that the PCs understand their choice. If the players make a choice that they think is right, but then in a twist find out that the choice they made is something totally different, they’ll come away unsatisfied, with a bitter twist in their mouths. It’s possible to do this well if you’re doing it intentionally, but in general you should be pretty explicit with your PCs about the choice they’re making, and its consequences.

What Actually Goes Down

Alright, with all that philosophical mumbo-jumbo out of the way, how does your ending actually play out? What do the PCs actually do? Let’s run through a few different common types of endings.

The Final Battle

Probably the most common ending type! The two sides gather up, give some speeches, then charge and have an epic battle. Last one standing gets to call game! More detail on this later, because there’s a lot to be said about final battles.

The Ritual

Everyone stands in a circle and says some stuff in unison. We joke about these being overdone, but they’re used so much for a reason–they work really well. It allows everyone to participate, it can be beautiful and moving, and it forms a nice parallel to the intention circle we start every game with.

The Rescue

Someone or something has to be rescued! Grab what needs to be grabbed, and get outta dodge. This is often a component of or motivation for a final battle.

The Escape

EVERYTHING WILL EXPLODE! BOOK IT! This is tricky, because you need to give yourself a set destination to jump to. The docks? The helicopters? The train?

The Philosophy Debate

Let’s choose our fate! This is common when there’s an object of great power, and everyone disagrees on how to use it. These can be important, but often get bogged down in mechanics, bickering, and can be hard to draw to a satisfying conclusion, especially when a single answer has to be reached for the game to conclude.

The Choice

This is similar to the Debate, but more individual. Some people have to do a thing, and others don’t. Who will step forward? This includes moments like people volunteering to stay behind to guard a tomb forever, using up their lives to power a spell, returning to the human lands, or giving up their magic forever. Each player has to make the choice for themselves.

The Redemption

Someone (or something) messed up! But they now repent, and are offered forgiveness for what they’ve done.

The Departure

The time has come for us to leave this place, and we will do so. Everyone bids farewell to the world they know (or the world they’re visiting), and gets on the boat/steps through the portal/etc.

The Adventure Continues

We’ve finished this quest, but another awaits! Prepare yourselves, everyone, because we’ve got plenty more work to do. Done poorly, this is an unsatisfying cliffhanger. Done well, this is an exciting open-ended quest hook, that gives the players room to imagine the next chapters of their characters’ lives.

Everybody Dies

The chained god is unleashed, and everyone is consumed in fire for all eternity! The bomb goes off, and everybody dies! The monsters eat everyone! This ending doesn’t happen very often, but it… does happen. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes less so. It can be really cool, when done well! Last year’s Golden Blade ended this way, but it came about because one PC made a choice based on the way she had changed during the game, so most players came away satisfied.

Something Else Entirely

There are probably more and weirder ways to end a game, that haven’t happened before, or that I just forgot about! Push the limits, experiment!

Bringing it All Together

As you were reading through these, you probably saw your game’s ending in half a dozen of those. That’s totally reasonable! Few games end with just ONE of those endings. To make a good ending, feel free to mix, match, and combine from those. It’s not at all unreasonable to have an ending in which the heroes have an epic final battle with the Big Bad, then after defeating her, take her powers away in a ritual, after which she is redeemed, and the heroes must then depart back to their homeland. Totally reasonable ending.

The important thing is that the elements of your game have led up to this point. The players should feel like they’re using what they’ve learned and accomplished over the course of the game to pull off this finale. If they acquired artifacts, have those be useful in a big ritual! If they got sweet new powers, make them use those to defeat the villains! If they were forced to have intense moral dilemmas, bring those up again at the end!

It’s also vitally important to keep momentum going into and throughout your ending. An ending should be a big rolling climax, that sweeps up the PCs and carries them into a grand finale. If you have big plot twists, reveal them before your ending or after it–but not during. A big twist will cause momentum to grind to a halt as people react, and as information spreads through the PCs. It might seem like a cool idea to have your villain be dramatically unmasked mid-climax, but the reality of it winds up being a little impractical. It’s hard enough getting PCs to focus on their quests, and keeping that focus throughout an ending is even trickier.

The Grand Showdown

On that note, let’s talk about final battles. They happen in most games, but as often as not people don’t put much thought into them. Why not? Make your final battle interesting! Don’t just make it a bunch of people with swords fighting one big tall person with a monster weapon. At the same time, though, an overly complicated final battle can dissolve into incomprehensible chaos, which is just as unpleasant for the PCs. Here are some things to consider as you think about your final battle.

Balance. How big is the villain’s army? How many people have they recruited? Who has more powers? Do you want your PCs to feel like epic heroes rolling in and overwhelming the villains, or should it be a desperate and dangerous contest? Do you want to give your Big Bad unlimited spellslinging and tons of protections to make them a bigger threat? Or would you rather give them more backup to give the PCs more people to fight?

Objectives. Consider giving your PCs specific goals within the larger battle. This can be a fun way to make specific groups feel empowered. Does each PC team have a dedicated enemy they have to overcome? Will all the monsters respawn indefinitely until the Kaiburr Crystal is destroyed? Do the rogues have to smuggle a bomb onto the enemy’s shrine?

Tactics. Are your PCs a rag-tag band of heroes, or are they an army? What about your villains? What kinds of battle plans are the characters to use? If your PCs do have specific objectives going into the final battle, make sure they know exactly what they’re doing and how to do it, in order to avoid more and bigger chaos.

Length. How long do you want your final battle to last? Should it be a brief climax in which the PCs murder the villain? Should it be a long, knock-down drag-out brawl that leaves everyone exhausted? Should it happen in multiple stages, with changing objectives? This winds up mostly being a question of balance, but is still an important consideration on its own.

The End Button. What determines when the battle is over? Is it when the Big Bad falls, or do the last few monsters need to be mopped up? You should make sure there are one or two people who are standing by, ready to yell a lot and gather everyone as the battle reaches its climax. Transitioning into the wrap-up is a place where a lot of final battles lose their momentum.

Now, with all that said–it’s still totally okay for those questions to have simple answers. There’s nothing wrong with ending a game by having the PCs roll in swords drawn, stab the heck out of a person in a black cloak, and then celebrate with a cheesy speech. Of course, if your final battle is PC vs. PC (as occasionally happens with advanced games), then you need to give these questions some very serious thought, especially the last one.

Multiple Endings

“Hey,” you say, “I have this sweet super complex advanced scenario game, where all my PC teams want totally different things! How do I pull that off?”

Hoo boy, what a big can of worms. LET’S OPEN IT AND DIVE IN.

It is totally possible to write a game with multiple possible endings–it’s even possible to have a bunch of them happen simultaneously! Here’s how you do that. First of all, figure out what each group wants. What do they want to accomplish? What is the change they want to see enacted? Is it a personal change? A political one? A global one? Now, how do they go about accomplishing that? What is the practical way they can achieve their goal in-game? Do they send a message? Perform a ritual? Kill someone? What steps do they need to do to accomplish that?

Once you’ve figure out what your different groups are trying to do, figure out what specific thing they can do to trigger endgame. You generally want to make sure this is something that involves lots of people! A common trick is to have them need a certain number of people to complete their ritual, or need to get everyone to agree on a thing to do something, or kill an entire enemy group to satisfying their blood god. That way you don’t just get a group going off on their own in the woods and calling game.

But hold on, what if they do? What if that’s not the worst thing in the world? It’s actually totally possible to have your different groups have goals that aren’t mutually exclusive. I’ve run games where one group accomplished their goal, decided they were satisfied, and called game for themselves, while the rest of the game did something totally different for the ending. That’s totally fine! It’s up to you to decide if your multiple endings are mutually exclusive.

You do need to make sure that everyone does get SOME kind of ending, though. An easy to make sure this happens is to at some point force everyone to gather at the same place. Maybe each group trying to achieve their ending needs to use the same altar for it. Maybe there’s a crystal that everyone needs, but can only be used once. If you want your groups to fight over whose ending reigns supreme, this can be an effective way to do it.

Branching narratives and multiple ending possibilities are really tricky to juggle, but if done well, it’s one of the most intense ways to empower your PCs. If they feel like they were the ones to bring about the ending of the game–and they’re aware that it actually could’ve gone differently!–they’ll feel awesome afterwards. But of course, then you run the risk of disempowering the PCs who failed to cause their ending. It’s a tricky art, and there’s no one tried-and-true method! Good luck, though.

Common Pitfalls

There are lots of ways to have an unsatisfying ending. The most common one is to just have a lot of people miss the ending! I was once in a game where someone grabbed a few props and ran into the woods with two people, and then came out of the woods five minutes later having called game. Uh, what? Turns out he was secretly the Big Bad in disguise, and had a nuclear bomb waiting in the woods, which he detonated. Well, that was sure thrilling. In order to avoid this, make sure your ending can’t happen unless a large number of PCs are present! Sometimes that can require a bit of silly shoehorning (especially if it results in your villains delaying their ascension ritual indefinitely until the PCs show up to interrupt it), but it’s still necessary.

Another common issue is when the PCs don’t actually understand the ending. This can take a lot of forms! Maybe they don’t get who the Big Bad is. Maybe they don’t really get who they’re supposed to kill in the final battle. Maybe the twist hinges on some big secret that was revealed while they were in the bathroom. Maybe your philosophical choice gets too esoteric and goes over the heads of the ten-year-olds. While some of these aren’t really your fault, you should do everything in your power to spell out the ending for the PCs, both during the leadup to the climax and in the resolution of it. Sometimes that can be a little ham-handed, but better that than the PCs coming away confused and unsatisfied.

It’s also very easy for endings to lose momentum. People get caught up in debating what to do with the crystal, or whether or not to execute the Big Bad for their crimes. Suddenly everyone has an idea about what to do, and people are bickering, and the focus is gone. The best solution to this is to have one or two people whose job it is to make sure things keep moving. Sometimes that means the leader who keeps the discussion moving smoothly and brings things to a consensus… and sometimes that means the angry militant who’s going to get bored of talk real quick and just resort to weapons. Either way, it’s better than just standing around waiting for plot to happen.

A common rookie mistake is to have your ending totally revolve around your SPCs. The PCs sit back and watch while their SPCs beat the evil SPCs! Then the SPC gives a sad speech and dies dramatically and the PCs cry. Okay, sure, cool, but what did the PCs actually do there? Did they fight a few monsters maybe to clear a path? Booo. Make sure the PCs are directly involved, and are the ones making the choice! If you’ve currently got some SPC sacrificing their life/magic to seal the Big Bad, consider–why not have a group of PCs do that instead? Much cooler.

An Ending to Endings

PHEW. That sure was a lot of words about endings! Let’s see if we can sum all that up…
Satisfying endings usually center on a moment of enacting choice in order to manifest or prevent change.

Figure out how to have everything in your game build up to your ending, so it doesn’t just come out of nowhere.

Make sure things keep flowing smoothly and that momentum doesn’t drop as your game ends.

Final battles are crazy and chaotic and awesome! Put some actual thought into how yours goes.

Be sure to think about who actually triggers endgame buttons, and how those play out mechnically.

Ensure that however your game ends, that ending is primarily PC-driven! It’s okay to have SPCs providing guidance, but your PCs, as always, should be doing all the work.

If you’ve done all of those things, sit down, pat yourself on the back, and then hit the submit button on your game! Are there things we left out? Further questions? Our askbox is always open! For now–good gamewriting, friends.

Original post 1/13/15