End of the First Day

It is the end of the first day of design on the MCDM RPG and I’m thinking about two things. Flow, and the Null Result.

Flow

There was a point in our prototype combat between James’ Goblins and Hannah’s Tactician where James asked Hannah what one of her stats was. I think at this point we were imagining each stat was also a defense you could attack.

Earlier we imagined maybe Defenses are separate from stats? None of these ideas are new. We’re not trying to have new ideas just for the sake of having new ideas. I hate that. We need ideas we believe in, while accepting that there is no “right answer.” And if it turns out that “the idea we believe in” is a popular solution from other games? Well, maybe there’s a reason it’s a popular solution.

But by the time we had ideas for how the dice should work, or how they COULD work, and we were actually fighting a prototype combat, each stat was also a defense. You could use your Might to attack my Agility. It’s obvious how this would work. You can imagine it. If my Agility is low, it’s hard for me to avoid your attack. If your Might is low, it’s unlikely your sword will connect.

Makes sense! That’s nice. It’s easy to fall in love with complex ideas that have to be explained. But even someone who’d never played an RPG before would probably understand why having a high agility means it's harder for the tactician to hit you with their sword.

But it means the active player (in this case the GM, but the same problem happens when you’re a player) has to stop what they’re doing, turn to another player, and ask for some information.  “What’s your agility?”

This creates this annoying “stop-and-go traffic” experience. I’m trying to take my turn. My goblin is trying to do something cool. Can I just do it please? Can I just see whether or not it works, so I can narrate the result and move on to the next goblin?

No, you need to stop and consult other players who might be in the middle of a conversation, or out getting a slice of pizza or whatever.

Or you’re in the middle of doing your thing and a player wants to react to your action, hoping to stop it before it resolves. Counterspell!

Is this fun? In a game mostly about Fighting Monsters, the GM often has a lot to do. The player is only running one character, but you’re running ALL the monsters. With many different special abilities, you’re trying to remember them all, remember how they all work together. So you’re a bit pushed! And you just want to know…did this goblin’s thing work or NOT!?

The GM stopping what they’re in the middle of to ask the player “What’s your Agility?” does not seem fun. Why?

Because it interrupts flow.

Flow is a state of immersion in a process. You know what you want to do, you have the tools to achieve it, so you just follow the process and you get your result. Flow does not mean “every result is positive,” no. It just means “I have a process I can follow, I understand it, and it becomes fluid. It feels effortless.” It just…works. Figuring out “did I hit or not” becomes easy.

So how might this work at the table? In a fighting monsters game? How do we preserve flow?

Very close to the end of the day we thought…what if, instead of characters attacking each other’s defenses, your options in combat just all have different difficulties? Casting spells becomes about “how hard is it to cast this spell?” and “how good am I at casting?” Weapon attacks are about “how hard is this maneuver I’m attempting?” And “how good am I at fighting?” I know I’ve played games that work this way.

The target, aka your victim, can still resist or diminish the effects of your Cool Thing, but not the likelihood of success. Your target may have LOTS of ways to react to your success, but they can’t actually interrupt you while you’re in the middle of doing your thing.

This suddenly seemed very interesting. Now my turn is about how much risk am I willing to take on? Use the easy maneuver? Or the really hard one? My choice. But I do not need to consult anyone else. I don’t need to stick post-its to my screen with everyone’s defenses written down and then remember to update them whenever they change (which, given how often they change in some games, is a fool’s errand).

I can just…take my turn. Succeed or fail. I don’t know if this model is going to work. It has to feel good when you play it. But it seemed like a fertile area to explore.

But it immediately led to the next question. One we’d been batting about all day, but now the “I don’t need to consult you, to take my turn” model put it into the foreground.

What happens if I miss?

The Null Result

Missing, aka “I miss. I do nothing. My turn is over. Next.” Is profoundly unfun. It just sucks. Why?

Well, I think the real reason is NOT “because you failed to succeed.” No, I think it’s worse than that. You did nothing. You spend 20 minutes waiting for your turn, looking forward to it, imagining Dope Shit, and then it’s your turn and…nothing happens. It is unfun and undramatic.

I can’t imagine anyone enjoys this. So what, if anything, is the alternative?

I think for a while we assumed that having no Null Result just meant you couldn’t miss. Right? If missing is the worst thing that can happen, and everyone agrees it's unfun, and you just…delete that result, then all the results you have left are all different versions of “I hit.” Right? You could probably math that design to make it functionally equivalent to “missing x% of the time.”

But what if the worst result possible was “your enemy gets to do something?”

Ahhh! Hey! Hey that’s interesting. Sorta exciting actually. Actually…actually you know what it is?

It’s dramatic!

Now we have this NEW potential result. “The goblin gets to do something.” Oh no! We hates that!

With this new, dramatic, and BAD (but not necessarily ‘unfun’) result…we can delete the Null Result (“I miss, nothing happens, next”) and still have success and failure!

That felt like something. That felt like we might be on to something. Mind you, we haven’t tested this, or even really modeled it yet. We need to refactor our combat rules based on this, but I think we can do that in like 30 minutes tomorrow, and then test again!

Rapid Prototyping!

It Was A Long Day

But I think we got a lot done. We focused on rapid prototyping. No paper design, let’s focus on an actual battle. A 1st level Tactician vs a bunch of goblins. And that meant we learned a lot about our new game. You gotta start somewhere!

I liked one particular breakthrough where we wrote “1d12 = it is late in the battle” and “6d6 = I am high level” on the whiteboard. It’s easy to explain what that means and why we got excited but I’m just too tired to cover everything we talked about today AND write it all down AND get enough sleep tonight to do it again tomorrow.

Will there be a post every day? No idea. We’ll all find out together!