Monstrous horror is very rarely about what it’s about. It’s not that every piece of horror is explicitly a metaphor about something that you can point to, but there’s usually something going on that we can identify with that makes it resonate with us. No one is really worried about vampires, but we do fear disease (and we worry about sex). We don’t cower from tentacle horrors, but we all wrestle with the sense that the universe is an indifferent place that we can expect little kindness or understanding from.

A monster that doesn’t strike these kinds of notes is just a colorful description. It’s the literary equivalent of bad syfy cgi, bringing you Mansquito and his ilk. Most writers know this, but it’s easy to blow past in the desire for novelty, and that can even work sometimes. Splatterpunk has an audience after all. But the good stuff? It’s not about what it’s about.

This lens is the reason I’ve always had a certain appreciation for White Wolf’s games, though I never truly became a fan until the new Changeling came out. Through both iterations of the World of Darkness, they have been at their strongest when then games have not been about what they’re about.

Now, the obvious joke to make here is one about emo supers, and while I’ll concede that there’s some truth to it, I’m thinking in a slightly different direction. Take Vampire, for example – more than anything it’s a game about being on the inside. The vampires are the cliques who run things as we imagine them to be; pretty, petty and vicious. This is not a horror theme (though it has horror trappings), but it doesn’t really need to be.

Of course, it’s easy to punch a hole in that analysis. A game that seizes upon some other theme like alienation could still rock out, but the point is that it’s still grabbing another recognizable theme and using vampires as a way to explore it.

The reason that Changeling grabbed me so much was because of this. It’s a great story about fae and weirdness, but it sunk its teeth into me because it’s also about the people who *matter* in your life (or about being mad at The Man, but that grabbed me less).

I mention all this because I feel like WW has performed a magic trick with Geist, one which just knocked my socks off when I saw it. As with other nWoD games, there’s interesting cosmology and fun, dark, mystical things, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about the people who play in the World of Darkness, specifically twenty-somethings in group houses after college figuring out what they’re going to do with their lives.

Seriously.

Geist has turned a number of WoD assumptions on their ear, explicitly swapping out the vast conspiracy for a lose (and gothy) confederation of nerds and artists. Better yet, one of the essential elements of character creation is coming up with the group’s personal mythology.

There are a lot of other things I dig about Geist. The powers system may be my favorite of any of the nWoD games, and it builds on the foundations of really excellent products like Orpheus, but it is all left in the dust by the sheer magnificence of its undertone. A game about gamers that’s not about gamers.

I raise a drink to that.

One of the first computer games I ever played was a game on the VIC-20 called “Night Driving”. A black screen, with colored rectangles representing the reflectors on the side of the road. It was a celebration of the limitations of the platform – there was no way that computer could display anything like a real road, so it turned that weakness into a selling point. Now, It was hardly a great game – it’s other main selling point was that it was one of maybe 3 games available – but I always loved the sheer chutzpah of it.

I think of this sometimes when I look at runaway successes in literature, and I’m specifically looking at the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises, with a little bit of an eye towards Dan Brown. I look at those and one common thread runs between them: the manner in which they inspire nerdfury. Specifically, they’re genre books that are fairly indifferent to the rules of genre. You’d think that would be a problem, but I sometimes suspect that it’s actually a big advantage.

At the most obvious explanation is a trifle cynical. For any given genre, there are a certain number of people who are interested, and a vastly smaller number of people who care a whole hell of a lot. If you write for those enthusiasts then there’s a good chance that you’re not going to be too interesting to the larger populace because they’ve already demonstrated that they don’t really care that much.

A slightly less cynical explanation is that the basics of a genre are usually very quickly grasped, and it’s those basics that really matter. Sticking to those basics (whatever they are) is more likely to appeal. Moving away from them, even if it’s “more” into the genre, is moving away from what people came for.

There’s a nice lesson there – if you’re enthusiastic about a genre and willing to just use it to launch into a story you’re excited about, then there are examples of how well it can work. Naturally, some readers immediately want to point out that these examples of how things can work are reprehensible affronts against all that is literature, so we can just take that rage as a given.

Now, the counterpoint is that the more purely you serve a genre, the more you create an audience for yourself. The people who are REALLY into a genre are always looking out for something to serve their level of interest, and they constitute a pre-existing audience. You can do well by playing to that, even in a market as small as the RPG industry (some would say you are already doing so by writing RPGs but, hey, into every life a little recursion must fall).

The problem comes, I think, when the choice is not made, and you end up kind of half-falling into genre. If you make the choice consciously, you can work with it. If you make it accidentally then you’re a lot more dependent on luck than you are on your talent and effort, and that’s a pretty tenuous position.

Still stuck thinking about relative advantage, so I’m going to flesh that out a little bit more. Also, I’m home sick and a little bit loopy, so roll with it. Dragon Age seems to be proving a decent example of the benefits of a relative advantage type of system. You level up a fair amount over the course of the game (about 20-25 levels) and gaining levels can gain new abilities, but the increase in effectiveness comes out of those abilities, which do not improve so dramatically as the actual levels. That is to say, a 20th level character can easily deal with threats that a 1st level character would have trouble with, but the difference in their capability levels is not as broad as the difference in their levels suggests.

To translate this into 4e terms, imagine that every character in 4e “locked in” at level 5, so that their attacks, defenses and hit points were all fixed at the levels they were at level 5. Now imagine, however, that they continued to gain new powers as they leveled up[1] – this means that the difference between a level 5 and a level 30 character is entirely measurable in terms of what powers they have (well, and the base-attack damage bump at level 21, but I’m setting that aside for the moment). Now, this will definitely be a profound power gap – high level powers are definitely better than their lower level equivalents – but not as profound as it looks at first. The lower level powers don’t exactly suck, and higher level powers might be two or three times better, but that is a much smaller multiplier than the level difference would suggest.

But now imagine that’s the game you’re running, and what it changes. What does it now _mean_ to have a 25th level monster? It’s attack and defense bonuses, as well as hit points, should be keyed off level 5, but its damage is pretty much unchanged. It suddenly makes sense that a troop of pikemen is really dangerous, even to a high level monster, but that certain monsters (especially ones with abilities like damage resistance) are dangerous because of what they’re capable of. Elites and Solos becomes the really important currency because the bump in attack and defense can be more potent than many levels of powers (and with HP capped around level 5, they will thankfully die eventually).

This is the heir to an idea that some people tried with 3.*, of capping level advancement at lower levels to keep things gritty, and I think this approach serves much the same purpose. If you lock down early, then every +1 you can squeeze out of play suddenly carries much more weight[2], and a lot of feats and powers suddenly look a lot more interesting.

Now, 4e doesn’t need this. The way it handles NPCs allows for a lot of DM hand-wavery to just say that the town guards are whatever level they need to be, and sometimes that’s all you really need. I dig that approach in a lot of games, but I admit it rubs me raw in D&D – it makes the treadmill a little bit too apparent – and something like this lets me imagine the world external to my characters as fitting together in a way that suits my sensibilities.

Anyway, I think I’m feverish, so I dunno how much sense this will make, but I’m scheduling this to post because I’m hopeful there’s some nugget of utility to it.

1 – And better gear. But I am temporarily setting that aside for the moment because, frankly, the frustration that comes of tracking gear in 4e is such a profound thing for me that it probably merits its own post sometime.

2- I picked level 5 because the average bonus at this point is near 10, so it’s close to the balancing point between bonuses and dice being dominant. Given the way D&D works this is mostly just sleight of hand, but it’s something I instinctively gravitate towards.

Today was originally going to be more Golden Century, but twitter discussion lead to a realization that I really want to talk about something core to D&D 4E and how that interacts with power cards.

The appeal of power cards is obvious in play with 4e – the number of powers and their exception-based design makes cards an excellent bookkeeping method, at least on paper. But there’s a catch: the actual fiddly numbers make pe-produced cards impractical – even with the description of the power it is necessary to look up the character’s attack and damage modifiers, often on a case-by-case basis. This means that the custom-generated cards from the character builder are really the only option, and even they need to be updated and re-printed regularly.

The rub is that it feels like it should be much easier than this, but the breakdown is hidden under a bit of sleight of hand. The practical reality of 4e is actually pretty simple – if you’re fighting something of your level, then you’ll probably hit on an 11 or more and miss on a 10 or less. There’s some fiddliness within the range – a 15 or more should pretty much always work, a 5 or less should pretty much always fail, but it’s really not much more complicated than that, whether you’re first level or thirtieth level. If your opponent is higher level it might be a little harder, if they’re lower level it’s a little easier.

The bottom line is that it’s all pretty much relative. Because the attack and defense modifiers scale up at roughly the same pace, they’re almost irrelevant. You could dispose of most of them and couch things entirely in terms of relative advantage, and it would greatly simplify things.[1] But doing so would strip away the sense of advancement that comes from watching numbers getting bigger.

Relative advantage would allow for the necessary information to exist purely on cards. When people imagine using power cards, they imagine something akin to Magic: the Gathering (with good reason – it’s a great model), but that’s just not practical with 4e. The number crunching not only calls for data external to the cards, but it also keeps the cards themselves from having any kind of elegance to them – a lot of what makes the magic experience work so well is that individual cards can be quite simple, with the complexity emerging in play.

But what makes it so problematic is that 4e is so *close* to being card-able that it invites frustration when the reality differs so much from the expectation. Arguably, this suggests that the space exists for someone to create a game which does fill that niche. Warhammer 3e might exist in a similar space, but it’s a big space and there’s lots to done in it.

1 – So, imagine the baseline of hitting on an 11+ against an equal opponent, and cards (assuming monsters are also covered by cards) simply introduce modifiers on that baseline rather than requiring the tracking of persistent modifiers. A particularily tough monster might be at +2 to its defense, a mook might be -1. That’s the basic shape of a pure relative advantage approach .