I take a minute every day to check a few daily deal sights like woot.com and tanga.com (they often have good boardgame deals). Recently, gamerati has started doing one of their own, Loot, which is gamer specific.

The schtick, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is that every day they put up one deal, usually a good one. Sometimes it’s only ok, sometimes it’s fantastic, but whatever it is, it’s only one thing, and it’s only for that one day. Predictably, on most days it’s not going to be anything you want or need, but occasionally it’s going to be just what you want at just the right price, and that’s kind of magical when it happens.

So far, Loot has been a mixed bag. There have been a few cool things I didn’t need (like Gamer Paper and Iron Tyrants) but mostly it’s been games I’ve never heard of and don’t care much about. But today, they knocked it out of the park, and are offering such a great deal that I decided it was worth dedicating today’s post to.

Today’s deal, if you haven’t already gone to check, is a bundle of the Dying Earth RPG and two of its core supplements (The Kaiin Player’s Guide and The Scaum Valley Gazeteer), in print, for $15. That is a jaw droppingly good deal, so much so that I regret that I already own all three books.

For the unfamiliar, the Dying Earth RPG is a Robin Laws game (which, for me, is enough to sell it all by itself) based on the novels of Jack Vance. It is baroque, colorful and magical play with an emphasis on wordplay and style that is very much in the style of the source material. A generic version of the system is floating around out there as Skullduggery, and it’s slick, but there’s something fantastic about the source material that streamlining loses.

Anyway, this is a great deal, and if you’re reading this today, I hope you take advantage of it. Totally worthwhile.

I’ve restarted Dragon Age, and right off the bat I have to give props: there’s one big difference between the Warrior/Rogue start from the Mage start, enough so that it caught be my surprise even though it made perfect sense in retrospect. So far that’s already introduced a few new wrinkles into things. For context, my initial playthrough was as a male rogue without the bonus content (for reasons of connectivity). I’ve started a female warrior and male mage and have been swapping between them, though the mage is looking to be the one I play more of simply because I’m super curious about how elements of the game play out if you’re playing a mage.

The reason I’m so curious to see the game as a mage is that one of the big recurring points of tension in the game is between the templars and the mages. For those unfamiliar with the setting, Dragon Age mages are pretty powerful, enough so to be dangerous, and their power also makes them vulnerable to demonic possession (something which can be made more likely through the use of blood magic, which is high power/high risk). To keep them in check (and because the church dictates that mages should not rule over men), mages are cloistered in “circles”, isolated places that are part school, part prison. These circles are overseen by templars, whose jobs include hunting down rogue mages (“apostates”) and killing blood mages, as well as being wardens of the circle.

This is a great conflict because it’s wonderfully mixed. The mages are unfairly oppressed, but at the same time, the danger they represent is very real, and more, it’s a danger that there are few (if any) protections against. At the same time, while some templars are sympathetic to the mage’s plight or are genuine defenders, some of them are exactly the kind of bully boy nutjobs you’d expect in this kind of gig. One of the things the game keeps coming back to is that the current solution stinks, but no one has a better idea (and, in fact, you get to see the tragic end of many attempts to find a better idea).

As a final note, there are factors in play in Kirkwall (the city the game takes place in) which have escalated the usual tensions in a circle to an extreme, and they’re all nicely human ones, usually the reasonable result of one thing leading to another.

The end result is an unsolvable problem with immediate consequences and personal elements. That’s a beautiful combination, and one that you GMs out there might seek to emulate. Historically, we try to steer away from unsolvable problems for fear of disempowering players, but that concern is (paradoxically) diminished by making the problem big enough and putting it smack dab in the middle of things. Life is full of these problems (usually as a result of a difference between what people deserve and what can be done) and it feels false if your game does not.

But simply having these as big abstract problems is rarely very satisfying, either to a narrative or a game. What makes it work in DA2, and will hopefully work in your game, is that it’s a constant source of new (addressable) problems. Not only are these problems of immediate concern, each of them puts the (big, abstract) conflict in a personal, actionable, and usually choice-demanding way. When a mage runs away from the circle and you find him, you are making a real choice when you decide to return him or let him go. It matters to that mage and to other people involved, but it also says something about the bigger problem.

To round it out, the tensions that drive the problem come from people, specific people who you can talk and work with. In the case of Dragon Age 2, there are numerous templars and mages who all have strong views and actions to take that contribute to the bigger picture. No one person (even those in charge of the factions) can truly steer the iceberg on their own, but they all contribute [1] . These are the people you interact with for your specific, tactical elements of play (adventures), but because they all have a position relative to this one big thing, you can feel the context of your actions.

Now, obviously, I think this is a page worth stealing from DA2’s playbook for your own game, so let me add one last twist: this is not the only such problem in Dragon Age 2. In fact, early on in the game it’s greatly overshadowed by another, similarly unsolvable problem in the form of a small army of Qunari that have set up camp in the city. But when that problem comes to a head, it doesn’t magically solve all the other problems in the city. In fact, some things get worse, since one problem often keeps another problem in check.

For my two bits, this kind of tension, escalation and context have a lot to do with why Kirkwall feels more alive than many other fantasy cities I’ve played around in, and while you might not be able to bring the wonderful art or voice acting to your table, there’s nothing stopping you from taking the ideas and running with them. Find a problem that’s too big to solve, have it create specific, actionable consequences that reflect on the big problem, and have characters in the setting who reflect and shape the problem to give it a face. Then do it one to three more times, and see what you’ve made. If nothing else, you will probably find you’ve created and adventure generating engine, and that’s no small thing.

(back) 1 – One other very human thing – any given individuals ability to make things worse is usually far greater than their ability to make things better.

I finished Dragon Age II this weekend. I enjoyed it a lot, and will probably get around to reviewing it, but I’ll likely do another playthrough first. Partly this is because I like to re-playthrough Bioware games in general, but in this specific case it’s because the game REALLY left me feeling like the choices I’d made all along the way lead directly to the culmination of things. One of the reasons I really want to try playing it again is to see how true that is – will things unfold differently, or is it all just sleight of hand? I’ll say this: if the impact of the choices are half as real as they seem, Bioware has done something really magnificent here.

Playing the game also got me thinking about tabletop play, and I think there are a lot of lessons to take from the CRPG that could translate well into tabletop. First and foremost, the whole game is, effectively, a single urban campaign. The majority of play takes place within a single city and its surrounding locations. I love urban games, but I’ve always found them to be a real bear to run beyond a certain point, but this hangs together well enough that it really feels like it could just as easily have been one of the Plot Point adventures that Savage Worlds uses. Yes, there are a few random bits that might feel out of place (mugging seem to involve small armies) but the overall shape of it works very well. This is hard enough to explain succinctly that I’m going to have to chew on it for a while to create a useful set of lessons for people who haven’t played the game, but if you do play it, take some time to think about how well it would migrate to tabletop.

The big lesson, and the one that really stayed with me as I played, was how strong the story/roleplaying side of it was. The fights were fun and all, but Bioware (as usual) brought their writing chops to bear to create a situation full of well-motivated characters in conflict with one another and few clear solutions. Part of why I’m so curious to replay the choices I made is that the game goes to great lengths to make sure they have teeth. A lot of times games will offer you choices, but there’s one obvious good choice, and you only take the others if you’re curious. DAII had more than a few points where the choices were all bad – not in a punitive way, but in a way that made total sense to what has happened. Things like a friend passionately and honestly wanting to do something that’s a terrible, terrible idea: you can be loyal to your friend and back their play, or you can (in their eyes) betray them. How do you want to play it?

Oh, and for the weasels (like me) out there who try for the middle path of compromise all the time, thinking that’s what the game wants? Yeah, that might work. Or it might mean you get BOTH bad outcomes. You’re often better off making real choices.

But here’s the thing: they managed to do this with a game that is really about button-mashing ass kicking. The mechanical parts of your character sheet have only a minimum of interplay with these choices. And that drove home a point for me: it’s a cop out to blame a system for “not supporting role-playing” – hard choices don’t care what system you use. If you’re not making them in your play, the problem is not mechanical[1].

Now, to head off the obvious protest, yes, obviously, some systems have built in hooks to drive things towards hard, meaningful choices, but the reality is those are just tools to help get there.[2] The system can’t makes choices matter – at best it can force a pantomime of the act of making a hard decision. Choices matter because your game, at your table, either goes there or it does not. If the problem is that you don’t know how to go there, then fine. It can be learned, there are tricks that can help get you there. If you want to reach that point, you can do it.

But if you know how, and especially if you know how well enough to complain that X or Y game doesn’t allow it, then you need to take a hard look at your table and decide if the problem is that you can’t face the hard choices, or that you don’t want to.

And if you don’t want to, that’s fine. But cop to it, don’t blame the system.

(back) 1 – I am, I know, more or less equating good roleplay with hard, meaningful choices. That’s not all there is to it, and there are a lot of assumptions in there about what hard and meaningful mean, but by and large, I think I’ll stick by it.

(back) 2 – One other easy protest is that, as a computer game, it has an easier time pushing things to choices than tabletop, by virtue of things being on rails and choices being from a menu. The latter point is reasonable – tabletop offers you more choices if you’re creative – but the former carries less weight than you might expect. It would be true if the choices were arbitrary (and a few are), but when the choice is a natural outcome of the conflicts in the setting, then the only advantage the computer has is one of pacing, and even that is a tenuous advantage. If two people, ideas, forces or whatever are in conflict, then the computer only has one path for things to come to a head. At the tabletop, you have many more options for how that conflict may manifest, but so long as the opposing factors are robust, the problems _will_ come to a head.

I finished Dragon Age II this weekend. I enjoyed it a lot, and will probably get around to reviewing it, but I’ll likely do another playthrough first. Partly this is because I like to re-playthrough Bioware games in general, but in this specific case it’s because the game REALLY left me feeling like the choices I’d made all along the way lead directly to the culmination of things. One of the reasons I really want to try playing it again is to see how true that is – will things unfold differently, or is it all just sleight of hand? I’ll say this: if the impact of the choices are half as real as they seem, Bioware has done something really magnificent here.

Playing the game also got me thinking about tabletop play, and I think there are a lot of lessons to take from the CRPG that could translate well into tabletop. First and foremost, the whole game is, effectively, a single urban campaign. The majority of play takes place within a single city and its surrounding locations. I love urban games, but I’ve always found them to be a real bear to run beyond a certain point, but this hangs together well enough that it really feels like it could just as easily have been one of the Plot Point adventures that Savage Worlds uses. Yes, there are a few random bits that might feel out of place (mugging seem to involve small armies) but the overall shape of it works very well. This is hard enough to explain succinctly that I’m going to have to chew on it for a while to create a useful set of lessons for people who haven’t played the game, but if you do play it, take some time to think about how well it would migrate to tabletop.

The big lesson, and the one that really stayed with me as I played, was how strong the story/roleplaying side of it was. The fights were fun and all, but Bioware (as usual) brought really strong writing chops to bear, creating a situation full of well-motivated characters in conflict with one another and no clear solution. Part of why I’m so curious to replay the choices I made is that the game goes to great lengths to make sure they have teeth. A lot of times games will offer you choices, but there’s one obvious good choice, and you only take the others if you’re curious. DAII had more than a few points where the choices were all bad – not in a punitive way, but in a way that made total sense to what has happened. Things like a friend passionately and honestly wanting to do something that’s a terrible, terrible idea: you can be loyal to your friend and back their play, or you can (in their eyes) betray them. How do you want to play it?

Oh, and for the weasels (like me) out there who try for the middle path of compromise all the time, thinking that’s what the game wants? Yeah, that might work. Or it might mean you get BOTH bad outcomes. You’re often better off making real choices.

But here’s the thing: They managed to do this with a game that is really about button-mashing ass kicking. The mechanical parts of your character sheet have only a minimum of interplay with these choices. And that drove home a point for me: it’s a cop out to blame a system for “not supporting role-playing” – hard choices don’t care what system you use. If you’re not making them in your play, the problem is not mechanical.

Now, to head off the obvious protest, yes, obviously, some systems have built in hooks to drive things towards hard, meaningful choices, but the reality is those are just tools to help get there. The system can’t makes choices matter – at best it can force a pantomime of the act of making a hard decision. Choices matter because your game, at your table, either goes there or it does not. If the problem is that you don’t know _how_ to go there, then fine. It can be learned, there are tricks that can help get you there. If you want to reach that point, you can do it.

But if you know how, and especially if you know how well enough to complain that X or Y game doesn’t allow it, then you need to take a hard look at your table and decide if the problem is that you can’t face the hard choices, or that you don’t want to.

And if you don’t want to, that’s fine. But cop to it, don’t blame the system.

(I am, I know, more or less equating good roleplay with hard, meaningful choices. That’s not all there is to it, and there are a lot of assumptions in there about what hard and meaningful mean, but by and large, I think I’ll stick by it.)

Cam Banks, the brain in a jar over at Margaret Weis Productions, was pondering the future of games and cited a conversation where it seemed the desire was for “a unified set of RPG rules.”

Now, this was just a conversation, on the Internet no less, so it has just about the statistical significance of a gnat’s fart, but it caught my interest all the same. Follow RPGs for any period of time and you know that the demand for that unified ruleset is out there, serving as a holy grail for many would-be designers.

This is one of those ideas you buy or you don’t. I don’t, but I don’t hold it against anyone who does. The fact that I think it’s asking the wrong question is another gnat fart – more power to them for trying. My sole warning (and this applies to a lot of things): if you reach a point where you feel the only thing that has been missing in solving this big a problem is your unique insight, take that as a reason to re-examine your understanding of the problem.

Anyway, the reason that Cam turns this into an interesting discussion is that it speaks pretty directly to how Cortex Plus is positioning itself and attempting to address one common failing of universal RPGs – that a specific game can produce specific ends more effectively. The CP model, as seen in Leverage and Smallville, is a reasonably thin engine – just enough to tell you how to roll and read the dice and teach a few concepts – with a custom build to reflect the specifics of the game in question. Even setting aside my own fondness for Cortex Plus, this is a pretty smart model. Combine it with the fact that CP is one of the two post-4e game engines to really grab me (the other being Dragon Age) and you’ve got the formula for some good stuff.

Now, I’m not going to tout this as super novel. Frankly, it’s the model that White Wolf has been using forever, but without WW’s approach to setting. Nor am I saying this is a panacea – the reality is that as easy as it is to _say_ you just build on a light framework, it takes work. It is entirely possible to suck.

But what does intrigue me is the way the model creates a tiered structure. You have the core game, as held and owned by MWP, surrounded by a second tier of specific implementations (Smallville, Leverage). What grabs me is the third tier, the personal hacks, which are much more derived from the second tier than they are the first. That is to say, the core may remain important for communication and clarity, but the real fiddly bits are outside of it.

This is not to say that an industrious amateur couldn’t produce a tier-2 work. Such a thing will almost certainly happen. But for the vast majority of hackers, tier 3 is a sweet spot. They can pick and choose bits they like and add in only enough stuff to feel good about it. It’s like knitting without needing to make the yarn yourself. That’s a powerful place to be.

Will this stay interesting? I dunno. A lot will depend on what MWP does in the future and how they interact with the fan community. I have a lot of faith in Cam, but the future is fickle. But I’ll be curious to see how it goes since it’s such an interesting mix of classical and nouveau hacking that I expect very interesting things of it.

I am totally that guy who saves his RPGs regularly so I can go back and explore a different choice. I kept my thumb in the page of choose your own adventures too. I’m a completest, and I hate the idea that maybe I missed some interesting branch or event because of a bad choice early on, so I take steps to protect myself against it. I don’t think this is uncommon, though obviously it is a matter of degree.

Computer Games seem to be built on the same assumptions I’m making. Some of this is a function of the medium – if you can save and try something else, why wouldn’t you? – but some of it is also habit. We understand completion. Computers and computer interfaces are really good at expressing ideas like percentage complete, but more nuanced ideas can be harder to express within the medium. Most and least are easy, but fuzzy numbers are hard. Plus, for programmers, it’s stupid to build content to NOT use. Writing a game which a player will only experience a fraction of might be a great idea, but it’s a rough allocation of resources.

This point came to mind while listening to the excellent Walking Eye podcast featuring Ryan Macklin, John Wick and Eddy Webb. Unsurprisingly, it’s an great listen, but there’s a brief moment of talking about engagement in video games that left me chewing on my own experience and considering that the prices of a compelling narrative in play may be paid out of traditional gameplay rewards, and that price might be too high.

One of the hardest lessons in life is that everything you do is ten thousand things you don’t. This is an important thing to learn to understand yourself, and it’s also something important to understanding drama. A story that could only have ever gone one way is a poor start as a story, and dead weight as a game. Sure, you can get some mileage out of illusionary choices, or choices that exist solely within tight boundaries, but we’ve already milked those about as far as we can. If you accept that deeper, more personal drama in video games is a desirable outcome, then I suggest something more drastic is in order.

What is that something? If I had a whole answer to that, I’d be off in Austin making big bucks. But I have bits of it, and the bits I’m really staring down the barrel of is this: Meaningful choices demand that the paths not taken be rich, and doing that well demands a patience for waste and frustration which, I think, is far riskier than most game designers can afford.