I’m on my second playthrough of Dragon Age 2, and I’m trying to make it end differently than it did my first time, because while I “won” the game, I was unhappy with many of the events surrounding the endgame, and I have a very strong sense that at least some of it is a result of choices made along the way. There’s a huge, spoiler-laden post coming as a result of this when I finish (whether I succeed or not, because the experience has been fascinating to me) but one curious thing struck me last night while playing.

One advantage of forcing conversations down trees in a video game is that it can force the player to make a choice. There are only so many options, and the game doesn’t proceed unless you pick one. This can be heavy handed or annoying, but if well constructed, it can work pretty well. The problem, of course, is that this doesn’t really work on the tabletop. You can’t narrow down choices that way, so the idea doesn’t really transfer.

Or does it?

Bioware did a very good job of constructing their menus, and they did something that was sufficiently subtle that I missed it the first time through. In almost every situation where they offer a hard choice (such as supporting one person over another), they almost always offer the Gamer’s Option, which is the non-answer that avoids locking you down and leaves you with the maximum range of options available. In a classic play sense, this is the “smart” choice, because by the logic of gameplay (as opposed to the logic of the game) it is most likely to optimize your outcome.

There’s a less subtle version of this that’s common in RPGs that is often shorthanded as “always choose 1”, in large part because of how Bioware has constructed these conversation trees in older games. Option 1 is usually the nice or good option, and you can usually successfully make it all the way through a game by rarely choosing anything else. It’s pretty clear in play that DA2 subverts that – all good choices all the time has consequences too, some of them quite bad – but what was less clear to me is that they also seem to have subverted the gamer’s choice. The optimal-seeming, low pain, don’t offend anyone path may be there, but it is not necessarily the path to victory. On this playthrough, I’m taking more risks and choosing more sides, and I’ve been seeing good results.

I’m hopeful that it may pay off in the end. Maybe it won’t, though kudos to Bioware for making me try. However it goes, I’m taking this lesson to heart.

In my experience at least, the problem with presenting players with choices has never been the lack of an explicit conversation tree. I don’t want that kind of ham-fisted force. For me, the question is usually what to do if they don’t engage. The instinct is to push the choice harder and harder, but that’s counterproductive.

If you value hard choices at the tabletop, then it’s worth explicitly planning for “none of the above.” Give it meaning, but allow things to proceed if players choose that course. The goal is to move away from pushing the choice hard and creating a “You didn’t choose and I will punish you!” response in favor of a “failing to step up does not go unnoticed, and your protections as a protagonist don’t mean that because you don’t choose, nothing happens” sort of approach. Just as it’s important to put effort into offering good, meaningful choices, it’s worth taking some time to give them good, meaningful context, so that a non-choice carries weight too.

Remember that a choice is also an opportunity. Maybe an opportunity for something good, maybe an opportunity to prevent something worse. Either way, forgoing the choice is also forgoing the opportunity.

A GM can absolutely use this as a carrot or a stick in her game, but I think it’s more important to use it as an element of setting continuity. The choice comes and goes, and things happen as a result of it – what those things are should be impacted by the choice (or lack thereof), but whatever the choice, things will happen.

With this in mind, it’s worth making sure there’s some pressure driving the choice (or non-choice). With a few exceptions, leaving choices available indefinitely to players is a pretty boring path, since the absence of pressure removes any need to do anything but push the decision off as long as possible until it is either irrelevant, or a truly optimal route is discovered.

This, by the way, is something you can do at the tabletop much more effectively than video games. The nature of electronic play means that it’s often easy to put off choices for a long time while you run around and do sidequests, unlock secrets and whatnot. You have many more tools available for pressure and consequence, and it would be a shame not to use them.

More on lateral connections is coming, but I got sidetracked by a thought this weekend. Someone on twitter was talking about bringing “Roleplay” oriented mechanics, like Aspects, into 4e, but was worried that getting his players to RP would be like pulling teeth. I sympathize with this a great deal, so I just wanted to throw out a few observations about systems out there and what purposes they serve, in hopes of finding a toolset that might appeal to recalcitrant players.

First and foremost, if you’re going to do anything like this in 4e, you need to retool action points. As they currently exist, the limits on spending them make them poor rewards, so you want something that makes them easier to use more often. There are lots of cool ideas for this, but I favor using the model introduced in 3.x Eberron – each AP is a 1d6 that you can add to any roll after the fact. You can limit it to attack and skill rolls, or you can expand it to things like damage and saves – totally a function of taste. The only real limiter I would suggest is that they be a one shot thing – you can’t keep spending them 1 at a time until you succeed. Just spend however many as you like, roll them, and move forward (and if you really want, put a cap of, say, 5 rolled at once).

Making a change like that make it much easier to hand out AP rewards for whatever you want more of in your game. In this conversation it’s broadly “roleplaying” but it could be different or more specific. If you want to reward playing to alignment or engaging NPCs or even just following the plot, then you can do that. Just try to have a clear sense of what you’re rewarding.

(Plus, as a bonus, you can get some cool colored d6’s and physically hand them out as the action points, rather than using chips or tokens.)

Anyway, given that, I would strongly suggest against using Aspects in straight 4e, if only because they can cause too much whiplash. Invocations aren’t the problem, but compels can be a sticky wicket, especially since they can seem to be a tool for GM fiat or bullying. Some groups take to the idea easily, but don’t rely on that, since it’s very much a taste thing. You’re much better off with a less fuzzy mechanic.

This is one of the smart things about Leverage’s distinctions. For the unfamiliar, they either grant a d8 bonus or a d4 penalty and grant a plot point, which is structurally aspect-like. The big difference is that it is totally up to the player whether something helps or hurts. The GM might quibble about whether it applies (usually resolved by the player incorporating it into his narration more fully) but the player is choosing to take the penalty himself.

This is hard to map directly onto 4e as there’s no good standard model for penalties, but it’s still useful as an illustration – things that players might be uncomfortable with the GM imposing on them, they are often more than willing to do themselves if you give them the chance. To this end, it’s not unreasonable to put out _offers_ of plot points in return for bad or dramatic choices, nor is it unreasonable to reward players with PP when they do awesome things, but they will balk if you start telling them what they MUST do.

That said, some players still aren’t happy with the GM having his power, and one other option is to move the reward mechanism to the table at large. The most common model of this is “Fan Mail” (from Primetime Adventures) , where players give points to each other when they do awesome things. Generally, this requires some sort of method to keep the points straight, such as giving each player a budget, or putting a common bowl in the center and letting people pay out of that. That may sound simple on the surface of it, but since we’re assuming worst case here, you want to have some reason why players wouldn’t just optimally distribute points to each other (even though that’s pretty lame). One option, for example, is to have them grant them out of a common bowl, which the GM replenishes occasionally, with replenishment based on how many points remain, or how the points were distributed. In this case, you’re trying to incentivise using the points as intended, but if your players REALLY won’t, then you’re better off falling back on a simple reward model.

Alternately, you could use the trick that Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies uses. Players start the game with a small number of points, which they can use for bonuses, or they can give to other players when the other player does something awesome. If the GM agrees it was awesome (which he usually does) then the GM can match that gifted point with one of his own. That is the only way new point get added to the economy, so it creates a curious situation where generosity is the best way to reward the group.

Anyway, my general advice would be this: Get players used to the idea of d6 action points as rewards before you do anything weird with them. Give them out as reward for skill challenges or cool scenes. Get the idea that they’re rewards into people’s heads. Once you’ve done that, start being more explicit about what they’re rewards for. Tie them to specific things, like milestones or quests, but also give them out when a player makes the table laugh, or does something awesome. If they get comfortable with this, then things like fanmail or specific incentives using action points as rewards will not be much of a stretch. If they stay uncomfortable with this, then you know it’s not for your group. If they call it metagaming, then they need to spend less time on the Internet.

But the bottom line is that introducing in-game rewards (mechanical bonuses) for roleplay is, for many players, a non-intuitive leap. They’re different things, and the difference can be jarring. Far better to ease them into it and see if it works than it is to just throw them into the deep end and hope they swim.

Thinking about other characters and how they can drive play lead me back to a thought that lives in the same orbit as the thinking in my Getting Villainy Done post. The hang up I’ve been running into is this: games are full of things that are _interesting_, but just because something is interesting as a fact does not automatically make it interesting to *play*.

If you look at a random setting, it is probably chock full of color, and much of it will be compelling and, as a reader, really help you bring things to life. Griffon-riding mailmen! Elemental Zeppelins! Randian Cults! Whatever they may be, most of this information will be presented in a way that makes an interesting read, but very rarely in a way that directly suggests _play_.

This is, I think, by and large unintentional, or perhaps to put it another way, well-intentioned. The idea is that if the written material is reasonably comprehensive, then the GM is capable of extrapolating interesting adventure hooks from it. Cynically, this also allows for material to cater to more tastes, as a certain category of buyers doesn’t want adventure hooks, since those go outside the bounds of “How the world works”, which is what really drives their need.

The problem with this approach is simply that it allows for unhelpful writing. I won’t call it lazy, because I know it’s not – these writers bust hump to make things interesting and fun to read. But if the author doesn’t need to think about how the setting material’s going to be used, then she may not, and the net result is really interesting color that does little to nothing to drive play.

This problem becomes more profound when you start talking about lateral play. Players who write back stories have even less interest in playable information than setting designers. They often have deep piles of self-reflective information or arbitrary (and usually lame) SEKRITS that they absolutely won’t tell any other player about.

That’s not a terrible problem in its own right. Lord knows that’s how it’s always been. But this becomes a more pressing issue when you start thinking in terms of what playable information characters are going to have in their background. That is to say, players are well served by mastering playable information too, if only to help come up with character backgrounds that will actually engage other players, rather than be just another failed special snowflake.