I’ve been playing Bastion lately, and enjoying it very much. It’s a very pretty Xbox game with some reasonably fun gameplay and fantastic music and visuals, but what’s been keeping me hooked is the story it’s telling. Some of this is from interesting gimmicks, like a narrator who is very responsive to events in play, but some of it is because the story being told has absolutely captured me, and I’m curious where it’s going (it does not hurt that the story in question speaks right to some of the sensibilities that I like to bring to Amber). It’s not a long game, and I find myself playing it in only small bits to stretch out the experience.

I’ve been struck by how well the narration works to illustrate the relationship between the story and the game. This seems to be a result of the narration being in a true storytelling cadence – that is, one which speaks to the essentials of a story more than the details. To understand what I mean, consider the difference between the telling of a legend like Hercules or Beowulf to a modern fantasy novel. The old epics, designed to be told rather than read, might have as much violence or as many events as a novel, but they’re described in a few sentences rather than some number of pages.

This is, I should note, not a criticism of either legends or novels – both are awesome – but they definitely deliver the story in different ways, much the same way that movies or comics do so as well. What’s interesting to me is that most modern methods of storytelling tend to drill down further into the details because they can, and because they have the tools (Special effects, cool art, patient and well trained readers) to be able to do so. They take pains to make the scene interesting and compelling and – if all goes well – the scene reflects well up onto the story being told.

But there is a disconnect between that level of detail and the story. A master can smooth over that disconnect easily, but the seam is usually visible. A tale may have fantastic scenes but little real story or vice versa. The thing is that, as an audience, I think we are better trained to be forgiving of good elements/poor story than we are of the reverse (though it may also be a case where it’s hard to make a good story out of bad parts).

This, in turn, leads to some interesting shifts in perspective to the point where the details can _becomes_ the story, and that gets very weird because then the story is something very different than we’re talking about when we go back to King Arthur and Theseus and such.

If all this seems a weird set of distinctions, there’s a very concrete way to illustrate it – pick a movie or novel you like, then think about how you’d tell its story. You won’t be able to remember every detail, and even if you could, just giving a blow by blow is not a very good story. You’re going to drop details, smooth hings out and change focus so it’s interesting to your listener. Much the same way a movie changes for a novelization, you’re to change the story to tell it. Try is with Star Wars.

Anyway, this comes back to video games because the disconnect between the details and the story being told is MUCH broader than it is in something like movies or books. It’s not a total disconnect – the details (that is, the part you actually play) can feed back to the story, but usually only in highlights and details. But at the same time, the width of that disconnect means that there’s more freedom to actually tell the story without fear that the details will overwhelm it. Compare this to a movie: If you have a cool story, but make every scene awesome, it’s possible the scenes will be what people will take away. In a video game, making play more awesome does not intrinsically detract from (or add to) the power of the story. That’s pretty potent.

Now, some qualifications are in order. There are plenty of video games where the story follows a more traditional model, and which do so by making the gameplay experience more like a movie or book. Most modern RPG’s are like this, including some of my favorites like the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. There is art and skill to doing those right, but it’s familiar to me.

Wat has surprised me is how much story I’ve been finding in simpler games, ones which are much more about gameplay. Side scrollers like Braid & Limbo or fighting games like Bastion. Yes, absolutely, video game designers have used story as a coat of paint & spackle to justify the details of their games since forever. Some have tried to buck this trend by making the game into the story (think MYST) but it’s always been an odd match.

But now, as the games have matured to a certain point and there’s less of a need to desperately justify why the blue colored blob of pixels wants to kill the green blob of pixels, story has moved beyond mere explanation and started finding a home in surprising places. I’m pretty happy with this.

Sorry for skipping yesterday, and ditto for today. I wrenched my back working out, and sitting up to write is not much of an option. Should be back on track on Monday.

There doesn’t seem to be anything to link to about it yet, so I’ll hijack someone else’s coverage of the announcement. Short form, Margaret Weis Productions has announced that they got the Marvel license and that it will be a Cortex+ product. I should also add that I will be involved in the design process (as are a number of other really awesome folks).

One thing I want to note: MWP has announced what can only be interpreted as a very aggressive release schedule (16 products in 15 months) but that is not quite as crazy as it sounds. They’re following a particular model of releases which I think is very much in line with the material while also being novel in ways that I think will pay off very well.

Anyway, it’s not something I can really talk about much yet, but I’m excited about it, and optimistic. I have a great love of supers RPGs in all their various forms and shapes, and on some level I think you can argue that it’s the most essential of RPG genres – almost every game out there with powers and badassery and limited trips to the emergency room is some narrow slice of supers. Yet for all that, it’s a well that has a lot of potential to be tapped for more goodness. Or so I hope!

So, the 2011 Ennies were announced on Friday night. I watched most of it via live-streaming (thanks to neoncon) and caught the parts I missed via twitter. I greatly regretted not being there.

The flowchart held up decently well, but it’s clear I overestimated the power of WOTC. The reality is that I could have gone with a much simpler chart that was basically “IS PAIZO IN THE CATEGORY? THEN THEY WIN!” There’s a bit of a joke to it, but that’s kind of the reality. Paizo walked away with 9 ennies, and the only one which was silver was for Best Adventure, where they also took the gold. Now, I totally don’t want to bust on Paizo – they do great stuff – and it seems mean spirited to suggest that there’s any reason for the wins other than their quality, and so i shall not do so. Instead, I’m going to cheer them – it used to be that you had to handicap the ennies for several companies, but now it seems it’s just Paizo, and that speaks well for how well they’ve done.

Of course, I can say this without sour grapes, primarily because the Ennies were very kind to us indeed. Evil hat took home 6 ennies for The Dresden Files – Silvers for Best Production Values and Product of the Year, and gold for Best Writing, Best Rules, Best Game and Best New Game. That was…jaw dropping. I was hoping for us to take home a few silvers, maybe a gold if we were lucky. There was just so many good competition and I had expected to be beaten by Pathfinder: Bestiary 2 for Production Values (and we were), Delta Green for writing, D&D Rules Compendium for rules (that was the real breaking point for the flowchart), The Laundry for Best new game and Mutants & Masterminds for Best Game. I didn’t even expect a showing for Product of the Year (which we lost to Paizo, natch).

Were I a younger man, this would be insecurity talking, but the reality is far more about the fantastic quality of the Ennies slate this year. And with that in mind, even though it’s just for this year, I’m going to encourage folks to handicap for Evil Hat. We did great, and thank you all for your support. It means the world, and the best reward you can give yourself is to check out some of the folks we beat because, man, there’s real metaphorical gold in them thar hills.

Man, one thing leads to another, so here’s another sidebar about mook rules.

This was inspired by my reading of the new webcomic, Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, which is basically “Greg Rucka’s the Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies Webcomic” (which is a pretty cool thing). It hasn’t been going very long but the most recent strip reminded me very clearly of why I don’t like mook rules.

Aside if you’re unfamiliar: Mook rules are rules for handling the “nameless extras” in a fight, allowing large numbers of opponents to be put in play but be casually cut down by the hero. The term comes from Feng Shui, which is the daddy of this. Some people claim the less-than-1HD rules from AD&D are the basis of this, but the similarity is – to my mind – shallow and cosmetic.

You can go read it is you like – there are only 8 comics or so at this point – but to sum up, this is the point where we see the heroine kick the asses of multiple badguys at once without breaking a sweat. This is, theoretically, supposed to impress us with just how intensely badass and awesome the protagonist is, but in practice it tends to fall a little flat. Partly because it’s so blatant, partly because it’s so overused, it tends to feel like the author going “See! See!” more than anything which tells me about the character (which is, I note, an interesting contrast to the page before, which is both badass and says something).

There’s a trick that bad writers use to make a character seem smart – they make everyone around them stupid. This is a terrible, lame, dissatisfying trick and mooks tend to be the badass equivalent of it. By making the opposition so trivial that they are casually knocked down, you don’t make your protagonist look awesome, you just underscore how lame everything is.

This is not to say that mooks can’t be done well, it’s just that they’re often not. One of the magnificent things about Hong Kong cinema was that it made fights with lots of guys seem awesome when compared to the same number of guys fighting John Rambo. There’s a balance to strike – the opposition needs to seem dangerous enough that the protagonist’s triumph does not seem inevitable. This same is true of games.

Games use mook rules for a variety of reasons, but there are three big ones: Genre simulation, Bookkeeping, and reinforcing awesome. Now, I have no real beef with the first two. If you want to model Hong Kong cinema, you need rules to model the big fights. Similarly, if you’re playing a system where tracking a lot of lesser adversaries is cumbersome, a system for aggregating them can be a lifesaver. The problem is the last.

Mook rules rarely illustrate character awesome for the same reasons they can fail in fiction. Unless there’s a sense of real opposition, then it’s just a stylish pantomime. If that’s what you’re really looking for, then that’s fine, but I point out that you’re making a tradeoff to do it. Mook rules tend to do a great job of reinforcing the lethality of a system – hundreds of peopel get shot or cut down, after all! – but they often do so in direct contradiction to the way the rest of the system works. This is not a bad thing in its own right, but you need to realize that there is a cognitive cost in introducing such a clearly meta-gaming rule, and when there’s a cost, you better make sure you’re getting what you pay for.

Now, Chad Underkoffler challenged me to say how you handle Zorro, Inigo Montoya and Batman without Mook rules, and I think those are GREAT examples of other ways to think of th e problem.

First, Batman’s an oddball because there’s some question of which batman you’re talking about. Grant Morrison writing JLA Batman could fight a million ninjas and win but he wouldn’t have too because he’s ALREADY BEATEN THEM, but that’s the extreme case. Going with something like the Animated series, Batman can take on 3 or 4 thugs at once, but he’ll have a hard time of it. With that in mind, the only time he ends up in that kind of fight is when he’s the one getting ambushed. If he’s in control of the fight, he isolates enemies and takes them down one at a time (something easily handled by rules that handle difference in skill + surprise). If he’s outnumbered, he’ll try to break the fight up so he’s taking on few people at a time.

Zorro follows almost exactly the same pattern (and, in fact, has the same question – lots of Zorros out there) which is no surprise given the connection between Batman and Zorro. The main difference is one of flash – Zorro may face large numbers of opponents, but a lot of the whole swashbuckling, umping around, swinging on things and so on is that it keeps him from ever being in one place where he has to fight them all at once. The exceptions to this tend to be the cheesiest, lamest of fight sequences (such as when Zorro, surrounded by men with drawn blades, sings his blade in a wide arc, hitting all their swords and – by some dark magic – knocking all his opponents back.)

Inigo is the most interesting case. He can explicitly take on 10 guys (Maybe 20 – it’s been a while) because he’s just that awesome, though we could only guess what that would look like. The problem is, it’s clear he really sees that as a stretch – this is something that’s really freaking hard, possible only because of his awesome level of skill. He’s not casually dismissing the guards. Now, this doesn’t rule out mook rules – you could do it with mooks that are reasonably dangerous – but it doesn’t necessitate them. The same logic that we’ve applied to Zorro probably is equally applicable here.

Now, this does reveal something interesting – in all of these examples we’re really talking less about the actual fight and more about controlling the situation. It’s a somewhat different focus, and one that not all games necessarily support, but I think it’s a powerful perspective.

OK, I’ve gotten knocked off on a tangent, and I’ll stay on it for the moment. What the heck, it’s Gencon week, so things are weird anyway.

First off, feedback to yesterday’s post was fantastic. I want to thank everyone who weighed in. Lots of good thoughts, and the starting points of some solutions, I think. Going to percolate a bit.

But the fact that it spun off into Fate lead to me thinking about aspects, and some thinking I’ve had regarding them. I very rarely make concrete declarations about aspects because they are not terribly concrete. Oh, sure, there’s an idea there which can be used, but its borders and shape are quite fuzzy. This is, I think, very much a good thing. It’s the reason the idea of aspects can be so easily inserted into so many different contexts, but it also addresses a harsh reality of gaming – we’re a painfully inconsistent lot.

Nothing reflects this more than the rules for compels, and it’s no surprise that these may often be the most confusing or problematic thing for players to work with. Some of this is because they’re different than other games – players who are used to implicit limiters may balk at explicit ones, for example – but I think there’s a deeper, more essential issue.

So, one of the core principals of gaming in my mind is that bad things are going to happen to your characters. Some people object to this, but I’ll stand by it on the simple grounds that bad things are the basis for almost every interesting thing that can happen in a game. It’s theoretically possible to have a game where players just build everything up positively, but given the relative rarity of such games, I’ll stick by my thesis: Bad things happen in good games.

Given that, the next question is where those bad things come from. It’s entirely possible for the bad things to be random, capricious, or entirely external to the characters. This is fine, but it is my opinion that arbitrary bad things are less interesting that bad things which touch upon the characters in some way. This is not to say everything needs to stem directly from the characters – there’s a sliding scale – but I definitely gravitate towards character-connected badness.

That’s two value judgments so far, and here’s an important jumping-off point. If you disagree with one or both of those, FATE Is not going to be a very good match for you. It won’t automatically become bad as a result, but it’ll be like a pair of shoes that’s not quite the right size. You can still run and walk, but it’ll rub you wrong, and you might just want a better-fitted pair.

Ok, so given that, how do we find good ways to draw things out of characters? Rich backgrounds can do it, of course, but that’s a lot of writing and a lot of reading that no one really wants to do. There needs to be a shorthand. Advantages and disadvantages can do this, but they have a couple problems. First, they tend to have limited lists. Second, they tend to be dominated by mechanics. Some people may pick ads & disads based on flavor, but I don’t think I’m being unreasonable to suggest that they are most often picked for maximum mechanical benefit (for ads) or minimal impact (for disads). Yes, I acknowledge that you may be a special snowflake who would never do such a thing, but me? I _totally_ would. My GURPs characters and various point-build supers over the years are utter embarrassments.

So, obviously, aspects step into that niche. And, conceptually, they’re very straightforward – will it help you? Get a bonus! Will it hinder you? Get a fate point! But there’s a lot of fiddle room in there, and that’s where confuses emerges. Not so often for when the bonus is given, since that’s very straightforward – player asserts the aspect is appropriate by declaring it and if the GM doesn’t countermand or call for elaboration then the bonus is given. There’s a little room for debate, but it’s smooth going overall.

Compels though…that gets kind of crazy. On some level, it would have been easiest if we’d just been more draconian about it and let the GM say “No, you can’t, you’ve got that aspect” and hand the player a point. That may allow the occasional dick move, but it’s very clear. Unfortunately, that’s not quite how we roll. We really _like_ that moment in fiction when someone exceeds their limitations or defies expectations, and it was with that in mind that we included the idea that the player could step up, spend a point and say “No, this matters enough that I will overcome my limitation and press on.”

Nice concept, eh? But the “spending a point” bit really muddied the waters. People love their Fate points, and the idea of needing to spend one without getting a bonus is one that does not sit well on them, especially if they are inclined to see it as GM bullying or extortion. It’s with that in mind that a lot of people have adopted a model of making the compel an offer rather than a demand, allowing players to simply refuse to take the point (and thus refuse the compel). I’ve talked about these Hard vs. Soft compels in the past, and it’s mechanically addressable, but doing so kind of skips the underlying question.

The real question behind any compel is how the player perceives it. That is – how much does the player _want_ to be hindered by the things he declared important during chargen. Sometimes the answer is “not at all” and it’s important to be able to recognize it. Sometimes the answer is “All the time” and you’re likely to have problems with compelling these players because they’re going to be pre-emptively embracing their problems.

But the rub is, how do you make a mechanic that incorporates both of these players?

This, I should note, is part of why I stick with hard compels (ones that demand payoff ) simply to make sure that they have teeth. Provided my sensibilities are in line with my players (and I hope thye are) my compels will rarely be rebuffed because what I’m really doing with a compel is offering the player a chance to do the thing he would have done if he’d seen the connection between it and his aspect. Yes, if the player’s being a jerk and trying to run sprints with a broken leg, then I’m also using it as an enforcement mechanism, but I honestly couldn’t tell you the last time I’ve needed to do that.

And that’s where we come to the self contradiction. Through my embrace of hard compels, I am almost never put in a position where I have to use them, which is really the ideal space. That is – the best use of the tool is not not need it.

It’s a nerdy kind of Zen, but I’ll take it.