Category: miscellaneous design rambles

“Fun” isn’t real and it can hurt you

(Fair warning, this one’s pretty much just an angry rant.)

So there’s a refrain I’ve heard a bit too often in game design spaces. “You’ve convinced me that it’s bad, but I’m still convinced that it’s fun.” Usually in regards to, like, “hey, this power gives the players a giant headache and screeches the game to a halt as they have to cross-reference several things and completely change how they approach the game”, or “hey, there is literally no way people have any impact on what happens here, so instead of supporting any interesting gameplay dynamics, you’ve essentially just made a gambling machine where the reward is how much you get to play the game”. So, y’know, serious, structural issues with the thing they built.

Thing is, the “fun” defense is… nebulous, at best. “Fun” pretty much means anything people can enjoy, ie, anything, and more specifically when making a game, it’s “the specific kind of enjoyment that this game is designed to induce in its players”. Now, the mechanical framework and flow of the game is how you induce that joy, so, a disruption to it is at baseline a disruption to that, but, you can’t really conclusively prove it won’t produce the brain chemicals, y’know? It might not enable any interesting player incentives, or it might enable actively perverse ones, but, what if that still feels good despite the structure of the game you’re making?

The trick is, that’s not really a useful response to feedback, nor does it actually help give a sense of where to go with a thing from there. If a thing doesn’t give much room for any interaction, or the interaction it incentivizes is fundamentally not good for the dynamic you’ve set up, even if that is fun for players, that means you’ve got a new headache of figuring out why. You’re trying to induce a certain experience in players, and the mechanical framework you’ve built up is supposed to do that – if you make a thing that doesn’t have interesting hooks in, and players enjoy that, that means you’ve gotta shift your framework so that this thing does hook in, and potentially change how the hooks work entirely, ’cause oh no, people aren’t enjoying that as much as this thing that’s a disruption to it! But, the thing is, I rarely ever hear this in response to genuine play feedback. This is from the ideation phase, when trying to think of ideas to fill out a content roster before giving them any testing. And usually, it’s said in resistance to the realization that an idea is not worth pursuing further.

(To be clear, this isn’t just the concept doing the defending. Designers are stubborn lots, and it always stings to have an idea that seems cool and then have it pointed out that it’s fundamentally not gonna work for the setup you’ve got. The impulse to reach for a defense is always gonna be there! The trouble is, it’s decidedly one of the easiest to reach, and it does bad things.)

“Fun” is, in game design terms, doing one of those linguistic tricks where it hides more specific and useful analysis. I’m a big proponent of analyzing player incentives with everything you make – including the incentives you’re relying on that drew players to your game in the first place. In a game where the pitch is being haunted by the ghosts of your past murder victims until you succumb to your guilt, it might sound “fun” to let you have a power that has a random chance to double-murder a ghost, eliminating it for good, but if players came for a story of clinging, eternal guilt, it’s not gonna be. And if it is fun for them, that means what “fun” is isn’t aligning with the original pitch, and you should reexamine that! If players do want the ability to fight back, then that’s now gotta be a part of the game concept, and one power with a random chance nobody has control over isn’t gonna cut it. Can you pivot the game to now being about managing to forgive oneself for one’s past misdeeds, and give the ghosts defeat conditions? Sure, if that would still fit what you want from the game! (Remember, sometimes the answer to players wanting something different like that is “that’s not what this game is going to be, it’s not what you’re looking for, you should go play something else for that”. Make a game to match a concept, but the players have to be willing to align with that concept, too, in order for them to play it right. Figuring out that concept and building for it is what this art is all about!)

What do they want, why do they want it, how can the framework be modified so that something like that can fit with it, should that be a thing they can get considering how it can change the gameplay and themes of what this game is. Those questions are very important to ask, and all are buried under the word “fun” in a most insidious way. When analyzing parts of a game, and when building them, you want as much perspective as you can, to see how the parts fit together and what can be discarded or turned. If you think a thing will be fun, but it doesn’t play well with the framework you’ve got, why will it be fun? That’s not a rhetorical question, it’s a serious one! Analyze and dissect the concept of fun until it’s splayed out in front of you on the anatomy table, and figure out what path of incentives and effects you want the thing you’re building to send your players on. If you conclude the worst, you can just set the thing aside and have it be the seed for a new project in future. Just ’cause you’re committed to the Silent Hill ghost-guilt here, doesn’t mean you can’t make a cool psychopomp-with-a-shotgun romp later down the line, if that still tickles your fancy! It’s just important to recognize that that should be a different thing.

One final note, which a friend brought up – the corollary to this, that because “fun” is a concept that’s more harmful than helpful to consider without elaboration, so is “not fun”, isn’t true. Much of the time, it can be – if you get feedback that an ability isn’t fun, your first step should be to examine what it incentivizes and how that plays with the framework at large, but, sometimes it isn’t that! Lancer, which is a D&D 4e-derived mech combat rpg, has one of the most elegant examples of this. There are two defensive ability types that come up I wanna analyze here – Resistance, which is just “whenever you take damage, halve the amount”, and Invisibility, which is “whenever you are attacked, there’s a 50% chance the attack misses”. There are many foibles and interactions that make these not quite analogous in expected result, damage that doesn’t come from attacks, attacks that deal damage even on a miss, attacks that don’t deal damage but do do nasty things on a hit, etcetera, but the short version is, hey, if you’re getting shot for X damage, the expectation value from having either of those effects is X/2 damage. Different dynamics, similar oomph. Sounds good, right?

Well, it turns out, no. Because everyone complains about Invisibility. Invisible enemies? Utter bastards, hate them every time. Invisibility-granting PC systems? Bane of every GM’s existence. Does Resistance have this same ire? No, of course not! The reason is very simply, if Invisibility does work on you, you lose everything you worked for. Did you unload a gun, or overheat yourself, or move out of position, to try to attack a target, only for Invisibility to mean the attack doesn’t happen? That’s all loss, no gain of any kind. You took a gamble, and you didn’t really have any control over that gamble, and you lost, and that just doesn’t feel good to people. If you’d gotten a half damage hit, that wouldn’t feel anywhere nearly as bad – because it means you get something. Brains like getting things when they try things, and get immensely upset when they don’t.

Now, is this a problem for Lancer? Not necessarily. Every attack has an attack roll alongside it, and while the math is intentionally shifted down so those hit more often than they miss, it still means every attack, Invisible or no, is something of a gamble where the loss condition is just “no forward advancement occurs from this action”. Having played Panic at the Dojo once, I have become infatuated with tactical rpgs where that isn’t a risk, and were I to make something like that myself, I would take cues from Panic in that regard, but Lancer isn’t doing that, and, that’s more than fair! It’s a game where that kind of gamble is part of how a lot of effects work, and that’s central to how it’s built to function. When you find out that something like that is getting consistent “this isn’t fun” responses from players, that can be your answer! But, if you’re making your own Lancer, and don’t know if misses actually add much to the game, and then get feedback like that? It’s something to consider!

So what was up with Champions?

So, I had a chat with my dad a bit ago, and, as our conversations are wont to do, it turned into ranting about tabletop roleplaying games. Specifically, as it had been on my mind lately, I expressed my retrospective bafflement at what exactly Champions, a superhero rpg that honestly doesn’t feel much like that, thought it was going for, when it so clearly did not capture anything that accurately modeled superheroics.

In response, my dad brought up a different game of the era, Villains and Vigilantes.

In Villains and Vigilantes, he explained, the characters begin as unpowered humans, and, they don’t know what powers they’ll get at the first session. They’re completely randomized, character creation is of the mundane stats and whatnot. This, obviously, makes it hard to plan things out or build up expectations, and, notably, it’s absolutely not an accurate portrayal of what superhero comics are like to read, nor does it mesh with a writer’s perspective of the same.

What it is emulating is the experience of the characters. Plenty of origin stories are things the character has no idea is coming, and, like, if you’d asked Peter Parker what superpowers he would imagine himself with, he probably wouldn’t say the athletic capabilities of a spider. Once that occurs, what you end up with is definitely not what superhero stories are like when there’s, y’know, a team of writers and a universe to create and play with that are planned around what is planned to happen, but that beginning step, the panicked confusion phase and awkward working out of how one’s powers work, that’s what it’s trying to capture.

Which brought us back to Champions. What Champions is trying to capture isn’t a character experience, but an audience experience. (I think those are the three obvious categories to fit things into – is this a thing that lines up with something the characters experience, something the audience experiences, or something the writers experience? Usually, it’s a mix, but it’s a mix with priorities and focuses.) Specifically, it’s going for the kind of audience experience that does distill superheroes down to a list of powers from generalized types.

It’s power-wiki fannishness. Who-would-win-in-a-fight fannishness. The approach of going “we’ll consider this person’s powerset to be Level X Energy Blasting, Level Y Energy Shielding, Level Z Physical Shielding, etcetera”. And, obviously, the upshot of this is you don’t really get something that fits the flow of superhero comics, and it especially stumbles into the problem that, lukewarm take alert, “who would win in a fight” is boring and dumb and the answer is, especially in superhero comics, always “whoever the plot/authors want to win”. So, this didn’t really increase my respect for Champions as a game. But it did make it more understandable to me, and, I think, for that as being the angle of what it’s trying to do, it’s not so bad at it.

This then came back to how we got on this topic. I’d been reading through Legacy, and was talking about some of its design decisions, and how while it looked pretty well-composed, it didn’t really thrill me to read. (Which is a far less tangible response, but, so it goes.) Being a writer, and as scornfully opinionated as I in his own way, dad presented his take on the various PbtAs he’s encountered as mostly being built from an authorial perspective, but, as he put it, a bad one. Specifically building things from “and then here’s what happens because it’s the plot beat this character archetype would cause”, like someone writing solely from having read tvtropes. I’m of the mind that this is a bit unfair, but, I do think it catches a bit of the thing with move design there – it’s making “here’s a thing that this character archetype does that affects the plot” into the explicit mechanics of it, and so the structure of the game and what approach it’s trying to emulate becomes building the arc of a story built around things like that. The comparisons to prestige tv writing have resonated the most with me there.

Cool! Now let’s talk about me

It’s been bandied about a few times, for good reason, the advice that to design a game you must capture the vision you’re designing for. What do mech battles look like and mean to you, and what parts do you want to emphasize? What about card games? Whatever your game’s premise, everything you mechanize is something you claim to be capital-i Important. I think part of the core of capturing this vision, as well as clarifying and extrapolating upon it, is determining the cocktail of perspectives it is from.

To use myself as an example, Draw Your Last, a game which is in progress but technically fully playable, is a card game anime rpg I’ve been working on for several years, and, at times, struggled with quite significantly. Specifically in this regard. What I’ve settled on, vision-wise, is in contrast with every other card game anime rpg I have encountered – there aren’t very many out there, but, there are a few interesting notes.

Specifically, most ones I encounter emphasize, as I aim to, the large thematic and motivational stakes present in any given card game. This is something that exists in all three perspectives – the writers must insert high stakes, often literal life or death, to give the card games “legitimacy”, the audience, similarly, is rarely there wholly for a play-by-play of card games, and the characters are obviously most invested in their own motivations being in conflict. Some of the games I encountered, one in particular, is there to construct a play-by-play of a card game – it operates one level of abstraction above simply building its own Yugioh-alike, and is explicitly made for the target audience of genuine card game players watching such an anime, those who would enjoy recognizing the specific strategies at play from a real-world card games perspective. This is, essentially, similar to what Champions does. It’s taking one section of the interest base, one category of fannish approach to a given subject, and saying, “here, this approach, this is what our game will be”. (I respect this choice of approach far more than what Champions aimed for, but, well, so it goes.)

One thing in which I definitely took a more authorial-perspective focus than any of the card game rpgs I examined were was the outcome of a given card game. In Draw Your Last, it is an explicit narrative certainty that the protagonist in a given card game wins. This is, generally speaking, how card game anime works. There are rare instances otherwise, at pivotal arc moments, and the game includes in the arc-building rules mention of how to construct such darkest-hour occurrences, but, from a structural perspective, that is the only context where such a thing occurs.

Obviously, however, from a character perspective, from trying to emulate fully what any given character experiences, the risk of failing the card game must exist. This yields something like the Villains and Vigilantes arrangement, where things do not go as a superhero story would, because, what happens in a card game with sufficiently drastic stakes, but then the hero loses? This must be papered over in some way to keep the story on its original track, but, doing so would be very inelegant, and so most card game anime rpgs I have seen take a concessional stance. This will not accept the grand stakes where heroes simply cannot fail, because, in the terms of the game, they can.

This is also one of those things I’ve seen come up in, like, tactical fighty rpg spaces. One of the easy GM issues to fall into is just not being prepared for what happens if the main characters lose, because in cool dramatic fight stories, when the heroes go off for a dramatic fight, usually, they win. This can depend from story to story, tone to tone, and setting to setting, of course, but a lot of the time for dramatic fights especially it’s common for less experienced GMs to end up floundering to avoid just having a game-over when things suddenly don’t go as expected.

Now, I’m a big proponent of “every outcome, every choice, in a given game should be worth making, otherwise why is it there” as a thesis. And to their credit, I’ve seen a lot of tactical rpgs put in work to communicate how to make the outcome of losing worth occurring, how to make it interesting if it happens instead of just “alright well I guess we stop playing now”. I do think it’s fair to include choices and outcomes that are conditionally bad, I won’t rail on Lancer for “I can pick talents for weapon types I don’t have and then have no usable talents” and whatnot, but especially for things like this, what possible outcomes of a given scenario, encounter, what have you, exist, they should all be, like, interesting and fitting.

And what “interesting” and “fitting” are loop back to the earlier thing – they’re entirely based on the vision, and the perspective, you’re building for! For something like the game trying to simulate actual card game play, having the outcome set from the beginning definitely would diminish that experience. But, hell, one of the core thesis statements I’ve been working under is that actual card games are boring as hell, and I’m trying to play to the experience of people who watch card game anime not at all for the mechanics of the card games, and, for that perspective, that level of simulation is absolutely a detrimental design choice! For someone who wants to build a game about superhero team-up episodes that emulates the classic structure of starting off with a fight and then teaming up once the confusion gets resolved, depending on what they want to focus on regarding the dynamic and tone shifts for each character involved, a “who would win in a fight” approach might grind it all to a halt, or it might be exactly what’s called for.

So… yeah! In short, thinking about what perspective and experience you’re trying to build for can tell you a lot about where to go with any rpg you make, and, it’s helped to parse a lot of design decisions I’ve found baffling in various contexts – usually because I absolutely do not share the perspective it’s built for! And that’s okay.

(Edit: The game being discussed was Villains and Vigilantes, not Mutants and Masterminds. M&M is a different superhero rpg with the alliterative naming scheme of Dungeons & Dragons. Whoopsie.)