Something Completely Different: Making Competing Players Powerful–Issue

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It’s not the project at hand, but I haven’t been able to get my mind off of the idea of “reinforc[ing] the players’ feelings of might, prowess, and general awesomeness” when the players are directly competing. How does one create a situation wherein both players feel good about themselves and what they’re doing, even when someone is losing?

Legal analysis says that we shouldn’t just wander in the woods trying to answer this question. Instead, we need to define the issue carefully and find out what the relevant rules are.

As we cast the issue we need to be specific about the situation we’re dealing with. The answers might be different for games played by two people, for three people, for two people cooperatively, for asynchronous play over the internet and simultaneous play on the tabletop, etc. Knowing the limits of whatever answer we come up with is important.

Since this is a miniatures game, let’s assume that we have two people playing against each other on a tabletop. That has at least three advantages:

1. Having the players set against each other makes the question harder–and, I suspect, more interesting.

2. Allowing more than two players leads to tricky balancing considerations which could distract from the project as time goes on.

3. Two players against each other in a real-world, synchronous match is the classic setup for a miniatures game. Being traditional isn’t a good enough reason by itself, but if this game is similar to others from a macro-level perspective it gives us some points of reference and examples for comparison. Again, the goal is to focus on specific ideas and innovations; it’s not necessary or desirable to start from scratch in every area.

With that in mind, the issue can be framed as:

How can a two-player competitive game reinforce both players’ feelings of might and prowess, where the game is played synchronously in the real world?

(I omitted “general awesomeness” as a feeling because it’s not very descriptive–we’d end up with a whole new issue of what “generally awesome” feels like. I’m pretty sure that if the players feel mighty and like they have great prowess, they’ll feel generally awesome.)

The more I get into this the more interesting it becomes. Both players have to feel strong, but they’re facing each other IRL in a competitive enterprise. It’s a situation rife with opportunities for one player putting the other down, and we have to build them both up. I love it! Let’s talk rules next time.

Theory: Make the Right Choice the Default, Part 2

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Last time‘s post was about why having getting up slowly be the default in Street Fighter 4 is a problem. Briefly, making players input a special command to get up fast–which they will want to do virtually every time–is more a rote action than an interesting decision. It makes players feel bad when they know what they’re supposed to do but something goes wrong and they fail. New players are hurt especially badly, because they have to divide their energies between learning the strategy of the game and mastering this uninteresting-but-important skill.

Making the better choice–getting up quickly–the default resolves these issues. It removes the false choices that sound like they might be an opportunity for strategic decision-making but almost never are. It eliminates the “feel-bad” moments, since the game’s design now prevents the player from fouling up something basic. New players have one fewer hurdle to clear before they can get into the interesting aspects of the game.

This doesn’t mean that getting up slowly must or should be eliminated from the game entirely. To the contrary, giving players the choice to stay down in the unusual situations where that could be useful can lead to interesting gameplay. Making quick-standing the default, and slow-rising the special maneuver requiring extra player input, retains the strategic option for the rare situations where it’s intersting without the problems that slow-rising-as-the-default brings.

Seeing this rule applied in other contexts really brings home to me how important it is. For example, the League of Legends character Volibear has a special ability wherein, when he is near to being slain, he gets a second wind and regenerates a great deal of health. LoL is designed in such a way that Volibear will virtually always want to activate this ability when he is in a bad way; is is very, very unusual for Volibear to be in a situation where he would want to hover near death to save this ability for another moment. (Off the top of my head, if a teamfight just ended in an ace the Voli player might be happier backing with the passive intact and healing at the fountain–but it would probably still be better to use the passive and push for an objective. Sorry, back on topic.) If not activating this ability were the default, Volibear would suffer from the same problems as SF4’s slow-rising: false choices, player frustration, unnecessary burdens on new players.

Fortunately, League’s designers did it right: they made Volibear’s second wind completely automatic. When it’s available and called for, it just switches on. The opportunities for strategic choice about whether or not to regenerate were so limited that the faux decision was removed entirely, with a net positive effect.

Compare this with League’s “Barrier” ability. Barrier protects a player from some damage, but it can only be used once every few minutes. There is an actual decision to be made about whether or not to use it, even when one’s health is low: if a fight is going badly, it might be better to accept defeat and save the ability for later. Moreover, even if you know you plan to use Barrier the exact timing matters; since the Barrier only lasts for a few moments, you might want to hold off until you become the focus of enemy fire. Hence, it’s often better not to use Barrier–and indeed, that is the default.

SF4 and League of Legends demonstrate that it’s not enough to give players choices. It’s also important to think about how players interact with those choices. If the game makes it hard for players to choose correctly, it will be harder to play. It might even be aggravating! When there’s a consistent right choice, just make it the default so that players can move on to more engaging decisions.

Theory: Make the Right Choice the Default, Part 1

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I love fighting games–Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, King of Fighters (especially ’98 and, for all its warts, ’03), Virtua Fighter, Capcom vs. SNK 2, Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The change list for Ultra Street Fighter 4 came out recently, and it reminded me of something I saw a long time ago–a design rule that I think makes a lot of sense but that many games, especially fighting games, get wrong. If a given option is almost always the right choice, it should be the default.

Street Fighter 4 is a good example of what happens when the default is the less-desirable option. For those not familiar with its genre, SF4 is a two-player game in which each player controls a single martial artist. The players use their chosen martial artist’s kicks, punches, and unique abilities (e.g., breathing fire or throwing rocks) to defeat opponents. SF4 is fun, popular . . . and has a somewhat silly way of handling players knocking each other down. It makes it hard to get up fast and easy to get up slowly.

In SF4, as in most fighting games, it is almost always best to get up as fast as possible after being knocked down. This is for two reasons. First, it gets the knocked down player back on offense more quickly–and being on offense is how you win. Second, and perhaps more importantly at high levels of play, the time a player spends knocked down is time the opponent can spend repositioning and setting up his or her next attack. Minimizing that opportunity is very important.

There are rare occasions when staying down is good. If the opponent comes at you with an attack that will meet you as you rise, it might be advantageous to stay on the ground. The attack will pass harmlessly over you, and then you can get up and counterattack. However, these situations are unusual; in most cases it’s still best to stand quickly and use your full arsenal of martial arts maneuvers to deal with the attack. (Fighting game aficionados will understand me when I say that you would rather quick-stand and DP.)

(Unless it’s a cross-up, in which case DPing might be wrong, but you still don’t want to be down, you want to get up and block backwards, since being down doesn’t stop them from continuing the block string and just turning it into a meaty.)

(OK, sorry, back on topic.)

SF4’s mistake is that it makes getting up slowly, which is almost always wrong, the default. If you get knocked down and do nothing, you will get up slowly and be at a disadvantage. Getting up fast, which you want to do at least 95% of the time, requires an extra joystick motion done with precise timing.

The fundamental problem with this is that it doesn’t make the game more interesting. Since you should do it virtually every time, it’s just adding rote behavior. Get knocked down, tap down as you hit the ground to quick-stand. It doesn’t even sound interesting when you say it!

Having slow-standing as the default also leads to what Mark Rosewater calls “feel-bad” moments. It’s entirely possible for a player to know that quick-standing is right, try to do it, and fail. Missing the input just makes the player feel embarrassed and frustrated. Since fighting games are often played online, where internet lag can cause the game to think an input was mis-timed even when the player did it correctly, these “feel-bad” moments can occur with substantial frequency.

Last but not least, slow-standing as the default makes the game harder to learn. Fighting games are not easy to play. They involve enormous execution barriers–it’s hard for a new player to get the fire-breathing and rock-throwing to happen consistently. Clearing those hurdles is only the beginning, because then the player is ready to start the real journey of learning fighting game strategy. That could be a book unto itself, but suffice it to say that to play fighting games well one must make split-second decisions in an environment of uncertainty. Saying to a new player “by the way, on top of everything else you need to tap down 95+% of the time when you get knocked down” is pretty rough.

I love SF4, but I can’t deny that it suffers from all of these issues. Quick-standing is a rote element of gameplay. I feel bad when something goes wrong and I miss it, especially when it seems like lag was the cause rather than an error on my part. It was a checkbox I had to spend time filling before I could “really” play the game.

OK, so the way SF4 does things isn’t ideal. Why is quick-standing as the default better? I’ll talk about that Friday.

 

Something Completely Different: Design Rules

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With the current playtesting project underway, I feel like it’s safe to talk a little more about the idea of a Dynasty Warriors-themed miniatures game. Playtesting can be somewhat grindy; a mental break can only do us good. 😉

If we were to pursue this game, the first step would be to come up with the core rules guiding the design. I can’t imagine not starting with:

1. The decisions must be interesting.

Part of the original idea was to use the game’s elements–its rules, its components, its play, everything–to put across emotion, much like how authors use words and sentence structure. That kind of guiding principle deserves to be a rule:

2. All aspects of the game must help convey an emotion.

In that formulation Rule #2 is question-begging: what’s the emotion in question? If this is a Dynasty Warriors-esque experience, there’s only one good answer:

2 (revised). All aspects of the game must reinforce the players’ feelings of might, prowess, and general awesomeness.

(Wait, this is really interesting–how do we reinforce competing players’ positive feelings at the same time, given that one of them is probably losing? So tempting to spend time on this . . . this is why it’s dangerous to work on other projects during playtesting! 😉 )

That wasn’t all the game was trying to do, though: it was also trying to create a sort of story arc. I don’t feel qualified to delve into what a “story arc” is, but I feel comfortable saying that a three-act structure counts.

3. The game experience must involve three acts, as in a three-act story.

I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds like a lot of fun to think about.

The Case Study: Playtesting Update

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Following up on the current effort to playtest the “end run” strategy:

I’m currently playing the non-end run games. Once those are done I’ll go back through and use the same setups to play the end run.

I’d be happy if the playtesting were going faster, but doing the experiment right has meant slowing down. Normally I can easily finish a solo game of Over the Next Dune in 30 minutes (which is useful information–it’s the kind of thing that goes on the side of a box!). Unfortunately, the extra record-keeping involved in recording the setups makes the games take significantly longer. As a result, it’s harder to fit them in around other obligations.

I’ll come back to this topic in two weeks, hopefully with final results.

Theory: Why Do People Play Magic?

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One of the great things about Mark Rosewater’s articles is that not only do we get a window into his design thinking, we also get a window into the market research Wizards of the Coast benefits from. Most of us can only speculate about why players do as they do. WotC has answers backed by data.

Among the conundrums WotC set out to solve is “why do people play Magic: the Gathering?” The results are fascinating, and I’ve found that they’re informative for other games as well. If you’ve ever run into discussion of “Timmies” or “Johnnies” online, and wondered what people were talking about, this is the answer. If you haven’t, I would still encourage you to take a minute to look Mr. Rosewater’s article over. It’s a classic.

The Case Study: Updated Rulebook

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It’s been a little while since I updated Over the Next Dune’s rulebook. I know I hate it when I open a game, read its rules, and then find out that in order to really know how to play I have to hunt down a bunch of additional notes and clarifications. My apologies to any new readers who have found themselves in that position!

The rulebook below incorporates the change requiring three adjacent player tokens for a rescue. It also includes some wording cleanup and formatting fixes. Having the diagram showing what numbers are associated with what searcher facings all on one page should make it a lot easier to read . . . .

Over the Next Dune – Rules – 4-15-14

The Case Study: Player Abilities

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Lots of cooperative games give players unique abilities. In Forbidden Desert, one player might be good at carrying extra water while another can dig buried players out the sand faster; in Shadows Over Camelot, King Arthur allows the knights to coordinate while another (maybe Gawain?) gains bonuses when fighting off Mordred’s siege engines. These abilities provide some extra replay value (since which one you get changes from game to game) and can open up some interesting decisions; should the water carrier hang out by the oasis and concentrate on topping off the other players’ canteens, or is it more important to have him or her go help dig?

Over the Next Dune has been in sufficient flux that I haven’t wanted to spend too much time putting in abilities. In fact, I’m not sure whether the final version of the game should have them at all–“they’re standard fare in cooperative games” isn’t a good enough reason. However, they’re fun to think about.

Implementing these is tricky because it would be easy to undermine the cooperative aspect of the game. One of OtND’s design rules is that the players must need to work together. Giving players more capability might end up allowing them to “Rambo” their way through the game by their lonesome.

Below are five abilities, one for each player token, which I think at least pass the “does this blatantly undermine the cooperative nature of the game” test. Feel free to give them a go. No promises–I haven’t playtested these at all. They’re just fun notions.

1. “Hey, Over Here!”–When a player token would be captured by a searcher, you may instead center that searcher over this player token. This player token, and any other player tokens covered by the searcher, are captured. Direct the searcher “down,” toward the starting line, just as if a player had been captured normally.

Since this ability can only be used to save another player, I don’t think it enables “Rambo”-ing.

2. Pop A Tire–Once per game, when this player token is adjacent to one or more searchers, choose one of those searchers to be affected by terrain. For the rest of the game, any time that searcher’s movement would cause it to enter one or more squares with terrain in them, the searcher must expend two squares of movement instead of one. If it does not have enough movement remaining to expend two squares of movement, it stops moving.

The searcher will still catch the player token using this ability if the token is in front of the searcher. As a result, this ability can’t be used to help yourself–only to set things up for someone else.

3. Throw Something Shiny–Once per game, when this player token is adjacent to one or more searchers, choose one of those searchers and point it in a direction of your choosing.

This could easily be used to save yourself. A player using it still has to think about where his or her teammates are, so it might be OK, but I’m leery about this one.

4. Coordinator–Once per game, when this player token tricks a searcher, the searcher does not capture player tokens it moves over. If the searcher is occupying any player tokens’ spaces when it stops moving, it captures those player tokens.

I think this may actually be the strongest of these abilities–it can solve some really difficult problems, perhaps too easily. It has both team-oriented and individual-strengthening applications, depending on the situation, so it would need careful testing.

5. No One Left Behind–Once per game, when this player token is adjacent to another player token, you may choose to move the adjacent player token along with you for your first square of movement using the same rules as apply when tricking searchers.

Totally team-oriented, so I think this is OK.

Theory: How to Be a Good Playtester

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My last post got me in the mindset of playtesting, and having done a fair amount I thought I might write up some lessons I’ve learned. These aren’t gospel–different testers and designers can relate in different ways. However, I think these are good baseline principles to use when you’re testing for someone you don’t know personally.

1. Give reasons for feelings. “This isn’t fun” is useful so far as it goes, but it doesn’t give the designer guidance as to how the game should change. If you’re going to express a feeling like “this isn’t fun” or “I was bored,” include a “because” statement. “This isn’t fun because I can’t catch up once I’m behind” and “I was bored because it took so long to get from the campsite to the mountain” capture the feeling but also tell the designer where to focus his or her attention.

(This is also a very good way to avoid fights with significant others.)

2. Prioritize your feedback. Stream-of-consciousness responses can be very helpful, but it can also be difficult to tell what’s a big problem that absolutely must be fixed and what’s just an idea to consider. If the first thing someone says is “maybe the combat should use cards instead of dice,” they might be saying that they hated the combat or they might just be thinking out loud. It’s especially confusing if the next thing the person says is “the rules for flying are completely broken!” Give big problems first and work your way down.

3. Be polite. This is one of those things that can’t be emphasized enough. It’s OK to say that the game was bad, and why. It’s not OK to say that the designer is bad. The internet forum rule “attack the post, not the poster” applies here as well.

A long time ago I was taught the “sandwich” method of giving feedback: say something good, then something bad, then something else good. People are much more receptive to criticism when it’s surrounded by some positivity, so it’s clear that you’re not just hassling them. I can’t recommend this approach enough.

4. Play according to what the rules are, not what you think they are. Make sure you’re doing what the rules tell you to do–and only what they tell you to do. When the rules are ambiguous or you’ve fallen into a situation the rules don’t cover, it’s critically important to stop and at least make a note of the problem. Deciding on an answer and just keeping on is actually the worst thing you can do, because then the designer doesn’t know there’s an issue. A bad rulebook will most assuredly come back to bite the designer later.

5. If the game works under normal conditions, try something weird. Once the game has been tested enough to work when played as intended (it’s OK to ask if this is the case), do something the designer might not have intended. What happens if, in a wargame, you ignore the provided trenches and just charge the enemy lines? Or if you absolutely refuse to charge the enemy lines and never leave the trenches? What if you just never take any offensive action at all?

Testing how the game responds to odd behaviors is important in making sure that there isn’t a dominant strategy lurking. It also helps check the connection between mechanics and theme, by making sure that actions which are bad in-theme are punished by the mechanics. In a game about the German blitzkrieg of France it might be OK if France can win just by playing defense–but if the Germans can win that way something is wrong.

There’s a hilarious story about the testing of Pret-a-Porter that I think really captures the value of trying something you don’t think is optimal just to see what happens. It’s in this video, starting at 12:40, and only takes about three minutes. Take a look if you get a chance.

One thing that isn’t on the list is “be good at the game.” You don’t have to be a skilled player of a game to test it. Most people who play a game won’t be very good, just as a matter of math–only a fraction of players will take a game seriously enough, and practice it enough, to become strong contenders. As a newer player you represent the majority perspective, and your feedback is valuable.

Don’t be intimidated by the idea of playtesting. If you’re at all interested in doing it, or if someone asks you to test a game that you think looks neat, just jump right in when you get the opportunity. You might end up enjoying it or you might not, but I promise that if you keep these five principles in mind you’ll be a solid addition to the testing corps.