Hi all, today I have an interview with Terri Cohlene and her son, Ross Cowman, designers of BFF! BFF! is currently on Kickstarter and is a game about girlhood, friendship, and adventure – it looks like such a fantastic time, and I hope you love hearing what Terri and Ross have to say about it! FYI: This game is nearing the end of its Kickstarter and could super use some support – please share and consider backing an interesting new project that has a diverse cast of characters to play!
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The Kickstarter video is so good! So much happy!
Tell me a little about BFF. What excites you about it?
Terri: Finally! After all this time, it’s getting out into the world! BFF! is a role playing game about friendship, girlhood, and adventure. Originally I wanted to create a game about friendship that girls would love. Turns out, lots of people (young, old and of different genders) are having fun getting into that mindset.
The art is fantastic and provides a backdrop for all kinds of great adventures, from school to sleepovers to summer camp to road trips to just hanging out at the mall.
Ross: Yes, all of those things. And it is really cool to be be working with my Mom, and all of the other folks on the team. BFF has so many people’s wonderful ideas in it!
As a design nerd: I’m excited to be using boardgame techniques to make a role playing game. I think this design space has a ton of potential to bring story gaming to a new audience that maybe didn’t feel like they had access before.
BFF! really does look like a combination of a board game and a roleplaying game, and I think that’s awesome!
BFF! seems to be almost a board game + story game hybrid. How did this design come about?
T: Maybe that happened because I didn’t know what I was doing. I started the ball rolling and, because my expertise is “story,” that’s where I began. I was thinking about what was important to ‘tween girls, and, Bingo! Friendship, of course. Then I shared my idea with Ross and he fine-tuned the game design, plus we brainstormed A LOT to get the results we have now. The landscapes were kind of obvious, except the fabulous details we ended up with were totally inspired by the artists and everyone else on the team.
R: When my mom brought me her idea my first thought was to hack Fall of Magic somehow to make this work. We eventually added some unique mechanics like charm bracelets and friendship cards to specifically support the friendship theme.
Speaking of friends, look at all these awesome friends!
Where are the character concepts and fictional structure being drawn from? Have have you come up with mechanics that connect those characters?
T: The brains of Cowman/Cohlene! Then we added the creativity of the rest of Team Deernicorn. Welcome to our world!!
R: Terri and I came up with initial ideas, then bounced them off everyone else in the team who added their own stuff to the mix. We wanted to have a balance of urban and rural, of indoor and outdoor, of crowded and spacious…
The characters are connected explicitly at the start of the game through the charm mechanics. Everyone trades charms which represent things our characters like about eachother.
The art for BFF! is really adorable, done by artist Veta Bahktina.
The charms sound so cool! What is their function mechanically, and what makes them important narratively?
T: The charms sound cool because they are cool! I initially had the idea of actual charm bracelets that best friend players could even wear between play sessions. While a nifty idea, it wasn’t practical. At all. (Ross wisely pointed this out!) Then we briefly considered having charm necklaces that the friend tokens could wear. Again, not practical. So we ended up with bracelet templates and custom charms brilliantly designed by Taylor Dow. They represent traits or memories that the friends like about themselves or each other. Throughout the game, there are opportunities to add charms, gift them or get rid of them, each time explaining why you are taking this action. They add to the depth of understanding, growth, and bonding (& fun!) that happens during play.
R: The charms are the biggest mechanical deviation from Fall of Magic and really crucial to getting players into the friendship mentality at the start of the game. At the start of the game we each take turns selecting a charm for ourselves and talking about how that charm represents something we like about our character. Then we go around a second time and each give a charm to another character and say something we like about them. Between each hangout each do another charm scene which functions as a kind of mini-debrief in the middle of the game.
The BFF! box art is so pretty and colorful. I love seeing all of the characters on the cover!
You’ve had some awesome sounding playtests. Were there any unique challenges in playtest with the broad age demographics or with keeping tone? What was some of your favorite feedback?
T: Not really. It’s been pretty easy to get into the middle grade mindset, whether that means imagining an older or younger (or same age) alternate self. Once that’s set, the playing field seems to be pretty equal. Favorite feedback? “I love it! It’s my new favorite game!” Or maybe, “You want to be an eggplant? Be an eggplant!”
R: We’ve had consistently awesome playtests, people grinning, laughing, and just having a really fun relaxing time roleplaying these friendships together. Some of the kids from the YWCA playtest group told us after they were really inspired to make their own characters and hangouts for the game. For me, inspiring some of these young women and gender-queer youth to become future game designers, is the best possible feedback I could ask for.
The gorgeous map/game board in BFF! is colorful and compelling!
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Wow! Thank you so much to Terri and Ross for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll skip on over to the BFF! Kickstarter page to check it out, and share this article with your friends! There’s a few days left to make BFF a reality, and I think it’s totally worth it.
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Tell me a little about Yarnia. What excites you about it?
Yarnia is a quiet little land that has a habit of being invaded by monsters. Eons ago the rulers of Yarnia set up a summoning system to bring in heroes from different worlds to aid them in their constant quest to repel the wool-thieving monsters. Part of what makes this so fun is that it’s a system that allows players to bring their RPG characters into Yarnia or roll an entirely new character for the quest.
A lovely cowl & a creative designer!
How did you come up with the idea for Welcome to Yarnia and start integrating the knitting aspect into play?
Yarn Quest – Heroes to Yarnia is an RPG knitting pattern that I designed to make a randomly generated pattern. We’ve done quite a few Yarn Quests now, and I wanted a pattern that would allow me to teach people how to double knit, along with introduce new gamers to RPG-style gaming. Welcome to Yarnia is designed as a sort of Introduction to the world of Yarnia. It also offers a gateway between the knitting and gaming communities, allowing members to cross over and bring new ideas to both communities.
What are some of the types of patterns players will encounter during their Yarn Quest?
There is a combination of geometric patterns and pixel monsters. I try and model my art after a lot of the classic RPGs like Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Warrior while putting my own spin on it.
Gorgeous wings pattern.
How do the roleplaying and storytelling mechanics function in the game?
The game is heavily based on storytelling as there’s no way to shift the full story on the fly like a traditional RPG. Your role as the player character is to make choices as you progress through the story, and the dice are the main tool you’ll use to determine what charts you’ll knit. As the quests are designed to be played solo or in a group they are often set up as almost a choose your own adventure. At the base of it I believe that RPG’s are a very extensive form of a choose your own adventure.
What makes knitting work with the roleplaying so well, and provide a rich framework for storytelling?
There is a large community of geeks who are also knitters, and knitterly folks love to try out new things. There are so many different stories to tell through the RPG format, and each person’s adventure is going to be different. Overall, it’s fun to experience new things, and Yarn Quest is different from any knitting pattern. The ability to record your character’s journey through a project that is almost a tapestry is a fun and unique method of knitting a pattern.
This black and white shawl with the bird pattern is so beautiful.
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Thank you so much Tania for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out the Yarnia Kickstarter today! Make sure to share the post with all of your friends, knitters and gamers alike!
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Hi all! I have a post today from Michael “Karrius” Mazur (email) about tabletop RPG dice math. Michael is a tabletop RPG player, more often a GM than not, and in his own words, he’s “always had an interest in tinkering with and designing game systems.” I asked him his favorite part about roleplaying games and he said it was that roleplaying games are a creative hobby with a low barrier to entry – and I like that too!
This post is definitely a lot of information, but I think Michael explains it simply and approachably. Please enjoy!
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Mathematical balancing can be an intimidating subject for RPG designers, but crucial for making a game that works like the designer intends is the solid foundation of having the correct dice rolling method. While familiarity with some methods of rolling are usually understood by designers, what questions to ask when deciding on a dice rolling system, the differences between said systems, and how to pick what’s most suited to the game can be a tough subject. The first question to tackle is often one of how many dice are appropriate.
The most familiar method of rolling dice in RPGs is the simple “roll a 1d20, add a number to it, and compare to a target number,” due to its use in Dungeons and Dragons and related spin-offs. One common modifier to that is instead of rolling 1d20, use the sum of 3d6. These two methods make for useful comparisons of the difference between rolling a single die vs rolling multiple dice and adding them. Both average out to the same result (10.5), and have similar maximums (20 vs 18) and minimums (1 vs 3). The following graph shows the probability curve of rolling each result on a 1d20 and 3d6, comparatively.
This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual by Michael. Full details in alt text.
The probability of getting any specific result on a 1d20 is equal – each number is equally represented by once face of the die, giving a 5% chance of rolling any number in its range. The flat nature makes it easy to do calculations with – if you have something that activates on certain numbers being rolled (like critical hits on 20, or special moves on even rolls), it’s easy to just add up those 5%s, even in your head at the table. On the graph “Probability of Rolling a Specific Result,” the line for the 3d6 is a “bell curve” shape – the most common results are in the middle of the dice range, due to an “averaging out” effect, where there’s multiple different sums that can achieve them.
Rolling the maximum or minimum are far less likely due to having fewer combinations of dice that can achieve them. While a 1d20 can be expected to roll within a half point of the average result (10-11) one time in ten, and roll the maximum result one time in twenty, a 3d6 rolls within a half point of the average an expected one time in four, and roll the maximum result one roll out of every 216. Rolling multiple dice causes the “typical” results to be far more likely, and the extremes to be far less so.
click through for more!
The next step on the analysis is to understand that when you’re playing the game, for most rolls you’re not looking to roll an exact result – you’re looking to roll that number or higher – to succeed on the difficulty of a task. The following graph shows what the probability is of succeeding on a task for at various results needed, comparing 1d20 to 3d6.
This chart displays the probability of rolling a specific result or greater, visual by Michael. Full details in the alt text.
What does it mean for the 3d6 that the extreme results are less likely, and average results more common? The biggest take away is simple: that if you’re already favored – and so the average result is a success for you – using 3d6 instead of 1d20 means you become even more so. But if you’re relying on an extreme result to have a chance of success, moving from 1d20 to 3d6 lowers your chance of success even more. Using a 3d6 allows a character to perform “lesser” tasks reliably, but struggle at performing tasks above their skill level. It promises easy success to the specialized, and warns away those not well suited to a task from even attempting it.
Situations where a skilled character repeatedly fails at a given task over and over become far less likely, which can ease frustration or keep a challenging monster fight from becoming trivial due to a few bad rolls from the monster. Systems that roll 1d20 allow a wider variety of task difficulties, which become possible for characters to attempt sooner, but continue to have a noticeable failure rate as a character grows. Rolling 1d20 gives a character less reliability, but also more leeway if they’re being forced into attempting more difficult tasks.
Deciding which tasks – reliable or risky – you want your dice system to encourage isn’t the only change in player behavior you’ll see from it either. An important consideration is how valuable a +1 bonus is to the success at any given task. This won’t be obvious to all players, but some will understand how this works, and others will pick up a sense of it as you play. The following graph shows the probability of a +1 bonus changing a failure to a success for each roll needed.
This chart shows the probability of a +1 helping, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text.
The probability of a +1 bonus having changed a failure to a success is the exact same as the probability of rolling the number one fewer than whatever you’re trying to roll. As such, the graph of the +1 bonus helping is the same as the graph of individual roll results, except shifted one number higher. If you’re rolling a 1d20, no matter what task you’re performing, a +1 bonus is giving a 5% greater chance of success. If you’re rolling 3d6, that instead varies.
For tasks which are near impossible or very easy to perform, the +1 might not be worth sacrificing much for. But for tasks that you already have a near-even chance at, the value is very high – over twice as much as you would be getting on a d20! Players are more incentivized to spend resources or time in order to get any small bonus they can when they expect they’re close to the average of an attack or defense.
All of the above shows the difference between 1d20 and 3d6 – but what about other dice, or rolling even more? The following graph shows a comparison between six types of dice rolling methods, all with roughly even averages of 10-11.
This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text.
The more dice are rolled, the steeper the bell curve becomes. Anything that could be said about 3d6 in comparison to 1d20 is even more so for 4d4, and the trend continues to strengthen the more dice are rolled. If you want it so the average result comes up very often, and people with even small advantages are heavily favored, you want a system that rolls many dice at once. Another design consideration that emerges is the range of values possibly – when rolling 1d20, there are 20 possible results. When rolling 3d6, there are only 16 results – and four numbers (9-12) come up almost half of the time. When rolling 7d2, there are only 8 possible results, and two numbers (10-11) come up 55% of the time.
When so few numbers are likely to be rolled, this means that characters gaining small bonuses or penalties can very quickly put them in the realm of instant success or failure. It only takes a +4 to go from the average value to an instant success on a 7d2, as opposed to a +10 on a d20, meaning there’s not a lot of room for individual bonuses to make a difference and still have a chance of failure. This however also allows a stratification in difficulty – it doesn’t require very large bonuses for an expert character to be able to complete tasks a non-trained character cannot, keeping numbers reasonable if you want multiple tiers of difficulty.
In summary, there are multiple considerations that go into choosing the dice rolling method for your game. A single large die, or fewer dice in general, is more appropriate if you want a game to have multiple conditional sources of bonuses such as gear, positioning, and teamwork, to keep tasks from ever seeming too reliable, and to encourage risky maneuvers. Multiple dice, or smaller dice, are more appropriate if you want to make small bonuses matter a great deal, allow characters to treat lower-difficulty tasks as trivial, or to have hard tiers in difficulty. Neither method is inherently superior; instead, both are proper tools for their tasks.
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Thanks so much to Michael for the excellent article! Please share around and I hope you all gained something from reading this post on approachable theory!
If you would like to write an approachable theory post, send an email to Brie with your name, pronouns, and pitch. Responses may be delayed over the next two weeks as Brie is recovering from grad school, but they’ll get back as they can.
Updated 5/9/18 12:55pm Eastern to change “odds” to “probability.” Failure on Brie’s part to not catch that mathematical terminology difference. Sorry!
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For the past several months I’ve been gearing up to start a new project called Leading with Class. Leading with Class is a web series I’m doing to teach leadership theory and practice using roleplaying games! It’s so exciting to have it together!
There’s a Patreon for the project and I have a Twitter set up that I’ll be trying to use for the project as well. It’s a dream of mine to teach important skills and make knowledge more approachable using games, and this is a great opportunity to use my experience and my education to put some good into the world. I hope you’ll join me!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Aaron Reed on Archives of the Sky, which is currently on Kickstarter!Archives of the Sky is a GMless game with collaborative story telling, set in the broader reaches of the universe where characters seek purpose in the epic galaxy. It seems pretty nifty, so please check out the interview below! You can also peek at at a play example here.
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Kickstarter video for Archives of the Sky.
Tell me a little about Archives of the Sky. What excites you about it?
Archives of the Sky is a tabletop storytelling game that uses epic science fiction as a stage for stories about very human conflicts and values. I love sci-fi and roleplaying, but most of the existing games I know of in the genre focus more on its external trappings: spaceships, laser guns, and so on. There are a few rare exceptions that focus on the more human, philosophical side of sci-fi– “Shock” by Joshua A.C. Newman is one of my favorites– but I wanted a system that also took inspiration from GM-less improvisational games like Microscope, Fiasco, and Downfall. After a lot of iteration and playtesting, Archives is the result.
What excites me about it is that it really evolved into a great vehicle for supporting a group of people to collaboratively create an amazing story together. The mechanics of the game really work to provide a structure for a plot, and to ensure that plot is based around a conflict between beliefs. The characters are then forced to resolve this dilemma somehow, which means they need to get down to the heart of why the believe the things they do and why they’re worth defending– and that tends to lead to some great roleplaying.
A group of people playing Archives of the Sky. Index card tents! yay!
How do you set up a game of Archives of the Sky – who has input into the story, the characters? – and how do plot hooks happen?
Everyone’s involved with setting up the world and telling the story– there’s a role called the Archivist to help facilitate, but everyone has equal creative authority. The first thing you do when you sit down to play is create a House together, a group of near-immortal wanderers who have been exploring the galaxy for thousands and thousands of years. You start by coming up with their core purpose, which becomes the game’s first value. This might be something like “We preserve life,” or “We learn truths,” or even something simpler like “We hunt” or “We sing.” It’s something this House has sworn to pursue as their highest calling.
The rules walk you through fleshing out the House a bit more, giving them a few more Values and figuring out their place in the galaxy, and then each player makes their own character, someone within the House. Characters each have their own personal Values, which may or may not line up with the House’s Values, or with each others’. These are the seeds of stories– think of Captain Kirk in the early Star Trek movies, who has sworn to uphold the Federation’s mission of peace, but will also “never forgive” the Klingons for the death of his son. Clearly, he’s going to have to face this conflict sooner or later. (Sentences starting “I always” or “I never” make great Values, by the way.)
Once the game begins, players take turns staging Scenes that advance the plot. Each scene is based around a Question which that player has about where the story is going. So if a mysterious transmission was detected in the previous scene, the next player might ask “Who sent the transmission?” as their Question– or might introduce a new complication by asking something like “Why can’t we find the source of the transmission?” Everyone then collaboratively plays a scene around answering the Question, both playing their character as well as making things happen in the story world (like a GM).
Some “trove” cards, created by the players to support storytelling.
What are the basic mechanics like for social and other conflicts, and how do they engage players emotionally?
Players have the option of resolving conflicts through roleplay, but there’s a mechanic that provides a bit of randomness and an uncertain outcome that can be used by any player who wants it. Another thing you do at the start of play is create a deck of index cards called the Trove, each one with a single word on it. (The rules encourage you to pull these words from your favorite sci-fi novels.) When you want to resolve an uncertain outcome, you can draw from the Trove and let the word inspire the outcome. What’s great about this is the interpretation can be anything you want: literal, metaphorical, even tangential. So the word “fire” might inspire one person to narrate a catastrophic explosion, while another might read it as the fire in someone’s eyes as they pull off a wild maneuver.
Where emotions come in is when the story gets to a Dilemma, a conflict between two Values. This is a situation where the characters need to decide on a course of action, but either decision would threaten one of the Values in play. Say the players have created a House with a core Value of staying hidden; but one of the characters has a personal value to protect the helpless, and the House has a chance to save a lot of lives by coming out of the shadows. Can that character convince the others to change their minds and go against their House’s highest value? Or will she find a way to live with betraying what she believes for a greater good? It’s not an easy decision, because any character who acts against a Value they believe in might have to Adapt at the end of the session, making a permanent change to their character.
An example of a Value, “We Always Show the Truth.”
What was your playtesting process like? Tell me about any realizations you had, and how you dealt with necessary changes.
I’ve been making digital games for a long time, but this is my first fully finished and released tabletop roleplaying game, and one of the things that surprised me was how much more playtesting and iteration tabletop takes. With digital games, you spend some amount of time thinking of ideas, a hellishly long amount of time programming them, and then some amount of time playtesting: ideally throughout the process, but often closer to the end. With tabletop, almost all of your iteration time is spent actually playing the game and seeing how it works, with a few hours here and there to think through problems people are having and revise the rules.
Archives morphed a lot as it went through close to twenty fairly significant revisions (i.e. not just tweaking wording) over about two years. It accumulated more and more rules as I tried to get all the parts to work the way I wanted them to. The downside was this is as you went through a game, you kept bumping into new rules, and needing to stop to explain them. Finally I sat down and counted up the number of individual rules and mechanics in the game, and there were something like 27 of them. I challenged myself to try to make a version of the game that had only 10 concepts that needed to be explained. I think the simpler version that came out of that was when I really cracked the code of how the game worked, and from then on everything was just refinement.
The biggest two realizations I had were A) the game was really about Values, not the plot events (in the original version, you did a lot of writing down plot points on cards, moving them around the table, taking special moves to revise them, etc.– in the final version, all that focus is placed on the Values in play instead). And B) A bunch of separate mechanics in older versions could be combined into the simple rule “Ask a question to begin a scene.” So at certain times of the game that’s a fixed question; at some times there are some questions that make more sense than others; but it’s only one rule to explain, and everything else follows naturally from that framing, which simplified things a lot.
How do you put the “epic” into the game, with mechanics, narrative, and structure?
I wanted all players to get involved in telling the story: contributing details to scenes, helping build the world, and so on, but in practice people were often afraid to contribute when it wasn’t their “turn” to stage a scene. So I added the concept of two meta-roles, called the Epic and the Intimate, that people take turns playing. Your job when you’re the Epic is to look for opportunities to make the story huge and awe-inspiring in scope… so if someone mentions a spaceship, you might jump in with “It’s three miles long and made from some incredibly black material that totally swallows up the starlight.” By contrast, the Intimate looks for moments to keep the focus on emotions and small human details: they can ask a player what their character is feeling at any time during a scene, or add small touches of detail, like a texture or a significant glance between two characters. This system works really well to give players “permission” to tweak the story, and having those two things to focus on help make the stories feel like the kind of sci-fi I want to emulate.
So someone is playing Turn and I’m very excited about this, but they and a fellow player have both stated clearly that they don’t think they’re playing the game the way I want it to be played.
And like.
This is my favorite and most often used gif.
Okay, I would like people to play quiet dramas, and slice-of-life style stuff. That’d be cool. But quiet drama means different things to different people, and part of why I need playtests is to see what it means in people’s interpretations of different types of towns and stuff. Not every play of a game is going to be the same, and I accept that.
So like, I’m struggling because I don’t know exactly how they’re playing, and I don’t think it is “wrong” or anything, but I do think that the way they did setup and what themes they chose influenced the play, and that matters. But how do I even say that? Like, even if you’re playing the game slightly differently than I expected does not mean it’s not playing the way that is appropriate based on the way you’ve set up the town?
Like, here are the ways you can play Turn “wrong”:
play it in a city or suburb, or a place with a large population
don’t have shifters in it
appropriate culture to play it
violate the “don’t do this in Turn” section of the essays (re: content)
pretend it’s just a standard PbtA game and don’t engage the mechanics
ignore identity and community as aspects of the game
don’t emotionally engage with the narrative or subject matter
Yeah, I know, don’t tell people not to do what they want with your game. *eyeroll*
All of the other stuff is interpretations of my design, which I can’t control. Tempo, subject matter, etc. are all stuff that are different in a lot of games, like Fiasco can go anywhere from “wow, this is exciting!” to “wow, this is depressing!” to “wow, I am super confused” in one freaking session. Monsterhearts can go from dark and filled with examination of abuse and sexuality to a few kind-of-friends Scoobying around town trying to protect everyone. This is to say little of trad games like D&D and Shadowrun, which can run the tonal rollercoaster AND still let you explore the subjects the games promote.
There are tons of types of small towns, all with their individual leanings and themes and politics. Small towns can have microcultures that make surrounding towns look at them like they’re upsidedown in a teakettle, and that includes the way people deal with things there. It’s complex, and that’s why there are different themes and elements of the towns you create in Turn. The thing is, I haven’t played all of the combinations!
There are many ways you could combine all of the elements in Turn, and frankly, I don’t have 4 hours every day for the next mumblemumble years to test it out fully. That’s why I’m excited to see other people play it! Yes! Show me your thing you did with my thing! That sounds really weird but I don’t care!
Tell meeeeeeeeee
Now, I’ll be real. There are a few things that bug me, and this is not a thing that this person did really because they highlighted at one point how my game was not doing this thing, but man, everyone calls it a Powered by the Apocalypse game.
I freaking. Okay. PbtA is a great system and has a purpose. Vincent and Meguey made a really amazing thing, and a lot of people have done amazing things with it. Turn is not a PbtA game. It’s inspired by it – and yes, I realize a lot of people think it’s the same thing to be inspired by a thing and actually a thing, but it is not – and I designed the game purposefully to go against PbtA principles I have seen reflected in related design. First, there’s no category of PbtA games. And second, here are commonalities between Turn and some games that are PbtA, and then some stuff that’s just Turn or not in Turn:
1) 2d6 (also you have a third die sometimes)
2) Move-like structure (you are rolling to resist rather than to take action)
3) Character sheets with personal information on them (you have two, one of which is sometimes swappable)
4) Stats with smaller numbers (you have 8, one for each sheet, and they’re absolute values)
5) Scaled results (you never fail in Turn, the results are to determine the consequences related to success)
6) No sex/intimacy move
7) No Hx, strings, etc.
8) Goals for Human and Beast that control advancement
9) Exposure tracked on relationships
10) Stress to measure turning from Human to Beast & etc.
This is not me saying “my game has nothing to do with PbtA,” this is me saying there are differences, they matter, and we need to stop saying everything is one kind of game because it happens to use a specific dice roll or has moves (which could be like feats), small stat numbers (like a ton of games), and scaled results (which I think was actually a thing in Shadowrun too, just not framed specifically this way?). Things are different! One thing is not necessarily the other thing! Like! Friends! We need to be a little more forgiving with definitions, or make some freakin’ new ones!
me.
Turn was originally conceived because I came home from playing my first session I can remember of Monsterhearts (this one*) and felt off about it. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t hitting the right tone. I spent the next… really fucking long time… trying to figure out what that was, and meanwhile flipped numbers around, took out entire things, mentally threw out tons of material, and settled on what Turn is when John made me finally write it down because one of my greatest fears is that people will look at it and go “huh, oh, just another PbtA hack” and my fucking opus will be washed away into nothingness because some dingus can’t tell the difference between two different games that are wildly. fucking. different.
Sigh.
I’m a little…passionate today about this, and I think I always am, and always will be. But there’s reason for it. We use categories, especially manufactured ones, to scoop quality things into the trash all the time. Oh, it’s just another fantasy game. Oh, it’s just another PbtA hack. Oh, it’s just another Fate hack. Oh, I’ve seen so many games about zombies. Like come on. And the thing is, I rejected some of what I saw in PbtA work on purpose, and while some parts of mechanical structure remain, there are a lot of things I pulled from elsewhere conceptually.
I would never dare to call myself original, but when you don’t have your own ideas, storebought is fine, so long as you mix them up in a new way and it still fucking tastes good.
I want to share my game with people without having the ever-burning comparison to “oh but you’re not as good as Monsterhearts and AW and and and” screaming in my face every time. I know you don’t mean to do it, most of you, but it sure burns my biscuits that you think it’s fun to tell me how much what I have labored so extensively over is Just Like That Other Thing. That’s what this is. This isn’t categorical. My game is different enough that it is reminiscent of PbtA work, but in part because of how many other games you could find similarities to, it is not the same.
And that’s what I mean about people getting Turn wrong genuinely.
I think.
It’s possible that I wouldn’t play Turn in the way you’re playing it, if you’re playing it and think you’re playing it differently than I intend. That’s like, good though? Because I am not every player. I am not able to imagine all possible ways my game could be played and executed beautifully, still exploring the concepts of identity and community while doing things with more passion and intensity, because the town they built makes more sense for that.
So basically, I want to hear about the ways people explore Turn. I might be surprised, or unsure, or need to think about how something goes. But if the game works? If it is telling those stories, asking those questions, and it’s enjoyable? Then you’re probably doing okay.
Hi all! I have a Patreon spotlight today and it’s on the designer and creator Kira Magrann, who makes some queer, experimental games that explore intimacy and cyberpunk themes, among other things.
Kira Magrann
Bio via Kira:
Kira is a tabletop roleplaying game designer, queer NB cyborg, and snake mom living in Columbus, Ohio. She currently has a Patreon where she designs experimental games, a YouTube channel where she talks about game design, and she blogs a few times a month at Gnome Stew. With the support of her patrons she recently released a game about Lesbisnakes in wintertime titled A Cozy Den.
Tell me about yourself and your work. Who are you, and what does your work do?
I’m a queer cyborg game designer living in Columbus, Ohio. I’m a horror movie lover, snake mom, and I’m working on making my hair look like Major Kusanagi’s. My work, my game design work anyway, aims to educate, titillate, and inspire. When people play my games I want them to feel things and have learned something they didn’t know before. Hopefully the designs and concepts are also accessible enough to reach a diverse audience which is something I work hard at doing.
The identification stats for lesbisnakes in A Cozy Den, featuring a range from High Femme to Stone Butch.
Descriptions of the various stats in A Cozy Den, including presentation.
You’re a known activist and queer designer. How does your perspective regarding these things affect your design work and the work you do for your Patreon?
Gosh, well, being an activist and a queer designer means that basically all my work will have some aspects of those two parts of me in them. Everything I make is queer, or cyberpunk (emphasis on the punk), or related to queer or feminine monster metaphors. It’s a huge pool of inspiration to pull from, which means I can make games that are kind of like, combinations of these things, and maybe not like, 100% just one of them. So A Cozy Den, my game about lesbisnakes, is about half snake half lesbian mythical monster creatures who are trying to live together during the winter. It’s also a non-violent game and focuses on cozy stories and mechanics. It also uses lesbian terminology, your stats being derived from a scale of High Femme to Stone Butch. So that’s easily like, all three of my main interests in one game. This is how all my games go! I basically draw from what’s important to me in my personal life, and also the genres I’m inspired by and care a lot about.
Three lesbisnakes from A Cozy Den.
Tell me a little about A Cozy Den. What inspired you to write the game? What about it speaks to your design and you as a person?
A Cozy Den came about because I’ve been obsessed with snakes since I adopted my 8 year old corn snake Sol about a year and a half ago now. I basically read about them daily and am in all these FB groups in the snake community and just love them so much. I’ve actually loved snakes since I was a child but never really owned any until now (I’m 37!). I had recently learned that snakes den together, and it really humanized them, painted them in a more communal and cozy way.
I like finding ways that make snakes less scary for people, because I think that removing fear even in a small way toward an animal can make huge changes in a person’s life and in removing fear in the world in all kinds of ways. I’d also been really into lesbian lifestyle history at the time and watched this short documentary on lesbian communes, and suddenly it clicked… snake dens and lesbian communes are so similar in all these ways like, culturally. They’re outsiders, American culture is kind of afraid of them, and the communes in the 70s and 80s in particular were very purposeful outsider ways for lesbians to live outside of the norm in America.
“What’s a Den?” section of the A Cozy Den text.
So I basically just combined the two and was like, I can make a game that can teach simultaneously about two things I love: snakes and queer history. That is so typical of my design style. I’ll basically find all these connecting points with the many genres and things in the world I love, combine them into an interesting genre game setting, and somehow teach about them in the game. I’m queer and a snake lover too, so this game is very personal, very much about me and the things I love. I also wanted to experiment with mechanics, to see if I could make a pbta game without physical conflict as the main driver. I’m more and more interested in games that don’t have violence, and instead create different types of feelings or situations. So in A Cozy Den all the conflict is inter personal… can the characters get along with each other during the winter in a closed space? What does cozy look like in a tabletop game vs a video game? There’s a lot going on in this tiny weird game, and its very much how my design brain and personal brain work. I could talk about it for awhile lol.
The “Healing” section of A Cozy Den.
Your new videos have been well-received! How do you decide what to do videos about? What is your process for creating the videos?
So, my videos, basically I recently got obsessed with YouTube (you’re probably seeing a pattern here with my creative obsessions) and I was like, shit, I could do this. I’ve always wanted to learn more about video making and a lot of my personal media on my insta has been drifting toward video too. Whenever I want to get better at something, I get obsessed with it and do it until I get better. It’s worked ok so far although I wish I could stick with one thing it’d be easier lol.
My videos are about my design process and thoughts, so while I’m working on things throughout the week I try to note particular issues I’m having while writing or designing, or thoughts another youtube video or article made me have, and then I write those down. Then I pick one, and make a word document with a bunch of bullet points stream of conciousness style what I might like to talk about in that video topic. Then I’ll step away for a few hours or a day, come back to it and clean it up.
I’ve cleaned up my extra bedroom office so that the space behind me looks decent and I have windows in front of me for natural light, and I just use a very cheap tripod from amazon and my iphone for recording. Then I’ll record in about 50 second pieces (I’ve found smaller ones are easier to upload to dropbox for whatever reason), upload them to dropbox, download them to my computer (this usually takes hours) then edit them in a free editing program I have on my ubuntu computer called kdenlive. I don’t do anything fancy with the editing, just add music and text. Once that’s done I’ll upload to youtube!
A video from Kira’s YouTube on Playtest Process and Design Iteration.
There’s lots of tricks on youtube to get more traffic and stuff in like, the way you tag things and name stuff and put ending credits in… all those I learned from watching videos on youtube about how to do it. I want to get a little more vloggy with my videos in the future, play with cinematography more, but for right now I’m trying to get a rhythm and skill set to just make them regularly. I think of my youtube channel like a blog basically, like, what would I write about to the community on g+ or gnome stew, then instead of writing I just film it. I’m getting better! It’s still mostly an experiment.
What are some goals you have for your Patreon and your design practice in general?
My Patreon is helping me become a better designer while simultaneously putting out content that I can’t make anywhere else. It’s a really unique opportunity to be able to explore whatever kinds of games my heart desires and not worry to terribly about the “sellability” of it, y’know? I think a lot of creators know what types of content really sells, something with fantasy fighters, something grimdark, something with skullduggery… basically new takes on the typical rpg stuff.
In order to create something truly new and different, it means that you’re taking a huge chance as a creator that no one in the rpg community will be interested in playing your weird stuff. So having this patreon to support me even a little monetarily helps me make those unique and innovative games. Also it is paying my bills! I’d love to get it up to 1500 a month, cause then it’d legit be like a part time job! But until then I’m scrambling to fill the extra money in with freelance work which to be honest is kind of overwhelming. It’s a dream to be able to live off my patreon. I think it’ll get there.
The Actions from A Cozy Den with some handwritten markup.
When do you experience the most joy, and the most satisfaction, while creating?
Wow this is a spectacular question and I’m not sure 100% how to answer it lol! The whole process for me is very joy inducing. I’m a hyper creative person and my imagination is always on overdrive, so coming up with the ideas is really fun. I also love to be critical, and I think editing is a critical skill, so basically the part where you’re taking the ideas and narrowing them and sculpting them into something more specific is also really satisfying. The act of writing is sometimes a little tedious, but when I get a flow going I disappear into the document for hours at a time and that flow feels really good, creatively.
I do really love collaborating, especially when I’m in charge of a project and can choose who else is on my team. I’m very proud to work with other marginalized creators and hire them to create art or other work like in A Cozy Den or RESISTOR. Sharing creative work is definitely scary, but I love creating artwork that people use or wear, so when people are getting the game and playing it I feel very accomplished and get this feeling of sympathetic joy. So I guess those are my favorite parts of creating, and the things that give me the most satisfaction in the process.
A character sheet from A Cozy Den.
Patterns and colors for the various lesbisnakes in A Cozy Den based on their stats.
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Thank you so much to Kira for stopping in to talk about her Patreon,A Cozy Den, and her design! Please check out Kira’s work and share around this spotlight to show off the cool work she is doing.
You can find Kira on Twitter as @kiranansiand on YouTube, as well as through Patreon where she designs experimental games, and sometimes at Gnome Stew. Make sure to check out A Cozy Den, too!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
I have an interview today with Jacob Kellogg on his game Journey Away, which is currently on Kickstarter. You might remember Jacob from his approachable theory article about complexity in game design – but don’t think his cool thoughts on games and design stop there! Journey Away is a game that I think is doing something fun and it’s got dice pools, which means I’m interested. Check out his responses below!
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Tell me a little about Journey Away. What excites you about it?
Well, one of the exciting parts of Journey Away is that it’s my first project that’s big enough to not be a Pay What You Want title; that feels like a threshold to me as a new designer. As for the game itself, I like that it feels like a different kind of experience than most RPGs. Fantasy is probably my favorite gaming genre, which can be problematic due to there being so many fantasy games out there already, but I think that the non-challenge-based mechanics really help this to bring something new to the hobby instead of just being another rehash. I feel good about that.
What made you go towards non-challenge-based mechanics? What about that is important to you?
The decision to use non-challenge-based mechanics was a convergence of two things. First, I had noticed that fighting monsters (and to a lesser extent, facing traps and hazards) was so common in fantasy gaming that it seemed to be treated as an inherent part of the genre. That struck me as odd, since to me “fantasy” is more about the setting. Second, as I started developing my own setting and premise for the game, it didn’t make sense that curious villagers would explore a magical world with wide-eyed wonder if doing so involved facing mortal danger on a daily basis. At the intersection of those two observations is the notion of non-challenge-based gameplay.
The beautiful cover art for Journey Away. I finally learned how to do alt text properly, so full description is there.
How did you make fantasy interesting and different for Journey Away?
As I touched on above, I think part of what makes some people feel like fantasy is “done to death” is that it keeps getting done the same way each time. The dice may change and each setting might have its own quirk, but ultimately they’re almost always implemented as some variation of allocating attributes and skills for your best odds of success against a series of challenges. I think stripping that away offers something genuinely different. It’s like if someone has only ever seen pasta served with tomato sauce and they ask me how I’ll make pasta interesting and different, maybe I’ll give them some chicken lo mein or beef stroganoff.
Even so, I also wanted a reasonably original setting. I ended up with a world where magic is a recent addition, because that offers lots of great benefits, like having plenty of opportunity for discovery and adding a sense of wonder to any magical artifacts you might encounter. It also offers a nice solution to the common fantasy issue of “race”. People like to play fantastical beings, but there’s a lot of baggage with the traditional handling of races. What I get to do in Journey Away is say that everyone’s a human, and the new presence of magic causes some folks to be born with altered features. So if you want to play an “elf”, you can just say that you were born with pointy ears and give yourself the traits you want; or if you like tieflings, you can give yourself those features without having to introduce race-based prejudice into the game; or if you’re coming to fantasy gaming from some other background, you can easily adopt the features of a character you like (such as a sexy vampire or an anime catgirl) without having to find a race in a splatbook and convince the GM that the stats are balanced. The setting really offers a lot of freedom to everyone.
I love the idea of getting the magical features you want because of the flexibility of the world. So tell me, how do these work mechanically? How do you represent magic in the nuts and bolts?
Magic is handled the same way as any other feature of your character: you declare that something is true about your character, and assign a die size to it based on how significant or impactful you want it to be. It doesn’t matter whether that character trait is your experience with fishing, your cute demeanor, or the potency of some magical ability you have. For example, a friend gave her character animal-mind-reading powers with a d10. Then, whenever we rolled for a situation where that was helpful (like when trying to negotiate with someone), a d10 would be added to the player dice pool. If it could get in the way in a situation (like when surrounded by lots of creatures), then a d10 gets added to the complication pool.
What is the core of conflict and discovery in Journey Away?
The entire primary mechanic is basically what I just described for magic: you give yourself traits to define your character, and assign die values based on how big of an impact you want them to be, with bigger dice having bigger impacts. Those traits then contribute dice to one pool when they’re helpful in a situation, or to another pool when they could get in the way. Circumstances can also contribute dice to both pools, but mostly to the complication pool. Both pools are rolled, and the players arrange the dice into pairs (one die from each pool). Pairs where the die from the player pool is higher generate beneficial developments, while pairs in which the complication die is higher generate complications. The player to the left of whoever rolled then narrates the majority development type (boons or complications), then passes to the player on the right of the one who rolled, and that player narrates the remaining developments. Of course, there will be structures in place to guide this narration with prompts for those who aren’t interested in or comfortable with absolute openness, but that’s the basic idea.
Conflict isn’t a major component of the intended emotional focus of the game. Instead, we’re framing the journey as primarily positive. Even the “bad” complications serve as an opportunity for fun moments, and the game is mainly about diving headlong into the wondrous unknown. This means that the game encourages forward movement, curiosity, and laughing together when things take unexpected turns. Journey Away very much presents the discovery of new things as a positive and joyful endeavor. I want to encourage a way of thinking: that things outside your current experience aren’t inherently bad and dangerous, but instead will enrich your life and make you glad you stepped outside the village to have a look.
Today’s approachable theory post is by Jacob Kellogg, creator of the new Journey Away rpg on Kickstarter, and is about complexity in game design! Find out more about Jacob after the post! Please read and enjoy.
Jacob Kellogg, selfie portrait.
Complexity in game design can be a touchy subject. Sometimes a game is so complex that it feels more like work than play, or deters your loved ones from wanting to learn it. Other times, a game might be criticized for not being complex enough, with critics saying it’s been dumbed down. In some cases, you might even find both opinions regarding a single game.
If you’re designing a game (or even just like to ponder game design theory), this can leave you with some confusion about the role of complexity in design. How do you know if a game needs to be simpler or more complex? What does complexity offer to your design? What does it cost you? I hope to shed some light on this issue by defining complexity, detailing its relationship to the separate concept of depth, and sharing some other considerations about the role of complexity as well.
Before we get started, I’d like to give a shout out to the Extra Credits team, specifically this video, for the lessons I’ve learned on this and other topics thanks to their hard work. Check them out!
Now, we can’t really discuss complexity until we’re all on the same page about what it means. When I refer to complexity in terms of game design, I’m talking about all the details and rules that you have to learn (and all the gameplay actions that are required) to play the game. For example, if you have to roll a die to determine the success of an action, that’s more complex than if the action just succeeds by default, because you have to know the rule about how that die roll works. If a player might have a special quality that lets them re-roll the die if it comes up as a 1, that’s another rule to learn, and therefore another layer of complexity.
Now that we’re all on the same page about complexity, what does it contribute to our games? While there are a few answers to that question, the primary role of complexity is the creation of depth. What do I mean by depth? Depth in a game refers to the number of meaningfully different gameplay experiences that can be had. That is, if there are two different ways of doing things in a game, having those two paths actually FEEL different in play is depth. For example, if playing a speedster in a superhero game genuinely feels different than playing a hulking brute, that’s depth. If they feel the same in play, the depth is missing.
Picture of the Shadow Amps section of Shadowrun: Anarchy & note from Brie: here’s a place where you have to look at the depth and complexity of different mechanic. Does this math result in greater depth in play? What do you think?
If we want to add depth to our games, we have to put some sort of rule or mechanism in place to differentiate the different play options, to make them feel different. Doing so is the definition of adding complexity. Therefore, the way we add depth to our games is by adding complexity.
But there’s a catch.
Not every unit of complexity produces the same amount of depth. Sometimes the addition of a small, simple rule will create a multitude of gameplay experiences, while other times the creation of a vast and detailed system will hardly be felt at all. Let’s look at another example.
Say we’re designing a traditional heroic fantasy RPG and deciding how different weapons compare to each other. If we want a two-handed greatsword and a little dagger to feel different in play (and we probably do), we need to add some complexity to define their differences. So, we decide that the greatsword deals a lot of damage and uses two hands, while the dagger deals piddly damage but only uses one hand and is easy to conceal under your clothes. Great! Now players can have genuinely different gameplay experiences (depth) with these two weapons, thanks to us adding a little bit of complexity.
Now let’s say we want to go a little further: we also want shields in our games, which can’t be used with a greatsword, but it feels weird for shield-users to be restricted to daggers for weapons, so we create a longsword to sit between the two. It deals less damage than the greatsword, but more than the dagger. The degree of depth between the longsword and either of the other weapons is smaller than the gap between the greatsword and the dagger, but it’s probably still noticeable, offering real depth to players.
But let’s go even further. I mean, there are more than three types of blades in the world, right? So we start adding bigger knives, smaller swords, axes, swords with different degrees of curve to the blade, and so forth. Conscious of creating depth, we make sure that each of these weapons is technically unique: most of them deal different amounts of damage from each other, and when we ran out of unique damage amounts, we started giving the redundant weapons special abilities, like slight bonuses to disarming your opponent or breaking their shields.
By the time we’re done, we have a two-page chart of weapons, but they’re so close to each other in their abilities that a character with one weapon could swap it out for a similar one and never notice the difference. We’ve added quite a bit of complexity: the player has to read two pages of listings and learn what all the abilities mean before they can make an informed decision about their weapon choice. And yet, we’ve added precious little depth: while the high-damage weapons feel different from the mid- and low-damage weapons, everything else feels the same. The feel of gameplay is almost identical to what it was when we only had three weapons.
This is what we must watch out for as designers: just because game options are technically different (complexity), that doesn’t necessarily mean that they feel different (depth). Before adding a layer of complexity to our games, we must ask ourselves whether the resulting gameplay options will feel meaningfully different from each other. If not, we are not creating depth in our game, and we need to seriously consider whether adding that complexity is truly a good idea.
Dice rolling on a white table, by John W. Sheldon.
The creation of depth is the main purpose of complexity. However, sometimes complexity can offer other benefits by reinforcing the theme of your game. For example, intentionally overwhelming your players with complexity can create a sense of panic that might enhance gameplay (a good example of this would be Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, whose complexity-induced tension is half the point of the game). Alternatively, if your game is meant to be a faithful representation of something else, making sure you cover everything might be worth the complexity even if it’s not reflected in the depth of gameplay (for example, the Elements of Harmony in Tails of Equestria have literally no effect on gameplay, but fans of the source material might have scoffed at an omission).
Complexity is an important part of game design. While some games need complexity to support their themes, its main purpose is as the main source of depth. Designers must decide how much depth they want in their games, figure out how much complexity will be required to get there, and then reconcile the two until our games have sufficient depth without excessive complexity. We’re looking for that sweet spot.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you find these concepts as helpful for your own designs as they’ve been for mine. All the best to you and yours, and best of luck in whatever your next adventure is.
Thank you so much, Jacob, for writing this post and simply sharing some thoughts about complexity!
About the writer:
Jacob S Kellogg, he/him
Describe your role in the gaming community.
I’m a fledgling new game designer, and founder of Purple Aether Games.
What do you love about games and gaming?
I love how games can bring different people together and give them a shared experience, and how it can help people think about things differently.
Hi all, I have a new series (only a few coming up so far, but it’s here) called approachable theory that’s going to focus on writing posts about game theory, design, and similar topics in a tone that’s approachable for new gamers, non-academics, and designers who are getting their start. I’m going to try to do some of my own once I get done with grad school, but in the meantime, I’m hiring other writers!
The criteria I have for the posts are that they’re under 2000 words, hopefully under 1500, and I have to be able to read them without using Google more than 3 times. Youns know I have trouble reading research at times due to its dense text and unfamiliar terminology, and I wanted theory posts that I could learn from on my worst days.
To pay the writers, I’m going to be using the patreon.com/briecs payout from each post, and pay any remaining funds personally to ensure they’re paid $0.05/word, which is just the best I can do right now – and hopefully you will all consider it a valid rate. I’m still taking pitches for it, and I’d love to get more diverse writers on the schedule over the summer.
Coming up first will be Jacob Kellogg, who has a game on Kickstarter right now called Journey Away. Jacob’s writing about complexity in game design, and I’m really looking forward to you all seeing the post!
All I ask is for you all to join me in treating the series with respect. Please don’t interrogate the writers about “what a game is” or if the subject is “really theory” – that’s antithetical to this series. Remember, also, that not everyone has a well-educated, well-read background and that some people were born well after the original D&D could drive. If you find that something is legitimately factually incorrect or ethically problematic, please do raise the question. Just don’t be a jerk, and be enthusiastic for the material.
Thank you all! Looking forward to another series of posts and hoping it makes game design and games more…approachable.
<3
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
