What is the Deck of Many Names, both as a product and as your vision?
The
Deck of Many Names is a 120-card deck designed to help flesh out minor NPCs on
the fly during a game of Dungeons & Dragons (or similar fantasy games).
Each card has a name, fantasy species, gender, rough age category, and quick
roleplay tidbit. When players engage an NPC who was originally a faceless bit
of background, you can just draw a card and immediately have enough information
to handle that unexpected bit of conversation. The deck is big enough that you
could generate two such NPCs every week for over two years before repeating
anybody.
I’ve seen big names like Matt Mercer suggest having a list of names prepped for the same purpose, but I thought the solution could be better. After all, with a prepared list of names (or online name generator), you’re still left having to decide details like gender on the fly. In addition to that being a bit of work, I’ve seen too many games where every such NPC turns out to be a human man. With the Deck of Many Names, you can skip some of those decisions while also ensuring that your array of NPCs includes a spectrum of genders, fantasy species, and age ranges. Basically, it’s a project meant to make D&D games both easier and more inclusive.
What kind of information about the characters are on the cards so you can easily reference it?
Each
card includes a name (given name only), gender (depicted on a spectrum), an age
category (young, middle, old), fantasy species, and a short bit of text
offering a quirk or other roleplaying cue.
The information is not extensive, because things like combat stats or personal history/occupation are likely to either not come up or already be established by the time you draw a card. For example, you may have just finished a combat against a group of bandits but your players surprised you by taking one captive to interrogate. You already know they’re a bandit and you’re done with their stats, but now you need to be able to play out a dialogue. Just draw a card and you’ve got their name and other relevant details. Or maybe you thought your players would just stop into the shop and get what they needed, but instead they try to start a relationship with the shopkeeper. You already know they’re a shopkeeper, but now you need those personal details that will enable a conversation; that’s what you get by drawing a card.
Of course, you can use these cards other times besides on the fly. Are you planning a campaign about an evil necromancer and don’t know how to decide their name, gender, etc? Draw a card. Do you need a starting point for creating your next PC? Draw a card and go from there. It really helps with a lot of things!
What kind of NPCs will we see in the deck, in background, ability, etc.?
You might draw a card and discover that the NPC in question is a younger human man named Abdul, or an older nonbinary gnome named Umpen, or a medium-aged tiefling named Osah. Each would also include a minor roleplay hook, like “can’t stop moving their hands when they talk,” or “uses verbal fillers a lot”. There are all sorts of combinations!
Hi all! Today I’ve got a great interview with Jacob Kellogg and Joseph Kellogg, creators of Rodent Rangers,a nifty roleplaying game currrently on Kickstarter! The project could really use some attention and it seems like a fun game, so please check it out, and see what they have to say about it in the responses below!
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Tell me a little about Rodent Rangers. What excites you about it?
Jacob:Rodent Rangers puts players in the role of anthropomorphic mice who go on missions under the feet of modern humans to help those in need. In addition to the nostalgia of old animated films like The Rescuers or The Great Mouse Detective, what’s exciting about this game is the light-hearted, joyful purity of it. Especially with the real world being as dark as it is right now, the idea of sending your tiny persona into a big world and nonetheless making a difference—all without the constant violence or mechanical complexity that comes with other games—just feels really appealing. Be a cute mouse and go help somebody. Let everything be okay for a while.
Joseph: What excites me most is the ability to tell stories that let kids get creative and solve problems. Instead of trying to sanitize other systems that rely on violence, Rodent Rangers focuses on using wit and a pure heart to deal with villains, while allowing for daring feats and narrow escapes.
What do the players do to play the game mechanically – how do they take action and tell stories?
Jacob: Mechanically, Rodent Rangers starts with a familiar premise: shared narration, with dice to resolve uncertain or risky actions. It’s a very lightweight system, with no hard rules for action types or explicitly-defined special abilities like you have in games like D&D. Instead, activities are descriptive, with the dice determining success or failure. The dice system is pretty sleek as well, with no bonuses or penalties being added to die rolls. Instead, your attributes tell you how many dice to roll and your skills tell you which size those dice should be, then you roll a batch of them and see how many “hits” (dice that show a 4 or higher) you got. If you meet a minimum threshold of hits (depending on the difficulty of the task) you succeed.
Joseph: Rodent Rangers is a skill-based RPG, with a dice system specially designed to be as math-light as possible. When players want to try something, like befriending a stranger or finding a clue, they pick a type of die based on their skill level, and get a number of them based on basic attributes (like Strong or Clever). When they roll, they just have to count the dice that came up as 4 or more.
What do the characters do in the narrative? Are they rescuers? What kind of adventures do they have?
Jacob: Narratively, the Rodent Rangers are an in-world organization that spans the globe, and sends teams of field agents out on missions to help their fellow critters (or even humans sometimes). You might recover a museum’s stolen relic, help to evacuate mice from a flooding sewer city, or even help guide a lost human child back to their parents. There’s an emphasis on being part of a team and working together, as well as being noble and wanting to help people (after all, that’s why you became an agent of the Rodent Rangers).
Joseph: Characters in Rodent Rangers are agents of the titular organization, a worldwide network or do-gooders and adventurers. They get sent on missions to help other animals or people in danger, and hopefully make friends along the way. In the sample adventure, players will be asked to track down a researcher who was kidnapped by sinister treasure hunters. To rescue him, they’ll need to look for clues, get past a devious snake, make new friends, and maybe even get into a high-speed car chase!
Potentially even encounter villains such as this!
What kind of character becomes a Rodent Ranger, and how do they fit into the larger world? Do these characters stand out?
Jacob: There are really only three key aspects of a person who becomes a ranger: they’re part of animal society rather than human society, they have some kind of skill or ability to contribute, and they want to help. Beyond that, a character could be anyone, which I think is something I really like about this game. You don’t have to be born into the right circumstance, be the chosen one, be part of the dominant forces of society, or whatever else. If you want to do good in the world in your own unique way, then there’s a spot for you on the team that no one else can fill.
Joseph: A Rodent Ranger is someone who loves adventure and helping people. Many mice are content to live peaceful lives, and shun danger. Rodent Rangers are often the best at what they do, and driven to put their talents to good use in the wider world.
How is Rodent Rangers special to you in it’s design and concept?
Jacob: Aside from some of the conceptual elements that I’ve already talked about liking, I’m really into how straightforward and “essentials only” the mechanics are. Games can sometimes get a bit overwrought, trying too hard to make sure every element of the experience has its own mechanic instead of just giving you the tools you need and leaving room for imagination. For example, as much as I like D&D, I would probably like it even better if you dropped the entire “spells” chapter in favor of a more “here’s the general idea, do what makes sense” approach. That’s what Rodent Rangers does: it gives you enough to show you what the game’s about and enable you to play, then gets out of the way.
Joseph:Rodent Rangers is special because it reflects many of the cartoons of my childhood, in which a pure heart and brave soul were all that were needed to save the day.
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
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