Breaking the rules
Eric Heimburg has a little post about loot in games, particularly how it is in the new 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. He complains that loot just isn't special anymore, and discusses how this is similar to MMOs (which people have accused the D&D developers of copying too much).
The problem, as I commented, is that you don't get to break the rules. That's what makes the games more interesting, and one of the major problems we have in MMOs.
Back in the bad old days of online game discussion (also known as Usenet groups and mailing lists), one of the stated goals was that games should attempt to capture the feeling of paper RPGs. But, it's not just the inability to send Cheetos and Mountain Dew over the internet that has held us back. The main problem is that the computer just isn't as creative as a human GM can be in a paper game.
But, the real strength is that the human factor lets you break the rules. If I'm playing a paper RPG campaign and some thugs attack us in the bar, I have a lot of creative options open to me. I might turn over a table to use for cover, swing from the chandelier, or perhaps pick up a chair and use it as an improvised weapon if I left my sword in the coat check room. In each of these cases, the GM has to come up with a rule that allows that action to make sense in terms of the game. Perhaps making an attack while swinging from the chandelier gives me +2 damage while giving a -2 penalty in this case. But, I can't just say, "I'm going to do something to give me extra damage to my attack!" to the DM and expect a benefit; you have to actually describe an action and perhaps hint at what you are trying to accomplish.
In a computer-moderated game, we have a problem with this system. If these actions are actual options in the encounter, then they must be coded in as options. No longer am I breaking the rules by choosing one of the options, I now have extra rules that can be used. Worse, these rules are likely set inviolate in the code, so they become part of the encounter and something to be analyzed and adopted as part of the strategy of the encounter. "Oh, always try to swing on the chandelier because that gives a bonus to damage. Knocking over the table restricts maneuvering but only gives a pathetic defense bonus." The best we often hope for is a conditional: "If the brigands are charging, use the chandelier; if they are shooting arrows, hide behind the table until they reload."
In a paper RPG, you're also often trying to tell an interesting story, which adds to the fun. Knocking over the table isn't just a way to get a defensive bonus, it's also a popular movie cliché and an opportunity to send the message that you aren't going to go down with out a fight! And that act can have interesting story consequences later that you can't necessarily determine at the time.
This isn't to say that you can't "break the rules" within the context of the rules. Magic: the Gathering has a color, blue, that focuses a lot on breaking the rules. One example is the Sleight of Mind card that allows you to change the words in the rules of a card, even! This is a structured way to break the rules, although you might notice that many of these types of cards need the most rules clarification.
In MMO games, we can see the same thing as well. In EQ2, I focused on the healing abilities of my Necromancer, to the confusion of a lot of people. I could give life from myself and my pet to others to heal (then replenish it by damaging the enemy). I wasn't a primary healer, but I was able to save our group from wiping one time during a really bad pull. I was able to "break the rules" by going outside my defined role in the group, direct damage. The flipside to this is when other people get upset when a character can break the rules when he or she cannot; one of my friends playing the game with me was sometimes cranky that I had a more flexible character than the one he was playing.
Going back to our talk of the olden days, there's a term for this: emergent gameplay. This is when players do unexpected things often still allowed by the game system. This could be a good thing such as the creative way people created items in Ultima Online from simple components. Or, it can be a negative thing where people figure out an exploit to reduce the risk of an encounter but still reap the reward.
So, I think this is an interesting concept to think about. How do the players get to break the rules in the game, and how does that add more interest to the game? How can we focus on the positive aspects while trying to minimize the negative effects?
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The problem is that game designers are horrified that someone comes and breaks their beautiful game, when they should be rewarding people for pushing the envelope.
I've been trying to give people alternative solutions in some of my games (except Eversion, where the important was pulling the player through the experience and any shortcuts were unintentional). Alphabox lets you make any set of English words with the existing blocks, and people have indeed found many alternate solutions to the default puzzles. I think that's rather rare in 'pure' puzzle games.
Comment by Zaratustra — 4 February, 2009 @ 8:18 AM
I play an enchanter/mezzer in many different games, and we are always flirting with emergent gameplay, it would seem. Here's a good example: One of the instances in Ruins of Kunark (EQ2) had an early boss that had some nasty special abilities. He would teleport you to some spot which you had to run off of quickly or you would get caught in a big explosion. And you had to avoid falling in a big hidden pit, too. Not to mention he was big and nasty.
However, it turns out that he could only use these abilities if he had power available to cast them. Which means that you could make the encounter much easier by mezzing him and draining him of all power. I suppose you could call this emergent gameplay, but the capability had been in the game since launch, it was just slow and usually not worth it. But it was not what the gamedevs had in mind. I think they change the ability so he could cast it with no power, or gave him a lot more power, or something.
With my design hat on, I can see their point. You don't want to make one class essential for success in one of the key parts of the expansion. With my player hat on, I'm miffed that they gave me these cool abilities that have no practical use whatsoever in the PvE game. They apparently got that point, and have added direct damage to my power drains. This both makes them more useful in PvE, and makes it harder to power drain someone while they are mezzed. Not so good for the PvP Illusionists.
I am definitely from the tabletop school. Making the encounter easier and less dangerous via skill and strategy is why I play an enchanter. If I wanted to endlessly mash buttons for big loot, I'd play a dps class.
Comment by Toldain — 4 February, 2009 @ 9:50 AM
One of the intriguing things about a question like this is that different people are going to have different solutions depending on what they personally enjoy doing in these game things.
Someone who's interested primarily in mechanics is likely to come up with a mechanistic solution, such as designing (and testing.testing.testing) very specific features with carefully-defined interactions. "That's as creative as you get to be" is how they might approach it.
Your friendly neighborhood Simulationist is going to insist that that's all wrong, though, that it fails to really capture the essence of being creative because it's too constricting. What's really needed (says the F.N.S.) is a Havok-like physics system -- let objects in the gameworld have plausible active behaviors and there'll be less need for a DM/GM equivalent to make up arbitrary rules on the spot. Problem solved!
"Not so fast," says the person who cares most about narrative, and story, and character, and the artistic/aesthetic presentation of action. Where's the fun in a clockwork universe? Beyond the first, "ooh, that's neat," how does that deliver a play experience that matters so much you'll remember it years later? Think about a game of Paranoia, where a good GM will -- regardless of formal game rules or dynamic dice rolls -- dictate the results of a player's stated action by considering how funny and/or diabolically clever the proposed action is and how well it helps create the GM's desired overall "feel" for the gameworld. What kind of mechanistic or simulationist system is capable of providing that level of abstract aesthetic judgement to creative and passionate players?
...
If there's an answer, I wonder if it might not come as some kind of amalgam of all three of these perspectives. It might even have to be someone creating not a game, but a GM-in-a-box as the entire application. The gameplay would come from hooking up this general-purpose "judgement machine" to what's currently considered to be complete game content: a collection of art, sound and character assets, an NPC AI engine, a physics interpreter, and a set of relatively high-level gameplay rules. Finally, the judgement machine would be given a set of overarching principles of fun, which it would try to satisfy using the game objects and rules as acted upon dynamically by characters (PCs and NPCs) in the gameworld.
In practice, every action taken by characters would feed into the judgement machine. It would then render unto the characters performing those actions what it thinks the results of those actions should be in order to satisfy the artistic goals assigned to it by the game's designer(s). Depending on whether those goals focus on rules-based, sandbox, or emotion-driven play, you'd get a certain type of gameworld as emergent behavior from however many players decide they like that kind of thing... just like players in a tabletop RPG decide whether or not some human GM suits their tastes in gaming.
All this is pretty blue-sky, admittedly. But providing to gamers the fair, creative, and aesthetic capabilities of a human GM is a non-trivial problem.
Comment by Bart Stewart — 4 February, 2009 @ 9:52 PM
Lightweight and Heavyweight Rulesets
[...] and make it a part of the mundane mechanics. Brian Green picked up on this and took the angle of how this is a case of MMOs affecting the design of pen and paper RPGs instead of the other way aroun.... He went on to discuss how modern MMO (and some PnP) rulesets are a consequence of the constraints [...]
Pingback by Dancing Elephants — 5 February, 2009 @ 5:42 AM
I think these problems merely point to the limitations of each genre. Computer games are great for fast-paced interactions that involve a lot of number-crunching, and they're great for visual immersion. Paper and pencil games are great for face-to-face contact, and depth of narrative.
In other words, try to imagine a GM telling you that you're having trouble aiming your nailgun because things keep exploding off in the distance, and your gunnery skill modded for weather, mental state, recent injury, and weapon maintenance doesn't equal the minimum necessary for an accurate shot at exactly this range.
Then imagine WoW producing a nuanced, grammatically correct text description of your character's life-story to date.
I would say, it isn't so much that we're breaking the rules in either genre, rather, it's just not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Comment by Bret — 6 February, 2009 @ 4:56 PM
That is the one thing I miss about tabletop games. You were only limited by the imagination of your group. There were no invisible walls or travel restrictions. You were given a lot of creative freedom as a player and even more as a DM. No video game can encompass all the choices a player wants to make.
With the current generation of massively multi-player online games, there is very little interaction with the enviroment. In a standard night of tabletop gaming, people would climb trees to avoid packs of wild animals. They'd use rope to climb up the face of a cliff. One might inch out onto a branch and attempt to jump to the other side of a gully. This sort of creative freedom is commonplace in the world of tabletop games.
We are indeed limited by the code we create. I don't expect that to change, but I'm hopeful that in the next twenty years, we'll see some cool advancements in the creative freedom offered to players.
Comment by Septa Scarabae — 11 February, 2009 @ 9:17 AM
Perhaps, like MTG, the way to make interesting emergent gameplay possible in MMOs is to build based on modular design. Build horizontally, not vertically, and keep variables within a relatively small power band. (Couched in MTG terms, modern MMO power band design far outstrips the power difference between Mons' Goblin Raiders and a Black Lotus, or even a Krosan Cloudscraper or Marit Lage.) I'm obviously biased, since I'm an MTG "Johnny", but I really like finding those hidden synergies, skirting the emergent gameplay edge. I love being able to take pieces of a game and find new, interesting uses for them. That's way more useful for keeplayable and replayable value in my book than the class/level system of raising a stable of alts to generate variety.
Yes, that means a designer has to keep a lid on potential abuses (again, MTG has to do this; that Arcbound Ravager was nasty), but it's doable, especially in an MMO game where players have come to expect periodic rebalancing patches. Horizontal design with a narrow power band is especially useful for the leveling concerns that have popped up in the Feb 13th and 15th articles. Designing to "break the rules" by allowing and encouraging experimentation is something that I would love to see in MMO design.
Comment by Tesh — 16 February, 2009 @ 10:42 AM
Being an explorer at heart, I would love to see that, too, Tesh. As a game administrator, I know that concept is fraught with peril.
Another way to think about what I posted here is that in MMOs, the rules apply universally. To see how that would apply to a game like MtG, consider if the only way to play MtG was in tournaments. Would the game be as fun? Would you have as many people playing the game if they could only play in tournaments? Probably not. Tournaments are the most demanding and rigid form of play.
Compare an imbalance found in an MMO with an imbalance in a tabletop game like D&D or MtG. In the tabletop game, you just make a "house rule" that nobody can play with the overpowered card/item/class/whatever. In an MMO, you're stuck with the imbalance until the administrators decide to deal with it. You can't just make an agreement with other people to avoid the overpowered aspect. In fact, you can almost guarantee that people will flock to it (and be ultimately disappointed when the pendulum of balance swings back and nerfs that aspect).
Ultimately, it's a combination of the smaller scale and human judgment in tabletop games that make them unique. Once you start getting "massive" and relying on a computer to judge the situation, you lose some of that magic. Then again, you don't necessarily have to put up with the negative aspects of tabletop games, either.
A few more thoughts.
Comment by Psychochild — 16 February, 2009 @ 4:08 PM