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Devil Designer: Or How I Learned to Stop Leveling and Love the Nerf Bat
By Corvus | January 19, 2006
One of my problems with the early days of RPGs was that I frequently ran across game masters who were engaged in some sort of perverse power struggle with their players. I’ve seen temper tantrums thrown when players quickly figure out a painstakingly crafted trap filled dungeons, escaping with most of the treasure and without much of the harm. I’ve seen players quickly and efficiently use the strengths of their characters to defeat an evil overlord, only to be rewarded with an abrupt end to the session and a weeks long sulk. I’ve seen players, with all the signs of people in an abusive relationship, dread the next session, knowing that the DM would, once again, destroy their new character, crowing loudly about his superior gaming skills. I’ve sat through literally hours of conversation with GMs about how never, ever once, have they failed to kill every character to ever appear in a campaign. Hours of it, I tell you, complete with play by play, blow by blow, descriptions of every death, complete with gruesome descriptions of the beaten down and frustrated players’ reactions to the loss of their characters, some of whom they’d played for years in other GM’s campaigns.
Like being the campaign’s crafter (or interpretor) and ultimate adjudicator of all conflict isn’t enough power? I have never understood this unbalanced war of storyteller vs. audience. Even if you approach RPing as a competitive game, the DM/GM/Storyteller’s role ought to be one of interface and guide, not adversary. If it’s about winning for you and you hold all the cards, so to speak, of course you’re going to ‘win’ eventually. I wonder if that attitude is a by product of a rules approach? If you approach role paying as an exercise in interactive, even cooperative, storytelling, such posturing and hostility has absolutely no place.
Which brings us to further musing on MMOGs and narrative focused design.
I feel that developers often behave in much the same manner as those twisted control freaks (not that I’m casting a value judgment here *kniw*) I mentioned. The gamers who purchase a game for $50 and then, in many cases, pay a double digit fee monthly for the privilege of playing it, are not the designers’ enemy. Not even when they’re loudly decrying your design decisions on the official message boards. If you’re reading this, you probably already know that the term ‘Nerf’ as it applies to MMOGs means when a character class is patched in such a way as to reduce it’s power. This is done in the name of game balance, but the message to the community seems to be, “You were too good at the game, so we had to set you back a bit.”
Even when the issue wasn’t specifically with a character class, but with the Ai, the players are often made out to be the villain, the cheat. Let me give you an example from a popular MMOG: A party including a rogue and a warlock found a clever way to challenge an instance boss without mowing through a full dungeon’s worth of mobs. The rogue snuck through the dungeon, and stun locked the boss. The warlock then teleported the rogue back to the entrance of the dungeon and then they waited. Before long, the boss came a-runnin’ (failing to bring along some backup) and the party handily took him out. I suspect they probably did this several times. Bosses give good loot. Of course, being proud of their accomplishment, they told others who promptly began using the same technique. The developers fixed the situation in the next patch. the boss now pulls along all the dungeon’s mobs with him, turning a cake walk into a death march. Rightly so, they fixed it. The dungeon wasn’t designed well. But the message to the community was that the exploit was fixed. Not to be overly sensitive, but exploit is a pretty pejorative term, narratively speaking.
So what am I suggesting? Well, like the issue of level restraints on in game items, I’m suggesting a narrative approach to the situation. Perhaps the message should have been cooperative and congratulatory instead of combative and condescending. Something along the lines of, “Ha! Good for you. I can’t believe that boss was stupid enough to fall for that. Well, he’ll be smarter in the future, so be careful.”
Same situation, same solution, sublime storytelling scenario.
My argument here is that when your approach to game design is centered on the rules, mathematical formula, and game mechanics, it lends itself to a numbers only approach to all aspects of your design and service. Math is pretty cut and dried. You come up the winner, or you come up the loser. There’s no need for emotional consideration. Numbers are crisp, clear, and stoic. On the other hand, if you ensure that every detail of the mechanics has a place in the overall narration, your game and service becomes a group effort.
It’s really just an inversion of focus. Story built of gameplay elements, instead of story elements existing to enable gameplay.
Tagged:Carnival, Design. | 8 Comments »
January 20th, 2006 at 7:17 am
In some twenty years of tabletop role playing I have never once met a Gamesmaster with such an appaling attitude towards the role. Is it possible that this is a cultural artefact? That such terrible approaches are endemic to the US for some reason?
Or perhaps it’s just because I ditched D&D fairly rapidly in favour of systems which better elnd themselves to story/character oriented play.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:34 am
I think it’s a combination of all the elements you mentioned. A few of those examples were nerds in Texas, which tends to provide a slightly aggressive and hostile approach to life. Age is another consideration. Most, with one notable exception, of the examples I provided were teenaged. The worst of them I’ve met at conventions, which tend to bring out the most social mal-adjusted of the lot and provide them with alcohol… never a pleasant mix.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Been there. Only had one really bad one, but that was enough. (shudder)
Please consider sending this (or a version thereof) to the aforementioned designers.
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:45 pm
I think see what you’re saying about exploit being a pejorative term. Rather than saying, “Hey, there was a glitch in the game and we fixed it,” using the word “exploit” places blame on the players. I’m reminded of Lucasfilm’s old “Habitat” (aka Club Caribe) where players killed a supposedly invincible character — Death and took one of his special items. The whole story can be found here about 3/4s of the way down:
http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:56 pm
Animagnum, I don’t think you see what he’s saying. He’s saying, why should it be an “exploit”, or even a “glitch”? Why shouldn’t the dumb monster and the creative players become part of the story?
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:17 pm
I’ve played with a number of DMs like those that have been described here and it’s made me wiser for it. However, sometimes it goes the other way around. I’ve had players who are so confident in their l33t skillz that I’ll purposefully trick them into difficult situations because I know that they’ll run headlong into it. And sometimes nerfing is necessary as well. When a developer create a game, they usually don’t have the time to nitpick each and every single last thing that could possibly happen, maybe. They just take care of the ones that will happen the most. IMO some players deserve it when things get nerfed because. No matter how you put the nerfing though, some people are going to see it as “The players were too good, so now we changed it on them”. What I prefer to do is something like what was describe here – up the non-player aspect instead of nerfing the player. Nothing ticks someone off more than creating a character only to have parts of it nerfed because someone decided it was too powerful. If it’s too powerful, then give them something harder to fight. As in the example, instead of getting rid of that warlock’s ability to teleport, they just made it so the boss trained the entire dungeon out with him.
Personally, I don’t like to play MMORPGs because I find that the players, collectively, get too emotionally involved in their characters. This is even more true in those for which you pay a monthly fee. Because someone pays $15-20 to play an online game for a month they feel that they’re special and in some way better than others when they’re able to get their characters to insane levels, or figure things out like what was spoken about. IMO, they should just get lives, but for those who do it an in-character explaination is always prefered to one that deal with the mechanics of the game.
February 2nd, 2006 at 9:57 pm
Alex, that’s exactly how I read it. Read parat of the story from the link I posted and you’ll see how it relates to this post. The players found what would normally be called an “exploit” and the creative GMs decided to roleplay the situation instead of claiming that the players broke the game or exploited a bug.
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Nice entry. I’ve never understood the GM vs. players mindset. I always view gaming as a cooperative story telling effort with the only goal being that everyone walks away from the table feeling that they helped create a fun shared experience.
Oh, and I also got to explain to Mel what it means that you were Slash dotted. That was a fun conversation since her involvement with the geek world is only through marriage.