{"id":13,"date":"2016-06-08T17:19:57","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T17:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/?p=13"},"modified":"2016-08-19T21:14:52","modified_gmt":"2016-08-19T21:14:52","slug":"the-perfect-metaphor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/2016\/06\/08\/the-perfect-metaphor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Perfect Metaphor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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People begin their design of a roleplaying game in all sorts of different places in the design, and for all sorts of different reasons. It might be a cool dice mechanic you thought up, the desire to create a certain type of character, or a reaction to something somewhere you wanted to redesign and it just kind of got away from you<\/span><\/div>\n
.<\/span>
\nNo matter what brings you to designing your own game, at some point you\u2019re going to want to decide what your game is all about, and I don\u2019t mean putting it in a tidy little box like sword and sorcery, space opera, or contemporary supernatural. What I mean is, focusing on the bit after the \u201cbut\u201d in the statement \u201cIt\u2019s like Dungeons and Dragons but\u2026\u201d.<\/div>\n
This \u201cbut\u201d is like a flashing sign showing you where to look for what your game is all about. This \u201cbut\u201d is the reason you got started writing something in the first place. It could be something really simple or something really complex but it\u2019s the thing you want to check in on as you continue with your design. That\u2019s not to say it can\u2019t change but it\u2019s ultimately how you can gauge the success of your design.A brief aside\u2026
\nOnce upon a not so very long time ago there was a website called The Forge (http:\/\/www.indie-rpgs.com\/forge\/index.php?board=76.0) which featured a lot of game design related talk.<\/div>\n
It\u2019s closed now but at the time it was pretty avant garde and as time went by became increasingly jargon heavy. That\u2019s not to say it\u2019s inaccessible but if you\u2019re planning on looking at some of the articles be ready to search around for the meaning of some of the terms you\u2019re going to find.
\nThe reason I bring it up is because one of the progenitors of the, site, Ron Edwards, coined the phrase \u201cFantasy Heartbreaker\u201d (you can read the article where it was first used here: http:\/\/www.indie-rpgs.com\/articles\/9\/). It\u2019s not intended to be mean-spirited but the article does ruthlessly deconstruct several games he has identified as \u201cFantasy Heartbreakers\u201d.<\/div>\n
In essence a \u201cheartbreaker\u201d is a game which is derivative or, specifically, tries to out D&D D&D or some other game. My understanding is that the heartbreak comes from the fact it is either unlikely to be popular or make any money and\/or could have been so much more.<\/div>\n
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I never much cared for the way the term \u201cheartbreaker\u201d came to be used. Although it wasn\u2019t Ron\u2019s intention*, it became a reductive and dismissive term. It still haunts design conversations today and the thought that hearing it in reference to their game might put somebody off completing a design makes me sad.Anyway, my personal feeling is just do what makes you happy. You don\u2019t owe it to anyone to innovate or colour outside the lines. Just follow the \u201cbut\u201d part of that original sentence and see what happens, or better yet, spend a little time fleshing out that description just to help with staying focused.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A great way to do this is to think of a metaphor, design brief, or pitch for your game. Perhaps by starting with an existing thing like a well-known game, book, film, or television programme and adding your \u201cbut\u201d statement to the end.<\/div>\n
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If a better example exists than this one, which comes from the Call of Cthulhu 6e Quickstart Rules, I don\u2019t know it.The simplest metaphor for a game of Call of Cthulhu can be likened to the fairy tale of the Little Dutch Boy.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/i>
\nThe dam had a crack and the Little Dutch Boy had to stand there with his finger in the hole to keep the water from flooding out and destroying the nearby town.<\/i><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
However, instead of how the original tale played out, imagine that on the other side of that dam is a bloodthirsty shark, which is gnawing away at the Dutch Boy.\u00a0<\/i>
\nHe loses one finger, so he must put another one in. Then he loses another finger, and another. The hole is getting bigger, and he must stick his entire arm in, and the shark keeps biting. But if he fails, if he leaves his post, the dam will collapse, and many lives will be lost. And so he stays, resolute in his convictions. He may die, but humanity will live because of him.<\/i><\/div>\n
Genius.<\/div>\n
Those two paragraphs tell me everything I would want to know about what to expect when I play a game of Call of Cthulhu.<\/div>\n
My design goal for Victoria was to create an experience like the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes<\/em> Films. It had to have a very simple and short resolution mechanic where people could roll dice and describe what happened without mentioning a number or looking at a table.<\/div>\n
Faith, which actually predates the writing of Victoria by fifteen years despite being released eighteen months after, is a bit tricky to remember. I\u2019m struggling a bit to recall exactly what spurred me on at the time but I wanted to create an experience like a Tarantino film where the resolution system, such as it is, would never get in the way of the most interesting thing happening.<\/div>\n
Was I successful?<\/div>\n
If meeting the initial design goals of a game means that a game was successful, then it was.<\/div>\n
If the game worked means that a game was successful, then it was.<\/div>\n
If covering the production costs of a game means that it was successful, then it was.<\/div>\n
If being able to give up your day job to write games full time means your game was successful then it wasn’t.<\/div>\n
Which brings me to my last point.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Don’t let\u00a0people that say you can’t make a living from writing games discourage you from writing them at all. If that’s your dream: go for it, and\u00a0don’t measure\u00a0the success of your games by whether\u00a0you’re able to write rpgs full time. The vast majority of what I would consider extremely successful designers work regular 9-5 jobs.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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*<\/span>*Online Ron Edwards is a pretty polarizing figure and it\u2019s unlikely you\u2019ll agree with everything he says; I certainly don’t.<\/div>\n
The reason I doubt he meant for it to be used to club someone’s dreams is because I saw Ron in action at Origins in 2010 (although he won\u2019t remember me). He had a booth where he had his games and a sign offering advice to people who were trying to write their own RPGs. I stopped for a few moments and just before I spoke to him a 20-ish chap bustled up to him looking for that promised advice about a game he was writing.<\/div>\n
I don\u2019t recall exactly what the premise of this fellow\u2019s game was, but it involved racing robot pokemons or something. Even though it was just a tiny germ of an idea Ron very earnestly listened to this fellow\u2019s pitch and took the time to understand what was going on. At no point did he make any disparaging remarks or dismiss what the chap was trying to accomplish. In short, in my experience, he\u2019s a nice guy who loves rpgs, designing rpgs, and talking about designing rpgs.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People begin their design of a roleplaying game in all sorts of different places in the design, and for all sorts of different reasons. It might be a cool dice mechanic you thought up, the desire to create a certain type of character, or a reaction to something somewhere you wanted to redesign and it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120,"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hazardgaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}