#gamedesignreflections

In video games, players can attempt any action that the designers programmed... but in role-playing games, players can theoretically attempt any action at all. Often, new players are drawn to role-playing games because of the freedom it offers. Video games have programming limitations, things like invisible walls, NPCs that don't act realistically, only a few dialogue choices(none of which you like), a wall that should be able to be climbed, a door that should be able to be opened, a space ship that you want to be able to pilot, the list goes on. So players come to role-playing games thinking that they will finally be able to do all of these things. But the most popular game, which most new players end up playing first, is Dungeons and Dragons, a "Rules-Heavy" game. And the detailed rules end up getting in the way of this freedom. With tables and charts that need to be looked up and referenced, with modifiers to attempted actions based on difficulty, with a list of skills that determine whether or not your character is able to perform an action in the first place, etc. In response to this issue, the game design trend has been to create "Rules-Lite" games, where the rigid detailed rules are removed, and the action is centered on the story, or narrative. This makes the game play faster and smoother than Rules-Heavy games, and in most cases the players really can attempt anything, but this can start to feel like less of a game since the players have more control over the game than the rules do. At the extreme end, this type of game starts to fall into the realm of collaborative storytelling, and sure enough, games like this are now being called "Story" games. These games almost completely remove the rules of the game, and rely on the players to tell a story together, which stretches the concept of it even being called a game. In designing Nightmares, it wasn't really possible to designate it as rules-heavy, rules-lite, or narrative-based game. There are elements of each that I wanted to keep. Starting with rules-heavy games, I wanted to make sure that the game is mechanically challenging, and that there is enough substance to the combat system that it would retain the character customization and tactical depth of rules-heavy games, being able to choose unique abilities that have unique rules to create a unique character build. One of my favorite video games, Path of Exile, influenced my design decisions for this part of the game. Path of Exile has a very large skill tree and most of the skill nodes are just value increases to statistics, but there are several unique nodes across the skill tree that change the mechanics of the character. It is these unique nodes that inspired the "rules-heavy" character building aspect of Nightmares. Here are some examples: Dark Hunger: By causing injuries, you recover injuries, but can no longer heal naturally. Remove the least important injury from any body location any time you roll a critical hit. Mountain: Your armor rating is doubled, but you lose the ability to perform active defense tests. Bloodletting: Remove 1 Stress any time you suffer an injury in combat, but you can no longer recover Stress naturally, and you now gain twice as much Blood Loss from injuries. Berserk: Your successful attacks affect all enemies within range of your attack, but you gain 1 Stress point for every enemy that you hit. There is a large list of abilities just like these, called Psychic Anomalies, with synergies between them that can allow for a wide variety of combinations and character builds, and adds depth to the combat system. So, as I mentioned in the last design post, combat maintains its realism and depth, but has been streamlined, and a large reason for this is the inspiration I took from "rules-lite" games. This streamlined design decision has been applied to all aspects of the game. There is no reason to have pages and pages of rules for every possible situation that the players can come across. The human mind is the key difference between a video game and a role-playing game. And to this extent, there is a degree of "story" game design in deciding what fits into the game and what doesn't. As opposed to other games that modify actions with various rules, there is no question about an action being easy or difficult here, there is instead only the question of it being possible. This is where it becomes similar to story games. If the GM feels that an action isn't possible, the GM asks the group of players if they think it seems realistically possible. The players have the final say on what is realistic to them, and if the players decide it is possible then the action may be attempted. The only rule to stop this from getting out of hand is a warning that this game is intended to be gritty. If the players want to go beyond the realm of gritty realism, then this is probably not the right game to be playing. Another point that relates to rules-lite and story games is the fact that skill lists have been removed from this game. The characters instead have words that describe their character's background, and the players can use those words to attempt anything that makes sense. For example, a character may have come from a Forest, and has Forest as a Rank 1 skill. That means the character can use the Forest skill for anything related to Forests, and essentially any actions attempted while in a Forest. If the character doesn't have a skill that applies to the situation, the character can still attempt the action using a rank 0 skill called Struggle, which applies to any possible action. Characters then advance in those skills with more specific versions of them, such as Forest Hunting. This system removes the unnecessary overlap of skills and allows for players to be creative with their actions. The last point I will make about the rules complexity is that I absolutely did not want the game to become a storytelling game without any mechanical difficulty. This is intended to be a game where the players are challenged by the rules of the game itself, similar to how a board game is played, but with rules that only take a few minutes to read in their entirety. As an end result, the game has simple rules that are easy to learn, but challenging to win against, requiring careful and skilled play.

Before Role-Playing Games, we had tabletop war games. Games where units were given detailed statistics to simulate war scenarios, even being so detailed that military generals used them to develop strategies and determine outcomes for impending conflicts. Gary Gygax, the father of Role-Playing Games, made a war game called Chainmail that he would later modify to make Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, many of the concepts of Chainmail were directly transfered into Dungeons and Dragons. But the biggest difference between Chainmail and Dungeons and Dragons was not so much the rules, it was that instead of controlling armies of fantasy creatures, in D&D each player controlled a single character. Naturally, D&D having been a modification of a war game, it maintained combat as a focus, and combat has been pretty much integrated into every role-playing game since then... The thing is, there are still some game design relics to show for it. One such relic is the Hit Points mechanic(also called life, health, wounds, or other similar names). This is an abstraction to easily show how much damage a unit could sustain before dying. Instead of tracking each injury a character receives, the character would just have points removed from their hit points score. Its simple, but it presents a problem. There are detailed rules for attacking, defending, using armor, using weapons, movement, positioning, etc. But hit points are undetailed and don't reflect any actual injury to the character. And with the complexity of combat in most games, it's probably better that players don't have to keep track of injuries on top of all the other details. Which brings up another problem, the nuance of combat. Again, the rules of these war games have influenced RPGs for a long time... To the point where combat in rpgs is often very slow paced. In most games, there is a rule to roll dice to determine who goes in what order in combat, which can take a minute or two to record. Each player then gets a turn, which can take anywhere from several seconds to several minutes, depending on how many actions they can take. The GM performs actions with each non-player character involved in the combat, which also takes time. In some games, more and more options for different types of actions are added in to avoid what's called the "dice-slog" (where players just roll to attack without any details other than "I attack this opponent," and the GM does the same), which causes even more time to elapse. Everyone then has to keep track of how many actions they took on their turn, and even though these actions are supposed to all be happening mostly simultaneously, it feels like everything else pauses except for the character that is acting. It can get so bad that players leave the table when it's not their turn, knowing that they won't have any interaction for at least the next 5 to 10 minutes. I'm going to stop there. I think at this point you can see there's a problem. Combat takes a long time to resolve, sometimes taking hours, and doesn't keep involvement very high. Having studied and practiced historical martial arts, I've taken a few approaches to combat that keep it more realistic and gritty than most games, and also smoothed out clunky rules to keep it quick and simple. First, I've made it so that combat is broken up into 2 turns: the players' turn and the GM's turn. This means there's no need to record who goes first, there's no time spent rolling to see the order of turns, and if a player isn't ready, another player can go ahead without having to wait. This also allows characters to act simultaneously without feeling like they are acting separately from everyone else. The big improvement here is that when combat starts, players are able to act immediately, unless they are ambushed. The next rule is that each player has a limited amount of dice that they can use in combat. After rolling a die, the player cannot roll that die again. If the player runs out of dice, they can't perform any more actions. However, the players recover one die on the GM's turn, and two dice on the players' turn, so players have to balance how many actions they're willing to take, how many dice they want to roll on any single action, and how many dice to keep unrolled to defend themselves with. Also, instead of trying to figure out how many actions a player can take on their turn, it is limited directly by how many dice they have left. A number of improvements made with this mechanic. The last design approach has to do with hit points. Instead of an abstract number that carries very little impact, each character has a body injury chart with little bubbles for different injuries to different body locations. The severity of injury is based on how much damage the character receives. This creates a visceral image of how they are afflicted by attacks, and doesn't require a ton of book-keeping, you just mark the injury bubble on the location it was inflicted. Now, characters could just keep suffering injuries to different locations and avoid death, except that each injury also causes an amount of blood loss(which, admittedly, is similar to hit points). When a character reaches a certain amount of blood loss, they fall unconscious and start hemorrhaging. To avoid this, characters can bandage themselves, but this costs 2 dice and causes the character to gain a point of Stress (which is the only way characters gain Stress in combat). As a result, combat ends up being fast-paced and realistic, with very little book-keeping. Balancing your dice between attacking and defending gets you thinking about the next turn of combat, keeping everyone engaged. The combat system maintains the resource management and risk/reward design philosophy of the game, and gives a visceral experience that can be played both tactically and narratively. And by focusing on the narrative, instead of having a rule for every little thing, the human mind is perfectly capable of keeping the game realistic. This is the concept I will write about next time.

The last point I will make about survival-horror is that horror cannot be sustained forever, and as I noted about survival video games, survival cannot be sustained forever either. That is why the game has been designed to only begin as a survival-horror experience, but eventually once players have carved out a stable existence, the game becomes more of an exploration and action-based game. I will touch on this another time.