Points of Experience
April 18th, 2011
Hello, everyone. Recently (as of the end of January, when I'm writing this), we here at Necromancers of the Northwest have had a bit of a reason to celebrate, as our book sales for Marchen der Daemonwulf and The Book of Purifying Flames have far exceeded our expectations, and, for the first time ever, it looks like we may actually make some kind of money off of this whole crazy RPG designing adventure we've set out upon. In light of these recent successes, I've taken to thinking a bit more about the nature of our business, and I wanted to take advantage of my little soapbox here to explore those thoughts, and share them with you, on the off-chance you find them as interesting as I do.
One would think, from the outside, that when you work in tabletop game design, as a business, then what you're selling (and, by extension, if you are a good designer, what you're designing) is all essentially the same. The game may change, the type of consumer that it's designed for may change, it may have all kinds of different goals as far as tone and genre and what-have-you, but at the end of the day, you're always selling a tabletop game, right? Well, yes and no. Sometimes that's what you're doing, and sometimes what you're doing is very, very different. But enough being cryptic: why don't I give you some examples.
First, let's start with the older kind of tabletop game, like board games or non-collectible card games. There are lots of other games that fall into this same category as well, like RPGs that are one-offs and don't have any supplemental rulebooks released for them. In this case, what you are making (and selling) is a complete package. The whole game is included therein, in its own little microcosm, and no part of it will ever really grow or change. In this case, the game and the experience the game creates are one and the same, and there can be no separating them, which means, for starters, that that experience had better be pretty compelling, so that players want to play more than once. It also tends to lend itself towards simplicity and abstract rules, but that's not necessarily related. There are probably lots of other design considerations that go into creating a closed-circuit stand-alone product like this, but I've never worked on one, and so I can really only guess at the nuances.
I've also never worked on a game like Magic: the Gathering, but I read a lot of Mark Rosewater, so I feel somewhat better equipped to talk about what it is that they design (and sell), and how it differs both from the above example, and the later example of what it is that we here at NNW (and other places like us) sell.
In Magic, unlike in stand-alone products, there is a constant stream of new cards coming out, which adds to what the game does and what it can do. At the same time, however, that stream also takes cards away, subtracting in a similar fashion. Not all formats of Magic work this way: some formats are less like a stream and more like the lake (or ocean) that that stream deposits into, slowly filling up and accumulating card mass as time goes on. But the designers aren't too shy about admitting that they don't really worry as much about those formats: they do care, and they try to bear them in mind, but their primary focus is, and will always be, on that stream, because by clearing away the older cards they have far more freedom and are able to better avoid power creep (I promise someday I'm going to cover this in more detail. Really!).
Even within that "stream," most of what those designers and developers are concerning themselves with is "limited play," which is a way of playing Magic that involves restricting the actual cards you're using to a very small, randomized sample (usually about 3-5 packs of Magic cards). In this format, many of the people who play are less interested in actually collecting the cards themselves, or in building the best deck one could possibly imagine, but instead are concerned about the experience of play during that in particular limited tournament. In effect, for most of what the Magic designers are concerned about, they're not really selling cards, or even necessarily a game, but rather an experience: a fun evening of drafting and playing against other people with a specific subset of the cards that they produce.
For example, in the world of constructed Magic (where you bring your own cards, instead of using whatever's on hand), it doesn't really matter that much whether something is uncommon, common, or rare. If you really want it, you can probably get your hands on four of it. On the other hand, in limited, card rarity makes a huge difference, as you're far more likely to have two or three of a specific common card than you are to have even one of a specific rare card. This is one of the major driving factors in what makes a card a certain rarity. Really, the more time you spend reading the design (and development) blogs on the Magic site, the more you realize that just about every decision they make takes limited into account in a major way.
We here at NNW, however, are selling neither a game, nor an experience (in fairness, War of the Goblin King, and other pre-made adventures, are really more selling an experience than anything else), but instead selling you tools which you can use to create your own experiences and modify your existing games. Ultimately, this is what any third party publisher does: they provide you with tools for expanding your existing game in some new direction. I'd personally like to think that, in our case, this is even more so than normal, as we specifically focus on finding cool things that players and DMs might want to do, but that the rules don't really cover (or else don't cover well), but, who knows, maybe that's what everyone else thinks, too.
At the end of the day, we have a lot less control over the product we sell, and how you interact with it, than either of the other two methods. For example, in the first case, with the stand-alone game, assuming you don't simply change the rules on your own, the rules are the rules are the rules, and that's what the game is and how it's going to play. The designer has basically complete control over the experience that you, the consumer, have, and what game it is that you're playing. In the second case, the designers still have a lot of control over the game and experience, though admittedly the further you move away from standard limited format the less control they have. On the other hand, it's very impressive how well they are able to make drafting, for example, Scars of Mirrodin,feel different from drafting Zendikar or drafting Shards of Alara, and how they are able to make so many different limited experiences while still using the same game.
By contrast, take Liber Vampyr. I have a lot of control over the feel of the rules included in Liber Vampyr: I can work and massage the blood point rules, for example, in order to adjust the way that players look at things, to make them more predatory, and to devalue human life. In a vacuum, I have a lot of control over the tone and feel that Liber Vampyr evokes. However, unless the entire game you're playing is about Liber Vampyr, and everyone is playing a vampire and running around being gothic and bloodsucking, as soon as that book sees actual play, I don't know whether it's being dropped into a sword-and-sorcery kick-in-the-door dungeon crawl or into a horror game where all the players are helpless before the terrible undead, or a happy smiley game in the unicorn kingdom. I don't know whether your DM is going to reward preying on the innocent (largely the idea behind blood points) or punish you for being a jerk every time you suck a barmaid dry.
Really, what we provide here are nothing more than tools, which you are able to use to expand your game and make it do things that it normally isn't able to do. In a way, all roleplaying games are sort of like that: they provide tools for telling a story collaboratively, without getting into arguments about whether an invincible shield that's impervious to lasers can be broken by a mega-laser that breaks invincible, laser-impervious shields.
Hopefully that was informative or interesting for you. I'm not quite sure what my point was, now that I've reached the end, but I'm pretty confident it was in there, and I've always been more a fan of the journey than the destination, anyway. Well…mostly.
In any event, join me next week, for Azata Week. In the meantime, try playing one of those stand-alone experience games, and let the designer's intended experience wash over you—sometimes it's nice to play along with someone else's experience, instead of always creating your own each week.