The Devil's in Designs
July 18th, 2011
Hello everyone, and welcome to a particularly fiendish installment of Dark Designs. As you probably aren’t aware, this is the first day of Devil Week, a whole week devoted to everyone’s favorite evil-doers from the Nine Hells. As such, it’s only natural for me to talk about devils, temptation, and sin.
In fact, I don’t think I have a whole lot to say about devils. Don’t get me wrong, I really like devils. They’re my second favorite race of outsiders (after modrons), and I think that they’re really fun. I came very close to writing what would no doubt have been a very long article about how, precisely, to use devils in your game. Someday I may write that article. But, really, at the moment, I’m not sure it would be that interesting. I imagine it would boil down to “devils should be sneaky and smart and suave and always five steps ahead” repeated in different words over and over again until I felt that I had driven the point home.
So, instead, this week, I’m going to talk about something that’s more “devil-related” than really having anything to do with devils. Specifically, I’m going to talk about the seven deadly sins.
Wait, wait, wait! Don’t take off just yet, hear me out. This isn’t going to be a sermon (at least, not any more than my average article is a sermon). I’m just going to take a look at each of the traditional seven deadly sins, and give my take on how they apply specifically to game design. Doesn’t that sound fun? Yes? All right, well, then, here we go.
Sloth
For the most part, this is unlikely to be a major issue for most game designers. After all, you won’t make it long in the business if you’re not motivated about game design. Still, there are a few things that can fall under the heading of sloth. First, it’s very easy for designers to get “burnt out.” If you spend all day every day doing game design—especially if it’s all for the same game—it’s easy to find yourself running out of ideas, and, worse yet, quickly losing motivation to do game design at all. Even if you only do game design in what little free time you have while holding down a completely separate full-time job, you can still get burnt out with surprising speed.
I’ve found that, in order to fight burnout, the best method is to make sure to give yourself time to “recharge.” Sometimes this is exactly what it sounds like it would be: chilling out, playing games of all sorts, watching tv and movies, reading books, and generally doing whatever it is you do to get your creativity all wound up. At the same time, though, you can also recharge yourself, sometimes at least, by doing different creative work. Sort of like how you can recharge your car’s battery by running the engine for a while, you can recharge your ability to deal with one kind of design by working on an entirely different kind of design (or other creative endeavor: like, say, writing a short story, or drawing, or building a new Magic deck, or what have you).
Of course, there’s other kinds of sloth, as well. For example, lazy game design, such as avoiding doing anything with polymorph, due to the rules for polymorph effects being murky and complex. I’m sure you don’t need me to spell out that this isn’t exactly the best way to get a good game, though I have to admit that sometimes I’m a little sympathetic.
Gluttony
Gluttony is another deadly sin that you don’t immediately think of when you think of game design (well, maybe you might. Game designers probably aren’t known for their physical fitness as much as for a love of cheetos, but that’s a different kind of gluttony). I’ve found that gluttony is one of the more common and tempting deadly sins, and the hardest to resist.
You see, the way that gluttony applies to game design is in a desire to fit in more design. This is a complex topic that can’t really be covered fully in 1/7th of an article, but ultimately, it boils down like this: each book (or other product) has so much space. And it needs to use that space to give itself a real identity and accomplish whatever purpose you have for it. Liber Vampyr, for example, needed to provide support for a wide variety of vampire archetypes, allowing players the opportunity to play as whatever kind of vampire they wanted. A Necromancer’s Grimoire: The Book of Faith, by contrast, was designed to provide in-depth support for one idea: priests, ie, clerics with a more personal relationship with their deities.
In the former, we actually succumbed to gluttony a bit, for example, by including spells that allowed for teleportation via mirrors. This has nothing to do with vampires (except that many vampires are unable to go near mirrors), and many readers were rightly off-put by these items that didn’t belong. They made it in because we thought they were cool, and wanted to use them, so we stuck them in anyway, knowing that they probably shouldn’t be there.
The latter, for example, could have included a number of new domains. Or maybe some channel energy variants. Those might have been fun to do. But they would have ultimately detracted from the book as a whole, and blunted its otherwise pointed design.
Envy
It’s easy to be envious as a designer, at least, a third-party designer, anyway. It might be harder to be an envious designer if you’re not third-party, but somehow I have this sneaking suspicion it’s a “grass is always greener” sort of thing. In any case, it’s easy to be envious as a third-party publisher because everyone else gets all the good stuff. For example, campaign settings: we don’t get to use any—at least, not any anyone’s ever heard of. We’re not even allowed to refer to the hells as [censored], or devils as [censored]. Similarly, we can’t write anything about mind-flayers, or beholders, or the like. It’s especially easy to be envious when the people who won’t let you play with their exciting toys aren’t actually doing anything with them themselves.
Along the same lines, it’s easy to be envious of publishers who “got there first” when it comes to good names (and ideas) for classes. I have a habit of coming down hard on the alchemist, and I stand by everything I’ve said about the mechanics not matching the flavor, though I’m sure the class is well designed from a strictly mechanical viewpoint. I have to admit that perhaps the reason I seem to bring it up so often has something to do with the fact that I’d kind of wanted to do an alchemist whose flavor and mechanics did match, but now I can’t—or, at least, I can’t call it an “alchemist,” because that name is already taken. In short, I’m envious.
Perhaps this is just my own personal failing, but somehow I think that every game designer has their own alchemist, something that they really wish they could get their hand in, but can’t and are envious of those who can. Those other designers might even be in your own design team: you might wind up getting a boring part of a book (like, say, new magic armor properties) while someone else gets something cool (like, I don’t know, new cavalier orders). If you have the ability, you might even try to get yourself involved in every project that sounds exciting, without giving anyone else the opportunity to do things on their own. Almost certainly bad design principle, but…a hard urge to resist.
Wrath
For the most part, wrath doesn’t seem like something that would pop up a lot in game design. Who, precisely, would you be wrathful towards? Well, there are a few different people you might wind up angry with. For example, you might have creative differences with other third-party publishers who use your system, and, you feel, are mucking things up. Or with people who have their own weekly game design article, and say unflattering things about your designs, as well, I guess.
What I’d really like to talk about under wrath is the fact that argument is a major aspect of working on a design (or development) team. Different people have different visions about what things should do, and what is an acceptable power level, and whether this or that is the cooler idea for a spell. Arguments are not only a part of game design, they’re really good for it. If everyone just agreed with whatever the first person said, then the game wouldn’t come out nearly as polished. If everyone simply gave up on an idea as soon as someone objected to it, a lot of great potential would be lost.
The tricky thing to remember is that designers tend to get pretty attached to the things that they’re designing, and arguments are an easy place for people to get a little excitable. Sometimes, it’s important to stop, and take a deep breath or two, and remind yourself (and perhaps others nearby) that we’re all working towards the same goal. It’s also important to try and make sure that the arguments stay on a professional and positive note, rather than on a more personal and negative one.
Lust
In what seems to be a common theme for these seven deadly sins, it may be difficult at first to see how lust applies to game design. It’s important to remember that there are several different kinds of lust, and, while it’s true that writing an extensive rulebook about “relations” and other adult content would probably not be a gaming company’s best career move (not that it hasn’t been done), it wouldn’t necessarily be bad design.
Instead, I think that the place lust most figures into game design is when a designer falls too far in love with one of his own designs. Don’t get me wrong: you have to love your designs in order to be a good designer. But sometimes you can get too attached to an idea, and refuse to let it go, until you don’t care whether the peg (your idea) matches the hole you’re trying to shove it into (the overall design), you’re just trying to ram it in anyway (that sounded a little dirtier than I thought. I guess it’s good this fell under “lust.”).
Naturally, with these issues, at least as far as I’ve seen, the ones that latch on the hardest are the slightly perverse ideas. Not perverse like whips and chains, or what have you, but perverse like “I want to do this simply because it’s something the rules currently don’t let you do.” For example, whoever came up with the warlock (a wizard who can cast his spells as much as he wants all day) probably did so because the idea seemed so wrong. With the warlock, it all worked out, but sometimes it doesn’t work out so great. The really difficult thing about this deadly sin, is that it’s hard to tell when you’re too attached, because, of course, you’re already really attached. Also, sometimes the idea really is worth making a proper place for, so this one kind of requires some careful navigation.
Greed
I touched on this a bit in envy, but it’s really tempting to try and involve yourself in everything cool. After all, you’re not in game design because it feels like work to you (even if it does tire you out at the end of the day); you’re in game design because you like designing games. It’s fun. You want to do it. And particularly fun and tantalizing designs, well…even more so.
Really, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to involve yourself in lots of different things. Especially if you’re a competent designer: it’s only going to lead to more good design, as well as more fun for you (and, assuming a diversity of projects, will probably help you avoid burnout; see “sloth,” above). Still, you might want to bear in mind that other people might want those jobs too, and the ones that you have trouble trusting with that in particular design would probably learn and improve a lot from having a chance to give it a shot. And, of course, if you spread yourself out over too many different things, it’s possible that some will start to suffer.
Still, it’s just incorrect to say that one of the seven deadly sins of game design is wanting to do more game design, so, perhaps you can just ignore greed.
Pride
Supposedly the deadliest of the sins, it certainly is when it comes to game design. I think there can be no doubt that the number one place pride applies to game design is when you let your vision get in the way of the design itself, and refuse to take into account any criticism or suggestions that may come along.
The fact is, there’s always room for improvement in design (well, more or less), and the fact that something could use improvement doesn’t mean that it’s bad design, or that you’re a bad designer, especially early on in the process. Really, the bad designer is the one who is certain that he has it perfectly right and refuses to listen to what anyone else thinks on the subject.
Sometimes, the changes are more than just small details. Sometimes the problem may be with your vision. Your cool idea may not work so great on paper. All the things that you think make it worthwhile may not, to others, really outweigh that one, big, prohibitive problem with the whole design, even if it does to you.
It can be tempting, sometimes, to let pride get in the way and forget about what would be the better design and just go with the design that you want to do. This will almost never end well, and, in general, if you find yourself not getting any support for your design from anyone…well, I’m not saying you should just give up (life’s not that simple), but you should definitely re-examine why you feel your design is so good, and whether the criticism you’re hearing has as much merit as those around you seem to think it does.
That’s it for this week’s article. Join me next week, when I’ll be continuing an ongoing string of devilish articles. In the meantime, see no evil, hear no evil, and certainly play no evil.