Introspective, Retrospective
October 17th, 2011
Hello everyone. The week before last I talked extensively about Marchen der Daemonwulf II, and how it had allowed (or, from another perspective, forced) me to take a critical look at the original Marchen der Daemonwulf, and evaluate it in hindsight. At the beginning of the article, I had intended to talk more about re-evaluating past work in general, and how it can be a useful thing for game designers (and DMs, and all sorts of other people) to do from time to time, but instead I just got wrapped up in explaining the choices we made in making Marchen der Daemonwulf II, and how those came about from our reflections on the original Marchen der Daemonwulf. I promised you that, sometime soon, I was going to re-visit the topic of re-visiting one’s work, and take a more generalized approach this time. Well, there’s no time like the present. Well, yeah, OK, two weeks ago, I guess, might have been good, but we’ll just have to settle for the present.
As with anything that you publish, when you’re designing a game, you eventually reach a point where you release it out into the world, and everyone gets to see it. After you do that, generally speaking, you don’t get to work on the game anymore. If you determine, afterwards, looking at it in a new light, that you really should have done thing X a different way, you can’t just up and change it—after all, it’s already been released.
Of course, this isn’t a universal truth. Lots of games have changes applied after the fact. In video games, for example, patches can be released all the time that alter the game in exactly this kind of fashion, as designers and developers continue to fiddle with little things long after the game was first released. In tabletop games, errata might be issued for a book (and, in fact, many sourcebooks wind up with errata at some point or another), or certain cards might wind up being banned, for example.
In Dungeons and Dragons, or Pathfinder, once something is out there it more or less stays out there, and remains part of the game, but in other games rules get updated or replaced all the time. For example, in Magic: the Gathering, though a card that has been printed can never be un-printed, and will always be available in casual games around the kitchen table, the focus tends to fall on an “environment” called Standard, in which only cards from the last two years or so can be used. This means that even if a card is designed that could probably have been designed better, it’s gone in two years, and the designer can always take another stab at whatever it was they had in mind a few years down the road, and the new card won’t necessarily be “replacing” the old card, and the two will never really be held in side-by-side comparison.
While it’s certainly interesting to imagine a Dungeons and Dragons where only books from the last two years (or, really, last year or so: D&D puts out a lot more books than Magic puts out sets of cards), that’s just not how it works. If I discover, for example, that I made a feat that was super-broken in a book or an article, there’s only so much that I can do about it. I can issue an errata, sure, and some of our books here at NNW have been errataed before (though only Liber Vampyr and Into the Armory). Errata are generally just for clearing up ambiguities, fixing typos, and rewording things to be clearer. They’re generally not for radical changes and “why didn’t I see this before” issues.
This means that, often, for a game designer, a published product is out of sight, out of mind. This is a shame, because one of the best ways for you to grow as a designer and improve your overall design is to actually look at your previous work sometime down the road.
To be honest, even though I’m talking about how important it is and how it’s such a rare opportunity for game designers, the fact of the matter is that I don’t find re-evaluating my previous work to be all that enjoyable, most of the time. Sure, some of it (really, most of it) is something that I can definitely be proud of. My past work is full of content that I really like, ideas that I still think are cool, mechanics that I still think were well done, and so on. Every time I think of Liber Vampyr, for example, I get a warm, proud feeling in my heart that it succeeded at its goal of giving support to all kinds of different vampire myths, and made PC vampires a lot more accessible. That feeling is important.
At the same time, though, whenever I take a close look at Liber Vampyr, I remember that while, yes, it does do a good job of supporting a variety of vampires and enabling vampire PCs, well…I was a much younger designer almost two years ago, and it’s filled with things I would do differently if I were writing the book today. Not on the big picture (for the most part), but in the little details. The example that I gave a couple of weeks ago, and probably the largest mistake, in my opinion, is the difference between blood powers and feats (namely, there really isn’t one, and no reason for having two). A number of the individual blood powers would probably be handled differently, and there are some things that I realize, in retrospect, are glaringly absent (most notably, the ability to rise again if a PC vampire is slain).
I think that, no matter how good a designer you are, if you look back at your work after enough time, you’re going to find some flaws with it. In fact, even if you were to stop growing or improving as a game designer, if you came back to a previous work after a long enough time, you would still find places where you want to make adjustments, even if it’s simply a matter of small, aesthetic changes (for example, it seems like no matter how many times I go over the same piece of writing, I always find a few sentences I want to re-word or rearrange in order to sound better, and, if I do it enough times, I will sometimes discover that I’m unintentionally changing things back to how they were before I previously changed them and then forgot about the changes).
Different people will have different reactions to looking at their previous work and finding places where they feel they could now do it better, and personally I find this a little bit embarrassing and more than a little bit uncomfortable. But the point that I’m getting to, I guess, is that even though it may not be fun to go back and rub your nose in just how much worse you used to be, it can still be a valuable learning experience.
For one thing, if you never go back and look at your work, you may never actually notice the places where you would now do things differently. To continue with the Liber Vampyr example, without having to go back and see all of the blood powers that should probably be feats, and the feats that would likely be better as blood powers, I probably wouldn’t have actually spent any time thinking about the importance of making sure that feats feel like feats, and class features feel like class features, and spells feel like spells, and so on, and that if they don’t (for example, the Curse of the Beast feat from Marchen der Daemonwulf), they have a very good and clear reason for doing so.
There’s more to be had from reading your own work than being forced to see your mistakes. You can also learn a lot about your tendencies and biases in design. For example, I like the spell effect magic jar. I tend to create a lot of magic jar style effects, often in ways designed to “fix” magic jar in ways to make it more accessible. I also lean towards more modular designs, such as in Marchen der Daemonwulf’s “build your own werewolf” approach. There are no doubt a variety of other things one could learn about my design habits from looking at my designs.
Besides being “interesting” trivia, being aware of these tendencies can do a lot for a game designer. Is there a reason that I tend towards modular designs? When I find myself building modular things, if I know that that’s my wont, then I can also know to stop for a moment and think “does this really need to be this modular? Am I trying to force it to be modular because that’s what I generally do?” As with anything, being aware of your biases allows you to compensate for them and produce a better result.
And that concludes today’s Dark Designs. Join me next week, when I’ll be discussing demons. In the meantime, why don’t you go back and examine your past characters or campaigns, and see what you can learn? You might get some good ideas for the next one.