But I don’t like it, and when I do get the players to interact with the world through their characters, everyone has more fun.  It’s the thing they remember when they talk about the campaign later. Few people remember battles — although they may remember the loot.  The battles where we still talk about them is when some interesting interpersonal or inter-character conflict happened.

A good villain will do this, if the players are invested. This requires threatening something they care about. Early in the game, that’s just them, which is why so many video games have betrayal/revenge plots.  (Not that they are all equally successful.)  Since we’re not making a video game, though, we have more options (perhaps video games could do this too, though.  The Sims does.)

With Amaranth, the players are going to be Heroes of Legend. They’re going to save the world. Yeah. Ho hum. Who cares about saving a world that only exists to be saved?    The character motivation is already there, but the players need the boost.  So what we’re going to do here is to threaten the p layers creations.  Not the GM supplied world they live in, but the one they helped create.

Phil Menard (aka ChattyDM) sparked this idea with his party creation session template. That linked up with some of the Mouseguard RPG bits I was reading, along with the My Life With Master game I’m running on Wave.  In all of these games, part of character creation is writing sentences about your character, and creating relationships with other players and NPCs in the world. The latter almost always means the players create the NPCs to have a relationship with them. Phil even has them create specific places in the world that are their favorites, and tensions with other players.

So I will be creating a similar questionnaire for my Amaranth game.  It’s started, but user feedback is welcome. It’s a wiki so make changes, or comment here your suggestions, I’d appreciate it.

I used to be very much in the simulationist camp, which mean I built a logical world with people and pressures in it, and dumped the characters and/or players into it and let them see what happened.  It’s interesting, but the players always warped the world around them, which frustrated me as a simulationist.  They were part of it, not the point of it, right?  Well, no.

I mean, why does the world exist if not for the story teller, reader or player to enjoy it? Certainly a fleshed out world is more interesting, but much like a play, the only things that need to be right are the things that face the player.  Knowing more is good, as it gives you flavor and feel and intuition to tell more, but it doesn’t all have to be perfect or told.  Video games and taught me this: games like Zelda reflect their game design and mechanics in the world itself.

The world I am creating for this game will be different than those, it is created to be a place for the players to be heroes.  It will enable and challenge them to become heroes, and while it will have a history and (presumably) a future, it exists primarily as a place for the players to be and become awesome.  Just as Hyrule is largely that place for Link, so will Amaranth be for our players.

Hyrule is for a solitary hero, though, and Amaranth needs to be ready for a group.  It needs to reflect the game mechanics for the game we’re playing and our plot needs to allow us to get into Zelda-like cycles and fractals.

Zelda is largely focused on the number three (despite the later game’s use of the number 4), and that’s implicit in the Triforce.  Amaranth has the Tetraganon (which is both a Zelda reference and a play on the number 4).  Why the number 4?  Well, several game mechanic-y reasons.  D&D 3.x is designed around a four-person party.  There are four basic styles of class: fighter, rogue, wizard, and priest.  So Amaranth is divided into fours.

Zelda usually has a regular world, and a shadow world. Much of D&D has a “Shadow Plane”, so Amaranth will have one as well. We can add two more planes, one of spirit and one of material, to mirror the Astral and Ethereal plans from D&D.  This is somewhat important, as we want to enable a full palette of choices from the D&D books, and make sure spells work logically without doing a lot of modification to the rules of the game.

There are four Goddesses/Great Spirits, which represent four virtues (Strength, Courage, Wisdom, and Wit).  Those don’t map directly onto the character classes, but that’s a good thing.  The Kingdom of Amranth is divided into four duchys, the city into four quarters.

Also, standard D&D has 20 levels, so the party should gain a certain number of levels per area, as they work through the whole story, capping out at 20 when they enter the Shadow realm and defeat the final enemy. Or enemies. There might be 4.

Four is a good working point, and gives a feel for how big things will be and what the cycles will be that we’ll use.  I don’t want to go into too much detail, things will change as I move forward on the world design.  But there are guidelines here, and that helps.  I’m documenting it all on our wiki.  A good place to start is with the Amaranth page itself, which uses another bit of influence, the Aesop’s fable of the Amaranth and the Rose, which gives me a bit more theme to work with.

I’ll write more about Amaranth as the design fleshes out some, and as I can write things that aren’t integral to my plot ideas.  That’s not a huge concern, as the cycles and fractals will give the players a feel for the shape and size of the plot, and it’s rhythm.  The next part is how to make the players care about and feel a part of the world.

• Looting required
• Simple system or one people are familiar with
• Generally short attention spans
• Almost certain attendance issues
• Needs some role playing for the GM

To which I need to add one more limitation that I’d forgotten about:

• Fantasy setting

I also said that I found my answers with a Zelda game, specifically Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. Although, I’ll admit Phantom Hourglass also informs my thoughts (but it strongly informs Spirit Tracks, so I guess that’s okay.)  ”Wait,” you say? “I thought you said video games were largely soulless, and you’re going to them for inspiration?  How doest that work?”

Hopefully really well.  Well better than D&D 4e managed it anyway.  It doesn’t fix all of my issues, but it gives me some very strong design guidelines that fit well with a good portion of my limitations.  This is pretty easy to demonstrate.

Zelda is a fantasy setting (despite the existence of Trains) with some looting — certainly there are treasure chests and pots to break all around, and they drop health and any of the consumables Link uses.  Perhaps most importantly, it’s a DS game.  That means it’s designed to be eaten in bite-sized chunks, perfect for short attention spans or the time you have to play a portable game.  It also has a structure that’s fairly tried and true, and you can leave it alone for days or weeks, and come back to it, still reasonably certain what has to be done next.

How does all this work, and how does it help for me? Well, the first thing to understand is that Zelda has a cyclical and fractal plot structure.  It’s a huge queue of things to do, each moving you forward from goal to goal, but each bit is basically the same in expression as the last bit.  That might sound boring, and it could be, but it’s also comfortable.  As Girl told me when I started playing Twilight Princess (my second Zelda), “Every dungeon,” she said, “has a map, a big key and a special item.”

She meant more than though, you need the big key to get to the boss, and the special item to defeat him. Defeating him gains you a heart container, upping your maximum health (the only thing Zelda has that’s like a level).  The special item is also often necessary to transit to the next area, and opens up new opportunities of exploration.

Here’s how this works in Spirit Tracks.  Ultimately, you’re quite locked down in this game — you can move fairly freely within a village or dungeon, but you can only move between them by following the tracks that were laid down magically by the spirits.  Opening up these tracks is necessary to continue forward. Each quadrant of the world has a map, each map shows part of the tracks.  Solving a problem gets you to someone who can open up the rest of the map, solving another tells you something about navigating the tracks.  Then you get into the dungeon, which when solved, opens up the last bit of tracks, back to the tower.   The tower is where the next map piece is.

Even more importantly, solving the temples fixes the tower which is your ultimate goal. It cycles through these steps,  at least four times ( I haven’t finished it), until the tower is fixed, and you can get there to defeat the enemy and recover Zelda’s body.

Opening up pieces of the map and getting the special items, creates shortcuts on the map that bypass the navigational challenges you had.  You can go to many of the same places, but now you can do it faster.  The Temples follow a similar design.  A dungeon might have three sections: the left section is open at the beginning, and solving it opens up the right section in a way that allows you to bypass or ignore the left section.

Doing a section of dungeon is a bite sized piece that can be done in a few minutes, and then the game saved.  Sure you go back to the beginning of the dungeon, but now there are parts you no longer have to do.  Right before you get to the boss, a portal opens up to the beginning (and back) you can leave, and shop and do other things and then go face the boss, which takes about as long as dealing with a dungeon section (or faster if you grasp his trick)

Dungeons thus become a microcosm of the whole world.  The special item for the whole world is the map itself in this case.  Completing it gets you access to the end, just like the boomerang or other item gets you to the boss in the dungeon.  These patterns are repeated throughout Zelda.

The other thing that happens with Zelda is that while you often have multiple tasks, but they are arranged in a chain: You  solve the village chief’s riddle so you can get the instructions that get you to the temple so you can fix the tower to get the next map.  Anything else you have as an option to do is a side quest (until it rarely becomes required and part of the main quest chain).  You’ve got one thing to do at any one time, and it’s very much like the thing you did at this point in the last cycle.  Not exactly, but close enough for comfort.

This then needs to inform my game design.  We’ll have areas which need to be “opened up” which have navigational issues which need to be solved.  There’ll be a big dungeon, with killing and loot, but which can be done in pieces, with perhaps more, smaller battles instead of a few large ones.  Special items become magical gear for the party, and hearts become levels they gain as they move through the game.  Having it in chunks like that, means that if someone misses a bit (because they’re out smoking or working), they can come right back and pick up where they left off without a lot of questions about why things are going on.

Sure, my plot may be more involved than a Zelda one, the particular tasks simpler than figuring out which two statues are looking at each other, but the basic idea, that it can be solved in a few minutes (30-60 minute chunks) is important, and hopefully keep everyone entertained.

It doesn’t fully answer my personal goals for role playing — there’s still very little of that in Zelda or any CRPGs. I’ll be answering that over the next couple of posts, however.

A lot of people will tell you that if the group and GM aren’t in sync, or if there’s a player problem then you get rid of the player.  I’ve done this — in high school — but I can’t do it now.  My wives are two of my players; another is Girl’s husband, and still another is their daughter, my GoddessDaughter. I only have two choices: accomodate them, or not play.

I suspect that’s why I’ve been hesitant to game again.  The last time we gamed, playing D&D 4e was pretty awful — for me as a GM and for my players, as well.  It was even more about battles and the looting has become more like shopping, as you have a list of things the players want and you place them there to find when they kill the monster. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and the combat really doesn’t support the attention span of my group.  Or keep me interested.

That’s when I realized I was going about it wrong.

I could adjust how the games played, because, ultimately, I’m in control of what sorts of challenges happen.  It could be any sort of thing, and I could modify it so that it fit the needs of my group, including myself.  That’s when it hit me: every Game Master, Storyteller and Dungeon Master out there is a Game Designer.

They’re a very lucky game designer, actually.  They actually know the players they are designing the game for. They can know exactly what they want, and provide it.  That, of course, got me to thinking about my players, and the frustrations that I had with the last game we played.

I’m not entirely sure who my player contingent will be, since I was asking for more players yesterday.  But for now, we’re talking about my wives Tam and Girl, Girl’s husband Moonwyrm and his girlfriend, and our Goddessdaughter.  Moonwyrm’s girlfriend, K, has a rotating schedule, so she won’t be there very often.  We have a couple of smokers, who take regular breaks — in 4e that often meant several breaks during a single combat.  And then there’s me, who doesn’t really like running combat much, and in crunchy systems like D&D not much at all.  But that’s what we’re stuck with, for now.

Limitations are the source of creativity, though, and these limitations sort of rumbled around in my head.  There’s a big difference form the assignment ‘make a game’ and ‘make a game about bean farming’ (to borrow Brenda Braithwaite’s example.  Even more specific is even better: “make a co-operative race game about bean farming.”  That’s so specific that now ideas are popping into my head, and I just made that up.  So I need to do that same thing with my gaming group.

I need something that can be done in easy chunks, where if someone isn’t there, they won’t be left behind.  I need something that’s not too complicated, and is rated no higher than PG-13, and probably with a G-rated plot, since we have a seven year old with us.  I need something with interesting character and story for me (and truthfully, my players like that too).  There have to be dungeons and loot.  Combats should be short, and we should be able to walk away at any point and come back with a slightly different group a n hour or week or more later and still know what is going on.

That rumbled around in my head, and as I was on vacation, playing Zelda on my DS, these ideas clashed together, and became Amaranth.  I’ll say more about that tomorrow.