Coloring Book Game Design
OR BUILDING A LEXICON FOR PRINCESS PLAY
I've been thinking about the post Doing a Cool Move a lot this week (written by Sam "Over/Under Cataphracts" Sorensen) - There's parts that resonate fiercely, like how Sam describes the joys of tactical infinity and the ways in which mastery presents itself therein, or the ways in which meta textual control creates a different (but not always bad) play space that is nearly inevitable at a table. I've also come to terms with the facts that I have a lot of problems with the post and disagree with probably 50% of it; From the way it avoids using the term mastery which is what it feels like it's really trying to talk about, to its critique of an era and genre of gaming (90s trad) that feels remarkably unspecific. If I was more petty I'd say something like "calling a game confused for expecting you to be able to switch between tactical combat and narrative melodrama is like calling a dish confused for requiring both sweet and salty flavors" - But ultimately I'm sympathetic to the vibe, and do think there can be something jarring about the JRPG-esc "Now we're in grid based combat with revive items, but in the next moment our healer can perma-die to a twunk with a sword" scenario at a table, especially when done poorly. Something, something, ludo-narrative dissonance...[*1]
In essence though, I too enjoy games that let you "Git Gud" and I think "Doing a Cool Move" is a really thorough investigation of what that can look like in tabletop, both in narrative and more "old-school" forms of play.
Playing to Find Out - Playing to Fail Spectacularly
Cosmic Encounter is a quirky little board game (with a modest 4.8/5 on Topping the Table) that has you playing a randomly hobbled together alien civilization, dealing with constant random cards and amassing a swath of abilities that range from useless to game breaking. It's a game I'd happily play any day, and also feels like a "competitive" game that is laughably uncompetitive. "Doing a Cool Move" involves maximizing your randomly dealt assortment of goodies, but ultimately who wins the game is rarely a matter of skill and far more a matter of chance.
Yet despite being all but unable to "Git Gud", the game feels far more engaging than a pure random victor generator like Candy Land - And I largely think that's a matter of goals. Sitting down to Cosmic Encounter is not an exercise in strategy, but rather an exercise in playing to find out. What wacky civilizations will crop up and what bullshit negotiations will this cause? It's a game where you'll likely have a terrible time if you want to win, but still must strive for victory to juice the game's sauce. The joy is watching slow motion train wreck that is you and your friends' engine.
However these kinds of chaos generators benefit a great deal from more species, more events, more cards, more bloat, more expansions, more Glamour. Keep this in mind for later.
Tactical Instability
I play with more than a few first time so-called "TTRPG" (uck) players, and often I hear the same few worries: They worry they won't bring an interesting enough story to the table (a misconception about play expectations born of Actual Plays and the culture around them), they worry they'll get a rule wrong (intimidated by large rule books and not wanting to "cheat at" or ruin the game, not realizing the GM and other players are there to help them make sure that doesn't happen), and more than a few times I hear the worry that the seemingly infinite sandbox is so vast that one wouldn't know what to do, never-mind the "right" or "good" move. I've known more than a few GMs who believe it is then responsibility of them and the game to teach the joys of tactical infinity and immersive story telling to this newbie, but this too doesn't resonate.
I myself have played plenty of OSE, more than a few FKR experiments, and a fair few sessions of vibes RPGs with simple resolution mechanics and... I can't say it's always my favorite, and it feels far better in one-shots. Sometimes I like approaching a game like a game. I like pushing my character to solve mysteries just cause. I like having lots of little levers to flip and abilities to activate. If I can do anything nothing feels unique to the system, and what is unique (universal resolution and a "I hit the monster" button) feel remarkably dull to me - Such experiences being saved purely by excellent GMs and engaging adventures. In fact, the time I most enjoyed engaging with tactical infinity was in Prismatic "Warren" Wasteland the Bird Man's Calvin Ball experiment, because infinity included the meta-textual artifact of the game itself that we were shaping and closing in around us which felt remarkably fresh.
To put it another way, I like my cage (as Jay "Wanderhome" Dragon puts it) - I like having some specific mechanical direction - I enjoy when a tabletop game feels constrained, directed, "gamey".
So when I hear a player say stuff like "TTRPGs just feel too open ended" I'm really empathetic to that... And then I have them play in my games and have had a 100% success rate of them enjoying what I do with the formula.
Coloring Between the Lines
I'm working on a project (side? main?) called Inheritors, which started as a hack of a friend's 4 stat Mad Max pamphlet game (Hell's Highway) and evolved into a fully realized vehicular mayhem machine. Where Hell's Highway relied on the aforementioned tactical infinity, I wanted something a bit clearer, directed, segmented. I don't exactly remember how things blossomed out to something so different, but we definitely got there.
In many ways trying to remedy my own dissatisfaction with a game that was GMed phenomenally but wasn't doing terribly much mechanically (with 2 notable exceptions), gave me a clearer picture for the level of direction I look for in both a game and a system. Grids! Splats! Dice Pools! Options! What was once a vibes game has turned into something very maximalist and very directed! I agonized about this a lot, wondering if (a) the project was worth my effort and if I was cooking hard enough (who knows, and I do miss my cowboys) and (b) I was losing the plot on this whole experiment by adding so much that it wasn't really a vibes game anymore (despite the grid being quite generous, and the emphasis remaining on player creativity over mechanical prowess to get through scenarios).
The greatest a-ha moment I had was some weeks ago when I provided players their mechs (we were doing a very high-tech 2-shot), as tokens with line-art because my coloring skills (and time) are very behind. Realizing we needed some method of identification, I busted out the coloring pencils and had players color in their tokens... It was magical. It also felt symptomatic of a greater design philosophy I was working within: Give players a lot of structure, a clear cage, a costume, a role, and let them fill the details. ((Yes, yes, this is all very obvious and exists in some form or another in most games, but it was the emphasis on clear structure to be injected with player color that made me think specifically of coloring books - It shifts the cognitive load from "what should I do" to "what can I do")).
This was exemplified by the pitch I gave to a first-time player at my table (who had tried and bounced off of a 5e group for reasons listed earlier and thus didn't think they like RPGs); "When I run the game I'm not so concerned about if you're acting 100% in character, or telling a story, or master the game mechanics, or "playing well." What I enjoy about the game is putting you, my friends, in situations and seeing how you engage with them, and when I play I look for the same type of experience." - In essence handing someone a coloring book and seeing how they bring it to life. (Admittedly a coloring book is quite a bit more on-rails than the types of situations I design, but the sentiment remains).
It's the line between a sandbox and a desert, less a cage to rail against (although this certainly applies too) and more a dog bed to store all my toys in.
Let's Go Shopping
There's one line of thought in particular in "Doing a Cool Move" that got my goat. It's in regards to rules breadth/bloat that was "super common in the ’90s and ’00s" - Your 3.5es, your Cyberpunk 2020s, your World of Darknesses, your d20 Systems - This idea that doing a cool move is about finding combos, that New Novelty is derived from more stuff (and eventually prettier stuff) and digging through it - That the (often unsuccessful) solve for "Gitting Gud" in highly structured games is to give players more options.
"You can see this philosophy pushed to its outer limits in something like Pathfinder. Pathfinder has innumerable options available to its players—ancestry, background, class, spells, pets, feats of a hundred varieties, dozens of weapon tags, and so on. More options, more choices, more cool moves, right? Surely, Pathfinder players must always feel like they’re doing more cool moves than their less-optionful compatriots at other tables, right? More, more, more?
In a word: no. This blind maximalism seems obviously wrong to me."
If maximalism is blind, then call me Daredevil!
To be fair, I earnestly get where Sam "Seas of Sand" Sorensen is coming from here - It feels cut from the same cloth as the people who want less player options and more adventures. But personally? I've come to love the array of player options, the joys of dissecting the frog of a game together at character creation - As a kid who spent part of their youth window shopping via magazines, there's a palpable nostalgia and joy to having a big old list of things to sink one's teeth into.
But what about in gameplay? Well... it's a bit of a coinflip. Frankly I find the less constrained games the Sorensen alludes to, to either feel remarkably dull to my tastes or sometimes (as is the case with Mork Borg's product line) be packed with the same kind of blind maximalism that... yeah doesn't really always go anywhere for those designs. In my mind the SRD "add content and player options for my game" craze is uh... not my vibe, and I think creates a lot of noise for unstructured games and a lot of vapid jank for the structured ones (despite its seductive glamour).
This doesn't mean more is always bad though. Consider instead if we envision this wide array of player options and items as a toolbox for adventure in the same way Clayton "Explorer's Template" Notestine envisions keys in modules?
Moreover what if we intentionally design this cornucopia with combos? (A tricky design challenge that requires a lot of bottom-level pre-planning) Cyberpunk 2020 has a Squirt Gun in its shop, a player option so simple yet so immaculately genius in a game with systems for cooking dermal medicine and the effects of acids, that I built a whole character around it once for a one-shot. (The incorrigible Maria, toting around her 3 squirt guns of gasoline, healing juice and dermal toxins respectively). It's this kind of combo potential that I think makes maximalist games shine (one might even say making such combos is what constitutes a "Cool Move").
Forget combat as flavor or combat as sport - Consider combat a puzzle with an array of pieces. The question is less "Can you solve it?" and more "How will you solve it?" This was the philosophy of Steel Hearts whose base Synergy and Element systems[*3] created a platform on which a variety of parts could be mixed and matched for wild combos that got wilder as players combod off each other - While constrained, players found mastery in flipping buttons in just the right sequence (while adapting to each new situation) to wipe the whole field in a turn (something that hinged on just a little bit of luck to pull off).
a friend being accosted by a villager in animal crossing using a catch-phrase she let her fiancé set
The Doll House
But I've found there's something even more important than Combos and Novel Faux-Cool Moves that this maximalism provides: It provides an inspirational template into which players draw their avatars and immerse themselves into a world. I often encourage designers to add total vanity items to shops, for just this reason - Part of the engagement is filling the Doll House with little bits that make a new whole.
Animal Crossing, beloved though it is, is a remarkably restrictive game. It asks you to do repetitive tasks, interact with randomly assigned pre-programmed villagers and eventually (eventually - and only in the newest one) gives you the tools to terraform the island to be more... Well more however you'd like it really. You can't add mountains or change the climate (though some industrious creators go pretty ham), you can't even add that many buildings (I miss you New Leaf...) but you can make it a bit more cozy. So why do people feel so personally attached to their island? Why don't these people just play Minecraft? Minecraft lets you do so much more!! It has true Cool Move Potential! I'd say in part because it gives you just the right amount of customization for those looking for a structure.
Villagers will ask you what's cool and you can tell them "Yuri" and the next thing you know another villager comes up to you and says "I've been getting into this Yuri that's the craze these days. I don't know how I lived without it!" - You can customize cute clothes then give them away and watch your villagers enjoy a Slayer T-Shirt - You can design the most welcoming living room in the world and then have the bathroom be filled with an uncomfortable number of Gyroids - All this expression packed in an ultimately very restrictive gather-sell-shop-oriented experience - In many ways Animal Crossing lets you leave a more personal mark on its world than other restrictive "story choice games" like Baldur's Gate 3 ~
This to me is peak Coloring Book design - Give the players a huge list of potential items and let them color in their hero and adventures to make something truly theirs.[*4]
Again this is nothing new to RPGs, but it's a strength I find in maximalism, in restriction, in what happens when you stop focusing on "the cool move" or on "the narrative" and just focus on "chilling in the world" - To guide and focus the creativity to something deeply personalized in an otherwise restrictive world and system. It offers those who aren't feeling creative an out to simply crutch on what's there, and for those who are feeling creative it gives plenty of headroom to express themselves.
[*1 : I think the main thing that comes up here is it breaks immersion (a fuller conversation that feels... rare these days) - I think there's a suspension of disbelief here that's required that can be especially off-putting, especially when one's goals are to fully immerse oneself in the living world.]
[*2 : I recently watched this play on a whim and frankly as someone with a history of Alzheimer's and dementia in the family its constant play on memory and being lost in one's familiar surroundings were delightfully haunting.]
[*3 : In Steel Hearts you roll d6s to deal damage (1s do 0, 6s do 2, everything else does 1) and generate "Synergy" for compatriots for every even rolled - Synergy could then be spent to boost/recharge abilities, move out of turn, and even take whole actions as instant free ones. The game also had 6 Status Effects you could stick on enemies - Changing an enemies status effect did 2 direct damage (cutting through any armor) while hitting an enemy with the element that matched the status effect meant extra dice (thus more dmg and more SYN) - All this combined to make a combo-ful game that sung once the Mech shop of 100+ parts was done.]
[*4 : Why not have familiars that each add fun wrinkles to gameplay (The Toad gives you the "Wet" spell, while the Cat gives "Night Sight" and the Crow gives you "Treasure Sense"), then let the player describe the rest. Restrict then release, like a stretch: Is the toad really chonky and barely fits in your bag? Does the cat meow like all the time?? Is the crow pink? For some reason???]
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