Back in June, Eric “Tadeusz” Ashley, whose World a Week column here at Gaming Outpost demonstrated his impressive versatility and prolificacy in setting creation (and, I hope, the wonderful versatility of the Multiverser game concept), and whose work will hopefully be featured in a forthcoming Book of Worlds for Multiverser, raised a challenging question in our forum. “How,” he asked, “do you help people do better designs, especially but not limited to when you may disagree with some of their worldview?”
We’ve done a number of articles on how to design good adventures, including last week’s piece on Scavenger Hunts. This is different. It has less to do with the design of the adventure and more with the design of the setting; it also is not so much about how to do it yourself as it is about how to help someone else do it. On the other hand, the ideas which are likely to work here are equally likely to be useful in our own designs.
I thought about this question for a long time, actually. I clipped the quote and the link, and saved it with my ideas for future development. I read it over at least once a week for several months, trying to think of what sort of advice I had on this. The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous I felt. After all, part of what I do is help people develop worlds for play. How do I do that? Since I don’t know anyone with whom I am in one hundred percent agreement about everything, I’m sure that there must have been at least a few worlds in there for which I didn’t agree with the creator’s worldview, but I found ways to help develop them all the same. How did I do it?
Then when the answer came to me, I realized that in one sense it was so simple that I would never be able to get an entire article from it. What I do works well, and merely describing it may be enough to answer the question.
In fact, the way I would help someone else improve his design very much reflects the way I would improve my own designs, except that when applied to myself I must be harsher because I lack objectivity, whereas when applying this to someone else I am the objectivity (or at least I am a fresh perspective), so it’s not necessary for me to work as hard at it.
When someone gives me a world they’re developing, the first thing I do is imagine that I’m a referee reading this for use in a game. This isn’t the backdrop for a novel, really (although I often use my game settings as novel settings, intact or altered); nor is it an exercise in creative description (although I recommend exercising creative description in your setting designs). It is intended to be a very practical tool designed to enable referees, like me, to stimulate interesting adventures. Thus I look at it with a critical eye toward what I can do with it, and how it will play.
Interestingly, that is also a task that involves imagining. When I am a referee reading a setting or scenario for use in a game, one of the critical parts of that process is in turn imagining that I’m a player inserted into this world, and pressing my mind in all the directions I think I would be likely to explore, to see what I would find. Thus when I’m a designer, I imagine being a referee, and within that imagine being a player; and when I’m reading someone else’s design, I do the same thing.
The process of imagining myself a player raises questions. What would happen if I did this, or went there, or examined that? If I were here, what would I do? What would prompt me to do anything at all? If there are obstacles to overcome, how would I approach them, and does the material provide sufficient answers to what happens if I do that? If I did these things, what sort of satisfaction would I get–in a sense, how does the setting reward my interest?
As a referee, my questions are whether the materials give me the answers to the questions my players are likely to ask, or at least give me some means of determining those answers consistent with what is given to me. If there are intelligent adversaries or auxiliary characters given, am I able sufficiently to understand their motivations and thought processes that I can play out their choices when the players surprise me? I also wonder whether I’m going to have to do something to get my players headed in some direction, and whether I’m going to have to constrain them, to prevent them from walking off the map, as it were, and whether the materials give me the tools to handle that. Always in my scenarios, I provide either a fairly solid reason why the player characters can’t or won’t escape the bounds of the scenario, or a reasonably simple means of devising what is beyond those edges if they do. I look for that, because I don’t want to be caught trying to figure out what happens when my characters walk out of my story. At the same time, there’s a very fine line between trailblazing and railroading. I prefer a setting in which many different adventures can happen based on player choice, but if there’s clearly a central adventure it raises the question of what I have to do as a referee to move them into it, and what happens to the scenario if the characters don’t or won’t go there.
As a player, the questions are whether the answers I get from exploring the world will appeal to me. In exploring this world, will I find things that hold my interest? Will they be credible, or will I balk at them? Will each discovery drive me to seek the next? At some point, will I exhaust the setting such that there’s really nothing left for me to do within it? Will I care about what I discover, such that I want to keep exploring, or will it fall flat because it makes no sense, or is too predictable, or forces me to work too hard to get anything I value?
If it’s clear that the designer wants the players to do some specific thing, I look for the hooks. Why will the players do this? What happens if they don’t do it? Does the designer expect me to railroad them somehow? If he intends to draw them into the in-built adventure, do I think his lures will work?
I also ask a lot of questions about the implications of that which is known. I try to follow things out to their logical conclusions. This often leads to me asking why certain things are the way they are. For example, if there are two races who have been at war for generations, and one is clearly superior, how has the other survived so long? If there’s some problem that’s never been solved, why haven’t they applied what appears the obvious solution, or if they have why didn’t it work?
In short, I don’t have to tell the designer what he should do. What I have to do is point his attention to the problems, the holes in his scenario, the things that don’t seem to fit. I do this by asking questions, getting him to ask the questions I would ask. Who are the characters, and what are they supposed to do in this world? Why do the players or their characters care about these things? How do you handle a character whose player doesn’t want to go there? What motivates the antagonists, and why do they do things the way they do? Hopefully in asking questions he will find answers that fit. They might not be my answers. I might still have a lot of trouble accepting some of his assumptions about the way the world works. If he wants to know how I would answer those questions, I’ll be glad to offer my ideas; I understand that my offer places him under no obligation to go my way. What matters is that the questions are raised and answered to his satisfaction, and ultimately that I can understand his answers even if I remain skeptical of them. If he has provided a complete and coherent vision for his world, I can run it, even if it doesn’t fit anything I know. It’s only when there are gaping holes or internal conflicts in the materials that the setting fails, and these are the things that are found by asking the right questions.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
