The Gaming Outpost

“Bang, you’re dead.” “Nope, you missed me.” “No, I didn’t.”

That’s the classic example of why we put rules in our games – to settle disputes and to give everyone a level playing field. But it’s also an example of the story affecting the ‘rules’ of the game.

The person being shot at could have responded all sorts of ways to justify his continued existence – “Bounced off my Titanium Armor”, or “You can’t see me, I’m invisible” or even “The bullet goes right through this holographic simulation of me.” The point is that the background story of the game can and should dictate how the rules work within the story.

Now, it’s possible to have a game without benefit of story (Chess, for example), and stories can be told without a game behind them. By far, however, the standard in the adventure gaming industry is to combine them; mechanics are set based on the story, and story pulls together all of the mechanics. Even the name “Adventure gaming” combines the two elements of story and mechanics.

Two of the big styles of games right now are Collectible Card Games (CCGs), and Role-Playing Games (RPGs). There really isn’t anyone out there that would argue that they represent the two sides of that spectrum between stories and game mechanics. Certainly, RPGs focus more heavily on the world and background as the players work together to create an interesting story. In RPGs, winning tends to be a fairly nebulous concept, and character development (and thus story development) is truly the primary goal. CCGs, however, have a much greater focus on winning. Because of that focus, the mechanics which keep the playing-field level are much more important than they are in an RPG.

However, neither mechanics nor story works best without the other. The best games have a interesting and absorbing world that draws in the players and a set of rules that enhance rather than distract from that world, while still providing the balance of a good set of mechanics.

But what happens when a CCG becomes and RPG? What happens when an RPG becomes a CCG? I’ve been fortunate enough to have been the lead designer on two CCGs – Legend of the Five Rings and Deadlands: Doomtown. For those that are unfamiliar with these two worlds, Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) is set in the empire of Rokugan – a fantasy version of feudal Japan, and Deadlands is set just after the civil war in the U.S. except that magic, mad scientists, and zombies fight for control and the ‘wild west’ has become the ‘weird west’.

When we began the design of L5R, we knew that we had to be different somehow. The CCG market had peaked and was beginning it’s descent. Games were starting fail where before any CCG that came along was making money hand-over-fist. One of our first goals was to build the world along with the cards. Rather than a game where the players had nebulous goals, we wanted our players to be able to answer the basic “Ws” of Journalism while they played their games. “Who am I”? “Why am I fighting this person”? “Where are we”? “What are we fighting about”? If the players had those questions in mind while they were playing, then the story of the game would answer itself, but if even one of those questions couldn’t be answered, then the game would be as abstract as moving pieces around the board in Risk or Monopoly.

To answer all of those questions, there had to be some large back-story within which all of the “mini-conflicts” that the players would be playing would make sense. Even in the beginning of development of the CCG, we knew that we would need to do as much world development on the CCG as companies typically spend on their RPGs. So, that’s where we started. We actually spent the first month of development of the CCG without any mechanics or cards; we only worked on the world of Rokugan and the people in it. So, when we were ready to work on the actual card game, we already had a detailed and (hopefully) interesting world to set it in.

Then, over the next couple of years, as we continued to develop the card game, the world got more and more detail added to it. Three years later, when we finally began developing the L5R RPG, we actually had more detailed story information than we could possibly fit into a core rulebook. It was simply a matter of deciding on which information to pass along in the first book, and what to save for future books. After that, we chose a set of mechanics that we thought fit the style and flavor of Rokugan, and sent the book to press. Possibly the easiest core RPG that anyone has ever written, just because we had spent 3 years getting ready to write it.

Just a little while later, we got the contract to design a CCG set in the Deadlands world. This was an entirely different design problem than the L5R CCG had been. This time, we were playing in someone else’s sandbox. Also, their sandbox had a whole bunch of rules we weren’t allowed to break. Now, those rules made the sandbox very cool, but they presented two very distinct issues.

First of all, unlike the L5R CCG, we didn’t have complete control over the world – the rules had already been written in Deadlands and we couldn’t just do whatever we wanted to. One example of this was that originally, we were designing spells to work like action cards – you play the card using a spell-caster, but then it goes to the discard pile. When the guys at Pinnacle (the owners and original developers of the Deadlands RPG and world) saw that, they gave us a call and we had to change it – spells would attach to the spell caster so that they could use them over and over again.

On the other side of the same coin, however, is that all of the rules and the world that Pinnacle had developed were so cool and interesting that it also made our job easier. We didn’t have to decide why magic worked, or how zombies were walking around, or what people would be fighting for in the CCG – Pinnacle’s world had already created the “Who, what, where and why” that would put players smack into the middle of an exciting story when they sat down to play the card game. It became our job simply to make the rules that would keep the CCG fun to play.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to have mechanics that immediately gave over the feel of the old west. The initial design work on the game was done by Matt Wilson and Matt Staroscik before they left to follow some new opportunities for them. They left a terribly sound foundation that we built on both in story and mechanics. It had been decided that we would be working within one little boomtown in the corner of the Deadlands world. While the ‘rules’ of Deadlands were in place there, we could basically do whatever we wanted within the tiny town of Gomorra. It was a good arrangement, giving us a degree of freedom without risking any of the stories that Pinnacle was developing outside of northern California.

Because the back story was a Boomtown, the obvious “why” was answered – lots and lots of money (money in this case being the mysterious ‘ghost rock’ fuel that makes the world of Deadlands go). The “what” gave us our winning condition – control of the town. Once we knew we wanted control of the town to be the focus, we had to find a way to gain control of the town. Besides just influence, this being the old west, we had to have gunfights all the time and they had to be fun.

Fortunately, just about everyone out there has played Poker, so we were able to get away with a combat mechanic that is actually relatively complex, but is really easy to teach people – they already know it! Everything after that was details, and incorporating the long-term story into the characters and events of the game. In the end, we were very happy with the results and Pinnacle was pleased with our handling of their ‘baby’ – everybody won.

Both of these worlds, Legend of the Five Rings and Deadlands, are entire properties at this point – they each have a Collectible Card Game, Role Playing Game, and Miniatures Game line going strong and each of them is developing into other areas as well. Each of those games has to fit together for the story to stay cohesive. A duel is a duel. A gunfight is a gunfight. When the story and the mechanics enhance each other, you’ve got a game that’s really fun to play. When they don’t, it’s time to go back to “Bang, I gotcha”.

-David Williams is the driving force behind the Legend of the Five Rings CCG and RPG, and the Doomtown CCG. Just don’t call him out for a shootout at High Noon.