Game Ideas Un limited: Invention

  Back in an age when women were predominantly housewives and mothers, unless they were forced to work as nurses or teachers or secretaries (and often even so), there was a young girl who could not cook.  Her mother had tried to teach her, but she could not seem to learn this difficult art.  For lack of a better solution, her parents sent her to finishing school, where they hoped she would learn enough to make someone a suitable bride.

  Finishing school was not much better than home.  She still could not grasp the finer aspects of this difficult art.  To make a cake, you start with some flour; and although her question was not so inappropriate as the queen to Alice (Where do you pick the flower?), to the minds of the chefs and bakers of the age it was completely beyond the scope of the lesson.  She asked how much flour.  The only answer they had was, as much as you need.

  This, to her, was completely inadequate an answer.  Looking around the kitchen, she started to find things she could use to provide real answers to this question.  Get a teacup, and scoop the flour with that, and count how many cups you used.  Take a tablespoon out of the drawer to measure the salt, a teaspoon for the baking soda.  And with these simple and available implements, Fanny Farmer was able to learn to cook, and ultimately to write cookbooks which enabled others to do the same.

  That's right:  Fanny Farmer invented modern cooking, because she was a terrible cook.

  Necessity is the mother of invention.  That is the lesson Fanny teaches us.  If you can't do something which you must do, the solution lies somewhere in creating a different way to do it.  For Fanny Farmer, a method of measuring ingredients by eye and experience was no method at all.  Creating a system which adequately provided controlled quantities gave her and uncounted others the ability to do that which previously had required years of practice.

  This will take us to several places.

  Many times in my gaming I've come to a point in play where a game system let me down; that is, I needed to resolve the outcome of some point that was not covered directly under the rules, and I did not see anything which stretched to cover it indirectly.  In such situations I generally wrote my own rules, creating systems and tables and other mechanics to meet a need.  This tended to increase the complexity of the games.  Ultimately with Multiverser I managed to get around this by devising a very limited number of mechanics which between them could cover all things conceptually.  But the practice of creating mechanics to meet needs is again an example of how invention springs from necessity.  Perhaps in a sense all good game design (and perhaps all bad game design) comes from such situations, as we attempt to solve the problems we have with our game systems by building better solutions.

  But the player needs to have this in mind as well.  In a well designed game, no character can do everything superbly.  There are the Great Leslies of the worlds of fiction, but even these have their limitations.  There is a style of play which attempts to address this by building stronger and stronger characters, trying to design the protagonist who is the best at everything.  To me, at least, this is dull.  If I create a character who cannot lose in any situation, then where is the excitement of winning?  There is a better way, at least in terms of maintaining the excitement, to meet the challenges.  In the broadest possible sense of the term, that way is invention.

  A character who is likely to face dangers and difficulties should at some point in his life and career assess his own abilities, and attempt to do so honestly.  Conan would never imagine himself able to cast a spell.  We rarely see Merlin draw a sword (and usually shudder when we do).  Part of that self-assessment should lead our characters to recognize their strengths and play to them; but part of it should also lead them to discover their weaknesses, and find ways to patch them.

  Those patches can take many forms.  One character might determine to learn an entirely new and perhaps foreign set of skills, such as a medic or technician learning to fire a gun to defend himself or a fighter picking up first aid to keep himself and his companions alive against the odds.  A character might buy or acquire devices which fill the void, such as an invisibility cloak or personal cloaking device for those who lack the ability to move stealthily.  If no such device exists, one might be made.  Similarly, a character might consider ways to achieve the same goals by different means--a warrior who can't pick a lock might have a crowbar with which to pry open the door.

  The most obvious patch, and the one on which many games rely for party cohesion, is that a character may choose to associate with others who have abilities that fill his needs and needs that are filled by his abilities.  The aforementioned Conan was willing to get help from people who had such skills, to travel with a wizard and a thief so he would not be unprepared in those areas.  That is a way of covering a weakness quickly and effectively.  But it is not the only way, neither is it always the best way.  One of my adventuring parties was put in a very difficult situation when the medic was the one who was fatally wounded.  None of us could save him, and without him none of our medical equipment was worth anything.  Finding alternatives became a necessity; and once it was a necessity, we made a point of finding them.

  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.