Suggestion games are unique creatures. I would say that running them is truly an art of its own, encompassing as many forms of visual media as the GM wishes to integrate. Because of this, a GM has near-limitless freedom with any aspect of their game: visual representation, Flash segments, railroading versus freedom, RPG elements, so on et cetera. This can be good or bad but, with the games I've seen on here and on the MSPA forums, GMs who are inexperienced storytellers tend to make the same mistakes a normal story makes, just on a lot larger (and more active) scale.
Today, I'm going to talk about just one of those mistakes. Of course, it is only my opinion that this is a "mistake." Certainly, the opposite approach has many disadvantages. I also do not wish to belittle those stories which make good use of the technique.
Early on in Problem Sleuth, the famous, now-finished
MS Paint Adventure preceding Homestuck, the dashing Sleuth character's problems came primarily from silly puzzles. These puzzles were solved via careful use of inventory management, item combination and scenery examination. Of course, it's not hard to see where this comes from. Problem Sleuth in its early days was inspired by classic adventure games like King's Quest, Zork and The Secret of Monkey Island.
Later on in the comic, more complicated game-like elements were introduced, including experience levels, some sort of honey comb skill system and RPG-style shadow monster battles. These were pretty funny to an extent, but a savvy reader may note that inventory puzzle elements were starting to disappear. As the readers were no longer highly restricted by a silly inventory, the only thing Andrew Hussie (the author) could mechanically say "no" to were suggestions that violated the already vague, almost ghostly transparent "RPG elements."
By about 4/5 of the way through the story, even the RPG elements were being played exclusively for laughs, and readers had near-total control of the narrative as no reasons remained to deny a suggestion except "this silly thing happens so you can't do this." I call this Problem Sleuth Syndrome: the slow degradation of elements in any forum game or other story that were originally critical to compacting the narrative. This reason I talk about it here is, out of all the types of stories I've seen, suggestion games are the most likely to be affected by Problem Sleuth Syndrome.
Let's talk about the primary inspiration for the Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Dungeons of Sunnydale.
Dungeons of Sunnydale follows my current hypothesis:
the more strict game mechanics are played for laughs at the start of the story, the more likely they are to disappear later on. This game, originally hosted at the MSPA forums, was a "parody" of classic dungeon crawlers in the same sense Warrens is. You had a class tree, unnecessary stats, time-travel-based mechanics, etc. However, as time went on, the mechanics got more ridiculous and less feasible to implement in a real game, and the actual narrative of the game became far, far more important than any game mechanics.
Sunnydale gets a free pass because it was taken over by a different GM part of the way through. I still think the mechanics would have been dropped in the first place and, in this game's case, that would have been fine as "understanding the way the game works" did not equal "preventing the characters from dying horrible, long-term or even permanent deaths." Sunnydale also had a sort-of nice story, but I'll admit I was not surprised by even a single one of the twists therein.
The Warrens of Oric the Awesome tries its hardest to avert this phenomena. Even when the story became infinitely more complicated, characters still lived and died by the players' tactical decisions and understanding of game mechanics. Warrens is, essentially, a "gamified" suggestion game. A suggestion game requiring all the same thinking of a light video game.
Before I go any further, I think it's worth examining whether falling to Problem Sleuth Syndrome is actually better or worse. In Warrens, there's a lot of REALLY tedious things the players manually decide on, like what to carry in the characters' inventories, which skills to use on who, right down to which items we put in which boxes in the Skill Tree. Loosening up the game mechanics greatly speeds up the story in every way, and this is one of them.
When you no longer have to worry about a character's HP, the amount of long-term consequences that could directly result from your commands to them dwindles significantly. Got a character who wants to kill you and is way stronger?
Run! You can obviously get away because that is a Dramatically Appropriate thing to do. On the other hand, if you don't manage to get away, it definitely means you die a horrible death because that is more Dramatically Appropriate than trading boring blows with the foe for five rounds after you realized he runs faster than you. All of these things sacrifice game building for character building in some way.
The biggest detriment to compact narrative in a suggestion game is character selection, also known as
">Be X." Popularized - again - primarily by MSPA, this is a common narrative mechanic that allows the players to switch which character is being "viewed." I quite like it when it's implemented well (see: Ruby Quest and its occasional switching from Ruby to Tom), but it comes at an immense price.
The moment players are allowed to "be" any character they please, all the actual consequences of video game-like mechanics are instantly annihilated.Red Haired Girl low on health? Switch to Blue Haired Girl. You don't much like the way Blue Haired Girl's story is turning out? Switch to Green Haired Boy. Oh, Green Haired Boy's stuck at a totally obtuse puzzle. Why don't we just switch to Pink Haired Dude to hopefully help out or, better yet, have Green Haired Boy solve the puzzle for the players in the background?
When I created Warrens, I had the intention to make a game where we could follow a character for a time sufficient to develop them. You know that old phrase, "it builds character?" Well, struggles and consequences really can build character in a suggestion game sense. You see, when you're constantly switching between characters, the most common consequence is none of them get enough screen time to have as much personality as, say, the lead character in a good novel. The only way around this is to build characters up in extremely short time segments (Homestuck is very good at this).
The answer to this dilemma was the Astral Influx. We get to switch characters by selecting them on it, cool! But, on the other hand, attempting to lighten the impact of game mechanics with character selection forces a hefty price upon the player. Let's say, for example, on Dungeon Level 4, long after recovering the Astral Influx, Riltia drops down a pit, and we have no contact with her whatsoever. One of the players says, "oh, that's fine, let's just tap her on the Influx and we'll see what she's doing!"
That player has just forced the players to play through Riltia's escape - assuming she does. Sure, we see what she's up to. We also lose all the other characters' cool loot and powers. Plus, we can't switch back to them without the Influx, and we can't get the Influx until we've manually solved Riltia's dilemma. With no more narrative control, the scope is more compact - we're back to the inventory stage of Problem Sleuth, relying on stricter mechanics with less options and more obvious consequences.
It is it inherently good to stick to a game-like ruleset and allow it to dictate a narrative? I'm not so sure. On the other hand, is it bad to get rid of game mechanics in favor of drama, cool animations and crazy plot stuff? Not sure on that one either. What I do know is a balance must be achieved to create consequences for suggestions while still keeping the mechanics accessible and subtle enough to where the game does not slow down to a micromanaging snail's pace.
Finding this balance, to me, is a long-term goal that I constantly work toward. Even if I never reach it - even if it doesn't exist outside of opinion - it's why I love making suggestion games based in video games in the first place. The ability to make the
players struggle to achieve their in-game goals instead of just the
characters is my primarily goal with Warrens and all games. Obviously, given the colossal amount of planning and thinking the readers do, I have been at least a little bit successful.
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Topic: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome ??? (Read 3970237 times)