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Design Notes #1: Bad Things Happen, and That's Good!

Hello again, fans of Oz, I hope everybody reading enjoyed my little April 1 story yesterday. Was any of the real? I'll let you decide because I'm not saying. 🙂 In that story, as you saw, quite a few bad things happened during its telling. People were hurt. Oz was invaded. Any of us that could be there would hate to be involved in such a horrible things. We don't like it when bad things happen to us. The same thing holds true in role-playing games. We spend time rolling up characters (or building them, depending on the system) and we want them to the last as long as we can make them last. In most games, we try to avoid bad things. After all, when bad things happen, at best the character's taken out of the game. Maybe a little humiliation. At worst, your character is dead and you have to make a new one. In some types of games, that's a good thing. When you live by what the dice have to tell you, it puts you on edge. You don't know what can happen next. But the same time, we invest a lot in our characters. We don't want one fatal dice roll, a single stroke of bad luck, to put an end to all our hard work. On the other hand, when we read a book (or for that matter, a comic book, or watch a TV show, or enjoy any kind of fiction), we live for the moments that bad things happen to the characters. After all, a story that has no conflict is absolutely no fun to read at all. What's the point? We thrill to the heroes of the story overcoming adversity! Role-playing games are a completely different animal than stories – or are they? A better question: do they have to be? I spent years trying to figure this part out. My goal was to create a game that emulated being in an Oz book. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to do it. I looked into games that were supposed to emulate genres: being in a superhero comic book, being in an eighties cartoon series, etc. Good stuff, but I had a little bit of a difficult time with it. Maybe I just wasn't getting it. Evil Hat Games created a Fudge-based engine called FATE. The FATE System is currently used in games like Spirit of the Century and the Dresden Files, as well as other games by other publishers. Looking through FATE games (as well as a Fudge build called Marvelous Superheroes) I came to realize one thing: To emulate a story, players had to love bad things happening to their characters. Yes, a radical concept, to be sure. It flies in the face of RPG convention. You want to AVOID bad things, right? But, to play a story-based game, you have to desire the bad things. When looking at FATE and MS, I realized another thing: it's the characters that make things happen in a story. Think about it. You don't enjoy a story for the adventures; you enjoy it for what the characters do during an adventure. This means that a story-based game has to be purely centered on the characters. The result is a tradeoff: let bad things happen to your character and in return, the character will have greater control of the story later. Oz is no exception to this. In any given Oz book, characters get captured, lost, enchanted, and anything else the writer can think of. Therefore, Heroes of Oz had to follow these two concepts. The FATE System does this using Fate Points. If you let something bad happened to your character, you get a Fate Point. You then spend the Fate Point later to have a greater effect on the story. Heroes of Oz does this with the Story Point. Of course, bad things aren't the only way to get a Fate/Story Point, but they are the most exciting way to get them! I'll talk about Story Points more in the next post. Until then, be blessed and brush up on your Oz history. You're going to need it!