High-Context (No Phonelobster)

[MGuy]

When you were describing this earlier my take away was that you were trying to observe how well a given thing engages with the context of the situation a player might find themselves in. Orc warcamp in a sandbox can be approached different ways. Either in a way with tactics/abilities that can be used in any circumstance or by making use of the context to aid the players.

Now it seems what you're saying that embeddedness seems to be tied to how 'exclusive' a thing is to a given situation. It seems that now what you're measuring is how likely a player is to feel that their choice to do A instead of B means something.

[OgreBattle]

How grateful am I that I found the holy sword?

Gambling and winning is more fun than being given a welfare check, sometimes the job of the DM is to make everything look like a big clever gambit win.

I think revisiting areas is a way to give a sense of 'characters exist in a persistent world". Been playing Megaman X and it's nice that when I defeat the octopus, the chameleon's stage floods so I can swim to a new area. It's nice that beating the drill rhino gives me a digging drill so I can now revisit the cave to dig up cool stuff.


Individual PC's going off to do a thing with their new power can be a downtime thing, like the water breathing guy goes and gets the holy sword in the flooded cave while the thief that can now talk to spiders acquires a spider girlfriend/mount.

[...You Lost Me]

I think the design space for low-embedding fantasy heartbreakers has been pretty well explored. I think there's more room for a heartbreaker to stand out from the crowd by going for a high-embedding design.

I think this is mostly because it is harder to codify embedded-ness. Writing out a chart for a class is straightforward, and so is writing out a bunch of magic items as (essentially) select-able player features. But how do you create a structure that leads to interesting embedded consequences? And how do you make sure that these consequences are both (a) sufficiently embedded, and (b) fair to the players (Ex: The knight gets a spider mount, the rogue gets spider silk, and the wizard gets nothing)

On a related note, this seems to fight against the concept of "level-appropriate" adventures, where you start your career by fighting spiders in a dungeon and you end it by taking down Asmodeus in Hell. Well-embedded rewards could cause players to punch above their unembedded weight class, making adventure design difficult or impossible. And any heavily-embedded game is also going to run the risk of wasting players' mindshare as they move from caring about 1 town to caring about 1 city, then 1 kingdom, then 1 plane, then the multiverse.

Sorry if that's a lot of random thoughts without a ton of cohesion. I think my root question is: how do you design embedded campaigns if you plan for players' capabilities to grow in scope drastically?

[Orion]

Quick hits posting from phone.

I should've titled this "high context gaming and low context gaming" instead of "embedding."

I have been using "embedded" to mean "context dependent and/or context altering." I have used "fully embedded in an unprincipled intuitive way.

Sometimes I used " fully embedded" as a way to talk about two-way vs. One-way interactions. Other times I used it to highlight deep context vs immediate context. Sometimes I just used it to mean hard way rather than easy way.

The distinction I was making in the challenges section is not about railroad adventures vs. Sandbox adventures. Its about whether the experience is self contained or context dependent.. A linear train ride with no choices is context dependent if the scenery changes with the seasons. A sanbox full of toys is context-independent if you can't bring in outside toys.

[Dean]

I like the terms high context and low context to transmit the idea you're discussing. I concur with the use of those terms.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

After going back and rereading Orion's posts with "high/low context" in place of "embedding"... at least things finally make sense now. Up until now I've barely understood what the fuck anyone is rambling about. I still don't really get it, though... don't the vast majority of players and DMs enjoy context? Don't most people enjoy context?

[hogarth]

I still don't really get it, though... don't the vast majority of players and DMs enjoy context? Don't most people enjoy context?

As long as it's not a lot of work. But if I'm just in the mood to stab some orcs, I might not give a shit about engaging the GM's carefully crafted campaign world (notwithstanding Orion and Blicero's claim that it's possible for "embedding" to take zero effort).

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

You might not give a shit, but I find it hard to believe you won't naturally engage with contextual situations. If there are two quests - stop zombies from crawling from this crypt & stop the orcs from invading these villages - and you go stop the zombies, you'll have to actively try not to engage with it when you get back to town only to find it's being raided by those orcs you ignored.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what embedding is.

[Orion]

I think my root question is: how do you design embedded campaigns if you plan for players' capabilities to grow in scope drastically?

It depends on whether your players are builders or solvers. Uh, let me back up a bit.

Scope vs. Permanence: Solvers and Builders

Okay so the role of context in a given campaign can be described 2-dimensionally as context scope and context permanence. Basically, "how many things do we care about at once?" and "how long do we keep caring about them?" Player preferences are all over the map on both axes. One person finds complex situations inherently fun to navigate, while the other sees complexity as a cost we pay to have nice things. One person craves a steady diet of new stuff to interact with, while the other lives for callbacks and shout-outs to the old stuff. I call the first player a "Solver" and the second player a "Builder." Both are high-context players, but in equal and opposite ways. (The other quadrants are the low-context Tourist and the ultra-high-context Expander)

Solver campaigns: A campaign for Solvers might look something like this: you live in a small town at the edge of a small kingdom, with more powerful neighbors on both sides. Both neighboring kings claim that your hometown actually belongs to them. An orc horde has just come down from the steppe, drow slavers recently dug a new underdark access nearby, a necromancer is raising an army in the bog, and rumor has it that the baron's evil son might be planning to murder his dad and declare independence. Find a way to keep your town intact and unconquered, probably by playing off all these factions against each other until you can start eliminating them one by one. Once you've "solved" a faction it gets eliminated from the game and you don't have to think about it any more; on to the next problem. A Solver campaign runs out of steam when the players run out of problems to solve.

Builder campaigns: A campaign for Builders could go something like this: you live in a frontier town that has been mostly cut off from civilization by an encroaching, monolithic darkness. Maybe there's an actual BBEG Dark Lord threatening civilzation in general, maybe it's just general Dark Ages-style decay and neglect. Either way you fight to extend the sphere of "civilization and safety" and drive back the "chaos and disorder." You can start small with the problems closest to home -- sheep are going missing in the hills, and now the blacksmith's son is missing too. After you sort that out, you can take on some bigger projects. There used to be a monastic order based out of an abbey in the hills, but dangerous beasts prowl there now and the site is long-abandoned. We used to trade with the elves in the forest across the river, but we haven't seen them in decades and the land is haunted by undead. Merchants from the port city used to visit us on the king's road, but they don't come any more for fear of the bandits. Once you've helped out in one location, you can keep checking in with those people for the rest of the campaign to watch they grow and rebuild, bask in their gratitude, and maybe solve any new problems they've run into. A Builder campaign eventually gets bogged down when the party has too many friends to keep track of.

[Orion]

After going back and rereading Orion's posts with "high/low context" in place of "embedding"... at least things finally make sense now. Up until now I've barely understood what the fuck anyone is rambling about. I still don't really get it, though... don't the vast majority of players and DMs enjoy context? Don't most people enjoy context?

In general most people do enjoy context, but sometimes context becomes a prison that keeps them from doing what they want to do, and sometimes they like other things that turn out to erase context as a side effect. Here are some examples of times people might not want to maximize context.

[*]Elves and Dwarves each have a quest to give the party. You could decide that because of their mutual hostility the party can only do one or the other. That would give you a game with deeper context, where deciding to do one adventure had ramifications that could lock you out of other adventures. But maybe your players think both sound really interesting and they'll be disappointed about missing out. It could be more fun not to introduce that obstacle.[*]Learning to fly and teleport is a part of a player's power fantasy. They know that acquiring these abilities will strip out a lot of the game's geographic context; it won't matter nearly as much as it used to where exactly things are. But it's worth it because it's cool.[*]If you don't let the wizard buy spell scrolls in town, and force them to only learn spells from spellbooks they find on their adventures, then every spell will have a story behind it, and their spell selection will be shaped by context. That could be cool but it could also be frustrating. If you let them buy whatever spells they want in town, they won't have stories, but they will have their first choice spells.[*]If you balance the red dragon in the mountains so that the party needs a dragonbane sword to win, they might feel really good about their decision to go quest for one earlier. Or, if they didn't quest for one, they might feel bad about it and then die.

[Orion]

Leveling Up

There are basically three things that can happen when you level up:

[*]You unlock access to new content (+Scope)[*]You unlock new ways to interact with old content (+Permanence)[*]You bypass, erase, or obsolete old content (-Scope, -Permanence)

Depending on how hard you pressed each of those three levers, you can theoretically steer your game into any of the context quadrants. My intuition for 3E and most variants is that "erasing old stuff" is the dominant effect, "unlocking new stuff" is the next strongest, and "re-contextualizing old stuff" is the weakest. The overall effect is usually (-Scope, -Permanence; favors Tourists) and occasionally (+Scope, -Permanence; favors Solvers). You could contrast this with AD&D, where the rank order was (Recontextualise>Unlock>Erase) and the net effect favored Expanders and Builders.

In general I think it would be a good idea to to build a couple of "paradigm shifts" into your level-up system. Have a couple of breakpoints where the game changes in a big way all at once. AD&D had "name level" where you got your stronghold and followers. 4th edition was supposed to have "paragon level" where you got your advanced class (not that it changed anything). A 3e heartbreaker aiming at Solvers and Tourists might want a hardcoded "Plane level" where you take it to outer planes. Other possible breakpoints could be "Hero Level," (when everything you fight is immune to normal weapons) or "3 Kingdoms Level" (when you become capable of mass combat). Whatever your breakpoints are, don't let people hit them with xp. Make the special levels require pokemon evolution stones or something so you can deploy them at a calculated moment to reset a stale campaign.

How to level your Tourist: Not much to say about this one, Tourists will pretty much always like gaining levels as fast as you'll allow them to. Leveling up means they can do new and different stuff, probably cooler stuff, and it also means they can easily bypass or ignore all the old stuff they're tired of. If other players in the party try to rope the Tourist in to managing a complex new situation, they may chafe. But if you have a full group of Tourists they just won't get themselves into that situation.

How to level your Solver: This is also pretty easy. When your Solver runs out of problems, promote them to the big leagues and give them a new set of problems on a bigger scale. If they've managed to save their home town from 6 local threats, just have the king send them a letter asking them to come save the kingdom from 6 regional threats.

How to level your Builder: This one is bittersweet but necessary. Eventually your Builder will accumulate enough "pets" (businesses, friends, houses, allies, projects, etc.) that the game sags under their weight. At this point you need to tell you Builder that all their pets "lived happily ever after" and re-set them to a new context. Send them to a remote outpost on a more dangerous continent and watch them build it all up from nothing again.

How to level your Expander: This one is genuinely complicated and might need its own post. I think there are two methods, "The Flower" and "The Fractal." The way "The Flower" works is you figure out what the full scope of the high level game will eventually be, and then you drop them right in the center of that unfolding flower. If the low-level game is about squad-level combat and investigation, and the high-level game is about managing an empire, start them out as a security detail assigned to the imperial palace. The same council ministers who begin as suspects to investigate or officials to bodyguard will become the people you intrigue with in stage two and then the people you boss around in stage three. If you want to go from street level murder hobos to plane-hopping heroes, maybe start out as murder hobos in Sigil. The way "The Fractal" works is you make sure to replicate some element of your setting across every level of scope so there's some kind of continuity. Maybe in an early adventure you had to arbitrate a trade dispute between some elves and some dwarves and you sided with the elves. You probably wouldn't expect that to matter at all now that you're a 15th level planeswalker, but what if it turns out that Corellon Larethian wants to repay the favor, while Moradin still carries a grudge? I think the easiest way to execute a fractal is probably in setting with a factional color pie. If you've established that your party is Red/Green aligned, or that you're playing Blue off against White, that dynamic can carry over across any change of scope.

EDIT: I think that Builders are probably the best market to target, from a supply/demand perspective. There's a lot of them and there's not much out there for them. There's even less out there for Expanders, but I think Expanders are by far the rarest player type.

[hogarth]

you'll have to actively try not to engage with it when you get back to town only to find it's being raided by those orcs you ignored.

That's what's great about being murder hobos: there's always another town. Why go back?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Whatever your breakpoints are, don't let people hit them with xp. Make the special levels require pokemon evolution stones or something so you can deploy them at a calculated moment to reset a stale campaign.

Hold up, what does this actually look like? If I want to break into the tier where I can start snorting cocaine off of succubi and I already have enough XP for it but lack whatever special mcguffin I need to actually get to the next tier... do I just not get XP anymore? Do I 'bank' it and get access to it when we reach that point? Do I only get XP when the GM lets me anyway, so this whole thing is arbitrary?

That's what's great about being murder hobos: there's always another town. Why go back?

Well, depending on the context, that town might be the closest one nearby. There's plenty of reasons to go back in that instance. But I guess if you have to go out of your way, then you're probably unlikely to return after you get your reward.

[PhoneLobster]

I should've titled this "high context gaming and low context gaming" instead of "embedding."

You should have titled this "ideas Orion has about stuff" because the problem you have isn't the individual things you talk about, certainly not all of them anyway, it's your bizarre fantasy that they fit under the roof of one label.

You opened discussing how character builds and party composition can fail to meet some level appropriate challenges. OK that's a thing.

You followed up discussing how encounters or adventures well over a party's level can be "solved" with indirect novel strategies. OK that's a different thing.

You talked a lot about how you basically like open world campaigns rather than serial canned adventures. OK, that's another, also different thing.

You talked a bunch about liking continuous narrative. ALSO another also different thing.

You've really jumped all over call backs, you like those, they are pretty great, but you seem to like them... maybe slightly too much. Still. Another, also different, thing.

You've brushed from several angles on persistent narrative consequence been a bit oddly coy about it, but OK another, also different thing. At least this one can also contain call backs even if it is not actually synonymous with a call back.

You've really hated on random item drops. You don't seem to understand random tables can be themed (here and only here). Then you also dismissed arbitrary items drops, which makes that whole bit just weird. But also. basically yet another thing.

You've decided you really like incredibly thematic incredibly exclusive item drops, placed by indescribable means. Which. Really. Entirely on its own could be a thread of whuts? Still. basically another thing.

You've really hated on shopping a lot, then sorta backtracked a bit, like everyone who always hates on shopping does. Because no one really hates shopping we are all just conflicted. Also another thing.

You have a bit of a talk about not liking narratively disconnected side adventures. OK. Fine. Maybe thats part of liking narrative. But it's kinda as much of a side tangent as such adventures themselves.

You decided overland travel and random encounter tables really tie a campaign together, rather than fill in gaps. That's another thing.

You decide you really like generating new adventures, basically on the spot or at least in response to the latest result of the previous adventures. Which is an elaboration on liking narrative, but also an independent topic not at all required by narrative.

Now you've tried to wedge two styles of game play that are not actually related to liking call backs, onto a scale of liking call backs or not. Given them shit exclusive labels and GNSed hard talking about "types of gamer". That's just silly. But also another thing.

Then you try and talk about leveling up, bring in more not very useful artificial labels, and accidentally talk about dealing with campaign bloat and scope interchangeably instead. Which is I guess about four different things at once which is hilarious but again. Still not your uniform single axis theory of game design you declared this whole thing is supposed to be about in paragraph one post one.

It's OK to just say "I have a bunch of ideas..." about, well, what is actually mostly GMing advice and the GMing style you would like rules systems to better support. You don't HAVE to create an imaginary through line of anything other than "I like it". Trying to do so makes your ideas harder to express, and also sometimes even just stupider in the first place.

[JigokuBosatsu]

A couple thoughts. First, context is much better. Second, I feel like a lot of the context bits are really just moving the crunch vs. fluff slider, or toggling the meta switch, or reskinning fluff (the Monster Summoning/Call Pegasus Knights example). None of which are bad but I don't know that we need a full philosophical dissertation to make it happen. Third, that being said, I think your idea actually would be worth putting into very formal language, as consistently and explicitly as you can before workshopping it.

So waiting to see where this goes.

[Ice9]

I dunno whether this kind of categorization really helps accurately inform design in the end, but it's fun, so:

Builder / Solver is a valid axis I think, since they are to an extent opposed. Well, they don't have to be opposed, but most game sessions tend to be about some kind of threat/conflict, not slice-of-life stuff, and most RPGs don't offer much support for the latter. So that does put "I want to keep the spotlight coming back to this element" and "I want to have made a permanent positive change to this element that I don't have to keep defending or having offset by new problems" in conflict.

This shows up in a lot of discussions about characters in Exalted trying to create positive change with their superhuman political or administration skills. "So you just want to declare everything's perfect now and you're done? Sounds very boring." vs "If everything keeps going bad no matter what anyone does, then the setting is depressing crap and I don't want to play it."

I don't think they're two axes forming a space with quadrants though.
I see an entirely separate axis being Tourist/Actor (happy to follow events/story wherever it goes, whether they have any influence on that or not - how they react to / portray that is where their attention is focused) vs ... Instigator? Creator? (needs a better name; they're the ones who want to be driving the direction of events, not stumbling into them via plot or happenstance. usually fine with outside obstacles they need to react to, but major change should occur as a direct result of their own actions)

Also, despite the Tourist name, this isn't the same as level of involvement with the game. You could have a very involved Actor player who puts lots of thought into the setting and how to play their character, or a very beer-n-pretzels Instigator player who likes making high-concept plans and goals but would be happy flipping a coin for how they turn out.

[Orion]

Dungeons & Dragons is the ultimate “big tent” game. Because D&D has more players than anyone else, they have to try to appeal to more players than anyone else. I don't think it makes sense for an independent designer to try to fight them on that battlefield. D&D can be played a million different ways, and I think your best bet to stand out is to pick a few of those ways and polish a game that can peel off the players who specifically want to buy what you're selling. I do think that the Forge went too far into encouraging people to make their games one-trick-ponies. RPGs are worthwhile in the age of excellent Eurogames because you can have so many different kinds of experiences within one activity, but I still think it's worth picking some selling points to optimize your game around. For today's exercise I will walk us through a hypothetical design exercise without using “context” and then at the end I'll argue for why “context” could be helpful.

We will start by choosing one selling point, then identify a couple of possible additional selling points that are nearby in design space. Then we'll start by looking at how that cashes out in encounter design, and then watch the effects of committing to these selling points ripple out into other domains like your equipment system and you geographic and political concerns. Once we've taken stock of those commitments, we'll look at the converse: the areas of freedom that those commitments unlock. Finally we'll talk about “context” as a shorthand that organizes possible selling points into two groups of opposite polarity.

The First Selling Point: Calibration. Let's say you want to make a “3rd edition style” heartbreaker, by which I mean something with a lot more special abilities and mechanical depth. But let's say you were also traumatized by the wildly mismatched power levels of 3e character classes, or Frank's memorable rant about giant crabs, or his “What are you actually supposed to do?” rant about Red Hand of Doom being super-deadly to normal parties. You don't miss poring over an adventure before running it to verify that your players would have a decent chance on their saving throws, that they have some way to cope with the DR, that there won't be a TPK via invisible archers or something. Basically you want to cut down on amount of time you personally have to spend calibrating your games, and you want to turn that into your selling point for prospective MCs. You want to tell them they can take any reasonable 5th level party, run it through any 5th level adventure, and trust that things are going to work out okay. You plan to make this happen by giving each character class a robust toolkit that can handle a lot of different challenges; maybe you use “tags” or “roles” to help people cover their bases. You also plan to publish well-calibrated self-contained modules and to develop a more detailed guide to encounter design. That's about as far as you get before you realize that “you probably won't have a bad time with our game” probably isn't a strong pitch by itself. You wonder if the groundwork you're laying could support a more positive pitch.

Additional Selling Points: Tactics, Sandboxing, Experiential Diversity. You're including lots of monsters with weird abilities and you're putting a floor on the PCs' power level so they'll always have a fighting chance. That sounds like a sweet spot for players who like to be skill-tested by novel tactical scenarios. If you want to maximize that tactical engagement you might have to put in a power ceiling to go with that power floor, but you might be able to get away with just “challenge mode” restrictions for the hardcore. You also realize that giving the PCs the kind of toolkits they need to reliably tackle a whole monster manual is going to have non-combat consequences. They're going to end up with the ability to traverse and survive in a lot of environments and solve a lot of problems, which means there will probably be a lot of tasks they could plausibly undertake. The commitment to well-calibrated scenarios also means that they're going to tend to be episodic. The more changes you make to an adventure to reflect events that have gone before, the less reliable that balance point will be. You can lean into this by marketing your system as a game for sandbox campaigns. Encourage MCs to buy or outline several quests in the area and to give them each a unique environment and enemy roster. Tell the MCs to let the heroes choose where to go, and tell the players to go after the locations they think it would be cool to visit or the enemies they think it would be interesting to fight.

The Cascade: You've got a vague paradigm for class design and adventure structure and a couple of philosophical ideas backing it up. Now you want to figure out what the decisions you've already made imply about how you can fill in the other blanks in your system. Start with magic items: do PCs need them? How do they get them? What do they do?

Well, if you calibrate your game on the assumption that the PC do need items then you have to make sure the PCs actually get them. This probably means going to Wealth-by-level or something similar, and either making item creation easy or making sure there are shops selling the staple items. Should wealth-by-level be a minimum or a target? All you need for calibration is a minimum. You could let people who go after more loot walk away with more loot. But to to the extent that you commit to your original secondary goals, you want WBL to be a target. If people get too much bling, that could undermine the tactical challenge. And if some adventures spit out more bling than others, people might choose missions based on that instead of picking the one that sounds coolest.

If you calibrate your game assuming the PCs don't have magic items, then you could roll treasures randomly. Let their class features do most of the work and let the random items just be a fun bonus. If you're especially hardcore about enforcing tactical challenge you might end up having to nerf all your items so they don't throw things off balance, but maybe you could actually use the existence of powerful magic items as a way to backdoor in a “hard mode.” You could set it up so that we assume that doing “level-appropriate” missions is always pretty easy even without items, and that a party with one or two good items can try their luck on over-leveled missions, and make the really skill testing kick in when you're trying to beat high-end content with a couple big items instead of a full high-level toolkit.

What about overland travel and wilderness survival? Those mini-games want to get either bulked up a lot or pared down to a minimum. A dungeon that's harder to get to is effectively a harder dungeon, so if we want both harrowing wilderness journeys and well-calibrated adventures, then those wilderness journeys have to be written into the adventure. That in turn means we need level-appropriate benchmarks for travel and navigation powers and a spot for them in our role system. You could make that game and some people would love it but it's probably an even narrower niche than the one we're currently looking at. If wilderness stuff isn't your personal passion, I suspect you probably go the other way and handwave the navigation. Your secondary goals definitely pull you toward minimalism. If we want our players to feel free to ping pong from the yeti caves to the sand dunes and back, we can't make getting around too difficult or time consuming. And if our players are hooked on our fine-tuned tactical set pieces we probably want to avoid bogging them down with random wilderness encounters.

Lastly, what about factions, politics, and diplomacy? Well, the primary benefits of securing alliances or patronage tend to be access to equipment, information, and backup. Since we're always trying to give the PCs multiple interesting destinations to check out, we can't be too stingy with information. We're assuming that the PCs will get the gear they need no matter what, and we're calibrating our adventures on the assumption that the PCs won't need backup. So we can assume that the players probably won't feel much pressure to secure allies. There's always something to be said for encouraging self-expression, so we could let them do it anyway and just steamroll the bad guys with their followers and sponsored bling if they choose to. (Or tell the MC that re-calibrating the game in light of this is up to them) Or, we could set things up so that those perks simply don't apply. Maybe even low-level monsters get abilities that regular soldiers can't cope with, or maybe we decide that even short wilderness journeys are actually extremely dangerous for large parties of soldiers. We hand-wave the wilderness survival when PCs do it, but assume normal people would get eaten by spiders before they reached the dungeon.

We can make an interesting extrapolation off of that, actually. If the Duke's men can't march to the orc temple, then probably the orcs can't actually march to the town, either. That might seem like a problem which would deflate a lot of the bad guys menace and therefore also deflate the players' sense of heroism, but I think we can work with this. It's actually a good thing in some ways if the bad guys in the dungeon aren't an imminent threat to the town, because that feeds into the sandbox dynamic. We want the players to feel free to skip the orc temple if they think orcs are boring; if they think the orcs might come and burn down the village, they might not feel good about skipping it. We could give a sense of weight back to the adventures by putting them on geomantic power sites. The bad guys aren't going to ride out from their dungeons to conquer the world, but as long as they're in there they're generating some kind of bad effect for the region. Maybe the orc temple spreads a blight that is depressing crop yields, while the shadowmancer's tower is giving people nightmares and the fire mephit gave belches smoke that ruins the town's air quality.

Areas of Freedom: As we lock these answers in, we actually open up new opportunities for ourselves. In general when you've committed to avoid letting the variance in one field tilt the outcomes for you game, that opens you up to either let it become a vehicle for player self-expression, go for rule of cool, or completely remove or remake it. For example: If you're doing the 3.5-style thing where people need to collect arbitrary +bonus items to stay on their level treadmill and they get a pre-scripted gold income to do it with, you might want to consider turning the “items” in supernatural gifts they manifest through training and discipline, or letting everyone make their own items with customized forms and appearances, or rejiggering the core math so the +bonuses aren't necessary. If you know that the players will be self-sufficient actors who don't need political connections, you could throw them into a wasteland that's all-but-uninhabited. Or, you could actually throw in lots of opportunities to take sides in elf/dwarf and goblin/orc and human/other human conflicts. There's a risk that the players might not care about the factions because the factions have nothing to offer them. On the other hand, the players might really enjoy feeling free to side with whomever they're sympathetic to without being constrained by strategic considerations. If you're not tracking travel times or testing survival skills, you could get rid of the actual wilderness and have your players just use a portal network to hop straight into adventures in all kinds of outlandish environments.

At Long Last, Context.

Long post is long, and I need to get some rest. I hope that this has cleared up why I think high context/low context is an axis that can apply to all those different topics. Basically there's a nexus of a bunch of abstract values like “balance,” “freedom,” “simplicity,” and “tactics” (and probably lots more) which tend to be mutually-reinforcing. Once you buy into one of them other similar ideas are likely to become incrementally more attractive and then you end up consistently pushed into the “low-context” end of the design pool across a variety of topics. Let me say again that I have nothing against this kind of game. I've run a lot of games like this and I've played a lot of games like this. I think that a lot of the Frank & K and community Tome material fits really well into a game like this. Part of the reason I want to talk about context on here is to see if we can get even better low-context design by exploiting the areas of freedom that it opens up. But the other reason I'm talking about context is that I think we already have pretty good games available for this style of play, and I see a lot of heartbreaker projects that overlap on these low-context commitments. I think there are good opportunities to stand out from the back by going in other directions.

[PhoneLobster]

Surprise. Phonelobster isn't impressed. Phonelobster is very not impressed. In fact this low quality of deep thought is making Phonelobster sad in the third person.

Now save me some effort and everyone just pretend I went through that whole last post and stopped every half sentence to insert one of the following, "That isn't even relevant", "WTF?", "No it doesn't", "That contradicts the first half of this sentence" and "That's just not even saying anything at all".

[OgreBattle]

The First Selling Point: Calibration. Let's say you want to make a “3rd edition style” heartbreaker, by which I mean something with a lot more special abilities and mechanical depth. But let's say you were also traumatized by the wildly mismatched power levels of 3e character classes, or Frank's memorable rant about giant crabs, or his “What are you actually supposed to do?” rant about Red Hand of Doom being super-deadly to normal parties. You don't miss poring over an adventure before running it to verify that your players would have a decent chance on their saving throws, that they have some way to cope with the DR, that there won't be a TPK via invisible archers or something. Basically you want to cut down on amount of time you personally have to spend calibrating your games, and you want to turn that into your selling point for prospective MCs. You want to tell them they can take any reasonable 5th level party, run it through any 5th level adventure, and trust that things are going to work out okay. You plan to make this happen by giving each character class a robust toolkit that can handle a lot of different challenges; maybe you use “tags” or “roles” to help people cover their bases. You also plan to publish well-calibrated self-contained modules and to develop a more detailed guide to encounter design. That's about as far as you get before you realize that “you probably won't have a bad time with our game” probably isn't a strong pitch by itself. You wonder if the groundwork you're laying could support a more positive pitch.

Additional Selling Points: Tactics, Sandboxing, Experiential Diversity.
...

It's tough to make this a marketing point as most people don't want to say their games as a teen with friends were bad. But yes having a level mean a level appropriate challenge is important, and that's what the Same Game Test was out to prove.
In marketing terms you can focus on "have a variety of challenges per level" then "here's how each hero archtype meets the challenge"
So you have some rat stabbing if you want rat stabbing, then you have dislodge a pillar to collapse a temple then brain the giant that emerges from the rubble to show you level XX epic progression.

So those sections deal with challenges the PC's face, this next part is on what PC's need to have to meet challenges:

The Cascade: You've got a vague paradigm for class design and adventure structure and a couple of philosophical ideas backing it up. Now you want to figure out what the decisions you've already made imply about how you can fill in the other blanks in your system. Start with magic items: do PCs need them? How do they get them? What do they do?

Well, if you calibrate your game on the assumption that the PC do need items then you have to make sure the PCs actually get them. This probably means going to Wealth-by-level or something similar, and either making item creation easy or making sure there are shops selling the staple items. Should wealth-by-level be a minimum or a target? All you need for calibration is a minimum. You could let people who go after more loot walk away with more loot. But to to the extent that you commit to your original secondary goals, you want WBL to be a target. If people get too much bling, that could undermine the tactical challenge. And if some adventures spit out more bling than others, people might choose missions based on that instead of picking the one that sounds coolest.

If you calibrate your game assuming the PCs don't have magic items, then you could roll treasures randomly. Let their class features do most of the work and let the random items just be a fun bonus. If you're especially hardcore about enforcing tactical challenge you might end up having to nerf all your items so they don't throw things off balance, but maybe you could actually use the existence of powerful magic items as a way to backdoor in a “hard mode.” You could set it up so that we assume that doing “level-appropriate” missions is always pretty easy even without items, and that a party with one or two good items can try their luck on over-leveled missions, and make the really skill testing kick in when you're trying to beat high-end content with a couple big items instead of a full high-level toolkit.

People who play skirmish games undertstand that big blasts take out hordes, anti tank lasers take out tanks, and shotguns are blasty at close range. A part of this is because they show off these things as features of your super cool commander or big robot so you go buy a model. With how D&D is presented though, sword guy is expected to sword everything and not man a ballista, some folks don't even expect to pick up a bow or throw a sword.

In a tabletop wargame people care because they're looking at how to wipe out the foe while not being wiped out themselves, so this can also be presented as "The player characters can gain special powers and monsters that help them against monsters, some monsters also use them". So it's not just "warrior needs adamantine +3 to hurt this golem+" it's also "The warrior who takes an epic level in juggernaut has DR/X bypassed by +2..."

What about overland travel and wilderness survival? Those mini-games want to get either bulked up a lot or pared down to a minimum. A dungeon that's harder to get to is effectively a harder dungeon, so if we want both harrowing wilderness journeys and well-calibrated adventures, then those wilderness journeys have to be written into the adventure. That in turn means we need level-appropriate benchmarks for travel and navigation powers and a spot for them in our role system. You could make that game and some people would love it but it's probably an even narrower niche than the one we're currently looking at. If wilderness stuff isn't your personal passion, I suspect you probably go the other way and handwave the navigation. Your secondary goals definitely pull you toward minimalism. If we want our players to feel free to ping pong from the yeti caves to the sand dunes and back, we can't make getting around too difficult or time consuming. And if our players are hooked on our fine-tuned tactical set pieces we probably want to avoid bogging them down with random wilderness encounters.

This kind of thing seems best in a supplementary book that has new PC options, new monster options, and then survival overland travel rules. It's Cold Outside, It's Hot Outside, It's Raining, We're on a Bat. Underground Adventure TIme.

Lastly, what about factions, politics, and diplomacy? Well, the primary benefits of securing alliances or patronage tend to be access to equipment, information, and backup. Since we're always trying to give the PCs multiple interesting destinations to check out, we can't be too stingy with information. We're assuming that the PCs will get the gear they need no matter what, and we're calibrating our adventures on the assumption that the PCs won't need backup. So we can assume that the players probably won't feel much pressure to secure allies. There's always something to be said for encouraging self-expression, so we could let them do it anyway and just steamroll the bad guys with their followers and sponsored bling if they choose to. (Or tell the MC that re-calibrating the game in light of this is up to them) Or, we could set things up so that those perks simply don't apply. Maybe even low-level monsters get abilities that regular soldiers can't cope with, or maybe we decide that even short wilderness journeys are actually extremely dangerous for large parties of soldiers. We hand-wave the wilderness survival when PCs do it, but assume normal people would get eaten by spiders before they reached the dungeon.

We can make an interesting extrapolation off of that, actually. If the Duke's men can't march to the orc temple, then probably the orcs can't actually march to the town, either. That might seem like a problem which would deflate a lot of the bad guys menace and therefore also deflate the players' sense of heroism, but I think we can work with this. It's actually a good thing in some ways if the bad guys in the dungeon aren't an imminent threat to the town, because that feeds into the sandbox dynamic. We want the players to feel free to skip the orc temple if they think orcs are boring; if they think the orcs might come and burn down the village, they might not feel good about skipping it. We could give a sense of weight back to the adventures by putting them on geomantic power sites. The bad guys aren't going to ride out from their dungeons to conquer the world, but as long as they're in there they're generating some kind of bad effect for the region. Maybe the orc temple spreads a blight that is depressing crop yields, while the shadowmancer's tower is giving people nightmares and the fire mephit gave belches smoke that ruins the town's air quality.

Areas of Freedom: As we lock these answers in, we actually open up new opportunities for ourselves. In general when you've committed to avoid letting the variance in one field tilt the outcomes for you game, that opens you up to either let it become a vehicle for player self-expression, go for rule of cool, or completely remove or remake it. For example: If you're doing the 3.5-style thing where people need to collect arbitrary +bonus items to stay on their level treadmill and they get a pre-scripted gold income to do it with, you might want to consider turning the “items” in supernatural gifts they manifest through training and discipline, or letting everyone make their own items with customized forms and appearances, or rejiggering the core math so the +bonuses aren't necessary. If you know that the players will be self-sufficient actors who don't need political connections, you could throw them into a wasteland that's all-but-uninhabited. Or, you could actually throw in lots of opportunities to take sides in elf/dwarf and goblin/orc and human/other human conflicts. There's a risk that the players might not care about the factions because the factions have nothing to offer them. On the other hand, the players might really enjoy feeling free to side with whomever they're sympathetic to without being constrained by strategic considerations. If you're not tracking travel times or testing survival skills, you could get rid of the actual wilderness and have your players just use a portal network to hop straight into adventures in all kinds of outlandish environments.

The MtG color pie is interesting because every set has cool art and iconic humanoids, monsters, vehicles, magicks for every color faction. The relationships between colors can either be standard allies or inverted "Oh White & Black are allies in this??". So I'd look at how MtG does the flavor, and then how the mechanics are implemented depends on taste.

[Orion]

There are a lot of existing “high context” games and playstyles. My favorite RPG is Blades in the Dark, which is ultra-high-context by default, but people are doing this in D&D too. The Intrigue and “Wilderness” campaign structures from Chamomile's DM guide both introduce plenty of context. Games with domain management tend to have it. Even a Bioware-style plot-driven pseudo-railroad could be high-context if you get enough decision points with snowballing consequences. My main goal here to to show off the technique of looking for connections between different areas of your design and seeing how your approach to character creation can interact with your handling of magic items, politics, adventure structure, and so on. You can probably make a high context game on any number of themes just by deciding your game is “about” one or two elements and finding ways to tie a bunch of others back into them. I can't tell anyone the high-context way, but I can describe an approach that doesn't match up directly with anything I've personally seen.

Design Intent: Crawl Stories

“Legends held that the crown of the last High King was locked away in the vaults of the giants' Cloud Castle. I wanted to retrieve it to restore my family's honor. I planned to assault the castle from the back of a pegasus, but the only known herd had migrated to a distant mesa. To reach the mesa I would have to cross the heart of the jungle, and the last living Arch-Ranger had died years ago. It was said that wood-elf guides knew secret paths through the heart, but they did not barter for precious metals. Men had been known to steal the crystallized sap known as “elf-gold” from the sacred groves, and it was known that the elves would bargain for its ransom. The last Baron of Thistledown had allegedly amassed a hoard of elf-gold, but his manor was haunted by the results of his necromantic experiments. Thus I found myself, for the first time since my childhood, darkening the door of a Temple of Light in hope of purchasing certain protective relics. . .”


I learned to play D&D by spending most of my childhood playing with my dad and in his friends in their fairly traditional AD&D hexcrawl. We started out with a map of our island and a list of rumors and it was a pretty sandboxy experience. Occasionally the DM would prompt us to go somewhere by feeding us reports of raids and kidnappings, but from what I remember our default loop was “pick an easy-looking dungeon; kill things, get treasure; pick a harder dungeon; repeat.” It was a lot of fun, but it wasn't quite everything I wanted it to be. (In fairness to my DM I should say that I was like 10 when a lot of this went down. I don't remember it super clearly and I may have just not understood a lot of what was going on at the time; I know some of the other players had side stories and more involved decision-making) I had 4 main points of dissastisfaction:

[*]Fear of Illusionism: Because the content can be tailored to the party, I often found myself dwelling on counterfactuals and wondering how helpful our class abilities “really” were. Like, would we have met so many shadows in that cave if we'd had a druid instead of a cleric? If we didn't have a thief would we get killed by traps all the time or would there just be fewer traps in the dungeons? Was that scroll of anti-plant shell randomly rolled or was it put in because he knows we'll need it? If it was randomly rolled, will he now go out of his way to attack us with plants so that we can use it?

[*]No Plans, Only Goals: During character creation, we looked over the maps and rumor sheets and picked out some personal goals. The cleric wanted to destroy the lich that was rumored to lurk in a haunted ruin; my ranger wanted to slay the dragon that was sometimes seen in the mountains. I don't remember either of us doing anything in particular to work up to those goals. We just cleared dungeons and got treasure until we were high enough level to fight the lich and then we went and fought it.

[*]Limited Information, Limited Agency: Even though we could generally pick our targets, I often felt under-informed. I usually felt like I had some information about the dangers of a location but little if any information about the rewards. This made it harder to roleplay my character as a goal-oriented person, especially since I wasn't sure if he was supposed to understand how XP work.

[*]Not Much Narrative Through-line: I don't think we did get around to killing the dragon, but I realized that even though it was a goal I'd set from the beginning, achieving it wouldn't actually be the resolution of a long story. If I had spent the intervening time tracking down a dragon-bane sword, training my own flying mount, and doing other things to specifically prepare myself as a dragonslayer, then by the time I killed the dragon I would have a story. Just “level grinding” until it's within reach isn't an arc.

When people decide that “kill stuff, gain power, kill bigger stuff” loop isn't giving them the kind of narrative arcs and self-expression they want, the usual response it to open up that loop and make the game about something other than killing stuff so you can kill bigger stuff. Now you're killing stuff so you can save the world, or avenge your brother, or amass political influence, or whatever. If I'd had the opportunity to join an intrigue-focused game I probably would've just done that, but I didn't. I also didn't have enough understanding of politics to really imagine how to do something like that on my own. Instead of looking outside the loop, I looked for ways to make killing stuff to gain power so you can kill more stuff and gain more power generate a more satisfying narrative and more interesting choices. At the end of the day, you still probably want the loop to cash out into saving the world or becoming the next Baron or something, but I want to have a more meaningful set of steps leading up to it. Instead of “kill stuff until I become Baron,” I want to get “kill this, so I can kill that, so I can kill the other thing, so I can become Baron.” To that, I propose a new paradigm for setting up the challenges, which will enable a player-facing system built on 4 pillars: Gear, Training, Staff, and Factions.

Must Be AT LEAST This Tall To Ride: In my proposed campaign structure, the MC is encouraged to sketch out a good chunk of sandbox before any characters are rolled up, filling it with a mixture of published modules, original creations, and brief location descriptions rolled off a random table (stuff like “ice-themed goblin temple, level 3”) Modules for this system wouldn't come with a suggested level range; instead, they'd come with a minimum level and a list of tags reflecting useful and essential abilities. Instead of trying to set it up so that all parties above a certain level will have those capabilities, we'll put the responsibility on the players to find ways to cover their bases. To help players cope with that, we need to do two things. First, make it possible for them to find out what they're in for. We don't want to give out perfect information, but we do want to write up some hard rules for research and surveillance. Players should be able to roll dice and find out some of the tagged requirements for a given location. Second, we need to make it OK for the PCs to fail. This means writing up chase rules that give the heroes a good chance to escape, it means using morale rules in which bloodied enemies often fail to pursue, and it means using an in-setting social norm that intelligent foes do accept surrenders and ransoms. The point of all this is to allow us to present the players with a series of fairly objective tests which they can pass or fail on the strength of their own preparation. So how do they prepare?

Gear: Because the challenges are not tailored to the players, they may find that they need specific magic items to get the job done. Player's should not have to beg the DM to get an item they need. On the other hand, it would be nice if important items had more story behind them than just buying with cash. Players will get most of their items through either the Legend system or the Crafting system. The Legend system lets you make research checks during downtime to discover the locations of lost magic items. This will be the only way to get rare or unique items (unless the MC just hands them to you), but can also be used for uncommon items. The MC will not be allowed to shut you down on this: if you succeed on your check, the MC must add the item to an existing location or create a new location to house it. The Crafting system will be available to all character classes and will let them assemble uncommon items from simple recipes. My current idea is to give each item a level, color, and material type. A Flamebrand sword might be RM5 (Red, Metal). Each ingredient would have a level and either a color or material type, and you'd make an item by simply combining ingredients with the right total level from those two categories. You could make a Flamebrand with iron (M0) and dragon-blood (R5) or with adamantine (M3) and ruby (R2). Color ingredients would come from sources such as gems, monster parts, rare plants, and of course various types of enchanted substances and raw magics. Players can make Research checks to learn where to find an ingredient, or Scouting checks to learn what ingredients a location might contain.

Training: If you want to avoid making any one class indispensable, there's a limit to how good you can let a class get at their specialties. You can't have Rangers rolling with +15 on Survival when everyone else has +5, because if the bonuses go up to +15 the DC probably can go up to at least 20, and that means that some adventures will absolutely require a Ranger. The need to make sure a well-rounded party has a good shot at any level-appropriate adventure also flattens within-class customization a lot. Each Cleric or Druid automatically learns the same several-dozen spells when they level up because it could turn out to be disastrous if the group turned out to need some of them and not have it. In Crawl Stories, all we need to do is make sure that there are magic items which can duplicate any must-have class features. We can set it up so that getting through the deep jungle outright requires either a ranger or a wayfinder's rod, and getting through the crypt-full-o'-traps outright requires either a rogue or a lens of trap-finding, because any party can Scout the location to find out they need it and then Craft themselves the relevant item. This frees us up to make class features bigger and more impactful and more customizable.

Also, protagonists in fantasy stories often do try to become more powerful, but they're usually doing something more specific than just leveling up. They tend to be looking for a teacher or a secret technique or an ancient ritual or something. We could introduce a Training system to tie the level-up process into the fiction a little better. The way this would work is that your class gives you some number of slots for mechanical perks; “maneuvers,” “invocations,” etc. We can give each maneuver a level and a rarity. Whenever you have downtime in town you can retrain to fill your slots with any of the common maneuvers of your level or lower. Uncommon maneuvers would have a % chance to find a teacher and a self-study downtime option. Rare maneuvers would be Researched through the Legend system just like Rare items are.

Staff: I'd like to make it a norm that high-level characters accumulate some kind of entourage, although not necessarily one that deploys onto the battlefield. Wizards should fill their towers with golems and familiars. Fighters should tame and breed exotic mounts, train and lead soldiers, and perhaps even employ some spellcasters in logistics & intelligence. We may have to exclude most of these guys from most combats for the sake of saved game time, but I want high-level characters to be able to delegate a lot of their Scouting and Research.

Factions: The last pillar that ties the player-facing system together is the Faction system. There are a bunch of Factions running around (the wood elves, the thieves' guild, the baron, the bard college) and through your adventures you can accumulate Standing and Favors with them. Each faction has special access to some ingredients and maneuvers. The more standing you have, the more maneuvers they'll teach you for free and the more ingredients they'll sell for gold or barter for other ingredients. Favors can be cashed in to get free ingredients or to recruit temporary allies for a mission or move them into your empty Staff slots. If you don't have a ranger and don't care to craft a rod of wayfinding, you could just hire a wood elf guide.

[OgreBattle]

What happens if the +15 survival ranger fails their survival roll for the party? it would suck to just abandon that adventure so some kind of 'progress but more resources are spent' can happen.

Though having these parameters spelled out does make it easier to go "we failed because we lacked X, lets go gain X or let's try Y instead"

For "must be this tall to ride", having multiple entries is handy. I think a module should be written with multiple angles in mind. That also makes for replability

[violence in the media]

[*]Fear of Illusionism: Because the content can be tailored to the party, I often found myself dwelling on counterfactuals and wondering how helpful our class abilities “really” were. Like, would we have met so many shadows in that cave if we'd had a druid instead of a cleric? If we didn't have a thief would we get killed by traps all the time or would there just be fewer traps in the dungeons? Was that scroll of anti-plant shell randomly rolled or was it put in because he knows we'll need it? If it was randomly rolled, will he now go out of his way to attack us with plants so that we can use it?

I really like this point of dissatisfaction, because it's the one that basically led me to get all my dungeon delving itches scratched by rogue-likes on the PC. Whether I choose to be a merfolk or a minotaur, a wizard or a berserker, to use axes or ice magic matters in those games in ways that they rarely (and fairly) do in TTRPGs.

If the dungeon randomly generates a lot of water levels, my choice to be a merfolk feels advantageous and I feel good for having picked it. If the game drops a bunch of nice randart armor, I'm pleased if I chose to be a warrior instead of a wizard. But it's important that just because I chose to be a merfolk warrior doesn't mean the game is going to bias water levels and armor drops in my favor.

I find myself wanting there to be adventures that are super hard, super easy, simply different, and sometimes impossible depending on what the players roll up to the table with.

[merxa]

There is a tension in the fail forward mentality, and a maybe a more 'context' driven fail sideways -- ie the door of orion will not open without the star-key.

modules usually have a fail forward mentality either by design or GM artifice, but it can cause failure to lack consequence, or becomes mere window dressing or loses its narrative weight.

Going back to the door of orion, perhaps it can be bypassed with a high / relevant skill check, but can only be attempted once before it shuts down into an emergency lock, and then only responds to the unique key. That might be called more fail sideways.

fail forward would be things like traps are sprung, the dungeon on the other side goes into emergency mode and becomes more difficult, the original builders get alerted etc. so the door can still be bypassed by either repeated attempts or brute force etc, so the 'rails' stays up but they might veer a bit or have an extra kink.

For the ranger example, fail forward would be random encounter, or mushroom identification failure causes disease checks for everyone.

fail sideways is the party becomes lost and wonders into a different hex / encounter / narrative. Or the location cannot be found in x amount of time / or maybe can never be found without additional assistance from the elves (ie the party must go sides before they can come back and go forward).

fail sideways as a mentality is much harder for narrative modules to provide, as it causes sprawl. In the context of a hexcrawl / sandbox it is more plausible.

[pragma]

I frame illusionism as "player choices should matter" when I'm GMing. Hard agreement there.

It sounds like this much of this pitch is about design philosophies for a hex crawl, though the ideas of the legend system and morale/flight rules do expand beyond that point. I'm excited that this kind of system could be gracefully bolted onto 5e, and will watch this space for potential house rules.

I also believe that the amount of GM prep work to do a hex crawl properly is a showstopper for many GMs. This essay made me wonder if a hex crawl generator program would be a useful tool: generating terrain types for hexes, random encounter tables and dungeons with appropriate descriptors is pretty easy. A generator like that could also place a few items of legend around, and be designed so there is a gradient of difficulty as you head farther from home base.

Re: legend system -- potentially great way to let players have authorial control, but I think that you'd want to tightly control how often they can do it. As a GM, I'd be annoyed by players spamming a legend system and as a player it wold feel cheap if I was optimizing how to spend my plentiful legends.

Re: rangers failing to navigate -- if you make wilderness journeys expensive (to the tune of a spell slot + a hit die per failed roll) then there's a big difference between making the journey in two rolls vs. fifteen.

Re: lots of stuff -- there needs to be timer in order for the hex crawl metagame to be meaningful. The ranger is rendered totally useless if everyone can find a rod of wayfinding with no permanent change to the game state.

[Foxwarrior]

My idea for this sort of game was more worried about intra-party balance (how do you ensure that when one hero gets Firebrand, every other one also gets something cool to play with? I was going for things like "every charismatic mythical megafauna comes with enough different tasty power organs for each hero to get one") and time management (if you can learn and craft to become more powerful, what's the rush? Seems like your solution is to make it so everyone's heads fill up to capacity early on and they start forgetting things?)

I like how yours potentially allows for improvised campaigns with the research system, instead of having the designer try to build a full deep world with two dozen dungeons-worth of content right off the bat... but I guess maybe you actually don't like that, improvising scenarios does lead to accidental illusionism.