Keepers in the Dark: Lessons Learned (so far)

A recent post detailed the 48 Hour Mega RPG Jam, which this author entered. Voting has now concluded (Keepers-in-the-Dark placed 16th!), allowing me to update my entry for the jam.

I am going to keep posting this horrid logo until I make a different one.

This post was begun about a week ago so has undergone some revisions, as a consequence of  the psychic fermentation process. It is now skewed much more towards analysis of general design principles, which I think makes it more interesting (ha! as if I have any idea what is interesting!)

A "PROFESSIONAL" DESIGNER
For the uninitiated, it is time I confessed: I am actually a professionally trained designer! This will come as an incredible surprise to anyone who has ever laid eyes upon one of my drawings (just as the fact that I presently earn a living as an English teacher is likely to cause apoplexy in anyone who has ever read anything I've written), but believe it or not, I actually have a degree and postgraduate qualifications in a professional design discipline and have received a regular salary from a real company for designing things. I know! The world is truly inside-out.

I mention this because I am truly astounded by how little of my training and work experience came in to play during the creation of this game during the jam itself.

FALSE DICHOTOMY 1: WRITING VS. DESIGN
The previous paragraph was a major breakthrough for me: I realised that my approach to game design has been, up until this point, not been as a designer, it has been as a "writer". Quotation marks are here applied with extreme prejudice against a deep (false) assumption on my part: that writing and design are two mutually exclusive activities.

Consequently, I approached the jam the same way I typically approach writing: the blank pages were  approached with no plan other than faith in my own confidence and the passage of sufficient time to produce something interesting. Naturally, the result was an incomplete and confused mess, with a few good (although well-hidden) ideas.

Had I approached this with my landscape architect's hat on my head, the story would have been very different. My design methodology begins by identifying the problem, and appreciating that the deadline is also part of that problem: from the outset, structure and organisation are already established as integral elements of the design solution.

It is only now becoming apparent that a similar approach to creative writing could be extremely rewarding (and will be carried forward into the upcoming NaNoWriMo).

FALSE DICHOTOMY 2: FLUFF VS. CRUNCH
One thing that threw a spanner in the works was the need to codify the increasingly bloated game mechanics. I do not think crunchy rules are necessarily the enemy of the type of gameplay I enjoy (namely, old school, which generally errs on the rules-light end of the mechanics spectrum), but the rules bloat did form an obstacle in this instance because:

1. Rules take time to write and, working on a strict deadline, lighter rules would have made more sense.
2. Regardless of the level of complexity, rules should always add flavour to the game, and make sense within the context of the game's paracosm.

The latter point is what struck me as missing from the rules document: where additional layers of complexity were successful is where they added flavour to the game (death and dismemberment, for example). On the other hand, the unnecessarily complex encumbrance rules too a great deal of time without adding anything meaningful to the gameplay or the world in which the game is supposed to take place. Compare the latter example to Patrick Stuart's encumbrance rules in Veins in the Dark: not only does it make organising carrying capacity an essential part of the game, inventory slots are tied to all the ability scores (apart from charisma), emphasising that the character is really pushing themselves to squeeze as much as they can from their limited capacity. 

Additionally, the most successful rules were described in a style befitting dungeon-dwelling scum,  making it an almost in-world document and tying the mechanics (albeit tenuously) to the setting.

FALSE DICHOTOMY 3: OLD SCHOOL VS. CRUNCHY COMPLEXITY
While I think the level of crunch in Keepers in the Dark is problematic for the reasons outlined above I am not of the opinion that a crunchy set of rules always curtails player agency. When I make a second pass at KitD there will be some bits chopped out but most of the mechanics will be moved.

The issue of rules and player agency seems to me to be a matter of how much is presented up front to the participants in the game, and how much knowledge of the game is necessary to play it. For KitD, a player with any experience of a dungeon-crawling RPG need only be granted a quick introduction to the premise and then shown how the D12 dice pool mechanic works. Additional rules can be explained on the fly.

Compare that to a game like 5th edition D&D: while the rules are superficially lacking in complexity, players undertake to invest time in learning their characters abilities in tactical situations. Despite supposedly shying away from the crazy character-builds of 3.5e and the tactical complexity of 4e, the game still maintains elements of both.

So my argument for complexity in play is just for a more robust set of DM facing rules: not to hide them from the players, but to provide a framework upon which the DM can base their rulings, with may rules being optional.

THE VALUE OF DEADLINES
Two of the many great teachers from whom I have been fortunate to learn helped me to  comprehend the importance. The first teacher explained that without a deadline, nothing gets finished: everything can always be improved.

This fact was hammered home by the second teacher, a friend and former employer of mine who also performs poetry. While he was always pressuring me to meet deadlines in order for us to collect the client's money and spend it down the pub, he also left me with this quote which has been attributed to both Auden and Valery:

"Poems are never finished, they are only ever abandoned."

This is true of any creative endeavour: at some point, one just has to walk away.


NEXT STEPS
I'm not quite ready to walk away yet...

In its present form, the raw ruleset needs to have dungeon generation rules outlined, a few spells and rituals added, and a few notes about monster creation, hazards and traps. Of course, the game will still suffer from all the faults already mentioned, but then its when phase 2 will be initiated.

Phase two will be the second pass over these rough notes: to reorganise and re-shuffle.. in other words, a hard edit. After that, layout and illustration.

Originally, phase one was scheduled to complete by the end of this month. That is no longer viable, and with NaNoWriMo looming, means that the beginning of Phase 2 will probably get postponed to mid December.

It's been an enjoyable journey, but that journey is far from over. Please stick around to see where the next leg will take us.

-Sofinho