Colin McComb’s Now, the Twist takes a long, hard look at game design.

[previously]

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Weeks ago, we talked about the price of freedom and what it means to have an external code imposed on us. Today, we’ll turn that around and discuss what it means to have an internal code that we use as a guidepost when creating games. I don’t mean the publisher’s or developer’s code—I’m talking about the internal regulator that tells us when we’ve gone too far… or that we need to go further.

It’s All New to Me

One of the defining characteristics of game designers is ego. I’m not talking about pride, mind you, but ego: the notion that what we create has some intrinsic value. If you’re doing this professionally, then this is true, in the objective sense that people are willing to exchange their money for your ideas.

This is both gratifying and worrying, especially if you’re not entirely sure what it is that they like. This is the case in any creative endeavor; it’s part of the reason why a second or third album by musicians is frequently more tentative and unsure of itself than the first, which the musicians simply recorded in a burst of creativity. Still, once you’ve put in some time and people keep buying your work, you start to feel like you have a handle on your work.

This might even be true…

But you also need to keep challenging yourself and pushing yourself to develop new ideas—new mechanics, new worlds, new characters, new ways of presenting your information—because you run the risk of stagnation otherwise. Whether we have earned our professional status because of a facility with words, a keen eye for numbers, a killer imagination, a combination of the three, or some fourth factor is almost irrelevant. Being paid for producing games is heady business, and we owe it to our audience to keep our work fresh and interesting.

What You Tolkien About?

This is despite what some might call the inherent conservatism of tabletop gamers. I don’t mean “conservatism” in a political sense; I’ve met people who identify themselves across all branches of the political spectrum, both as game makers and game players. Instead, I mean the tendency of gamers (and, indeed, most any consumers of entertainment) to stick with the tastes they know they like. Dungeons & Dragons (and its various spinoffs) remains the most popular tabletop RPG although it has changed very, very little in its basic presentation since its inception.

By this, I mean the flavor portion of the game, rather than the rules—the underpinning rules structure has undergone radical transformations from the white-box birth of the hobby to what it is today (though the latest iteration certainly hearkens back to the days of wargaming). Believe it or not, WotC took a huge risk in presenting dragonborn and eladrin as basic character races, and they should be commended for branching into new (for them) territory.

One explanation of gamer conservatism is the popularity of the source material. People who read Tolkien want to play in a world similar to Middle Earth, and for good or for ill, Tolkien’s work has influenced the hobby, mass market media, and other games in  a way that still remains hard to quantify. When we designed Planescape: Torment, we specifically made the choice to avoid elves, swords, and dragons, skipping past the usual fantasy tropes to look for other pathways to telling these stories. This is not so much praise for my team—though it was a wonderful team—as it is a statement of the culture. Check this out: for all the great press we got, Torment still hasn’t sold as much as the roughly contemporaneous Baldur’s Gate II.

From a business standpoint, that makes BGII an unqualified success in comparison. If I had to make a cold-hearted business decision about which franchise to continue, I’d really have no choice except to take the one that brought in more money.

Swing Harder, Boy

Yet—and this is the part that works for my argument—10 years after the publication of Torment, it continues to gain in stature. It continues to be listed as one of the most influential computer games of all time. I still get mail about the game. I don’t say this to inflate my ego (no, seriously, I’m not) but to offer some advice:

Explore outside the mainstream. Expose your audience to new ideas, even if it means subverting the standards. Why are we creating an audience for our work? If cold cash is your only basis for pursuing the audience, there are better lines of work to be in. We owe it to our audience and we owe it to our egos to take chances.

If we all walk on the same paths and present the same information, without some new way to present our work, we lose the creative spark that ignites our passion for the work. We lose the right to be legitimately proud of our imaginations. If we do not demand better for our customers, how can we demand better for ourselves?

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Colin McComb has been making games professionally for two decades now. He got his start at TSR Inc., where he worked on many projects he is still inordinately proud of, including a significant portion of the Planescape line and the co-creation of the Birthright campaign setting. After TSR, he went to Interplay in California, where he helped design the classic computer RPG Planescape: Torment. He is currently working on developing games for his own company, 3lb Games.

Colin McComb’s Now, the Twist takes a long, hard look at game design.

[previously]

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You know, of all the questions I’ve answered in my career, there’s one that doesn’t come up with the frequency it deserves. I mean, yes, I’ve answered it before, but I didn’t give it the answer it deserved, either. That question is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Nearly every writer and game designer finds themselves confronted by this question at some point or another, and depending on the project we’re working on, we’re most likely to rattle off a litany of the particular sources we used for a project.

What Do You Know?

For instance, with Birthright, I read Mallory again, studied feudal structures, played war games, looked into tribal cultures (African and Asiatic), and listened to lots of mildly grim classical and synth music. For Planescape, it was industrial music, Piranesi, Hieronymous Bosch, Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs, Hellraiser, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, Goya, and anything I could find that represented at least a small deviation from the mainstream, finding darker and darker materials with every door I opened…

But as the old parable goes, listing these influences is like giving someone a fish. These answers tell someone what influences we used for a particular project, and if they want to build on our work for that particular world, we’ve given them a foundation of ideas. How they choose to pursue it beyond this point is up to them, naturally, but the choices we’ve taken from our source material can inform and direct their choices. A good and accurate list of our sources ensures they’re able to make quality decisions that maintain the flavor of the world.

Diversity of Knowledge

If people don’t ask you about a specific work, but instead ask where you get your ideas in general, you serve them better by describing not the sources of your inspiration but how you find those sources in the first place. You teach them inspiration.

When you design games, you need to be able to come up with ideas, and you need to be able to do this quickly. This means you must be well prepared to discuss a variety of topics and be willing to dive into matters you don’t know anything about. That means you need a good diving board, or if I may be permitted to change metaphors quickly, you need to have established a strong ecosystem of knowledge, so that you can quickly relate one idea to the next.

My primary influences are naturally different from, say, Wolfgang Baur’s. He has a strong background in the sciences while mine is almost purely in the humanities with a special focus on philosophy and theology. Yet underpinning both our interests is the fantastical and mythical, and this helps us approach our work with a common language. I don’t want to break down a list of books we should all read (though if you haven’t read your Greek myths and at least one other major world mythology, get on it), movies we should all see, music we should all know, and so forth since so many of those lists already exist.

Look, for instance, in the back of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook and you’ll see a great list. If you happen to have a copy of the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, there’s a list there, too.

Shake It Up

Instead, I want to offer a broad guideline for how to expand your knowledge. The first step: Look beyond your comfort zone. If your primary focus is philosophy, then you should look into science; remember that science was born from philosophy and that both branches of knowledge focus on the pursuit of a greater truth. Further, reading magazines like Popular Mechanics or Scientific American or National Geographic will open a world of ideas for you. Even if you don’t understand the science behind string theory, knowing its broad outlines provides you a launching pad for further investigations.

If your primary focus is mathematics, then look into history. Find an event that speaks to you, and look into its causes and effects. Wikipedia, for all its faults, is a fantastic resource for this, and well-followed links can drive you to some excellent original sources—or, at least, sources that are entertaining in their falsity, and for game designers, that’s almost as good a source.

But you can’t be indiscriminate. You need to read widely, and you need to read well. Knowing all the episodes of Pokémon is not going to elevate your knowledge base, just as eating at McDonald’s daily is not going to improve your health. If you’re really that interested in anime monsters, start exploring the references, trace them back to their roots, and follow those roots in different directions. For most of the media we consume, there is not one clear, inevitable path down which the trend must continue, and it pays to examine the road less traveled.

The older I get, the more I realize what I don’t know. I’ve come to accept I’ll never be a world-class musician—in fact, I doubt I’ll ever be a bar-class musician—but I still enjoy practicing guitar, even though I’m only barely getting a grasp on the theory, because it shows me how much I still have to learn. Studying karate has opened up the history of Asia in a way that kung-fu movies never did. And playing a variety of games has taught me how to approach problem-solving in new and different ways, providing a basis for shifting strategies and perspectives I might never have learned on my own.

This is perhaps the fundamental lesson for inspiration: keep looking, keep asking questions, keep learning. Apply what you learn in life to what you love in life, and you’ll be able to draw connections from the entire depth and breadth of your experience.

Colin McComb’s Now, the Twist takes a long, hard look at game design.

[previously]

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So we’ve discussed the importance of editors already and why it’s important to make their lives easy. Here’s one great way to do that: make a clean turnover.

It’s much easier to say this than to do this. It’s extra work you don’t necessarily budget ahead of schedule, but it’s also crucial. I don’t just mean a manuscript that is buffed out, shiny, and filled with new-car smell. I mean one that covers the points the editors need covered—or, at least, one that provides them with a good launching pad for moving forward on each of their assigned tasks. For all the work editors put into the job, their lives are made much easier if they have a starting point that lets them build quickly and easily…

First and Foremost

The first step is providing the text they need. This seems obvious, but I’ve heard that some people don’t do it. So, the most important tip: make sure you have written what your contract calls for you to write.

If you’re contracted to write 18,000 words on the martial and marital habits of a reptilian tribe, write those 18,000 words. Don’t write 16,000 and expect to get away with it; your editor will call you up and demand the 2,000 words. Likewise, don’t write 22,000 words and assume that your editor will be happy. This means trimming 4,000 words from the document, and sometimes, that’s more work than writing them.

Some of the words you have written will not be suitable, and you may be called upon to rewrite. This shows your editor is paying attention to what you wrote, so instead of demanding payment for the labor of the extra words, write (new) words cheerfully.

It’s the Little Things

Make sure your turnover complies with your publisher’s style guide. Every publisher has a specific way to present information, intended to retain consistency across their entire product line. The more closely you adhere to their style guide, the more time they have to develop your text and prepare it for printing. (Also, unless the style guide specifically calls for two spaces, only use one space after a period.)

If you have questions or comments for the editor about specific pieces of text, it’s easier and better to put them directly in the body of the work than in an email. This way the question comes at the right time, rather than requiring the editor to seek out the line in its proper context.

Use some identifying mark so that your editor can search for each instance where you have a comment. My personal method looks approximately like this: “(([EDITOR NAME]: Here is my question, relating to this stuff)).” I also highlight the callout. Whatever your style, use something that stands out, attracts attention, and is an easily searchable string. It must be something that isn’t common to the rest of your text; you don’t want your callouts going to print.

Here’s an important thing to remember: clean text. By this, I mean you not only run your grammar and spellchecker, but you go back and re-read your text. I guarantee you will find errors. My personal bugbear is repetition. When I’m writing quickly, words or phrases suggest themselves, and then they suggest themselves again. And again and again. If you spend enough time writing, you’ll figure out what your own problems are, and you can look for these when you read your turnover.

Seriously. Look again.

Suddenly I See

If you’re required to do an art order, take some time with it. Allocate at least a day to go through your text and pull some evocative images from your writing. If you can’t picture anything for a suitable image, there’s probably something wrong with what you’ve turned over. Remember, your work is intended to spark the imagination of your readers, and if you can’t even spark your own, you need a rewrite.

I’ve found that jotting down art notes while writing is helpful although you don’t want to get too detailed as you make your first pass of writing—it detracts from the flow of putting words down on paper. Still, when you get to it later, these notes will prove valuable. Your art order should include the optimal size of your illustration, the focal point, and any details crucial to understanding your text.

You can be extremely precise with what you want from the illustration, or you can trust your artist to be professional. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with people like Tony DiTerlizzi, so trusting my artist was easy. In most cases, your publisher works with professional, trained artists, so you should learn to trust them as well.

Equally important is a good map order. Making a good map order isn’t just drawing a couple of lines, throwing some numbers on it, and calling it a day. My method is to pencil in the map, mark it over with pen, erase the extraneous pencil, and then scan the map so I can clean it up digitally. Other people have more success with mapping programs or freehanding with a stylus. Whatever your method, you want your map to be clean and legible enough that your cartographer isn’t sending you messages asking what these spare lines are and how they fit into the rest of the area. Make sure every area you have in your text is shown on the map, and make sure every area shown on the map has at least one small blurb in the text. Yes, this is something else I learned the hard way.

If you’re looking for more tips on a good map turnover, check out this link from Sean K. Reynolds.

Finally, you want your file names to be consistent. If your publisher has a specific file name to use, use those. Otherwise, use names that describe the work you’re sending in. For instance, if you were working on Angry Kobold’s Revenge with a number of other contributors, you’d want a name that describes your portion and your contributions. For example:

Text turnover: AKR-Ch5-ColinM-Text

Art order: AKR-Ch5-ColinM-Art

Map order: AKR-Ch5-ColinM-Map

This helps your editor find, categorize, and file your work for easy access.

As usual, you can dig much deeper into each of these topics. Feel free to drop your questions and comments down below.

Welcome to Colin McComb’s Now, the Twist. A dangerous journey, forcing him to take a long, hard look at game design.

Join him, won’t you… in his ongoing struggle to pass Go.

[previously]

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Last column, I wrote about the essential similarities of games across the spectrum, positing that—at a fundamental level—they share qualities that are immutable, without which they would cease to be games.

They might be puzzles, experiments, imaginative play, art, or other ephemera dancing around the edge of games without actively engaging in a full gameplay experience. They might be fun, they might be engrossing, they might be challenging… but without those formal elements, they’re not quite games.

Any arguments? No? Excellent. Well, now that I’ve tied all games together, I’m going to tear them apart again…

Unique Snowflakes

You hardly need me to tell you that every game you play—or at least every game that’s worthy of the title—differs significantly from the others in a crowded field. For one thing, too close a copy of another game runs the risk of copyright violation, and for another, someone who rips off another game finds and deserves professional scorn. It’s not that hard to make a different game (though it is hard to do it well).

However, if you’re going to do it, you should know what you’re doing. Knowing the pieces of a system lets you understand the system better. Just as you don’t perform surgery by opening up someone’s chest and guessing what pieces operate which functions, you should have at least a basic understanding of what your formal elements provide your game and how to categorize them accurately. You can go down the list of formal elements (players, rules, boundaries, procedures, resources, objectives, conflicts, uncertain outcome) and alter each of them in ways that would make a new game out of an existing one.

Let’s call the formal elements the basic structure of life in games: we use those elements to recognize the game as a game per se, and we use them to differentiate the games we play into finer and smaller categories. Just as animals differ widely from one another within the animal kingdom, so too do games. It is the nature of the variation that sets them apart. A flatworm is not a bison, but they are both living creatures. Go Fish is not, despite the similar name, anywhere comparable to Go… except that both of them are recognizably games.

Tweaking the Elements

You can change games in two primary ways: through the dramatic elements or through the formal elements. Changing the dramatic elements is easy (though again, not easy to do well): you change the characters, the setting, the emphasis, and the story, essentially re-skinning the thing, and you’re all set.

For instance, take Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Now look at Star Wars and The Matrix. They’re essentially the same story (please note the word “essentially,” purists of either film!), but they’ve been stripped down to basics and repurposed to bring a new experience.

You can do this with games, too, although it’s far more common in the computer industry than in tabletop (have you noticed that first-person shooters tend to play awfully the same these days?). On the other hand, what’s the d20 System except the common base of an RPG refracted through the dramatic filters of hundreds of designers?

The other way to change a game is through its formal elements. You can do this by changing the number of players, for instance; a solitary or two-person game’s dynamics changes tremendously with the addition of more players. A touch football game between a handful of people on the lawn becomes a vastly different animal when you’ve got a full complement on either side. Suddenly all the procedures you had in place to set up plays and downs and penalties change and become more formal. The dynamic among the players changes. It is inevitable.

Likewise, by changing the conflict, whether in the forms of challenges, puzzles, or competition, you change the game too. If you had a Tetris clone but made it a head-to-head competition, you’d have a vastly different game. If your Pathfinder session started awarding points or bonuses for undercutting other players, you’d see a much more cutthroat Friday evening. If you turned Pandemic into a competitive game, rather than a cooperative one, the style of the game would change dramatically.

Basic Block and Tackle

But the most powerful and obvious way to set your game apart from others is, of course, through the rules. They’re the DNA of the game, the most basic building blocks, the pieces that tell every other element how to fall in line and where to go. Where procedures tell the players how to play the game, rules tell the players what the game is.

Really, to differentiate one game from another, you don’t have to change the rules as much as you might suspect. What you do need to do is figure out your core mechanic—the thing your players will do the most in the game, the action around which your game’s action revolves.

You can make this similar to other games, but you don’t want it to be too similar. In RPGs, d20 System games have the same basic mechanic at their core, but they differ with a host of ancillary rules that set them apart from each other and make them unique. A tiger and lion are both large predatory cats, but they are remarkably different in appearance, behavior, and lifestyle; so too do the secondary rules of games in the system distinguish them: feats, classes, weapons, and so forth.

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Armed with this knowledge, you can analyze any game and figure out how to deconstruct it and put it back together in a new way. Try it out. Pick up any favorite game, alter just one of the formal elements, and try playing it with those new constraints. I’m certain that almost every person reading this has made up a house rule at some point; now you have a mandate to explore deeper. Report in the comments how it affected the game, and we can talk about further changes!

Welcome to Colin McComb’s Now, the Twist. A dangerous journey, forcing him to take a long, hard look at game design.

Join him, won’t you… in his ongoing struggle to pass Go.

[previously]

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When I talk about games, at least when I’m speaking professionally or professorially, I like to point out the essential similarities among games of all sorts. Mechanically speaking, roller derby has a great deal in common with chess, and if we want to understand games, we need to understand exactly what sorts of underpinnings are common to all our endeavors.

Or, in less high-falutin’ terms, we need to understand how games are all alike…

This is where I’m going to get a little academic. (But not much! Because if you wanted to read some abstruse technical document, you’d head some place that hosts that sort of thing!)

Now, I mentioned way back the field of ludology, or the study of games. The granddaddy of the field is Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens, or “The Playing Man,” in which he identified the characteristics of play and its purpose, pointing out that even animals play.

The field has diverged a bit since then, so I’ve had to pick an interpretation that seems suitably encompassing and specific enough to fit my own needs. Still, why should I bother?

After all, you can make great music without knowing the specifics of music theory by simply playing music. Likewise, you can make great games without knowing the theory behind them by simply making them. I’m fairly certain the progenitors of our hobby didn’t spend long hours reading academic dissertations; they simply played lots of games, and then wrote the games they wanted to play. This is a good and valid approach.

At the same time, I want to defend the idea that as designers, we should know the elements of games, the pieces that make these disparate activities similar, and we should develop a common language for game design. This allows us to design our games more thoughtfully and with greater precision. With a fuller comprehension of the foundations of our hobby, we won’t spend all our time designing our way around fundamental engineering problems or answering questions that have already been answered. Instead, we can focus on the ultimate goal of gaming: fun.

So I looked at a few different theories, and I’ve settled on a model I modified slightly from the original by USC professor Tracy Fullerton. Without any further preamble, these are the formal elements I consider essential for all games, the things any game must have to be considered a game:

1. Players
2. Boundaries
3. Rules
4. Procedures
5. Resources
6. Objectives
7. Conflict
8. Uncertain Outcome

Some of these are fairly obvious. Of course, a game needs players, right? But how would we define players in the first place? What differentiates players from spectators? It turns out that the idea of Players contains some implicit assumptions we need to unpack to understand their role. Players are first and foremost people who are playing the game, but to play the game, they must satisfy a couple of important conditions: they must agree to play the game (or “accept the invitation to play”), and they must agree to abide by the rules of the game.

If someone says they’ll play Axis & Allies and then insists on playing it like Risk, they’re not playing A&A. If they ignore the rules, they’re cheating, unless everyone agrees to operate under these assumptions.

Okay, so we’ve got our players. What are Boundaries? They are what Huizinga calls the Magic Circle, the space in which the game is played. The game boundary could be the tabletop itself, but it’s not confined to the physical. You can stand up from the table and head to the kitchen for some Cheetos and Mountain Dew and still be involved in gameplay. Boundaries are a mindset that encompass the physical, the mental (if you believe you’re playing and others in the game believe you are, you are), and the temporal. That is to say, if your game has a time limit, it has a temporal boundary.

The Rules of the game are the physical laws of the game universe. They tell us what is and is not possible in the game. By permitting certain actions, they necessarily restrict others. They outline all the elements, defining what differentiates this game from others and how the players interact with the game world and each other.

Procedures are how players actually play the game. If rules provide the broad outline of the actions available, procedures define what and how the players perform those actions. Procedures tell us when players take their turns, what actions they can take on their turns, and how, for instance, they can rebuild their health when they’ve taken damage. If you want to overrun an opponent, the rules define the effect. Your part is to announce your intention, to ensure you have the capability to do so, position yourself in such a way to do so, and then roll the dice.

That is, procedures tell us the who, how, where, and when we can take action in a game. The why is up to you.

To complete these actions, and to improve our chances of winning, we have Resources. Resources can be the ultimate goal of our games, but more often than not, they are the means to the end. They can be as concrete and obvious as gold pieces or factories, or they can be as abstruse as hit points. Resources must have both value and scarcity. In general, none of us cares much about dirt or air, but when we’re gardening, we want good quality dirt, and if we’re drowning, we long for a place where the air is non-scarce.

Resources in games might include powers, lives, money, units to command, and more. What’s better, the scarcity of resources gives us an immediate leverage into conflict, which is at the core of gaming. From a design standpoint, resources allow us a quick and easy way to modify the game without changing the rules dramatically.

Objectives are targeted rewards to keeps the player involved in the game. A game without objectives quickly becomes pointless, and while we can generate our own objectives in games, it is not nearly as satisfying to do so as it is to overcome the objectives built into the game. We can have miniature objectives or nesting objectives—that is, objectives that take us closer to our goals as a piece of a larger objective—but we need to feel a sense of progress toward some ultimate goal, or else the game may feel repetitive or worthless. For instance: “The princess isn’t in this castle!”

Conflict arises from the interaction between players, rules, resources, and the game system itself. You might even argue that most game systems encourage a particular type of conflict and the rules of the system implicitly and explicitly establish the types of conflict the system creates.

There are three essential types of conflict: obstacles (whether a maze, a wall, or a puzzle), opponents (that is, other players), and decisions (which enemy should I attack? Where should I allocate my resources? What feats should I choose?).

All of this leads to the Uncertain Outcome, the reason why we play games. If we knew the outcome of a game before we went in, would we bother playing? If we didn’t get that rush of turning the odds in our favor or overcoming obstacles that seemed insurmountable, would we have the same joy in play? If we knew whether we were predestined to win or lose, the game would not hold the same attraction.

We can define the outcome in several ways such as most points, most lives, most kills, or any combination of these in a certain amount of time or on reaching a threshold. Maybe, as in blackjack, our uncertain outcome is how much money you have when you choose to stop playing.

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We use these formal elements to create dynamic systems of complex and interrelated parts. Modifying these elements allows us a great measure of control over the play experience, and doing so mindfully gives us a tremendous insight into the potential results of our actions.

Next column: Now that we’ve talked about how games are all the same, we’re going to discuss why they’re all different. In the meantime: What sorts of elements do you think games need? Did I miss any?

Welcome to Colin McComb’s Now, the Twist. A dangerous journey, forcing him to take a long, hard look at game design.

Join him, won’t you… in his ongoing struggle to pass Go.

[previously]

___

A couple of columns ago, I mentioned that editors fill a crucial role in the business. They really are the unsung heroes of the RPG industry because, when they’re on their game, no one notices. When was the last time you looked at an RPG and thought, “Man, this book is so well edited”?

Most likely, you skimmed the list of names in the front (if you looked at all) to see who’d written the book, checked out the art credits, and if you’re a graphics geek (by which I mean no disrespect, of course!), you might have looked at the typographer and layout people, too. But the vast majority of people skip past the editor and assign most of the credit for a well-written project to the designer, about which I’ll speak more later…

On the flip side, when an editor is off, everyone notices. For instance, a former TSR editor achieved infamy when he ran a global search-and-replace to change the word “mage” to “wizard” to accord with the company style guide. Unfortunately, he neglected to search for “mage” as a whole word, and every instance of “mage” in the product changed—including those within other words. So “image” became “iwizard,” and “damage” became “dawizard.”

It was a basic mistake, but it’s also one that could have happened to anyone. Given the hundreds and hundreds of pages in the book he was editing, he might be forgiven for his oversight. (I should note that I am also charitable; others might well disagree.) Still, this was a glaring error, and it resulted in the kind of attention no editor wants.

Unfortunately, if an editor does get attention, it means that he or she has failed. Their job is to be as unobtrusive as possible and to provide the designer with a foundation of lucid text, clear organization, thorough and consistent development, sound grammar, good rule design, careful layout, and all the other things that people who sling words around casually for a living take for granted when they see their words printed on the page.

Designers frequently can take a fire-and-forget approach with our projects. Once we’ve made our turnover, we might have some input down the road, but it’s largely out of our hands.

Not so for editors. They have to make a first pass on the turnover and make sure the project is coherent. Then they fill out the art and map orders if the designer hasn’t done that, and they make another pass and concentrate on language and structure. Then they make another pass and… I dunno, fill it with fairy dust or something. Then they turn it over to graphic design and layout, and then the project comes back to them. Again. Again and again and again.

They’re the people in charge of it from design turnover to final production. What the editors do has an outsized impact on the project.

If you’re really lucky, you get an editor who understands your vision (if you’ll excuse me for using that word) and who works with you to expand and fulfill that vision in the way you dreamt. For example, one of my favorite projects that I ever wrote for the RPG industry was Planescape’s Faces of Evil. Everything went right with this project. The words flowed, the maps worked well, the art order was ideal, I got what I wanted from it, and there was no deadline crush. I still get compliments about it, and in particular, people like the voice and character of Xanxost, a slaad who narrated part of the book.

Now, I came up with the idea of a slaad narrator, and I wrote him into the book and everything, but the way I wrote him is not the way he appeared.

So here as a guest columnist, explaining how Xanxost turned into something sweet, is Faces of Evil editor Ray Vallese.

***

Hello, mortals! Oh, sorry—got carried away there, thinking about Xanxost. When I first dug into Colin’s manuscript for Faces of Evil, I saw that he’d come up with the great idea of having parts of the book narrated by various characters with their own agendas. One hated the baatezu, another was a fiend apologist, and so on. Their motivations came through in their language, but their voices sounded too similar. I tweaked the sections to try to make the narrators sound a little different from one another.

And then there was Xanxost the slaad. Not only did it sound too much like the other narrators, but it also had Colin’s usual complex, elegant style. Slaadi were supposed to be about as chaotic as you could get, so I decided to go to town on Xanxost’s sections (after selling Colin on the idea—an editor should always collaborate with the designer rather than hijack the text outright). I kept the text understandable since true chaos would have been a chore to read, but I tried to turn Xanxost into an unreliable, distracted, proud, hungry, and hopefully engaging personality. Little things—such as dropping most contractions, using a simple sentence structure, referring to itself in the third person, being unable to count, holding up slaadi as the ultimate example of perfection, and so on—helped bring Xanxost alive.

Still, in some places, Colin had written wonderful sentences that I didn’t want to “dumb down” but that would have sounded wrong coming from Xanxost. So I left those sentences alone and had Xanxost explain that he’d learned the fancy phrases from an elf poet (er, just before the elf’s head came off his body).

As an editor, I don’t usually rewrite an author’s text so dramatically, but as I said, I had Colin’s blessing, and the change seemed appropriate for the project. Fans seemed to like Xanxost, anyway, so I knew that we’d done something right. (I’ve often joked that we should have gone on to write Xanxost’s autobiography, which could only have been titled I, Slaad—little shout-out to the Ravenloft crowd.)

***

By the time Ray and I worked together on Faces of Evil, I had managed to get past the professionally destructive notion that changing my text was an implicit criticism of my work and therefore me. I had even grudgingly learned to accept that most editors know a lot more about the structural aspect of the language than most writers. When we worked on FoE, though, I gained a whole new appreciation for editing. What had been an adequate and mildly interesting character became something fun, exciting, and best of all, evocative in my editor’s hands. When you find an editor who can do this for you, you’ve struck gold.

You might, on occasion, run into an editor who makes decisions that are actively bad for the project. I once had an editor change the word “nigh” to “neigh” because he didn’t know the word, thus making the sentence ridiculous: “As winter draws neigh…” However, this is rare and unfortunate, and again, it usually reflects on the editor.

I’ve had editors who take my work and disappear with it, and I don’t see the project again until I’m holding the published version in my hands. As a freelancer, this happens more frequently—proximity is a great way to have continuing input into a project, and working far from the office almost ensures most editorial decisions will be made without your input.

Guess what? This is totally okay. I’ve mentioned before that you need to sacrifice your ego for the sake of the work. This is good for you, anyway: your game is just a game, and it’s important to remember that.

When your editor takes the time to work with you closely on a project, you say yes. It means he or she recognizes the value in your project, believes in it, and wants to improve your ideas. You’re not infallible.

… but if you have a great editor, you’ll sure look like it.

Welcome to Colin McComb’s Now, the Twist. A dangerous journey, forcing him to take a long, hard look at game design.

Join him, won’t you… in his ongoing struggle to pass Go.

[previously]

___

Before launching into the usual snarkery, I’d like to take a moment for a more serious topic. You may have heard that James Ward, creator of Metamorphosis Alpha and co-creator of Gamma World&emdash;a man with a serious involvement in the history of TSR &emdash;has become seriously ill, and the medical bills are adding up. Ward is one of the Names from the early days of the gaming industry, and if you enjoy playing games, he is one of the people to thank. You can thank him now by donating whatever you can to his medical fund. …

More personally, Jim Ward gave me my start in professional game design. He took a chance on a completely unproven philosophy major who hadn’t even graduated from college, put up with my crap as a punk kid, and did the same for a pile of other people. He was an excellent buffer against the excesses of TSR’s executive management, and he is a deeply kind man. Please help, and if you can’t donate, help spread the word. Thank you.

___
Shameless Self-promotion Moment
I’d first like to make a quick plug or two: Misfit Monsters Redeemed and The Inner Sea Primer from Paizo are both now available, and I worked on both of them.

I’m extremely happy with Misfit Monsters, in which I took a shot at making the dorkiest monsters of gaming interesting and fun: I reworked the delver, disenchanter, lurking rays (the executioner’s hood, the lurker above, and the trapper), and the wolf-in-sheep’s clothing. Putting these together was the most fun I’ve had designing in a while, and I’m delighted to report the other monsters in the book are equally fun. If nothing else, you need to see what Adam Daigle did with the flumph, the one-time biggest loser of gaming ever.

Okay, the plug is over.

Begin Snarkery!
I spend a lot of time dispensing sage advice from my remote game design mountaintop. Yes, I’ll tell you, this is the way to do it. Heed my advice, aspiring game designers, lest you fall into lo these many traps! I have won awards! Much of this advice is hard won by dint of personal experience—my friend and former Planescape editor Ray Vallese sent me a mocking message on the publication of my last column, which as you may recall exhorted serious deadline discipline.

He wrote, “Who are you, and what have you done with Colin McComb?”

I shook my fist at him from a distance and made some crack about editors. But he was right, at least about my work ethic from years ago. As I noted in my last column, having a strong work ethic is a crucial character trait, and it’s one that you can and must build if you want to succeed in the gaming (or really, any) industry. I know this because I had to nurture mine, and it occasionally still requires some slapping into shape.

Because I have managed to do that and because I sometimes teach people how to design games as a paid professor, I thought I had become wise in all my dealings with games. I have grown and become an elder statesman! I can do no wrong!

Except, it turns out that’s not quite true.

Last weekend, I brought a game to the Rio Grande Game Design Competition at U-Con in Ann Arbor, a friendly little convention that I urge people to attend next year. I’ve had this game percolating for a while, and I’ve run a few playtests with my scrappy little prototype. Perhaps optimisticly, I thought the competition would be a good way to kick myself into gear on fixing it for eventual publication.

I was absolutely right. There’s no pressure like a deadline to get something done. (Hey, didn’t I say something about deadline discipline earlier? Note to self: edit this to look more professional. [Note to readers: this note was a joke.])

So I revised my rules with my last playtest notes, and I made several further prototype passes (the last few of which involved a Dremel, foam core, and Lite Brite markers… oh, and blistered fingers—can’t forget the blisters!). I carefully packed my game for its exhibition and judging at the hands of entirely disinterested parties. (Note to self: knock off the parentheticals!)

Into the Crucible
As I watched the game be unpacked and the players set up the pieces, I realized immediately I had left out a couple of slots on one of the crucial cards. I realized certain aspects of the game were overcomplicated and largely peripheral to overall gameplay. I had created a long rule set and had not made it easily accessible. And these were just the first and immediately obvious of the game’s sins.

As I watched the playtests, it became clear I had violated a several fundamental design precepts. Rather than being in the competition, I realized, I was using this contest as a playtest session with people who didn’t know me, and I walked away from the day with over a page of notes about the game that had to be implemented for the game to be playable as I had envisioned it.

Ouch.

The feedback the contest organizer sent back confirmed this. One of the questions said, “Do you want to replay this game?” One of the testers answered, “Not as written but with a few clarifications/adjustments it could be a lot of fun.” Another wrote flatly, “No.” Overall, the consensus seemed to be, “This game could be fun if it was, y’know… finished.”

For someone who tells his students they should get strangers to play their games and for someone who constantly harps on the need for a pile of playtest data, I seem to have violated my own precepts pretty significantly.

Man, is that annoying. For the future of this game, I hereby publicly commit to at least three playtests where I have no say or clarification as the players play and where the players have no vested interest in being polite to me or being concerned with my feelings. As Wolfgang has noted, “You can never have enough playtest data!”

I agree. I forgot that these rules apply to me as much as they do to anyone.

Chalk another one up in the Helpful Experience column.

Welcome to Colin McComb’s Now, the Twist. A dangerous journey that will force him to take a long, hard look at game design.

Join him, won’t you… in his ongoing struggle to pass Go.

[previously]

___
I recently finished another project for Paizo Publishing, and since the experience is fresh in my mind I figured I’d go through the freelance RPG design and development process—which, I should note, is very different from the tabletop design and development process.

First in line is the freelance order. This is where the company looking for work sends out emails to their desired freelancers to see who is available for the project. If they happen to contact me, I ensure that I am absolutely aware of my schedule and my work habits. This requires me to be brutally realistic in my self-assessment before accepting the project. If I don’t have enough time or I have doubts, I communicate that up front. Yes, it might mean a smaller paycheck, but that’s the price I pay. This is a truism: if you blow a project, you move quickly down the list of people they will contact for work…

So here’s Advice #1: If you choose a freelancer’s life, choose quality over quantity.

If the project is big enough (for example, Paizo’s Game Mastery Guide), I can request specific portions that appeal to me. One of the advantages of freelancing for a company like Paizo is that they provide a detailed outline of what they want from a book with a rough range of word count for specific sections.

From a production standpoint, this allows them to provide a consistent play experience across their line of products, and, from a design standpoint, it means I have an exact target for every project and portion thereof.

Whether I have a section of a book or an entire book, this is invaluable. Knowing my word count helps me put together a spreadsheet that tracks my minimum daily word count goals. One of the great advantages of modern publishing is that I can get an exact word count by section simply by highlighting my text. By establishing my minimum word count each day, I give myself a mini-deadline. Only the most extenuating circumstances (such as house projects or —ahem—new games) let me off the hook for a day. Even then, I know I have to make up the work the following day. Seeing the required daily word count creep up, rather than down, is an extraordinarily good motivator to work hard.

Advice #2: If you want to work in the industry, practice discipline. Learn to get your work done in a timely fashion, and, if possible, do it ahead of time.

Lack of time budgeting is the primary downfall of freelancers. Counting on a burst of inspiration (whether genuine or deadline-dread related) to boost your productivity is a huge gamble. It largely worked for me many years, but it has also backfired on me too, and those were painful lessons. Learn to make good habits, and, if you can’t do that, at least don’t let yourself sleep until you’ve finished your daily work. If your word count is still too high, you’ve taken on far more than you can handle for your project.

This leads to Advice #3: if you get into trouble, let your contact know as soon as possible so the company can make arrangements to work around the issue. It is far better to admit this ahead of time than it is to make your contacts scramble at the last minute to fill the hole you’ve left.

But enough advice. Back to the process. When I get to work, this work involves a fair amount of research. Depending on the project, this could mean refreshing my memory of particular facets of a campaign setting or finding source documents such as books, films, articles, or whatever.

It always means finding the proper inspiration. Every project I work on has some sort of media influence, whether fiction, music, or movie. This helps key me into the proper mindset. If I am bogged down in some detail, I hit that key media again to remind me of any cool ideas I forgot to write down.

Which reminds me: I write down cool ideas at the appropriate points in my document, so I remember to include them later. (Why didn’t I write that down? Hm.) One problem with this is occasionally I get distracted while writing a sentence, and I forget how I was going to end it when I come back later. In the daily writing routine, it’s frustrating to come back to a paragraph and discover that I’ve left a sentence that says something like, “Once roused, the.” Worse still is just “The.”

So I would add as subadvice, don’t leave sentences half-finished. You’ll just get annoyed.

I’m a big believer in saving frequently. While autosave is a great feature, I guarantee that the last 5 minutes of every document are the best thing ever. If the word processor crashes, the best thing ever has just disappeared. This is one of the reasons I learned a pile of quick-keys—not moving my hands from the keyboard allows me to save quickly and keep working without breaking the flow. Grabbing a mouse breaks the flow and is a prime reason for a “The” fragment.

Let’s see… so I’ve hit some of the process, I’ve hit the importance of meeting deadlines early or on-time, or at least letting the developer know when I’m running late. So I’ve turned my project in, and now I’m done, right?

Not so fast. Whether it goes to a developer (who further develops the work and makes sure it adheres to the project’s specific goals) or to an editor, who cleans up the work and makes sure it’s print-ready (and boy, am I oversimplifying the role of an editor here), I still need to be on-call to answer questions about that work.

Sometimes this happens months down the road because the company’s schedule is not my schedule, and I’ll need to brush up on what I turned over before I answer their questions. But I want to make sure I give them the best possible answers to help them in their job. This is a crucial phase, and I hasten to remind designers that editors are your friends, even when they are tearing apart your work. They will catch errors and inconsistencies in your work, make sure it fits into their world, correct your dumb style mistakes and terrible grammatical choices, and much, much more (such as asking what your intent was with the sentence fragment).

They may also rewrite your work or discard portions of it altogether. If this happens, well… Advice #4: Learn to let go. If you are writing work-for-hire, what you write stops being yours as soon as you turn it in. It becomes the property of the person or company who contracted you to write it, and what you’ve written may not fill their needs.

What you can do in this case— rather than crying and moaning—is write to the editor and ask what you can do differently for the next project. If you keep getting work from the company, you can assume that they simply wanted to take that particular project in a different direction, and what you turned over didn’t meet that description. There’s no need to take that personally, especially if they pay you for the work anyway.

It’s when they send insulting letters back that you need to worry.

Next time, I’ll share design advice for non-RPG games—I’ll have a fresh new perspective on it, since I’ll have playtesting feedback for my game from a group of strangers at U-Con in Ann Arbor (November 13, with Paul S. Kemp as the Guest of Honor).

Any questions?