Solid Gaming History

From Metafilter comes a link to a really well-written blog that covers a lot of history relevant to old-school gaming: cardboard, paper and 5 1/4" floppy. Jimmy Maher's The Digital Antiquarian goes analog for a series on hex wargames and D&D that gives the best concise narratives of these hobbies' origins I've yet seen, and then traces their influence on computer games through the divergent paths of text adventures and computer RPGs. Early in my blog's history I noted a reverse influence - the more naturalistic problem-solving nature of text adventures coming in through the Old School movement and enlightening the number-crunching, cRPG-like ways of later D&D editions. So it's good to have all this history spelled out with great detail and insight. For example:


' I submit that D&D was in practice not mostly played by groups of “artful thespians,” but by scruffy teenage boys and men perfectly happy to remain Jim and Bob as they pondered the best way to kill that group of trolls in the next room. And that experience of D&D a computer could, within inevitable limits, simulate pretty well.'


There's even an emulator version of Temple of Apshai, the pioneering computer RPG. Brave danger as a congeries of extended-set ASCII blocks!

Good stuff here.

IF Theory Reader

The Interactive Fiction Theory Reader is available on Lulu. It's a very nice compilation of thoughts about interactive adventure design and atmosphere from the text-adventure game revival of the mid 90's. In it is my old (I guess by now "classic" essay on interactive fiction, Crimes Against Mimesis. It's too bad I didn't have time to update it for the book - for example, by adding in material from this series of posts. But there you go.

Speaking of time being short, my "day job" is throwing multiple deadlines at me right now, so posting is looking to be intermittent through the end of the month.

I tend to make 4 kinds of posts: "program" ones where I work my way through a series of essays or observations; "product" ones where I give you something I've been working on, like the current Gazolba adventure or the house rules; play reports (mainly to keep a record of what goes on in my campaign); and "impromptu" posts where I riff on something that's turned up elsewhere in the web. The impromptu ones are easiest to do, so expect more of those in the next few weeks. And it's interesting that one such post - Why's There a Dungeon Under Your City? - is my all-time most popular in terms of pageviews.

Endless Bag of Tricks (Download)

"So if I push this here..."

Having recently shown you my generator for problems in adventures - open-ended tasks amenable to creative solutions - I'm also distributing my more complicated generator for tricks - objects with a number of pre-planned consequences for interacting with them. It's called the Endless Bag of Tricks and you can get it from the Google Docs link on the right.

The Bag applies some of the ideas from interactive fiction, or "text adventure" games, to go beyond just laying out what a thing does and what it is. Just as important is how you interact with it. In classic interactive games like Adventure or Zork, it's important to get the right verb. "ROTATE HANDLE" won't work, where "TURN HANDLE" will. "BREAK HANDLE" might not work, but if it's a carefully coded game, you might get some message for that, even if only to tell you it's impossible.


This action layer - Table D in my system - allows for some of the most plausible actions on a special object to have meaningful consequences.

Cut the curtain, and a ghost might be released. Throw water on it, and a treasure map might appear. Text adventure veterans know to throw every verb in the book at a situation, but tabletop roleplayers don't have all the time in the world. So, it's important to put some clues in. A shifting face might be visible on close inspection in the curtain's patterns - clue to the ghost. A diary you found elsewhere might say that the map is found in the room where the curtain is, and the knowledge is open to minds that are  "not too dry."

There's an art to making all the pieces of a trick come together in a satisfying whole, which for me anyway is a lot of fun. Here are the first three tricks I test-generated with the Endless Bag:

1. This stairway down is “guarded” by a pair of high leather boots standing on the top step, toes toward the stairs. If one or both of the boots are moved, a transparent skeletal figure will rise up out of them, gesturing wildly and pointing to its many broken bones, then vanish. If the boots are not put back to exactly where they were, anyone stepping on the stairs must save or fall down the staircase, receiving blows and kicks as they go, and taking 4d6 damage. If the boots are not disturbed, nothing happens.

2. This is an ancient and dilapidated pipe organ set in the wall. The keys and pedals don’t work. The seat opens up and 200 gp worth of old sheet music is found in there. One of the blocks next to the wall is loose; there is a small crowbar next to it with the tag “Don’t get this wrong!” “Getting it wrong” in this case means taking an unknown person’s advice in the dungeon … If the block is slid deeper inside the wall, a fragile, ornamented egg will fall gently to the ground inside the wall, worth 100 gp. If the block is pried out, a poison dart will shoot out from deep within the wall, smashing the egg, attacking anyone in front of it as a 5^th level thief and doing 1d3 + 2d10 poison damage. Pushing the block in stops the dart, and the egg will fall without harm.

3. This is a cozy fireplace set in the wall, with no chimney, a smokeless fire blazing, an a bucket of water nearby. If the fire is extinguished, it will collapse into ash and a choking cloud of thick smoke 20 by 20 feet, and a sooty imp will jump out and attack. Anyone in the smoke except the imp is at -2 to hit. The fireplace will be found to be choked with thick ash, but if this is cleaned – obviously assuming the fire has been put out – a shining white brick among the blackened bricks of the fireplace will be found. Just touching the brick with bare fingers will give a vision of how to deal with the white brick wall in area X. Pushing the brick, however, will collapse the fireplace on the character, giving 4d6 damage with no save.

Hope you enjoy the Endless Bag of Tricks and can use it in your own game!

Choose Your Own Adventure / Intrinsic Rewards

B. F. Skinner

Grady Hendrix has a great article on Slate, linking together three early forms of interactive media - choose-your-own adventure books, text adventures, and role-playing games. The CYOA genre has a surprising pedigree. Apparently, the idea came before role-playing games, and was foreshadowed by B. F. Skinner's self-paced teaching books that are themselves based on psychological reinforcement principles. Get the right answer, and advance; get the wrong answer, and go back to study some more.

The "reinforcement" in Skinner's books, as well as the CYOA books, is completely internal. The point of Warlock of Firetop Mountain was not to score points, but to open the damn treasure; likewise, even though most text-adventure games kept score, the points never really got taken seriously. This is an insight basic to all kinds of games: finding new stuff is its own reward.

It's because of this I don't see experience points for exploring as necessary. For fighting the monsters you don't really want to fight because they can kill you? Sure. But adding to the map, hearing the DM's description of a natural wonder, those are intrinsic player rewards that have nothing to do with extrinsic rewards: experience or gold being accumulated in the name of characters.

It is this division between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that, I think, characterizes the divide between the power gamer and the rest. Simply put, a power gamer is focused on the extrinsic system of rewards. In roleplaying games, it's leveling up. In competitive games, it's winning. The intrinsic pleasures of simulation, role-playing, discovery, or socializing carry no weight by themselves to the power gamer. If winning comes by a boring technique; by assembling an implausible but min-maxed deck, character or army; or by being rude to other players - so be it.

Image by CosmoDNA, somethingawful.com

The other side of the coin is the extrinsic punishment system of the game. Character death, in roleplaying games, is the ultimate punishment. An intrinsically driven player will appreciate a good death; not so an extrinsically driven one.

This is also why every attempt to regulate player behavior by manipulating experience points, gold, levels and other such things plays into the hands of the power gamer, becoming in the end just another tool to victory. In the end, going up one level into the real world to apply social pressure, or down one level into the fantasy world to work out the consequences of the undesirable behavior, works out better than playing around with the twilight world of the game mechanics.

Text to Tabletop 5: Layers of Players

One more resurrection and recap of my old posts, adapted to roleplaying. In 1996 I wrote about the second-person narrative of the adventure game. Derived from the convention of a game master telling you what's going on, second-person leaves the question of who exactly you are open to three interpretations. I've rewritten these for the tabletop context. Just as the interface is different, so the interface between player and story protagonist is very different. In the roleplaying game, the interface character is a game puppet instead of the text adventure's game protagonist. If the game protagonist is built up of in-game motives and actions, the puppet adds a set of in-game characteristics to that mix.

The Player

This is you, the real human being sitting at the table playing the game. Your goal is to have fun. This means different things for different players. Adding on to your puppet, discovering new things, controlling a world full of risky surprises, gaining greater understanding of the meaning in the fictional world, and expressing yourself, are just some of the things you seek out. You are the basis for the other two characters; the game puppet's strategy is only as good as your smarts and knowledge, the story protagonist's actions are determined by your willingness to act in line with that story. And when you see a rust monster, you know that critter is going to damage your weapons, because you read about it in the Monster Manual.

The Game Puppet

This is you, a cipher of a figure with a class, race and level for a name. You are built up of stats, words and possessions on a sheet, embodied perhaps in 28mm of lead or plastic. You are limited, and this limits the player. You want to do something, but the rules or the GM's ruling won't let you. In spite of your limitations, you want to carry out the best strategy at all times, the one that will let you deal out more points, take less points, and collect more pieces and points. You know that critter is going to rust out your weapons ... never mind how, but you know you have to take a round to change weapons to your wooden club and hit it, even though the club only does 1d6 damage.

The Story Protagonist

This is you, Jhin-Dho, a half-elven sorcerer's apprentice who has an elaborate backstory involving the succession to a royal throne and a family intrigue and he also trained as a puma burglar and inherited this glassteel sword... Anyway, your goal is to stop the villains and find the true heir to the Kingdom of Regalia while staying alive. It's a bit odd that you keep listening at doors and tapping in front of you with a pole, but hey, being a seasoned adventurer is part of the story, right? And it's only because you have heard tales around the campfire of the wily rust monster that you put away your sword and reach for your shillelagh when you see the telltale tentacles and propeller tail.

I don't have much to say about these layers right now, but I present them as a vocabulary that might be useful in the future. Quite a lot of differences in the style of games can be traced to which of these layers takes precedence; but all three are always present and communicating with each other in some way.

Text to Tabletop 4: Clues

From the coda to my Crimes Against Mimesis essays, writing about computer games:

Consider four identical doors, one leading onwards, one concealing a lethal explosive. In the story that would result from solving this puzzle, it would be much more satisfying to the story reader and the game player if there was some way to tell which door hides the ticking bomb, rather than having success come only from a lucky guess. The clue may be difficult enough so that the player opts for the brute-force, save-restore-undo method (who would think to "listen to north door"?), but at least it is there to explain the story protagonist's actions in a fictionally satisfying way.

In a role-playing adventure game, there is no save-restore-undo (apart from overly generous referees), and this is well and good. Players have to know that their actions can have permanent and fatal consequences, and that their decisions are for keeps. All the same, the above advice holds in all adventure games for a different reason. The key word is "satisfying."

Satisfaction with the problem-solving process comes from the belief that you, the player, had - or could have had - something to do with it. This is what divides a random "trick" from a solvable problem. While a few completely random effects like the four-door problem are fine, and in fact almost mandated in old-school dungeon design, a little bit more thought applied to them can make the experience more memorable for players. It will seem like a fairer test of their problem-solving skills - and anyway, aren't combat and saving throws random enough?

Again we return to my mythed-up Wheel of Fortune from a previous post (near the bottom). As written, this trick is manifestly random and unfair. It comples Chaotic characters within 10 feet to spin it, with the usual die-roll results on a table malevolent and benign; Neutrals get a save and Lawfuls are only tempted by their player's curiosity. Here's one thing I would add:

Chaotic characters who gaze on the Wheel from a distance of more than ten feet feel a strange attraction to its idol all the same, as if approaching it is something they have wanted to do all their life, but they are not compelled to act on it until they approach within ten feet. Neutral characters must save to see if they feel and behave as Chaotic characters or not while in the room with the Wheel. 

That "strange attraction" should be a red flag to good players, warning them they may lose control of their character if they approach any closer. Once again, for player skill to count, there have to be some clues to work from.

One more observation regarding clues from my old essay:

If we see the game as more than a collection of puzzles, though, a game feature can have nothing to do with any puzzle and still contribute to the atmosphere or the storyline. "Smart red herrings" like the gargoyle and the chapel in Christminster strengthen the background of the game with additional information (even if the meaning of the initials on the gargoyle is somewhat, ahem, obscure). At the same time, they effectively rebut the creeping suspicion that all the features in the environment are dictated by one puzzle or another, and serve notice that the fictional milieu has a life outside of the mere game which is being played out inside it. Even the "shadowy figure" red herring in the original Adventure is eventually explained in terms of the game's rudimentary background (those vain dwarves!) Consequently, the player feels satisfied, rather than frustrated, when its true nature is revealed. To sum up, in the well-written IF game, every item and location should still serve some purpose; but the puzzle-game shouldn't be the only purpose.

In my design code, dungeon dressing should be informative, and even empty rooms usually will contain at least a "smart red herring" of some kind. Going with the scheme in my previous post in the series, this feature can contribute to an understanding of the history and workings of the place (naturalistic); can contribute to atmosphere and poetic meaning in the place (mythic); or can simply be amusing with a dark undertone (gonzo), like the clown murals scattered throughout Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage dungeons.

Text to Tabletop 3: Breaking Context

One theme I treated in my old Crimes Against Mimesis essays (see previous posts) was the clash between the elements of a puzzle and its context. I urged game designers to integrate game objects and puzzle situations more fully into their fictional worlds. A chainsaw shouldn't just be sitting there on a table for no reason; why not link it to a lumberjack that you've heard about in another scene? A cryptogram shouldn't just be there as a puzzle on a wall; maybe it's a way that the Red Hood Monks communicated to each other privately without breaking their vows of silence.

In the gonzo context, the player of the game is self-aware, and we see all sorts of random objects and puzzles, frame-breaking references to pop culture, genre intrusions, and other elements of gonzo.  What I was setting up as a standard in my Mimesis essays, though, was closer to James Maliszewksi's label of "Gygaxian naturalism" in D&D (though you could just as easily tag gonzo with the "Gygaxian" label). Naturalism applied to monsters leads to developing other characteristics than combat stats - to flesh out their feeding, reproduction, social structure, anatomy, and other mundane details. Naturalism in puzzles, likewise, makes sure each puzzle or problem has some meaning outside of the experience of the players trying to solve it. Naturalism creates more immersion in the world and strengthens the fictional frame rather than breaking it.

With the benefit of time and perspective, I would still recommend the designers of puzzles in role-playing scenarios to put them into context if they are going for a naturalistic feel. I think gonzo dungeons inflicted on a willing public are perfectly OK, the current belt-holder being Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage, a sprawling reconstruction/homage to Castle Greyhawk. At the same time, there is something very satisfying about a puzzle or dungeon trick put into naturalistic context, and you have to respect the art and craft required to reconcile an artificial obstacle with a realistic world.

I've also realized there is a third option for puzzle context in roleplaying games, or for that matter, interactive fiction. There can be a mythic resonance to puzzles, monsters, dungeons, and other elements of an RPG.

Text to Tabletop 2: Return to the Scene of the Crimes

Crimes Against Mimesis is a series of web articles I wrote in 1996 about the representation of reality in text adventure games, or "interactive fiction". It's gotten a certain amount of fame, even cited in Wikipedia, despite my leaving the IF community shortly thereafter without really having done anything other than writing those articles. Ironically, the text adventure I had been preparing and left half-finished was more a collection of puzzles than anything literary. Its first puzzle, "Cube and Key," was actually an adaptation of an RPG puzzle room I'd come up with earlier on. So it's only full circle to bring these observations about puzzles back to the RPG context.

In-game puzzles and problem solving are one big way to answer the call for more player skill involvement in what's come to be called the Old School Renaissance of Dungeons & Dragons. Even running a system neck-deep in character skills, I doubt if there was ever a DM so bold as to create a riddle and then make the players roll dice against their character's Intelligence to see if they solved it. For all the huffing and puffing about dimwit characters "cheating" by solving puzzles with their players' true IQ, this is one area where the players have always refused to abdicate responsibility.

The big difference between programming a computer and running a live game? Many of the unrealistic aspects of puzzles I objected to in Crimes are irrelevant. The DM understands all the command words the player can use, has a mental model of the world that can tell the players how their attempts are working out, and if any area of the mental model is hazy the DM can consult the oracular dice. The items available with which to manipulate the world do not have to be pre-set and scattered around, but can be bought in town, manufactured, or improvised.

One wide-open area of the tabletop RPG, too, is the possibility for player solutions that surprise the DM. It's an even more gutsy move to put a problem in the way of the players that you don't know the solution to yourself. But really, any interactive problem takes a certain combination of faith in the players to solve it, and faith in the robustness of the game to survive the consequences of their possible failure to solve it.

You will notice here I said "problem" instead of "puzzle." Problems, as I see it, are tasks like "get across this chasm inhabited by hungry bats" or "get through this bolted and barred iron door." Puzzles are more constrained - "Speak 'eggs' as the answer to this riddle" or "Put a spear in the empty right hand of the statue." Problems are more amenable to being solved more quickly and easily than their setter would have liked, but both problems and puzzles hold out the possibility of player failure, so the GM had better be prepared to route around the damage. (There was, in fact, one memorable late night in our hometown campaign where Dave the DM, after the better part of two hours, pretty much had to feed us the answer to the puzzle "SHOATMMSPEIRO" to keep the linear scenario going.)

In Crimes one of my main pleas (in part 4 of the essay) was for text adventure puzzles to become more like real-life problems - goals that can be reached by several different means, or by combining several different objects in a way that makes sense. Even if implemented with real-world objects, a lock-and-key puzzle is still a lock and key. You need the broom to frighten away the cat so you can reach in the mousehole and get the flashlight. You can't frighten away the cat with the crowbar - so says the computer program, but a good GM (or for that matter a good programmer) will increase the realism of the world simulation so that you can.

Even with all these possibilities, many old-edition D&D adventure designers didn't (and don't) take full advantage of them. The game has a good system for combat, and improvised actions and environment effects can be taken into account using it. But there's less of a vocabulary, less of a system, less of a precedent for handling non-combat problem solving. We all know a good puzzle or a tricky problem when we see it; but how do you get there in the first place?

I'd like to know your thoughts before I write on...

Text to Tabletop 1: Return to the Colossal Cave

The next few posts - with inevitable digressions - are going to be about links between old-school-style D&D and text adventure games.

It's been at least 10 years since I played a computer text adventure. I got into them big-time in the last few years of grad school and first year of my postdoc.  At the time I was pretty much as far from gaming mentally as any time I've been in my life. Yes, text adventures were gaming, but a lot of people were taking them as some form of postmodernist enterprise, and being literature, it was cool, so OK. (This is what living in Manhattan will do to a soul.)

Apparently text adventures were an early branching off from pre-1975 Dungeons and Dragons. Add puzzles, creatures and treasures from D&D to some real-world experience of spelunking, and a hit is born. You can read the whole story here on Rick Adams' excellent site about the very first text game, Colossal Cave Adventure. Or read this even more excellent article on spelunking the source code and source cave.

Adventure, Zork and their text adventure kin have a lot in common with the old-school approach to tabletop gaming. For example, both text adventures have a fair amount of humor and mild surrealism in their dungeon settings, mixed with scenes of horror and wonder. This matches well with the gonzo atmosphere from Castle Greyhawk that so many are trying to recapture these days.

What's really important, though, is the path of divergence in problem-solving these games took. Adventure and Zork could very well have taken up the wargame roots of D&D, incorporating hit points, damage, combat, and saving rolls. For various reasons this was left for other games to do - most memorably the seminal Wizardry.

Instead, text adventures were about verbal manipulation of the environment. You tried different things with the dungeon features and the items you picked up along the way - "pull rope," "cut rope with sword," "burn rope with torch." There wasn't a live DM, so you didn't always get an answer. Sometimes the program knew what you were doing didn't work. Sometimes it did work, and you could move on to the next part of the adventure.

If this sounds familiar to someone steeped in the old school renaissance, it should ...

John the Roguish: “I search the room.”
GM: “What are you checking?”
John the Roguish: “I eyeball the table and chairs to see if there’s anything unusual, then I run my hands over them to see if there’s anything weird.”
GM: “Nope.”
John the Roguish: “Are the moose’s eyes following me or anything?”
GM: “No.”
John the Roguish: “I check the moose head.”
GM: “How?”
John the Roguish: “I twist the horns, look in the mouth, see if it tips sideways …”
GM: “When you check to see if it tips sideways, it slides a little to the side.”
John the Roguish: “I slide it more.”
GM: “There’s a secret compartment behind it.”

The above example of diceless resolution from Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming translates to this kind of text-adventure play - although the referee and the programmer have very different ways of interacting with the player:

> look table
You see nothing special.

> look chairs
You see nothing special.

> look moose
A stuffed moose head is on the wall. You might think its eyes are following you, but they're not.

> twist horns
I don't understand.

> look moose in mouth
A stuffed moose head is on the wall. You might think its eyes are following you, but they're not.

> push moose
You slide the moose head to the side, at first hesitantly. There is a secret compartment in the wall behind it.

The next few posts are going to explore some implications of the text adventure mentality for refereeing and playing old school games, leading to the next pdf download - something I've been working on called The Bottomless Bag of Tricks.

Anyone else feel like reminiscing on the old text adventure games? Drop a comment!