Design Diary — Incorporating Feedback

At the start of the month, I received the first wave of design feedback from the Developmental Editor Avery Alder. This isn't the first time we've worked together, but every time I get to sit with her and talk to her about game design, I feel blessed beyond words. She is one of the principle reasons I got into tabletop games! Both in 2015, when I encountered Monsterhearts as a teenager and realized the transformative properties of tabletop RPGs, and also in 2018, when I attended a workshop by her at the NYU game lab, and learned how to bring post-capitalist and anti-colonialist approaches into my game work. Her writing in Dream Askew and Dream Apart got me to write my first TTRPG Sleepaway, and she's the person I came crying to when Wanderhome exploded in 2020. I cannot express the depths of my adoration for her, and I've been waiting for Seven-Part Pact to be in the stage where I'm confident enough in her looking at it for years.

It is a tremendous honor to have someone compassionately tear apart your writing, and she did so with the efficiency of a master surgeon. If you have the chance to work with a developmental editor before publishing, especially one as skilled as Avery, I cannot recommend it highly enough. But still! Oh, my hubris! Of course the moment I send it to her, I am stricken by all the passages missing. The game has never felt more clumsy and ham-fisted than when I was reading through my writing and her commentary.

For the sake of my honor and dignity I will not be sharing her line-by-line comments with all of you, but I will be including her summary of her notes in an adjacent Patreon update for paid members. In the summary of her notes, she lays out a few core principles. Through this, and also through my conversations with her after-the-fact, we've uncovered some real philosophical differences between the two of us, and I'll be talking about how I'm going about incorporating her design advice while honoring my difference in games philosophy.

How Important Is Understanding

One of the biggest differences between Avery and I comes down to a difference of opinion regarding the essential quality of comprehension across rules text. Avery has been very open about her goals in functionally every game she's written; she writes rules to be understand and implemented with minimal referring back to the text. She views a failure on the part of the players to understand her precise intent to be a moment of failure in the design. She bakes the process of learning and expressing the game's rules into the layout and text as thoroughly as possible, so that you can extremely quickly go from buying the game to playing the game. Once you know the game rules, you shouldn't even need the rulebook. It's a very board game approach, which I admire.

This is different from me! If you're familiar with my work, you know I love making rulebooks that insist upon themselves in the game process. Wanderhome and Yazeba's don't exactly help you remember the rules as quickly as possible and get out of the way — they encourage luxuriating, sitting around with them, and pulling them out for reference mid-game. Seven-Part Pact takes this approach to an extreme, with a dense text that involves close-reading at the table. If Avery's rulebooks are the rulebooks of a board game, my rulebooks are in some fashion the boards themselves.

It's good we have this difference in approach. Ultimately Avery makes beautiful and compelling games, and I try my damnedest to do so too, and both of our approaches further our respective ends. (This difference is part of why I really struggle to consider myself a "storygame designer" and part of why I've been working on a manifesto towards a different school of game design in the background.)

It does mean that when Avery gives me feedback on any of my work, our ideological differences become extremely apparent. Seven-Part Pact represents an extreme outlier in this regard — it is a game that demands the kind of friction that Avery's work is extremely invested in eliminating. This means that if Avery was herself writing Seven-Part Pact... well, I'm not sure she'd want to, firstly, but it also means that it would look radically different from my own work. This is secretly one of the greatest strengths of having her as a developmental editor! If she was too similar in her approach, I think she wouldn't push back on a number of areas where pushback is actually very vital.

Explaining The Punchline

One of the biggest points Avery made about Seven-Part Pact was a concept she called "explaining the punchline." Here's how she puts it in one of the first comments she left on the document:

LSV and Limited Resources have this saying: "That's the joke." Okay, it's a widely-known saying, but when they say it, it has this variant meaning. It means: that's the core gameplay conceit which makes the card functional, clever, and/or flavorful. "It's a 0/1 with double strike and trample, but it's in a Lords Matter set, so half the time, it's just going to incidentally be a 3/4. That's the joke."

We talked during our initial kickoff meeting about your design goals of Seven-Part Pact, and how one of your design goals is to romanticize, diegeticize, and reverently lampoon the page-flipping, rules-lawyering, tome-studying nature of a lot of roleplaying games. That's the joke.

I think you want to explain the punchline as early as possible - before players experience the overwhelm, you want to get them excited to revel/wallow in the overwhelm.

This comment reflects a design maxim I hold: in a roleplaying game, you don't ruin anything by explaining the metaphor (or, in the vocabulary used above, explaining the joke).

To explain further, part of the pleasure of playing a complex game is that the emergent behavior of the game pieces add up to more than the sum of their parts. An individual card may appear weak or useless on its own, but in conjunction with other cards within its environment, it surprises players with its utility. A rule in a TTRPG may appear arbitrary or strange at first glance, but in conjunction with other rules, can produce dynamic and exciting gameplay that couldn't be anticipated from just seeing the rules on the page.

It can be really tempting, as a game designer, to keep your emergent gameplay choices secret from the players. "Let them figure it out during play!" you'll say to yourself, and you'll cackle to yourself because of how smart you are. The problem with this approach is that a game isn't one work of art, it's two — the players are co-artists bringing their own perspectives to the experience. If they get bored before they realize your trick, or they dismiss your trick as a typo and falsely limit themselves, or if they just don't figure out your joke, then they don't actually get to have fun. As game designer, you always have to remember you exist at the far end of the spectrum of "time spent thinking about your game." There are many things about my games that feel obvious to me, that completely blow the minds of everyone I tell them to.

So you gotta explain the joke.

But also, part of the way Seven-Part Pact (and a lot of my games) work is that I don't necessarily know all the jokes! Avery is right that I can be intentional and point out some of the artistic choices made, but if I start trying to helpfully explain every rules combination and intersection, it'll quickly become cumbersome and didactic. Seven-Part Pact, despite containing a lot about the precise mechanisms of patriarchy, is not actually a lesson plan on masculinity. It's a fun wizard game about being powerful wizards! So the risk of over-explaining is that I can actually make the game more hostile to potential players than if I let them start putting pieces together themselves.

How do you split the difference?

My Methodology

Following the first round of developmental consultation with Avery, and conversations the two of us have had together afterwards, I've started putting together a methodology for determining if it's important to "ruin a punchline" or not. It goes:

1. If a player completely misses this concept, will it ruin their engagement with the text? For example: If a player misses that Seven-Part Pact is about toxic masculinity, they may assume I'm a misogynistic man and that the game is reinforcing gender roles rather than disrupting them.

2. If a player playing in good-faith reads the game-text and assumes the game-text is telling the truth, will it produce negative play experiences at the table? For example: If I had a hypothetical rule that said "it is impossible to send Foes of Death back to whence they came," then a player may assume that if a Foe of Death escapes, there's nothing to be done, and may insist this to the other players — creating a point of complicated negative friction and strange play patterns. One solution may be to change the line to say: "Scholars agree that it is impossible..." or to have a specific line in the rules for magic saying that "magic is capable of accomplishing the impossible."

3. If some players are reading the text as having one meaning, and other players are reading the text with another meaning, will this incompatibility produce irreconcilable conflict? For example: If some players assume they can use magic to move the position of the Sun in the Orrery, and other players disagree, and the text does not clear up that ambiguity, the frustration of this conflict could produce really weird game states.

The flipside of this methodology is that there will be lots of "jokes," hidden meanings, emergent design moments, intentionally-ambiguous rules, and clever interactions between mechanics throughout Seven-Part Pact, they'll just be instances where the ambiguity is fruitful, non-vital, and non-discrete.

So an example of an area I intend to preserve the ambiguity of the text is in the function of witches — wizards claim they cannot perform the same acts of magic, but counter-reads of the rules reveal that this might be a falsehood. Which is it? That's a very good question!

I'm sure you can already start to see the application of this methodology, along with the application of Avery's other feedback, in the Draft 4 documents I've already shared.

Check out this post to see Avery's thoughts in detail. Thanks for reading!