I had a "Eureka!" moment the other day, and wanted to share it with y'all. I'm going to use two terms: Positive Game Design and Negative Game Design. The blog post will be about I went from trying Positive Game Design to where I'm at now, Negative Game Design, and why I'm satisfied with where I wound up for Crescendo.
Before the definitions, however, understand that my general goal in design is to be mechanically invisible during play. This doesn't mean there aren't rules. Crescendo's actually a fairly heavy game, filled with a lot of crunchy bits that would take awhile for people to learn. I want my designs to fuse mechanics and fiction in a way that makes you forget they're mechanics in the first place. It goes from "what does this thing do" to "what's the consequences in the fiction?" and then looking to the rules automatically, without breaking the flow of being in a fictional world with your friends. I think this is generally what people are trying to accomplish in the rules-lite genre, but I don't think that works. We'll get to why in another post, but it's necessary to know I feel that way.
Positive Design is very simple: whatever you want the players to do, reward them for doing it! You want people to get money? Link gold, the highest form of currency, to XP. Now players will chase the gold, because that will help them level up. You want players to do something, you give them a carrot. There's no stick inherently in the set up. Maybe there's something like HP that makes you want to be careful, because when your HP is gone your character is dead and you can't get gold. Moves from the PBTA games are another example of positive design. "Do X, you trigger a Move", with a pretty generous canon on whether you succeed or not. People sort of like rolling dice in an RPG (put a pin in this for later), so if they do the triggers they get to roll dice! Yay! Do a thing, get a thing. Positive Design is good because it's simple! You know what to do! Go get gold! Or go trigger Moves! You know what you need to do, and in general you're not told how to do it. This opens up a lot of freedom of choice and lets people do all sorts of ridiculously awesome stuff, because there's the carrot! GO GET THE CARROT!!!! I love Positive Design done well. The OSR this stuff down to an art, the highest form of science. My favorite game, Burning Wheel, is positive design par excellence. Really good PBTA has Moves that are just open enough to allow for creativity, while getting the carrot, see Hearts of Wulin.
But.
Positive Design can have some serious problems. At a basic level, Positive Design is Pavlov on a "global" scale. If you reward an action players will drool on command. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. We're rationalizing animals. We respond to positive impetus. Whether or not that's "right" is irrelvant: we do it. Trying to ask if it's bad or good is like asking if air is bad or good. It's a fact. Using that fact about humanity in a game isn't wrong. But it has to be used very carefully, otherwise the rationalizing part of the animal goes out the window, and suddenly you think you're only a rat hitting the button. That's tragic! Part of what makes playing, fun, so awesome for kids is that they attach a great deal of meaning to it. Childhood games are very serious affairs. They mean something to those who undertake them. If you do too much Positive Design you'll actually wear out the pleasure center in your brain and then you won't be able to even remember what fun really is.
Negative Design, at first glance, appears to be the opposite of Positive Design. If you do a thing the game doesn't like you're punished for it. If you don't dribble the ball in basketball you can't play. If you touch the ball with your hands in soccer you're penalized. Hits in Dark Souls are devastating. If you get hit in the OSR it's almost always lethal, or at least a huge inconvenience. You know not what to do.
Negative Design, however, holds a secret: the things they don’t penalize are inherently pleasurable. You pull off a jump in Ninja Gaiden or Mario and you immediately feel good, because you did a thing you found fulfilling. It’s not that you’re rewarded by the system like with Positive Design. The action itself is enough. And, because you never do the same thing the same way, the variety of gameplay is automatic. How you can do something the system doesn’t punish is theoretically infinite! Expression and creativity are inherent parts of a Negative Design. The list of things you can do is wider than what you can’t.
But.
You can overdo it. If the system is too punishing, then you shut play down entirely. If the negative reinforcement is too light, nobody will discover the style of play that you intended. If the game doesn’t properly communicate the general picture of play through theming and art, players will get lost. It’s really difficult to get a Negative Design correct. The designer of a Negative Design arguably must have a clearer vision of the game than a Positive Design, because figuring out the game is impossible without there being a very strong vision.
The astute may protest: “But no game is entirely a Positive or Negative Design!” And that’s correct! Dark Souls rewards you for stabbing someone in the ass. Points are given for getting balls into or through nets in soccer and basketball. HP is definitely a Negative Design. Like most things in life, it’s not one or the other, but a continuum between two poles. Most games, while being definitely closer to one pole or another, definitely aren’t entirely in one camp.
Now for that “Eureka!” moment in designing Crescendo. I don’t love dice rolling in RPGs in general. Don’t get me wrong, picking up the magic math rocks is addictive! It’s fun to roll! But the act of breaking up a narrative to pick up the dice has always been jarring to me. I like the table in a steady flow state, one where everyone is locked in, and picking up the math rocks hurts the immersion I look for in Crescendo.
And the system I had come up with fixed a lot of my issues! Players initiate “checks”, Defying either the LW (GM) or another Player, or the LW (GM) starts calling for dice rolling in batches, changing the flow state to include dice for large stretches of time. Rolling itself was really simple: pick a Skill, roll against an announced DC. There. That’s it. It works.
But I didn’t love it. For one thing, Crescendo has Stats and Item dice, and it felt like Player investment was irrelevant there. Stats or Items would only come out if a Skill was unavailable. I didn’t like the loose ends. But the ultimately damning thing was that Players would drift out of the narrative. They just picked up a die and rolled. It wasn’t a long break, but Crescendo’s meant to be one long continuous flow of play.
And then I read the pitch for Journeyman, on Kickstarter. The core mechanic is to roll 3d6 and pick either the top two, middle two, or lowest two, depending upon your fictional advantage, “normal”, or disadvantage. I had seen this idea before, but this time something lit up in the back of my head.
Crescendo’s rolling changed to grabbing a Skill, Stat, and Item die, based off the narrative the Player had supplied. But I had an idea: you rolled all three dice and automatically took the two lowest dice… unless you could provide clear fictional advantage. At which point you took the highest two. If you failed there are Conditions, which really sting to get, as they take awhile to get rid of.
Trying the system led to spectacular results! The flow state barely stopped in that session, and we were rolling a lot that night. What happened was simple: once players were told “You need to justify getting those top two dice” the fiction was gamed, hard. Players began narrating to justify higher rolls. So long as I was a bit forgiving at times the Players didn’t break narrative flow. Having more granularity of mechanics actually increased RPing, as Players would take the hint from the system that to not narrate would mean lots of negative feedback. But, as it turns out, narrating and RPing is a naturally pleasing activity! So instead of a chore, players were having a ton of fun! The negative systemic feedback was simple and brutal. The benefits were obvious and creative. Before even the middle of the session there were grand speeches and awful revenge promised.
The realization hit: I had made Crescendo a very Negative Design. Contrary to the Positive Design of the OSR and Burning Wheel, Crescendo assumes that players will find heavy narration and RP fun activities in and of themselves. No one needs to be given rewards for doing what they already want to do! Instead, the game has a bunch of strategically placed punishments. If you don’t lean into your Traits your actions fail, outright. If you betray your Beliefs you pick up Conditions, even if you succeed. There’s massive changes that happen in the narrative if you change Beliefs, discouraging willy nilly changes.
An “empty” space is created by the boundary lines. Go outside them and the feedback is immediate and long-lasting. But inside the boundary? There’s an infinite sky. And you got wings.
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