A Matter of Perspective

So I have been playing around with the one of the comments that James Wyatt, Ray Winninger, and others have said about the creation of a campaign world.  Basically, that pearl of wisdom is "don't bury your players with needless information."  In other words, even though the world building itch motivates many DMs to create lavish 20,000 years of history for their world, along with 15 nations, and epic songs and other legends to populate the world- that urge should be resisted.  The reasoning is 1) you will burn out before the first game session can happen, and 2) the players will be overwhelmed and get bored.

In UX this is sometimes called the "wall of noise". where users are confronted with a web page full of information, but it is all given equal weight.  That kind of appeals to modernist, Bauhausian design aesthetics (everything is a modular part on the page) but it becomes an overly rhythmic interface for the user— there is no useful irregularities for them to see a hierarchy of importance.  And designers are not only supposed to be making a nice looking page, but also guide the user to the most important things.

When a designer is crating a landing page for users who may lack any fore knowledge on the subject, it is good design to make it asymmetrical and kind of lumpy- with the things you want them to do by default all up in their face, and the less important stuff kind of squished into the background.

In Windows, Microsoft encountered a wall of noise problem.  User testing showed that new computer users were flummoxed by the windows 3.1 desktop, and didn't know which of the similar drop downs at the top of held the important to them tools.  The designers had just assumed people knew how to dive in and use this tool they had built.  But when they realized the problem, their solution was to put a big fat Start Button in the lower left corner of the screen in Windows 95.

Back to world building, the basic idea suggested by the experts is for the DM to detail the party's starting area in detail, and then get progressive more vague outside of the town.  This lets the players understand what they should be worrying about, and not get them worked up about the cool kingdom over the impassible mountains, until they are ready to go over there.  Sort of a Bullseye of information centered on the tavern where the players get their quests.

That got me thinking about how to provide the party with their maps.  The most logical approach would be to put some tissue paper over the world map, and draw a set of concentric circles around the starting town, and then draw in map details, with each ring getting more vague and sketchy, until outside the largest ring it would simply be "here there be monsters" or terra incognita.

Which I suppose it would be a good mental model for a party of peasants who had never left their hamlet.  But its pretty rare that you get a group of players willing to start their characters off at such mundane level.  Players want to start off with cool world wise characters, who have ended up coming to the town, like the Seven Samurai, to sort out the local problems.  So it is not fitting to be with holding information form the players, when their characters would probably know more.

So the thing I have been playing around with is perspective maps.  It is closer to the mental model we humans have when thinking spatially, and is more a reflection of where we are, and how we see the world around us. 

Some classic examples 

So playing around with the default setting in the Dungeon Master's Guide, and Google Sketchup, I made a low quality 3D version of Mike Schley'svery cool map of the Nentir Vale.  (which I am using here without permission.)  The idea of this experiment is to show to the players how their characters would see the Nentir Vale mentally from their home base in Fallcrest.

 The 3D map

Looking North East

Looking North West

Looking South East

Looking South West

The view looking back at Fallcrest from Winterhaven

...and the view looking back from Hammerfast

Now this perspective is hovering about 12 miles in the air, but everything in the map is exaggerated.  (the forests are about a mile tall, and Thunderspire is about the height of Mount Everest, if this was all to scale.)

Probably it would be better to offer the players a 360 Quicktime VR type online tool, where they could look around the Nentir Vale from Fallcrest, and get a real feel for their environment.  And then by the nature of their perceived proximity, they are able to understand the things they should be focusing on.

Stuck on Stickers

I am a huge fan of stickers. Maybe it goes back to elementary school, when rather then grades, you got a cool sticker on your homework, if you did good enough. It was a very clear and rewarding indication of success. I am sure some teacher was having a hard time getting a bunch of 10 year olds to understand why getting a "checkmark plus" was something to stive for, while getting a "X" was to be avoided.

They probably began drawing smiley faces and frowny faces on homework to show graphically the emotion the student's hard work (or lack there of) had produced in the heart of their teacher. But at a certain age, kids get wise to that sort of guilt manipulation and stop caring. So then one enterprising teacher browsing in Woolworth's, saw a sheet of stickers for the Monkees or something, and had the idea of decorating the successful papers to give their student's tangible results on their homework.

I like tangible results. They encourage users to continue with behavior that you as a designer want to encourage. Also I like stickers, because they are empowering. You can peel them off and apply them to something, changing it. leaving your mark on it. Transforming it by your own hand.

In my D&D game we have found that it has been hard to track effects that last for more then the length of a turn. As the DM I have had to keep a legal pad ready to track just what all is going on with the Mobs, and who has used an action point, etc. But as the players get higher level they gain powers that have more complex effects, many of which combine to produce powerful results. So important for everyone to be able to understand every effect that is inplay at the start of their turn.

I saw where Kiko from Penny Arcade designed status effect stickers that could be printed out on an ink jet printer. I am sure the idea has been around as long as printers have been cheap. I can recall watching the Napoleonic wargamers at the old Rusty Scabbard (my local RPG store when I was in high-school) would drop small colored rubber gaskets around soldiers necks when they were killed. (they played with smaller scale minis, so a company of 5 men were all attached to the same rectangular base- so they would not remove the unit till all were dead.)

And then also Bdrago at Eberron Strikes Back took that idea and created a sheet of status effects, and also Bloodied status stickers, using the perfectly sized ¾"round labels. (I am sure other people have also put their spin on the idea, but these are the ones I saw.) So anyway, I thought that was pretty brilliant, and created my own take on the game aid:

» Download Status Sticker Set (.5 MB PDF)

(Print on the Avery #5408 round ¾" printable labels)

Statuses

Bloodied, Second Wind, Failed Death Save, Dazed, Weakened, Slowed, Immobile, Poisoned

Damage Types

Fire, Cold, Acid, Electricity, Thunder, Radiant, Necrotic, Psionic

Other:

A sheet of variously colored Marking indicators (so different players can have their own color. Even the Warlock.)

+/- 2,5,10,15 markers (For use for other ongoing effects, and other specific situations. For instance, as a reminder that a character has cover (and thus a -2 to be hit) from a specific enemy. You might use a -2 lable, and draw an arrow toward the enemy it applies to.

...anyway leave a comment and let me know how well these work, or if there is anything I have overlooked. I am thinking of these more as player reminders, which is why I focused more on unique colors then trying to cover every situation. Anyway, If i had to choose between noting on a sheet of paper that I had caused an ongoing fire damage effect, versus getting to slap a big old "on fire" sticker with flames on it, on the DM's fancy troll mini, I know what I would pick as a player.

Like my peanut butter was made of chocolate all along...

This is a new experiment- one that I am curious to see where it goes.  I have noticed that in the last year or two my rate of blogging has dropped off considerably.  Mostly I think is because there are now a whole host of new social media tools that each does part of what my old blog used to do all on its own back in the day.  So its been gather digital dust.  (digital dust is like little grey pixels, but smaller...)

Anyway, there have been ideas or thoughts that have been nagging at me- ones that are under various topics, and require a bit more explaining then 140 characters can allow.  Plus the more I thought about it, they really fell into two areas- Interaction Design (IxD) and Role Playing Games (typically D&D).  So I thought I would create a journal to explore these two areas of thought.

As a point of reference, the earliest Information design problem I can recall was my frustration with the map that came with GDW's Traveller 2300/2300AD game.  It was (and still is) a vexing problem of displaying information of stellar geography, so much so that I found I kept returning to it again and again over the years, in the hopes of finally solving it.  And along the way, I eventually found I had fallen into a career of solving similar problems for clients.

Actually, I would say that RPGs are at their core a designed experience- one where the Dungeon Master acts as the experience designer for their "users".  It is in a lot of ways, a good gaming session is like a Brainstorming session, Focus group testing, and product launch all rolled into one.

So that is what I am going to try and address in this space- how RPGs can be used to improve our understanding of Experience Design, and how in turn the tools of IxD can be used to improve the RPG experience.