User blog:Jooblies/First Blog Post - A Frank and Honest Assessment

THE CHAOS AND BETRAYAL OF GAME DEVELOPMENT

Morvennan has been in development as a world for about a year and a half now. As a game, it has only been going for about 3 months. This creates an odd conflict where the world feels really dense and interesting but the systems for interacting with it are crude and at times unsatisfying. In addition, because of the chaotic nature of the system it occasionally breaks in ways that make people less interested in playing.

One such example is when a player was not able to respond to Native threats to his town in time and found that it had been suddenly taken. Because this was the first time I had encountered this situation, as a Morvennan Guide I had to make a call, and the call was that it was a surprise attack - there were already Mooglai in the town, they attacked suddenly and there was no time to fight back. The town was siezed and the player didn't even have an option to respond or fight back. He was simply informed.

The reasons that this was a mistake are threefold, and there may be more that I cannot think about, but hopefully I will be informed at some stage! It's all part of the learning process.

First, it was not consistent and broke the suspension of belief. The system has always stated that if an action has a chance of failure, you do scissors/paper/rock. A seige definitely has a chance of failure, even if it is a masterfully executed surprise attack. Additionally, I missed an opportunity to allow the world to demand attention during a game. This seige should have taken over whatever quests had been planned - it was exactly the kind of thing I was aiming for, and this time I dropped the opportunity.

Second, I violated a Noble's trust in their town and in the system. By merely informing him that the town had been taken with no explaination as to why the townsfolk didn't fight back, why it was so easy or where his character was at the time, I completely broke whatever belief the player had that their town was a place of safety. In another game, at another time, this would be useful, but this time it did not feel necessary or make sense, really. We expect the lead characters in stories to be where the action is; even if we had no idea where the Noble actually was at the time, they would CERTAINLY have been in that town when that seige began, or near enough that they'd have a chance to join the chaos. That's narrative 101.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it wasn't fun. It was just a tragic event with no element of entertainment in it. The town was simply besieged, the Noble's forces crushed and that was it. There was no big seige, there was no awesome stand-off by the Noble in the defence of her people, no mighty last stand, no character development, nothing. It was simply a big dump of bad news out of nowhere. This siege could have been a great gameplay moment and - even if the Noble lost the city - seemed fair, epic and fun.

No matter how real or logical something is, my paramount concern as Morvennan's game designer is that the game be fun. There are ways to make someone seizing your town fun. In the future, I'll do that instead.

I would like to thank Will for teaching me a valuable lesson.