Taking to the Stage as a Killer: Minimalistic Fluffy Crunch

Today we talk about someone near and dear to my heart... at least as far as video game characters are concerned. For those who don't know the handsome man featured above is the character Jhin from league of legends. Full disclosure he is by far my most played character outstripping the competition by 3+ times.

So what about him captures my interest so completely, especially amidst a field of well designed characters? I think its how perfectly a set of pretty small simple ingredients come together.

To put it in food terms (never write when your hungry) there are two types of pizzas, there is the american pizza loaded with so much cheese and toppings that the thing is almost heavy to pick up, but every bite bursts with flavor, and on the other hand you have the traditional Italian pizza; topping lite, tons of room between each ingrediant, and hardly any cheese, sometimes none at all. Picking only the perfect flavors to work in quiet but confident concert

Both methods of pizza have their merits, and I love both, as I love both design philosophies and they both can produce amazing results, but as a designer it always catches my eye when someone creates a minimalist design, it shows a level of mastery and confidence that buffet style doesn't quite convey.

To illustrate my point let me quote a passage from the Jhin short story they put out around his release:

"He drew the fingertips of his left hand across the slick surface of the clothes. The feel of the skin's oily surface quickened his breath. He picked up the tight, leather mask, then - unable to help himself - slid it over his face. It covered his right eye and mouth. It constricted his breathing and removed his depth perception...
Delightful."

To me this perfectly captures how Jhin thinks, and ultimately every aspect of his character, for those who don't know Jhin is a sniper serial killer who views his kills as part art work part performance piece. He also has a thing about the number 4.

Reading some design insights by the developers the main crux of his being was created because someone created his core mechanic (4 shots then reload (in a game without reloading) and the 4th does the most damage) then they asked themselves a question that very easily could have gone unasked, 'why?'.

See most characters have some weird thing that they could do better or doesn't make much sense, why does eating some oranges have a cool-down, why does, heck, another sniper in the game only do a special shot every couple of shots? The answer is normally 'for game-play reasons' but here they asked 'but why would the character do it though?'.

And that answer was Jhin, this character, a character who limits himself not because of some game play reason, but to create a better performance and he doesn't care that other people don't see his art, or that they don't understand why he does things, for him its all about fulfilling his internal needs (see ocd / perfectionist).

And as a player you enact that for him, every action you do in game is in service of this ideal of putting on the perfect, most impressive, performance from waiting for the perfect moment to bind someone, to playing around 'that deadly fourth shot' almost every mechanic he has is based around the idea of 'how can this be difficult in such a way that I can show off by doing it perfectly'.

This process is called bottom up design, starting with a core idea (A gun that shoots 4 bullets and the last one is the best) and finding something to fit that, those who are aware might also notice that this design is also pretty top down as well (come up with an idea for a character then build around that) and that is sort of the point, a brilliant design starts with a bottom point (the Crunch) and a top point (the Fluff) builds a single tight link between them and builds out from there.

At some point I'll go into top down vs bottom up in more detail, but suffice to say like most things in design the answer isn't which one is better, its a little more complicated than that.

Football VS Property Management: Randomness as a core mechanic and agency

Following on from last time on the topic of randomness I thought it would be good to compare 2 different systems that HEAVILY use randomness and contrast why I believe one handles it much better than the other, and to touch on a huge topic when talking about system design 'User Agency' or agency.

To do that I'll be talking about Bloodbowl and Monopoly

Warning: This will probably be crunch heavy and fluff light, but see the last post 'Fluffy Crunch in the forty first millennia' on how this relates to fluff.

Chances are almost everyone reading has played monopoly, but just quickly its a game where you roll dice to move around the outside of a square landing on random properties and buying them and charging rent if other people land on them. Its a tad more complicated than that but not much, and for the purposes of this you can almost substitute any 'traditional' board game you might have played as a kid.

Bloodbowl on the other hand is a little bit more complicated and a lot more unknown, although the recent series of bloodbowl video games gave it a lot more attention.

Broadly speaking its a fantasy football boardgame in which the ball often takes a backseat to brawls between two teams of fantasy creatures, every action is decided upon dice, and death is always one step around the corner, you can even trip fall over and die when trying to run a little bit too fast.

So what do both of these games have in common? Well dice decide basically everything. You can't chose which properties to land on in monopoly, or what card you might draw, in the same way that even a giant treeman might, against all odds, lose a fight to a goblin and die, or an elf somehow managing to miss a throw to a team mate 5 ft away.

But whats the key difference? Well I'v sort of already said it 'Against all odds', see in bloodbowl you have a very very clear idea of the chance of every action and exactly how it will play out, and most importantly WHAT YOU CAN DO TO CHANGE THOSE ODDS. Now that's not to say monopoly doesn't have an element of risk management and odds playing, for example buying or not buying certain properties and ... that's about it, if you play auctioning (which you should be) how to go about doing that.

This brings me back to 'Agency', agency is one of the most important things to consider when designing any system. It's basically how does the user feel like they have control over the system. This is vital otherwise the user will just feel like they are wasting their time, or watching a system essentially use itself, or in the case of multiplayer games like the other player has all the control.

In monopoly, and many other 'traditional games' the player is basically at the whim of the dice and even the best player they can only change the variations of the dice by small degrees. The prime example of this is snakes and ladders, you literally have no agency at all and no matter what you do you have the exact same chance of any action happening.

Contrast this to bloodbowl where almost everything is changeable, you can chose not to attack a treeman with a goblin, you can mark players, you can move players deep into the other players territory on the off chance you gain control over the ball. Its so extreme to the point that, and this is very common in games of this style, 1s always fail. So no matter what you do there is a chance of failure.

Basically if the user can't affect the system, why use it at all?

But that doesn't really cover the question of 'why randomness as a core mechanic' if more agency is good, and randomness reduces agency then why use randomness at all in systems?

This is a good point, and many systems take that idea and run with it, chess is a prime example, the only tiny amount of randomness is who goes first.
But if you look at chess the 'skill ceiling' (how good you can get and how much that affects your chance to win) is incredibly high. There are grand-masters who  have studded for years who still don't fully know everything.
And the 'skill floor' (how good you have to be to even stand a chance against a somewhat competent person, the 'barrier to entry') is very very high too, so a beginner would have no chance unless against someone of equal skill or someone 'playing easy'.

What randomness does is provide a quick and easy way of lowering both the skill ceiling and skill floor, no matter how good you are something can go wrong, and no matter how bad you are something can go right.
It also it provides variation, things wont always go the same every time. For example almost every move in chess has been planned out and counter moves thought out, but in games with randomness that's just not possible, so the next game, even with the exact same inputs by the users may have a vastly different output.

Snakes and ladders provides an excellent example here because the skill floor and the skill ceiling are identical (0 'Skill'). However this isn't very satisfying, but the barrier to entry is very low, which is why its almost the first game anyone will play.

So what this comes down to is randomness provides a way of making a system accessible, and also not identical, In the end randomness is a way to make games more interesting, but when implementing it into a system you have to be weary of sacrificing too much agency to make it happen. A good way of thinking of it is every time you add randomness, think both 'how can a user circumvent or make allowances for this randomness' and 'how does this lower the skill floor, ceiling & barrier to entry, as well as mix things up'

This was meant to be a short one too...

Fluffy Crunch in the forty first millenia: Bad Fluff Translations & Randomness

Lately iv been getting into warhammer 40k and, like with most systems I pick up, I'v been delving into just about every rule there is, read just about every thing you can possibly do, and yes, read tons of fluff too.

Warhammer 40k (WH40k), like most board games, is in a unique position when it comes to fluffy crunch because almost every rule in game you come into contact with as a player, this means there are so many opportunities for fluffy crunch, but also so many times where something doesn't quite make sense.

As a quick example in the Ork rules-book 'Waaagh!!! Grimskull' you get a bonus to rolling on some table. The fluff in the book portrays Grimskull and his waaagh! (army) as a disciplined (at least for orks) no-nonsense, pretty fearless group, and also quite elite (small but powerful). However this bonus means your entire army becomes more likely to squabble and rewards bigger sizes of more expendable guys. This is a pretty clear failure to translate story to mechanics. Especially when considering instead of giving a bonus, subtracting from the result would make them less likely to squabble and reward smaller sizes. (not to mention subtracting being better than adding is a bit odd too).

But something else WH40k highlights is how even when the crunch is fluffy it can still go bad. This particular brand of badness happens so often it sort of got its own jargon in the form of 'FUN*'. Basically any time a system represents something being chaotic or unreliable via randomness.

Extra credits (look them up on youtube, if your here you'll love them) did a video once revolving around hearthstone and how randomness is very hard to manage in games and how, when poorly managed leaves the players feeling hollow in victory and bitter in defeat, although sometimes can lead to a cool moment when a one in a million chance leads to victory, which anyone who has been a part of knows is cool, and something games should allow for, but not at too greater cost.

However how do you show something being chaotic or unreliable without it just being random? Well its hard not to, but there are ways you can do it without it being too bad but still capturing that edge of your seat, I really hope this works feeling.
 For example in Warhammer AoS (the ones with swords that aren't part chainsaw) there are a set of units belonging to the skaven; ratmen with inventions that are notorious for being mainly spit and ductape and unreliable. They way these work in game is they have the OPTION to roll in an attempt increase the weapons power, and any result other than a 1 they perform better, and the 1 result has a minor negative.
In this example you as a player sort of get to put yourself in the shoes of a skaven, this thing might be unreliable, but its the best thing I have and I might as well roll for it, since its a pretty big reliable benefit. You get to have your random cake and eat it too so to speak. The fact that you have the option is pretty important here, not only does it minimize randomness by not making you roll it if you don't want/need to, but it also makes you take the step into the shoes of the skaven by willingly choosing to accept the random chance.

 Warning: Technical
There are a few problems with this however, primarily there is a problem known as negative bias, basically 'almost everyone will say that they are unlucky'. The way it works is even if you roll 1 every 6 times, it will still seem like you roll it more than you should, firstly its a negative thing so you remember it clearer so it seems like it happens more and secondly because the outcome is so likely to be not 1 you naturally plan as if its not 1 so when it is it throws a whole spanner in your thought process making it stand out even more compared to if its 2+ it barely even registers as an event.

This 'negative bias' is the reason randomness in systems is seen as a bad thing, even if a random thing is balanced accounting for it happening the amount of times it does, and even if the impact is low, it still seems like 'Gosh I never get lucky' comes out of the mouth of every person who interacts with the system. More on how something being balanced around randomness not always working out even if it does on paper another time.

                              So how do you put randomness in a system for all the positive                                                               fluffy reasons without making a bad system?
                                                     Its complicated.

Hi! Whats This?

Hi, so you've found your way here and are probably wondering what this is all about?

This blog is basically my way of putting down my thoughts about design.

I love design, specifically mechanical design, that is; the design of entertainment systems.

Whether that be in board games, video games, apps, edutainment, or anywhere else you might find a system in place designed to be interacted with for some purpose that includes entertaining the user in some way

But why 'Fluffy Crunch'? Well firstly I just needed to put something in or I'd spend all day trying to come up with a perfect name that both encapsulated what I wanted to write about, had some wordplay or pun, and represented the feeling of the blog.
More on topic however it refers to the idea of 'Fluff' meaning anything around entertainment systems that don't directly interact with the systems mechanics. Think of a book set in the world of a  game you might play. Sure it might heighten your enjoyment of the world as a whole but next time you interact with that game it wont really factor into how you interact with the system.
The opposite of this sort of became known as 'Crunch' or 'the inverse of fluff'. Its the system itself, the rules of the system, how the user interacts with the system, that sort of thing.

           However I believe that the best experiences are created when the Crunch is fluffy.
           When the rules of the system reinforce or build upon the fluff.

To get a bit technical for a second a few years ago the idea of 'ludo-narrative dissonance' came up in relation to video games, this refers to any time the narrative is at dissonance, or 'at odds with' the mechanics of the game. To give a basic example of this a game who's narrative involves sharing rewarding the user for hording up loot by giving them levels.
While there are some holes in the idea of ludo-narrative dissonance, and it can get a bit nitpicky at time ultimately I think its something to keep in mind when designing any system.

          Basically it comes down to whenever you design a new system asking yourself:
                     How does this work with the fluff (and all aspects of the 'product') to
                          create a more consistent whole not a unrelated set of 'things'

So why this blog? Well basically I like thinking about crunch, and how it relates to a whole bunch of things, fluff being a big one of those. So this is a way for me to organize my thoughts as well as work on explaining them better.

Warning it will probably be long and at times a bit technical, but hopefully interesting and a bit entertaining.