Editorial Josh Sawyer on Chess and Clear Choice

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Tags: Josh Sawyer

In his latest blog post, Josh Sawyer explains his approach to RPG systems design (which I would characterize as "gamist") via a chess analogy:

I sometimes look to traditional games for mechanical inspiration. One of the ones I think of most often is chess. Clocking in at over 1,000 years of play around the world, chess has had a lot of iteration time. I'm not an expert on chess strategy and I'm not a particularly good player, but I know chess well enough to take some simple lessons away from it. Two that I often rely on are lessons of obvious value and orthogonally equivalent value. These two lessons can be summarized by examing three chess pieces: the queen, the knight, and the bishop.

[...] The queen is typically the most powerful piece in chess (though not the most valuable; that role is reserved for the king). The queen's movement capabilities combine the lateral movement of the rook with the diagonal movement of the bishop. Even if you are learning chess for the first time, the fact that the queen combines the movement of two other pieces makes her relative power clear. A rook's ability to perform a castle, the knight's excellence at creating forks, and a the pawn's ability to capture an enemy pawn en passant are all capabilities that take a while for players to appreciate, but not the queen's movement. The queen's value is obvious.

Gameplay consists of players making (more-or-less) informed decisions about what they need to do to overcome an obstacle. It is not enough for the obstacle to be clearly defined and communicated to players. They also need to have a clear understanding of what tools are at their disposal to solve the problem. In chess, the player's primary tools are his or her pieces. Though circumstances determine the value of pieces on any given move, no one needs to advocate the fundamental value of the queen in chess.

[...] Chess has various informal ranking systems for the relative value of pieces. The rankings are not used for scoring, but they are used to give players a rough idea of the strategic (not tactical) value of those pieces. In the most commonly used system, pawns have a value of 1, rooks have a value of 5, and queens have a value of 9. Knights and bishops are both rated at 3. Bishops move diagonally, always staying on their starting color, and knights are the "funny moving" pieces of chess, hopping two squares horizontally or vertically and one square vertically or horizontally, passing over other pieces along the way. Though their tactical applications in any given circumstance are completely dissimilar, the common ranking systems give them equal (or close to equal) strategic value in chess.

[...] When we design tools for the player to use -- abilities, gear, options, upgrades -- options with ostensibly orthogonally equivalent value create interesting choices for the player. They also lend themselves to increased clarify of purpose. The more tools overlap in function, the less obvious it is to players why a given tool exists. The less tools overlap in function, the more those tools seem suited to a specific circumstance.

While these are high-level design concepts, creating choices with obvious, easily differentiated values can make the low-level details much easier to execute and build upon. When a player is presented with strategic or tactical choices, he or she is always fundamentally asking the question, "Why do I want to make this choice instead of any of the others?" As designers, we want to communicate the answers to their questions as elegantly as possible. Ideally, the design of the player's tools and the game's content should be self-advocating, allowing players to reverse-engineer our intent and their range of choices without a word of explanation.

There's also an accompanying Youtube video:

Clarity of choices above all things. But does that approach inevitably lead to "dumbing down"? Discuss!

Well you can have a very simple system or a well explained system. Simple system is cheaper so cost saving usually wins.

Depends on what you mean by "simple".

Iphone simple.

In general, simplicity in the rules system is a good thing. Complexity should come from the interaction of the rules and not from rules themselves being needlessly complex.

Looking bad at old games is a great thing, most developers seem not to take their inspiration from anything more than two or three years old, giving us modern shooters (same for any genre, but this one's the most obvious) deriving only from modern shooters with conventions quickly cementing and a very "inbred" game design.

I do find it a little irritating when someone making an RtwP game starts talking about chess.

What?

Only thing I gathered from Josh's rant, is that he can talk a lot without actually saying something. Also it seems he doesn't understand the difference between a system and a game. Nothing new.

I just imagine trying to control all those little chess pieces moving simultaneously in an RTwP game.

Eh, perhaps you should read what he's talking about first.

He enjoys teh irony.

he still made me laugh which is worth something

Not really

Sounds familiar:

He wishes.

I guess someone just doesn't want their race traitor tag showing.

I disagree with you Infinitron, that this is focused in gamism. Or at least what I call gamism. Of course, this is just semantics, but there is a more subtle concept here, I think. The thing about Josh's design views, or at least what I read about them, is that they seem to focus on system concerns. Like, sometimes, you have a conflict between your exploration elements (setting, character, situation, etc), and your abstract systems, such as how characters improve, hit points, the combat system, etc. For example, whether there is only a single spell that is capable of creating a searing ball of flames and throw it at someone, or whether there are 300 different ones, each with their own quirks, advantages and disadvantages, affects both things. On one hand, it is telling a lot about how magic works in your game world. On the other hand, it will affect a lot about how the gameplay of the static systems.

Mr. Sawyer's design philosophy seems to be that these abstract systems should be somewhat separated from the setting elements. That the rules should be clear and take the game in a specific direction. This isn't a gamist thing necessarily. Burning Wheel does the same thing, but it is a narrativist game though and through. Meanwhile, all the iterations of old D&D where all about making things fuzzy. It wasn't about using the right tool the system gave you, it was about using the various situations to come up with solutions. The designers didn't necessarily think of a specific solution for the dungeon or a problem from the get go. Instead, they used elements that had a certain synergy, that were related to each other, to let the players come up with their own solutions to things. It wasn't about feats, combat actions, skill synergies, and character building. It was about coming up with idea sing the stuff that was in your sheet as a starting point. But it was still gamist, because the game was about the challenge of solving those problems.

Of course, it is hard to do this stuff in a computer game. Making a balanced combat system, with interesting abilities that challenge you to understand how to best use them in each situation, this is hard, but it is feasible. You can build the heart of a computer game around this, and this has been done many times. If you put in good rules, and thing a bit about your combat encounters, it will work. But if you want to allow the players many different solutions to opening the entrance of a cave, with each of them having different repercussions, it is hard. If you want your combats to have several things you can use in them, like stalactites, ambushes,traps, baiting, you either will spend your whole life adding subsystems (hi there, Dwarf Fortress!) or have to do this by hand. And doing this by hand will make the game a lot more "adventure like". Still, even if it is a lot more work, I still like this second approach a whole lot more.

Alex That may well be true. I was not using "gamist" in the classical PnP sense. I think CRPGs have their own, slightly different versions of these categories.

I did.

My post was a not all that serious butthurt TB fan support of the obvious Alt/Troll post above mine.

No, you are oversimplifying his point. This post is definitely not just a reiteration of the trite "simple but powerful" cliche. I wouldn't have posted it here as news if it was.

He's describing specific design patterns that improve player choice.

Well, you can call these however you prefer, Infinitron! I don't mean to say that you should use this or that terminology, but I still think that having a gamist CRPG, in that its focus is about the challenges, which at the same time feature really open systems that have lots of ifs, buts and elses could be a lot of fun. Most games I have seen trying this, however, seen to forget giving the player many alternatives at all points, resulting in a straightforward adventure game, though. But I still think it could be done, and I think it would be awesome if it was.

A) Chess is not somehow optimized. To think that it is a model system is inherently fallacious.
B) Intent and genre. Chess represents A kind of game. It need not necessarily hold insights for other games especially computer games beyond simply the complexity of strategies.

Josh is using chess to demonstrate certain design concepts, not as a model of game to aspire to. If you think this post is about "how CRPGs should be like chess", then you've failed to understand it.

In fact you could easily rewrite Josh's post to omit any mention of chess and it would still make sense.

Gamistfags are fucking aliens.

An RPG is not Chess (or Go for that matter). It has conworld and it has context inside of it.
An RPG combat is not supposed to just be balanced and tactically rich, but also to be mechanically consistent with this context.
Whenever you lose sight of this you start making a Puzzlequest instead of a proper RPG, except possibly with Bejewelled clone replaced by Chess clone or some other shit.
The problem with that is that you want to make an RPG, not Puzzlequest.

And if you don't understand the difference and want to make Puzzlequest, then please fucking stop.