Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

Splinter Cell: Conviction

So, my housemate, Orrin, played through the demo of Rich Dansky‘s Tom Clancy‘s Splinter Cell: Conviction. For the moment, her observations hold more water than mine, but just watching her, I could see the writing on the wall. For her, it was all stuff like “INFILTRATE THE MANSION,” but for me, it was “POST MORE ON ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE.”

Because this is something that’s worth talking about. You’ve got all this crap that’s going on inside the head of the character, and all this crap going on inside the UI (or on the character sheet) of the player. Generally, though, the environment doesn’t reflect any of this. If you’re lucky, you get some post-processing shaders to put everything in stoner blur (or the GM narration equivalent) when you’re dazed.

If you’re really lucky, you get one of those entire maps where you’re crazy, like in BioShock 2 or Velvet Assassin.¹

Heads, HUDs, and types of action

Video games have been trying to push character and game state information into the 3d environment for a while. Dead Space and Ghostbusters both replace classic interface elements with animations on your character.[3. Arguably, World of Warcraft does this with its various floating punctuation marks. I think that's an in-between case, myself. I'd love to see an MMO push character-mind stuff into the environment, though.] The reduced screen clutter is supposed to immerse you more in our friend the environment.

Does it? I think it worked a little in Dead Space, but thought it was almost irrelevant in Ghostbusters. Seeing the character state on the character looked great, but it didn’t make me feel like there was any kind of focus on him or his world. It wasn’t his story, it belonged to the actual Ghostbusters, and that was okay. The game also did a good job of conjuring the environments from the first film, but didn’t share that film’s gift for evoking 1980s New York.²

And the environment in Dead Space was an impressively rendered rehash of other games, kinda like every half-decent remake of Aliens. Focusing on it more didn’t really do anything for me.

Splinter Cell, though, is taking one of my own personal demons (quest text) and marrying it to one of my personal fascinations (the dungeon, or, if you must, the level). Your environment doesn’t just tell you what you have to do… the tooltips for climbing and sneaking and peaking and all are projected into the environment, too.

In other words, the game takes a somewhat new approach to two things:

• Required action (Infiltrate the Mansion)
• Potential action (Jump on this crate)

You find yourself looking into the environment for your goals and opportunities. Will Hindmarch says:

Conviction is all about putting you into the head of Sam Fisher, more so than his body. The game projects his thoughts onto the walls and surfaces of the game world, turning literal space into a figurative, psychological terrain at the same time.

That’s particularly interesting to me, because I think that the dungeon (electronic or imagined) is a landscape of psychological terrain.

The Dungeon as Psychological Projection

Conan beneath the Scarlet Citadel

Sometimes, that terrain is the designer’s headspace.³

Sometimes, it’s the hero’s. If you look at Quarmall, ⁴ or the Scarlet Citadel,⁵ you see environments that reveal the essential qualities of the characters therein.

The Scarlet Citadel reveals almost only what Conan brings in: old grudges, bold action, murderous ferocity, and a canny mind ready to exploit any weakness. And, yes, he fights a giant snake. Says it all, really.

Quarmall is more your “ecosystem” dungeon, with its giant slaves bred to pump the ventillation system, its halves controlled by warring princes, and ruling over all, its withered wizard-king. Here the Gray Mouser encounters charlatan wizards, and Fafhrd muscle-brained fools — both things they’ve been accused of being themselves.

Each also finds opportunities to showcase his most conspicuous qualities. The Mouser abducts a girl and attempts a spell, Fafhrd finds his romantic inclinations overwhelming his better judgment.⁶ And, of course, traversing the dungeons levels leads the two to reunite and perpetrate one of their own greatest scams.

So, if the dungeon is, in part, a projection of the hero who enters it⁷, is that something to consciously model in roleplaying games? It’s not hard to envision a mechanism for doing so, something like 3:16‘s flashbacks, only projecting into the environment, rather than exclusively the hero’s own past.

If I’m a little suspicious of the idea in a roleplaying game, I’m even more suspicious when it comes to MMOs. Do designers even have the right to tell a player what’s going on in their character’s heads? I’ve been told that an exclamation point is already a bridge too far. Should the character even be acknowledged as someone psychologically separate from the player, or is that just a legacy inherited from other sorts of games?

And if we’re facing the death of the character⁸, then is it acceptable to make psychological assumptions at all?

______

The early editions of Tunnels & Trolls are a good example of two class design schema:

• Classes to fill holes
• Classes on a spectrum

The two base classes are warrior and wizard. The warrior is a straightforward arms and armor type, noted in the game’s fifth-and-a-half edition as being based on Conan. Wizards have a mix of dungeon utility spells and combat spells.

T&T‘s mechanics are somewhat more regular than D&D‘s. “Take that you fiend!,” the equivalent of “Magic Missile,” simply allows the character to wield his intelligence as a weapon.

The spectrum element comes in when rogues are added to the basic mix. Like D&D‘s thieves, they appear to have been modeled on the Gray Mouser, but they are essentially fighters with who dabble in magic. They represent an in-between space between the warrior and wizard class, illustrating the spectrum principle.

Initially, rogues were required to choose to become either warriors or wizards as they leveled up… a choice the Mouser himself made at a young age. In practice, apparently, players tried to avoid making this choice, and thus T&T introduced a mirror-class: the warrior-wizard.

The warrior-wizard is interesting not only in that it completes the spectrum of character classes, but in that it requires the rolling of unusually high attributes at character creation. The combination of fighting, spellcasting, and attribute requirements is suggestive of D&D‘s paladin (though I doubt there’s a direct line of inspiration). As of T&T 5.5e, then, the classes form a sort of circle.

Unlike most fantasy games which followed, Tunnels & Trolls embraced Dungeons & Dragons‘ milieu of dungeon delving wholeheartedly, but casually rejected many of D&D‘s other additions to the fantasy genre, such as the thief-specialist and the fighting cleric. In other words, it absorbed D&D‘s gameplay innovations while ignoring its class design.

It’s particularly tantalizing to imagine a version of D&D with the more elegant class structure of T&T. Indeed, while the thief has only occasionally been imagined as a subclass of the fighter, reimagining the cleric as a variant wizard has a long heritage. The “White Mage” is a fixture of franchise like Final Fantasy, and is echoed in TSR’s mid-90s Lankhmar boxed set.

It’s almost criminal to go this far down into an article about Tunnels & Trolls without mentioning that the game’s far more lighthearted than D&D grew up to be. The spell names are, largely, cheap jokes. The tone of Liz Danforth’s 5.5e is tongue-in-cheek, and rather charming.

I was raised on two kinds of fantasy gaming. The first were the Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games, which were full of puns and jokes. Although the humor was  of a slightly different breed, they fit well with my readings of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance, as well as Robert Aspirin, J. R. R. Tolkien¹, and, dare I say it, Piers Anthony.

The second were the Dungeons & Dragons variants and The Lord of the Rings, plus the Elric books. Though all three have more humor than they’re generally given credit for, they are by comparison dreadfully serious. I think Aaron Allston makes it through the Rules Cyclopedia without so much as an ironic aside. The third edition of Dungeons & Dragons admonishes (though not absolutely) against the use of cheap gags in your characters or campaign.

At this stage of my life, I appreciate the humorous side of fantasy gaming more. I’m compelled by Conan’s rarely-detailed “gigantic mirths,” and the heroic laughter of Fafhrd and the Mouser in “Adept’s Gambit.”² I’m attracted by the absurdity of creations like the rust monster and the beholder. That makes a review of Tunnels & Trolls rather a welcome evening chore.

Spotted this over at Skadi:

Skadi Relationship Map

I’m a fan of Skadi, her sort of being a Red Sonja to Groo’s Conan. The illustrated relationship map was very cool, though, and struck me as something out of a very slapstick game of Trollbabe.

I often refer to Dungeons & Dragons as a game of dangerous archaeology. In their classic tomb-robbing mode, the party enters an underworld with its own history, meaning, and ecology.* The process of exploring a dungeon is much like the process of excavating a tomb… except eighty times faster and with more blood and looting. You’re like Heinrich Schliemann dosed to his eyeballs on haste.

The dungeon is the first and most important venue for environmental storytelling. (Yes, I said the “s” word, but stay with me a minute.) The classic dungeon isn’t full of helpful NPCs… for every Scarlet Citadel with a friendly-but-evil wizard in a holding cell, there’s a Moria or Howling Tower. The central question of those latter dungeons is this: what happened here?

Which brings me to a presentation from GDC: “What Happened Here?,” an examination of environmental storytelling by Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch. Smith and Worch are, of course, addressing video games, but their analysis has a lot to offer classic dungeoneering.

Construction

Let’s start with some very basics:

We’re saying that the game environment, which has been derived from a fictional premise, can communicate

the history of what has happened in a place

• who inhabits it
• their living conditions
• what might happen next
• the functional purpose of the place
• and the mood.

In other words, say you’re exploring a mouldering tomb that’s now the home of a band of human bandits. Entering a room, you find a makeshift deck of cards, dirty bedrolls, and the smoldering remains of a fire.

Immediately, you can infer that this is a living space, that the inhabitants spend a lot of time idle, and that they might be back at any moment. The GM has scattered the elements, but you, as a player, have constructed the story behind the space.

As Smith and Worch say:

Environmental Storytelling is the act of “staging player-space with environmental properties that can be interpreted as a meaningful whole, furthering the narrative of the game.”

…

“Environmental storytelling relies on the player to associate disparate elements and interpret as a meaningful whole.”

The narrative layer they’re talking about isn’t flowcharted or railroaded, it’s a layer of story that the players assemble non-linearly using their PCs senses. Rather than a passive storytelling experience (like two bandits sitting there talking about how bored they are), we’ve created an active and interactive exploration.

[I]nterpretation is more compelling than exposition.

…

“Active” also means that the story isn’t shoved down the player‟s throat –quite the opposite, discovery is self-paced. The player is *pulling* the narrative.

This leads to a familiar world, which is self reinforced, more complete, and more immersive.

Now, what you’ve seen might create a feeling of subtle menace: the bandits could be back at any moment. Or it might create a feeling of sympathy for men living in filthy quarters and passing time without even a proper deck of cards. Or disgust at the moral decrepitude of gambling thieves. In other words:

Every player is going to bring his own views, experience and frame of reference to the scene, and come to different conclusions.So environmental storytelling “Invites interpretation of situations and meaning according to players’ views and experience.”

Telegraphing

Environmental cues can also be a powerful tool for informed decision making by players — a cornerstone of the old school and the classic dungeon experience.

This dead NPC sizzling in a fence points out real environmental dangers to the player. Just like the trail of red blood leading into a dark room helps the player prepare for what’s ahead.

Environmental storytelling “can help the player navigate an area by telegraphing.”

“Meaningful narrative is inferred by players if you give them cues but leave them the space to imagine.”

– Steve Powers, Disney

At Grognardia, James often speaks of the pleasant lacunae in rules and settings that give referees room to imagine the hell out of their game. I posit that those lacunae are equally vital for players, and should be present in the content the referee creates.

Something should be wrong

Smith and Worch:

When dressing up the scene, think about how these elements connect. This is how we take the act of simple environmental jumbling to the next level:

• Placing a cup of coffee in an odd place.
• Offsetting a chair in front of that table a little bit.
• Maybe it was hastily pushed over. Think about what happened there. A single prop can transform the scene.

Imagine another element in our cramped tomb chamber: a dark brown stain across one of the bedrolls. Blood, or shit? Is the owner ill? Wounded? More questions, more room for interpretation and imagination.

The Environmental Layer

All of this exists in a layer of “story” that’s not the railroaded narrative or epic history gamers have come to associate with the term. Environmental story isn’t just the communication of information, it’s another way in which the imaginations of the players and the GM interact.

The process is, fundamentally, archaeological: the players unearth the world piece by piece and invest it with meaning from their own speculations and experiences.

What are your experiences with weaving story into environments? How do your environments reflect the stories your players have created in them?

____

* See James Maliszewski’s excellent essay on Gygaxian Naturalism at Grognardia.