PUSH IT! (Patreon)

I want to create a melee ability that breaks through an enemy’s defense. My first thought is Auron’s Armor Break skill from Final Fantasy X, where he runs up and swings his sword at the enemy and their defense goes down. It’s a cool and useful move! Now if you were to bring it into a tabletop RPG wholesale, it’s hard to understand what’s going on. This sword swing is like all my other sword swings, but THIS sword swing weakens the enemy?

Non non non we need to PUSH IT! This ability has you pull out the Impact Fangblade, a massive sword you’re forced to drag along the ground towards your enemy, heave skyward, and allow it to meteor down upon the enemy’s armor and crumpling it with them inside. Allies have edge on their attacks against them for the rest of the encounter, and I’m pretty sure their next of kin takes damage once they reach 16 years old.

This isn’t to knock Auron. He embodies a lot of what I’m going to talk about.

Howdy! I’m Willy, your next Patreon poster! I’m known for being a weirdo game designer that enjoys making bold choices that players can sink their teeth into. Today I’m going to give you permission to let your imagination run wild 🦁

PUSH IT! is used in multiple art and design disciplines. In illustration, you push your contours to more extreme curves and angles to express the shape better. In animation, you push your poses and extend the movement further so that what the character is doing reads better. And in imagination play design, you push your concepts into bigger and bolder ideas so the players can easily share them with one another while they play.

Why is this important for imagination play? Well think about what sets it apart from visual mediums; take what you would see in a video game and compare it to an ability you’d read in an RPG book:

The text version of the ability needs us to PUSH IT! before it can reach the impact of the in-game version

Roleplaying is a group hallucination event. We use miniatures and set pieces and illustrations to help calibrate everyone’s imaginations to a similar space so that the game rules don’t break down. This phenomena extends to people reading the game rules before the game even starts! It’s up to the designer to paint a clear enough picture for the player so that they can paint an identical picture to the other players! It can be a hair pulling game of telephone for everyone involved!

So the players aren’t in your mind, nor are they in the other players’ minds. When you're coming up with rules and ideas for your tabletop roleplaying game, you need to make sure they're coming in crystal clear. And the best way to do that is to PUSH IT!, often further than you find comfortable.

Matt’s talked about the Polder player option recently, so lemme tell you how it shook out from my perspective and how I like to PUSH IT!

It’s Matt, James, Djordi, and myself, along with Gertz, Lars, and… was everyone in that room? I think so. But we talked through who the Polder was and what was established for them up until this point:

• They’re our halflings, visibly human looking short folk with slightly bulbous noses.

• They were created by the beast lords to be servants.

• They can be super quiet and usually go unseen.

• They make for great shadows.

• They live among humans with minimal issues.

• They don’t get scared or corrupted

• The ones we’ve seen so far are New Yorkers.
  

• And the big one, they’re magical.

Okay so if Polders are magical, but physically not much different from humans, how do we express this in a way that’s distinct and everyone can imagine? Points 2 and 3 are what we have to go off of, with our humans and everyone else’ halflings as sort of our guide posts. The Polder needs to be familiar enough for people coming from other games to recognize while staying in line and coexisting with our humans.

Halflings already kind of fill the bill. They can move around enemies and hide behind allies, they’ve got an ever present luck to them, and they aren’t easily frightened. The luck bit is pretty magical, but it isn’t a distinct enough detail about halflings that people latch onto. Non non, I want their movement traits.

Moving around enemies and hiding can tie into Point 3, but we need to PUSH IT! to make for a distinguishing feature of the Polder. How are they super quiet? Their footsteps don’t make noise. How small and nimble are they? Nimble enough to ignore difficult terrain completely. Already these features are distinct enough that players can easily remember and call forth in play. “The road is rocky. Send the Polder!” And all we did was take the halfling ideas and said PUSH IT!

Silent steps and being nimble definitely seem valuable enough to support Point 2, but that can’t be the only reason why they’re silent servants, can they? There’s also nothing particularly magical about these features either. Let’s take a step back and look at Point 4: they make good shadows. Well what makes them good shadows? What can we give the polder that compliments the shadow without stepping on the class’s featureset?

Allow me to take the idea of the shadow and PUSH IT! on a different axis. What if Polders could turn into shadows? Something simple that could be used in combination with their movement and would be super useful for a sneaky servant to have.

Yeah this!!!

For the shadow class, an ability like this is more of a ribbon. You literally sink into the shadows and you don’t move; it’s definitely useful in multiple situations, but it isn’t going to make or break the class. However, it absolutely makes the Polder distinct from other player options in the game and from Halflings and Hobbits at large! The Polder Sceadwian ability is drafted and ready for testing.

How do you know when you've used PUSH IT! on an idea a bit too far? You can get better at having a sense for it over time, but you test it in play! Are people getting caught up and questioning what's happening because it's way beyond their comprehension? Is it over-centralizing to the point where the cool thing loses its edge from standing out every time or repeatedly clashing with the tone?

Is it fun despite all that?

We have the benefit of incredible testers who can vibe check these things, but you can get a lot out of a second opinion from friends or colleagues to see if you're way out of line. And if your idea is too much, well PULL IT BACK!

And what about subtle ideas? How can we PUSH IT! on smaller, more meaningful details in our designs? A part of doing bold ideas is avoiding having too many things going on at once or it becomes overwhelming and difficult to imagine. With subtle ideas, a hidden dew claw, a tiny kiss that grants a luck bonus, you repeat the idea in multiple places and/or make even more space in the design for them to stand out. It's kinda funny actually, the best way to do something subtle is to put those ideas out in the open by themselves for everyone to see.

The founders of the art of PUSH IT!

I'm a clown. We've been using greasepaint to exaggerate our expressions so the people in the back of the crowd can see what we're doing. If you feel like your designs aren’t getting across to your players, then it’s time to PUSH IT! so the entire crowd can see inside your mind and talk about them on the car ride home. 

Hope you enjoyed this one! I enjoy talking about techniques from other fields and how they can apply to whatever I’m working on. I’m pretty sure we’ll have more opportunities to talk about transposition, abstraction of ideas, and contextual analogs in the future, too :)