Starting from First Principles (Patreon)

“As you know, the question is, ‘What are characteristics, like Might and Agility, for?’” Matt asked me as we started a kickoff meeting. We knew this was going to be a long one. Even though we’d been working on this game on and off for over year, now it was funded. MCDM was officially committed to making this RPG, and that meant looking at every rule in the game the only way we know how.

It’s James, here to share with you all what our design kickoff meetings are like at MCDM. See, once the game got funded, we scheduled a bunch of these bad boys to start thinking about everything in the game from characteristics to dwarves to language. Since we’ve been spending so much time in kickoff meetings, I thought it would be good for us to show you what our process is like.

Two Kinds of Kickoffs

The first thing to understand is that we have two kinds of kickoff meetings: design meetings and concept meetings. There are a lot of similarities between the ways these meetings go down, but there are a few key differences:

• Design kickoff meetings are mainly about the rules of the game. How should the rules for damage work? What kinds of things should a tactician be able to do? How should skills work? What should the rules for negotiation look like? These meetings include discussions about lore and narrative, but mostly in how they’re related to the rules. That’s actually quite a bit of discussion, because this is a game that helps people build worlds and tell stories, but lore isn’t the focus of the meeting—the rules are. The MCDM design team (currently just Matt and me) must be at these meetings in order for them to happen.
• Concept kickoff meetings are focused on the game’s lore and world. What should our dwarves, elves, humans, and more look like, and what’s the story of the peoples of the timescape? What’s the ecology of a voiceless talker? Does this world have giants? If so, how do those giants live their lives? What should an iconic party of heroes look like in our game? Is the key art image for the fury going to be a hakaan, human, orc, or some other ancestry? These discussions are focused on lore, though we often discuss the rules too, since the fiction informs the rules. If we decide to have dragon people in this game and some of them have wings, then players are going to expect rules for flying dragon people. We can’t ignore the rules during these meetings, but were not really there to create new rules. If something comes up that requires a rules change, we’ll note it, and save it for a later discussion. These concept meetings must include the design and art teams. The art team consists of our three artists/art directors (Jason, Nick, and Grace) and our art producer (Lars).

All are Welcome

While our design kickoffs must include Matt and me and the concept meetings must also include the art and design teams, anyone at MCDM is welcome to sit in on these meetings. In fact, Jason, our executive art director, often sits in on our design chats because he wants to have a good understanding of how our game works. He also has contributed some great ideas and feedback as we discuss the rules! Lars is often part of design meetings, since in addition to being the art producer he’s also in charge of our testing team. Lars is a super-experienced QA expert and gamer with a lot of great feedback and informed opinions, so it’s great to have him in there with us. These meetings are open to anyone on MCDM staff who wants to come, even if all they want to do is listen.

Start from First Principles

Our design meetings start from first principles. We ask, “What is the purpose of [insert rules or lore being discussed in the meeting]?” For instance, we recently had a meeting about characteristics that started with Matt asking the question I kicked off this post with. “‘What are characteristics, like Might and Agility, for?” The question is NOT “What do these do?” or “How do these work in our game?” It’s “What purpose do they serve?” In other words, why include them at all in the game? How do they make the game more fun or easy to play?

We discuss this opening question for a while, because the answer that we agree on becomes a guiding principle for the rest of the meeting. You’ve probably seen us talk about using the words tactical, cinematic, heroic, and fantasy as goals for our design. We basically do the same thing for every meeting we’re in. Once we’re on the same page about this stuff, the rest of the meeting flows more easily.

“Why have characteristics?” The main reason is that they give a way for a player or Director to look at a character sheet or stat block and instantly know what a creature in the game does well and where they are weakest. That tell us two things:

1. Characteristics need to be easy to understand. You have to be able to look at them, and if you know the game’s rules, you can instantly surmise quite a bit about the creature’s strengths and weaknesses both in the fiction and the rules.
2. Characteristics need to be impactful. In order for characteristics to be able to say a lot about a creature in a little bit of time, they need to be a core part of the game. Their influence should be felt in most of the rules. If having a high Might score only affected your carrying capacity, but not attacks, tests made to climb or jump, how far you push people, and a host of other rules, then the Might characteristic would not be a good way to determine how strong a creature is overall.

We do this for every kickoff meeting. “What’s the purpose of negotiation?” “What’s the purpose of the tactician class?” “What’s the purpose of Stamina?” We do it in concept meetings too! “Why do we have dwarves? What’s the fantasy we support by having them as a playable ancestry? What about elves? Humans?” “Hey, we already have fantastic creatures to battle in this game, do we need animals to be a part of it too? Do people want to fight a deer when they could battle a bredbeddle instead?”

There’s also a really good reason for asking this question at the start of a meeting—it helps us shed the assumptions that we bring from other games. We love and play tons of games. The staff at MCDM has played a metric butt-ton of board, card, roleplaying, and video games that use rules and lore similar to what we’re discussing in these meetings. Starting from first principles lets us shed the way other games do it and think about how we would do it. Often we wind up in the same place as some other games, but starting from first principles helps us understand why we’re doing it this way and lets us own the rules and lore because we got there as genuinely as we know how. It’s honestly quite freeing to come into a meeting and say, “Okay. Forget everything you know about magic in other games, and let’s talk about why our game should have it, if indeed, it should at all. What is the purpose of magic in our game?”

Sometimes these meetings don’t make it out of the first principles phase or they shift focus because the answer can be, “There actually isn’t a good reason to have that in the game.” When we were first making this game and talking about resting, Matt asked, “Do we have something like short rests in this game? What’s the point?” The answer was that we didn’t think short rests would add anything to this particular heroic game. Narratively, we could imagine people taking quick breathers between the action, but that happens whether or not you give them a reason to do so. As far as we could tell, there wasn’t any good purpose to short rests for the game we’re trying to create, so we said, “We don’t have these,” and moved on to the next topic, “What is the purpose of long rests, or in our case, just resting, in the game?”

With agreed upon first principles in place, we start brainstorming.

Brainstorming

Once we have our principles in place, we start brainstorming. “If the purpose of armor is to add to your survivability, what if it straight up added Stamina?” “It’d be really cool if dwarves had a way of tattooing themselves that was carving sigils into their stone skin.” “All the components of an operator’s suit are compatible, so it would make sense if all the pieces looked like they fit together no matter how you mix and match them.”

When folks are brainstorming, we toss out ideas and build on the ones we like. Brainstorming is all about getting the ideas out there, and allowing people to build on each other’s best thoughts. In order to do that, we follow two rules of brainstorming:

1. Take notes. Good note-taking during a brainstorming session has served me well over the course of my various creative careers and hobbies. When you’re working on a game as big as ours, there are inevitably ideas that you’ll believe in, pursue, and watch fall apart over the course of months. At that point, it helps to go back into your brainstorming notes about that aspect of the project and see what other ideas you liked but chose not to pursue.
2. Don’t be dismissive. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm.” What it really means is, “Don’t tell someone their idea sucks, because it will shut them and others down, making them less likely to contribute ideas, reducing your creative power as a team.” Some of the best work to come out of a brainstorm starts with someone throwing out a half-baked, bog standard, or vaguely worded idea containing a spark of awesome. The rest of the team can build on that idea, clearing away the bad parts and throwing fuel on the spark to make it a roaring fire. Brainstorms create ideas that no single person in the meeting would have thought of on their own, because we’re all inspiring and building on each other’s stuff. Also, every person is their own worst critic. I’ve often thrown out ideas in meetings that make me think, “Should I even share this? It probably stinks on ice,” only to have a coworker respond with, “That’s your best idea yet!” or “I’m really glad you said that!” Encourage people to share ideas, even the bad ones. Bad is subjective, and you never know what could come of it.

When brainstorming during a concepting meeting, we’ll sometimes pull photos and illustrations in to help visualize ideas. “You know how some lizards have these big frills on the back of their heads? What if our dragons had something like that? Here, let me show you what I mean.”

In the case of our characteristics design meeting, we went down a lot of different roads with brainstorming. “We have the standard method of assigning a score to different characteristics to show a creature’s power levels. But do we need all of these? Fewer characteristics makes them even faster to interpret. I’m not sure we need Might and Endurance or Reason and Intuition.” “If the purpose of characteristics is to show your overall strengths and weaknesses, what if instead of numbers, your Might had a word called a quality associated with it. Instead of having a 3 in Might, you’d be Beefy. Instead of a −1 in Agility, you’d be Clumsy. Then people could really read it at a glance without having to reinterpret the numbers!” “What if our characteristics were more granular than Might and Agility? What if we had Accuracy for dealing extra damage with weapons, Power for dealing extra damage with supernatural attacks, Dodge and Endurance to resist physical effects, Will to resist mind effects, Force to increase the TN to resist your supernatural attacks, and Combat Mastery to resist the TN of your weapon attacks? Then skill rolls could be a totally separate thing that just use skill bonuses.” We explored a lot of different ideas.

Brainstorming lasts as long as it needs to. Sometimes we spend 20 minutes or more building on one idea. Sometimes we throw out a lot of ideas very quickly. It all depends on what we’re talking about. Once we get all the ideas people want to discuss down, we analyze them.

Analyze

Once we’ve talked about how different ideas could work, we evaluate them. This typically isn’t a formal process where we go down the list of ideas and grade each. After brainstorming, we have a good sense of what the folks at the meeting think are the best ideas. Those are the ones we take the time to analyze. If someone feels an idea is left behind, they’re free to bring it up! I’ve done this a lot. “Hey, I’d like to circle back to that idea you had, Jason, about armor simply adding to your Stamina. I think it’s worth talking about trying!”

We discuss the idea’s strengths, so that we’re all on the same page about why we like it and how it supports the first principles we established at the start of the meeting. Then we start thinking about all the different ways the rule or concept might pop up in the game. “If hakaan are supposed to be big, what happens if someone play a hakaan operator? Can they fit in the armor?” “I think Intuition and Reason are things we should differentiate. You can imagine a hero in our game who has a lot of experience and street smarts, which I’d call Intuition, who doesn’t have a lot of formal education, which would be Reason. Like a lovable scoundrel!” During this phase, we try to poke holes in the ideas we loved the most. The best time to know if something isn’t going to work is as soon as possible. We can’t be afraid to say, “There’s some good stuff in there, but that idea just won’t work for this game.” We’ve still got notes on it, and it might be useful down the line.

For our meeting about characteristics, we discussed the three ideas I listed above for quite a while. As we analyzed them, we learned a few different things:

• When we first started working on the game, we had six characteristics: Might, Agility, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, and Presence. As you can see from the examples above, we did determine the Reason and Intuition should be separate characteristics in this game. However, we did think that we might be able to get rid of Endurance. What was Endurance really saying about a creature that wasn’t covered by Might to represent physical staying power and Intuition to represent mental staying power? On the rules side, Endurance mostly factored into your number of Recoveries and your Stamina total, which could just be two independent statistics that improve based on your class and other factors. Ultimately, this would be a very small change in comparison to our other ideas, but still a big one in terms of the game, so we decided to try it.
• We also liked the idea of replacing scores with key words like Beefy and Clumsy. We thought that we could easily cover the spread for PCs with just five or so descriptive words for each characteristic. For example, Might could have the following qualities, in order of strength from highest to lowest: Ripped, Beefy, Average, Scrawny, and Feeble. This worked great for PCs, but it didn’t translate well to monsters. Shouldn’t an ogre be stronger than Ripped? And shouldn’t a giant be stronger than whatever an ogre is? And shouldn’t a dragon be stronger than that? Likewise, shouldn’t a pixie or skitterling be weaker than feeble? This method would have us using so many word to mean “Strong” and “Nimble” and “Smart” and “Wise” that the granularity would get lost. This idea died at this phase in the meeting.
• We talked about the idea that you might have a different set of characteristics that are all directly related to combat with skills separated from them. One for damage for weapons, one damage for supernatural attacks, one for determining the resistance TN of your weapon attacks, one for determining the resistance TN of your supernatural attacks, and three for determining your bonuses to different types of resistance rolls. Then skills would be separate bonuses. We did like this one, so we decided to move forward with it too.

The analysis phase helps us develop a picture of which ideas are best and most worth our time to pursue. Once we have that, we form an action plan.

Action Plan

This part of the meeting is pretty simple. We all agree on the options we like. We check in to make sure that nobody has anything else to say, and then we assign out the next steps. It might be that the art team says, “Okay, Jason is going to do some concept sketches of what a dwarf looks like,” or “Let’s work with Lars to find a freelance cartographer to draw some sketches of a Vasloria map.” The design team might say, “Awesome. Matt’s going to write up a language web,” or “James is going to go ahead and make new pregens and monsters using these ideas so we can playtest them.” After we assign the work, we also make a plan to meet again and review it.

Our characteristics kickoff meeting gave me two assignments:

1. The next time I run a playtest, let’s try it without Endurance and see what people think. There was no need to run a playtest for JUST this, but we had lots of other stuff to try.
2. Write up a design document describing in detail how characteristics and skills working separately would operate. Matt and I would review the document in another meeting and decide if we should test this method too. When you write out the rules, you always find holes in the design that you missed in the kickoff meeting, so this is helpful in continuing to test the viability of the idea.

After you make the action plan, the meeting is adjourned (or we hang out a bit and talk about Baldur’s Gate 3). Time to get to work!

Next Steps

After the kickoff, the work happens. Depending on the action plan, we might have another meeting to review a document, piece of art, or have a playtest or we might just follow-up on our company Discord with each other. But that’s all process stuff for another time.

However, I can’t leave you high and dry with respect to our characteristics. Where did we net out? Well, dropping Endurance worked well. After the first test we did without Endurance, not a single person mentioned missing it. No special attention was drawn to the fact that we had cut it, and no one seemed to notice. That seems like a very good cut!

In terms of the characteristic system I was creating … I did it, and then we had a meeting, and ultimately we ended up not using the system. Matt and I were enthusiastic about the idea, because it allowed for maximum flexibility when building your hero. Did you want to pump up damage, your own ability to resist effects, or the irresistible nature of your own attacks? Ultimately, we felt that by splitting up what your hero could do by having core combat characteristics and a bunch of separate skills would make it harder for the characteristics to represent a creature at a glance. They’d only represent that creature’s abilities in combat, not who the creature was overall. We also thought it added some unnecessary complications to the system. On top of all that, we got your feedback and decided to scale down the amount of resistance rolls made in the game, so into the bin it goes!

Thanks for reading this folks. I gotta run to another kickoff meeting!

—James