Blog 12.5: Game Design Philosophy- Exemplary Exemplars

There’s something I keep hearing when I talk to players, new ones, old ones, GMs, online, and in real life. It’s a consistent request, and I think it’s really worth listening to:

"We want more examples of play!"

Now, there are some game designers I've spoken with (board games, card games, RPGs, etc.) who philosophically believe gameplay-examples-in-books are less important than they used to be. That makes some sense because of YouTube, podcasts, and actual plays can fill the same role. There's also a lot of science that demonstrates people learn new skills better from audio and video than text. Don't get me wrong-- I think those are fantastic ways to learn a game and I sincerely hope we have the time, energy, and budget to create some ourselves before release. But, I don’t fully agree with that line of thought.

Our rules will come with examples. Lots of them. Maybe too many. And not as throwaway one-liners, either. We’re telling a full, messy, consequence-soaked crime drama through them. The same crew, tentatively named Peña, Murphy, Judy, and Valeria, shows up again and again. We want you to get to know them as you get to know the mechanics. The structure changes depending on the chapter: sometimes it’s beat-by-beat, an exemplar scenario right after a rule; other times we explain a chunk of ideas, then drop a longer scene that shows how they work together. We mostly decided which one to do by gut feeling and how complex the topics are.

One thing came out of this that we didn’t expect: writing these examples turned into a rudimentary in-house playtest; a stress test to see how things click. Do players have enough tools to act? Are the consequences clear? What happens when someone wants to do something weird? What happens when a character’s in XYZ situation but we only talked about ABC? While devising the scenarios, we caught strange interactions, phrasing that didn’t land, and “edge cases” that weren’t actually all that rare. It made the game tighter, and it made us want to include more.

The story we tell in the “Rolling Dice” chapter starts with a plane full of cocaine and ends with the crew insulting a cartel boss to his face. Along the way, we cover how to build your dice pool, when to roll, simultaneous actions, special dice, Deus Ex Machina, Hamartia, failure, success, and that key middle ground: success with consequences. Here’s a taste of what we walk players through:

- Peña tries to land a plane in a thunderstorm, with a broken altimeter, the cops looking for his runway, and cocaine in the back.

- After he brings the cocaine in, Murphy's distributing it, but gets robbed by a rival, Berna. He escapes through a bathroom window just as buckshot from a sawed-off tears through a suitcase of product.

- The crew, desperate to earn money to pay back the cartel, robs a bank. Teach of them has a role to play, and three of them succeed-- but Judy fails to stop a guard. Valeria has to threaten the manager at gunpoint while the guard struggles against Judy.

- Later, they have to silence the witnesses who can place them at the bank, four witnesses in four different locations, and the hit has to be simultaneous. Peña’s goes smooth. Murphy screws up and sets off an alarm. That makes Valeria’s job harder, but she pulls it off. Regardless, thanks to Murphy, the cops are coming.

- Judy doesn't like how it turned out and invokes the Deus Ex Machina mechanic (which we’ll talk about in a future blog) to save the day. Murphy’s mistake is undone... mostly. The new fiction holds, but there’s a cost for using divine intervention, and Judy pays dearly.

- Then the crew tries to pay off the cartel. Even with the bank money, they’re short. They explain, they plead, they negotiate. Valeria burns a Hamartia point (a metacurrency) to succeed. Murphy does too, but he gambles too hard and loses. His arrogance makes the boss snap. The door slams shut on that relationship.

We wrote those scenes to show the system in motion. In their full, non-summarized form, they cover eight different mechanics. And if we can take rules, which are, by nature, a little antiseptic, and turn them into a fun, dramatic story? That’s a big win. If you want to know what happens to Judy, Valeria, Peña, and Murphy next, you’ll also want to read the rules that are affecting them.

So, what are your thoughts on examples of play? How do you want them presented? Would you prefer podcasts, YouTube, etc.? Or do you like having them in the book?