Revelation through Exploration

by Jeff Crook
November 13, 2000

As part of my Skotos design goals, I thought I might try my hand at this article-writing thing. G-M Skarka (and I just have to say, what a perfect first pair of initials he has, considering what it is that he does) is detailing how a game is developed, from conception to birth. In my case, the game concept has already been developed. I have a game world, a history, and a large-scale world future. I have lots of character-creation details. I have a large list of skills, and a universal mechanic for how those skills work. Basically, I can see my world from an atlas point of view. There are a few places that I have already visited in some detail, and many more that I intend to uncover.

So how, I asked myself, do I reveal my world to the players? Do I begin with the standard approach and provide an encyclopedia of knowledge that their characters may or may not know? Or do I open the world bit by bit, peeling it like an orange, or an onion. Some people might say a jawbreaker (which is notoriously hard to peel).

When I created this game for tabletop play, I wrote a 140 page Player’s Handbook that went through character creation and gave a brief overview and background of the races and regional differences between people, the mythology and religion, the skills, the game mechanic, and the things for sale in the market. Pretty standard stuff, right? Just what you need to start rolling dice, or, in the case of my game, flipping domino tiles.

Unfortunately, none of that is appropriate any more. Maybe I should rephrase that. Fortunately, that is no longer needed. When you are beginning to play a character, how would you rather learn what is available for sale at the tea shop – by flipping through two hundred pages of supplements, or by entering the tea shop and looking at the labels or asking the shopkeeper? What’s more fun – choosing a martial arts style from a list of forty, or visiting each school in the village and talking to the masters, meeting the students, or watching a combat? Isn’t that the wonder and the mystery of role-playing that first grabbed us, the thrill of discovering a whole new world where whole new things are possible? This is going to be exciting.

The Qigung game does offer special challenges for storybuilders and storyplayers both. It is almost like a science fiction game, in that the elements of the game have little or no base in the average player’s experience. Most people who play fantasy games have at least read fantasy literature, so most fantasy games have a medieval basis familiar to the average player. No one really needs to spend a lot of time explaining what a long sword is, or a shield, or chain mail armor, or a dragon. However, the opposite is true of a punjung bi or a judge’s pen. Yet even those odd weapons are drawn directly from traditional Chinese weaponry. Dienso Da War Wo uses the nomenclature particular to the game, so even if you know Chinese and are familiar with martial arts games, you wouldn’t know right off hand that this is a type of leather armor made in Dienso province. And where snake or tiger boxing seem pretty obvious, how many people unfamiliar with the game would know about White Eyebrow boxing, or even what Gong Fut style is? Gong fut means ‘poised arrow,’ so that should help, but without that in-game translation, the learning curve of the average player is significantly increased, especially when you start talking about the evil nature of most bhokkra.

When I first designed this game and gave the Player’s Handbook to my first group of playtesters, they were a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options and information, very little of which was even remotely familiar to them. Although Chan-la is based on China, it is quite different – purposefully so. I wanted to avoid any arguments about what was right or wrong about how the martial arts, or any other aspects of the Far East, are represented in the game. The martial arts invoke strong emotions in those who study them, and they don’t like to see their own particular system misrepresented. I began the game design with the intent of recreating the familiar where I could, but within my own rules, and then making up the rest.

So, with this first group of playtesters, I created a group of pregenerated characters for them to play. Strangely enough, they are still playing that original group, although I have given them numerous opportunities to create new characters of their own. Even so, it took some time for many of them – long time traditional AD&D players all – to get used to the strangeness of not being allowed to buy a horse or wear metal armor because of their social class. And still, my wife, who plays a character skilled in drunken beggar style, with weapon skills in the brass smoking pipe and the inn stool, didn’t really grasp how peculiar her character truly could be played, much less how to fight with an inn stool, until I took her to see Jackie Chan’s "Legend of the Drunken Master" a couple of weeks ago. Now, she is ready to play! she says.

Still, I have learned from that mistake. With the tabletop game, you began with a choice of (this is just a guess) over two hundred skills. The combinations of those skills and their levels are nearly infinite – far too heavy a burden to place on a beginning player. With the Skotos game, I intend to scale back the scope of the game’s revelations. The first stage or grand theater will take place in a small rural village. There will be a good but average assortment of skills available on the surface, more for those who dig and role-play. I am taking the example of my own experience to regulate how the world is revealed. I live in Memphis, where there are a few choices of martial arts schools, but not nearly the number or the variety of schools available in San Francisco, which in turn cannot offer the choices of Hong Kong. The same sort of availability will exist in the developing game world of Chan-la. Some of the characters in the first theater will, of course, hail from the San Franciscos and the Hong Kongs of Chan-la, and these will be granted a deeper beginning knowledge of the wide world. But the majority of characters will only know what is available in their own little village. And as they grow and progress and begin to explore the world beyond their village, hopefully they will come to see that the big fish of their small pond weren’t so big after all.

To this end, I hope to reveal in a series of articles the various things that the average villager of Chan-la would know, from the major heroes of history, to the nature of the important gods, to how to throw a good upper cut or a knee to the groin. They’ll know of magic and maybe even have seen it performed, and they’ll have heard rumors of the strange powers of Lohan monks. They’ll know what sorts of nasty beasts lurk in the nearby forest, and what happens to you if you neglect your ancestors’ tombs. But mostly they’ll know about their own worries and concerns, about the rivalries between the three most important families in the region, about the forest and the hills and the river, and all that lies within their own little corner of Dienso province in the empire of Chan-la.

The hardest thing for me will be to not spill the beans.