Borrowing from Video Games: SW:TOR’s Story

If you’d told me a few months ago how many hours I was going to blow on Star Wars: The Old Republic within my first month, I wouldn’t have believed you. After all, I’ve been clean of World of Warcraft for nearly five years. I’ve played other DIKU-style MMOs in the intervening time completely casually, often getting bored after a few hours in. I’ve been eagerly awaiting Guild Wars 2 for precisely the reason that it’s replacing a lot of the most obvious inheritances from EverQuest and WoW. Yet the gameplay in TOR could almost entirely be run in any standard DIKU from WoW to Rift with just an art and sounds change. And, while I’m a big fan of lightsabers and all the other assorted brand identity of Star Wars, that in itself wouldn’t explain the draw of the MMO.

What does is the story.

The most obvious evidence of this is the sheer amount of cash spent on voice acting and animation: every mission in the game has at least a short conversation that is fully voiced, animated, and cut like a scene from an animated film. It’s leagues beyond “click NPC, see mission text, click accept” and the level of animation and NPC interaction is far beyond even any other voiced MMOs I’ve played. When you get your quest to kill ten rats you’re going to feel viscerally that the death of this arbitrary number of arbitrary critters is a matter of life or death for your questor. Not only do you see the emotional reaction to your mission completion, you even usually get a thank you note a little while later giving you the denouement of the plotline.

That’s useful, high-production-value gloss. It really makes the game shine. But it’s not the true engine of the story.

The real brilliance is the story flow, which is something I’ve never seen another MMO really do in the same way, and certainly not to the same success. The way most MMOs these days work is the concept of quest hub to quest hub. You go to a little village or camp, there are a bunch of NPCs that have missions in the area that need doing, and eventually one of them gives you a mission that takes you to the next quest hub. There may be some overarching logic to your overall path, but it gets drowned in the noise of all the quests you’re doing. And the overarching logic is shared by everyone in your faction.

TOR starts with a personal, class-specific quest. It’s different for each of the eight primary classes in the game. You’re on a personal mission: the quest to catch and ruin the criminal that stole your ship, the careful dance of ending a terrorist conspiracy, a secretive search for a rival operative that threatens to undo your master’s plans, and so on. Each of these personal stories is broken into a whole series of smaller goals… and each of those smaller goals sends you by the ubiquitous quest hubs to pick up a few more missions while you just happen to be in the area. It’s a simple and yet winning change: instead of the focus being on whatever arbitrary pile of tasks happen to be in the area, it’s on the much more compelling (yet equally arbitrary) series of class story tasks that happen to send you through the area.

And these tasks are incredibly arbitrary for the simple fact that every one of the four class stories in a faction has to share exactly the same series of beats. If you travel in a group of four, each a different primary class, you’ll never have to wander more than a bit out of your way to do each other’s story quests. The agent goes to the temple to stop terrorists, the inquisitor is hunting a relic buried there, the warrior needs yet another relic, and the hunter has to eliminate a troublesome NPC that happens to be there. Yet the overall design is clever enough that your own story doesn’t feel especially slighted by knowing everyone else is going to the same places for different reasons.

That’s a long lead up of explanation to get to the question: Why don’t we do this more often in tabletop RPGs?

One of the biggest problems I’ve seen in tabletop games, particularly those run by new GMs (or just for new groups where the GM doesn’t know the players well), is in getting player engagement. As a GM, you put your story out there and the players either find something about it that their characters invest in, or they slog along out of friendliness hoping something will eventually click. I’ve seen a lot of games eventually stall out largely because most of the group never really cared much about the story.

The obvious solution to this is to run a sandbox game where the players completely drive the action based on what their characters want. But, in addition to not working well for all genres, a true sandbox requires a level of improv skill and/or prep time that not every GM is ready to bring. Plus, ignoring the derisive label of frustrated novelist, a lot of GMs get inspired by a story idea that they want to try rather than an open setting.

TOR offers a compromise: an individually-directed story that nevertheless parallels and draws the player into the story the GM is interested in telling. Instead of the player character’s goals being side tasks that sometimes distract the group from the main story, they’re the hooks that get the group into the main story in the first place.

Interestingly, the place I see this kind of thing most often is convention games with pre-gen characters that have written backstories. GMs that make these often take great pains to ensure that the pre-gen’s goals will keep the plot moving. Why not do this with your home game where the players each have their own character? For all but the most closed or disinterested players, it’s a simple matter to ask them for their take on where they’d like their characters to grow or what they want them to accomplish. Then set measurable steps to this goal (either as achievements out of play with the player, or delivered in-character but clearly during the first session). You can even bribe the player with the promise of a big dump of exp or other upgrades set to milestones or total completion: for certain players, nothing focuses the mind like pursuit of system-based character improvement.

Once you know where the players want to go and you have a finite series of steps to get there, it should be a simple matter to bind those steps into the main story you want to run. Want the players in a haunted house? The solution to a player’s personal mystery is hidden inside. Want them to infiltrate an enemy group? One of them has information pertinent to a player’s story that has to be socially engineered. Need them to kill ten rats? A contact has a crucial piece of the puzzle and that’s his price for turning it over. Sure, the players may grumble a little: it is obvious what you’re doing. But as long as it has a measurable impact at getting them closer to their goals, they’ll most likely play along.

And the coolest thing about this in a tabletop game is that you should be able to disguise it more easily than an MMO with areas that have fixed levels of enemies. Player goals don’t necessarily all have to serendipitously wind up at the same place. They can be trusted to help one another on disparate goals only to see a story emerging from all of them together. Or, for groups where their goals run largely perpendicular to one another, you could even gloss the entire game as periods of downtime progress on goals with sessions chronicling the times that a bunch of the PCs’ goals happen to intersect.

It might not be high art, but it certainly beats a player complaining that he doesn’t even know why his character is there.

Ultimate Star Wars – Force Powers

Originally posted September 2007

Further narrowing down my Star Wars game concept where only episodes 4-6 are canon (here and here), I’d like to figure out which Force powers actually show up in the original trilogy vs. what powers were added in the expanded universe. I’m also interested in keeping the Dark Side powers as different methods of using the standard powers (to keep those that fall to the Dark Side from having to work harder to get their mojo, since the Dark Side is supposed to be faster and easier). From memory, I have:

• Force Senses (Innate Power for the Use the Force skill): Use to overcome sensory penalties, use a lightsaber without personal danger, initiate telepathy between closely attuned sensitives, and receive minor flashes of precognition.
• Force Push (Low-finesse TK): Use to shove, lift, throw, and tractor in objects, as well as to make force leaps and otherwise enhance athletic ability.
• Force Wave (Mass TK): Use as special attack to shove lots of people or objects at once.
• Force Manipulation (Mid-finesse TK): Use to manipulate objects in simple fashions (push buttons, turn knobs, etc.) or to choke or crush objects.
• Force Precision (High-finesse TK): Use to make fine manipulations of objects like assembling a lightsaber in mid-air. Also, when used out of anger, it tends to agitate electrons in the air and become Force Lightning.
• Use Lightsaber: Allows you to bring your Force skill to bear on using a lightsaber, rather than the normal melee skill, and to parry objects that should be too fast to block (such as blaster bolts).
• Mind Trick (Minor Mind Control): Use to bend the minds of the simple for short periods (functionally, use Force skill instead of Persuade skill).
• Mind Illusion (Moderate Mind Control): Use to create visions in the minds of others that will seem to be completely real. Unlike Mind Trick, the user does not have to engage in conversation with the target or even be perceived.
• Mind Shackle (Major Mind Control): Use to gradually enslave minions to your will (functionally, use Force skill as Leadership).
• A Moment Ahead (Minor Precog): Use to see a few moments into the future. The character can use this to receive bonuses on appropriate skills, such as Pilot or Melee. The character also receives uncontrolled visions of the future, often while dreaming.
• Destiny View (Major Precog): Use to see the future up to several weeks ahead (even further for especially significant events). These visions can be clouded or outright wrong when multiple precognitive Force users are working at cross purposes.
• We are All Connected (Telepathy): Use to initiate telepathy with non-attuned individuals.

That gives Luke essentially four powers plus the innate, so he can be built easily in Spirit of the Century, while leaving enough other powers to account for alternate specialties or badass older Jedi.

Ultimate Star Wars – History

Originally posted August 2007

Since I still have hopes of some day running an Ultimate Star Wars game (a rethinking of the prequels with only the information from episodes 4-6 as canon), and based on my Star Wars tech unifying theory, here’s a brief alternate history of the universe that I was inspired to write this afternoon. (Or it could be close to the official history, I dunno.)

The Force is not just a religion, it is central to our society; those who deride it as merely myth know not their past, and are doomed to repeat it.

Aeons ago, the populations of a hundred worlds struggled against the limits of their science. Close neighbors exchanged messages, told one another their stories, but the universal speed of light made an impenetrable wall against their meeting. Cultures that could exchange words in beamed radio waves within a day would require years of travel to cross the gulf of stars between them.

But one day, the grid of communications began to fire with urgency. The stars were alight with attackers that moved from world to world, star to star, as if by magic. The Sith had come, bringing their unstoppable war machine from beyond the stars. With but a thought, the least of them could overwhelm the greatest technologies of the greatest thinkers of all the worlds.

Defeat was inevitable. For a thousand years the repressive regime of the Sith Empire crushed the populations of known space beneath its heel. Science faltered, light died, and all bowed before their Sith lords. The Sith repressed anything that might rise to threaten the power of their birthright.

But a millennium is a long time. In the dark age of the Sith, nonetheless a renaissance was occurring. Serfs and slaves were moved from world to world, and those long separated by space could finally meet and share ideas, friendships, and rebellion. Though the Sith carefully guarded the powers of the Force, enough was observed over the centuries that some could dedicate themselves to fathoming its secrets.

The war was long and brutal, and much of it was fought in freeing the minds of the people from the yoke of slavery and fear. Overwhelmed by their subjects, the Sith turned to their powers and found them countered by the emergent Jedi order. Each time a mob of rebels attacked, there were Jedi to protect them.

Within a century, the power of the Sith was broken, and civilization was emerging anew. Yet the loss of the Sith, too, meant the loss of faster than light space travel; the massive Force-workings needed to traverse the stars were beyond the self-taught Jedi. Full of the need to meet our brothers once more, we made what was perhaps a great mistake. The Force is faith, it is true, but any miracle that is repeatable can be analyzed and incorporated by science. Within another century, those with no sensitivity to the Force had, yet, made the Force central to their technology.

Ships bent space around themselves, moving as quickly as light. Fields of force could be tuned and shaped, making plasma weapons feasible and useful. Now the many races could touch one another. Now the many races could kill one another.

We have existed in some stage of war ever since, with the Jedi order doing its best to contain the worst atrocities of those that rely so heavily on the Force and yet discount its majesty. We had the powers of the Sith, but we refused to use them as our oppressors had done, and we have seen this decision bring us to the brink of ruin.

The Jedi order is dying, allowed to atrophy by those that refuse to admit that our religion is the soul of their science. When we are gone, who will keep the universe from sliding, once more, into a dark age of tyranny?

Ultimate Star Wars – Tech

Originally Posted July 2006

So I’m not sure how I got to thinking about this, but I think it had something to do with the idea someone mentioned about rewriting episodes 1-3 while discarding everything created for the universe except in episodes 4-6. Which got me thinking about running a game where the only canon is what appears in 4-6. Which got me thinking about recreating the technology explanations solely to fit what appears on screen in the most efficient way possible.

The problem with Star Wars tech is the problem with pretty much all sci-fi that creates a story and then invents technology to fit: you often get good stories, but the science tends to suffer more than if you come up with a few advanced tech assumptions/conceits first and then build logically from there.

Even though Firefly/Serenity was probably Joss simply looking for tech that was thematically appropriate to a space western, I quite like the post-hoc explanation in the RPG that most of the tech that’s beyond what we can currently produce is based on the partial Grand Unification of Electromagnetism and Gravity.

I figured some similar simple assumption/conceit could be used to explain the tech that appears in Star Wars 4-6 much more succinctly than the modulating phase crystals and turbo lasers and all of the stuff that shows up in the EU explanations.

So science savvy people, please let me know just how far fetched this conceit is, and whether the science that follows seems plausible, assuming that the conceit is true, within a space opera setting.

Conceit:

In the galaxy far, far away, a generally inexplicable but measurable Force allows electromagnetism and magnetic particles to bind in ways not allowable by general laws of physics. Technological apparati can be created to manipulate energy along the wavelengths that trigger this force effect. Some individuals seem to have a biological chemistry or pattern of brain wavelengths that allows them to naturally produce the force effect to a certain degree, and they have established a religion that claims that the Force is evidence of the supernatural.

Uses of the force effect:

The primary use of this effect is to create stable, manipulable fields of magnetism and electrons. These force fields can be used to channel, contain, diffuse, and reflect energy in practical ways. With enough charged particles fed into the fields, they can even serve to screen against standard particles by providing enough charge to resemble the electomagnetic field that keeps the atoms of solid material from penetrating one another.

Blasters: Blasters produce a short-lived cylinder or column of force field that is injected with charged plasma and fired at a target. Generally, the speed of the shot allows the field to bind the plasma until it reaches a target; blasts that go astray tend to break down rather quickly as the plasma cools and disperses into gas – this rate is based on the power of the weapon, and determines its effective range. The blaster effect has been well documented and its technology mass produced such that blasters are usually safe in any trained hands.

Lightsabers: The elegant weapon of an earlier age, lightsabers were developed simultaneously with blasters and are both simpler and more complicated. Rather than binding a bolt of plasma as blasters do, the saber produces a thin column of force of only a meter or so in length, and injects it with plasma. The field is designed to contain and repel other fields and plasma, and yet allow physical matter to pass and come in contact with the plasma contained within. Because the field and plasma remain attached to the generator, energy loss is much lower than a blaster since the charge of the field and the heat and amount of plasma can be simply maintained rather than being created anew with each blast. Since the plasma is being constantly refreshed, a lightsaber blade cuts and burns with at least the strength of a blaster bolt immediately after launch.

Unfortunately, lightsabers are much less practical for common use than the blaster. The generation of so much energy that remains in proximity to the generator for so long tends to increase the failure rate of the device; users must be trained to maintain the weapon, and it helps to have an intuitive feel for when the device requires maintenance. Further, few sentients are equipped to deal with wielding what is essentially a nearly massless wand of plasma – lightsaber wielders are often more of a danger to themselves or their allies than to enemies since it is easy to misjudge the blade’s placement. Because of this, the blades have never been commonly used by any but the Jedi.

Tractor Beams: Only practical on very large ships because of the size of the electromagnet required, a tractor beam projects a column of force at a magnetic object and uses it to precisely focus and extend a magnetic attraction between the two objects.

Hyperspeed: Understood by only the most elite physicists in the galaxy, and yet mass-produced for its utility, hyperspeed uses the scientific oddness of the force effect to circumvent the limits on approaching the speed of light. The ship creates a very tight field of force that hedges out all other energy wavelengths and, seemingly, universal constants. From the universe’s perspective, the encased ship is nothing but energy, so is able to accelerate to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light very quickly, for limited energy compared to its mass, and with greatly reduced relativistic effects on the crew. However, the field works to its utmost to screen against the regular background forces of the universe – skirting too close to a gravity well can quickly tax its resources and hitting an object of significant mass can be deadly to all involved.