Five Reasons Guild Wars 2 Has Great World Design

Looking for a new MMO after City of Heroes closed, I’ve ended up playing Guild Wars 2. It’s mechanics are fairly good, having learnt a lot of important lessons of what actually makes MMOs fun for lots of people. But it is also appealing because its world building is very good, and there is much to be learned from that if you’re doing your own world building. Here’s five quick lessons from things GW2 does very well:

#1: Familiar Faces, New Twists

Races and factions need strong hooks, and the truth is the bucket of hooks is very small. It has to be because hooks are big and bold. They need to be because hooks are exactly what they sound like: they exist for people to grab a hold of quickly and easily. So it makes sense to use archetypes and familiar checkpoints, like having a big strong animalistic race that likes fighting. It makes to have a naturey-race that is all pretty and graceful. People have clear things they like in games and they can quickly latch onto things like this and go “this has what I like and feel comfortable with.” This is why it’s usually okay for fantasy games to have elves and dwarfs, or not-elves and pseudo-dwarfs.

But it’s also important to have new things to explore underneath those hooks. For example, in Earthdawn, all the elves went mad as they tortured their own flesh to stave off the madness of the horrors. That gives them a new kick. In Guild Wars, the wood elf types are a) actual plants and b) the youngest of all races, so they lose all of that ancient-and-wise thing elves normally have. But they’re still pretty and nature-attuned, with a strong hook. The ego and magically-better-than-everyone hook is instead given to the adorable little chibi hamster people, the Asura. The Charr, the big tough cat guys are kilrathi-klingons, but unlike most warrior races they don’t shun technology but embrace it. They are in fact the greatest technologists on the planet because that’s what a military industrial complex DOES BEST. The Norns are basically vikings but their gods are more like those of native American tribes, so they’re a bit more than just not-vikings. The humans are the most vanilla, but their twist is their gods have abandoned them and they are almost extinct. No great glorious human empire.

Twists can be poorly done, or not done enough, or destroyed by protesting too much (Talislanta, I’m looking at you, goddammit), but they are vital to put in to keep things interesting.

#2: Culture Matters

The best way to make races feel more than just archetypes or cookie-cutters is to explore culture. That’s where a lot of the twists above come from: for example, by exploring the ideas of a culture built around war, it is easy to see that they might embrace technology. Likewise, the Asura’s tendency for arrogance and technomagical genius has had a profound effect on their societal design and typical worldview. Everything has become a competition, and their government is full of mad cultists pursuing science at any cost, and nobody really cares. The norns have a deep spirituality which, because this is fantasy, is literally true, and colours everything they experience. The Charr were ruled by the magic-using clan among them, but since overthrowing that clan have a distrust of magic and a need to reestablish themselves post-revolution. And all these things effect the stories you get involved in, the characters you make and the choices you face.

Culture isn’t just more realistic, it makes worlds feel more lived in. You know what the man on the street thinks and feels, not just what he wears or what flag he follows. It can give even the most tired cliches depth, and be a great way to reveal the twists you need to keep things fresh. It is also the best and easiest way to inspire and push stories. Culture is what makes humans human, and so we instantly respond to it. It’s why we travel the earth and study other countries and indeed, play other roles. You can never skimp on it, and the more of it you do, the better.

#3: Everyone’s An Egotistical Jerk

As with hooks, it is important that players don’t have to be total bastards. People who want to be the good guy when they play need somewhere to go. But on a cultural and political level, no nation, no organisation, no group and no mindset should be saintly, and all of them should have reasons to disagree with all the others. This is partly because it’s much more realistic (and it makes your cultures more realistic as a result) but also because again, it drives story. Stories are about conflict, and cultures are at their most interesting when they conflict – and in the real world, they always do.  This works on a micro-level, when the elf in the party hates the dwarf, but also on a massive macro-level, where alliances are regularly forged and then dispelled as goals run together, then drift apart.  Even what appear to be classic tales of white and black have these elements: Bespin tries to be a neutral party in the war against the Empire; the drama of Empire Strikes Back comes from Lando making an alliance with one side to further his own goals. Gondor and Rohan are enemies before Sauron turns up and forces them to unite.

In Guild Wars 2, the Charr’s warlike culture forces them to constantly attack the other races. It’s all they know. The norn likewise have a culture built around pride: only those who build great legends go to heaven, so they are driven to prove their superiority. The Humans are fighting for survival, but also have been told by one of their gods that they have a Manifest Destiny to spread across the whole planet. The Asura’s absolute mastery of magic proves they should be running the world and they may have the resources to do it. And the plant-born Sylvari are so young they judge everyone on first impressions, which is usually that they are jerks trying to kill them.

#4: We All Have To Work Together

Sometimes, you can make your factions too disparate and too distrusting. Even if “adventuring types” are the exception, your game can suffer if there are no good reasons for people from these vastly different backgrounds to be thrown together. Vampire: The Requiem made this mistake and the campaign they released with it required a massive amount of justification to explain having one of each clan in the party. You want your cultures to conflict, so you have to squish them together. If everyone is hiding away in Elfhome or the sewers, then conflict won’t happen.

Guild Wars 2 does this nice and simply with geography. When the great dragons returned (see point five) they rearranged the world a lot. The norn were pushed south from their mountain home until they ended up between the Charr and the Humans. The Humans are right next to the Charr, but everything behind them is worse. The Charr need to expand to ensure they don’t become so weak that the magic users of their number come back and crush them, but don’t have enough resources right now to crush the Norns or the Humans, so might actually need allies. And when the Sylvari appeared, they grew like seeds from a newly sprouted World Tree, which bloomed very close to the Asuran Empire. The Sylvari, new to the world, need guidance from the other races, but they also know the most about the Elder Dragons, so everyone really needs their knowledge too if they are going to survive. The Charr need magic support if they are going to hold off their old oppressors, but can’t risk encouraging it in their own ranks. The norns will need to learn more about surviving in the plains now they are out of the mountains. Everyone is holding pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle and they can’t finish it alone. Wired into the setting are thus ways to drive everyone into co-operation so the conflicts above will occur.

#5: There Are Millions of Things That Need Doing, Right Now

Obviously, the biggest thing driving the races towards cooperation, both indirectly (because of land movement) and directly (because otherwise they’ll die) is the return of the Elder Dragons. These enormous jerks lived below the oceans for milennia, and now are back to end the world, like a whole pack of Midgards. That is a problem that really needs to be fixed, teamwork or no teamwork. So there’s a strong driving goal there. But that’s not the only one.

On a smaller scale, every culture has its own crisis, or crises to deal with, many of which we’ve already covered. Away from their ancestral lands, the Norn spirits are restless and angry. The Charr are recovering from a devastating civil war that the losers would love to restart in a second; the Asura are heading towards a civil war as their culture becomes sicker and sicker. And the Humans are trying to survive, which has also, on a micro-level, forced all humans of different cultures together to unite.  There is so much stuff to do it almost makes you despair – but you can’t, because you don’t have time. Which is the other point: these problems are at a crisis point right now, and could easily tip over. If the Charr can’t hold their city from enemies, they’ll fall back into civil war, and if that happens their race could be wiped out by undead, or ghosts or dragons, and without the Charr, the other nations are screwed, because they don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle (see above). So everything matters, and it matters right now. There’s a quote in Warhammer I always remember: “The Empire is always one-dagger thrust away from anarchy”. I keep that in mind whenever writing settings, because it means that every dagger thrust is always the most important thing in the world.

And it absolutely should be, because that way everything the players do feels important, feels charged with meaning and accomplishment and resonance. It also means storytellers never run out of ideas, and there are always things that must be done. You players will never need to look for motivation because it oozes out of every micron of the setting. So there can never be player paralysis either. Don’t get me wrong, if you want you can pursue your own goals, parallel or tangentially: start a business, join a band, run a city, whatever. But if you want or need adventure, plot or conflict, it is low-hanging fruit, fresh on the vine.

You can see what needs doing, you get a sense of how to do it (those missing jigsaw pieces) but also a sense of what prevents that (everyone’s a jerk), which you know about because culture matters, and which is interesting because of the new twists. So you have a goal to reach, a path to walk, obstacles to encounter, character motivation and flavour to describe. Your setting, in short, has written your stories for you. Exactly as it should.

Gaming Theory: Rules and “Immersion” (aka The Squib Manifesto)

Somebody asked me to talk about Gumshoe. I will, but first I need to talk about a few terms. Like immersion.

A few years back, Jocelyn Robitaille and I and a few other people sat around on RPGNet and spitballed trying to lock down the concept of “immersion” as it applies to roleplaying games. It wasn’t a new idea: it’s existed as long as fiction. It’s simply the point where reality falls away and you have trouble knowing where the stage ends and the reality begins. As human beings, we’re very very good at confusing reality and fantasy. It’s why you can edit people’s brains using only a reflection of their arm. It’s also why we create so much damn literature and art, and part of why we’re so messed up by it all – we are addicted to getting lost between the two worlds. It’s something I’ve always been fascinated with, which is why I love stories about the power of narrative and genre tropes (like Discworld or Thomas Covenant or Roger Rabbit) or about breaking the fourth wall (The Real Inspector Hound, The NeverEnding Story etc). Also, I have mild dislocated synaesthesia, which means if I see somebody injuring themselves, I feel the pain physically in that part of my body, and I have strong emotional transfers as well, so the whole crossover issue is extremely important to me.

Roleplaying is fundamentally about layers of reality and creativity, and almost all of the comedy it naturally produces comes from that. Improvisational theatre feeds on layers of narrative assumption and sharing those assumptions – it depends fundamentally on the idea that if you fake punch somebody, they instinctively fake reel.  Or to put it another way: THIS.

I’m digressing like crazy. The point is, one of the important parts of fiction is immersion in the story, getting caught up in it, and sometimes it gets so strong, we get carried away. Actors talk about the point where they lose the boundary between themselves and the character. Audiences weep when their favourite characters die and reflexively cry out “Don’t go in there” even when they know the characters can’t hear them.  RPGs intrinsicly involve stories, and thus are full of this kind of immersion.

The problem is, that long ago in the history of roleplaying, the term immersion was used to mean something else. This was a style of play which basically rejected any and all rules-speak or so-called “meta-game” play, and demanded the player experience the entire gaming world through the eyes and mind of their character, concerned for nothing else. It was, even at its coining, a fairly extreme definition, and has remained so, to the point where it becomes, I think, fairly useless. Although it clearly involves a similar experience to being immersed in a story, according to its proponents it is unique to rpgs (and thus is unlike anything actors or improvisers feel, although some disagree about the latter), it is unique to players (it cannot ever be experienced by GMs) and most importantly, it is instantly and irrevocably destroyed by rules or metagaming or any outside concern.

It’s this last bit I particularly take issue with, because I believe that one thing rules are GREAT at is breaking down the boundaries between the real and the imaginary.

The simplest example is that if Throthgar the Mighty is swinging his sword, he feels tense because he does not know if his swing is mighty enough to fell a beast. Now, to the hard-core gaming-style Immersionist, there needs to be no extra information to this. He has become Throthgar in every way that matters, so his heart is full of trepidation solely from the story. For me though, I think what makes RPGs interesting is we can do something else to make a link to Throthgar. We can, in our world, have a player take a physical action (rolling some dice) which produce tension (an unknown, random result). This creates a feeling inside Bob the player which is inherently similar to the feeling inside Throthgar; and so without even using his imagination, Bob has a sudden, reactive, unconscious connection to Throthgar that goes beyond merely the imaginary.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am aware that this may not be precisely the same experience.  And for some, the real world sensory information they are getting from real-world activities can only ever be noise, not signal, to the imaginary information they are getting from the story actions. For those people, mechanics exist solely to create a story collaboratively, not to provide emotional information, and indeed, they find the very idea of mechanics often so noisy they distract from their emotional information.

I however, take a different view. I think since we HAVE to have mechanics of some sort, and since we can never escape the real world sensory information, we might as well use them to inform our imaginary information, and that this is precisely the purpose of RPG mechanics. Yes, they exist to share storytelling around and create narrative elements (whether diagetically or exogetically) but those are perhaps even secondary goals to the former. We are telling a story, and the rolling of the dice are tools to create emotional response, just as props and voice and sets and language are to other storytellers.

This isn’t exactly rocket science, but it does cause problems on the internet because for some people, if you talk about the concept of Immersionism, you can never talk about rules, and it is laughably, obviously counter-intuitive to do so. Hence I need to take all this time to establish the other point of view, jut in case. And on RPGNet, we ended up coining two different names for these things, to keep the Immersionist-Play-Stylers happy that we weren’t horning in on their turf. Currently their thing is called “deep character immersion” and the other thing “setting immersion”, a wholly unsatisfactory attempt to keep the peace. Again, I’m just making this clear so that anyone else who gets confused when I talk about immersion knows what’s going on – I’m talking about when reality and imagination blur, not a playstyle. Perhaps for the purpose of sanity we should call that something else, like Getting Into It or Squib.

Yes, squib will do nicely.

The interesting thing about Squib is that it is an art not a science, and that what squibs one person will completely fail to squib another, or different types of rules can cause different kinds of squibs. For example, in Tynes and Stolze’s Unknown Armies, the GM is encouraged not to tell the players how much damage they’ve taken. Why? Because in real life you don’t know how injured you are, and keeping that game information secret causes a squibbing connection from your real world self who does not know how close his playing piece is to being Out Of Play, and your imaginary self who has no idea if he has just a messy scratch or if he is about to take the big dirtnap. However, what this sacrifices is the OTHER sense of squib which comes from taking hit point damage. If I have 40 hit points and an attack does 38, that’s a huge amount of numeric information. If you think in numbers, as many people do, you feel the WEIGHT of that. That’s a big number, and it sends the mind reeling at the size of it. And THAT sense of bigness in the mind of your real self provides a squib connection to the severe physical pounding your imaginary self just took.

By choosing what kind of information to transfer, you can choose the kind of squib effect you want. However, not everyone interprets information in the same way. If you believe the Fleming/VARK model, there are four distinct ways in which people take in information – visually, aurally, textually and kinesthetically (through touch). I think what you might find, if you poked at this further, is that people who thrive on kinesthetic information might prefer boffer LARPs, people who are visual prefer costumed freeforms, and people who are aural like the GM to do long descriptions of their gushing wounds and wish he wouldn’t just keep talking about how many hit points he took, and people who are textual are quite happy to hear the hit point information and instantly translate it into the same description in their head.

What’s problematic is people often think that their way of getting information is the only/best way, and that therefore, if a GM is reducing everything to numbers, he is a “bad GM” and the GM who talks in adjectives is a “good GM”. You might also hear people say that the way it is done in Unknown Armies is “good design” and that hit points is “bad design”, despite both ways having just as much value for emotional transfer. Add the internet and these silly decisions can quickly turn into hard laws of design or holy wars of belief.

In truth, I believe that a good GM is like a good teacher – he tries to engage all four learning types at his table, and evaluates his players to find out how they prefer their information delivered – and knows their strengths, weaknesses and preferences in delivering information. A good designer doesn’t always have the options of covering all media, of course, but one of the impressive things we saw recently in RPGs last year was a much wider consideration of the kinesthetic, in games like WFRP 3rd ed and FreeMarket, which used lots more physical tokens.

Anyway. That’s how I see it.