Things Easier With Pixels, Things Not

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay, color tweaks by Mike
I don’t have many pet peeves – technology that suddenly stops working without explanation, or won’t do what you tell it to in a timely fashion are two of the biggies.
Computer Gamers and Game Companies describing what they do as “Gaming” as though all other forms of game-playing were irrelevant is another. Computer Gaming and Tabletop RPGs are chalk and cheese in many respects.
TTRPGs are as much like a computer game – even a computer RPG – as they are like a TV show or movie, which is to say that there are superficial resemblances deriving from certain aspects of the production that are similar – and that’s it.
Interaction
The manner of interaction is completely different, for one thing. To the extent that there are any similarities, it’s the computer RPG simulating being like a TTRPG, and not vice-versa. Most computer games use either mouse-point-and-click or keyboard controls (and I include PlayStations and the like – just because they only have four keys…).
TV show interactions are even more limited – feedback through various sources, some social media interactivity (depending on the show), and the occasional public vote conducted using telephone call-ins. Everything else is basically the same as it was in the 1950s (if you conflate emails with traditional mail).
Display
Computer Games – with the exception of text-based games, which went out of style nearly 40 years ago – are intensely graphical in nature. They can’t leave anything to the imagination for a number of reasons – first, you might need to interact with whatever-it-is (even if such interaction does nothing, if the game only has objects with which you can interact, they aren’t exactly hidden or surprising); secondly, because they need to create immersion in order to keep you playing, and thirdly because different people will imagine the same thing quite differently from one another, limiting the appeal of the game for those who aren’t especially imaginative. And that bites into profits, and that’s unacceptable.
TV shows can’t leave anything to the imagination, either – though they can occasionally substitute a representative visual facsimile for something the censors would deem unacceptable. For the most part (especially in modern times), the attitude is that if you can’t show something happening in a given time-slot, it doesn’t exist in programs that air in that time-slot.
TTRPGs have a default operating mode of “within the imagination”(s) of the players, making them completely different in the demands placed upon them from the other two forms of media under discussion. GMs focus on delivering descriptive narrative and ways of ensuring that the interpretations of each player at least overlap.
Movement
Television and movie images are inherently capable of movement, however illusory – so much so that movies derive their name from the earlier term, “Moving Pictures”.
Most computer games rely on mobile animated elements set against a still or scrolling background, and so simulate a fully-moving image at a fraction of the computing demands that full animation presents. Only very old or very simple computer games rely purely on fixed images (see my earlier comments on text-based games, which inevitably normally have either still images or no images at all).
Most Tabletop RPGs have no images – again making them different from the other two media – except perhaps from something from a game supplement, used as eye candy, or to depict something for which it is important that everyone be on the same page in imagining – such as the shape (and implied capabilities) of a monstrous creature. Virtually all of them are Still images, though.
Atmosphere and Ambiance
In my book, these are the real big-ticket items when it comes to the differences between the three media kinds.
Television has no less than five weapons at its disposal; movies have the same five, but more money to spend on each of them. Unfortunately, they often also have micro-management-by-committee, a recipe for safety and blandness; so they have greater obstacles to overcome, simply because there is more money available to splash around.
- Music is almost continually present in both movies and TV shows, an almost subliminal presence. Each major character normally has their own theme or motif, often a slight variation on the main theme; producers have learned the hard way that this aids character recognition, even if the audience aren’t aware of it.
Sometimes, key locations will have their own themes, too. Understanding the way that music adds to a cinematic experience can be difficult, simply because most of us aren’t aware of the music in a production most of the time.
The 4-disk director’s cut of The Lord Of The Rings goes into the subject in some depth, with further releases in that trilogy adding to the subject.
But there’s a simpler technique if all you want is an appreciation of the value brought by a soundtrack: the inappropriate Mashup.
- Load in a movie and add subtitles for the hearing impaired so that you can read the dialogue;
- Turn the sound all the way down;
- Play a soundtrack from a completely different tone or style of movie and see how much the ‘flavor’ and nuance of the movie changes.
Some suggested Mashups for the purpose:
- The Maltese Falcon and the Star Wars Soundtrack;
- The Sting with The Exorcist’s Soundtrack;
- The Great Escape with the Apocalypse Now soundtrack; or
- Titanic with the soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
This won’t enlighten you as to technique – that will require far deeper study – but it will at least demonstrate the power of the soundtrack to evince ambiance and atmosphere.
- Sound Effects, better known in the visual media as Foley and Sound Design, are also far more ubiquitous than most audiences realize. Unless it’s a live broadcast, every sound that you hear on-screen has been made for the purpose by an expert – and frequently using something completely different to the object creating the sound on-screen. The most famous example is probably coconut shells for the sound of horses’ hooves!
The job has undoubtedly changed somewhat with the advent of libraries and digital archives of sound effects, and – of course – it was Star Wars that launched the related field of Sound Design into prominence. These days, it can be hard to remember just how groundbreaking that movie was in this context. But so evocative are the sound effects from Star Wars that you can play them (and there are many of the iconic sounds available over the internet, or at least used to be) and you are instantly “in” the movie – no visuals or soundtrack or dialogue needed.
Don’t believe me? Try the “Star Wars Dogfight” (fifth from the bottom) on SoundBible.com or the Lightsaber Turn On (third from the top) and be convinced for yourself!
For a deeper look at Foley, I can recommend this article at techradar, which has links to a number of documentary excerpts on the subject, and here’s a two-minute excerpt from The Shining from mashable and the famous T-Rex scene from Jurassic Park, both with deliberately bad foley effects showing how much they can add – or detract – from a scene.
- Costume Designers work very hard at their craft. Much of the detail they put into a costume will never be noticed by the viewing public but costume designers carry much of the burden of generating a feeling of authenticity – whether it’s a suburban shopping mall or the bridge of a starship, the inhabitants of a hobbit village or the finery of an Elizabethan court. Again, I can’t not recommend the documentary extras of The Lord Of The Rings highly enough, but a documentary on the creation of Dr Strange’s costume won’t vanish from my memory quickly, either. I don’t think it’s the same documentary, but this youTube video should at least hit the highlights. Like Foley, much of the artistry flies beneath the radar. But good costuming is essential to creating the atmosphere of a scene.
For example, below is a portrait of Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, painted in 1613, and a closeup showing some of the detail in the clothing – and another in which the image has been translated into an entirely inappropriate setting.
Original image provided by Wikipedia, Motorcycle image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay, collage by Mike
When you look at the motorcycle image, Richard almost looks like he belongs – the swagger and attitude fit – so you start casting about, mentally, trying to find some explanation for the completely incongruous wardrobe choice. You might remember Meatloaf’s lacy shirts, or the New Romantics, and before them, glam rock. But then the motorcycle isn’t quite right.
And, of course, a subdivision within the broad category of Costume is makeup and prosthetics – everything from Gandalf’s false nose to Thor’s Hair (and, for all I know, his beard).
- Architecture & Set Design
Costumes clearly don’t work except in the right context or setting – and that’s where the Architects and Set Designers come into the picture. Together, they are responsible for a huge proportion of the style and ambiance of the presentation. In one of the Stargate SG1 box sets – I forget which, but it was one of the later ones – there was a DVD extra that looked behind the scenes at the set construction, giving a more functional presentation of the work they did than any other such documentary snippet that I’ve come across. (The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, normally my first go-to for such, was more about the use of miniatures, but there is also some interest in the design and construction of Bag End – but this wasn’t done in the usual fashion for such things, so its general utility is lacking for educational and reference purposes). - Which, quite naturally, leads us to Visual Effects. Most people equate this with lightsabers and spaceships shooting blasters and phasers at each other, and anything that explodes or emits showers of sparks, and they would be right to include those – but the totality encompassed by Visual Effects, even excluding CGI and Motion Capture, is far greater. Everything from creating weather on demand to cars that have to be driven on camera – or appear to be driven on camera, or appear to drive themselves! Mechanical effects are also often incorporated into set design and makeup. For example, a set may be built with break-away doors or walls to enhance a fight scene. Stunts and stunt work also fall within the jurisdiction of special effects – and that’s why even shows like Elizabeth, about the British Historical Monarch, have a special effects team.
In their own way, Computer Games emulate or incorporate exactly the same tools as TV and movies, but the balance is slightly shifted in some cases.
- Music is just as important for Computer Games as it is for TV, but generally doesn’t get the same level of recognition – and that is a fraction of the recognition that pop artists get. The best way to get some idea of how important music is to Computer Gaming is to look for walk-through videos, because many of them save space by dumping the sound, or replacing it with their own commentary. For example, there is a series of flash-based games called Disaster Will Strike, whose walk-throughs (from memory) are soundless. Many flash games also give the player the option to turn off the music independent of the sound effects (or reduce it’s volume to zero, which does the same thing). Sometimes, to save on memory and processor demands, I’m forced to turn the music off but I rarely do so if I can avoid it.
There are even some games that are music-based – both free to play and gambling oriented. The first are fairly easy to find, and all seem to be basic variations on guitar hero and hitting the right arrow at the right time. The latter are much rarer, but if you’re interested in some music games that you can bet on, you’ll find some at my bonus code.
Other sites are moving in the opposite direction, aiming to make the player more comfortable by providing music of a genre they like while they play. You can even access various podcasts while playing these games. The front-runner in this movement is Fanduel – look for the TuneIn feature and enjoy music genres including R&B, Classical, College, Classic Hits, Soul, and more.
- Sound Effects are, once again, the other half of the audio jigsaw. Like foley, in most cases you don’t notice these unless they are lacking, or not properly synchronized with the action. Again, some games give you the option of turning these off separately to the musical soundtrack, giving you the chance to explore the contribution made by the Sound Effects. That contribution will vary from game to game, of course.
- Costume is often a bigger deal for computer games than it is for TV shows, at least so far as design is concerned. The reason for this emphasis is that in TV shows you have an actual actor who carries some of the load; in computer games, the designers have to produce the entire character. On top of that, every possible action has to be scripted and animated.
- Architecture & Set Design Like costume design, in some ways this is more elaborate than designing for TV or movies, but in most respects, less. These are often digitally-painted static backgrounds, which can never be permitted to intrude upon the game-play or the action. In other cases, they are frames for active game elements like doors that make it appear as though the whole scene were animated. The more layers of independent and interactive elements there are, the more realistic the world seems – and the higher the demands placed on the technology that operates the game and its functions.
Certain games acquire a reputation for outstanding graphics by pushing the boundaries of what is possible. The history of computer gaming is littered with milestones – some of them obvious, such as the transition from 8-bit graphics to 16-bit, back in the mid-80s, but to properly address that history, it needs to be divorced from the history of the underlying technological infrastructure; at best, this divides the story into chapters.
Information on the subject within these constraints is surprisingly hard to come by; website after website seemed promising only to abandon computer-based gaming for consoles at the first opportunity. I’m happy for consoles to be part of the story, but game evolution (mostly on the PC, or system-independent games played through a browser) did not stop on the day the first console was released.
Evolution Of Video Game Graphics from Silicon Republic contains some useful information, and is a good starting point. It contains a link to a 13-minute youTube video covering 1952-2015) at the bottom of the article that is directly about the subject. Other youTube videos that tackle the subject are this one (1958-2018) 10’39” and this one, claiming to cover 1962-now in just 11 minutes. A more comprehensive series on YouTube by Stuart Brown, A Brief History Of Graphics (originally presented in 5 parts and now stitched together into a single 45 minute documentary) promises still more depth.
But the ultimate resources (because you can return to them time and again) are a pair of books, available through Amazon: An Illustrated History of 151 Video Games: A detailed guide to the most important games; exploring five decades of game evolution (US $26.88), and The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon (US $17.60).
- Visual Effects occupy a special niche within computer gaming simply because they lean toward the more pyrotechnic and fantastic. I don’t know about anyone else, but many of my visualizations of the way various D&D spells work is still rooted in the AD&D games of the 80s such as Pool Of Radiance and the other Gold Box D&D games from SSI. Explosions and ray blasts and collisions between objects and the like are an inherent component of computer games.
Which means that they are an inherent part of distinguishing one computer game from another. Much of the difference in “look and feel” between Balder’s Gate and Diablo, for example, lie in the special effects.
TTRPGs traditionally have none of these. They have to create ambiance with word choice, pacing, and narrative content; they need to employ the same tools, plus tone, and triggering events, to create atmosphere.
If the PCs act differently to what you had anticipated, the atmosphere has to immediately change in response, or the GM’s narrative will feel ‘out of step’ with the in-game reality. The GM needs the active cooperation of the players to succeed in generating atmosphere within a game.
The Use of Augmentations in TTRPG
It’s no wonder, then, that GMs are turning to the same tools used to create ambiance and atmosphere in the other media forms under discussion to augment the reality that they are spinning out of cobwebs and phrasing.
At a general level, these forms of game augmentation can be divided into two main branches – visuals and audio – each of which can then be subdivided into three primary subcategories.
Visuals
I’m going to start with the visuals and do my best to keep the discussion general and confined, rather than bogging down into too much detail. These, after all, are not new subjects here at Campaign Mastery.
Images & Maps
In the form of maps, visual augmentation from within this category is as old as RPGs. These days, it encompasses vastly more – such as seeking out images on the internet that depict a character or setting for illustrative purposes. I’ve devoted a number of articles to this subject already, both its utility and the practicalities involved – everything from using Google Image Search (which has changed in the way it works twice since the article was written, and not for the better – but not so much that the old article is completely out of date!) to how to change the color and tone of images. This is the augmentation tool that I use more than any other (one of these days I’ll have to publish an excerpt from one of my adventures with all the graphics that I use integrated into it – it will have to be a special project because of copyright restrictions constraining my choice of images).
Miniatures
Miniatures and Battlemaps are even older than RPGs, since their earliest incarnations derive from Wargames, including the predecessor games that led to original D&D. They are so important that they have their own category and tag here at Campaign Mastery, currently containing twelve posts.
Props
Props are something that you either love or hate. There can even be dispute over exactly what should be included in this category – are handouts and prepared notes to the players “props” or not?
This uncertainty has impacted on this classification’s representation here at Campaign Mastery – there’s only one post explicitly tagged as “props”, but I’m sure I’ve done more than that. In fact, the relevant section of the Blogdex currently lists no less than ten articles on the subjects of Props and Handouts (and I really should think about doing one on character notes. And there was the recent poker game in the Pulp Campaign, which employed two stacked decks to actually let the PC concerned see and hold his hands. So much to write, so little time…)
Sounds
The side of the coin with which I am far less familiar is the use of Audio enhancement. There are reasons for that, but I’ll get into that a little later.
Audio Textures
Audio textures are foley for the RPG. Designed to be playable on a continuous loop, they contain things like birdsong and wind, or rain, or thunder, or the generic ‘clank’ of steel striking steel. They may include the sound of horse’s hooves if the PCs are riding.
Ideally, you would create unique audio textures from layers of elements so that you can match perfectly the circumstances in your campaign, and there is software that lets you do just that – if you have the samples that you need to include. In practice, I suspect that you would probably put together four or five “standard mixes” – travel (good weather), travel (bad weather), indoors (inn), and combat would probably do 90% or more of a campaign.
I looked at some of the problems and requirements involved in using sound in an RPG (thinking only of music at the time) in The Hollow Echo Part 1 – Adding Music To Your Game – but that was written and published three years ago, and things move fast in the software world. How many of the resources are still valid is unknown. I can report that I found several new ones searching for “Star Wars Sound Effects” earlier in writing this article, so if they are gone, it’s not the end of the world.
Soundtracks
Which brings me to the question of soundtracks, which was dealt with specifically in the article listed above. Because I took as broad an approach as possible in looking at the advantages and limitations, what to choose as a soundtrack, and so on, it should all still be relevant, and spares me from getting into too much detail here. In fact, I’ll just quote from the concluding paragraph: “Music in RPGs: There are a lot of people who swear by it. There are others whose circumstances limit the utility of the proposal. My opinion is that if you can solve the problems and if you can achieve a suitable environment, it can’t help but add to the gaming experience – but those are two very big caveats. Fall down in either area, and you may find that it’s a detriment of devastating impact.”
There’s also some material on both props and sounds in Taking advantage of the sensory hierarchy that readers might find useful.
Vocal Inflections & Accents
The remaining enhancement is the most commonly employed one. We all have a go at it now and again, no matter how hopeless we are at it! There have been at least two articles on the subject here at Campaign Mastery that are worth perusing, especially if this is the only string in your bow:
Speaking In Tongues: Writing Dialogue & Oratory – before you can speak it, you have to write it – and
The Secret Arsenal Of Accents – how I integrate foreign languages and accents into my vocal performance even though I’m hopeless at them.
A third post that looks relevant is actually about PCs and the oratory skill (or its equivalent), and not about GMs orating.
The Limitations and Flaws
Okay, so I’ve cast an eye over the field, and it looks rich. But there are pitfalls to consider, too.
Visuals
There are five major issues to contemplate. Virtually all the images that you can present will be still, not animated – limiting the usefulness of the image. You can compensate to some extent by focusing your attention on wallpaper-sized images, big enough that you can zoom in and pan around. I’ll only select something smaller than 1200×800 if there’s absolutely nothing worthwhile that’s larger. What’s more, it’s normal for me to select three or more contenders for any given image and then select between them. Of course, I’ll save the others to a separate folder for future use!
Another problem with images is that they are often dismissed as nothing more than eye candy by the players. They don’t realize how much work went into finding and editing the image in question. You need to be like a Foley artist in this respect – you don’t want your work to be noticeable in it’s contrivance, but you don’t want it to be irrelevant, either. This is a question of what you choose to depict and what you will leave to the imagination – especially if miniatures can enhance and bolster that imagination. A picture, after all, Should Be Worth 1,000 Words.
Miniatures are frozen snapshots – no movement that is not supplied externally – and symbolic representations, rarely accurate in depicting individuals. Provided you can get something that is a reasonable representation, though, they can be extremely useful. If you don’t use them, you have to work extra hard at describing combat situations so that the players are aware of their environment and the limitations it imposes on their courses of action – and any opportunities it opens up. One of the biggest problems that I note is miniatures that are not sufficiently distinctive. It’s not quite as bad as needing to give each PC his own distinctive color pattern, but it’s also not quite accurate to dismiss the thought. Pre-painted miniatures takes all the ham-fistedness out of the equation, but also restricts individuality. A custom paint job is nothing but individual, but it makes you totally dependent on your skill at painting figures.
In between, there are a number of intermediate skills. For example, you might settle for painting over a pre-painted miniature’s shield – a flat and relatively simple shape that makes it possible to render examples of the same basic character as individuals. Or you might get good at painting beards onto characters (or not). I once knew a guy who was terrible at painting miniatures – but, by being extremely careful and delicate, he had mastered the art of dunking figures heads or crests just enough that he could change hair color. Contrast that with someone else I once knew who spray-painted small pieces of steel wool before coating them in a clear lacquer that permitted these ‘hairs” to be glued in place as an actual beard or hair appliance, or fur-cuffs. He could change a sword into a dagger, or a dagger into a spear, so well that you couldn’t tell (after painting) that the figure hadn’t arrived from the factory that way.
What you do with miniatures depends on what skill level you have access to.
Props are often clunky, limited, time-consuming to create, and usually only broadly indicative of the “reality” they represent. I find that they tend to be more trouble than they are worth, most of the time. But there are exceptions. In particular, some way of indicating who you are speaking as can be exceptionally useful – I know one GM who has a stick with a slot cut into the end, onto which he can attach a name-card. When speaking in character, he simply holds it aloft to indicate who’s talking.
Most of the time, I find that it isn’t necessary with well-written dialogue.
What I do find necessary from time to time are handouts and notes to the players. I consider these to be props, too, even though they both function at a metagame level; they are both ways for the GM to speak to the character, telling him something that “in theory” he already knows, but that the player controlling him does not. I’ve given away most of the handouts that I’ve produced over the years here at Campaign Mastery, one way or the other.
There’s one problem that applies to all of these both individually and in combination: Overload. This can be a real problem; too many inputs can overwhelm the listener. “He’s like this picture, but dressed fancier, and he has a green glowing wand that he waves around something like the way I’m waving this stick, and oh yes, he’s wearing….” This is too much for most people; they can mentally adjust the image that they are being shown according to the GM’s words, but the costuming just fades into insubstantiality when you start concentrating on the waved stick – and so does the image. The real problem in this example is the choice of an insufficiently representative image. Pick one with the right clothes, collage in the head with the face that you want, and collage in a green-glowing wand – if necessary, importing a hand that is gripping it. Then repair any holes in the background. It’s better for the elements to look somewhat hacked together than for one of them to be wrong.
Another form of overload was made palpable in the pulp campaign a while back. The story is spelt out in An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session. But both players and campaign survived this brush with calamity – with some hard lessons learned.
Unfortunately, most GMs regard themselves as writers first and foremost – accurately, of course – and few of them have ever attempted to master a painting program of any sophistication (Microsoft’s free “paint” program doesn’t count). That means that they often lack the skills needed to perform such editing collages. That isn’t always the case, and in reality it’s far less common than the people concerned think; it’s often a confidence issue, not a real limitation. As I said, a poor execution is preferable to an execution that’s lacking.
The final problem to be discussed in this section is also common to all three modes of visual enhancement: GM Workload. Each of these augmentation techniques comes with an overhead, especially when you are first starting out. It takes time to write good foreign-tinged dialogue; it takes time to search out suitably illustrative images, and more time to edit the ones that aren’t quite what you need. It takes time to customize miniatures and plan how they are to be arranged on the battlemap. It all takes time, and most GMs are already crunched for prep time.
Used correctly, these enhancements can ultimately save you prep time – I don’t know how long it takes the average GM to write 1000 words (it would take me somewhere between two and five hours, depending on how much of it flowed naturally); if it takes 30 minutes to find and edit an image that replaces that thousand words, that’s a net gain; if it takes two hours, that’s a break-even; if it takes four or more hours, that’s probably a time loss. Of course, if I have three or four quick images, that probably makes room for that longer job. It’s all a balancing act; and key to it all is making darned sure that the value of the image is as close to that mythic thousand words as possible.
Sounds
I have to grope a little more when it comes to sounds, because I don’t have experience in using them; my one experiment in that direction was a disaster, a tale told in The Hollow Echo Part 1, and revisited below. But before we get that far, consider this: Sounds can overwhelm voice, which remains the primary communications mode within a game. It can sometimes be difficult hearing everyone even without adding a soundtrack and/or ambient campaign noise to the environment.
In order to play sounds, you will need some sort of Technology. At first, that seems no problem – almost every PC and mobile phone has the necessary software by default these days; throw in a Bluetoothed speaker and “Bob’s your uncle” as the old Australian slang would have put it. Except that the software provided is rarely the most user-friendly way of going about the task – ideally, you want something that can display a list of tracks and repeat the one you select immediately and effortlessly. The default media players tend to be lousy at that. To say nothing of wanting to mix sources and fade from one track into another, or play two tracks simultaneously. None of these are difficult problems to solve in terms of the technology; but most apps neither need nor want this functionality. Finding the combination of hardware and software that does exactly what you want, as painlessly as possible, may take quite some time. In the meantime, you will be stuck with a second-best or third-best solution at best.
Loading times can vary enormously. Even something as trivial as the power levels of your device, and whether or not you’re on battery power, can make a difference. So can innumerable under-the-hood conditions that you never get to see. And you have to not only load the software, but the file, and perhaps at the same time that you have a word processor and file explorer and graphics display program all running. This brings me back to that disaster of sound that I mentioned earlier.
Disaster is probably too harsh a term, to be honest. But here’s the story: “There came a time in [my Dr Who] campaign where the Doctor (the sole PC) was to encounter the Daleks, and for dramatic purposes, and because I could, I wanted him to hear their famous “Ext-er-min-ate” before he saw them. After a bit of a web-search, I found a wav file that was good enough for the purpose. At the proper moment, I double-clicked the sound file to play it – after spending 30 seconds trying to get Windows 8 to display the folder. And waited. And waited. And waited. And then, with all the dramatic tension irretrievably lost, it played. Biggest anticlimax in ten years or more of GMing.” – all that’s a direct quotation from The Hollow Echo. Actually, it was a little worse than described – the file took so long to load and play that the player started speaking, and so missed the first part of the file. “…erm-in-ate” has even less impact, hard to believe as that might be.
After this event, I ran some tests. Sometimes, the file took 3 seconds to load. Sometimes, 2 or more minutes. The more things that I had open, the more the trend was toward the high end – but it wasn’t consistent. Even loading it up ahead of time, with the laptop set to “mute” so as not to have premature recognition by the player, did not result in consistent performance, though it helped. The greatest reliability came from having the file playing continuously, muted, until I needed it – then pause it, un-mute (wait if necessary, it often is, for the un-mute to take effect) then hit play – spending the time in between engaging the player in game-related conversation and switching the software to single playback, not looped.
Too many moving parts, too complicated, too likely to stuff up on me.
Having a longer file, and audio tapestry, which I wasn’t trying to synchronize with in-game events, would make a huge difference. This was a sound effect that went awry; ambiance might be an entirely different kettle of fish. And YMMV. So take the object lesson to heart as a warning – and do some testing and playing around in advance of committing yourself to using this enhancement.
The third sensitive point is “Appropriateness and Originality”. It’s relatively easy to achieve originality with an image that you can alter to suit your purposes; it’s a lot harder with sounds. That means that your sound mix has to be closer to “perfect” to start with, and most of us aren’t equipped to create what we need. That means using someone else’s work; so long as it’s for private use, you probably won’t need to worry about copyrights (but be careful if you podcast your games). But it also exposes you to a whole lot of associations that may be unwanted.
For example, let’s say that you’re using a soundtrack mix that you’ve created yourself using classical music and selections from various movie soundtracks. One track ends and the next cues up – and a player exclaims, “hey, that’s the music from the toilet paper commercial” – or “from Indiana Jones” – or whatever. Because these pieces of music have all been used before, often for all sorts of things, these associations can pop to the surface and intrude into your game at the most extraordinarily-inconvenient times.
Finally, as with images, there’s the ever-present problem of GM Workload – not only in prep but at the game table. A couple of seconds’ pause while the next image comes up doesn’t matter much since once it does, you don’t have to do anything to it except show it to everyone. That’s not the case with a sound file – hit play, make sure the volume’s right, why isn’t it playing yet, oh it’s still loading, here we go, whoops it’s on repeat (or not on repeat) and this is the wrong track….
Not All TV Shows Are Created Alike
There are four ways in which every TV show is different. First, no matter how similar they may be, every show is different, and so the demands made are different. And that means that some shows are more difficult than others. Stargate is not the same as Deep Space Nine, which is not the same as Battlestar Galactica, which is not the same as The Flash, which is not the same as… well, you get the point.
Each show has a different budget, season-on-season, and on any given episode. Financial planning is critical for any department in producing a TV show, and you often have to rob Peter to pay Paul – “bottle episodes” used in advance to save money for a bigger show that is only being scheduled now. In a perfectly just world, the budget would be proportionate to the difficulty – but it never is.
To make up the difference, you have only the Skill and Dedication of the department affected. But dedication can only go so far – and the unions tend to frown on unpaid labor, even if it’s labor of love. That’s why penny-pinching when it comes to hiring department heads is often a false economy, and producers know it. Hiring the best might be more expensive on paper at the start of a season, but the time saved by knowing what you have to do and how to do it will add up over the course of a season or two to more than counterbalance that initial expense. Once the changeover takes place, it’s all gravy – a better show for nothing extra spent – from there. At least until some other producer steals the talent away, or they retire, or you promote them to some other job, which will almost certainly happen within a year. Then it’s a question of hoping that the good stuff rubbed off on the number one assistant, or starting all over again.
And yet, despite the obvious differences between TV shows that the above analysis makes clear, the Standards Of Success against which all television sows are ultimately measured remains unchanged and applicable to all: they are either convincing enough or they are not. Meeting this mark won’t guarantee eligibility for an Emmie, but not doing so will almost certainly guarantee time in the unemployment queue. Whether or not the person ahead of you in line is someone else from the same production often depends on how quickly and ruthlessly changes can be made, and on how much money the studio was hemorrhaging on this turkey. Convince them that the promise of success is still within reach, and the necessary changes have been made, and the show might continue – on strict probation, and probably on a budgetary diet that it can ill-afford.
…and Not All Computer Games are Create Alike, Either
Life isn’t all beer and skittles for those who make computer games, either. It’s often the case that they don’t get paid until the game starts selling, for example; changing that requires some external bankroll, perhaps from a game company that has other successful titles. Even if you do get paid, it may not be the full amount you are owed according to your contract; once again, that might be pending until the money starts coming in. Too many industry horror stories start with developers who believe in a project so much that they sink their own money into it.
Setting that aside, there are several practical hurdles that have to be overcome.
First cab off the rank is Dynamics – have you ever played a computer game with a half-second delay while the program figured out which button you pushed and what you want the game to do? I have, and it’s not fun. The game needs to be instantly responsive – and that means not waiting to load the next screen, either. Yes, that really used to happen! I’ve played some games where you would tell it to save your progress and have time to make a cup of coffee and get a slice of cake before the save was finished – and a similar delay awaited you if you ever needed to restart from that saved position. Nothing – not game-play, not pretty pictures, nor soundtracks – can hold up the Dynamics of the game.
Second comes Pacing – by which I mean the speed at which events unfold within the game. You can’t have patches that are too slow and portions that are overwhelming; you need time for the player to assimilate the state of events and react accordingly.
Third consideration is the Rate Of Progression. Too many games are too slow to progress either at the start or the end; getting the rate of progression right means always promising that the next run will get the player closer to success, if they play as well as they have just done.
So those are things that every game has to get right – but the content of each different game imposes different restrictions and parameters on each of these choices. So every game is already different.
Fourth is a criterion that is similar to where we started with TV: the Difficulty of Creation. The greater the level of originality, especially under the hood, the greater the difficulty of creating the game. More than five years ago, I reviewed the Kickstarter campaign for a computer game in development called Witchmarsh in glowing terms. The game developers had taken the game as far as they could with the funding they were able to tip in, and needed more to finish it. Their campaign was successful, but progress was slower than expected, and false starts numerous. I’m quite sure that the original funds raised will have been depleted long ago, but such is the power of belief that backers still get regular progress reports and those participating are all still working away to make the project a reality. The last update through Twitter was only a week or two back. It has definitely become a labor of love for those working on it; if that were not the case, they would have abandoned it long ago. And, as a labor of love, the developers have gone beyond even the speculative possibilities raised in my article. All of which only adds to the complexity and difficulty.
It’s always harder to break new ground.
The next problem is closely related to the previous ones: the difficulty of play has to be right. I know that sounds like I’m repeating the same things that I discussed earlier, but this is actually an independent variable that has to be closely matched to the increase in difficulty as you get deeper into a game – so this is about the rate of progress that you make, relative to the increase in difficulty. There is, for example, “Reach The Core”, a mining/tunneling vertical scroller that can be a lot of fun at early levels – but there are so many upgrade paths, and they are so poorly explained, that it’s hard to pick the right ones. And as a result, progress starts to slow to a standstill as you get to the more difficult levels – and the game quickly grows boring, thereafter.
A very similar game, but with more responsive controls, better explanations, and more limited ‘improvements’ available, is Mega Drill! (mustn’t forget the exclamation mark). I’ve played this through to the end at least a dozen times, striving to achieve the top rank of success. I finally got there about a month ago, haven’t played it since – but occasionally get the itch to do it again, because it managed to be fun throughout.
Game developers rarely speak in terms of a budget of dollars – their budget is in time, in man-hours, or in lines of code. But it’s a constraint that can be just as hamstringing as any other. I can best illustrate this by talking about a completely different type of software, and a very old computer by modern standards on which it was to run. A change in the requirements required a change to the code, which carried the program executable’s length to just more than an additional page of virtual memory – in effect, the program was now too big to run efficiently on that old computer, which slowed its execution to a crawl. The users were faced with a choice: upgrade to a (gasp) modern 386 PC (which had enough RAM and processing speed to cope with the higher requirements) or trim some of the status messages to recover enough space for the whole thing to load in one gulp. The fastest and quickest and cheapest fix was the latter, but I persuaded their manager that it was a false economy because another change would inevitably come down the pike and put them back over the limit. He chose the most expensive solution – a temporary cutback on the function reporting until a new PC could be obtained, tested, and installed – with the larger version of the program in operation on it. A temporary fix while a more permanent fix was prepared, in other words. They were, at last report, still using that 386 to run that software – 25 years later. For a commercial installation, that’s amazing longevity!
Finally, the most difficult criterion to assess: Game-play. Just like in an RPG, this is king; everything else is subordinated to it, of necessity. And yet, it’s the hardest thing to put your finger on – a game either has great game-play or it doesn’t. And there’s all sorts of nuances to that “doesn’t” – some games miss the mark by more than others. They still score a “fail” on the game-play test, but by a greater or lesser extent – which is in direct proportion to how long the game can be tolerated.
A special case
Spare a thought, too, for those poor souls who are hamstrung at every turn by the nature of the product they are developing – and who nevertheless have to somehow produce a game that is good enough to earn revenue for those paying for the development. I speak, of course, of games in which the game-play is already well-known and innovation is so rare as to be almost unheard-of – gambling games. I don’t care if it’s a poker game, or a slot machine, they must be very easy to code (because all the basic functionality has been developed for you already) and very, very hard to do really well, because it’s all been done before.
Run through our list of factors that define how difficult it is to make a genuine advance on the state of the art – or just create a really playable game. The only real areas that the game developers in this case have to explore are the graphics and the sounds and the special effects. And yet, they are constrained in all those areas by the need not to interfere with the basic game-play.
As you can tell from the disparate approaches reported earlier, sometimes they are reduced to throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Neither Are All RPG Campaigns created Equal!
If every TV show faces unique combinations of tools and challenges, and every computer game faces its own unique combination of tools and challenges, why would anyone expect all RPG Campaigns not to be just as distinctive? There are nine ways in which, even at this general level, each would be distinguishable.
1. Clarity of concept
How clear is the concept at the heart of the campaign? A fuzzy concept permits a game to range all over the place – not necessarily a bad thing – but prevents the concept being a jumping-off point for ideas, and adventures can be wildly inconsistent in direction. A muddy concept is worse, containing internal contradictions that the GM has not resolved; the campaign will eventually tear itself apart. “You are good guy murder hobos” – contradiction alert! “You are all evil, but will be forced to not only work together but in the general interests of society as a whole, for your own survival, advancement, and the achievement of your ambitions” – that’s a fuzzy concept because it has two contradictory ideas (“evil” and “altruistic”), but it resolves this contradiction by providing a reasonable justification for the “out of character” behavior required, so it’s only slightly fuzzy. This was the concept at the heart of my Shards Of Divinity campaign – and it required a redefinition of the different alignments in order to permit “reasonable” game play on the part of otherwise “evil” characters.
2. Strength of concept
This is tied directly to the first criterion in part. It’s a measure of how many original adventure ideas can be spun out of the core concept. You can have a concept that is clear but weak, or one that is clear and strong; I’m not sure that you can have a really fuzzy or muddy concept that is nevertheless strong. So this can be handicapped by the clarity of concept, but is otherwise independent of it.
3. Breadth of development
The more aspects of a campaign are touched by the concept, the greater the breadth of development. Breadth is actually about how the concept has manifested in a campaign plan and in individual adventures and game content; the number of aspects of the campaign touched by the concept is the result of the development of the campaign. This is all about what I often describe as campaign prep, and about the connection between that prep and the core concept(s).
It’s important to distinguish between potential and actual development. Potential is coming up with ideas; Actual is translating those ideas into substance. The latter is what matters, because it’s what it visible to the outside world. I’m sure we’ve all encountered individuals who were great at ideas and terrible at execution…
4. Compelling Plotlines
It doesn’t matter how great or poor your ideas are if all that comes out of them are insipid and uninspired plotlines. You need stories that are going to arrest the player’s attentions and keep them coming back to the campaign’s game table, time after time. Attendance and participation need to be a compulsion.
5. Immersive Reality
Believe it or not, it is possible to have a really immersive reality without compelling plotlines, and vice-versa. In the first case, everyone likes the idea of playing, but the adventures never live up to the anticipation; the execution falls flat. If you have compelling plotlines but no immersive reality, game-play becomes a purely intellectual exercise, an exercise in wits. There’s probably a 50-50 chance that the campaign will collapse into a players-vs-GM conflict at regular intervals. Neither outcome is really all that stable or likely to last.
Another way of looking at the relationship between these elements of uniqueness is that 1 constrains 2; 1 and 2 permit or inhibit 3; 3 makes 4 and 5 possible.
6. Interactive Characters
I’m not just talking about PCs or NPCs here; this is the capacity for interaction of the totality of all characters in the game. If your concept and development ensures that the NPCs are more interesting than the PCs, the game is in trouble; it should always be the other way around. It’s great to have NPCs that are fascinating for the players to interact with, but the PCs are the stars of the show.
Beyond the degree of fascination they can hold, you also have to contemplate how much fun there is to be had from the characters interacting. I have – once in more than 30 years – had a 4-hour game session in which every word was said in character, and all that happened was the PCs interacting with each other. Once. Every other time I’ve come close, someone has broken character for a side conversation, or game mechanics have intruded, or I’ve had to provide ex-cathedra narrative.
On of the smartest things I ever did was give the PC’s headquarters in my superhero campaign an AI, because it means that lots of ex-cathedra narrative can be handled as dialogue and interaction between this NPC and a PC!
7. Game System Compromise
No game system is ever perfect. Nor is any game system ever perfectly suited to any given campaign. Thus the game system compromises the potential of a campaign in two ways – and choosing another game system can be better or worse in either respect. My goal with the original Fumanor campaign was to capture some of the flavor of Rolemaster, but actually translating the game from 2nd Ed D&D into the ICE game system was a total nightmare. It looked good on paper, but in execution it was close to unplayable. 3rd Ed came to rescue on that occasion!
8. Playability Compromise
Every campaign is further compromised by the to make it practical for play. Without this need, you could use House Rules to tweak and modify every rule in a game system, trying to achieve a perfect match between campaign and game system.
9. Expression Of Complexity
At the heart of every campaign are some complex ideas, whether the GM recognizes and understands them or not. “Ethics and Relative Morality in a world of Absolutes” was part of the complexity built into Shards Of Divinity. These are deep waters, and we never got to do much more than soak in them from time to time in the campaign – but if it had proceeded to its planned completion, there would have been some very hard questions for the PCs to answer, with the fate of worlds riding on their answers. Which is fine if you know there’s a right answer, and have some hope of determining what that is – but when you aren’t sure there is any right answer, only degrees of “wrong”?
Demands of an RPG are arguably higher than those of the other media forms, but the tools available are more limited. Again, it’s no wonder that some form of augmentation is desirable.
Mastering The Facility Of Augmentation
This article is finally winding it’s way toward a conclusion (and toward 10,000 words, which I think it will get to first!) It’s time to look at the practical measures that can be taken by a GM to employ these augmentation tools.
The right tech, used correctly
Find out what tools you need and learn to use them. That could be google image search plus an art editor – I use Krita – plus an image display program, the Fastone Image Viewer. Those, or their equivalents, are the minimum for really using images – or it could be something else for the implementation of music and/or sound effects.
As a side-note, I use DuckDuckGo more often than Google these days, but still use both. DDG is easier to work with when what you want is the image and not the website that the image comes from; but occasionally you come across an image that is what you want but that the server hosting it won’t open for you for some reason. I use “Search Google For Image” from the right-click context menu directly from inside DDG to look for an alternative source – sometimes I don’t find one, but usually I do. Interestingly, the two search engines have relatively few results in common – so if I don’t find “US Army Dental Surgeon 1936” (or whatever) in one, I’ll look in the other before trying a new search term.
Timing
Test, under conditions that are as much like the ones you will face at the game table as possible. Time those tests. Rehearse, especially dealing with high-risk problems like accidentally closing the folder with the file that you wanted to double-click on (it happens!)
The Limitations Of Representation
Identify the ways in which your representation of the game environment limits you, and seek solutions to reduce the scope and extent of those restrictions. Make your minis and maps more user-friendly, in other words! And don’t forget to think outside the box – See The Bigger They Are, The Bigger The Headache: The Proxemics Of Scale and 52+ Miniature Miracles: Taking Battlemaps the extra mile for some ideas to get you started.
The dangers of expectation
Do something once, and it works, and your players will expect it to be present every time, and to work on all of those times. Do something once and it doesn’t work, and your players will expect to never see it again. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, I have to admit, but the sentiment is correct.
The problem comes with the commitment of prep time. Sometimes, an enhancement activity is simply unsustainable given the available prep time.
It’s worth remembering, though, that you will get faster with any tech that you’re just getting to know, in part because you’ll learn what you need to do and how to do it more efficiently, and in part because you’ll work smarter, not harder, without even realizing it. Things like designing your adventures to accommodate the assumption of whatever enhancement you have chosen to implement.
The Constraints Of Prep
Finally, remember that this IS just an enhancement most of the time – you can live without it if you have to. Managing prep time is about prioritization and time management, and the more professionally you approach the scheduling of what you need to do, the more successful you will be. There are four posts related to game prep that I particularly want to emphasize:
- Decisions Of Plot: Encounter Planning and Prep
- Like sand through the fingers: Time waste and Campaign Prep
- Fire Fighting, Systems Analysis, and RPG Problem Solving Part 2 of 3: Prioritization which is all about breaking big problems into manageable ones and prioritizing the important bits.
- To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?
Conclusion
The use of technology-based resources can enhance games or simply discardable color, but they can be disproportionately expensive in demands on the GM. If these practicalities are taken into account, and media employed as a supplementary augmentation of what the GM is doing anyway, or used to substitute for prep-work the GM would otherwise need to perform, they can be worth the effort.
It’s essential to be critical in choosing what to represent, and what not to. (more)
As much as 1/3 of my prep time in most of my campaigns is employed in searching out appropriate visual representations that I can show the players. The typical day’s play involves 20-40 such representations (depending on the campaign). Almost 1/3 of them need to be edited in some way, and some require massive alteration requiring hours of effort. Occasionally, one needs to be created from scratch, often a still-more time-expensive activity. Yet, the sue of such imagery reduces the writing workload by more than half – call it by 2/3, so I get 50% more prep done in a given time-frame.
This is an augmentation of my capabilities as a GM that is worth the price. But it needs to be carefully managed, and rigidly controlled, lest it get out of hand. There are times when I still need to rely on the imaginations of my players, and do it old-school.
But that’s the secret to all forms of reality augmentation in TTRPGs: planning, flexibility, and discipline. All things that any good GM should be practicing already.
Whew! Finished at last! It’s almost 5 1/2 hours late in posting, but – given that it’s roughly twice as long as a normal post – that’s not too bad!
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