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Mario vs Armored Core

 There are days when a man must open his eyes and choose to punch the old gods in the face. There are days which demand violence. Today is that day. Today we compare and contrast quest design structures in Mario vs Armored Core! LET’S GOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

So first off, why are we doing this? Aside from lingering insanity, Armored Core and Mario represent two styles of linear quest design. Mario levels progress in a straight line from left to right, or from a starting point in 3D to an end point in 3D, in all cases you are assigned (or stumble into) a task, complete the task, and get a reward. Armored Core is similar. You are sent a set of tasks and their associated reward, you choose one, and it’s left to you to accomplish that goal, whatever it is. The difference in genre is the point here, because I am abstracting my brain away from mechanics, characters, themes, etc. and focusing purely on the quest design structures. By doing this with such wildly different games, I ensure the focus stays where it should be. 

Let’s break these games down into chunks and walk through each, shall we?

Choose Your Adventure

Mario “quests” are presented as levels. You approach the painting, dive in, and choose which quest you want to undertake in that particular region of the game. Alternatively, you have a world map or just an open world. In all cases, you choose a space to explore and the quest or quests available are based on what is physically present within that region. In Mario 64 this is a discrete choice you make upon entering a level, in Mario 3 it’s similar, though the presentation is very different, and in Bowser’s Fury you engage with a quest simply by interacting with items lying around in space, much more fluidly than either of the previous examples.

In Armored Core you get email offers from companies, and the interface displays these by showing you which part of the city map you wish to engage with. Choosing an offer presents its rewards and a description of the quest. This is analogous to when choosing a level in Mario 64, and you dive into a painting to choose which part of the castle map you wish to engage with. In Armored Core, you choose the quest reward at the same time as the location. In both titles you are choosing a location and a reward before appearing in another space to actually undertake the selected quest.

With that connection established, we can expand. Bowser’s Fury is also a quest-based Mario title, but its quests are presented as you explore the world. Going to an island functions the same as jumping into a painting, except that everything exists in the same space without division. Where in Mario64 you choose which quest to undertake before even entering the space, Bowser’s Fury has all its quests simply exist in the world for you to discover, with a few exceptions that trigger based on your actions. You can imagine, based on this comparison, how Armored Core’s quests could be adapted to an open world. Wandering an open space in your mech, finding events and actions to participate in, and engaging with those in a more free-flowing manner than was possible in the past. This method looses the narrative delivery in the form of emails, however, and that must be addressed, or could be argued to prevent a “true” Armored Core from ever being an open world game, I’m not here to have that particular argument today.

As another point of comparison, Mario 3 presents its levels as a world map. You explore a map going from one space to the next in a fairly linear progression from start to finish. You could present Armored Core in much the same way, presenting its missions as nodes on a map that you dive into once chosen. Doing this would change nothing other than the email interface of the game, as the game already shows you a map and allows you to choose missions based on region. If we wanted to give Armored Core a Mario 3 style world map, all that’s required is to adjust the presentation of that one screen, the core features otherwise can remain the same.

So by looking at these aspects, we can learn a few things. Mario quests are presented as static nodes in some form of overworld, while Armored Core presents these through a representation of a computer terminal. Mario intends their quests to feel exploratory, while Armored Core intends theirs to feel like missions you must complete without asking questions. These narrative differences cause different choices to be made in the presentation, but overall the actions taken remain similar. In both games you are dropped into a small space and must find something, reach something, or otherwise interact with something before you are given your reward. Of course, all games can be said to require only that you “find something, reach something, or otherwise interact with something” that is a very vague sentence, so let’s look at some specifics. Let’s see what, exactly, these two game series want you to do while engaging with a quest.

Let’s take a look at those action verbs.

Quest Actions

Quests in Mario tend to be collection-based. You have to find the star, the sun, the moon, or some other object which is hidden behind some object or task. However, the task you must complete to collect the reward varies quite a bit. In Mario64 Nintendo established the formula they've used ever since, and we see quests that break down into 5 different types. You have stars which are rewarded as a result of the following: Exploration, Boss Fights, solving Puzzles, experimenting with New Mechanics, or basic Skill Tests. Exploration stars are about reaching a new location, often as the first star in a level, so that you can get an understanding for the space before being tasked with any more specific interactions. Boss Fights come in many forms, but always demand completing combat in a specific setting of some kind, usually with a unique enemy. Puzzles reveal a hidden star in mundane places, such as climbing to the top of 4 specific poles, or shooting yourself in a cannon to break a brick wall. New Mechanics are introductory quests which allow you to experiment with things like the flying cap or metal mario transformation. Skill Tests are jumping or timing challenges that test your ability to manipulate Mario in particular ways, usually involving reaching the end of a difficult gauntlet. Skill tests can test the player’s speed, such as in the foot races, their jumping ability, such as in nearly every star in Rainbow Ride, or their precision/timing, such as by having them stomp on a pole to free a chain chomp. Skill tests are, predictably, the most common star type in the game. 

Quests in Mario 3 tend to be simpler, you must only move from left to right and reach the end of the level. Every “quest” in that game is the same, and the challenge comes in the obstacles of the level preventing you from doing that.

Quests in Bowser’s Fury are similar to Mario64 in terms of genre, though there are some additions such as delivering a key to a cage, or forcing Bowser to blast open particular walls.

Quests in Armored Core tend to all be skill tests. There’s no need for exploration-focused rewards because the fantasy is that you are a military contractor just following orders. That said, there are a few instances where you can explore a level for hidden rewards, or even entirely new quests. While Mario had a focus on Puzzle quests, Armored Core leaves its puzzles for optional unlocks of new items. There are no New Mechanic quests because the mechanics in Armored Core focus on mastery, and introducing a Metal Mario equivalent would ruin that pacing. Boss Fights and Skill Tests in Armored Core are, however, much more varied than in Mario. There are quests to defend a space from invasion, to chase down a fast enemy before a timer runs out, to reach a difficult space, to reach a difficult space before a timer, or to do so with a boss on the way. Armored Core even has an entire Arena section of the game that is nothing but a gauntlet of boss fights in every possible flavor. The game even combines these things, the boss fights in the main game tend to be Arena combatants you’ll fight in that context as well. Armored Core uses quite a lot of layering like this, expanding its skill tests through combinations, putting a boss fight between a timed sequence, or adding in a restriction on the amount of damage you can take just for that added spice.

Those familiar with the kishotenketsu design philosophy will note that Mario also layers its mechanics, but that type of interaction is much more common in 2D Mario titles, usually those without quest design in the same way as the 3D titles I’ve been referencing so far. Still, there’s a pretty clear connection in the design philosophy of how Armored Core expands its quests alongside player skill, and how Mario does it in those games. You can imagine how a 3D Mario title could start layering in skill tests on top of each other to create a much more “hardcore” experience, perhaps you’d have to race Koopa The Quick while also dodging enemies or beating bosses or whatever. In fact, I'd bet some of that is already present, just less obviously than it is in 2D, because of the difference in difficulty ramping for a 3D platformer.

So once again we have a number of lessons we can take from this. Let’s start by listing out the types of interaction each of these games turns into a quest

Mario:

• Go To A Location

• Collect An Item

• Kill A Monster

• Win A Race

And in Mario you can get the following modifiers on the above

• While Carrying An Item (which drops if you take a hit)

• Within A Time Limit

• Complete Task X Number of Times (such as collecting 8 red coins or killing 4 enemies)

Armored Core:

• Go To A Location

• Collect An Item

• Kill A  Monster

• Win A Race (though usually this is about killing a target before they escape)

• Defend A Target

And in Armored Core you can get the following modifiers

• While Taking Less Than X Damage

• Within A Time Limit

• Complete Task X Number of Times (such as killing all targets, or defending many areas)

Looking at the above you may note that Armored Core has more bullet points, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those games have more quest variation, because I have combined quite a lot of the depth Mario games tend to use. For example “Collect An Item” in Mario could involve putting on a Metal cap or a Flying Cape, transforming the game into something entirely different where in Armored Core that only ever means “go here, stand on this, come back”. 

It’s also worth pointing out, explicitly, that the lists of possible quest actions in both of these game series are mostly identical. Both games demand you go to locations, collect items, kill boss monsters, etc. Despite the differences in genre, the quest design interactions remain largely the same. This tells us something about the fundamentals of quest design, and is highly useful going forward, because knowing this we can start to test other genres as well, and see how often these specific goals are present, and how we can start to compare something like Bowser’s Fury to something even less related, like World of Warcraft (no, I will not be making that comparison today. The old gods can only take so much face punching).

Let’s move on to the final part of the quest!

Rewarding Your Players

Quests need rewards, right? Mario and Armored Core have wildly different approaches to this concept, as I’m sure anyone who has played both can attest. 

Mario games reward the player by effectively just checking off an item in a long checklist. You have collected 1 of 120 stars, collect the rest to complete the game. Mario doesn’t always have a discrete number of rewards, nor does it always require all of them to complete the game, but a consistent theme in those games is that you must complete a number of tasks before unlocking a final boss and beating the game.

Armored Core games reward the player with more options. You get new parts or money to buy new parts, and as you progress you improve your mech and therefore your ability to acquire more parts by completing new quests. Every quest in Armored Core improves your numerical advantage, making you a more powerful combatant, more capable of handling the ever-more-difficult enemies the games throw at you.

Putting It All Together

So what have we learned? Well, these games show a wide contrast of skill-focused, linear quest design. Both task you with overcoming difficult challenges and modify those challenges over time to cater towards increasing player ability. Both expand their quest offerings by layering simple concepts on top of one another. 

Specifically what I think is valuable here is the comparison in types of skill test between two very different genres. Most Mario quests are simply “Go To Location” and we still see that same quest type in Armored Core fairly often. Most Armored Core quests are “Kill A Monster” and we see that same goal present in Mario all the time, if presented a little differently. What I wasn’t expecting was to see all the other quest goals that these two games share. I mean honestly, I couldn’t have picked two more different titles, yet almost all of the quest goals are shared between them both. In fact, the “Defend A Target” quest that is not shared could very easily be adapted into a Mario game if Nintendo wanted. You can imagine a horde of goombas climbing up a hill and you have to shoot fire flower bolts at them or something, right? It’d be an odd choice for a Mario quest, but I could see a one-off use of this in a shipped title, if there was a level where it made thematic sense.

Incidentally, while writing this article I also played a number of other Giant Mech games, stuff like Zone of the Enders, Robotech Battlecry, Zoids: Battle Legends, etc. and they all share similar quest interactions with Armored Core. I also looked at several other game types, MMOs, farming sims, etc. and these same cores are present in the majority of those quests as well. In fact, the same can be said of literature and film, these same quest goals of “go to a location”, “collect an item”, and “kill a monster” could be used to recreate everything from Lord of the Rings to The Illiad to Legally Blond. 

Knowing that so many stories are based in relatively simple actions gives us a point of comparison to use while choosing our systems to build into a game. While the impulse is to adapt action movies like Looper or The Matrix into first-person action titles focused on gunplay, if we look at the quest design of those films, the protagonist’s quest is almost always just “Go To A Location” and the gunplay is a side effect of the desire to move into a space, not something actually required by the story. Similarly, classic epics task the hero with “Retrieve The Golden Idol” and the monsters are simply placed along the path to that idol, not a required part of the quest itself. Yet games so often put the Golden Idol into the item drop pool for the giant monster, thus demanding the player kills the beast that should have been an optional hazard.

Mario and Armored Core both show us a way of presenting the player with exactly the information they need to choose a quest. They tell you to go and kill the monster, and they acknowledge that most quests aren’t about that violence specifically. Many of Armored Core quests can and should be completed by rushing through to the target as quickly as possible, ignoring or circumventing combat as often as you can, as any sensible person would do in real life, but I think you’ll find that it’s impractical to do a pacifist run of the game, just as it would be impractical to expect the plot of Looper or The Matrix to advance without the violence. Still, we as quest designers have to be aware of the difference in focus. We have to acknowledge that it’s not the role of the quest to demand the violence, it’s the role of the enemies to demand to be dealt with. 

And that’s all for me today. I can’t wait to read all the angry comments! Thanks for your time!

Verb Directions in Game Design

 A few months ago I looked at verb design in other media and as part of that blog post I briefly dipped into Magic: The Gathering, but ever since then I’ve wanted to revisit this part of the discussion and dive in deep on how Magic deals with expressing player and character personality.

So first, let me explain why. Magic: The Gathering is a combat-focused experience that expresses character personality through action verbs at a level of nuance and complexity I have never seen in a video game. Production demands of video games are more intense, so it’s harder for them to really explore the depths of this type of design. Unfortunately, even narrative juggernauts like Hades will have the complexity of personality only available in their main character. Even MMOs, games which are built with the same desire for expressivity as Magic, don’t ever give players the open expression space to really act in a way that’s unique to them or their character. I’m sure you can immediately think of many very compelling reasons why all of this is true, but I want to take this post to discuss how to push the envelope a little further while still remaining on a budget! So let’s dive in!

Magic cards exist on a game board. Any given card will belong to you, the player, or to an opponent. Your cards can be used to affect that opponent in some way, and in doing so, this card is acting outwards, which looks a bit like this:

All this graphic means is that the card is acting towards something. This is the most common expression of action a character in a video game can be given. Usually, this outward action just takes the form of damage. A character acts outwardly and damages something within its range. This is a standard attack design. Usually this attack will affect a target’s health and there’s no other target for your outward action, except to target some other object’s health bar.

Magic, however, offers multiple targets within an object. You may choose to attack an enemy creature card, an enemy planeswalker card, or the enemy player themself. Only attacking the player themself will cause damage to their health bar. However, despite only one option changing the health bar, all of these choices are valid in different circumstances. 

In the graphic, the green card can attack any of these three valid targets. Please note that the third target is left empty as a way of showing that the enemy player is what’s being attacked. This representation reflects how in Magic The Gathering, a player can only be attacked if nothing blocks that attack. Regardless of where the attack lands, though, the card will deal its damage to some other object and that will be the end of this attack action. 

This is not, however, the only interaction option available. Much like how Magic offers multiple targets, Magic also offers multiple interaction styles. Some cards can cause your opponent to discard. Discarding cards can happen from your hand, or from your deck, and this serves as a sort of alternative health bar. If for any reason there is no card in your deck when you have to draw a card, you lose the game, and so players may choose to build a deck which focuses on discarding instead of dealing health damage. 

I denoted this discard-based attack in blue because it’s describing an attack which is dealing damage to the deck, rather than dealing more traditional health point damage. It’s worth at least mentioning that there are other mechanics that could be included here, such as dealing poison instead of health damage. I don’t really need to be comprehensive to make my point here today, so feel free to fill in the blanks there with all the other ways a player might choose to win in MTG.

Now. So far we’ve been talking about combat damage being dealt in a standard means, but deck damage, also known as “milling” is usually done in other ways. Generally, this type of “damage” is done via abilities and effects. This could be “Pay X Cost and remove a card from the enemy deck” or “when this card comes into play, remove a card from the enemy deck” or any number of similar situations. Magic has learned to trigger its abilities in many different ways. Some cards may ask you to pay a direct fee, others may only happen once during a specific scenario, others may happen repeatedly on a timer. All of these are happening to the side of combat, outside of that order of operations.

So now we have two methods of interaction represented here. You can interact with Health, or you can interact with the Deck. You can interact Directly, or you can interact Indirectly. And these are just the options for a creature card. This same set of actions is also represented in the skillset available to the player themself. They can simply cast fireballs to do damage without the need of a creature, and the targets they may choose from are identical, though they of course will interact slightly differently, and player spells like this happen at a slightly different time in the turn hierarchy.

Now. We got super complicated. I apologize, and I’ll stop there with this part of the breakdown. 

Next, let’s strip things down again and go look into two cards and how they may interact with one another in a void.

We have two cards here. Let’s say one is attacking the other, or otherwise causing some effect to be applied to that other card. Regardless of what form the interaction takes, one of these cards is acting on the other. What does this defending card do in response? Well, what can we do with an arrow? I mean. It’s just a graphical metaphor, but… what could we do with this arrow in this graphic to say it’s not going to hit this other card? Well…. I could put a line in between these two cards, right? A line would say “There is something between these two, so the attack isn’t happening” and that would be pretty effective. In fact, Magic has a mechanic for this. It’s called Blocking. If I want to prevent a card from attacking me, I block the attack with a creature. 

So here’s my graphical representation of that. The top half of the arrow is blocked by the wall. I left a ghostly impression of it to show that it would have passed through, if not for the obstruction. I have now blocked the attack! Maybe I blocked the attack with a creature card, or maybe I blocked it with a spell or ability. It doesn’t matter. I blocked the attack. People who play Magic may be screaming “But you can’t target an attack like this!” because technically you can’t choose to attack a creature directly in Magic, but I’m not really concerned with the specifics of the rules here. The idea is just “my creature was going to do something to your creature, but you put something in the way, so I can’t”, and I only care about this abstract concept for now. 

What else can I do with an arrow? Well, I could bend it! Or point it at something else, if I didn’t want to visually bend it, but the result is the same: I can put the pointy end somewhere else. I don’t want it pointing at me, I want it pointed at you. Or your ally at least. 

 

What else could we do with an arrow? Could we make it longer? What does THAT mean? Well, I guess it means the attack went through the defender. In other words, the defender dodged. The defender just isn’t where the attack is happening any more. Now that pointy end is somewhere behind the target. In the visual language I’ve set up for these, I suppose that means the damage went to the player, but whatever. It’s somewhere else now, and sometimes that’s the most important thing.

We could also turn the arrow back on itself. Send it back where it came from. Or delete the arrow, and make it so it never happened. I could also make the arrow bigger or smaller, simulating changing its effect to be more or less powerful.

This graphic shows every way to alter an action. I may have missed a few, of course, feel free to leave a comment if you think you have another. Now. All of these graphical representations show a single action. Magic also allows you to respond to the response. In other words, I may attack, and you may redirect my attack back at my face, but I can then prevent the attack from happening, thus stopping myself from taking damage. Or I could redirect the damage back to you again. Or decrease the amount of damage. You can see where this is going. The above graphic applies to any single action, and each action can be responded to by another action, and the chain continues on until someone runs out of things they can do. This also applies to indirect effects, of course. My earlier graphic with arrows coming from the sides of a card could have all of these same effects applied.

Just for the sake of clarity, let’s make this a bullet list instead of a graphic. These are the ways to interact with an action:

• Ignore it

• Redirect it

• Block it

• Reflect it

• Empower it

• Weaken it

• Dodge it

• Prevent it

A reminder: These are methods for interacting with an attack. If you try to deal damage to me, I may use any of the above to try to stop that attack from affecting me. If you try and cast a spell on me, I may do the same. If you try and deal damage to an object which is important to me, I may use these same abilities to prevent that damage as well, I don’t necessarily have to be the target myself. That said, though, obviously it may change my ability to interact with your attack, if the target is someone or something other than myself. I may or may not be good at extending my protection to others. By the same token, I may or may not be good at responding to outside actions. Perhaps I’m only good at setting up actions myself. Aggressive types will focus on hitting big swings, right? They’re probably less good at responding to someone else’s action, but a more manipulative person might excel at only responding to actions initiated by others.

That brings us to our next discussion. What does it say about a person if they choose to interact in only one particular way? What does it say about them if they’re only good at initiating that first action? How about if they’re only good at responding to actions? What does it say if they can only apply these effects to themselves? What does it say if they can only apply these effects to others? To go to the earlier graphics, what does it say if a card is only good at dealing “Damage” to a deck? How about if they’re only good against planeswalkers? Or creatures?

Well these are starting to sound like classes in D&D. Paladins are great at applying effects which prevent damage to their allies. Rogues are great at dodging, reflecting, and redirecting attacks, but only when those attacks affect themselves. Wizards and Mages have spells that could do that reflecting and dodging, but which can affect someone other than themself. These essential verb building blocks that we’ve broken down in this article are the pure distillation of character action. By understanding the personality you wish to convey, you can choose particular interaction styles that suit the character. Magic’s secret to conveying depth in their characters is that they offer a game with a wide range of possible options at every level. The multiple targets I mention early in this article serve as expressive grounds for conveying character. If you want a character in Magic to come across as thuggish, you have it deal a lot of damage, and focus only on damage to health. If you make a thuggish character that deals deck damage instead of health damage, then that character becomes someone who would flay another’s mind for personal gain, a very different type of thug. Having multiple targets for any given action means your characters have more ways to express themselves. Even without multiple targets, however, you can still express yourself through the type of interaction you choose, whether direct, indirect, or etc.

But you’re not working on Magic The Gathering, you’re making a roguelike, or a strategy game, or a fighting game, or a FPS. 

Well, what is a bullet, except a direct outwards action? I’m acting outwards towards my target by shooting a bullet at it. What can my target do to respond? Can they redirect the bullet? Can they make the bullet weaker? 

What is a sword strike? Can your opponents parry and shift the target of the blade to go somewhere less harmful? Can the sword be blocked?

What about an alternative health bar? Can I attack your stamina gauge instead of your health, rendering you unable to move? Can I attack your mech’s heat system and overload your battery instead of trying to cut through your armor? Could I use energy attacks to cause your battery to explode instead? Where are the other systems I can target when choosing how my character operates?

When I said that I’ve never seen a game as nuanced as the narrative verbs in Magic, this is what I mean. In a shooter game all you get are various forms of outwards action with next to nothing that can be done to alter the attack. Overwatch is one of the very few games of that ilk which manages to convey character in this way. Overwatch also has multiple targets in the form of pushing carts or capturing points or whatever, though they don’t ever have more than one active at the same time, which is a bit of a shame (and yes, allowing that would make it a very different game, so it’s fine if that’s not the game they wanted to make). Overwatch, also,  is only ever concerned with dealing health damage to your opponents. You never have a capture point that demands you disable the enemy base’s shields, or that type of thing. Your focus is always in one direction, which streamlines the game, but removes any expressivity from the verbs.

Magic finds this streamlining by simplifying its systems to stay on budget. Magic says all damage from any source will deal simple number values. Most creatures deal somewhere between 1 and 5 damage total. Some deal more than that, but the bulk of the game is in the 1-5 range because low numbers are easier to calculate and deal with for the player. There’s no “1d6 damage plus 2d4 fire damage” type of interactions, every source of damage deals a simple, set amount, and all damage is identical. In games we avoid this simplicity in order to bump up the variety. You WANT video game damage to be more complicated, otherwise it gets predictable and boring. But what if instead, you put the interest back in via alternative targets for that damage? By changing the places where damage can be dealt, you are putting the focus on responding to action directed inward, something you don’t often have to concern yourself with in video games (with some exception for those games which have shields that you can redirect to be in front or behind your space ship, but even those never go very far to make it interesting).

Most games focus only on outward action. You are the hero of legend, this is your power fantasy, so the only thing that matters is how you act outwardly upon the world, and how the world responds to this outward action (usually by giving you gold and exp). Even the modern wave of games which give players more interesting, fantastical abilities (like the aforementioned Overwatch, or other games like Destiny or Outriders) usually only require a direct outward action in order to win, and focus entirely on dealing health damage until your enemies retreat. Very very rare is the game which demands that you redirect your opponents in order to win. Rarer still is the game that allows victory by only using redirection.

Imagine a video game starring one of these characters. What does that game look like? What’s the primary verb the character uses to overcome its challenges? What’s the progression as the character develops and grows?

These characters absolutely star in the decks they are built into in a game of Magic, yet how could we make them star in a game? These characters can’t replace the protagonist in Call of Duty, no matter how bland white dude we try to make them, because their abilities are too different at too fundamental a level. Making any of these cards a video game protagonist would require a wildly different approach to game design. I, for one, would like to play these games.

And that’s all for this post for now. I hope that’s given you something to think about when designing the gameplay for your game’s main character, or for when writing the character’s backstory once you’ve decided on their core verbs.

Thanks for reading!

Storytelling Through Skill Trees

 Humans are not trees. It’s a radical statement to make, I know, but try to bear with me while I explain this difficult concept! Humans, in fact, do not begin as a single entity and then branch out to catch the sun’s light. Instead, when we grow what we try to “catch” are various abilities, skills, and knowledge as a means of reaching a personal goal. No two of us are chasing the same sunlight. 

Which is my really obnoxious way of saying: Why are we so convinced that skill trees are a great solution to map character growth over time? If we look at evolutionary psychology in books like “The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory” or “The Strange Order of Things” we find that psychology professionals have identified that organisms basically grow in whatever way they find the most success. Even trees and plants will change their growth patterns over time based on the resistance that they meet in their surroundings. So if all of the biological world is based on the concept of adapting to their unique stressors, why are we building all of our games with rigid skill trees? Why does my D&D character sheet require that I be a wizard or a bard or a fighter? Why do I pick my difficulty when I begin the game, and get locked into these systems? This stuff doesn’t fit our evolutionary needs. Adapt or die, these are the rules of the whole world. If your system doesn’t allow adaptation, then it incentivizes death. 

The common wisdom found in game design communities will, however, contradict me here. Players WANT to be a Bard because they don’t want to have to do a ton of research into building their character for a silly game they play twice a month on tuesdays. Figuring out the entire system just to understand how to build the most powerful character is an awful way for most of society to spend their free time (obviously some people do like these things, and more power to you! Literally!). People want to walk down a path somewhat mindlessly, and make a few choices along the way knowing that they will still have a good time in the process. This is a natural desire for each of us, because we want to feel like we’re good at things without having to spend our lives mastering those things. In fact, even in real life, most of us are unconcerned with becoming the most or the best, we’re largely just trying to figure out how to Make The Thing in the first place. The idea of becoming the best Thing Maker alive is absurd. 

Fortunately for us, we as humans have already spent boatloads of time and energy learning how to educate other humans in healthy ways, and to do so while they are quite literally incapable of understanding how to plan out a complex skill tree path. As children, we are placed into schools which teach us a set curriculum, and as we advance through our education we pick up skills along the way. Some of us will pick up more math skills than others, some will pick up primarily physical talents, and still others will focus on the arts. Often, we will pick up a set of skills society enforces upon us, which we do not find daily use for. How often have you or your friends complained about having to take that advanced calculus class, knowing your career goal is to bake cupcakes? How often have you been out with a group of friends and you break out that “party trick” you learned years ago but never had any specific use for because you learned it completely aside from whatever your core path was? We all have those “useless” skills that don’t come out as a daily occurrence because we thought they’d be worth it at the time.

The point that I’m making is that a person isn’t a collection of skills carefully chosen, but a collection of skills of which only a carefully chosen few are repeated. In other words, I like to design games, and so I write a lot about game design, and so people view me as a game designer. I’m also an artist, but I do that much less, so people view me as an artist much less. If your Cleric doesn’t also have a set of skills from when they tried being a Barbarian, are they even a real person? 

WWBJD?

First grade teachers will cover a generic set of skills we think are essential. Reading, Writing, Basic Math, etc. are all represented. By the time you reach 18 you have dropped any number of skills by the wayside. But we treat characters in games as if they start at the beginnings of a tree, and branch out as they go. Reality tends to work in reverse, where we start in the branches and funnel into increasingly-specific direction over time. If school were a skill tree, you’d start off with an extremely nonlinear pile of skill to choose from, and somewhere at the half way mark of the game, you’d finally have the 30 required skills to earn your certification as a Paladin. Once you’re a Paladin, you can officially dive into those deep Paladin skills that just would not be useful to anyone else. The “Paladin” class, in this example, acts as a signpost. It’s a guide saying “if you come this direction, your experience will look like this” and is a good way to direct people towards a specific goal. This concept has been proven to work so well that every school system on the planet finds some rough approximation of it, even if the details vary. So why on earth do we build games the other way around? Why am I choosing my class at the start of my character? Why am I locked in with lateral movement a near impossibility? And look, I acknowledge that multiclassing in an RPG is there to solve exactly this, but come on folks, we all know that’s not the same thing. In real life I don’t get a degree in art and then a minor in english and then only get to either be an artist or a writer for the rest of my life. That fluidity of adaptation is essential for human evolution and happiness both, and is something we should strive to include in our game design. And ok, saying all this is well and good, but how do we make it happen?

The key features of this evolutionary look at personal growth is that we start off general and end up specific after walking through a series of gates. This really isn’t unlike how Outriders handles its skill tree.

On the left we effectively have elementary education, then there’s a clear delineation where you can branch into a new path if you choose. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with only a few places where you can jump between the three trees in this image, so this works more like a D&D multiclass system where you can choose a new career path, but you’re defined by the choice you made when accepting that first job (our company LOVES lateral movement among our employees, just fill out these 6 forms and reapply after a minimum of 2 years in your current role and you’ll be considered for that pay cut!). The way humans like to work is to have a more open pool available. Mechanically, this would be more like drawing from a large pool of skills which get increasingly specific as you go along. For those familiar with CCG games, this is sort of like drafting a pack of Magic cards. You start with a broad pool of possibilities, but each choice you make narrows your focus down so that later picks become almost predetermined. Which sounds rather confusing, so let me make a chart to demonstrate that visually.

Let’s avoid debating how to organize those DnD classes, that’s not the point here. But the idea is the same regardless of how you structure things. On the left is a list of skills for everyone, and as you go right it filters down to be skills for each specific class. If we were to continue the Magic The Gathering example, the green box on the left would include cards of all kinds, then the next column represents when we’re given boxes of cards for each specific color, then next would be deck types, and the red on the far right would be boxes full of cards catered to popular meta decks. As you move from left to right, you go from generic to extreme specificity, just as you do when you progress from elementary school to college. Your development is along whichever path you like, and then once you reach the end you must prove you have achieved mastery. Is your MTG deck a “red” deck if you have 5 red cards in it? 10? In real life, if you want to be known as skilled in a particular area, you take a certification exam for that skillset. In other words, you qualify yourself as “a red deck” by proving that you have enough skills to use the term. In this skill tree, you do the same thing. If you want to call yourself a rogue, you have to have… let’s say 10 skills in the rogue tree. Once you have any 10 rogue skills, you are officially a rogue. Congrats! I don’t care if you have 25 points in wizard, or 45 points in paladin, if you have 10 rogue points, you qualify to call yourself as a rogue. 

This aligns much more closely to how we, as humans, expect to learn. There are goals to reach at the end of the path we’ve chosen, and it’s our task to reach the goal we choose. No two people will learn in exactly the same way, but generally you get to where you want to go. As opposed to the purely linear skill trees that we see in games like Outriders, or the ones we get in games like Path of Exile which start off at a particular class and then try to add the nonlinearity at the end, which is the opposite of how we humans learn and grow.

There is, of course, quite a good reason people tend to design games in this “backwards” way: People get overwhelmed by too many options. If you start off in the “Everyone” bucket, you have far too many choices at once, and how on earth could you ever possibly choose? Again, we look at developmental psychology for our answer. We don’t allow kids to choose the classes they take, we give them a set curriculum and they learn all of it. Once a kid knows more of what they like, we start to give them choices to make, such as choosing types of curriculum to take in high school (which sometimes takes the form of choosing blocks of classes, and other times in choosing entire high schools). Then we don’t let them fully branch out until college, once we know what they like. So in the above example, perhaps you could choose a class to start with, and then change that class at any time. If you choose, for example, Wizard, you would begin collecting skills within the wizard curriculum, moving from generic skills into magical skills, and if you reach magical skills and suddenly realize you want to pivot into a Warlock instead, well that’s fine because you haven’t reached the point where the skills required is different from a Warlock anyway, so no big deal. Once you choose Warlock as your new class, your current skill list is the same, you just have a new goal. If you choose to then become a Fighter, well you’ll have to start over from the physical skills list instead of the magical skills list, but at least you don’t have to relearn the skills for everyone! And already this feels much more like what it’s like to be a person going through a real education process, realizing that you want to learn something new.

The other aspect of this is what to do with unused skills, and to which I suggest limiting the immediate skill list you have, such as how you can only build a deck of 60 cards in Magic The Gathering. Then you take all the skills you’ve learned, apply the “build” you want, and there’s your character. This is also how we work in real life, we’ve all got those party tricks we can break out, but our core “build” is just the skills we use over and over in our daily life.

This guy gets it

But this isn’t an article about game design, despite how much time I’ve devoted to that so far. No, this is an article about narrative design. Mapping skill trees to human development patterns doesn’t add all that much to the game design process, but it fundamentally changes how we are allowed to tell stories in these games. Imagine you’re the child of strict parents who are forcing you into Paladin college, but you’ve always known you’re a Bard in your heart. Maybe you take night classes and dream of running off to the circus, maybe you only look onto Bard skills from a distance, but either way you have a problem: You don’t WANT to progress the way you have been. Now your skill tree is greyed out, and there’s only one path to choose. You can see the other roads, but they only bring you agony. You can never be anything but what you are. Life is awful. 

At least life was awful, until you met Him. He changed you. He showed you the way things could be, he showed you the world. He taught you a Bard skill! It was a simple one, but you have a skill point on that forbidden tree! How is that possible? Weren’t those other trees greyed out? Were they? Or could you have put those skills there at any time, if only you’d allowed yourself? Sure, your parents will be pissed now, but it’s not like they can stop you from learning, right? And maybe they’ll even tolerate a few skills, I mean it’s not like you’re at the real hard stuff yet, right? It takes a while before you can unlock those Bard-specific skills anyway, this is just a phase, you’ll grow out of it before then. Which, of course, you don’t. You get your first Bard skill and you’ve crossed the threshold. Your parents see this trigger and disown you. They know you have a Bard skill, and no son of mine will be a filthy Bard! Not under MY roof!

In this example we have a set of skills that unlock based on triggers reached by hitting a threshold. Then we have quests that react to those same triggers, your parents changing their dialogue based on if the boolean variable “hasBardSkill” has been flipped to true. It’s simple stuff, programmatically. What’s important, though, is that we have that natural movement from unskilled to skilled which matches human development. If you started off by choosing to be Paladin, and only ever got the chance to multiclass, this storytelling would be impossible. You’d already be hard-coded into your class from day one with no way out, and what is a story without personal growth and change over time?

But I’m not leaving it there either, because I drew the earlier connection to developmental psychology for a reason. Characters in stories have goals. In some cases, those goals have to do with reaching a particular location on a skill tree. In other cases, they may just want to be a different person in a more abstract sense. Maybe the character is a child who just really wants to be like Daddy, so they try to learn the same skills he learned. Maybe the person has anger management issues and needs to develop those skills, or maybe they’ve found themselves trapped in a life of crime and they want out. Maybe they are getting bullied and the only reason they care about the skill tree mess is to keep them from being hurt. People grow over time, at all stages of life. There is a biological imperative in all of us which tells us to keep adapting, even if many of us try to ignore it because we don’t want to believe that we can change, or because we’re simply happy where we are. In games we map this growth onto what we call a Skill Tree, but in reality what we’re mapping is the development of our own minds. If a person has a mental block against allowing themselves to become a particular type of person, something common among abuse victims, that might manifest as a greyed-out skill tree, as in my earlier example. A skill tree is nothing more than the path of growth a character is allowed to move along. If the path is linear, then that person is only capable of growth in a particular direction. If the path is open, the person is allowed to grow more freely. Which shape the tree exists in will determine the possible reality that will define the person. Or at least the reality they impose upon themself. What kind of person has a linear skill tree? What does that say about their political or religious beliefs? What kind of career might they prefer?

To offer an example, consider the film Easy A. It’s a romantic comedy where the protagonist feels invisible as a teenage girl in high school. Her goal is to be popular, and the moment she trips that “isPopular” trigger, her life completely spirals out of control. Sunk cost fallacy keeps her there for a while, but eventually she has to come clean and resume her normal life. She’s not trying to become a Wizard or a Barbarian, but she is definitely trying to learn a new set of skills in the Popular Girl tree. Those skills, however, cause her nothing but trouble and her story focuses on how she must quickly learn to adapt. As another example, look at the anime Mob Psycho 100. Mob is a psychic high schooler who must avoid using his powerful psychic skill, which is triggered by stress. He has the skill unlocked already, but wants a new set of skills over on the “Physical Skills” branch instead. He has found that the more physical skills he has unlocked, the more able he is to control his use of those psychic skills he’s so worried about. It’s all a great way of mapping depression onto verb use, and shows us how we can demonstrate a character’s personality based on what skills they have, and which ones they feel like they need. These are two examples, but just consider the stories you've read or watched. Consider how the protagonist uses their skills in a way that either helps or hurts their progress through the story. Consider what skills they have at their disposal and why they did or did not use those skills in that story. Try to imagine what their skill tree might look like.

Each of us has a skill tree full of nodes we’ve unlocked. Each of us has a set of skills we are willing to use, and a set of skills we are unwilling to use. If we were a videogame, our preferences and the walls we build for ourselves would all manifest as variations in the UI that presents our stats to the person controlling us. 

What class are you? What class do you not consider a possibility for yourself? Is it because that tree is in some way locked for you, or is it simply that you’d have to go too far back on your tree to switch to that other path you’d need to be on?

Hopefully that gives everyone something to think about. Thanks for reading! I’d love your comments and thoughts below!