Art in mechanical design - has always been an awful idea?
Callan S.:
Not sure how to start this. I guess I'll just stumble into an example first - take the idea of turns. Turns seem to be a pretty good idea for supporting a group activity - ie, everyone in the group gets a turn. But what if you design to reflect a game world - ie, you inject art into the mechanics. Taking Rifts for example, a juicer several more attacks a round - so once you've finished yours, your just sitting, and waiting on his player to finish up before you can participate again. This is screwing up the idea of a group activity.
Even the idea of 'skill' and 'damage' on a 'sword/weapon' - if someones sitting there, missing over and over, or doing practically nothing when they hit, it's hardly participating (Ah, I remember once only being able to hit on a nat 20 on some monster that was brought to the canvas, so to speak - so I had my monk did flurry of blows because the minus to hit didn't exactly matter and I got two chances...to miss). And not because they made a bad move or whatever - it's just that 'swords' are just 'that way' with 'damage'.
What I'm trying to grope at is when you inject art into mechanic design - the art can effectively be wrong/fail at goals/it was a failure at design goals to bring in this art. This isn't the normal state of art. You can't normally look at a painting of cambells soup or melting clocks and say they are wrong. But if one of your design goals is it being a group activity, and bringing art into the activity effectively removes members participation (and not because they lost or wanted to miss a turn), then that art is failing the design goal.
Or, from the other side of the coin - and this makes me twitch and retch inside somewhere - is the idea to 'water down' the art to bring it in. Ie, the juicer has more attacks - but not too many more, m'kay!? Okay, that example isn't making me retch inside, it's the idea that such a compromise being advocated as an overall good thing does.
Both compromise each other, but not the sort of compromise that mutually benefits. The group game idea is just whittled down and...it's just whittled down. The art is watered down and...well, ones artistic muse doesn't need to express itself through a medium that waters it down. It can go scribble on a page, bang on a drum, whatever. There's no upside to being watered down - there's always another medium to work in that doesn't do that. Both design goals and art are compromising, but with no real benefit to each other. They are just compromised.
I suppose I'm groping at my own writers block in this as well - invent something and instantly a dozen more thoughts go 'OMG, but what if it screws up X, Y or Z in terms of design goals?' and artistic muse just says fuck it. I'm pretty sure that's the cycle. The model of designing mechanics with art embeded in their structure (like, say, a 'combat' sequence, where you get 'attacks' and a whole bunch of other stuff which is artistic ideas layed onto number and procedure) just suddenly seems really awful and something that should not be passed on as wisdom.
On the flip side, I guess the card game 'Lunch Money' and table top wargames like warhammer 40k have alot of art in their mechanics. But it seems more the over the top and silly type. It's not exactly art that's going to matter to you in a deep way on the long term. Although thinking on it now, am I missthinking on how deeply the art in roleplay is supposed to matter/how deeply it's implied that it matters, in general RP culture? I'm not sure - if I wanted to address (or even try and beat) a particular painful issue, I'm not sure I'd actually get to it with space cat girls with bling lasers and a bunch more of happy go lucky shit. Silly fiction always makes me think of happy go lucky stuff - and that isn't anywhere near actual pain. Even 40K's 'in the future there is only war'...I mean, hardly - dudes in these big chunky cool looking power armour and orcs using teleporters to fire goblins into enemy vehicles? Oh yeah, sure, that's really getting into the idea of there only being war!? Hardly! That's just one big, glorious themepark! And I'm not knocking themeparks, but it is a themepark.
In terms of getting at something a bit more deeply than a happy go lucky way, has art in mechanics been an awful idea that's been passed down from generation to generation?
Jasper Flick:
I grappled with what you mean by "art" a bit, and I'm seeing two sides pop up.
1) Art is writing, fiction, setting.
From this angle, you're talking about mechanics failing to match the setting. Or fitting around it in a way that makes play not enjoyable. For example, the writing evokes fast-paced, over-the-top action, but in-game combat is a dragging war of attrition.
I say this is not inevitable. This is simply design without the requirement of making it fit the "art", be one with the "art", and work perfectly with the "art". There are plenty of fields where this is done really well, just look at building construction alone. It is just that for mainstream RPGs (the ones having most of this type of art), so far this isn't a requirement at all. At least, that's how it appears to me.
It's also that designing something to be in tune with another's vision is completely different than only dealing with your own vision. It's far cheaper to just slap d20 on your IP and tie it together with some strings, than to really make an effort. It's also the default risk-averse choice.
Compromising the art to fit the design might make it feel like a better fit, but would indeed be unacceptable from an artistic point of view. Unless the design came before the art, in which case it's a constrain in which to work. I don't know examples of that though. Even Ebberon, writtin specifically to be a D&D 3e setting, to me appears completely out of touch with the mechanics.
2) Art is physical, the drawings, cards, miniatures.
This kind of art is a powerful means to evoke flavor. If they're being silly, it's perhaps reinforcing the inherent idea that the whole thing is silly. If the game isn't supposed to be wacky, then bundling distracting wacky art with it is once again bad design. You just don't smile happily and dress pink on a goth party.
I have little experience with minis, but I've seen a lot of those wargame miniatures, and indeed I couldn't ever take them seriously. I don't know if it's interntional or not, but it was always over the top. If it's not intentional, there's a big disconnect going on somewhere. Aren't there minis for realistic WWII games around? Those shouldn't be silly...
I think MtG cards are a good example where it mostly works, but sometimes not. Usually, I consider the art to be really good and fit what the cards are about. Sometimes though, it's doesn't match and it's jarring. For example, a card depicting a normal bird capable of flight, but the creature doesn't have the flying ability. Another example was a collection of specific creatures, but there was one color missing. In fact, there was art depicting the red creature of the set, but according to the rules it wasn't. It was probably deemed too powerful and discarded, and they recycled the art for something else.
Does this get things moving, or is my contribution a dud?
Callan S.:
Thanks for the reply, Jasper.
Welllll, your kind of playing out the 'Mechanics should match the art' arguement. The other side, though, is that mechanics are atleast in part there so everyone gets a turn. If the art - and by that I mean how the fiction goes - says someone sits there for two hours (and I've seen accounts of this and I think been in some games like that and even been the guy to sit out), then it's screwed up the game being a group activity because clearly someones just sitting there. One pat responce is that 'that's a bad GM', but I don't think it is - I think it's something deeper and the GM isn't at fault for producing fiction as he was asked to (it may even be (brain?) damaging if he's repeatedly told he's a bad GM for it, over the course of years).
Basically I'm not arguing for either side - I'm suggesting it's a lose/lose situation. Here's why I suggest that; If you try and build mechanics that are to support a group activity, when you bring art/fiction into them (like the number of attacks example from above), you start to compromise everyone participating. If you try and balance that out, then the art starts to get compromised because you know, so and so class would have more attacks, your artistic muse knows this to be so. All this, because of trying to force art/fiction into the very mechanics themselves. Just for contrasting purposes, a game which doesn't try to force art/fiction into the mechanics, as far as I can tell, is universalis. So a game without art in the mechanics has already been done before.
That's the suggestion - there just seems to be...and maybe this is just me, this conflict where any artistic inspiration is then muted by mechanical/group need, which in turn is then compromised by any further artistic inspiration (if it even comes), etc. So I've come to the point where it just appears this idea of shoving art/fiction into the mechanics, is just a bad idea.
Perhaps I'm a little cynical, but I think many other designers get around this by just not being interested in managing the group activity perse - any group management is taken, it seems, as an artistic suggestion rather than, if someones sitting there doing naught, the group management is screwed up. If pressed on the matter of everyone, like, actually get a turn, there's often a dense multiparagraph responce on how the fiction is a many layered thing and moves in mysterious ways or such and basically basks in the art of it all. I'm not trying to lay into that (well, a little, but just for fun >:) ), but to say it's perhaps a coping mechanism with what is essentially a lose/lose situation in relation to raming art into mechanics? Also I'm saying that, in case this seems an absolute non issue - in case anyones so used to soley dealing in art creation and is wondering what on earth art could compromise to? Since it might appear there is nothing else on the radar but art/fiction creation and thus there's nothing else to compromise with, let alone any need that shows up.
Vulpinoid:
Callan,
As a qualified industrial designer, I find it abhorrent that you would believe that art and mechanism may never work in harmony. It sounds to me like you are arguing that the two agendas are completely at odds with one another.
There's an interesting thread over on Story-games (here), where someone makes the comment that they don't like the Serenity RPG because it feels like a generic game with a "Serenity" coat of paint on it. That's exactly what it feels like, because that's what it is. It's a case of "we got the IP license to make a game out of this" and "We've got this new game engine we want to publish"...screw it if they don't go together properly, we'll just use some Firefly Universe slang in the textbook and hope that people don't notice. Hell, you can't even make a character like "River Tam" in the game because the rules just weren't designed to accomodate that sort of character...pure evidence of a system not matching the fiction and certainly not being appropriate to produce the kind of experience one would hope for.
That's not evidence that "Art" and "Mechanism" can't work together. It's just bad design from people who've been in the industry long enough that they should know better.
If you are treating the development of the art as one stream, then treating the development of the mechanism as another stream; things WILL get messy when you cross the streams. They've existed in isolation and will have diverged in different paths, trying to tie them back together will leave some awkward gaps.
Conversely, if you design a game with a single vision in mind and produce art and mechanisms simultaneously from the core vision, then I don't see a reason why the two halves have to cause issues with one another.If something doesn't feel right with respect to the core vision, then chuck it. If the art and flavour of the world doesn't support the premise then it should have a damned good justification for staying in place. If a mechanism doesn't give the desired results, then the same applies. As soon as you compromise the core vision, your lost...and the problems start.
To go back to your RIFTS example, what do the different types of augmented humans really represent in the game? It's nothing if not a kitchen sink of a game which has totally lost it's focus as far as I'm concerned. Hell, I'd argue that there was no focus in the original game...post apocalyptic world...let's just chuck everything into it. If the game focused on the Coalition and their struggles against the exotic, the alien and the horrific it could have been one thing...if the game focused on the magic users and their ability to step through rifts into alternate realities it could have been something very different. But Palladium just wanted a game that could be everything to everyone.
If that doesn't say lack of focus, I don't know what does.
Take your specific case in point...If one player has a Juicer, and someone else is playing a Vagabond, then really consider what these characters are doing together. The Juicer player obviously wants to play one sort of game (and some might say that this player favours a Gamist agenda), the Vagabond player obviously wants to get a different experience out of their game (perhaps playing a game of survival among vastly overpowered companions and enemies...or perhaps wanting to explore a world while maintaining their hope and humanity).
If the two players are working with different goals in mind, then why are they playing in the same game. Firstly, I think the GM should have indicated to the players what sort of game they were intending to run. Secondly, if the GM did explain their game concept, then any players who created an unsuitable character should shut up and quit their bitching.
As a counter example...If I say I'm running a game that will chronicle the development of a group of friends over the course of 20 years...then the player who shows up to the first session with a Juicer is a moron.
I'll agree with you to a point.
If you develop rigid mechanisms first...then try to slap on a coat of paint to pretty it up, the added artistic embellishments will probably feel out of place. Bad design.
If you develop the art first, creating a rich an elaborate world with no heed for how it works...then decide to place structure and rules to make your world work, the rules will probably seem a bit disjointed and may not reflect what the original vision intended. Also bad design.
If you develop bits and pieces...a bit of art here...a mechanism there...some flavour text later...then try and tie it together into a coherent whole...or worse still, just try to offload it as a generic kitchen-sink game. Awful design.
If you work to a core vision and goal, develop art and mechanisms from that vision and aiming toward your intended goal. Create images that point toward your intentions, develop text that gives a feel for your aim, write rules that show someone how to achieve the type of experience you are trying to share. Good Design.
Just some thoughts (based on years of study in the field of design, and experience with some very bad design in numerous areas, not just gaming)...
V
Jasper Flick:
Callan, I think your definition of art here is too broad. It appears to range from art products, to what emerges during play, to how to make sure everyone has a good time. You're also specifically focusing on a specific mechanic: turn-based combat, but is this just an example, or is it your main point of interest?
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