Design of Ozro: the Three Hats of the Game Master
Published:
Ozro is a fantasy role-playing game. Its design goal vis-a-vis Game Masters is to reduce the work they need to do to the absolute necessary minimum.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
A role-playing game that supports the Game Masters is not one that gives them more and more to do and prepare ie, adds work; but one that runs itself as much as possible ie, takes work away.
The Three Hats
Ozro defines three different roles for the people creating the game, and depending on what is being done, the person typically called the Game Master may wear three different hats:
- System Designer
- Adventure Writer
- Game Master
System Designer
System Designer's job is to create the core systems of the game (duh!) and do the math necessary to balance them.
Wearing this hat requires you to think about a situation that may arise at the table, and decide how the game is supposed to handle it. Can it be solved using an existing system? Does it need a specialisation of an existing rule, or a completely new rule? In all cases, you must ensure that the rule you have designed is unambiguous, explicit in its assumptions and intended outcomes (as guidance to players), and leave no guess-work for the Adventure Designer and the Game Master.
Adventure Writer
Adventure Writer's job is to apply the rules provided by the System Designer to create adventures.
The story, setting, and all narrative elements are the domain of the Adventure Writer, but the mechanics that determine eg,
- how many combat scenes should happen during an adventure?
- how much coin should the players be rewarded with after an adventure?
- how much coin should come from the questgiver, from the treasure chests, from the monsters, etc?
- how does the environment help or hinder the players?
are the responsibility of the System Designer. The Adventure Writer should receive a blueprint that can be followed blindly and result in a mechanically viable adventure ie, one that will, if completed successfully, leave the players slightly better off than they have been before, but will not make them overpowered. Wearing the Adventure Writer's hat requires you to take such a blueprint and invent a fun setting, plot, and monsters to populate it with.
Game Master
Game Master's job is to take either the base system and run it as a sandbox, improvising all the plot and the setting; or to take a prepared adventure and run it as-is.
The Goal
The goal of Ozro is to reduce the work the Game Master needs to do to the absolute necessary minimum. The Game Master should only ever need to wear just one hat ie, their own.
If the System Designer and the Adventure Writer wore their hats properly and did their jobs well the game should "run itself", with the Game Master occassionally stepping in to spice things up.
To make the goal explicit: for every mechanic provided by the game, everything that can be done by the System Designer must must be done by the System Designer. No ambiguities that would require the Game Master's judgement may be present. The game is the car, the System Designer is the engineer, and the Game Master is the driver; the Game Master should be able to just start the car and drive.
The Game Master can definitely wear the Adventure Writer hat at times (that is where part of the fun lies), but he should never be required to wear the System Designer's hat. If this is ever necessary, it means that the System Designer and the game have failed, and the rules must be improved or expanded.
I think the Game Master is an underappreciated role. People who decide to be Game Masters are the ones making the game happen, and are the most important person at the table (think about it for a moment: what happens if a player can't make it? and what happens if the Game Master can't make it?). The Game Masters are also the ones expending the vast majority of effort in preparing the game; they need to create the story, design the monsters, locations, non-player characters, etc. The players only need to be at the session on time and know the rules for their character.
From my point of view, if they already have plenty enough to do, it would make sense to lessen the Gamer Masters' logistical and mechanical burden as much as possible.
As a Game Master, I want to be able to prepare the adventure seed, plant it at the table, and direct the story as it grows. What I do not want is to have to think about questions that require me to design and balance game systems.
When I want to have a combat scene I want the game ie, the System Designer, to tell me what that looks like in precise and usable terms instead of handwaving and bullshitting about about some crap that's too abstract to be useful.
When the players ask "how much are we going to be paid for this quest?" (which is one of the questions I hate the most) I do not want to ponder what would be the number that will be high enough to be enticing, but not high enough to make the player characters overpowered.
When we finish the 42nd session, players have amassed a metric fuckton of coins, and have already bought everything they wanted, I do not want to have to start inventing convoluted ways to prevent money from becoming irrelevant.
To sum up, I want the game to provide precise, explicit, and unambiguous rules for all the situations the game expects and intends to happen. If the game expects X to happen I want to read the rules governing X, and be able to set the situation up properly by simply following the procedure. If the game is not able to handle its own premise by itself and needs me to rescue it... miss me with that underdesigned shit (especially if I paid good money for the rulebook).
Scope of the Game
Obviously, it is impossible for a game to provide rules for everything.
However, it is possible for the game define what it is about and how it is intended to be played. Then, within so narrowed scope, the game should provide rules that are sufficient to play it. The stated purpose of the game must be supported by the mechanics at all times, and there should be no mechanic without a connection to this purpose.
What is Ozro about?
Ozro is a game about a group of people travelling around and having adventures in a generally hostile, grim fantasy world.
Think forgotten ruins in remote places, a world where the wilderness is still untamed, and where conflict is always simmering below the thin, outer layer of calm.
This is where I find fun in role-playing games, so I design Ozro to facilitate this. It is, primarily, a game for me. A similar principle applies to cooking: prepare food that you would find delicious instead of trying to guess every other person's taste, and you will most likely find people who will like it.
Therefore, in Ozro, there are rules for combat (how to deal and suffer wounds), medicine (how to heal wounds suffered), and cooking (how to make a player character more resilient). There are no rules for building for building houses, because that is not the purpose of the game.
The ruthless economics of RPG publishing
No matter how much I rant about underdesigned games and about designers and publishers pushing the burden of finishing the games onto Game Masters, there is one fact that makes change terribly unlikely.
There are more players than Game Masters.
This simple truth makes it much more profitable to publish materials aimed at the players. For every one Game Master sitting at a table there are two to five players, which means that players are roughly 2⁄3 to 5⁄6 of the market. "Look how cool my character is!" simply brings in more money than "Look how easy it is to run this game!". Therefore, the rule of cool rules supreme, and I do not think that any publisher seriously cares about the difficulty of actually running a game.
There are some attempts making rules-light games, but that is, in my opinion, the wrong direction to follow: being light on rules may reduce the page-count of the rulebook, but it only creates more places where Game Master's judgement is necessary ie, where the Game Master needs to wear the System Designer's hat.
There are attempts at making more "narrative" games, which is, in my opinion, another misguided approach. Demoting mechanics and dressing it up as creating a "collaborative storytelling experience" takes the game away, and an RPG without the G is just improvised theatre that pretends it isn't. (This is the reason why I despise the old "Polish school of RPGs", which are heavily focused on narrative and atmosphere, with rules being almost an afterthought.)
The thing is, I want neither a low-calorie rules-light RPG, nor a zero-calorie narrative RPG. I want the full-fat RPG with plenty of game.
Is it difficult to make an RPG that supports the Game Masters and make their life easier? Yes.
Is it impossible? No.
The much-hated fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons proved that it is, indeed, very much possible to create such an RPG. Unfortunately, Wizards of the Coast got severly punished for publishing it.
Luckily for me, I am no wizard and I do not live anywhere near a coast, so I am free to create, from my point of view, the best fantasy adventure RPG possible. And I intend Ozro to be that game.
I plan to make this a series (we will see how it will turn out), with each post showing the rationale behind and the design goal of a different part of the overall design of Ozro. I do not intend to make the posts polished treatises or in-depth discussions considering various other systems (unless I will see them as somehow relevant to the topic at hand); the posts will be about Ozro first and foremost. The posts' two main objectives will be to help me crystallise my thoughts, and to show the direction I intend to take Ozro in.