Joe the Elf

I think I have said before that making games is hard. I know there are many people out there who love playing games and think that will translate into making games. You will never find a group of people who will work harder for less money than game developers. The amount of work that goes into a great experience is hard to fathom until you have gotten to the 90% mark. Quite often, at that point, you have just begun to ship your product.

One of the marks of a great game for me is good storytelling. I appreciate good storytelling in games and in movies. I would love to do more storytelling in games. I have at least one person who tells me I should not be thinking about making games for my storytelling, that I should go and write books. I try not to be hurt by the aforementioned statement. I also run a tabletop game off and on and I get told by some of the players over the decades of being a tabletop game master that I should write books. When they say it, I actually feel humbled by their praise. Go figure.

I have a Sunday project I have been working on for a while now. It originally started in 1997 as a tool I built for myself for my own tabletop campaign. I wrote a clever tool in C++ and I was a test audience of one off and on for about five years. I dusted off the codebase in March and ported it to a web service. It was somewhat fun to move my early project into “ThE cLoUd”.

Somewhat ironically, I suspended my tabletop game to give myself some time to build tools to help make my tabletop games more interesting. That is probably the most programmer-ey thing in the world.

Over the past few months I have had someone helping me build an MVP out of my little tool. It is nearly complete with a few tweaks here and there. I am almost at the point where I can test it out as a Progressive Web App (PWA). This means it is a website that has application functionality and it is usable on the phone, and on the browser.

I think this is important for a few reasons.

The first is that it means I can set up some kind of revenue stream around this without having to pay Tim Apple or Larry SearchyPants a 30% tax. It also means I can update my project and release a new version without needing to wait 12 to 100 hours depending how close it is to Christmas.

Setting aside the pain of making new things, and the excessive tax, I think that making PWAs is the future. We are about to see a resurgence of people experimenting in the open web for a variety of reasons and I am super excited about that. I understand “Does It Scale?” is easier to answer if you can point at a link to the Platform Thirty Percent Tax Store. The tides are turning and being able to build and deploy quickly to the web will be a really important thing for the coming five years.

I am going to stop talking about my excitement for the un-App-ening that is happening. It has nothing to do with what I want to talk about today.

Today I want to talk about Joe the Elf.

Running a tabletop game is hard. It is almost as hard as making games sometimes. I will confess I am one of those “make shit up” kind of game masters.

I make the world into a tapestry, and I have a series of agents acting in the world behind the scenes.

I do not care if the players stay on the rails of the story. There isn’t one. I give them hints and teasers to stuff happening in different places at different times. I have played in tabletop games where the game master has tried to take control of the story and force the players into the tavern, or make them enter the dungeon. It is tedious and frustrating when that happens because it breaks the fourth wall.

I do my best to do things to keep the fourth wall intact for players. You can look up the fourth wall if you like. Googles has buttons for you to click on without my lovely links. 

It is hard to keep the fourth wall intact when you are making shit up. If you are adding random things to the game world on the fly, you might find yourself in a situation where you have the players coming for a stop at a roadside tavern, and inside sitting at a table near the hearth are five elves engaged in deep conversation.

I generally add window dressing to the campaign with elements like this. Of course, invariably you have that player who asks you two questions:

“What is the name of this tavern”?

And

“I introduce myself to the elves and ask for their names”.

This can be a difficult moment. It is one thing to quickly reply “This is the Roasted Apple Tavern”.

The next question gets more difficult.

“The elves introduce themselves as Gilthaniar GoldBow, Shaellisti Oakleaf, and uh…”

Here is where you can hear the shattering of the fourth wall.

You have so much spontaneity in storytelling and so much stuff that matters in the back of your head you have hit a momentary mental stack overflow.

At this point you gesture lamely and add:

“Joe the Elf”.

If you were running your tabletop game on Yelp you just lost two stars.

Naming five elven NPCs in realtime is hard.

Unfortunately, it is sometimes very important.

This ties into game development here. Sometimes you will find “Joe The Elf” manifested into game development. You have too many cities, taverns, and agents in your game to name effectively.

I have decided to label this problem as Tedious Creativity.

Tedious Creativity is the need to deliver multiple creations that are thematically sensible over a short window of time.

Fortunately for us, computers are very good tools for helping us solve this problem. I started monkeying around with my own solution decades ago.

I am going to be shipping that as a product for game masters Very Soon™.

If you are running a tabletop game and are interested in kicking the tires on a tool to help solve Tedious Creativity, drop me a private note on any of the socials.

I would love to give you early access in the coming weeks and get your thoughts and feedback!