Gaming - Development Hell

I suspect most people I know in the RPG business, either as writers or hobbyists, have the same problem I do: More ideas than time, and more time than productive writing time.  As an example, I'm writing this in the hopes that it'll kickstart the process for Torg writing.  In my case, it's paired up with an increasing sense that story matters a lot more than statistics, which means that writing statistics becomes a chore, so once the story's all written, then the last 10% of the work feels like it takes 90% of the motivation.  There are, of course, ways out of that particular bind - I wind up doing a lot of copy-paste and adaptation, rather than a deep dive - but it's a thing I've noticed.

For instance, the Savage Star Wars ruleset I worked up, which I've had several opportunities to play and works just fine, for any scene, setting the scene and then writing up the mechanics, despite the scene being about 75% of the word count, the mechanics took me far more time, because while I could quickly and easily understand how I wanted to handle them, and could visualize the mechanics in my head, I couldn't bring myself to care about them.  I cared about the story, and wanted the players to have a sense of wonder, but in my experience, the best dice can do is support that, not make it, while at the worst, the act of rolling itself creates an additional step between player and scene, even with a system as rules-light as Savage Worlds, which hits the sweet spot between crunch and fluff for my tastes.

One of the consequences of this is that I've come to appreciate the "old-school" approach to encounter design a lot more.  Of all people, Kevin Siembieda got this one right, which is saying something because Palladium is a mess and every single book seems to involve him preaching at the reader for ten minutes about the Right Way To Game.  I'll run my own game, thank you very much, Kevin, but that doesn't mean I won't consider your input.  In this case, his input was basically this: "balanced" encounters are a myth created by people obsessed with the statistical outcome of a situation.  Modern adventure design, mostly inspired by WotC's D&D 3.x and beyond, tends to focus on "level-appropriate" encounters, and with solid, game-based, reasons for doing so.  If you're looking at it as a game, where you're relying on mechanics to encourage players to continue, then yes, encounters should be geared at mechanical equivalency.  However, consider: there is no way that Bilbo and Smaug could be a balanced encounter.  It is more important, to me, to establish what the characters' goals are than to plunk a mechanical problem in front of them and expect a mechanical solution.  Some games, such as Seventh Sea, 2nd Edition, take this to the point of design philosophy.

One of the problems with mechanical solutions to problems, and one of the reasons that I've drifted away from mechanics as the main component of design, is that mechanics, because they are tangible and quantifiable, tend to overshadow the rest of the scene.  To go back to Bilbo, to solve the scene mechanically, it winds up being structured like this:

1. Bilbo and the dwarves roll to find a secret door.
2. They roll to determine its mechanism.
3. Bilbo rolls to sneak in
4. When Bilbo inevitably blows a stealth roll, he rolls every round to bluff his way out.
5. When he blows that roll, he rolls to outrun the flame.
   

Stripped to mechanics, it's just not fun, and the players wind up being spoon-fed the solution to the problem more often than not.  There's another danger in that scene, though, and that is that the party finds the wrong solution to the problem.  I don't mean "wrong" as in "they're off the railroad!" I mean wrong as in Bilbo decides he can take the dragon, because this is a mechanically-inclined game and clearly the GM would never put a mechanically impossible problem in front of them.  The dragon is supposed to be a piece of talking scenery, but now Bilbo is dead and the player is upset that the GM has applied a realistic solution to the problem of dragon versus hobbit.

There has to be a balancing act - there needs to be enough mechanics to allow the resolution of challenges, where either success or failure, or shades of success or failure, are realistically viable, and no more.  At the same time, there needs to be enough info about the world, the setting, and the scene that the players, and the characters as denizens of the world, setting, and scene, can make reasonable, informed choices.  Sometimes their reasonable, informed choice will be Boromir's decision to protect the hobbits, or Benkei's decision to spend his life buying time for Yoshitsune time to die, or even Egil's decision to bluff his host by pretending to be drunk and then vomiting in his mouth.  It might be outrageous, foolhardy, and self-sacrificing, but the decision should have more context than "that's what the dice said."

At the same time, for all I've talked about the importance of scene, there's a limit: no player is going to sit there when they find a magic item and the GM reads the scene from the Iliad where Achilles gets his shield.  Some might write the scene from the Iliad, but even Achilles didn't stand there reciting all the features of his shield, that was Homer's job.  Achilles gazed in wonder at the shield and received it from the gods.  If your players spend more time listening to the world than interacting with the world, you've missed the mark on the other side.  I say this as someone on both sides of the table - players are basically small children, they get bored if they don't have a thing to play with, and they wander off to find other things to play with, whether that's World of Warcraft or another gaming group.  Sometimes the GM can show them an awesome thing and hold their attention for a few minutes longer, but their interaction is what keeps the game moving.

So how do you do that?

No idea.  Still figuring that one out.  Been doing it for almost thirty years at this point and still haven't struck that balance perfectly yet.