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Designing on

Shutter Island

April 12th, 2010

Alex Riggs

Dark Designs Archive

             Hello everyone. Today’s Dark Designs is going to start off in territory a little ways away from game design, but I promise that if you politely suffer my ramblings I will eventually reach my point and you’ll see how it all ties together. It’ll be really impressive. Hopefully.

             I recently saw the movie Shutter Island, and it left me somewhat less than satisfied (by the way, if you are worried about spoilers for Shutter Island, this article is not for you. I will basically ruin the plot of the movie in order to get to my point, so, if you haven’t seen it yet and think you might want to, stop reading.) As you may or may not know, the movie is about a detective who seeks to uncover the truth of a conspiracy in a mental institution on an island. As we find out towards the end of the movie, however, he isn’t actually a detective but has, in fact, been a patient on the island for over two years.

             As they revealed this information, I couldn’t help but imagine how this plot twist had come to be. Conspiracy movies involving a mental institution that covers itself up by making its detractors appear to be insane are old hat, and at this point are borderline trope-y. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that this movie got its start with the writer sitting with a group of his friends—quite possibly in some basement somewhere—saying “Man, you know what they should do? They should make one of those movies where the guy’s trying to uncover the conspiracy in the mental hospital and they make him look crazy, right? Except that it turns out he really was crazy the whole time! It’d be awesome!”

             And, no doubt, to someone who looked at the movie and judged it solely by its pitch, the whole thing would appear fresh and clever and innovative. Unfortunately, a movie is more than just a pitch. After watching the movie for just over two hours, only to realize that I had, essentially, been watching a movie where no one was ever in any real danger and the entire plot was basically imagined, I couldn’t help but feel cheated. This isn’t to say that I can’t enjoy a movie unless a character is in mortal danger, but the movie simply failed to deliver on its premise, and I think that that really hurt it, as well as my enjoyment of it. Were Mark Rosewater writing this article, he would say that it was a classic case of “No movie is worth a scene, no scene is worth a line.” In other words, someone let the idea of the dramatic reveal (and no doubt a huge surprise to the audience) that the main character had, in fact, been delusional the entire time, eclipse the true goal of making a movie that is enjoyable to watch.

             “And why are we interested in your opinion of this movie, Alex,” you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. The pitfall that this movie fell into is a very common one in design. Pet projects and “wouldn’t it be cool if”-s are very common in design, and it’s very easy to simply not realize that a given feat, class, monster, or what have you, as cool as it may be to you, is simply not fun to use. That is one of the many, many reasons that design is done in teams.

             To make it even more in the purview of this article, our second project, Into the Armory, very nearly fell down this pitfall. When it was first pitched in design, Into the Armory (then just called Arms and Equipment guide, after the third edition supplement of the same name, because it was apparently our model for the book) consisted primarily of pole-arms, many of which were highly likely to use the same statistics as existing weapons. When I asked about the choice, I found that apparently the book was going to be, in essence, the History Channel Guide to Dungeons and Dragons, or, in other words, all those historically-accurate weapons that never quite made the Player’s Handbook. I was somewhat less than enthused, and insisted that we re-evaluate our goals in this book.

             The idea’s author, in this case, had a cool idea, which is near and dear to his heart, to bring into the game all those various and sundry things from real-life medieval history that have, thus far, been ignored by Dungeons and Dragons. I have no doubt that if we did so, hundreds of people the world over would be thrilled to see them. I have very much doubt, however that the supplement would be very fun. Yet even if all the new weapons and such got their own unique set of stats (a bludgeoning rapier, for example), they still wouldn’t be doing anything new. Perhaps those few gamers who really wanted a 1d6 finesse-able bludgeoning weapon would be thrilled at this option which completed their combo, but otherwise I don’t think we’d really be doing much to improve the game.

              After lengthy discussion amongst the design team, we determined what we wanted the goals of Into the Armory to be. Several of us were just coming off a Zendikar kick, and we wanted to see some high-flying swashbuckling adventure stuff – items and gear that encouraged players to go over the top and be just a little cooler than normal. I also said that I wanted to re-examine siege warfare in Dungeons and Dragons, because I felt that, as a part of the game, it was lacking (another case of placing flavor over fun, in my opinion, which I will have to talk about in another column. But just note that everyone does it, even the pros). And, unless I’ve fallen into any pitfalls without seeing them, Into the Armory should be a resounding success at both of those things. I suppose a little bit of a teaser wouldn’t hurt, so, have this little tidbit: I spent about an hour today working on something called “golem armor.”

                Until next time, may your lines never eclipse your scenes, and your scenes not get in the way of your movies.