Be ye warned…

This be a Random Bullshit article. It’s likely a bunch of stream-of-conscious ranting and rambling about… well… about whatever the hell it’s about. I’m just thinking — and screaming and swearing — through something. Sometimes there’s a point and some useful, actionable advice. Sometimes there are even headings and structures just like a real Feature. But often, it’s just a pile of words that go nowhere.

The Q and Angry follow-up to this Feature will be released with the second part next week and will encompass both.

And now, on with the rant.

The first half of the rant.

Stop Trying to Make Open-World Games

This Feature — this rant — is a bit late in coming. If you’re a site supporter — thanks for that, by the way — if you’re a site supporter and hang out in The Angry Discord, you might have seen a massive fight about open-world games a few months ago. I didn’t technically start the fight, but I sure as hell grabbed the banner and a sword and charged screaming into the fray. That’s because I’d already been ruminating on the topic when Frienemy for Life @mendel said something like…

You know, chaps, I don’t think tabletop roleplaying games can actually do open world games very well at all, and also I love cricket and tea and my socks don’t match, pip pip, cheerio guvnah.

Yeah, that’s how he talks.

Anyway, this shit’s late in coming but I’m calling it topical because FromSoftware just dropped a massive DLC deuce on Elven Ring called Flight of the Erdtree or something and now everyone’s talking open worlds again.

That’s how this horseshit happens, you see. Do you remember when Elven Ring first came out and everyone was all like, “Finally, FromSoft did open worlds right for reals!” Do you remember when, before that, everyone was saying how Breath of the Wild — because Tears of the Kingdom passed like a fart in the wind — everyone was saying how Breath of the Wild finally did open worlds right for reals? And do you remember how, suddenly, every Game Master was saying, “Gosh, I’d sure like to run an open-world campaign. A real open-world campaign. Like Breath of the Eldring.”

You know what’s funny? This shit’s been going on practically forever. You just don’t know it because half of you are frigging zygotes who don’t remember a world in which we weren’t screaming about AI taking jobs from shitty Internet artists and the other half have the memories of goldfish. Well, you may not remember, but Peppridge Angry remembers. I remember when The Elden Scrolls V: Skyrim came out — the first time — and finally did open worlds right for reals. Hell, I remember when Grand Theft Auto III invented the concept of the open-world game and simultaneously did it right for reals. I even remember all the games before GTA III that also invented the concept of open-world games. And I remember all the games in between. Ass Creed, Witcher, FarCrysis, and so on and et cetera and nauseum.

Of course, I wasn’t The Angry GM back then. I mean, I was a Game Master. I’ve been stuck behind the screen since frigging 1988 and I’ve been angry about that since… also 1988. But I didn’t have a comment section and an e-mail address and a website back then and so I didn’t have to deal with a bunch of numbnuts sending me messages like, “Angry, I just finished the greatest game ever — Insert Game Title Here — and I was thinking I’d like to run an open-world campaign. A real open-world campaign done right. Like Insert Game Title Here. How can I do that?”

Today, I’m going to give you my definitive, once-and-for-all, now-and-forever answer. An answer that’s as valid today as it was when Arena was renamed to The Elder Scrolls because Ted Peterson and Vijay Lakshman accidentally made the biggest-ass open-world roleplaying computer game ever when they were trying to make what basically amounted to fantasy Street Fighter and an answer that will be valid in ten years when some new franchise I can’t even imagine finally does open-world game video games right for reals.

That answer comes in five parts…

(1) What the hell do you even mean by real open-world campaign for reals? (2) and how the hell do you think you can pull it off? You know what? Nevermind. Because (3) you really shouldn’t do that, (4) and you can’t. (5) Fortunately, you don’t have to.

What the Hell Do You Even Mean by Real Open-World Campaign for Reals?

If you’re one of the multitude of mouthbreathers who’ve been begging me to tell you how to actually run a real open-world campaign for reals, let me start by asking you what the hell you mean by that? What is is a real open-world campaign for reals.

Because this is a written monologue — unless you’re listening to the crappy audio recording — you can’t actually answer me, so allow me to guess your stupid answer. See, I know this shit coincides with some video game release or other and I ain’t immune to that shit myself. Skyrim grabbed me hard back in the day. So, I suspect, if you really drill down to the core of the issue, it’s something like this…

I really loved my time Breath of the Eldtree’s world and I want to give my players that same kind of joy as they explore my world.

That’s it, right? Strip away all the bullshit where you try — and fail — to analyze gameplay loops and mechanics and world design — and that’s what’s left, right? You must do that because, in the end, you’re not trying to recreate mechanics, you’re trying to capture a feeling and pass it on to your players. Which, by the way, is very commendable. It’s both altruistic Game Mastering and a solid approach to campaign design.

If I asked you to expand, further, on that feeling of joy, you’d probably wax poetical about how it felt to get lost in the world and wander for hours spotting interesting shit on the horizon and checking it out for sheer, unbridled curiosity’s sake. Or you might tell me about how you’d encounter camps of Hollow Moblins and how you’d approach each as a unique puzzle of conquest. Or how you totally broke a puzzle in some lame-ass shrine. Or how you ended up where you weren’t supposed to be and made a frantic, skin-of-your-teeth escape back to the world you knew and loved.

Am I close? I am, aren’t I?

Ultimately, that’s the Open-World Experience, right? That’s why it’s called that. The game literally just drops you in a world and invites you to wander at your own initiative, undirected by the heavy hand of the game designer. Go where you want, check out what you want, and do what you want in any order you want. If there’s a quest or plot, you can do it or ignore it as you desire. If something grabs your attention, you can drop what you’re doing to see what it’s about. And you can engage with the game’s challenges in whatever creative ways you want.

How The Hell Do You Think You Can Pull It Off?

So you want to invite your players to just explore your world, right? You want them to explore on their own initiatives, to check out whatever points of interest catch their eyes, to accept or reject any quests or plots you put in front of them, and to engage your challenges in any creative ways they can imagine?

How, exactly, do you plan to do that?

I know it’s unfair of me to ask you that considering that’s what you’re asking me, but life isn’t fair and I ain’t either, and whining that it should be different is a waste of energy, so pretend you don’t have Angry to kick around and that you’ve got to figure this shit out for yourself. How might you pull that off? What would building that campaign look like? Where would you start?

Most of y’all — I’m guessing — would design your campaign the way you think Elven Ring and Tears of the Wild got built. You’d build a big-ole world and scatter a bunch of interesting shit around it to explore. Then, you’d let the players discover the points of interest and choose which to explore. And then you’d play out their explorations.

Of course, the reason you’re coming to me is because you know there are holes in that plan. First, you know there’s probably an ass-ton of up-front work to design even a small chunk of a world with a bunch of POIs to choose from and you want to know how to divvy the up-front work from the design-one-session-in-front-of-the-players work. Second, you’re probably really iffy on how the players might discover the points of interest. You know you want the players to wander the world and stumble on shit that looks interesting, but when you try to picture that playing out at the ole TTRPG table, you get a big ole error message in your brain.

You definitely need to overcome those problems, but they’re not the only problems you need to overcome. Before you start figuring out whether you could do such a thing, however, you need to ask yourself whether you should.

But You Shouldn’t…

Trying to build a real open-world campaign for reals like your favorite video game sounds great, but it’s actually a really terrible idea. I know you loved that game and I know you think that game is exactly what you think exploring a fantasy world is supposed to feel like and I know you think tabletop roleplaying games should be the perfect medium into which to translate that game and I know you think recreating that game’s play experience is exactly why you got into Game Mastering in the first place, but that’s all wrong. You’re wrong.

And the first problem is that you’re blinded by your love.

The Problems You Don’t See

I admit this heading is a dumbass place for me to start this discussion. It’s going to seem like I’m attacking your beloved that game and that’s probably gonna make you all defensive and shit. You’re only human, after all. And that’s kinda the problem.

Open-world games have problems. They ain’t perfect. That doesn’t make them special; all games have problems. But open-world games tend to have some specific problems that arise from their open-worldness. Unfortunately, some of those problems are getting worse with each new generation of open-world games.

I ain’t saying open-world games don’t capture the unique open-world experience better than any game ever has. Of course that game is an amazing example of open-world exploration. Every world in every open-world game has been. Hyrule and the Lands Between are amazing to explore. So was Skyrim. So was the Wasteland. So were Hook Islands and 11th-century Jerusalem and all the rest. I know. I was there.

When you love something — especially when it’s unlike anything ever before — it’s hard to see the flaws. It’s also hard not to leave nasty comments dismissing the flaws as skill issues or no worse than other, crappier games or go die in a fire, asshat or whatever. Please don’t do that.

Open-world games in general and that game in particular are subject to pacing problems, balance problems, and general gamer complacency.

Open-world games involve long stretches of wandering the world and looking for something to do. That’s just their nature. And because open-world games — out of necessity — try not to pressure their players with urgent goals and quests, there’s really no pull on players to stop wandering. If you’re the sort of person who finds exploration intrinsically motivating — you enjoy wandering and looking and satisfying your curiosity for its own sake — you probably never noticed the ratio of wandering time to actually doing shit time in that game, but not everyone’s so intrinsically motivated by one, small aspect of the whole gaming experience as you are.

Before you lose your shit and fight me on that, at least finish this entire section and the next heading, okay?

Because open-world games are player-directed, they also tend to have some pretty serious balance issues. You — the player — can go anywhere and do things in any order you want. As you do so, though, you’re gaining levels or stat-ups or finding better equipment or gathering crafting materials to upgrade your gear and fill your pockets with conusmables or whatever. Every game’s got a progression system and that game ain’t any different. The problem is that if you don’t hit each in-game challenge at the sweet spot of character power level, you can wreck the experience for yourself. Either you hit things too early and get frustrated or you hit things too late and get bored.

And that brings me to the complacency issue. Open-world games are, ipso-facto, open. You can engage the game’s challenges however you want. Which means you’re also free not to engage with them. The longer you play that game, the more likely you are to just run past or sneak past incidental content. Or just blast it out of the way with some easy, first-order strategy. For all the creative ways you can take down enemy camps in Breath of the Wild, for example, the fact is, that after a few hours, you either just do the murder frenzy thing or else you just start skipping the camps altogether.

Now, these problems don’t ruin open-world games. Especially not for their respective fan bases of intrinsically motivated explorers. That’s partly because the exploration experience — for those players — is so engrossing that the problems aren’t worth sweating and partly because the game designers are smart about those issues and they’ve learned to mitigate them. Or hide them.

Well… some of them, anyway.

The World You Don’t See

Open-world games are a frigging nightmare for game designers. Gameplay experiences are best when players are shepherded through carefully designed, curated gameplay experiences with balanced challenges every step of the way. Such a design ensures every player will experience a well-paced narrative and stay in a perfect gameplay flow state throughout the entire damned game. And that’s all true whether we’re talking action games, puzzle platformers, or strategic simulators.

Now, no game designer can pull that shit off perfectly every time for every audience, but most game designers can satisfy most fans of a given genre with a carefully designed, curated experience.

Open-world games are… well… they’re kinda the opposite of carefully designed, curated experiences. You see that, right? I don’t have to explain that shit. In fact, the three major problems I highlighted all result from the player-directed nature of open-world games. That’s just what happens when you give players total freedom. So, what’s a game designer to do?

They do whatever the hell they have to do.

On the YouTubes, you can find ten thousand analyses of that game and every other open-world game ever. Each analysis highlights the hidden layer of design under the open world that manipulates players into having a curated experience without noticing. Breath of the Wild funnels players along certain paths with something like 90% effectiveness. Its gradual replacement of enemies with stronger, color-coded varieties keeps challenges on par with Link’s equipment and progression. Or it would have if the designers hadn’t shit the bed on that particular system. Just like Skyrim which did the same frigging thing without the color coding.

Elden Ring’s open-world is barely open at all. It uses all sorts of funneling and chokepoints and line-of-sight tricks and gating to drag you on invisible rails through the game.

Open-world game designers have been dealing with this shit forever. They’ve been solving problems with the very concept of open-world gaming since the genre was invented. Consider, for example, that players have to be able to find shit to do. Because you don’t want the players wandering for hours looking for the fun. What you really want is for the players to choose to wander and then, within a few minutes of making that choice, they find something to engage with. Otherwise, players get bored.

Minimaps and Ubisoft towers — shit we complain today is ruining games — were early solutions to that whole sandbox problem. And they were revolutionary solutions once upon a time and totally did open-world gaming right for reals until we got sick of them.

Modern open-world games have gotten better at dealing with that sandbox problem. Breath of the Wild still uses Ubisoft towers, but because computer power is such that lots of detail can be rendered at long distances, the player doesn’t need locations highlighted anymore. They just need the ability to stick a pin in points of interest. Breath also did some amazing, revolutionary tricks with terrain design and line-of-sight. Look up The Triangular Design of Breath of the Wild if you’re curious. You’ll get a dozen essays.

Elden Ring tightened up it’s world. It’s big, but it’s dense, and it also relies heavily on line-of-sight tricks to ensure there’s also something to see. Elden Ring’s in-game map is also amazing at telegraphing what you’ll find where and it’s so subtle most players didn’t even notice it.

The point here’s that there’s a lot more to that game’s open-world design than just plonking fun shit to do on a big ole map and turning you loose to find the fun. There has to be. Because most people — even you — would actually get bored or frustrated in a real open world. Open-world game designers are constantly innovating new ways to keep you from realizing how much open-world gameplay would actually suck.

Less Fun with Friends

One last, minor issue I want to raise is that most open-world games are solo games. If they do have any multiplayer component, it’s usually pretty limited. You’re not meant to explore the open world with a friend or three or five. Exploration is a lonely life.

Of course, that’s partly because loneliness helps enhance the exploration experience. It’s part of what makes you feel like you’re free. Like you’re beholden to no one. Like you’re the master of your own path. You can’t really share that feeling with other people.

But there’s more to it than that. Open-world games are self-directed and that means any goals they offer must be long-term or loosey-goosey. You’ve got to be able to opt into, opt out of, or put on indefinite hold any quest or objective the game hands you. Unfortunately, team-based games need strong goals to unify the team. People don’t work well together without a strong sense of purpose and most suck at group decision making. Team-based exploration tends to get bogged down in endless committee debates about what direction to go next.

Most multiplayer open-worlds either focus on other aspects of play — like survival, for example — or else they’re multiplayer games in name only. Everyone’s playing their own game, they’re just all connected to the same server and playing at the same time.

…And You Can’t…

It’s tough to get open-world games right and, even when the designers do get them right, they’ve still got issues. Thus, designers are constantly innovating. That’s why the amazing open-world games of yesteryear seem kinda crappy today and today’s open-world games “Finally got it right.”

Translating open-world video games to tabletop roleplaying games is especially fraught because the problems inherent in open-world video games are especially destructive to tabletop roleplaying games. That game survived its pacing and balance problems — you may not have even noticed them — but those problems will destroy a tabletop roleplaying campaign. Meanwhile, complacency absolutely can’t happen. If you’re skipping encounters in a tabletop roleplaying game — assuming the Game Master lets you skip any and every encounter — you’re not really playing the game.

The point is, you can’t really emulate open-world video game design in tabletop roleplaying games because they’re different media and because you don’t have the skills or the resources.

Years of Careful Design You Don’t Have

Open-world video game designers pull all sorts of shenanigans to make their games work. But over the top of those shenanigans, they also lay down an extensive open world.

Let’s say you weren’t worried about the bullshit design tricks that make the game actually good. Even if you just tried to build an open-world game like that game pretends to be, you’re gonna run into a prep problem very quickly.

You can’t design the world and all its towns and dungeons and everything else up front. I mean, you could, but you’d need a couple of years to launch that campaign. Fortunately, tabletop roleplaying game homebrewers only ever need to prep the next session; they don’t have to build the whole world. But suppose your campaign gives the players a very limited choice between, say, a dozen different things to do in or near the starting area. What are you prepping? How are you gonna get ready for that?

Ultimately, you’re going to end up inventing a bunch of pacing and prep tricks to stay one step ahead of your players. That’s what the Angry’s Open-World Game series was actually about, by the way. It wasn’t about building an open-world campaign, it was about using a bunch of prep and pacing tricks to fake one.

So, first, you’ll probably discover that a dozen options are way too many. Players are perfectly happy with two or three options. Next, you’ll figure out how to improvise wilderness and travel bullshit to stretch the time it takes to travel anywhere so you have some between-session time before the players hit the door to the dungeon or whatever. Or you’ll ask your players to decide between sessions what their next goal is. Or you’ll just go the whole hog and manipulate the players into the one choicest adventure you want to run anyway. No choice needed.

That’s how it’s gotta be because building an actual open world is way too much for one homebrewer gamemaster to actually pull off. But how much of that shit can you pull before you’re not really building an open-world game anymore. At what point are you recreating the experience through smoke-and-mirrors trickery and the tools of the medium you’ve got.

Hold onto that thought…

Video Games Ain’t Tabletop Roleplaying Games

I know this ain’t the sort of mindblowing revelation you come to me for, but tabletop roleplaying games and video games are different. I, myself, am a huge proponent of learning good roleplaying game design from video games and so I have to keep saying that because lots of you dumbasses don’t seem to recognize just how much differences in the media affect what each can do and how.

There are two specific major differences between vidja games and TTRPGs I want to highlight that make translating that video game’s open-world experience to your RPG tabletop basically impossible. One’s to do with time and the other with narrative presentation.

You Can’t Waste Time a Wanderin’

Players value their video game time differently than their roleplaying game time. At the RPG table, time’s valuable. It’s too valuable to waste too much of it wandering around looking for shit to do. Those same players might be perfectly happy to spend fifteen minutes climbing a video game mountain to see what they can see from the top of it and then another fifteen minutes hoofing it to some distant point of interest, but if you waste a half hour on getting a vantage point and then traveling to a destination at the roleplaying game table, you’re gonna have a rebellion.

This ain’t down to actual amounts of time, though. Don’t misunderstand me. Rather, it’s down to how time is valued. You can see, for yourself, how you value time differently just by observing how you play that game differently when you’ve got a couple of hours to spend versus when you’ve got a half-hour before you need to run out for an appointment.

With video games, there’s this sense — however busy your life — that there’s always another hour for video games later. You know you can come back later or tomorrow or whatever and pick up where you left off. At the roleplaying game table, though, your thoughts are closer to, “If we don’t get anywhere tonight, we’ll have to wait an entire week to play again.”

And that’s ignoring the issues of turn — or spotlight — time that arise whenever you’ve got a group of people sharing a pool of game time.

Of course, this shit need not be a big deal. After all, time flows differently in tabletop roleplaying games because such games are narrative-driven. This brings me to the second issue…

You Can Only See the World in Your Mind’s Eye

Even when they use maps and visual aids, tabletop roleplaying games are a narrative medium, not a visual one. The Game Master describes the scene, you describe your actions, and the Game Master describes the results. Everything’s done by narration.

Do you remember that I said a few thousand words ago that the plan to “Somehow let your players discover the interesting things to explore through gameplay” was actually a big ole hole in your open-world game plan? Well, this is why I said that. It’s also why you felt like you — the hypothetical lover of that game — had to e-mail me in the first place. You know there’s a skipped step there; you just can’t see what it is and what to do about it.

Exploring a video game world is a visual thing. As you move about the world, you see the environment with your eyes and you pick out the visual clues that suggest there’s something nearby worth checking out. It might be a glimpse of a gray texture amidst the green trees that suggests a wall or a winding contour that suggests a road winding to or from somewhere or just a strange plant formation where a forest spirit might have taken a golden poop. Whatever it is, you notice it and you wander over to see what it is.

Note, first, that that process is a weird mix of passiveness and activeness. You actively wander the world by moving your thumbstick and panning your camera about. Meanwhile, you passively drink in the visual details and see if anything jumps out at you. If something does, you can turn the camera toward it or move to get a better view or whatever and see if any more details reveal themselves.

The problem is that the active part is the moment-to-moment movement while the passive part is the examination and deduction. And that’s exactly the opposite of how tabletop roleplaying games work. All the physical movement crap is passive. Your character just does it. Or dice do it. You don’t describe your movements step-by-step. In fact, you describe your movements in terms of what you’re moving to. Meanwhile, the mental crap is the real game-playing stuff. You — the player — make decisions and connections and deductions with your brain.

This is why it’s so hard for Game Masters like you to picture how wandering the world and looking for interesting stuff to check out should work at your roleplaying game table. Players can’t see the world and drink in the environment and spot weird details while they wander. The game just doesn’t work that way.

That is because — and this is the second thing to note — that exploring an open-world video game tests your — the player’s — perceptiveness. Why does that game leave you feeling like you’re actually exploring a world and noticing interesting things worth checking out? Because you — the player — are literally doing just that. You’re being tested on your own ability to notice details in the visual environment with your own human eyeballs that warrant inspection. Moreover, as your perception changes — because you choose to move closer and get a better look, say — your emotional state does too. When you realize that odd detail really is a building and when you see how sprawling and unusual it is, your anticipation grows and grows until you finally reach the door.

At the roleplaying game table, your perception isn’t involved. Instead, the Game Master describes what catches your character’s attention and asks you what you want to do about it. Having the interesting details pointed out to you by the Game Master’s narrative spotlight feels very different from noticing shit you might have overlooked with your own eyeballs.

The flat truth of the matter is that you — any Game Master — simply can’t capture the experience of wandering a world and noticing interesting things at the roleplaying game table. You just can’t. It’s something the medium can’t do. But it’s so central to the feeling of curiosity-driven, self-directed, open-world exploration that, without it, you can’t make a campaign feel like that game.

Or can you…

Next Time…

That was a mean trick. No, you can’t. Suck it up, buttercup.

Unfortunately, my ranty, pontificating analysis has gone on way too long and I’ve still got a lot to say. So I’ve got to split this in two. I know I’m leaving you with a bunch of crushed hopes and broken dreams about ever capturing the feeling of your favorite game at the roleplaying game table, but fret not, mon friar, because I actually do have some good news for you. That’s why I need a few thousand more words.

The truth is, while you can’t turn that game into a tabletop roleplaying game, you actually don’t have to. You can capture a similar spirit of open-world adventure without actually doing anything special or difficult. In fact, you’re probably already doing it.

But that’s a story for another day.