Hierarchy, Contrast, Alignment
Ancient principles to guide future efforts.
In good designs, we get a glimpse of the order of the world.
Consider the sword. The violence it can do is physical and its form and substance are driven by physical laws, but it also speaks to us on other levels. It symbolizes the wielder—the Warrior—and his practice.
Particular swords can intimate particular ideas. A sleek, unsharpened long blade with a deadly point can convey elegance. Its incredible speed reminds us that death can come at a moment’s notice.
A wide, curved blade flares with the menace of an implied cruel contest between flesh and steel. The wielder does not care about recovery or handling; power is what will give him your certain, ugly death.
The dual-edged longsword, crossed with steel at the handle, says even more. It promises stability and peace—and guards against but also threatens chaos, suspended in the eternal tension of the Warrior Order.
These and more we can see and understand by glimpsing an ancient trinity of principles—Hierarchy, Contrast, and Alignment.
I. Hierarchy
Hierarchy is often perceived as “those who serve, and those who are served,” but a more fundamental (the most fundamental) truth about hierarchy is that everything serves it in the end. Hierarchy is a primal attribute of nature and a persistent feature in all human endeavors.
Games are no exception, and a designer’s goal is to have a discernable and well-ordered hierarchy which resounds within us as deeply true, reflective of something greater than ourselves. An unworthy sword is looked upon as a mere cutting implement. Can we avoid the same fate for our game? When someone ponders our game, do they see something beyond the rulebook?
These are questions of hierarchy.
In the context of tabletop gaming, hierarchy refers to the ordered structure of the game’s fundamental elements. Its impact goes beyond a game’s design patterns, uniting the overall themes, premise, and presentation.
A game’s hierarchy is difficult to intentionally change without fundamentally redefining it. Instead, a designer must be wary about adding elements that weaken the core.
Is our game focused on close-quarters combat with a side of espionage? Is it a medieval political simulator with an advanced market system? Establishing and supporting these soundbite descriptions of our game is actually one of the most important roles we have in its design.
Importance vs. Prominence
We say our game is about a war and its corresponding battles, and we include a logistics system to tie everything together. There is a looming threat that our players spend all their time and energy working with the logistics simulation, only occasionally playing out battles. Promise vs. delivery.
If we spent 40 rulebook pages talking about character attribute scores, we clearly considered it to be important. But if their effect on game mechanics is swamped by equipment, character level, class traits etc., then it was probably a mistake. Presentation vs. relevance.
Our game needs to do what it says on the box. Supporting systems must be carefully created such that they will not muddy the hierarchy.
Filtering
That which can be reasonably eliminated should be. If someone gives us a stack of 100 papers but only 4 of them are important enough to require our attention, a very real failure has occurred.
Carefully following a design’s hierarchy leads to difficult questions. With each system we add, we must ask how it serves. If we create a large collection of low-tier systems, these will naturally take up the player’s time (and rulebook pages) with less-than-important considerations.
This mismatch of player devotion vs. design gravity is more than just a communications problem—it is a sign that the chaff needs separating from the wheat. Once the core design ideas of the game are laid out, they will force us to cut, downplay, or change things we thought we wanted.
Instead of resisting this effect, we would be wise to embrace it. Remove or reduce systems that are not strengthening the core design of the game. Even though our perceived loss will be great, the game will benefit by staying its original course and more pointedly conveying its essential mechanics and themes.
II. Contrast
Just as with visual arts, contrast is the most impactful tool a game designer can use. Creating clear conceptual boundaries makes the central ideas easier to understand, reason about, and share. This serves the hierarchy.
If we imagine creating a tabletop RPG character system from scratch, one of the important considerations is how to convey the differences between characters. Let’s look at some options.
Nothing!
In one extreme example, we create a game where all characters are mechanically indistinguishable—zero contrast. If we say “trust me, each character is definitely special,” but the characters all navigate challenges identically and with identical distributions of success, then we have failed to convey the feel of different characters through the rules.
Serious players in this field like to reason about how characters will perform and how the game will unfold. Giving them Checkers and telling them they get to be a chit is unlikely to capture their interest.
In any case, a flat character system does not serve the hierarchy.
Classes
We can start with Checkers and add a single level of contrast, creating bundles of behavior (classes) for the chits. This chit is a Spearman, and that one is an Archer, and so on. With this change, our class-based Checkers is already on the scale of complexity of many classical wargames.
For this to work, the players must regard the different classes as different tools.
Direct distinctions can be formed from rules baked into the class itself. An AD&D Paladin has the Lay On Hands ability he can use to heal allies. The Warrior in Stars Without Number has battlefield luck, giving him the ability to evade one attack per fight that would otherwise have hit him.
Indirect distinctions are achieved by constructing the class to participate in pre-existing game systems in a distinct way. ACKS’s Fighter gets bonuses to Attack Throw progression and damage as he levels. In addition, he has the best selection of weapons as well as superior hit dice. These elements make him an unparalleled master when participating in the combat system (which is a central and unifying game feature).
Note that direct distinctions are more effective at communicating to less experienced players. Indirect distinctions require that players grasp the game systems and draw conclusions based on their understanding.
Classes fully support themes, premise, and presentation—they serve the hierarchy.
Beyond Classes
If we contemplate differences between class members, the answers no longer come as cleanly. Distinguishing between two Archers or two Spearman is contingent on underlying game systems. But in a general sense, there are two ways to subdivide classes: quantitative or qualitative.
We need tangible examples of both.
a. Qualitative
Qualitative distinctions involve creating sub-classes or similar membership-based designs. A Thief could be a Thug, Spy, Burglar etc. Each of these splits are mutually exclusive children: the Thug bundle and the Spy bundle contain elements that do not overlap but belong to and use an overarching Thief bundle of behavior.
Sub-classes are only a common example, though. We could implement guild/faction membership, packets of system expertise (i.e. choose 2 unique abilities from a list of 10), background/luck/birth packages, feat/proficiency systems, and so on.
b. Quantitative
Character scores lend themselves to interaction with numerical systems, and it is through these systems that players can customize and/or reason about character performance. This means the effectiveness of distinction by scores is entirely based on the underlying systems.
Consider a system for a Move Silently skill: 1d10 + [Move Silently score] + [level difference] is rolled and the result is read off a table.
A character with score 0 trying to evade same-level opposition will get a strictly negative result in 6/10 or 60% of cases—risky if raising the alert level is dangerous. This character will achieve the most desired result only 10% of the time.
On the other hand, a character with score 2 will fail 40% of the time—still risky—but will achieve the best outcome in 30% of attempts. The improved access to intermediate results is also noteworthy.
Leaving aside detailed criticisms of the design, we have a Move Silently skill with a score and an underlying system. If information about “alert level” and other requisite terms is available, we can reason about the Move Silently system and its impact on the character.
Notably, even with full information, interpreting the value of +2 score is a complex matter of judgment with several factors weighing in. This is desirable pattern for a system in a tabletop game because it allows different players to form their own instincts about evaluating outcomes.
Circling Back to Scores
What if we started right away with quantitative distinctions (instead of the qualitative distinction of class)? A widely-referenced example would be The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
Each character is (almost entirely) defined by their distribution of scores in the skills, and each of the skills have an underlying system managed by the game engine. The players seek increasing power by raising their scores, and they specialize (or de-specialize) their character by focusing on a specific distribution of scores that matches their gameplay preferences and goals.
A few issues with this.
a. Complexity that Opposes Intuitive Play
For each skill we introduce, we need a system—and we must communicate that system to the players through the rules. Unlike in video games, we can't hide all the work in unseen code. There are smart ways to deal with systems communication (tables/matrices are classically concise), but not every type of skill lends itself to this.
Having many and rich systems makes the game bulky—hard to communicate about, slow to pick up, and requiring a great many mental resources (and a lot of dedication) to master. This is related to a problem that Bradford C. Walker calls “piloting the Mech.”
Some degree of this is fine, even desirable. Too much and the game will feel like a slog. Players who have mastered it will see the ultimate truth at the end of the road—that the character system could (and should) have been more concise and more focused.
Thus, it seems possible but very difficult to balance having enough in-game systems to create satisfying and well-supported character differentiation primarily through scores.
b. Doing Less with More
A classless character system (that isn’t a distinctionless system) is really just a system with 10,000 classes. No one would present a system this way because the differences between the 10,000 classes are, on average, so small that they are barely perceptible. The distinctions are weak.
Is it more communicative to say that a character is a Mage or a [0, 0, 3, 7, 2, ..., 0, 7]? Designers address this problem by creating clusters of related scores that are meant for certain character archetypes, but one might uncharitably liken that to inventing rocket fuel in order to light a fireplace.
If we are smuggling archetypes into a scores-based system, it weakens the arguments for founding everything on scores. But if we don’t smuggle in the archetypes, players will force them into the system ungracefully. The hierarchy demands to be served.
And it is not merely a problem of making space for archetypes. Effectively summarizing what a character can do (the basis of comparative reasoning) will require one of two things. Either the player judging the character must be a master of the game with a deep understanding of the scores and their consequences on gameplay or the designer is a wizard who has managed to inject intense but readily available meaning into a number-oriented collection of systems.
c. Converging to Uniformity
Strong players will master our underlying systems. In a scores-based character system, this entails valuing and devaluing certain scores and learning to navigate precisely through the skill systems to achieve strong results. If our underlying systems are robust, this won’t be a problem.
But these systems have been “solved” time and again. The players explore and find that the underlying systems form a hierarchy that was beyond the reckoning of the designer. By sighting this hierarchy, they achieve dominance and mastery over the character system. They formulate ultimate expressions of the best “classes” one can play, the best routes with which to navigate the game.
Sometimes this results in the discovery of a class system (rocket fuel fireplace), but often it results in a demigod character towards which all “good” characters converge. Having a single character does not serve the hierarchy—nor does accidentally creating a Rube Goldberg class system.
d. Fighting the Hierarchy
Scores-based character systems push the game in the direction of being about the character system rather than what the characters are supposed to participate in. This is because they come with a baked-in premise: customize your character exactly how you want, even if it’s against the hierarchy. A game cannot have more than one premise in the same way a man cannot serve two masters.
With scores, we can’t support a game’s themes without building them into skills. We can’t present clear character concepts without demanding system expertise; apotheosis is impossible. Is “build your character from scratch any way you want” really worthy to be a premise? Should that not be a mere means to an end rather than an end unto itself?
This way of making distinctions is in fundamental tension with the game’s natural hierarchy. Rather than being a vehicle to gameplay, it subsumes and redefines gameplay and redirects the game’s energy to focus on character piloting rather than a deeper, underlying experience.
Some of my favorite computer games are exactly these types of systems (Morrowind, Underrail, Wizardry VII/8). But the joy I get from these games is from exploring and exploiting the character systems themselves rather than the worlds in which those characters are placed.
For tabletop RPGs, the character-to-world and world-to-character interactions are the foundation of all meaning in the game. The character system and the characters themselves thus cannot be the focus of the game without losing something essential and distancing ourselves from the hierarchy a TTRPG needs to have.
III. Alignment
The aspect that supports us in gluing everything together is alignment. When a game’s spear has better reach than its dagger, it has an aligning effect. It is a natural and intuitive notion, and seeing it reflected in the game tells us that the game holds an aspect of truth (hierarchy).
When a Good character makes sacrifices to help others and an Evil character takes advantage of the unfortunate to further himself, it has an aligning effect. Here we have alignment supporting contrast supporting hierarchy—the game is in a peak state of harmony with itself, with us, and with deep truths.
Because alignment is a more intuitive indicator of the health of a game’s hierarchy, we tend to take it for granted. Less needs to be said on the subject, but it can still be a valuable tool.
If the Paladin must be Lawful Good, then there is a sense that everything is working like a precisely-tuned clockwork mechanism. Part of the Paladin’s role is to be a contrast to Evil and Chaos—a compass that reveals the underlying hierarchy. Everything that a cooperative and pro-social denizen might fear or despise or hold in contempt—that is what the Paladin opposes.
But if we find that a Paladin must be merely Lawful and Not-Evil, then it is a cause for concern. On what grounds does he oppose Evil, fundamentally? Is this character’s role to be mired in legalisms? How does this more complex and murky Paladin serve the hierarchy? Confusion of this order is a sign of misalignment.
If a Barbarian in a far-future setting has, as his defining traits, an advantage to using Laser Pistols, it is a different kind of confusion. A Laser Pistol is associated with technology, materialism, precision, incrementalism; the Barbarian is associated with primeval laws, metaphysical alignment with nature and violence, wild vitality, and brutal strength. These two combined form a puzzling contradiction rather than working together.
But the mere presence of confusion is the sign of misalignment we’re looking for. Themes, premise, presentation—alignment applies doubly to all of these, and it is alignment hat helps us seek out better paths to hierarchy this way.
IV. What should designers do?
A game that has a good hierarchy isn’t just a collection of good ideas. Those ideas have to be fit together in a way that supports and embodies a greater, resounding truth.
It is a designer’s responsibility to question whether a game’s hierarchy is reflective of its promises; any mismatch is a sign of our failure. Systems might be working against themselves. Internal conflicts might rage in the design space of the game’s elements. Theme, premise, presentation—we must implement the right systems with hard-sought and intelligent contrasts so that our goals and the game’s outcomes are aligned.
We must actively think in terms of hierarchy until we can see nothing else. Because if we don’t, our players will uncover what we could not, and they will show us how far we strayed from good design.