IMPORTANT NOTE TO THE SEMI-LITERATE:  Please note the word "Design" above.

These pages contain a whole bunch of stuff about my personal philosophies on game design, and the state of game design.  It leans heavily towards making a fantasy pre-industrial age MMORPG that is realistic, believable, balanced, and immersive.  Some of these ideas and suggestions are applicable to all types of game design in any genre, from pen and paper to the MMORPG model.  Some of them are specifically geared for computer-based systems.  Some of them require server and wide area networking technology that is about 3 generations away.  That's okay though, it just means this document may still be valid by that time, if the computer game industry hasn't been sucked into a quagmire of bureaucratic crap and cheap sequel stamping by then.  Oops, too late.

These pieces are not presented perfectly, and many times the topical relationship between an article and the page it appears on is marginal.  Some pieces look like they belong on two or more pages, so I just left them in the most appropriate section.  These articles will be continually updated as I feel like it.  The staggering volume of text and constant updating is very convenient for me, as whenever someone challenges a theory or factoid presented here, I can easily say, "Oh, that's taken care of in some other section," then hastily write a piece that explains the discrepancy and update before the critic can navigate his way through the mass of material.

Some of these pieces were written by Randall G. Sherman (Shadwolf).  Important editorial contributions and suggestions were made by lots and lots of people, including (but not exclusively) Randall Sherman, Tony Faber, Derek Collazzo, George Harvey, Jesse Kurlancheek, Penelope Baker, Wendy Montgomery, Kristin Bates, Stephen Bulla, Jeff Sandler, J., Allerion, Wi, Iron Monkey, Mourne, Airety, and the power proofreading team of Tasha, Lucy, Abby and Taco-Girl.

At the time of initial publication, this entire guide totaled over 340k in text alone.  Feel my pain.

Holistic Game Design

One thing that keeps popping up throughout this long and rambling document is the idea that "This thing doesn't work unless these other things also work."  This interrelationship of elements in a system can be considered "holistic," and is a good thing to keep in mind when designing, tweaking, or patching your system.  Everything affects everything else.

Somehow, established professionals in the game development field forget this idea all the time, or perhaps never considered it.  As a direct result of thinking about game design in a non-holistic way, elements are introduced into the game for seemingly decent purposes and wind up destroying whole areas they were never meant to impact.  However, because designers of all types tend to be stubborn, proud people, these mistakes are often left there to fester, and the game is never quite as good as it was before.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons this document is so long and sprawling.  Whenever I think of an idea to tack onto it, there are three or four corollaries to that idea that cry out for explanation, and therefore these need to be added as well.  For instance, a PvP+ environment with no switch can be an excellent element of a game world, but it has direct impact on almost everything else.  It requires careful weapon balance, character potential limits, class balance, a robust justice system, legally sanctioned benefits for non-criminals, etc. etc.  Introducing an element that is unbalanced from the PvE standpoint (i.e. the sword that does 9000 damage so players can easily kill a boss monster) demolishes PvP and must be disallowed before it ever gets into the game.

It's easier to show how ignoring holistic philosophy ruins games than trying to provide examples of good holistic design, since (a) holistic design is far too uncommon in the industry, and (b) if a game is largely holistic and balanced, but there are a few stupid ideas thrown in, they eclipse everything else.  Therefore, here are some theoretical examples of how ignoring the holistic approach can destroy other elements of the game:
 

Implementation	Reason	What It Ruins
Sword/crossbow/spell of mass destruction	It seemed like a good carrot for high level players	Every other method of attack, and all content below the level of content the superattack is geared for.  Also wrecks PvP.
Hooded faran robe (AC)	They look cool	Because the team forgot that players could cast overpowered protective spells on garments, robes become the #1 choice for armor.  This ruins almost all other armor, any class that is unable to cast these spells, and any content geared towards players wearing standard armor.
Monsters with really good loot	Player base whining	All other monsters besides uberloot monsters, the item economy, the cash economy, and any character type not specifically outfitted to deal with uberloot monsters.
Easy XP farming areas	Player base whining, or a desire to power players up to meet unbalanced content	All content below the highest level, all quests below superquests, all characters not optimized for powerleveling, etc.

On the other hand, here are some of the considerations presented within this document and the other game elements required to make sure they work (assume that "robust server and code" is included for all elements, of course):
 

Implementation	Additional Required Systems
Off-hours (logged off) activity system	Strong timekeeping, learning by doing skill system.
Historically accurate weapon system	Modifiers for weapon reach, reasonable player power range, good pre-implementation research.
PvP+ environment	Player power limitations, zero sum balanced combat system for all possible attack forms, working justice system, reasonable sanctions agaist criminal lifestyles, reasonable death system, etc.
Reasonable cash economy	Taxation system, reasonable rewards for all moneymaking activities, sufficient cash drains that are either unavoidable or else worth the players' while to use
Player character nobility and rule	Monarch menu, robust NPC engine for dealing with the movements of peasants, etc., reasonable economies, large scale combat engine including NPC's for territorial incursions and defenses, dynamic construction engine, diplomacy engine, robust justice system, taxation, siege, supply considerations, etc.
Trade skills	Every other aspect of a balanced economic system, all aspects of combat that relate to crafted combat goods, use-based skill gain system
Non-static human and monster populations	Dynamic construction engine, off-hours activity engine, ability to hire NPC's of many types, logical migration algorithm, frontier for new monsters to come from

Naturally, every element that is tied to a particular implementation has its own ties to other elements that make it work, ad infinitum.  This seems daunting at first, but after a long time considering these things, one's brain can start to make the connections and references automatically, and with a little effort, all elements of the game become tied together in a complex web of relationships which are more easily navigated.  Congratulations:  you are now designing holistically.

The Grandfather Clause of Stupidity

Probably the biggest single source of bad rule and mechanics decisions comes from the fact that most game designers, rather than actually going to a library, base most of their research on the work of other game designers.  In this way errors are compounded, unrealistic ideas are perpetuated, and design flaws from the earliest of games become commonplace in all modern iterations.  It all goes back to the origin of the "role playing game."  Here we are talking about the true origin of the "let's pretend" game like House or Cops and Robbers, but of the origin of the systemized, rule-based role playing simulation.  It all starts with Chainmail.

Chainmail was a short, cheaply published book by Gary Gygax and Dave Perren, originally published by Guidon Games, copyright 1971 (Gygax claimed 1969, but the copyright information contradicts this).  It was a set of rules for tabletop miniatures battles using lead figures and dice, and contrary to popular geek-convention myth, there was indeed a 12 page fantasy rules supplement present (in addition to the now-standard concept of "hit points").  By 1974-1975 it was being published by Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Rules (TSR).  About this time, the first version of Dungeons and Dragons came out as sort of an add-on to Chainmail, three little brown books that focused on the playing of individual figurine-characters as opposed to conducting large scale tactical combat.  The combat tables determining hits, misses, and damage were very similar to those in Chainmail. This is where all the trouble begins.

The modern idea of the systemized RPG, from pen and paper to MMORPG, all stems from this Chainmail legacy, and several silly factors have never been properly weeded out.  The two biggies are:

• The focus on combat as the core activity in games that are purportedly about assuming a role, as opposed to a tabletop miniatures battle system
• Arbitrary and unrealistic characteristics ascribed to weapons and armor, very convenient for calculating casualties in mass combat quickly yet wholly inappropriate for small-scale tactical simulations

Example:  In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 1st Edition, there is a huge hairball of a combat chart that nobody used, called the "Weapon vs. Armor Class Type" table.  This one table helps to make sense of the arbitrary D&D weapon damage system of, "duh, a dagger is pretty small so it does 1d4, a bastard sword is a little bigger than a long sword so it does 2d4 instead of 1d8...".  The table assigns various bonuses or penalties to hit with any given weapon vs. an armor type, i.e. a weapon may have terrible chances against full plate and shield, but be better at penetrating chain.  The table was flawed (it treated chain and shield the same as it would treat splint, as they were both base AC 4, etc.), but it lent some purpose to a weapon one might not otherwise consider useful.  It was also very complicated to use for the typical beer and pretzels gamer, and so nobody ever used it.  In the misbegotten later editions of AD&D, this table was simply removed altogether, and players were back to the old choices of longsword, longbow, and two-handed sword.

The advent of the computer as a referee, or even a referee's assistant, presents entirely new possibilities to get away from these godawful abstrations and arbitrary damage values.  A computer is perfectly happy to calculate whether or not the sun is shining at a bad angle into an archer's eyes, or the effects of windage on a sniper's shot.  As better, more powerful machines become available and come down in price, the potential of the MMORPG server to do complex battle calculations increases.  The basic ones aren't even that complex.  Is the guy being stabbed by the stiletto wearing maille?  Then the stiletto has more effect!  Is a spear longer than a club?  Advantage spear!  Simple considerations like these can add a whole new level of subtle realism to the game, and with it, a whole new importance to strategy in combat, as opposed to how high one's numbers are.  If game software engineers would stop thinking in terms of an expensive version of 3 little brown books published in 1974 and more in terms of computer-simulated battle conditions, I would be ecstatic.

Paths Unlimited

One of the things that separates a really well-designed role playing game from a hack and slash through a single corridor is the concept of choice.  Players need to be able to have choices, and those choices have to matter.  A player should be able to pick and choose a course of action for his character from as wide a variety of possibilities as is feasable, and while some of these choices will be obviously stupid ones, there should not be only one option for becoming "heroic."  Unfortunately, the nature of modern CRPG design seems to mandate that players kill stuff and rob it, due to the relative ease of focussing on combat only as a path of advancement, as well as the "monsteritis" syndrome that relegates all non-player characters to the role of "thing that sits around waiting for players to attack it."

The most elementary system for expanding the number of options open to a player is meaningful craft skills.  This means artisan trades that players can explore that exist for some reason besides equipping "real" characters who go out to kill stuff.  In a world where food is required by PC's and NPC's alike, agronomy and foraging could be important skills, as could hunting game.  Indeed, a nomadic character who stays away from town would need these abilities, even if he supplements his rations by murdering other players for their salt pork and waybread.  If food is not required, other skills would certainly be valuable, like leatherworking, ore refining, smithy, woodwork, bowyery... the classics, as it were.  If the engine is sophisticated enough to track the construction of new buildings over time, carpentry and architecture take on new possibilities.  Cartography, dowsing, herbalism, medicine, tinsmithy... trade skills can number in the hundreds easily, limited only by the complexities of code and the ability of developers to think outside of the norm when considering trade skills.

Some of the most rewarding aspects of playing an RPG for some players lies in the less quantifiable pursuits like diplomacy, the acquisition of a title, political influence, and inter-community trade.  These are more difficult to simulate in a system relying on hard code, as by and large these are subjective skills, not measurable in terms of points.  However, one can always start somewhere.  The acquisition of titles like "Grand Master of the Four Flowers School of Swordsmanship" can be done through quests, say to prove one's worth in a contest of skill at the school, assuming one has spent enough time there to qualify for the test in the first place.  This sort of contest is nice, because it doesn't confer anything but a title and bragging rights, but only one person (presumably) can be Grand Master of any one school.  This provides an avenue of competition amongst players that doesn't involve PvP, which is nice for those not inclined toward human conflict.  Acquiring the title of Ambassador may require several successful missions to neighboring city-states (although the heuristics determining a successful negotion would be rough indeed), and may confer on that player some extra status in his hometown that could translate into legal flexibility, or even better prices at the market.  To gain more standing in the Merchant's Guild might require successful caravans full of needed supplies to dangerous zones, and might confer similar price benefits and a certain amount of credit, plus economic flexibility between regions if your monentary system is realistically diversified.  A Master of Lore, accredited by the not-so-local Wizarding College, would have demonstrated a high degree of aptitude in several areas of arcane knowledge, and would maybe gain access to some interesting (though not utterly powerful) incantations, probably of an informational nature, and better availability of ingredients, plus access to restricted tomes and such.

Even the overused motive of "kill stuff" can take on new meaning if the system is flexible enough to support it.  If your goal is (using an Asheron's Call cliche for example) to drive the Tumeroks out of Dryreach, wouldn't it be interesting if it could actually be done?  You'd think after losing about 18 million troops to marauding humans, they would have given up on the idea of holding the town and move somewhere else.  The town is freed, the conquering players are hailed and honored, and now there's something else to do as the evicted monsters make other plans, or call for backup.  If the engine allows for the dynamic construction of buildings over time, a player could discover a group of enemies secretly building a fort in the woods.  Maybe the players can band together to ruin their plans.  If they don't, then attacks on the locals will be launched out of the fortified base, forcing players to either do something about the situation or lose the town.  Adding meaning to combat-related goals requires the same thing that noncombat goals require:  imagination to conceive a new way for things to be done, robust code to implement the ideas, and sufficient technology to support the execution of these ideas without too much strain on the server or the client's bandwidth.

Design from Tech or Tech from Design

A point addressed many times throughout this treatise is the effect of the codebase and its limitations on what content and systems you are able to implement in a computer based RPG.  A designer may have a cool idea, but when he props it, the code team says, "Never happen," "Requires new tech," "Not possible given our development cycle," etc.  These are valid arguments, and some pie in the sky features will never make it into a particular game system because of them.  However, eventually the designer gets sick of hearing these things, and so begins to only propose things he knows have a good shot being implemented given the restrictions of the code.  As a result, all of the new content winds up looking pretty much the same, with no innovative characteristics.

There is an analogy to this situation that I have personally bitched about for years, in the field of musical composition.  At its purest level, the act of musical composition (the design phase) is done purely in one's head, and the subsequent translation to paper and copy is only a method of communicating the mental sound-picture to players who can then execute it.  As the composer gets more tools (tech), he can easily slip into the trap of basing all of his ideas on what his tools can do.  One current example of this attitude in the music industry is the use of sequencers as a composition tool.  An over-reliance on the sequencer (tech) to determine what you can compose (design) results in very similar, boring music, since you tend to avoid things that are difficult to express using the sequencer (tech limitations).

It stands to reason, therefore, that it's possible to conceive more interesting and innovative systems if you don't consider the practical limitations of technology during the initial design phase.  However, because tech limitations are a reality, not all of the cool ideas you come up with on the design side are going to make it into a product that has a reasonable development cycle.  Pushing this issue causes problems in the form of contempt between the design and tech teams as follows:

Design:  "I want to implement this feature, it's really cool."
Tech:  "This will never happen if you want this game to ship in this decade."
Design:  "But I NEEEED this!  Do it!"
Tech:  "Screw you buddy."

Tech gains contempt for design because design is obstinate and unrealistic.  Design gains contempt for tech because tech is viewed as lazy.  In fact, either or both of these could be true.  These problems have to do with personnel decisions and human resources, and are outside the scope of this document.  Basically, though, having a tech and design team who are compatible and have a similar vision of making a really cool game is a good thing in some cases.  Like, if you want to make a really cool game.

Roleplaying = Fighting

This relationship and its origins were alluded to in the "Grandfather Clause of Stupidity" section.  When one looks at the gamut of roleplaying games, from the first iterations of D&D through modern server-based MMORPG's, they all seem to be about one thing:  fighting.  The original cause for this is that all modern RPG's were spawned out of tabletop miniatures battle rules, but the trend is perpetuated by some other, equally noisome, factors.  First and most importantly, there are the human factors:

• Players are generally dull unoriginal people who prefer to pretend to kill shit than think about plot development
• Referees are generally dull unoriginal people who prefer to run adventures about killing shit than work on plot development

However, let's consider some other factors, equally important, that mandate combat effectiveness as the primary concern for a character in an RPG, paper or computer based.

• Combat is Dangerous.  It may be all well and good to play the bookworm research mage, the pacifistic wandering healer, or the law student with a knack for solving mysteries, but if the game setting is typical of the RPG genre, at some point a fight will break out.  The first time this happens, depth-oriented noncombat characters like this will be killed, thus hindering their chances of further development.  Meanwhile, the guy who put all his points into Guns skill or the barbarian with 18/00 strength will merrily slice and dice through the enemy, and live to see another day and another load of experience.  Even in cases where death is not final, like in overly-generous paper campaigns or in any MMORPG, it's still inconvenient, frustrating, and probably carries some kind of penalty.  Players of nonfighting characters are railroaded into rerolling combat monsters just as effectively as if their character had been killed forever, along with any intent they ever had about roleplaying that sort of character.
• Designers are Unimaginative.  This is about the same as the human factor given above, but here it deals with something more insidious than the GM/referee/developer's inclination to steer toward combat in the first place.  Here, the referee knows that he should do something to make skills besides "Hit Things" and "Don't Get Hit By Things" some utility... he's just very bad at implementation.  In a pen and paper game, this means that the poor guy who dumped half his creation points into stuff like Investigation, Computer Op, and Lore is screwed by the utter lack of anything to do in every adventure.  In a computer-based game, it means the players who opted for low physical characteristics and concentrations on things like Gambling and Cooking are relegated to the position of mules, unable to advance in a level-based system or forced into hours of mindless repetitive clicking in a skill-based system, all for the chance of maybe one day being able to perform one task that was patched in for them out of pity 6 months after final.
• Abstract Values Don't Roll Well.  Noncombat skills people tend to make use of in an RPG setting are typically skills like Investigation, Disguise, Alchemy, etc.  These are rather simplistic terms for very complex and hard-to-quantify activities that have a lot of other abstract factors influencing the "chance of success."  Pen and paper rules for the use of these skills are usually extremely long, describing ways to reduce these outside influences to a die roll modifier, and when all else fails, the GM assigns arbitrary modifiers based on how the player describes his activities.  Obviously this doesn't work at all in any sort of computer-refereed setting.  On the other hand, combat is relatively simple.  You roll to hit, you roll damage.  Any factors that modify this roll like range, target size, attacker position, etc., are easy to define, and factoring them in becomes less of a judgment call and more a matter of how complex your attack algorithm is.

In a computer-based single-player or single-run RPG like Baldur's Gate II, it becomes almost impossible to make noncombat skills and character types really matter except through the most contrived scenarios.  Need a purpose for your thief?  Well, every dungeon has zillions of traps only a thief can deal with.  Want to be the nice guy smooth talker?  Just pick the appropriate responses from the multiple-choice conversation dropdowns.  In almost all cases, it still comes down to how well you can kill the other guy, but there's a tiny glimmer of hope.  Maybe by the next generation of single run computer RPG's, advanced technology will be coupled with the unlikely possibility of advanced storywriters and these games will be more than this.  (I'm not holding my breath though.)

In the current state MMORPG, there isn't even the faintest glimmer of hope.  Of the big three, the one that provides the strongest case for the noncombat character is Ultima Online, where trade skills actually matter and there may in fact be a purpose in life for your blacksmith.  This only seems fantastic when compared to the other two MMORPG models for tradeskills:  Asheron's Call, where trade skills are something you raise on an allegiance mule to help your real character kill more stuff, and Everquest, where trade skills are basically a waste of time and ultimately even more boring than the monster camping that comprises 99% of the "action."  Even in UO, your master of mercantile pursuits is still dead when he missteps out of the guard zone and gets jumped by a few murderers who then loot his house.  You cannot conduct diplomacy with a computer-controlled NPC in these games... hell, you can barely have an intelligible conversation with another player.  The closest you can ver get to performing a mission like spy or a thief, obtaining the objective without combat, is by exploiting bugs or by jumping someone else's quest, or possibly muledrop thievery and player scamming.  If a system like UO does allow for thievery, eventually so many people complain that thieves get bizarre and arbitrary limitations slapped on them, effectively ruining the class.  MMORPG's have not yet been able to deal with the provision of a meaningful existence for the non-killer, and so they actively steer content toward the killer, encouraging more combat optimization, more powerful attack potentials, and less variety.

It seems bleak, and it is.  This is one of the reasons that jaded players of MMORPG's and CRPG's have gone back into the roulette game of pen and paper, hoping against hope to find a GM and/or players who do not suck.  As a general rule, though, most people do suck, and are incapable of telling an RPG from a glorified shooter, which is what many so-called RPG's actually represent.  It is my fervent hope that the RPG, particularly the MMORPG, will rise above the level of "bad Doom with character levels" and manage to present an immersive and compelling storyline that draws players in, rather than continuing on their current slide.

Limiting Player Power

It seems inevitable:  even if any game system starts out as being playable, logical, balanced, and fun, it gets destroyed in time, usually through the addition of badly thought out supplementary material, either supplementary rulebooks, patches, or expansion packs.  It's true that such supplementary material can be beneficial to any game system, not to mention the prospect of continuing revenue from one's player base, but inevitably a horrible thing happens. Everything gets bigger.

It happens all the time in pen and paper systems.  The saving grace of a paper system is that as the referee controls the game (hopefully), he has the option to change and ignore bad rules whenever they inevitably appear.  Examples:

• AD&D 1st edition was a nice little game, completely arbitrary, yet it worked.  There were a couple of little problems with it (look, elves speak 18 million languages, get combat bonuses, infravision, sword and bow bonuses, and live forever), but it still worked.  Why?  A group of AD&D players, using the rules well and accurately, might possibly get to an all-time high level of 15 or so if they were very lucky.  Most of their adventuring was done around the 5-7 range.  Then came supplements with overpowered classes (Cavalier/Barbarian in particular), Deities & Demigods with rules for how to turn your character into a divine being, and eventually the 2nd edition, where the power level was raised for everyone.  The process continued forever, and D&D no longer works.  Charts and probabilities that are designed to be functional and fun around the 15 and under range have no bearing on a game full of behemoth godlings.
• GURPS is an excellent generic system, with a good eye toward realism and logic.  It is also designed for characters of 100 points (hero material).  During a long campaign, maybe you could push to about 150 points with earned experience.  Try to go beyond a relatively low technology 100-point setting, and GURPS no longer works.  GURPS Supers, with a base character value of 500 points, allows for more cheesy numbercrunches and bad mechanical failures than any other system specifically designed to handle superhumans.  Try an Ultra-Tech campaign, and it becomes tragically comedic:  you still have about 10 health, but now attacks are doing something on the order of 15d6 explosive damage.  In either case, if you are attacked in a high-point value adaptation, either your armor protects you fully, or you are instantly vaporized.  Now that's epic.
• Street Fighter, my personal favorite for beer and pretzels combat-heavy RPG systems, is fantastically balanced, and works incredibly well.  That is, until supplements are considered.  Ever eager to make something "just a little more powerful," more and more bad rules for uber characters started to appear, adding more and more arbitrary and stupid super tactics and maneuvers, until the system becomes a complete joke.  Grand Master Ryu has no chance against some choad who bought all the supplements.

The only MMORPG of the big three that has made a semi-successful effort to limit player power is, oddly enough, Ultima Online.  Once you hit 225 stats and 700 base skill, that's it (unless you abuse a bug).  You can shift those points around if you like, but you cannot go any higher.  You will always have problems fighting things like dragons unless you cheese somehow.  This is a blessing for UO, as it has so many other horrible problems with it related to code and people management that unlimited player power would have destroyed it within the first 4 months of retail.

The bottom line is that no game system can accurately and satisfactorily handle the concept of player characters too far outside of its rules focus.  There is a logical reason for this not based in game theory:  there is no real-life analogue for these people.  You can only become so formidable as a person through training, practice, and mental exercise.  With some luck you might become a Leonardo Da Vinci, or a Musashi Miyamoto, or a Yang Chengfu, or a Temuchin.  You cannot realistically go from 5 hit points to 200 hit points with a similar increase in your physique and mental acuity, which is exactly what happens when player potential is not capped.  These superbeings are far enough outside the scope of possibility that they too must be considered "black boxes" along with off-the-cuff magic systems.

The presence of superbeings with unlimited growth potential presents a neverending problem for developers.  Players becoming godlike?  Better get in some tougher, crazier stuff for them to try to fight, and some handheld tactical nuclear devices to fight them with.  Got a lot of multimillionaires in your world?  Better make stuff more expensive.  The ogre chieftains and the evil warlock overlord you set up to be your boss monsters are little more than a joke, and so now you need to supplant them with something else, no matter how much it screws up your storyline.  As the bar goes up, all your players must rise with it, until your entire world-design that you so carefully crafted to keep everyone interested and happy is little more than a footnote, ignored by players as they rush off to superman status to defeat your newest hastily thrown-together enemies, forcing you to repeat the entire process.

It seems clear that a hard cap on the ultimate potential of your players is necessary in a system that allows for rapid development (in a pen and paper game, you could just give out less experience).  Once a character hits this mark, he may be able to change his identity around a little, maybe he stops tilting at the lists so much to spend more time in the alchemy lab, but he cannot aspire to have so many hit points that he could casually charge the town guard when they come to arrest him with crossbows, or jump into a canyon because he's bored and live to tell about it.  This becomes easier if you don't let the players see where the cap is (see "The No Numbers Concept" below).  The content team will now have to be more diligent to make sure that players who feel they have maxed out already have something to keep them interested, but the inevitable path you take to do this (better storylines and immersive plots) lends far, far more to a gameworld than the prospect of improving your spreadsheet-characters.

Segregating Player Power

This is sort of a compromise that is made when the disparity between high and low power players is too great for a truly cohesive system to handle.  Unfortunately this never works very well either.  The basic idea is to force players of varying power levels into different regions, e.g. high-level land, newbie land, uber land, etc.  Generally the solution is to limit certain hunting grounds to players that are (theoretically) within the power curve of the enemies found in that area, like a dungeon that restricts access to players of level A to B.  There are three basic problems with this system:

• It effectively makes the world smaller for every player, as the potential explorable landmass is restricted.
• In most cases, safe zones like towns are still open to everyone, so the trickle down of unbalanced equipment cannot be stopped, raising your power curve for lowbies and encouraging twinking.
• It mandates something like a level-based system (or one based on total character point value) which, in addition to being a silly artifice with its own set of problems, is not a decent barometer of actual player character survivability, punishing characters who spend more time on noncombat activities and associated skills.

The No Numbers Concept

The fact that a traditional RPG is essentially a numerical simulation has spawned a number of very annoying trends in player behavior.  Most of these types of behavior can be subsumed under the term "numbercrunching."  Also called "min/maxing," numbercrunching largely involves the study of the game's numerical systems and figuring out how to use it to the player's best advantage.  Therefore, becoming a better fighter is more a matter of allocating your points appropriately, instead of logical considerations like developing advanced tactics, using terrain effectively, and personal bravery.  The player character is reduced to little more than a spreadsheet, and players become obsessed with watching their numbers increase.  Unfortunately, the game system eventually evolves to accomodate this sort of player with provisos like high-xp farming areas, repeatable activites to raise use-based skills efficiently with a macro, etc.

It is my firm belief that the axiom "most players are self-centered bastards who will ruin other players' experience at the drop of a hat" is greatly exacerbated by this numerical obsession.  Why do players steal kills from other players?  Because doing so will help their numbers increase.  Why do players exploit bugs to kill monsters (or players) with relative ease?  Because doing so will increase their numbers.  Why do players use cheats and plugins that give them unfair advantages in the game world?  You get the picture.  Sure, some of this activity stems from a desire to simply ruin the game for other players, and some people gain enjoyment from this, but there is no way to deal effectively with this sort of player except to quickly identify and remove him from your game.

Now consider the effects of a use-based skill system where the numbers are effectively hidden from the player.  This means he cannot see his exact strength or hit points, he does not know that his sword does X amount of damage per hit, and wounds are represented graphically only, either status bars, hit location indicators, or ideally an actual change in texmaps reflecting damage to specific body parts.  The player will have a pretty good idea that he is decent with an axe, a novice at archery, and completely unskilled at alchemy, but he doesn't have a number to refer to as his "skill."  Once in a while, he may receive a system message telling him that he has learned something new about pottery, but these messages should be unreliable and ambiguous.  He may even be able to compete for titles in various contests of skill, but this is only an indicator of prowess, not a measurable figure that you can watch increase as you fight your eight millionth orc.  Sure, there are players who will still go camp the goblins for "skill," but he can't really be sure it's doing him all that much good, and if the designer has been building his system holistically, it's not.

What happens now is that with visible numbers unavailable for scorekeeping purposes, plyers become less interested in keeping score.  This puts more pressure on the developer to make sure there is plenty of interesting stuff to do for the player, once the possibility of spreadsheet tweaking is removed.  Such a system requres more diligence and work on the part of the developer, in many ways, but the payoff is immense.  With numbers removed, your environment becomes more immersive.  With spreadsheets removed, you remove a great source of annoying player behavior.  And you may be able to reclaim some of that market that abandoned computer-based gaming for more logical paper systems.

Death Systems for Persistent Worlds

Death in a pen and paper or small-group setting is relatively easy to handle, assuming the GM has decent judgment.  Death can be cheated any number of ways through GM fudging, and the death of a character can remain an epic, traumatic event, in a way that is apropos to the story being told.  In the MMORPG world, however, the consequences of death are harder to deal with.  On the one hand, you want there to be consequences for death, or it becomes meaningless, and you have people routinely making suicide charges for XP or jumping from lighthouses when they get bored.  On the other hand, dying in an MMORPG can be due to any number of stupid reasons, most usually lag or a badly timed disconnect.  Losing all of one's possessions and possibly the character itself due to chronic router failure is frustrating to the point of cancellation, and more importantly, destroys the immersive quality of the game.  Nothing can be done to prevent technical failure 100% of the time, but this should not be a reason to make death completely meaningless.

In order to give some weight to combat activities, it must be dangerous somehow.  In real life, the danger factor is obvious:  everyone reacts to physical pain, and people generally have an aversion to death.  In a pen and paper RPG, the danger is in losing a character that the player has an attachment to and a certain emotional investment in.  In an MMORPG, death penalties are generally limited to a loss of some/all equipment and possibly some form of experience penalty.  Please keep in mind that when devising a system for death penalties in an MMORPG, the primary goal is not to stop players from whining, as they will do that anyway.  Yes you want to prevent people from becoming so frustrated that they cancel their subscriptions the first time they lag out in battle, but the primary goal is to devise a system whereby there is a reasonable level of risk attached to reckless, suicidal actions.

Permadeath is a tricky issue for MMORPG's.  The loss of a character can be traumatic for sure, but this makes it an effective deterrent to acting like a nincompoop.  It also carries a few other interesting benefits:  the permadeath of a character can be used by a sufficiently advanced roleplaying subcommunity to expand the player-based lore of the game, it reduces the resale allure of characters via eBay (after the first few people buy an expensive account then get the character killed forever because they don't know how to play it), and it slows down the inevitable process of everyone reaching maximum potential in your world, thereby helping to maintain a more or less stable power pyramid from lowbies to ubers.

A compromise system, involving a limited number of resurrections before permadeath, could possibly work.  A theoretical system Shadwolf and I worked out involved resurrections being performed by a house of worship of the character's faith (which incidentally increases the value of religion in the campaign to something more than "useless lore").  A character might have, say, 5 resurrections at the start of play.  More resurrections could be earned by the character through devout service to the temple, religious questing, being a local hero, whatever, and would slowly regenerate automatically if the character was below 5 remaining resurrections.  In this way, a character still has every chance to avoid permadeath unless he is involved in something very stupid or very heroic indeed, and if a player dies to lag 4 times in a short period of time, he should really be thinking about waiting for better conditions before playing anyway.  Couple this system with temporary weakening and reasonable equipment loss, and now death is still something to think about, but you avoid the "killer dungeon" aspect of bad campaigns.

Permadeath can be further eased by the following method:  On the permanent death of a character, after the big cutscene has ended, the player goes back to the character selection screen, where the name of the dead character is listed along with an indicator that he is dead.  Choosing this slot now gives the character 2 options for a replacement character:  either a newbie from scratch, or a "relative" of the old character, with the option of a new first name only.  The new character has an appearance very similar to the deceased's, the same surname, and abilities based on those of the old character, maybe roughly equivalent to the dead character's power total over the starting base divided by 3.  The old guy might be dead, but his brother/son/second cousin is there to reclaim the family honor!  This is also a possible method for dealing with death/retirement by aging in a game, and assuming your game lasts long enough to cycle through enough game-years, one player can potentially write the family history of an entire line of adventurers.  In such an aging game, the replacement character might have a power total bonus equal to the old character's divided by 2 instead of 3, as a little perk to a player who has managed to avoid getting his old character killed stupidly.

Marking Time

Time is an important concept in pen and paper RPG's (the good ones, anyway).  It can be important to know how long you've been crossing that desert, or how long ago the 1-year ultimatum of surrender or die from the humanoid leader was issued.  A sense of time lends credence to your world and meaning to your lore, both in your world's recorded history used in your background, and in the ongoing chronicles of new events recorded for the benefit of the players.

However, time is also extremely inconvenient for any persistent world:  players log in and out, for different lengths of time and at different intervals.  Characters that are logged out are effectively in a stasis field:  nothing affects them, and they have no impact on the world.  As a further consequence, players who log in more than others have a significant advantage over other players directly proportionate to the amount of excess time they spend playing.  Is it possible to find a way around this quandry?  I believe there is, though like most things worthwhile, it requires some work.

Start with the assumption that you are going to keep track of the passage of time in your world.  If you figure out that the average player will go adventuring for about 3 hours at a stretch, figure 4 real hours = 1 game day.  Configure your day/night cycles and seasons to reflect this 6 to 1 ratio, and institute a calendar.  Now you have a time context to work from.

If we figure that the player in question logs in for 3 hours per day, i.e. 1 day in 6, this is a pretty aggressive schedule for an adventurer.  The guy heads out to do battle with the forces of evil (or opposition to his socio-economic interests) about once a week, and the rest of the time he is taking care of business in town, repairing his stuff, maybe tilting at the lists or studying in the encyclopaedia arcanum.  A guy with no life who plays twice a day in 5 hour stretches is going on aggressive expeditions as his full-time job.  A guy who logs in a couple times a week is more casual about active adventuring, sort of a fellow who likes to bash in a few monster skulls now and again, but enjoys town life and its security.  These are decent parallels for the types of players who fill these schedules.

So what happens when they log out?  It's silly to assume they are put into stasis.  If they're taking care of odd jobs as an apprentice, working as an altar boy, farming, hunting, or just engaging in some good old manual labor, shouldn't there be a systm that reflects this sort of off-hours activity?  Implement a system where the player chooses a number of options for how he spends his off hours, and based on his location and condition at the time of logout, he does them.  When he logs back in, the system begins by doing some checks for him based on the amount of time he was logged out, and maybe increasing appropriate scores.  Naturally, the reward for these sorts of spare time activities should be nowhere near the reward for actual play time invested in character improvement, must be curved down the longer one is online to avoid the superman after a year of logout syndrome, and never result in monentary gain (assume all monies earned are sufficient only to pay for the character's upkeep and any incidental training fees), but it provides some sort of compromise solution for the player who just doesn't have all day to sit in front of his computer, playing the game nonstop, and eating up your bandwidth.  This can also be seen as a sort of in-game macroing system, giving the develpment team more firm ground to stand on when they implement a no 3rd party macroing policy.

The offline hours activity system can also be used to compensate for the fact that player characters never seem to sleep.  Simply calculate the amount of time the character has been logged on, divide by 3, and devote that much initial logout time to sleeping before you start doing things.  Therefore, a character logged on for 4 hours real time (1 game day) would spend the first 1 hr. 20 min. resting.  A character logged in for 12 hours would use the first 4 hours to logout time to sleep.  This is a little unrealistic (stay awake for 3 days straight, then sleep for 1 day), but it beats requiring players to actually sleep at intervals during a marathon play session.  To allow for players logging in before the sleep cycle is complete, assign a variable "Sleep" to the character, that increases the longer he plays.  Offline sleep decays this value.

This can also be applied to the mundane details of life that people consider "not fun."  If you want to be slightly unrealistic, you can mitigate the hassles of eating and paying taxes with an offline system.  Using the sample system below, simply have the character forage more initially (or pay more for food in town, if he is not foraging) based on a "Hunger" variable, in much the same way you allow him to play catch-up with sleep.  Whatever tax formula you wish to apply can also be resolved on login, the character paying a tax based on the goods in his possession over time.  In order to combat the phenomenon of playrs stripping naked justbefore logging out to avoid taxes, it may be necessary to apply a "TaxBase" variable that tracks the player's possessions at intervals while he is online, scaling up the variable based on what the character was holding at the time of tracking.  Taxes are then paid on the next login, based on the TaxBase accrued while online, plus a value based on how long the player was logged out and what he owned on logout.

Sample Offline Activity System

The character has a popup menu he can access via the GUI, listing the various offline activities he could possibly perform.  You need to list as many as possible, since a character might disconnect anywhere by accident, and you don't wantto require him to tailor 50 different lists based on all the places he might log out.  A simple offline activity list might look like this:
 

Activity	Prerequisites	Possible Benefits
Heal	Being Wounded (default priority 1)	Damage is healed based on character's medical skill, increased if he logs out near an appropriate medical facility
Forage	Hunger (wilderness default priority 2)	In town, character defrays his offline cost of living by scrounging for food, with possible loss to social standing due to trash-rooting.  In the wilderness, player hunts/fishes/traps/whatever for as long as he needs to in order to feed himself.  Possible small increase to appropriate skills and controlling attributes.
Train (skill)	n/a	Character has the possibility of gaining a small amount of the chosen skill and controlling attributes.  Efficiency increases if he proximity to a suitable training facility that he has access to.
Voluntary Community Service	Criminal Points below the threshold of possible instant arrest	Reduction of criminal points, possible loss of social standing.
Court-Sanctioned Community Service	Being imprisoned when the ciminal point total on release would make instant arrest possible	Reduction of criminal points to just below the instant arrest threshold, loss of social standing.  This activity precludes logging in until completed.
Mundane Job (description)	Job skills, being in town	Offline tax mitigation, possible small increase to job skills and controlling attributes.
Apprentice (description)	Artisan skills, proximity to an NPC artisan with room for an apprentice	Limited offline tax mitigation, defraying cost of living, possible small increase to job skills and controlling attributes.
Study (knowledge skill)	Proximity to an appropriate library facility or school, or possession of study materials	Possible increase to skills and controlling attributes.  May incur additional fees or tuition if the knowledge type is especially arcane or otherwise valuable and being studied at a facility.
Social Climbing	Being in town	Possible increase to social standing.
Repair	Damaged equipment in inventory, appropriate skills and tools	Repair of damaged equipment, possible increases to repair skills and controlling attributes.

Default settings for this selection screen might be Heal, Forage, Mundane Job (Laborer).  The character would, on logout, sleep for an appropriate amount of time, then heal if he is wounded, then forage for food until he was no longer hungry, then (if he was in town) work as a laborer to mitigate his taxes, possibly getting a little bit of physique in the process.  If he was out of town, the third possibility is gone, and so all he does is sleep, heal, and feed himself.

The player may wish to modify his selections.  For instance, say the player wants to become a respected soldier, aspiring to become a Field Marshal or such, and has enough money to be able to pay taxes.  He might then modify his list to read Heal, Repair, Train (weapon), Social Climbing.  If he was in town, he would sleep, heal if wounded on logout, then repair any damaged gear, then split his time between training at the barracks and hobnobbing with the nobility.  He must be careful to not do this too long, lest he become impoverished.  If he was outside of town, Forage would be a default priority for him since he's out of range of markets, and so he would Heal, Forage, Repair, and Train (weapon) on his own.  Social climbing is not possible for him in this situation.

Note that there is no offline option to harvest resources or craft.  This might seem strange, considering that realistic mining/lumberjacking/what have you is a slow and boring process that might be better performed offline.  However, if such activities are allowed, one has to take special care to get around the phenomenon of "become a millionaire in your sleep," akin to UO macro-mining all night.  The fact of the matter is that raw materials harvesting is an extremely hard and thankless job, especially preindustrially, and it takes a very long time to get iron out of the ground, UO's mining system notwithstanding.

A generous system might allow for a small amount of iron to be given to a player who chooses Mundane Job (Mining), but most of what the players digs up is going to go to his employer.  Likewise, a player who chooses Mundane Job (Blacksmith) might be able to select something he could have created when he logs back in, based on the amount of time he was logged out.  More generous allowances might be made for players working in their own shops.  Likewise, a lumberjack operating outside of town, like a criminal or a hermit building a cabin, might also get some leeway, but the guy who wants to harvest 2000 cords of wood for making bows to sell should not be allowed this abuse.  Simply have another offline activity selection called "Construction" or such to allow for this eventuality.

Twitch Factor

"Twitch" is a generic term representing the importance of manual reflexes to play a particular game.  An example of twitch is aiming your gun in a first person shooter to hit a target.  Another might be timing a jump to get onto a moving platform in a Mario type console game.  Still another example would be the ability to quickly and efficiently coordinate troop movements and orders in a micromanaged Starcraft battle.  All twitch play involves hand-eye coordination, fast decision making, interface control, and after a while, automatic reflexes burned in by hours and days of play.

Many games rely on twitch to play well.  First person shooters are primarily, if not completely, twitch games.  Almost all of the early arcade and console games (Pac Man, Defender, Galaga, Sinistar, etc.), not to mention pinball, are twitch based.  As games evolved and a larger, maybe older, market was sought, twitch became less of a factor, or a total non-factor.  Games where twicth doesn't matter are typically turn-based games like Solitaire, Myst, turn-based strategy, etc.

The modern computer-based RPG is generally a combination of the two.  RPG's that are turn based are obviously complete non-twitch games.  However, turn-based play is impossible in a modern MMORPG (the Realm's combat system notwithstanding:  it is really a graphically-enhanced MUD).  It's only barely tolerable to wait for others to take actions in a turn-based game involving as few as 3 people; in a playing arena with 2000 simultaneous users, it would be insane.  It would stand to reason, then, that in such a realtime environment twitch would be an important part of player skill.  However, in MMORPG design and player attitude, there is a decided distaste for twitch play, and this is reflected in the game engine.

The distaste for twitch play may stem from a prejudice on the part of RPG nazis who feel that the CRPG is somehow above the FPS, and thus should be above the FPS's reliance on twitch.  There is some justification for lowering the importance of twitch in a progressive game that incorporates character building; after all, twitch depends on the abilities of the player, not the experience and design of the character.  Nobody wants their level 10 character trounced by a level 1 character whose player can click the mouse faster.  As a result, the importance of twitch has been vastly reduced (though not completely eliminated) in the play of the modern MMORPG, and as games "evolve," new mechanisms may be introduced to further lower the impact of good twitch play, such as UO's inclusion of Last Target into the client, eliminating the need for players to manually select a fast-moving target for spellcasting (or use a third party program to do it for them).  The need for Last Target in UO was somewhat related to the awkwardness of its interface, however, and cannot be dismissed entirely as a cheap way of "making the game easy."

However, trying to do away with the importance of twitchy character control is a mistake when carried too far.  In the early days of Asheron's Call (say up through about month 6 or so of final), character control was an important part of being a good player.  Characters who were weaker "on paper" than the guy next to them could do extremely well in difficult situations if their control was good.  High-powered characters whose players just let them sit still and auto-attack were more likely to meet an ignominious death.  Because Asheron's Call has balance issues and no cap on player power potential, the importance of twitch went away.  No amount of eye-hand coordination can compensate for the levels of raw power and invulnerability that players and monsters alike achieved.  The long-term success of a character today in AC is determined almost entirely on the character's initial design and how much experience he has.  The role of character control is limited to only the closest contests of power, maybe within a slightly wider range in the realm of PvP, but twinking and a good macro count for far more now than a player's actual ability to react to his environment.

Increasing the importance of twitch play in the MMORPG allows some reward for the player who is actually good at playing the game in this manner, and helps to differentiate otherwise cookie-cutter clones from each other.  This is not to say that twitch should be overwhelmingly important next to character development:  nobody expects a total novice character to be able to whip an enemy way over his head just because he's got good reaction time and makes quick decisions.  However, in combination with limiting player power, it can make all the difference for a truly excellent player at the top of the game's power curve, as opposed to someone who got there without mastering the interface.

Twitch also helps a game's longevity.  As long as twicth and automatic reaction time are important, there is always room for improvement as a player.  One can powerlevel forever and read endless messae board posts about what theoretical combinations and tactics work well, but if the ability to execute these tactics is a function of the player's ability, there is always something to work for.

Beware the RP Police

A common trend on many small-scale games, and on private server games, is mandated roleplaying.  This is a horrible horrible idea, especially in a wide area network environment.  It's a direct backlash of the "serious roleplayer" community against "kewld00dz," a term that expands in meaning for every player to encompass "people who don't represent their characters the way I think they should."  This arrogance is then handed down as law by the game administrator, who must then waste time monitoring the roleplaying or lack of same.  Pretty soon, he manages to convince some like-minded RP nazis to do this for him, and before long the entire game is filled with people actively policing each others' roleplaying, judging everyone around them against a set of standards that none of them can actually agree on, and the game message board starts filling with lame accusations and arguments about "who's not roleplaying properly."  To me, this is the first indicator that I should be looking for another game.

My girlfriend is currently fond of a Sphere shard with this sort of roleplaying-mandate attitude, and I can't stand it.  Much of the apparent time spent on the shrd is dedicating to policing roleplaying, while there are some glaring flaws in their default Sphere .52/Linux scripts that have obviously never been addressed.  There are a number of guidelines on their page describing how you must be in character all the time, which extends to such absurd lengths as to say that it's wrong to just log out in front of someone, or to go afk without first making your excuses and goodbyes, then finding a remote area, then logging.  What the hell is that?  If someone in a pen and paper game said, "Damn, hang on a sec, pizza guy's here," I wouldn't accuse him of being a bad roleplayer for it.  Needless to say, this shard's message board (the OOC board, of course) is filled with ridiculous back and forth banter about whether person X is roleplaying, or whether he should be penalized, because he did something that offends the tender sensibilities of the posting RP cop.  It's funny to note that the reaction of the "true roleplayer" in these situations is to immediately look at a non-roleplaying solution, i.e. GM intervention or banning.

I've already made this argument in a little-read old UO rant, which deals with a situation involving high-handed RP nazis on the Catskills shard.  The gist of it is this:  you cannot mandate how people choose to represent their characters, you can only encourage them to do it in a certain way.  People do not subscribe so they can take acting classes from a bunch of geeks who suck at acting themselves, they do it to play the game.  The perceived problem is that the "bad roleplayer" is ruining the flavor of the game.  The real problem is that the whiner can't bear the thought that other people might not envision the play world in exactly the same way that they do, and they can't deal with it.  From a player standpoint, it's really easy to deal with.  Simply have your character accept that people are different sometimes, although this may be outside the scope of possibility for the player in real life.  If someone is spamming net talk around, just treat them like anyone in the real world who mouths off uncontrollably and unintelligibly:  as an insane person.

This seems to be largely an issue for the players of a game, rather than the developers, but the two are subtly linked.  Much of the behavior that breaks fiction on the players' part is due to shortcomings of the system.  If your game rewards players for macroing in a mana pool or hiring an NPC to spar with for a week straight, they will do it.  If the mechanics of your game are visibly numerical, people will talk about their abilities in terms of numerical scores.  If there is a weapon imbalnce that makes a billy club the most powerful weapon in the game, everyone will carry a billy club regardless of its unrealism.  Certainly you cannot eliminate these sorts of references to game mechanics by players, but you can minimize their fiction-breaking potential through design.  In this case, you can control these impacts by reducing the appeal of macroing, hiding the numbers, and careful balance.  A game should never dictate to a player how he should approach the game, but it can certainly encourage certain behavior.

Zero Sum Rule (Shadwolf)

There are several different genres of game today (sadly less than there use to be).  Each of them has its own peculularities, but all seem to have the consistent problem that imbalance develop in nearly every game designed.  Observation of these games has lead me to the conclusion that there are certain similarites in many of these games.  For these purposes, I will be dealing with any game that deals with combat.  This includes pen and paper RPGs, CRPGs, RTSs, FPSs, MMORPGs, turn based strategy games and a variety of others.

There are a few basic considerations for combat: how fast is the unit, how much damage does the unit do, how fast does it do damage, how hard is it to hurt, and how much damage can it take before it is disabled (not neccessarily killed).  In an RPG or FPS, the unit is the player character or their opponents; in a strategy game this refers to the combat units of all sides.

The first of these considerations, and possibly the most important, is how much damge the unit does.  This is closely linked with how fast the unit does damage.  The hardest part of solving this is picking a useful unit of time.  This unit should be based on how long it will take to kill another unit.  This unit of time can then be compared to the damage of a given attack to generate a damage over time ratio.  This should include the healing rate of the average unit.  If you do 5 points of damage in a given time, but the target heals 2, you only actaully did 3.  This damage should be expressed in terms of a percentage of the average health a unit has.  Thus, you should end up with something like a 5% per second or a 7% per round ratio.  A maximum and minimum value has to be set for this.  Many a game has been broken for lack of this.  Most games start with a maximum, but each new episode or suppliment wants to add a weapon or attack that is more powerful than anything that's been done before.  The values keep climbing and the game gets broken.  You need to ensure that this maximum is never exceeded, now matter how cool or unique the circumstances.  A good guideline is around the maximum health possible for any unit.  The minimum is a little harder to judge, but it should be at least higher than the minimum rate at which a unit can heal.

Once damage over time has been determined, a value should be assigned.  Remember that higher damage attacks have a better chance of killing the enemy in one shot and so should have proportionally higher values.  An example might be as follows:
 

D/T	5%/turn	10%/turn	20%/turn	30%/turn	50%/turn	etc.
Value	1	2	5	7	15	etc.

Next, how hard is this unit to hurt compared to other units?  This would then be expressed in terms of what percentage of damage it typically avoids.  This would then allow you to determine how many shots an average attack will take to disable the unit.  This number would then correspond to a value much as damage over time did.  This value would be added to the damage over time value.

The last positive value to add would concern how fast the unit is.  The value for this would depend on not only the speed, but whether or not there are ranged attacks and how this speed affects the use of thos attacks.  If the speed is high enough to constantly stay at range and avoid melee units, or to close with any ranged unit before it can fire, then this value should be inordinately high.  If it is fast enough to allow one melee unit to eventually close with another, it should be moderately high.  Again, this value is added to your total.

As a blance to all these values, cost must be determined.  Cost may have up to three factors, intitial cost, upkeep cost, and time to produce.  Intiatial cost should be the least of these.  The three should balance out to give a negative cost which reflects the potential usefullness of the attack or unit.  This cost, when added to the above values, should give you a zero sum.  The net effect is that all attacks, if you've done it right, should be balanced.

How this works:

For an RTS you might have infantry that would be slow, weak, but cheap.  Cavalry might be much faster and have a stronger attack, but be weak on hit points and cost more.  A dragon might be stronger, faster and harder to kill, but the cost and upkeep would be outrageous.

For a pen and paper RPG, a CRPG or an MMORPG a fighter might have a good fast attack with his sword that does moderate damge and costs him one stamina per round to use while a mage might have a fireball that does huge area effect damage at range, but takes 3 turns to fire and costs 10 mana to cast.

These values work best if stats are kept as low as possible.  If the weakest character has 3 health and the strongest has 10 and most attacks do 2 to 4 damage, there is a good spread and all characters will be fun to play.  If the weakest player has 10 health and the strongest has 250 and attacks do anywhere from 10 to 100 points a shot then any character with low hitpoints will be perpetually one-shotted whereas the high hit point players/units/monsters will completely invalidate the use of any but the most numbercrunched weapons.

Too Little is Better than Too Much

Once you have defined your baseline for your zero sum formulae, things get tricky, which is why there is a need for constant system adjustment via patches in a persistent world.  When these adjustments are made, you try to get as close as possible to the ideal balance, but in general, you're better off erring on the side of caution than excess.

The reason you want to err on the side of caution is to make sure that you don't invalidate most of your players' options.  Say for example you have a set of weapons available to players in an extremely simple middle ages-style RPG.  Barring weapons classified as ceremonial/gladiatoral/desperate, you have the following choices:  axe, sword, spear, mace, dagger.  This system is very simple, and the weapons behave pretty much like you'd expect them to.  However, you have a rogue developer on your team with a personal bias about the dagger, and it winds up being imbalanced.

First let's see what happens if he thinks the dagger should be better.  Maybe he was stabbed in a barfight or something, and attaches more importance to the dagger as a result.  Therefore, when your game is released, the sum of your factors for axe, sword, mace and spear even out nicely to zero, but your rogue developer has increased the damage and accuracy of the dagger disproportionately, and the dagger's new total is around +4.  How long do you think it will take for the players to pick up on this?  Now instead of having 5 viable weapons to choose from, you have one.  You have just lost 80% of your character type variety, not to mention the whining you will have to deal with when you nerf the dagger down to acceptable levels.

Now let's say the rogue developer thinks the dagger is excedingly silly, and thus lowers its speed and damage ratings.  The dagger now has a rating of -4.  It's still a problem, but now your viable weapon choices are limited to 4 good, balanced weapons, instead of the 1 they had in the other scenario.  It's still a problem, of course, unless you want to relegate the dagger to the ceremonial pile of substandard weapons nobody will ever use under normal circumstances, but when you fix this problem, it will be seen as a buff, and in the meantime your players aren't all running around carrying nothing but daggers.

Why Nerfing is Good

"Nerf!  Nerf!" is the eternal cry on dev boards whenever something is perceived as being weakened by the game's designers.  Let us suspend disbelief for a moment and assume that for once the implementors of patches are not making a horrible mistake based on skewed misinformation about the way the game works, and that this "nerf" is being used correctly:  as a balancing technique.  Something in the game has been identified as being too powerful, and a nerf is required to bring it in line.

Used in this way, the nerf is an excellent and vital method of maintaining a sense of balance.  If you choose to not nerf the offending object, a universal (and much misbegotten) policy in Asheron's Call, there are only two other options open to you:

• Buff everything else until it seems like everything is in line
• Leave it broken

The second method, leaving the game broken, is even worse, but it happens on a semiregular basis.  In games that are not persistent, like Age of Kings (early), the trebuchet was horribly unrealistic and therefore could be used to devastating effect.  Why bother building a mixed force if a trebuchet is as easy to maintain as a peasant levy, and far more devastating and hard to destroy?  (To their credit, the publisher did eventually patch this.)  In Heavy Gear, the bazooka was implemented as a guided weapon (which is incorrect from the standpoint of the original Heavy Gear tabletop system), and if you could get one, there was little reason to get anything else.  This was never changed.  Typically, such a game's publisher looks at a product like this as a product with built-in obsolescence, and so he leaves it broken rather than devoting company resources to fixing it, when that manpower could be steered into producing their next income-generating broken game.  The buying public is gullible and stupid as a rule, and although I might never again buy a product made by that team as a result of their shortsightedness, many others will.  It's easy to see where the profit lies.  (NOTE:  The only game to ever be successfully and persistently fixed for balance after publication is Starcraft.  End result:  Starcraft is one of the most popular computer games of its time, and the absolute best RTS game on the market even today.)

In a persistent subscriber-based game like an MMORPG, there is considerably more pressure on the development team to fix mistakes and address balance issues, but it doesn't always happen.  In Ultima Online, lord of all buggy cesspools, bugs that allowed cheaters to loot houses and instakill other players were not fixed for a very long time, explained away as "creative uses of magic," until subscribers began cancelling in droves, at which point this sort of bug abuse suddenly became their biggest concern.  In Everquest, there are character classes that have never been on par with other classes, and they have never been fixed despite subscribers leaving.  In Asheron's Call, foolish mistakes like tuskers being worth an inordinate amount of XP for the risk involved in killing them should be considered game-destroying snafus, but it has been publically stated that they will not be reworking these creatures, most likely due to this "no nerfs" bullshit.

Let me digress a little more about Asheron's Call and the value of nerfing for a moment, as I have some experience with this game system and its absurd policy of not nerfing.  One of the largest problems with Asheron's Call is the predominance of the 3-school archer/melee, particularly the melee.  The initial buffing of these classes was due to a perceived dominance of mages in killing effectiveness.  This was a correct observation, but the answer (buffing other character types) was absolutely the wrong one, and led to a nigh-infinite series of additional class problems that have only gotten worse through the game's history.  The correct solution was to look at why the mage was so powerful.  The answer was that the mage had an extremely powerful attack (war), but it was also nearly impervious to damage due to the overwhelming power of Life and Item protections.  The correct response would have been to nerf these protections and their associated vulnerabilities, most especially Imperil.  Had this been done right away, we would not be seeing the sorts of absurd class problems that fuel the fires of particularly vitriolic ranters.

Everything Starts with Grain

You can tell a lot about the way a culture will develop when you figure out what they eat.  Since most fantasy-era RPG's are set in a quasi-medieval setting with established town centers, the important food factor is what sort of grain the people are eating.  Agrarianism is a prerequisite for stable settlements, and once the locals are harvesting grain, you have the luxury to develop other ideas, and the necessity of a system of supervision and food distribution that doesn't exist in a hunter/gatherer setting where everyone's primary duty is to get enough food to feed themselves every day.  In a very real sense, the actual base economic unit of the preindustrial society is not the coin, but the bushel of grain.

The first thing influenced by food is how many people can be supported given a certain amount of arable land, and how much of the population must be dedicated to farming.  A primary crop of wheat can support a certain population per acre, barley a different number, oats different again, etc.  Because game designers tend to be unimaginative, they tend to use wheat as the primary crop if they've even bothered to think that hard about it.  A general, historically accurate figure is that each wheat farmer produces enough food for himself, his 3 non-farming dependents (who don't get as much food as the farmer), plus 10% surplus, taking into account the amount of grain you need in reserve for replanting.  This means that for every non-farmer (adventurer, politician, soldier, etc.) in town, there must be 10 farmers raising wheat.  This figure reflects the best technology available in a preindustrial society prior to the late 18th century, where advances in erosion control and fertilizers increased yields.  The sort of technology we are talking about here is the kind you would expect to see in a fantasy quasi-medieval society:  heavy plows and the wooden horse collar.  Wheat farming has the considerable advantage of encouraging draft animals and horsemanship with increased hay and feed production, which in turn leads to cavalry.  Each farmer generally works about 7 acres of wheat, and assuming your society is using a three-field system, each farmer would require about 10 acres, including the land that is left fallow that year (generally used for grazing while the land replenishes itself).  Using a rough conversion of acreage to square miles (640 to 1), each square mile of wheat will thus support 64 farmers and their families plus 6.4 non-farmers.  A typical farming village in old England of about 180 people thus requires 3 square miles of arable farmland, which is in keeping with the fact that such villages typically existed about 2-3 miles apart.

However, if you are trying to design a civilization that has relatively tight borders and supports a gigantic number of people, you have to either say they trade for their food from less populated farm regions (raising the cost of living for everyone in the city) or say there is a very high-yield crop/farming method that allows for large population support on smaller acreages.  Corn is an extremely high-yield per acre crop, and can be used as your primary food source, although you have to get around the fact that corn is very susceptible to blights and such in an early farm culture.  The middle american cultures subsisted almost entirely on corn, and its efficiency allowed them a spectacular amount of leisure time to develop technology, but every few years they had to contend with massive starvation because a crop went poorly.  Rice can also support a tremendous number of excess people above the number of workers required, but rice is a bizarre crop that allows for a virtually unlimited number of workers in a small area, each of whom produces just slightly more than what he needs to survive himself, working throughout the year in several harvesting cycles.  This makes it attractive to small landmass communities like those of feudal Japan, but creates a whole new set of social implications.  This will be discussed later.

Rice does not encourage the domestication of horses, hence extensive, specialized cavalry is not a natural outgrowth of rice communities.  (This can be convenient for a game designer who doesn't want to be bothered with horses.)  Horses were used in a few non-wheat based cultures, notably the Mongols and the Japanese, but they fed on available scrub, and they never reached the level of universal application or breeding as a wheat culture's horses.  For instance, neither the Mongols nor the Japanese bred specialized draft horses as did the Europeans, thus they never got heavy warhorses, thus no close formation lance-using heavy cavalry.

It's conceivable that corn could encourage horse domestication, but there is no historical reference for this, since horses were not available in the new world until introduced by the Europeans.  However, the use of horses is quickly learned when they become available.  The Sioux people almost immediately became a culture based entirely on horses when they were introduced.

Supplementary food sources also have an effect on your maximum population per acre of arable land.  Generally, the typical inland European diet of the middle ages was very light on meat, at least for the peasantry.  Upper classes would demand more meat, but you don't have to get too deeply into detail here.  The thing to keep in mind is that herding animals that require grain to feed are roughly 1/10 as efficient as the raw crops in terms of pastureland.  Therefore, if you want to have the typical fantasy idea of a roasted haunch in every tavern, you need to allocate even more land to pastures.  However, to make up for this there are some land-efficient methods of getting meat into the food chain.  Pigs are typically left to run in contained forest areas to forage for themselves, effectively harvesting nuts and roots (and garbage in the form of slops) and converting it to ham and bacon.  Game can be taken, of course, but if you go too heavily on the idea of game you deplete the forest and run out of game in subsequent years, thus hunting cannot be relied on as a major source of nutrition.  Cattle and the like can graze on the town commons, saving a little bit of pasture area.

Fishing can be incredibly efficient in areas that can support it, taking up no land at all and returning large amounts of protein, especially if your civilization has advanced fishing technologies in the form of nets, boats, and possibly even fish traps.  A fishing village can generate up to a 150% surplus, and fishing industries helped to fuel the prosperity of the early Normans, and the rise of a better-fed and richer middle class.  North american tribes along the Delaware river were able to harvest as much as 20 million tons of fish annualy, raising their standard of living considerably.  However, people tend to get sick of fish very quickly, and there should be an alternate food source.  In modern-day African fishing villages, dogs and cats are cosidered edible and desirable as food, and can be traded for goods and services.

If all else fails, you can use black box devices like "magical weather control and soil refreshment" which allows for more than one crop of wheat to be harvested per year, and negating the necessity of a two or three field system, i.e. no farmland is ever fallow.  However, an unrealistically superior food source which is easy to harvest, i.e. massive amounts of fruit on every tree, tends to lead to a sedentary and primitive society due to a lack of need for innovation and industry.  Jungle communities that subsist heavily on readily-available fruit tend to stay in the stone age while the rest of the world is forced by necessity to move forward.

Once you have your food sources determined and a supportable population figure, you can tell a lot about local political systems from what your crops consist of.  In the case of wheat, barley, and other annual grain crops, this contributes to the feudal system of  "Lords of the Land."  When you have food and land to grow it on, someone is going to inevitably try to take it away from you.  This results in the creation of a warrior class, dedicated primarily to holding onto the farms, and maybe taking the next guy's fields as well.  These warriors are excess people, and don't produce food themselves, taking it instead from the farmers.  Now your army becomes somewhat organized under some form of leadership, and because they have the power to keep the peasants breathing, they naturally assume a leadership role, sometimes going so far as to bar the peasants from owning proper war gear out of a sense of job security.  The farmers keeps the warrior class from starving, the warrior class protects them from invaders and wild predators.  Historically speaking, wheat farmers and the like stayed in their appointed social station, only rebelling against the lord when they were taxed so heavily that they began starving to death.  The lord of the land, for his part, typically taxed the peasants as heavily as he could possibly get away with, but woe was the lord who starved his farmers to death.  (Example:  Wat Tyler's rebellion, 1381.)

Rice and the methods required to grow it bring about a different social system.  Because rice is a relatively low-margin food source (i.e. very little is produced in excess of what the peasant requires to live), you need a phenomenal number of people working relatively small rice fields if you want to support a warrior class to keep your people safe.  This requires a very advanced and strict management system in which everyone must obey the taskmaster, or the whole village will starve.  This is likely the origin of the strict disciplinary tradition of the early Japanese people, which continues to influence the culture even today.

Taking our example of fantasy supercorn, we have here a crop which is exceptionally high-yield, and relatively few farmers can support a large number of excess people (say, the population is merely 60% peasantry, as opposed to a more realistic 90%).  The social implications for a supercorn farmer are significant.  On the one hand, this production of excess crops can mean the farmer has more freedom of choice and status, especially if supercorn is hard to cultivate properly.  If this is the case, the farmer who can get maximum yields out of his supercorn has been elevated from unskilled laborer to desirable artisan.  The growers of supercorn may even have enough clout to form a guild, but this is unlikely; food is such a basic requirement of society that any attempt to "strike" or price-gouge by supercorn farmers would probably lead to the warrior class beating them down.  If hedge-wizards are required to get a faster crop rotation, then these specialists may have political power and influence, although they would almost certainly be civil servants and not player characters.  However, the political intricacies of supercorn farming NPC peasants are not really important to the player usually:  it's just something to keep in mind when creating a believable social system.

Kingdom Size and Armies

A badly designed fantasy campaign typically includes completely off-the-cuff sprawling empires and holdings of the local king.  "Well, this here kingdom is 500 miles by 500 miles, about, and like it's divided into 250-square mile quarters which are governed by dukes..."  Unless the army rides around on motorcycles and Lear jets, this is not going to be the case.

In the preindustrial community, the area that a "monarch" can claim is effectively about 15 or 20 miles from the capital, or wherever the primary military base is.  This is about as far as his soldiers, tax collectors, sherriffs, and what have you can maintain his authority, yet still be under his control.  This is because of two factors:  one, how far his men can ride comfortably on a daily basis, and two, the size of the army he can support with his excess food production.

Another consideration is how far the peasants have to travel to get their goods to market.  This is considerably less, since the peasantry don't have access to stables full of high quality horses and changing stations, and must often carry their goods in by foot, or ox/draft horse wagon.  Markets should be no further than one-third of a day's travel from the furthermost farmer to be practical (this concept is known as the "rural edge").  This depends on the quality of roads and how convoluted the terrain is, but assuming you have reasonable terrain and metalled (paved) roads, figure that farmers would not be functional further than 5 miles or so from the market.  Wagons are slow.  There also has to be a provision for getting required food into the urban center, which is typically in the middle of a county.  Considering that you don't have good refrigeration or preservatives, the food should ideally get to the city as fast as possible.  Therefore, if you look at markets as an extension of a kingdom's central power, you cannot have a gigantic metropolis supported by dozens of layers of markets.  The food would rot by the time it made it through the gates.

Getting back to the consideration about soldiers for land defense and control, one has to discard immediately the nonsense about armies of 100,000 men clashing in huge slaughterfests on the battlefield.  You simply cannot support an army that is larger than your peasant population.  If you assume that your society is heavily militaristic, with a need for a big deterrent to invasion, maybe 4% of your total population might be members of a standing army (40% of nonfarmers), with the possibility of raising 6% of your total population as peasant levies (7% of total peasants, or about 20% of working peasants) in times of crisis.  It should be noted that if your kingdom enters a full-scale conflict, most of the front line is going to consist of these peasant levies; the standing army will be spread to a number of positions in case of surprise attack, and to function as reserves.  This is a good reason to avoid war, as you can only lose so much of your peasant population before you start running the risk of starvation.

Using the supercorn example and supplementary nutrition like fishing from the preceding section about food, the entire size of a king's holdings can be compacted even further.  This gives the military a great defensive advantage, since they have less farmland to defend.  This could be a very important consideration in a fantasy campaign, where the supercorn farms are occasionally raided by giants, requiring a more concentrated defense force to drive them away.  In addition, if supercorn is less labor-intensive than wheat as well as less land-intensive, you free up more of your population, and thus your standing army can be larger.  You also have more people with free time to think up interesting ideas like calendars, a church, arts and sciences, and magic.

Geriatrics, Sexual Roles, and Agriculture

Modern conventions that have been placed into most role playing environments include unrealistically good geriatric care and sexual equality, at least for a preindustrial culture.  Without getting into a detailed and fervent history of attitudes toward the elderly and women's suffrage, a game designer with an eye towards immersive believability could stand to benefit from understanding the reasoning behind the history of these causes, and the implications of introducing them into a setting which historically could not support them.

In a preindustrial agrarian society, everything is based on how good your harvest is, and therefore on how many able-bodied peasants you have at your disposal.  Able-bodied peasants generally referred to males between the ages of 16 and 40 or so.  These were the people who kept everyone from starvation and allowed for more leisure time among the aristocracy and artisan classes, so they could develop technology.  As outlined earlier, the peasantry typically comprised at least 90% of the total population, if not more.  However, out of everyone that lived on a farm, only able bodied laborers were immediately important to the harvest and therefore the tax base.  This excluded three major groups of "peasant dependents":

• The very young
• The very old
• Women

The very old in a peasant house are doubly penalized.  The first consideration is the same as for children in that they cannot work, but they will never become strong farmers again.  In effect, all they do is eat.  This makes them a liability to the farmer, who now has to support more mouths and still pay his rent and taxes, and also to the lord of the land, who sees the elderly as a useless food sink that cheapens his tax base while returning nothing.  (The concept of gratitude for services rendered is another modern ethical consideration that can only exist when technologically feasable.)  As if this weren't bad enough, medical care was understandably extremely limited, and one reason the elderly were not such a problem for the population was that a peasant was usually dead by the time he became unable to work.  Old people are more susceptible to injuries, as the body stops regenerating as efficiently once the capablity to propogate the species is gone; he is as useless to the gene pool as he is to the lord of the land.  A fall resulting in a broken bone was usually fatal.

Women had a number of things working against them from the standpoint of food gathering in the European system.  The first is the difference in bodily functions with men, particularly the lack of explosive upper body strength, which is important for hard manual labor (or killing something with an axe) unless it's something relatively easy like rice sprouting, and rice-based cultures often did have women working the fields alongside the men unless they were having children.  Secondly, the advantage of human females in metabolism works against them:  since women can survive longer without food and water than men (except during pregnancy), they tended to get less nourishment.  The primary role of women in this sort of society, where the survival of the species was actually something to worry about, was childbearing.  This was a full time job in many cases, since you took it for granted that a certain number of your children were going to die before they reached maturity.  Having lots of kids was both a societal and genetic imperative.  Coupled with the incredibly high rate of death during childbirth, this meant that women in the European theatre generally led short, miserable lives that consisted of little more than light hand industry and birthing.  Without the technology to improve their lot, and the lot of the society, it was an unfortunate inevitability.

Concerns about the elderly only really apply in a fantasy campaign where time is important, as it is in any really good campaign.  The elderly members of the peasantry are still effectively useless in the agrarian power structure, though.  They cannot farm, and eat the food that others bring in.  The archetypical fantasy mage often tends to be old, but one can assume that a mage is by all rights a member of the aristocracy or the nobility, with access to better healthcare and nutrition than anyone else, and historically only the upper classes lived to advanced age.  If you want to present a more compassionate face for your society, you can say that the excess food production from your fantasy supercrop allows the elderly to be supported, in effect a technological advance that permits a new ethic to flourish.  You must be careful, though, to avoid a situation where longevity is the norm for every member of society, or the elderly will be eating food they haven't grown for many many years, draining the economy past self-sufficiency very quickly.  For this reason, magic should not be allowed to act as an advanced anti-agathic agent, and the old ex-farmer will still die at what would be consdered a very young age today.  The same rationale can be applied to the survival of young children, simply by lessening the risk of famine.  However, a situation where magically created food can sustain everyone infinitely should be avoided, as such a situation creates entirely new sets of social problems that are outside the scope of a comprehensible fantasy game for a modern player.

Now let's assume that because you don't want your fantasy game to be picketed by the Women's Liberation Movement, you have a caveat that women are equal to men in all ways.  Actually, this is not true:  what you are really saying is that player character adventurer women are equal in all ways to their male counterparts.  The peasant woman is still probably dying while having her third baby, but the peasantry is pleasantly invisible to the players.  However, there are some interesting implications.  If women have the same physical potential as men, this means that the peasant wife can now be very productive during the planting and harvest... not as productive as the man, since some of her time will still be spent trying to deliver babies, but say about 80% or so.  Ths raises the female peasant from the role of "dependent breeder" to an important part of the agrarian community.  This means that there is less waste and overhead for the peasantry, resulting in a higher surplus yield, which means you have more people with free time.

Women are still valuable as the mothers of the next generation, though, so how can you reconcile this with the idea of female adventurers risking life and limb without restriction?  You must assume that magic allows for safer delivery, and that the midwife is the magical equivalent of a primitive but functional maternity ward.  Magic can also act as a blackbox form of pediatric care, and so less peasant children die before maturity.  If this is the case, then the people have less of a problem with women getting killed on the battlefield, since the next generation is more safely assured.

Matriarchal Societies:  Women's Rights Footnote

A point raised by Penelope Baker (Jin Lee) while I was looking for nitpicky points was that there were societies where women were not treated as breeding chattel, but were actually in higher social positions than the men.  Examples of this are the matriarchal priestesshood societies like some of the early Celts.  Females were considered to be closer to the Earth Mother, or what have you, and had appropriate status and authority.  Civilizations that encouraged a feminist military ethic, like some of the splinter Greek cultures, tended to die out fairly quickly due to a lack of offspring.

A female warrior tradition is more prevalent in pre-iron cultures, notably the early Celts.  In a hunter/gatherer or very early agricultural society, you have a far more limited population, and therefore everyone has to act in the defense of the community.  The religious importance of the goddesses Macha and Morrigan among the early Celts reflects this, especially in the case of Morrigan, a brutal warrior goddess.  Cuchulainn was trained by a female warrior from Britain, and there are surviving accounts of warrior queens, Melb, Cartamundu and Boudeccea.  Eventually, the Celts were attacked by civilizations that had stratified into a more complex, stable agronomy, allowing them to use iron more effectively, but placing their women into a more traditional noncombat role.  Celtic legends seem to reflect that the female warrior castes did not favor very well against the male-dominated aggressors (whether this was a result of iron vs. bronze, or this in combination with a lack of explosive upper body power, is not clear), and the roles of Macha and Morrigan were subtly changed in reaction to this.  Women still played a role in the defense of the community, but their role was now more supportive than front-line.  Morrigan ceased to be associated with traditional weapons, instead leaning more heavily towards magic, shapeshifting, deception, and treachery.  The female warriors of the Celts were more heavily involved with planning, training, fortification defense, espionage, and the like.

The dominance of male-ruled society in the British Isles relegated the Celtic goddesses to even lower status, sometimes even reflected in legends involving the rape of goddesses, followed by death during childbirth.  The Irish, who were less consumed by war, also reflected this trend, but their goddess figures took on a more egalitarian role as wife and mother.  This did not change the fact that as the iron age progresses, women were removed almost completely from the battlefield except in extremis.

The first Queen of England, Queen Maud (1102-1167), daughter of King Henry I, was somewhat famous for her 19 year war against her cousin Stephen, who had the backing of the nobles who disliked the idea of a female monarch.  Their cat and mouse game with the throne continued until Stephen's son and heir died, at which point Maud reached a compromise with Stephen:  Stephen would be king, and upon his death the crown would go to Maud's son by Geoffrey of Anjou, Henry II.  However, 12th century England was already somewhat civilized, and the division of labor between men and women was set, so the actual fighting was done by the men, so regardless of Maud's technical leadership of her forces, she did not go out herself and hack at the enemy.  (Irrelevant note:  Interestingly, Henry II also had a sort of power struggle with his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but Eleanor did not lead a rebellion herself, rather setting their sons against Henry II.  The son who wound up winning the throne was Richard the Lion-Heart.)  In any case, by the time cultures develop into settled iron age systems, the women are more rigidly segregated into home care roles.  Examples of females of the noble class are almost universally in behind-the-lines leadership roles, and the oddities of the nobility are never universally applicable to the population at large, as "surplus people" always fall under different rules.

Other matriarchal or relatively equitable societies also flourished, for example in early China, but there was still a strict division of sexual roles.  Women's role in battle and labor-intensive occupations was still extremely limited, and much of their time was still spent having children.

In any case, a matriarchal society is undesirable in a modern RPG setting for a mass market.  If women are inherently holier and more authoritative than men, then they must be designated as NPC's.  Inherent governing authority by virtue of a sex selection box doesn't make for balance.  Even if you balance this out with limitations placed on female player characters, you wind up with (at best) an unbalanced situation where sex is chosen based on what sort of profession the player wants to follow, or (at worst) a situation where one sex is unable to participate in the majority activities of the game, and is therefore undesirable.

Monsters and Food

A fantasy campaign traditionally (though not necessarily) includes monsters in its population.  These monsters are of three basic types:  humanoids, nonhumanoids, and fantastic beings.

Humanoids are the fodder of most worlds.  Orcs, goblins, trolls, ogres, fuzzy cat people, whatever... these are the bread and butter of the adventurer on the line, and they come in sufficiently organized numbers so as to pose a threat of invasion, giving the humans an excuse to hate them.  If you are concerned with realism in your game design, humanoid tribes will have much the same concerns as human civilizations, primarily food, terrain control, etc.  Relations with the humans will typically be exasperated at the start of the campaign, explained by factors like an inability to communicate well, vastly different ethics, and plain old competition for resources.  However, the humanoid monsters generally do not possess the potential for personal prowess that humans have, as evidenced by the fact that human adventurers tend to kill them in great numbers.  We can thus infer that the typical humanoid lacks sufficient technology to allow him to progress, and is locked into a more or less nomadic hunter-gatherer tribal existence.  They probably do not have a high degree of metallurgy and use bronze and stone for weapons, and hides, wood and bronze for armor.  Their lack of agriculture makes them wander around in search of food, bringing them into conflict with territorial humans.  Lack of agriculture also makes them less likely to have the leisure time humans have, and so they are slow to develop new technologies, including magic.  Given all of these disadvantages, they have to have some sort of compensation to avoid being wiped out offhand by the humans.  The simplest advantage is faster breeding, the single most important evolutionary trait there is.  This also increases their need to take more land for foraging, putting them into increasing conflict with humans.  Other advantages may take the form of military readiness:  with no farmers, every humanoid is a hunter, and