4/26/13 Episode 31: Lessons Learned Part II

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means—it’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay, last time, I started doing something called Lessons I Learned, where I looked at the sixteen sets that I have led, and I was going through chronologically and talking about what I learned from each set that I did. And I—I originally thought maybe this would be, you know, a one or two part series, and then I got through three of the sixteen last time. So I now believe it’s a little longer than that.

But the plan is that I—I think I will do some more today, then I will take a little break and will come back. I won’t do this continuously. I know Innistrad had a three-parter, but that was a little more cohesive. So, this is—somehow, I know when I first started this podcast I was worried like I wouldn’t have enough to talk about, and now I have like three different meta-series running on, so clearly there’s lots to talk about. So that’s the good news.

Okay, so when last we left, we were up to my fourth lead design, which was Odyssey. Which could possibly be a podcast all on its own. The lessons of Odyssey. So one of the things I explained, I’ve talked about this in my column a couple times, is that mistakes are great teachers. Because mistakes really encourage you to learn what went wrong. And Odyssey in some ways was one of my biggest mistakes, but I learned some very, very important lessons.

So let’s walk through the most important lesson. The one that almost shaped me as a designer. So, when I first made Odyssey—I have not yet done my Odyssey podcast, which I will do at some point. But when I made Odyssey, I was very intrigued by the idea of taking a staple concept of Magic and turning it on its ear. And the concept that I wanted to play around with was something called card advantage.

A real quick card advantage primer, for those who don’t know what that means—the idea in Magic is, often I’m trading my resources for yours. And the idea is we each have so many cards. And cards mean both cards in hand and cards on the battlefield, and the idea is, if I can use one card to get rid of more than one card of yours, I will eventually—I have this advantage over you in that I—you know, there’s no longer parity if I go up. So if one of my cards destroys two of your cards, then I’m up ahead of you. I have more resources than you do.

And card advantage is a lot more complex than what I’m explaining here, but the basic principle of it is that if you think of each player as having sort of just raw advantage based on their cards, then you can play cards that give you advantage by getting you ahead. And it’s a pretty important part of Magic. Like I said, it’s a lot more complex. Maybe one day I’ll do a card advantage podcast. It’s a super complex idea. And what gains you card advantage is not always super clear.

Because for example, spending one card to draw more than one card, you know, that can net you card advantage. Which is a very different thing than I blow up to of your creatures with one of my cards. They’re different animals there. They mean different things. But they all (???) back to this same basic idea of card advantage.

And early in Magic, the players had slowly figured out the importance of card advantage. And so I got in my head, I said “You know what would be kind of cool? Let’s make a set where card advantage doesn’t work the way it normally works.” And so what it did was, I ended up creating a set that had a very strong graveyard theme, and that the importance of Odyssey was that the graveyard took on a relevance that it really hadn’t before.

Now, Weatherlight had a graveyard theme, that (???) Weatherlight, and The Dark had a little bit of a graveyard theme. So those two sets had definitely played around in this area. But Odyssey just took it to the nth degree. You know, Odyssey introduced flashback, it had a mechanic called threshold that like if you had seven or more cards in your graveyard things turned on, and there were a lot of ways to get cards in your graveyard.

And one of the most famous whenever I talk about it is, there was a little hound that you could sacrifice a card in your hand—you could discard a card to give it first strike. And there were times when you were playing where the correct move was discard your entire hand to give it first strike when you didn’t need it to have first strike. Like just throw away your hand. That was the correct play.

And what I found was, I made a set that—I mean, I think to this day it is one of the Spikiest things I ever made. And when you talk to players, there is a subset that loves Odyssey, because Odyssey is in some ways the Spikiest the game ever got. That it’s all about this resource management and understanding the board and understanding your graveyard. And having all these things and like being able to monitor them all and understand them. You know.  And the block later would have madness—it is a very complex system that, if you got it, it was very cool. But if you didn’t, it was just very confusing, and it made you do things that didn’t make any sense.

So one of the things in game design in general—and I learned this from Odyssey, which is—you the game designer have a lot of power. Tons of power. You can make your game players do anything. And how do you do that? You just incentivize. You know, when a game player plays a game, they’re like “Okay, I’m in for a fun time. Tell me what to do, I’m going to do that and win. And that—most game players don’t think about if what they’re being told to do is the fun thing to do, they just trust the game maker and do what they’re being told.

And, that means you the game designer have a lot of responsibility, because they are putting the trust in you to make it fun. And, you can make it not fun. This is a really important thing for game designers to understand. Players will go wherever you lead them. You know, and I know there’s this inherent idea that, well, you know, players look out for their own fun, and if something’s not fun then they just won’t do it.

And no. That is not true. That is not true. I have (???)—I mean, Odyssey is one of these examples, where I will watch players go down the path and do things they don’t want to do and purposely not have fun because they’re like “Well, that’s what I’m supposed to do.” And, you know, as a game designer it made me realize that, like, I have a responsibility to the player. You know, and that this thought exercise of “Let’s take this concept,” you know, “and let’s say ‘hey, this thing that you want to do, players, I’m going to make it so it’s not good,” was a dangerous—it was me kind of intellectually playing in space that was kind of fighting what my job was. You know, my job is not to make Magic this intellectual thing to think about as much as it’s supposed to be “make a game that’s fun to play.”

So one of the things that we talk about in R&D is the difference between interesting and fun. And it’s a common mistake that game designers make. Because interesting means as a thought procedure, as something that you can stand back and sort of analyze, detached, it is interesting. “Oh, it is very cool that, you know, normally the game does this but in this situation it does that.” You know, and a lot of game designers confuse interesting for fun. It’s not always the same thing. Things can be interesting and be not fun. In fact, a lot of things that are interesting are not fun.

And that one of the things we talk about in R&D is, sometimes you go “Your game is veering toward interesting, which means that it is—what we mean in R&D is that you are making decisions that are intellectually based rather than emotionally based.

I mean I talk about this a lot, that—you know, I believe—and I said, I talked about this in my article on synergy, that as a writer one of my big themes is the idea that people like to function intellectually, but really function emotionally. That we as humans like to think we’re intellectual creatures, but when you get down to it I honestly believe we are much more driven by our emotions than we are driven by our intellect, as much as we like to think otherwise.

And in games—I apply that to games, and what that to me says is, people seem to think what people want from games is intellectual stimulation, which is partially true, but more important than that is emotional stimulation. People want to emotionally feel. And I think game designers—because smart people tend to like playing games. You know, game playing definitely leans toward a smarter demographic.

But even the smarter demographic is still looking for an emotional—I mean, they want intellectual stimulation, but not at a cost of emotional stimulation. You know, when I design a Magic set, I need it to be fun. I need it to be something players want to do. You know, in Odyssey, the lesson of Odyssey was I didn’t do that. I mean, I did it for a subset—I understand there were Spikes that enjoyed it.

But for a lot of the players it’s like “Hey, throw away your hand.” Like, “I don’t want to throw away my hand.” You know. I don’t care if that’s the best play. I don’t want to do that. I want to play my cards. You know. And, I mean the lesson of Odyssey really hammered home to me that my job is not to stimulate thought as much as it’s to stimulate emotion.

Now, I want to stimulate thought. I’m not saying you can’t both stimulate thought and emotion, and I definitely—Magic is a thinking game and (???) that it’s a thinking game. But the lesson here is, it can’t be a thinking game at the sake of not being an emotional game. Because game playing at its core is about people having experiences they want to have that’s fun for them. You know.

And like I said, by the way. Conquering something intellectually has emotional outcome. You know, when you figure something out, you feel good about that. So I don’t want you to feel like--I’m not saying ignore intellect. But what I’m saying is, be careful that you interweave your intellect with the emotion. That intellect without emotion leads to gameplay that might be on the surface interesting, but it’s not fun and that’s important.

The other things I learned from Odyssey was—and this was a good thing, not all bad things—Odyssey was really the first set where I hammered home on a theme. And the funny thing was, I made a set that was a graveyard set, and then put lots of other trappings into it. And then when I turned the set over to Development, Randy Buehler was the lead developer, he said to me “Okay, I sense you’re doing a set about the graveyard, but you’ve got a lot of other stuff in here,” and what it made me realize is, the need to focus.

Because here’s another common designer problem. You don’t have enough faith in what you’re doing, so you stack other things on top of it. You’re like “Well, here’s what’s supposed to be the interesting thing, but just in case they don’t find this interesting, I’ll put this other thing in.” You know, and what happens is, you dilute what you’re doing. You dilute your experience. And that, Randy wisely said, “Hey. You’re making a graveyard set. Let’s make it a graveyard set. Let’s take out this other stuff you’re doing and focus.”

Because—and the best way to think about this is, imagine like you’re going to the movies, and it’s, you know—you’re going to go see an adventure movie. And they go “Well, yeah, it’s an adventure movie, but we want to make sure there’s some romantic comedy mixed in, and—oh, also, we want to make sure there’s some suspense mixed in, and oh also we want to make sure there’s some comedy mixed in. Oh, and also we want to—and you get a muddled movie. Like give me my action/adventure. I want people running around, bombs exploding and stuff, you know.

And obviously you can mix genres and stuff. But I mean, the thing is, you have to figure out what you are and be that. The game has to figure out what it’s going to be and be that. Odyssey was a graveyard set. It needed to be a graveyard set. If you start adding things in that have nothing to do with that, it pulls away from it.

And I think one of the big things—I mean, as I look at my later designs, the things I’ve gotten a lot better at is—I believe that the job of a designer—maybe the most important job of a designer, especially the way that we do it at Wizards, is bullseye-setting. It’s to say to your team, “This is our goal, this is what we’re trying to accomplish,” and then you get everybody moving in the same direction.

And a good design from a Development standpoint is something that has clarity to what it is doing, so the developer goes “I got it. I see what you’re doing.” You know. Innistrad, for example, won the Rosewater Rumble, and one of the reasons I think it did was, it had a focus that was frickin’ razor-sharp. We were doing a horror set. And even though, for example, some of the things I turned in, Development needed to make changes, it was because “Oh, they understood my vision, they needed to fine-tune it, make it better match what my vision was.” But I had a clean vision. They understood what they needed to do.

And Odyssey, I think—I mean, I clearly learned this lesson a little bit in Tempest, but Odyssey really hammered it home. Because Tempest did not have a theme that’s quite as strong as Odyssey did. Odyssey was a graveyard set. You know, the year before had been Invasion, Invasion was a multicolored set. And so, we were starting down the path of what I refer to as the “Third Age of design” in which themes became important. Ravnica was the first set to do it with the multicolor theme, Odyssey was the second with the graveyard theme.

Okay, let’s continue on, so that I’m not—I get there and I’ve talked about one set. So the next set after Odyssey was Mirrodin. So, now, I first need to point out that Mirrodin had its problems. But, the vast majority of Mirrodin’s problems were development problems. Now there was one big problem that design made, that I think hampered Development significantly, and let me walk through that a little bit.

So, I was not head designer when Mirrodin got made.  I was the lead designer of the set, but Bill Rose was the head designer. And when I put together Mirrodin, I had a lot of color mixed in. I had a lot of, you know, things activated for different colors—now, I had a theme that said any artifact was usable in any deck, but I believe that certain decks could—certain colors could better use them. So for example, if you had an artifact creature that had an activation, well you could still use the artifact creature, but if you wanted the activation you needed to be in the right color.

And so, I put that in the set. I didn’t even at the time understand exactly why it was so important to me, because as a designer I’m very instinctual, like it felt right but I didn’t understand it. And at the time, Bill thought I was muddling the message. Because he thought like, you know, if I had too much color stuff it didn’t feel artifacty enough.

And I didn’t understand why I wanted it, so I didn’t fight for it enough. And later, in retrospect, it’s like “Oh, I recognized the fact that the inherent danger of artifacts is that it’s drifting from the color wheel. And in fact, one of the huge problems that the Mirrodin block had was, we called it the blob, the problem was there was no one piece that was crucial. It could use whatever it needed. And so it was very hard to kill the blob. If you took one piece away it just used another.

And I feel like if color had been more ingrained in that, that it would have said “Oh, well this card is good and that card is good, but this card really needs red and that card really needs blue, well if you’re not committed to red and blue you can’t use both cards in the same deck.

And the lesson there, internally for me, was learning how to listen to myself as a designer. That if something’s important, if you feel something’s important, you’ve got to stick by your guns. And I—I think my big kind of regret is that I didn’t understand why I felt so strong, and then I didn’t stick up more for something I felt was important.

And like I think what Mirrodin taught me was, I mean, I’m very happy with Mirrodin, I did a lot of work with Brady Dommermuth, with Tyler (???), with a bunch of people that shaped what the world was, the idea of doing a metal world and an artifact thing was pretty cool.

And I was very proud of how I was able to take something and, like, the set did not—New World Order didn’t happen at the time, but it’s funny. If you go back and look at Mirrodin, Mirrodin in my mind was kind of this weird precursor in that it had a lot of simple things. That I found a lot of ways to evoke what I needed to evoke with a very simple set of commons.

Also, Mirrodin did a very good job of reprints, of taking things that were cards you had seen before, but used them in the set that gave them context. I mean, the famous one was I put Terror and Shatter in, and the idea was in this environment, you took Shatter over Terror most of the time in a draft. Where before that was never true. And I was trying to show you how cards that value based on circumstances, like “Well normally, Terror’s better than Shatter. But in this world, Shatter’s better than Terror.”And I enjoyed sort of using reprints to help people re-educate and show a shift.

But anyway, I thought Mirrodin did a lot of early work that we would later use for New World Order, and use for a lot of our philosophies of how to reprint things. I… the other thing that I guess I think about is, I fought hard for things that ended up biting us. I learned that I—I have to be careful.

Development for example advised we take out the artifact lands, and I fought very hard. Because what I said was “Yeah, I understand that they can be dangerous, but there’s so much good that comes from them. There’s so many people that won’t try to abuse them that I wanted to keep them in.” And I think that the—the answer was, “Maybe make them legendary at higher rarity?” I needed to do something.

Like I think my instincts of “Here was a cool tool that could be fun” were good, but I had to be careful that, as we’ll see when we get to Unhinged, I have a tendency and one of the things in general, this is true of any designer, which is  you enjoy playing the game in a certain way. And Magic particularly. Magic has so many different ways to play that your experience of the way you play is merely one way how to play. And you have to be aware of other players and other play styles.

And I think sometimes my Johnny sensibilities get the best of me, where I look at things that are dangerous and go “Oh, no no no, those will be fun.” And like, not recognize that “Well, they might be fun for players that aren’t trying to do things with them, but they’re dangerous in the hands of players who are.” And, well, on some level it’s Development’s job to check power level, I’ve got to be careful to sort of respect what’s going on and say “Oh, maybe this would be fun, but it causes problems.” You know, just because it’s fun for some players doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous for others and you have to kind of look at everybody.

The other thing about Mirrodin that I learned is, it’s the first set where I really had a sense of the environment creating a feel. I think one of the things that happened over time is, like I talked about this idea of believing how important emotion is in game design, and that’s always been a big part of who I am, and I think it took me a while to sort of understand that what made environments really shine was that they had a feel to them.

And Mirrodin did this really well. Mirrodin felt like a place and it had a sense to it, and that—you know, Mirrodin, in a lot of ways, was a precursor to a lot of stuff that was coming, because it was the first set in some ways where it just had a tangible-ness to it. The world felt like a particular world. And that—the sets before it, like I was playing in space and I was doing mechanical things, but the set didn’t—didn’t hold together emotionally as well, and Mirrodin was the first set where I—I think I understood the impact and the need to have an emotional anchor to what I was doing, and having an emotional pull through on the theme. And that’s what Mirrodin taught to me.

So Fifth Dawn. Fifth Dawn—so I did both Mirrodin and Fifth Dawn, Fifth Dawn was the third set. Fifth Dawn was interesting. I seeded Fifth Dawn 16^th in my—in the Rosewater Rumble, which meant that I thought it was one of the weakest sets I’d designed. I mean—that and Eventide are my two lowest, I think. I mean, Unhinged is in there too. But Unhinged did some things right that these two sets did not.

Fifth Dawn was in a weird place. What happened was, Mirrodin broke, and we hadn’t figured it out until the design of the third set was about to start, but we did by then, and so basically Development came and said, “Can’t do this, can’t do this, can’t do that,” and like “Okay…” and I think the lesson of Fifth Dawn was, by necessity—and also because it was the third set, and once upon a time before block planning we tended to do the following. This was the block plan back then because we didn’t really have one: “Do something, do more, crazy turn!”

And I tried to fix the problem with a crazy turn, and what I learned was, and like I said this is kind of what taught me the importance of block planning, I mean like I said, your greatest mistakes are your greatest teachers, is like I made this crazy change where I care about artifacts and all of a sudden care about colors. And there just wasn’t any support for it. I mean we, we were able to stick a few things, because we knew about it, into Darksteel, but nothing other than the Myr I guess, nothing was in the first set. And like it just became a lot harder to do that. To make the color matter when we didn’t set it up.

And the lesson of Fifth Dawn is, if you want to do something, look if you want to have a third act turn that’s okay, but you have to know in the first act. Like in writing, one of the things that I talk about is, that whatever your solution is in the third act, you have to introduce it in the first act.

There’s a famous thing in playwriting called Chekhov’s Gun, where—Chekhov was a playwright, and he has a famous quote I’m going to paraphrase, I don’t remember exactly, but basically it’s like, you know, “If you see a gun on the mantle in the first act, it will be fired in the third act.” And what he’s saying is, you know, you need to set up where you’re going because when the audience gets to the third act they want to feel like there’s some investment in it. And my example there is, like, sometimes as a writer you see things in film plays that give away things because you recognize the structure of what the writer does.

And so my famous example’s in Batman Begins, there’s a scene early in the film where young Bruce Wayne’s riding with his dad on the subway, and his dad has a line about how “Hey, Bruce, do you know the subway goes directly into City Hall?” And, as a writer I’m like “Okay, does that line have anything to do with the scene it’s in?” “No, it has nothing to do with it.” “Oh, obviously that’s going to be important for the third act, the writer needed to get it in.”

And so, while I’m a big fan of Batman Begins, it was a little clunky, it kind of gave away—it showed its Pavlov’s Gun a little too simply. Usually when you do it better, it’s like you introduce something that feels like it has a purpose, and then later it also has a purpose of setting up your third act, and that didn’t do a good job of it, it just sort of said, I mean I, a writer, was able to go “Oh, I guess the third act, it matters that the subway goes to the city hall.” Which it did.

And I think the same is true of block structure, which is understand where your third block is going to go, and make sure your first block sets up for it. Now, if you’re doing your job, the same rule applies. The way your first act sets it up is not necessarily obvious. Like, how you’re going to use it or what you do in the third act is hidden, but that it’s set up to support it. And Fifth Dawn really did a good job of trying to teach me that, of trying to hammer home the idea that you can’t just pull things out of nowhere.

In screenwriting and in playwriting, there’s something called (Deus Ex Machina), it’s Greek. And it means… I think it means “from the heavens” or “from the gods.” And the idea is, in a lot of Greek plays, you know, there would be a problem. Some mortal would have a problem. And things—just when things looked horrible, the gods would come down and solve the problem for them. And so what happened was, what it means in plays is, when you have an outside source come solve the problem. You know.

And that’s very unsatisfying for the person watching the story. That they want the character to solve the problem, not some outside—like, you know, it’s like, you know, you don’t want to watch the Die Hard movie and then at the end the police come in and stop Hans Gruber. Like that’s—no. You want Bruce Willis to stop Hans Gruber. Like, he’s the guy that’s invested in—you’re following. You know, he is supposed to be the one who solves the problem, not some outside person.

And the way that applies to Magic is, that you want to make sure that what the third act’s about, it feels like it comes out of the first act of the thing. And that, like I said, for example. Future Sight has all this wacky things going on, but it paid off because it came out of where the block was coming from. You know, the first block examined the past, and the second block looked at this alternate present, and like it sort of set you up for “Okay, now we’re going to look at the future.” You know, and each one of them had a future-shifted sheet to set up what you could do with that.

And that—like, Future Sight, it worked because a lot of things set it up to be there. And then of those things, it would—I mean, it works—I mean, for the people it needed to work for, it did. Of the people it really connected with. I mean obviously, I’ll talk about Future Sight soon, but like the structure was set up because it meant something. The future, you know, a set about the future was ground in the fact that the first set was about the past. And the second about the present.

But I mean, Fifth Dawn really hammered home that idea of “I needed to set up.” The other thing Fifth Dawn hammered home, the other lesson of Fifth Dawn, in fact one of the most important lessons of Fifth Dawn, is we—when we were putting the set together, we—Randy and I—came up with the idea of having Aaron Forsythe on the team, because at the time he was running the website. And we thought it might be really neat to have this complex series of articles about what it’s like to be on a design team.

And we knew Aaron was a very good writer, and we knew Aaron had some, you know, some good insights, he was a former pro player, and so we brought him on the team. And what happened was, he just shined. He was awesome. And what I learned there was, I kind of got out of his way. Like, he was doing awesome work and I just wanted him to do awesome work. And, you know, one of the big lessons that I learned, and Fifth Dawn was kind of where I learned it is, one of my roles as the lead designer is to make my team shine. And to give my team every possibility they have to meet their potential.

And so—and to this day it’s something I feel really—I feel strongly about, which is being the lead is not—you’re not supposed to draw focus, you’re supposed to make the whole team get invested, and have all of them do is want—to be part of what they’re doing. And I want everybody to leave the team feeling like they have maximized their capability of what they could do for the set. You know.

And that—I was really happy that I was able to let Aaron take the ball and run with it, because from that we discovered Aaron. You know, and Aaron would go on—from that very experience, we realized that we wanted him in R&D. And then from that he became Head Developer. And then he became Director of Magic, you know.

And another important lesson of Fifth Dawn was kind of like, the—one of the values of Design is the resource of designers. And that—hey, that’s why you want to try out new people. One of the things we constantly do is we call them the fifth slot. But the—usually we try to on a design team, we have five people on a design team traditionally, that I like to have a fifth person that’s someone who doesn’t normally do Magic design. You know, that’s not a normal designer/developer. Someone from elsewhere in the Pit or elsewhere in the building, and sort of A. it brings in a different sensibility, and B. sometimes you discover things and you see people’s potential that you would not know. And I think that’s very important.

Anyway, I am now sitting in the parking lot, so I managed to get through three more. I see where this is going. So here’s what I’m going to do. I will continue the series, I think the series—I’m very happy with how the series is going. But I am not going to do five parts back to back to back to back.

So, I’m going to do with this what I’m doing with my color series, and what I’m doing with my card type series, where I think I’m going to revisit it and keep doing it, but rather than make it back to back it’s something I’m going to spread out a little bit. I might not spread this one out quite as much as I’m spreading the other ones out, because these ones are a little more tied together, but next week will not be part three, I’m going to do something different.

In fact, I think next week, I’m going to do—we just had the Rosewater Rumble, winning was Innistrad, I’ve done an Innistrad podcast, #2 was Ravnica, I’ve already done a Ravnica podcast, tied for third was Zendikar and Future Sight, I’ve done a Zendikar podcast, I’ve not yet done a Future Sight podcast. And that is a very controversial set, I’ve already set up Future Sight by doing both the Time Spiral and the Planar Chaos, so next week a little tease for what I’m going to do next week is, next week will be Future Sight. And I think it will be some fun stuff to talk about.

But anyway, I’m happy you joined me today, (???) lessons learned is always interesting, and I hope you guys are enjoying it. I think it has a lot of wider applications beyond just Magic design. Anyway, that is all for today, so I got to go to work, and it is time to make the Magic.