6/23/17 Episode 446: Twenty Lessons, Part 14--Bluntness

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. So today is another in my series, Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts. Where I recap twenty important lessons that I’ve learned over the twenty years or more that I’ve been making Magic. This is based on a GDC speech I gave, so we’re up to lesson number 14. Don’t be afraid to be blunt.

Okay. So for each one of these, I always start with a story from Magic. So this one take us back to Rise of the Eldrazi. Okay, so the idea of this set was that we were on Zendikar, and we learn that these ancient creatures had been trapped inside the world. And in Rise of the Eldrazi¸ they get out, because they’re called the Eldrazi and this is the Rise of the Eldrazi.

So we had to figure out how to design the Eldrazi. So the Eldrazi were definitely challenging to design for. So basically the idea was, they were giant, voracious alien creatures. You know. They were these things that were ??? of like—one of the things about them was that one of the reasons they were so hard to fight story-wise is no one understood what they wanted. They were kind of a force of nature more than anything else. You couldn’t reason with them. They didn’t have any sort of normal sense of reason.

 

So—and, they were ancient, ancient, ancient beings, they were huge, there were three of them, the Titans we called them, so it was Ulamog, Kozilek, and Emrakul. Those were the three Eldrazi titans.

And so we were trying to figure out how to play them. You know, how do you make giant voracious ancient alien beings? That’s tricky. So one of the things we did was—and this was the first time we met them. Obviously they came back in Battle for Zendikar. 

But the first time, Brian Tinsman was the head designer. And so what he decided to do is just embrace the giant-ness. And he created something that we refer to as “[battlecruiser] Magic”, which is, what if Magic sort of just slowed down a little bit, and then allowed players to just get out huge giant creatures and then battle each other? And so the idea was, in order to get the hugeness of the Eldrazi—and note, the Eldrazi were not just the Eldrazi. They created spawns and things. And even their spawns were huge.

So we were trying to figure out how to—we were messing around with sort of how to make them flavorful. So to capture the voraciousness, we came up—oh, what was it called? We came up with a mechanic that was called annihilate. [NLH--Called"annihilator" in the final version.] And what annihilate did is it had a number. Annihilate 4. Annihilate 2. When you attacked with a creature with annihilate, your opponent had to sacrifice that many permanents. Now, that could be lands, it could be any permanent. But let’s say I had annihilate 2. So if I had annihilate 2, you would sacrifice two permanents every time I attacked.

So we tested annihilate, and it proved to be really strong. It was, like—when you had annihilate, you wanted to attack. It was a very powerful ability. And what tended to happen was, it just took a couple attacks before your opponent was in such a—you know, such a negative for having to deal with that, that often it would win you the game.

That—I mean, we didn’t bring annihilate back in Battle for Zendikar because it proved to be so what we call snowball-y. Like, once you started attacking with the Eldrazi, they’re just so hard to come back from. That losing, you know, multiple permanents per turn is something that you just don’t rebound from. That it really tends to, you know—that it really sort of started winning and just kept winning more and more.

But anyway. But our problem was, we were doing playtesting, we had a common creature that had, you know, I think it was a 7/7 or an 8/8, it had annihilate on it. I don’t remember. Annihilate 1, annihilate 2. But the point was, we had this giant common creature that we wanted you to attack with. Because the Eldrazi—like, you were supposed to attack with the Eldrazi.

But what we found in playtesting is, when we playtested with less experienced players, they just got scared. You know, it took them a while to get out this giant Eldrazi, they finally got it out, and the last thing they wanted is anything to happen to it. So they weren’t attacking with it.

And the problem we had is, like we knew the ability was powerful, we knew that once you sort of attacked with it and saw how awesome it was, you would attack. But how do we get by that first barrier? How do we get people to attack with it when their gut instinct is, “Ooh, I don’t want to put my creature at risk?”

And so we had a lot of, you know, trying to figure out how exactly to do that. How do we get somebody to attack with the creature? And finally the solution that I came up with was, what if we just write, “Must attack? This creature must attack if able…” or, “attacks if able” I think is the template. “This creature attacks if able. Attacks every turn if able.”

And what we did is, if we gave you an Eldrazi and just forced your had, you had to attack with it, well then the player, like, okay, there’s no pressure on them. There’s no tension. Like, that’s just what the creature did. I have no choice. If I play the creature, it’s got to attack.

And then once they attacked with that creature, they started to see the value of attacking with Eldrazi. And so by making one common creature just mandatory, that like, how do we make sure you attack with it? We just force your hand. We force you to attack with it. Was enough to sort of tip the scales and start teaching people about the Eldrazi.

And the funny thing is, we went through all sort of subtle things. And in the end… so, there’s a story… what’s the name of the story? It’s a famous Greek story I think. Where… I’m blanking on the name of it. But there is a wise soldier or something. And he—who was it? Was it like—was it David? King David? King Solomon?

One of the wise kings of age-old… they come and there’s this knot. There’s this super—like, I don't know, very intricate knot. [NLH--The Gordian Knot] Made out of giant string. And this knot is, you know, the whole thing is like, feet in diameter. You know, five, six feet in diameter. Because of all the, you know, all the interweaving. And it’s just this really complex knot. Oh, maybe it was Alexander. I  think it was Alexander is the story. [NLH--Yes.]

But anyway, there was some omen or something that says, you know, in order to take the village you have to untie this knot. And so what he does is, the solution is, he just takes his sword and he chops it in half.

 

And this was kind of the solution here, is like sometimes you just need a straight blunt answer. You know, there’s another classic—I used to make Magic puzzles. And I made a Magic puzzle once where  I made this very elaborate setup. And then I gave you a Lightning Bolt.  And you know, there’s all these different things and different creatures you can kill and different triggers on the creatures, and like all the stuff. But your opponent was at three life and you had a Lightning Bolt, which does three damage.

So the idea was, it was just this idea that, yeah, you can look and maybe there’s an elaborate, complicated answer. But you know what? There was a simple answer. Just Bolt your opponent. The board didn’t matter.

And that was me playing with expectations of puzzles, where like you have this expectation that there is this really ornate answer, which normally there was. I just wanted to make a point sometimes that hey, sometimes the answer is direct and simple.

So we get to today’s lesson! Don’t be afraid to be blunt. And I think part of this is, when you are an artist, when you are a creator, you are taught that subtlety is important. You are taught to show, don’t tell. You know. That you’re supposed to, you know, don’t be so obvious about what you’re doing. That you want some subtlety built into it. You know.

And a lot of times, that’s good. You know. A lot of times you want to be subtle. I think stories are better when you sort of have to piece some things out, that everything isn’t spoon fed to you. But, the point of today is that I think sometimes in all the lessons of subtlety, in all the lessons of sort of not hitting somebody over the head, that you miss that that’s a tool.

And that’s kind of the theme of today’s podcast is, not that you should always be blunt, not that bluntness is something that’s supposed to be used even the majority of the time. But that it’s a tool. It is something that you can use, and that too often, I think, people are worried that if they’re blunt, that somehow they’re not doing their job or they’re not being as artistic as they could be.

There’s a concern—like, I don’t think that—I think a lot of today’s lesson—I mean, different lessons come from different places. I think, you know—so one of my favorite books, if you guys don’t know this already, is a book on creative thinking called A Whack on the Side of the Head. By Roger Von Oech. By Dr. Roger Von Oech, I believe. He has a PhD. [NLH—Yes.]

And one of the things he points out all the time is that one of the things—the book’s about creativity. And about—the premise of the book is, anybody can be creative. The reason you’re not creative is not a lack of the ability to be creative, but the fact that you sort of censor yourself. That you create rules that you then won’t break.

And that a lot of creativity is recognizing your own rules, and figuring out when it’s okay to break them. And I think the subtlety rule is another one of these rules that you’re sort of taught, of “Oh, oh, don’t be blunt, don’t be blunt, don’t be blunt,” and what you sort of gets lost over is, no no no no. Don’t always be blunt. You know. It’s very easy when you’re starting out to just want to be blunt.

And you know, I know for example, I had a class in dialogue. I love dialogue, and I took a class all about dialogue. And what the teacher said was, you know, part of what you’re doing in dialogue, when you’re writing dialogue is, you are trying A. to capture how people speak, so it sounds like natural speech. And B. people convey information differently, you know, there’s a way by which people convey information and you should understand it.

And what he was saying is, that often people don’t come out and say what they think. You know. And a lot of dialogue writing is figuring out how to say something without always just saying it. And so—and I think the same thing is true for any art form.

I mean, even in game design, you know, that part of, you know, I talk a lot about what games are, are sort of, you’re mentally challenging the game player. That you’re trying to, you know—things aren’t always what they seem, and you have to figure out interesting ways to interact and can you figure out, you know—can you get to the goal within the rules system in a way that might not be the normal way to do it? So in games there’s a lot of pushing people to want to be unorthodox in how they function. And so, from that is this loud messaging of, you don’t want to be too obvious.

So let me talk, give some examples where we try to be a little less obvious in Magic, and some problems that we got into. So for example, Mercadian Masques was a set we made many years ago. So Mike Elliott was the lead designer of that. And Mike came up with a couple mechanics.

So the two main mechanics of the set, one was called “spellshapers.” And spellshapers were creatures that you could essentially—the flavor was, you could turn cards in your hand into a particular spell. So for example, let’s—Waterfront Bouncer, for example, could turn any spell in your hand into an Unsummon. So basically you spent, you know, you spent blue, tap, and discard a card, and now you can Unsummon a creature.

And so the idea essentially is the card said, “Oh. Well, I can turn any card in your hand into this card.” That’s the sort of flavor. But we ended up using a creature type for them, they were all spellshapers, but that was the way we signified them. We didn’t mark it in any way. We didn’t say, you know, we didn’t give it an ability word or anything, we just—they could do that. And they all did a similar thing, they all were spellshapers.

 

Then, he also had a mechanic—recruiting? I’m not sure what it got called. It didn’t have an official name, part of the problem. And there were rebels and there were mercenaries. Rebels were white, mercenaries were black.

What rebels did was the one-drop rebel got you the two-drop rebel got you the three-drop rebel. And in mercenaries, the three-drop mercenary got you the two-drop mercenary got you the one-drop mercenary. So white went up, black went down, for those that aren’t familiar with Mercadian Masques, up is better than down. The rebels ended up being very, very strong. Mercenaries not so much.

So we had two mechanics. We had, you know—these were legit mechanics, they were on a whole bunch of cards, they did something new, but for the spellshapers, we just connected them through a creature type, and through the rebels and the mercenaries we connected them through a creature type. So the set had spellshapers, the set had rebels and mercenaries, but there was nothing to sort of call out the mechanics.

But, I mean, they were there. And they were loudly there. It wasn’t like they were quiet. There were a lot of spellshapers. There were a decent amount of rebels and mercenaries. It was definitely something significant in the deck.

And the rebels and mercenaries, even, they were linear. They called out, you know, you don’t want to play one rebel or mercenary, you want to play a whole bunch of rebels and mercenaries. So seeing one made you go look for others. Yet, when the set came out, the number one complaint I got was, “Why didn’t you guys make any new mechanics?”

And at first I was like, “Okay, guys. There’s new mechanics.” And at first, you know, like—I have, boy/girl twins. And so when they were born, you know, we’d have a stroller, and we’d be wheeling them around. And you know, so people would come up to us, and they’d go, “Oh, are those twins?” And we’d go, “Yes, this is Adam, our son Adam, and this is our daughter Sarah.” And then they’d go, “Are they identical?”

Now, I was taken aback at the time, because I’m like, well, one’s a boy and one’s a girl. They can’t be identical. You know. Identical means you have the same genes, it’s split, so, you know, you have the same genetic makeup so you have to be the same sex to be an identical twin.

So the first time I heard it, I just, my thought process was, “Oh, okay, that person, you know, oh, was a little ignorant of what identical twins is. But okay.” And then I kept getting asked. And then finally, when someone sort of—like, it just takes some amount of time before you realize that, oh. I don’t think that the average person knows what an identical twin is.

Or not—like, you know, that the difference between an identical twin and fraternal twin, for those that don’t know, or [dizygotic], if you don’t want to say fraternal, it has to do with whether there’s one egg or two eggs. Did the egg—did two eggs get fertilized, or did one egg get fertilized and split in two? And if you split in two, they’re identical. The genetics are identical so they’re identical twins. But if there’s two different eggs, there are two different eggs. I mean, they have the same parents, but they’re two different eggs. So, you know, the siblings who look alike are siblings who look alike, but they can look radically different. And in the case of my children, they’re different sexes.

So there’s a dynamic that happened with Mercadian Masques that also happened with my twins, which is, I finally came to the realization with my twins that like, oh my goodness, a lot less people understand what identical twins means than I thought. I understood it. I assumed everybody understood it.

And I think Mercadian Masques was a similar quality, that I always assumed that, hey. I’m a game design. I really—I can identify game mechanics really easily. But you know what? That’s not something most people are necessarily good at. And when you don’t label something, that people can miss it.

And that when we didn’t label—“Oh, spellshaping!” or whatever we wanted to call it, you know, or just give it a name, actually. Spellshaper didn’t even do a great job of communicating. The idea that these peddlers, I guess, they were all sort of street peddlers, were selling you magic. And that you could sort of use that magic to turn your cards into whatever that was. It wasn’t particularly well-conveyed. And like with the rebels and the mercenaries, if we had just given it “recruiting” or something. But the lack of a keyword or ability word made people not see the connection.

Okay. So likewise, here’s another example. Is that in Urza’s Destiny, so Urza’s Saga had cycling. That was one of the mechanics. And so I was trying to do a tweak on cycling. So cycling is, if the card is in your hand, you can discard the card. Pay two, discard the card and draw a card.

So I made these creatures that, while on the battlefield, you could pay two, sacrifice the creature, and draw a card. So the idea is, oh, it’s cycling from play. Normally, you get rid of the card in your hand, you pay two mana and get rid of the card in your hand, and you get a new card. Here you pay two mana, you get rid of the creature in play.

And the idea there was, oh, you know, you could block with it and then sacrifice it so the creature remains blocked. Damage was on the stack at this point, so you could do damage on the stack tricks.  But anyway, there was a bunch of different reasons why I might want to trade the permanent I have in play for another card.

And so anyway, I was really excited because I felt like, oh, this is a neat take on cycling. But, I didn’t label it. I didn’t say that, you know, “Get it? It’s cycling?” I didn’t say, “Cycling from play,” I didn’t do anything. I just did it. And my assumption was, oh, well, you know. Clearly, you’re spending two. And cycling in Urza’s Saga all cost two. You’re spending two generic mana and you’re getting rid of something, a card, and you’re getting a replacement card. You know. It seemed really clear to me.

And as I started explaining that, every time I would explain it, mostly, I mean a few people got it, but most people were like, “Oh yeah, I didn’t get that.” And it happened again and again, and finally you’re like, oh. Okay. People just—people don’t see—you, the game designer, have a critical eye.

Like, one of the things that happens all the time in game design is, we make a mechanic that structurally is similar to another mechanic. But flavorfully and gameplay-wise is very different. But what happens is, because we tend to look at things through the lens of the mechanics, things will seem really similar to us, because we’re like, “Well, that’s just this without the trapping.”

And what we’ve learned is that the public sees it in its final form. They see with all its flavor. They see it in its synergy with things around it. And that you can have two mechanics that kind of in a vacuum play in similar space. But you dress them up a little differently, have different flavor, put them in different environments, and have different synergies, and the audience doesn’t see them as remotely similar. That that’s something that we tend to do.

Likewise, for example, this example doesn’t just go to mechanics, but those (???). So let’s talk about stories for a second. So for a while, we were trying to sort of, not, sort of spoil the story on the cards. So we sort of would like, subtly hint at things. You know.

So for example, in Theros, at the end of the story, Elspeth—spoilers here, if you haven’t read the Theros story, but it’s been a while. Elspeth dies. Dies at the hand of Heliod.

But we didn’t want to spoil the book, so like we—the set was sort of, like, very vague on it. We weren’t obvious about it. You know. And so what happened was, you know, I mean now we have a novel, so if you read the novel, the novel told you what happened. Or novella I think, for Theros. But what happened was, we were subtle about it. We weren’t very blatant, especially in the card set, that Elspeth died.

And then what we learned was, people just didn’t understand that Elspeth died. That we were just, like, you know, that what we learned is, when we sort of hold back on the story and we’re not blunt on the story, that people, like—that’s a pretty major thing that happened. The main character ended the story by dying. And the majority of people didn’t know it. You know. The majority of people, like, when I would bring it up, people were like, “Well, what did you mean?” “Well, yeah, she got killed by Heliod.” “What are you talking about?” You know.

And that really made us sort of rethink. I mean, a lot of the modern storytelling—and I mean, obviously there’s amounts of how blunt you want to be. But a lot of things we try to do with storytelling now is be a little more up front and make sure that people get at least the general—the idea is, let’s not be subtle in you getting the general gist of the story.

Let’s be subtle on some of the details. You know. It’s not that—like, I want you to know that Chandra reunites with her mother. Hey, the subtle—what are the emotions she’s feeling? Hey, go read the stories. But I want you to know that Chandra and her mother, you know, got reunited. You know, we put it on a card, and like, look, they got reunited! You know. It’s a cathartic moment. They got reunited. You know, that we want to make sure that big moments and things that happen, that you’re aware of it.

So the—a different way to think of this, as we talk about today, is that—I’ll bring back the metaphor I had before. So you have a toolbox. Your—you know, one of the things I like to say is you as an inventor, as a game designer, as a craftsman of whatever, you have a bunch of tools available to you. And one of the things I’ve learned over time is that what separates a good artist, game designer, whatever, from a great one often has to do with their tools.

That what happens with somebody who’s really good is—you know, and for example. One of the things they say is, if you want to be a writer, read. If you want to be a director, go see movies. You know. If you want to be a game designer, play games. And why is that so important?

Because the more games you play, the more things you experience, the more tools that you learn, the more apt you are. That—I mean, I think there are a bunch of things that define how good you get to become. One of those things is experience. You’ve tried things. You know what I’m saying? Like, essentially, there’s three things I think that bring wisdom if you will.

One is experience. Have you done it? You know, like one of the reasons I think I’m a pretty good Magic designer is I’ve done twenty-one, you know, almost twenty-two years of Magic design. I’ve been designing Magic cards continually for that long. That means I’ve made a lot of Magic cards. I’ve made thousands and thousands and thousands of Magic cards.

In fact I’ve made thousands of Magic cards that see print. And like I said, one in a hundred cards sees print. So, you know, if I have thousands of cards that saw print, that means I’ve designed hundreds of thousands if not millions of cards. I’ve designed a lot of Magic cards. I’ve made a lot, a lot of Magic cards. Some of which were really bad. But the experience of making them taught me a lot. There was a lot that came from the know-how of doing it.

Number two, there is knowledge. That part of what makes you better is you learn things. Part of the things, for example, when I’m teaching other people is, I have a great repository o knowledge in my head. That comes from just doing this job for a long time. You know, when someone says, “Let’s try Thing X,” I go, “Oh, yeah, I’ve tried Thing X. Here’s what we learned.” You know. That I have a lot of lessons in my head, I mean, part of that is experience, and part of that is just, I’ve learned things

Now, they go hand in hand, experience brings you knowledge, you know another thing also is, part of knowledge is just you’ve thought about things. I’ve made a lot of different sets that did a lot of different things, that have made me think about Magic in a lot of different ways. So I’ve learned a lot about Magic. There’s a lot of knowledge gained there. So number two is knowledge.

Number three, and this is what I’m talking about today, is tools. That one of the things that really makes you valuable is learning, you know, whether it be little tricks, it be little means by which you can do things, like one of the things for example I find when I’m teaching young designers, or newer designers, is there’s a lot of stuff I’ve tried that has worked and I can share that. You know. I can share, sort of, “Hey, here’s a thing that you can do. Here’s something that’s available to you.”

And so if you want to get better, if you want to become a better game designer, those are the three things that you need to think about. You know. You need to—so when I say experience, experience is, make games. Design games. The more games you’ve designed, the better you’ll get at making games. You want to be a writer? Write. You want to be an artist? Draw. That there’s nothing going—nothing is going to replace the act of doing it and iterating and learning from it.

Number two, like I’ve said. You want to be a game designer, play games. Read about games. Study games. I know Richard Garfield, for example, not only does he play every game he can get his hands on, he has studied the history of games. In fact, he’s taught a class on the history of games.

Like, how exactly did chess come about? How did backgammon come about? How did checkers come about? You know. What are games that—you know, or mancala. There are games that have lasted thousands of years.

And the interesting thing is, chess as you know it was not always chess. There are things that are in chess now that weren’t always agiven. And, there are precursors to chess. Chinese chess and a lot of other chess variants that are similar but different. And when you sort of study and look and say, hey, how did this game evolve, you the game designer start to, (???), “Oh. That is interesting. That’s interesting they did this.” You know.

And so something that Richard has done, you know, and that I say to anybody is, hey. You want to be good at the thing you’re good at. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s games or whatever. But study that thing. You know.

I, for example, wanted to do great TV shows. I watched a lot of TV. I really wanted to understand how things clicked and how they worked. And, you know, I was fascinated—I really, really liked pilots. A pilot is the first show of the series that introduces the characters and the premise of the series.

And pilots are really hard to do, because you have to both introduce everything, while showing an example of what a sample episode would be like. And I really, really—before I got this job, the thing I thought I wanted to do with my life was make TV pilots. I really loved the idea of crafting a world and making a world, and then finding sort of how you introduce that world. And there was a period of time where I would watch every pilot I could get my hands onto.

I, in fact, there’s a—at the Writer’s Guild of America, which is a guild I’d later join when I became a professional writer, they have a library that anybody could use, not just guild members. And you can watch videos. And I went in and I watched every pilot I can get my hand onto.

And it didn’t matter whether I was interested in the show or not. What I wanted to see—I was particularly interested in—I mean, I watched both hourlong and sitcom. I was very interested in sitcom. But anyway, I watched both. And like—how do you introduce stuff? How do you learn stuff? What are the tricks?

And so I educated myself. I got a lot of knowledge. I also did a lot of writing. And same with game design. Before I worked for Wizards, I made a lot of games, I read about games. Now, there weren’t a lot of books about game design at the time. But I found the stuff I could, I read the stuff I could. I went to—GAMA is a convention, a game manufacturer’s association. And there were seminars in game design, and I went and I took seminars in game design. I talked to professional people. You know. I acquired all the knowledge I could.

Third thing was tools. And what that is, is, A. In gathering the knowledge and playing other games and stuff, you know—like, one of the most valuable things about playing other games is seeing how they do things. How they solve problems. And what I say is not just play the game, but think about how the game ticks. Think about what makes it work. What is the engine that drives the game? What is the fun of the game? How does the game make you—you know, like, all the lessons, all the other lessons I’m giving you through this series, like, look at existing games and see how they do it. You know.

And, you know, usually games, you can tell if they’ve lasted the test of time, you know, and play some of the classics. And try to understand, okay, why’d they do what they do? Why they do this, why they do that.

And, it’s also fine, something I like to do, is say, hey. Is there some place I—you know, some way—I mean, always play the original and understand the original. And then go, hey, is there some way I can adapt it? Could I take this game and add a few rules and maybe, you know, do something to the game that might make the game more fun for me? You know, experiment with it.

And so the reason that I, when I talk about bluntness is, I believe bluntness is a very important tool that people are kind of trained not to use. And the funny thing is, when you start out, it’s one of the most popular tools you use. Beginners are incredibly blunt.

And what happens is, this is gonna sound a little weird, but you want to be not too blunt with your blunt brush. You want to figure out where you need to be blunt. So when I say, “Don’t be afraid to be blunt,” I’m not saying that bluntness is the answer. I am not saying that every problem is a nail. But I am saying that it’s a hammer, and that at times you’ll have nails, and when you need to pound nails in, you know, a hammer is a good thing to have.

And it is really easy. So I did a podcast talking about, don’t do things to prove you can. A very common thing I see people doing is they somehow pooh-pooh the tools. And go, “Oh, that’s not the tool of a real artist.” You know. “A real artist is not blunt, so I will never use the blunt hammer.”

And what I find is, when you get experience and you get knowledge, you start to realize that there are tools that you often write off early on. That there are tools that you’re like, it’s not—when and how you are blunt is not something that should be done lightly. You know. Interestingly, that I’m not saying to be blunt I how you use your bluntness. I’m saying use it carefully. That it is surgeon’s tool, and you want to figure out the place to do it. So let me talk through the most common reasons why you might want to use the blunt hammer.

Number one is, and this a good example from my Rise of the Eldrazi story, when you try things and your audience just isn’t getting it. When you try stuff—and what I say is, it’s fine to start from a subtle place, I have no problem saying, okay, let’s not hit them over the head, let’s try be a little subtler about it, but do playtests. Watch.

And this is why it’s so important to playtest with people that aren’t you and your team. You need to playtest with people that don’t know your game. And ideally aren’t emotionally invested in you. Because there are things that are obvious for you because you’ve been playing around with it, that there’s no way for you to see whether it’s something that people will understand or not.

And so the reason that playtests are so important is that you need to constantly be testing. Do people get this? Does it make sense to them? Do they understand it? And so a common theme you will find in these kinds of playtests is, players just miss something.

And like my example with Mercadian Masques or Urza’s Destiny or even my twins, it is so easy when somebody makes a mistake to just gloss—like, “Wow, that was a weird mistake. I wonder why they made that mistake.” And then what you have to say is, whenever anybody makes a mistake, you have to say, “Oh, could this be a mistake a lot of people would make?”

And you can’t use your value judgment. You know too much. Yes, I get that spellshaping is a mechanic. And yes, I understand how a mechanic works. And yes, I understand the mechanics of what—how you define a mechanic. And under any definition, yeah, this is a mechanic. But, people didn’t see it. You know.

Urza’s Destiny. Cycling from play. Look, there’s so many reasons, there’s so many parallels why it is exactly cycling from play. And if I said to somebody, “Hey, why don’t you design a card that cycles from play?” they would make the exact same card. But the point is, that doesn’t mean they see it. You know. Being obvious, or being sort of direct in how you do something doesn’t mean people see it.

So, number one tool for bluntness is, when people aren’t seeing something, sometimes what that means is, you’ve got to put it in their face. That you don’t want your audience just missing things. So it’s okay when you test and iterate and they’re not seeing things, it’s okay to use it.

The other reason you might want to use the blunt hammer is sometimes misdirection. That sometimes what you want is—like, I used to do magic as a kid, like actual, you know, predistita—uh—magic tricks. I’m missing my word I want. [NLH—Prestidigitation.] You know, making, pull a rabbit out of a hat and stuff.

And one of the things that I learned in that is, a lot of the tricks of magic is sort of pulling focus. Is making people pay attention to your left hand when your right hand’s doing something. And a lot of the tricks I learned there was that you want to make sure people are looking in the wrong place. So bluntness sometimes is a great way to make people look in the wrong place. So sometimes, when you want to mislead, bluntness can be a tool to help people mislead.

Another thing is, when you have a sequential issue, when you need to build on something, sometimes you need to be blunt, not because people won’t eventually figure it out, but they need to figure it out really fast, because there’s things that build up on it, that if they don’t understand that fast, they won’t build upon it.

So sometimes bluntness is just for ordering. To make people do things in a certain order. That the things you need to find the earliest, you’re the bluntest with. And so, you know, that is the—you know, like I said. There’s a lot of ways to use the bluntness hammer. There’s a lot of different tools you can use it with.

And like I said. It runs the spectrum from, “Your audience isn’t getting something,” to “You’re using it as a means to make people focus (???) for some reason of how you’re doing your design. And you know, the walkaway—I’m almost to school today. The walkaway today is that you need to makes ure that you have every tool available to you. You want a full toolbox.

And the reason this one got called out for a specific lesson, there’s lots of tools, and (???) for example, I write a bunch of Nuts and Bolts articles  where I talk about how to make Magic sets, and in there I talk about all sorts of tools. Like, the design skeleton for example is a tool that we use in Magic design to sort of plot out what we’re going to do. And a lot of what I teach people, I like to teach people the tools.

The reason I bring this one out, and the reason this had a whole lesson to it is, I am fighting something—there are lessons you learn early on in any sort of creative endeavor that you later must unlearn. Like, one of the things for example when I was a writer is, in school, they really pull a lot of common speech out of you. That you’re taught to write really formally when you’re taught writing.

And then one of the things as you start to study communications, is going, oh oh oh, these things you learn early on actually aren’t 100% true. That a lot of good communication is being more casual in how you present things.

Same with math. There are certain math concepts that they just teach you, like, “This is just true.” And then you get to higher math and they go, “Well, it’s not completely true.” And the reason is, early on, sometimes you need to learn things, and then unlearn them later on. And I think the bluntness rule is one of those things that when you’re first starting out, because beginners are so blunt, that you are taught to sort of not be so blunt.

And so this is an advanced lesson that says, okay, one of the first things you learn is don’t be so blunt. And now what I’m saying is, well, wait a minute. Bluntness is a tool. You can use that tool. Figure out where and when and how to use it, use it effectively, use it to—use it on purpose. But, you know, be very careful with when and how you use it.

But don’t throw it away. Don’t abandon the tool. It’s an important and valuable tool. And there are just times when you need to convey the things you need to convey, or your players just aren’t getting it, or whatever. You know, you have some reason that you need eyeballs on something. And it’s a great tool to get the eyeballs there. You know, that it is okay, in the right place at the right time, to force your players’ hand. And that, my friends, is lesson number fourteen. Don’t be afraid to be blunt.

But anyway, I’m here at Rachel’s school. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. I’ll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.