We sit down with the passionate RPG legend Ken Rolston and talk around all things Reckoning... part one of two.
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Ken Rolston, lead game designer, in the past, and eagerly anticipated the opportunity to have a second round with the talkative man. Y’see, interviews can, unfortunately, take many forms: marketing rhetoric, closed answers, boring responses, etc. But when you interview Ken, you know that you’re going to get something unique and, more importantly, passionate. In this first half of our interview, we talk about RPG standards, the importance of narrative, morality in Fable and some more juicy tidbits on the game design process.
Check it out below.
Ken: I’m going to sit right next to you so we can be intimate in ways that men are uncomfortable with.
Atomic: Absolutely. Let’s bring back Ancient Greek rules, right?
Ken: Yes! That sounds delightful.
Atomic: I was considering writing no questions and saying, ‘Just talk to me.’
Ken: Yeah, that’s an ugly thing. Ask any of the handlers.
Atomic: I’m okay with that.
Ken: Then do your thing. Whatever you think is fun. You should give me some structure or you’ll be sad.
Atomic: I’ll give you a little bit of something. Right, actually derived from the chat that you guys had this morning [at the RPG influencers roundtable], one of the questions towards the end was about this ultimate payoff at the end of an RPG: killing or becoming the villain. What are the RPG standards? It seems to be, you’re either good or your bad but there’s also this really fertile grey area. Is that something you’re exploring in Reckoning?
Ken: Well, I would say that I always explore the grey area because I don’t systemise it. And I would say that, on the other hand, that’s a cheap copout because as long as you’re not telling the player that he’s in a rich moral environment, maybe he’s gonna miss that message. But I actually think being heavy-handed is worse for the experience of the person. Let me try another approach. Live-action roleplaying. I love to live-action roleplay. There’s nothing I like better than being totally screwed. I love that disaster because it’s a special kind of experience. Now, if I’m told by the system that that’s what happens, then it feels mechanical, it doesn’t feel like it’s my real choice. Also, if I think I can tell clearly what’s good and bad, that’s not a real dilemma. So in a game, my ideal situation is you come to a branch in a quest and you can do the thing that looks to you like it looks bad and looks to you like it looks good, and the game rewards for both are identical or perfectly balanced, so that you never feel like you have to do anything to improve your gameplay. So you just say, ‘This is who I am.’ And that’s the best moment in any game, when I say... my favourite moment is any game when you see something on the table, and in a role-playing game you know you’re supposed to steal stuff, but the new game, you’re not quite sure what’s right. And then at that point, partly, you’re testing the interface, but what I want you really to do as a player is say, ‘Do I want to be a guy who steals stuff?’ A guy who steals cups? That’s not very fucking cool, y’know. So that’s the experience I want. And it turns out to me that games like Fable, though they’re fun in a kind of a playful way, they’re not about morality or anything like that. It’s about fun, and I don’t mind fun. That’s just not a fun I want to do narratively.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012