Putting the “Advent” in Adventure Game Design

My wife likes advent calendars. Sorry, Advent calendars. I had to have Evon, raised Catholic as she was, explain to me today that Advent is a period that includes the four Sundays before Christmas, starting on Advent Sunday. It might be in November. There’s a wreath. It has a pink candle and three purple candles. You’d think you light the pink one first or last. Nope! It’s the Gaudete Sunday candle, lit third. Sometimes there’s a white candle lit on Christmas Day. I knew none of this. What do you want, I’m Jewish.

What I did know is that Advent calendars have 24 hidden presents. You used to get only little paper things, but then, sometime in Evon’s youth, the major technological innovation of chocolate gifts was advanced. That changed everything. Now you can get just about anything tiny that comes in varietals of two dozen. Heck of a world we live in.

This year, Evon got us two Advent calendars. One was the Whittard Tea Advent Calendar, which serves us two matching tea bags a day from December 1 to December 24. The other was the Bonne Maman Fruit Spreads and Honey Calendar, each day offering a tiny jar of jam or jelly. (Or honey, I guess. Or spread or preserve or conserve—this is another thing I needed to be educated about, and I can’t blame being Jewish for this one.)

Tea and toast, everyday. Couldn’t be more delightful.

But these two calendars could not be more different, and exactly how gives me an opportunity to discuss one of the most pressing problems in adventure game design: the way in.

An adventure game is a game which relies on sequential play of various scenarios. They come in both electronic and tabletop forms. Dungeons & Dragons, Diablo, and Call of Duty are all adventure games. In the board game world, our team has worked on quite a few of these, among them Betrayal at House on the Hill, Apocrypha, Thornwatch, and the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game.

The scenario is the main currency of these games. Each is a surprise: You don’t know what is going to happen in the next one. Something is going to be different. You have to adapt. Maybe you gain a level. Your deck gets new cards. You put some new items in your inventory slots. The game changes and you change with it.

As a game designer, your goal is simply defined: get people to play as many scenarios of your game as you can. You want to make sure they get maximum value out of what they bought. Pathfinder has about 30 scenarios per campaign path. Betrayal has 50. Apocrypha has 99 over its three boxes. We put a lot into making those, so we want people to play them. So, the question is, how do we get them to?

There are at least two contradictory approaches, and they are perfectly encapsulated in the Advent calendars Evon bought.

The tea calendar takes the approach we often call “onboarding.” Day 1 was a Christmas black tea, while Day 2 was an English breakfast. I know what these two types of tea taste like. I like them. The calendar has made me smile right away. I trust them. Later, they’ll probably introduce some wild options like caramel apple and coconut chai. Something called an “infusion.” But not on Day 1 or 2. That’s for the familiar.

Our lead developer, Chad Brown, talks about the power ramp a lot. He asks the team, “How often do you want to lose the game?” Typically the production company will answer something like 40 to 50 percent of the time. That’s a lot! Think about how often you lose an RPG scenario. You don’t, right? You wouldn’t come back after a string of brutal losses. So, the game is tuned to make sure you don’t lose much. And especially, it’s tuned to make sure you don’t lose much early. If you get those brutal losses right out of the gate, you might not come back ever.

The tea company is playing these odds. You can’t get to Day 3 if you don’t like Day 1 and Day 2, it thinks. It’s onboarding us. It’s probably right to do so. Right?

The jam company says, “Screw that, let’s party.” Day 1 was a quince jelly. Day 2 was a guava spread. To hell with your strawberry expectations, we’re going pedal to the metal off the starting block. And holy cow, was that quince jelly fantastic. Evon’s made jelly out of quinces once. I couldn’t tell you what one looks like. But now I know it tastes like a sour citrusy pear, which I like a whole lot. Evon was right there with me on it.

But then we hit the guava. She took one bite of the guava toast and was like, “That’s all you.” We have now negotiated the terms of the calendar: If one of us doesn’t like a particular day’s offering, they get most of the next day’s product. Just to repeat: We negotiated. A calendar. On Day 2!

The jam calendar is using a process we call “powerloading.” We hit you with something brilliant and risky right as you open the box. If we have a good idea, you see it very early. This builds a different kind of trust: You trust us to try to amaze you with everything. We won’t always succeed, but we’ll take a shot at it every time you let us. Sometimes we will give you a strawberry jam scenario because you will be sad if you don’t get one. But it’ll be between a dragonfruit scenario and a mangosteen scenario. Because we’ve trained you to expect that from us.

These decisions lay the foundation for how the journey will end. An onboarding approach will give your players an expectation of gradual ramping up of the complex and crazy, till you end in a powerful conclusion. A powerloading approach will give your players an expectation of swinging from tree to tree, till you end in the craziest spot of all. If I’m expecting a rich flavorful tea in the 24th slot, I want an onboarding path. If I’m expecting durian jelly in the 24th slot, you’d probably better exhaust me with chaos before you drop that on me.

So, where does your best idea go? At the front, where everyone will see it? In the middle, where everyone still playing will have the knowledge to appreciate it? Or at the end, where your diehards will feel a tremendous sense of payoff?

All of those answers could be right, obviously. There’s no right or wrong in general, but might be for a specific game. Pathfinder is way more onboardy than powerloady. Apocrypha is the opposite. Unsurprisingly, Apocrypha is the one of those that lets you pick the order of your scenarios. Since you could go anywhere, we gotta make sure you’re surprised wherever you end up. In Pathfinder, we dictate the path—that’s why it’s called a path—so we can ease you in and blow your mind later. When you’ve centered yourself. When you’re confident you’re in control. That’s when we take your control away. Just like you want us to.

The tea company’s path only works if I trust them to blow my mind later. And they will. The jam company’s path only works if I trust them to deliver something satisfying most of the time. And they will. That’s about who they are, not what they’re doing. But what they’re doing matters. They can onboard or powerload, but not both. They have to guess what we would prefer. For thousands of us all at once. That’s what it’s like to be an adventure game designer.

This is what I think about over tea and toast. With 22 days to go. Can’t wait!