There is no Quicksave for D&D next.

I had the recent great and unexpected fortune of having a friend ask me to run a game for him and his housemate. He had never roleplayed and the housemate had a long time ago. He wanted D&D so I grabbed the D&D NEXT playtest packet. I followed my own advice (or Bungie's to be more accurate) and worked up a quick setting with some interesting options. 
Come game day I had everything ready to go.
Then we sat down and it took over 2 hours to make characters. This was a really interesting experience because despite playing lots of MMORPGS and video games, neither of them had played D&D. I felt the horror mounting as we followed the printed instructions and trudged through the leviathan task of choosing and then creating a character for both of them. A process that might take 5 to 10 minutes with kewl music and graphics in a video game. Hours of page turning, chart referencing, figuring out the compromises resulting from earlier decisions and contextualizing all of this in terms of the game world I had created for them.
This was no fault of theirs, they are smart guys who happen to not know the rules for Dungeons and Dragons. I don't take any responsibility either, I read through the play package several times and made notes about the stuff that I expected to get caught up on. The real challenge is that there is a whole language of jargon associated with D&D and a massive base of assumed knowledge that you don't realize you require until you have two players who don't have access to either of these things. Sure, there are trainer wheels like using pregen characters and linear plots to get them on-track. But these guys are Adults and I didn't want to game down to them. I wanted to show them how cool D&D is for people who's common experience of gaming is in front of a monitor. 
Watching and trying to help these guys get a grasp of the game taught me a valuable lesson: D&D has completely failed new gamers. It is a relic of an age when there was no such thing as disposable multiplayer entertainment. The upfront time and knowledge investment is bizarre to the uninitiated. 
Finally we were done and went on to have a great time. As we played I found myself having to search up specific rules frequently and soon decided on the 10 second rule. If I couldn't locate a rule in short order I just made it up. And this had absolutely no impact on their expectations because they didn't know the rules either. The natural conclusion to that line of reasoning was: why bother using these rules at all? Do I need to be an educator, on sabbatical from D&D University to teach these new students? I didn't sign up for that, I want to have fun.
The game that we played that night used a d20 and hitpoints but it wasn't really D&D. And it was the most fun game of D&D I have ever played. My nostalgia for the D&D, massive rulebook, style of play foundered on the rocks of now. A now in which I am smarter, better educated and far busier and a now that is informed by a lifetime of gaming. Video and computer games have taught players that games do not need to be ponderous and that fun resides somewhere in the shadowed intersection of shared interaction, imagination and common tools. The complexity of the tools does not determine the quantity of fun.
So I sent them both an email today asking if they are willing to change over to Five by Five. Thankfully the answer was `we're both in it for the experience and not the mechanics' and that was endgame for D&D next.

Why? Because it's your...

Recently at GDC  the writer and art director for Destiny, the next big thing from Bungie, spoke about their approach to building the world, characters and opponents.

http://gdcvault.com/play/1017789/Brave-New-World-New-Bungie

I have quite a library of RPG world building guides. In 50 minutes (forget the q&a at the end) this video rocketed to the most useful resource to date.

Breaking it Down
So you don't have a spare 50 minutes.

Start with a lofty, inclusive and ambitious GOAL
Theirs:
"Let's build a world where we can tell any great story we want. A place millions of people will want to visit again and again, for the next 10 years - and more."

Establish the PILLARS that will support this goal
Theirs:

1. The world needs to be Hopeful and Inviting. Players have to want to spend time there.
2. Idealised Reality. Grounded in the familiar but capable of accommodating any crazy / genre bending ideas that the devs want to include.
3. Filled with mystery and adventure.Reasons to keep coming back.
4. Players can become legends. The players can leave a mark.

POSTCARDS
Use images to develop and define your Pillars. Build a portfolio of images until you have an image or group of images that define each Pillar. These are your Postcards. Think of them as photographs taken within your world.
"They are rare and powerful because they set fire to your imagination. They ask a ton of important questions."
If your world is a collaborative effort or will be published, your Postcards are the most effective way of communicating the essential elements to your collaborators / artists.

PALETTE
Your Postcards will be an anchor for the themes / tropes you will express in your work. You can take enormous advantage of this. In the video they talk about Palette, it is a video game existing in the visual realm. Palette informs the player, preloading the essential consistencies of the world into their brains. Tabletop games inhabit the theater of the mind but Palette is still an effective device for building a style guide to your world. Even better, you can build regional style guides to differentiate your locations.
See these timestamps in the video for more:- 21:05 Palette and 30:55 for the Opponent Mood Board.

FOCUS - Shifting to Production
At this point you have defined your Goal and supported it via your Pillars and based it on a unifying Palette / regional style guide. You have a series of Postcards that communicate all of the above. This is your core World Bible.
If the words you write are a love letter to your world, these words are written on the back of your Postcards and sent to your audience.

REFINE
33:00 "When you are building a new world you do not want to put arbitrary genre rules around what is possible and what is not possible. For a long time you need to make everything possible."
As you build this world, whether you use a  Big to Small or Small to Big methodology,   your Postcards and Style Guide will direct you. The above quote recedes in value as you proceed. You will have ideas that don't fit. Either trust that and save them for your next project or reconsider your Postcards.

CONCLUSION
My key goal in this post was to establish that video game development media has value for the tabletop roleplaying game writer/ user. I also felt compelled to use this video as a starter because it slammed some serious gold into my game development brain. Hopefully, while watching it, you heard the same `kachings' as I did.

*R1* Pulsating

You are a slab of Northern Muscle.

Unrelenting like the glacier that grinds the mountain, Defiant like the mountain facing the gale, Merciless like the gale blasting the glacier.

You have carved your way through the cultists of Thoom, taking first those who invaded your village. You gained achievements. You crafted ever fiercer weapons. You liberated mountains of gold from cult vaults. Now you scale the basalt battlements of the Grand Temple of Thoom. Soon you will meet their Laughing God and hear their lament as you cast it down. Suddenly a hand darts out to grasp your wrist. Through the hidden port looms Jugular Dhoom, High Priest of Thoom. Laughing madly he shakes you loose from the dripping rock face. Dancing before your eyes; PRESS R1. Then, as you fumble to respond, he casts you loose. “NOOOOO” you bellow as you plummet to the hungry rocks. “I died to a QTE.”

A Quick Time Event is a scripted event in a digital game that requires a response from the player to progress and often results in character death if it is not completed. In my experience they are generally disliked. Despite this they are now a common tool in the digital adventure / action game design set. So what can a tabletop GM learn from QTEs?

QTEs are a really interesting point of differentiation between digital and tabletop games, which is why I named this blog after them. They are a triggered event, perfectly expressing the degree to which a digital game can railroad the player. While often used to draw the player back into the core plot, QTEs occupy the broadest divide between game mechanics and game immersion. They speak to the player, not the character, bravely shattering the fourth wall by telling the player what buttons to press, reminding them that they are sitting on a couch with a controller in their hand and it is 3am. A poorly executed QTE can be very jarring. It can interrupt your sense of fairness and disconnect your understanding of how your character is meshed into the game mechanics. It can also drive home the difference between the character that the game has written for you and the one you want to play.

We are on the verge of significant changes in the video game industry, the console cycle has lagged and while the big players have squeezed the final drops of performance out of the current hardware the smaller operators have gone mobile and spearheaded digital distribution. At the same time we are on the verge of significant changes in the tabletop roleplaying game industry, the traditional printing and distribution networks are evaporating. At the same time the smaller operators are moving into digital and print on demand distribution. There is an interesting tipping point or relocation of mass on the horizon.  

So why do I love the QTE? It highlights the difference between core assumptions made by digital and tabletop Game designers and by the folks who use their games. These games, the way we play them and how we access them and critically assess them is in a state of profound change.

Tap to START

So this is the Plan.

I think that console / mobile / PC games have a whole lot to teach tabletop roleplayers. I think that the typical approach stating that digital games are inherently inferior to tabletop games because they are by design content and context limited ignores all the other aspects that they share.

And if you are a person who is interested in improving how you tell stories / challenge your players / build or convey the elements of an epic and memorable campaign, here is the cherry: The digital gaming industry invests millions of dollars per year into researching the critical elements of player investment.

Why does a player buy a game? Why do they keep playing it? Why did they buy the DLC (Downloadable Content)? Why didn’t they buy the sequel game? A great deal of this reporting ends up online.

So this is the Plan. I am going to Mine through the reams of online media re: digital gaming to improve my pen and paper RPG Craft.

So what are you waiting for? Tap to Start.