Post Mortem 2: The Orc and His Dragon

A few days after finishing Attumen the Huntsmen, level design wrapped up the first dungeon of the Burning Crusade. Called Hellfire Ramparts, it was our first attempt in a dungeon that was closely integrated with the shape of the dungeon outside of the raid.

Scott went ahead and spawned the dungeon, deciding on the density of the packs, the pathing speed of the patrollers and then came into my office.

Scott: Alright, Mr. Brazie (he always called me Mr. and I still have no idea why), I've got a big task for you.
Me: Oh sweet, do you need me to test pull all of the bats in Karazhan again?
Scott: Ha. No. I want you to sit with Joe Shely and design all of the abilities in Ramparts.
Me: Whoa, really?
Scott: Yeah, just work together. Then when you finish, I've got a boss for each of you.

Joe and I worked together pretty quickly to knock out the ability design for the dungeon, including my favorite part, a little wolf ambush that triggered halfway down the halls. Then we spoke with Scott the next day.

Scott: Alrighty, this next dungeon is a double-header. There's two bosses at the end and there's two of you. Joe, you've been here longer. There's a demon boss and an orc with a pet dragon. Which one would you rather do?
Joe: I'll do the demon.
Scott: Sweet. Then, Mr. Brazie, you have the orc and his dragon. Basically just make fight "Reverse Rend and Gyth" and you're good. Maybe have the boss flying around before the fight begins. Let me know when you're ready to review.

Now, I don't know what your impression of me is, readers, but I love doing the exotic and difficult to implement.

"Why do Rend and Gyth... when I can do *flying* Rend and Gyth!"

... and thus triggered the most painful boss development I had ever done. (ok, ok, it was only my second boss, take it easy on me!)

Development Dollars are Expensive

Choosing where you decide to spend your time as a developer is a very difficult skill to develop. Do you invest a lot in a risky, potentially game-changing design or do you invest in a highly polished, basic experience?  Early on, eager to prove myself, I pushed myself too frequently into the high risk category. 

Some of that's okay - you're new, nobody expects anything and readily forgives you if you fail. This is an extremely important aspect of any game design culture. If it's not safe to fail, you will never push yourself to grow.  However, I recklessly pushed forward in every aspect of my designs. 

So what was the risky, low-payoff decision I made with this fight?  

If your thought was either "oh, it's because the dragon flies" or "oh, it's because the dragon lands", you are close, but not quite. Let's review his design!

Sometimes You Do OK on the First Try

Rend Vazruden: 

Revenge - Deals cleave damage to the target and two nearby enemies when the target dodges.

When Vazruden reaches 50% health, he calls Nazan down from the sky to assist him.

Gyth Nazan:

Flies around in the air, bombarding enemies, until Nazan calls him to the ground.



Fireball - Deals Fire damage to a random enemy. Only used while flying.



Liquid Flame - Leaves a burning spot on the ground that causes damage to enemies within it for 10 sec.

Flame Breath - Deals Fire damage in a cone in front of Nazan. Only used when he lands.



Dragon Roar - Fears all enemies nearby for 3 seconds, except the tank. [Heroic Only]

Analysis: 

What's the state of this design? 

Let's consider the goals:

• Gameplay: Pick abilities that players understand and enjoy handling.
• Simple: There were 34 dungeon bosses in Burning Crusade. Dungeon bosses need to be simple, understandible and quick to build.
• Nostalgia: Remind players of a familar, but underplayed encounter from classic wow.
• Aesthetics: Make use of the open vertical space. 
• Training: Give a new designer experience recreating a familiar experience.

Do your own analysis and reply in the comments. I will respond, then update this post afterwards... and tell you about the horrible mistake I made.

Initial Analysis:

Gameplay: 

• Vazruden is boring. For a heroic, scary orc, he does almost nothing. Furthermore, aside from the random damage from Nazan's fireballs, nothing is really going on here.
• Vazruden's dodge proccing revenge is not a fun mechanic. Furthermore, the cleave plus AoE fire stacking punishes melee groups heavier than ranged groups.
• Flame Breath is fine on its own, from a pure concept. However, as mentioned by several commenters, the execution was lacking. 
• Specifically, the fact that he didn't have a cooldown when he landed meant players randomly died. 

Simple:

• This encounter is quite simple, right?
• Actually, no. "Flying" creatures at this point during WoW's development had to be hand pathed. 
• This was not only a difficult process, but also hard to modify, due to poor tooling.
• Furthermore, the presence of two creatures, who can be killed in any order, creates a number of difficulties. For example, which one drops loot? What happens if one creature leaves combat, while another is still alive?
• These kinds of contingencies make a simple surface encounter hard to implement.

Nostalgia:

• Success. Subtle, but effective

Aesthetics:

• This was a huge win... until the fight started. Seeing the dragon fly around was awesome pre-fight.
• Within the fight, it was a huge dragon... who you never saw because he was above you all of the time.
• Furthermore, the aesthetics of a flying dragon played against the mechanic of having an attackable add flying around in the air. 

Training:

• This worked out. However, I ended up going further down the deep end than I expected... because of...

The Huge Mistake

So what was the huge mistake that I made...?

Well, I decided that if the master died and the dragon lived, the dragon would wake up the orc and go back to flying around. 

"What?" you may have said. 

Yes. That single decision ended up taking over a week of my time to implement, fix, refix, fix, find another bug, fix that bug. Patch over the patch. It was a ton of time wasted on a very minor polish point. 

Eventually, Scott came into my office and said, "You know, usually I just despawn and respawn everything." ... and in 20 minutes, the encounter reset and respawned just fine.  

There are times where you'll just try too hard to make something work that just doesn't add any value. 

Can we make it Better?

I think the easy answer to this is yes. So let's take the framework and think through it:

How can we:

1) Make it clearer what Vazruden and Nazan do?

2) Make players care about the mechanics in an appropriate way?

3) Create opportunities for responses that make players feel good?

4) Make the experience more satisfying?

5) Make the boss abilities and theme fit better into his role of a Herald of Illidan?

Postmortem 1: Attumen the Huntsman

It was a warm day in May when I walked in the doors of the unlabeled entrance to Blizzard HQ, hidden deep in the heart of a school campus.  After the usual couple hours of HR paperwork and contract signing, I was brought upstairs to the WoW team floor and deposited in the middle of the hallway/meeting room where the other game designers were sitting.

They were excitedly discussing the plans they had in store for the final boss of Karazhan, a 10-man raid instance - the first of its kind for the team. 

Afterwards, I was introduced to the future lead encounter designer, Scott Mercer. Scott had worked on Starcraft as a level designer and was responsible for a ton of the itemization work that had been done in classic WoW.  (See Shard of the Flame ala Ragnaros)

Recently replaced as item designer by the notoriously handsome Travis Day, Scott was now responsible for the newly formed encounter design team, which would focus on raid and dungeon bosses, as well as providing support to the quest team for outdoor spawning. 

Scott didn't expect to see me. To be honest, almost no one did - I'd been hired after a long lunch interview with the Gang of Three design leads (Pardo, Chilton and Kaplan) about a week before. 

The second day, someone in IT brought up a computer for me from the QA dept and set me up inside a small office next to one of the production QA members, a friendly guy named Stuart Massie, who was responsible for collecting testing requests and writing the patch notes. Stuart helped me setup my machine, taught me how to use the internal wiki tools and introduced me to Alex Tsang who helped me setup WoW Editor.  

Then, I was off!

... but what on earth was I supposed to do? I stumbled over this question for a bit when a voice interrupted me.  

"Well, hello Mr. Brazie. Let's get you started."

I spun around to see Scott wander in. A warm and friendly, if occasionally sardonic, guy, Scott shared my love of the Japanese language and was an expert on all things k-pop.  

"So, I'll be honest, I wasn't really expecting you already, but I'm glad to have the extra manpower. We've a got a lot ahead of us." 

Scott sketched a rough layout of Karazhan on the whiteboard behind me. It read as follows:

[Demon Island] 

 - CUT

[Tower Top]

Demon Boss - Geoff

Nether Wyrm - ??

Chess Game - Pat

[Library]

Archmage - ??

Golem - ??

Satyr Summoner - ??

Bone Dragon - ??

[Opera House]

Little Red Riding Hood - ??

Romeo and Juliet - ??

Wizard of Oz - ??

[Entry Hall]

Maiden - Joe

Butler - Joe

Horseman - Scott

Animal Bosses - ??

"We need to get all of these bosses done by the end of summer. The good news is we've got plenty of time to pull it off. Since you're new, I want you to focus on learning the tool. It's old, its weird and it takes a long time to master.  So, I'm giving you a boss I've already designed and want you to focus on implementation."

Me: "So what's his name?"

Scott: "Attumen the Huntsman"

... and so began my life as a raid boss designer. 

The Plan

I grabbed a yellow notepad and jotted down the notes Scott provided as requirements:

• Starts out attacking the horse
• Attumen runs in when his horse is hurt.
• Mounts the horse when either one of them is low.
• Horse should charge other people randomly.
• Attumen is a ghost so he should be hard to hit sometimes. 
• Attumen should be faced away from the group, has a shadowy cleave attack.
• Attumen should get pissed off when you disarm him. 

Starting Out

Looking back, it's a great idea to start out by implementing someone else's idea. It lets you focus on learning the execution, rather than fretting heavily of "what" to do.  I gleefully ran around the tool, mostly confused, attempting to copy and paste various pieces of existing monsters to create Attumen.  

Version 1:

Midnight was spawned as a static spawn inside of the livery.  

Midnight had two abilities - charge and hoof

  Charge - rushes to the target

  Hoof - a short stun on the target.

Attumen has three abilities - shadow cleave, enrage and ghost form.  

  Shadow cleave - 3 target shadow damage chain attack, jumps to 2 nearby targets.

  Enrage - when disarmed, Attumen gains bonus attack speed, bonus damage and turns red!

  Ghost form - reduces Attumen's chance to be hit by 50%.

When one reaches 50%, both despawn and a new Attumen + Midnight creature spawns at 100% health.

Analysis:

So what's the state of this design? 

At first glance, this seems to satisfy the requirements of the design. However, it has a number of issues. Which ones can you spot?

Answers:

Midnight's design doesn't quite work. Charge rushes to a target, which means you want to pull Midnight off an enemy. However, the primary target stun means it is difficult for the tank to build an hold aggro on the boss.  

Attumen's design is incredibly frustrating.  The chain attack means the tank + 2 melee characters will always be hit by the Shadow cleave. This means there's nothing your melee characters can do to avoid it. When Ghost form is activated, you cannot do anything to stop it.  Furthermore, Disarm, which should help the player instead penalizes them. 

Finally, there's no reason to attack both Attumen and Midnight. When either one reaches half, a new creature spawns. This means all threat is lost and all damage done is lost. 

Iteration

Iteration is the process of improving a design to achieve a goal. In the case of games, the goal is to make the experience more satisfying.  

Version 2: 

Midnight was spawned as a static spawn inside of the livery.  

Midnight has one ability - charge and knockdown

  Charge - rushes to one of the three most distant targets and fixates on them for a couple seconds.

  Knockdown - knocks down the tank temporarily

Attumen has three abilities - shadow cleave, enrage and ghost form.  

  Shadow cleave - cone shadow damage attack

  Uppercut - when disarmed, Attumen gains begins knocking up the target.

  Intangible Presence - curses all nearby enemies, reducing their chance to hit for a few seconds.

When one reaches 50%, the highest health of the two transforms into the fused creature. Preserving damage dealt and gaining the abilities of both.

What changed?

At first glance, these abilities look identical, but each one has changed its mechanics in subtle ways that allow players to iteract with them. 

Charge - the choice of only a distant target means you can choose which 3 of your allies will be struck by the attack. 

Charge - the addition of a fixate guarantees a certain amount of damage is dealt before the horse runs back. 

Knockdown - the duration of the knockdown is much shorter than a stun, allowing for a more rapid response.

Shadow Cleave - now a cone attack, melee dps can avoid being hit by standing behind Attumen.

Uppercut - now an appropriate flavor attack, this has no actual bearing on most tanks, but retains the feeling of change when Attumen is disarmed. 

Intangible Presence - now a curse, it can be removed by Mage or Druid players. 

Merge - the fact that it preserves the damage taken from the other incarnation means multi-target DPS'ers such as Warlocks or Rogues now have their bonus damage preserved. 

Can we do better?

Yes, yes we can.  There's a lot of issues that remain with this design (which is the one that went live).  At the time, I didn't have a process to use to analyse and detect these issues.  However, I really want you, the reader to understand this. 

Take my process and apply it to these two mechanics: Charge and Intangible Presence.

Midnight's Charge:

1. Is this ability clear?

2. Does the player care?

3. Does the player have a response?

4. Is this response satisfying?

5. Does this make sense in this situation and fit the theme?

Attumen's Intangible Presence: 

1. Is this ability clear?

2. Does the player care?

3. Does the player have a response?

4. Is this response satisfying?

5. Does this make sense in this situation and fit the theme?

Copy and paste your answers into the comments and I'll evaluate them. 

Learning From My Past

1. Preface - "Why is Game Design a Black Box?"
2. Introduction - "Theft vs. Innovation"
3. My Story - "The Simplest Thing First"
4. Lessons
1. Clarity - "Make it Clear"
• How? - "Communication"
2. Care - "Make it Important"
1. How? - "Tuning"
2. How? - "Emotion"
3. Response - "Give Players a Response"
1. What Types? - "Reactions"
2. What Types? - "Preparations"
3. What Types? - "Recovery"
4. Satisfaction - "Make the Response Satisfying"
1. Why? - "Reward Good Behaviour"
2. Why? - "Punish Bad Behaviour"
3. Why? - "Pacing"
4. Why? - "Ennui - How Repetition Reduces Satisfaction"
5. How? - "Alternate Ways to Satisfy"
5. Fit - "Make it Appropriate for your Game"
1. When? - "Fit the Theme - Don't put Aliens in Hamlet" 
2. When? - "Fit the Audience - Don't Arm Wrestle during Chess"
3. When? - "Fit the Game - Internal Consistency"
5. Conclusion - "What was the point?"
6. About Me
1. "Who am I?"
2. "Who were my teachers?"
3. "How do you become a master?"

(I am updating every Saturday evening. Feel free to comment liberally.)

What was the point?

If you've been following my blog for any amount of time, you may be wondering why on earth I decided to share these stories.

The answer is that there's a method within my words.  A series of tools that when repeatedly applied dramatically increase quality of a game design with each iteration. The terrible truth is that these lessons are so simple, so basic, that they are easily forgotten.

1. Design for clarity
2. Evoke player care
3. Give your player a response
4. Make the player's response satisfying
5. Fit it all within the context of your game

These 5 tools are the self-feedback tools you can apply to anything you are personally working on. Don't move on to the next step until the previous has been satisfied. 

Then do it - again and again - until you've achieved the quality level necessary to create your game. If you can deeply ingrain into your psyche these five concepts, you can consistently nail basic game design, which opens up a world of opportunities. 

Next Year

In 2013, I intend to turn this lens back upon myself and review every major piece of design work I've done. Think of it as a post-mortem if you will, full of the lessons I learned in my own life. 

Stay tuned for adventure!

-Alex

Fit Your Game - Internal Consistency & Identity

During the development of Wrath of the Lich King, I was brought on early to help develop the vehicle system when our lead designer became embroiled in a lot of bigger issues. The opportunity to work on such an important system made me ecstatic.

The initial plan was to develop a system for making tanks and airplanes in the new outdoor battlefield known as Wintergrasp. 

In Wintergrasp, vehicles were a limited resource, meaning only a few players could use them while other fought on the ground. 

Being a PvP zone, with vehicle-only objectives, this mixture of players and vehicles worked naturally. Despite the relatively limited amount of time I put into the vehicle mechanics (mostly flavors of cone ram damage and catapult style delayed explosions) - it worked and modeled other PvP games such as Battlefield and Halo. 

Being a conscientious, passionate and utterly reckless game designer, I pushed the programmers really hard to make sure that the vehicle technology was very modular, extremely flexible and could be reused for anything. 

Too Much Rope

As the Wintergrasp technology proved fruitful, curiosity rose among the other designers on the team about the technology. Eager to learn the new systems and give new legs to the game, they began adapting it for other purposes - something I completely encouraged.

If Jeff Kaplan were here, he'd probably say something like, "we took vehicle tech too far, without enough constraints and consistency."  While there's a lot of truth in that, I feel like the problem was even more basic: 

Often we made vehicles without carefully taking into consideration the audiences involved.  

After Lich King shipped, I personally modified almost every vehicle quest in the game, tuning numbers, changing mechanics and adding consistency such as global cooldowns to vehicle abilities. 

Inconsistency

Due to this massive variation in not only quality, but difficulty, frequency and complexity, that it meant that each vehicle quest requires a significant learning curve and triggered anxiety from players who didn't know what to expect. This established a baseline negative response which manifested itself in player feedback many times over the course of Lich King.

I don't want to single out any designer on the WoW team by picking on a particular vehicle quest. In fact, if anything, much of this is my own fault for not establishing examples and guidelines for quest designers to start from easily. So I'll pick a specific example that I worked on personally.  

Yes, that's right. I'm the madman behind the source of much hatred and anguish known as the Flame Leviathan. 

Not to take credit from any of the very talented designers who contributed to the planning and execution of the encounter - but many of the issues players had with the experience stemmed from decisions I accepted as immutable early on.  

Riding on the success of Wintergrasp, there was a surge of excitement to see vehicles make their debut in a raid setting.  

Identity

Wintergrasp vehicles worked well, as players could destroy and protect them, choose to pilot or not pilot them. Thus a player could easily slot themselves into the role of "vehicle pilot" or "hero".  Likewise, while no single player could destroy a vehicle, no vehicle could kill *all* of the players.  

Role switches at work.

In Ulduar, players faced with handling the Flame Leviathan had no such choice. You're a healer? No. You're a gunner now.  You were a tank? Well, now you're a lowly ammunition loader.  

Sometimes, when you switch things up, they turn out awesome. Other times... awkward. 

When players actively choose to buy-in on that decision, they have a great time - modern encounters such as Amber Shaper Un'sok and Alysrazor show that exotic changes in gameplay can be super fun - for the players that opt into that challenge.

Flame Leviathan had a lot of time, love and complex vehicle design built into it. It was a fun encounter  - but it didn't do enough to reinforce your core identity apart from the vehicle. In fact, I probably worked a little too hard to avoid your class mechanics entirely.

Reinforcing Your Place in the World

Late in the game, to help relieve some of the complaints, I added the "toss you onto the tank" mechanic where players needed to defeat an NPC using their player abilities under time pressure. This helped a bit, but left tanks and healers somewhat out in the cold.

An alternative might have been for one of the vehicle types to have been an SC2 style meditruck, accompanying a smaller fleet of vehicles through the gauntlet - protected by a small squad of normal players on the ground.  

Ultimately, a lot of the complaints stemmed from one real issue: I was trying to put a game that was not World of Warcraft inside of the World of Warcraft.  

If there's a lesson here let it be this: It's perfectly fine to add things like that. It's not perfectly fine to expect everyone in the game to do it and enjoy it. 

Know your audience. Know yourself. 

Fit Your Audience - Don't Put Arm Wrestling in Chess

I was sitting at home on vacation, when a friend told me to check Facebook to see the greatest sport every devised. I turned away from my kitchen to take a look.

Having been a competitive Go player in college, I had a significant appreciation for competitive board games. Having been a cross-country runner in high school, I had a significant appreciation for athletics.

However, I wasn't particularly interested. Roger insisted saying: "Look! First they play, then they fight. Isn't that AWESOME?"

Now, if you stop and think about it, it does make a lot of sense. The same kinds of skills apply to boxing and chess: reading your enemy, drawing him into a weak moment, then delivering a final takedown attack to complete the victory.


In fact, that fact that they need to continue using their brains after taking a pounding has considerable real-life connection to battlefield performance. Smart, strong warriors would be victorious where short sighted or weak ones would not.

The amount of skill required to compete in this sport is immense. A recent reports indicates that the ELO system for chess caps out at around 2800. For chess-boxing, that number is around 3300. Assuming they use the same starting point, what this says is that despite the smaller number of chess-boxing players, the skill gap between the best and worst player is much larger.

Boxing is quite popular. Chess is quite popular.  Why then isn't Chess-Boxing also popular? Clearly there's a ton of talent and skill involved.

Know Your Audience

As someone who never took the time to learn the strategies of Football, I often found myself hanging out with my aunts while my father, grandmother and uncles watched the Big Game. 

One day, while at a friend's place during the Superbowl, I asked my friend Michelle why she was riveted to the screen. 

At first she joked about thinking the Quarterback had a cute butt. When I pressed the issue, she explained:

"Well, my team has been doing pretty well and I've been following the linebacker in my Fantasy Football league. I'm pretty sure if he gets a first down, I'll come back to take 2nd in my league."

... boy, then I knew why the girls blanked out when I raved about A Link to the Past.

The simple answer is that people are drawn to watch what they know and understand. If someone knows Football, they will feel comfortable watching Football. If they know Soccer, they more easily watch a game of soccer.  Something as complicated as Chess Boxing requires double the knowledge base to enjoy. 

The overlap between people who are sufficiently experienced with both chess and boxing is rather small. Perhaps that won't always be the case, but for now it is.

Arm Wrestling is Simple

Let's say we wanted to create a new evolution in gaming, but we wanted to make it overlap with real sports. Since we've decided that boxing was too complex to mix with chess, let's trying something simple, that everyone knows - like Arm Wrestling. 

Let's consider a possible iteration of our new game, Arm Wrestling chess:

Rules: 

1. Plays just like regular chess
2. When pieces fight, the opponents arm wrestle to determine if a piece is killed. 

 Awesome - that should make for a better sport, right?

Well.. no.

Don't Cross the Streams

The reason that chess and arm wrestling are entertaining on their own is that they are contests in the same space. Two chess players battle over permutations in the mind. Similarly, two arm wrestlers contest their strength and muscle timing tactics head to head. 

The reason these games work at all, is that the conditions for success are the same on both sides of the equation.  But once we've mixed arm-wrestling with chess, the outcomes of any given decision have now become uncertain.  

We've undermined the ability of the chess player to consistently perform tactics in a way that they can reasonably and consistently expect to perform. Which detracts from the mental appeal that chess brings.  

Similarly, we've undermined the consistent strength performance of arm wrestling, by suddenly adding in a tactical element that means that where once upon a time, using all of your power to win was the right call, suddenly, the right call might be to lose a few arm wrestles to wear your opponent down for an important play later.

Fit the Theme - Don't put Aliens in Hamlet

During my first year as an associate game designer, I was assigned to work on the "Sunstrider Isles" - later to be known as the Isle of Quel'danas.  The project's scope was ambitious - we were going to make an island with a growing number of quests that would grow and evolve as players quested there - and we had to do it all in under three months. 

The quest team was responsible for the overall vision, but back then quest designers rarely spawned exterior zones. So I was brought on to fill-in the space. I was assigned to work with the handsome and stylish Eric Maloof on the capturable northwest side, while the tough-nosed Luis Barriga handled the Dead Scar. 

I saw it was a town and merrily set to work, trying hard to make an early good impression.  I had blood elves wandering around, talking to each other, gaily gossiping about the neighbors and doing day to day chores around town. 

The next day, Eric came over to my desk. 

Eric: "Hey, Alex, I noticed you started working on the Sunstrider City already."

Me: "Yeah! I figured let's knock it out quick so you can get your questing done before the deadline."

Eric: "Well, I appreciate that... but was that a Blood Elf gardening?"

Me: "Yep, right next to the NPC to who takes out the trash and scullery maid who complains about the butler."

Eric laughed: "Well, I find that incredibly amusing, but these are Blood Elves. They are lazy magic users and incredibly militaristic."

Me: "Oh. Huh. Let me try that again..."

I respawned the city, over the next week. This time with duelling warriors, soul channeling Warlocks and half-broken robotic automotons which patrolled the perimeter. The eastern side had Infernals falling from the sky and demons escaping from magical gateways.

Eric: "SO much better."  

I still kept the gossiping NPCs, but they gossiped about the bosses inside the raid instance instead. Did you ever hear them?

The Importance of Fit

The mischievious Gnome, the stoic, confident Tauren and the recklessly magical Blood Elves are very important themes. While fun to do the burly Gnome, or the cowardly Tauren character, these characters lose their charm and uniqueness if the original kit hasn't been well-established.

This is why Fit is such an important concept in lore, game mechanics and life. If not reinforced over and over again, these important backdrops will be overlooked and forgotten.  

How many players realized that the Arakkoa were victims of magical genocide or that they were once part of a dark and ancient empire? Very few.

Instead, the theme of "creepy bird people" was constantly reinforced. It's okay though, they didn't really matter to the over-arching story of the Burning Crusade. 

Theme and Fit

In a nutshell, try to reinforce the appropriate stereotype with every tool at your disposal: Art, Level Design, Combat Mechanics, Story. These "kits" are your palette for telling a consistent story about the world your players live in.  

Make it fit, or it takes the pillow to the face!

Next time: fitting the audience...