Juice and Value Chains in RPGs
At work right now, I'm putting the polish and juice into our current project (a video game for kids), and it got me thinking about juice in tabletop games. If you're unfamiliar with the term juice, it's something that's easy to spot but difficult to communicate. My working definition is:
Responsive feedback that provides a satisfying execution of play in increments.
Juice can reinforce and highlight key systems but if the devs squeeze right, then even smaller sub-systems have a bit of juice. Repetitive tasks should feel rewarding and good, visually and mechanically. Some examples of juice in video games are the following:
- The visual effect and animation when creating a card in magic the gathering arena
- Ribbons and trails when moving around a level in Hades
- A short animation that shows a sheen on weapons
- Multipliers that pop up and shake on screen with each hit in something like Borderlands
I'm sure you're thinking of plenty yourself. Please share them!
Make the Squeeze
While it might be easy to spot juice in a game, it can be daunting and difficult to discern a place to start for adding juice to your own. There is a knee jerk reaction to put juice into every single interaction, but this dilutes the juice. It is a thing that's cultivated through playtests. It's zeroing in on those repeatable moments that feel good to a player. Heartbreak feels good in a place with juice.
If I can't put juice everywhere in the game, then there are two questions to consider:
- What juice do I make?
- Where does the juice go?
Juice appears differently, depending on the type of game being made. Cool combat multipliers probably don't make sense in a game with little to no combat. Knowing what juice to add depends on what aspects you want to feel really satisfying for the player. How do you narrow that down from everything? I have a suggestion, and it's called value chains.
Before getting into that and if it isn't super clear yet, I think this same concept and thinking is true of ttrpgs. "Oh, so it's all the pretty art." Wrong. While art can support juice, it is rarely juice by itself. Art is akin to a cool particle system that makes something that's nice feel extra nice. Just like juice in video games, it is highly contextual but much harder to spot.
Examples of juice in ttrpgs from my very subjective point of view as a GM and player:
GM POV
- The literal table: How the space you exist in both IRL and online are set up can add juice. Again, this depends on a table. My table would hate if I used an actual monitor for maps at our IRL table while others would love it. The juice of ttrpgs is a social one rather than a digital one.
- Communication: Telegraphing danger, encouraging players to continue taking to that NPC without being heavy handed, or having NPCs be discrete from each other are all juice for the table.
Player POV
- Attention: It's never not your turn at the table. Being present and actively listening to the group is big time juice.
- Inquisitive: Being curious and asking questions without dominating the table.
Once again, I'm sure there are more that you're thinking of. I still have no idea how to make juice as a designer. Onto Value Chains!!
Value Chains are the juicer
The obstacles posed above about juice can be answered through something that's been blogged about in game design circles known as Value Chains. Back in 2021, Daniel Cook took the concept of Value Chains and discussed how they apply to game economies. All games have an economy of play which is often built on sink and drain concepts. The idea is that you're building up resources (XP, gold, token, cards, etc) and using them to progress/improve (level up, armor, relationships, etc). Value Chains are a design tool to help you find those economic relationships/feedback loops at various levels which informs you, as the designer, where player engagement and progression occur. There isn't 1 value chain to rule them all, but they're often interlinked (naturally). They can also support each other, but it's recommended that the cost be high for when they do. It's also possible to use value chains in social/communication lenses, not just economics, but that's an entirely different post.
One of the key parts of Value Chains is that at the end of them, they have a value, or anchor, the designer is trying to elicit for the player to feel/ways to motivate them. The example used in the linked blog post talks about how farming sticks is boring but when you farm sticks to build a house and decorate it, then farming sticks is much more interesting.
What the fuck does this have to do with juice? I find juice draws attention to value chains quite naturally as each step is important for players to feel/see to incentivize them to progress, regardless of the game format. It organically builds incentives to do the thing. A couple of simple examples of this in ttrpgs are ahead. The syntax for a Value Chain is the following:
Action (Inputs required to do the Action) -> Output of Action
It's important to note that Value Chains are not Systems and should not be regarded as such. They are ways of stepping through player actions to, both diegetic and non-diegetic, to ascertain anchors.
Blades in the Dark
The district pages of Doskvol in BitD are great juice. Since players are citizens of Doskvol, these pages aren't GM facing material. There's a spread of art along the top to give, at a high level, the architecture and vibe of a district followed with a brief description, landmarks, notable NPCs, and a nice breakdown of the space economically in a small table with pips. I've talked about it before at length in another post, but I was drawn to the pages again, since so much of BitD is a social dance of factions, districts, and your crew's HQ. We can extract this further into one of BitD's many value chains like so:
- Do a job (-time & -skill checks) -> +Faction relationships
- Access Info (-time) -> Information on District/NPC/Faction
- Information on District/NPC/Faction -> Knowledge
Cloud Empress
Players gain Stress from a range of interactions, mainly when levels of threat increase. Drawing a weapon on someone or having one drawn on you triggers stress. Casting magic risks Stress. If trying to be a pacifist, the world will push you in its volatile and violence, both ecologically and socially which forces players to negotiate and manage their risk level when exploring. Its stress value chain would like this:
- Travel through world (-time & -resources) -> +Locations
- Explore location (-time & -roleplay) -> +Items/Relationships
- Items/Relationships -> Discovery
Share some value chains you see in a ttrpg system or sub-system you enjoy and share!!
Drink the juice
Coming all the way back around, if we are aware of a value chain that elicits the feeling of Knowledge, then we know the juice needs to wrap around Knowledge. In CE, the juices is targeted usage of art for NPCs/groups of people, descriptions of the land, and mythos as page dividers.
The overall goal with this is to provide desigers a tool of using lenses and then focusing in on the systems/layout/art of their game and adding juice in ways that might not be immediately clear, at first.
If you're a ttrpg designer, have you done a similar process or is purely vibes-based?