Machst Spaß! Machst schnell!

Repertoire First Playtest (or Procrastination)

2006-05-24T23:31:00.000-07:00

Well, after much delay I’m finally getting these notes down. And I’ll admit I’ve learned something significant here: write up playtest notes immediately. Stale notes aren’t as worthy.

First of all: hey, this game actually works! Fie on harsh Game Chef critics! Kudos and congratulations to the incredibly awesome games which did win and their brilliant designers. Repertoire is not their peer. Yet.

Anyhow, the catty backstage sniping of a troupe of actors boiled out of the game without any coaxing. Honestly, at the beginning of the session, I’d forgotten that particular part of the design, absorbed instead in trying to translate mechanics and text into an actual game.

The biggest problem was certainly that the producer either needs more to do or not be a player role. It’s easy enough for a player to pick up the producer’s end of an endgame argument. Any responsibilities that the producer took on would diminish the power of the actors, a lot, so for the time being I think the producer is going to become the face of the game-as-challenge.

And generally, the mechanics are about half-baked. The token currency is little too complicated, and there’s significant weakness in how scenes resolve. On the one hand, as it stands, it’s easy for everyone to lose, so the the producer’s rancor increases rapidly. And it’s not clear why you would want to bid against another player; on the other hand the bidding against was a significant contributor to the cattiness.

There are few places where the rules are really soft. There ought to be some control over who can be in a scene—one idea that got suggested was that the number of dice and actors in a scene have to be different which is interesting enough to playtest. On a related note, there needs to be a clear rule about how and when a scene gets called – possibly the framer of the scene calls it when he wants to.

Cards should probably get a fact when they’re written (and actor cards should get 3 written by their player). Furthermore, once the last fact is added to a card (i.e. if the type of card dictates a d8, when the 8^th fact is added) it should be retired at the end of the scene.

Oh, and about 30 tokens per player is probably plenty.

Virtual Playtesting

2006-05-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

For some time now I’ve been toying with a little language for randomizers, which might even be a subset of a little language to describe game rules —with role-playing games have the focus. For the most part, the application has always been testing ideas or for a convenience die-roller. I’ve always been frustrated with every die-rolling program I’ve ever used, because there’s invariably a dice mechanic that hasn’t been thought of, and the program isn’t flexible enough to model it.

And, obviously, the kernel of a randomizer representation language exists. 3d6 is the sum¹ of three six sided dice. It’s only when games start to need “the highest of” or “reroll 6s and add” that things get complicated. Which is almost every game. And of course Dogs in the Vineyard² needs dice to be commited in pairs, and whatnot. Although for a die simulator, this is hardly a new problem.3

But a real application just raised it’s head: playtesting. If you playtest with virtual dice, on a MUSH, or IRC, or even in person with a coupla laptops, then not only is it really easy to change rules and whatnot, you get an automatic record of play, plus empirical exercise of your system. So you can see up front what different card distributions do, or run quick simulations of conflict resolution systems that use dice.

Plus, if you’re like me, it makes as much sense to write the intial rules text in a programming language, and you get very abrupt feedback when it’s broken.

The pitfall is that the system warps your thinking about the rules. The same way that System Matters in play, the framework would influence design decisions. “Why not use d12s for this? They’re a pain to code for.”

Certainly worth thinking about.

¹ usually.

² Dogs, why is always Dogs?

³ Consider the method that several games use to generate stats: roll all the dice up front, and then assign the values to stats. Same thing.

International Intrigue rides on

2006-05-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

I still dig on this idea. Every time I pick up a little Greg Rucka, I keep thinking “This! This is what I want to be playing.” And I don’t know if this is where I want to go with it, but I really think I’m going to rob Ben Lehman blind, and pull the bargaining mechanics out of Polaris.[1]

Honestly, regardless of what I think of the color text, the basic idea of negotiating the results of a conflict, of using the wonderful fun of a bidding game like Modern Art or Pizzarro and Co. except plot elements are the stakes and the wager really jazzes me. And I think this completely fits into what I’d been pondering for International Intrigue.[2]

I’ve also been contemplating the idea of silent use of the rules of the game, so that all conversation can be in character or action related. And while the “key phrases” idea is interesting, it jars me a little. I’ve been thinking about a system that grows on the simple act of handing someone dice in order to suggest that they need to roll to resolve conflict. Especially if the ultimate characters are spies, some sort of tactical combat hand signals] might be in order.

On thing I’m playing with is the idea that as action moves from back at the home office, M and Q to actual theatre of operations, man in the field kind of stuff, that the number of adversarial bidders will change. I also like the idea of compelling each player to take a role in a scene where he want to bid, and then offer his bids from the mouth of that character.

So at the home office, the best way to represent the schemes of Them⁴ is to take the role of a Moneypenny, or a signals officer, or something, delivering the bad news.

An essential component, and one I still want to play with, is the conflict between the agents personal lives and their work.

¹ And I really ought to get in at least one session of the thing.

² which so needs a better name, it’s sickening

³ or do I mean these

⁴ a la Asimov

Tiny Game

2006-04-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

Tiny Game

Tiny Game is actually a roleplaying game, but being as that it’s so tiny, I wanted a short title.

Tiny Game fits in a nutshell: players tell a story in a round. Each player’s turn consists of as much story as they want to tell, unless they’re interrupted by another player. If they’re interrupted, any players who want to propose a direction for the story to take in general terms, and everyone with a proposal rolls a die. Roll off ties. High roll takes over narration, which starts with them describing how their proposal goes. Continue until end of story.

That’s Tiny Game. Here’s what it’s for: as a critical tool, examine how a given game or design-in-progress provides more than Tiny Game. It’s essentially just naked Fortune-in-middle conflict resolution, but it seems to me that it could be said that there are games out there that are just a dressed up FIMCR. Hell, you could even frame D&D this way, if you had a mind too.

Bargaining and Stakes

2006-04-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

Now, I may wind up eating all of this after reading Polaris, but here’s the thought: every stakes-setting/CR/FIM style system I’m familiar with has some variant of a free-and-clear where players discuss what the stakes are for a particular conflict. But only rarely have I personally seen the free-and-clear work on a level other than the situational. In other words “if he’s doing that, I wanna do this instead…” etc. But there’s something appealling about the idea of establishing stakes such that they’re of equal value, somehow.

What I’m thinking about is a “libre-clear” stage, where everyone can offer stakes for either side of an argument, but ultimately there’s a sort of bidding/betting/bargaining aspect to the exchange. Consider poker: your stakes have to match your opponents, eventually you show, and the winner gets the stakes. So, stake-setting by analogy to back room poker, where players will dramatically offer their watches and tie-tacks for whatever value the other players will grant them.

And as a final disconnected thought: Jon Tweet’s pleasant trope of the High Stakes Poker – some mystical force empowers the game to wager all kinds of abstract things – years of life, talent, skill, beauty. There’s a whole game in that concept, where characters are built to be players at that table.

Levels of Story and Extended Conflicts (while stirring polenta)

2006-04-09T23:20:00.000-07:00

Premise: I’ve been thinking for a while about indefinite nesting of storytelling elements – that there’s a natural but hypothetically unnecessary division into Story, Situation, Scene, Conflict, Task.

What I’m thinking is based on the Heroquest style Conflict resolution: if something is worth playing out, break it down. Except where Heroquest (and really, too many game to name) limit that to combat – or in other words, sub-Scene level events, what I’m considering is the same idea writ large.

Quick treatment: game begins with a story proposal. Players have characters and all that, and somebody (the GM?) says “Okay: here’s the rough sketch for the story.” And the requirement is that the proposal be framed as a conflict of some kind. Very high level, ideally around a theme, but a conflict.

Now, the group as a whole decides somehow whether to let this go – that they’re willing to let things run their course, (in other words “not interested,” or better still “lets do what happens if we pass on this”), or that they’ll resolve the whole Event with a single roll, or they want to break the event down in to Sub-Events.

Sub-Events get treated the same way – but they ultimately have to resolve the Super-Event. In other words, the group produces Sub-Events until they wrap up Event that spawned them. But each Sub-Event can be broken down further and further.

There’s a certain amount of stuff to be answered on this. Like how does non-Conflict stuff fit in. If we need an Event of “and they travel to Europe” what do we do with that? And how do we encourage little diversions and amplifications of themes and motifs and whatnot?

That’s for thinking on.

The Hive

2006-04-08T20:58:00.000-07:00

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, and it came to mind recently and I wanted to jot it down while it’s fresh and handy.

Basically, this is the idea: packet switching, or parallel processing applied to the business space. As time goes on, and more people get the entrepenuerial bug, and the web makes it easier to set up a storefront, there’s a lot of people who are passionately pursuing one thing and doing it well. In theory, if they could coordinate better, they could rival the forces of giant corporations.

So, the notion is, reduce the barrier to enter business. Have a service that provides not only a virtual office, but networking with other small businesses, initial business licensing, non-professional legal and practice advice, insurance etc.

Consider that there do exist businesses to do logistics on a large scale. And the virtual office is not exactly a new idea. But why not a single reverse-incubator? Rather than buy or start little notional businesses, instead provide a set of services to them.

And put it in a family of commerce style atmosphere. Not the creepy “you just started a business, let us leech on your idea” but instead a lubricated business flow between family businesses, and mutual support.

Specific examples:

A single-day rental office / conference room. The Hive’s central HQ would have offices and receptionists etc, for short term rental. Your sideline can have somewhere to meet with clients etc without having to maintain the offices year-round.

Recommended publication services, web designers, web brokerages, telecomm, etc. Throw business back and forth within the Hive.

Group rates. Be able to provide insurance, lending, benefits to member shops at a larger scale rate.

Untitled Committee Game

2006-04-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

This is the idea for the game that wanted to be my second entry for Game Chef 2006. (Ingredients would be Committee, 2 hours, Ancient, Emotion. Since this is not an entry, I’m ignoring all that.)

Basically, the players start as a Committee of Ethical Values or some such. One player proposes a societal concept (like, cybernetic consciousnesses in cyberspace, or occupants of a long term space station, or an alternate Renaissance, or even untrained sex therapy workers) and then the group as a whole develops a system of laws, or an ethical structure or some such. The system has to be written down.

Then, each player gets a chance to break the system. They present a case – perhaps to a Council of Judgement – that’s specifically ambiguous under the system as codified. The Council votes secretly on whether the conduct is correct or not, along with the element of the code that supports or condemns the action, and the presenter gets points for wildly disparate results, while the Council gets points for unified judgement.

Rules would probably be along the lines of who can say what to whom. Probably Judges can only address the supplicant directly, and no sneaky leading questions.

Scoring notions:

Supplicant gets Support x Condemn x Articles Cited
The Code gets MAX(Support, Condemn)² x Judges

Which should score high for the Code if Judges agree, and higher for the Supplicant if they don’t. If a Supplicant scores highest, then that player wins, but the Council loses.

How'd We Lose The World

2006-03-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

This isn’t quite as poetical an entry as it’s title suggests. Basically, I want to get the following thought down: if passion and sincerity are our best tools against oppression (and I admit completely that I’m paraphrasing from an Onion AV Club article here), then isn’t our biggest enemy Being Cool?

I mean, here’s the thing. We go out of way to show how jaded and bored and above whatever we are. Or how obsessed we are over the trivial.

So of course corporate commercialism plays to Cool. It reaps huge benefits from any restriction on freedom. Where the individual loses, the Man stands tall. The more we can’t stand apart for fear of being different, the more be plow wads of cash into absolute crap, the more we let ourselves be screwed.

This is quickly descending into screed, but the basic upshot is this: clever irony, calculated apathy, gothic ennui, and nostalgic collection are all Bad For You. Now you’ll excuse me while I go buy South Park

Season 7 on DVD. Because it’s on sale, of course.

Conflicts, Situation, and Divisionism of Flags

2006-03-01T18:45:00.000-08:00

Thinking about a certain kind of fiction, especially with a large set of characters, one of the things I’m seeing is that a lot of the excitement and tension in a certain kind of story arises because we watch the the conflicts arise between characters. To pull from contemporary examples, Lost (as I know it) is currently in a stage of rising tension, and it revolves mostly around characters ceasing to have so strong of an outside threat that they must band together, combined with the introduction of an ambitious but politically maladroit character into what was a strained but tense political situation.

This relates to role playing inasmuch that it seems then that’s there’s a situation like Clue going on: the game begins after all the fun. (With apologies to James Ernest ). Great faith in “GM prep” builds all the situations on the front side, and then play involves explicating and resolving those plot conflicts.

For clarity, I don’t think I’m talking about “conflict resolution” type conflict. I’m talking about plot level conflict. Difference being, a plot conflict is like “Herr Schlechtman is framing Joe with defrauding Yoyodine, Inc.” and conflict resolution is “Joe cracks the safe and recovers evidence to clear his name OR Joe gets caught robbing Yoyodine.”

Anyway, there’s been a lot of reaction from every side to Illusionist play and it’s less-fun (or really: less-successful) variants. GMs write the whole story, and the players are along for the ride. Either they know it up front, and participate and that’s fun, or the GM deceives them into thinking they’re participating (or they allow themselves to be deceived) and that can be fun, or they find out they’re being tricked, rail against the force the GM is pulling on them, and it’s almost always Not Fun.

One move has been to suggest that rather than plotting, a GM should establish a situation, that an object of the role playing act is the situation, and the GM’s role becomes to establish it. usually there’s a lot of process to produce a situation that relates to the characters, or the player’s interests, or the flags they’ve written for their characters.

But the situation invariably seems to include conflict, and if we’re suggesting that the GM shouldn’t have the final say on a plot, why should we let him write even that much? If we’re discarding the idea that the GM is Chief Storyteller, or Plot Owner, then I think we call into question what role the GM does play in defining the story we’re telling. You can’t just say “he shouldn’t come up with the ending” and leave it at that.

So, why is it that the only input players have to the situation is their flags? Don’t get me wrong, flags are a huge development, and good flags, especially ones that trigger reward cycles (in terms of in game rewards, rather than any other kind) do a lot towards driving the game.

I have two reservations about flags, though. First, in terms of influencing situation, flags are at two removes. First, the GM interpretes what those flags mean, often well after they were related to him, and second, the GM chooses which flags to emphasize, and usually reinterpretes those flags again in establishing the situation. It’s very possible for a flags driven game to produce situations that are no better tailored to the player’s interests than it would have been if the GM had just said “this jazzes me, and I think it’ll jazz you. Here we go.”

Here’s the notion that evolves out of all this: the players sit down and make characters, and they choose situation elements. Those elements need to be something that they, as players, want to see in the game. Their characters should relate somehow to their elements, since if nothing else, characters are our interface into the story. The GM gets to add some other elements, and some characters and whatnot.

Now, in the course of play, these elements get brought into conflict. Each scene is about juxtaposing characters and situation elements, and the game needs to reward building conflict just as much as it does resolving it. It’s possible that a really stodgy scene framing mechanic would be important here, including requiring that the partipants (both characters and elements) be brought into the scene at the beginning, and results be recorded at the end. It might be particularly interesting to establish mechanically how scenes follow, and who frames the next scene.

Downtown Interconnects

2006-02-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

This might be my naivate, but a recent Slashdot article brought to mind an idea I’d had back at a technology startup I used to work for.

The whole idea behind some of the basic technologies that the Internet is built on is that there is no center. But everyone who actually uses the Internet is a client of an ISP—they’re “downstream” from the “backbone.”

But the more I see and understand about how things work, the more I wonder why businesses in a metropolitan center don’t interconnect. A single dry pair with a T1 link between two businesses with competently configured routing would effectively give both businesses the benefits of a redundant network link.

If you had more businesses, and arranged the connections between them intelligently, you’d come to the point where only a complete failure of all links out of the business district would sever any of the participating businesses. Granted, we’re assuming mutiple carriers into the participant’s networks, and that their service agreements don’t prevent the plan…

And while technically, it would be quite feasible, commercially perhaps not. Consider how difficult it is to put together a simple peering agreement between two companies whose business it is to work with data networking. How do you seriously propose to arrange for a dozen businesses whose competencies lie outside that arena to arrange the transactions, much less manage the service. (Bringing in a broker company might or might not help.)

At some point this does become practical. When businesses are getting smaller, when each company does a particular thing and does it well, and they need to communicate quickly with the companies across town, not with the head office across the globe. When network links become faster, and more ubiquitus, and easier to come by. And that time might be coming soon.

At least, I’d like to see it.

A Resolution Mechanic Looking for a Premise

2006-02-13T18:02:00.000-08:00

Hey, this is the game designer’s Other Vice. (The first being Abstract Theory.) I was listening to a piece on NPR, and the story is building around this budding romance, and the plotter in me is seeing that what we want most is for this American-born Iraqi POW to get together with the cute truck driving corporel. Which means, says the plotter, that they cannot get together yet.

From whence was born this mechanic. Granted some kind of actual conflict, with real stakes and all that, the table votes on how they as players, as audience members and story writers, want the thing to go. There’s some gears-and-axles to encourage splits and tricksy voting – off the cuff, I’d say that winning voters get a point for each loser. Better still: the conflict initiator gets the product of winners times losers, so you’re pressed to chose conflicts that will split the table.

So the winning side of the conflict becomes Comedy, and the losing side is Tragedy. If Comedy is a unanimous vote, then Tragedy happens. Otherwise, magic? Roll for it, or spend the points you’ve been getting to force Comedy, or Comedy always happens unless it’s unanimous.

Honestly, I think the concept needs to be explored a little better, and that the answer to what happens probably follows pretty clearly from a combination of the concept and whatever premise the system is serving.

Game Design Theory Question

2006-02-10T21:06:00.000-08:00

One worthy observation that’s been made on the indie design circuit is the distinct divisions drawn between components of the game. It’s a worthwhile thing to recognize that there’s a difference between player and character: that the player might want things for their character that their character really wouldn’t want. We’ve played that way for years, but new games are actually written that way.

Structural elements that have been identified are situation, scenes, and conflicts. But ultimately are situations, scenes and conflicts really different?

What I’m suggesting is that there’s a thing I’ll term a story element. A story element comprises some kind of a set up – some situation that needs to be resolved. Story elements can be composed of smaller elements. It’s entirely possible that a story element might be added into a larger element. The resolution of an element could be determined merely mechanically, or as the result of the resolutions of it’s sub-events.

How does this relate? Basically, situation is a big story element: it comprises the basic tension of at least a full session of play. It’s composed of several mid-sized story elements (scenes). Each one of the scenes is composed of one or more conflicts, which might be composed of tasks.

What I’m arguing here, from my computer science perspective, is that from point of view of an element, they’re functionally very similar. It’s probably useful to distinguish element-as-situation from element-as-task, but in terms of viewing a game as a way to manipulate a tree of setup-resolution boxes, I think there might be something to considering story-elements as a general class of things.

One consequence is that you get the freedom to subdivide elements as far down as you want to go, and to lay off when you want to.

Any way, this has turned out pretty high-flown, and I’d love to have a more concrete example of how this might work, but I think I need to wrap this one up and go back to fevered theorizing.

More noodling

2006-02-07T14:58:00.000-08:00

Here’s a complete throwaway idea and a design exercise.

Throwaway idea: Situation consists of a set of issues that must be resolved. Characters can’t ignore them, either because of the game premise, or because they’re tied directly to the characters. None should be simple to resolve. In fact, I’d go one further: if you can see a way to resolve the issue, it’s not a game-term Issue. Scene framing involves picking one of the issues and presenting it’s next manifestation. Some kind of time pressure forces brevity in scenes, so the particular problem relating to the Issue may not be fully realized before some kind of action is taken. The next scene related to this Issue will be influenced by how this problem got resolved though.

The idea is inspired by crisis-mode media like Battlestar Galactica and Alan Moore’s Top Ten (in turn inspired by Hill Street Blues and its similars). Specifically, the way that a set of plot arcs interrelate in each episode, and the various situations interact.

Design exercise: first of all, I’m finding that thinking in terms of little RPG sketches is particularly satisfying. I like all these little ideas that skitter around one’s metaphorical ankles. But they won’t get out the door without some development. So, the exercise is to bring to a play-testable state each of these ideas. Or at least some of them. Maybe a Game Chef with myself thing, or if someone else is willing, I’ll do several iterations of this. Could easily be 4 a year, with playtest, seems to me.

In terms of “what is playtestable” I tend to think that the whole thing could be pretty spare. A Game Chef style 15 page splat of sketchy rules, complete with cop-out freeform traits. (As distinct from valid freeform … separate entry.)

Dogs Versus Shadows

2006-02-01T01:15:00.000-08:00

Playing Dogs in the Vineyard recently, I had a sudden realization about how it works. I mean, it’s there in the book, plain as day, but it took having a certain design-focused view to get it.

The realization is like this: Traits and Relationships in Dogs work like Keys or BITs do in Shadows of Yesterday and Burning Wheel. In one way, they work better, in theory: the Traits are good for driving conflicts in a particular direction, and Relationships drive the story in a particular direction.

Now on the one hand, Traits do this without explicit reward. If you hit the Trait, you get the dice. The bigger the dice, the more you want to hit the Trait. So that’s the reinforcement on the Trait.

But it gets weird if Traits are too broad, or if you don’t understand how your Traits work when you make your character.

And I find myself dubious about how well Relationships work with the Dogs premise of making decisions of morality. Does it make sense to commit to a Relationship with a character in a town that you might not be back to? In some ways, it might make more sense to relate to the other PCs, or to organizations (The Dogs, the Faith, the TA, the Mountain People), or sins or demons. Which then does serve as a guide for the story.

All of this musing has gotten me off the track. What I’m specifically fascinated by is that Dogs manages to accomplish what The Shadow of Yesterday does very directly with Keys and XP, in a very elegant, indirect way.

Agent Kujan's Scene Framing Mechanic

2006-02-01T00:36:00.000-08:00

This is a toy role playing game, purpose of which is to suggest a scene framing rule. I don’t know if the rule would make for a fun game, or if the whole thing would just crash. But here it is:

The Custom Agent’s Office
A Toy Role Playing Game

So, everyone chooses a character, name, some background. Definitely a goal of some kind: where they want their character to go, or succeed at or whatever.

Pick someone at random, they frame a scene, and start playing it out. Can be anything that player wants. From then on, other players can jump in on the current scene and express their incredulity. They then have to frame a new scene around the details of their doubt.

(Right? The idea is that the interrupter is Agent Kujan from The Usual Suspects. “I don’t buy it.” “Convince me, show me every last detail.”)

So the idea, very strongly inspired by Mr. Baker, is that on the one hand, you have credibility. Each player has the right to doubt, and revoke credibility in the scene. That’s the purpose that a resolution mechanic serves.

What that’s connected to is a scene framing mechanic. You revoke your credence at the cost of framing a new scene – or with the benefit of the new scene I suppose.

One of the things that results, I think, is that it’s a winning strategy to bring other characters into a scene, because their players will be more likely to buy into a scene that they’re a part of. Or, if nothing else, they may be too distracted playing the scene to doubt it.

The obvious break that I see is if everyone’s goals are unrelated, or aren’t in conflict. On the other hand if the goals can’t be reconciled, then who’s going to extend credibility in the first place?

It needs a bit more substance before it could be played, but I think it’s worthy of the extra effort.

MassTest and Giving Back

2006-01-31T10:02:00.000-08:00

First of all, I’m pretty pleased right now with my MassTest extension to the Test::Unit library for Ruby. I really need to add it as a gem, or something, because I think it would probably be useful for purposes beyond testing web sites – my original use case.

As an aside, while coding for Test::Unit, I’m not entirely sure that it’s approach is necessarily the best one. Because of it’s TestCase-is-class philosophy – and by dropping the JUnit TestSuite-is-a-TestCase paradigm – it’s a bit on the tetchy side to extend. I want to incorporate it, and if it’s similarly annoying, I may be compelled to produce a competing package.

There are a couple of features I’d like to add to MassTest, and I don’t want to forget them. Quicky listy:

Include directory – This is kind of a general thing I want to do in Ruby in general. I want to scan a directory, load and .rb files I find, and add any MassTestCases I find into the current Suite.
Coverage – I’d really like to have some kind of automated way to determine what the actual domain of a set of tests ought to be, and then to determine if I hit them all.
I also would like to see about making the web related tests I’m doing be more robust – I think I probably ought to push off redirects until the actual tests, and I’d love to be testing content somehow.
Which does suggest memoization as a general feature. It might be nice to be able to record data in the course of a test, and then check against it later.

Game Shipment

2006-01-30T14:09:00.000-08:00

Hurrah! Bunch of new games, care of my good friends at Funagain. (I really ought to emulate certain other bloggers and get an affiliate dingus.)

Anyhow, in case anyone is keeping score (or if I want to come back later and check) here’s the list of newcomers:

Domaine
Blue Moon
Gloom
Ys
Kablammo
Looney Bin
Bang!: A Fistful of Cards
Monkeys on the Moon
Hare & Tortoise

Current Mood

2006-01-30T13:24:00.000-08:00

I’m currently maintaining a mixture of blase disregard and rebellious elitism.

This may not really be a surprise to anyone.

End of non-sequitor.

Here but for the grace of God...

2006-01-24T11:46:00.000-08:00

Speaking of casualties, it makes it really sad to be browsing Funagain and run across games that I think so highly of … because I used to own it. But all is not lost: Funagain has shopping lists. I can record everything I lost, and come back over time and replace them.

When they’re not out of print.

Anyway, if anyone out there still needs to assuge some of their need to good for Katrina Survivers, here's a particularly frivilous way to manage that.

Board Game Inventory

2006-01-23T22:38:00.000-08:00

Also known as bragging. Really, I’m doing this to see what games I still have after the hurricane. I’ve tried to sort them in to rough categories. And I already see some of the casualties.

Hamster Rolle
Thing-a-majig
Maskenball Venezia
Perudo
In Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit (Baby Boomer expansion)
Trivial Pursuit – Genius Edition
Cranium (unopened)

Axis & Allies
Space Hulk (definitely cool)
Adeptus Titanicus (rules?)
Crimson Skies – wargame edition
Millenium Wars: Kashmir
Millenium Wars: Air War

Wings of War – Famous Aces
Wings of War – Watch Your Back
Diceland (Great White Sea + Ogre)

Aliens
Arkham Horror (the new Fantasy Flight edition)
Munchkin
Abduction
Dungeoneer – Vault of the Fiends (incomplete?)
Drakon

Torres
Big City
Pueblo
Taj Mahal
In the Shadow of the Emperor
Pizarro & Co.
Mueterer
Modern Art
San Marco
Tyros
Web of Power
Frischfleisch
King’s Gate
Alhambra
Putsch
Carcassonne
Carcassonne – Traders & Builders

Metro
Saint Petersburg
Colossal Arena
Ivanhoe
Atikka
Ohne Furcht und Adel
Thor
Chinatown
Bohnanza
Hoity Toity
Ricochet Robot
Dragon Delta
Super Icehouse collection (+ plus lovely Aqua pyramids)
Mississippi Queen
Drunter & Druber
Gardens of Alhambra
Trans America
San Juan

Illuminati Deluxe Edition
Hell Rail
Cartagena
Wreckage
Robo Rally (plus as many expansions as I’ll ever want)
Simply Cosmic (+2 colors)
Riot!
Caribbean

Magdar (sigh)
Senator
Orcz
Maginor

Dynasties
Trax
Lord of the Rings: The Search
Toscana
Snits!
Gipf
Tamsk

Lift Off
Falling
Laguna

Bang
Bang: Dodge City
Fluxx
Njet
Express
Draco & Co.
Cthulhu 500
Lunch Money
Corruption
Chrononauts – Early Americans
Gother Than Thou
Aquarius
Hex Hex
Coloretto
Chrononauts
Oriente
Mu & Mehr

On the Edge – one deck
Crimson Skies – collectable minis
Star Trek Customizable Card Game
Bitin’ Off Hedz
Save Doctor Lucky

Deadwood (plus expansions)
Parts Unknown
One False Step for Mankind
U.S. Patent Number 1
The Great Brain Robbery (2 copies)
Captain Park’s Imaginary Polar Expedition
Witch Trial
Unexploded Cow
Freeloader

Tiddlywinks
Blokado
Shifti

And a puzzle? Noticably AWOL: Diplomacy, Zertz, Java.

Fiction Masquerading as Game(?)

2006-01-23T03:36:00.000-08:00

In conversation not too long ago, I was hashing out some fairly strong feelings about how a lot (a lot) of published RP materials are essentially novels in a strange format. Or even huge serials. And in certain respects, I really dig seeing that. It hits a button for me like reading collected comics or watching whole seasons of TV over the course of a week on DVD. Those who haven’t seen Battlestar Galactica really ought to drop on the collected first season. I’ll just wait here to collect your thanks.

But the avowed purpose of such media is that it be the basis of roleplay, which is a very different enjoyment mode than one gets out of concentrated passive entertainment. I think there’s a fundamental issue with large gaming supliments, which is that they’re ultimately something for the GM to relate to players. Basically it’s a script for Illusionist play, which is really rough.

Honestly, sometimes the intent seems to be that everyone will read these 300 page tomes about the World of Hoobajoob, and we’ll all have this huge and rich shared canon to riff off of. Eh? My experience is that I can barely get a group of players to read the actual part of the rulesbook that refers to character creation. I’ve become the Master Explainer, and that means that as GM, I become the conduit for the Canon World. Which leads to a certain amount of very frank “this is how it is” type discussion, which can be very awkward, especially when it relates largely to a conflict that the characters are presented with Right Now. Concrete example: say the characters are in the midst of the Royal Reception when the envoy of the Empress of Glass arives wearing all white and completely unspeaking. Well, there might be dozens of pages in the Encyclopedia of Hoobajoob regarding the Empress, her envoys, the significance of white, and the current socio-political structure relating her to the Royal Court. But if I need to take a break to explain all that, why not just have the guy run in and proclaim that the Empress is pissed off?

So, yeah, part of the frustration is the fact that without the setup of the referants, there’s no real point. The other side of the coin is the Plot Immunity that designers see fit to impose on GMs. Both Pinnacle and FASA pulled this crap, and I believe White Wolf has played the same game for a long time. Technically Unknown Armies is pretty rife with it, but Atlas left things loose enough that it wasn’t all that important. Essentially the threat is “if you in any way alter the paths of these characters, you might as well not buy the next few supliments” which is sort of annoying.

On the other hand, I know people who love the setting. Or a setting from, say, a series of TV shows, or children’s novels, or whatever. And there’s this urge to play “in that setting.” And I can’t say that I myself am entirely immune to the allure. Predictably, I kinda think that Galactica would make an awesome RPG premise, setting included.

Which leads me to wonder, is there a way to present a setting that isn’t onerous to roleplay in? Basically, you need to solve a few problems.

How do you get the players to read and absorb the information?
How do you avoid deprotagonizing the characters by writing this awesome setting?
What kind of elements facilitate interesting play, and what are just stoking your own pen?

I think that The Burning Wheel and The Shadow of Yesterday have something really interesting going on, by putting all of the setting details in the character lists. After that, I’m still in the thinking phase.

RPG Doodle 2

2006-01-22T22:54:00.000-08:00

Game where the players control a group of people, like an army or a corporation or something. Maybe they each command a portion of it (like they’re all VPs, or colonels, or something).

Important to the game would be the control the characters have over they’re underlings, and the abilities of their underlings. Managing the trust the underlings have for their boss, as well as using their time and skills well would be some of the challenges of the game.

The more I think about this, the more the idea has a Sim flavor, although the mechanics might extend to other kinds of game, granted that the command strucure isn’t absolutely central. It does seem like it would support other premises fairly well.

Quicky Little Mechanical Noodling

2006-01-22T22:39:00.000-08:00

Battlestar Galactica, Apollo is technically on parole. He’s still the flight commander. His pilots ask him when he’s coming back to the card game. He’s tells them, as nicely as he can, that it’s pretty much against the rules. They start to get loud about how uncool it is that their beloved commander is locked up, and he shouts them down.

Here’s the idea that inspired. Imagine Apollo has a trait like Devotion to Duty. He could get a point pretty much all the time, because he’s in a position where his duty puts him in all kinds of conflicts. But as another player at his table (even GM), I’d want to see him get more for putting his duty in front of his own beliefs.

Here’s the basic premise: you’ve got some kind of plot/behavior reward. Like TSoY Keys. Except that when you hit your trait, you get one point, guaranteed, plus extra ones at the behest of other players, and the GM.

Maybe there’s some kind of cost to grant extra points, but it should be positive sum – you spend something worth less than a point to grant the extra.

Anyway, the idea is that when you do something run of the mill, you get a point, but when you do something really cool, your fellow players boost you up because it’s so cool.

Some nifty boardgame style mechanic to influence how the points get awarded. Maybe the GM always gets a bump up an award. The rest of players get some kind of collaborative extra award? Maybe there’s a pool of points, but they have to agree, or expend their own points for the nomination.

Big Roleplaying Concepts

2006-01-18T23:20:00.000-08:00

I think I’m beginning to develop a severe agnosticism about a lot of the Big Concepts in roleplaying. From the RGFA Threefold Model, to the Forgish GNS, I’m beginning to think that as dogma it’s a bunch of malarky.

Which is not to say “there’s no such thing as …” anything. I completely accept that people play games to compete, to tell stories, to pretend that they’re in a different world and to pretend that they’re different people. I accept that it’s legitimate to term these activities Creative Agendas, to call them Narrativism, or Immersion, and useful even to call them these things.

What I really think is unhelpful is to talk about a triangular arrangement of these things, or to balance them against each other in terms of cohesion or coherence or some such nonsense. Trying to arrange them in some crazy Unified Model of Roleplaying serves no other purpose than drawing lines in the sand of the huge huge universe of all possible roleplaying.

Yes, it’s useful to have the concept behind the word Narrativism (or Dramatism), for the same reason that it’s useful to know what “savory” means if you’re cooking. But I don’t think it makes sense to try to say that cuisine must be “Coherent,” and only include savories, or that if there are sweet elements they’re just “color.” Or that a chef fits somewhere in a graph of sweet, savory and spicy.

Because, honestly, we realize that sometimes we want different things in a meal, or in a game. And it’s useful to be able talk about those things, because that’s how we get what we want.

But trying to fit them all into some correlated philosophy of play is just nutty, and wrong. Like Nazi Ethnology: it’s an evil pseudo-science.

Let’s talk about what makes for Gamism, and Sim, and Narrativism and Dramatism (if those are different things,) and how it can be promoted. Let’s be honest about wanting to take a directoral stance, or to attempt character immersion, and encourage each other in those endevours. Let’s recognize that some game texts, and games that we run have those various flavors, and play to their strengths because we have names for them and recognize them. But let’s not try to fit them all into an overarching holy writ system of roleplaying.

Web Framework Caching

2006-01-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

An idea I wanted to get down before I forget it: if I’m going to extend any templating system, and especially cs/Template, I want it to cache it’s templates.

Here’s the specifics: essentially, the new templating system would function identically, unless it was handed a CacheWatcher (or whatever.) Now, some of the resources that the template uses to produce the output of the document get cached. Includes would be a perfect example; once they’re included into the template, they should stay there until they need to be reloaded.

Now when the template gets an output call, it checks it’s CacheWatcher to see which of it’s resources are dirty. (The default behavior is that everything is dirty.) The motivational case is that the CacheWatcher treats vars, evals, withs, etc as dirty, and includes as clean, unless they’re made manually dirty.

How are they made dirty? Why with a RingService, of course! The whole point is that I can use a semi-static nav menu as an include, and know that it won’t slow the app down unduly. If I change the menu, I run a little mini-app that announces the path as being dirty, and all the templates that are using it will reload it (once) when they need it next.

Some more advanced usage might include filtering out vars by their lifecycle, and keeping them around while, for instance, a session is still open. Why dip into the DB all the time? Granted, it gets things more shared, but I think share nothing is mostly a guideline.

Resolution Analysis

2006-01-12T21:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve been wanting to make a few notes on this topic for some little while. Basically, in reading more and more of these indie games that try to make the destinction clear – especially in conflict resolution mechanics and stake setting, there’s an interesting flow built into every resolution system, that seems to legitimately say something about the game and it’sworld.

First of all, when does a roll¹ happen? It seems to me that a roll occurs as a the grown-up equivalent of “nuh-uh!, noyadidn’t!” that happens in the children’s game Let’s Pretend. Ultimately, you don’t roll unless some player is calling your declared action into question. Well, sometimes you roll pre-emptively, to prove your authority to control the game. A GM might call for a roll because he finds the proposed course of action implausible, or wants to emphasize the danger and risk involved, or to resist the inexorable advance of the players². Another player might call for a roll because he sees his character as in conflict with the first.

Secondly, how does the roll interact with the game world? For instance, when and to what degree is the character committed to his player’s declaration? One important impact on this whole thought is Fortune in the Middle, since a player doesn’t need to commit much before the roll, except the barest outline of his intention.

An important aspect of the relationship between a risk³ in the gameworld and the roll that resolves it is the point at which the player can back out clean. In some games (both as designed and as played), a player can say at any time up to the actual roll, “Maybe that’s not such a good idea. Never mind.” The other end of the spectrum is that once you’ve declared your action, you’re going through with it, even if during the course of resolution, you discover that there’s a difference between how chancy you thought it was and how chancy it is. In between is the idea that a declaration is half an action; that your character will have revealed his intentions, even if you decide to back down.

Resolution mechanics are one of the bridges between player and character,and between the real world and the game world. They tell us a lot about what the relationship between a player and a character should be. If resolution is frequent, task based, only called for by the GM, and declaration is a commitment, then the implied relationship is very close. Players are meant to feel as if they’re seeing out of the eyes of their characters. When resolution is less frequent, is conflict based, commitment to action comes later in resolution, and right to call for a roll is shared by all participants, the implied relationship is more distant, almost over-the-shoulder of the characters – possibly not even identifying with any of them. Adjusting along that line seems quite straightforward, and it’s worthwhile for a designer to look at what they want in their game and plan resolution accordingly.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is the idea that any resolution mechanic follows a flow of attention from the game world, to the real world and back again. It’s how the mechanic manipulates that flow that determines in a large part how successful⁴ a mechanic it is.

¹ I’ll use “roll” as a shorthand for the whole “task and/or conflict resolution, with or without dice or other randomizers” echillada.

² In fact, the variety and general fuzziness of why a roll can becalled for is one of the things that sets RPGs aside from board games. In a board game, all the players are have a set of conditions for rolls (call the Rules), which they’ve agreed to abide by. In an RPG, the conditions of the call are less clear.

³ Again, this is a shorthand. I’m quite aware that not every resolution is related to something that’s risky – but ultimately if there aren’t two paths, or success and failure, or even better and worse, why roll? Well, that’s a whole different matter.

⁴ Success being judged in this case in a fairly deconstructive wayhere, based on the supposed intentions of the designer.

Two RPG design insights

2006-01-10T23:11:00.000-08:00

One of these is mine, and one of them is not.

First, a most briefly, heartbreaker games are reactionary designs. I’m convinced this is a simple and complete identity. The supposition, which bears out under anecdotal evidence and personal experience, is that one comes to one’s heartbreaker game as the result of finding the things ine’s favorite RPG that frustrate your personal idiom. After grinding your teeth on whatever grit you find in your first puppy-love of a system you figure out how you would fix it. But you love that first system which makes you hate, and hate but good the things you find that are wrong with it. So that first design, that lovingly recapitulated copy of the One True Way, with these fixes and Oh! what a shiny bauble is the result.

Which brings me to insight two: that roleplayers metamorphose over time and the impetus of the metamorphosis is frustration. Ultimately, every player gets fed up with his GM(s). Maybe in the nicest possible way. Maybe fed up is too strong. Maybe, just maybe, there are players out there who are so inspired by their GM that they just burst with enthusias to run a game themselves. But honestly, I think that most players turn to running games because, on way or another, they think that they can do it better.

The transition to designer is similar. Even if you don’t finish a single design, the urge to design is spawned by the feeling that you could write game that’s better. This sort of ties in to insight number one, in that the first game is a heartbreaker. The design comes out of wanting to do it better than this game.

So, I don’t know if there’s an application to all this, and it may not be all that profound, but both thoughts were pretty striking, and I wanted to get them down.

First Post!

2006-01-10T22:37:00.000-08:00

Well, obviously not really. But what it is, really is the first post with my very own home brewed bloggy posty Ruby thingy. Which has been great fun to write, as it’s been the cobble together of several libraries which I love some of and love the foibles of others (net/http to be specific.) So, this is a string of beads that goes cs/template, YAML, RedCloth (which is so cool¹), to the above mentioned, less than intuitive net/http²

Anyway, one system call, and I’m into a lovely little vim edit of my entry, which gets posted as I close it. And when it doesn’t work, it’s all there in marvelous Ruby code to fix.

Of course, some of the fixes are easier than others. For instance, both of Why’s libraries are awesome, perform exactly as advertized (although I often wish for YAML::load_from_path and YAML::dump_to_path, but that’s because I’m lazy. And it wouldn’t really be that hard. Hmm…)

¹ See?

²Well, net/https, to be precise.

RPG doodle

2006-01-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

I've been contemplating an idea for a game that resolves around spies, but with a grounding in the purposes behind their nefarious operations.

In essence, the concept is that the players start play as various officials in (possibly different) intelligence agencies. There's some sort of world situation which they all want to see change somehow.

As they resolve to have certain actions taken, play drills down through the ranks until an actual operation gets called, and the players sit down as the spies employed to take action.

Ultimately I'd like to see this as almost a more competitive board game-style RPG. Somehow the role of referee either doesn't exist or falls to some player as the drill down occurs.

At the highest level I picture some sort of status board, which probably incorporates areas of ignorance and crisis. As officials, the players have a game-level goal to achieve. Possibly their separate positions have certain things to gain. A core idea, I think, is that the condition of the board can only be altered by operations, which have to be carried out by the players as spy characters.

Somewhere in here is the idea that the players take many sides, either because as officials they (collectively) play all of the sides in their world. So as (say) the Executive of the US, I might call for an operation to infiltrate Middle Eastern Terrorist Network A.

As we drill down to the US intelligence community, including a British and French representative, the player of the head of METN-A becomes (say) the Chief of the NSA. The conflict, of course, is between needing players to take on different roles, and them having an incentive to take on roles that are mutually antagonistic.

On some level, I want the actual operations to be stories of a whole other kind. That the likelihood of failure-through-incompetence should be almost nil. The eventual ops should be good stories in their own right, but with everyone completely on the same side, unless they betray one another.

Thinking...

Forum thoughts

2006-01-06T17:18:00.000-08:00

Most of the Forums world seems to be phpBB or it's similars. Ultimately, I'm finding that I have a few features that I'd love to see in a forum system.

First: Following threads. Currently this is work that a Forum member has to do. Forums mention that some threads have "new posts," but then it's up to me to see which ones I've read and which I haven't. I for one forget whole websites over a weekend. Which thread I've read the most recent post to is really more than I care to deal with.

Second: participating in threads. Some forums will notify you if a thread you posted to has been posted to by someone else. But many don't, and the consequences of not following threads become even greater when you're trying to participate.

So, the thought is that you'd be able to collect a set of threads, and read the newest posts to them quickly.

Additionally, one useful function forums provide is for the aging and locking of old threads. It might be nice for a thread to be in a sort of garbage collection phase, where existing posters can continue to post to the thread, but even that ability fades without use. Eventually no one can post, but in the meantime the thread lives for as long as there's useful discussion.

I also am a big fan of subthreading. But I've yet to see a forum that allows you to collapse subthreads. There might even be some sort of subtle moderation in counting the number of members who collapse a subthread. Fundamentally it suggests that it's not interesting, because they don't want to see it. Implicitly, that might even push the thread towards being auto-collapsed, read less often, posted to less frequently, and eventually reaped.

Web Etiquette

2006-01-06T14:18:00.000-08:00

I realized something the other day about forum posting etiquette while reading a site that I don't usually even post to. Basically, it occurs to me that it's rude to post absolute statements.

On some level, it's okay to say something like "I was thinking about this and..." or "This just occurred to me:" but not to post absolute statements of fact - at least where what's being discussed is theory (even theory of practice.)

By analogy, if I were to say "Separation of Concerns is vital to web development." in a forum of discussion, it seems to me that's a little rude. By implication I'm suggesting "and if you think different you're a moron."

I'm not entirely sure what I think about this. Ultimately I think I come down on the side of softening statements in forums. After all, you're there for discussion - what's useful to you and to the silent masses who will read the exchange later is the free flow of ideas. If you make closed pronouncements about your subject, you're effectively ending the discussion.

First post regarding web-engine

2006-01-05T15:21:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking for some time about a web development framework, and I'm doing my best to take the best ideas I've seen and fold them into one big thing.

I was originally quite inspired by Wee, by Michael Neumann. I really like the structure that Wee allows in web programming, and especially as AJAX becomes available at large, it seems like the sort of paradigms that Wee (and Seaside, and Borges) open up are intensely interesting.

On the other hand, I don't like the idea of generating HTML in code, and I don't like code in my HTML. I believe fairly strongly in SoC, and feel that even for a lone developer it leads to strong, flexible practices in code and application.

I've been very happy so far using cs/Template (although PageTemplate is a close second), and I think a derivation of the same will figure heavily in the final product. There are two features I want to add to it: the ability to add macros to a Template::Document, and a manually-dirtied caching engine.

I'd like to use Needle as the means to define wee-style parts to be composed with templates.

Anyway, that's a general roadmap. Separate entries as time goes one for different parts.