Recycling day-- I'm in the process of trying to back up some of the more (or less) interesting things I posted on the Village Board> We had a couple of discussions of mechanics, ideas, play and settings there I wanted to make sure I had a copy of. There are some topics I wrote on a couple of years ago that I want to revisit what I wrote then and see if my take on things has shifted (particularly my pieces on male vs. female dynamics at the table).
Anyhow, one of the things I wrote up when it was closer in mind than it is now, was a post-mortem of my City of Ocean Campaign. I'm going to post that (along with responses from two of the players). I've been thinking about this campaign and what worked about it-- plus it gives me content and allows me to archive this material again. So if you've already read this, bear with me. Also, there's a couple of links I mentioned that no longer function, so you can ignore those. Maybe we'll find the site backup at some point and repost it. I also probably need to do this kind of post-mortem for a couple of the other campaigns I've finished since then (the Vampire game, Planescape/Black Company, Bloodlines, Steambuckler, Scion, HCI...yow.). Also interesting in that I've run more with the Action-card system that I first really used here.
CITY OF OCEAN POST-MORTEM (long)
This is kind of long, but I wanted to put up something about a campaign I finished a few months ago. I’ve been thinking recently about campaign planning, especially as I come to the wrap up of the Steambuckler campaign and look towards what will follow. I’ve started some planning for that, but it has been skeletal at best and I suspect that it will probably change drastically before I get to the table with it. My Vampire game is starting to hit some of the larger arcs of the story, but the Exalted game is still at the start. Anyhow since I have to start some other planning I thought I’d go back to think about how my City of Ocean game came to be. I haven't done anything like this with my fantasy camapigns, in part becuase most of them have threads that play into other games, but I might in the future.
I welcome questions and comments-- especially if the players could comment on their perception of the campaign...which we played for three (!) years.
The simplest way to describe the game would be weird modern. To get a sense of what it was like check out Auzumel’s page for the game at http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/coohome.html. She kept that up for about the first of the three years (real time) of the campaign.
Originally I’d been thinking about doing the Modern Gods game I’d talked about for a while. In fact I’d generated a lot of material and passed it on to the three people who were going to be playing (Auzumel, Devilbird and Laeoch). However after doing a lot of work, I hit a brick wall in my thinking and couldn’t figure out how I wanted to structure the campaign. I still haven’t but that’s another story. I knew I wanted to do a modern game since I hadn’t for a long time.
So here are the pieces that were rattling around in my head:
*I owned a copy of Unknown Armies, as well as Over the Edge (and a complete set of the CCG for that game). I liked some of the ideas for these things, but I didn’t like the rules and I didn’t like everything…so maybe 40% from each was useful. But I wanted to take some bits from them.
*I had only seen a couple of episodes of Buffy back them and knew a little of the backstory. Auz and I were driving along and saw a billboard with Spike on it. She asked who he was and I told her as best I could. The thing that stuck me them was the idea of demonic possession causing Vampires. I began to think to myself, why stop there? What if all the supernatural manifestations were different kinds of demons or better yet, the kind of creature that resulted from possession was based on a persons personality. I knew I wanted to do something with that.
*I didn’t have anything yet in mind for the game, but I wanted something strange and yet real. So I did up a syllabus for a course that would take place in a modern world where demons existed (you can see a version of that here http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/syllabi.html). Once I did that I realized something else about the game world. It would be a place where this supernatural stuff went on but it was dealt with in fairly conventional terms, that people tried to write it off into another paradigm. Part of the point of the game would be these conflicting and contradictory explanations of what was going on it the world.
*I decided one of the big themes of the game would be signal to noise ratio. Unknown Armies deals with this idea suggesting that 99% of what people hear about the “Occult Underground” is malarkey, misinformation and untruths. I thought that was a great idea, but in some ways unplayable. If 99% of what players got wasn’t true then they would be utterly lost. Still the idea of having all kinds of stories about the “real truth” and what magic is and everything else appealed to me. However, I would take the idea and run it backwards.
*By this point I knew I was going to consciously borrow from PK Dick, Borges, Eco and WS Burroughs. I was going to make the strangest possible game. I’d draw from online strangeness to add to the atmosphere. High conspiracy and misanthropic explanations would abound. And here would be the trick: everything might be true. I just keep making stuff up and throwing it at the players. More noise, more events, more alternate explanations and systems of thinking about what was going on. The truth would be whatever the players followed up on and seemed to think was true. Of course, I wasn’t going to tell them that. There a point in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum when he realizes that all the conspiracy and plotting that he’s put together has a life of its own and yet is also purely in his own mind. The point of the novel is about ascribing significance to events (I think). In this game I would continually throw things about for the players and watch them assign significance to things…then I’d follow up on the threads that they pulled on.
*By this point I’d started to think about the Persona 2 game for the PS which I’d played a little bit of and which had “rumor magic” as an aspect of the game. I found an image of the city from that game which looked particularly strange and that set my mind about what it would be (you can see the image on the front page of Auzumel’s site). I put together a tourist guide just to start building the geography in my head.
*With this much put together I still didn’t have a structure or real sense of what would actually happen. I ended up spending a week scribbling ideas in a notebook—anything that came into my head. This freewriting really helped. And it was in the middle of this sketching that I found two things that really helped. The first was Ken Hite’s Suppressed Transmission column (which he has two collections of). They are chock full of high weirdness and how to put those in a game. I decided I’d just start shoveling that stuff in…. The second thing was a PBS special on a young man with a certain kind of brain aphasia (I think that was the term). He’d have seizures but instead of fits, when he was overcome by these things he would absolutely and totally believe he was god. I thought that was freaky so I used it.
*I decided to come up with a typology of demons (http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/cdc.html). I liked the idea that demons would be a “disease-like” phenomena that would be covered by the Centers for Disease Control. I also started to come up with some more thinking about the sources of demons as discussed in that class syllabus. I liked the idea that they were a frightening thing that people didn’t talk about, but everyone has some story for why they were. I also worked on an explanation that had a “First Atlantis” and a Demon pre-civilization and the idea that there was another race of non-possessing demons that had been killed off. However once we got into play, that storyline died out—the players never followed any of those threads and in some ways that story was too literal.
*The explanation that Demons were bent psychics would be a popular one and my thinking about that brought me back to the Divine Aphasia I mentioned before. I decided there would be a really awful family of powerful people who would eventually serve as possible villains. I would call them the Throne family (I know, an easy reference) and they would have a giant media/shopping/entertainment center at the heart of the City of Ocean. [Incidentally, I really liked that name for the city as it had a kind of mythic resonance, but it also became a pain in the ass to write out and say because it is a non-intuitive phrasing]. My idea would be that they family would be involved in the occult happenings, but the most apparently mildest of them would actually be a powerful psychic who projected his Divine Aphasia out on other people, convincing them he was god. That was the starting point and eventually I built a larger and more complicated backstory for the family with all kinds of Faulknerian details: murder, rape, incest, etc. In the end they were a useful set of figures but weren’t really direct opposition until late in the game.
*I started thinking about the PCs and who they would be. I ended up recycling a device I’d used in a previous game. The PCs would all be summoned to a lawyers office on a particular date to receive a legacy from a person they’d never heard of. The trick would be that the instructions would have been set before the characters were ever born. Also, some of the people named in the legacy (essentially everyone but them) would have died in the meantime (strangely of course). The legacy would come out of a previous group of supernatural investigators who owned a location and who had all died or vanished before they were born. My hope at the beginning would be that this would push the group into following that path and being supernatural “PI’s”. That never really happened and in retrospect that was a good and obvious thing. I hadn’t set up any mysteries beyond their own origins and what was generally going on. Most of the campaign ended up with the players just trying to live their lives in the faces of this strangeness which was fun—but only because it was a small game. With a larger group of players, I don’t think it would have worked. An investigation game is by its nature “episodic” but this was continuous in a way I’d never seen before where things just kind of kept rolling downhill.
*I didn’t want to use a conventional game system, but I also didn’t want to go “diceless”. I’d done that with Amber before and had been dissatisfied with the results. Instead I used a resolution system based on a character card deck. I won’t go into the details, but everyone had their own deck, with results tuned to their abilities, special weirdness cards made especially based on their personalities and some other odd result things. I’d used it before for the Crowsmantle game and for a Swashbuckling game I’d done for Armageddon. It worked pretty OK, but because the game was 95% discussion, event and description and maybe 5% combat the cards were less important. They were amusingly fun especially when certain strange cards kept coming up.
*I had everyone come up with character concepts of normal people, but with two things. First, they all had to be either orphans or adopted. Originally I’d thought to make their true fathers and heritage a subplot for the game (as I’d done in another game). However, that ended up being beside the point and pinning that down would have been too concrete so I let it drop. Second, they had to come up with a special thing for their character. Lizbette was a messenger and “knew” the city. Because of that I tried to describe the areas more fully in the game. Eventually from this I ended up making the city itself and its “state” stranger and more metaphorical. I did this in two ways. A) everyone in City of Ocean knew about all the strange stuff, but somehow it didn’t translate to the rest of the world (they figured this out eventually when they tried to tell someone in NY about a cultic ascension over the phone…they just couldn’t get what the players were saying). B) the city itself became a character (or vice versa…hard to explain). Maya made up a character who was focused on names and naming. From that I tried to make most NPCs have interesting or significant names: the old investigation group all had names that were variants on Paul (Pavel, Paolo, etc.), allies would have names that were variants on Alan (Allen, Alewine, Alain, etc.), bad guys had ones as variants on Peter, plus lots of other names were either strange or were taken from historical or literary references. Lei had a character involved with the arts. That led me to develop a plot were he had to organize a museum display for a traveling exhibition based around the Grail mythology in its various forms (think of something like the King Tut or Monet exhibits).
*By this point I’d decided that one of the concepts in the game would be about restarting reality. Unknown Armies has an idea where when the 333 archetypes are filled, then the world restarts. I decided that the Throne bad guy would be trying to do this artificially. He would be severing heads and connecting them to computer programs to program people who would follow these archetypes. At first I thought this would be a fairly literal investigation thing, but it ended up falling to the background until much later in the game. Because I was determined to let the players set the agenda, I tried to let go of ideas that sounded really cool to me, but that the players didn’t follow up on. Instead, I just shoveled more stuff on and watched to see what stuck.
*In the first session I did individual scenes with the players in which they received notes about coming to meet at the lawyers’ office. In each scene, there was a fish—Lizbette was buying one, Lei was watching kids play Go Fish and one dropped out of the sky at Maya’s feet. Quite honestly I thought it was a great image. What did it mean? At the time I didn’t know. But I put it in. My point in the game would be to add these details in—some pre-planned and some on the fly and let the game go. I would come up with explanations later. The tension between these competing explanations and what the characters did would be the theme of the story. I also had it in my head at that point that the group had already done all of this (i.e. the campaign) once, but had failed—as a result the world had broken. They wouldn’t know it but they would be replaying everything. That resulted in them having some glimpses into other paths throughout the game. For example when they arrived to get their legacy, there was a fourth person there who managed to get into a fight with them. Then, just as it got heated, the scene restarted. The three PCs remembered everything, but now there was no fourth person.
*Another detail that I had at this point was the idea of a set of serial murders called the Carpenter Killings. I wouldn’t give the players all of the details about them, but they would be some kind of message from the future or indication of the breakdown in reality. It was one of those cases where I had an idea that I would reference in passing and then if they decided to follow up on it, it would become significant—as it eventually did. That was tough to do but I think made for a very different game.
*Having three players was great but also tough. In the last year of the game, Lei (Laeoch) had to quit because his schedule was screwy. We’d had a number of blown sessions before that and it had started to hurt the campaign. With that few players, the interactions with each other and with the NPCs became really important. Story was much more vital than conflict and combat was rare. However I recommend trying games with small groups like this, especially if you can find dedicated players willing to explore the story.
AUZUMEL REPLIES:
Hmmm, as one of the players, I have to say that CoO was entirely unlike any other game I'd ever played in.
First, it's not like we knew that what was important was what we paid attention to. So, I'm a careful player and poor Lizbette was even more detail-oriented than me (tough when your character pushes you to work harder than you would normally!). So for me, I saw all these things happening and we weren't following up on 'em. It was driving me crazy. Tormenting Lizbette with things that still had to be resolved was a fairly major portion of every session, I swear. Needless to say, there was a level of nervous exhaustion that set in after a while there.
Sometimes it really bothered me when I'd try to follow up on something, get nothing worthwhile and some other character just hanging out would get a veritable banquet of information dropped on their toes--and then they'd just shrug. *sigh* After a while, I gave up on being annoyed. It was just how the game was. Nothing was direct and effort did not have a direct coorelation with results in the short term. Maybe in the long term, but definitely not on the day-to-day logs. Looking back, I see that what the attention to detail did do was drive back most of the encounters with the wierdness. Lizbette's life was a lot less messed up and strange than her comrades' lives were...but she fretted for them too.
It was a hard game too--because I'm accustomed to Edige slowing down and feeding information over and over so that everyone at the table has a few chances to get it. This wasn't like that. At all. Hell, sometimes when I'd refer back to something that happened earlier in the game, Edige would have forgotten and no one would be sure and there'd be much paging back through notes. I mean, there was a lot out there and sometimes the game felt like watching Uzimaki and trying to catch all the spirals on the screen.
There were really great NPCs in the game. I mean, fabulous. Stories as tragic as the world can manage--and I still tear up when I think of some of them. Yeager Allen, especially. Sheesh.
There was constant variety and changes in pace. You'd never know where you were going to end up in any given session. But overall, it was a story about semi-normal people trying to figure out how to get by in a very not-normal world. We didn't try to re-normalize it--we just tried to stay out of big trouble and not cause too much harm. That was the scariest thing in the game--how easy it was to cause terrible things to happen...a moment of negligence, inattention or selfishness and some poor bystander would get the worst of it.
I loved CoO. Loved it completely--even when I was gnashing my teeth in frustration. It makes me a little sad that it's not a trick that Edige can quite pull again--we really didn't catch on that it was a sly wink at PC-centrism until the very last session, when he told us straight out. Of course, the players were the least PC-centric of all Edige's players tho--LDB & I are just not accustomed to thinking of ourselves or our characters as the center of the world. When we heard the news, we literally both blurted out, 'Huh? No way!'
The card system worked fine because the game was mostly observation, social interactions, research and deduction. The battles were handled perfectly fine with the cards--especially because Maya always pulled that KickAss! card when she was intent on kicking ass. The special cards were the best part, definitely. Mystery Machine? *groan* The Immaculate Lizbette? *heh* Just funny and satisfying when the right card came up for the right situation....'You are Here' came up as we were trying to shift the city center away from the Throne Center---I mean, how lucky was that?
LIL' DEVILBIRD REPLIES:
I've been thinking about this, and I don't even know where to begin.
How fitting...
Hm. Let's see -- what were the most memorable points of the game?
1. The NPCs. Edige has a gift for creating NPCs who are actually characters, not just props. Aside from the clever (and sometimes unfortunate) names for almost every person we encountered, there were some NPCs in this game who really just stole the show in some respects. Not because they overshadowed the PCs -- Maya's attention-hogging would only permit her good friend Pan to do that -- but because they truly were unique and odd people. And I mean this about the bad guys as well as the good. There were no cookie-cutter NPCs in the City of Ocean.
Some of the more memorable ones: flamboyant Pan, Maya's best friend; Br. Peter Praetorius, a demon-possessed Inquisitor; Tad Bizzaro, who had no imagination but did possess an amazingly detailed memory and photograph-like art skills; Warner Alain, the (formerly) one-armed Olympic rifleman and cobbler who was sure we were going to get him killed; Yeager Allen, a tragic devil wrestler; Jeffrey Paolo, an enigmatic and truly creepy adversary; the Seneschal, Garzhargen and Weasel (or was it Rabbit?), and Baku Revo from the Black Tower world; the Andalusian Dog, who made an appearance and ate all our brownies; (and speaking of brownies) the impeccably dressed Isaac, who knew all kinds of ritual magic but lost his memory when he tried to talk about it, was from another world shard, and thought we were eating real brownies; Hollo Ting, the bane of Lizbette's existence, but one of those working on climbing the Merchant Archetype ladder; Robert Throne, whose divine Aphasia was so scary and thick he blew up a phone from the other end; Grace Alewine, Lizbet's stoic myrmiddon and another of those climbing the Archetype ladder; Nick Static, who wreaked havoc with magic and ate applesauce like people breath air, the Folding Man, who eventually helped rescue Grace from the cage of thorns, Castonegro, the evil Sorceror (and the relatively benign Buddha of Margate), the fallen gods... the list goes on and on. There are so many more distince characters that I remember, but have forgotten the names, now.
2. The City of Ocean itself. Whether we were in our version of City of Ocean, or the Black Tower world, or Isaac's shard -- the landscape around us was a magical entity in its own right, full of significant names, strangely reminiscent features, and a life of its own. Still, nothing compared to talking to the City on speakerphone, asking it's name, and hearing the grand litany of the eternal City (Nochet, Tanelorn, Silverbrook, etc.), and then realizing that you are one of the Seven Gods of the City.
3. The immense number of story possibilities within the game, and the responsiveness of the GM. Now that I look back at the sheer overload of information and possibilities, and the way the GM listened carefully to the way we phrased things, I can see places where he picked up on what interested us and ran with it.
As Auzumel said, we were surprised to find out how much of the game we had actually directed, but there were signs earlier on. For example, when we were doing something potentially important -- such as Maya using the Name of Castronegro's demon against it and punching it to get away; saving the calf from the slaughterhouse; or using Lizbet's "You Are Here" knack to find someone -- Edige sometimes made us repeat the description of our action. If Lizbet said, "I'm going to try to find Lei using my knack," the result would be much weaker and less immediate than if Lizbet said, "I AM going to find Lei, using my knack." It was all in the wording.
4. The way our characters' "knacks" (Names, navigating the City, aesthetic senses) were incorporated into the game early-on and became key aspects of both the characters and the campaign. Maya could "see" True Names -- when she looked at the Name of any of her companion heirs, the Name was much too big to see, as if she were trying to read a huge billboard with her face pressed against the sign. And if the Name was that big, and we all seemed to share it, it had to be the Name of the City, from Maya's perspective. (Then again, everything was the City, from the perspective of Maya, Lei and Lizbet.)
5. When Laeoch left the game, his character Lei fell into the background of the story, but was still around. Lei had always been connected to the Carpenter killings, which seemed to be progressing backward in time (getting sloppier instead of more skilled, etc.), and there came a point at which we discovered that Lei had gone into the House of Renunciation the first time we had done this, in order to send us the message that became warped and garbled and manifested as the killings. We were shown a vision of death and had a chance to stop it, thereby changing the world again. I loved the fact that Lei wasn't just dropped from the story. He still had a purpose, and when his character did "reboot" and drop from the Seven God heirs, it was because we had finally gotten the message and changed the path away from the previous trainwreck.
6. As Auzumel said, the sheer amount of information was bewildering, tantalizing, frustrating, and unlike anything I'd ever seen in a game. We kept notes as best as we could -- I went through two notebooks, myself -- but I was always discovering I had missed noting an incident, or a connection I should've made, or a detail that changed my perception of the event/person/whatever. And like Auz said, even Edige forgot the djinn in the bottle we found at the flea market, so it wasn't just the players. I think I literally felt lost in the game for the majority of the campaign -- maybe until the last two episodes -- but it still managed to be fun.
7. Also as Auz said, the card system worked really well for this game. The responsibility was on the player to interpret the outcome of the draw -- so if you drew a crappy result, you could still try to make the outcome less painful or embarrassing. Which we often forgot. The luck of the cards was incredible, too -- those special cards kept coming up at just the right moment. I still laugh when I think of Lei's uber-weirdness-magnet Mystery Machine card.
And now for some musings and unanswered questions, if the GM is so inclined...
8. We ate a god and a sacrifical calf, and had halos and a purple feathered-serpent aura after that. I always wondered what would've happened if we had eaten more of the gods and angels that had fallen to earth after we shook them out of heaven.
9. Did we ever find the Carpenter victim that was connected to the disappearance of Maya's house? Who was it? I don't remember doing so, and if we didn't, why not?
10. Was Darren Peters set up to be a bad guy? Or was he a red herring?
11. Who really killed Maria Legatti? She was found in a ditch, wasn't she? I remember someone from the Church had come looking for her and indicated Lei was under suspicion for murder...
12. Who kidnapped Lei, and why couldn't he say 3, 6, or 9 after they drove the cut nail into his head?
EDIGE23 NOTES:
I don't think I ever really answered those questions for her.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Matrix Arguments
I may have talked about some of this before, but I'd like to go back to the idea of Matrix Arguments briefly. I mentioned some games that radically reshaped my thinking about games (and I have another post on that eventually). One of these games was more of a concept than a formal game. For a few years I managed a local game con in one form or another. Usually we had a designer named Chris Engle volunteer and run things. I'm not sure how people knew him, but his games were always a hit. I'd see him at other conventions as well. I know Dusty played with Chris Engle and maybe there's some connection on that end. In any case, I never played those, but eventually a sketch version of some of the rules came into my hands. His system, called a Matrix Game, builds around the idea that the shared narrative of the rpg actually has the form of a series of arguments-- I state that X is going to happen, then show how the system supports that argument, the GM rules, dice are rolled and the situation advances. He has a number of games books that elaborate these ideas and there's more to it, but I'll talk about what I came away with from this.
I began by adapting some of those ideas for a Third Continent game which I knew would focus on building, the Pillar of Fire campaign I mentioned earlier. The group would be the fragments of a mercenary company, trying to rebuild and eventually take revenge on the people who sold them down the river (a classic theme I reused in my Black Company/Planescape game). We used Rolemaster at the time, which had many contradictory systems for handling large scale task resolution. So I decided to use elements of the Matrix system to handle the large scale plots and plans. It looked essentially something like this.
Objective: Stated goal for what the characters want to achieve long term
Method: The basic plan the characters want to undertake to do achieve this
Three Supporting Statements: Three things the group can bring to bear to actually carry that out.
As a GM I'd have them put those together, then I'd rate the relative strength of those support statements, take into consideration the difficulty of the task involved and have them make a roll. Based on that I'd determine success or failure, quality, time involved and so on.
As an example
Objective: We want recruit like-minded converts to our cause in the city
Method: Establishing a fraternal organization that covers our true purposes but draws in people to be screened.
Support #1: Balamon has extraordinarily strong social skills plus magics to supplement this
Support #2: We have a goodly supply of money to pour into the project
Support #3: We'll craft a particularly appealing set of precepts that will play on peoples egos, since the characters have a strong religious background we have experience in proselytizing.
Depending on the area, that might be more or less difficult. The choice of supporting statements comes into play in that, as a GM, I know who the lead person is, I know that there's a made up “code” they've come up with that I might use later on. So generally, I consider the strength, if it fits with what's been going on, and if I think they've actually put enough time and effort (in game) into a project to get it off the ground.
That's a fairly broad-scale example. Matrix arguments can also be used on a smaller scale. They're not as formal in that case and can serve an additional purpose for a player. Sometimes a player doesn't want to play out a particular scene or event at the table, but they still want to accomplish something. Or alternately, their character possesses skills that they don't feel they can adequately narrate at the table. I recall the old Legend of the Five Rings Gamemaster's Book had a nice section on this last point. Supposing you have two people playing Courtiers, both with equal skills. Let's say that one player's more comfortable with the back and forth banter at the table, while another gets tongue-tied when put on the spot. Part of the GM's obligation should be to recognize those divisions and help level the playing field. You shouldn't necessarily penalize the articulate player, but you should give the less articulate player another means to demonstrate that they have equal social skills-- as measured by the game system. In a case like this you can use a Martix argument.
Objective: I want to ingratiate myself with the Daimyo of the Winter Court
Method: I'll do this by aiding and befriending those persons who he seems to have faith in
Support #1: I have good skills in Human Perception and Court Lore-- allowing me to identify those people
Support #2: I have an existing network of contacts I can use to find out what these people need and to possibly obtain those things
Support #3: I have strong oratory skills, which I'll use to praise those people discreetly and gain their trust.
Again, the level of concrete detail can vary from argument to argument. The more specific the supporting statements, the more I generally give the benefit of the doubt. The trick, as a GM, is that I want to be convinced of the validity of these things. Examples of other small scale things which people might use a Matrix argument for: seduction, setting up an information network, building something, writing a book, creating a business, researching a field in depth, gossip mongering, making a reputation, and so on.
So to give a final example, taken at least a little bit from a conversation I'm having with Will in the Changeling game.
Objective: I want to start a club on campus
Now let me stop there and note that the objective describes the end reality a character is working towards. Another version of that objective might look like this: I want to gain a social position on campus by starting and leading a club. Keep in mind how that stated objective shapes what follows.
Method: Find a niche that no one has exploited
Support #1: I know Kay Ballentine, plus a few other older students on campus who have been here for some time. I can get from them what might be an area no one else has come up with.
Support #2: My Fairest skills have a general social application, but also the lives of the Court is always about finding the next hot thing. I can apply that here.
Support #3: I've been a leader before, and that experience should show me the best way to get both student and administration support.
That's just an example off the top of my head, and probably not a great one. These kinds of arguments can be useful for players who look at the mass of information and NPCs in a game and aren't sure where to start. Stating your objective up front and then negotiating with the GM provides a short-hand that allows you to actually use your character's skills at the same time as it doesn't reduce everything to “make a roll.”
I began by adapting some of those ideas for a Third Continent game which I knew would focus on building, the Pillar of Fire campaign I mentioned earlier. The group would be the fragments of a mercenary company, trying to rebuild and eventually take revenge on the people who sold them down the river (a classic theme I reused in my Black Company/Planescape game). We used Rolemaster at the time, which had many contradictory systems for handling large scale task resolution. So I decided to use elements of the Matrix system to handle the large scale plots and plans. It looked essentially something like this.
Objective: Stated goal for what the characters want to achieve long term
Method: The basic plan the characters want to undertake to do achieve this
Three Supporting Statements: Three things the group can bring to bear to actually carry that out.
As a GM I'd have them put those together, then I'd rate the relative strength of those support statements, take into consideration the difficulty of the task involved and have them make a roll. Based on that I'd determine success or failure, quality, time involved and so on.
As an example
Objective: We want recruit like-minded converts to our cause in the city
Method: Establishing a fraternal organization that covers our true purposes but draws in people to be screened.
Support #1: Balamon has extraordinarily strong social skills plus magics to supplement this
Support #2: We have a goodly supply of money to pour into the project
Support #3: We'll craft a particularly appealing set of precepts that will play on peoples egos, since the characters have a strong religious background we have experience in proselytizing.
Depending on the area, that might be more or less difficult. The choice of supporting statements comes into play in that, as a GM, I know who the lead person is, I know that there's a made up “code” they've come up with that I might use later on. So generally, I consider the strength, if it fits with what's been going on, and if I think they've actually put enough time and effort (in game) into a project to get it off the ground.
That's a fairly broad-scale example. Matrix arguments can also be used on a smaller scale. They're not as formal in that case and can serve an additional purpose for a player. Sometimes a player doesn't want to play out a particular scene or event at the table, but they still want to accomplish something. Or alternately, their character possesses skills that they don't feel they can adequately narrate at the table. I recall the old Legend of the Five Rings Gamemaster's Book had a nice section on this last point. Supposing you have two people playing Courtiers, both with equal skills. Let's say that one player's more comfortable with the back and forth banter at the table, while another gets tongue-tied when put on the spot. Part of the GM's obligation should be to recognize those divisions and help level the playing field. You shouldn't necessarily penalize the articulate player, but you should give the less articulate player another means to demonstrate that they have equal social skills-- as measured by the game system. In a case like this you can use a Martix argument.
Objective: I want to ingratiate myself with the Daimyo of the Winter Court
Method: I'll do this by aiding and befriending those persons who he seems to have faith in
Support #1: I have good skills in Human Perception and Court Lore-- allowing me to identify those people
Support #2: I have an existing network of contacts I can use to find out what these people need and to possibly obtain those things
Support #3: I have strong oratory skills, which I'll use to praise those people discreetly and gain their trust.
Again, the level of concrete detail can vary from argument to argument. The more specific the supporting statements, the more I generally give the benefit of the doubt. The trick, as a GM, is that I want to be convinced of the validity of these things. Examples of other small scale things which people might use a Matrix argument for: seduction, setting up an information network, building something, writing a book, creating a business, researching a field in depth, gossip mongering, making a reputation, and so on.
So to give a final example, taken at least a little bit from a conversation I'm having with Will in the Changeling game.
Objective: I want to start a club on campus
Now let me stop there and note that the objective describes the end reality a character is working towards. Another version of that objective might look like this: I want to gain a social position on campus by starting and leading a club. Keep in mind how that stated objective shapes what follows.
Method: Find a niche that no one has exploited
Support #1: I know Kay Ballentine, plus a few other older students on campus who have been here for some time. I can get from them what might be an area no one else has come up with.
Support #2: My Fairest skills have a general social application, but also the lives of the Court is always about finding the next hot thing. I can apply that here.
Support #3: I've been a leader before, and that experience should show me the best way to get both student and administration support.
That's just an example off the top of my head, and probably not a great one. These kinds of arguments can be useful for players who look at the mass of information and NPCs in a game and aren't sure where to start. Stating your objective up front and then negotiating with the GM provides a short-hand that allows you to actually use your character's skills at the same time as it doesn't reduce everything to “make a roll.”
Sunday, April 5, 2009
4/5/09
Had one of those days yesterday-- where the weather change and allergies combine together for fantastic effect. We had a good game the nights before-- both Changeling and Libri Vidicos. I'll write that up soon enough. Unfortunately we had Shari out sick for Friday's game which was a big sequence wrapping up some big threads. I'll have to try to get a good summary of the happenings together.
But as for yesterday, Mark's trying to start a monthly Saturday open board games session-- a catch as catch can for when he doesn't have other events scheduled. He and I have been playing board games together fairly regularly for going on five years now every Tuesday night, and he's been more than generous to me over the years so I wanted to head up to support this endeavor. Plus, as you probably know, I love's me some board games.
Well, I remembered why I don't usually care for open board gaming. Having that right play group is nearly as important in board games as it is in rpgs. There's less time involved, but boy do you get a chance to see the worst in people in a compressed environment. We had six people-- Mark, my friend Matt and his wife Amy and two new guys-- a nice fellow named Brian and another guy who I'll simply call Jackass, since I couldn't even bother to remember his actual name. He managed to combine some of my favorite traits in one voluminous and sweating package:
1. No control of his indoor voice
2. Constantly knocking shit around
3. Overrolling-- shaking the dice cup until my ears bleed
4. Reaching over and touching other people's stuff
5. Restating the rules that other people already know
6. Wet-voiced
7. Listening to music while playing
8. Giggling at other people's misfortunes at every opportunity
9. And an absolutely poor loser...
This last one is what killed it for me. We decided to play the Alhambra Dice Game. I quite enjoy it and it was the only game I'd brought that supported six players. I should have brought Union Pacific, but live and learn. I explained the rules carefully and tried to stress several times that you needed to focus and that it was a dice game-- you could get fairly behind in it, especially on your first play of it. It is easy to pick up but easy to miss some things early and get screwed later on-- especially with six players. We didn't have a runaway leader problem, in that we had nearly everyone actually competing seriously for the lead.
Except, of course, Jackass who by the second round started whining and complaining. Complaining and stomping his feet about bad rolls, sulking that his plays didn't go off, bitching that other people were 'attacking' him when they were just making strategic choices since there's little or no direct attacking in the game, and of course by the last two rounds screaming that he'd never win.
IF YOU'RE LOSING A GAME. DO IT GRACIOUSLY. ENJOY THE PLAY. LET EVERYONE HAVE SOME FUN AT HOW BADLY YOU'VE MANAGED TO DO. DON'T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. DON'T MAKE EVERYONE ELSE FEEL BAD.
Play to win, but be good in losing.
Ugh. I've been spoiled for some long by playing with good people. As I drove home I realized I'd been gritting my teeth for the last hour-- and had a headache that took until today(combined with the aforementioned allergies and weather) to go away.
On the plus side, the Brian guy we played with was quite nice. I liked him.
But as for yesterday, Mark's trying to start a monthly Saturday open board games session-- a catch as catch can for when he doesn't have other events scheduled. He and I have been playing board games together fairly regularly for going on five years now every Tuesday night, and he's been more than generous to me over the years so I wanted to head up to support this endeavor. Plus, as you probably know, I love's me some board games.
Well, I remembered why I don't usually care for open board gaming. Having that right play group is nearly as important in board games as it is in rpgs. There's less time involved, but boy do you get a chance to see the worst in people in a compressed environment. We had six people-- Mark, my friend Matt and his wife Amy and two new guys-- a nice fellow named Brian and another guy who I'll simply call Jackass, since I couldn't even bother to remember his actual name. He managed to combine some of my favorite traits in one voluminous and sweating package:
1. No control of his indoor voice
2. Constantly knocking shit around
3. Overrolling-- shaking the dice cup until my ears bleed
4. Reaching over and touching other people's stuff
5. Restating the rules that other people already know
6. Wet-voiced
7. Listening to music while playing
8. Giggling at other people's misfortunes at every opportunity
9. And an absolutely poor loser...
This last one is what killed it for me. We decided to play the Alhambra Dice Game. I quite enjoy it and it was the only game I'd brought that supported six players. I should have brought Union Pacific, but live and learn. I explained the rules carefully and tried to stress several times that you needed to focus and that it was a dice game-- you could get fairly behind in it, especially on your first play of it. It is easy to pick up but easy to miss some things early and get screwed later on-- especially with six players. We didn't have a runaway leader problem, in that we had nearly everyone actually competing seriously for the lead.
Except, of course, Jackass who by the second round started whining and complaining. Complaining and stomping his feet about bad rolls, sulking that his plays didn't go off, bitching that other people were 'attacking' him when they were just making strategic choices since there's little or no direct attacking in the game, and of course by the last two rounds screaming that he'd never win.
IF YOU'RE LOSING A GAME. DO IT GRACIOUSLY. ENJOY THE PLAY. LET EVERYONE HAVE SOME FUN AT HOW BADLY YOU'VE MANAGED TO DO. DON'T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. DON'T MAKE EVERYONE ELSE FEEL BAD.
Play to win, but be good in losing.
Ugh. I've been spoiled for some long by playing with good people. As I drove home I realized I'd been gritting my teeth for the last hour-- and had a headache that took until today(combined with the aforementioned allergies and weather) to go away.
On the plus side, the Brian guy we played with was quite nice. I liked him.
Friday, April 3, 2009
4/3/09
First, best wishes to Will aka Cruelbutterfly on his birthday today. He gets older but he's still the youngest one in the group.
Another linkdump post--
Robin Laws has an interesting post about going to guest lecture for a course on RPG and Narratives.
Ken Hite's revising the bibliography for GURPs Horror and is looking for suggestions.
Both Laws and Hite have written articles for a series of books from MIT Press which cover gaming and narrative. There's a thread with much of the stuff available online if you've got some time. In particular you can find Hite's article on Narrative Tension and Call of Cthulhu here. I wish I could have done a book like this at ND Press.
Wired catches up on German-style board games about five years too late.
The Last Express was a computer game a decade ahead of its time. Someone pieced together the cinematics here.
The Free RPG Blog, full of interesting ideas.
A fan made enormous comic mash up of all the ten Doctors.
Another linkdump post--
Robin Laws has an interesting post about going to guest lecture for a course on RPG and Narratives.
Ken Hite's revising the bibliography for GURPs Horror and is looking for suggestions.
Both Laws and Hite have written articles for a series of books from MIT Press which cover gaming and narrative. There's a thread with much of the stuff available online if you've got some time. In particular you can find Hite's article on Narrative Tension and Call of Cthulhu here. I wish I could have done a book like this at ND Press.
Wired catches up on German-style board games about five years too late.
The Last Express was a computer game a decade ahead of its time. Someone pieced together the cinematics here.
The Free RPG Blog, full of interesting ideas.
A fan made enormous comic mash up of all the ten Doctors.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
4/2/09
So a little more thought and detail about the system I was talking about yesterday. This would be purely/primarily a combat mechanical system for a board/minis game simulating arena fighting. Possibly for adventurers fighting one another for treasure in a dungeon, but that might be something more advanced-- where you deal with environments and obstacles. Generally, as I'm viewing it we have a small group of players or one-on-one gaming without a referee.
Initially players choose from a pregenerated set of characters to play. This would cover the classic fantasy archetypes. They'd be balanced among one another. A later module for the rules would add in mechanics for modifying these characters or creating new ones from scratch (obviously a point based system would be needed there). I'll come back to some ideas on that later (special cards for characters).
So characters would have a set of stats:
*Physique PH-- represented as a bonus, ranging from +1 to +3 or so. This would add to damage dealt by physical weapons. It would also be used for grapple contests. Also for stun checks.
*Skill SK-- again represented as a bonus. This would be the bonus for 'to hit' tests.
*Agility AG-- again bonus. This would be used for reflex tests and defense tests.
Will WL-- again bonus. This would be used for resisting magic and for magical damage.
*Move MV-- the number of spaces a character can move on a round.
*Wounds WD-- how much damage a character can take in the course of the game
Equipment would be:
Armor-- absolute value reducing damage from an attack. Higher value armor reduces MV and AG.
Weapons-- have type, damage bonus, and possibly attack bonus (for accuracy). Might have a special ability. If ranged, has penalty for shots above a certain distance.
Characters also have one special constant ability-- like being able to keep a card when they flush their hand. This would be a simple power.
Finally, characters would also have a set of five abilities-- with higher difficulty levels. The five levels would be:
Pair
Three of a Kind
Small Straight
Full House
Four of a Kind
The actual abilities at each of those levels would vary from character to character.
Actual Play-- and I'm putting in some numbers here mostly as placeholders. I'll have to run some of the probabilities to see what works.
Each player begins with their own deck of standard playing cards-- Joker removed, I'm going to assume. Their figures start at either end of the battlefield-- or as otherwise dictated by the scenario. There might be some mechanic for set up and position.
Players draw the top card of their shuffled deck. Suit cards have their standard printed value, Aces count as 1, and Face cards count as 11. I might have the terms here incorrectly. Players add their Agility to this number. In the case of ties, Black trumps (i.e. wins). That player takes the first action and then play will alternate between the two sides. If the result remains a tie, pull again.
Note: That's going to be a standard mechanic throughout-- with contests pulled like this and either Red or Black trumping depending on the test involved.
Players discard cards drawn for this initiative test-- each player has their own draw and discard pile. The discards should be played face up. Each when specified by the rules of an action or ability, both decks cannot be examined by either player during the game.
Next each player draws a hand of five cards.
Beginning with the starting player, each in turn takes an action.
Move-- discard any card and move up to your Move in squares.
Assess-- discard and redraw your hand. I'm debating whether or not to allow a character to keep one card or have that as an ability track for characters.
Focus-- set aside a card. You may use this card at any point in the future. If you Assess, this card is not discarded, but remains. Essentially, this allows players to take an action to temporarily raise their hand limit until the spend that card. When you set a card aside for Focus, you draw a card to bring your hand back up to five. Should there be a limit on the focus pool size?
Attack-- for attacks, you have to be within range. Ranged attacks have a penalty if the target is too far away. Both players select a card from their deck and then reveal simultaneously. The standard number values apply-- with one exception. If one player plays a Face card and the other plays an Ace then the Ace has a value of 13. The attacker adds his Skill to his card's value (plus any weapon bonus) and the defender adds his Agility to his card's value. Compare the results--
If the attacker's total is higher, then the attack hits-- move to damage resolution.
If the defender's total is higher, then the attack misses.
If there is a tie, then Red Trumps. If both players tied and played the same color, then if both cards are Red the attack hits and if both cards are Black the attack misses.
Resolving Damage-- If the attack hits, the Attacker pulls a card from the top of his deck, sight unseen. To that value, he adds his Physique bonus (if a physical weapon) or Will bonus (if a magical spell) plus any damage bonus for the weapon or attack. He also adds the difference between the final results of the initial combat pull [note: should this be a standard element to reward good play or should it be for a special ability]. The defender subtracts his armor value from this damage total and then subtracts the remaining amount from the character's wounds. If a character goes to zero or less, that character is KO'd.
I'm thinking that if a player draws an Ace for the random damage pull that could be a critical hit of some kind.
Move and Attack-- a character may move and attack on the same action by playing a Face Card as their Move card first, and then immediately making an attack.
Withdrawal-- if a character is engaged in melee, they may attempt to withdraw and move away. Players draw and add their AG to the value. Black trumps in ties, other ties leave the character stuck in melee. If successful, the character may make a full move away by spending a card.
NOTE: In all cases when a character spends a card for an action from his hand, he redraws immediately back up to five cards.
Defend-- I'm wondering if there needs to be a defend action—like an all out defense or perhaps a moving defense-- extra card spent to move and gain a bonus to defense (maybe having to spend a face card).
Reshuffle-- characters reshuffles immediately if they run out of cards. Players may reshuffle early by discarding an Ace and then shuffling their discards into their draw deck. The Ace discarded is not shuffled back in but starts the new discard pile.
Those are the basics, and by that I mean the skeletal structure I'm thinking of. Have to consider:
*modifiers for obstacles and cover.
*a critical hit system
*what standard character abilities are going to look like
*what the special abilities are going to be like. How are they revealed-- there's a question of information here-- if they're standard attacks, opponents will see the person playing multiple cards and will know something's coming. Have to figure around that circumstance.
*armor and weapons-- should be standard for the pregen characters-- all characters should have some kind of ranged attack?
*combat statuses-- from abilities and critical hits.
*much later, considerations about character customization and purchase.
Initially players choose from a pregenerated set of characters to play. This would cover the classic fantasy archetypes. They'd be balanced among one another. A later module for the rules would add in mechanics for modifying these characters or creating new ones from scratch (obviously a point based system would be needed there). I'll come back to some ideas on that later (special cards for characters).
So characters would have a set of stats:
*Physique PH-- represented as a bonus, ranging from +1 to +3 or so. This would add to damage dealt by physical weapons. It would also be used for grapple contests. Also for stun checks.
*Skill SK-- again represented as a bonus. This would be the bonus for 'to hit' tests.
*Agility AG-- again bonus. This would be used for reflex tests and defense tests.
Will WL-- again bonus. This would be used for resisting magic and for magical damage.
*Move MV-- the number of spaces a character can move on a round.
*Wounds WD-- how much damage a character can take in the course of the game
Equipment would be:
Armor-- absolute value reducing damage from an attack. Higher value armor reduces MV and AG.
Weapons-- have type, damage bonus, and possibly attack bonus (for accuracy). Might have a special ability. If ranged, has penalty for shots above a certain distance.
Characters also have one special constant ability-- like being able to keep a card when they flush their hand. This would be a simple power.
Finally, characters would also have a set of five abilities-- with higher difficulty levels. The five levels would be:
Pair
Three of a Kind
Small Straight
Full House
Four of a Kind
The actual abilities at each of those levels would vary from character to character.
Actual Play-- and I'm putting in some numbers here mostly as placeholders. I'll have to run some of the probabilities to see what works.
Each player begins with their own deck of standard playing cards-- Joker removed, I'm going to assume. Their figures start at either end of the battlefield-- or as otherwise dictated by the scenario. There might be some mechanic for set up and position.
Players draw the top card of their shuffled deck. Suit cards have their standard printed value, Aces count as 1, and Face cards count as 11. I might have the terms here incorrectly. Players add their Agility to this number. In the case of ties, Black trumps (i.e. wins). That player takes the first action and then play will alternate between the two sides. If the result remains a tie, pull again.
Note: That's going to be a standard mechanic throughout-- with contests pulled like this and either Red or Black trumping depending on the test involved.
Players discard cards drawn for this initiative test-- each player has their own draw and discard pile. The discards should be played face up. Each when specified by the rules of an action or ability, both decks cannot be examined by either player during the game.
Next each player draws a hand of five cards.
Beginning with the starting player, each in turn takes an action.
Move-- discard any card and move up to your Move in squares.
Assess-- discard and redraw your hand. I'm debating whether or not to allow a character to keep one card or have that as an ability track for characters.
Focus-- set aside a card. You may use this card at any point in the future. If you Assess, this card is not discarded, but remains. Essentially, this allows players to take an action to temporarily raise their hand limit until the spend that card. When you set a card aside for Focus, you draw a card to bring your hand back up to five. Should there be a limit on the focus pool size?
Attack-- for attacks, you have to be within range. Ranged attacks have a penalty if the target is too far away. Both players select a card from their deck and then reveal simultaneously. The standard number values apply-- with one exception. If one player plays a Face card and the other plays an Ace then the Ace has a value of 13. The attacker adds his Skill to his card's value (plus any weapon bonus) and the defender adds his Agility to his card's value. Compare the results--
If the attacker's total is higher, then the attack hits-- move to damage resolution.
If the defender's total is higher, then the attack misses.
If there is a tie, then Red Trumps. If both players tied and played the same color, then if both cards are Red the attack hits and if both cards are Black the attack misses.
Resolving Damage-- If the attack hits, the Attacker pulls a card from the top of his deck, sight unseen. To that value, he adds his Physique bonus (if a physical weapon) or Will bonus (if a magical spell) plus any damage bonus for the weapon or attack. He also adds the difference between the final results of the initial combat pull [note: should this be a standard element to reward good play or should it be for a special ability]. The defender subtracts his armor value from this damage total and then subtracts the remaining amount from the character's wounds. If a character goes to zero or less, that character is KO'd.
I'm thinking that if a player draws an Ace for the random damage pull that could be a critical hit of some kind.
Move and Attack-- a character may move and attack on the same action by playing a Face Card as their Move card first, and then immediately making an attack.
Withdrawal-- if a character is engaged in melee, they may attempt to withdraw and move away. Players draw and add their AG to the value. Black trumps in ties, other ties leave the character stuck in melee. If successful, the character may make a full move away by spending a card.
NOTE: In all cases when a character spends a card for an action from his hand, he redraws immediately back up to five cards.
Defend-- I'm wondering if there needs to be a defend action—like an all out defense or perhaps a moving defense-- extra card spent to move and gain a bonus to defense (maybe having to spend a face card).
Reshuffle-- characters reshuffles immediately if they run out of cards. Players may reshuffle early by discarding an Ace and then shuffling their discards into their draw deck. The Ace discarded is not shuffled back in but starts the new discard pile.
Those are the basics, and by that I mean the skeletal structure I'm thinking of. Have to consider:
*modifiers for obstacles and cover.
*a critical hit system
*what standard character abilities are going to look like
*what the special abilities are going to be like. How are they revealed-- there's a question of information here-- if they're standard attacks, opponents will see the person playing multiple cards and will know something's coming. Have to figure around that circumstance.
*armor and weapons-- should be standard for the pregen characters-- all characters should have some kind of ranged attack?
*combat statuses-- from abilities and critical hits.
*much later, considerations about character customization and purchase.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
4/1/09
April 1st, so of course the internet is split between April Fool's Day jokes and people ranting about how much they hate April Fool's Day jokes on the internet. There is no middle ground-- choose the form of your destructor.
Last night we played a strange board game called Phoenicia. I'd traded an old issue of Strategy & Tactics for the game which had decent scores on Boardgamegeek (a hair short of a 7). The game itself has decent components--plastic pieces rather than the typical wooden ones you see in most games. The author, Tom Lehman, wrote a couple of other games I sort of liked To Court the King and Race for the Galaxy. The rules, however, deliberately obfuscate the game. I ended up finding a rewritten set on BGG and printing those out.
We had our first play-through last night with three players-- the game can support up to five. That's a strange spot for games we've found out. If a game can take five+ players and you play with three you often end up with some imbalances-- essentially the two stronger players wait for the weaker player to make a mistake. Whoever can take advantage of that can often gain a significant edge. We had that effect last night, but the problems we saw in the game went past that.
Phoenicia intends itself to be a light civ building game-- with development of cultural advancements in order to gain both victory points and production. The first problem arose as I went through the rules. The game has several clever mechanics but they don't make a whole lot of sense in the larger context of play. It also has a couple of 'exceptions' where an action you can take is handled one way in one phase and in a related but slightly different way in another. That caused confusion. As well it handles money oddly-- imposing tight storage restrictions combined with two forms of cash. That's important as there's a strong auction element to the game.
So we had somewhat confusing rules (even after being rewritten for clarity), problematic mechanics and our first time playing. Within the first few turns we saw that one player (me!) had leveraged himself into a position that the other players would have a hard time knocking him from. The game supports the runaway leader strongly-- good choices are usually good on all fronts-- at least that's the way it looks at first blush. If you can get ahead in money you can run the auctions and deny other players cards they need to get back into the game. As Mark put it-- a few plays and the game would end up being based on luck--since we'd know the obvious good choices it would depend on when certain cards came up. It also reminded me of the Alhambra Dice Game, which I really like, but crushes newcomers when playing against people who have a sense of the game as a whole. Until you've played that game a couple of times you can't really see the importance of particular choices. That's true in all games, but some absolutely require players not to screw up their choices or else find themselves sitting in dead last.
I think our overall impression of Phoenicia was negative-- but we'll play it at least one more time to see if having a better sense of the game will make a difference. I'll also go back and review the rules and the comments on BGG to see if I'm missing some major part of the game.
*****
On a related note, regarding board game mechanics-- I'm thinking about the necessary structures for a particular kind of board/minis game. This would be a skirmish battle, eventually with possibly several figures per side, but for the moment, imagining two figures, one per player. I've played a number of "arena" games-- old Melee and Wizard, Arena of Death, and Gladiator; some modern mini games support this kind of conflict-- the Shadowrun large scale figure game IIRC.
So I'm trying to imagine what the key factors in these kinds of games are and here's what I've come up with:
-Customizable Characters
-Balance of Tactical Choices
-Isn't over with one good hit
Now assuming that we want a game which can be played in less than an hour, I've been trying to think of some mechanics that handle that while a) being simple and b) not simply being a case of the person who rolls better wins. So any system has to have easy to manage tactical decisions. I also want something which stands out from other like systems.
I had a couple of related ideas--
The first would be some kind of dice pool, moving between attack and defense. You've have the ability to wear the opponent's pool down. You'd also have the ability to float some rolls between rounds. My only problem with that is if you scale the game up, with players controlling several figures. Then suddenly you have to manage multiple pools-- unless, of course, the pool is shared between figures on a side.
My other idea, and the one I'm leaning towards is something based around a standard deck of playing cards. Each player gets a deck. They'd start with a hand limit and draw to that. Actions would be rated by the cards played-- so a move action could move you up to the value on the card's face. Maybe you could move and attack, but you'd have to play a face card for your movement. Attacks would be compared against defense cards, with a trumping mechanic for suits or for colors (red trumps black on attacks).
The other part of this would be taking actions to focus to increase your hand size, to flush cards out of your deck, to cycle and redraw, etc. So there'd be a strategic element to hand management. You'd also be redrawing fairly consistently in order to keep your hand at a minimum size. Players would alternate playing cards/actions.
The other thing would be that, assuming you have say eight different character archetypes, each character would have a set of special moves. You could only trigger these moves by playing a special set of cards: a pair, a three of a kind, etc. The harder to put that together, the more impressive the effect. Everyone would have five "moves" (with like requirements) but what happens at each level would vary between characters. Individual characters would also vary based on weapons, armor, stats, HP-- nothing too complicated, but enough to create some difference. I'd use the idea of the shared pool for scaling up the number of figures each player controls.
Ideally this would be something that would only require 4-6 pages of rules, plus character templates. Still in the gestation stage, but I think there's something interesting there.
Last night we played a strange board game called Phoenicia. I'd traded an old issue of Strategy & Tactics for the game which had decent scores on Boardgamegeek (a hair short of a 7). The game itself has decent components--plastic pieces rather than the typical wooden ones you see in most games. The author, Tom Lehman, wrote a couple of other games I sort of liked To Court the King and Race for the Galaxy. The rules, however, deliberately obfuscate the game. I ended up finding a rewritten set on BGG and printing those out.
We had our first play-through last night with three players-- the game can support up to five. That's a strange spot for games we've found out. If a game can take five+ players and you play with three you often end up with some imbalances-- essentially the two stronger players wait for the weaker player to make a mistake. Whoever can take advantage of that can often gain a significant edge. We had that effect last night, but the problems we saw in the game went past that.
Phoenicia intends itself to be a light civ building game-- with development of cultural advancements in order to gain both victory points and production. The first problem arose as I went through the rules. The game has several clever mechanics but they don't make a whole lot of sense in the larger context of play. It also has a couple of 'exceptions' where an action you can take is handled one way in one phase and in a related but slightly different way in another. That caused confusion. As well it handles money oddly-- imposing tight storage restrictions combined with two forms of cash. That's important as there's a strong auction element to the game.
So we had somewhat confusing rules (even after being rewritten for clarity), problematic mechanics and our first time playing. Within the first few turns we saw that one player (me!) had leveraged himself into a position that the other players would have a hard time knocking him from. The game supports the runaway leader strongly-- good choices are usually good on all fronts-- at least that's the way it looks at first blush. If you can get ahead in money you can run the auctions and deny other players cards they need to get back into the game. As Mark put it-- a few plays and the game would end up being based on luck--since we'd know the obvious good choices it would depend on when certain cards came up. It also reminded me of the Alhambra Dice Game, which I really like, but crushes newcomers when playing against people who have a sense of the game as a whole. Until you've played that game a couple of times you can't really see the importance of particular choices. That's true in all games, but some absolutely require players not to screw up their choices or else find themselves sitting in dead last.
I think our overall impression of Phoenicia was negative-- but we'll play it at least one more time to see if having a better sense of the game will make a difference. I'll also go back and review the rules and the comments on BGG to see if I'm missing some major part of the game.
*****
On a related note, regarding board game mechanics-- I'm thinking about the necessary structures for a particular kind of board/minis game. This would be a skirmish battle, eventually with possibly several figures per side, but for the moment, imagining two figures, one per player. I've played a number of "arena" games-- old Melee and Wizard, Arena of Death, and Gladiator; some modern mini games support this kind of conflict-- the Shadowrun large scale figure game IIRC.
So I'm trying to imagine what the key factors in these kinds of games are and here's what I've come up with:
-Customizable Characters
-Balance of Tactical Choices
-Isn't over with one good hit
Now assuming that we want a game which can be played in less than an hour, I've been trying to think of some mechanics that handle that while a) being simple and b) not simply being a case of the person who rolls better wins. So any system has to have easy to manage tactical decisions. I also want something which stands out from other like systems.
I had a couple of related ideas--
The first would be some kind of dice pool, moving between attack and defense. You've have the ability to wear the opponent's pool down. You'd also have the ability to float some rolls between rounds. My only problem with that is if you scale the game up, with players controlling several figures. Then suddenly you have to manage multiple pools-- unless, of course, the pool is shared between figures on a side.
My other idea, and the one I'm leaning towards is something based around a standard deck of playing cards. Each player gets a deck. They'd start with a hand limit and draw to that. Actions would be rated by the cards played-- so a move action could move you up to the value on the card's face. Maybe you could move and attack, but you'd have to play a face card for your movement. Attacks would be compared against defense cards, with a trumping mechanic for suits or for colors (red trumps black on attacks).
The other part of this would be taking actions to focus to increase your hand size, to flush cards out of your deck, to cycle and redraw, etc. So there'd be a strategic element to hand management. You'd also be redrawing fairly consistently in order to keep your hand at a minimum size. Players would alternate playing cards/actions.
The other thing would be that, assuming you have say eight different character archetypes, each character would have a set of special moves. You could only trigger these moves by playing a special set of cards: a pair, a three of a kind, etc. The harder to put that together, the more impressive the effect. Everyone would have five "moves" (with like requirements) but what happens at each level would vary between characters. Individual characters would also vary based on weapons, armor, stats, HP-- nothing too complicated, but enough to create some difference. I'd use the idea of the shared pool for scaling up the number of figures each player controls.
Ideally this would be something that would only require 4-6 pages of rules, plus character templates. Still in the gestation stage, but I think there's something interesting there.
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