One common method of timing games is through what I call progressive goals. This method involves a sought incremental goal that, when it reaches a certain point, signals the end of the game.
This is the 300 points for either team in a standard game of Rook. This is the ten for a single player in a standard game of Settlers of Catan. There is a final goal that all players work toward that, when attained, signals the end of the game.
This method is not often used in roleplaying games. In fact, the only game I can think of off-hand that does anything resembling this is The Shadow of Yesterday. The transcendance rules in TSOY provide a progressive goal that signals the end of a character. (Though I do think that a case could be made that My Life with Master operates on a similar principle in which the players are trying to accumulate enough Love to trigger the endgame.)
This is clearly not fit as a game-timing mechanic (nor is it intended to be one). For one thing, it times only a single character. The game doesn’t end just because one or two character transcend. But more importantly, there is no pressure to work toward transcendance. In Rook, why would you play if not to earn points? But in TSOY there’s all sorts of other stuff to be done in play. This allows players to bypass the progressive goal altogether. They can pursue some other goal instead.
This phenomenon is common to most roleplaying games, and may actually end up meaning that this is a method of timing that is generally unsuited to roleplaying. This method requires the game mechanics themselves to quantify play goals, and that may simply be too difficult to do. (Even in MLwM you can run into this problem, where players are having so much fun being evil and villainous that they don’t pursue the destruction of the master.)
Tags: Snippet-post, Theory
This is something I had intended to mention in this post, but forgot when the time came: Joshua Newman’s Under the Bed uses precisely this timing mechanism. All the players seek to accumulate favorite tokens. The game ends as soon as someone reaches a pre-determined number of them.
Thomas
The transcendance rules in TSOY provide a progressive goal that signals the end of a character.
Hey, that offers some insight into Clinton’s appreciation for Hero’s Banner: the “end of the character” timing mechanic.
Paul
Paul,
That’s actually a pretty good ovservation. It’s one of the things that I find so intriguing about this stuff: we haven’t really done much experimentation with it, so it’s hard to say what we might prefer or why. I’m excited to see what kinds of stuff I get excited about in the coming years in the same way that I got excited when I first saw good endgame rules in My Life with Master.
Thomas
Personally, I hate this type of timing mechanism. It seems so anti-climactic. It’s commonly found in collectable card games. We fight a major battle and just as things get good and all our cards are on the table, one guy looks around and says meekly, “I’ve got 20 power.” And we all look at eachother and say, “Okay then. Let’s play again?”
The best solutions to this I’ve found are games that fight a series of mini-battles, after which each game refreshes (or partially refreshes) so that the next battle isn’t won by the same winner. Often if winning these battles has a comulative effect (such as a new resource), then one player will end up winning a few. When enough are won, we can end the game. Some games have multiple victory conditions: You can win at 20 power, or you can go on to play a MAJOR VICTORY. This is actually quite common unofficially in other games: after a game is won, all players decide to waste everythign they’ve got on one major battle.
I’m seeking ways to apply this philosophy in RPGs.
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Getting more on topic: I don’t have very much experience with mystery games, but it seems to me any game where you have to solve a murder or investigate a crime will have this END result build in. Likewise, most games that are meant to be episodic have this end game built in. The episodes can last forever, but the adventures end at a particular point. I think superhero games have this, too. Most of it is usually implied by the genre, rather than specified in the rules.