Posts Tagged ‘Applied’

Play still takes too long

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

In one of those bits of irony that suggests to me that Tony Lower-Basch is reading my mind (or that I’m reading his), he’s been talking a lot about today’s topic over on Story Games this week (How shall I create my character for this session?, Social footprint, and a number of other threads).

Roleplaying games still take far too long to play. The fact that a one-shot tends to take three to four hours to play through, and even short-form games like Primetime Adventures take fifteen to twenty hours to play through, makes the investment of time and energy to play roleplaying games extremely high.

This high time-commitment may very well be an outgrowth of story-oriented roleplaying. Consider how much time it takes to read an emotionally impactful novel or watch a moving film. Now consider how much editing it took to maximize emotional impact. Is it simply the nature of the beast that creating a meaningful story takes four hours if you’re lucky? I don’t think so.

One of the problems here, at least I see it as one, is that most roleplaying games are what I’ve seen Shannon Appelcline call ‘un-constrained games’.  That is, they are games that just go on and on until someone calls an end to them.  There is no mechanical ‘timer’ built in.  So, in the interest of considering timers in roleplaying, I’m going to look at some timing mechanisms in games over the next couple of posts.

First off, some roleplaying games have them, or have something that could easily become them.  Primetime Adventures has a timing mechanism in its Budget< ->Fanmail economy.  The system constantly loses resources and has no way to replenish them.  Eventually the system runs out of resources altogether.  So this isn’t a totally new concept for roleplaying.  Tomorrow and at least part (maybe all) of next week is going to be devoted to considering various timing mechanisms and how they work.

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Transparent mechanical purpose

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

All this talk of social hacking actually does have some application, and that is what we shall discuss today.

The Forge design philosophy is closely tied to its play philosophy which, over-simplified, is that you play by the rules precisely as they are written.  You do not tweak them, at least not without playing them as-written enough to understand what those rules do.

There is, however, an extremely common opposing philosophy which I shall call the ‘pick and choose’ model of play.  This model is built around the idea that every play-group is playing a game that is ultimately idiosyncratic.  They are constructing their own procedures of play by pulling useful tricks and techniques from myriad other games to support whatever the group’s play goals are.

In some ways, the Forge model is an interesting sort of shortcut for writing roleplaying games.  (Note that this is not a bad thing, merely the way things are.)  Specifically, writing for people who utilize the Forge model of play allows you, as a writer of games, not to explain yourself.  You can include a rule that is designed to (say) control pacing of the game, without explaining that that is the purpose of the rule in the text.  (Note also that this is the model of the vast majority of board games.)

This works because you may assume that the players will play the game as-written and thus learn, through play, the purpose of the rule in question.  They will experience the ways in which that particular mechanic impacts pacing, and with that experience will come some ability to modify the mechanic to alter its effects.  Also with experience comes evaluation: it may be decided that the group does not require a mechanic to regulate pacing, perhaps they can handle pacing better on their own using their own procedures.

This model teaches players and groups how the mechanics impact play based entirely upon using those mechanics in the real world, with little (if any) exposition within the game text.

Unfortunately, this is pretty incompatible with ‘pick and choose’ style play, in which players will be evaluating whether they wish to utilize certain mechanics before experiencing those mechanics in play.  This a priori (before experience) judgment of mechanics stems from a desire to maximize fun now.  The group does not want to have to test the mechanic over a couple of sessions only to find out that it actually is not as much fun to play with the mechanic.  (Note that this is partially, perhaps even significantly, a function of the staggering length that a unit of play has in roleplaying.  Properly testing a mechanic for group suitability could take anywhere from four to twenty hours.)

Writing for ‘pick and choose’ style players requires an explanation of mechanical purpose.  What does this mechanic do for play?  The group needs to know up-front, at least in outline, why they should bother with your mechanic.  What is it that this mechanic provides that their group would love to include in their play?

One big thing that explaining your mechanics does that can be seen as a negative is that it makes subversion difficult (if not impossible).  If you (for instance) have a game designed explicitly to make people question their beliefs, and you feel questioning beliefs is something that everyone should do (especially people who don’t want to do so), then explaining your purpose will cut out that critical target audience.  You can’t ‘trick’ your audience into learning something that they would not have sought out on their own, which is unfortunate.

I really want some discussion on this topic.  I’d love to hear from both sides of this issue about why one system is better than the other, or even just a list of advantages to be had from one or the other.  I’ve gotten us started above, what else have you got?

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Who needs mechanical resolution?

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

I’m making a terrible habit of late posts.  Ugh.  I need to get on top of this.

One of the games I got to play at Gen Con this year was a three-person playtest of Jonathan Walton’s very interesting take on Avatar: the Last Airbender.  The three players involved were Jon, Shreyas, and myself.  All three of us are pretty big fans of the show, and had spent part of the trip to the con discussing it.

This is to say, we were all pretty much on the same page in terms of interpretation of what the show is about and how it works.  We did not need a game text (either flavor text, atmospheric text, or even mechanics) to make sure we were all working with roughly the same imaginative content.

When we sat down, we pretty much just had Jon’s character sheets and his Dharma Paths (which are pretty dang cool).  No real mechanics established yet, other than some sketchy ideas about how the sheet changes and how Dharma Paths progress.

We spent the first half-hour or so tossing around mechanical ideas, trying to figure out enough procedure to sit down and play.  We got some really sketchy ideas down based on the four elements (a fairly central concept to the show), and set to playing.

There was a lot of fun stuff going on in the game, but the one thing I wanted to highlight because it’s what I’m talking about today: we didn’t have any mechanics to determine success or failure.  Not at the task level, not at the conflict level, not at any level.

This is significant because, as I see it, the vast majority of games coming out of the Forge design philosophy have, historically, been primarily focused on resolution mechanics.  (It should be noted that reward mechanics are likely more central to the Forge philosophy, but that they are predominantly tied into resolution.)  There has been a shift in recent years toward pacing mechanics (Primetime Adventures) and front-loaded situation generation (Dogs in the Vineyard, Shock:, etc.).

Even with those recent shifts, though, there’s a strong focus on resolution mechanics, especially with tying them into thematic ideas.  Shock: utilizes praxis scales, which are highly thematic, Dogs in the Vineyard utilizes things that describe individual characters, as does Primetime Adventures.

I bring all this up to suggest this: resolution mechanics are not a necessary aspect of design.  They are an option, and can be a powerful one, but since mechanics necessarily reduce flexibility those mechanics reduce the options available to players.  This focusing can be purposeful and powerful, but it isn’t something that your game has to use.

So the question for you, gentle reader, is this: if we dump resolution as a primary focus of mechanics, what else might we pick as a mechanical focus?  In Jon’s Avatar game, mechanics are primarily a pacing thing.  They are designed to maintain a fast-paced game, and to provide some interestingly varied narration.  What else could our mechanics be about?

Thomas

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What does ‘immersion’ mean to you?

Monday, July 10th, 2006

If I’d been on top of my game, I would have opened up Immersion Month with this post rather than a definition.  Still, better late than never…

‘Immersion’ is, in the immortal words of Emily Care Boss, a tar-baby.  Discussions of the topic inevitably become extremely sticky, and the more effort you put into getting a good grip on it, the less productive your efforts become.  This is largely due to the fact that so many people mean so many different things by the term.

The first step to any solid and productive discussion, one which ends up producing interesting results rather than self-congratulatory back-patting, is to figure out who means what.  So, that’s what this post is for.

I want to hear from everyone.  If you are big into immersion, if you dabble, if you think it’s the worst thing to ever happen to roleplaying, I want to hear it.  So, what does the term mean for you?  And do you do it or know people who do?  And what do you think of that?

Even if someone says pretty much what you think, please chime in.  On this issue, the internet-standard ‘silent agreement’ is probably going to do more harm than good.

Also, for now at least, let’s not do any discussion.  Let’s just get some data, with no peanut gallery comments.  I say this, in part, so that everyone knows up-front that they won’t have to defend their statements.  Just say what you think and feel.  It’s a pretty low-risk proposition.

Thomas

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Mediums, trying to find application

Saturday, July 1st, 2006

I generally try not to break my Monday/Thursday post schedule all that often, but I want to talk about this, and my schedule for July is full-up.

Thursday I had a really long and highly abstract theoretical discussion of different mediums for roleplaying.  Real briefly, I want to point out where the application lies here, and possibly explain why it’s not explicit in the original post.

The problem with trying to design games for mediums other than face-to-face is that we are so deeply immersed in thoughts about face-to-face communication that it is difficult to see how other mediums differ.  Face-to-face mechanics tend to be significantly denser because they are utilized in a rich medium.  You can afford complex mechanics because they still don’t take that much time (or at least they take less time than they would elsewhere).

Another thing is that we simply do not consider how to utilize aspects of communication that we don’t tend to deal with.  Consider that Code of Unaris utilizes precisely one mechanic (the one that makes the game so good) that leverages the medium it is designed for: Hacking works as well as it does because online chat has such a high level of permanency.  It doesn’t work nearly as well as a formalized mechanic in face-to-face play.

The question that arises from this is: what do mechanics look like that leverage permanency and delineation?  I don’t have an answer to this question.  In fact, until about a month ago I didn’t even realize that this was the question to be asking.  But it is.

If we are going to design for other mediums, rather than consider how to make it as much like tabletop play as possible we must consider a number of aspects of play that are so constant in tabletop play that we simply didn’t notice them before.

What are these games going to look like?  I don’t know, but I know I’m excited to find out.

Thomas

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Color is important

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

I do not often talk about Forge theory as directly as I plan to today. Hopefully you can bear with me, I think this one’s important.

Ron Edwards, in his Provisional Glossary of Forge theory jargon defines the term “color” (which we will discuss today” as:

Imagined details about any or all of System, Character, Setting, or Situation, added in such a way that does not change aspects of action or resolution in the imagined scene.

In this definition System, Character, and Setting mean roughly what you would expect. System is (roughly) the procedures of play; character is, well, character; and setting is the English 101 definition of the time and place the action happens at. That leaves us with Situation, which is defined as:

Dynamic interaction between specific characters and small-scale setting elements; Situations are divided into scenes.

This is stuff like “The six fingered man killed my father”. Situation is a fairly macro concern, really.

This is all preamble to my primary point which is: there is some element of play at the mirco level that provides the real meat of play. I have been calling it “color”, but it does not mesh completely with the Forge definition.

The element I am talking about is the one that provides context to the narrative. Does a character undertake an action eagerly, reluctantly, sadly, in anger? This is an important question. In fact, it is key to the way we interpret the narratives we tell when roleplaying.

But remember that the Forge definition includes the clause that color “does not change aspects of action or resolution in the imagined scene”. In Dogs in the Vineyard, whether you gun a man down in anger or in cold calculation matters. In Nine Worlds whether you struggle to win, or win without serious effort matters.

What I call “color”, those contextualizing little bits of the narrative, is important for a number of reasons, but primary among them is that players need context. If there is not a shared context provided the players will simply provide their own, not-so-shared context. My post suggesting that Play is Chaos? This is precisely what I was talking about there.

If you fail to point out that your Batman-esque character is a reluctant hero, then in my head I will make him some kind of hero. It is possible that I will pick the same motivations that you do, but it is by no means certain. Maybe I will assign more sinister motivations to him.  This is not necessarily bad, though it can result in me misapprehending the sorts of challenges that you want to engage with,  This, in turn, likely means you will not have quite as much fun as you might if I were on top of things.

One example of different interpretations that really sticks with me is something that Ralph Mazza posted way back at the end of 2003.  While I happen to consider Tolkein’s Fellowship of the Ring to be chock full of good stuff, Ralph has other thoughts.  And, really, I think this is a matter of pickup up on different bits of color.  Ralph is noticing and remembering certain things while I am noticing and remembering other ones.

And those first bits of contextualization matter.  Once you have it in your head that a character is fundamentally evil (or good, or amoral, or whatever) then every action they take from there on out is going to be interpreted in that light.  And color provides that contextualization.

I fully acknowledge that “color” may be the wrong term for what I am talking about here, but whatever the term is, it is a fundamental aspect of what we do, not only when we roleplay, but when we interpret any bit of narrative.  In fact, without this color stuff, there is not a story.

Consider the fact that most television news channels are not telling stories.  There is not anything to grab onto to contextualize what is going on.  Instead, what they are providing you with is data.  And data is not the same thing as a story.

Color matters because it is what makes stories meaningful, and not just bits of data.

Next week: The long-awaited (by someone I’m sure) discussion of roleplaying via various mediums.

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Games within games: the optimization game

Monday, June 5th, 2006

I claimed way back when I started this blog that it wasn’t all about roleplaying theory, but look at all these posts about roleplaying theory!  Time to make good on my claims.

Don’t get me wrong, today’s post does apply to certain types of roleplaying, but it applies to more than that too.  Today’s post is on games that include solo sub-games.  The most common example is the CCG.

I love CCGs, and other games that include this dynamic.  I can spend hours by myself pondering card choices, and combos, and balancing various factors for deck construction.  This same dynamic draws me into miniatures gaming of all stripes.

But the optimization game is a bit odd.  It’s designed to be played alone, with multiple players taking on a sort of workshop atmosphere.  Further, it’s a sort of anticipatory game.  It’s not much fun at all on its own.  Designing stuff that you have no intention to play is rarely fun.  However, designing stuff that you intend to play can be fun even if you never play it.  At least up to a point.

You see this sort of thing in roleplaying in complex character generation.  I can spend hours tweaking a Burning Wheel character, for instance.

The optimization game is an odd beast though.  It’s not really collaborative or competative.  In fact, the optimization game isn’t all that social.  Since we gather to play for at least partially social reasons, people rarely spend much time playing the optimization game in groups.

What this means, at least in part, for design is that you can design games that have an ongoing fun-factor when the game breaks up.  People can continue to play the game (or a part of the game) on their own time between sessions.  Since the optimization game is about setting up to play, so this also builds anticipation.

If you want to encourage a sense of rising anticipation in your players, and provide something related to the game “to tide them over” between sessions, developing some sort of optimization game is a great way to do that.  However, it’s important to note that the optimization game isn’t always a good thing to add to your game.

Some people are better (or worse) at the optimization game.  If you put one in your game then you are giving advantages to people who are better at the optimization game and to people who are willing and able to spend more time on it.  The guy who spends twenty hours meticulously designing his deck is going to have an advantage over the guy who just throws together some things that seem cool in ten minutes.

The other big risk that you run is building anticipation and then failing to fulfill it.  If I spend two or three hours designing a deck, and then it turns out that no one will play with me I will feel disappointed.  The real risk here is that repeated disappointment will rob me of anticipation, which defeats one of the primary purposes of the optimization game.

So, should you have an optimization game in your design?  Well, I like them a lot, but it’s not all hugs and kisses…

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Freeform rocks: don’t let the rules rule

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

This is a bit late, but more than that relatively incoherent. If you do manage to dig up some of the (I think) clever ideas underlying this piece, please let me know. Especially if you can articulate it better than I can.

“Freeform” is a pretty loaded term. Consider the fact that my interview with Sarah Kahn is about “freeform”, but clearly we use the same term to talk about a bunch of other things too. Today, I’m talking about one of those other uses. Specifically, when I use “freeform” in this entry, I’m talking about play that does not refer to a game text to provide authoritative structures.

Remember that all authority in roleplaying ultimately belongs to the players, so what we are actually talking about here is a ceding of authority to a rules text. The text simply has no authority on its own. Now there is nothing wrong with ceding authority to a rules text, and doing so actually has a number of benefits. But like most things in life there are trade-offs, and it is important to realize what we are giving up when we give authority to the rules.

Let us examine the upside first. One of the really great things that granting authority to the rules-text does for play is that, in a sense, it gives authority to a person who is not a member of your play group. Specifically, the the writer of the game. This, in turn, means that you get ideas put into play that you would not have come up with on your own.

Ceding authority to a game text also gives you a static authority. This means that everyone knows that they final authority is impartial. For instance, when we play Capes around here, if we are not sure about how a certain thing should be handled, we check the book. The book shows no favoritism, and it provides a certain amount of stability to the game.

Further, ceding authority to the game text makes the game somewhat universal. If I am familiar with a rules text, and I want to play with any other group that is using the same rules text as an authority, then I know pretty much what to expect. While some of the particulars may differ, I can expect the core experience to be the same in both groups because our ultimate authority is the same.

The biggest advantage that I have noticed is the first one I mentioned: giving authority to the rules-text introduces a sort of new life to your group’s play. It allows for some emergent play that just would not happen if your group was left to itself. It is important to note here that your group does not necessarily need that emergent factor. In fact, your group is full of good ideas already. Getting that emergent factor from outside your group is something of a bonus, and one that comes at a price.

One of the big things that freeform play does for you is that, since you are not ceding authority to an inflexible game text, you are able to evaluate where authority should be distributed in real time. There are a number of risks in doing this: sometimes you make worse decisions in real time than if you just stuck to the game text. That is, real-time evaluation of where to distribute authority is a skill, and sometimes it is better to be safe than sorry. (Of course, this introduces a curious paradox, as it is difficult to improve the skill if you do not pratice it.)

There are a lot of points that I would love to talk about regarding freeform in the sense I am using today, but this is already pretty long, so I will limit myself to a single major point:

When you cede authority to the rules, one of the things you do is set aside your immediate evaluation of what the group wants most. In a freeform game, when a question comes up about the rules, the evaluation criteria is “what does the group think would be best?” When you have ceded authority to the text, the evaluation criteria is “what does the text say”?

Of course you still evaluate “what does the group think would be best?” when you cede authority to the rules, but the tendency is to do it between sessions. “Should we keep playing with these rules?” is not something that tends to get asked mid-session unless something is going terribly wrong. When you play freeform, you evaluate the question of how to best achieve your goals on a moment-by-moment basis rather than a session-by-session basis.

The thing is, freeform is hard. The group must have a set of play goals that is compatible, and they must have at least an intuitive understanding of what those goals are and how best to achieve them. And there is an entire array of skills involved in evaluating what structures of play will best meet the group’s goals.

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Designing and writing are two different skills

Monday, May 29th, 2006

If this entry were a book chapter, or an essay, there would be a subtitle: “Duh”.

I don’t pretend that this is anything brilliant.  Of course designing and writing are two different skills.  I mean, some people are really good at writing, but can’t design worth a flip.  That’s fine, not everyone has to design stuff.

I bring it up because, in the land of self-publishing of games (of all sorts), especially under the model most people from the Forge adopt (specifically: one person designs and writes the game text), we often gloss over this fact.  We talk a lot about design.  A whole lot.  And that’s well and good, design is a huge part of games.

However, it strikes me that there’s another extremely important skill, and that’s writing.  It’s possible, probably even common, for someone to design the structures of their game in such a way to foster a specific sort of interaction in the players, but then fail to write in such a way as to express the rules clearly.

But I figure we’re all familiar with poorly written rules.  The sort that are difficult to parse, or ambiguous.  The rules themselves are sound, but they are conveyed poorly.  However, clear rules isn’t the only thing that good writing skills bring to the table.

I’m specifically talking about evoking specific moods and mindsets in your readers which will, hopefully, influence play to tend toward your vision.  I point you at “Moments frozen in the flow of time” (I think that’s what Ben calls it) in Polaris, or the short introductory bit in Dogs in the Vineyard.

These sorts of textual bit shape play in subtle ways, and the in ways that have little (if anything) to do with your skill as a designer of rules and structures for play.  This is a situation in which being a skilled writer makes you better at communicating your vision.  Again, not much surprise that this is the case.

With all that said, there’s a surprising lack of discussion of good writing of games.  There’s tons of discussion of good design, and playtesting, and that sort of thing.  Yet I don’t recall any discussions of how to organize your text to achieve certain ends, or how to effectively evoke certain emotions, or anything of the sort.  We present one another with rules, and discuss how to improve them, but we don’t do the same with text.

To be fair, writing is a big field, and there are plenty of places to get this sort of help.  More people are giving pointers on how to write than on how to design games, so it makes sense to talk more about rules.  Yet I feel we’ve sort of forgotten, at least some of us (read: me), that writing is an important skill, and one we need to talk about and promote in the context of publishing games.

So, in the interest of doing something other than whine: what are some good resources for learning to write 1) Teaching texts, 2) Reference texts, 3) Evocatively.

Thomas

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If you want to: rules vs. guidelines

Thursday, May 25th, 2006

In a brief aside on Anyway today Vincent Baker said: “Being an rpg designer doesn’t mean writing game texts – that’s what being an rpg writer means. Being an rpg designer means designing a system: it means arranging a group’s interactions so that they can agree to what happens in play.”

This is an excellent way of looking at what I want to talk about today, so thanks to Vincent for his timely post.  Specifically, I want to talk about the fact that, depending on the goals you have for play, some jobs are better handled by an RPG designer and some are better handled by an RPG writer.

For some goals in play, you want to shape the interactions of the player directly.  You want to use mechanics to force interaction into specific patterns.  You can use this to generate unexpected emergent behavior in the groups who play the game, and you can use it to get groups to tell stories of a sort that they probably would not tell on their own.  You can make people face narrative issues they would not in their normal social interactions.

Shaping the interactions directly by designing systems of interaction can lead participants to discovery.  Behaviors can emerge under the rules you impose from outside that can result in surprisingly interesting and unexpected outcomes for the participants.  For instance, if you sit down and play Breaking the Ice straight out of the book, you may not realize just how play will look.  The rules do not spell out the social implications of the odd sort of GM fiat set up by leaving the guide in compete control of when dice are awarded.  But some play of Breaking the Ice reveals that the structure of the game encourages some amazingly cool collaborative interactions.

But sometimes your goals are better met through other means than shaping the social interactions of the players.  When you develop the structures of play directly, you impact the content of play indirectly.  The invese also holds: when you do things to impact the content of play directly, you influence the structure of play indirectly.  (This distinction is something that I plan to cover a bit more in depth next week.)

One of the most common, and easiest, ways to influence the content of play is through “advice” or “guideline” sections.  For instance, in Dogs in the Vineyard, Vincent Baker has a section titled “GMing Conflicts” (pp 76-78) in which he has such advice as “you should push for small stakes” and “you should always follow your group’s lead”.  These are not limits on the structure of the game itself; they are guidelines, advice for making play look more like what Vincent intends Dogs play to look like.

There are a number of reasons to use advice instead of rules.  Most of these reasons are tied up with the fact that advice is “fuzzier” than rules are.  This means that advice tends to be taken in idiosyncratic ways.  What counts as “small stakes”?  Depends on the group.  What counts as 2d4?  Well, that’s a mechanical thing.  Advice is also easier to develop.  Not necessarily easier to present (at some point I hope to write a bit on writing pegagogy), writing is hard work and conveying fuzzy ideas is often more difficult than conveying concrete ones, but advice is easier to develop.

When I work on a game, I use two rubrics to decide whether a given feature of play should be produced with rules or with advice: 1) How much time and effort will it take to develop rules that generate this behavior (implicit in this question is: can I even develop such rules at my current skill level)?  2) How important to my vision of play is it that play always looks like this?

If the importance of an element is high, and I feel as if I can generate rules to bring out that element, then I will proceed to do so.  If I realize that an element is something that I only want to see in play sometimes, or something that would be nice but not vital, then I tend to work on advice.  And every so often, when I try to figure out how to make rules that enforce a certain element, I realize that it will take a lot of time and effort to do, and the element just is not worth it.

I am looking for two major lines of feedback on this post, though I am as always willing to discuss pretty much anything: 1) What are some other advantages of rules over advice and advice over rules?  2) How do you, personally, decide which elements of play need rules and which ones need advice?

Next week: why “freeform” play rocks my socks.

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Even more lessons learned from Nine Worlds

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

As before, so again: this post contains a significant amount of what could fairly be called “criticism” of Matt Snyder’s Nine Worlds. I criticize because I love. I mean, I am still in this game and psyched about it months after we started, so I’m clearly having fun. It is somewhat sad that I tend to notice and consider what is not-as-fun more than I do what is fun, but it is what I do.

This post is about the unbalanced nature of adversity in the game. In Nine Worlds opposition comes from other characters, either other Archons (player characters) and their attendant stats or supporting characters (NPCs) with their own, roughly Archon-esque stats. The problem is that conflicts with supporting characters are, in some odd way, basically a form of GM fiat.

Yowch. Did I just say that much of Nine Worlds conflict resolution is GM fiat? That’s rough, but let me explain what I mean. When you get into a conflict it’s every man for himself. That is, if it is your PC vs. three NPC entities (note that a single NPC entity can by multiple minor characters) then, even if they are working together, you compare your Fate score to each of theirs separately. This is pretty cool, and allows for some really interesting free-wheeling multi-participant conflicts.

The problem is: there are no solid boundaries for generating the stats for these NPCs. There are a number of examples of NPCs in the book (which, by the way, are brilliantly done; each one is just focused enough for you to use as an inspiration for your own conflicts instead of being so defined as to try to shape your story), but for the most part they are more powerful than the PCs starting off.

Since there are no rules or guidelines for use when generating your NPCs it tends to boil down to a “that feels about right for this guy” game. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, but in the case of Nine Worlds it means that the GM has to be good at judging just the right amount of adversity when he sets up those stats.

An example from recent play. My character, Aristo Denes, started off strong. I used a series of solid victories in the first couple of sessions to pump up some of my Muses making me a conflict winning beast. Three or four sessions later I resolved two or three of them at once. This gave me a lot of experience points, but it weakened my right-now conflict winning power.

The problem is that my conflicts were tending to be with NPCs of roughly the same power as before. While I had those big Muses (and was drawing all those extra cards) the adversity was just right; it was a real toss-up whether or not I could beat some of those guys. But without those Muses I started getting viciously stomped by my opposition. I think there may have been an entire session (maybe even two in a row) where I won no victories. (It is possible that this is not the case; Matt’s got recordings, so one day we can find out.)

Since you can only increase your Muses by winning victories, this had me stuck in a rut where it was unlikely for me to win, and getting into conflicts and losing them only made my opposition stronger for the next time we fought. It was, needless to say, somewhat disheartening (but still fun!).

I needed to win some conflicts to boost my Muses to fight the NPCs in question (since my character’s story pretty closely involved a number of them) so I decided to do what Fred Wolke calls “kicking puppies”. That is, I decided to frame some conflicts with weak NPCs that I was virtually guaranteed to beat so that I could grab some easy points and build up my Muses for later.

Specifically, I started up a fight with some Elite Aegis Agents who I whooped up on in the first session, but who haven’t been seen since. As I framed the conflict Matt considered, briefly, framing Herakles into it, but since I had made explicit my intention to fight a weak opponent, he decided not to.

So I do win, and I score something like 5 points. This is a nice start, but I am still at an overall deficit as I lost a couple of 7 and 8 point conflicts a session or two ago so my opposition is significantly stronger than I am with their Muses. However, as I remember things anyway (where are those recordings Matt?!), when I, as the winner of the first hand, decided to continue the conflict (this, by the way, is a super-clever mechanic) Matt brought in a new, stronger NPC. He is, unfortunately, not on the wiki, so I can’t point you at his numbers, but Matt basically made him up on the fly. It worked out fine in the end, I think I beat his Fate by a couple of points, but my “puppy kicking” was nipped in the bud.

This is supposed to point out that, ultimately, conflicts are sort of GM fiated. Matt, as GM, can introduce new NPCs to the conflict or bring in more powerful ones when appropriate. I am not actually against this in general, but there are no guidelines, especially no mechanical ones, for the GM to follow. Now, Matt is totally doing his best to be fair and keep things interesting, and for the most part he is good at it, but I am not so good at that sort of thing, and I fear what might happen if I ever ran a game of Nine Worlds.

Contrast this with Dogs in the Vineyard‘s proto-NPC generation which provides you stats for precisely 6 NPCs. You do not get mechanical resources for more than those six. Or look at Dungeons and Dragons CR system (as maligned as it might be) which makes an attempt to provide challenge level guidelines. Or even look at Primetime Adventures budget system: the GM can only throw so much at you before he runs out of resources.

Of course I really feel a bit bad singling out Nine Worlds like this, as there are tons of games that do similar things: Sorcerer, InSpectres, HeroQuest, and so on. And every single game I just listed I really enjoy playing. But, and this is why I brought the topic up at all, I think I would enjoy them better with a tighter oppositional structure.

I think this stems from the game part of the hobby. I like to evaluate my chances of succeeding and pick optimal paths for victory. That is just part of what I like to do. The same is not necessarily true of everyone else in the hobby, and so I wonder: people who do not find the crunch interesting, do they too wish for a more tightly guided opposition, or do the greater options and flexibility provided by not having those guidelines make play better for them?

I spoke with Ben Lehman about these issues I and he had two really good comments. first, he pointed out that the GM does not actually have total freedom when designating stats for NPCs because Matt has included stats for the most powerful NPCs I the gods, right in the text. This gives you a ceiling for NPC stats. While it is possible for the GM to make players the biggest possible foes in every conflict, if the PCs eventually reach a point that permits them to defeat the gods; the GM has limits.

Ben also explained that his understanding of the rules was that the player with narration rights could veto the introduction of new characters to a conflict. If this is the case (hopefully Matt will chime in) then I could have, if I had felt strongly about it, prevented Matt from introducing a new character and I could have kept kicking the puppies.

I bring all this up not so much to criticize Nine Worlds as to suggest that this is an important thing for game designers to consider. In our game Matt is good at judging numbers for opposition, but not everyone who wants to run or play Nine Worlds is going to be. Rules, or at the very least good solid guidelines, to help players to balance opposition no matter what their skill levels. If you don’t have something to help, you are going to stick some portion of your user-base with a period of trial and error during which they are having less fun than they could be. (Which is a great segue into a discussion of why some people don’t like learning new games, but I’ll let that wait for another day.)

Next week: The Paradox of Plot Twists

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Collaboration

Thursday, March 30th, 2006

I had an interesting conversation with Ben Lehman the other day. We were talking about Vincent Baker’s Gamie-Games Contest. Ben’s actually already written one game, and Shanghai Poker looks pretty cool. In the course of our conversation, Ben expressed that he would be interested in writing another entry.

Since, in spite of my significant discussion of roleplaying stuff on this blog, I find myself tending to be more strongly drawn to straight-up game design, I asked Ben if he had any interest in a collaboration. Ben’s response was that he finds it difficult to design games collaboratively since it is not clear where the buck stops when conflict opinions arise.

This was an interesting observation, and to me, somewhat startling. Startling because a good bit of my game design has been collaborative. For instance, Pips was a collaborative effort between Will and I. We worked closely together during our extremely educational stint working on Trithofar, and on the various incarnations of Influence, and we pushed the extremely clever Zone of Control up to playtesting before real life (and our lack of solid prototyping skills) tripped us up.

Further, Will and I are currently collaborating on a customizable card game called Conclave and a short-play (three sessions) roleplaying game called Familia. So far it’s been nothing but positive. Together we generate much better ideas, and while the games in question have, perhaps, not met either of our original visions, they’ve been incredibly good games.

Then it dawned on me: Will and I could be relatively unique. The interplay of our ideas, our specific personalities, and our long and close friendship may be skewing my perspective. It is entirely possible that the results of our collaboration are atypical in game design. Consider how few other games you see designed in collaboration…

Yet we see collaboration in other fields, both artistic and systemic. Collaborative novel-writing, while not ubiquitous, is relatively common, especially in certain genres. Engineering and computer programming projects (below a certain scope) are often collaborative (above said scope you tend to have a project director). My limited understanding tells me that movie scripts are often collaboratively written.

So the question to you, gentle reader, is this: is collaborative design an overlooked, and powerful tool for game design, or are the constraints it imposes too limiting for its widespread use (perhaps it takes a rare meeting of personalities or shared vision, or perhaps the disadvantages outweigh the benefits). Have we not seen much collaboration because we do not tend to think of it as an option (tradition), or because it just is not a very good option?

Thomas

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Manipulating physical space with props, lessons learned from Breaking the Ice

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

(Big fat disclaimer: I am not a graphic artist/designer. All I can tell you is what I know about associative psychology, at which I am no expert. That said, I do think most of my analysis is pretty good. If it turns out that you are a graphic artist/designer and you want to correct me, please do so!)

First thing first: I need you to look at the originally printed character sheet for Breaking the Ice.

(Quick aside: Special thanks to Emily Care Boss for graciously providing me with the PDF of that sheet. If you have not yet read and played her excellent game Breaking the Ice then I have a piece of advice. If you are into roleplaying theory and design techniques, then this game should be high on your reading list. If you are into playing roleplaying games and having a blast, then this game should be high on your playing list.)

Moving on you will notice that this single sheet is split into three major parts. On the left side you have space for one character, on the right side you have space for another character, and in the middle you have a space for recording things that apply to both characters. You may also note that there are helpful mechanical notes at the bottom of the sheet. The specific notes that Emily has here address every important mechanical aspect of the system such that, having read the rules once, I can read the notes on the character sheet and remember everything there is to remember about playing the game. Such notes are recommended for anyone who has a system simple enough to distill like this. But those notes, while cool, are not what I am going to be talking about today.

So, you can see that this single character sheet is designed to be used for an entire two player game of Breaking the Ice. Not one sheet per player, one sheet per game. Since players (generally) want to be able to see the sheet for reference, both players are going to try to find a way to sit (or stand, or whatever they are doing) so that they can both look at the relevant parts of the sheet. It turns out that the most natural seating arrangement for this character sheet is sitting side by side with the sheet on the table in front of the players.

In Western cultures (probably in others too, but I do not know for sure) this is an arrangement of cooperation. You sit beside someone in this manner when you are working on a math problem together, or when you are facing some other challenge. This calls up associations of “the two of us facing a challenging task”. Note that this is not “the two of us facing an opponent”, that would require a person across from you. So the character sheet here gets people into the mindset of “the two of us are going to face this challenge of telling a cool story, and we’re going to beat that challenge”.

Also notice that the left and right sides of the sheet are going to be at least partially filled with text, but the center is a big blank space. People tend to want to fill central blank space. This goes double when that space is intended to be filled. There is a subtle pressure to get some Compatibilities on the sheet because that blank space is just so unaesthetic.

Another interesting thing to consider is that the blanks space in the middle is “shared” while the space on the sides is “personal”. That is, you have a responsibility to write stuff on your side, and your partner has a responsibility to write on their own side, but both of you have a responsibility to write in the middle. This shared responsibility encourages you to work together to make sure that something actually gets written in the middle.

Now, contrast the character sheet up there with the ones Emily has available on the Breaking the Ice site. I have them duplicated for your convenience: in black and white and in color. Now, while this is a more attractive sheet visually (note the shading, and the color, and the general feeling of the blank sheet feeling somehow “complete” but with space to add things. Also notice how taking the mechanical reminders off the sheet adds symetry to the whole composition.

Two major things I see here. First note that the orientation is no longer side-to-side, but top-to-bottom. We have a much stronger sense of vertical hierarchy than horizontal hierarchy. Just take a look at the descriptions I just used: “side-to-side” does not indicate which side is primary, but “top-to-bottom” does. Of course I could have said “left-to-right” orientation, but we do not tend to talk that way, and I find myself unable to think of vertical equivilent for “side-to-side”. So there is a subtle (and possibly so subtle as to not matter in play, but I do notice it in theory) shift in importance. One of the characters (and thus associated players) is “above” the other. I just do not like it as much.

The other thing to notice is the way Compatibilities are listed. It is in a compact little diamond. Still between the two characters, but it is no longer a gulf begging to be filled. Instead it feels almost a bit cramped to write stuff in there. The space around the label “Compatibilities” almost feels necessary, as if you do not want to fill it in. There is also a (very) minor complaint that since the lines are above and below the label, but the lines are small at the top, so that it is not clear where you should write your first (and subsequent) Compatibilities within that space.

Another game to look at as doing something similar (though not as subtly) is Ben Lehman’s Polaris (another game you should be reading and playing). The rules of the game themselves call for a specific seating arrangement, which is sort of reflected in the character sheet. The Polaris character shet is not nearly as powerful as the one for Breaking the Ice, but in all fairness to Ben, it has a much more difficult task.

In Breaking the Ice two people who should be in a cooperative mindset need to share data. The solution is simple, let them sit beside one another and do so. In Polaris two people who are in a competative mindset need to share data. In fact, they need to share almost all of the data on that sheet. They both need to know the ability scores, and since they share the use of Blessings, Offices, Abilities, and Fates they need to share those too.

The problem which arises is that, unless one of the players is really good at reading things upsdide down, you have to duplicate the data in order to make it fully shared. But duplicating data means writing twice as much: whenever one player records something, the other must as well, and every so often you will need to check to make sure that no one has screwed up and misrecorded something. And if someone did do that, well, how the heck do you figure out who made the mistake and fix it?

Ben’s solution to the problem at least does not bring up those problems. Instead he simply makes some data easier to access for one player and other data easier to access for the other player. This puts them both at the same level of advantage and disadvantage when it comes to having a grasp of the overall state of play. Unfortunately, while it puts everyone on a level playing field, it fails to provide all the needed data to all the players who need it in an effecient manner.

Another thing worth noting is that while the text calls for two players to play the “Moons” and to be relatively neutral, the design of the character sheet seems to indicate that the Moons are closer to the Heart side than the Mistaken side. While I have never seen this impact play (it turns out that it is more fun, and the game runs best in my experience, when the Moons abuse the Heart whenever possible), it is a consideration when designing character sheets.

Character sheet aside, what Ben did with physical positioning in Polaris is brilliant. While his character sheet may not be fully encouraging of that positioning, the rules a clear about it.

First, you sit across from your primary source of adversity. This naturally gets you in a competative state of mind. That guy across from you is the one you have to “beat”. Then it sets, equidistant between you and your opponent, a pair of neutral arbitrators. The rules themselves call for these arrangement of physical space, and they really help get people into the right mindset.

(One quick aside about Polaris, and this could be an etire essay at a later date: The shifting of roles from Heart/Mistaken to one of the Moons and back again is genius. The Moons, in addition to being “neutral” are also not opposed to one another. Since your fellow Moon is also your Heart/Mistaken, and play proceeds around the table, you go from cooperating with your opposite to competing with them and back. The tension this develops is excellent. The big thing I see it doing is that it helps develop a “no hard feelings” mentality. Since you work together and oppose one another, it is easier to see that opposing one another is just another way of working together.)

Now, I get somewhat critical of both games here, but it should not be read as it may seem: both of these games are doing way, way more with character sheets than any other game I have seen. Any complaints I have are because these things are just a beginning when they could be so much more, but think about it: at least these games have beginnings at these issues while no other game I have seen (yet) have done so.

Thomas

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Nine Worlds, some interesting emergent play

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

In our Skype-based Nine Worlds game (which I spoke of recently) Matt uses a simple method for determining what happens in the next scene. It is basically the Primetime Adventures solution: each player, including the GM, frames a scene in turn.

Players, to date at least, have invariably framed scenes involving their characters, and Matt has been pretty evenly distributing his scenes among the characters. Since the Nine Worlds advancement system (not to mention character effectiveness levels) is tied to Muses. Bigger Muses make you more powerful in play and have bigger payoff when they resolve than smaller Muses. Since Muses can only be increased when you win in conflicts you want to be in as many conflicts as you can manage to get into. Since multiple any conflict can take a theoretically unlimited number of participants, you can get in on conflicts started by other players if you are able to come up with a good set of stakes related to the conflict (though, interestingly, they do not have to be related to the stakes set by the original participants, just something relevant to that). With a tendency of one to two conflict phases per scene, the more scenes you are in, the more conflicts you can be involved in.

From our play last night, Ben and I worked together to attach our characters to one another. I think we were both working, at least partially, with a metagame concern of linking up character interests. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Nine Worlds in no way requires party play or anything like that, but it doesn’t discourage it either, overall it’s pretty neutral to it. Anyway, Ben would frame a scene that I happened to be in and I would get to participate in a conflict, and then I would frame a scene with Ben, and he would participate. Doing this we were getting roughly twice as many conflicts each as Fred was getting.

On top of that, since we were both getting some spotlight whenever either of us framed a scene, we both got more spotlight time (thought it was shared time, I did not mind).

It is important to point out that this is not actually an emergent property of Nine Worlds itself. This method of scene framing is not, as far as I remember, in the rules of the game itself. Instead this is just a way of doing scene framing (the order of which is, again as far as I remember, not addressed in the rules). When this specific method of determing scene framing authority is combined with the rules of Nine Worlds you get this interesting (and cool) incentive to keep the characters working together.

(I am actually hoping to have another article up this afternoon. I’m talking about Emily Care Boss’ super-cool Breaking the Ice.)

Thomas

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Nine Worlds – As a game; as a game in action

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

Some of you may remember Matt Snyder putting together a voice-chat game of Nine Worlds. We played our first actual session last night (wiki here) and Matt said something to the effect of “Hey, if you guys get a chance generate me some buzz.” So this is me doing that, hopefully Matt doesn’t hate me when this is over.

I’m dividing this entry into three sections: 1. The game itself, 2. Actual play of Nine Worlds in general, and 3. The session we played last night.

Section 1 – Nine Worlds as a book and a game

I’ve got a copy of the Rush to GenCon 2005 edition, so it’s a bit tough to judge the physical quality of the book. I can say that the layout is solid, the play-aids are good, and the cover art is highly evocative. More than that, I don’t know. But I can speak of the content of that book, and that’s what I’m going to do.

If you’ve got a cool setting, and you want to know how to present it to other people to play in, I recommend this book. I liked the way Vincent Baker did stuff in Dogs in the Vineyard, but there aren’t really any story-seeding characters or locations in Dogs. Matt has taken a different route in which he presents a whole bunch of short, sweet descriptions of people and places.

The reason I suggest Matt’s work to you in this regard is that he provides just enough information about each element he records to be great inspiration for stories in play. At least, if not more, important is the fact that he doesn’t provide so much information to the reader that you end up telling Matt’s stories instead of your own. There are hints of stories all over the place, but they’re just enough to set your own imagination off instead of tying it down. If you’ve got cool stuff to share, this is the way to do it.

Overall verdict on content: The entire book is shapes your imagination in a positive way. It provides you new ideas, and constrains the directions of play just enough to help keep everyone on the same page.

As a game, I am sad to say that Nine Worlds doesn’t shine as brightly. There are some extremely cool ideas at work in the mechanics, but ultimately they are too flawed to get excited about. Still, there are some really cool things going on.

First, when you look at a Nine Worlds character sheet you’ll probably notice the Muses. If these look a bit like Spiritual Attributes from The Riddle of Steel, that’s because they’re closely related. Except that Muses are a much more mature imagining of them. In once sense, Muses work in basically the same way as Spritual Attributes. That is, they add directly to you chances of victory during resolution, and they’re a significant bonus. However, the way that Muses contribute to experience is very cool.

The way it works is that any time you use a Muse in a conflict and win, you make a little mark next to it. You note whether this victory used Arete or Hubris (more on these later). Then, whenever the narrative reaches a point where the Muse is either resolved or becomes unresolvable (your Muse might be “Save my girlfriend” and you might fail) you gain experience from it.

Here’s where things get cool: you get the experience whether you succeed or fail and you get experience in the thing you use the most (more on this in a bit). The first part is great for narrative freedom because you don’t have to “win” to get more powerful mechanically. This turns out to be a big deal, and it allows you to do some really cool tragic stuff. Also of note is that you only get to resolve that Muse (and get the mechanical advantage) when you reach a milestone in the narrative. You can’t just spend it down on the fly like you can with Spritual Attributes.

I mentioned Arete and Hubris earlier. These are the two really big stats for characters in the game (called “Virtues”); if either one goes to zero then the character dies. In-game the two represent a number of opposing ideals. Arete is excellence according to the laws of the universe, not mundane, but supernatural in the strict sense. This is the Virtue you use when you want to be the Champion of the Gods, or when you just want to be a really cool human. Hubris is individuality, often expressed via breaking the laws of the universe. This is the Virtue you use to challenge the gods themselves; magic and unnatural power.

Whenever you start a conflict you pick one of the Virtues to help you win. What methods are you employing for victory? If you do win, then you mark any Muses you used with the Virtue you used. When you finally resolve a Muse, you get one of two types of experience: Valor or Pride based on which Virtue was used most with the Muse. This turns out to be pretty cool since a glance at a character’s experience levels quickly indicate preferred thematic choices.

Also cool is that the two types of experience are used in different ways. Valor can only be used to increase your own stats while Pride can only be used to increase the power of “Talismans” which are statted items that your character can use (after a fashion) which aren’t actually your character.

But it’s not all shining brilliance. Each of the four suits is linked to an Urge. This is cool because each Urge is evocative and provides some great (again, non-stifling) direction for narration. Unfortunately, the Urges are clearly unequal in power. Thus specialization in the more powerful Urges is mechanically encouraged. This isn’t cool. Further, the Urges provide a potential for some really excellent mechanical variation among characters, but in action they end up being mechanically similar while providing simple narrative color variation. This is the big miss for me.

Specifically, the mechanical differentiations for four different Urges boil down into two categories: changing stats, and making short-term changes to stats last longer. Of the Urges three change stats, and one is clearly better than the other two at doing it. This means that optimal characters are good at Metamorphosis and Stasis. This could have been a lot cooler than it was, and ultimately disappointed me.

The other big mechanical problem is in the Virtues. While they provide great color, and a really cool differentiated experience system, they’re hard to work with in play. Since the Virtue you use at any given time determines the number of cards you draw for a conflict. You then get to add appropriate Muses, but that Virtue is where you start. Since narrative power is strictly gained through the conflict mechanics, winning here is a big deal. There’s no “You lost, but you still get more power” in this part of the mechanics like there is with resolving Muses, so players will always want to win. This, in turn, means that you always want to draw as many cards as you can. Since, other than color, the two Virtues work identically, you basically always want to utilize the one you have a higher rating in.

This turns out to be a devestating slip in the design. It ripples into the experience system such that having a lot of Pride isn’t so much a statement about your in-game choices, but a statement that you have a high Hubris value. This robs the game of the potentially interesting Arete/Hubris conflict to a very large degree.

Ultimately the combination of a set of mechanics that encourages players to build their characters with roughly identical Urges and the fact that players are encouraged to pick one Virtue during character creation and stick with it throughout play make the mechanics of Nine Worlds a bust. There are tons and tons of super-cool ideas in there, but as Nine Worlds shows us, it only takes a single slip in design to rob them of their power.

Section 2 – Nine Worlds in play

In play Nine Worlds ends up being a mixed bag. The mechanics and the setting presentation provide rock solid color direction and narrative fuel. There are hundreds of cool stories just waiting to be told, and you’ve got all the tools you need to jump in and tell them.

The world you get to play in is superb and evocative, and that’s always a big plus for stories. Further, the world is thematic in such a way that it encourages certain types of stories, which I also find to be a big plus.

As I mentioned in the mechanics discussion above, this winds up not really mattering that much. The mechanics of the game hamstring a player’s efforts to address themes. Specifically, since narrative power (and thus ability to address theme) is derived from victory in the conflict mechanic, players must always strive for victory in the conflict mechanic. This means that thematically appropriate losses may not do what you want thematically.

In some ways this is a feature, and not a bug. That is, it makes all the stories about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. Since you can’t get ahead by failing, victory for your character is what you as a player strive for. This pushes the stories in a specific direction: a constant striving for dominance over everyone else. Unfortunately, the player can not effectively make negative statements about this striving within the mechanics.

The ultimate result is that the majority of theme is addressed at a level outside of the mechanics. While I do admit that a functional social contract is necessary for any functional roleplaying, Nine Worlds seems to rely more heavily than many games upon this social contract. It restricts player choices in such a way that many statements and cool stuff come from outside the mechanics and setting material. This indicates that the game isn’t facilitating play nearly as well as it could be, which is a tragedy.

Ultimately, what Nine Worlds does do right, it does very right. Further, I can’t think of another game off the top of my head that is doing the same thing, even badly. This leaves you in a position such that, if you want to do what Nine Worlds does, then Nine Worlds is better than any option out there (even not using anything), but you will also notice that the game could have been much better than it is.

Section 3 – Nine Worlds in this instance

The specific instance of play I’m discussin here is one that Matt was recording. When I see a link, I’ll put it here. He had mentioned, either in his recruitment post, or in alter discussion, that he had some intention to use the recordings for marketting purposes. That is, to show the game in action. I mention this because it has some bearing on the way I ended up playing.

Interestingly, I didn’t really think about the recording when it came to making revealing personal statements. This is probably due to the fact that I’m basically equally guarded around just about everyone, so I don’t feel the need to put up extra layers of shielding for some unknown listener.

The session in question was good. It was Matt, Fred, and I since Ben is on some crappy dial-up connection and couldn’t join us. I’ve played with Fred for over a year now, so I’m pretty familiar with his play style. On the other hand, I’ve played with Matt precisely once: a ten minute demo of Nine Worlds at GenCon 2005. This was a good chance to get a feel for how he thinks and plays.

The game ran smoothly, with a few hiccups when we tried to frame new scenes and weren’t entirely sure what we wanted to do. Beyond that, things went roughly as I expected them to: Every conflict I was in I used Hubris (since that was what I had the highest rating in), and Fred always used Arete (again, his highest Virtue). Even drawing huge stacks of cards, the Urges we had rated highly were always the ones we used because the cards never came out in such a way that we could score higher Fate values with our non-specialized Urges.

The mechanics channeled us into a very predictable set of behavior. While this was okay (maybe even straight-up good) in the first session, since it helped us get a solid feel for the characters, I can see that it has the potential to get old over more sessions.

At the same time, the Urges provided some truly kicking narration. Thinking within the constraints of a Stasis play, or a Metamorphosis play, or a Chaos play really gets the creative juices flowing. The Arete/Hubris split on methodology also made for some cool distinctive color, though the lines did blur once or twice.

The world definitely followed through on its promise. It was rife with conflict, and the book provided just enough material to propel us directly into cool stuff. Definitely a positive. There was, in play, an interesting tension between resolving a Muse now, and holding onto it for the bonus it gives you while it’s still on the table. That was pretty cool.

Another interesting thing about being recorded is that I made an intentional effort to do as much mechanical stuff as possible. I scored some points, I used some Muses, I created a Muse with Points, I boosted stats with Points, I created a Lock on some stats, and I intentionally resolved a Muse.

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been so aggressive with the variety of my actions if this had been a regular, unrecorded game, but I’m not sure that this was in any way a negative thing. It helped me get a grasp on some of the mechanics which might have taken a bit longer otherwise.

Of course the ultimate question that arises is: was it fun? And the answer is, in spite of its flaws, this is one dang fun game. Its imperfections are somewhat saddening, but it still delivers a fun experience. I recommend it overall, but be aware that it could (and honestly should) be a better game that it is. On the bright side it does deliver on a lot of its promise, and ultimately points in some cool new directions for play.

ADDENDUM (20:06): This post is terribly schizophrenic. It’s well below the standards I’d like to think I have when it comes to editing and clarity. In case it’s not clear, I really enjoyed the game and anticipate continuing to enjoy it. It is just that it seems extremely clear to me that I could have been enjoying it a whole lot more than I am, which would have been simply phenomenal.

ADDENDUM (Jan 28, 2006): Matt has made available the first scene from our game. There are some volume equalization problems (that is, my voice projects a little too much), and it is just on scene, but it’s good stuff. You can find it on Matt’s blog.

Thomas

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