Stakes November 29, 2006
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Applied, Theory.3 comments
I know, you would think no one would need to say anything ever again about stakes. They have just about been done to death. Enough so, in fact, that some are willing to grant that they are a term whose usefulness has long since past (see the extended discussion over at Story Games with Ron Edwards…may link later when I have time to dig it up).
Still, it’s fair to sayt that a good number of people are still using the term and the practices it entails. Bracketing for a moment the issue of whether stakes pre-empts a given game’s mechanics, I have a basic idea for how to use stakes more dynamically.
First, one of the big problems with the term is the conceptual baggage it brings with it. The term connotes gambling and, more importantly, assumes that you take great risks only with the possibility of great reward. In roleplaying or story games, this poses some problems.
First off, it encourages what I will call ‘parity’ of possibilities. If you try to perform an exceptional and flashy action, then you usually risk an equally flashy failure. If I am going to convert an important NPC to my side, then I might have the GM/whoever sets counter-stakes suggest I should lose a trusted ally if I fail.
Sometimes this works just fine. However, plenty of times, it stretches the narrative continuity of the story being told. The causal ties between what I am trying to do and what results grow wider and wider. Again, sometimes this is also functional in a given game. Often, though, it introduces just enough absurdity to disconnect players from the story.
A good alternative arises if we just break away from the gambling-game theory metaphors. Instead of making it about ’equal’ events we can make the stakes about getting more or less control over the story. This sets well with the original conception of conflict resolution from which stakes emerged.
The more successful you are, the more fully you realize the intention that motivated your character’s actions. The more you fail, the more the situation spins out of your character’s control. If multiple players are involved, their varying success should indicate their respective authority in the scene.
It might even make sense to suggest that there not be counter-stakes proper, only a sense that the action will have results different than the ones they intended. If they are trying to break into a vault to find dirt on the bad guy, maybe the alarm goes off, a guard stumbles upon them, or they find only the misinformation the bad guy left them.
Ideally, a mechanic could exist to measure the back and forth, some tool to indicate when enough accumulated advantages result in either success or failure. You can establish scene thresholds, helping to scale the length and importance of a given scene, allowing players to help determine what those thresholds are. The closer you get to those thresholds, the more the narrations made by players should reflect the proximity of success.
Very low threshold scenes would probably look a lot like all or nothing stakes, while higher ones would produce more fluidity…
Oh, one more thing November 29, 2006
Posted by Ian in Game Design, Methodological, [3am] Design Log.add a comment
Yes, this is definitely modeled on the token economy system I have been trying to work out for 3am, probably benefiting from being an entirely different project. So it might be worth looking here for the motivations behind these experiments.
And, of course, there are the many posts you can crawl through by clicking the [3am] Design Log tag.
Token Game November 29, 2006
Posted by Ian in Actual Game, Applied, Game Design.add a comment
I had meant to post this over thanksgiving, but a few technical difficulties intereceded. Here is a draft of the game that I began for the MACE Iron Game Chef competition. This has seen no playtesting to date, so play at your own risk (and please let me know!). Those of you who know what Crime & Punishment looks like should see a family resemblance.
There are a few discrepancies in the text, which I am still trying to decide which way to resolve. For the moment, ignore the talk about each type of deity having a preferred type of drama. I like it, but want to think through it a little more before working something more concrete into the mechanics.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to teach myself the basics of photoshop to prep the character sheets, so here is a simple description of how to produce each of them. Each should be drawn so that they take up most of an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper (big enough so the cells actually accommodate tokens) .
Primal Deity: Draw an equilateral triangle (or something close to it). Mark the midpoints of its sides and use those points to draw a triangle within the primary triangle. The central triangle is the gift cell. Number the other spaces 1-3.
Unifying Deity: Draw a diamond (square tilted onto a tip). Mark the midpoint of each of its sides and use those points to draw a square within it. That square is the gift cell. Number the remaining spaces clockwise 1-4.
Changing Deity:Draw a pentacle. The pentagon that is defined by its lines is the gift cell. Moving clockwise, number the points of the star 1-5.
Communities with Something in Common November 20, 2006
Posted by Ian in About blog, Actual Play, Applied, Community, Jargon, Manifesto, Methodological, Theory.3 comments
This does not entail a rejection of the communities of gamers that are already out there, that subsume individual groups. Online forums and in-person conventions all have their place in the big picture. That place, however, is not the regulation of play styles but as trading zones for them.
The forum serves as a point through which different cloisters can appreciate each other, share their successes and failures. The appreciation should always come with a sense of distance. There needs to be less investment in the hobby or industry as a whole, as an individual thing whose well-being we need to care about. That focus makes it too easy to get invested in pronouncements that we feel must hold true for all cloisters. Instead, we need an ethic of appreciation, a willingness to just listen, read, and absorb the stories from other cloisters. Think of it as travelers from all over the world meeting in an airport. They come to the place with very different experiences, very different lives, and we can learn more by just sharing and interacting than by trying to offer advice about how to ‘fix’ what we perceive as their problems.
Conventions provide precious opportunities in which we get to encounter different playstyles. Rather than assuming that the playtyle with which we come to the table is the ideal one, we ought to come to the table ready to negotiate with different playstyles. The convention game is an actual play trading zone where we can experiment with new arrangements and share our styles. It is to accept that mediocre play may happen, but that mediocre play may be the first step toward a different and powerful play experience. Sometimes, too, it is just a lesson of how badly certain play styles go together, of how certai relationships need not be pursued. In short, it’s not unlike dating.
This ethic of appreciation is, again, not about some airy romantic love of the other. It’s an acknowledgment that a person’s play style is not simply a set of actions that they perform here and now, but a set of lessons which they have acquired from a great number of actual play experiences. Those lessons reflect layers of active social learning which cannot be easily summed up, learning which has to a great extent gone on outside of a strictly verbal framework.
