Design, particular and general December 29, 2006
Posted by Ian in Game Design, Methodological, Personal Reflection, Rambling, Theory.add a comment
[Caveat lector: this is a rambling post in a big way, only a modicum of organization and defined by things you can only barely call 'ideas']
Okay, so a couple of things came together in my head and I have been toying with creating another simple rpg. It all started with planning to run a TSOY session for some friends, set in the past of a campaign world we created for a 3.5 campaign arc. Before I knew it, I could see how to run the session with an entirely different set of rules.
Now, I’m actually going to run the game with TSOY, just because I want a system I can trust. But now I have a pet system to play around with and blog about, so I will.
I have a few basic goals with this game. First, to create a GM role that is very improvisational. I want each player to be able to, once per session, just look at the GM and say “I want this scene, with this character, now.” To support that, I want to work up a challenge chart, that the GM can use to quick build challenges with finite resources. When it comes to on-demand scenes, I see them getting a big chunk of those resources to build the scene.
Second, I want to make the mechanics tight, tight, tight. I want to see how closely I can tailor mechanics to concept. I have two attributes in mind (Water and Air) and I want every conflict to have a Water and an Air aspect. Water stands for what is actually happening in the scene, while the Air represents the ’spiritual’ or ‘ethical’ dimension of the conflict.
I have a mechanic (more on that in another post) that allows both aspects to appear in a single roll of the dice, and for a player to be able to win one aspect while losing another. And, I think, I don’t want any dice rolled for any conflict that does not require both aspects get dealt with. I’m hoping that keeping the concepts tightly wound around mechanics makes the game easier to both learn and get into. With any luck, I’ll get a chance to find out.
But all this has me wondering exactly why this game has hold of me at the moment. I really don’t have any pretensions to publishing, to making money, or, even, seeing people playing it a lot. What am I up to in my design process?
I started getting into the design process for this because it feels like it expresses something about my current emotional state, my current spiritual state. Those aren’t things I talk about a whole lot, but it plays a big role. The mechanics began as hodge podge, but I am clarifying them based on the affects (not concepts) currently dominating my life.
I’m not just playing with mechanics, but thinking about my life through them. It isn’t that they are a commentary on my life, so much as a parallel practice that hones certain attitudes I am trying to cultivate. On the one hand, it’s personal, but the final product’s success does not depend on someone being able to respond to it in according to that personal dimension.
I feel like that this probably plays a role in why other people design, but I don’t see a lot of discussion about it. It is, of course, a more personal and ‘tender’ issue. The debate over (art) – (not art) touches on it a little, but really seems to miss the point.
High or low, art or craft, there is a question of the person involved, of how they are involved. Some ‘high art’ is utterly mechanical, some ‘mere craft’ is riddled with the cries of sadness and joy felt by their creator.
Anyway, this is me just placing a bookmark by this question, a promise to myself and others that I will be returning to this idea, hopefully with more choate things to say about it rather than just wandering inchoately around it.
Back in the Day December 15, 2006
Posted by Ian in Community, Personal Reflection, Rambling.add a comment
Lately, I have been thinking about how the web seemed way back when before Google, Yahoo, and all the rest set about providing us with the tools to map the web. I’m thinking about how you used to get a web address from a bulletin board, a friend, or an article, and go look it up. About how you would crawl from site to site according to the links between them.
It was a fascinating time, when you really felt you were exploring some new land, stumbling across all these incredibly personal, raw things. I remember coming to those sites with less expectations of what I would find and more of a genuine curiosity. I read with a sympathetic ear, listening for the glimmers of light between the lines. There was something synaesthetic like that to it.
The emergence of the new web world, though, has created hubs. I appreciate them and it makes my life easier. But it has stripped the distance away from so many websites. I don’t go so often with the expectation of needing to listen, to cull, but to find my expectations elabrated for me.
And I miss that, am wondering how we might begin to foster that sentiment again. I think again to Walter Benjamin, to his essay The Storyteller, where he talks about how important it was for the story to come from afar, to bear within itself the promise and allure of distance, something that we accepted as containing the alien and the divine, which we must make sense of without being told.
Something profound, deeper than the sort of ‘interpretation’ we often talk about, which is little more than unfolding what we already know or what is already there but not yet known by us. This is an encounter, a moment when we must appreciate before we can begin to speak, a moment of silence.
Modeling Scarcity December 7, 2006
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Applied, Game Design.add a comment
This has been in the back of my head for a while. I have been playing in a TSOY game set in the Firefly ‘verse and one of the themes we were hoping to touch on was scarcity. We were thinking it would be kind of fun to have our characters really have to grub around to get all the things they need. That dimension of the campaign never quite came to the forefront, partly for mechanical reasons, partly because we just got interested in other things.
Still, it set me to wondering how you might build a more robust scarcity subsystem for a game like TSOY. The use of key scenes can evoke the atmosphere, to be sure, but what else could be done?
I don’t quite feel like the old school, D&D route quite works. Making the player keep track of cash, how much things cost, making them go through the motions of buying all their stuff, counting rations, and so on, just seems alien to the play of a game like TSOY.
One thing that came to mind was a resource pool. It’s a pile of tokens in the middle of the table which can be accessed for bonus dice. It might be interesting in the case of TSOY if players didn’t get their usual stash of bonus dice but had to place them in the middle of the table to form this pool. If you went this route, it might make sense to cut the number of tokens player received in half.
Mechanically, any player could give another player a bonus die. However, the pool never refreshes between sessions. New tokens can only be added by engaging in scenes where the players engage in some action to get their character’s basic needs (food, lodging, fuel, etc.) met. In fact, it only gets refreshed when players *succeed* in the actions they take.
A simple 1 success = 1 token might work well, just as a simple 1 failure = loss of 1 token could work.
Alternately, for a more brutal version of scarcity, you have a separate resource pool. Each session includes at least one ‘resource scene’ in which players have an opportunity to acquire a stash of new resource tokens. Each player receives a Need, something which requires they take one token from the resource pool each scene in order to meet that Need.
If that Need is not met during a scene, one of the character’s skills is deprecated, treated as if it were one rank lower than it actually is. When that skill reaches Unskilled, a point from the pool associated with that skill must be spent. The character may not refresh that pool until they have spent a resource token to meet their Need.
The Need itself would be particular to the character, associated with a particular skill. It should also be understood that at any time a character may engage in a conflict with another character to deny them access to a resource token. Which does a nice job of encouraging player to player conflicts which are where some very interesting things tend to happen in TSOY.
In the back of my head, too, I am thinking of the recent story arc on the medical drama House. The unfurling conflicts around that addiction are well-modeled by conflicting needs between characters, even where that need is more abstract (a need to help House when he can’t help himself, a need to feel like a good parent, a need to be respected).
It might also be interesting if you let players change their character’s need at a cost. So, for an advance, you could lose one need and acquire another one. In some ways, the Need mechanic is just an inverse of the Key mechanic. One nice thing, though, is that it is still player-centered.
