Character ownership (comedy, epic, tragedy) February 26, 2009
Posted by Ian in Applied, Creative Agenda, Game Design, Personal Reflection, Simulationist.add a comment
As I think about what it might look like to play Uns, I keep wondering about this issue of character ownership. Superficially, the game is all about the character ownership. There is one player, one main character, and everything basically happens for the sake of them.
But that really doesn’t capture what the game is about. The rigid constraints of the module system (here are the places you can go, period) makes any sense of ownership more limited. The character serves as a screen to be drawn through the setting, an organizing element that structures play, helps narrow down what can or ought to happen where.
Contemplating my design process February 7, 2009
Posted by Ian in Applied, Creative Agenda, Game Design, Personal Reflection, Simulationist, Theory.2 comments
Talking, even half-heartedly, about sketching out a game again shook loose something in the back of my head. I started to think about how I design, why I design, and then I started thinking about how I think about play. What is more, I have been producing a game of PTA for my gaming group, a more active role than I have taken in gaming for a good long while (it’s been refreshing, with a few bumps).
Somewhere over a slice of pizza, it hit me that almost all of my design efforts to date have been presumptively focused toward a Simulationist CA.
Macchiavelli in Play? January 31, 2008
Posted by Ian in Applied, Game Design, Methodological, Small Idea, Theory.add a comment
I’m sure I’m not the only player who picked up Vampire when it first came out way back when, read through the material, thought it was so interesting and different than what had been going in gaming, and then sat down to discover I had no idea how to run or play the political intrigue that supposedly drove the game.
And it crossed my mind there might be a way to structure those interactions a little more. The biggest thing is to give political and social bonds some sort of mechanical weight. Here is a basic idea:
Social conflicts always have enduring consequences. If you lose a battle of wills, you get a consequence recorded directly onto your character sheet regarding your relationship to the winner. That becomes a demand your character must meet or pay some resource to ignore (back in the day, Willpower).
Ideally, over time, there would emergent tensions in those consequences, perhaps even to the extent that a single player would have conflicting injunctions.
Some extra fiddly bits might be useful, like giving the victorious character a pool of resources they can offer their subject for following their injunction. That sets up a follow and get rewarded or disobey and have to burn resources.
Of course, any given player should have a limit on how much bounty they can distribute in a single session, so that a player with lots of social power is in the position of having to play favorites.
Classroom Deathmatch, Hacks January 31, 2008
Posted by Ian in Actual Game, Actual Play, Applied, Game Design, Review.add a comment
So I played Classroom Deathmatch last night. It was good fun, though I dare say it dragged a little toward the conclusion (that, though, may have had as much to do with the constrained amount of time we had to play as anything else).
The basic concept is fairly dark (only one student gets out of the deathmatch–or, in our case, no student) and the mechanics very simple. It’s a round-robin format, with a GM-lite figure called the ‘Superintendant.’ Narration rules are clever. You never get to narrate the results of your actions, they are narrated for you by other players depending on whether you succeed or not.
Perhaps the most brilliant mechanic, though, is that every character comes into play with a random item, some terribly obvious in their use (throwing stars, guns), others a little less so (spray paint, morphine). It’s playful and inspires creativity.
As an aside, it did seems like it was a little too easy to succeed and failure was an aberration. That may have had to do with luck, but I suspect it also had to do with the low attachment you have to a character. It’s pretty easy to burn their resources quickly because, well, it’s pretty unlikely they are going to make it through too many rounds of play.
Narration is a little amorphous in terms of how much to narrate at any one point, so it became pretty easy to end almost every narration with a character’s death. Since there are 50 characters to go through, that’s not such a bad thing, but still, there is something not quite satisfactory about that pacing.
Which leads me to think about tweak play next time we try the game. Most of these are aimed at making it a little easier to sustain small stories around the characters. Ideas:
Targeting: make it harder to kill a character in one narration. Require a player to be targeted before they can be removed from play. It would be a simple mechanic. When a player has been successfullt targeted, set a coin, tails up, in front of them. The next time the player gets a turn, they turn it heads up. At the conclusion of their turn after that, they remove the coin.
So long as there is a coin on their character, they may be removed from play by a single success. It would be interesting, too, if the targeting player then gets to narrate say, any two elements of the targeted player’s scene, thus driving them a little, almost as if chasing them.
Deferral: Give each player (not character!) three tokens. At any time, after someone has narrated their character’s death, they may play a token and renarrate the scene so that their character survives. Every other result must remain the same, though the details may vary. Begin narration, “so, you see it going down clearly in your head like this, but…”
Variable Population: I’m not sure what the right mix would be, but for the evening of play we were looking for, 50 was a little too many people. I would think abot shaving the population down to 20 or 30, esp. with the hacks in place.
