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.
The Roach and Rabelais December 3, 2007
Posted by Ian in Actual Game, Applied, Methodological, Personal Reflection, Review.add a comment
Because I hate to let the blog lie fallow for too long at a stretch, I wanted to throw out a little thought that has been working around the back of my head. It’s simple, really, an observation about how I play the Shab al-Hiri Roach.
I play the Roach like something between a cross of Rabelais and tragedy. The mechanics all but guarantee that the characters will be victims and the color helps cement that. The characters are people cast into a maelstrom of ill will, subject to the grossest whims of chance, and capable of being degraded beyond their control, through the agency of a mere bug, a bug that crawls into their bodies.
But it’s more than just that awful tragedy, though. The mechanics of the Roach cards, with their injunctions to eat and copulate, to conquer and enslave, emphasize the sheer meatiness of the characters, their appetites, their physical presence, but as objects, as things to be consumed.
The brevity of the mechanical contact to the amount of game play enhances this, giving each scene drastic variability. The single draw of a card, the single roll of a die, shapes the entire scene and its aftermath.
There’s comedy that can come of that. But beneath that comedy there’s a fear, a fear that drives the comedy. It’s a vision of a world where hope and despair are mere accidents of chance, where people are mere containers, vessels, for animal hunger, where people can become awful things wearing the tatters of their humanity like shame.
Random 4e Reaction August 22, 2007
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Game Design, Methodological, Review, Theory.add a comment
I’ve had the chance to chat with a few people about our first reactions to what we have seen. One thing that amuses me is one of the places that I seem to differ from them in one key area.
One of the things mentioned in the Youtube video is the increased emphasis on filling a role in the party, on clearly defining 4 key roles for characters to fill. I am unsure exactly of how this will fall out, but the idea excites me while it seems to disappoint others.
It excites me because that is what D&D really seemed to need to me. It needed to tell the players, before they even started play, that this is a game about a group facing great challenges. It needed to tell them, from page one, that they needed to work together and cooperate, coming together to be greater than the sum of their parts.
It seems to worry those I have spoken with for the corollary of that: they worry that their freedom in creating a character will be inhibited by having to fit a role.
While I hope that the system ends up being flexible enough to allow a lot of variation in the sorts of characters who can fill those roles, at base that constraint is a good thing.
My best short-term games began with discussions that helped role formation occur and my best long-term games picked up speed as players found their roles in relationship to each other.
Many poor short-run games failed because there was no group posited, only a passle of ‘cool’ seeming character ideas. I had a few slumps in my long-term campaign, too, when roles seemed to blur a little.
Building that role structure into the rules seems like buckets of potential awesome. If they can manage to provide mechanical incentive (e.g. some magic items clearly aimed at those who excel in roles rather than classes; xp for fulfilling role-related goals) for maintaining those roles over the course of a long-term campaign, all the better.
That said, I dearly hope that those four roles are not the tired breakdown of fighter, divine, arcane, and rogue. I really want to see the spellcasting division of labor softened and the role of rogue made more available to a number of class mixes.
