Design Effort Vs Predictable results: One solution

26 June, 2009 at 10:45 am (Story Theory)

I had this nifty idea. It helps with a certain writers block I get, which is more an effort to reward imbalance block. The block comes from thinking of writing up the code for a combat between a PC and a monster and the imbalance of that effort relative to the reward, as I can see the percentages and know exactly how it’ll turn out, barring exceptionally random results.

But this idea I had is nifty. I actually kind of thought of it a few years ago when I first played WOW. It goes like this:

  1. Monsters have a percentage chance, perhaps around 20%, of being ‘potentially highly dangerous’. They show up with a red aura or whatever.
  2. BUT this doesn’t mean they are, it merely means they have the potential.
  3. Once you go into combat with them, they have a percentage, perhaps around 5%, of being a considerably more dangerous version of the creature. Perhaps what one might call an imbalanced version relative to the PC.
  4. If that roll doesn’t come off, they are just regular! Few! Thank goodness!
  5. So you’ve got it so far? Monsters can sometimes appear as more dangerous, and sometimes they actually would indeed kill you! But, you say, this is just playing an odds game – you could work out the percentage of death and avoid all that coding by just rolling it to begin with!
  6. Okay, here’s the nifty bit. The player can press a key or has an item and it, if they use it prior to starting combat, it turns these guys to regular monsters. No aura. No chance of being lethal.
  7. And the second nifty part is that the game records how often you use this instead of facing off with the monster. If you never use it, you get some sort of award at the end of the game, much the same as in nethack when you fulfil the requirements of a conduct. If you use it a few times/X amount of times, you might get some other award. If you always use it, no award, but you don’t face arbitrary death if your not up to facing that.
  8. That bits important, because just as much as there can be too much work for a predictable win result, there can be too much work for a predictable (eventual, as the odds will come up) lose result. In play it’s not a predictable result, as much as you want that award and current circumstances influence your choice on the matter. :)

I’m really quite pleased with it. I feel a lot of weight come off me, in terms of coding stuff. Though I guess I’m not doing it right now – but now it’s a fun thing to do, so it’s quite easy to get the whim to do it. And I can feel that whim building up :)

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Between oblivion and susceptiblity

18 June, 2009 at 9:36 am (Story Theory)
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There’s this curious position. One of the things I’ve encountered a lot is people, when designing or prepping, bring a lot of prior assumptions with them when doing so. It’s ‘how things are!’. A lot of these assumptions aren’t even compatible with other assumptions, but they get dragged along out of reflexive habit. I’d gone the other way. But the curious position is, I’m thinking now, is that if you strip away all prior assumptions it doesn’t lead to something which is ‘the way it is’ and not an assumption. Even the big bang and the much latter formation of our planet is essentially an assumption. I don’t mean I’m questioning the hypothesis that it’s true. I’m referring to the physics of this universe – why are they set the particular way they are? Who knows – it’s essentially an assumption to carry them over. Why have some of those physics laws or more in a game, when that’s just carrying on an assumption of ‘how things are’?

But after that, once you’ve stripped it back that far, there’s nothing.  I suppose you could hypothesize what else there is. But I’m more into getting past assumptions and dealing with what there is – but once you strip away all the assumptions, there is no ‘is’. Even physics are gone.

And yet I’m still definitely against just carrying baggage/old assumptions. I’ve thought before that roleplay seem to, over time, purge more and more assumptions out of me, while most other people seemed to go the other way and have more and more assumptions reinforced in them as ‘how things are’ without question.

At least for my own position, I may have overshot in an effort to get away from that unquestioning assumption making and it’s a question of which particular assumptions I want to carry into a game. If any. If I don’t want to carry any, then I don’t want to design a game. This isn’t flipping to the other extreme where assumptions are carried without question and without any self examination to see whether assumptions are carried. This is the conscious identification of assumptions and then either the deliberate decision to carry one or more of these assumptions, or not design at all. And that’s only assumptions that have been identified, as much as one can make sure the only ones that get through are the ones you have identified and can percieve.

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You can do anything…on a DS!

13 June, 2009 at 7:03 pm (Story Theory)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhvhdGLZQ5g&feature=channel

The question it poses at the end ‘What would you write?’ is an odd one. It’s not like whether you can win is the conflict, but how you’d win.

If you haven’t had a look at the video, you need to grab a star and this game has a large dictionary in it. You can type in a word and it’ll make that object appear - like a ladder, if you just need to climb to get the star. But as the video shows, you could also write ‘beaver’ and it chews down the tree the star is in. Again, it seems like how you do it is more important than whether you can manage it.

I wonder if it’ll be helpful in illustrating different needs people bring with them when it comes to the activity called roleplay?

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Neat idea for descriptive bonus XP

10 June, 2009 at 12:34 pm (Story Theory)

Though this was a neat idea here, except I’d say instead of dividing XP gained for creative description, everyone gets the same amount of XP. Ie, if someone gets 30 XP for a creative move but then, in a group of six, only gets 5 points and watchs a bunch of couch potatoes get 5XP for doing nothing, you feel like your being sponged off of. But if everyone gets 30XP (or whatever the award is), then hey, cool!

Though the poster did seem to give it to protect people who feel they are being ‘punished’ if they aren’t creative and stuff. But, rather than trying to deal with that wussyness (as I see it), I think it’s nifty for other reasons. Though I do think people need some sort of kick in the pants, even if only mildly, rather than just giving to them or they feel all sad and stuff cause it’s ‘punishment’ not to get something they put no effort into getting.

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Me? Advocate following the setting? How odd?

7 June, 2009 at 5:28 pm (Story Theory)

I can’t believe I’m advocating conforming, to some extent (doesn’t have to be alot) to the pre-established setting, over here. And Tommi would probably be wagging his finger for posting on the D&D boards as well. Look for posts by ’Noon’.

I’m actually quite a big supporter of the GM doing what he wants. But specifically in that one particular thing he could want to do is conform to the setting, to some extent, in how he judges things. And by conform, I mean by his own evaluation – the buck stops with him, unless rules say something about it stopping with someone else.

And I don’t even mean utter conformity to it – perhaps mostly mangling it and doing what you want, but some sort of nod and preservation of how it went prior.

And yet here I am – it’s almost like I advocated this idea of the GM doing what he wants, here and there, and the ideas gone extreme and come back to bite me in the bum! The GM advice there just straight says to throw in monsters in to meet the meta game objective the GM has, with zero reference to the setting. There’s alot of ‘it’s for the story’ nonsense justification, which is nonsense because either the setting is part of story, or you chose the wrong setting for your story.

Far out! It’s like I’m usually having to argue about it being a supported illusion and really if the rules say the GM can do it, he can – but here I’m suddenly on the other side of the berlin wall, saying they have forgotten the very reasons they played a game that engages a setting at all (though I’ve left copious disclaimers that if you just wanted to engage the numbers, then cool, your doing what you want and have forgotten nothing of your objective, have fun and power to you)

Just bizarre – I do advocate that if you get to decide something, you do as you want. And that includes, if you want, trying to conform to the setting. But doing what you want can’t include failing to do what you want, as in ignoring setting utterly when it was something you wanted to do (and again, if they didn’t want to do it to being with, that’s fine, this doesn’t apply, have fun doing whatcha doin’).

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Train is over when it…HEY!

29 May, 2009 at 5:06 pm (Philosophy)

From the twitter of bbrathwaite,

Someone took a souvenir from Train at #g4c. If you inadvertently took it, please return it. It was a Terminus card. Thanks.

You might know of Brenda Brathwaites game ‘Train’. There’s a rule in it “Train is over when it ends.”

If you’ve been watching ‘play this thing’ there’s a few…I dunno how you’d put it? Don’t get what you started the activity for, games? An older one is “The Graveyard”. Another is “Vampires”. With a few others as well. “Fathom” has the subtitle of ‘pleasantly fucking with your head’ in the review, even (taking it the review is in tune with what the authors think of these sorts of games).

And I’m rather skeptical of what I consider to be a bait and switch for shock and awe design. Most notably BECAUSE the player has no way to affect the author at a similar level.

Until now, it seems.

As much as I can see art in a game that acts like it will give control but doesn’t (graveyard), or massively changes the theme to give a fixed message, I can see art in taking the card.

Mind you, the person was probably just souveniring/stealing. Which is a shame because I could see the art in it. Because when you start stripping away the boarders, you don’t just strip them away for the other person – you strip your own boarders away as well.

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“You can do(type) anything!”

21 May, 2009 at 12:25 am (Story Theory)
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Just a comment by a poster called Seth, over on an applied game design thread about text parsers, reminded me of something.

Ah, nostalgia. Personally I loved the (false) feeling that you could type anything into a text parser and potentially get a result. The multiple choice option makes it far easier than trying to get into the designer’s head but at the price of removing the veil.

I like that caveat, that quick note of how it was a false feeling, yet acknowledging the feeling could be enjoyed(loved) anyway. And especially noting how the ‘veil’ was lost – directly referencing it as simply a bit of a fun illusion.

Ah, I wish I could talk in these terms, in relation to table top design, all the time. I really do. Bit lonely that way.

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Fiction ‘Material reference’ mechanic

15 May, 2009 at 7:21 am (Story Theory)
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I was thinking about a discussion in the ‘Roots’ thread here and at ‘anyway’ about materially referring to the fiction.

In roots I’ve argued with Josh that no matter how much you refine your understanding of the imaginative space, you still don’t make contact with an agreement.

But here’s an idea…

Okay, the focus is on scrap metal and what’s good enough to repair a point of your armour, in this example.

The GM describes the piece of metal. Players can ask questions or whatever.

The thing is, the player has, by the rules, the ability to write down that the scrap gives a point of repair. It’s actually the players choice.

BUT in play it’s simply presented as the GM describing some scrap metal and then the player, should it appear to them as being able to repair armour, says “Okay, so that’s a point of armour repaired”. The GM never gives them a point of armour repaired. They refer ‘materially’ to the prior narration/description, and by refering to it they ‘know’ whether they can repair some armour. The description and such does not refer to the players ability to choose – it just describes what the metal looks like, and the player refers materially to the fiction to determine if he gets a point of repair. We don’t wave flags around with “Players choice” printed on them.

“BUT BUT”, you might say, “I would just always give myself the armour no matter if the description was of a rusted hairpin!”

And here I throw my hands in the air and shrug? I don’t know how so many gamers can say they are so much into imagination, but then say they are utterly and uncontrollably compelled to ditch the imaginative world and just always give themselves the point?

Even if you were playing gamist, it can be taken as adding personal challenge, by not giving yourself the armour when it’s a rusty hairpin. That acknowledgement of extra difficulty taken might take some extra organising at the start, but it’s still entirely doable.

Or am I just imagining this response and most readers would say “Oh yeah, I’d just go with whether it seemed to give me an armour point or not”? I’m really anticipating that former response though, and from people who think they can just materially refer to the imagined space already. Which seems a total contradiction to me.

Anyway, I really quite like the idea of this. It…how to put it? It decouples direct currency exchange? Like if you have 32 points to distribute on stats, that’s just a direct currency hand over to the player. But here the GM does not hand over any points. He just describes the metal. That’s all he does. Then the player gets a point! It’s not a point that’s handed over, it just kind of manifests from the imagined world – from that fluffy cloud Vincent keeps drawing.

That sounds rather nice to me – not earth shattering. But really nice. I think it might help give a feeling that usually only develops after an hour or so in my play experiences. Reflecting on that, that’s because after an hour the players are usually relying on something the GM’s said, in order to operate, rather than on the pure stats/currency the char gen gave them.

I often think of how my designs atleast start with a stark currency exchange. With this rule, they still would be a currency exchange. But at the same time it seems to draw from the imagined world. The world were trying to be inspired by, and so more attention to it as the source is a good thing.

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Imagination coupler, Mk. 2

10 May, 2009 at 5:26 am (Story Theory)
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Not that the rest of the roleplay community works within the idea of artistic expressions, but something struck me about that today and I thought I’d have a chat with myself about it!

It occured to me that someone elses art can just be flat out boring to you. This isn’t terribly controversial – I’m sure we all like some types of music or paintings, but to other types of them we go ‘Meh’, while other people might hail them. Not controversial.

But it struck me that if I took a board game and plugged in spaces for artistic expression to occur (like someone describing their characters move), I’m putting in work and effort into something that, if I look at it calmly, can not be exciting at all. It could be entirely boring, simply because I don’t dig the art the other person expresses at that point.

Why add something that adds nothing? The art has a chance, perhaps a fair chance, of adding nothing. Indeed, why go out of my way to fit it into something which would have worked perfectly well as a board game? Why spoil a good board game will dull blanks? In fact, go to the effort of filling a good board game with dull blanks? It doesn’t make sense, yet that only just occurs to me.

So I thought about it and realised I’ve sought of thought along these lines before and suddenly a hybrid appeared in my mind (and some steam wafted out of my ears). Basically I’ve thought of an imagination coupler before, but it was fairly rudimentry – the classic “Get +2 to hit if the GM feels prior narrations would grant that”.

Here it’s slightly more complex. Say you had three moves (how many doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s atleast two/a choice). Upper Cut, Roundhouse, Flying Kick.

Now the first thing is that as designer, I choose moves that atleast I find exciting. So these are all exciting options that thrill me, the designer – instant reward for designing! The second thing is, the player chooses one of these moves as his move, BUT he can also describe his move. And if the GM so whishes, he can construct a bonus to hit and damage that suits that narration (perhaps working within a certain budget – how much he spends of the budget depends on how poweful he feels the prior narration was). Or the GM can just take it that the move they stated, happens. The third thing? The player gets the stats described to him and can either choose to take it OR the previous move he stated (which was one of the following: Upper Cut, Roundhouse, Flying Kick).

The good thing about this coupler is that something I as designer think is exciting, will always happen! No ‘dull art’ moments. Either one of the moves happens, or in play if I as GM think the art is exciting, then it gets implemented (assuming the player goes with it – if they don’t, they go with one of the pre set exciting moves). There is only what I think of exciting – there is no forcing imagined moves into the design, even though they can pan out dull as dog poo.

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Prediction #1

6 May, 2009 at 2:01 am (Philosophy, Story Theory)
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Over here on the anyway site, Jesse Burneko says this in comment #28

So there’s all these fictional aesthetic calls that dictate how the dice move around. And yes, the GM has the final say over that. But it’s not *arbitrary.* It’s all usually very clear when it’s actually happening because the fiction is a much more powerful force than people give it credit for.

My prediction is that in five to eight years from now roleplayers will say of the following “Everyone knows that”: It is arbitrary – it’s as arbitrary as the GM is, or as arbitrary as the GM wants to be arbitrary. It’s just that the GM can try not to be arbitrary – he can try and syncronise with other peoples notions and prior narrations. And so can everyone else at the table. They can all try to support an illusion that it isn’t arbitrary, and most people can do a fair to good job of giving that, as much as most people can follow the instructions of a magic trick such that the illusion that magic has occured, is constructed.

People will say “Everyone knows” that the fiction isn’t a powerful force, but if everyone throws their weight behind it and acts as if it is a powerful force, then in terms of practical ramifications, it is as if it is a powerful force. The illusion it is a powerful force and many practical ramifications of it being a powerful force, will exist – if everyone throws their weight behind it. In the same way as votes for women or the abolishment of slavery exist as a powerful force with physical ramifications, if people throw their weight behind those ideas.

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