Mechanic Sketch – The Limit Break

Just came up with a small idea for a limit break mechanic, and then expanded it some, and decided to jot it down before forgetting.

I began thinking of “thematic batteries” while also thinking of the manga Vagabond and the long long fight contained therein, and since I’m also thinking of Go again these days the idea of the River mechanic from Weapons of the Gods also popped into my mind, which gave birth to all of this, which I think could and should be slotted into my Tribal Game, should I pursue it (I should, but it’s really about the would).
(Much of it came as generic, but tying it to keys made it neater. I think it’s pretty easy to see how they can be divorced again – just change the conditions).

Mechanic is for a “Roll a bunch of dice, use highest”, or “Highest makes a big difference” system.

When a condition set up by the Key appears, the player can (must?) take the highest die they roll and place it in the magazine. The other dice get a minus (either a static minus 1/2… depends on the die size, or more likely, an increasing – -1 for the first die you add, -2 the second time you add a die…). You can only add one die per roll.

Magazine size I think should be limited at ~5, thinking of a system using D10s, and especially when coupled with the progressive minus. If the minus grows more slowly, (-1 for the first 3, -2 for dice 4-6, etc.), then it could go longer.

Once the Magazine completely fills up, it starts discharging, perhaps one could “hold it in” till a big opportunity comes along, but once you begin discharging, you must keep going: You either don’t roll the dice at all, or you add the dice from the magazine to your normal rolls – you go in LIFO order – Last In, First Out. One die per roll, plus a bonus for its position (as above, either you get a +1 for the first, +2 for the second… or +1 for 1-3, +2 for 4-6…).

Once you finish discharging the magazine, you would get an “Advancement” in The Shadow of Yesterday terms, or some other change should be undergone by the character.
Considering the penalty for “holding it in”, so as your Limit Break fills up you either get a certain benefit or limitation.
Considering the option of discharging the magazine before it completely fills up – makes it more tactical, less thematic – inclined not to. But listing possible permutations.

Medium Matters: An Instructive Con-Game

About a decade or so ago, I’ve played in a convention game, which was not very good. It had been very instructive, and had stayed in my mind[1], and I think it’d make for an instructive example of something that most of us hear often, and accept: Medium matters. It matters if you tell a story as a book or as a movie, as a movie or as a mini-series. It also matters to a game if it’s played online or offline, with other people or solitary, and special care should be taken when taking a game that was designed in one medium and “porting” (importing) it to another.

The game had the GM, and about a four of us players, perhaps three, I’m not entirely sure. The player characters were held captive, and a man was “interrogating” them, making use of a virtualization tool, so that he can see the images we project with our minds, or perhaps it was just our characters talking – that part was a bit unclear. So he presents us with a situation, we are at X, and Y happens: We reach a junction, and fire opens at us, what do we do? Or rather, what did we do? You see, our characters infiltrated this facility, and got pretty far before being captured, so he wants us to go over what we’ve done and how we’ve done it.

Thing is, if what we narrated ended with us being caught, or we didn’t have enough time to think on our feet, or whatever, he, the GM and the person he was narrating, because in this case they are one and the same, would go, “No, that’s not how it happened” or “Why do you lie to me” before asking us to show him, again. Needless to say, it was mostly GM-fiat deciding things, and he didn’t give us all the roads we wanted [2]. Oh, we’ve had pieces of paper given to us, showing us the resources we’ve had at our disposal, that were found with us, that we said we had, etc.

After a while, after the GM had decided we had all the information we needed, I triggered an explosive charge and broke us out of captivity (see point [2]). We were now in the middle of a hostile facility with everyone coming after us. The GM kept with his “time-sensitive” pressure, giving us time to react, or penalizing us for time we spent thinking, as the players. And then we didn’t really know what we were meant to do, how we were meant to escape – where were our guns? We needed them. And then, all our characters died, and the session ended. And the GM talked to us a bit about the background of the game, the all-important background.

The game was modeled after an internet text-game, with MUD-like commands (Zork), /interact with…, etc. It’s also a puzzle of sorts, where through trial and error we find out who we are, the layout of the facility, what we did, etc. The missing bit is that one of the items in our inventory wasn’t really an item we had, or that did anything, but a lie/image created in order to hide the place where we hid our guns. And we also had to figure out how to take out the facility’s power-source later (as in, after breaking out).

This leads me to where the “port” had issues. I think you can tell how our “interrogation” was very much like a video game, complete with “Saves”. Every time we failed to clear a section, we returned to the last section cleared. But after all this time played, and unlike the internet game that always had this option, we were thrust into “real-time”. Now, our decisions were final, and failure was harsh. This may have been true to the in-game, but it was a drastic departure from the way the original game was designed. This was made worse by two things.

When you sit in front of a computer game that has saves, you’re more willing to take risks, it doesn’t cost you much. But even if it were a pain, you can pause the game and think. Most games let players talk for a bit, but we were really not given much time, at the table, with in-game events happening as we the players tried to discuss things.
Finally, the internet game was a puzzle, aimed at the players, and it was a puzzle that did not have time hanging over the players’ heads. The puzzle of figuring out that one of the items was not real, and was used to masquerade where our guns were – this is information our characters had, but we the players did not. The original game was there to challenge the players, but here the “challenge” was very problematic, as we had one shot, and we had no time.

Of course, the whole game was also horribly “Rail-roaded”, with us only going one direction at a time,  and while in a text quest there’s some challenge in finding the right /interact command to continue, the real point of the game is figuring the fake item and its usage, and that you set the explosives in the interrogation room, it’d seem. Which made the whole experience a lot less fun. And the challenge was very “Gotcha!” [3]. I mean, the whole game-play the only thing we could basically do was figure out the “How” in a description, and then we all died.

[1] Then again, I have a known issue forgetting things, so don’t take that as too much credit for the game.

[2] The most extreme case of this was when we had a piece of explosive (see next sentence in main post) triggered by a key-word. I used it early, figuring it was on me/in the room, and it did nothing. But it was in the room! And later I did trigger it; when it fit the GM’s needs.

[3] It reminds me how in school trips you’d get told the following story, “A man went to the train station, and saw a woman wave goodbye to someone. He killed her, but didn’t go to jail. Why?” and you’re only allowed to ask yes/no questions. The answer is: “They were married, she faked her death and cut her finger to do it, and the husband went to jail for it. Waving her hand at the train station he saw her missing finger, and since he was already convicted of murdering her, he could not be convicted of it again.”
See, “Gotcha!”, it’s information that really comes out of nowhere.

Pick and Play! Part 2: A “Solution”

In the first post, I discussed the issue: How long it takes you from picking up a game to playing it, or from gathering some friends to playing it, is far too long. Here I’ll address a solution. And ramble some more!

Discussing a Solution:

So, those 2-3 hours, while they may be ok in general, many of us want to play a game in 2-3 hours. I think an organizer would be willing to spend 30 minutes, but if you can do without, it’d be even better. This is why a game where you create the setting (but this must be play, and not pre-play), or better-yet, use Earth, is often a good thing. Another world everyone knows (The Middle-Earth amidst fans) can also work.

There are many games I’d have played, or tried to play/run, if I had known how to transmit them to people who did not, and will not read the rules. I think designers should, or people who run their games at con should (for their benefit), come up with exactly how they teach a game, what they teach before play begins, and what they teach as they play the first few scenes. Andy Kitkowski said this might be best achieved via video-demos, or audio-recordings. I think he’s right.

Because yes, that’s what should happen, and why people can play so many board-games so rapidly. Someone talks for 5 minutes, often with pointing at specific tokens, at specific sections of the board, moving things to engage the other players. After 5-7 minutes, people begin to play, but the teaching of the game doesn’t stop. The person running the game explaines more complicated things that always come up, as they come up. The turn order, the combat/purchase or what have you is usually understood after 10 minutes or so. Some things are not explained, because they never come up, but that’s ok.

Another technique people who run board-games employ, based on the table’s preferances, is that after those ~15-20 minutes of having taught the rules and people playing a bit without guidance are concluded, they clean the board and begin a proper game. In Role-playing scenes, people often teach in specific scenes but also carry them onward, which is better than it being during potentially fatal action; examples include “Initiation” in Dogs in the Vineyard, and “preludes” in most World of Darkness games.

I am currently working on a game, code-named “The Beast Witch” (though it may also be code-named “The Sacred Hunt” or whatever, “The Tribal Game” category). And while talking to Paul Czege I’ve had a thought*, later shared on the afore-mentioned threads: Have a bunch of cardboards, like quick-reference sheets you get in board-games, at the center of a table. At the top of each such sheet write a “Situation” that comes up in the game, and then list on the card what to do, in order. I suggest the player who picks up the card reads the card. This is not easy, because it means you should be able to follow each stage as you reach it. If there are tactically “full” choices, you might want players to read the whole card before they begin following it.

Originally, I thought you’d list each “Sub-system” on the card, but that’s a bit backwards, as you don’t know whether to follow it or not, but something like “My character made another character laugh” or “I thought that other player made a good contribution to the story” tell you exactly when to pick them up.
I also think this will be a fertile ground for ritualistic phrases, or even actions, because you can tell people to make an oath, or perform an action, and the mere act of following such an instruction-card is sort of a ritual on its own.

Some more thoughts I’ve had: I am certain many games could be written, and then you could come up with such quick-sheets for them, and many games come with quickstart rules (but not enough). Also, quickstart rules, and the whole way we write our books might need to be reversed. We put the summaries at an appendix, where they might fit in the beginning, with the “main book” which just elaborates should go on later. I quite like how board-games do it: On the back-cover which avoids page-flipping we have the bare-bones overview, in the first 2-3 pages we have each stage, with a paragraph describing it, and then we have 6-20 pages which describe each stage in (often excruciating) detail.

Likewise, if we have quickstart rules in a hardcover book that’s heavy to lug around, and we might want to flip from the quickstart to the main section, or pass the quickstart rules around… it’s just not a good fit for them to be in the book. Unless you just want to train someone at how to teach the game, but not actually use this document as they go along. For that, I suggest the quick-start rules to be in a small booklet, separate from the main book.

So, to jump a bit back, while I believe most games can have such resources created for them, I wonder if it’ll affect the game’s design if it were designed from the beginning with the plan to make use of these things. We should find out.

For my upcoming game, I both plan to use the “The Big Bang shape” I discussed before, and to make each character sheet contain as much information as the player will need and I could fit on it. I’m taking a page from some of John Harper’s designs. You want the character sheet to contain as much information as possible, and that reading it and then being taught the rules for 5 minutes more should be sufficient.

Of course, giving players pre-generated characters, situation, and even enemies will cut drastically on preparation time, but it will also limit what most people will play in the beginning to just that. I might discuss that in a future post.

* The thought came in a slightly different context, of a game where each sub-system is completely different, with no unified mechanics.

Pick and Play! (“Fluency). Part 1 of 2

Ok, this discussion is going to cover several ideas, they may yet get further exploration later on, both exploring how they interact, or just each of them on their own.

The core issue, what it’s all about, is the ability to play games. A “game” does not exist when it is not played. There is no Settlers of Cattan “play” inside the box. There is no D&D Campaign inside that setting book. You only get play when you have people using the thing, when people are engaging in play.

The Problem:

That above theory is one thing, but one thing that is clear is, the focus should be on people playing the game. You want to make it easy for people to play the game. Easy is sometimes more important than good. If it’s easy, people will pick it up and play, and then it should be good. If it’s good, but no one ever plays with it, then how will they know it’s good? And even if they will “know”, will it be worth more than farthing, seeing as it’s not played?

This post follows a discussion on Story-Games, first in this thread, where a discussion on constraints led me to muse and opine on why people can play one board-game after another, though each is focused in scope, but people are loathe to do so with RPGs. My observation was that the main reason is how long it takes from when you pick up the game and how long before you can begin playing, which was spun into this thread, where Joel Shempert uses the term Fluency Play to describe this (or the result).

Well, many of the modern story-games are pretty small games. They run ~80-120 pages, and these pages are more along the lines of 6×9″ as opposed  to most traditional games that are 8.5″x11″. Reading such a book usually takes me about 2-3 hours, which may not be as bad as say, 6-8 hours I need to dedicate to traditional games (usually considerably more..), but it’s far from good enough.

Ok, so it took me 2-3 hours from when I picked up the book to “knowing” the game, now I have my friends with me. I know the rules, we can play, right? Oh, how I wish this were so. If I were to impart them with all the rules it’d take them about 20-30 minutes to learn. Now this brings to mind two questions:
1. Reading is faster than speaking, so why did I need to read it for 2-3 hours when 20-30 minutes were enough to begin playing?
2. Do you think people can sit and listen to you explain the rules passively for 20-30 minutes?

In my experience, people can spend 5 minutes listening attentively, 10 minutes listening, and at 15 minutes they’re ready to rebel. If you are talking for 20 minutes, you are often not going to play the game at all.
Now, it’s true that it’s possible each one of us had spent 2-3 hours learning the rules, but that is both unlikely, and you want as someone who makes a game to assume it is not so. You want to make it easy on people to play your game, remember?

So, we have one person who knows the rules, hopefully it didn’t take him long to know them. But now, what of his friends, the people he wants to play with? This issue is also very acute for game-designers who are looking for playtesters in general, and myself in particular. I just don’t know how to teach a game as I go along, and feel the need to info-dump. This also makes it harder for someone who is looking for playtesters, to just find some people and begin playing. If you need them to read the rules, that’s another hurdle, and at a convention it’s just not feasible.

This is the first part of two, the next will be posted tomorrow, and discuss some methods to address this.

The Friendship Game V2, an Old New Game!

So, after transferring data from my old LJ design blog over here, I went over this blog’s content again, and came across The Friendship Game again, which I am growing to appreciate more and more.

The Friendship Game (PDF link) is a small engine, yet quite potent, which deals with creating a story focused on the interactions of characters. It provides a somewhat positive reward cycle and also drives play by the use of “Secrets” which come up during the game, make things more difficult, and then end in catharsis.

What I think is more interesting is that one could take this game, almost without any changes, and plug it into a system they have which lacks a powerful social system. In fact, if I were to work on a Juiced Rider, Memory Mecha hack that takes the game into the realm of an anime high school monster summoning setting, it’d be nearly mandatory to add something of the sort. Read later, because the engine is available for you to use in your own games.

After dusting it off, and talking to Per Fischer and Paul Czege about it, and my old discussion with Adam Dray as well, I decided to add some stuff to it.
What was there, is still there, the new content begins at the 4th page, the sentence above “Lacunas” and onwards. Much of it clarifies some situations, gives advice, and is a summary of the game’s rules.

Additionally, there’s a contract! Basically, this game, and the text in it, are quasi-Creative Commons. People will need to email me to ask for my permission, which should be granted in all but the most extreme cases, and they could use the game. All they’d have to do is make it clear in the text of their game which section is mine, and that it is in fact mine. Think of it like licensing art-work for use in your games!

If you play the game, tell me what you think. If you read the game, tell me what you think. If this idea intrigues you, you know the drill, tell me what you think!

Finally, I already have some thoughts on the game, but mostly to make it more welcoming to non-story gamers, stuff most story-gamers will take par the course; such as always have at least one Goal per character, and if you resolve your last one, start a new one (as well as begin play with one). The game’s tone could also be changed by modifying the default target number, and changing how much each invoked Secret adds to the TN, for instance. But that’s for later, if at all.

Why Don’t Characters Have Minds?

Behaviourism as I was taught it in Sociology classes seems a bit different from how Wikipedia puts it. Notably, as I understand and will discuss the issue, people may as well not have thoughts and feelings. All you can judge them by, all you can understand them by, is their behaviour, their utterances, their frowns. The behaviour they exhibit.

Now, while this may sound par the course for those of us who walk around the world, we cannot assume, according to behaviourism that there is a construct such as the “Mind” at work here. We treat “frown” as is not happy, and perhaps even the desire to transmit that idea. We treat laughter as approval, but we do not look at people as if they are having a thought regarding something being funny. There’s nothing beyond the laughter, and perhaps connecting it to what had preceded it. There’s no black box that finds things funny, sad… and if there is, it’s locked to us (and this is how it differs from the definition given by Wikipedia).

Now I’m going to ask you people to forget the above discussion – not literally, but if you have objections to it, then they are most likely not relevant, as I was covering what lead me to the thoughts I’ve had, for the most part.

As I seem to have said so once before regarding emotional connection, to characters, characters in roleplaying games seem devoid of “minds”. All we get to see are their actions, hear what they say, and we get to make up whatever story regarding what goes on inside their minds, or we can even ignore the whole question; what you see is what you get.

I find this quite different from normal human interaction, where we seem to always be attempting to gauge what people are thinking through their reactions. It is the black box which we are attempting to piece.

I think games should have more moments to explore what characters feel and think, even if it were in the form of monologues like soap operas. The closest we’ve got is I think in inSpectres’ confessionals, though those are more akin to the 40-something confessionals or those in Survivor (reality show), and as such are just as suspect as anything else said by the character. I think it’d be interesting to explore, share, and have the game informed by what occurs inside the characters’ heads.

As for “Deep roleplaying”, or immersion, it solves very little, seeing as even if we were to treat those characters as people, we still are not privy to what they think. For something that seeks to emulate stories, this is quite a lacuna.

Settings Sell – Colour Sells

In a way, I am not entirely happy about what I am discussing, but this might be because of my position on mechanics, and the ability to carry settings rather more easily than other things.

Settings sell, and the colour of games sell. The opposite also holds true, because we use the game’s setting and colour to decide if we are to buy the game, quite often. As I’ve told elsewhere, I was initially not sold on Tony Lower-Basch’s capes, because I shy away from superhero games, and it was billed as a superhero game. I purchased it once I’ve been convinced I could take from it what I wanted without dabbling in supers.

There is obviously the movement within story games to tie colour, or at least theme, to the mechanics, so you should be able to pick a setting and find mechanics that support it, or pick a set of mechanics and find a setting that encourages them and the kind of story you wish to tell. But you can see how much it is not so with how many hacks many games receive, and even if the games retain their theme, the colour (sci-fi as opposed to a WW2 story) can often be quite painlessly switched.

I wonder if a part of the issue comes from when many games were more or less identical, and the only thing to separate them, and even their themes, were settings. Even if the mechanics are the same, it’s not always the same kind of story. Heck, why go to “similar systems” when we can remain within the same one? Ravenloft and Forgotten Realms give rise, or enable different stories. Different World of Darkness games give rise to different themes, even if their mechanics are often similar enough (or let’s look at games of Technocracy and Traditions, Kindred of the East and Vampire: the Dark Ages if we’re going to be sticklers). Settings are what we had to differentiate games, so we chose by settings.

But I don’t think it’s that simple. While the metaplot in the oWoD was quite good at polarizing the player-base, if you liked it, then there was nothing like it to suck you in. It sucked me in. Even if the system was not always to my liking, I’d really enjoy thinking of the world that had been created.

And if the system was not to my liking, it’s not like I couldn’t just replace the system. For you see, there wasn’t a place as much as in the oWoD where people told me they played the game while without blinking an eye told me they didn’t roll dice, at all. For the setting is considered the game.

If you’re not a system-geek, and even if you are, settings and colour are really important at whether you’ll buy a game or not. This is the allure of licensed settings, this is why generic systems create several setting worlds.

It works. It sells.

Game Design Sketch: The Big Bang.

This is for lack of a better term, a game design “sketch”. It’s a rough idea I’ve had and which I am storing here. Quite interestingly, it’s a shape, almost geometrical, for currency and/or story to progress along a game.

I do not yet have content to insert into this form, but it’s here, just waiting for some content.Here is The Big Bang Diagram file, and if anyone has the skills (and time) to help make it look better, I’d be extremely thankful.

Anyway, I call this form “The Big Bang”, at the center there’s a pool of resources, or a situation that begins things (ala the “Bang!” term in story-games). Then the first circle around it has either events or actions. You can do any number of those things, or use your resources on any of these actions (use resource to initiate conflict, to ameliorate consequences, etc.). I am thinking that resources on this level would be either smaller, or be inside the fiction level.

Then, after a while, you get to move to the second circle, the second layer. Now, here it gets interesting. All those “or” are options, because obviously you could do any number of these things in different places.
Perhaps you only get to move resources to the outer ring if you performed certain actions on the inner ring, and this could also control how many tokens you move, or create on the outer ring.
Perhaps any resource used on the inner ring moves resources to the outer ring, but we also have the question of who will own it then.
Also, perhaps you need to earn the right to move, either to move resources or on the type of events, such as a fan-mail style economy. Perhaps you don’t want to move because you can only use Key style mechanics on the inner circle.

To use resources on the outer level, let us say more global events, or resources that are meta-fiction, perhaps the economy is “free”, that you can use resources on the outer ring while also making things happen on the inner. Or perhaps you only get to do things on the outer after a certain threshold of resources/events had occured on the inner. This however, could make it slightly more of a betting game, where you wouldn’t want to get your resources stuck on the inner ring, but you’d also not want to move all of your resources too quickly and be left without a way to affect the inner ring while play still progresses there.

And then, while playing on the outer circle, you also move things to a closure, if this represents story, or perform acts that move tokens if this represents resources. Back to the “Pool” at the center. And if this is not a free-flowing economy where you can exist on all levels simultaneously, after a while there is a “Bang!”, where the previous action (a scene, a series of scenes?) had concluded and this generates a new situation, or that a new resource cycle begins.
Such a resource cycle could lead to diminishing resources if you close the gate and continue with the resources from before, or you could reset it to the default amount each time, and of course, some actions could also create more resources.

Finally, I see the shape not just describing the nature of the game, either the plot’s progress or the resource currency (or both!), but as an artifact in play – a map that is used and has tokens and chips placed on it.

And this is the sketch I had in my mind during a train ride on Thursday. A sketch, where many details can and need to still be crafted.

P.S. I added blog posts from my personal blog here as well, seeing as I’m slightly changing what this blog is about, to general thoughts on games, story (and its form/nature), and game design.

Thoughts on Currency, Memory, Prisoners [JRMM]

I think as some friends of mine have pointed out, the most interesting part of the game is the memory interface. How players or rather characters can gain and lose memories. As such, I think a lot depends on how memories are handled, and how you get new ones and such.

I think another important aspect are the “Credits”, though there may be something that needs to be done with them, perhaps to tie them into something that is more story oriented, so the higher your credits, the more the emotional onslaught is going on, so you will want to leave less, or your friends will need you, or you realize how fucked up you now are as a result of the memory swapping that had been going on.

Even if we leave the currency as it is now, the issue I wanted to touch upon was that we need to see how quickly currency is gained, and how quickly in general end-game is reached, either the rare “Salvation” or the more likely “Down-spiral of doom”. Of course, once we find this information out, it’s only half the job because I don’t know what I want to reach. If it ends within 6-10 sessions, it might be great, but what if I want it to end within say, 8 hours, or two sessions? I think knowing will help greatly, especially knowing what affects it, as this will enable me to control different variables to make the game friendly both to longer campaign play and to one/two-shots for convention play or long weekends.

The other reason this is important, and let’s be frank, I don’t need to just “discover” where the game is aimed in terms of length, I need to decide. The discovery is of what affects it, so I could modify it accordingly. Anyway, the other reason it is important is for the memory deck. The memories get added and removed, and currently this happens between sessions, but if the game is to work in one-shots, then is the deck that you have the one that you will have until the game ends?

The upside is that you are much more likely to gain back your memories, even if someone else ends up with a memory of yours, if you can get them to get it back to the joint pile then you once again have a shot to get it. But there is then a much reduced chance of the excitement of not knowing if your memory is there. The two lead to differing themes, one is the chance to reclaim yourself, even if only the player truly knows that this is the character’s true self, as the characters cannot truly differentiate, or the theme of losing hope of regaining oneself and having to make do with the tattered remains and the patch-work quilt that now makes up your history, your past, your friends, your morality, your you.

I think that it is required that there will be specific actions that not only enable you to swap memories with the pile in the center, but also actions that will call for you to remove memories from the joint pile, add memories to the joint pile. I wonder at removing memories without adding new ones, or adding new ones without removing old ones.

I am also unsure about whether it is better to remove the memories removed from the pile without letting players know, or letting players know, in order to be able to highlight the hopelessness the characters now have in regaining their old selves.

This is another issue, will the characters try to regain their old selves? Will they know their self had been modified? I can’t help but think characters will use tattoos and journals to write down who they are, to help them hold on to the fact they had changed, even if the new them is truly them, as the emotions come with it.
On that note, I wonder if the psychiatrists and psychologists aboard the ships will help people cling or will try to get them to remove their hold on their past. I suspect it may be quite a utilatarian world-view in the default setting, where they will merely try to keep them hanging, because this is all that matters.

Here is another issue, Prisoners make the rules kind of murky. Removing the monks seems almost par the course, with enabling them in an appendix for an alternate style of game, with them being not only the default but the only kind of player-character-types.
Anyway, I think that if you look at the setting then the whole concept of “Prisoners” as distinct from regular characters is a bit ridiculous… because in the end, after memory-swapping, how can you tell, and is it truly important who was a criminal before? A criminal might end with a hero’s personality make-up, and vice versa.

Thus, I think any person might volunteer for this thing, and if they manage to get out of it alive and finish their tour, then they get the money and a pardon if they are criminals. Conversely, one might add a dystopic rumour about how due to exactly this clause, whoever is freed is placed under permanent surveilance, because they might be dangerous. Heck, as a result of the war they had participated in, even heroes with heroes’ personality make-up might become somewhat callous, especially if you take into account the set-up that they are in, their comrades, and so on and so forth.

This seems to me to be a much better direction. Things like shooting missiles should definitely cause memory-swap and also erasure, as it warps the psychic-mind in the area around it in space. We’ll see.

I also need to verify that the system is not too fiddly, perhaps there might be also cause for some more RP scenes, though I kind of like the austere and bare-bone quality it has.

Ships in the Fog Blog of Game Design?

I know I haven’t blogged a lot recently (under-statement), and even less than I actually blogged in general had been posted here, as I decided to stop cross-posting from my other blogs here… I’ve been swamped with school, Chen, dealing with miniatures and such. I’ll elaborate on this more as time allows, but that time is certainly not now.

Anyway, I’ve moved my game design blog from LJ to WordPress, which I like better in handling, having no commercial, its appearance, how robust and easy to manage multiple blogs it is, etc.
The old blog was here, and the new blog (don’t expect a lot of content, please) is at https://guyshalev.wordpress.com/ which has all the old content and a new post.

The new post is what I also want to talk a bit about here. The new post is titled Design Thoughts – Cranium Rats, Competition, Story, Currency. If you think its format is a bit weird, well… it was written in a class about Wittgenstein for the most part, so one thing followed another and so it came to pass. This WordPress theme changed anything from say, 7.1.. to 7.A.b.c…

I wonder if I should’ve split it, both because it’s pretty long and to make reading it easier. Points 1-5 could be seen as "Logistics", of how to handle the game, Cranium Rats. Point 6 talks about the interaction between Story and Competition, which #7 does as well but in a different manner. #8 talks about Currency and is more closely tied to Cranium Rats. #5 also deals with Currency to a degree, but slightly more "didactic".

I feel though it’s hard to pin-point exactly, that this might also be of interest and slightly more broadly applicable than only to those who know Cranium Rats, or even those who are interested in competitive games who also have a story. I wonder how others feel.
I also can’t really think of how to let people know of this post*, so consider this post the place where I allow myself to do so, and more than that, a post where I point people to the new blog, where things will rarely happen, but every so often, they will.

I specifically think of the new post, that sections 6-7 might be of interest to people, here’s an example with 7.b.c-d:
c.In the joint realm (of story), competition can obviously revolve around story, over its direction, over controlling it, etc.
d.I find this option or at least its presentation as unfulfilling and insufficient, because every competition which occurs within a game of this sort will affect the story. Either directly, or by its control via currency which is exchanged between the players who will later use it in order to succeed within the game or to modify it on the player level directly. And so, even though it is an option, it could be said that every solution that will be given will already perform this, so there is no need to talk of it as a separate option at this stage.

Until the next time, where hopefully school will no longer bury me.

* I am also feeling the desire to feel appreciated, this what happens when you no longer blog regularly, because when you do, your regular readership “takes care” of it to a degree.