elsewhere is where you always are

The results for Game Chef will be announced tomorrow - assuming that the judges don’t have to push it back again. I’m quite happy with how Acts of Creation turned out - as a strategy game, it really clicks for me. The roleplaying aspect is a bit more understated, but that seems to be a design hurdle that I need to jump over. DEAD has the same issue: The game flows very well now that I’ve refined the shit out of it. The real question now is how to re-integrate the roleplaying aspects into the game.

Why?

Well, first of all I have a sort of Holy Grail that I’m shooting for, here. I really believe that the gap between the play of board and card games, particularly many of the eurogames, is not all that big, and that the integration of roleplaying into these games is not much more difficult than the integration of the mechanical variety of boardgames to RPGs.

Ancillary to that is the fact that I’m relatively bored with indie systems these days. While there are exciting things being done all the time thematically, and in terms of genre-bending, the mechanical richness of the indie set is lacking. A lot of the mechanics lately seem to boil down to fancy footwork to cover the fact that you’re really rolling another die. While this helps in terms of creating a narrative, these systems lack any real strategic or tactical depth.

I’m trying to mine boardgames and their components for new and mechanically interesting while still bringing the story home. I’ve gotten a lot more done with the first part, and I’m working hard on the second part.

One of the things I’ve talked about on here is the idea of Distributed Play - the idea that toys (or in our present discussion, game components) carry with them inherent mechanical options that aren’t suggested by others. For instance, if you play a game with a small set of cards marked 1-6, you could theoretically replace a six-sided die with the cards. However, the physical aspect of the cards allows for options that dice don’t have: they can be sorted, stacked, turned (’tapped’), flipped and marked - all things that dice don’t do as easily or as well. These properties give a stack of six cards a different set of gameplay possibilities than a a similar number of dice.

The importance of this can’t be overstated - points and aspects and attributes are fine and well. But when their net effect is to simply add +1 to a number, the mechanical flora of games starts to pale.

My design is going apace - at this late stage, I’m thinking that I just have to start freakin’ writing and let the chips fall where they may (so to speak).

Part of the trick with the game is that the resources at hand for the players are extremely limited.  Everyone gets one hand of 13 cards per age, and all of the mechanics associated with the play of one age must fit with, or emerge from, the simple play of those cards.  I’ve been tempted more than once to go over to dice, and I think if I get enough validation to redesign I’m going to use Tarot cards instead, or perhaps just give them as an option.

As it is, just the raw writing of the game is going to take some time at this point, so I have to get started.  Examples are going to be key.

I’m also considering changing the name of the game to Acts of Creation.

Oh, and for a chuckle I went over the list of games that have influenced my design.  Here’s the list:

Polaris, Carcassonne, Eye of Judgement, Primeval and Black & White.

There are more, I’m sure.

I’m doing my best to throw myself headlong at GC this year - if you were hoping to participate, it’s a shade late, but still possible.  Here’s where to go to get started.   Unfortunately, I threw myself headlong at a game idea that was fundamentally flawed, considering that I basically missed two of the pieces of art that were in one of the sets I chose, and spent a good day and a half designing around that flawed concept.

After recovering the shattered pieces of my sanity, I’ve thrown myself back into the fray and banged out this:

Here’s the quick pitch:

The game uses (primarily) Dale Horstman’s art sets.  There are four players in the game, and it is set up much like Polaris in its rigor.

At the beginning of time, there were four Elemental Lords.  Seraph (Air) - the mermaid art, Ouros (Fire) - the serpent art, and Chthon (Earth) - the king figure.  Each of these Lords was in constant contention with their Nemesis, and this constant flux kept the universe in constant harmony, and prevented the World from being born.  But one of the Lords, now known as Leviathan (Water) - a black square, made a pact with his Nemesis in order to make the Cosmos in his own image.  Leviathan was consumed by the process and the Cosmos became unbalanced, resulting in the creation of the World.

The game plays out over the Four Ages of the World.  In each one, the Elemental Lords are trying to defeat the Leviathan and return the Cosmos to a balanced state.  Of course, in doing this, they destroy the world.  The Leviathan is seen by the people of the world as their protector - the world itself is mostly ocean, dotted with islands.

Mechanically, the game is set up like this:

There is a central board, with four stations around a central ring.  Each station belongs to one of the Elemental Lords, which are represented by the art in the set (plus the black image).  Each player chooses (or is given) one of the Elemental Lords to play.  Then each player is dealt a Nemesis (the other art piece for each character - the mermaid, the beast-man and the serpent-lady), including Leviathan.

Finally, the players are all dealt a hand of playing cards to use as currency during the game - each suit belonging to one of the Lords - but the cards are dealt by rank (everyone is dealt an Ace, etc), and you may get a suit belonging to anyone.  You get the Jack, Queen and King of your own suit - these cards are different in that they represent divine intervention on the part of the Lord - a sort of ubertrump card.

There are other components - one based on Elizabeth Shoemaker’s art (the hand photographs) - which are powers that you can execute once per Age of the world: lock, bind, sacrifice and void (again, a black square).

Play will be centered around the center circle, on which will be drawn a relationship map of the World - cities, religions, societies - that are created, manipulated and destroyed during the Age of the World in play.  This would borrow, to some extent, from REIGN’s ORE system of agency creation.

…

I can see the game table.  I can see people playing the game, and I can see the flow of play - what I’m missing, what I really need, is the theme of the game - what the driving force of the game is.  Is it about the status quo v. change?  Is it about the inside-out ethics (if the other Lords win, after all, the World is destroyed - usually a bad thing)?  It seems like I have all the brew I need to create some serious play - but I can’t get it to come to a boil in my head.  I can’t seem to get a real handle on what the game is about, which is stalling my ability to define the conflicts.

Any suggestions?—————-

Now playing: Pilgrims of the Mind - Something’s Pulling Me Under

Cairn.

After much deliberation and a lot of searching, I finally have a name for the core mechanic that is underlying DEAD, Cold War, Merchant and a lot of other ideas these days. It took a long time, but now it seems intuitive and simple: a cairn - a pile of stones infused with meaning.

Awesome.

I tinkered with the idea of using the Inuit word inuksuk, until I realized that I’d be the most recent in a long line of white folks co-opting the term. Inuksuk are fascinating, though - check out a scholarly paper here, and some photos on Google Images. They were used in some instances as hunting blinds and ‘beaters’ - fake humans that would confuse caribou being herded into a slaughter area by Inuit hunters. Inuksuk means “something which acts for or performs the function of a person.” Which is something to take to heart for the games: That the cards and tokens themselves act like an additional player in the game.

Speaking of which, Tycho on Penny Arcade was talking about the function of raid decks for the World of Warcraft TCG, particularly the Molten Core deck. I’ve been studying the WoW TCG for a while now - mechanically, it’s pretty standard, but the execution is very cool. The Raid decks are an excellent extension of both the gestalt of online play to the TCG, and a fun idea in and of themselves. They’re essentially ‘dungeon decks’, played by a separate player, which have highly synergized and powerful cards. Defeating a raid deck requires that multiple players act cooperatively to defeat the challenges within.

This is the same idea as with DEAD - an antagonist deck that the other players cooperatively are trying to defeat. DEAD simply rotates the roles of the antagonist, and adds some suspense to the game by giving the antagonist some bonuses against the players.

Not that long ago, I posted about a spy version of DEAD that I was knocking around. This weekend I visited River City Hobbies in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. River City is very much an old-timey hole-in-the-wall kind of hobby store: lots of back-issue comics and baseball cards sharing space with Warhammer and a dysfunctional RPG selection. I manage to spirit away a copy of the Drangonlance SAGA system (the true prize!), a copy of the GoO version of Tekumel, Malhavok’s Arcana PHB on consigment for a song. I also picked up a copy of my spy version of DEAD, tentatively titled Cold War.

It seemed at first that Fantasy Flight Games had already published my game idea. You can find it here. I played it with with gaming buddy Jerry over the weekend, and it’s a blast. It also, of course, almost gave me a fucking heart attack. Here was my game, already published. Was my system doooooooooooooooooomed?

The short answer is: No. While there are similarities, mechanically, between my game and Fantasy Flights, there are crucial differences. In FFG’s version, you play the CIA versus the KGB, one player to a side. You contest over objectives that are mainly Cold War hot-spots, but you do so one at a time. And the mechanics, which are very, very slick, are more about suits (Economy, Military, Media and Political), each suit having a given power. By tapping the card, you execute the power. For example, the Media suit, once tapped, allows you to look the top card on the draw pile and either keep it for yourself, put it back on the pile for the other guy, or discard it. Each card also has a value attached (1-6), and your goal is to make a set of cards that are equal to, but not over, the target number of the current objective.

Like I said: the game is very tight and a hell of a lot of fun. I managed to squeak a win over Jerry with the very last objective in play, having been in running behind for most of the game.

My idea differs in several ways: all of the players in my version are NATO agents, and everyone is also the opposition. Actions aren’t entirely symmetrical on both sides of the conflict (FFG’s game is perfectly symmetrical), and there’s only one location in play at any one time.

So once again I dodge a bullet - but this is a bullet with a fringe benefit. First of all, it shows me that my ideas are eminently workable - FFG’s game was a blast to play, so there’s a lot more hope for DEAD and the core mechanic. Second, I found a new, awesome, two-player game to add to my collection.

And I got it for half price!

Well, I’ve finally untangled the Gordian Knot of the token economy for DEAD.  It took a lot of the starch out of me, and I’m writing this blog post with my face feeling a bit numb from a long day of writing and thinking.   However, I think I’ve finally arrived at a much, much mroe elegant design, and I’ve saved myself a lot of disappointment in the later playtests.

I actually had to throw away yet another possible refinement to DEAD: trading in the character sheet.  I toyed with the idea for about 10 minutes, then told my wife about it across the table at the coffee house, and she looked me straight in the eyes and said ‘NO!’  She’s right, of course.  At some point you have to shove the baby bird out of the nest, wings perfectly formed or not.  If the sheets seem irrelevant for play after the playtests, at least I have an idea of how to approach the issue.

After delving into 4e and its new MMORPGness, I’ve taken a page from that book as well, using the transactions of MMORPG skills (particularly Guild Wars, which I’m familiar with) to help me frame different action cards in my mind.  It’s helped quite a bit.

It started with this piece from NPR on children’s play. The main thrust of the research presented in the piece is a rather old and cranky piece of wisdom: those darn kids don’t play like we used to.

In a nutshell, the research presents the idea that with the introduction of branded toys and structured playtimes, kids are losing the ability to self-regulate their behavior, and to create and carry out plans (called ‘executive function‘). This lack of executive function is correlated with poor outcomes in education - moreso than a lot of other cognitive functions, like a kid’s ability to read.

The upshot is that a childhood playing with sticks, blocks and other highly neutral toys is better for kids than a childhood playing with Barbie and the Transformers. Cognitively speaking.

A while back I talked about distributed play - the idea that toys possess (or are assigned) roles in play.  By combining different toys in different roles, play emerges.  This is pre-ludic behavior - a child searches for ways to combine toys (or objects, for that matter), forming a set of rules regarding what works and what doesn’t.  Later on, this aids in the assignation of rules to bits and pieces on a game board.

So far, so good.

Where the researcher and I diverge is on the question of whether branded toys carry more or fewer narrative roles.  He would say that the narratives imposed on the toy by the associated media involved would decrease the number of roles a toy could (or perhaps would) take in play, and therefore act as a sort of ‘crutch’ for the child’s executive function.  Toys with more (or more clearly) assigned roles require less ‘work’ for the child’s imagination.

I’m not sure I agree.  Or rather, I agree with the idea, but not the outcome.

Branded toys may offer a narrower range of roles, but I don’t think that necessarily translates into a smaller range of narratives.  A Luke Skywalker action figure might always be Luke Skywalker (my own daughter prefers my vintage Hoth Han Solo), but Luke may find himself robbing banks or chasing after dinosaurs as often as not; activities that are divorced from the specific set of canonical roles adults would assign to Luke.

Furthermore, I’d say that there’s a skill is that is just as important for kids today to gain: media negotiation.  No matter how insulated we were to make our kids when they’re young, unless you’re Amish they are eventually going to enter a society awash in media.  Learning to negotiate that media, to manipulate and gain mastery over it (as opposed to letting it master you), is important.  Play with branded toys, I believe, simply shifts some of the skill development over into this new area - an area that will (hopefully) make our kids much more savvy media consumers than we are ourselves.

In this first part of a review of 4E by a playtester at Ain’t It Cool News, the following is said:

From Everquest to the World of Warcraft (and the many other imitators in between and after) comes the notion of perfect balance – the idea that every class, every character, every role in the party, has something to do and never, ever, has to sit on the sidelines.

I’m not the kind of guy to say I told you so. Cookie for Kuma!

Matt Snyder doesn’t give a crap that Gary Gygax is dead.

Well, at least not in the abstract - he’s not inhuman, after all. But he doesn’t see the point in giving Gygax the credit being lauded him in various remembrances, obituaries and eulogies. Eulogies being delivered, by the way, by such media darlings as Stephen Colbert, no less.

There are more fiery paragraphs, but I’ll quote the end:

We laughed. But, you know? He’s right. Clinging to Gary so you, the self-conscious gamer, can avoid feeling alone and awkward in your nerd shame is giving Gary a lot more credit than he deserves. You and your friends earned that by what you did. Gary didn’t even order the pizza for Christ’s sake.

He made a fun game. He had a life and a family and did lots of stuff. He died. He was just a guy from Wisconsin. Ok? Ok.

I’m not half as sad that Gary died as I am sad that the hobby still defines itself as a lifestyle rather than as an activity.

As the author of Nine Worlds and Dust Devils, among others, you’d think that Snyder would, at least, be able to acknowledge the debt that he has to Gygax and the rest who came after him for the creation of the hobby that he has, at least marginally, profited from. Gygax is, at least in the realm of the RPG, one of the giants on whose shoulders we all stand, to borrow a phrase. I’m assuming that there’s a tacit acknowledgement there, but if there isn’t, then Matt needs a serious reality check. Yes, we’d all be “doing something else” - but we’re not, and Snyder isn’t.

The broader question that I’d like to explore is the entanglement of RPGs as ‘activity’ and RPGs (and gaming) as ‘lifestyle’. Snyder finds it sad that people identify this closely with gaming and RPGs. I can only imagine that I’m one of the people that makes him sad, since my second-to-last blog post states very clearly that I believe that D&D, and the creative outlet of RPGs in general, saved me from doing something stupid with my life when I was 13 - either ending it, or wasting it on drugs or some other, far darker, ‘lifestyle’.

Why this is a surprise to Snyder is a mystery to me. Games, and RPGs in particular, are a quintessentially social medium. You can’t (I’ll qualify this as ‘couldn’t', actually, since I’m sure it’s possible now with CRPGs and MMOs) play an RPG without being immersed in a miasma of social interaction with your fellow players. Even if it isn’t the explicit, tree-hugging ‘the system is within us and without us’ notion of the indie scene, RPGs require the formation, manipulation and exposition of social discourse among the players. In other words, even if you’re an asocial bastard, you still have to meet your fellow players in a space somewhere outside yourself in order to facilitate play. If you don’t, you’re not going to be playing for long.

Mix this together with the identity play that is the core of the RPG experience, the ‘I am Giigor Redweave, Rug Merchant to the Sultan of Zum’ transference that takes place during the course of play, and you have a heady concoction ripe for transference of all kinds. Including the incorporation of the idea of ‘gamer’ into the idea of oneself. Apparently, Matt’s never made that kind of transference, and that’s all well and good. But for a great many people, perhaps socially or physically isolated from people who shared their interests at a critical juncture in the formation of their personal identity, made that connection with a something, with a percieved ’someone’, even if that someone was a fantasy character of their own device.

Now, I will be the first to say that I think that game (and RPG) culture has its flaws. They are legion. But I don’t see Mr. Snyder’s refutation of the impact of Gary Gygax’s work on the lives of those of us who played, still play, and have embraced the game as part of their identity as separate from this culture. Instead, it rings to me as exactly the sort of myopic, unempathetic, asocial caricature that Matt Snyder wants to divorce himself from.

Instead of dismissing it, I think that we can take a look at the grief being expressed in the gaming community and try to take from it some lessons on the power of playing with identity and community - a power that I think gets taken for granted in game design.

[cross-posted to Story Games]

John Kim put up a link to a 4th Edition set of character sheets that were provided by WotC at the D&D Experience in Arlington, Virginia.  This is my first look at the new system (I’m not tracking it closely because I want to come to it relatively fresh when it’s released in June), and it stuck me very suddenly - just as D&D birthed the MMORPG, the MMORPG has now wrought changes in D&D.

Very interesting.

Most of the sheets are the same as usual, until you get to the feats, class features and spells.  Now, instead of spell lists, you have ‘Powers’, which are further sub-divided by type: At-Will, Encounter and Daily.  At-Will is like it says - as a standard action, use said power.  Encounter powers are used once per encounter, and Daily are used once (or more) until you rest.

Looking closer, the mechanical breakdown of spells, feats and skills have reached an all-time minimum.  Most powers have been stripped down to their mechanical roots, and those roots are laid bare.   For comparison, check out the text blocks on those sheets again this list of Warlock spells and abilities from a WoW site, or even this list of Elementalist skills from Guild Wars.   The similarity is striking.

So why am I writing about it here?  Well, first of all I find this sort of feeback loop very interesting.  If you want to lure WoW players into D&D, make D&D more like WoW.  Basic marketing logic.  Secondly, this provides a very interesting test basin for Elsewhere.  Whereas modelling D&D was always a chore for previous editions, this one should prove a snap.  I’m going to start working on some basic diagramming this weekend.  I’ve modeled WoW and Guild Wars using Elsewhere as a framework for a while, and D&D 4th seems like a good way for me to transition into ‘traditional’ RPGs.

There are plenty of posts circulating out on the web about Mr.Gygax’s death and people’s moments with him. This post is a bit different than all of those, because my single (direct) interaction with the man was confrontational, if not negative.

I reviewed the World Builder, by Troll Lord Games, and I panned it. Severely. Probably more than it tuly deserved. Since his name was attached to the series, Mr. Gygax was pointed towards the review over on ENWorld (or as I like to call it, the House that d20 Built). What transpired was a relatively terse conversation of a few posts, followed by the general sentiment of ‘oh well, let’s get on with life’.

Sometime after that review, I moved to Wisconsin and spent an afternoon wandering around Lake Geneva looking for Gary’s house. I found it, and even though I could tell he was home, and even though he famously welcomed wandering geeks like myself to sit down for a few.

So here’s what I should have said to the man that day in Lake Geneva: Thank you.  Not only did the game you helped create change my life, it has guided it ever since.  It’s also not much of a stretch for me to say that your game saved my life.  The 7th and 8th grades were not kind to me.  Braces, acne and a curve-busting IQ marked me as an outsider in my small, rural town.  Without the diversion and the mental floss that D&D and its brethren provided me, I may not have made it to the 9th grade, when things got much better.  I was alone, and yet I wasn’t.  I felt a kinship with gamers all over the country (or the world) who I knew were delving into the same rich well of imagination that I lived in.

Thank you for my Fortress of Solitude.

It wasn’t until this evening, some long hours after posting my bit on the Encyclopedia of Life, that I realized that I never actually expressed the fact that it would make a great worldbuilding resource.  It suddenly struck me today that I haven’t done much worldbuilding for the last couple of years.

Time was, I defined myself (ludically, I mean) as primarily a worldbuilder.  I have a couple dozen notebooks and burgeoning data files attesting to the amount of time and energy that I’ve invested over the years into becoming a decent world craftsman.  I still consider it a high art - but why don’t I do it anymore?

Part of the answer is that I dont’ play regularly - or when I do play, it’s with other established settings rather than ones of my own design.  While there are certainly aspects of the craft that I apply to a game of Buffy, there isn’t the same level of intensity needed to create verisimilitude that there is in running a D&D campaign in a whole new world.

The other part of the answer is that I’ve become far more interested in the creation of tools than in the creation of any sort of end-product.  I’m more interested in making ways to help other people create better worlds than I am in simply crafting another of my own.  This impulse has its apotheosis in Elsewhere - the meta-metasystem.

The wheel keeps on turning, however, and given that I’m currently reading Iain M. Banks’ latest Culture novel Matter, the raw material of worldbuilding is being piled in my mental warehouse, waiting to be used again.

I heard about the Encyclopedia of Life on a Wisconsin Public Radio show today. The goal: Nothing less than categorizing every (living) species on the planet, and then work backwards. Don’t try to go there quite yet - the stress on the servers from all of the hits on the first day crashed the site. I’m sure they’re putting together some co-lo as we speak, or stringing baling twine, or somesuch.

As a worldbuilder, I’m excited about the possibilities that a random walk through such a site could give. Combine a yeti crab with a butterfly! Combine a horse and a species of algae!

I’d also like to take this opportunity to talk about a long-standing idea I’ve had: a system by which you could (theoretically) model any living organism’s properties in a game context. This spawned off a different idea for a universal technology system, which was itself spawned off of an idea for a universal starship model.  And of course the entire constellation of systems falls under the general rubric of Elsewhere.  But I digress.

The idea is actually straight-forward. You have a Life central stat, which is then described using the Linnaean Taxonomy to start statting out your creation: Kingdom (which determines what your other derived stats are, including things like size), Phylum (body shape, for the most part), Class (separating things like bugs from lions), and skipping a bunch of steps to Species.  Each of these attributes can be seen as a template - being in the Plant kingdom precludes a lot of things, for example, like eyes.

The system would (in theory) then take into account things like size and adjust accordingly.  The larger you are in your particular Phylum and Class, the more points you would need to add into a stat like Legs in order to be more mobile.  Conversely, the smaller you are, the more agile you are.  Creatures of differing size are equally effective at their own scale.  If you wanted to play a game with a hummingbird and an elephant, you can.  Just don’t expect toe-to-toe combat to go your way if you’re the hummingbird.

From there, you splice together your basic attributes (a la Elsewhere) to create feats and other stunts that your animal can do.  Long arms and arboreal?  You can brachiate!  Strong swimmer and articulated flippers?  Come on out of the water for short periods.

A much more restricted form of the idea hit me when I was reading a recent National Geographic on extremely weird new dinosaur finds.  Just taking a look at this  rogue’s gallery shows just how versatile evolution really is.  If you can dream it, it’s probably not only possible, but may have even walked the Earth at some point.  This led me to Red in Tooth, a dinosaur game that’s the same idea as Life, but pared down and focused much more.

I’ve come across quite a few posts lately where authors in the indie scene are advocating getting out of the ‘publish or die’ rat race:

Fred Hicks suggests reasons why you may not want to get in to begin with;

C. R. Nixon suggests becoming an expert player instead of designer; and

Jonathan Walton wants out of the cred treadmill.

On the whole, I can’t disagree with any of their points.  Yes, people should play a LOT more story-games (hell, all different kinds of games) before they start designing.  Yes, people should take advantage of the technologies available to them in the form of Lulu and electronic distribution instead of print runs.  And yes, living for cred will kill your soul.  This I know first-hand.

But (and there’s always a but), I can’t help but notice that all three of these guys have already ‘made it’.  Clinton was the other (saner, IMHO) half of the Forge, and is the author of The Shadow of Yesterday.  Walton has PUSH and all kinds of ideas swimming around that make my knees woogly.  Fred Hicks has the best selling game on IPR.  These are guys who have already made their mark.  It’s easy to sit back and suggest that all of the crap that inevitably comes with the territory in publishing isn’t worth it.

True, they’ve been there and they’re speaking from experience; but they’re also the same people who can bend ears.  For those of us still working on the first big score (and who have already put in their 20+ years of play), this isn’t the kind of encouragement we need.

Let me put it this way: I’ll believe all of this isn’t necessary to be a voice in the indie community when I see these same folks pulling in voices from outside the circles we all jerk in, and the circle widens considerably.

Note: This includes me.

I’ve re-installed Wordpress to a new directory using Dreamhost’s one-click option, so now I can stay up-to-date without so much work involved.

The new URL is http://blog.kumapageworks.org/elsewhere/ - adjust any feedreaders accordingly.  Those of you already subscribed will have a few more posts to catch up before I kill the old install.  Both URLs are feeding off the same database, so no one will get cut off unexpectedly.