Doing Carry Right: The Big Three

This is post one of my series of posts about Carry wherein I conduct all that question-answering that you really should do when first writing a game. Also, this post is intended to be an example of the kind of analysis that Jared, Luke and Vincent were getting at at VeriCon.

What? is your game about?

Carry is about the psychological issues of soldiers in Vietnam. It’s about seeing how the pressures of war change this group of men, and how their own issues and burden feed into that process. It’s about considering how we fictionalize conflict, and it trys to get at the fact that war fiction interfaces with the actual events of war in a very strange and unique way.

[The Jared & Luke in my head are now nodding, but with bemused looks that indicate that I may say that now, but lets see how smart I am once they're done with me.]

How? is your game about that?

All of the characters are defined by their Profile, which fluctuates over the course of the game. Some profile are more psycho, and others are just abnormal. Over the course of the game, the non-played characters in the squad get killed off, focusing pressure more and more on the played characters. Finally, there’s an endgame where the surviving characters snap and turn on each other. Mechanically, the endgame determines who actually survives, and what legacies and memories the played characters leave behind. The mechanics have a high level of variability, in order to encourage and allow the nonsensical nature of what happens to troops on the ground in war.

[Luke breaks in, to tell me that I haven't said anything about the soldiers Issues, and he thought the game was about that. I go, oh yeh, almost forgot that really important part]

Also, the players create Burdens for their characters, which are the issues and problems that they bring with them into the war. These Burdens are the lens through which the characters interface with their Profiles and the events of play.

[Jared says that thats a lot of stuff, and it's time to move on.]

What? behavior does your game support/reward?

Well, there’s two parallel sets of resolution mechanics. The first, for Squad scenes (non-combat, essentially), makes you give the dice you roll for conflicts to other players. This rewards the recipient for impressing the other players in a Fan Mail-like fashion - but, in rewarding others, you are also increasing their future effectiveness.

[OK, so how does this support seeing how pressure changes the soldiers over the course of play?]

Well, everything is a tradeoff - you want to win conflicts, but in so doing you weaken your future effectiveness and increase someone elses. The only way to get more dice other than that is to change Profile - so, if you get low on dice and noone is giving you any, you have to go a little crazier.

[What about Burdens?]

Your Burden is represented by a permanent die, which you can use in conflicts if you can bring your Burden to bear - essentially, if you can sell the table on it.

[Cool. Whats the "parallel mechanic"? And why have two, isn't that just making it more complicated?]

Well, the other one is for Action scenes, basically for combat scenes. The highest ranked played character has to give the other characters orders, which they can agree with or not, independently of whether they follow the order or not. If they agree, they give him a dice, if they disagree, they give the GM (representing the adversity) a dice. When the GM calls it, they roll their dice pools, and the difference is points that go towards killing, wounding and maiming members of the squad. This is entirely dependent on the difference in the rolls, not on who has the higher total.

[Oh, there would be more questions. But this is long enough already, skipping to the good part:]

So, does section 3 match up with sections 1 and 2?

Looking back over it, no. It doesn’t. The behavior that my mechanics support: trying to maximize your effectiveness via impressing others. Choosing between orders and the survival of the squad.
Bringing your Burden to bear as much as you can. That kind of stuff.

So, class, what is my game about? Impressing the other players. Making choices about the value of obedience versus the value of survival. Seeing your Burden everywhere. That stuff under the first question, thats emergent post-play evaluation and back-cover blurb material.

The bullet-point to take away from this demonstration is that your game is about the behaviors that it rewards.

Questions?

Notes from VeriCon

Vincent Does Theory
He invented a rule that got us to do something we wanted that we wouldn’t otherwise do without that rule. RPGs are the same.

Agreement around table is the only thing that makes anything happen.

Rules don’t resolve disagreements between players, they resolve discrepencies in agreement.

Expectations - violating expectations in game can be/is on the same scale as “real life” dissapointments.

Luke: Permission. I give permission to do X, it hinges on process to maintaining agreement. Permissions create expectations.

Jared: Example w/D&D, Call of Cthulu and Paranoia. People who only play one have certain expectations, built by the game text/experience. Other games, like Vampire, don’t have a tight focus on expectations, and players have to engage more actively.

Luke: All games have a premise, some muddled, some clear. Premise creates expectations; expectations, permissions and agreements create social contract. All games assume functional social contract. People -> group -> cohesive group - > playing game.

Jared: House rules in RPGs can create lots of discrepancy in expectations.

Question: How is giving permissions different from creating expectations?

Vincent: The process by which I allow you to do X - thats permission. Expectation is that I want you to do X. Establishing rules to meet expectations is creating permissions.

Luke: Functional game = same page in terms of we all have X expectations and give each other Y permissions.

Question: How do explicit permissions/expectations interface with actual events in play that could steer play away from perm/expec?

Luke hands Vincent chalk.

Vincent: “If I use chalk I’m just going to draw a line.” He proceeds to do so, marking hashes along its length. The line is the procedures of play, the hashes are events. All games have seperate procedures and events.

Luke: You could say that procedures link events.

Vincent: draws this picture

In order to illustrate that as long as functional play is happening proceduraly, events don’t really matter per se.

I interject with a stupid comment that derails discussion. We establish that overall expectations for game are premise, and situational expectations are preferences that change with the changing events of play.

Thor & Luke: Game designer & rules & text & group all intersect on generating expectations.

Moving On

Question: When designing a game, how important is it to design all-new mechanics?

Jared: Definitly look at games out there. Lots of games come out of published games the designer wishes was better. Personally, enjoys making his own mechanics because its more interesting.

Luke: Focused on one game, Burning Wheel. His advice, take a game you enjoy, and destroy and obliterate and burn out everything you don’t like about it. It’ll become unrecognizable, then you add in stuff that makes you happy.

Vincent: Totally bogus to design a game just to design it. His job is to find what he likes and make it do compelling that you’ll like it too.

Three Questions

Jared: Three Questions: 1) What? is your game about. 2)How? does your game do that. 3) What? Behaviors does it reward/encourage in the players.

Luke and Jared proceed to grill people on their designs, with amusing and enlightening results. The following notes are amusing things and/or bullet points, but I think 3 or 4 people offered up their game designs to be…critiqued, generating various amounts of discussion.

Luke: (in response to “What do you mean by ‘what’?) “No fucking Forge ‘what do you mean by the word ‘what’ shit. Answer the question.”

A well designed game won’t have mechanics that don’t interface with the premise.

Jared: GURPs isn’t a game.

Luke: Disagrees. Strenuously.

Dev makes Luke fall over.

The Point: What you do in play with mechanics is what your game is about. Look at the distance between start and end of a section of play (a full reward cycle, in Forge lingo). Whats the difference? What has changed? Thats what the game is about.

Setting Versus System

I get a phone call I have to take and miss the first 10 minutes of this section. Again, lots of discussion, and these notes are summary and/or amusing points. When I get back:

Vincent: No such thing as a “game world” because all we see is moment by moment.

Personal thought in reference to the “level playing field” argument: You don’t want to feel like others will get something you won’t, so appealing to the mechanics as an impartial judge becomes important to you.

Jared: In response to comments about octaNe being a better game to play Die Hard with than Feng Shui (yes, this was all on topic): “Which is why I’m a better game designer than Robin Laws.” He asks us not to mention this to Mr. Laws.

Vincent: What I need to know as a player is what I can contribute to each event in play, and how that contributes to the other players and their characters. Stuff on your sheet is a useful mnomic device to remember which rules to apply to which situation.

Luke: (in reference to comment that you experience a movie by yourself but play RPGs as part of a group) Just as you are the most important member of the audience at a movie, you are also the most important person at the table, except that you have participatory power (implication: and thus a different responsability).

Joshua (Newman)/Emily: “Physics” kind of means genre conventions and premise conventions. The physics of Star Wars are that Han Solo is cooler than everyone else, etc.

Luke: There is no game world, just people around a table.

Vincent: Rules can refer only to things in the game world, but they don’t have to. Limiting yourself to stuff that is there in the world means you’re missing out on lots of stuff that would support what your game is about.

Jared: The idea behind game design is to make it be about something. You can only model reality so far, and only if thats what your game is about.

Publishing

I took no notes here. Everything was pretty much stuff that has been covered in the Publishing forum at the Forge. It was cool to find out that Vincent has spent only game money on game stuff ever since the first printing of kill puppies for satan.

Oh - and for the second weekend in a row, Jared ran one of his own games, a short game of InSpectres. I couldn’t stay for it (damn!), but there ya go. I also, sadly, missed out on a mentioned game of Jungle Speed.

But yah, this was cool. I know my notes may make no sense, so feel free to ask about something and I’ll do the best I can to explain.

More Awesome News

I am very happy to announce that Indie Press Revolution had brought me on board! Woo-hoo! They currentely have the print editions of Timestream available, both perfect and coilbound, with the PDFs soon to come. All my stuff is here.

Oh, and I recommend that you use IPR instead of lulu for the perfectbound, because it’s over 25 bucks. Which means you get free shipping.

Update: here’s the official Press Release.

Thanks Brennan!

Carry the 2nd

Carry revision 2 is now available for perusal. Click here to download. I also posted a Connections thread at the Forge with some more information.

I’m totally looking for playtesters, by the way.

Changes from revision 1.1:

• Formalized Burden Creation to include feedback from Dreamation: three sentences that gestalt into your Burden, discussion of lines and military experience.
• Decided that there will be 3×5 cards for easy Grunt choosing and reference.
• Moved all of chargen into one section, with the Squad section just being for reference.
• Explicated that dice are chosen in ascending Months In order. Added some guidance as towards choosing initial dice pools.
• Reworked and expanded Profile descriptions, including their best and worst Approach.
• Added rule that the GM can bring in a Burden die on a Fodders side if the Grunt rolls theirs. There’s a strong possibility that each character writeup will include a “Fodder Burden” entry, which is that characters Burden if they are not taken by a player.
• Added rule that you can roll your Burden Die even if you can’t use anything in your dice pool because of your Profile/Approach.
• Cleaned up Squad Scene conflict resolution rules (IIEE stuff, mainly).
• Added that you must change Approach when pushing a conflict.
• Added some stuff to how and why you should give people dice after rolling, as well as a tip about keeping multiple dice collections separate.
• Added some explication as to how Action resolution works, and why you would choose to give to one or the other.
• Added rules for establishing Backstory on the fly during play (thanks Rob!).
• Reworked Endgame. It should be better now.
• General editing, rewording and clarification.
• Updated all examples.

Ticket To Ride: Europe

So I got this game at a silent auction, brand new, for 18 bucks. So it has a pretty low barrier to me thinking I made the right choice.

Oh man. What a good choice.

I played a couple games with my suitemates last night, and it was pretty dern fun. In terms of game design, it’s fantastic - it rewards the following behaviors: taking the most risks (and succeeding), going as big as possible, and going as quickly as possible. However, the system is such that trying to fulfill all three at the same time throws them into tension - making really long trains takes extra time to draw extra cards, and so does trying to take the most risks. Taking a big risk (in terms of going for the longest routes) only works towards getting the longest train if its in the same region as the small routes, and so on. So you have to make measured choices. Throw on the layer that everyone is going through the same process and a little resource management, and you have one fun game.

So yah. Identifying behaviors to reward, creating structures that force choices and sacrifices to be made among those behaviors - good stuff.

I look forward to this semester being my semester of playing more games, of all kinds. In my suite we have Loaded Questions, Ticket to Tide and Cranium, and are shortly receiving Apples to Apples (fun!) and Jungle Speed (GPA will drop!). Not to mention I need to play Under the Bed and My Life With Master, as I own them but have not yet played.

The times, they are good.

Another Thought On Art

The whole modernist and then post-modernist thing in art, specifically in film and in writing, is about deconstructing the traditional narrative and finding other ways to express via that medium.

The whole modern (in the sense of contemporary) thing in RPG design is about replicating the traditional narrative.

I find this interesting - I don’t know if its relevant.

Carry Continues

If you are following/interested about Carry, there’s a fantastic AP Thread at the Forge.

The Best Thing About Dreamation

Was that it reminded me that role-playing is fucking fun.

Like, seriously. All this theory bullshit? It’s cool, and its valuable, and there are great things that come out of it. But I didn’t think about it all weekend, because I was having such a good time actually playing.

For all the shit that people give Ron, he’s right about one thing. Actual play, actual play, actual play. Without play, this is all meaningless.

Yes, some people can’t play, for whatever reason. It’s a reality. But for those of us that can, we should, or we have no business as game designers.

I don’t care what you play. I don’t care who you play with. All I care about is that you have enjoyable, healthy play. If you get it from D&D, thats awesome. Shadowrun? Fantastic. PtA? Great. Doesn’t matter. Play, talk about your play, make it better.

Along those lines, I’m going to russel up some play right now.

What I Learned From Dreamation

Friday Night

Why yes, trying to get over the George Washington Bridge on a friday night will involve lots of traffic.

Running in at 8.02 for your 8.00 scheduled demo is not the best way to start off a Con…

…unless nobody shows up for it, and you play Mortal Coil instead, where you learn that:
- Nobody likes a pretty boy.
- These people that you read their words on the intarweb, they are cool fucking dudes and dudettes.
- Immortal Soldier God with a drug problem and a gun = bad, but hilarious, times.
- Why yes, Keith Senkowski does indeed curse as much IRL as he does on his blog.

The game Jungle Speed is so freaking awesome, I still have the tremors. And I, like, suck.

Saturday Morning

Tony L-B is Major Victory.

I wish I was a cool kid, like Jared Sorenson.

Alexander curses as much as Keith, but will tell you how to make your demos not suck instead of kicking your ass at Jungle Speed. So thats cool.

Brennan doesn’t take himself too seriously. I like that in a guy who’s handling my money…

Tony will take what Alexander told you about your demo, and distill out something that will actually make someone buy your game.

Explaining your game to someone who has never heard of it, multiple times, will eventually make you remember why you wrote the damn thing in the first place.

Holy fucking shit. Someone will actually PAY me for this thing? Like, me, in person? Give me money in exchange for my product? I don’t know if I can deal.

Saturday Afternoon

Being totally ready for your afternoon demo, and still having no-one show up, still sucks…

…unless you happen to be sitting at the same table as one of the Continuum authors, who doesn’t have any players either! Talking shop with someone whos into your niche can be pretty freakin’ sweet.

Jesus Christ, is Tony ever not demo-ing Capes? Well….no.

Thats right. The last copy of Under The Bed EVER! Bitches. (Well, until the next printing…)

With Great Chili = Awesome.

People asking you if they can demo your game (Carry) is very, very cool. Like, too cool for words.

Saturday Night
Just….wow. Carry is going to be really, really good. Once I, like, write all the good parts.

In case it wasn’t FIRMLY established, PtA pwns us all. Hie thee to this AP thread.

Rebecca’s job is to take care of you. She takes her job very, very seriously.

The absolute best thing you can do for your weary, emotionally wrecked body is to dump adrenaline into it by playing a couple more hours of Jungle Speed. I’m told that the twitching will, eventually, stop.
- Knuckle wounds only mean you play the game seriously.
- Beware the Harbinger.
- Why yes. I will build the wizards tower. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Dick.

Cash money in your hands = glow of sweet, sweet satisfaction.

Miscellaneous

To reiterate, everyone really is that cool. In addition to the above, Ben, Emily, Shawn, Lisa, Thor, Andy, Joshua, Luke…and I’m sure I’m missing many….thank you.

And I’m spent. There’s fodder for many more posts here (mainly about Carry), and I’m sure that stuff I missed will come out. But yeh. I had an awesome time, despite my 2 no-go games, and whats more a valuable time. As one may expect, my fears were unfounded, and with this one under my belt I feel hella more confident.

Now, to see if GenCon is even a remote possibility….

Signpost: Elements Of Design

Gah. Hurried post, but I want to write up a descriptive document along the following lines:

Elements of Design (Conceptual): The Elements of Exploration. Scene Framing. Distribution of Credibility and Authority. Reward/Reinforcement Cycles. Underwriting.

Elements of Design (Mechanical): Flags. Fortune/Karma/Drama. Currency. Guages & Tracks. And many more.