I Like It More Now

I finally finished fiddling with my official publisher website. I like it a lot more, and it’s hopefully simpler, easier to navigate, and more informative. And prettier.

So, that’s at hamsterprophetproductions.com

If you have any feedback about the site, feel free to leave a comment.

Investigation Game Mechanic

I had a dream about a game mechanic, and when I woke up, I (a) actually remembered it and (b) it didn’t turn out to be totally incoherent.

It’s pretty simple, and I’m sure someone has something like this in one of the bevy of investigation games that are out/coming out around now.

So, the GM (or whoever’s in charge) has a whole bunch of plot threads going on, and he or she writes down a number of discrete clues and/or information that has to do with finding out whats really going on. Either each clue has multiple levels of potential detail, or the clues themselves are ranked by how important/detailed they are. These levels have some kind of number associated with them.

When the investigators make a roll, or accumulate evidence points, or whatever they’re doing to actually get clues, they’re trying to meet or exceed one of those thresholds. If they do, they get the clue! Hooray!

Next time they’re making a roll (or whatever), they can do it like normal, or they can risk, and thus build on, their current clue(s). If they do this, the threshold of the clue they risk is the new floor for the roll (or whatever), but if they don’t make it to the next threshold, they lose that clue. The witness clams up, the evidence disappears, the investigation deadends suddenly, everyone has a case of amnesia, whatever.

I see this as being Agon-y, with the GM having a Strife-like budget that he or she divides among clues initially to set thresholds, and then can use to make things more difficult during the game as well.

Hrm. Maybe this would be a neat Agon hack.

Anyhow, I like the idea that you can be losing some clues as you gain others in a nonsequential manner, making finding everything out much less linear. A critical component would also be keeping clues on physical cards, and not allowing anyone to take separate notes about them. So, as the game progresses, there’s an effect of trying to fill in holes from memory.

{Annalise} Changes & More Music

So I think my issues with the Claim economy are mostly fixed, so now I have to concentrate on re-imagining the central resolution mechanic. I really liked the thing that I had, but it was something that seemed to either totally make sense or just not click at all with players. Like, if someone didn’t get it after going through the process once or twice, they didn’t end up really getting it at all. So, as long as I was at the table to walk through it every time, it was fine, but it’s obvious that without me there to do that, it’s not intuitive enough for what I want gameplay to flow like.

So I have this new thing now, that doesn’t break conflicts down as much, and has a different way of using the dice, and it inspired (like so many other things) by Otherkind. Basically, you’ll have some number of dice in a trait, and you’ll be rolling that many dice (say, 5) against some number of dice rolled by your Scene Guide (say, 6). You roll em and order them in ascending order, then match the orders to create pairs. So, like, if you roll 6,5,4,2,2 and the SG rolls 5,4,4,3,3,2, the pairs will be 6-5, 5-4, 4-3, 2-3, 2-2, naught-2.

Then, then owner of the higher die in each pair assigns the pair to either Victory or Growth.

Then, you get to use claims to reroll stuff and sometimes shift pairs from one pool to the other.

Then, whoever has the highest single die in Victory wins and gets to say how, and then the winner of each other pair in Victory gets to add additional stuff, complications, etc. Then all those dice go back to the traits and pools they came out of.

Then, each high dice in each pair in the Growth pool feeds into the individual characters experience economy, and the lower dice in each pair goes back to the general shared Scene Guide effectiveness pool.

I think this will be easier to grok. I hope it will, at least. It keeps all the dice on the table for the entirety of the conflict, which should help. It makes conflicts a little more totalizing that I know that I’m comfortable with, but at the same time, the pair-by-pair narration in the older system was something that often got skipped over in play, so maybe expanding the scope isn’t worst idea in the world.

* * *

Anyway, the interesting part: the Annalise soundtrack thus far tonite:

• Healer - Falling Whispers
• Orgy - Pure
• Depeche Mode - Judas
• Goldfrappe - Oompa Radar
• Bush - Machinehead
• Rammstein - Amerika
• Depeche Mode - Only When I Lose Myself
• Healer - Yailly
• Bush - Chemicals Between Us
• Lords Of Acid -Hey Ho!
• She Wants Revenge - Sister

RPG Design Handbook: Chapter 3 (part 1)

(Previous Posts collected here.)

Chapter 3: Methods and Conceptual Frameworks

Introduction & Part 1: The Process of Roleplay

There are a variety of models, theories and frameworks for understanding and thinking about roleplaying. These are valuable to the designer for a couple of reasons. Not only does an understanding of the underlying processes of the activity you are endeavoring to shape give you the tools with which to work, it also gives you a language with which to express your activity. As design is rooted in play, most (if not all) of the material covered in this chapter grows out of and is aimed at interpreting and understanding play.

So, what is it we do when we’re roleplaying?

Roleplaying is an activity made up of two crucial components: creation and collaboration. When a group of people is roleplaying, they are engaged in a process of collaborative creation. We are all working in unison, guided through the system of the game, to create something together that didn’t exist before. The “something” in question is what I usually call the “fiction” of the game, which is a term that entails both what actually happens in the fictional world of the game (i.e. the “plot”), and all of the other details, constructs and context that the events of your game impact on and change in an indirect manner, but which are important to your group (i.e. the “setting” and how it changes, among other things). This concept is also commonly referred to in some circles as the Shared Imaginary Space, or SIS, but I prefer fiction as a more neutral term.

The other critical concept to consider is the nature of the players. Unlike almost every other social activity, people engaged in a roleplaying game are both participants and observers, with each individual player biased towards one or the other end of that continuum in different proportions at different times. A player of a roleplaying game is both participating in creating the fiction, usually through the medium of their character or their role as the Game Master, and simultaneously observing the contributions of others as they interact with the fiction as well.

To summarize, here’s a definition of the basic process of roleplay:

Roleplaying is a process of collaborative creation, wherein each person involved is both a participant in and an observer of changes made to the fiction of that particular instance of roleplaying.

Or, to say it less formally, when you roleplay, you make stuff up with your friends that you all enjoy.

What does this mean for design?

The direct implication of this understanding of roleplay is that game design is simply deciding on certain ways to shape the interactions of the participant-observers with the fiction, using the levers of collaboration and creation. Roleplaying is, at root, a social interaction. Game design is the art and craft of shaping that social interaction towards a desired goal (remember your design goals?), and here we have a handful of vectors (with non-exhaustive questions to think about) to channel that shaping:

• Collaboration. How do the players of your game get to influence each other contributions to the fiction? How does their interaction influence the fiction, or the tools that they each have to bring to bear? What happens if the players of your game choose not to collaborate? Does competition figure in at all?
• Creation. How do players of your game contribute new material into the fiction? How do they negate material? Do they get to create material for each other? How do oppositional creations work?
• Participation. What tools and support does your game provide for aiding or shaping the participation of the players? How is “spotlight time” apportioned, if at all? What happens during the times that players aren’t fully participating?
• Observation. How does someone who is almost fully observing fit into your game, or do they? Does observation have an effect on what’s being observed? Is there support and tools for constructive, productive “downtime”?

Again, this a set of questions aimed to get you thinking about your specific tools, not proscribe them. Notice how these four approach vectors can be combined with one another to generate more food for thought (what happens along the Observation-Collaboration vector, for example?).

While the rest of this chapter will outline and detail more specific models of roleplaying, this overview of its basic process should be kept in mind for the design process. The basic thing to remember is that you are shaping a particular set of social interactions towards to certain goal.

The Observer Effect

I’m subscribed to C.W Richeson’s LJ, in which he posts his RPG reviews. The latest one is of a game I’d never heard of, called Aletheia. It’s apparently an occult conspiracy RPG with an interested setting - anyway, you can read the review for yourself. It sounds like something that I would be interested in playing, but I don’t think I need to go out and buy it. Anyway, reading the review sparked some ideas that relate to my always-in-the-background desire to make Timestream a better game.

Brain Explosion, Go:

So, there’s this thing called the Observer Effect, or maybe Observer Bias, that all characters are subject to. What it means is that each observer of an event has a specific and subjective understanding of that event, and that consensual reality (i.e. the timestream itself) is the aggregation of subjective observation.

Observer Bias can be strong or weak. The more involved with an event you are, the stronger your Bias, and the more tangential or secondhand your knowledge or involvement, the weaker.

So, time travel and temporal manipulation are always working against the Observation Effect. For new experiences (i.e. everything in your subjective future) you don’t have any Observer Bias, cuz you haven’t observed them yet. For anything you have already experienced, you have a certain amount of personal Observer Bias, which is what you have to overcome in order to change those things. There’s also a certain built-up Observer Effect for most things, that represents how ingrained that event is in consensual reality. Once your able to personally re-experience the situation, then you can try to overcome the ambiant Observer Effect.

So, in some kind of mechanical way, I would think that Bias is the effective “difficulty” of a roll, or set of rolls, or whatever, while the ambient Effect is the “hit points” of the event, which you have to bring to 0 in order to change it.

Big, famous event that you have known about all your life (uh, Hitler, for example, or the JFK assassination) has a high difficulty and loads of hit points.

Big, famous event that you’ve never heard of (like, maybe something in China’s revolutionary past  for a working-class American, or the like) has a low difficulty, but still loads of hit points.

Small event that you were personally involved in (basically, anything from your personal past) has a a high difficulty, but if you can overcome that it doesn’t take much to change.

Small events that you don’t know anything about (most of everything else) has a low difficulty and is pretty easy to change.

So, here’s a self-correcting framework for saying “it’s hard to change big things or personal things, but easy to change things that you’ve had nothing to do with and that not many people know about”. Also, once you change an event, you have a stronger Observer Bias (because of your multiple sets of memories about it), and changing it the next time is subsequently more difficult.

Strain (i.e. Paradox) comes from when you can’t overcome the Observation Effect.

So there’s some thoughts.