gaming – Page 21 – dangermouse.net

Thoughts on designing games

Prompted by an online discussion, I had occasion today to think about designing various types of games. Specifically roleplaying games and board games. (By “roleplaying games” I mean things like Dungeons & Dragons – the original RPGs – not video games that many people nowadays seem to think you mean if say “roleplaying games”.)

I remember when the only RPG I owned was Dungeons & Dragons, but I wanted to play a science fiction game. So I did what many young gamers do and tried to design my own game system to support it. The result wasn’t great.

When you try to design something given only one prior example, you can easily get stuck into thinking that things have to be done the same way, and the design space that you explore tends to be very restricted. When you encounter a different example, suddenly whole worlds of new design space are made evident and open up to you. You don’t have to use 20-sided dice. You don’t have to make rolling higher numbers more desirable. You don’t have to have armour make a defender more difficult to hit. You don’t have to assess damage by subtracting points off some numerical total.

To really get good at designing RPGs, you need to be exposed to a wide variety of designs. You need to read different rule sets and play games with different mechanics. You need a breadth of experience. I have something over 20 different RPGs, possibly up to 30 (which is actually not a lot compared to many gamers), and so I now realise the first attempts I made at designing RPGs were laughably narrow-minded and amateurish.

On the plus side, designing a roleplaying game is actually not as complicated a task as what may seem easier: designing a board game. A board game is much more restricted in what the players can do, whereas an RPG is open-ended and allows players to do virtually anything. But paradoxically this very difference is what makes designing an RPG relatively easy. In an RPG, if a player wants to do something and the rules don’t cover it, you can wing it. If you’re experienced enough, you can even wing it so seamlessly that the players never notice.

In a board game, on the other hand, you need a clear cut rule to cover every possible situation that can arise in the game. You can’t just tell the players to “do whatever makes sense” or for one player to decide what happens. You have to design the rules carefully and meticulously enough that this problem never arises. That’s really hard.

Finally, in a tangentially related topic, I was playing Scattergories online with some friends today and needed to name a title that people can have, beginning with W. Other answers included the valid Wazir and Wizard. I opted for Walgraf, which I honestly thought was a noble title from some European culture.

However, searching the internet for confirmation turned up virtually nothing! The only two seemingly confirmatory hits were the rulebook for a LARP (live action RPG) named Blackspire:

12.12 Titles of Nobility

…

12.12.6 Viscount/Viscountess

12.12.6.1 Recommended title for serving a term with excellence as Champion in addition to winning the kingdom Weaponmaster tourney.

12.12.6.2 Recipient may substitute an equivalent title name for this rank such as Vicomte, Viconte, Visconte, Vizconde, Visconde, Walgraf or Pasha.

And the second is a campaign log for a D&D game set in the Greyhawk campaign setting:

There are a few snickers in the small crowd of nobles, especially from Lord Galans and Walgraf Deleveu. Lord Galans owns lands that now border on the Watchlands, and Walgraf Deleveu holds title to the lands between the Watchlands and Celene.

Now… it’s odd that both of the references to the noble title of “Walgraf” on the net are related to RPGs. I thought it might be possible that the word was invented by an RPG author and I’d learnt the word from some of the old RPG books I own. I checked the World of Greyhawk books, and they have a list of noble titles, which includes “Graf”, but not “Walgraf”.

So this is a mystery. From where did I learn the word “Walgraf” as a noble title? And why does it appear in two places on the net, both of which are related to fantasy roleplaying games? I am truly stumped.

New content today:

Catch up lunch

Today I had a lunch appointment with a friend to catch up and have a chat. We don’t see each other much since he left the company we used to work for, so I like to schedule lunch every now and then, where we can just chat and share stories about what we’re up to. This guy is a major creative inspiration for me, and he’s always working on various projects. He’s into creating board and video games at the moment, and told me about the interesting game mechanics he’s using, and the creative backstory writing he’s trying to do.

We ate at a place called the Old Paint Shop Cafe, which was indeed an old paint shop, now converted into a cafe. My friend recommended the burgers, and I had one, which was both amazingly good and amazingly good value.

Apart from the trip to lunch and back, I relaxed after yesterday’s exertions on the golf course, and worked on Darths & Droids comics, writing and production. That’s about all to report for today.

New content today:

Friday Games Night post on Saturday morning

It’s been a busy 36 hours. Last night was fortnightly Friday night Games Night with the guys, and our second in-person meeting since COVID-19 shifted us to virtual back in March. We only had four attendees, but that was a good number as it meant we could all play the same games together. It was also hosted at a friend’s house near where we used to work, and I suggested we get dinner from the Thai place where we often went for lunch. It’s possibly my favourite Thai place in Sydney, and I haven’t been there for ages. I was missing their delicious massamam curry, as well as all the other dishes they make. SO we did that, and it was just as good as I remembered.

I was the third to arrive, and played a few games of Klask first, which the host had recently bought. It’s basically a miniature air-hockey table, with magnetic paddles and a ball and a couple of other little complications. It was amusing fun, and when our fourth arrived we had a short knockout tournament.

The first three of us also played Arboretum while waiting for the fourth. This is a simple looking card game, but the strategies are complex and brainbusting. Naturally, I did poorly.

When we were up to four players, we launched into a game of Treasure Island, a new one for most of us. This was a lot of fun. Each player is a pirate, but one is the infamous Long John Silver, and the other pirates have initially captured him and are now searching for Long John’s buried treasure before he escapes and goes to dig it up himself. Long John’s player mark a secret map with the location of the buried treasure, and then according to the rules of the game is slowly coerced into handing out various clues to the other pirates. The other pirates all race around the island and try to find the treasure by searching in areas that they actually draw on the board using erasable markers. Long John tells them if they’ve found nothing, or perhaps if they’ve found another clue. (Or if they indeed find the treasure, they win instantly!)

Here’s my friend drawing a search circle on the board. You can see a few other circles in various colours, and also lines which mark where pirates have moved, or areas of the board where Long John has given a clue that the treasure is not located. Oh, the other thing about the clues is that Long John is allowed to lie, but only a limited number of times, and you don’t know for sure if he’s telling the truth or lying about any given clue, but you can privately inquire into this – so it ends up with each pirate having a unique set of knowledge about where the treasure might be, which overlaps that of the other pirates. So you can also get hints by watching where the other pirates go to search.

Here’s the board late in the game, and you can see my secret miniature map of the board behind the screen, where I’ve marked areas where I am sure the treasure is not located shaded with hatching, and there are also some areas I’ve marked off where Long John has told me the treasure is not located, but I suspect he may be lying.

As the game progresses, each pirate narrows down the search area. But at some point Long John escapes, and he gets to move directly towards where he knows the treasure is. If he gets to it first, he wins. As it happened in this game, one of the other pirates found the treasure just one turn before Long John was due to escape, so it was a tight game.

As I said, it was a lot of fun. But honestly much of the fun is generated by the interactivity with the map board, moving your pirate around and drawing lines and circles all over the board. There’s a large luck element to the game, as it’s possible for a pirate to luckily search the correct area on the very first move of the game and win instantly (although given the area involved this will happen very rarely). And although each pirate is using logic to narrow down the area, it’s still luck involved when one of them actually searches in the correct place. So it’s a lot of fun, and there is logic and strategy involved, but I think the luck factor dominates in determining who actually wins. You could be the best player in the world at this game and still win only 25% of the time in a four-player game. I’d call this more of a shared experience like a roleplaying game, than a cut-throat competitive game.

After this we played a quick game of Railroad Ink as it was getting too late for another long game. This is a lighter game, but definitely with more skill involved in determining the winner. It was fun too. Pretty much everything we played was a hit tonight, and we all had a great time!

New content today:

My personal summer

Today I began my usual summer ritual of switching to cold showers. Yesterday I had my last warm shower for the next few months, barring unusual circumstances. I do this every year, usually some time in November, switching to cold showers for the summer. I usually reach the end of March before going back to warm showers; sometimes a week or two into April, depending on the weather as it cools down into autumn.

The weather here has really started to warm up in the past week or so. More than that, it’s gotten humid. Last year it didn’t really get humid until about February – the early summer was very hot and very dry, which of course led to those awful fires we had. But the switch to a La Niña pattern in the Pacific has brought a cooler, moister trend to eastern Australia. So hopefully a lot milder fire season, although the problem this summer may be storms and flooding.

Today was a relaxing Sunday mostly. My wife and I took Scully on a long walk this morning before it got too hot. We stopped at the bakery to buy some bread, getting a white sourdough load, and also a fig and walnut sourdough loaf for a sweet treat. My wife wanted to get some challah, but I remembered when we arrived and didn’t see any that they only bake that late in the morning, so it’s only available after about 11 am. So I chose the fig and walnut loaf instead.

Both loaves were still hot from the oven, and even after walking all the way home (over 2 kilometres), the fig and walnut loaf was still deliciously warm as we cut it open and had some simply spread with melty butter.

My wife and I played a couple of games of Codenames Duet, continuing our campaign after a bit of a break. We successfully completed the Bogota city game, but failed with a first attempt at Dubai.

And finally this afternoon we had Luna from next door over to play with Scully for a while. It’s a bit weird having another dog around. Even though they look somewhat similar, I feel like Scully is very familiar and I know her personality very well, and she’s almost like a little person. Whereas Luna just feels like a dog and is somewhat unpredictable. She’s also very face-licky – you need to be on your guard unless you suddenly want Luna to run up and lick you all over the face. Scully doesn’t do that, thankfully!

New content today:

Face to face gaming

At last night’s games night we had an attendance of five, plus the two daughters of the host (ages about 8 and 10). They joined us for a game of Sushi Go Party!, followed by Mysterium.

After they went to bed, we continued with a game of Tournament at Avalon, which is described as a “chaotic trick-taking game” – which is about right. It’s fairly complex and took us a lot longer to play than I’d expected at the beginning.

It was good meeting friends again for the first time in eight months or so, having some pizza, and playing some games while we chatted about what we’ve all been up to.

Today I dedicated to housework and writing a few comics. Not really much to report there.

Oh, I had a weird dream: that shopping centres everywhere were advertising this revolutionary new change to make it easier to navigate large complexes. They said they recognised how difficult it was for new customers to find their way around in shopping centres, and this change would make it incredibly easy. The entire change was: Instead of calling them “levels” or “floors”, they would now be called “stacks”. So instead of needing to go to Level 3 to find a shop, you would now got to Stack 3. All the signs saying “Ground Level” or Level 1″ were changed to read “Ground Stack” or “Stack 1”, and so on.

Yeah, amazing, I know.

New content today:

Cyberpunking

Further to yesterday’s mention of Cyberpunk 2020, I had an idea for a game. Use the world setting as given in Cyberpunk 2020, but have technologies that exist in the real world but which don’t exist in CP2020 appear as newly emerging tech within the game.

For example, CP2020 basically has virtually no concept of wireless networking. To access a network you have to physically plug into a connected system. So imagine some megacorp within the game has just invented WiFi. How will this shake up the world? The PCs might be hired to steal the technology, or prevent it from being monopolised, or something.

Also further on gaming, tonight is the first face-to-face meeting of my fortnightly gaming group since March. We decided that with COVID apparently well under control here in New South Wales, we would start up meeting in person again. (We just reached the milestone of 14 days in a row with zero new cases, apart from residents newly arrived from overseas and already in quarantine.) So I’m writing and scheduling this post early before I head over. Should be fun!

New content today:

Secret project day

I spent most of today working on a secret project, which I won’t be revealing until some time next year. So there’s not much I can go into about that.

Um. I didn’t do much else, except go out for a pie for lunch, and take Scully to the dog park. It was warm today, but not too hot. Tomorrow is forecast to be hot again. I think we’re really past the chilly weather and into a summer pattern now.

Oh! I also grabbed a bunch of roleplaying books off Humble Bundle today – PDFs of the old Cyberpunk 2020 game by R. Talsorian Games. Published in 1990 (second edition of a 1988 game named just Cyberpunk), it was amusing going through the PDFs and seeing what they predicted that life would be like in the year 2020. Here’s a piece of art showing a guy buying some pirated software off a street hustler with a trench coat full of hot CDs:

I sure know I’d be out on the streets doing this if I wasn’t such an upstanding citizen.

New content today:

Games night experiments

It’s fortnightly games night with my friends and we’re playtesting a new game online that a friend of mine has coded up. It’s MasterWord, which is a brand new board game that hasn’t even been released yet, but my friend saw a sneak preview of the rules and implemented a Discord bot version, so we’re playing it right now.

Earlier today I mostly did comics work, creating new Darths & Droids strips. Oh, and the weekly grocery shopping. That’s about it for today.

New content today:

Cancellations and Codenames

Saturday dawned cool and grey, although a bit of sun poked through on occasion. The forecast was for late showers, leading into a rainy Sunday.

Late morning I went for a walk with my wife and Scully, doing our usual bakery/marina/park loop. Although cool, it was humid and quite sticky by the time we got home.

There was an email waiting for me. From the organisers of tomorrow’s market, where I planned to have a stall to sell my photography prints. They said they’d received many concerned emails about the weather forecast, and consulting multiple weather sites they noted that the forecast for Sydney tomorrow is heavy rain and thunderstorms during the day. My stall is indoors (I chose is specifically to avoid inclement weather), but most of the market is outdoors. So the organisers were writing to say they had decided to cancel the market, to avoid damage to stallholders’ products, and to avoid wasting time with a low buyer turnout.

I understand why they did it, but it’s disappointing to have yet another delay, with all the COVID cancellations. And it’s also annoying because I had to book a hire car via a car share company, because my car isn’t large enough to transport all of my stock and equipment. Because the cancellation is less than 24 hours before pickup, there’s no refund. 😕 At least it’s tax deductible. Assuming I ever make enough money form this caper to pay tax in the first place.

This afternoon my wife and I played a couple of games of Codenames Duet campaign mode. We tackled Monte Carlo, which for those who know the game means 9 turns with zero bystanders allowed. The campaign games are starting to get tough – the previous city, Sydney, was 9-1 and it took us four attempts to win it. But we managed to knock of Monte Carlo in just two games today!

The first was a bit of a debacle, with some really tough clue combos. I had to clue the words TRUNK and BARK, but without cluing the word MAPLE, so that kind of ruled out any wood/tree based clues. And I had to clue GERMANY, while ALPS was an assassin (instant loss if guessed). There were other issues as well which I forget – let it suffice to say we lost badly.

The second game started terribly. I clued LAWN to indicate GRASS and BERMUDA, but my wife’s first guess was YARD, which was a bystander, so we instantly lost a turn. But we pulled it back together with consistent strong 2-cluing, and in the end it came down to my wife having to clue two words to me with the final clue for victory. She gave the clue HARD 2. Which was truly inspired, and straight away I realised the answers had to be YARD (as in “hard yards”) and NUT (“hard nut to crack”). I guessed them and we won!

That completes all of the 9-turn games in the campaign. Now we shift to the 8-turn games, which ratchets up the difficulty again. It’s getting challenging, but is a lot of fun.

New content today:

Busy busy Monday

The start of a new working week! I had a lot of chores and tasks I wanted to get done today. First cab off the rank was a 5k run. The weather was a lot cooler than last week, which I think helped, and I felt a bit more at ease through the last few laps than last week, and ran a better time of 27:32, so that’s good. Although I’m beginning to think the 26:32 I ran a few weeks ago might have been a GPS glitch that credited me with more distance in a shorter time somehow, as I haven’t been able to break 27 minutes since.

I had some errands to run, visiting the post office to mail some things that somebody bought from me, and then a tailor to drop off a jacket for alteration. I got a new lightweight cotton jacket on the trip to the city a week or so ago, and it’s good, but the breast pocket is weirdly sideways – it opens on the side rather than the top, and I feel that as soon as I put anything in there it will just fall out unless I button the flap over it, which is just annoying and not normally something I do with pockets. So I put it in to be altered by removing the flap, stitching up the side, and unstitching the top, to turn it into a normal pocket. I don’t quite understand how any clothing designer could thing a pocket that opens on the side and not the top is a good idea. I had to wait about 15 minutes in the tailor’s shop because there was a woman in there ahead of me, having a dress altered, and she was wearing it and making lots of little adjustments and the tailor was putting pins in all over the place, and it honestly took about 15 minutes until they were done and I was served.

I spent the afternoon writing Irregular Webcomic! annotations to fully finish off that batch I started working on last week. And picked up Scully from my wife’s work and took her to a nearby park (not our usual dog park, which is a short drive away) for some ball chasing. There was a woman there with a boy about 6 or 7 years old, and he was keen to throw the ball and have Scully chase it, so I let him do that a bit.

The conversation with my friends about the definition of a game slopped over into today, with someone suggesting the following:

I’m imagining a pastime in which people take turns drawing cards with activities named on each card, such as Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, or Snakes and Ladders [or maybe even soccer, or crossword puzzles], and then attempt to refine an evolving definition of “game” such that there are more cards in front of that person meeting that definition than anyone else. This proceeds until someone draws a card named “This Pastime” at which point the pastime ends, and either the current definition of “game” encompasses the pastime itself, in which case someone may win, or else the definition does not encompass the pastime, in which case the people were not playing a game after all, it was merely a pastime.

New content today: