Two levels of game enjoyment

The latest hot stuff in the lunchroom conversation these days is the show My Kitchen Rules. So I watched a bit of it to see what the fuss was. Have no fear, I did the same thing with the Harlem Shake and Rebecca Black. You can see the lengths to which I'll go in order to get my head around pop culture references.

I've no intention of continuing to watch the show but as I watched I saw an important lesson for game designers. It's possible to create a game that is unenjoyable as a participant and enjoyable as the audience.

In the episode I watched there were two contestants who hosted a dinner party for the other contestants and judges. At the end of meal all the guests gave scores for each course. Each episode the role of hosts moves to the next team.

From what I saw it was clear that almost none of the contestants enjoyed having scores come their way. Like most people they think they're more competent than they are so naturally they're disappointed with the scores. Secondly the scores come from the competition, all of whom want to win so naturally there's a tendency to score harshly. Being caught in this kind of game, where the competition determines your success and failure, would enrage me. It encourages spitefulness, vengefulness and bickering. It's unenjoyable.

At the same time this is one of the most popular shows on TV so there are plenty of viewers who enjoy it. I think they enjoy it for the same reason that bitchy soap operas are enjoyable. The show generates spitefulness, vengefulness and bickering: in other words, it creates conflict between people, and the audience likes to see conflict created and resolved.

To repeat the lesson: it's possible to create a game that is unenjoyable as a participant and enjoyable as the audience.

My Kitchen Rules is such a game and is a perfect example of what to avoid when designing a tabletop game. Remember to make the game fun as a participant and as an audience. Creating conflict is good for story games, but don't do it at the expense of player enjoyment.

NaGaDeMon Day 23: Play Test Part 2

Last night was the second and final play test for Lego FU, at least within the month of NaGaDeMon itself. The changes I made after the last one seemed to work well, so they're going to be committed to the document.

A surprising emergent property, though, was the replacement of the standard FU Conditions of Injured and Dying with No Legs and Disassembled. The players started the night asking, "I shoot at him. Do I kill him?" and moved to "I shoot at him. Do I disassemble him?"

The scenes of minifigs in pieces on the ground, trying to hop around and reconnect with their legs or trying to roll their heads around to reconnect with their torsos were interesting to say the least. All sense of blood-thirstiness vanished immediately, even though one player insisted on their minifig carrying the head of a captured bounty back to the bounty office.

This time I also remembered the Creationary box. It's hard to build something convincing in 60 seconds, it seems, and worked about half the time. I'll definitely leave that as an optional rule.

Two Roads You Can Go By

I have a new game idea in the design sketchbook and I'm planning how to go about developing and writing it. What's surprised me is how I have two options clearly in front of me for how to proceed. Part of me wants to toy with dice rules because there are some interesting ideas out there (many of which were prompted by reading Daniel Solis' blog and tweets). The rest of me want to write scraps of fiction and setting to see if that's interesting first and then figure out how to bend the dice to create those stories.

I think the more disciplined method is to take the fiction first and force the dice later. I'll have to be more patient, but in the end I think I'll get the better result. So it's off to the writing desk with me.

Probabilities and Decision Points

One thing I've learned from Apocalypse World is that dice don't have to be complicated. It's a 2d6 system. More accurately, it's a 2d6 system with interesting results that point the players back to the fiction. When I first encountered small press games about five or six years ago, there seemed to be a trend of creating kooky rules for conflict resolution, combining dice with cards and the phase of the moon. The more esoteric, the better. Apocalypse World reminds us that the dice (and the rules in general, for that matter) should be as unobtrusive as possible.

It's little wonder, then, that I've felt the need to again streamline my rules for decision points in Siege. I've had a little fun working out the probabilities for the dice pools so that the player experience is simplified without affecting the probabilities significantly. In other words, you probably won't notice the difference between what the previous methods provided and this revised version.

A new game design idea

I was struck with inspiration for a game project the other day. As usual, I've been looking around for existing systems which do something similar, or the same, rather than creating something new. The more I looked, though, the more I realised that it would have to be a new project.

So I started sketching some notes and this led me to my next conclusion. This project appeals to a single person: Me. I've tried explaining it to a couple of people and failed to generate enthusiasm. Either my pitch is poor, or the concept itself is unappealing as a game, or both!

The concept is a bit high, to be sure. Much like a lecture on the aesthetic philosophy of Kierkegaard, it will have its devotees but it will never draw the crowds of a U2 concert. I'll probably do it anyway, but only because it interests me.

Neoncon CreativeU

I've been watching the Neoncon CreativeU schedule build. It makes me both happy and jealous. Happy because I like to see conventions do more than just play games, and jealous because it's bigger and better than what we mustered together for Uprising.

So if you're able to get to Neoncon, you should go. It's bigger and better than what we did in Uprising. My jealousy is a recommendation.

Dice Pools Are Awesome

So as it turns out, once you start thinking about decision points in a story, they reveal themselves to be quite complex. I've been working on Siege and in particular have been wrestling with the interaction of decision points with the character stats. In Siege, a decision point has the potential to affect characters and relationships, as well as the story itself. So I have to ensure that the rule for decision points engages this interaction in the way I want.

As it stands now, I think I have a solution to the problem. The next step is to find a way to keep it simple. I would despise creating a game that distracts from the story with unnecessarily complicated rules. And as you can tell from the title of this post, I think the solution is a dice pool rule.

Not character, not story

For almost two years I've been thinking about a conversation I had with Robin Laws about how RPGs and story structures relate. He's made lots of comments about it both before and after, so the message continues to come back to me. The nub of the point is that if an RPG is to be a story-telling exercise, it needs to contain rules that go with the ebb and flow of good story telling. There are plenty of games that seem to contain rules like this. Just as one example, Spirit of the Century includes the potential for character aspects to be compelled, thus simulating the notion that the protagonist will endure hardship in the leadup to triumph. Compel enough aspects to get the hero in trouble and this gives the hero enough fate points to overcome even the most significant obstacle.

In order to incorporate this into Siege, I'm looking into an opportunity that is not character driven (like Spirit) and not story driven (as though the plot has a form to follow). It's... well, you'll have to wait until I flesh it out some more.

Chess, Warhammer Style

Turn sequence is an important part of any game. The order of initiative is established by some games to reflect the abilities of characters, and it's a common mechanism. The idea of each player taking a turn in sequence is seen as a fair system to arbitrate the activity of players. Nevertheless, it has some problems.

The biggest problem is the downtime for other players. In a group of four or more players, with complex characters in a system that allows for loads of options, any player who uses their turn to deliberate will enlarge the downtime for others. I've not yet read a game system that forbids this, meaning that the system allows for long, deliberate turns that make other players snooze or reach for books and other distractions.

Once, I heard an actual play recording of Escape Or Die! by Fred Hicks. The game includes a mechanism to help with this problem. Play moved around the circle, with each player framing a scene for the character on the left. In the background, a timer was counting down a number of minutes (one less than the number of remaining characters). If the timer expired, Doom was increased by one. The only way to reset the timer was to make a complete lap around the circle of players. Listening to the game, I enjoyed the tension of the doom clock and the chorus of "Doooooom!" when it reached zero. I also remember one player who liked to narrate long, drawn-out scenes and actions - oh the frustration! His penchant for elaboration chewed into that timer, leaving less and less time for others to play, but at the same time engaging the players because they knew they'd have less time to frame a scene and act it out.

Another choice is a game I've neither played nor read: Sons of Liberty. From what I can glean here and there, there are no turns, in the sense that I've discussed above. If you have cards in your hand that let you take an action, you can play your turn. If anyone spots an actual play recording of this, let me know. I can only imagine the potential chaos.

Board games typically make use of a turn sequence. Monotony, er... Monopoly is the classic example. It not only has a lengthening downtime, it also has a horribly demotivating death spiral. I don't play it for those two reasons. It's rarely fun for everyone.

If you're wondering about the significance of this on your favourite games, and perhaps thinking that I'm spilling a lot of pixels for no real benefit, consider changing the turn sequence mechanism of chess. Chess has alternating turns in which each player is allowed to move a single piece (complex moves like Castling notwithstanding). Now suppose you were to play chess with the same turn structure as Warhammer. Players take it in turns but on each turn can move every piece once. What does that do to your chess strategy? [1]

Perhaps take it further and apply a Sons of Liberty approach. You can move one piece at a time, but you can keep moving pieces as fast as you can move your hand from a finished move to another piece. What does that do to your chess game?

The mechanism for turn sequence has far ranging effects on the game. It's the framework for the framework, so to speak. In thinking about my own game-in-development, this is a key area I've yet to decide upon. At the moment I'm ruminating over the Escape Or Die! concept and a highly procedural concept (e.g., A Penny for my Thoughts). We'll just have to see how it goes.

Footnotes

1. Conversely, what would it do to your Warhammer strategy if you could move only one piece or squad in your turn?

John Cleese on Creativity

OK, all you budding game designers. Take about 11 minutes out of your day to watch this. It's John Cleese speaking about his experiences and thoughts on creativity. He has plenty of credibility in this area, as one of the Monty Python writers, so I hope you can learn from him for your own game design.

Freudian Slips are Intentional

I've said before that games make moral statements, right down to the design mechanisms. In fact, it's in the mechanisms themselves that the moral statements are made.

So I'm glad to see that it's also in the setting. Go read it for yourself and then reconsider why you want the orcs to be evil.