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Oh hey, its the Play by Post theory thread. I have no post mortems to share but I do have some loose ideas rattling in my head. I have been involved in Break Down That Gate and Impgame, and I agree with the conclusions Dog Kisser and WereGoat made. Not much to add there. Instead I'm going to share my thoughts on developing a system meant for PbP. Also: WereGoat posted:SET AMMOUNT OF ARTS DRAWN Seconding this. Its easy to get caught in the cycle of feeling you need more and more illustrations until you are doing something crazy. - Now, I am currently on and off running Above/Below, a Fragile Gods clone. Its still ongoing, but recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about other game systems, largely inspired by DogKissers Break Down That Gate. BDtG has been very enjoyable for how it has brought a large number of people together, as it allowed for anyone interested to make a character and participate as much as they wanted. That open recruitment is something I liked much. I have been thinking of a game following it's general structure, but with major differences. Something I have been wrestling with, is the subject of rules in general. BDtG had a decidedly narrativist focus. The rules served as a loose framework for a creative writing exercise. Just enough to tell you when to roll dice to add an element of randomness. And while creative writing is great, I keep thinking to myself, is it possible to introduce more "gameness" without losing that? Can you define such game with enough rigor that its possible for a player to make predictions about the future and plan for that? In BDtG, role playing your character was a central focus. But in addition to that, many people had fun theorizing about the best plays to make, the best items to acquire, the best skills to develop. I feel like that element of trying to fight the odds added a lot to the game. But in the end none of it mattered that much. Losing was never an option. Indeed, the one case of multiple player characters getting killed was retconned away because it really was not an outcome anyone wanted to see. So what was the point of the struggle? The one thing really being strived for was the GM spotlight resulting from high dice rolls. And that is a valid thing to strive for. And the character building did serve a purpose, that of self expression. Ultimately, having your character have a +30 to rolls involving digging was less important than having your share of the narrative revolve around digging. So, was the importance of numbers a mere illusion? Much like the clunkiness of D&D often leads to people houseruling rules away until they are doing freeform roleplaying only vaguely informed by the rulebook. That can be fun, but it feels dishonest to me. Inefficient. And many games have solved this issue for the better. A good example being Apocalypse World and it's descendants. Their rules are built around generating a specific kind of story, and they contain no cruft unrelated to that. They are simplified down to what really matters. But I keep thinking, back to the style of BDtG. Is it possible to make a similar mass player system with enough rules depth to make planning and mechanical differentiation of your character meaningful, while still not losing that creative feeling of looser systems? I fear that if there are too many rules to consider, the players's focus is going to shift away from the fiction and to the rules themselves. The difference between roleplaying and boardgaming I guess. But then again, plenty of roleplaying games have a lot of mechanical crunch and people have fun playing characters in those so maybe its not a big issue. Now, one game that has done mechanical depth in PbP is Bee Bonk's Wrecking Crew. It has gameplay strictly defined by it's rules, allowing players to make plans and predictions. It achieves many of the things I'm interested in, but also has quite different focus. Instead of collaborative, it has players competing individually. Can we take the mechanical depth of a game like Wrecking Crew and insert it into the collaborative structure of Break Down That Gate? I can see several issues that arise from trying that. If we have a game with the depth of rules to allow for a variety of character builds, we can end up in a situation where some players have studied the system enough to noticably empower their character over those who have been playing in more carefree manner. Is that a bad thing? BDtG allowed for major discrepancies in player power, and the playerbase did not mind, but the game was also quite simplistic. Having bigger numbers did not fundamentally change what you were doing. If the system allows for a more optimized character to have wider range of options, will the people who did not plan out optimal choices feel irrelevant in comparison, get demotivated and drift off? To combat this, its probably important to not make character build choices too dramatic. Keep it focused on personal expression rather than seeking an optimal build. Even if your character is not the best numerically, it is your character, which might be even more important. Another issue that arises in collaborative games is the "superplayer" syndrome. If the players are all on the same side, with the same win condition, what tends to happen is that the player with greatest understanding of the game determines the optimal strategy to follow, leaving the other players with no decisions to make. Then, in effect only one person is playing. Now, in practice that won't always happen simply because a lot of people are not going to care even if someone shows them the optimal strategy to follow  . But I still want to combat the problem, so that the people who do want to talk tactics can do so.So how to avoid that? One option is having no major gameplay decisions to make. BDtG kind of fell into this category. There was no need for a strategy beyond piling on challenges that did not already have a lot of players taking them on. The other solution I can see is having players pursue different goals from each other. Perhaps most simply by having them compete against each other. But that would lead to a very different game from the collaborative nature of BDtG I'm hoping to preserve at least in some capacity. If the players are against each other and there are clear winners and losers, those who get their way and those who don't, the latter are likely to simply quit the game. I feel like a good compromise would be having the players on the same side, but forcing them to balance between personal and collective goals. That way there is no optimal collective strategy to be found, as each person is also considering their own interests. That might be a working solution, but it begets more questions. Do you trust each player to be self driven enough to come up with goals they care enough about to weight against progress of the team? How do you balance the different options? So there's my thoughts, more or less. I do feel I have the basic structure of a game taking shape, but questions like the above remain unanswered. Feel free to pipe up with any thoughts you might have.
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Jan 28, 2019 22:47
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 04:26 |
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