Sunday, November 29, 2009
Sometimes The Numbers Don't Work
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Under the Hood #3 - Social Capital
Welcome to the next instalment of Under the Hood. Today, I’ll be looking briefly at the social traits in gaming.
This is an area where I’ve often found mechanics to be the least helpful. After all, for many groups, the social aspects are always played out in detail role-playing without actually using any mechanics. This can cause difficulties where a player’s ability and a characters ability are widely divergent.
And so, I’ve been looking at alternative systems for representing a character’s social advantages and disadvantages.
There are two alternative systems that I’m looking at employing in our current project. The first is a descriptive set of mechanics that defines your characters personality generally. Each trait would be on a spectrum with a personality type at each end – shy versus outgoing as an example. This helps for two reasons. Firstly, it makes social mechanics a bit more interesting and thus more likely to be played with by those more interested in the game aspect of role-playing (it’s also a tad more realistic, where being outgoing isn’t always an advantage). Secondly, for those Weavers (such as myself) who aren’t inclined to use the mechanics as much, it provides a better framework for the players to map out their characters. The ratings in each social trait help provide a foundation on which to build the character’s personality.
There are many disadvantages to this system. It may get very clunky. It struggles to deal with individual characters having different levels of shyness at different times. It works differently to the character’s other traits, meaning another system has to be learnt and dealt with.
The second system is my current preferred idea, but is still very much in its embryonic stages. Characters will have social traits as normal and, I imagine, these will be largely ignored during sessions. However, character creation will also detail the family, friends, and important acquaintances of the character and the character’s social traits will be used to affect a Weaver-maintained resource pool of trust, favours, and the like. As characters then act within the world, they will expend their social capital by asking for favours and gain more social capital by doing favours. Of course, there will also be other means for social capital to raise and fall. The system will support both individuals and organisations/communities positions on the character and will track a couple of forms of social capital (renown, love, and respect). Most importantly, all the stats for each character will fit on a single side of a character sheet (or a sheet maintained by the Weaver) and the system will be no heavier on the bookkeeping than health systems are for combat.
These ideas are only at the earliest stages of development. They may be discarded entirely or they may change beyond recognition. At this time, they’re being presented here because I’m very keen to get some feedback on how you all think systems of these types (especially the second one) could be of use to you and your gaming groups. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Service Interruptions to Continue...
Sunday, September 27, 2009
We Proudly Present...
Monday, September 21, 2009
Laying the Foundations #2 - The Importance of Community
Welcome to the second instalment of Laying the Foundations. In this week’s article I’m going to touch on the fundamental unit of our hobby – the gaming group.
In the same way that the family is the building block of society, the group is the building block of our gaming community. Whilst some people do buy gaming books just to read them, the overwhelming majority of us buy the books because we want to play the game – whether or not we do is another question entirely.
Gaming belongs to a network market – the more people that are playing in your area, the easier it is to find other gamers with compatible schedules, and the easier it is to find people who want to play in the kind of games you want to play in. It surprises me that so many gaming companies aim their works at single players rather than the group.
Magnesium Games intends to buck this trend at least somewhat. We’re focussed on the fact that the group is the building block of the community and the community is the key to thriving in the gaming industry. Of course, we also recognise that many individual gamers belong to multiple groups and we’re going to provide for that as well.
There are two main ways we’ll be looking after gaming groups. The first is our website. Whilst at first it will be predominantly a collection of articles and reviews, it will later be expanding to include a selection of gaming tools. These will be designed with a collaborative, group approach in mind. We’ll also be structuring our premium memberships around a group basis as well as an individual basis.
Secondly, our game products will be released in three ways – In the traditional hard copy and e-books, and as boxed sets. The boxed sets will be sold with a range of options so that you can customise it for the members of your group and the size of your group. Depending on the exact set, it might include a hard-copy of the full main book, multiple hard copies of a shortened version of the rules for players, various props, character sheets, maps, tokens, dice, and other goodies.
Of course, all of this is quite a long way away, so why am I talking about it now?
Put simply, I’m talking about it now because the group experience is at the core of all our design and business philosophies at Magnesium Games. With few exceptions, we don’t game by ourselves but as part of a group and we believe that every aspect of the hobby should be designed to cater to the group as well as to the individual.
See you all next week…
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Under the Hood #2 - Multi-Dimensional Mechanics
In this instalment of Under the Hood, I’m going to talk about our second Design Principle, which I’m currently calling Multi-Dimensional Mechanics. Partly because it’s a somewhat apt description, and partly because it sounds kind of amusingly steampunkish.
What do I mean by Multi-Dimensional Mechanics? Well, let’s start with the singular dimensional rules you see in most systems.
Under these rules, a character will have a set of traits which affect their chance of success. They may do this in any number of ways. Some systems have a flat bonus that is added to a die roll and then has to beat a target number. Some systems might change the number of dice you are rolling.
The thing that all these systems have in common is that there is only one number from the character that affects the roll. So, if you make your character better at something they tend to increase their chances of getting a success of any type and to increase the level of success that they can achieve.
That may sound reasonable but there is an important difference between how easily something comes to a person and how much they can accomplish with it. Some people may find solving a given mathematical problem simplistic, but only be able to do it through a complex and circuitous route that takes them three times as long as someone for whom mathematics comes just as easily but who has a greater knowledge and can thus accomplish much more with it.
Another way to think about it, is the idea of representing the ease with which someone with a high potential manages the simpler tasks in a given field before they’ve learnt enough to even attempt the harder tasks. Both characters may have a rank of 1 in their Computer skill, but the natural talent is going to have a lot easier time with that 1 rank than the person who has struggled to learn it in the first place.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is definitely represented in the overwhelming majority of systems. It’s just that there is no dividing line between the two and generally, to improve one is to improve the other.
In our system, we’re determined to make that line a little bit sharper. As in many systems, to make a roll you combine two different traits. One of these traits – the one that determines how easy a task comes to you – tells you what sort of dice to roll (d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12), and the other- the one that determines how much you can accomplish with a task – tells you how many dice you can roll.
Thus you can create a character with phenomenal potential, but very limited abilities – or one who has toiled for decades to have an in depth understanding of a given topic, but still struggles to apply it to new works.
This system doesn’t divide the two out perfectly, there’s still some overlap. But it is a bit neater than many other systems. It also creates some interesting options to improve our take on the first Design Concept (the Narrative Character), and as you’ll see later – makes it a little easier to do some of the things we want to do with Tokens and Experience.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Laying the Foundations #1 - The Core Principles +2
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Under the Hood #1 - The Narrative Character
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Sidebars: Testing the Waters
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
A Valuable Lesson
Unfortunately, that was the only copy I had of that blog post. Rest assured, I will be re-writing it and posting it. Unfortunately, due to other commitments, I won't be able to do so until next Sunday.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Weaving a Story
In last week’s post, I made an off-hand reference to Players and Weavers and thus inadvertently let slip one of the term’s Magnesium Games will be using across all of its RPG products. Weaver is our take on Game Master, Storyteller, Dungeonmaster, Narrator, and the many other alternatives.
Why not Game Master?
For the simple reason that it makes the GM sound like they are in complete control of the game. Everyone who has played in a game before will know how unlikely that is to actually happen. More importantly, it’s not something that you want. We want an interactive experience, not a master-slave relationshop.
Why not Storyteller?
This harks back to the same lack of interactivity. An RPG is not a story that is being told, it’s a story that is being crafted by a group of individuals. Everyone who is playing is telling a story, it’s not been told by a single individual.
So, Why Weaver?
For me, the idea of weaving best captures the role of the person who’s running the whole universe as their character. Their job is to take the stories that the Players make up and to weave them in to the fabric of their universe and their plot ideas. Weaver seems more interactive, after all there is little that a Weaver can do without the individual Threads that make their Tapestry. Whilst the Weaver may be able to exert influence on and, at times, even control individual Threads, they can never control them completely and thus the Tapestry is created by both the Weaver and the various Threads.
Tapestries and Threads
Having taken the name Weaver and run with it, I expanded the metaphor to look at some of the other regular parts of our hobby. As you’ve already seen this has lead to two other terms I intend to use in Magnesium Games’ products.
A Tapestry is your campaign, chronicle, adventure, or story. It consists of many different Threads of different sorts. The players you weave with, the system you play in, the setting you use as a backdrop, the mood and atmosphere you all set, and the themes you explore. It’s up to you and your troupe to decide which threads to use and how to weave them together. The only certainty is that the players will mess with your original intentions…
The Design Process
Got a better idea? A better set of terms that more accurately describe the narrative experience? One of the many, many things Magnesium Games wants to accomplish with a relatively open design process is lots of feedback and criticism of the ideas we have so that we can make a better game. If you love the terms, let us know in the comments. Or, if you think the whole idea of a Weaver creating a Tapestry from disparate Threads is corny, cuckoo, or just plain crap, then drop a comment below.