We Proudly Present...

This week was going to be the next instalment of Under the Hood and I was going to save the unveiling of our new logo until the long week-end next week, but some recent illness has impacted my ability to write coherently and I'm just a little bit too excited about the logo to hold off any longer before I show it off to everyone.

So without further ado...

Logo Design by: Tom Buttery

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…

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.

Laying the Foundations #1 - The Core Principles +2

Welcome to the first Laying the Foundations column. In this series of articles, I’ll be looking at the reasoning behind Magnesium Games’ online presence and what we hope to achieve.

To start things off, I thought I’d talk about the core philosophies which Magnesium Games operates on. For those wondering how this ties in to our online presence - the decision to have an active online presence and to make the online portions of our business the most active and important aspects have their roots in these principles.

Last week I mentioned that we have five underlying principles. I’ll go through each in no particular order.

Openness

Magnesium Games will strive to be as open as is practical. This doesn’t mean that we’ll tell you everything there is to know about everything we do. It does mean that we’ll tell you a lot more than most people would.

We won’t tell you everything for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there are some things that can’t be told for security, privacy, or legal reasons (for example, no one is going to want us to tell everyone all the details we collect when you sign up to our website, password included). Secondly, as every Weaver and the majority of Players know – the right amount of anticipation at the right time can be a vastly enjoyable experience. Thirdly, it’d take a lot of time to tell you everything and that’s less time we’ve got to spend on making games or improving the website.

Oh, and chances are very few people will want to know everything that we’re doing.

Openness also means that we’ll make our products and services as readily available as we can, which means at as a low price and in as many formats as we can, as well as striving to make the best possible use of Creative Commons licences to allow derivative works.

Adaptability

Times change. Markets shift. It’s survival of the fittest, and that generally means those most able to adapt to change. Magnesium Games will strive to be very quick to react to, well, everything. Many organisations seem to take forever to make even simple changes to the way they do things. Often because to get one thing changed you need to get approval from numerous people. I once worked with an organisation that required seven people to sign off on fixing a single typo on a form. It took three months to change. For three months the form read ‘shit to’ instead of ‘ship to’…

Magnesium Games is designing its internal processes with a strong view to keeping them highly flexible and as easy as possible to adapt without compromising on quality or security.

Respect

Respect is the foundation of all human interactions and is the second most important of all the principles (see below for the most important). It’s a fairly simple concept – Magnesium Games will act in a respectful manner towards all those it has dealings with and expects to be treated with respect in return. This will, no doubt, be the cornerstone of our forum rules.

Sustainability

Despite what you may be thinking, this principle is not specifically about being environmentally-friendly. It’s about being viable. The business must operate such that it does not run at a loss and such that it can pay all of its suppliers and employees in a timely fashion. It needs to turn a profit only if it needs to build capital reserves so as to either expand to achieve better economies of scale or to ensure that it has sufficient reserves to survive unexpected events.

Not-Being-Evil

This is the most important of the five underlying principles. It’s also the easiest and the hardest to explain. Easiest because it is what it says it is – Magnesium Games will always endeavour to act in a good way. We won’t cook babies. We will help little old ladies cross the road.

Hardest because enumerating exactly what is evil and what is good often gets far blurrier than any of us like to think it does. It’s also a principle we expect to find easy to live by- the gaming industry not being one that is fraught with moral perils (at least, not outside of our games and imaginations).

The Extra Two

There are two other principles that are worthy of mention. Though I’ve not included them in the core five yet, it is likely that they will be included in an eventual revision to them.

The first is the principle of moderation. Extremes tend to be bad. And that holds for seemingly good things as well as for obviously bad things. So it applies to all our principles as well. You can see it in Openness where we promise to protect our member’s privacy despite our commitment to being as open as possible.

The second is a trickier concept to verbalise, but one that will underpin all business ventures I take part in. Unfortunately, I don’t have a single word or short-phrase for it just yet. Suggestions are welcome. Economists have a concept they call externalities. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Wikipedia has a decent explanation. In all the decisions we make, Magnesium Games will endeavour to do so from a Social Benefit and Social Cost point of view rather than a Private Cost and Private Benefit point of view. I could talk on this subject for several pages, but will refrain from doing so here. If you want to know more about what this business model means, drop a note in the comments.

Final Thoughts

The astute amongst you will have noticed that this was not the article that was promised a fortnight ago. I decided that detailing these principles was of far greater importance and far greater benefit to understanding what Magnesium Games hopes to accomplish, than the original topic would have been. The next Laying the Foundations will feature the originally intended “Importance of Community” topic.

Thanks for reading!