Sometimes The Numbers Don't Work

Sadly, I do not believe that the numbers add up for the viability of getting Magnesium Games up and running at this time.

It's funny how much an individual's situation can change in six months.

When I started work on MgG, I was working 30 hours a week and had almost no financial commitments.

Six months later, I find myself working 40 hours a week and looking at signing up for a mortgage.

Suddenly, the 10 to 15 hours I needed to put in each week to make Magnesium Games work seems like an impossible reach. More and more I find myself only working on the bare minimums - and not always reaching those - and less and less working on the underlying products. Plato's Game, despite its compact size, has more or less stalled in development. And the big project has seen a mere two dozen pages of setting work completed in the last three months.

Financially, where before I found it easy to put aside 5 grand for start-up costs, I now find myself eyeing off that money as essential to buying a house for myself.

Motivationally, I have always derived a lot of my drive from my own gaming group. Unfortunately, it has proved increasingly difficult to organise games (a side-effect of getting jobs, I guess) and the last few campaigns I've run have been... poor, at best.

Still, this is not the end of Magnesium Games. But it does mark a change in approach. The blog will be much quieter for the foreseeable future. I will still post the occasional article, but mostly it will be silent. Until I am much closer to the release dates, the blog simply takes too much time. Especially as I looked at expanding it to include other authors.

I have also decided that it is mostly likely unfeasible to produce a game by myself. Financially, not having a partnered artist is prohibitively expensive. Creatively, not having someone to closely bounce ideas off is not conducive to my best work.

So, Magnesium Games will not be getting its own website in the near future and will be mostly quiet. Work will continue, albeit at a slow pace, on the core projects. And I will once again renew the hunt for a dedicated business partner.

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.