Games and Toys and Defeat Horizons

I’ve continued playing Wesnoth and trying to figure out what it is that annoys me in the game. I think I’ve got at least a part of the answer here: the issue is that what we call “games” actually consists of two different types of interactive objects, and mistaking them for each other is a recipe for disaster. Just an idle thought, let’s see if it goes anywhere.

A Zombie Cinema variant of sorts

I’ve considered writing some sort of sequel for Zombie Cinema for a couple of years now, mostly because I’m personally a bit bored of playing Zombie Cinema and want a bit of variety; it’s a tricky business, considering the number of constraints that I take on in any such design. I’m pretty happy with my latest effort mechanically, it’s just that the game lacks in really functional genre. Here’s how it works:

Finally finished!

I haven’t been blogging this summer, as I’ve been writing my new TSoY book. It’s the largest book I’ve ever written (though not the largest I’ve designed), although I did have some help in the form of prior art by Clinton and Josh and other TSoY enthusiasts who allowed me to use their work. Very, very much work, I haven’t pushed this hard since -05.

I deliberated on the name of the book for quite a while, and ultimately ended up calling it The World of Near. The issue here was that I didn’t want to use the same name Clinton had used for his own book, but I wanted to make it clear that this was a TSoY sourcebook. “TSoY” is still on the cover as a sort of brand logo, but the actual name of the book is different. I never cared much about the rpg (and textbook) industry practice of publishing new editions of the same book even where the creators, intent and structure of the work were completely reworked.

A Peculiar Combat System

I’m supposed to concentrate on writing TSoY, but a short note about something else should break the pace nicely. The following came to me yesterday when I pondered the system aesthetics of fantasy adventure games: if I were to design a beginner-friendly fantasy adventure game, I would consider the d20-based D&D mechanics and pool-based Tunnels & Trolls mechanics both too dependent on special tools – strange dice shapes or too many dice, to wit. So I started thinking of how I’d create a traditional fantasy rules set using only a deck of playing cards.

Levels at Jyväskylä

I haven’t been blogging much lately, what with being busy doing real work. A little convention report should be doable, however: we were at Levels in Jyväskylä this past weekend with my brothers to represent and advocate for roleplaying game culture amongst the other game programming. Levels is a small video game convention (500 people or so) with a delightfully comprehensive view on the boundaries of game culture, encompassing and supporting quite a bit of non-electronic gaming as well. This was only the second year Levels has been convened, but perhaps it’ll continue; the convention is arranged by the local university of applied sciences as a student project, I understand, so it has some chances of becoming an institutional event in perpetuity even after the current crop of students leaves the house.

Challenging the Diplomacy rules?

I’m something of a fanatic when it comes to the rules of Diplomacy. I have a reverence for them that must be quite unhealthy – I consider the game one of the most perfect designer games, a wonderfully powerful and robust engine that does exactly what it purports to. Thus I’m very hesitant to give my blessings to even small deviations from the rules, unless they display the same sort of universal power we get with the Calhamer rules. (Ironic how I am still capable of participating in those detailed arguments about convoy paradoxes and such; those parts of the rules text are and have long been a mess, even if the rules as they are played around here are very clear and logical. As always, I try to play according to the Platonic ideal of the rules, not so much based on any particular edition of the text.)

I myself haven’t had any strong inclination towards changing the rules of Diplomacy with house rulings of any sort, and I usually just yawn at any variants that add things on top of the basic structure, making it more complex. So it’s quite surprising that for a while now I’ve been iddly wondering about one particular rules change that I can’t quite dismiss on the grounds of inferiority. Could I have figured out a rule that actually improves Diplomacy? I’ll need to test this one and find out!

About the D&D Combat System

This is a sort of sister thread for my look at Vancian magic from last week. Looking at what you actually do in D&D (generally, not specifically the modern take), this is what I get:

• Plenty of freeform negotiation of situations (which I’ve sort of already dealt with last year in my discussion of challenge-based adventuring); despite some weak efforts to the contrary, the core D&D experience really runs on the basis of you-imagine, I-imagine, the result of which is a set of mutually accepted (credible, in theory-speak) challenge constraints that are then set in stone until the challenge is completed.
• The magic system, which is the most important resource subsystem in the game. Increasingly so at higher levels, increasingly so in later editions.
• The combat system, which is what you do with that positioning and those resources.

So it stands to reason that I’m interested in tackling the combat system now.

Vancian magic

I’ve been reading Dungeons & Dragons books from the end of the ’80s – meaning the Mentzer edition, to be exact. They’re full of freaky shit that makes little sense, but is certainly thought provoking. My favourite is the Crucible of the Blackflame, the halfling racial artifact that has the minor power to repeal entropy alongsides its actual function of producing cloth that flies. Apparently the racial purpose of the demi-humans in D&D is to create kites that fly without a wind and take decades or even centuries of slave labour to create. Quite random stuff, that.

Anyway, reading all this old D&D material has turned my mind upon the Vancian magic system of D&D. I like the Dying Earth stories of Jack Vance a lot, but I never really appreciated the magic system of D&D – what works in a book won’t necessarily work in a game that has quite difference concerns, anyway. When I was younger I was actually quite adamantly opposed to D&D style magic because of its utilitarian nature – in my fantasy adventure roleplaying and reading magic was a mysterious, powerful force that would basically be a big deal whenever it made an appearance. Many people also dislike the somewhat counterintuitive memorization system with spell levels and such, preferring different sorts of mana systems – this is not the case with me, though; a homogenous pool of magical energy has never provided interesting detail to my play, so while it certainly has made appearances in my games, the solution was always a cludge.

After playing the Mentzer edition of D&D and reading the related books I’m starting to think that I could perhaps make a Vancian magic system palatable for my own D&D gaming. Let’s see what such a system would look like:

Trait Cinema

Busy, busy… but luckily I’m again having a bit of time to develop the English-language Arkenstone webpages. Those have been lying in a somewhat unfinished state through the autumn and winter, as I haven’t had time to create the materials to make them complete. Now I have a bit more time, though, so I’m doing nice things like board variants for Zombie Cinema. I also translated and honed a weird variant of the game that I wrote some time back – it’s a variant to add traits and more dice into Zombie Cinema – because more dice is always better, right?

Writing of War

I’ve managed to get some work done on the new TSoY book I’m supposed to be creating. Difficult to make time for uninterrupted writing, but perhaps I’ll manage now that the holidays went away. Aside from planning the book and writing some chapters, I’ve been planning more campaign frames for playtest. Specifically, I’m figuring out how to run the War in Khale, which is something that is featured pretty prominently in the original TSoY text. Despite being laid out, however, I don’t think the text much concerns itself with the specifics of how to run a campaign around the war – especially resolving mass combats is something people seem to have problems with, if forum threads wondering about it are any indication.