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.

Playing Battle for Wesnoth

I’ve been playing Battle for Wesnoth lately. It’s a light hex-based fantasy war game that mixes influences from western war games and Japanese skirmish war games. Wesnoth is free software, and really quite impressive for that – it has nice graphics and sounds, plenty of cheesy fantasy dialogue and everything else you’d expect of a game in this genre.

For all its good sides, though, I’m quite dissatisfied by this game overall. The project workflow obviously has worked well, and the production quality is good, but the game’s fundamental design tenets seem faulty to me. Let’s see if I can figure out why.

Overview of the Diplomacy scoring conundrum

Diplomacy is one of the most played and researched of modern designer boardgames. Regardless, many interesting theoretical issues remain. One I’ve been occupying myself with is scoring games – or more generally, evaluating player performance. I have some vague notion that this’ll be useful when we have tournaments here in Finland, but mostly I just find this issue an interesting theoretical problem. It’s so challenging, in fact, that I don’t have any ready-made answers – I can formulate the question, but I don’t have a perfect response.

Bull Dungeoneering

Mazes & Minotaurs, as the name implies, is a D&D -derivative roleplaying game published a while back. I remember reading it several months ago when I was bored – it has the feel of a ’70s rpg polished to fit modern standards in terms of terminological clarity, rules logic and such. The most amusing part of the game is that it is a Gygaxic take on Greek myth, as opposed to the medievalism of D&D. The game has the same goofy setting bits that make it a bit difficult to relate to at times (like making centaurs a PC race, not my cup of tea), but it also has lots of Greek flavour; I especially liked the Noble as a character class, that should make for some interesting roleplaying.

It’s not the game I want to discuss here, though, but the recently released adventure/campaign (I guess it’s not a campaign in traditional terms, but I know I rarely play this long games nowadays myself) Tomb of the Bull King. It’s an amazing, over 200 page long dungeon adventure, and seems to be the among best adventures in its genre that I’ve ever read. I simply can’t figure out what drives these guys – all the hundreds of pages of material for M&M are free, and apparently just created for the larks, or perhaps out of passion for the game.

Analytical boundaries of Diplomacy scenario design

Busy, busy… I started writing the new TSoY book, and I have all seven sorts of whitecollar monkey business on my plate, too. In my free time I’ve been speculating about Diplomacy variants a bit again. This time I decided to write down some basics about what makes a Diplomacy variant. This isn’t necessarily that interesting for Diplomacy players so much as game designers interested in system aesthetics – there are certain aesthetic principles to Diplomacy, and they can be used to determine when something goes over the line and becomes something else than a Diplomacy variant.

I should note that the following might seem slightly mystical. That’s Diplomacy for you, some of us take it far too seriously.

What GNS theory claims

GNS theory is a part of this model of roleplaying developed by Ron Edwards that we call the Big Model. GNS is perhaps the most famous part of the overall theoretical framework, the most contested and the most used for different purposes. It’s also rarely understood very well, which makes it a worthwhile topic here. A discussion at Story Games convinced me that there is still a need for yet another introductory article – I’ll make a point of writing mine in a very exact and simple manner, perhaps it’ll be useful to somebody.

Depiction of women in rpgs

OK, so both Jukka and Sami raised the question earlier, so I feel compelled to outline it in some greater length. That question is, of course, whether rpg illustrations debase women and how come that’s so. The matter has been extensively dealt with by many writers, some of them women (which might certainly give them some more leverage in complaining, if being offended justifies an argument).

My hate-on for big swords

OK, I’m going back to the topic from last month, which I chose and choose to frame in personal terms: I don’t like the kind of fantasy modern fantasy adventure roleplaying games like D&D and Exalted seem to offer nowadays. This being a personal opinion does not, of course, preclude looking for reasons and values behind the opinion.

Cultural subtext of modern fantasy gaming

My brother brought me a bunch of materials on the D&D 4e today. I’ve also been reading about this and other topics from the internet lately. The new D&D seems to be quite interesting as far as rules design goes; the rules disregard all high-level decisions made by the players so far, which would seem to imply that the actual game part only operates as set-piece battles on a battle grid. Of course not that interesting as a traditional adventure roleplaying game, but the new-style combat-oriented D&D will certainly benefit from having rules to match. Many people have complained that the new D&D resembles a computer game more than anything else, but that’s not a crime.

However, I rather doubt that I’m going to play the game. From what I’ve seen the new D&D is the same kind of geeky trash that the third edition was, insofar as the fictional content goes. Violence porn with little regard for nuances of setting or situation, disconnected from any cultural roots whatsoever. Just looking at the kind of art they illustrate popular (or wannabe-popular, as the case may be) roleplaying games with makes me want to retch, frankly.

Learning Go

I got to play another game of go at our local game club last Friday. It’s pretty surprising how many people had no idea what the game is, despite it being just about the most popular boardgame in the world. Regardless, the opportunities to play are not far and wide, even if I do like the game: most gamers who even know what it is about just look at how abstract go is and give it a pass, preferring anything with some more structure and more players. Still, from the few games I’ve got to play I have to say that I like go: it’s very deep and surprisingly interpretive for all of its abstractness: the stones have strong relationships to each other and there’s tremendous variety in the possibilities. Playing go is very entertaining and not at all heavy and difficult, as one might assume with experience from worse abstract games.