Currency and Metagame &c vs. a Complete RPG

[lumpley]

(There's been talk before about when and whether a game's complete, like http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1137">Actually Finishing your RPG here.)

So I've been designing some games and I've got some questions.  I'll use my http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1437">Narrativist Vampire Game as an example.  Set aside for a moment how ugly and icky the Premise is and just look at it as a game design.

I think of it as basically finished.  Everything important is covered; everything else deserves a sentence or three, but there aren't really any more mechanics.  (Maybe the Very Very Bad needs some kind of mechanical enforcement, but you can imagine what that might look like, so can I.  Every night you're hungry and you don't feed, roll a d10 against the number of nights you've been hungry.  Fail and you die.  Fail and you flip out.  Fail and you go into torpor.  Whatever, just examples.)

Whatever the PCs want to do, they can do.  When did a vampire ever have to roll dice to turn into a bat?  The only resolutions the game really requires are a. How Attracted and b. How Angry, and those can certainly work as Drama-driven between the player and GM.

The mechanics don't constrain or direct or limit or guide the players/PCs at all, not directly.  They don't deal with success or failure or anything like it.  All they do is create NPC actions.  But that's fine, because it's the NPCs' actions that drive the moral dilemma.

All leading up to:

So what's the Currency in the game?  1=1?

How do Effectiveness, Resource and Metagame fall out?  In my game?  In drama-driven games in general?

Is it, in fact, a (mostly) finished game?

I'm not really interested in the question of Would It Work, because the only way to really know is to play the thing, and I'm sure not going to.  But presupposing that it plays basically the way I intend, well, what about all that stuff that other RPGs have?

How, very generally, are Coherence and Having All the Elements on the Checklist related?

-Vincent

[Mike Holmes]

Hmmm... Strange question...Gorg no get..

You used good theory in your design. You are done with that phase. Playtest. Edit. Repeat until satisfied. Done.

You don't want to play a game you've created? Now I'm really confused. Was it just an intellectual excercise? Just play the damn thing, get someone else to, or be done with it.

What "stuff that other games have"? You can include some setting if you like. Or color text to deliver the mood. Stuff like that. But otherwise, tune it and publish it.

What you really need is a good first copy. All you have now is just notes. You won't believe how much longer the finished written version is than the notes, and what you add in writing it. OTOH, The World, The Flesh, and The Devil is only eight hundred words total or something lie that? A game does not have to be long-winded to be good.

What are you waiting for, get writing. Need to see how to structure a small game? Go to Jared's page or Scott Knipes or Zak Arneston's. You'll get the idea quick.

Mike

[lumpley]

Ah, nope.

My question is: in Ron's essay, he says that every RPG has Currency.  For the life of me I can't find it in mine.  Is it there and I don't see it?  

(Similarly Metagame and Resource.)

I'm asking for help analyzing my game design, taking it apart into its component pieces.  It's a selfish thing to ask but there it is.  I guess I've just got no eye for it.

-Vincent

(Oh, and yes, in this one very particular case I designed a game I don't want to play, as an intellectual exercise.  Except that a tiny bit of me, back in a dark, ugly corner of my soul, does want to play it.)

[contracycle]

My question is: in Ron's essay, he says that every RPG has Currency.  For the life of me I can't find it in mine.  Is it there and I don't see it?  

IMO, your currency is 1=1, FWIW.  But there is only one, umm, reciprocating cycle in which that currency is expended - the relationship.  Currencies usually came into play be having an exchange mechanism, I would think - a way in that points here turn into points there.  It may be that if you created all three proporsed games and found a way to spend points between them, the currency would be more apparent.  Frex, say another game involved dark magic (rationalise at will); it might be that you could write down relationship points and hence write up Dark Secrets/Whatever by spending "too much time at the lab".

[Mike Holmes]

My point was just that what Gareth has said above is correct. There is little to discuss in your game in the way of currency. What exists is 1 to 1 which means that there are no possible curreency problems per se (there might be balance problems, but that's a whole 'nother issue, and one that usually only comes out in playtesting). I think that Ron may have overstated the whole currency thing, and in lots of games (like yours) even if currency exists it's a non-issue. Really it only becomes an issue when it does get complicated. I see no division, anywhere.

As far as M, R, E. It is unimportant at this point as to which is which. If you really want an analysis I'd say that, unusually (but not really interestingly from a discussion point), your game has all resource stats represented as the stats of the NPCs encountered. Essentially, NPCs are resources (so the vampire's Effectiveness with that NPC, attraction, say, can evaporate; hence resources). Thats pretty interesting from a design POV, and might be cool in play (if we ever find out), but now that we know that, so what? I have never found any correlation between what kind of MRE mechanics are used, and how good a game is. Really it's just shorthand for descriptive purposes.

The only questions that seem pertinent about the game to me at this point are about whether or not your specific mechanics reach your goal, or, possibly, whether your goal is interesting. The former question we can speculate about a lot, but will mostly only be truely answered in playtesting. The latter question is a personal one. For me, I'm not all that interested (and, interestingly, neither would it appear that the designer is either). Someone might be interested, tho, who knows?

If you'd like to continue your experiment I'd suggest moving on to testing.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

A number of people have missed my point in the Currency discussion regarding how the concept pertains to game design.

That point is that the actual named mechanics are not often split neatly down the Currency categories. Nor do they have to be. I suggest that when a given game "descriptor" (attribute, skill, secondary score, blah blah) cuts across or includes more than one of the Currency categories, it can be a matter of any of the following:

- elegance (which is the case in Zak's game so far, I think)

- omission (in which case one notes a "hole" during actual play, when Drama must be brought in when it wasn't intended or desired)

- breaking (which is the case in, say, Champions' Recovery)

In other words, there is no "rule" in my mind regarding how Effectiveness, Metagame, and Resource "must" be allocated across the words/terms used to describe or play a character. Speaking strictly for myself, elegance is, to my way of thinking, a worthy goal, necessarily minimizing or eliminating omission or breaking.

More generally speaking, I agree with Mike that it's time to play the friggin' thing and see how it drives. For the record, it's the only vampire-RPG concept currently available that piques my interest.

Best,
Ron

[lumpley]

Gareth,

Cool.  Gotcha.

Mike,

You're right about now that we know that, so what.  Except that now that you've pointed it out to me, it's settled in my head and I can stop thinking about it.  Not much in So What terms, but I'll take it.

Ron,

Yep.  Count me among the people who had missed that point.

That's the story of me and the Forge, though.  "Hey, but --" I'll say, and y'all point me to it and there it is, already thought of.  (You may remember me from such posts as "Director Stance: does it exist?" and "IIEE: necessary?")

Which game of Zak's do you mean?  (Other than, like, all of them.)

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

Oops, I meant your game idea, Vincent. The one about the relationships, intimacy, and totally dysfunctional nastiness.

Best,
Ron

[lumpley]

Heh heh.  But elegant totally dysfunctional nastiness.

Yikes.

-Vincent

[Paul Czege]

Hey Mike,

OTOH, The World, The Flesh, and The Devil is only eight hundred words total or something lie that? A game does not have to be long-winded to be good.

Thanks for this. I made the mistake recently of reading a "too many rules-light games" thread on RPG.net, and it bummed me way out. No one mentioned The World, the Flesh, and the Devil specifically, but there were a lot of people using words like "incomplete" to refer to rules-light games, and "lazy" to refer to the designers.

Paul

[Mike Holmes]

Well, there are "incomplete" games out there, IMO. I just don't thing that yours is one of them, Paul. OTOH, I've never playtested it; I'm assuming someone has?  ;-)

But, long != complete.

Vincent's game might be ready. And like I said, by the time he actually writes it up, it may be longer than he thinks. I wonder if we'll find out?

Mike "Desperately Seeking Playtesters" Holmes