kathanaksaya for IRC and PbEM

[Green]

Just recently, James West published a lite version of my game, Kathanaksaya, in the most recent issue of Random Order Comics & Games.  After a little bit of sitting on the shelf, I've decided to come back to it and revisit some things I wasn't yet ready to deal with at the time.  Mostly, these center around issues with playing in online environments like chats and emails.  For a while, I refrained from putting to much effort into designing the game for online play because Kathanaksaya is primarily a face-to-face game.  In addition, the often unreliable nature of non-freeform online gaming frequently prevents the proper investment of time needed to get the most out of it.  So, I decided to put things on hold until I could get a clearer perspective or until some ideas came to me.  Nothing has come up yet, but I have pinpointed a few things that make playing Kathanaksaya online more challenging than when face-to-face.  Also, there are things about online playing that really enhance Kathanksaya.

What I'd like to do is create a rules variant for online Kathanksaya play.  I do not care to make any drastic changes to how things work.  I'd like to keep Story Points, Specialties, and the bidding system.  However, I believe I need more work as to how players are expected to use these resources.  I want to keep things flowing as smoothly as possible without resorting to hammerhanded Narrator tactics.

So far, these are the potential challenges I've noticed during chat-based play:

1.  Lack of non-verbal contextual cues.  Even with smileys and emoticons, it is often difficult to ascertain tone and other subtleties of meaning.  This is especially important to iron out when involved in OOC discussions.  While I tend to agree that many of these issues are best left to the players to iron out, if there is a way the game itself could facillitate matters, I'd be grateful to figure it out.

2.  Players not knowing when it's their turn to speak or act in character.  This is particularly important in bidding.  As interesting as it would be for me to watch players carry on like the New York Stock Exchange, the chaos that would ensue does not always make for better play, especially when the players want to tell a more serious, focused story.  Establishing who gets to talk and when is vital, especially when it comes to bidding.  I am willing to concede that this may also be a social contract issue.

For PbEM games or mailing list games, the main problem is how to use the bidding mechanic without slowing down play even further.  While the frequency of posting and the length of each post varies from group to group, I am wondering if there is a way I could help make things easier rules-wise.  While I could go the eBay route and keep the system as-is, I think that may drag things on longer than they need to be.  One person suggested that in cases of conflict or when players wanted to take control of the plot for a bit, they simply state how many Story Points they're willing to pay to have things turn out that way.  The one willing to give up the most wins and spends the points they put forward.  I think this idea is entertaining, but it brings up another concern: how to refresh Story Points.  It's easier to ascertain the beginning of a new scene or act in a real-time roleplaying environment, but in PbEM, things tend to veer from the original topic.  Social contracts notwithstanding, if there is a way to show or help people how to do this with the least amount of fuss, I'd really like some assistance in figuring out how to do it.

For both these venues, I'd really like to figure out how to best take advantage of the media.  In face-to-face gaming, bringing out the theatrical elements enhances the experience.  In play-by-post, awareness of and appreciation for language make gaming more vibrant.  In chat-based games, you have a combination between the two.  I really want to preserve these aspects, so I'm reluctant to adopt any rules that get in the way of this.

I appreciate whatever help you can give me regarding this dilemma, and hopefully within the next year or so Kathanksaya would be a stand-alone game available in print.

[Paul Czege]

Hi Shawn,

I have ROCG #4 sitting right here on my computer desk. And I enjoyed reading the version of Kathanaksaya in it.

So far, these are the potential challenges I've noticed during chat-based play:
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2. Players not knowing when it's their turn to speak or act in character.

Recently, Dave Panchyk http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=7713">posted a link to http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html">this article by Clay Shirkey. The relevant passage:

It's really worthwhile to look into what Joi Ito is doing with the Emergent Democracy movement, even if you're not interested in the themes of emerging democracy. This started because a conversation was going on, and Ito said "I am frustrated. I'm sitting here in Japan, and I know all of these people are having these conversations in real-time with one another. I want to have a group conversation, too. I'll start a conference call.

"But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I'm going to bring up a chat window at the same time." And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski said "Well, I've also opened up a wiki, and here's the URL." And he posted it in the chat window. And people can start annotating things. People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.

So, suddenly you've got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated. So you can have the conference call going on, and you know how conference calls are. Either one or two people dominate it, or everyone's like "Oh, can I -- no, but --", everyone interrupting and cutting each other off.

It's very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can't see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi's conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type "Hand," and the moderator of the conference call will then type "You're speaking next," in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.

Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. "Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so's work." Or "You should look at this URL...you should look at that ISBN number." In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out -- "No, no, no, it's w w w dot net dash..." In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: "Go over to the wiki and look at this."[/list:u]Paul

[Green]

Thanks.

So what you're basically saying is have a system in place that acts something like the conch in Lord of the Flies?

[Tony Irwin]

Just recently, James West published a lite version of my game, Kathanaksaya, in the most recent issue of Random Order Comics & Games.

You're in print! Congratulations Green :-) Its been so cool to see how you've kept moving your game forward since starting it.

What I'd like to do is create a rules variant for online Kathanksaya play.  I do not care to make any drastic changes to how things work.  I'd like to keep Story Points, Specialties, and the bidding system.  However, I believe I need more work as to how players are expected to use these resources.  I want to keep things flowing as smoothly as possible without resorting to hammerhanded Narrator tactics.

Sounds tough, especially for PBEM. My best experiences of PBEM play were "freeform" star trek while I was at Uni, except now I'd say it wasn't freeform at all its just that the system was rarely made explicit and wasn't what we normally think of as "system" in rpgs.

Thing about PBEMs like that is that you need really strong character concepts that are immeadiately identifiable to everyone else - in fact much of the system usually deals with being faithful to your own and other player's character concepts.

That works for Star Trek (or any other fannish source material) because all the players know the genre and all its characters inside out. I'd also say it would work great for Kathanaksaya because one of the most appealing features of your game (for me anyway) has always been its immensly strong characterisation of PCs - I really can nail down a very personal character concept and communicate it to everyone at the table.

I'd consider the possibility that even if you come up with a really excellent variation for PBEM that successfully ports in your bidding rules, that in fact the people who have the most fun with your game will be those who gradually drift away from it into something more "freeform" like this

Each week the GM will post a summary of what's going on, try and tie separate events together, and provide new "kickers" for the group and each individual character.

Players can introduce new NPCs for their characters, provided these NPCs don't fill any PC's particular "niche".

Players can write for other PCs responding to their own character's words and actions provided that it is faithful to how the owning player writes for their own PC. If in doubt ask the player.

See for me that's System not freeform, and it might be useful to consider if whether for a PBEM version you need to clarify those system aspects. Otherwise you might just end up with PBEMing making for a slow, interrupted version of your game, rather than a game that really takes advantage of all the great things PBEMing has to offer (time to really think and plot out a great post, the fact that there's a written record of the game so far, everyone has equal "screen time" - no one can monopolise the GM, and so on...)

I appreciate whatever help you can give me regarding this dilemma, and hopefully within the next year or so Kathanksaya would be a stand-alone game available in print.

I hope so, best of luck with it :-)

Tony

[Shreyas Sampat]

1.  Lack of non-verbal contextual cues.  Even with smileys and emoticons, it is often difficult to ascertain tone and other subtleties of meaning.  This is especially important to iron out when involved in OOC discussions.  While I tend to agree that many of these issues are best left to the players to iron out, if there is a way the game itself could facillitate matters, I'd be grateful to figure it out.

This is, IMO, a Social Contract issue and there's no easy way to get around it, but take a look at the way Universalis makes mechanics out of raising topics for OOC discussion and grievances; the Challenge and Fine mechanics particularly might be valuable to you.  In fact, expanded, a mechanical way to cause metagame occurrences might benefit K. play (the bidding mechanic is obvious here): "The Narrator cannot run scenes concurrently.  10 SP."

2.  Players not knowing when it's their turn to speak or act in character.  This is particularly important in bidding.  As interesting as it would be for me to watch players carry on like the New York Stock Exchange, the chaos that would ensue does not always make for better play, especially when the players want to tell a more serious, focused story.  Establishing who gets to talk and when is vital, especially when it comes to bidding.

This is definitely a mechanical issue, unlike your first concern.  In the IRC situation (I don't know much about design-for-PBEM, but indie-netgaming has given me a lot of ideas for design-for-IRC), ordering of events is clear and obvious; you could use this to your advantage.  For example, you could use the nicklist as a way to establish a turn order that everyone can refer to easily; you could also set a length ("one sentence" or something) for utterances and require that someone respond before the speaker may speak again.  Etc.

[Green]

Going by nick would be interesting, but I do want to prevent people from putting ` or ~ or even numbers in front of their nicks so they could go first.  All other things being equal, I think going alphabetically by nick would be best.  This would persist even in conflicts, but if a player/character has no stake in things, they are skipped.  Players must wait until recognized (by the Narrator or the preceding player) to go.  Cycles begin and end with the Narrator.  Example:

Say that the players from the example in my game are playing on IRC.  They use their character names as their nicks.  Things would go in order like this:

ME (Narrator): Talk-talk-talk
Dibby (a PC): *action* Talk-talk-talk.  OK, Dobie?
Dobie (a PC): *action* Talk-talk-talk.
ME: Ziggy?
Ziggy (a PC): *action* Talk-talk-talk.  Back to you, O great and powerful Narrator!
ME:  Talk-talk-talk. Bid.  Dibby?
Dibby: *action* Bid.  Dobie?
Dobie: pass.
ME:  Ziggy?
Ziggy: *action* Bid
ME: Talk-talk-talk.  Bid.  Your turn, Dibby.
Dibby: *action* Bid.  Dobie?
Dobie: *action* Bid.  Ziggy?
Ziggy: *action* Bid.  OK, I'm done.
ME: *action* Relent.  Now, talk-talk-talk.[/list:u]