Finding gamism design hard

[Bankuei]

Hi Callan,

The interpretation doesn't need to be descriptive necessarily, but it does at least need to register whether the effects of the player's strategy have produced results or not- that is, even if all the GM says is, "You killed him" or "He's still standing" that's important from a gamist point of view.  These things affect the player's decisions for future strategy, and while videogames give immediate feedback, table top requires that you check damage, wound levels, roll vs. target number, or some other mechanic to declare the outcome.

Chris

[nathan404]

I'm new, so forgive me if I'm restating something old.

It seems to me that those people who fall under the 'gamist' heading tend to like the attack/ hit / damage paradigm for combat, and the rolling to 'beat' a target number for skills (both of these represent a kind of "winning" - their character in some way is better than what the game is currently throwing at them). The reason that Baldur's Gate and Diablo appeal to these people is that they get what they want - with no wait. I think that perhaps this is what makes gamist table top RPGs so hard to develop. You need to provide that satisfaction of attack and damage, and quick reaction to properly feed what the gamist wants. Also, you want some way that the player can use a character to break a rule of the game. For example, the way D & D does this is feats.  The player is generally satisfied once he has a combination of feats and character class that has a higher damage output than average (or  otherwise breaks the rules, a mage for example).

-nate

[Callan S.]

Hey Chris, I get what you mean now. I agree, tactical feedback is vital! I thought you were refering to colorful tactical feedback and that's what my post was about.


Hi Nate, welcome to the forge!

I'm not sure that's a good appraisal of gamist priorities. Chess and monopoly involve considerable wait times, relative to comp games, and they have been and will be around for centuries. Speed in result responce (and speed applied to promote challenge) are both very valuable, but not the actual goals of those crazy gamists. Nor is 'breaking the rules', as you put it, a goal. One of the key components of winning is peer (and personal) appreciation of the strategy and guts involved in that win. I think to design this way you need to appreciate their efforts in this light, rather than perhaps seeing them as just wanting things quick, or to break the rules.

[Harlequin]

Hey, Callan...

Just to jump in with a sideways note for a second, to me the physical-action and -reaction element, along the lines of what you were discussing earlier with the "spot the right symbol" thing, is a useful mechanism for Gamist play.  Simply because it engages the player on a literally visceral level, uses and abuses our biology in support of gaming.

Boffer LARPs and the like (our local version is actually a dice-based not boffer system, but is otherwise similar), derive a great deal of their advantage from this.  I'm seldom happier than when I'm sprinting across a large campsite in pursuit of a quest or task, sneaking through the brush successfully, evading pursuit by sliding on my heels down a steep hill, or leaping into the lake.  (Even the organizers seldom expect that last, somehow, which has led to some very funny situations.  "Nobody was supposed to SEE that prop yet! It was on the bottom of the lake!" "It was pretty obvious once you got close...")  There's not a lot you can exploit of this, in a more confined environment - though what there is, might be a very interesting experiment - other than the action/reaction/perception thing along the lines of what you discussed.

For examples of ways you might use this in an RPG, I recommend Cheapass games.  While not RPGs, to me there's immense potential for a resolution mechanic in a game of Falling, or Brawl, or Diceland, or Lightspeed.  In fact I proposed a dungeon-crawling combat mechanic based on Lightspeed in this thread, where a player had a stack of cards depicting his character striking, dodging, blocking, and so forth, and played them as fast as he could in response to the GM doing similarly with cards full of monsters.  As in Lightspeed, you might end up with a compromise between speed and accuracy, where I've seen someone play out his cards twice as fast as anyone else... and lose the game, thanks to a preponderance of friendly fire.

Anyway, this is a sideline to your current thread, and I don't mean to threadjack.  Suffice it to say that I believe there is room to exploit biology, in gamist design, and that all too little has been done with this to date.

- Eric

(Edited to fix formatting error.)

[Mike Holmes]

I completely misinterpreted you before, I though you were saying they were fun (I thought you refering to the causality they inspire, sort of a sim fun). Personally I've always enjoyed a certain drum roll effect while the dice rolled and as their final result is tallied, somewhat like waiting for the bead in a roulette wheel to stop is a pleasurable tension, I imagine (or Van Dam (sp?) getting half a dozen replays of one kick before you see his foe actually take it). Is that fetishism?

Well, I think that this sort of suspense is important, too. It's just that you need very little buildup to accomplish this. That is, you get it with the computer, too, wating to see every round if you managed to hit, and if the little monsties have been made to cease hurting you. When they go down, then there's that release from the time pressure.

It's all there, and better with a computer. IMO.

Anyway, moot point now. In terms of '1. Input action. 2. Perform mechanical steps. 3. Note output.' I think your always going to have step two. Computers don't remove it. You still need to look at the screen, push the stick in the right direction and press the button repeatedly. It's still work, it's just that it's a tiny amount of work. For example, imagine if you had to do all that but it took hours of it to get any reward from a game. When the reward drops low enough, it clearly becomes work.

No, incorrect. The joystick is the method of information input. I'm going here, I'm attacking. In a FTF game, you have to say you're attacking, and then do the work of calculating the successful attack. The "mechanical steps" in this case are:

1. reference character abiliities in use.
2. Possibly do more lookups, or math - to make it properly suspenseful, you'll want to add all your mods up, and possibly back calculate the number you need to roll on the die, so all you have to do is a quick comparison step once you roll. All of this can take a lot of time. And for almost everyone, this is all work.
3. Take the success level of the randomizer, and discover effects. With many systems you're not even half way done yet. There's damage to roll, effects of armor yadd, yadda.

Mike

[Callan S.]

Hi Eric,

I don't see how that's off topic at all? I read through the cards idea and it made ideas spring to mind as I read it. I'm not sure I can use it though (but I really want to explore it latter) as the real time elements mean you sort of need to stream line the system. You can't mix system types them like you usually do in traditional RPG's. But I really liked your idea inspired by those cheap ass game (it was reading a review of brawl, I think, that sent me in this direction to begin with).

To all:
Okay, it helped talking about it in this thread and I wrote out a rough but solid outline to paper last night of the games structure (primarily to concrete the challenges involved) which I'm really happy with!

Now, as I said, I really want to ditch having a GM (or to make Ron happy, I mean ditch having a traditional GM role).

Now, the first part of it's already perfect for that (sort of by luck), which means there's even more reason the second half should go GM'less. And perhaps it doesn't even need a GM either, I'll see what you guys think. I'll go right to the part that needs focus.

Okay, at this stage the players have placed all their attack tokens next to monsters of their choice, on a board.

What each player needs to do (and what I initially intended a GM to facilitate) is to recall and say the correct combination of his attacks he uses on that monster.

Meanwhile the other players have a certain number of mini attack tokens. They keep rolling simple attack rolls, as many times as they like. When they succeed at an attack, they put down a mini attack token on the monster. Once they are out of these tokens, they stop.

Now, the original trick was that the GM goes from player to player (in a random order). The thing each player is looking out for is to try and get off as many of these mini attack tokens AND just before the GM get's to them, use their PC's movement rate to run back out of melee reach of monsters and/or get out of ranged fire of monsters. Also I think any mini attacks not applied are lost.

Now, it occurs to me that players could handle this themselves. They could say outloud the combination they use, then check the monsters stats to see if that was correct (removing the monster themselves), then calling out 'DONE!' to indicate the next player should do this. This means that instead of watching for when the GM is coming, your listening out for 'Done!' to happen.

Problem here is player homogenisation, where they wait to say 'Done!', to let the next player put down all his tokens. I also think there may be probs with calling out the correct combo and checking...not so much cheating, but since its work, players may do it sloppily. This doesn't matter so much to that player, as it does to others who base their esteem exchanges based on adherance to the system.

[Harlequin]

You might steal a trick from the Game of Thrones boardgame (which IIRC is in turn stolen from a long ago game with "empires" in the title).  Everyone puts down their tokens simultaneously - face down.  The back design distinguishes per player but gives no other information.  Make 'em do it in silence or something, or else set up the reward system for competitiveness rather than cooperation.  (Crucial points go to he who actually gets a given kill, and so forth.)

Then flip all the tokens right-side up.  You can build sequencing and so forth into the designations on this side; actually, there's a host of subtleties you can invoke at this point.  In Game of Thrones, for instance, logistics/command issues are automatically present because of quantity limits; no matter how many or how few armies you may have, you only have 2-3 "March" tokens, required for an army to move or to attack. And those tokens don't all have equal attack strength...

I strongly recommend you find a friend or gaming club who owns this, if you want to consider this design as described.  Or buy it; it's well worth the sticker price.

- Eric

[Callan S.]

Ah, where I started:

Okay, at this stage the players have placed all their attack tokens next to monsters of their choice, on a board.

I didn't describe it, but before this moment the players had rolled a dice, seen the icon it indicated and frantically tried to get their Token next to monsters with that icon first. Because the first token gives that player some sort of bonus others will miss out on (XP or something, it doesn't matter so long as its a rare and valuable thing).

I'm not sure how throne of kings helps with the next bit? The bit I want help with is players declaring something like three attacks to defeat the monsters (they had put tokens next to). It's basically a memory test (remember the right sequence for each monster). Then they (or a GM, but I wanna get rid of him) check to see if they got it right. They need to check because I'm planning for these attacks to be customisable (outside of play) like the Zodiac game example.

Basically I think it'll just be checking the strength of an attack against a monster stat, to see if it's fine. I'm just wondering that in having to do this a few times, people may get lazy and you get the prob I listed above about esteem.

Also, I'm thinking they most likely will (without a GM) wait to say 'Done!' so the next player gets to put down all their mini attack tokens.

Did I miss how throne of kings helps with this?

On rewards, I'm thinking psuedo competitive: For example, if you kill a monster everyone might get 50 XP, but you (the killer) get an extra 5 XP or 10 XP on top of that. This way it's sort of a team thing, but also people will compeat too.