[Lego of the Gods] First Draft

[Lee Short]

I've posted a first draft of Lego of the Gods in pdf, on this page.  There's also an HTML version there.  This is my Setting-building game, which is actually  more of an RPG adjunct than as an RPG proper.  

As Frank Filz pointed out, I probably need a new name for this...trademarks and all.  Suggestions, anyone?  

Comments welcome.  
Lee

[Mike Holmes]

Hmm. Cool. I've seen other lego RPGs, and I'm wondering if perhaps there's a way to create a metagame to link them all together. For example, one thing that's always changing is scale. I think that your game might be able to address things like that in terms of "converting" one Lego game to another.

What do you think?

Mike

[Lee Short]

Mike,

Actually, the game doesn't have anything to do with Lego.  I'm just using Lego as a metaphor for the building-blocks of the Setting, which are the fundamental unit of the game.  

I haven't actually looked enough at the real Lego games to see if there's any kind of synergy.  The angle that seems like it has the most potential to me is if you treated each little Lego assembly as a Tarot card to play and then made a game out of "playing and interpreting" Lego assemblies as my game plays and interprets Tarot cards.  If you did this, I think the right way to handle it structurally would be to treat each assembly as a Trick, with the maker "leading the card" and giving the base interpretation and each other player required to add pieces to the assembly and interpret their addition.  

----

While I'm here, let me say that there's a couple of specific things I'm looking for feedback on, in addition to general feedback.  So, whoever takes the time to read this and give me feedback, could you answer the following questions please:

1.  I don't consistently stick with either second- or third-person usage.  This is because there's a lot of stuff that doesn't flow naturally in third-person, and I really want to stay away from passive voice.  I might be able to rework the text to avoid this, but I don't think that that would be a trivial job.  Did you find this distracting?

2.  I'm counting on the example at the beginning to help the rest of the text make sense.  I was kind of stuck in a chicken-before-the-egg issue (ie, I can't talk about A without referring to B, and I can't talk about B without referring to A, so which topic do I introduce first?). Did this work?  At what points, if any, in the text were you confused?  

thanks and all feedback welcome,
Lee

[MikeSands]

For my part, I didn't notice the changes in voice. It reads fine.

In terms of the example first/rules first question, it works fine as is. I think that introducing more of the rules before that first example would be a mistake, but building on it afterwards is good.

And the game looks good. A nice compromise between doing this sort of worldbuilding totally freeform and the kind of extreme that Aria managed.

[sepinor]

Hi Lee,

I love the concept of this game. If you had some serious folk sitting around playing this you could hammer out the foundation of a world each of them could own for themselves. When I used to DM sessions the players would sometimes get lost the first session in backstory and local history, etc. This game is a neat alternative to having that happen.

To answer your questions:

1. I didn't find it distracting at all. On the contrary, the second-person usage resonated with me as a reader. The game itself is all about involvement and the language spoke to that. I find reading rules often a laborious sort of hell, but I breezed through these ones.

2. The example at the beginning was crystal clear to me. I'd keep it where it is, like it is.

My only issue is with the title; while I understand your metaphor, to me it's a little tenuous and perhaps doesn't do justice to the game, especially one that requires a certain amount of gravity and uses Tarot cards. But as you said in your post, use of 'Lego' might not be possible. I've been trying to think of a suggestion or two, but I'm coming up dry. Something that speaks to the interpretation and collaboration involved in the game.

It looks like you put a lot of work into this and I think it shows.

- Matt Donnelly

[Mike Holmes]

I haven't actually looked enough at the real Lego games to see if there's any kind of synergy.  The angle that seems like it has the most potential to me is if you treated each little Lego assembly as a Tarot card to play and then made a game out of "playing and interpreting" Lego assemblies as my game plays and interprets Tarot cards.  If you did this, I think the right way to handle it structurally would be to treat each assembly as a Trick, with the maker "leading the card" and giving the base interpretation and each other player required to add pieces to the assembly and interpret their addition.  

This was precisely what I suggested to the last person who wanted to design a game of this sort. Chargen, for instance, was slecting one of those little lego bodies. Shape and color would be primary. Then the color of the legs, and the type of head added would complete the, as you call it "Trick" of the character. We also looked at how to make this more complex given the few combinations available with the standard lego dude.

The problem was that nobody wanted to come up with what the combinations meant. Even when there were few. What if one game was pirates, and the next space dudes? The method needed to be flexible, yet produce an eventually "permenant output" as you put it.

It's the idea of interpreting the cards (or legos, or whatever element) that I think is key here. The meanings of the objects develop as you play. Universalis is, of course, just like this, but it has nothing to "inspire" the meaning from, just generic "Coins." This method (Chris' originally) better enables the player to be creative by making the currency of the game something more inspiring.  

So what I'm saying is that I see what you have as a very universal sort of thing, usable not just for worldbuilding per se, but for building meaning for any elements of any games, be they lego body parts, or superpowers, or whatever.

Mike

[Lee Short]

Thanks for the nice words, guys.  

Mike -- oddly enough, it wasn't until I was done with the rough draft that I realized how similar this really was to Universalis (which I have read but never played).  And I certainly agree that the core mechanic could be used for a whole lot of things (my first reaction to Chris' disclaimer about the narrowness of SitF's applicablilty was "what?  you could use this for anything!!  In fact, I want to use it for X, and Y, and and and ...") .  I think that really the only thing in the game that might be unique is the vision of gameplay and the synergy that gameplay might have with another roleplaying game -- ie, how it helps the players create the shared part of SIS for a detailed Setting.   I've got some other thoughts I'm kicking around about how to do this for Character, too.  Maybe I'll put my mind to doing a fantasy heartbreaker around that concept; I kind of think that would work pretty well.  But first I've got an SitF Amber takeoff that I'm dying to work out.

[Mark Woodhouse]

Hey, Lee. With regards to your 1 + 2, I found your text highly readable and didn't have any trouble with the example. I hate to be a party-pooper, but what does this framework do that Universalis doesn't do in a less-constrained and more social-contract-enforcing way? It seems to me that using Tarot as your currency is going to reproduce the assumptions of Tarot interpretation as to What Matters in your setting design process. Sure, you could redesign, but that's practically rewriting LotG for each playthrough. And since all currency is redistributed and equivalent, there's really no way that I can see for players to assert their own priority of vision - that's all left to Social Contract.

I'd really need to see it in action, though (hint!)

best,

Mark

[Lee Short]

Mark,

Actually I wouldn't say that this is either more constrained or less constrained than Universalis, just differently constrained.  I haven't read Uni recently, but IIRC, it's more focused on a character or set of characters and kind of explores the world through the characters.  This will pretty much force you into a bottom-up design paradigm.  Also, because Uni is itself an RPG, it is unlikely to be used as an RPG adjunct in the way that Lego is designed to.  That doesn't mean that it couldn't be, though.  

Just some quick thoughts.  I'll have to re-read Uni and come up with some more well-formed thoughts on this.  And you're very likely to be given the chance to run through some Lego soon.

[Mike Holmes]

Hey, Lee. With regards to your 1 + 2, I found your text highly readable and didn't have any trouble with the example. I hate to be a party-pooper, but what does this framework do that Universalis doesn't do in a less-constrained and more social-contract-enforcing way? It seems to me that using Tarot as your currency is going to reproduce the assumptions of Tarot interpretation as to What Matters in your setting design process.

As I pointed out, I thought that this was actually a feature that made it better than Universalis for some applications. That is, Universalis demands that all inspiration come from the player, while a system like this is informed. To the extent that the Tarot cards represent something like Jungian stereotypes, I think that they're not overly informative, but instead just spur creativity in differeent ways.

Not sure it's superior or inferior, but like Lee says, different. Also there are some aspects of the application of the rules that I think make it work better for what it's aimed at. Yes Universalis can and has been used to do "metagame setup" and the like, but I've never found it to be particularly good at that - it's not that it's character centric so much as conflict-centric. So it's better for saying what happens to a set of countries, for example, than for defining them in detail. In Universalis you're really only incentivized to create as much detail as will be used in the resolution on that level.

Mike