The Fundamental Mechanic (II)

[gwangi]

I'm glad to have happened on this forum. I have been designing an rpg for just two days now in response to the "reveresed engineer" challenge. Basically, I inherited a character sheet that I have to build a story telling game around. The character sheet had the words "King" and "Country" on it as key concepts. I decided (until I decide otherwise) that I wanted the game to be about court intrigue and that I would use a chess board and chess pieces to track the progress of the game and character interaction. I am employing a lot of chess terms metaphorically in the book, like opening, midgame, endgame, gambit, castling, threaten, check, etc. My intention is to draft off of the appealing tactiles in chess without evoking any overt rules of chess. (My tagline is "If you don't think Chess is a roleplaying game, then maybe you aren't playing it right!") That's not to say that I am totally against the idea of including some very small tactical element, but I definitely don't want players concentrating on the board much while playing the game. And I don't want any knowledge of how to play chess to be required. For instance, I seriously doubt that the pieces will move as they do in chess. They may not even have movement rules. (I definitely don't wan the 5-foot step kind of grittiness one finds in d20.) I already know that piece colors have an effect in character creation, rather than indicating "sides." Okay, now I'm rambling and getting into design particulars. I had better get to a question before this post is just another self-absorbed comment.

I have already run through a gross of ideas and discarded many of them. If any of you have a spark of brilliance you want to share, I would love to hear it. I may have already thought of it, but even that will be something for me to consider. (It will tell me whether the idea is intuitive, for instance.)

A more general question for discussion might be: If a story telling game were to use a board and/or tactiles, would it be better for those tactiles to be completely abstract or highly abstracted (like chess pieces) rather than representational?  I'll start by saying I think so. I find that miniatures, for instance, limit my roleplaying too much. I would rather play with green (or red or brown) wooden cubes to represent goblins than to have a bunch of very specific looking goblin miniatures on the table. The former allows more theater of the mind to occur, while the latter handholds my imagination and I grow bored.

[komradebob]

A more general question for discussion might be: If a story telling game were to use a board and/or tactiles, would it be better for those tactiles to be completely abstract or highly abstracted (like chess pieces) rather than representational?  I'll start by saying I think so. I find that miniatures, for instance, limit my roleplaying too much. I would rather play with green (or red or brown) wooden cubes to represent goblins than to have a bunch of very specific looking goblin miniatures on the table. The former allows more theater of the mind to occur, while the latter handholds my imagination and I grow bored.

Wow. I'm totally the opposite of you regarding the abstraction.

Which makes me very curious about where you'll take your design.

[Pôl Jackson]

Chess board as RPG element = aweseome.

Top-of-my-head thoughts:

1.) Given that chess is a two-player game, then perhaps your "King and Country" game should be a two-player RPG. Or perhaps there are two sides, and players split into teams.

2.) The individual pieces shouldn't represent characters; that would get unweildy. Instead, each piece represents an area of influence within the Court.

• Queen:  Queen's Court
• King:  King's Court
• Bishop:  The Church
• Knight:  The Knighthood
• Rook:  The Castellan's Staff
• Pawn:  Servants

So here's how this could work: Each player has a character defined by:

• Their Influence in one of these areas. (Member of the Queen's Court, member of the King's Court, a Knight, a Servant, etc.)
• Their Color (Black/White or Red/White, depending on the chess set used.)
• Maximum number of contacts/influences

3.) On each player's turn, they may either take a Move turn, an Attack turn, or a Support turn.

• On a Move turn, they move one of the pieces that represents their area of influence (using normal chess moves). Player describes how their character is positioning themselves within the Court.
• On an Attack turn, they look at the pieces that represent their area of influence, and figure out which other pieces are being threatened by that piece (again, using normal chess moves). Without moving the piece, the player describes how they attack a character in the sphere of influence represented by the other piece. Attacks can be mental, physical, or (more likely), social. The opposing piece is not actually captured unless an actual death is narrated.
• On a Support turn, they look at the pieces that represent their area of influence, and figure out which other pieces are being threatened by that piece (again, using normal chess moves). Without moving the piece, the player describes how they support a character in the sphere of influence represented by the other piece. Like attacks, support can be mental, physical, or social.

If a character hasn't been defined before a player Attacks or Supports them, the player can make them up. That's what the "maximum number of contacts" score is for.

I realize that I'm probably not being terribly clear. I can provide examples later about what I'm talking about, if you like.

3.) The color of square that the pieces are on should have some sort of mechanical effect on play. There should be some times where you'll want your pieces on black squares, and some times when you'll want them on white ones.

I'm just brainstorming, though. Take what you like, and leave the rest.

[gwangi]

Those are some interesting ideas, Pol, though I think I am headed in a different direction. Perhaps you should make that game. I would like to comment on and ask you about a couple of your assumptions.

Sides. Given that I don't want the game to play like chess, I don't want black and white to be sides, but rather aspects of character. There will, however, be those banding together to advance plots against the king and those working to protect the king and uncover plots. So I guess there will be sides, but it will be more organic. That is, the "good guys" could easily have players of both "colors." That may beg further explanation, but I'd rather not lift the veil on my "tone" mechanic just yet.

Pieces. Why do you think pieces representing individual characters and/or NPC's would necessarily be unweildy? I am building a game that I hope scales well but it primarily for large groups. I am hoping to try it out at a Con, or better yet maybe a Renaissance festival. I think one of the ideas I'm really attached to is that each player is represented by a single piece on the board of their own choosing. (The King and the Rooks are reserved for larger game effects.) I have assigned a range of archetypes to each piece, along with in game bonuses (kind of like class or race bonuses in standard rpg's). By archetypes I mean each piece epitomizes a social station and a range of possible characters. The bishop for instance could be a priest, astrologer, advisor, guild master, treasurer, etc. Any person of non-royal blood, fairly high social status, and who lives by wits rather than might.

I agree that the color of square should (and will) be a part of the game.

The rest of your ideas I like a lot. I hadn't planned anything as "tactical" as the Move/Attack/Support idea you had. However, it sounds a bit like the board game Diplomacy, and I'll admit that is one of my models. Diplomacy may well be the best example of a role-playing boardgame. I wonder why it hasn't been brought up before in the "fundamental mechanic" threads. I would also include Betrayal at House on Haunted Hill as an excellent example of a roleplaying boardgame.

[gwangi]

Regarding abstraction. I don't want to go too far down this road because it's really another whole thread. However, I believe that tactiles can go way too far. Up to a point, visuals support the imagine, after that point, they replace it. I teach a course in old time radio drama at my college and I firmly believe, for instance, that the theater of the mind, as evidenced in radio drama, requires more active participation on the part of a person's imagination than does a comparable television show. A tv show might be VERY imaginative (e.g. Star Trek), but how much imagining are YOU doing when you watch it? Conversely, when someone describes a scene to you in words, your mind must work to supply the images. This activity is proven by psychologists to be pleasurable to the brain and to create investment. Think about how you respond to a movie based on a book you love. You may be turned off by the casting because you have investment in your own imagined versions of the characters.

Anyway, that was a quick version of the point I was trying to make when I say that abstract miniatures might be better than highly detailed ones. A true roleplaying example would be the use of metal or pre-painted D&D minis. How many times do you make or alter a character to match the mini? Lots of people do this. Perhaps without being tied to the visual reference they would have come up with something more personal and unique.