Go as primary resolution mechanic?

[anonymouse]

Idea:

You use a 9x9 board; the 13 and the 19 are probably too large for any kind of quick resolution.

Every action has a stone-amount associated with it; maybe an Easy task is 6 stones, and a Hard is 15 stones, or suchlike. These are just numbers pulled out of the air.

Sides (GM/Player(s)) take turns placing stones; you get a number of stones to place equal to the difficulty task, so you'd each place 6 for the aforementioned Easy, et cetera.

..except I'm not sure where to go after that. You could do standard go, and count up territory, but that seems far too uneven.

There'd have to be other rules for placing stones, and what constitutes a "success" or a win.

Just seems like there must be some interesting way to use the board and the stones for resolution.

[Garbanzo]

A-

Is the placement of each stone was accompanied by some description?  
This would be nice; the evolving narrative of the conflict would be almost-freeform, loosely correlated to the shifting balance of power on the game field.

Is this what you're thinking?


I'm not getting the link between # of stones and difficulty.  
My intuition is that an easier task should have the odds shifted from GM to player (player gets 2 bonus stones/ GM captures must exceed players by 2/ whatever), and I don't get how both playing fewer stones accomplishes this.

How do you see this working?

-Matt

[Mike Holmes]

The obvious thing to use this for would be for some sort of game where the action was all about somethig that takes a long time to develop. The example that's foremost in my head is Politics. So, you'd do like Matt said, and describe what each stone placement meant, and the winner of the overall game would be the winner of the political contest.

Lot's of possblities. Allow in-game rolls to "buy" more placements. Allow others to remove opposing stones. Or to move your own stones a certain distance. Etc.

Anyhow, the board then becomes a sort of super-resolution system that tracks the progress of the larger task made up of sub-tasks.

I can actually see several games going at once, on different sized boards representing different goals of differing importance. Perhaps there's a "central board" that represents the overall goal of the game, and only advances when other boards are resolved. When that board is won or lost, then the game is over.

Just some ideas.

Mike

[Jonathan Walton]

I see this working really well in any kind of tactical situation.  Wars, negotiations, magic duels, whatever.  Each placement is accompanied by narration, and captures signal a shift in the power balance, as one player has a minor victory over another.

As a variation on Mike's suggestion, what if action focused on different sub-sections of a large board, which continually shifted in size and location.  So, for the course of a round, you'd only concern yourself with what was happening within a small section of the board, but you would ultimately have to consider how the results affected the larger board.

[Valamir]

I think you'd need to be a pretty darn good Go player for this to work.  Stones are not equal in power.  A well place stone can foul up your opponent's entire strategy.  A poorly placed stone is completely inconsequential.  

Some plays are aggressive.  Some are defensive.  Some are both.

If you are going to tie stones to narration, than the players better be good enough Go players to judge so that they can phrase their narration accordingly.

[Jonathan Walton]

If you are going to tie stones to narration, than the players better be good enough Go players to judge so that they can phrase their narration accordingly.

I disagree.  Why can't players base their narration on what they percieve or desire the value of the placement to be?  It doesn't really matter the actual value of the move, in my opinion.

Ex.

Bob placing a stone: "Ha ha!  I leap into the fray, both swords swinging!  Great swaths of men fall before my blades!"

Jennifer, placing a stone that, surprising Bob, dooms a large portion of his stones: "Not so fast!  I believe you have made a tactical error.  Your impetuous has isolated you from the rest of your company, where you will be an easy target for my archers."

Bob, placing a stone and buying some time, but now knowing his cause to be hopeless: "Ha ha!  I laugh in the face of death!  Nimbly, I dodge the arrows raining upon me!"

Jennifer, placing the last stone which causes Bob to lose a section of the board: "You cannot dance that way forever, impudent fool.  An arrow drives itself stright through your belly, pinning you to the ground.  Let's see you laugh now!"

[Valamir]

Jennifer, placing a stone that, surprising Bob, dooms a large portion of his stones: "
"Bob, placing a stone and buying some time, but now knowing his cause to be hopeless:"

Umm...are you sure you disagree?  Because both of the above sentences sounds like Jennifer and Bob are good enough go players to recognize that Jennifer's play just screwed Bob over.  Especially given the context of dooming an entire section of the board with a single stone...and recognizing this as soon as the stone is played...not an easy thing unless you're pretty good at the game.

Sounds like exactly what I was saying to me ;-)

[Jonathan Walton]

Well, on a 9x9 board with a significant number of stones on it, it's pretty easy, even for newbies to see when a section of stones is hopelessly doomed.  Maybe I should have illustrated my point.

A corner of the board starts out like this:

Code Select Expand

OOOOX
--XX-
---O-
-----

Next, Bob makes a hasty move to try to capture Jennifers stones.

Code Select Expand

OOOOX
--XX-
--OO-
-----

Jennifer, smiling, makes her move.

Code Select Expand

OOOOX
-XXX-
--OO-
-----

Both of them can now see that Bob's block in the corner is doomed, even if they know zilch about Go.  But Bob makes a last gasp for salvation.

Code Select Expand

OOOOX
OXXX-
--OO-
-----

Before Jennifer takes him out.

Code Select Expand

OOOOX
OXXX-
X-OO-
-----

Which then becomes:

Code Select Expand

----X
-XXX-
X-OO-
-----

If you match this up with my narration above, do you see what I mean?  Bob can narrate a bold advance when what he's really doing is losing.  The actual value of a move is not as important as player perceptions.  Then, when the reality of a situation sinks in (with obvious situations or actual loss of pieces) characters can be just as surprised as the players.  I just think you don't need a ton of skill at Go/Wei Qi in order to have that be a good mechanic.  Knowing the basics is enough.

[Andy Kitkowski]

You could put all the stones into a bag: If a white stone is drawn, "Action Succeeds!".  If a black stone is drawn, "Action Fails!"

/ducks

-Andy

[clehrich]

From my few attempts to learn Go, I'd have to agree with Valamir.  The thing is that the plays aren't really like described, if you're good.  You place a stone at quite some distance from any other, in what seems to be open space, and really good Go players can immediately see what the various possibilities are for resolving the new situation; they then recognize that among those possibilities, the essential points are two others, again not adjacent, and they in a sense bid for these.

What I'm saying is that if you have one player who's good at Go, and another who isn't, the first is going to make a play ("Ha!  I have destroyed you, you varmint!"), and the other guy's going to be confused.  They then continue to play for several more stones, and it turns out that the first guy was right.

I like the concept, don't get me wrong, but I think a game as subtle and abstract as Go, with as many possibilities as it has, would require that everyone in the game be almost exactly equal in ability.

My game project, Shadows in the Fog (see web link below), uses Tarot cards for a somewhat similar purpose.  The nice thing is that there really aren't any rules about interpreting cards, so being good at using them in the game is really an extension of the #1 RPG skill: making it up as you go along.

[hix]

How about reducing the size of the board, from 9x9 to 5x5, or even 4x4?

I've only ever dabbled in Go, but a smaller board seems to make it easier for novice Go players to learn and understand the ramifications of what's going on. So, rather than novices needing years to become a match for experienced players, the experienced players are given less options.

Steve.

[anonymouse]

Well, the point was not to use actual go rules to determine results, but to use the board and the stones specifically. I imagined it'd wind up having something to do with patterns, dominance at the center.. something. Not necessarily anything to do with the game of go itself.

Also, yes, it's much better for long-running actions than it is for whether or not the Fighter hits the Orc.

[Marco]

I'm interested in this (I've run a game--which may pick up again, where Go is used as a metaphore for the world--and the characters (members of a an elite sci-fi caste) all have to have Go skill to understand the politics).

After reading the whole thread, I see that it's not about using the rules--but rather the strategies. I think that there could be other ways of more concretely represeting these stratetiges (have a list: the player calls out "Go for broke!", etc.) Perhaps, though, none more elegantly.

I will say this: any resolution system where the player plays *against* the GM rather than, say, rolls against a target number will require much balancing for players who are poor, GM's who are poor, or any other imbalance.

In otherwords, if I *did* have to win, and a 9th-Dan was GMing, my character wouldn't be able to tie his shoes unless I was given like 10 stones ... and maybe not even then.

-Marco

[Mike Holmes]

That's a good point Marco. I find it comes up in TROS, as well, for example. A good player can play way above his character's skill level. Fortunately, balance is not prime to TROS, and you can work around this.

It does mean, however, that a talented GM has to watch himself and not apply the smackdown too harshly if he wants the game to continue.

IOW, in any game where skill is part of the equation, you either have to accept that play will be skewed by this fact, or eliminate the skill portion somehow.

What's odd is how you see games going out of their way to try and do both at once. They try to incoporate skill, and then to eliminate it simultaneously. This typically results in some poor designs.

Mike

[Chris]

I find this line of inquiry fascinating - I think you might have something here.  The problem I see (which has been mentioned before) is simply that you are removing the simulation aspect of an RPG and replacing it with a real life skill - one of he draws of RPGing is that I might not be able to swim 50 yards, but my character can forge the English Channel.  GO based resolution would require the player to be good at GO, which is, I must say, a very strange requirement to playing an RPG game.  There is no luck in go - it is, perhaps, the purest distillation of strategy ever - so a poor player could conceivably loose even the easiest of resolution.  Making the boards smaller, as suggested, wouldn't work - a 4x4 game of go isn't go, and none of the strategies would remain.

That said, I'm excited to see where this goes.  The evolving, nearly narrative aspect to a game of go would add something quite unique to resolution, to say nothing of the pure aesthetic appeal of watching the game develop.