This may well be completely irrelevant to the Forge -- and if so, I apologize in advance -- but here are the rules for Calvinball:

http://www.solitaryway.com/calvin/cb_rules.htm

Is it even possible to formalise rules for Calvinball? It's a fun little read, though.

Hi Grex,

There's a wide variety of games that incorporate rules modification as an element of play. I group them roughly into two types: playable and conceptual. On the playable end, what you usually have is some rules that are modifiable and others that are not modifiable that regulate the modification process.

The role playing game Universalis provides a formal procedure for adding to or modifying its own rules. Oddly, this is rare in role playing games, which far more often permit rule changes by GM fiat alone. The system for rule changes ("gimmicks") relies on player common sense -- that is, there is no attempt to use the rule system itself to rule out gimmicks that would make the game unplayable, such as a gimmick making it illegal to spend coins. This is because the rule changes are not intended to be ends in themselves, but done in support of shared role playing and storytelling. The assumption is that most rules will not be modified.

The card game Fluxx is on the conservative side of the playable range. In Fluxx, cards played affect the rules of play (such as how many cards are drawn and discarder per player turn) and the victory conditions. Here the focus of attention IS on the rule changes, but because all the rule changes come from the cards themselves, making the possibilities finite, the game is not (to my knowledge) breakable no matter how aggressively it's played. The content of the cards themselves forms the unmodifiable framework.

Nomic bridges between the playable and the conceptual. It is based entirely on open-ended modification of its own rules, and that's the entire point of play. Rules are classed as immutable and mutable at the outset, with the immutable rules providing a framework for orderly modification of the mutable ones. However, one of the initial immutable rules allows immutable rules to made mutable, so all rules are in fact potentially mutable. This can be prevented (for instance, the immutable rule allowing immutable rules to be made mutable can be itself made mutable and then changed). But the game can also be made unplayable or unwinnable (for instance, the immutable rule requiring the players to obey the rules may be made mutable and then abolished). There's a rule that says that if the game becomes unplayable the first player unable to complete a turn is the winner -- but that's a mutable rule. If a non-RPG can be Simulationist, then Nomic is (specifically, Sim exploration of System, to the nth degree).

Though it is in fact playable, Nomic is also largely conceptual because in some respects playing the game isn't the point at all. The main purpose of the game and of playing the game is making and exploring a metaphor for legislative government.

Calvinball is firmly in the conceptual category. It cannot be played in the way it's presented as being played (that is, competitively), but only acted out as a sort of performance art. It works for Calvin because Calvin is actually only pretending to play it. (This pretending is certainly enjoyable, if a bit poignant; Calvin is at the heart of it a rather lonely child). Other games in the same category: Mornington Crescent; One Thousand Blank White Cards (1KBWC).

- Walt

The role playing game Universalis provides a formal procedure for adding to or modifying its own rules. Oddly, this is rare in role playing games, which far more often permit rule changes by GM fiat alone. The system for rule changes ("gimmicks") relies on player common sense -- that is, there is no attempt to use the rule system itself to rule out gimmicks that would make the game unplayable, such as a gimmick making it illegal to spend coins. This is because the rule changes are not intended to be ends in themselves, but done in support of shared role playing and storytelling. The assumption is that most rules will not be modified.

After posting the above I did some googling to refresh my memory on Nomic. Ralph, were you and Mike aware that Universalis has attracted some notice in the Nomic community because of its approach to modifiable rules? For example, see this list of Nomic-like games on nomic.net. (That list also includes 1KBWC, Fluxx, and Calvinball.)

Ron's Gamism essay uses "Calvinball" to describe a particular form of dysfunctional Gamist play:

In 'Gamism: Step On Up,' Ron Edwards wrote: Calvinball
This is the famous "rules-lawyering" approach, which is misnamed because it claims textual support when in reality it simply invents it. Calvinball is a better term: making up the rules as you go along, usually in terms of on-the-spot interpretations disguised as "obvious" well-established interpretations. It basically combines glibness and bullying to achieve moment-to-moment advantages for one's character. A Calvinballer may also be adept at bugging the GM about some rules-detail often enough that a goodly percentage of the time yields a reward for it, but not often enough to tip everyone else off to what's going on.

Hi there,

Walt, you wrote,

I assume that's using the reference to Calvinball as a convenient label for describing a particular observed dysfunction in a particular mode, not an assertion that any play resembling Calvinball (that is, any form of rules modification on the fly) must always be undesirable.

Calvin is at the heart of it a rather lonely child

Walt Freitag wrote: After posting the above I did some googling to refresh my memory on Nomic. Ralph, were you and Mike aware that Universalis has attracted some notice in the Nomic community because of its approach to modifiable rules? For example, see this list of Nomic-like games on nomic.net. (That list also includes 1KBWC, Fluxx, and Calvinball.)

Walt Freitag wrote: can anyone see any particular utlity, for any particular style of role playing, in developing the idea of formalized rule changing as an aspect of system beyond, short of, or in different directions than where Universalis takes it?

Walt Freitag wrote:
So, to make this a relevant Forge topic, let me ask: can anyone see any particular utlity, for any particular style of role playing, in developing the idea of formalized rule changing as an aspect of system beyond, short of, or in different directions than where Universalis takes it? For instance, there's been some interesting discussion of constraints on GMs requiring them to pay currency to introduce adversity into situations. Would similarly formalizing/constraining GMs' ability to change rules have any benefit? What about players consensually changing e.g. global resolution success thresholds to alter risk/reward ratios during play?

re the Nomic wiki:

Oops, my mistake. I considered the possibility that a Forge member had contributed to the site, but I thought the odds were against it since I had gotten to the site from a raw search rather than from links. I managed to miss the previous thread (I think I had family visiting at that time), thanks for pointing it out!

re Jared's suggestion of system hacking for Matrix:

Yeah, mutable worlds is one case where mutable rules would seem applicable. Besides the Matrix and other virtual worlds (and really, any setting whatsoever can also be transposed into a virtual world if you really want to -- instead of playing in Byzantium A.D. 600, you're now playing in Byzantium A.D. 600 on the holodeck) -- there are also many-worlds parallel universes a la Sliders or Amber's Shadow worlds, where shifting to a "nearby" parallel universe is indistinguishable from magically making an alteration in the one you're in.

The unusual element in any case is the idea of quasi-permanent change to "how things work" whether inside or outside the shared imagined space. (In contrast to most magic, which makes either momentary changes to "how things work" or quasi-permanent changes to "how things are.") In The Matrix, it would be the difference between Neo using his powers to pass through a wall, and Neo using his powers to make all walls permanently permeable to all hackers (or to everyone). The cumulative effects of such changes would appear to get out of hand very quickly. On the other hand, changes that were fair tradeoffs (such as, increased hacker powers that also increase the agent powers) might be manageable.

This reminds me of an old idea for an interpretation of magic in a role playing game (inspired by one of those what-makes-magic-magical threads) that I haven't had a chance to use yet. I'm imagining a fantasy setting in which the underlying rules of magic are constantly changing. A mage's knowledge becomes obsolete without ongoing experimentation and practice, and/or lots of ongoing dialog with other magicians. The most powerful mages are the young ones with the energy to keep up with the latest developments, turning the cliche of the wise elderly uber-powerful magic-user upside down.

Some of the more practical techniques for imagining the changes as they take place would probably be player-driven or partly so. For instance, on a roll of spell failure, the player gets a low-percentage reroll. If the reroll hits, the player can make the spell succeed by narrating the change in the laws of magic that's just occurred that made the difference. (e.g. "It's now the new moon, and that nullifies the standard resistance for Necromancy spells.") When a spell succeeds, the GM can does a similar reroll for a chance to narrate a change that causes the spell to fail. ("Fire can no longer be created magically.") The changes are kept track of, and affect all future spell casting until contradicted or modified by further changes ("Fire can still be created magically, but it now requires a sulphur crystal to do so.")

For me it makes a nice metaphor for modern day technical knowledge ('with the release of Explorer 10.0, all OBJECT/EMBED tags must include a new parameter setting MICROSOFTISMONOPOLY="false" or else the tag will be ignored'), pop culture savvy ('as of this month, boy bands are no longer hot in the female 11-14 demographic'), etc.

re Eero's post:

Eero, this is fascinating and seems spot on topic to me. I hope I have a chance to see the whole game someday.

Clearly, the process would be complete if the rule set reached the point where, given a reasonable beginning, the rules dictate the entire shape of the rest of the story -- that is, if the rules embody an entire "story grammar" for the group's book. But would it, could it, ever reach that point? Probably not, considering that the results of attempts in academia to construct story grammars in other ways have not impressed me. So you'd instead reach the point where the rules have become a strong "style guide" and perhaps cannot be usefully added to any further. At this point, you could continue playing to create more stories in the idiom, or not.

One interesting design question here is how to regulate how much specificity from the context of the relevant instance is brought along into new rules. So, if the hero is killed on the second try by being backstabbed by a villain named Clem on a Tuesday under an apple tree, and the group dislikes the outcome, is the new rule "Heroes cannot be killed before the third try," "Heroes cannot be killed on the second try by being backstabbed by villains named Clem on Tuesdays under apple trees," or "Heroes cannot be killed?"

- Walt

In my experience with Calvinball the fun of it has been in never knowing what rule will be created next. The other players and I were forced to create brand new tactics on the fly to get around a rule that is usually either A) Random or B) To creators advantage.

I have considered what you all have been saying about ‘how do you determine not only how a player can change something but the nature and permanency of that change.’ Those questions brought to mind an idea I had once played around with and have already seen in some games to a degree.

The conditions for the game are usually a futuristic/ sci fi setting (like the matrix) with an extensive in game programming language. That way the player is challenged not so much by limits so much as by what they can learn to do. A stronger case for this kind of game is that it indirectly pits players against players very easily. One player might be supporting an NPC base by writing coding for the behavior of its sentry robots. Players trying to penetrate that base would have to not only get into the code but also figure out the codes exploitable flaws or the best way to alter the code itself. I suppose I sort of envision this like a big bunch of different user mod’d starcraft maps with all kinds of variant scripting around them. Except with the player given almost absolute control over the virtual-virtual environment, the player has a chance to go beyond any of the conditions or limits given enough effort.

This paves the way for a good sci/fi game which is the progression of time and technology. Its rare in most 3-d online RPGs I’ve seen to actually have the craftable items change, and in this case the syntax of the programming language, instead of just adding on. This concept actually gives us newbies a leg up in the game while giving the older players much more versatility to tackle all the aspects of the game. There was a need for COBOL programmers around Y2K, and I’m sure a missions with some old and old world items would really bring a sense of time and character to long time players (even without going to the extent of having the characters age and in game, which is another topic I’m sure is floating around. I’m new so I hope I didn’t break any guidelines in this post...you know, with my flagrant cursing and all)


A fully developed in game programming language is, safe to say, outside of what a fully developed MMORPG in particular could handle - the players not knowing enough of code optimization being a more obvious problem. I haven’t forgotten this would also be a game so the programming language would suffer for simplicity and fun’s sake. Still, if something like this could be done on a large scale I would be amazed.

Eero,

I don't know if you're aware of this, but what you're proposing borders on Structural Myth-Analysis: The RPG. I've often thought this would be a fun concept, but it definitely falls into the "conceptual" end of the Calvinball range, not the playable (except by very heavily caffeinated grad students with a weird sense of humor).

I'm not going to give a big diatribe on structural myth-analysis, but basically the concept is that every object, element, theme, event, etc. in a myth is actually one end of a relation. If you break down the myth sufficiently, and know enough background about the culture, you can determine what the other end is (usually it's implicit in the structure of the myth). This then creates a new object: a two-ended relation. This relation will then repeat, within the same myth or in others, often transformed by inversion or other rigid form (upside-down, backwards, read as a bad thing, but always an absolute opposition).

In order to do this as a game, what you'd do is create a "Key Myth," as in your game. Then everyone would break it down into elements, noting that most of the details of the relations remained latent, and that there's no culture to nail things down to. So then you tell another myth, but at every twist and turn people get points for borrowing from the previous myth in terms of structural elements. If you also follow the same chronological order, you get extra points, and if you do so without actually repeating any apparent elements (i.e. no names, places, things, etc.) you get a further bonus. So the way to get points is to produce a myth that doesn't look at all like the key myth but actually replicates its structures in complex variants.

Now it all gets even more complicated. You can now postulate a set of relations between the two myths. Each relation then points to a further relation within each myth, and so on. So now tell a new myth, where you lose points if you follow the same chronology, but you gain points if you use a full structure.

And so on.

Just as an example of a structure,

Myth 1: the hero climbs a tree
Myth 2: the hero falls down a well --- Climb = 1/Fall (inversion)
--> Analyze: Tree=plant, well=water, therefore Plant = 1/Water.
Myth 3: the hero cuts down a vine in order to find water.

Same structure. Ta da! But you'd want to tell a whole story like this, which means that everything would also totally interrelate.

Anyway, just my diseased imagination. I read far too much structural myth-analysis last spring (all 4 volumes of Mythologiques straight through twice), and I couldn't help imagining the game version.

Chris Lehrich

Note
Claude Levi-Strauss, Mythologiques: Vol 1, The Raw and the Cooked; Vol 2, From Honey to Ashes; Vol 3, The Origin of Table Manners; Vol 4, The Naked Man; all trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: U Chicago Press, various years). Not for the faint of heart!

Walt Freitag wrote: Calvinball is firmly in the conceptual category. It cannot be played in the way it's presented as being played (that is, competitively), but only acted out as a sort of performance art. It works for Calvin because Calvin is actually only pretending to play it. (This pretending is certainly enjoyable, if a bit poignant; Calvin is at the heart of it a rather lonely child). Other games in the same category: Mornington Crescent; One Thousand Blank White Cards (1KBWC).
- Walt

I actually made another connection from what Varis said. I designed a while back a game for learning latin as a part of my exploration of rpgs as pedagogic tools, and started now to think whether that would count as a game where rules are changeable. Let me elucidate somewhat:

There are firm rules in the game, but they are based around description and GM decision. Roughly the best description wins, or the one that best proves the character's competence in a given situation. Added points for formal antique rhetorical structures.

Where the rules changing starts is in the setting's definition of magic: the world is divided into three circles of existence, one inside another, such that the role of latin changes in each. The center is the great city of Umbra Romae, Urbs Aeterna, the next circle is Circulum Oppidum, the circle is towns, and the last is Circulum Pagorum, the circle of villages. In each of these latin is used differently: in the city it's the main language in use, and all the other languages are banned. In the towns latin is used mainly by wizards and witches, as it is a language used and understood by spirits, which are commanded by it. Then there is the third circle, where the structure of the world is sufficiently weak for the true language to form it by main force: what is said in latin is true. The magic system is of course largely predicated on what the players can say, as there is no stats for characters, including a "speaking latin" skill. The better you learn latin, the closer to the Urbs you can go and the greater wizard-god you are on the third circle.

Anyway, the question is, is this changing the rules? Consider: while a player will have to construct elaborate stories about his character's sword fighting skill, and still not be sure about success, the whole game changes when he gets enough latin to give the description in latin. "Gladiator optimus sum, meus gladius acutus." all but guarantees victory in confrontations in the third circle. The rules have changed, the demands are increased, and game continues. Is this changing rules, or is this still within them, like some flexible magic system? Take Mage:tA or Ars Magica. Like in this game of mine (Urbs Aeterna I call it), you can construct almost any spell in them. Unlike my game, all spells in those games are resolved through the rules system, while in Urbs Aeterna the resolution is almost absolutely organic; if you can say it, and with correct syntax and enough verbiage, it will happen. This is almost like Calvinball where the players can likewise invent new rules. Here you cannot make your spell a rule, but when you have learned it, nothing stops you from using it again and again. Where is the boundary of rules and no rules?

clehrich wrote:
I don't know if you're aware of this, but what you're proposing borders on Structural Myth-Analysis: The RPG. I've often thought this would be a fun concept, but it definitely falls into the "conceptual" end of the Calvinball range, not the playable (except by very heavily caffeinated grad students with a weird sense of humor).

Eero--is there more to the game than that, and is there any chance you've got the rules written down in English somewhere that would be accessible? I've a kid doing well in Latin, and I think he and his teacher might enjoy introducing it to the class.

--M. J. Young

M. J. Young wrote:
Eero--is there more to the game than that, and is there any chance you've got the rules written down in English somewhere that would be accessible? I've a kid doing well in Latin, and I think he and his teacher might enjoy introducing it to the class.

First, let me second M.J.'s request. I would very much like to see a specifically pedagogical game like this, and having actually slogged through "Gladiator optimus est, meus gladius acutus" sort of stuff my own self I would be very interested to read it and, who knows, maybe playtest it.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Ars Memorativa is too hard for most nowadays, almost unknown, and it's effect on learning languages is entirely undocumented, so I deemed it necessary to go for it through games.

If there is interest (for playtesting, even), ...

As a language geek (Oppin suomea...)

Shouldn't that be "gladiator optimus sum" (instead of 'est'), since the next phrase translates as "my sword is sharp"?
Also, Chinese does have grammar - just not inflection. Those are two different things. Saying "wo ba xin xieqi" is just plain wrong, grammatically, as is "wo qu dao ta de jia" - they should be "wo ba xin xiexialai le" (I wrote down the news, or, I wrote a letter) and "wo dao tade jia qu" (I went to his house).

taalyn wrote: Shouldn't that be "gladiator optimus sum" (instead of 'est'), since the next phrase translates as "my sword is sharp"?

Also, Chinese does have grammar - just not inflection. Those are two different things. Saying "wo ba xin xieqi" is just plain wrong, grammatically, as is "wo qu dao ta de jia" - they should be "wo ba xin xiexialai le" (I wrote down the news, or, I wrote a letter) and "wo dao tade jia qu" (I went to his house).

clehrich wrote:

Also, Chinese does have grammar - just not inflection. Those are two different things. Saying "wo ba xin xieqi" is just plain wrong, grammatically, as is "wo qu dao ta de jia" - they should be "wo ba xin xiexialai le" (I wrote down the news, or, I wrote a letter) and "wo dao tade jia qu" (I went to his house).

Yes, yes, quite true. I just meant that at base, Chinese has fantastically simple grammar that can be learned in about 30 minutes, so that you can learn everything else by rote memorization. And yes, literary Chinese is more complicated, though not by a whole lot.

taalyn wrote:
As a language geek (Oppin suomea...)

Eero Tuovinen wrote: That said, I trust your judgment, mr. Young (I have great respect for your web-pages ;).

More to the point, he wrote: If I give you the game to read and you think something worthwile would accrue from introducing it to someone, go ahead.

If there is interest (for playtesting, even), I'll translate and expand my notes on the game within the coming months.

Finally, he wrote: I'm in a hurry with other projects right now, but I'll have plenty of time starting in May, so interested people may expect the game in the summer.

I hope this isn't terribly OT. This is my first post here at the Forge.

Anyway, myself and a partner are working on an rpg, and it contains a mechanic/setting element which allows the characters to make changes to the world (and rules, though that wasn't necessarily the original intention). I admit to not being familiar with Universalis, but my understanding is that the rule-changes are player-based, and thus strictly a metagame mechanic. As in, the characters themselves aren't aware of these changes. What do people see as the difference between a 'change-mechanic' that is character-based instead of player-based? Of course, in a character-based mechanic, the players are still obviously pulling the strings.

Again, sorry if this is OT, if so feel free to move it or whatnot.

Just thinking about how it works when players can make rules in character and out of character. (I can't talk about Universalis either)

Walt wrote-

One interesting design question here is how to regulate how much specificity from the context of the relevant instance is brought along into new rules. So, if the hero is killed on the second try by being backstabbed by a villain named Clem on a Tuesday under an apple tree, and the group dislikes the outcome, is the new rule "Heroes cannot be killed before the third try," "Heroes cannot be killed on the second try by being backstabbed by villains named Clem on Tuesdays under apple trees," or "Heroes cannot be killed?"