Rather than starting a new thread about the same thing you guys were discussing 6 weeks ago, I thought I would raise a similar issue here:

I have never managed to do this very effectively myself but I have worked with an individual who, when he designs a system, makes sure that the game rules and mechanics signify numerologically. Various mechanical features of the game such as the point buy system for character creation, number of primary attributes/skills, type/shape of die used, etc. signify in more than one way. In these games, there are two points of connection between the game system and the story that is generated through its use.

For my tastes as a player, I find this particular twist on gaming very very enjoyable especially if I am playing a character who does not think in a conventionally modern way. If I, as a player, am given the opportunity to read the natural phenomena of a constructed world allegorically, it makes me more alert for opportunities to make my character do so.

Hi,

Great thread.

For what it's worth. I spent two years working on symbolic communication over a wireless network for Hallmark Cards. It involved a set of symbols that would be a shorthand for long text messaging. I can talk about it because it appeared in public on Sprint phones for two months, but was cancelled due to budget-cutting and lack of US text messaging density (as opposed to Europe or Asia.) Where I'm going with this is:

We found that large amounts of information can be passed on with just a few symbols. Fire symbol may mean hot. Heart means love. Fire next to Heart next to a Wink smiley means something more suggestive. We'd developed a few hundred symbols that worked alone, but acted as ingredients when strung together in different sequences or amounts. (Several flame symbols before a heart symbol can mean INTENSE desire...or that I just got burned really bad by my girlfriend, if followed by a frowny-face.)

Makes me think a whole rpg character could be built this way, but not without stumbling blocks. The hard part is, people are word-focused. So making them translate each time adds another thing they have to do to enjoy the game. We do translation all the time, like pips on dice do the same thing as numbers. But this is only one symbol that needs to be translated. And its repetitive/constant use promotes its ease of use.

People who already knew each other well and shared a similiar background or "context" could easily communicate with each others with symbols, since they automatically knew the "implied" meaning of the symbol. We had one couple carry out a string of long communcation with only symbols. It was amazing, but not surprising as this is how languages develop. Gamegroups all have their shared jokes and experiences. So you'd be dealing with that.

To do this in a game, the symbols must have iconic meaning. But even so the symbol can be interpreted in many different ways. For example, the skull and bones symbol that was pointed out earlier that means "poison", could also mean "danger" or "don't go here" or "there be pirates!" depending on the person viewing the symbol.

Developing a game around this would be an interesting. Hope some of this adds to the discussion.

Hello,

The above was split from Mechanics as symbol sets. Carry on!

Best,
Ron

Makes me think a whole rpg character could be built this way, but not without stumbling blocks. The hard part is, people are word-focused. So making them translate each time adds another thing they have to do to enjoy the game. We do translation all the time, like pips on dice do the same thing as numbers. But this is only one symbol that needs to be translated. And its repetitive/constant use promotes its ease of use.

I think Nephilim does this also, in the sense that your character can largely be reduced to a set of factors representing the five elements. My recollection is that the system is unnecessarily crunchy, adding a vast overlay of other stuff to this relatively elegant simplicity, but it might be worth a look.

I've long thought I should write an early modern magic game in which everything is represented through astrological forces, but it's never really come to anything.

My Shadows in the Fog does actually try to put something of this structure into action by making every mechanic referable to Tarot cards. In fact, the part of the game that continues to bother me as inelegant and clunky is that part which uses things other than Tarot. The problem is that, unlike the symbol systems mentioned for phone messaging, there is no one-to-one relationship between a card and its meaning; in fact, a great deal of the theoretical underpinning of the game is dependent on the inadequacy of such a structure.

All of which moves, if you ask me, toward a potentially serious obstacle in the development of game systems of a particular kind:

Stuart wrote: For my tastes as a player, I find this particular twist on gaming very very enjoyable especially if I am playing a character who does not think in a conventionally modern way. If I, as a player, am given the opportunity to read the natural phenomena of a constructed world allegorically, it makes me more alert for opportunities to make my character do so.

Hello!

I'll just jump in for a brief comment on Nephilim, where your character is essentially a being of pure magical elements, disposed in a pentacle. Depending on how your pentacle looks, your character will be more of the "physical" or "social" type, for example.
Each magical element is linked to a planet, and has various philisophical meanings. All the magical disciplines one can learn are based on those elements (fire, earth, water, air, moon, dark moon (a corruption of the moon element, a thing which your pentacle shouldn't have too much of), orichalque (which litterally disintegrates your pentacle) and finally sun (the only element humans possess, and which is necessary to transcend a Nephilim's existence)).
Thus the game articulates around a very well structured cosmology with philosphical implications, which one finds at a smaller scale for his own Nephilim and also on his character sheet (strength is based on fire, f.ex.).

I've got the latest edition in french, but the company went bankrupt. What's more, it started becoming more of a superhero game than an esoteric-philosphical quest kinda game (and some say it at long last became playble...).
If anyone wants more information, please contact me by PM.


A friend is trying to devise a gaming mechanic for scandinavian mythology games, solely based on the runes and their signification.

A character would be defined by runes instead of numerical values, and actions be resolved by drawing a certain amount of runes (possibly modified in accordance to the character's inherent runes).
The aim here is more to see who makes the action evolve into what directions, rather than who "wins".
He also thinks of having a rune defining each scene, so as to make players aware of the general mood and let them play off that in addition to other events. (Skalds could probably influence this rune.)
It's still very sketchy, and one of the major problems is that it's very hard to resolve acute conflicts like combat. Then again, this is for a very story-oriented game, so it's probably acceptable.
Another problem, maybe more profound, is that by pulling runes and interpreting them, one looses a certain degree of liberty in one's actions. On the other hand, it could help players leave the beaten track of routine, and destiny is a very important aspect of scandinavian mythology anyways.

Hope this helps ;)

Artanis wrote: Another problem, maybe more profound, is that by pulling runes and interpreting them, one looses a certain degree of liberty in one's actions. On the other hand, it could help players leave the beaten track of routine, and destiny is a very important aspect of scandinavian mythology anyways.

Consider a case where a young lad tries to rob a great warrior's purse. The warrior notices the thief. How is the situation going to evolve?
The warrior get's to draw one rune, the boy as well.
We get "compassion" for the warrior, and "boldness" for the young one.
(Runes usually have a right and reversed reading, depending on how you draw them, of more or less opposite meaning, which implies that you can't do something completely in opposition with the drawn rune).

Getting back to my example, we could have a scene where the boy bravely stands up to the viking, impressing the warrior to such an extent that he takes him as a novice.
What we certainly couldn't allow is the warrior demanding the boy's hand being cut off, since this would be contrary to the drawing of the runes.
If the player tries to divert the rune onto something else in the scene (forgiving the barkeeper for spilling beer over his table, f.ex.), then what's the point in drawing the runes in the first place?

There's a narrowing of possibilities in that you have to define the scope of the drawing of runes (then again one does the same thing when throwing a damage dice...) and especially in that you have to conform to some extent to the meaning of the rule. The runes being pulled randomly out of a bag, a player is sacrifying freedom of choice.


I do agree that it can generate very original scenes and spurs the players' creativity, but that's more because one has to cope with contraints rather than having a large freedom of action.

But this could precisely be what one want's for his game.

How do you see that this could be an increase in liberty?

While interesting, the possible ways of rules signifying that people have been discussing here are not at all what I had in mind. Or at least not what I have experienced.

I am not arguing in favour of individual attribute quantification taking place in the form of ambiguous symbols. The systems that I like are ones in which whatever signification comes from the rules/character attributes numerologically.

Let's suppose a GM was designing a story/world/game system (for me these are often identical) based on Sufism. One of the ways this could be cued is through a luck, merit or divine favour system that operated like Idries Shah's formulation of baraka. But another way would be to structure the character's primary attributes based on the latifa system. In the GM named these mechanics, baraka or latifa, if the GM did not name these things are such but simply ran the system on that basis, the latifa pattern that the attributes resembled could function as a signification system that communicated unmediated with the players.

Essentially, rule systems can signify in two different ways. They can signify arithmetically or algebraically or they can signify numerologically. But only algebraic or arithmetic signification can be applied to variable scores; if one tried to do numerological signification with variable scores, chaos would ensue (sometimes 6 would be better than 7, sometimes it would be worse). Thus, numerological signification would have to be embedded in mathematically fixed relationships between numerical or other quantitative attributes.

Much of what you guys are talking about is the idea of robbing symbols of their mythic resonances and putting them to work as though their meanings were entirely subjective. I want to do quite the reverse. I really don't like Tarot-based games that try to beat whatever specific meaning these symbols have left out of them. Not that there's anything wrong with them -- they're just really not to my taste.

Much of the theory on this site is about how to make system facilitate a particular style of play. While this interests me, another interest of mine is how one makes system reveal a world. In my worlds, the physics and metaphysics are one in the same. One can take an Aquinan approach to the physics (as codified in the rules) and examines the implications of the causal relationships it sets up or take an Augustinian approach and examines the allegorical implications of the phenomena it produces, either way, this is system signifying.

While everyone uses the Aquinan model with rules (otherwise the rules would not mean anything), they tend to take it only one step. The universe most people inhabit is a moral universe but the implicit moral and philosophical structures of a world are rarely, in gaming, embedded in the rule system. Hero Wars is a nice example of a system starting to look at a more complete Aquinas-style system of signification.

What I am talking about here, though, is an Augustinian system of signification -- where the mathematical relationships between the abstracted character attributes, irrespective of the rules of the physics they are part of, themselves signify. In my view, in order for such a system to work, it has to be affixed to numerical values; otherwise it will produce the effect that is being discussed in the rest of this thread: the problem of deriving stable signification from a symbol system whose meaning is constantly being negotiated.

Artanis wrote: How do you see that this could be an increase in liberty?

What we certainly couldn't allow is the warrior demanding the boy's hand being cut off, since this would be contrary to the drawing of the runes.
If the player tries to divert the rune onto something else in the scene (forgiving the barkeeper for spilling beer over his table, f.ex.), then what's the point in drawing the runes in the first place?

Stuart Parker wrote: Much of what you guys are talking about is the idea of robbing symbols of their mythic resonances and putting them to work as though their meanings were entirely subjective. I want to do quite the reverse. I really don't like Tarot-based games that try to beat whatever specific meaning these symbols have left out of them. Not that there's anything wrong with them -- they're just really not to my taste.

clehrich wrote: Actually, what I'm talking about is putting back the mythic resonance. As you put it, I want the symbols to reveal a world.

So that the learning curve on a game with symbols is not so high, the following might work (add to if you want).

Repetition of symbols adds to learning.
Limiting the number of symbols used.
Using familiar icons that logically work for the player's context.

i.e. Magic the Gathering has done this in a wonderful way. Anyone who has played the game has no problem defining what the following symbols represent:

Green Tree - life, growth, brute force
Red Flame - fire, chaos, war, dangerous
White Sun - healing, protection, purity, good, law
Blue Droplet - intelligence, trickery, manipulation, theft
Black Skull - death, poison, evil, disease, power at a price
Clear - neutral, artifact

Repetition of play and common associations make this work.
Now, with only 5 symbols, you can combine any two ingredients and still be able to pass the meaning along to the players.

The problem comes when there are too many symbols, and too many meanings. If one were to develop a card deck or ruin set to do this, and limited the symbols, upped the repetition of symbol appearance, a strong (symbol-use) RPG for might be developed.

Hello,

Here's an application of the ideas. I have always liked using dice with symbol sets on them, although I think the idea remains undeveloped.

Dragon Dice was a very enjoyable wargame for me, in its beginning incarnation, and Throwing Stones struck me as a fascinating way to role-play. Both games utilized the similar principles of differing icons, number of icons per side of dice, and number of sides per die, as well as color, such that a character, in the latter game, was literally a handful of specific dice. The recent game Bones is a lot like Throwing Stones but not hampered by the "collectibility" consideration, and I for one think it's really on track.

Best,
Ron

clehrich wrote: Actually, I would think that the "forgive the barkeep" approach is perfectly valid.

Now to my mind, the warrior isn't necessarily constrained by compassion, nor the boy by boldness; it's the players who have to deal with the constraints. So there's considerable range there.

So the warrior is looking at the situation and the player has a choice, in his bag, among the runes Bear, Elk, and Fir-Tree. These have been used a certain amount in the game, and have some vague meanings from that perspective, but in order to apply them the player must come up with some analogy between the in-game situation and the rune's history of use.

[example snipped out]
To me, that's much more liberating than "Roll dice for reaction" or whatever.

Artanis wrote: So I see our original disension more as a mixing up of theory vs practice. In theory, you've got more freedom when there are no limiting factors. But in game, an unsuspected rune can break routine and thus bring something new. I don't see this as an increase in freedom, but as a vector for imaginative innovation (!).

I wrote: Actually, I would think that the "forgive the barkeep" approach is perfectly valid.

So what's the point in drawing runes if you can divert it's effect whenever it doesn't suit you, and then go on doing what you wanted to do in the first place?

Let’s consider a famous [Tarot] card, The Tower, often taken to mean disaster. The imagery is of two people falling from a high tower which has been struck by lightning.

Now if we think of the card as simply a meaning, it’s difficult to see how it can be used in any but a limited number of circumstances. For example, in a combat situation, it could be taken as disaster for one of the combatants. But if we think of it as a relation, there are lots of possibilities opened up to the cunning player.

Suppose the card has been used for the following:

• A thug came to grief in a gunfight with a middle-class professional
• A spell to summon power from the Thames went catastrophically wrong, and the spell-caster was flung from the docks and drowned.
• An attempt to climb the tower of Big Ben went wrong; the climber fell to his death.

Okay, so clearly all these fit the description, Disaster. But there are other possibilities if we think of it as a relation. In every case, two adjacent spheres have commingled disastrously: the lower-class thug with the middle-class professional, the caster on the docks with the Thames beneath, the climber in the air with the land beneath. So we could in fact read this card as meaning a bringing-together of separate spheres. If the spheres are close together, this is disastrous, as we’ve seen. But suppose the spheres are far apart, and bringing them together is a good thing?

Sir David Fulsham (a Lord, as we know), confronts a thug (lower-class). The spheres here are far apart. Rather than interpret the Tower as disaster for the thug, Sarah could interpret it as bringing the two spheres into conjunction, making the thug feel higher-class than usual and read Sir David as a guy like him. This could cause the thug not to attack Sir David, but in fact to unbend and deal with him in a more constructive manner.

Now of course, it takes a cunning player to make this sensible, and Sarah’s going to have to do some fast footwork to get the idea across. To do this, she’s going to have to draw on all that history of the card’s usage: this is what Interpretation is really about.

If this seems like a strange example, incidentally, Lévi-Strauss has a neat case of it occurring among the Hidatsa, a North American tribe. For them, pollution (in the sense of impurity) has exactly this property, i.e. it brings together spheres normally separate. When a man goes hunting, for example, he is absolutely prohibited from touching his wife or his sister if she is menstruating, because the pollution of the blood will commingle spheres that should be kept separate: his arrows will not fly (air/earth), he himself will be hurt (predator/prey), etc. But if he goes eagle-hunting, which among the Hidatsa involves climbing down into a hole, tempting the eagle to descend to the ground, and then grabbing the eagle’s ankles, the hunter has a problem that the spheres are too far apart: underground and air are distant. He needs the eagle to descend, to come to the ground, because underground and ground are close. So the eagle-hunter is encouraged to touch a menstruating woman, even have intercourse with his wife if she is menstruating, because this will draw the eagle to the ground. Thus it’s not that pollution is a bad thing, it’s that it brings together spheres usually kept apart. If for some reason you want to do this, pollution is a useful tool.

Here you see the mythic bricoleur at work. He’s got an object in his shed [the collection of weird stuff like Bears and Rabbits] that has had lots of parallel uses: pollution has brought together lots of spheres best kept apart. Now he needs to accomplish something that involves such bringing-together of spheres. Not deflected by the seemingly negative valence of pollution, he recognizes that it will serve his purpose admirably, and puts it to work in his ritual machine.

Are we talking at cross-purposes here?

Stuart Parker wrote: Yes. And I apologize there. I seem to recall Piers having to make excuses for my communication style when we met in person.

Because of the way my games unfold, I generally cannot demand this level of fidelity in advance because the process of play, in games I run reveals the world in a much more literal sense. Thus, the world structure and therefore the mythological and philosophical systems on which it is based are not shared knowledge at the beginning of play.

Because all of the games in which I use numerological signification are about discovering the "true" nature of reality, your way of keeping symbols in context simply wouldn't work at the initial and intermediate stages in my campaigns.

I think we're on the same page now. Cool!

Stuart Parker wrote: Another more obvious consequence (accounting for my infrequent visits here) is that I do not share the values of most regular Forge participants in prioritizing decentralized egalitarian control of story over other objectives.