Awhile ago I said I'd just go and design a gamist game. I've found it's actually pretty damn hard and I probably look all talk and no walk now.

Anyway, one of the main problems is that I don't want to know the intricacies of the game. I mean, that's why I want to design gamist, because working out the puzzles of these systems is so engaging. Ironically what makes me want to design this way is all to likely to be satisfied without play (THIS IS BAD!), since I'm designing it.

I've actually toyed with the idea of a random value system. One where you roll a random set of numbers and keep it. This set of numbers are a key to the values in the rest of the system. For example, one number might determine at what value a mace (for example. Could be a blaster or hedgehog…whatever genre demands) has its damage set at. Another might determine the HP of a certain class. It'd all work off some charts which say what those key numbers mean. Basically all the factors are random…you make your random key and then play. Each key would mean very different combinations of numbers in play. This way I'd never know what the hell play options are optimum for a specific key combination. I'd have to play to find out.

Some side effects of this is that some play options would be super leet in comparison to others. Though that could be a feature rather than a bug…once you've conquered a combination, finish your campaign and roll a new random key.

The only thing I don't like about it is that I've only conquered a random key. In playing D&D, if I find some neat trick, I feel I've conquered (a little bit of) the very same game played by hundreds of thousands of people. I find it a bit prestigious. One answer might to make the key only have around 20 permutations between each number. I dunno.


Another direction is to emulate the play in Baldurs Gate/Champions of Norrath video games. These are games that I've sat and played for hours by myself, and played for hours with several other friends (Also done this with the 'Hunter: The reakoning' multiplayer video game). Often mustering the energy to play even some D&D with a simple story was too much. While handing out the controllers and jumping into some four player co-op (well, co-op with a little competitiveness) was quite easily achievable. I think there's a culture in the hobby to place any blame for not playing (and doing something else like watching a movie or vid games) on the players. Personally I'd prefer to unravel what makes BG/CoN so attractive, in mechanical terms.

One of the things that makes it good, I'm hypothesising, is a 'spot/react' real time element. Basically it's spotting an opportunity and reacting to it immediately. And I really do mean immediately…not waiting for your turn to eventually come around. I'm suggesting that its very rewarding to see and opportunity and act on it in that same half second you recognised it. The more you separate when the player can react and when they can see the opportunity, I think the more of this reward feeling is lost. Personally I'd describe it akin to how dogs are primed to chase a moving target the instant they see it bolt. Likewise I think our own primal reflexes enjoy it when we see a goblin amble onto the screen and we can instantly snap off an arrow at it, lashing out at it instantly.

That's my theory anyway (open for discussion). To emulate it I'd thought of the following. To emulate when the goblin (or whatever threat) comes onto the screen, you can't just have another user put down a figure…I mean, its too obvious and easy. What I thought is that you could have several tokens, each with six icons on them(all tokens have different mixes of icons). Someone places these around the edge of the board and once done with that, he rolls a six sider, which tells you which icon will mean a baddies going to appear on. Immediately all players begin to scan the layed out tokens, looking for one of these icons. If you’re the first to plant your own special attack token on where a baddie is coming in, you get first wack and get some special bonus from that hit (prolly a minor XP bonus). The reason for this competitiveness isn't just for competitiveness's sake, but instead because once someone lays down their token it's too easy for everyone else to plant theirs there as well.

Further, I'd like to have something like each baddie having a base, around which is a bit of card with a certain pattern. Again like before, there is some dice roll (which has a corresponding base type listed for each number) and then you can quickly place your attack on a baddy of the right base type for some sort of bonus. I'm not sure if all players should have their turn at the same time and compete with each other in real time, or players have separate turns and the dice is rolled for each player, they then compete against some ramshackle timing device (I have troubles figuring how to implement a timing device).

Finally one of the things I'd like to emulate from BG/CoN is the "I'll just see if I can get in another attack on this gobo before I have to turn and run clear of his attack and then get in another of my own". I'm thinking something similar to the above, but I'm not sure quite how.

Another thing I was thinking of having some 'out of sequence' points for each player. These points regen either when the GM says or every ten minutes of real time. Basically they allow the player to act off turn. Hopefully this allows a different tactical level since even as the enemy figures are moved, you could interrupt to let off an attack at an ideal time…but since you only have a few points of this, you don't do this all the time…just when you can spot an opportunity as the baddies move.

Finally, perhaps in combo with the above points, you can burn up a bit of extra resources and just kill most of the equal or lower bad guys. These bad guys would have a certain rating…drop enough attacks on it and they are considered dead. The big upshot is that the player could do this at any time and just take away the bad guy straight away…very instant reward. It would cost more in resources than traditional turn based attacks, but would be worth it every so often for the sheer entertainment value of "I make him dead!" and snatching away a figure. You know you want to! :)

I'm worried that the above dice thing may be convoluted. Does it sound like that? Or does it all just sound boring? If so, in what way does it lead to boredom? But what I'm really worried about is it being convoluted…there's no point going from D20 to trying to emulate these games if it's just going to be as clumsy at giving easy play gaming.

Noon wrote: Personally I'd prefer to unravel what makes BG/CoN so attractive, in mechanical terms.

If I might say, I think thats an odd area for a tabletop to try to nail.

That, and its easy to sit down with a console and a disk full of levels, monsters and imagery as opposed to a tabletop scenario.

I was just looking at the remark about mechanically figuring out what made those games tick, and alot of that does fall into the mathmatics behind the scene. Too, Baulder's Gate is a D&D based game. Some of that snap reaction you're looking at there comes from the machine processing a D&D "turn" faster than any playgroup could.

It can be other ways, and if you're not looking at the mounds of mathmatics, coolies. Should be interesting to see what comes ^_^

To be specific I'd said I was looking at what makes them attractive, in mechanical terms (how you would describe it, like my 'spot/react' speculation). Different from how they work mechanically (like rolling dice, keeping score of HP, whatever).

I probably sound pedantic now, but I'm not. This is actually one of the difficult distinctions I've been working on and need help on. So I'm just clarifying the crucial question here. Regardless of what number crunching is going on, what sort of principle/mechanic is happening that is so agreeable to users?

So while the program can process a turn faster, what is good about that for the users? I actually think the nuances of each attack roll that might be savoured in table top ("ooh, my total roll is 19 again, YES!") is lost ("C'mon *bashes button*, just hack through this guy faster so I can get to this other guy"). The computers emulating it so fast you don't get time to stop and smell that particular rose. So that rose isn't the one I'm looking for.

Once I do have the right ones identified, we go from there, back down to making mechanics that suit that goodness.

I agree with Moose in what I think he's saying, in that I think that TT-RPGs are more suited to the pace of deduction/Induction tasks rather than those of mental and physical agility. That may just be tradition speaking, but the computer can make the pace of the interim calculations fast enough that it makes it seem "real-time" enough to be fun in that way. That is, in a CRPG, part of the immersion is that you have to react all the time in real time (although there are usually "timeout" proceedures). If that's constantly interrupted with other stuff, then it might not be as fun.

The nearest thing that I've done was an event that I put together for a con last year. There you moved miniatures around in real time, merely counting squares moved, and numbers of actions taken in a one minute real-time block. Then there was an approximately one minute interphase where you took that number, and did a little quick calculation that determined your remaining endurance.

This managed to get a very "real-time" feel to play (it was exhausting, actually). And it meant that players made the same sort of real-time mistakes that you'd expect - some of which were quite amusing. Still, I'm not sure if the whole thing might not have been better as a computer game which, since there wouldn't be any interphase, would have taken half as long to play out.

Mike

Hi folks,

I think two other factors that apply to videogames are 1) continous involvement and 2) more frequent rewards.

The first is in the fact that many of these games keep the player actively involved in the point of the game. That is, if the point is hack and slash, you hack and slash for most of the game, not at sporadic intervals. In rpgs, this could happen, but few people get the same viseral kick from rpgs as videogames because the payoff is too slow, which brings us to the second point-

Press a button, watch your character throw the fireball, get the satisfaction of watching the enemy burst into flames, immediate gratification. Say what you want to do, figure out numbers, roll dice, figure out more numbers, then wait form someone else to interpret the numbers into a cool imaginative visual. These are two totally different play experiences.

Games that speed up the handling time do better, as well as those that cut out the need for a GM(such as wargames). I'd also say that having physical or at least visual representations of the action(even in the abstract) provides some form of concrete award. Play well in Warhammer, and you can watch the hordes of Orcs on the table disappear.

All that said, I think the biggest issue is the frequency of reward to actual play. A couple years ago, I ran Zodiac, a game based on the Final Fantasy series of games. We played a weekend marathon, something none of us had done in forever. The addictive factor was the speed at which people leveled up and were rewarded. The game always provided yet another carrot to reach for, and the carrots came fast enough to encourage steady play. "But I'm almost to the next level!" was the rallying cry of our fading endurance.

The rewards were quick enough to kick in the Pavlovian response. In most games, rewards are usually points that don't have concrete influence on play until you've gained a significant amount, which usually means its several sessions before you see any appreciable difference in play. At that point, your brain hasn't associated the reward with the actual play itself, and you don't have the incentive to push hard in play as much as endure it.

Chris

Hello,

Here's an old thread from Jesse (jburneko) which might be interesting reading for this topic: Gamism in action or why I hate arts and crafts. Perhaps less useful as a thread, but perhaps related, is Spycraft, gamism, & relationship maps.

Best,
Ron

Hi Mike, thanks for the response.

I agree with Moose in what I think he's saying, in that I think that TT-RPGs are more suited to the pace of deduction/Induction tasks rather than those of mental and physical agility. That may just be tradition speaking, but the computer can make the pace of the interim calculations fast enough that it makes it seem "real-time" enough to be fun in that way.

This managed to get a very "real-time" feel to play (it was exhausting, actually). And it meant that players made the same sort of real-time mistakes that you'd expect - some of which were quite amusing.

Still, I'm not sure if the whole thing might not have been better as a computer game which, since there wouldn't be any interphase, would have taken half as long to play out.

The first is in the fact that many of these games keep the player actively involved in the point of the game. That is, if the point is hack and slash, you hack and slash for most of the game, not at sporadic intervals. In rpgs, this could happen, but few people get the same viseral kick from rpgs as videogames because the payoff is too slow, which brings us to the second point-

Press a button, watch your character throw the fireball, get the satisfaction of watching the enemy burst into flames, immediate gratification. Say what you want to do, figure out numbers, roll dice, figure out more numbers, then wait form someone else to interpret the numbers into a cool imaginative visual. These are two totally different play experiences.

Games that speed up the handling time do better, as well as those that cut out the need for a GM(such as wargames). I'd also say that having physical or at least visual representations of the action(even in the abstract) provides some form of concrete award. Play well in Warhammer, and you can watch the hordes of Orcs on the table disappear.

"But I'm almost to the next level!"

And it was HARD. I mean DAMN HARD. Go ahead and draw the map of a standard 3 story keep. You've probably got about 75 rooms on your hands. Now a certain percentage of those rooms will be empty. Probably about 10 to 15. The rest you actually have to fill with something. And it can't just be room after room after room of monsters because that will get old. You at least have to give some variety to encounters. I mean even if the whole place was filled with Kobalds, you've got to make each Kobald encounter unique some how. You have to vary the parameters of the challenge. Maybe the Kobalds are armed with special weapons. Maybe you have to fight the Kobalds in and around some traps. Maybe you have to get involved in a three way fight between yourselves, goblins and kobalds. And of course it can't be all fighting either. So you throw in some traps but, man, trap creation is a subtle art I tell you.

Hi Callan,

I don't think it is necessary to have someone else interpret the results, although I think the gamist reward in tabletop play occurs when the interpretation is actually placed within the shared imaginative space, as opposed to the individual player's head.

But just describing a cool action is not sufficient, it must come with a cool outcome for folks to really get the gratification in play. The first without the second is the painful part of the Whiff Factor, and the second without necessarily the first often is revised via Fortune in the Middle for many groups. "I swing, 20, critical, ooo, max damage!" then becomes, "You jump up land on his shoulders and drive your sword into the top of his head!"

For gamism, color alone isn't the satisfying part, it also has to be backed solidly by System, there has to be mechanical backing to make it appeal to the players.

In regards to my Zodiac experience, the reward wasn't just leveling up, but at each level you got points to build a new power. So, the players were looking forward to getting a new power each time, and since each power added to their effectiveness and strategic options, it was a lot more rewarding than simply getting +1 to hit, or a little extra damage. It's rather like getting a new magic card, with completely different powers that can stack or modify everything else you've got going.

The game itself is based on the Final Fantasy series of videogames, which pretty much is random battles mixed with linear boss battles. This being the case, I would simply set up a list of set encounters, with "rest points" and we had participationist gamism going on. The events were entirely prescripted, but the players had full control over what their tactical choices were during battle.

Folks typically levelled after 3 encounters, and I had initially statted up something like 12 encounters, ending in a big boss fight. Players usually took somewhere around 10 minutes to finalize their decisions for leveling up, which gave me time to upgrade or write new encounters to deal with their rising power levels. After the intial scenario was run through, I spent about half an hour writing another, and off we went. Ron's issue with same kobolds, unique experience, was solved for me in two regards-

1) Creating new, unique monsters in Zodiac is pretty easy, and you just base them around a different power, or set of powers, and its a completely different tactical experience

2) Leveling up quickly on the part of the PCs allowed me to introduce new, different and more challenging beasties at them quickly.

In D&D, or most other systems, you're lucky if you level up once a session, and maybe, just maybe, you get a new ability that changes your gamist options. This means the monsters or challenges have to stay pretty much in the same range, which can get stale quick. With Zodiac, the speed of character development(aka, increase in power and strategic options), allowed for me to vary things significantly through play itself.

It basically took the joy that folks get from thinking, "What will my character be like, at level 10?" and all that strategizing, from thinking months ahead, to say, the end of the session. Character creation becomes almost an ongoing thing, and it definitely has a level of appeal to it.

Chris

Noon wrote: Is it a focus on interim calculations being performed that makes it fun, or is it continual pressure on ones resources (HP or whatever), in real time, that provokes a sort of pressure cooker fun (the fun coming from beating the pressure). I suppose I'm trying to prise away stuff that is being done, like a D20 roll, plus bonus, compared to a DC, then multiple dice rolled and added up with a bonus, then applied…yada yada yada. Now, I actually think there is a lot of satisfaction to be had from those things in traditional play. But here I think they don't give that much fun. There is fun to be had from the idea of character statistics interacting (a sim pleasure, I think). But I think that the 'in the moment' fun might be quite apart from the intricacies of statistical machinations. I think it's more to do with a 'pressure cooker' effect.

What do you think? Because if it's true, the perceived barrier of how a comp can do lots of calculations quick and players can't, isn't actually a barrier to real time play.

This managed to get a very "real-time" feel to play (it was exhausting, actually). And it meant that players made the same sort of real-time mistakes that you'd expect - some of which were quite amusing.

Could you detail how it was exhausting, so I have some things to look out for? Cheers if you can.

And I'll take the note about mistakes in a good way. If you can make mistakes, then player skill is involved…and that's good. So perhaps the design doesn't need to be mega intricate so as to engage player skill.

I'd been considering a real time minute/admin minute mixture myself. Perhaps one answer is to make that admin minute more like a reward minute. A rough example might be their collecting gold in the real time minute but making a quick roll in the admin minute to find out the exact amount to note down. More of a 'oooh, look what I got' minute. Sure, other more boring stuff would happen…but hopefully its easily forgotten as the rewards come in.

Mike, that game sounds extraordinary, and I'd love to run something along those lines. I appreciate your sharing the idea and discussing how it proceeded; do you have any more formal writeups of the idea / ruleset lying around?

Uh, actually, no, I don't. It's currently "all in my head" and in revision there, to boot.

But, quite simply, the system is that all actions have a cost that you count up as you do them - generally single digit like one go go a space, so counting up as you go is really easy. You start counting at the level of the total "bulk" of whatever you're carrying. So, if I start with ten bulk, and go ten spaces, that's 20.

Then you check a chart to see what the endurance cost is on a sliding scale between turns - so that the more you do in a turn, the more quickly you become exhausted. If you sprint for one minute, you can cover almost the whole mall - and may not be able to move for the next two hours. Whereas if you pace yourself, you can get a lot done in that two hours including getting to the other end of the mall.

"Combat" just adds to your count if you're hurt. Generally, getting through zombies in a space costs the square of the number of zombies as you plow through them. If you ever are out of endurance and co-located with zombies, you are killed. Killing a zombie costs one with a bullet (they don't dodge, it's just work), or a number of dice in cost if using a hand weapon - the chainsaw is most efficient. So there are no separate rules for combat, and players can handle it without the GM doing more than glancing over.

In the game we played, one character died, trying to kill zombies. He just waded into a crowd of zombies shooting them, and couldn't knock down the figures fast enough in one minute (and, or was simply becoming exhausted). After two minutes of this, they swarmed him, and there was nothing he could do. It was just like scenes in zombie movies, including the player getting that horrified look on his face as he realized that he'd stood there too long, and couldn't take them all out.

If the game hadn't been real time, the player could have made the calculations, and wouldn't have fallen into this trap. He simply miscalculated. What I worry about with the system is that some player will learn it well enough that they can do the calculations on the fly, and not be in this danger. But running it only once a year, that's not likely to be a problem.

In a CRPG, however, the calculations like this are done behind the scenes secretly so the player can't calculate. Instead, they do like they did in my game, where they play around with the character a little to get the feel for what they can do. In fact, the first few minutes were quite like watching somebody play a video game. Which I thought was amusing. I'm thinking that this time out, I'm going to have a training session to get past that before play.

I mean, I tried to guage the actions to a one minute timeframe, and I think it was pretty realistic. But somehow looking at miniatures on a board, the players didn't get the sense of exhaustion until they saw the numbers on the sheet going down after the first few minutes of frenzied zombie killin'. :-)

Oh, and I won't describe the precise mechanism, but to give a hint, it's something like the Ars Magica endurance rules, actually (and IIRC).

Mike

Chris:

I don't think it is necessary to have someone else interpret the results, although I think the gamist reward in tabletop play occurs when the interpretation is actually placed within the shared imaginative space, as opposed to the individual player's head.

But just describing a cool action is not sufficient, it must come with a cool outcome for folks to really get the gratification in play. The first without the second is the painful part of the Whiff Factor, and the second without necessarily the first often is revised via Fortune in the Middle for many groups. "I swing, 20, critical, ooo, max damage!" then becomes, "You jump up land on his shoulders and drive your sword into the top of his head!"

In regards to my Zodiac experience, the reward wasn't just leveling up, but at each level you got points to build a new power. So, the players were looking forward to getting a new power each time, and since each power added to their effectiveness and strategic options, it was a lot more rewarding than simply getting +1 to hit, or a little extra damage. It's rather like getting a new magic card, with completely different powers that can stack or modify everything else you've got going.

It basically took the joy that folks get from thinking, "What will my character be like, at level 10?" and all that strategizing, from thinking months ahead, to say, the end of the session. Character creation becomes almost an ongoing thing, and it definitely has a level of appeal to it.

Mike wrote:

Callan wrote: What do you think? Because if it's true, the perceived barrier of how a comp can do lots of calculations quick and players can't, isn't actually a barrier to real time play.

Well, the question is whether or not you see the actual die rolling, reading, math, etc, as work, or fun themselves. I'm guessing that, for most players at least, that they're work. They only want the feedback so that they can make their next decision. The decisions are what involves the player, the feedback is the reward. In between is only work, unless you have a fetish for these things.

Now, given a good enough modeling of the mall, which would entail like terrabytes, I think a computer model would have worked better in full real time like a multiplayer FPS. But, sans that technology, the game worked about as well as I could have imagined.

If you want something that allows the players to snap react to things, might I suggest something as simple as cards? Have the players situate a number of cards in front of them equal to their total combative actions (perhaps to include defensive and assisting actions like healing spells, etc.) and when it comes time, they must pick up the card and "play" it on the spotted target.

One of the pitfalls I'd see with any system of this nature is the sheer amount of information that the GM would have to be able to process in a small amount of time. If it's the group -vs- one target, then it's easy. But if, in real time, the GM must have a squad or disparate group of enemies react to the PCs and be proactive as well, the GM may tend to make more mistakes than is reasonable.

Hi Callan,

The interpretation doesn't need to be descriptive necessarily, but it does at least need to register whether the effects of the player's strategy have produced results or not- that is, even if all the GM says is, "You killed him" or "He's still standing" that's important from a gamist point of view. These things affect the player's decisions for future strategy, and while videogames give immediate feedback, table top requires that you check damage, wound levels, roll vs. target number, or some other mechanic to declare the outcome.

Chris

I'm new, so forgive me if I'm restating something old.

It seems to me that those people who fall under the 'gamist' heading tend to like the attack/ hit / damage paradigm for combat, and the rolling to 'beat' a target number for skills (both of these represent a kind of "winning" - their character in some way is better than what the game is currently throwing at them). The reason that Baldur's Gate and Diablo appeal to these people is that they get what they want - with no wait. I think that perhaps this is what makes gamist table top RPGs so hard to develop. You need to provide that satisfaction of attack and damage, and quick reaction to properly feed what the gamist wants. Also, you want some way that the player can use a character to break a rule of the game. For example, the way D & D does this is feats. The player is generally satisfied once he has a combination of feats and character class that has a higher damage output than average (or otherwise breaks the rules, a mage for example).

-nate

Hey Chris, I get what you mean now. I agree, tactical feedback is vital! I thought you were refering to colorful tactical feedback and that's what my post was about.


Hi Nate, welcome to the forge!

I'm not sure that's a good appraisal of gamist priorities. Chess and monopoly involve considerable wait times, relative to comp games, and they have been and will be around for centuries. Speed in result responce (and speed applied to promote challenge) are both very valuable, but not the actual goals of those crazy gamists. Nor is 'breaking the rules', as you put it, a goal. One of the key components of winning is peer (and personal) appreciation of the strategy and guts involved in that win. I think to design this way you need to appreciate their efforts in this light, rather than perhaps seeing them as just wanting things quick, or to break the rules.

Hey, Callan...

Just to jump in with a sideways note for a second, to me the physical-action and -reaction element, along the lines of what you were discussing earlier with the "spot the right symbol" thing, is a useful mechanism for Gamist play. Simply because it engages the player on a literally visceral level, uses and abuses our biology in support of gaming.

Boffer LARPs and the like (our local version is actually a dice-based not boffer system, but is otherwise similar), derive a great deal of their advantage from this. I'm seldom happier than when I'm sprinting across a large campsite in pursuit of a quest or task, sneaking through the brush successfully, evading pursuit by sliding on my heels down a steep hill, or leaping into the lake. (Even the organizers seldom expect that last, somehow, which has led to some very funny situations. "Nobody was supposed to SEE that prop yet! It was on the bottom of the lake!" "It was pretty obvious once you got close...") There's not a lot you can exploit of this, in a more confined environment - though what there is, might be a very interesting experiment - other than the action/reaction/perception thing along the lines of what you discussed.

For examples of ways you might use this in an RPG, I recommend Cheapass games. While not RPGs, to me there's immense potential for a resolution mechanic in a game of Falling, or Brawl, or Diceland, or Lightspeed. In fact I proposed a dungeon-crawling combat mechanic based on Lightspeed in this thread, where a player had a stack of cards depicting his character striking, dodging, blocking, and so forth, and played them as fast as he could in response to the GM doing similarly with cards full of monsters. As in Lightspeed, you might end up with a compromise between speed and accuracy, where I've seen someone play out his cards twice as fast as anyone else... and lose the game, thanks to a preponderance of friendly fire.

Anyway, this is a sideline to your current thread, and I don't mean to threadjack. Suffice it to say that I believe there is room to exploit biology, in gamist design, and that all too little has been done with this to date.

- Eric

(Edited to fix formatting error.)

Noon wrote: I completely misinterpreted you before, I though you were saying they were fun (I thought you refering to the causality they inspire, sort of a sim fun). Personally I've always enjoyed a certain drum roll effect while the dice rolled and as their final result is tallied, somewhat like waiting for the bead in a roulette wheel to stop is a pleasurable tension, I imagine (or Van Dam (sp?) getting half a dozen replays of one kick before you see his foe actually take it). Is that fetishism?

Anyway, moot point now. In terms of '1. Input action. 2. Perform mechanical steps. 3. Note output.' I think your always going to have step two. Computers don't remove it. You still need to look at the screen, push the stick in the right direction and press the button repeatedly. It's still work, it's just that it's a tiny amount of work. For example, imagine if you had to do all that but it took hours of it to get any reward from a game. When the reward drops low enough, it clearly becomes work.

Hi Eric,

I don't see how that's off topic at all? I read through the cards idea and it made ideas spring to mind as I read it. I'm not sure I can use it though (but I really want to explore it latter) as the real time elements mean you sort of need to stream line the system. You can't mix system types them like you usually do in traditional RPG's. But I really liked your idea inspired by those cheap ass game (it was reading a review of brawl, I think, that sent me in this direction to begin with).

To all:
Okay, it helped talking about it in this thread and I wrote out a rough but solid outline to paper last night of the games structure (primarily to concrete the challenges involved) which I'm really happy with!

Now, as I said, I really want to ditch having a GM (or to make Ron happy, I mean ditch having a traditional GM role).

Now, the first part of it's already perfect for that (sort of by luck), which means there's even more reason the second half should go GM'less. And perhaps it doesn't even need a GM either, I'll see what you guys think. I'll go right to the part that needs focus.

Okay, at this stage the players have placed all their attack tokens next to monsters of their choice, on a board.

What each player needs to do (and what I initially intended a GM to facilitate) is to recall and say the correct combination of his attacks he uses on that monster.

Meanwhile the other players have a certain number of mini attack tokens. They keep rolling simple attack rolls, as many times as they like. When they succeed at an attack, they put down a mini attack token on the monster. Once they are out of these tokens, they stop.

Now, the original trick was that the GM goes from player to player (in a random order). The thing each player is looking out for is to try and get off as many of these mini attack tokens AND just before the GM get's to them, use their PC's movement rate to run back out of melee reach of monsters and/or get out of ranged fire of monsters. Also I think any mini attacks not applied are lost.

Now, it occurs to me that players could handle this themselves. They could say outloud the combination they use, then check the monsters stats to see if that was correct (removing the monster themselves), then calling out 'DONE!' to indicate the next player should do this. This means that instead of watching for when the GM is coming, your listening out for 'Done!' to happen.

Problem here is player homogenisation, where they wait to say 'Done!', to let the next player put down all his tokens. I also think there may be probs with calling out the correct combo and checking...not so much cheating, but since its work, players may do it sloppily. This doesn't matter so much to that player, as it does to others who base their esteem exchanges based on adherance to the system.

You might steal a trick from the Game of Thrones boardgame (which IIRC is in turn stolen from a long ago game with "empires" in the title). Everyone puts down their tokens simultaneously - face down. The back design distinguishes per player but gives no other information. Make 'em do it in silence or something, or else set up the reward system for competitiveness rather than cooperation. (Crucial points go to he who actually gets a given kill, and so forth.)

Then flip all the tokens right-side up. You can build sequencing and so forth into the designations on this side; actually, there's a host of subtleties you can invoke at this point. In Game of Thrones, for instance, logistics/command issues are automatically present because of quantity limits; no matter how many or how few armies you may have, you only have 2-3 "March" tokens, required for an army to move or to attack. And those tokens don't all have equal attack strength...

I strongly recommend you find a friend or gaming club who owns this, if you want to consider this design as described. Or buy it; it's well worth the sticker price.

- Eric

Ah, where I started:

Okay, at this stage the players have placed all their attack tokens next to monsters of their choice, on a board.