Dag, both JS and Zak have posted that they are working on games where players take the role of machines. Well, I have a game dealing with that as well (including a binary-based mechanic that isn't fully fleshed out yet). You can check it out here:

http://www.key20.com/machina

There are some typos and it isn't very well edited and the site's not that pretty but it does its job as my "portable" notebook.

Let me know what your initial impressions are, what questions you have, and let's get some discussion going on!

The site for the second game (entitled "Zodiac 12") will be posted soon. It's not nearly complete so any of you 133+ h4x0rz that figure out its URL will only find the barebones of what's to come.


_________________
Jason L Blair
Editor-in-Chief
Key 20 Publishing
http://www.key20.com

[ This Message was edited by: Key20Jason on 2001-05-23 17:03 ]

Jason:

First, let me say that I really enjoy the premise. You have a gift for word, my friend.

Second, with the d16 concept: were you thinking of rolling 4 dice and tallying evens and odds (thus 1's and 0's), or actually contriving a sixteen sided combination of dice? Or either?

Okay, my real analysis is as follows, however:

I think it is a good concept. The writing seems very emotionally advanced to be written by machines, even evolved/awakened ones, but that may be part of the point. A good portion of the game seems built around emotional exploration of the character.

This is good.

I am wondering if this is going to be built-in mechanic, or reliant on players (someone like Ron, who is narrativist in tendency already, and as such, would have a blast with such a notion)? I ask mainly due to the fact that while many gamers could and would take this to great heights, there are a number of people who "need more" to their games. Again, I realize that this is very early in the process to fully answer some of these questions, but it never hurts to ask what you have in mind.

Also, if this is a stand alone game, you may want to answer the question of what brought down man. From the reading, I am willing to toss about that the machines bit the hand that fed, so to speak, but explicit description might not be bad (unless you are going metaplot, or leaving that open as a "GM answer this for yourself" trait).

I see a lot of potential parallels to that new spielberg movie: "AI". I haven't seen it (and if I have my way, wont ever), but you may want to be careful of this, as many people are likely to leap about in hair-pulling frenzies pointing fingers. People are like that. I have no idea why.

All-in-all, I see hours of enjoyment in a Blade Runner-esque (hell, Phil Dick-esque) notion. I would like to point to Terry Bisson's "Pirates of the Universe", which is a great book, and the gens could provide tons of source material for some of the more aesthetic companion machines.

That's it for now. I'll try to have something a bit more substantial later, but I'll have to re-read the material first.

Dav

It sounds really cool. I like the binary system, that's just elegant. I can't wait for that to be fleshed out.
I feel as though you could really easily include optional Director Stance rules with a system like that.

I also like the difference between 'awaken' and 'drone'. Do the player's characters begin as drone? Or by virtue of being player-characters, do they begin the game as somewhat awaken?

Will there be a somewhat explained setting (reasons, history, etc.) for the world mostly without humanity?
In GOLEM I'm leaning toward letting GMs make their own history and world setting.

Jeff Diamond
6-0 Games

I've been toying with binary representation of attributes for Null Compliant (my robot-oriented game). For player-understanding and rules-lightness, attributes range from 00 to 11. 00, 01, 10, 11. I've been toying with dice mechanics. I'm exclusively going to use d4s (mabye) and d8s. A d8 gives you a value from 01 to 1000 (which would be better as 0 to 7: 000 to 111). But I don't want to give people a lookup table to figure their binary roll value.

So one mechanic: The one's digit is a d4, the ten's digit is a d8. There is also a "wild" d8 (maybe). If you have a 1 in the proper digit, you roll the proper die.
00 = Wild (W), 01 = d4+dW, 10 = d8+dW, 11 = d4+d8+dW

But I don't like d4's, so I'm still brainstorming on a better method.

Dav,

On 2001-05-23 18:05, Dav wrote:
Jason:
Second, with the d16 concept: were you thinking of rolling 4 dice and tallying evens and odds (thus 1's and 0's), or actually contriving a sixteen sided combination of dice? Or either?

Okay, my real analysis is as follows, however:

I think it is a good concept. The writing seems very emotionally advanced to be written by machines, even evolved/awakened ones, but that may be part of the point.

I am wondering if this is going to be built-in mechanic, or reliant on players (someone like Ron, who is narrativist in tendency already, and as such, would have a blast with such a notion)? I ask mainly due to the fact that while many gamers could and would take this to great heights, there are a number of people who "need more" to their games. Again, I realize that this is very early in the process to fully answer some of these questions, but it never hurts to ask what you have in mind.

Also, if this is a stand alone game, you may want to answer the question of what brought down man. From the reading, I am willing to toss about that the machines bit the hand that fed, so to speak, but explicit description might not be bad (unless you are going metaplot, or leaving that open as a "GM answer this for yourself" trait).

I see a lot of potential parallels to that new spielberg movie: "AI". I haven't seen it (and if I have my way, wont ever), but you may want to be careful of this, as many people are likely to leap about in hair-pulling frenzies pointing fingers. People are like that. I have no idea why.

All-in-all, I see hours of enjoyment in a Blade Runner-esque (hell, Phil Dick-esque) notion. I would like to point to Terry Bisson's "Pirates of the Universe", which is a great book, and the gens could provide tons of source material for some of the more aesthetic companion machines.

That's it for now. I'll try to have something a bit more substantial later, but I'll have to re-read the material first.

JSDiamond,

On 2001-05-23 18:53, JSDiamond wrote:
It sounds really cool. I like the binary system, that's just elegant. I can't wait for that to be fleshed out.
I feel as though you could really easily include optional Director Stance rules with a system like that.

I also like the difference between 'awaken' and 'drone'. Do the player's characters begin as drone? Or by virtue of being player-characters, do they begin the game as somewhat awaken?

Will there be a somewhat explained setting (reasons, history, etc.) for the world mostly without humanity?
In GOLEM I'm leaning toward letting GMs make their own history and world setting.

So one mechanic: The one's digit is a d4, the ten's digit is a d8. There is also a "wild" d8 (maybe). If you have a 1 in the proper digit, you roll the proper die.
00 = Wild (W), 01 = d4+dW, 10 = d8+dW, 11 = d4+d8+dW

Hmmm...in my warped brain, the machines are humans who have just forgotten how to love...

First, I have to say that the site itself is beautifuly designed and executed, and the text is very evocative. It is a game that I wouldn't mind playing. It has a strong fantasy feel to me that I like.

Thinking about it on a more abstract level, though, I'm not sure what effects you imagine as a result of them being mechanical. In what way is this not just a cyberpunk post-holocaust game with emotionally disfunctional characters ? While the special effects are different, I'm not sure in practice what seperates this from an array of existing games.

I'm being a little disingenuous myself here, in that I can actually think of a variety of interesting things - I'm just wondering what your take on it is.

- Eagerly looking forward
to the next idea.

James

Thinking about it on a more abstract level, though, I'm not sure what effects you imagine as a result of them being mechanical. In what way is this not just a cyberpunk post-holocaust game with emotionally disfunctional characters ? While the special effects are different, I'm not sure in practice what seperates this from an array of existing games.

The short answer is, basically this is an excuse to come up with a completely alien race, psychologically speaking. You have no particular impetus at all to make THEIR emotional development AT ALL mimic normal human emotional development (which is, presumably, based on evolutionary concerns which are irrelevant to robots). What sort of ethics make sense to a creature which only reproduces in factories, has no history of cooperation=survival, etc. ?

If you have a game-mechanical system by which this whole
series works, then you perhaps could even have different paths. For instance, the ones designed as recreational could have SOME of the basic human drives programmed into them initially, and so would be closer to human. The logical process in others could be completely alien.

What it comes down to is, humans are pretty much humans from a mental point of view; these don't have to be, and there are a variety of interesting conflicts that could be based on it.

- James

[ This Message was edited by: james_west on 2001-05-23 23:15 ]

Also, now that I've had a chance to clear my head, using the servants of mankind as the newly dominant race puts us humans in the position of gods to these machines. Man is revered in Machina since man was, without question, their creator. And you're absolutely right about the alien mindset. Machines still see things according to their utility (such as the concept of mother, father, and child having nothing to do with sex, age, etc.). Machines have a different set of priorities and standards. The three emotions given at the site (empathy, anxiety, and enmity) will be defined part of the machines. They will rise and fall and the machine will respond accordingly. Granted, I could have just had a anti-memory bomb go off in our atmosphere and accomplished the same thing. And a clean slate should not be confused with dysfunction, really. Let's look at the Mona Lisa. An emotion (or emotional being) becoming dysfunctional is like taking a big black marker and running rampant on Mona's visage (moustache, graffiti, etc.). But these machines just have a clean canvas and through their experiences a painting will form.

Hey... ya edited your post while I was responding. :wink: Good call on the machine's initial programming influencing their emotional development. Hmm... okay, so to go back to Mona, each machine would have a rough outline (broad strokes) on canvas and their experiences would fill in with fine detail.

This is exactly the type of inspiration and focused thought I was hoping for. Thanks! And keep it coming!

_________________
Jason L Blair
Editor-in-Chief
Key 20 Publishing
http://www.key20.com

[ This Message was edited by: Key20Jason on 2001-05-23 23:27 ]

Giving some more thought to the binary mechanic in Machina. I was thinking, have you considered using a hex system. Meld a d10 and d6, simple, machine oriented, and versatile.

Anyway, it was just a thought if you were having problems with the binary aspect.

Dav

You could use Othello pieces, where white side = 0, black side = 1. Then have the players flip a bunch.

Though the resolution should be pretty fast. I'd hate to see people figuring whether 110010 beats a difficulty of 100111.

I keep trying to think of ways to do a d2, d4, d8, or d16. But I can't come up with a good method of rolling d2's or d16's without special dice. That way, you could have an attribute of 1101 which would mean:

d16 d8  d4  d2

1   1   0   1

You'd be surprised at how fast you pick up thinking in binary. Back when dinosaurs were roaming the earth, around twelve years ago, a large part of my job involved throwing together hard-wired logic circuits at the drop of a hat, and I found eight-bit binary counting becomes natural in only a few hours of continuous use.

Of course, there's the issue of people being willing to spend even that much time on it, if it ain't their job.

I love the "Othello pieces" idea - it's a more finessed coin flip. It seems someone ought to be able to design a cool mechanic based on that.

- James

Yes, Othello pieces will HAVE to make it into one of my games someday. I wonder where you can get 'em for cheap?

Having been on a sleep-deprived, overworked, carpal-tunnelicious ride over the past month (which is now, thankfully, over. Helloooo printers!), I've decided from that haze that Machina is looking like the number one contendor. Maybe 'cuz it's the newest or the cutest or maybe not. I dunno. I'm gonna think on it for a bit and I will finish up the Zodiac 12 site just so people can see where that was going.