I've posted a first draft of Lego of the Gods in pdf, on this page. There's also an HTML version there. This is my Setting-building game, which is actually more of an RPG adjunct than as an RPG proper.

As Frank Filz pointed out, I probably need a new name for this...trademarks and all. Suggestions, anyone?

Comments welcome.
Lee

Hmm. Cool. I've seen other lego RPGs, and I'm wondering if perhaps there's a way to create a metagame to link them all together. For example, one thing that's always changing is scale. I think that your game might be able to address things like that in terms of "converting" one Lego game to another.

What do you think?

Mike

Mike,

Actually, the game doesn't have anything to do with Lego. I'm just using Lego as a metaphor for the building-blocks of the Setting, which are the fundamental unit of the game.

I haven't actually looked enough at the real Lego games to see if there's any kind of synergy. The angle that seems like it has the most potential to me is if you treated each little Lego assembly as a Tarot card to play and then made a game out of "playing and interpreting" Lego assemblies as my game plays and interprets Tarot cards. If you did this, I think the right way to handle it structurally would be to treat each assembly as a Trick, with the maker "leading the card" and giving the base interpretation and each other player required to add pieces to the assembly and interpret their addition.

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While I'm here, let me say that there's a couple of specific things I'm looking for feedback on, in addition to general feedback. So, whoever takes the time to read this and give me feedback, could you answer the following questions please:

1. I don't consistently stick with either second- or third-person usage. This is because there's a lot of stuff that doesn't flow naturally in third-person, and I really want to stay away from passive voice. I might be able to rework the text to avoid this, but I don't think that that would be a trivial job. Did you find this distracting?

2. I'm counting on the example at the beginning to help the rest of the text make sense. I was kind of stuck in a chicken-before-the-egg issue (ie, I can't talk about A without referring to B, and I can't talk about B without referring to A, so which topic do I introduce first?). Did this work? At what points, if any, in the text were you confused?

thanks and all feedback welcome,
Lee

For my part, I didn't notice the changes in voice. It reads fine.

In terms of the example first/rules first question, it works fine as is. I think that introducing more of the rules before that first example would be a mistake, but building on it afterwards is good.

And the game looks good. A nice compromise between doing this sort of worldbuilding totally freeform and the kind of extreme that Aria managed.

Hi Lee,

I love the concept of this game. If you had some serious folk sitting around playing this you could hammer out the foundation of a world each of them could own for themselves. When I used to DM sessions the players would sometimes get lost the first session in backstory and local history, etc. This game is a neat alternative to having that happen.

To answer your questions:

1. I didn't find it distracting at all. On the contrary, the second-person usage resonated with me as a reader. The game itself is all about involvement and the language spoke to that. I find reading rules often a laborious sort of hell, but I breezed through these ones.

2. The example at the beginning was crystal clear to me. I'd keep it where it is, like it is.

My only issue is with the title; while I understand your metaphor, to me it's a little tenuous and perhaps doesn't do justice to the game, especially one that requires a certain amount of gravity and uses Tarot cards. But as you said in your post, use of 'Lego' might not be possible. I've been trying to think of a suggestion or two, but I'm coming up dry. Something that speaks to the interpretation and collaboration involved in the game.

It looks like you put a lot of work into this and I think it shows.

- Matt Donnelly

Lee Short wrote:
I haven't actually looked enough at the real Lego games to see if there's any kind of synergy. The angle that seems like it has the most potential to me is if you treated each little Lego assembly as a Tarot card to play and then made a game out of "playing and interpreting" Lego assemblies as my game plays and interprets Tarot cards. If you did this, I think the right way to handle it structurally would be to treat each assembly as a Trick, with the maker "leading the card" and giving the base interpretation and each other player required to add pieces to the assembly and interpret their addition.

Thanks for the nice words, guys.

Mike -- oddly enough, it wasn't until I was done with the rough draft that I realized how similar this really was to Universalis (which I have read but never played). And I certainly agree that the core mechanic could be used for a whole lot of things (my first reaction to Chris' disclaimer about the narrowness of SitF's applicablilty was "what? you could use this for anything!! In fact, I want to use it for X, and Y, and and and ...") . I think that really the only thing in the game that might be unique is the vision of gameplay and the synergy that gameplay might have with another roleplaying game -- ie, how it helps the players create the shared part of SIS for a detailed Setting. I've got some other thoughts I'm kicking around about how to do this for Character, too. Maybe I'll put my mind to doing a fantasy heartbreaker around that concept; I kind of think that would work pretty well. But first I've got an SitF Amber takeoff that I'm dying to work out.

Hey, Lee. With regards to your 1 + 2, I found your text highly readable and didn't have any trouble with the example. I hate to be a party-pooper, but what does this framework do that Universalis doesn't do in a less-constrained and more social-contract-enforcing way? It seems to me that using Tarot as your currency is going to reproduce the assumptions of Tarot interpretation as to What Matters in your setting design process. Sure, you could redesign, but that's practically rewriting LotG for each playthrough. And since all currency is redistributed and equivalent, there's really no way that I can see for players to assert their own priority of vision - that's all left to Social Contract.

I'd really need to see it in action, though (hint!)

best,

Mark

Mark,

Actually I wouldn't say that this is either more constrained or less constrained than Universalis, just differently constrained. I haven't read Uni recently, but IIRC, it's more focused on a character or set of characters and kind of explores the world through the characters. This will pretty much force you into a bottom-up design paradigm. Also, because Uni is itself an RPG, it is unlikely to be used as an RPG adjunct in the way that Lego is designed to. That doesn't mean that it couldn't be, though.

Just some quick thoughts. I'll have to re-read Uni and come up with some more well-formed thoughts on this. And you're very likely to be given the chance to run through some Lego soon.

Mark Woodhouse wrote: Hey, Lee. With regards to your 1 + 2, I found your text highly readable and didn't have any trouble with the example. I hate to be a party-pooper, but what does this framework do that Universalis doesn't do in a less-constrained and more social-contract-enforcing way? It seems to me that using Tarot as your currency is going to reproduce the assumptions of Tarot interpretation as to What Matters in your setting design process.