Trevis wrote up a page for new players that should help a lot, and will give everyone an idea of how it's set up. You can read it here: http://wiki.trmfineart.com/bin/view/Unigame2/IAmANewPlayer



Interesting rules page. Nice and short - just the way I like it.

I see how Matrix Games and Universalis are different. You differentiate between different changes players make with their coins. In Matrix Games they get one or two arguments a turn no matter what. I do have a version of the game where I use coins but that is to limit the length of the game. "Mongolian Goat Rodeo" is a sports/race game in which players use their argument coins to make things happen that are not covered by the basic rules (which cover movement and "tussling" i.e. getting the dead goat away from the other player - It's Buzkashi, a weird Afghan game)

Anyway, by having players get argument each turn the only reward is in telling the story not in getting coins. In fact a Universalis GM would be running a token economy where they have to give players coins or the game would grind to a halt.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

MatrixGamer wrote: Anyway, by having players get argument each turn the only reward is in telling the story not in getting coins. In fact a Universalis GM would be running a token economy where they have to give players coins or the game would grind to a halt.

Hi Chris.

Yeah, the rules on the "I am a new player page" wiki page are basically to help play Uni in an asynchronus enviroment, like the wiki, and to help people understand the mechanics of how to post to the wiki.

If you look at the bottom of the Rules page on the wiki there is a standard play aid for tabletop Uni. Universalis doesn't have a GM, or even a facilitator. On the wiki I'm merely the host who runs the technology.

In uni you get coins back in two ways. 1.) Closing a scene earns you a set number of tokens for each participant, usually 5. 2.) Complications between components you control and components someone else controls, the dice rolled in the complications generate coins for both sides.

best

Trevis

Are you familiar with the refresh and complications rules from Universalis?


I'm an idiot. I didn't know of the other method of getting coins back. That makes sense.

I've worked with token economies as a psychotherapist (there are a behavior modification tool). My observation of them in therapy is that they don't work. Parents are told - reward your Child. They then ask - What? Reward them for everything!?! Then they don't. I use a slight modification on the interevention. I ask parents to decide before hand how many times they are going to reward their kids during a day and them make certain to catch them being good that many times. This increases their positive attention to the kids which is the real goal anyway. Token economies are really a sneaky way to increase parents being nice to their kids!

Please accept my appology for being a surface reader.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

Since the conversation started moving away from discussions of the wiki, I split this off from Lessons from playing Uni on Wike

To give you some background on the token economy Chris, Refresh occurs each scene at a customizable but generally fixed rate (everybody gets 5 Coins is the default).

In a Complication Dice are rolled and those dice generate free Coins which can be used immediately to resolve the conflict or kept for future use.

Ultimately, the Coins become more of a pacing mechanic than a limiting one. Its not hard to get more Coins so there's little danger of running out and thus little incentive to horde. Rather what they do is measure how much capability you have to impact play right now. If you're Coin rich (relative to the other players) you're temporarily in the Drivers seat. You can interrupt their turn, Challenge their "arguements", and introduce all kinds of new Components and Events...all of which cost Coins which, being rich, you can afford.

After a couple of turns of spending at a high rate, however, you won't be cash rich and you'll have to scale back your impact until you can arrange to acquire more Coins. Again not hard to do, but in the mean time some other player(s) will be moving the story...perhaps differently than you. So spending Coins is a constant trade off between effectiveness now vs. effectiveness later.

Since Complications offer the opportunity for windfall "profits" players are motivated to act as antagonists for each other in setting up conflicts that will then need to be resolved. Resolution uses dice pools which either have to be purchased (spending Coins to make Coins) or come from pre existing Traits (as described in the other Matrix thread). So players are motivated to create conflict between existing Components in a way that involves currently established traits so they can get free dice to generate bonus Coins with.

Play winds up being pretty cyclical in that regard with players often on different cycles so different people move into and out of the drivers seat at different rates.

This is kind of like what I did in Mongolian Goat Rodeo but in that game the players did not get more coins to a big part of the game was deciding when to use you horde. Players would hold on to the end to make one great dash for the finish line.

A local guy here in Bloomington Indiana runs an RPG that he developed from my game (Cinematrix) that has more similarities to Universalis. He's an RPGer so that is no surprising.


We will have to get together at Origins or Gencon to talk about this. It's time that this radical fringe part of the hobby become mainstream.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press