I was reading an old thread which started with Ron Edwards talking about page45 comic stores and how "alternative" and "mainstream" are sometimes seen a little upside down. There was stuff about Trivial Pursuit and the cards and I just started thinking about

Visual aids

What is Trivial Pursuit, for example? A bunch of visual aids for a game of asking questions. You could come up with a system which exactly replicated the board as a mechanic for deciding the question category. You could replace the "pies" with numbers on a piece of paper, you could leave out the colors and call the categories by name and so on. Yes, people could come up with the questions.

You don't see that too much in roleplaying. The only aid is actually the character sheet. (Btw, I say that those people who don't think that the look of the character sheet doesn't matter are just very mistaken.) Okay, we have miniatures, which we have to assemble and paint ourselves. This is not really very appealing to those of us with little artistic skills and not a lot of interest in devoting even more time to what is already a time-consuming hobby just to get some visual aids. I think visual aids could be one good way of adding "production value" into a game.

When I'm thinking of "The Family RPG That Everyone Buys For Christmas", I'm thinking of a box with a pretty cover and a lot of visual aids. If it has turn-based combat, it could have a track to keep up with the flow of turns, complete with pieces which can be set on the track to see who's turn is coming next and when. It would have all the pools in the game (be they Fate, Hit Points or Influence) represented with for example glass pebbles of different colour. It would also have a board, although I don't know what it would be used for.

Basicly you don't need a pen for anything, but instead you'd have lots of pretty things to play with. When I think of it, almost every popular game (not including software) I can think of is basicly a box of visual aids. The games can be easy (Monopoly) or hard (Chess), but everybody can remember the rules by heart, or at least when they look at what's inside the box they remember how they were supposed to be set up and how most of it goes. What people really pay money for are just the visual aids. Paper and cardboard and plastic. Many people have mentioned to me that it was actually the polyhedral dice they first noticed about roleplaying. (Most of those people never really got to it, granted.) They look cool and are fun to play with. We try to sell them books.

Personally, I'd like more visual aids and I think I'll go on doing some experimenting.

Thoughts? Are there games out there with visual aids? What are they?

Btw, has anybody noted how ingenious the Storyteller character sheet is?
1) It's highly visual
2) You don't need to erase anything when your character develops, you just color the next dot. This helps a great deal in keeping the sheet nice and clean (and you don't have to redo it once in a while to keep it readable).

Itse wrote: What is Trivial Pursuit, for example? A bunch of visual aids for a game of asking questions. You could come up with a system which exactly replicated the board as a mechanic for deciding the question category. You could replace the "pies" with numbers on a piece of paper, you could leave out the colors and call the categories by name and so on. Yes, people could come up with the questions.

When I'm thinking of "The Family RPG That Everyone Buys For Christmas", I'm thinking of a box with a pretty cover and a lot of visual aids. If it has turn-based combat, it could have a track to keep up with the flow of turns, complete with pieces which can be set on the track to see who's turn is coming next and when. It would have all the pools in the game (be they Fate, Hit Points or Influence) represented with for example glass pebbles of different colour. It would also have a board, although I don't know what it would be used for.

What people really pay money for are just the visual aids. Paper and cardboard and plastic. Many people have mentioned to me that it was actually the polyhedral dice they first noticed about roleplaying. (Most of those people never really got to it, granted.) They look cool and are fun to play with. We try to sell them books.

Btw, has anybody noted how ingenious the Storyteller character sheet is? ... 2) You don't need to erase anything when your character develops, you just color the next dot. This helps a great deal in keeping the sheet nice and clean (and you don't have to redo it once in a while to keep it readable).

clehrich wrote: but what do you do with renewable resources (like damage and so forth), i.e. stuff that changes up and down during play?

Itse wrote: It would have all the pools in the game (be they Fate, Hit Points or Influence) represented with for example glass pebbles of different colour.

Itse wrote: Thoughts? Are there games out there with visual aids? What are they?

I hate to say it, but you might be trying to reinvent Magic cards.

- James

Itse,

Interesting points.

The things you are talking about are usually given more thought in the world of board games, where they are called "chrome". My personal experience with board games leads me to believe that chrome often affects my decision to buy a game, but not usually my decision to play it once I have it. Gameplay is king once the game is sitting on your shelf.

To bring this to an example in the RPG arena, WotC came out with the Dungeons and Dragons adventure game in 2000(and a very similar one for Star Wars). The product included pregenerated characters with simple, visually appealing character sheets. The rest of the box was simplified rules, a glossy color dungeon map, shiny color POGs (paper discs) showing characters and monsters, and a set of dice. There were, in short, plenty of visual aids. Problem was it wasn't the complete D&D. Gamers just bought the rule books. From the huge numbers of these boxes I later saw on clearance racks, I assume they didn't sell well to any market.

What can we learn from the D&D example? A stripped-down "introductory" game doesn't seem to be a viable product. What you are suggesting, a game designed to be chromy at its core, may or may not work. There have been a few "RPG light" games over the years with minis and customizable maps and whatnot. To my mind the problems with them all is that, in "simplifying" the RPG experience, they kept the mindless dungeon crawling and tedious hack-n-slash combat while eliminating character and story.

So, I conclude that a visually apppealing, family-oriented RPG would be one that played down combat in favor of character and story. More like Once Upon a Time on steroids than traditional-RPG-light.

Ultimately, though, I have strong doubts about anything RPG-like ever being a "family" game. Not without some major perception changes about the hobby.

james_west wrote: I hate to say it, but you might be trying to reinvent Magic cards.

- James

I think that visual or tactile aids can be a definite benefit to a game, for these reasons:

-To make some aspect of gameplay easier or better, as with using miniatures. In my experience, its been more gamist games (such as D&D and more combat-oriented Storyteller games) that improved with the addition of miniatures, battle maps, etc. - but it definitly made playing that game easier and more fun.

-A hook into the game. One of the main appeals Deadlands had for my group was that we got to play around with cards and poker chips. Good times ensued.

-Explanation and teaching of mechanics. Here I'm thinking of the other day when I was telling a friend of mine, who doesn't play RPGs, about the game Timestream that I'm currentely working on. The main time travelling mechanic uses pools of counters, and I was trying to explain how it works to him. He kept on not getting it, until I pulled out some pennies and dice and showed him how it worked. It took about 30 seconds for him to grok it. We spent the next couple hours talking about the ramifications of various mechanics and paradoxs (incidental lesson - even non-gamers can give you valuable insight into your game!).

So, I think that RPGs can benefit from visual aids. At the same time, it seems to me that the visual aids that a game most benefits from are things that aren't necessarily included in the game, but are readily available somewhere else (such as poker chips, cards, pennies, glass counters, etc.). Why pay the cost of providing a bag of counters with your game when you know the consumer can get it somewhere else, probably for cheaper, if they don't have it already?

Here's a vaguely related thought. What about designing a game that requires certain kinds of visual aids (maps, or blueprints, or something). You include some in the game, and then put a new one on your website each week or month, free to download. Perhaps this would be a way to add production value to a game. Not so sure how feasible or even desirable this would be, just a thought.

Thank you for your time,
Nathan P.

Nathan P. wrote: Here's a vaguely related thought. What about designing a game that requires certain kinds of visual aids (maps, or blueprints, or something). You include some in the game, and then put a new one on your website each week or month, free to download. Perhaps this would be a way to add production value to a game. Not so sure how feasible or even desirable this would be, just a thought.

clehrich wrote:

Nathan P. wrote: Here's a vaguely related thought. What about designing a game that requires certain kinds of visual aids (maps, or blueprints, or something). You include some in the game, and then put a new one on your website each week or month, free to download. Perhaps this would be a way to add production value to a game. Not so sure how feasible or even desirable this would be, just a thought.

Can you elaborate on that?

The board doesn't have to be a map, or any sort of physical-abstracted representation of the imagined space. A board-game RPG would use the board as a springboard to storytelling WITHOUT, imho, the board dictating such things as "physical location." Say it's your turn for a scene, so you roll and wander down the board and wham, you get X, where X is a certain sort of scene/plot twist/game mechanic/something that has to be resolved a certain way. That's the sort of thing I'm imagining, anyway.

I think visual aids are a great idea, which is why I've been experimenting with systems that track wounds, distance traveled, and so on using a shared "map". the definitive example of what I mean is in the Court of 9 Chambers quickstart PDF, where I have the players lay out nine sheets of paper, each with one of the numbers from 1 to 9 on them. when you take one point of damage, you put a "my character's wounds" token on the sheet labeled 1. when you travel three abstract units closer to Paris, you put a "travelling to Paris" token on the sheet labeled 3 (or move it three steps from where it currently is.

this makes it feel like a boardgame, although there's no special printing costs. I'll include sheets with large numbers in pale grey as watermarks for printing out, the players use little squares of scratchpaper as tokens; that's pretty much it, as far as special equipment.

I'm not trying to be pushy or anything, but everyone should copy this idea. =}

This is mostly a "me to" as I fully agree with Itse's original post. I bemoan the lack of visual aids and props in RPG; all of the above are good reasons for ways they can be exploited, but IMO the central point is that they focus everyones attention on the same thing. I think this helps makes the shared imaginary space coherent and common amongst the participants.

I also wonder to what exten more complex rules could be used if, instead of having to remember them, the 'board' or other prop displayed them as a process you moved a marker through. I think there is a lot of scope here, revisiting the game-ina-box roots of parlour games.

In Great Ork Gods, I recommend using glass beads, or other pretty little counters for counting Spite. In the playtest I found this to be an excellent way of keeping track of a rapidly changing resource, as well as appealing to my sense of irony (counting Spite with pretty things). It also gives the transfer of Spite a more tactile feel and thus more meaning.

I whole heartedly agree agree with the use of visual aids. I am a great advocate of adding more to my game Icar. Here are some way in which I try to improve the game using visual aids:


• Weapon Sheets In most RPGs, weapons, vehicles and equipment are list in a book that are then written in pencil on a character sheet. In Icar, weapons, equipment, space craft and equipment are listed in a book as well as on an A4 sheet that is folded and kept with the character sheet. Only equipment of note is listed (no toothpicks and the like). These sheets are downloadable from the site. This gives a more physical form for the equipment and allows special rulings to be included on the sheet. An example of a sheet is here:
[img]http://www.icar.co.uk/pics/incidental/cataclyst.jpg[/img]
This system can be used for any game, but does take a fair amount of work and printing cost.
• Removing Numbers from character sheets. I have a personal hatred for character sheets that look like spreadsheets. That's why I use discs in Icar (like a base 10 clock) to record the stats. There are a few numbers left on the character sheets, but I would have shot of them if I could figure out a way! The character sheet looks a bit like:
[img]http://www.icar.co.uk/game/pics/csv8.jpg[/img]


I have had good response from the players that have used weapon sheets but the general consensus is that this might not be too good for Fantasy games. After all, a Sword might only have 2 stats and a bit of description - is it really worth having a sheet? That's quite a subjective question to ask and would rely heavily on the type of game.

Icar can be found, for free, at http://www.icar.co.uk

Hey all,

With the subject of visual aids, I'm surprised no one has brought up Player Hand Outs. You know, the little things that you just hand to the players and say something like "You find this..."

Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu is usually chock full of them. Pick up just about any pre-made adventure for the game and you'll usually find pages and pages of stuff to photocopy, clip up, and hand out. It's my experience that players and GMs alike just love these bits.

Now, as I consider how one could use this idea for the core rules of a game, I think to myself... I cannot remember a single game I've ever read which devoted any time to handouts. Well, wait... I take that back, I once read Cthulhu Live, the LARP version, which talked at length about props for the game. But that's LARP, and I'm thinking of table-top style. But maybe, instead of including visual aids, one can write up a bit in the rules about the benefits of going out and finding visual aids?

As I ponder this topic, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with my wife recently about how I miss the ol' Box Set style games. You know the stuff, you open the box, there's maybe two or three soft cover books, a handfull of maps, some dice, and mabe some other trinkets. Oooh, that's good stuff.

Consider this idea...
You've got a good game already, it's viable just as books alone, but maybe you publish a 'deluxe' edition that has the main rule book(s), plus a book of short stories. Or maybe just a box with the short stories book. Now for each short story you include a single trinket. A single item ready for the GM to say "You find this". Maybe you also include in your game, or suppliment, an essay on the potential uses for miscelaneous player handouts.

Oooh... just imagine the rattle when you shake the box... the feeling of mystery when first looking at the trinket handouts before actually reading the stories.

Oh yes... the players eyes do light up and the gm does smile when everyone hears "You find this..."

Anywho... rattled on long enough.

-Eric

Oh...good call. I've always done my best to have a player handout or two for each session, and my players seem to dig it. Also, people seem to remember things better if they have something tactile to remind them of it, like a note or piece of paper.

Some box sets involved player handouts/visual aids - I'm thinking here of the Bloodwars adventure for the Planescape campaign setting, for AD&D. It come with, not only a cool comic book explaining the backstory, but also a book of art and illustrations that the module would reference too (i.e. "There is a Glabrezu in the room. Show the players page 4 of the art book." or something like that). That was really cool.

Again, downloads of pics/illustrations of unique creatures, important NPCs and neat archictecture in your game world would be a cool support feature.

Thank you for your time,
Nathan P.

I've tried visual aids with players -- hand-out sheets, cards for weapons and/or spells, tokens, etc. -- and they always complained that it was too difficult hauling all these around. Then I made each of them personalized envelopes in which to carry all the visual extras, and they soon craved more and more!

I recall one campaign in which my players had fun when each of them was given a not-drawn-to-scale FPRG map (imitating the inaccuracy of real world medieval mapping) which differed according to the culture and profession of the player. They seemed to enjoy the chance to supplement their own PC knowledge with someone else's and to argue in character when their maps contradicted each other.

Doctor Xero

Dr. X,

The conflicing maps idea sounds terrific. But it also sounds like a lot of prep work.

I'm more about finding something odd... an unusual key, a faded out polaroid picture, a little statuette, etc, then writing a short story around them.

I've recently started running a modern-day game using the D20 system, and I had a large urge to get people to put their character sheets down and fiddle with things instead, perhaps because I wanted to draw attention away from the tactical side of the system. I thought back to the things that I thought were cool when I saw or read about them, such as the old Call of Cthulhu newspaper clippings or the use of Fudge points as seen in the Amber FUDGE game logs hosted by iago (who posts here, I believe).

The bits from that Amber FUDGE game I remembered very strongly (probably because one of his players put a lot of effort into writing wonderfully readable logs) was the way that Fudge points, an in-game resource, became tactile things. You didn't check something off your character sheet, rather you handed one of your glass beads back to the GM. The bit that really struck me was in their last session, when (and I'm paraphrasing) he took everyone's blue beads away, handed them one red bead, and said "This can be redeemed for guaranteed exceptional success, at the cost of guaranteed doom for your character after the game." I could just picture in my head the players tossing that little bead up and down in their hand, deciding if they should cash it in.

In any case, using glass beads as an in-game resource (the ability to narrate success for part of a scene) was warmed to by my players right away, and I had those things sliding back and forth across the table like coins in Universalis. I used a few LARP-style props as well, such as a sheaf of notes and a PDA containing a few image files as cryptic hints. (That thing certainly got passed around a lot.)

In the next session I decided to pander to the tactical bent of my players a bit, and printed out plans for the building they were infiltrating and gave them cheap plastic miniatures (from HeroClix, I think; apparently anybody who actually plays the game has tons of extra 'thug' or 'medic' figures). I know miniatures are so common that they hardly count as props, but again, the fact that they added a tactile element to the game helped to pull people in together around the coffee table rather than sit back and leisurely peruse their character sheets. I also used a small deck of cards from a CCG I once played to generate random results for the character's interaction with the spirit within the house. Sure, I could have rolled a die and looked on a chart, but handing someone a card with the name "Astral Parasite" and a suitably spooky picture on it drew the players together to look at it and hand it around.

I could easily be overstating the effect of props I've seen personally, since I spent an hour or two running around preparing these things, so I was hoping they'd be enjoyed. But I definately got the feeling that engaging as many of the players' senses as possible (a soundtrack CD, things to touch and move around the table) increased their involvement.

Finally, there's the Rocky and Bullwinkle Role-Playing Party Game, published in 1988, that uses cards, a spinner, and hand puppets as props. Maybe that means the idea of a prop-focused RPG has laid fallow long enough to be revived -- although I admit that Puppetland would have been a bit too expensive if it had come with actual puppets.

Some ideas on nontraditional character sheets can be found in Character Sheets - Rubbish?

For the game I am developing, Fortunes Wheel, I am thinking of using little polymer clay tokens to track 'bidding/experience points', along with add on cards to compliment tarot decks used for play. The add on cards would be story 'seeds' with elements to be discovered in the story on them, keyed to certain Tarot cards (so when a card comes up in play it can activate the 'seed'. There would also be adventure 'clues' much like those in CoC, but more in the way of creative 'hooks' to fire players imaginations, since the game can, in theory, be played without a fixed GM role and with quasi-random adventures. The other visual element I was thinking of was that character sheets are more like 'code wheels'-they are discs (one fixed atop another) not standard sheets.
Now, the idea is that these could all be printed out from pdfs and assembled/cut out by the players if they want, but I would also do limited runs (or to order runs) of fancier ones. The tokens are especially easy to do quickly in bulk from a mould.
Its all rather visual aid heavy, but then its something Im envisaging as sort of an art project for myself almost as much as it is a game.

Doctor Xero wrote: I've tried visual aids with players -- hand-out sheets, cards for weapons and/or spells, tokens, etc. -- and they always complained that it was too difficult hauling all these around. Then I made each of them personalized envelopes in which to carry all the visual extras, and they soon craved more and more!

Mike Holmes wrote: It's been my experience, that one person, the GM in games with one, should handle all materials. If he doesn't show, or doesn't bring his notes, play isn't going to happen anyhow. If you leave it to players, then someone will forget or lose their character sheet. In any case, why burden more than one person?

Why the tradition of players holding on to their characters and stuff individually has developed, I can't say. But it doesn't work well.