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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).

Quote from: ItseWhat 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.

Actually, I was recently given a box of Trivial Pursuit cards with what are supposed to be super-hard questions.  They include two dice, and some little sheets to mark off wedges.  One die gives category, and the other essentially says whether a given question is a wedge question or otherwise.  Thus Trivial Pursuit without any board, wedges, or anything like that.  Comes in a smaller box, and I suppose is less cool in a sense, but the special dice help.  So I'm totally with you about visual aids and whatnot.

QuoteWhen 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.

My only problem with stuff like this is that my understanding is it's very expensive to produce in small quantities.  If you are Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers, you can crank out zillions of little pieces and boards and whatnot, but if you're doing indie design you'd probably end up having to make your game hugely expensive to make it break even.

QuoteWhat 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.

Actually, a wonderful example here is Attack Vector, in which if you don't have the little molded plastic thingies, it's fantastically difficult to play the game.

I'm totally in agreement with you, but my own inclination is to move away from visual aids that aren't actually necessary.  That is, if you have a game in which such aids are actually important to the gameplay, then I don't mind buying the things; otherwise I tend to want to ditch the stuff as frills.  I guess I see it as a balance between looking cool and wasting money on silliness.

Admittedly, I have always admired people who can play chess in their heads, with no board or pieces.  I like to do crosswords without a pen for this reason.  So I may not be the target audience of visual aids!

QuoteBtw, 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).

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

Just some thoughts, rambling in response.

Chris Lehrich

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

Like this:

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

Instead of a character sheet in the traditional sense, you just have a paper or card with boxes where you place your resources.  If you lose HP, you take a pebble out of the box, if you heal, you put one back in.  Something like the Player Card's in Puerto Rico or Age of Renaissance maybe, only a little more complex.

Quote from: ItseThoughts? Are there games out there with visual aids? What are they?

A few things come to mind, character sheets, as you said, definitely fulfill this purpose.  Deadlands has Fate Chips (even though they don't come with the game) that serve this purpose. Some games used to come with markers for characters and such that you could use on a map in lieu of miniatures (Star Frontiers, Villains and Vigilantes, StarAce).  I think Everway would be a good example, but I've never played it.

You're right, this sort of thing is fun and very eye-catching.  I know a fair number of people that played HeroQuest (the board game) because it was a board game, with cool figures and stuff, that had never, and still have never, played a regular RPG.  Also, they're just fun to play with. . .

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.

Quote from: james_westI hate to say it, but you might be trying to reinvent Magic cards.

- James

I think the re-invention is closer to Cheapass Games.  In fact, a Cheapass board-oriented RPG could be really, really neat.  I don't even think it necessarily has to be "light."  It just has to be "accessible."

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.

Quote from: Nathan P.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?  I was sort of thinking of providing lots of weblinks to such things in my game Shadows in the Fog, with the considerable advantage that I don't have to construct them myself, but I think you mean something more.  How would such things be required?

Chris Lehrich

Quote from: clehrich

Quote from: Nathan P.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?

I can try. This is all off the top of my head, so I'm not sure how well it would work. What about a game based off the movie The Cube, which centers on the characters trying to find their way out of this humongous, moving maze consisting of square rooms. Some of the mechanics could change depending on what room you are in, and the GM has a map and the information for moving rooms around. The players could have a smaller and more incomplete map based on where they have been. The game comes with a standard set of rooms. If they players make it out, great. However, each month, the designer would post a set of new rooms with new mechanics, and guidelines for moving them that would be added to or replace the existing maze. So, as characters go through and gain XP (or whatever) and improve, the maze actually gets longer and more difficult, in realtime.

Though, the more I think about it, the more this seems like a boardgame than an RPG. When you get right down to it, isn't one of the features of the RPG that it doesn't require any visual aids?

Thank you for your time,
Nathan P.

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:

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:

[/list:u]
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