Progress…

Dev Purkayastha has posted some thoughts on the Story Games Boston playtest of Agora. I’m really happy that SGB — folks who tend towards game designs that are very different than my own — are giving Agora a crack, because I get some fantastic differing perspectives on how my game works. It also shows me what I need to explain better for audiences that aren’t me, my friends, and my design partners.

Early playtest feedback has been giving me a lot of good stuff to consider and mull over. One thing that I’ve been hearing a few times over, though, is a desire for a one-page cheat sheet for play procedures, which I can totally understand. Agora is a complex game, and the big picture of the beast would be a handy thing to have.

I took the six core procedures that players will encounter in a given turn and wrote quick bullet-point summaries of them. Then, with a little ghetto-hypertexting via text color, I came up with the following Agora Turn Guide:

At some point I’ll make an Incident Guide that handles Creating Incidents, Audience options, Burnout, and Fallout — but it’s my impression those aren’t critical right now, whereas the turn flow certainly is. The Turn Guide is in the playtest package, as well.

Thanks to Saturday Morning Breakfast Comic

As the mighty Fred Hicks might say: “I wonder what this means…”

The local Los Angeles Strategicon was this last weekend. We attended (with little Prudence, her very first con!), and had a blast. I did not run the IPR booth at Gamex this time around, which was sort of awesome. It meant I had lots of time to just hang out, chat with friends, and play lots of games. I barely noticed not having a ‘home base’ to fall back to.

Friday night we checked in and all that and then I settled down to play Montsegur 1244, a structured freeform game which is getting a lot of play and buzz. I went into it expecting it to be not-my-thing, and I came out of it knowing that it was not-my-thing. Lack of strong character goals and a blindness to the parts of historical context that I really dig into were the big problems for me; I was also sort of an odd man out in our (randomly-generated) situation: everybody else was playing the sex-and-family bits of the situation, whereas I was the only one playing the religion part of the set. Which all sounds more negative than it really is — everybody else was having a blast, and it’s a nice little package of game-situation.

Saturday morning started off with In a Wicked Age, which Will calls, “The game I don’t like that I have fun with every time.” Which is pretty spot-on accurate. We played in God-Kings of War (best for cons) and ended with a giant naval battle determining the fate of an empire. Schweet.

Saturday afternoon I took the baby which Meghann had so kindly been entertaining while I was wicked-aging. She went off to play a Star Wars game; I played A New World: a Carcassonne game with Prudence strapped to my chest. The game is very neat and challengingly different than basic Carcassonne. After that was done, we all (myself, Meg, Paul, Ryan, Jesse, Will, James, Morgan… who am I forgetting?) sat down to a luxurious two-hour-long dinner slot, which allowed us to have a lot of casual social time. I really hope Strategicon retains the new schedule; I don’t mind getting to the morning game an hour earlier if it means dinner isn’t a big harried rush.

Saturday night I played in the Houses of the Blooded LARP, which I went in expecting it to be not-my-thing and was totally blown away by the awesome. John has devised a very, very slick conflict resolution system that is near-perfectly tuned to the LARP environment. It incorporates mechanics directly into the roleplay in a nearly seamless fashion. Yes, even combat — at the conclusion of the first (and only) duel of the night, John declared combat over and all the Vampire LARPers cheered because it was over so quickly and cleanly. The “private scenes” which are played out in public give the whole experience a great sense of pacing and introduce tons of information into the game constantly. Nobody walks around wondering where the action is — everybody walks around scheming on how to turn the action to their ends.

Sunday morning I had the baby again — I can’t recall what Meghann was playing — and so played Thurn and Taxis again with baby in the sleepy wrap. I love that thing; I don’t know how people raise babies without it.

Sunday afternoon saw me running the Agora playtest/preview, which succeeded on both fronts admirably — I got some good playtest feedback and also introduced the game in an engaging and entertaining manner. Thanks to Jesse, I even have an Actual Play recording of most of the game. Playtest feedback mostly centered around “selling” player actions, and will result in a couple new (small) procedures and some chunky Mastery player advice.

Sunday evening, my parents trekked out to the convention just to take the baby off our hands for a timeslot. While Meghann played Mouse Guard, I was able to just kick back with Ryan Macklin, who I don’t get to see often enough, chatting about game design but also just things-and-stuff. When they were done, Meghann returned spouting superlatives about Mouse Guard, so presumably there will be mice with capes and swords in our gaming future.

Monday morning I was literally the only RPG on the schedule, and so our game of Primetime Adventures had six players. We did a “Yes, and…” sort of series-building and came up with something truly spectacular. Running in perpetual syndicated reruns on TVLand, our show was “Trouble in PERL-dice,” a 60s-era sitcom-spoof (think F-Troop) about the Board of Directors of the international criminal organization PERL (pronounced ‘peril’). As the show was ostensibly in reruns, we played one episode out of a “marathon,” so started with the very end of one episode, including the “Next Time On…” segment. This allowed us to have a Next Time On list for the episode we played, and this worked marvelously. Our climax featured two flying aces in a dogfight using invisible planes — in other words, two guys in sitting position arcing and spinning around in the air. Fantastic stuff.

And then it was time for post-con Mongolian BBQ with almost the whole gang (Paul and Ryan understandably buggered off before then), completing a fantastic convention.

So everybody’s seen Star Trek by now, right? It was totally awesome, and really, just about everything that I would possibly want from a reboot of a very beloved franchise that I have spent a long time enjoying. Of course, you’ll notice I said “just about everything.” There’s one thing, and it’s not even a criticism of Star Trek so much as it’s that the movie fell into the same trope that a lot — scratch that — nearly every movie, novel, television show, or other media production made in the Western World falls into.

So does anybody remember Star Trek: Nemesis? I mean, I’m sorry for bringing it up and making you think about it, but if you will recall, that Star Trek movie featured a giant, scary, pointy-ended Romulan ship dedicated to the destruction of the Federation and cast the comparatively underpowered Enterprise as the only line of defense opposing it. Sound familiar? Yeah.

There’s just something, apparently, about the little guy standing up to the giant threat from beyond. And I’ll be the first to admit, this makes for a great story. Unfortunately, in recent years, it’s made for the great story, especially in Hollywood. Our hero is always inexperienced, overpowered, and outclassed, and yet somehow he comes out on top — and by somehow, I of course mean “by banding together his friends to outmaneuver and outmatch the overpowering threat.” Every. Single. Time. Every. Single. Story.
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I spent a little less than an hour in Illustrator today, reminding myself I am not Daniel Solis. I did, however, end up with this, which I am rather fond of:

I’m on Ryan Macklin’s podcast Master Plan, in an interview about designing epic games that is so epic… (how epic is it?) …it’s so epic, it had to be split into two episodes.

Click the following to download Part One and Part Two.

I always have a lot of fun on Ryan’s show, and in this one I really enjoyed the opportunity to relax a bit, call myself on my own bullshit, and talk nuts and bolts rather than big, high-minded abstracts. In other words, I got to talk about game design fueled by my enthusiasm for game design and not some misdirected attempt to spread my brand or drive sales. Very refreshing, and very fun. I should also note that a lot of the podcast is also about Ryan’s upcoming game-in-development, Mythender, which was lots of fun to talk about and sort of counter-interview Ryan about.

Graham has announced the design parameters for “Little Game Chef” on story-games.com.

THEME
The theme is immersion.

INGREDIENTS
Write a immersive game incorporating three of the following ingredients:
* Burn.
* Horse.
* Midnight.
* Sea.

Submissions need to be uploaded to Graham’s server in one week, midnight (Britain-time) on the 29th.