Earlier today I played a little Agora with Brand Robins and a chap you may know as Ice Cream Emperor. The two of them put a crazy Dune spin on the game that sent me reeling. Brand had some Diamond Ardents who were just screaming for blood of all the unbelievers, and ICE had this eerie brother-and-sister duo of Augustan Circles who tapped their family tradition of accepting the Mysteries of the universe to guide their hands in ruling the people.

We only played their Descent scenes (and did character generation), but I am really looking forward to seeing where they might go with it. It’s awesome to see how many directions one little rule set can run off into.

I’ll post the log when I get a chance. Trust me, though, it was superfuckingcool.

Alright, it took me forever to post this up, but it was a messy file that needed a lot of cleaning up to make it readable. Now it’s pretty!

Read the Agora IRC Playtest from April 15, 2006, in all its htmlified glory.

Shreyas, DevP, and Vaxalon gave Agora a whirl a couple weekends ago. We uncovered a lot of textual concerns and clarified some rules questions, so it was good stuff.

More in-depth discussion at The Forge and Story Games.

By now we’re all quite familiar with how to set up a situation, a knot of conflicts that the players address to create story. What I haven’t seen is a thorough explanation of how we determine when those conflicts have been resolved, and when enough of the conflicts of a situation have been resolved that the situation is no longer a situation. How do we gauge when a dynamic situation has been stabilized by the actions of the player characters?

Last night in the final FLFS playtest, the players had figured out that the Americans were masquerading as pirates with a black ship in order to scare off the colonists so they could get at the Old Martian ship that the colonists were unknowingly sitting on top of. The PCs took the captain of the American battleship prisoner for high piracy and all that, and I suggested that the game and the story might be over. It would have been something of an anticlimax if the players hadn’t encouraged me to go on a bit further, with a pair of scenes where the characters reanimated the alien ship and the black ship came out of hiding to stop the British from claiming their prize. When the PCs rammed the black ship into the asteroidal surface of the martian relic, the ending was much more satisfying than simply having their ‘leader’ in a holding cell.

If conflict is character + desire + obstacle, conflict is resolved when any of the three are removed from relevancy. The character no longer wants his object of desire, the object of desire is destroyed or rejects the character, or the obstacle is overcome or circumvented. Easy, right? Of course it’s not so simple. The things that we do in game and the addresses that we level at the situation can mangle those neatly arranged conflicts into an absolute mess. We can turn simple, strong, fair conflicts into impossible juxtapositions of elements that refuse to lose relevancy. Worse, we can turn clear conflicts into murky, weak, illusory conflicts where we’re not sure if anything really is still contested. As if that wasn’t complex enough, when we set up situations with four or five or more conflicts embedded within them, at what point do we walk away from the situation? Do we have to resolve every single conflict? Can we leave one or two dangling and not feel like we’re leaving things undone? Can we only resolve half of the conflicts? Can we resolve just one? How about none?

Enough, or Too Much?

The question of relevancy is key, here, and most importantly the question of who judges relevancy by what process. Does the GM have final say over whether the Big Bad is properly dissuaded from trying to eat the town? Can the players simply declare stakes to the tune of “we resolve this conflict” obscured to whatever degree by flowery in-game language (”We make sure the barbarians never come this way again!”)? What about in games, as in much Full Light, Full Steam play, where the players may not all know all of the details of the situation before they start trying to address it? Say the barbarians are drawn to the beseiged town because their souls have been stolen by the resident necromancer and they are powerless to resist. If the players don’t know that, how can they frame stakes to resolve the situation? Does the GM deny stakes and tell them they don’t understand what’s happening yet? Does the GM let them have their stakes and then just trample on them two scenes later when the barbarians return? Do the players force the GM to get creative in parsing their declared stakes with his non-public situation, so he can have them come back as, say, zombie barbarians?

Perhaps the answer varies game to game, and even table to table. A swashbuckling game favors heroism; a conspiracy game favors cunning. Your swashbuckling game may favor flamboyant stunts; mine may favor witty punchlines. One game may favor all-or-nothing climactic battles; another may favor whittling things down with time and great sacrifice. In my case today, FLFS is a game of broad strokes and bright color, and features a one-roll die check towards this purpose. Many things are resolved in a single die roll. Still, this isn’t the answer I want for the question. What determines whether the elements juxtaposed into conflict have been untangled to the point where the character and the object of desire are united? I don’t have a universal answer, and I want one.

Let’s take a look at Actual Play. Let’s take a look at other narratives, including film and television and novels. When I tried to end the game prematurely, I was responding to the fact that, by my accounting, the character+desire+obstacle knots had been unravelled, and that the colony, the Superb, and the relic ship were all safe in the players’ hands. By ’safe’ I mean that they would not be meaningfully threatened by the obstacle that was still lurking out there. It was the equivalent of letting the characters run into the castle stronghold ahead of the army and trying to end the story as they closed and barred the door. It was letting Frodo and Sam get to the foot of Mount Doom and then throwing up my hands crying, “You made it! Game over!” Yes, I think I was missing the entire point. Any good narrative doesn’t just show the characters manipulating the situation until it’s a foregone conclusion that the characters get their desires — a good narrative shows the characters attaining their desires. I was trying to skip over the players’ victory scenes, and it is the victory scene that determines that the conflict has been resolved — whether it’s the black pirate ship being rammed into the asteroid or the ewoks singing Jub Jub. So perhaps it’s a matter of framing that victory scene, according to the rules of the game and your table. Once you do that, you’ve won. If this is the right of it, that means that framing scenes is some powerful mojo — the final step of resolving conflicts. I’ll have to think on that one.

Depleting Situation

There’s more than one part of the question, however. As for how many conflicts of a situation must be resolved in order to extinguish that situation, let’s consider some actual play. The game last night had three conflicts, at least in terms of its Engineered Situation. The first conflict was whether or not the colony would be evacuated. The second conflict was whether or not the Superb would put itself in harm’s way. The third conflict was who would claim the alien ship as their prize. When they PCs took the American captain hostage, the colony was evacuated, the Superb was cutting the head off of their potential competition, and the alien ship was more or less theirs. But you see how only the first one of those was anywhere near decisive? They had the colonists in the cargo bay; the colony was evacuated. But the Superb hadn’t really taken any risks or run away from any risks, yet. Likewise, the alien ship hadn’t really been fought for; the PCs in fact had only just realized that there was even something to fight over. The additional two scenes addressed those dangling threads — the alien ship was pilotted back towards earth and the Superb had turned the competition into a smear on the rocks. Once all three conflicts had been resolved decisively, the game was very much over, and the conclusion was much more satisfying.

This was a single-situation game; there are no plans to continue with these characters. If we wanted to, though, I’m sure we could have created another situation with new conflicts that took some of their power from the events of the first situation. The PCs had destroyed two American ships and captured three Americans as prisoners of war; they had an unhappy utopian colony in their landing bay; they had a priceless relic ship in tow. New conflicts could certainly be created out of that grist, no problem. Would there have been any benefit in not resolving one or more of the conflicts then and bringing it forward into the next ‘episode’? While my gamer habits shake me by the shoulders screaming “Yes! Yes! Continuity! Long Plot Arcs! Yes!” I actually think the answer is no. Any of those characters could have come back; the ship and the asteroid and the American crews could have resurfaced; another conflict might involve the restored colony somewhere else. That’s continuity — the same elements in new conflicts creating a new situation. But you don’t have to postpone the resolution of the immediate conflicts in order to do that.

So for Full Light, Full Steam I’m thinking — a nice little checklist with all the conflicts in the situation, and you can just tick them off as they’re resolved. Once they’re all resolved, the situation is over. Other ’stuff’ might have been involved outside of those conflicts, but they weren’t the conflict in the game. Those looming issues are choice material to inform later conflicts in following situations.

All Roads Lead Back to Situation Creation

If I’m going to dance down this little road, though, it means I need to be careful about what conflicts are frontloaded into the system. Slap a warning sticker on the Engineering the Situation rules, something to the effect of “Watch out — the conflicts you put into a situation will actually get resolved when you hit ‘go!’” Don’t put Making Peace with your Father in the In slot if you want to kick that question around over the course of the entire game. Instead, put in Getting Father to See a Doctor or Resist Father’s Tempting Offer. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to toss Overthrow the Evil Empire into the first situation and… whoops, the game was supposed to be about hard-bitten rebels under an oppressive regime and we lost our oppressive regime right out of the gate!

To some extent this is covered by Thematic Batteries, which persist situation to situation, and inspire each situation created. These are the templates for the flow of the game, and conflicts created from them should always provide an instance where the battery is relevant, not target the battery itself. It’s dirty pool if I set up a conflict where Judson’s character, with the battery American, has to deal with the revelation that he’s not actually American — although a conflict where his nationality is called into question is perfectly legitimate. Even if, through the course of the situation with his questionable nationality, it turns out he isn’t an American, it’s the struggle through that process which is the conflict, not the aftermath. He might even opt to swap out that battery at the end of that situation, but he would do so at his discretion and after having played through the events that led up to it. Alternately, he could keep American even though it wasn’t true, or rework it to reflect his history with the nationality. If the example isn’t working for you, replace “American” with “Brave,” “Noble Blood,” or “Closet Homosexual.”

One of the edit notes that I have to add in the post-playtest edit is that the Drama dial is a question of “How hard do you want it to be to be your character?” and that fits in here. With the drama dial cranked, your thematic batteries are relevant in problematic ways — patriots are faced with traitorous old friends; brave heroes are maligned as cowards. Thematic batteries directly inspire the object of desire (regain my Honor!) or the obstacle to that desire (my Arrogant Assurance gets in the way). With the drama dial on a lower setting, thematic batteries are relevant in complementary ways — patriots rally mobs of Britons to victory, and brave heroes display acts of derring-do. There, thematic batteries inspire indirectly: the object of desire is something agreeable to your batteries (save my fellow Cornishmen) or the obstacle is vulnerable to your batteries (it just so happens I’m a Decathlete!). Whichever the case, such conflicts can be resolved through the course of play without crippling later play — in fact, resolving these conflicts inform later play and develop the characters as you go.

I Do Go On, Don’t I?

It never fails; every time I turn around there’s yet one more thing that needs a little deeper rewrite in the post-playtest edit. I’ll be taking a hard look at the new scene framing rules via the scrip to make sure they don’t kill victories like I tried to last night; I’ll need to restructure the creating conflicts from inspirations section from Engineering the Situation; I’ve got to focus that Drama segment and see if the other parameters can be retooled similarly, and strengthen the cross-references with situation. Above all, I’m increasingly convinced that I need a strucutred worksheet for situation creation which turns into a reference sheet for the Game Master to use in play. Something to keep track of open conflicts and to more clearly display NPC thematic batteries to the other players. The Situation Sheet, to complement the Character Sheet. As the other players keep track of their characters, the GM needs to keep track of the situation so he can bring it to a satisfactory end.

Actual Play report from the final playtest of Full Light, Full Steam posted on the KP forums and on the Forge.

Now I wade into the post-playtest edit. Wish me luck!

Ludanta Retero. loo DAWN ta ree TIER oh. It’s Esperanto!

Lud- is “play” or “game.”
-ant- makes it a present participle.
-a makes it an adjective.

Ret- is “net” and is colloquially used for the internet.
-er- makes it a smaller piece of a larger thing.
-o makes it a noun.

This is my little corner of the net about playing games.

So Andy’s actually had to take out the big Moderator Mallet on Story Games for the thread Games and Gaming: Ready made out of the box?. The thread is on 24 hour hold and he suggests that the participants take the definitional question out into the blogosphere. Sounds good to me. Here’s my take:

“Out of the Box” is a meaningless term that is based on a faulty assumption — that playing a roleplaying game consists of following procedures outlined in a book and no others. A game playable “Out of the Box” ostensibly has everything you need to play already included. This is an impossibility. Roleplaying games, by their natures, require player investment. Player investment, in turn, requires the players to have something to invest. That something always comes from outside of the box.

Example the First:
Candyland can be played out of the box. Here’s your playing piece, here’s the board, here’s a deck of cards. A computer could play this game. When real people play this game, they are doing one of two things: (a) developing their color-recognition skills, assuming they are small children, or (b) socializing with the other players and using the board game as a pretext for interaction. This is the stupid-simple case, but Monopoly works the same way. Ever played Monopoly against a computer opponent? Using just the published rules and the tiniest bit of code for bidding on properties, a computer opponent is just as good as a flesh-and-blood person. The decisions that players make do not require any real-world experience or knowledge of real estate or even basic strategy; nothing from outside the box is required by the operation of the game.

Example the Second:
A roleplaying game — let’s say Capes — cannot be played outside the box. Click-and-locks, index cards, dice, and tokens are insignificant markers of significant elements of the fiction. Those elements of the fiction are provided by the players. Players must bring information, knowledge, experience, and judgement from outside the “box” into the game or else nothing can happen. From creating a conflict to taking an action, player input almost always comes from outside. A computer cannot play this game, because the computer can’t formulate, “I’m putting out this conflict because it will make the other players care enough to invest in it because their characters are all keyed into this central theme, so then I can harvest a whole lot of tokens off of it.” The game requires human input and human investment.

Now, I pitted two board games against a roleplaying game. By no means am I suggesting that board games are universally playable out of the box. Games like Pit, any trick-taking card game, and a number of poker variants, not to mention Go, all require out-of-game input in order to play, and cannot be played out of the box. However, I can’t think of any roleplaying game that can be played out of the box, simply because the foundational act of role-playing fundamentally requires input from outside the box.

But Josh, you may be saying, all of that isn’t what the question is about. The question is about the rules of the game! And here we come to the real stumbling block. Are we talking about the rules presented in the book or are we talking about the system used in the game? These are not the same thing. One may be based in part off of the other, but the two are never identical.

Game designers sweat and toil to create a set of rules that work together, creating synergetic effects and guiding play in desired directions. Game players use rules to inspire, structure, and adjudicate the fiction that they create. However, the set of rules that the players use — the System — is broader than the set of rules that the designers provide. Every time. The decisions that the players make are rational decisions based on principles that are relatively persistent. You have no idea how many scrappy, cynical, loud-mouthed ideogogues I’ve played through the years. No game rule in any book ever told me to play such a character, and yet I have done it consistently for a long time. Similarily, good GMs and players have been using flags long before Chris Chinn identified and named the phenomenon. A friend of mine, for a third example, has everybody at the table vote for the best roleplayer at the end of each session, and the winner gets a candybar and bragging rights; they do this every game, regardless of what other rules they are using from other sources. These are rules, and these are parts of the System in use at gaming tables around the world.

The “Out of the Box” proposition suggests that the rules in the book can become the system of a game without any interpretation, modification, or addition. While this may be an admirable goal, it’s also impossible to accomplish. All games are individual creations of their players, who take inspiration from multiple sources. One source may be more prominent in a given game than others — a “Dogs in the Vineyard game” may base most of its System on the rules presented in the book Dogs in the Vineyard, but it cannot and will not take all of its System from that book. Vincent knows this; flip through Dogs sometime and look at how many times he references the play group and their preferences, advises everyone to pay attention to their fellow players, and explicitly recognizes that the interpretation of the rules is the responsibility of the players. It doesn’t work any other way.

Nir Shiffer, who started the thread that spawned all of this, said, “My position was that given what I’d like to do with a game, I prefer a system that does this while requiring as little alteration as possible. The ideal system, then, would be one that I wouldn’t have to change at all.” I do think that he’s assuming that system is presented in a book, which I’d quibble with, but on the whole, I can stand behind such a statement in a few different ways.

The ideal System in play does not require changes in the midst of play. Hear, hear! If you can fine-tune your System to do what you and your friends want and do it consistently, then bully for you! If everything that you’re going to encounter already has a provision waiting for it, and everybody’s on board with those provisions, your play is going to move like greased lightning. I suspect that a lot of gaming groups around the world are already there (Emily’s article on the Ennead comes to mind). However, this is system in play, not rules presented in a book.

The ideal gamebook presents a set of rules that can be implemented as the System of a game without any changes at all. I’m perfectly fine with this as an ideal, much like never giving up, but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually acheivable. Unattainable ideals are good — it means we never reach the destination and continue on the journey, and I’m all good with that. Further, challenging those ideals is a continual process that lets us further refine our understanding of how games really work — that is, in fact, what you and I are doing right now in this article. Recognizing that this is an impossible ideal is important, though, else we become fanatics and veer off into crazyland.

The ideal gamebook presents a set of rules that can be implemented, with other rules that come from different sources, in a System-in-play without changing any rules from the book. This works for me, too, and this is a worthy and attainable goal for game designers. This is providing people with tools that don’t need to be jury-rigged in order to operate, tools with access ports for the other tools and rules that come from other sources, tools that work. I suspect this is mostly what Nir and others mean when they say “Out of the Box.”

So why am I railing against using this “Out of the Box” term? Because it short-changes players. It denigrates their creativity. It does not recognize that players are being creative and taking control of their own fun at the table. It suggests that all they are doing is following rules, that the high-almighty gamebook is the sole source of good times, and if you’re not having fun what you need is a better gamebook. That is all utter crap. I’m sure that’s not what Nir means — not at all — but I think it’s a dangerous possibility if we start thinking that we game designers are packaging up experiences and selling them to players.

Games don’t come in boxes. Stuff to play games with come in boxes. Games are created by playing them.

It feels like I just finished a playtest. Oh, that’s because I just did.

Now that FLFS is going into edits-n-art, Agora is jumping up and down like an unruly younger brother demanding attention. I’ve put things together into a legible and quite possibly playable format, and posted it up for interested parties to download. Details can be found on the Agora Playtest page.

The official playtest window is now through June 30th, and I am quite merrily putting participants on a playtester’s byline in the finished product. The materials are freely downloadable, and if you want to take a look-see, you are of course under no obligation to do anything other than, you know, tell everyone you know how awesome the game is.

The official playtest window for Full Light, Full Steam ends this weekend (although it looks like one final playtest will take place next week) so I will be returning to the FLFS manuscript with great trepidation to rake through it for one more editorial pass, correcting problems, and adding a couple more segments.

It also means that I’m arranging for art, and I’ve got three awesome folks lined up — I’m really excited to see what they’ll turn out. In order to make sure we’re all on the same page, I’ve put together a little art guidelines package, part of which is some image files of solar steamers and their escorts and fighters. Since I was already doing these up, I thought I’d post them here so the likes of you can see my l33t threedee modeling skizillz using ten-year-old rendering software. This is why I’m getting other folks to do art for me.

The HMS Exemplar, a generic solar steamer
click the image for a compilation of four different views

A generic escort (technically, a Leo classification) — no solar sails because they’re battery-powered. Did I mention “batteries” are giant springs? Heh, that still amuses me.

A wing of fighters and an escort. The fighters are Rollickers, not that it matters in the least.