Played the sixth session of the Agora v2.8 rules this evening. We managed three scenes in three hours, which is better (we’ve been managing two scenes in three hours) but not where I want the game to be. For all of its complexity in play, I am trying to make it relatively quick — I want scenes to range from 20-40 minutes, not an hour.

And so this is the place, right, in game design where you have a relatively functional set of mechanics, but it’s not firing on all the cylinders. You playtest and playtest and playtest, making rules tweaks and adjustments, and you keep plugging away at the playtests, and eventually you start to lose sight of the target. The game generates play, sure, and you become very familiar with the type of play that the game is (presently) producing… but that’s not it, and you’re not really sure what “it” is supposed to feel like any more.

And then you wonder if there really is an “it” that you were aiming for when you wrote the original version of the rules three years ago, because at this point you can’t remember what the impetus was, except that part of the rules started out as a little mental exercise, a joke really, and kind of grew from that, and maybe that’s all the game really is: a joke grown out of proportion. Was there ever a game? Was there even an idea of what the game would look like?

And you look at your sales record, and you look at all the avalanche of games that are now being produced, and you wonder if the effort you’re putting into this is worth any expected payoff — not just in terms of sales, but in play and players and fellow-gamers and sharing something that you think is cool. Because, if you can’t remember what that thing was that you want to share, what are you even working towards, here?

…

And then you notice that it’s two in the morning, and you should probably be in bed already, and you should take it on faith that you’re not a moron and there is an experience that your game is pointing at, and you’re probably missing the forest for the trees at this point. The playtesters keep coming back, right, so the game is entertaining enough — just with rough spots that need smoothing out. And after the playtest, you had some really thought-provoking discussion and you took good notes and really, you should come back to this in the morning with fresh eyes.

And you tell yourself that, but you don’t get up and go to bed. You sit and you stare at your notes and the character sheets, and you keep wondering: what is this game supposed to do?

So last night we’re playtesting Agora, and Alex and Judson are all, “Man, goals should be, like, more important. They should be, like, derived from your ideals.”

To which I responded: “Well yeah, they should… oh wait, I didn’t actually write that down, did I?”

No wonder my players were not playing like shark movie victims!

So in Agora, when you roll a 1, something happens. When you roll a 1 in ideals, that die goes immediately to your fallout pool. Since 1s never reside in your ideals pool, you can’t auto-counter 1s that your opponents place. You can use your single roll in your counter in the hopes of getting a 1; if you do, you counter… and any die that rolled 1 goes into fallout. You want to have the largest ideals pool, because then you can identify new opportunities, but going after the largest pool too lustily can lose you all your dice to fallout. So the ideals 1s work. I like ‘em.

Contrast with rolling a 1 in resources. That die goes into your burnout pool, which is a little more heinous than your fallout pool. You will probably lose that die off of your character sheet. In order to balance that consequence, 1s in resources are wild, and they place a wild token on an opportunity as they go to burnout. As noted above, these wild 1s are also harder to counter. This is all fine and dandy so far.

Except in the opening of a scene, when there are not yet any opportunities on the table. What happens when you roll a 1 in resources and there is no opportunity to place that wild token on?

The Old Way was that rolling a 1 in resources allowed you to, on your next turn, create a new opportunity if there wasn’t already one on which you could place your wild. This was an exception to the “owner of the largest ideals pool can identify new opportunities” rule. It was… clunky. I thought the clunkiness would be okay since this wouldn’t happen often, but no — it’s usually about 50% of the scenes have their initial opportunity identified by a 1 in resources rather than ideals pools. This makes it hard to learn the game, since you very well may be faced with a weird exception case right off the bat. Also, this annoys me.

So first, the No Opportunity, Die Lost fix goes like this: when you roll 1s in your resource pool, they are immediately applied to opportunities. If you roll more than one 1, you may place only one 1 on each opportunity. If you have any 1s left over, they are simply lost to burnout. This is the simplest fix, and it’s also the harshest. Players will be losing dice to burnout with no benefit to balance things out. This is a potentially crippling disincentive to roll dice, and it may stall the game as players try not to roll their resources unless there is a opportunity already out there, or they have the largest ideals pool.

Alternately, there is the Unused Wilds Hang Around fix, in which any 1s you roll in resources stick around in your resource pool, “locked” into the 1 result, and will be swept into your burnout pool at the end of the scene. You can place them at any time, and it’s to your plain advantage to do so, since you’re losing the dice so you might as well get some use out of them. This is slightly clunky, and diminishes the fun that I find in burnout dice — they are immediate flashes of self-destructive efficacy, the blowout that propels you forward in the short term at the cost of a long term loss. Keeping your exciting blowout around for use later deflates this a good deal. Also, keeping track of which dice in your resources pool are locked and which aren’t would be annoying.

This brings us to the Unusable Burnout Double Up fix, where, if you roll a 1 in resources and there is nowhere to place it, that die doubles into two dice, which you roll into your resource pool (without rerolling the rest of the pool). Any 1s that you roll also double. This creates a sort of ‘charging up’ thing. So this gives you a distinct benefit for rolling a 1, but it removes the disadvantage in rolling a 1 (since you’re not losing the die). Alternately, you could throw the die that rolled a 1 into burnout and then introduce two new dice, so your burnout pool is growing along with your souped-up resource pool… but that solution seems to be getting excessively fiddly. And all of this fix is introducing a whole new rule to the game, rather than changing the rules that exist so that this situation doesn’t arise in the first place. This rule would not be mirrored in ideals, which is also a symmetry problem.

I could also combine the No Opportunity, Die Lost and Unusable Burnout Double Up fixes so that you can place one 1 per opportunity out there, but any excess are subjected to the double-up process. If there are 0 opportunities out there, any 1s you roll double up. The doubling-up process would not be available to any player with the largest ideals pool, though, which is kind of an annoying disincentive to have the largest ideals pool — unless you are not obliged to identify new opportunities, which seems a reasonable middle ground.

Or, another slight twist, making simpler rules: 1s rolled in burnout either give you a wild to be used immediately or give you two additional dice. In other words, whether or not there is a goal out there you could place on, you can, instead, double up the die. This makes d4s kind of crazy, since seeding your resource pool with a couple d4s early in the scene means you’ll be getting 1s on them whenever you reroll your ideals pool. They can double up repeatedly, resulting in a ton of d4s in your pool — and also in your burnout pool. There would be a good incentive to place those dice (so they wouldn’t reroll and generate more burnout). This is also, though, a rule not mirrored with rolling ideals — unless ideals double up when they go to fallout, which may or may not be a good thing. The only way to tell? Playtest.

So I’m hip-deep in Agora, these days, doing a long-term playtest that we are rebooting on Monday. We’ll be playing version two, draft eight, or as I like to call it, Agora 2.8. There’s so much about this game that I don’t really know where to begin.

So it is a very crunchy, very fiddly, very competitive dice game. You literally rip stats off of other characters and add them to your own sheet. The trick, of course, is balancing the different roles of this extended grudge match so that everything is fair, gameplay is enjoyable, and so on. That’s harder than it sounds. For instance, my most recent bugaboo was making sure that surprising turnabouts are surprising but not crippling. In a player-versus-player scenario, it’s all too easy to make blindsiding (surprise, you lose!) a valid strategy. Blindsiding is really fun, but being blindsided is not. It’s a good thing to do to NPCs, who don’t care. So the trick has been to pace things out so while you can get surprised, you can still react — and if you’re savvy enough, overcome.

Up until recently, I had split significance and consequence into two steps in an attempt to foster this pacing. In other words, in turn 1 you said what you were doing (the significance) and in turn 1+x you said what that meant mechanically (the consequence). So you’d first say, “I’m planting bombs in your fusion reactor,” and then later say, “This will destroy your Fusion Power Plant 4d8 stat.” Which worked fine, as long as all the players kept a really tight control over making sure their eventual dice spoils matched up with their initial goals. However, multiple goals would pile up on one opportunity, and when spoils were later applied, they often matched some of the goals but not the others. That, and this is a highly competitive game, so relying on the players to keep a focus on story… well, let’s just say that didn’t always happen.

Repeatedly, my playtesters kept asking to assign both significance and consequence at the same time, and I kept balking. A large part of Agora is pacing, drawing things out so that whole giant conflicts aren’t pre-played out of existence. I wanted the development of worry: “The luddites are infilitrating the nuclear plant! Oh my god, they have bombs! They’ve rigged it all to explode in cascade failure!” My initial idea was that, by delaying the consequence, you fostered a sense of suspense. You wouldn’t know what was up at first. So when I got asked if you could just do significance and consequence all at once, I said no. Many, many times over.

See, the thing is, from a game perspective, you want to know what’s at stake up front. In fact, perhaps not even want, but need to know. So the criticism was valid. From the perspective of the stories I wanted this game to tell, though, you don’t know everything that’s at stake up front. I thought I had hit one of those concept-killing contradictions until I realized that what looked like a contradiction wasn’t. There’s a big difference between knowing everything that’s at stake, and knowing what is at stake right now. Thus, escalation was born.

When you first start off, you declare what you’re doing (significance) and starting spoils for winning (consequence). What can be assigned as starting spoils is rather limited. So everybody knows what’s at stake right now, but they don’t know what might be at stake by the time the problem ends. Because, through the course of play, players can escalate things, piling on more dice and making the spoils more interesting. It’s now perfectly possible to start off with some innocuous-looking spoils and then kick things into high gear by roping in that nuclear power plant later. The development of worry is intact, and the information flow necessary for the game is there.

This was also one of those rules fixes that snaps a disturbing number of things into place. I had had a grab-bag of kinds of spoils, dice spoils (stealing other people’s stats) primary among them. I had no way of organizing them. I also had a play experience that sort of just… went, with no large-scale structure. And I had a ton of rules interactions — not so much a ton of rules, but a ton of ways that the rules interacted. Too many, certainly, for a new player to digest all at once. I worried about veteran players creaming and crippling new players in the first round. Escalation fixes them all.

You can escalate the same situation (the ‘opportunity’) more than once. Opportunities always start with dice spoils, but when you escalate, you can introduce all those other nifty kinds of spoils that were previously unorganized. And the different kinds of spoils are ranked, so you can only start affecting alliance memberships on the third and later escalations. You’ve got to build up to them. And — here’s the clincher — the number of times you can escalate an opportunity is limited by what round you are in. So those alliance memberships can’t be touched — can’t even be introduced into play — until the third round. And by the third round, all the new players should be familiar with the kinds of spoils they’ve been able to touch. The game unloads its rules element by element, piece by piece, with the result that — hopefully — new players won’t get creamed and crippled before they’ve even figured out how to complete a single goal.

Which is great! Except… it basically means restructuring the entire fifty-page rules document. I’m very excited by the possibility of clarifying so much… I’m just not looking forward to the massive editing job that’s in store for me.

At the very least, we’re going to playtest the damn thing before I spend hours moving blocks of text around…

Hi, remember me? I used to post a lot. Now I don’t; I have a job that actually requires my brain and a computer at home that’s less than reliable. But do not mistake my lack of posting for lack of work. Here’s a quick overview of what’s on my plate:

Story Games Names Project - Jason Morningstar asked me to do up the layout of this project. Like so many projects of its kind, this started as a simple idea and has mushroomed to stupid proportions. At last count, the book is going to weigh in at a little under 300 pages and have like 800 lists.

Sons of Liberty - The rules chassis turned out to be surprisingly functional the first time out; I’m tweaking the situation creation ruleset, and then the system will be done. Then I just have lots and lots of writing to flesh out the figures and world that the game takes place in. Sure would be nice to have a functional computer for that (come on, tax return!). It will be released in early 2008, just in time for election year madness.

Agora: how shall we live? - This game is on the back burner, due out in 2009. It is not being quiet over there on the back burner, however. I have a little flurry of notes scribbled on Post-Its regarding improvements for the game. When it rolls around into active development and then to publication, I expect this to be a very strong design. Very much looking forward to it.

Secret Project Keystone - This project, which started out as a flicker of an idea at GenCon SoCal, keeps leaping up to the forefront of my mind. It wants me to design it now. It will probably get its wish soon, although I have no idea where it will fit into Kallisti Press’ publication schedule. I’m going to be tight-lipped about details, but at this point it’s an unholy mashup of Dogs, Capes, Shadow of Yesterday and Primetime Adventures. I plan on spooning in more sources later; cause really, what’s the use of the shoulders of giants if we don’t scramble up on them every once in a while?

Dynasty - Play a dynasty of a pseudo-European noble house in a pseudo-Holy Roman Empire. Acquire lands and titles, backstab the other nobles in play, and so on, but never lose sight of your primary goal: ensure a robust line of succession. This card game is already finished and sitting on my hard drive. It just requires 155 full color cards, counters, a d20, and a box. It’s waiting for an infusion of capital.

Full Light, Full Steam: Tactical Card Game - This is just shaky notes at the moment. The current plan is back-burnered design on a lazy-slow schedule. When FLFS 2nd edition rolls out in 2010, I’ll be getting more art for the book. From the pile of art in the book I can derive art for the cards. At least, that’s the plan.

Playing! - I presently have FOUR regular gaming engagements: Tuesday Playtesting Circle, Wednesday Nobilis, Thursday Primetime Adventures: Conservancy of Gears, and Saturday Full Light, Full Steam. I’m also dumping geek-time into NerdSoCal.com and Nerdly Beach Party.

So in conclusion, I’m not quiet cause I’m not doing anything; I’m quiet because I’m too busy with other stuff. I am buried in projects, and I am loving every minute of it. At some point soon I’ll have Sons of Liberty in a more “public” phase where there will at least be stuff to share. I miss sharing stuff with all you guys, and I’m looking forward to doing more of it soon!

This idea for refining Agora came to me in the carwash yesterday.

In order to get the game to better address how shall we live? I’ve come to the conclusion that the PCs need to be working in/for/on a common population. Everybody doing their own thing and only interacting when they get around to feeling like it means the “we” part of the central question doesn’t really ever come up. It’s more exposition than interaction, and that’s what novels are for.

So my current model, which I know is too heavy-handed and will need to be retooled, is that the PCs are the members of the governing Council of a colony. They all still have wildly disparate agendas and beliefs; they’re just ostensibly working together. They are “on the same side” exactly as much as the Democrats and the Republicans are. I figure at some point I’ll figure out how to get armed hostilities and civil war jammed in there for good measure. In any case, the colony has a set of common Ideals and Resources itself that everybody can use. To be crude, the “goal of the game” is to reform the colony’s Ideals to be more to your character’s liking.

How it Works

Okay? So now the rules fiddling. Scrap the ‘on my turn, I do something and somebody sets up opposition for it.’ Little interaction, lots of mental stretching to figure out opposition, cludgy rules for when players are involved and on which side. All that? Trashcan.

Play takes place in a series of turns. A turn can be a month, it can be a year, whatever.

Phase One: What I’m Doing The first phase of the turn, everybody explains in short form what they’re doing, their plans, et cetera. This is pretty much just short-form exposition at this point, but I might retool it to be some sort of casual roleplay / kibitzing as the “Council” convenes.

Phase Two: Secretly Propose Conflicts Then everybody takes a 3×5 card and writes down a potential conflict. It can be based on somebody else’s plans; it can be wholly uninvolved. So “Morgan’s factories are sabotaged by ecoterrorists” works, but so does “Citizens are kidnapped by unknown assailants!” You put all these potential conflicts in a pile, shuffle them, and set them in the middle of the table, face down.

Phase Three: Draw Obstacle Cards Go around the table to figure out who will be running obstacles. Players may choose to take a card off of the stack. If you pull a card, you’re volunteering to run an obstacle. If you don’t like the card you pull, or if it’s not quite enough for you, you can pull a second card. You can either choose one or combine them to create your obstacle. You can keep pulling cards up to half of the deck. Go around the table until at least two players have cards they’re happy with (or the deck is exhausted).

Phase Four: Split Up PCs The players running obstacles then describe the very first hints of the problem that they will be running. The first reports of kidnappings, for instance. Or they can play coy and say that it’s just time to inspect the newly-built factories. Everybody then discusses who will go where, and the PCs split up to address the different problems. Additionally, the opposition players explain why their player character can’t possibly address the obstacle that they themselves are running. If you’re running an obstacle, your PC is obviously going to go address one of the other obstacles.

Phase Five: Address Conflicts Play then splits up, with a series of back-and-forth scenes. First the inspection party arrives at the factories. Roleplay a little there, and then switch over to the kidnapping investigators interviewing the first eye witnesses. Do that for a while, build up to something, and then switch back over to the factories. The opposition players run the obstacle in one scene and their characters in the other; maybe they can farm out NPCs to other players who don’t have PCs there. If you’re running an obstacle, you get more resources for each card you make use of. So if you’re just using one card, you get X dice. If you’re using two cards, you get X+Y dice. If three cards, X+Y+Z dice. And so on. Your goal as opposition is still to get the other players to roll in as many ideals as possible.

Players attempt to resolve the situation however they’d prefer: conquering it, convincing it, subverting it, whatever. They accrue fallout as before, and fallout may force them to rewrite their Ideals. If they succeed (ie, opposition die pool exhausted), they can harvest resources off of the obstacle and they can roll their burnout in order to rewrite the colony’s Ideals using keywords from their own Ideals. (You have, in effect, ‘proven’ that you’re right.) If the players failed, the opposition player might rewrite the colony’s Ideals or may force more fallout on the players (haven’t decided). Lastly, players can pass some of the harvested resources along to the communal colony resources (there will be no “bank”).

Phase Six: Clean Up And then there needs to be a winding-up phase where PCs can come together and bicker over each other’s actions. Obstacle cards that were not used are returned to their owners, who get a little recompense (and can use them again next turn; reused cards bestow more dice if used). Somewhere in here, perhaps in this clean-up phase, perhaps elsewhere, I want to have a ‘lock out’ mechanic where the players can deny each other the communal resources. So if I screwed up or blatantly pursued my own ideals at the expense of the colony’s welfare, you all can gang up on me and say that I can’t use the squadron of hover tanks any more. (I half-suspect that the civil war rules will be a heavy elaboration of the resource-denying rules.)

…But Will it Work?

So basically we’re talking multiple, rotating GM roles coupled with communal property/setting. I’ll try and beat the rules to the point where a single turn takes about an hour; a generic session can then involve a handful of turns. This should work best for four-to-eight players (with groups of two to five PCs for each obstacle). It should work passably for two and three; at two players, you’re just trading opposition, which can be fun; at three players, somebody’s always going solo hero. This restructuring may make it harder to play online as Thomas Robertson has been (sorry, Thomas), but I may look at some variant rules or something similar to preserve that aspect, since it’s pretty keen. If nothing else, there’s little reason why the “council” has to be the same set of people each turn.

The players still work as intermediaries between the world (embodied by the obstacles) and the colony (encoded in its resources and ideals), which is a cycle that I like. Players are proposing elements of the world/setting and then incorporating them into the overarching story of the colony. So there’s all kinds of yummy collaboration going on, guided and channeled by the game procedures. I may ditch the obstacle library, since any obstacle can “return” when somebody suggests it as a potential conflict. I don’t see any reason to maintain their initial sets of resources and positions for when they return.

I’m really excited about this retooling; I’m hoping that this will bring Agora more towards the ‘game’ end of the toy/game spectrum.

The official playtest window for Agora: how shall we live? was due to close June 30th, and so with my usual punctuality I will be closing it over the next week. This means a few things:

First and foremost, if you playtested Agora and you’d like to be credited as such, contact me (through email or a comment here) with your name and how you’d like it listed.

If you’ve got some burning observations about Agora, post it up at the Forge or Story-Games or the Kallisti Press forums or email me. I probably won’t be sinking my teeth into the Agora edits for a bit (I’m eyeball deep in FLFS edits and layout), but I’m keeping them handy for when I do.

If you’re in an ongoing playtest past the playtest’s close, I will be happy to hear about it and any further insights you discover; however, all bets are off now as to whether or not said insights will get to me in time to actually affect the first edition of the book.

Lastly, the playtest document is going to be taken off the website in a week or so, so if you’ve been meaning to take a look at it, now’s the time before it’s gone.

Thank you to everybody who participated in the playtest! I’ve already received a lot of very good and solid accounts and advice and I am positive that the finished product will be a better game for the experience.

So Mo is advocating in Getting Around to (One of) the Point(s) (and I thought I liked parentheses) that players can, if they don’t like how the published system does something, do it another way and get the same result.

Judson is talking in the Story Games thread The Akido of Game Design about how games can be designed with the naive assumption that all rules will be followed, with the even more naive intent to make the rules unbreakable, or turn the whole thing around and design the game rules so that “exploiting” them is how the designer intends it to be played.

It’s not a new idea that players will ignore rules they don’t like. However, I’ve read a big pile of posts and threads and articles where indie players and designers avow that they play their games “exactly according to the rules” or “exactly as the designer intended” which is, when you get right down to it, more or less impossible. (Short version: authorial intent has an influence on reader reception, but it does not and cannot dictate reception exactly due to the very nature of language.) Players will interpret rules, even if they don’t introduce formal house rules.

A great example of this is Lacuna Part 1, where Jared refuses to allow players the illusion that they’re following the rules exactly and producing a play experience as he intended. How you play Lacuna will be determined by your personal idiosyncracies, and in fact how you play says something about you as a person and as a gamer.

Process and Product

Rules channel play. They determine not only what happens but how it happens, at what cost and with what side effects, guiding players to interact with each other in specific ways. Rules are about creating a product and provide a process to get there. Players select rules based on both what those rules produce and how they go about it, and players abandon rules when they either produce something they don’t like or when they do it in a way they don’t like.

Mo’s central conceit is that the point of a game is to produce a certain end result — a product. Dogs is designed to put players in a situation where their beliefs are challenged and they must either escalate or let their beliefs be trampled on. Primetime Adventures is designed to foster a groupthink atmosphere where the players collaborate on creating a television serial. And so on. There are many different techniques (processes) that will get players to that same end product, and different players have different technique preferences. A given game book may offer a desirable end product but an undesirable process to get there. Mo’s argument is that, assuming that the social contract allows for it, players may elect to use processes beyond those presented in the book to get to the end product that is.

Judson and later comments in the thread point out the potential disconnect between the product that a book promises and the actual product of the process the book provides. If a game says that it is about epic derring-do and then hands you a character who has trouble killing rats, well, there’s a problem there. You might want to modify or abandon the process that ends with your character covered in rat bites. The designer might see you changing things willy-nilly and put out a new edition. The new rules do not make your character triumph over the rat population; they make it harder for you the player to change things around in the published process (or make changing this less effective). Or to put it more kindly, the designer may try to provide a system that does not “need” to be modified in order for it to be played. I suspect that this impulse usually comes from a Design What Doesn’t Matter philosophy — you needn’t be spending your time worrying about rules when you should be playing.

One strand of indie design inverts the problem by putting a focus on creating a set of rules that “hits the target” of a specific intended type of play. These games provide a rule set which encourages players through overt and subtle means to play a certain way and get a certain result — the process rewards the players to keep them on-target to create the end product. This shifts the emphasis from liberating players so that they can create the end product on their own to showing players how to reliably create the end product by specific processes. While the end product is still the eventual goal, these games focus on the process that creates it; in many ways it is not an exagerration to say that the game is the process.

Which seems to bring Mo’s proposal in direct conflict with this design philosophy. If the game is about the process, about the steps and obstacles and progression towards the end result, avoiding that process in favor of another one is, in effect, playing another game entirely. One of my own designs, Agora, is an extreme example of this. One of the prime tenants of Agora is that in order to create any progress, you have to risk what you’ve already got. This is exemplified in the dice mechanic, in which any die roll risks losing that die. You roll in dice representing the things that you are risking in the conflict, use those dice to make the other side lose dice, and whoever runs out of dice first loses their stakes. Usually players will surrender their stakes rather than continue on, since the risks can easily outweigh the potential gains. The product of the game is to put yourself and your followers on the line for your vision of future society; the process is a pretty straightforward matter of risking dice representing things that you care about.

Now, I can easily see players disliking that process. Deciding to sidestep that process in pursuit of the same product, though, changes things. Resolving all conflicts in, say, open negotiation as to what you’ll lose in order to gain your stakes, would result in an almost completely different game — much more staid, controlled, less dangerous, less risky. And that would be perfectly fine.

Publishing Books, Popularizing Games

I am not going to explode in a puff of smoke if somebody plays my game differently than I intended it to be played. There’s no reason whatsoever for me to point out that they are playing it wrong, that they are ignoring important rules, or that they won’t possibly enjoy themselves playing that way. Most likely, they are enjoying themselves playing that way; that’s why they play that way. And in fact, if somebody out there took something I wrote and played something based off of that material and had fun, that’s a cause for celebration! I’ll more likely ask to hear what they did and what happened, because that’s absolutely awesome. I will no more count it a failure than I would count it a failure if someone used a sculpture that I made as a decorative doorstop (which, for reference, my dad still does ten years after I made that sculpture). Here’s why: I design games and I write books. I don’t write games. So when somebody reads my book and enjoys a game that comes out of it, I count that as a success.

Mo’s proposal that an undesirable process can be sidestepped in favor of a more desirable process is not (generally speaking) changing the rules of the game being played. It’s simply using rules that weren’t presented in the book. Back to the Lumpizzle Schiprizzle: “System is the processes by which the players agree on the characteristics and development of fictional content.” This has no direct correlation to the rules presented in any book anywhere. This refers only to what happens at the table. If Mo’s table uses some rules they found in a book and some other rules that they found somewhere else and they have fun doing it, that’s awesome. If the end product of following these patchwork processes resembles the end product promised by the book in question, that’s just gravy. What’s important is that the end product they create is something that they all want to produce and the process that they use to get there was entertaining for everybody at the table.

The book is not the game, and that has some pretty significant repercussions for the production of the book. This is actually a portion of the publishing process where the mainstream guys are leagues ahead of the indie guys. A book is a product sold to customers and read by consumers; a game is an experience enacted by players. That the players may be the consumers or that the customers are buying the book in order to play the game does not equate the book and the game any more than a chicken farmer made my dinner last night. The book and the game are related, certainly, but they are not the same.

Some people buy the book without playing the game. Some people buy the book without any intention of ever playing the game. There are a ton of books out in the world that were written and published in order to be sold, not played. The obvious examples are tie-in novels the likes of which White Wolf and Alderac both produced with a good measure of success. Less obvious examples are sourcebooks which provide flavor and background, whether or not the events of an actual game ever take place in that location or directly concern the faction or technology or whatever the sourcebook is about. These books provide two things. The first is simple: context. If I’m playing Changeling, the material I read in Kithbook: Redcap will be useful to me even when I’m not playing a redcap or opposite a redcap. The second is a little more amorphous: inspiration, both in terms of fictional content and in terms of process. I have not yet played Exalted or The Shadow of Yesterday, but having bought and read the books, the content has inspired me to create epic storylines like Exalted and tie flags to character advancement like TSOY. And to be perfectly frank, White Wolf and Clinton have my money despite me not playing their games.

Some people play the game without buying the book. This may sound odd, but this is actually the majority of gamers in the world — one guy buys the book and plays with his four friends. One sale, five players. I’ve played Nine Worlds without having read more than a paragraph out of the book. I’m sure you’ve played games that you haven’t read the book for, too. From the designer’s standpoint, they’re putting a lot of hard work into that game’s design that will be enjoyed by people who have not given them any money. For some altruistic souls, that may be fine, but there is also some more pragmatic considerations taken into account. Most obviously, simple play can lead to later sales. Games of all stripes operate on this principle, from indie games to board games to sports (gotta buy a baseball mitt). If it was fun to play the game that Jimmy brought, I’ll buy the necessary materials to play it on my own later. Additionally, this can generate cross-sales. Nine Worlds was all sorts of fun at Gamex; I’ll buy Dust Devils to see how that plays out, too. Lastly, this also helps build brand recognition, a high-level concern that the indie publishers are only starting to realize exists. To take a page from the web comics guys, it’s not a stretch to consider selling teeshirts, mugs, and dice bags imprinted with logos, characters, and memorable quotes, and sell them not only to people who’ve bought the books, but to people who have only ever played the game. The game itself can be an icon.

Designing for Players Not Using the Published System

So once we start looking at the book as a separate monster from the game, players disregarding portions of the book in favor of personalizing their game seems like less and less of a crisis. In fact, once you separate the book and the game, the design that goes into the book is pretty profoundly altered.

First, though, the absolute rock-bottom basics. You’re providing a book and making claims about what the book is good for. If you’re a good indie designer and have that target of intended play, the text that you provide must give clear instructions on how to follow the intended processes to get the intended end product. Players won’t do everything “right” all the time, even when they’re trying, but the text needs to get them to the point where they’re performing processes accurately enough to get the end product. In the most basic terms, you promise something (a play experience) and you need to deliver on it. Simple.

However, let’s elaborate on that a bit. You are promising a play experience; you are selling a book. When you sell anything, you present its features — this sportscar goes 120 bazillion miles a second — and so the features of the thing that you are selling — the book — are the things that need to be what’s featured. So in order to make a solid sales demonstration, you need to present how the book provides the game experience. Put the book in the potential customer’s hands; have them read a pertinent section explaining a rule or look up the cost of whatever they want their character to buy or do. Put the quick-reference chart out of the book in front of them. Send them home with the character sheet out of the back of the book. Link the book to the game. Which is all salesmanship and I was talking about design, right? I still am. In order to do any of that you need to have that easily-read rules section, equipment costs table, quick-reference chart, and character sheet. In order to sell the book as essential to the play experience, the book needs to be essential to the play experience. And you can’t make that essential link as long as you’re considering them the same thing in the first place.

However, once you’ve made that sale and the customer takes the book home, hopefully to become a consumer and play the game with others, then’s when the real design work pays off. Because the players are not going to play the game exactly as you intended. Not only may they want to make a few little changes to accomodate their social reality, but they will, inescapably, interpret the rules as they read them. The ensuing game is what sells their friends on buying the book; it’s what sells the original customer on buying a second book; it’s what sells everybody on buying into the brand.

So you give them options. At any given time in any given game, any given player should have more than one option. Options should be within and without the fiction of the game. Mo should be able to call down a conflict and throw her dice around and she should be able to offer up a mutually beneficial and mutually appreciated alternative to rolling dice. Problems encountered in the game should allow for multiple approaches, not only in terms of in-character action (sneak past or overpower?) but also in mechanics and interactions at the table (roll dice or narrate or cut scene?). Players should have resources available to them that can swing results in their favor when it’s important and some means to signify when the results aren’t important. And lastly, leave one option open, unconstrained by the processes presented in the book — the “Say Yes” portion of “Say Yes or Roll Dice.” Consider it an expansion port that they can plug in whatever procedures they’d like to add.

Additionally, design with a space for player input to make a significant difference in the game. Again, this goes for both in-fiction events and at-the-table interactions. If a game design is a rattling machine that always does one thing, it’s entertaining once per playgroup, and the players are engaged as an audience experiencing a spectacle rather than as creators collaborating on something personally significant. This can be as high-brow as thematic concerns that the story will address in play to the down-and-dirty simple mechanics of spreading points out on a character sheet. The more input each player has, the more that player owns the ensuing experience and it becomes not something that happened to them, but something that they did themselves. Not only will this reduce players abandoning the published system, but even when they do supplement the provided processes with their own stuff, the tie-in that the design guides them to make will keep them from straying so far that they miss the intended target that you’ve promised them when they bought the book.

The point, for both options and input, is that these provisions supercede silly little things like how many dice to roll when. Options and input empower the players to take the processes provided in the book and run even further afield from what you might have intended. It makes the game about the players making choices about the play experience they are creating. And it makes the game less about what the designer originally intended. It is providing the seven-cornered cube, and inviting the players — and the readers — to take what you started and create out of it something profoundly original.

And how much better is that than getting some people you don’t know on the other side of the planet to roll dice in a certain way?

Following Shreyas’ comments and some poking and prodding of my own, I realized that I’d left out explicit Surrender rules, and attached a few little bits and pieces there that should make things a little more interesting.

The following new section, and a couple smaller fixes, are included in the Playtest document.

Surrender

Scenes end when one side decides not to continue and surrenders. Players may only surrender between exchanges of Challenges and Stands; players may not surrender instead of taking a Stand. When a player surrenders, they lose their stakes but do get to narrate a cliffhanger to the end of the scene.

If a player decides to surrender when it is their turn to make a Challenge, they may attempt to gain a Surrender Epiphany. This is an advantage to be used later that the character is able to extract from the conflict despite losing the stakes. The surrendering player rolls their Burnout pool. If any of the dice roll ones, the player may keep one of them to use as an epiphany in a later scene.

If the player is the last to surrender out of a conflict, they earn the right to narrate a cliffhanger, a turnabout at the end of the scene that introduces a surprise or new element to the scene. A good cliffhanger suggests later scenes and conflicts. Cliffhangers cannot negate the stakes that the other side wins, but they can complicate them.

Example: Surrender
Jason can see that he’s going to run out of dice if he tries to push through another round. He does not think that he’ll be able to get Nathan to roll in his fourth ideal, so he decides to surrender. He waits until the round is over before he surrenders so he can try for an epiphany.

For the epiphany, he rolls his Burnout pool, which consists of a 1d4, a 1d6, and 2d8. He rolls two ones and keeps one of them as an epiphany. The die is recorded on the obstacle sheet for when the Horizon’s Teeth is used again in a later scene. It might be used to narrate a collapse of mining tunnels, some misplaced explosives, or similar advantage.

As his cliffhanger, he narrates that from their vantage atop the mountain range, the miners spot smoke from a settlement’s fires off in the distance. They have neighbors — and judging by the amount of noise they’ve been making, the neighbors know they’re there.

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.