Fast and loose with the rules

Shane

My partner and I played the Dungeons and Dragons, but the board game version.

My quick review of this game is that you can play this and have fun, but only if you put the effort in. Much like tabletop D&D, without the enthusiasm, you’re just sitting around the table hitting a goblin with your sword each round. With the enthusiasm, the dungeon master can pull out a rather interesting story and give the cardboard a life.

It’s a cooperative game, for 2-5 players that feels a lot like Dungeons and Dragons. After playing this, you’ll likely wanna throw off the shackles of that rule book, and jump into real D&D. (Where, ironically the rule book is much bigger, but you’re far more free.)

Rules as building blocks

The rule book for this game isn’t very long. It’s intentionally kept manageable in order to be accessible as a family game. You won’t be spending hours reading the rules before you start, like you could when playing the original version. However, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with just those rules. There are still gaps where they could probably add in more rules (looting a dead goblin, for instance), so we found ourselves making up rules as we went along to fill those gaps.

It’s interesting because it didn’t feel like the game was broken because we had to do that. We could have played entirely within the rules: “looting” isn’t an action that your character can do. It’s not mentioned in the book, so it’s out. That would have been fine. They couldn’t really call themselves a D&D game if the rules really were that ridged though.

There was one occasion where I wanted my wizard to fire her bow through a doorway, where a companion was standing. My partner double checked his rule book (the DM has their own copy, with extra content), and couldn’t find anything about being able to shoot through someone, narrowly avoiding them. So, on the spot, he made up a rule: you can do it, but roll this 50/50 dice too – on success, the arrow hits the goblin, otherwise, it hits your friend.

Having space to make up house rules like this made it feel like real D&D, though I could definitely see it as a criticism of incomplete rules. Being able to make these types of rules feels like you’re building a game together, rather than just playing it. Ownership of these rules brings the player and the game closer together.

Monopoly has this same aspect to it, oddly enough. Go read the rules: you’ll probably find that your household has been playing it differently to the house next door. In our house, we liked to play with fines and taxes going to “free parking” and whoever lands on it first gets the money – pretty sure my dad made it up (or at least, that’s just how his parents played).

There are certainly games where house rules wouldn’t make sense. What would you change about Dixit or Blackjack? But when it’s on the table, I’d say go for it.

Ignore the baggage

The first adventure is a typical one. The sheriff has ventured alone into the old cave system to try and sort out the troublesome goblins. He’s been in there an awful long time though… Thank goodness you four adventurers have turned up, just in time to go and rescue him.

My partner – who insisted on being the dungeon master for this game – has never spent much time with goblins. Not much time with fantasy at all, actually. This was a concern of mine, initially. But he doesn’t know their typical tactics, or motivations. It turns out the DM’s guide doesn’t fill him in on any of this either, so he kinda just had to wing it.

We ended up with some very interesting canon being formed though. When I attempted to loot the first goblin, Tim’s reaction (after finding no looting rules) was to have the goblin corpse turn to dust. A little later a goblin, after his thousand year slumber, materialised out of a whirlwind of dust, and leaped in for the attack.

This isn’t how goblins are supposed to behave. They’re not thousands of years old, and they’re not dust creatures. But they are in this game – they are in Tim’s world. It was incredibly cool! This isn’t the same game as everyone else played. You want normal goblins? Go and player literally any other game. It was truly unique – which is surprising when this game, out of the box, feels a little stiff and railroaded.

One of the take aways for me from this game is that it’s cool to let the players build a world outside of the rule book. A game should somehow encourage imagination. Let the players figure out themselves why something is happening the way it is. Adding in the opportunity of talk about what’s happening in this world makes it very fun.

You’ve two choices when designing your game: write out the whole backstory, and have the players be part of that adventure, or have the players write the whole thing. When the players are writing, they’re more invested.

By the way, if you like the sound of that second option more, you should be playing real Dungeons and Dragons.

Why don’t we do the things we enjoy

Shane

Since Overwatch came out, during my free time I get to make a choice: work on a project – something creative, relaxing, fun, and maybe even a second revenue stream – or play Overwatch. 

I’m not sure why, but sitting in front of a computer always wins. Playing a game that I’m not very good at; I’ve recently dropped from 50th to 44th level. In fact, it often makes me angry, yet I still play.

Building a world from the eyes of a two hundred year old Mage has never been dull, nor made me angry. Exacto blading out forest and grassy plains tiles, similarly. The ukulele has made me angry once or twice, but it’s certainly more rewarding than a computer game. 

Is it just to do with effort required?  Maybe. It’s certainly less work to sit at the computer and simply react to events happening to me. Am I just super lazy?

The other way of looking at it though is to see at what point I lost steam for a project.

For Barony, it’s all mostly done. The next piece of work is generating the map that gets sent along with each action sheet to the player. This will involve a bunch of design work – getting a picture on to a page. That’s not something I’m very good at at all. That actually is frustrating. I do know about Hexographer, and maybe I should just bite the bullet and buy that, but it’s frustrating that I have to rely and learn another piece of software because of a lack in my own creativity. That’s what this whole process is about: being more creative.

For Arcana Delve I’ve stumbled upon a similar issue: designing the cards. I feel like there should be pictures of the monster’s you’re fighting, and the items you’ve collected. Also, it required me to start using a desktop publishing program, with a mail merger style feature to produce many cards. I got around that by drawing out the cards by hand, but when you need six of the same card it can get a little boring. I’ve since gotten Office 360, including Publisher so maybe that can help.

Maybe I just need to stop making excuses!

It’s the art that makes me struggle the most. So I feel I should be focusing on philosophy of design, and encouraging players to use their imagination rather than relying on the crutch of images. Text in place of pictures, maybe. That doesn’t help with maps (or does it?) but it can certainly help on other parts of the project.

To encourage that, I’ve decided to set myself a daily word count to reach. It’s actually really low: around 300 words per day (so this blog post should cover it), but it means I’m actually making small amounts of progress at least rather than none.

Over the mail resource management

Shane

Barony is played entirely over postal mail with real paper. A letter sent from a ruler of a small town (the player) to their clerk who’s helpfully implementing their orders (the game master).

My struggle now is that it’s quite tricky to have a standardised way of extracting information from players.

I’ve begun with two sections: the first is a “simple” method, where the player can give an overview of what they want to happen, and the second is a more detailed version where they can specify real numbers of people to work on a task. The idea here is that someone who doesn’t care to play with numbers as much can just fill out the first be and be happy their turn is over.

There’s a third section, where players can just write anything. Since the game master is a real person, they can interpret and work the instructions into the game in the same way a dungeon master would react to a player who invents a profession for themselves.

At the moment it is genuinely a series of forms (or tables to fill in numbers).

The experience I’d really like to replicate is an RTS like Age of Empires. You click a workman, and click again on the job you want them to do. Of course, that doesn’t work in my medium.

On the action sheet you can direct people however you like though: splitting the militia inside the walls, near, or far. Directing people to be collecting certain resources. My problem is I’m not sure if this will be fun, or just form filling – the boring bit to get you to the more interesting story that’s being built around the world.

I suppose the only way to find out is to try it out!

Story vs Adventure

Shane

Matthew Colville filled us in with his thoughts on DM’s leading with a story – a series of plot points which the players must hit – versus an adventure – scenarios the players take part in, which may or may not lead onto another pre-prepared scenario. A story is Harry Potter, but the adventure is Albus Potter sitting in the Gryffindor common room retelling it to his friends.

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_hxIv79S30&w=854&h=480]

I was taking another read through the adventure I’m writing to play with my family. Unfortunately (at least from Matt’s point of view), it reads a lot like a story. The players meet in a tavern, and then get sent off on a quest into the woods, where one thing happens, which leads them to another thing. Maybe they can do these things out of order, but there are still plot points they do need to stumble upon.

I wrote it this way because it chimes with how other adventures I’ve read have been set:  describing the location, what the people there have to say, and where the next plot point is. I’d call this a story: a book you can read, but have no effect on the world other than artificial choices. By artificial choice I mean, like Matt mentioned, letting the players choose door A or door B. Eventually you’ll loop back and end up at the other door, so it doesn’t matter too much which they pick. I’m thinking here of (the short amount of) Out of the Abyss I’ve played, where I feel we’ll get through quite a few of the “choices” before progressing.

So I’m going to go ahead and call it: pre-written “adventures” are actually stories.

When playing Into the Quiet Forest with my family it definitely turned into a story though. My family went door to door in the town, something I didn’t expect. They drew our lots of the kidnapped girl’s backstory – found her secret boyfriend, who for some reason hoped to never see her again, learnt about her relationship with the towns people, and her father. What happened to her mother? None of this is in the story I’d written already. I had to make it up, on the spot. I had a partially drawn picture of the girl from the adventure’s text, but it was my job to on-the-fly colour her in.

It’s the DM’s job, but may even more so the player’s job, to turn an “adventure” into a real adventure.

Rewards for Events

Shane

After recently playing Friday, a solo board game, I wanted to contrast the difference between how it gives rewards to players and how a game like Munchkin does. When the player tries something risky, how does that change the reward?

Friday is a single player game where you get to choose between two events to “fight”. The card is a great example of a dual purpose card: the top half is the hazard to succeed against, the bottom is the reward if you beat it. Although the two cards you choose from are still random (you could get two of the same card for instance) you still have the benefit of making an informed decision. You know that if you win, you’ll get this reward.

This makes the game much less “random”, opening the door to more skill. Now you can see the reward there’s a good amount of risk assessment you can do. You can contrast this with Munchkin. In Munchkin you flip a card to find your bad guy, and you attempt to fight it, completely unaware of how good the reward will be. Sure you can see how much treasures you could win, but you still might be risking your life for a pair of pantyhose you already own.

Having the event and the reward happen on the same card means you can tie them together thematically. Friday, unfortunately, doesn’t take advantage of this. Tying the reward to the card means you can make the reward more sensible: if you’re fighting a dragon maybe it makes sense to find dragon teeth and gold, but what would a direwolf be doing with those things?

Munchkin has no control over the rewards, other than saying the number. This makes it tricky to scale the rewards with the player progression in a game where that matters (not so much a thing in Munchkin). One of the upsides of this mechanic is that the reward can stay secret – something that doesn’t matter in a one player game like Friday, but is very important when you want to surprise your friends.