So, when we were unable to muster the energy to play Misspent Youth, we decided to try out the board game Doom. At first, I had confused it with the game Frag—a frantic, devil-may-care interpretation of death-match style play. But Doom is more of the “first-person mode” interpretation. It’s from the same family lineage as Descent, and while I consider that game to be tedious and boring, Doom does many things differently. (Odd, since Descent came later, but then, that’s progress.) All told, we had a good time, and would have a better time, changing just a few things around. (more…)
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Game Tasting 2: Misspent Youth
On Tuesday night, we went to play Misspent Youth, but didn’t succeed. There were a number of lessons we drew from this.
The first was simply a logistical one. Game tasting needs a day of rest, somewhere in the itinerary. The prospect of 5 days of unbroken gaming is fine, but when you stay up until 1 or 2am afterwards, engaged in a thorough and extensive dissection of the game, it is both mentally and physically exhausting. Last time, we ended up not playing How We Came to Live Here, this time, Misspent Youth.
The second was a lesson about Misspent Youth particularly: the game has a structure that asks you to do one of the hardest parts on your own, at the beginning, with almost no scaffolding. It asks you to make a dystopia that enrages you, with only a few questions about it and some categories you need to be sure to answer.
That’s hard. That’s what none of us had the energy to do. But it’s not necessarily bad. It’s a kind of gatekeeper. If you don’t have the wherewithal to say “fuck yes, that makes me fucking angry” about something at the outset, you probably don’t have the wherewithal to play the game in the spirit intended. So, that’s kinda cool.
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Content and the Market
So, this is a bit of a continuation of some thoughts from my last post on continuing content. Quick recap: we know that we can make things of a certain sweet size that we can release to keep a game thriving and active. A modular design, particularly with enough areas of traction, makes it easier to make these sorts of things. Now, onward.
I had sort of shelved the notion, thinking that, for my purposes, it was wrapped up. Then, I read this post by the inimitable Simon Wardley, and it got me thinking again. Go read it.
OK, you’re done? Good. (more…)
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Secret Lovers: a half-baked game
Our recent radio silence has been the result of real-life busy and game-design busy. Apologies.
I mentioned over on G+ that I’d write up the Werewolf/Mafia game I half-baked the other night, and here it is. It’s untested, so play it and tell me whether it needs more salt:
Secret Lovers: a game of fucked-up sexual expectations
This is a game like Mafia, or Werewolf, where a group of people try to find who among them has a secret. In Mafia, a small group of people are killing off everyone else, and everyone else has to stop them before it’s too late. Here, two people are secretly fucking at night, when they shouldn’t be, and everyone else has to punish them through loveless marriages. (more…)
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Continuing Content
(Ramble warning.)
You know what’s great? Buying a game, being a fan of it, being able to go to your friendly local game store and get more for that game and incorporate it into your play, reinvigorating it and helping you keep enjoying this game you love. Or maybe you don’t even have to buy it, if the designers release it for free—less support for the FLGS, but easier on your wallet. Or maybe you don’t have to buy it, but you do have to do something for it, some kind of weird activity.
At this point, we’ve moved beyond the “single simple perfect game” vs. “supplement treadmill” debate, I hope. The problem isn’t supplements, it’s poorly-thought-out supplements, it’s supplements with too many moving pieces to interact with the core and the other supplements cleanly. It’s supplements produced cynically to keep milking a property. ((Let me say: I don’t think that any but the second of these claims can be made substantively, but the other two are at least perceived to be the case sometimes.)) But neither is a single-book game perfect. If the book is a seed to the random number generator of our brains, we sometimes want or need other books (or content) to get more seeds to get more outputs.
So, we’ve started to see some games doing an interesting thing, making free well-considered content that fits in and adds to the replay value of the original game. The two big examples of this are, to my mind, Fiasco‘s playsets and Apocalypse World‘s playbooks. ((While the names are very similar, they’re importantly different: playsets are collections of content for different settings, to be used one-at-a-time in each game. Playbooks are types of character, to be combined in the same game with the other playbooks and with the playbooks in the core Apocalypse World book.)) (more…)
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At the Loom
So we recently had a request from the brilliant @strasa for a post about meshing multiple arcs together when running Becoming Heroes. It was always our intention that it be done, as closely as possible, to give everyone an epic sense of destiny at work. Nothing is as iconic to fantasy as this particular story structure—that everyone arrives at the crossroads of destiny at once, at the same time, for one last final battle between good and evil.
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Post-Gen Con Deconstruction
So a thing came up on the Googles (over here) and it reminded me that we had not, in fact, posted about our experiences running a booth at Gen Con. This oversight will now be remedied, if only to pay homage to my feet.
Running a booth at Gen Con was simultaneously exhausting, exhilarating, manic and fun. Much like game design, actually. Also, like game design, it’s difficult to relate the experience—like an idea that’s just too big to convey all at once. I happen to love lists, so here’s a list of the top ten things (in random order) we learned by doing. Fair warning: this is all based on our experiences, and may not match other people’s experiences for the matter. Also, it’s based on running a first time, 10’x10′ booth for selling RPGs. So, caveats in place, here’s our list.
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