So, with unprecedented swiftness, a few weeks after posting about wanting to play a game with balloons, I have now played a game with balloons. It took involvement with a smallish ARG and days spent sitting around in a Soho office building up my credibility with competence and cake, but it worked. The best photos of the day that I’ve seen are here.

The Soho Project involved the fictional media company Fictional Media, who were running a competition in which people chose tasks (”organise a tug-of-war between businessmen”, “tell the story of a Soho street”, “eat a meal in a Soho restaurant and review it in song while still on the premises”), recorded them, and uploaded the videos to be judged. A simple enough process: the team with the most points at the end was the winner. At the same time, however, a shadowy Resistance was working against Fictional Media, and at Super Stag Saturday — the final day of the Project — all teams dissolved, subsequently reforming into FM versus Resistance. Fictional Media were the forward-looking technocrats, aiming to synthesise a Soho Experience from the videos, keen capitalists with a taste for mediation; the Resistance were the slightly luddite, desperate-for-reality rebels with a love of unconvincing rhetoric, barbecues, William Blake, and silly hats.

I joined the Resistance, and brought my own hat.

For complex plot reasons that make perfect sense, the endgame came down to hunting a stag that had the brain of a genius computer scientist inside it. It wandered the streets of Soho (roughly a square mile) for an hour and a half, heading unpredictably toward the steps of William Blake House. Resistance members in groups of three, carrying a balloon each, had to find the stag, show it the balloons (the symbol of the Resistance was three golden balls), and, when it stopped, tie the balloons to its antlers before returning to base for more balloons. FM members — also in groups of three — had to photograph the stag, return to base, show the photographs to, um, the body of the computer scientist genius (currently inhabited by the mind of a stag), and then run out to find the stag again.

Gameplay considerations:

• Running around Soho chasing a stag with fifty balloons on its head is a lot of fun. I think it probably wasn’t as much fun for the FM side - no balloons for them, after all - so perhaps it would work better, once divorced from the Soho Project plot, with two teams, each with a different colour of balloon?
• The game ran for around ninety minutes, and we’d used up between fifty and eighty balloons by the end, with only 12 people on the Resistance team. So it’s probably not a good game for a huge number of players, but it could accommodate 30 or so (an hour would have been comfortably long enough for a satisfying game, I think).
• The stag head is, yes, not integral to gameplay. But it’s pretty spectacular. And tying the balloons to something is definitely much better than just giving them to someone.
• There’s no point trying to stop people from using their phones to tell each other where the stag is, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s pretty hard to find a single person in a square mile, even if they do have a giant stag head, and having to do it afresh every time you find it would get a bit wearying.
• More games need to force their players to ask passers-by whether they’ve seen a stag.
• If you play this game where there are children and you don’t have a heart of stone, expect some balloon attrition. If you play this game and one of the members of your team does have a heart of stone, expect her (it wasn’t me!) to take back one of the balloons you’ve given to a child in order to tie it to the stag.

Josh’s comment about the Mafia Game is pointed and accurate; the feeling of “are you one of them? Are YOU?” is exactly what I want to capture with The Things?. My problem with the Mafia game is that it goes to the trouble of according credibility to certain people (the police, sheriffs, what-have-you), then fails to support that credibility. Nobody can verify your role until the game’s over. (And of course, as Josh mentioned, resistance to execution, which is what the dice-slotting system below is for.)

It may be obvious that my real problem with the Mafia Game is that I never draw a Mafia card, and I always die first or second, because I come off as too eager to kill someone. Of course I want to kill someone! I want to kill the Mafia! I hate the Mafia Game! But I still play it when given the chance, because paranoia is fun.

The one-room-fewer-than-players idea is solid: four areas (say mess hall, lab, barracks and “outside”) provide enough variability in networking to allow for different board configurations, while guaranteeing that at least two players have to be hanging out together. But I want an armory too. Everybody wants an armory.

What can you do, mechanically, when left alone in the armory? In the lab? Outside? There should be some incentive for players to go to each room, and some (possibly different) incentive for Things to do so; that should be enough to make players worried enough to follow when anybody goes off by herself.

This post goes under “treatments” and “rehabilitations,” because here’s what I’m thinking for conflict resolution in The Things?: Yahtzee!.

Starting conditions: Every player has 5d6 and a hand of at least five cards. Any red card in your hand means you’re a Thing.

Whenever a player declares a conflict (on herself or other players), and assuming that conflict isn’t vetoed, everybody rolls their 5d6. The player with the highest total gets initiative, and describes the stakes of the conflict from his end–basically, “if I win, x happens.” (Ties are broken by a 1-die reroll, player’s choice of die, and three players together can veto anyone’s stakes.) Other players state their stakes clockwise around the table, then everybody gets to reroll as many dice as they like.

After that reroll, you start looking to put your dice in a box. Is everyone familiar with Yahtzee!? You try to make your dice conform to certain “hands,” many of which resemble poker hands, like a full house, four of a kind, etc. There are also catchalls like “total all your 3s” and “Chance,” which is a total of all your dice if they don’t fit into any other category. You can only use any given category once; if you can’t fit your dice into a category at all, you have to put a 0 somewhere.

The first group reroll is a freebie, but subsequent rerolls have a cost–cards from your hand, which go into a pile in the middle, face down. Each die you reroll costs one card, and you must describe a character action to accompany it. Any other player can grab that card from the middle and reroll up to two dice, describing her character’s reaction; in doing so, she takes the risk of becoming infected by the acting player. The cards grabbed for reactions don’t go directly into your hand, but stay face-down until the conflict is ended. All this happens simultaneously–throw or grab cards as you please, or declare that you’re done by putting your hand face-down on the table (on top of the reaction cards you grabbed, if any).

Whichever player gets the most points out of their category (”total all your 3s” is obvious, but a full house is worth 25, and a five of a kind is worth 50) wins the conflict; her stakes come true. Whichever player has the highest end total of dice–independent from the special scoring categories–wins the conflict in-character, and must describe how her character wins (”I block the door”) and how the winning player’s stakes come to pass (”but you go out the window”). These two players may or may not be the same person.

Finally, every player picks up his hand–now including reaction cards–and draws up to five, if necessary, from a deck of all-black cards. Any red card in your hand means you’re a Thing now. If you are a Thing, you can’t use your last red card for a reroll.

a) Does this make sense?

b) How do Things get more than one red card? Maybe there should be one deck of all black cards and one of half red, half black; when drawing back up to a hand of five, players could grab the necessary number of cards from both piles, look at both, decide which one to keep, and put the other one aside in an out-of-play discard pile.

c) Each (pregen) character will have one or two special abilities related to this process–like “Set Your Jaw: use ‘total of all 4s’ as many times as you like” or “Devil’s Luck: you may reroll up to three dice on any reaction.” Those are lame, though. What are some good special abilities?

I’ve cleaned up and posted RPG Nomic, a skeleton ruleset that Ben, Wheeler, Will, Lisa and I slapped together for use by AIM RPG groups. I’ve stripped off the few rule-stubs we added that didn’t have a chance to develop; it’s worth checking out for Ben’s Drama-Fortune-Karma mechanic, which he should have posted at Reality NOS, honestly.

It’s been sitting there for months now, but today I finally finished the official playtest draft of Bricolage. It’s still too long, but I don’t think it’s broken anymore. It grew considerably more abstract than the original concept; it’s now probably closest to a kind of pseudometanomic.

My friends and I had fun playtesting the very first, broken alpha version, and I think it’ll be more fun now. If you want to playtest it, your reports are obviously welcome. I’ll post the game’s illustration (by Jon Morris!) when I get home.

In response to ‘I’m Sorry I haven’t a Nomic’:

I was the one who ran Survivor Nomic, and I agree that the game grinded to a near stand-still. I’ve been tossing around ideas for something I call ‘Survivor Nomic Live’ (or SNL for short, not to be confused with certain prime time television shows). The same concept is there, with a self amending ruleset and the objective to eliminate all players but yourself, but played in a format closer to BlogNomic’s style.

Here’s what I see right now. The game is split up into rounds, and each round has three phases: Change, Select, and Eliminate. The Change Phase is where the proposals to change the rules are made, but the players cannot progress onto the next phase until the rules provide methods for Selection and Elimination. Perhaps the players could even vote as to when to move on. In the Select Phase, following the methods the players have created, one or more players must be selected to be subject to Elimination. Then, one of them is eliminated in the next phase, and the next round begins.

This allows for flexible gameplay, and at a pace determined by the players. To play like Survivor, the selection phase rules would go something like ‘play such-and-such physical challenge, and everyone except the winner is subject to elimination’ and the elimination phase ‘each player votes for one player subject to elimination and the player with he most votes wins’. To fit the Amazing Race, selection: ‘players race to somewhere in the world and the last player to arrive is subject to elimination’ and elimination, simply: ‘the player subject to elimination is eliminated’. Such physical challenges are not feasible for internet play, but with the variety of mechanics seen on BlogNomic I think the game has great potential.

Let me all know what you think.

Hey, I thought of something to do with Lonely Mechanic #1: build a Rube Goldberg device.

Get a piece of paper and pencil and assign them to a player. Figure out what you want to do (eg turn on a light switch) and find something that loosely corresponds to that goal in the NAICS list (eg 3351101 5, “Electric lamp bulbs and tubes (including sealed beam lamp bulbs)”). Generate another extant ID number, this time at random (315191W 5, “Knit outerwear, nsk, total”), and have your device triggered by some event involving that product.

When you’ve come up with a good use, have someone draw that step, write a quick description as (1) at the bottom, and pass to the left. Then either increment or decrement one digit of the generated ID number by two, OR roll a ten-sided die to replace that digit, trying to get closer to your ultimate goal (in our example, we could do it in one increment, four decrements and a reroll for the W). Obviously, the player holding the paper for any given step would have to draw and describe the use case the group came up with. This might work better with players who can’t draw.

Leonard said:-

A sensible version of Clue would be more like the movie. One player would be the killer, whose goal would be to obscure the truth and eliminate the other players from the game, either by causing them to make false accusations, or by killing them as well. […] Players would have reason to form alliances and stick together, and the board would have a real purpose. Still have to do something about the arbitrary accusation rules, though.

Kevan said:-

Ben and I were talking about this a few weeks ago, for reasons I forget, and I don’t think we came up with any solid solution to the “secret murder” problem - it’d be great to have a game where NPCs (or even PCs) could be bumped off in secret, if they ended up alone with the murderer-player, and nobody but the murderer would be aware of it until the body was discovered. […] I think you’d have to include a GM player who’d watch over the game, know who the murderer was, assume that they’d kill at every opportunity, and announce that players are retroactively dead when someone found their body, or (a bit weirdly) when they walked back into an occupied room.

Leonard:-

Now that you’ve brought up the undead, though, here’s a solution to the secret murder problem: anyone murdered becomes a zombie. As long as you can secretly communicate to a player that they’ve been killed, they can keep rolling the dice and staggering aimlessly around until someone else notices that they’re a zombie.

Kevan:-

Aha, solving the wandering-corpse problem with zombies is absolutely perfect. The secret communication could perhaps be a weapon-card thing - give each player a weapon to begin with, and have the rules insist that players secretly flash their weapon cards to anyone they pass in an otherwise empty room. If someone flashes the poison card at you, then you have been zombified by the evil Dr Body.

The zombies either have to attack the detectives (but hold back long enough for them to forget where the zombie came from), or just avoid them for as long as possible; if the detectives are all eliminated before they can unmask Doctor Body, then the zombie team wins. Perhaps with some sort of recognition for the zombie who put the most work in.

Will added:-

OR, decree that only two people may be present in a room at one time. It would work with the whole suggestion aspect of the game. Actually, that works quite well. Then, the killer can’t attack you unless you suggest/suspect him, which gives decent enough motive.

The original Cluedo rules are available online for reference, but I think we’ve thrown most of it out, beyond the board - the whole “Miss Scarlett, in the ballroom, with the lead piping” element is lost, if the weapon is always the same, the location is meaningless and the identity of the murderer is already being tracked by the weapon cards.

(I suppose this means we could use the location and character cards for other purposes. Possibly use the character cards for a facetious combat system; if you’re being attacked by an opponent, or a group of them, draw a card at random from the six, and that’s who gets the punch in. And we could allow the weapon cards to be used as a ‘reroll’, but if your second draw is your opponent, they beat you and get to keep your weapon.)

We haven’t really said how the accusation system would work - given that it’s reduced to just accusing a character, without weapon or location, then maybe it needs a penalty for an incorrect accusation. Perhaps accusations could just be made as straightforward attacks (loser being forced to reveal their weapon card, their identity); if you attack and overcome an innocent, then you’ll be forgiven for being regarded with suspicion.

(Although any mechanic that uncovers a player’s innocence is potentially dangerous, and this goes for the weapon-card rerolls - you could ban players from waving their cards around at whim, but as soon as there’s a mechanic that allows cards to be revealed, it becomes easy enough for the detectives to prove their innocence and isolate the murderer.)

I was going to post this as a comment, but it got too long. That’s what the submission link is for!

Ben said:

“Alternatively, something that is ‘cooperative’ but still has limited resources that the players have to compete over could be fun. So you have the ‘work together’ option, or the ‘My plan is good, and yours will lead us to destruction, thus I am stealing 3 of your cogs’ option. …

Working together is fun, but cautiously working together spiced with paranoia and accusations and backstabbing is more fun! …

Oooh! You could combine this with my earlier desire for a game with bluffing/diplomacy.

Each player gets a goal card. A few of the goals are mutually exclusive, but most can be combined. ‘Get three green widgets up and running’ and ‘Set up a chain reaction between a blue gizmo and a green widget’.

Each player draws a goal, and keeps it secret. Now, each player has exclusive access to some resources, so in order to accomplish any goal, some players will probably have to work together. I see simultaneous moves, so each player lays down a card representing their ‘turn’, and reveals them at once. So you don’t get to see if the other gnomes stuck with their bargains before you decide whether or not to break yours. And you’re trying to guess what the other player’s goals are, while keeping yours secret, but still working towards yours.”

Kevan said:

“Excellent. The joint-win-versus-solo-win aspect could perhaps be reduced to individual points, rather than the whole game - have an extra goal card dealt onto the table (’orders from the Gnomish Emperor’), and earn one point if you complete that goal, but two or three if you complete your secret personal goal. And then replace the completed goal with a fresh one.”

Leonard said:

“Here’s an idea. It waters down both the public goal and the bluffing, but I think it’s a good alternate approach and maybe we could fix them back up.

The initial state of the board is the *plan* for the machine: a configuration of deactivated ‘device’ cards arranged in the shape of a completed machine. A ‘device’ is something like an oil pump, a motor, or a laser. Until someone activates a card, that piece of the machine doesn’t actually exist; it’s just part of the plan. Here’s the public goal: you have to complete the machine within a certain timeframe. I don’t like using a deadline to enforce a public goal; any other ideas here?

Most of the cards the players play with are ‘piece’ cards. This is something like a screw, a piece of sheet metal, or a liter of oil. Each high-level component card has printed on it the low-level cards you need to meld to activate it. Once you meld piece cards into a device, you put a token of your color on that device to activate it. Once all the devices are activated the machine is completed.

But each player has some secret ‘technique’ cards that let them substitute some low-level components for others, or just build a high-level component with fewer cards than are required. Here’s the bluffing, maybe?

Each technique card also describes an obsession or quirk of the gnome you’re playing (eg. ‘You hate screws! Everything should be built with bolts! You can use 1 bolt to replace 2 screws in a device; you cannot use screws except one turn before the deadline.’). They restrict your actions and you get more points if the completed machine fits your preconceptions. Here are the private goals.”

Josh said:

“I’m not so sure about the idea of the game board, as I think it needlessly limits the scope that the game can aspire to. The way I saw it working is that the goal had a card, drawn at the beginning of the game, that specified the requirements needed to complete the machine (for instance, that the Quantum Galvaniser needs six Girders, attached with Screws to a Motor, plus a power source and a cooling system). Play then continues as Kevan discribes, with two types of cards coming into play - Component cards, like the screws and the girders (or other components with the ’screw’ or ‘girder’ characteristic), and Construct cards, which are like mini-goals which require components of their own, and which require components to be added to them to be completed. Thus one player could draw a Gel coolant system, and have some of the players work towards it, but one players private goal could be to draw, complete and have incorporated a Water coolant system. As Kevan suggested, at the end of the game each player who has achieved private goals gains points, the more the better.”

I’m starting to think this might work best as a networked computer game.

There is a “board,” as Leonard suggested, called the Machina. It changes every time you play–it’s made up of several connected macrocomponents, which are in turn made up of multiple component cards. There’s a recursive algorithm to generate the blueprint for this game’s Machina. It’s essentially a radial tree that only goes one or two levels deep.

There are multiple ways to build a macrocomponent: like Josh suggested, a Coolant System might be either Gel or Water, and like Leonard said, a Drive Engine might need one Screw or three Bolts (and either a Cam or two Pistons, etcetera).

During the turn, you can make deals to trade cards, table-talk confidentially or otherwise, and so on. At the end of the turn, everybody contributes a card to the Black Box, which shuffles them up and applies any transformations as necessary (eg if your specialty lets you play a Cherry Bomb as a Dynamite, you put in a Cherry Bomb and a Dynamite comes out). All the cards are displayed, but there’s no attribution, so nobody except you knows exactly what you played.

This anonymity is what allows for the Sabotage cards. Don’t like that Gel coolant system? Blow it up and rebuild it with Water next turn! Don’t want Ben to finish the Quantum Refrigerator? Cover him in Glue for a turn! And of course, like all good sabotage, nobody knows who did it.

Meanwhile, each player has two secret Goals, as determined by the way the Machina is blueprinted (you’ll never get the goal “Gel Coolant System, Not Water” if this Machina doesn’t include a coolant system at all). Some goals are worth a fixed number of points, and some are variable, depending on the number of Screws you manage to substitute for Bolts or whatever. Depending on the intersection of your Goals, you get a predetermined special ability from a table: Cross “no Bolts” with “Gel Coolant” and get the ability “convert any Screw to two new cards from the draw pile.”

Each macrocomponent is worth a certain number of points to every player who contributed a card to it, and of course one’s personal goals are worth points too, so you could theoretically win without completing your own goals. To win the game, you don’t have to have the most points–you only have to have more than a certain threshold of points (again, determined by the components of the Machina, so that it’s impossible for everyone to win). Multiple players could win, or nobody could win.

It occurs to me that this game wouldn’t have to be computerized if you had a neutral party, like a Machinist, who handled the card-exchanges and Black Box shuffling. That would require a lot of note-passing, but then again, that could add to the fun.

Will says a few things:

“How about an RPG involving magic where the success of the casted magic (in fact, the casting itself) relies not on the player rolling dice, but the player’s character rolling dice? This sort of breaks the fourth wall, but you could explain it away by making them need to be magical dice. Maybe the practitioners of such an art are called “dieslingers”. They could travel to the far reaches of the earth, righting wrongs in their own edgy, outcast way. This would probably end up being terribly tongue-in-cheek, but maybe that’s the point.”

Given the existence of things like Cardcaptors and Yu-Gi-Oh!, I think this would be accepted with a perfectly straight face by most of our demographic. By the same token, though, I’m not sure it’s enough to hang a game on. I think it could be cool as a Final Fantasy-style job / class; I may be thinking of FF Tactics’ “Calculator Mage” or whatever, but I like this better (and I think they were weak in implementation anyway). When I have a little more time I’m going to start a wiki for a group-design catchall RPG, and I think this would be neat to plug into it.

“What about a battling game where what dice you roll, and in what combinations, determines what kind of attacks you can throw at your opponent? There could be arithmetical modifiers depending on the situation which could allow you to multiply two results together or whatever to augment your attacks. You could keep track of that kind of thing with cards, but I don’t think the cards should dictate the attacks you could do - it would be the dice which had that control. Instead, you would have a set number of attacks you could do, but you would have to use dice rolls and interpretation thereof, in combination with the use of your limited modifier cards, to discover and make an attack.

The attack (or spell, or whatever) types themselves would be basically limitless - you might notice that you’ve rolled (amongst all your dice) your birthdate^2, so you use your Square Root modifier card to get your birthdate (in DDMMYYYY form), which allows you to take a modifier card at random from your opponent’s stack/deck/hand/whatever.”

I think this is awesome. Roll a big handful of dice and partition them however you want on a graph–columns for sums, rows for consecutive digits. Use them to activate the semi-fixed set of spells, homonculi and items you brought to the table, and both players draw from the same deck of number-mod cards. Once you’ve used a set of dice to power one of those spells / quasits / items, you put them back in your pool and reroll them. Or maybe you’re not allowed to reroll until you manage to use them (or draw the appropriate mod card)! That would be a powerful incentive to bring in a set of use cases that provides good coverage of your die results, but of course the rare ones would do the big damage. (Will, is this something like what you had in mind?)

Advantages: Combines game-opening resource management with in-game skill and luck. I imagine people who are good at Set would be good at this. Plus there’s a lot of good geeky number-crunching to be done.

Problem 1: Since I, at least, would be scared to spend dice hastily on a few Mild Fizzles and miss my chance at a Polyphemus Mono-Laser Ultrablast, I could see this game crawling along like bad Scrabble. How could we push mechanics that wouldn’t bog things down? Would using a chess timer be overkill?

Problem 2: What are the most interesting number sets to use here? “Your Birthday” and “Perfect Square” attacks are good, but is “Mersenne Prime” going too far afield? Or should we not worry about sets at all, including those two examples only as rare bonuses, and make most cards activate on “12 or 52″ or “Multipes of 5?”

Problem 3: And oh yeah, what kind of dice are you allowed to use? Do you spend cards to draw them from a common pool, or do you bring your own set? Hmm… do the dice you bring determine what attacks you’re allowed to bring, too? What are the limits? I think Kevan’s “x sides of dice” metric would work here, but it’d probably need to be closer to 100 sides.

Addendum: Just thought of something that could be cool–maybe in addition to cards and dice, each player has a fixed number of chips that he or she can bid in order to bring more dice into play from the pool. More bidding increases your power, but also increases the risk you take of losing it all at round’s end. The problem here is that one big bet could put you out of the game for good–it’d be hard to avoid victory / loss cycles after the first round. Anyone know a good way to combat that?