A few things

Thing #1
There is a new updated Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures up and available. New features include dungeons, which is completely inspired by someone who tested the game named Cameron Harris (I think), but who I've lost his email.

Dungeons, while right now I don't think happen regularly enough, solve a little sticking point I've had; namely, that of "why don't you just funnel all of your development points into a single Settlement, instead of spreading them out?" Hopefully, the appearance of a dungeon in a kingdom where a player is simply "camping out" for level ups will make him think twice.

Dungeons are simply a series of battles, that pay out 2X gold, and when they exist, prevent special effects of Settlements from happening. Plus, if you decide to NOT try and take out the dungeon, the Settlements get angry with you.

To offset the new dangers of Dungeons, I've added a new "harder to die" feature, which allows for a scavenger magician to find your body, and replace your severed limbs with magical armor. Fun stuff, if you look through the abstractness of it all.

I'm at the point now with the game that I don't mind it being posted up to the geek, so if anyone wants to earn some geekgold, feel free to submit the game.

Thing #2
On another note, in honor of my love for games that play differently, I picked up the new Z-Man edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights. And then, I put it down, and picked it up again. It's a good workout, given that the box is amazingly heavy considering that it's all cardboard and paper (no wood pieces).

After playing around with it a little bit solo just to get the feel of how it worked, I came to the conclusion that it really does feel like a game produced in the early 80s: fairly simple mechanics wedded to countless look-up charts that reference other look-up charts. But it's a 1980's game with the trappings of the new millenium's penchant for gorgeous art and top notch production values. Even the box top oozes class; the main background of the box is matte black, but the rest of the artwork is all colorful and glossy. Granted, I don't buy too many games, but I don't think I've bought a game with cardboard punch-out chits this thick before. Anyway, I look forward to bringing this handsome edition of a "choose your adventure" book out on the table soon, even if it's just with my 6 year old daughter, who should be able to handle most of it easily as long as I'm the reader, since the game is pretty much A) move in the world, then B) go through a look-up chart process to find out what story happens there.

Also, I wouldn't running a play-by-forum/blog version Tales at some point. Granted, it's a lot of typing, but the game flow and 99% non-turn-order wackiness should make it easy enough.

Speaking of play-by-forum, I'm currently in Season 12 of the Battlestar Galactica play-by-forum game at the 'geek. Needless to say, with all of the possible interrupting, and potential out-of-turn card play, it's a slow go. Very slow. I'm amazed that people can actually RUN a play-by-forum version of this game, much less play it. For the record, the game officially started over a month ago, and we still haven't quite made it 'around the table' of player's turns yet.

**Still awaiting his next chance to playtest the Three Fates game.

An Epic Update!

Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures has been updated once again. Click here for the link.

Numerous things have been hammered out and altered. A quick glance:

REMOVED
-- No more cursed items (for now).
-- No speed initiative for creatures.
-- No references to time penalties on Quests.

ADDED
-- As suggested by "Tim," the player has some decisions to make in Battles now (granted, not much too start the game, really)
-- In response to the "mighty Battle Actions" that the player can obtain, Creatures are built differently; known game types are randomly assigned, and can affect the rules of Battle now.
-- As a way to increases the useful of the Terrains, Creatures are randomly assigned Terrain Modifiers, which modify their Level.

CHANGED
-- Magical Items are Battle Strength modifiers, instead of Level modifiers.

Probably the biggest addition is the use of and acquistition of Battle Actions. These are basic modifiers that are used during battles, which can only be used once per player level change. So, when you increase your Level at a Temple, you "recharge" your Battle Actions. Also, increasing your Level gains new Battle Actions.

The selection of new Battle Actions is sort of interesting. They create "paths" towards a character archetype. So, instead of simply declaring yourself as a Fighter or Wizard, the "path" that you decide to take in acquiring your new action sort of thematically decides that for you. It's sort of subtle.

Anyway, the Creatures are probably too mean now, due to the Terrain modifiers. As they are using the modifiers regularly, whereas your Battle Action modifiers are pretty limited, especially early on. But maybe not.

The Moral Compass

So, life has been getting in the way a lot recently. But I promised that I would update ESNA, and so here it is. The latest version of Epic is up with some rules clarifications, new cards, new quest types, and a new topic to discuss!

(Of course, I should note that I haven't really had a good chance to fully playtest this version. So while I've clarified things that has bugged people, I'm sure that the new added rules have just as many holes in them.)

And on to the topic...

At this point, I need to comment that I am not a student of philosophy of any size or shape, so I'm sure I'm using terms in the wrong way; hopefully the drift of my words is clear.

Dungeons and Dragons used to have this thing called Alignment back in version 1 days, I have no idea what the equivalent is, if any, in today's version. Anyway, it was a compass of sorts that described the way your character should act, making a cross between a Good/Evil axis and a Lawful/Chaos axis.

And in a lot of ways, pretty useless. Since you just played the game the way you wanted your character to play. Or at least that's how we did it. It was a game of heroes doing heroic things, not villains performing evil deeds.

And so, I bring up "morality," or the basic thinking of good actions versus evil actions within a game. This is something that to my limited vision never seems to be covered in games too much. Goals of games are hard wired into "best way to win" or "best way to collect the most points as fast as possible." And while these are all choices that players make, aside from a mere point-collection perspective, there is very little consideration with regards to which path is the "right choice" versus the "evil choice."

Just how far you can veer off the "most point laden path."

In fact, there is seemingly very little outside of RPGs that allow for a player to truly make a moral choice, even down to a simple childlike level of good versus bad. Even in shame such as Battlestar Galactica, where there's a "good" side (the humans) and a "bad" side (the skinjobs), it's not a player's choice; it's merely a card draw of fate that determines your goals.

Then you can take it a step farther; what is really good or evil; one's view of what is good is certainly different depending on which side of the fence you are on. Once you are a Cylon in BSG, getting rid of the humans are a good thing. The victor of a war decides who the patriots are, and revolting peasants are the losers.

So, the next step in this is, is there a way to define a good or bad aspect in a game, derived from a player's choice of actions? Something more than just a logical quest of point accumulation?

What I will contend here is that actions are only decided to be good or evil based on the defining conscience and responses around those actions. In fact, what makes actions somewhat compelling in an RPG is that the NPC, being run by the DungeonMaster, have a memory of how the characters treated them previously. And it is the "memory" of past actions that ultimately define the view of a character's action over the course of time as to whether they are good or evil. Without that memory, there is no justice to return in kind, and no remorse for following a different path.

Or something. As I said, my screw around time has been short. Hopefully this makes sense.

And so, I've imparted some rules into ESNA that attempts to capture this. I've given Settlements a simply memory of past actions where those who live in the Settlement feel they've been slighted by the player, and actions are altered based on those previous actions. Conceptually, I like this a lot; since my playtest time has been remorsefully short, mechanically, I don't think it's implemented as fully as I'd like, and in fact, probably doesn't come into play too much at all.

But it does allow you to go off to rape and pillage an entire Village, at the cost of spreading the news that you are, at best unstable, or at worst, someone that the other Settlements should not be dealing with.

And in some cases, late into the game, pillaging Villages is a good thing for you to personally do; it reduces the cost of building your Keep while gaining some extra gold. If you can live with the crummy reputation throughout the land.

Anyway, it's up for review. I'm always interested in comments and suggestions.

Updated ESNA

Updated ESNA to include the missing rules as was reported by Aaron_ in the comments.

Also, I should point out that he found something similar. Granted it's much more dice-heavy, but kind of does the same thing. Which makes me want to move on to other things.

ESNA finally written up

Ok, it's been awhile, and I've been sort of distracted by real life things, but I finally got around to putting together the early beta rules I've been playing Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures with, for those who want to play along.

Remember, it's kinda mean at this point.

Clicky here for the rules and stuff.

It's also in my Half-Baked sidebar.

2 more playtest

Well, two more playtests for ESNA. I'm learning a bunch about the flow of the game (which moves very quick) and the balance (which is favored VERY heavily in the game's hand I think).

Game two actually was moving along swimmingly well, I managed to build a castle, went on a few quests (one involving going off and slaying a stinky elephant, two of them involving going of and returning an emissary from another Region, and one involving escorting a princess). Even managed to get up to Level 2, and created a few Level 2 creatures (Burrowing Gophers and Flying Kangaroos).

Unfortunately, on my next request for a quest, I needed to defend the castle in Brykestok from the invading Burrowing Livestock horde (well, two of them), and in since I was so busy transporting people around like the variant taxi driver I am, I never bothered to stop at the village to rest and reclaim HP, so I totally blame that on me. I was planning on doing that on the next Quest, but got hoodwinked into the castle defense.

Game three was a pretty sad state of affairs. I got beat up by two Undead Football Fans really badly; I couldn't even muster past their ridiculously slow speed rating of 3, to avoid their early hit.

Anyway...

Initially I figured that the player's total score would simply be whatever gold he has when he decides to retire (which at this point in the design cycle seems to be, don't even start adventuring; be a farmer). But gold is an interesting fungible resource; right now it is used to reclaim HP at the Village, and to advance levels at the Temple. Ultimately, I've determined that the race to simply retire with some amount of "vast sum" is kind of boring. It's pretty much at this point, "well, the game is getting too hard, might as well stop when I get a big payday."

And aside from that, the terraforming is kind of fun. And while it's sort of fun to run around the world, you can sort of do it on autopilot; I need some more decision points.

So, the player can build a Keep now, in which to retire in. The sheer impressive size of his Keep
will be the player's score.

At any point in the game, the player can determine his Keep location by selecting a Region without a building in it. At this point, the player can funnel money into his Keep.

But there's a trick to this. To increase the value of his Keep by one, he must pay the sum total of the levels of all the buildings that currently exist in the Kingdom. Early Keeps are easy to build while "building resources" are plentiful, but the money is tight early on, and you might want to spend money instead of HP (as I've learned quickly). Later on, while the Kingdom is functioning nicely, it's more expensive, but gives you an excuse to dump that extra cash into something nice like a media room or your Keep. So there's a bit of risk/reward decision making in the process of how and when to spend your cash. And that's typically good.

Along those same lines, I've been pondering the use of a new building, the Quarry, that will also let you spend money, this time to increase the Level Values of the Buildings. I don't want to increase the +1 Events too much (even though I will), and again, this will allow the player to make more decisions into the game with regards to money managements.

All is well in the world. Except for Fred, the Third, my latest Nameless Wanderer.


*****

Since there seems to be a little bit of interest in the game, I don't mind spending some time to put together an official, full functioning, completely pre-alpha ruleset for those who are really interested in getting the butts handed to them. Feel free to chime in.

From a design article standpoint, the game is doing what I thought it would do, and I really hate giving rote playtesting stories, as I'm much more interested in talking about design concepts, goals, and ways to achieve those goals. Since this game has pretty much fulfilled the "build the components as you go" requirement at this point, my need to present lengthy papers on personal dsign opinions has lessened for this!

ESNA playtest

Yes, I'm still screwing around with ESNA (Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures). I just took my first playtest spin with it tonight. Granted, it's a first test, but some notes....

It ran pretty smooth. It ran pretty short, because I got decimated pretty quickly.

As you can see if you click to enlarge the picture on the left, I managed to explore my little Kingdom out to 9 different Regions, eventually meeting my demise in Hillyhills on my return from the dead-end otherwise known as Icabod's Roost due to a particularly strong pair of Armored Snakes. One of the interesting features that developed was that I only drew the "+1" twice; my first use was creating the useless Level 1 Temple in Caroyln, the second use was developing my Village in Alyndale up to a Level 2, since I was watching the terror of continuous hordes of level 1 creatures just CONSTANTLY gnawing on my extremities with every turn.

In general, I felt that the development of the Kingdom went well, with enough "0 Additional Path" cards drawn to make my life a pain to move around in, but not so much that I felt trapped. The Region of Byzantine, Diamonddale, and Icabod's Roost were the Regions that "dead-ended" out; Diamonddale being particularly damaging as it was a central Region, and it canceled out one of my 4 gimme routes out of Alyndale.

Clicking on the left picture here shows my Creature List. Since I didn't even come remotely close to being able to advance to a new level, all of the creatures encountered were also Level 1. Overall, there were 9 total encounters, plus the two Building Advances, and I think a single "no event happens" phase, which leaned against me slightly in terms of expected probabilities.

Early on, I defeated a Flying Kitten, which, aside from a tiny amount of gold, netted me a treasure, so I opted for a +1 Crown of Flying (+1 due to the Kitten being a Level 1 creature, this allows me to add +1 level against all flying creatures during battle) to place upon my pretty little skull. Sadly, the very next encounter, which I believe was against the Armored Dumpling, wound up putting a curse on my crown.

Defeating the Stinky Jackalope netted me the +1 Bodice of Stinkiness (again, +1 level for me against Stinky creatures). But sadly, by this point, even though I increased my village to 2, I was not able to really rescue enough hit points to continue on.

The second encounter of Armored Snakes (which now doubled their damage because there were, well, two of them due to being it's second encounter) did me in nicely.

Finally, I guess as creatures go, even though typically I like my Undead to be zombie-like slow, I guess if they are Undead Rebel Bikers, their bikes would explain their higher speed rating.

As you can see by my character sheet, there's not much to be filled in. Pity the poor nameless wanderer, for nature has run it's course on thee.

Obviously, in one playtest, there's not enough data at this point to determine if "the numbers" are out of whack...but my intuition tells me that the game leans pretty hard into the player (at least at the starting level) at this point, just based on the fact that the encounter/improvement Event occurances are relatively close for a small sample. I started with 50 hit points...perhaps that's not enough to start with.

But I think that the need to advance levels quicker that the creatures can multiply is of prime importance. Also, I was playing with an Initiative rule where when a creature is encountered I would check a Battle Result number from my Level against that creatures speed. Losing that check gave the creature a free hit on Nameless Wanderer, which didn't help.

On the other hand, this is what I assume it felt like playing a 1st level Magic-User in the first editions of Dungeons and Dragons:

"Oh yeah, ok guys, you go off and fight that monster and I'll be huddled in the corner over here, keeping my one stinking Magic Missile around in case we REALLY need, but otherwise, I'll just be right...over...here. Cowering. Occasionally shaking my staff at the the monster."

Too bad this is a solitaire game.

Multi-Card Extravaganza

In a lot of cases, I’m always more interested trying to innovate wacky new mechanics than trying to develop the game itself. In the end, the mechanic itself may not look very innovate as it essentially gets whittled down to something workable as a function of a game. Having said that, take a look at the card off to the left here. While it may look like a crudely drawn spider web, it actually has a bunch of information hidden within the web....

I'm pretty fascinated by games with hidden information, and the ways for the players to logically decode it, as these things are not very easy to create. Of course, the great example of this type of game is Clue, or Cluedo; and it still holds up pretty well after all these years. In fact, it holds up so well, that most games of the deduct-the-mystery style of game play pretty much are descendant for Clue. Not that I'm aware of many. Mystery of the Abbey uses the "figure the card that is out of play" from Clue pretty well. Wadjet uses the same puzzle amazingly poorly.

Also, my fascination of playing around with the mechanical aspects of cards continues. “Mechanical” is a strange term, I know to use to describe cards; cards can do a lot more than we are used to in relating information, I think. When refer to mechanical uses here, I am referring more to the physical actions and uses that cards be used for, or for indicating things, rather than just the pure display of indicia.

Probably the most common form of this would be based on the rotational aspect of the way the card is played. The most obvious game use, and in some game-y legal circles, of this would be that of rotating a card 90 degrees in Magic:The Gathering to indicate that it has been used in that round. Questionable patents aside, this is a fairly clean mechanism. Other game uses the rotation of cards to indicate various things; the 2 player Starship Catan card game comes to mind as a way to keep track of resources.

What I would assume to be the oldest incarnation of rotational meaning to cards most likely predates your standard playing card deck itself. The reading of Tarot cards are often read as having the opposite meanings of the particular card being studied if it has been turned on the table upside down. So while a Death card placed in its natural orientation would indicate “change” in the future, a reversed Death would indicate “statis” or no change.

Something I am not too aware of, however, are cards that have direct mechanical relationships with other cards, or cards that, when combined mechanically or spatially create some meaning or data out of the combination whereas as single cards the data shown on them is useless by itself.

There are some games that come close to the effect I’m looking at. Games such as Skallywags, where you try to build a pirate out of three different body parts. Still, to me this doesn’t equate to what I’m getting at; the game boils down to a three card set collection mechanic (get one card of each “suit”). It’s just that the suits are head, torso, and leg, aside from hearts, spades and diamonds.

I guess I’m looking for something more gimmicky. So where does this lead? Especially with the lead in to this post?

On occasion, I keep coming back to a haunted house game design that I've worked on here and there. One the things that I was fighting against was trying to come up with was a interesting hidden information system, something that wouldn't just be a bastardized Clue clone.

Basically, the game involves players surviving the night in a haunted house. There's a fairly neat "haunt" mechanism I've come up with that does a pretty good job of capturing "I think I sense something is going to happen," as opposed to your standard haunted house game draw-a-card result. Ultimately, the game revolves around trying to put the various ghosts to rest by trying to figure out what item they want, and where they want the item to be placed. For example, a ghost may want the locket placed in the study. But coming up with an interesting way of hiding this information, that wasn't easily cheat-able, was a problem.

The current system as it stands now involves a combination of cards that can reveal hidden information. In this case, the web card as shown above, and then a series of "test" cards. Each test card represents an item, a room, or an attribute that can help describe a room or item, that you are "testing" for. If half of the windows show a web intersection, then the test is true. So placing "the Pocketwatch" data card on the web above, will reveal two windows having intersections; any ghost that has this card is somehow linked to the Pocketwatch, and wants it to be placed somewhere in the house.








How this works:
Each web card is a graphical representation of a digital bar code. Each item and room can be described by two atrributes. In the case of the Pocketwatch, it is both "gold" and an "heirloom." By pairing up the digital codes for each attribute, you can create a unique code for each item.

This kind of data creation is repeated for the 8 different rooms of our haunted house. Again, there are numerous attributes that we can define in various pairs to help code up a particular room.


And then, with this data, all of the combinations of items/rooms are compressed into a single barcode number. A partial list of the data is shown below.

At which point, it becomes fairly easy to assign different areas of each card as a location for a TRUE (a crossed web graphic) or FALSE (empty space) to graphic show the digital mark of the card. So, each web card contains the “barcode” of all this information based on the web intersections. Each windowed test card, with windows based on certain attributes that a player wants to test for, simply reveals only certain barcoded elements.

So, naturally, after devising all this, my interest waned in developing the game. The haunt mechanism turned out to be a bit more finicky than I would like. But as things naturally happen, after catching glimpses of a show on TV about shipwrecks, this mechanic has been born again! This time the barcodes revealing information regarding landmarks, directions from landmarks, and water depths, of where various Shipwrecks are located.

In the Shipwreck case above, instead of trying to graphically hide the barcode into a web, the barcode information is using simple icons.

And so on, until my interest wanes on that idea…

Another aspect of meshing two cards to derive information I’ve played around with is using the edges of cards to point to information on other cards. I’ve gotten a few emails detailing using PocketCiv like mechanics in a fantasy-adventure dungeon-bash game. But a lot of these games I’ve seen leave me a little cold (which maybe is worth another post). So, I’ve decided to see if I could create one.

As I’ve noted before, when you are designing a game primarily for “print and play,” the amount of components really need to be kept to a minimum; a BARE minimum. In the current design, I’ve decided to limit myself to 20 unique cards that describe all aspects of the game, the world creation, the quest creation, the creature creation, the battle resolution, etc. Of importance to this discussion would be the battle mechanics.

In your typical slash-n-bash dungeon affair, many dice rolls are used to determine battle outcomes. Since a big goal of these print-n-play games is to make them somewhat playable on an airplane, rolling dice is not acceptable; a way to use the cards to derive random numbers for battles would have to be created.

Basically, a basic battle outcome in this game is a fairly simple and quick affair requiring only three cards. Each card along the left edge has a series of arrows, randomly distributed that indicate a combatants Level. When placed slightly offset on to another card, these arrow line up with another strip of numbers on the lower card. This set of numbers is the strength points that a combatant is given (essentially duplicating a dice roll). So, a battle simply is play a card down, then play a second card on top of it. Reference the creature’s Level, and obtain the creature battle score from the first card played based on its Level. Place a third card on the second card, and reference the player’s Level on the third card to obtain the player’s battle strength from the second card. Compare the battle scores for results.

There’s quite a bit of Excel work going on here. Even though the Level arrows bounce around from card to card, the average results are that the higher the Level that you are obtaining a Battle score for, the higher the average Battle score will be obtained. So even though the battle scores and Level numbers may look like they are randomly placed, the layout of the data on each card was particularly chosen.

And of course, as with all hack-n-slash adventure games, the scores can be further modified by special weapons and such.

One may ask “why not just have the results of a level on one card, instead of spreading it across 2 cards?” The reason is fairly straight forward. It’s simply about creating a much larger spread of results than is obtainable by using a single card solution.

Given any particular Level, if each card just has a single Level-to-Battle score ratio, the amount of results that can be obtained is solely dependent on the number of cards you have. In other words, with 20 cards, you are left with exactly 20 results for any given level.

But in this implementation, due to the fact that the Level indicators can point to any other number on a different card, for a single card, a single Level on that card can possibly point to 19 other random results (the 19 cards). Since each of the 20 cards can point to 19 different results, this results in a spread of potentially 380 different results.

I’m sure there are some additional interesting ways to building things to get a whole data point out of two halves. For even more mechanical fun, in the past, I’ve toyed around with sliding cards in paper sleeves as a way of hiding, and obtaining information. Not that slider cards are anything new, but I believe that they can be pushed further to the limits than they have been previously used for.