Monday's Pitch: Magic in Equilibrium

So, I was reading the introductory rulebook for Vampire: the Eternal Struggle. In addition to making me yearn for the quiet, succinct simplicity of the 182 page Magic: the Gathering Comprehensive Rules, it also brought up an interesting concept: hand equilibrium.

In Vampire:tES, if a player’s hand is below the maximum, they draw up. If it’s above, they discard down. Now, I don’t think this will work as a Magic: the Gathering format because of how delicately balanced Magic is. Many cards only work because hand size is this or you can only draw when that.

It’s interesting to contemplate something like Mindculling doing a strange riff on Wheel of Fortune. It’s cool, I like looting, even reverse looting. One of the things I want to do do in the Zombie CCG I occasionally work on is drawing cards related to a location’s size, then playing some of them and restocking the difference from your hand. Meanwhile, your opponent does the same, except they’re looking for Zombie cards to play against you.

Monday's Pitch: Many Campaigns, One Character

Given that identity is just a set of Cogitoes Summing it up, a tenuous set of contiguous, self-aware thoughts, why not use that as a vehicle for self-aware roleplaying within self-aware roleplaying. The players’ characters are consciousnesses with some character and general faculty at fashioning ‘skins’ and operating them. The physical world is a mystery to them. Or rather, the physical worlds. The sum skills and talents of corporeal beings are no more than simple data that can be transmuted from one kind into another between skins.

They create skins that enable them to interact with various, lesser planes of physicality, either for exploration, curiosity, or even as part of a larger plan set in motion by some equally non-physical enemies. The more they act in the physical plane, the better they get at manipulating its ins and outs.

This is a setup for an adult roleplaying game. Not “nip-slips and beer” adult, “I can’t make it this Sunday because I have a baby” adult. The deal is that the characters are nothing more than personalities tied to a meta-experience level. Whenever the players make a character for another short-lived campaign, they convert that meta-experience into game experience for their characters. (For example, Dungeons and Dragons has a scale that goes up to 30 levels. If the characters are one third of the way up the meta-experience scale, their characters for a new DnD campaign would be Level 10. Alternatively, you could do it by experience points, which would make him one third of one million, so 300,000 XP and Level 23). Their characters are only vaguely aware of the setting, matching the general unfamiliarity of the players with a new setting. As time goes on, each will become more familiar with it (or the campaign will be canceled and they’ll start a new one).

This lets players play and level the same character across many different game systems and settings without having to worry too much about whether they’re going to be playing the same game next week or not.

Next: Problems

Monday's Pitch: Reward Players for Losing

So I was reading this and thinking about how some of the brightest minds of my generation were destroyed by the "pull the lever, get the pellet" sort of dull, non-initiative-driven interaction that public schools, video games, and even most employment train people for. They breed the type of interaction where it's good to win because winning is good.

However, it isn't always good.

Learning to lose has some merits. Put the box inside of a box and simply make a game that you win by losing. I don't mean that you spend four or twelve or twenty hours losing. No, that would suck. But when the game rails you into a bad spot (morally, play wise, etc.), you can lose on purpose and there's a new, 'better' route for the game to follow.

 

Is it just providing a different lever for players to pull? Yes. Does it say something different? Yes. In the end though, I admit that with the internet and strategy guides (both things I loathe about modern gaming: "Here's instructions for which buttons to push in our game to get a thing we made. The super-gaming guide is simply Tron 2 on a jump drive, but after every action scene you push a button on your controller and you get an achievement.") Anyway, since I'm already courting a Skinner Box analogy, I suggest The Watchmen Method; nothing you do matters anyway, so you might as well do what you want.

That is, individual victories, losses, and choices don't end the game; it just keeps trundling along, win or lose, generally worse if you lose, but you tend to eventually end up in a place where the challenges you face are ones you can beat or don't have to beat (cooperation, interaction, exploration, etc.). Whatever 'ending' there is to the game is a composite of a few large decisions with a lot of minor decisions affecting one another.

"Yes," you might say, "that's certainly personal and whatever and despite the fact that automatically generated end scenes would seem jarring when they're mathematically strung end to end and the fact that this game involves maybe people trying to do stuff and not succeeding, which isn't--generally speaking--something someone playing a game wants to experience, I'm going to focus on the trouble with how I can still pull the right set of levers to save an ersatz Aeris or whatever."

That might have been a good thing to ask about. Randomizing encounters is a good way to approach it. Sure, if a character gets less than twelve, but more than no hits in on the Elder Dragon Grestreyx, then dies to his fire-breath, then they will probably end up as a burn patient in a hospital that leads to a story that reveals his family's dark secret, but there's a smaller chance he'll emerge badly burned but recover quickly and be celebrated and loved by the community, beginning a path of heroism.

Will players be angry they can't job the system? Will they call it arbitrary and act like none of their decisions have any effect, even if you give them a nice option of skipping outcomes they've already experienced? Will they quit and play something else, despite the fact that no matter their options, they are still playing a video game and at the end of the day haven't made any consequential decisions at all? Yes. Yes, they will.

After all, once you learn to pull the lever, you get free pellets! If rising obesity rates in developed nations are any indication, folks love pellets!

Monday's Pitch: Humans Are Awesome

Every Monday, for as long as I feel like it, I'll pitch a new idea.

I've long loved my race. We're omnivorous, submersible, dexterous, and smart. We can [perceive a healthy portion of gamma wavelengths], [discern enough frequencies of compressed air] with enough skill to link a subset of those to [each person we meet], feel just about every inch of our body, perform a delicate chemical analysis of everything we put into [our mouth] and [dispersed in the air around us], discern our [physical orientation] and [acceleration] with none of those senses at all. We're silly adaptable, with [eyes that can see underwater], ears that get better when we're blind, and eyes that get better when we're deaf. The external genitalia aren't so great, and there's that crazy sleep thing, plus other stuff, but we can live in almost any environment our planet can cook up, heal wounds, adapt to viruses, communicate with each other in thousands of limitless different ways, identify patterns, reign in any number of voluntary biological functions, become stronger by using muscles, and train our reflexes. That's all before getting to the basics of empathy, unconscious ballistic trajectory calculation, and developing calluses.

It's probably because our planet is a teeming wasteland of life and water/heat systems just itching to devour everything else that sits around for too long. If there was life on other planets, I don' t think they'd visit us because A) We're covered in stuff, and B) We are the galaxy's Australia. Everything here can and will be eaten by something else, or buried and forgotten about. The exceptions to that rule are remarkable because of it.

Take away any one or two of these things and suddenly everything changes; tough, regenerating skin, short-term, unconscious audio recall, that thing where we can get each other pregnant without even having sex because of motile, haploid reproductive cells. Motile reproductive cells. Yeah, lots of things on Earth have these characteristics. Some even have them better (I've seen the heartbreaking YouTube videos of two-legged dogs; I know the score.), and in all likelihood, life forms on other planets have very similar paradigms; life thrives wherever it can, however it must.

But given so many sci-fi/fantasy settings where aliens are badass and humans get the twin advantages of being the protagonist and not being a two-dimensional race of caricatures, it would be nice to have a setting where we can explore the rightfully badass qualities of humanity in a sea of aliens who just don't have that bizarre, amped-up Terran biology in their corner.