But that’s cool. I almost have an outline–4 pages so far. It’s actually a bit more than an outline, including all the rules for the game so far. It’s just not written up in a fashion that will make sense to anyone but me. I wrote it with the express purpose of condensing what I had on the game down to a single document that makes sense to me, so I’m happy with it so far. But it’s not quite ready to be written up into a playtest draft. It’s missing a piece.

I want an endgame. But let’s start earlier, shall we?

What is this all about?

My game is about, well, shit, it was about Mongolian overlords fighting it out, and now I want it to be about U.S. politicians duking it out. I’m more excited about that setting/situation than I am about the Mongolian thing. And I think the mechanics will support it just as well, if not better.

But, really, what is the game about? I want to say: Striving against and cooperating with your political rivals (anyone who’s not you) to accomplish your desires (hey, Beliefs were taken).

Fuck, sounds like I might as well do a “The War Room” hack for Burning Wheel and get it over with. I have some clever mechanics, and some smart theft from IAWA, Burning Wheel, and Sweet Agatha, but is that really enough to justify a new game?

That question aside. I want some sort of endgame where the players either do or don’t achieve their desires and I haven’t figured that part out yet. Perhaps it’s good enough for playtesting right now, and that will be figured out through play. In any case, things are progressing, and I just wanted to post here to let GC people know that my game is still being worked on in a real way.

It would be cool if I could make the two-week deadline, but I’m not sweating it. I have one more mechanical niggle to work out before I think this thing is ready to playtest. Exciting!

Basically, this is a three player game where characters (and possibly players, I haven’t figured that out yet) are competing with each other. The core mechanic is called an “Offer”, which is invoked by a player once she either wants to create and resolve a conflict or create and resolve a cooperation of sorts. This player rolls 2d4, keeping one in the open and hiding the other one. So it looks like this:

4 [2]. A four in the open, a two hidden.

The open die is the value of the possible conflict. The hidden die is the value of the possible alliance. This player says a total number that she ostensibly rolled. In this case, let’s say she lies and says, “Seven.” The player she’s making an offer to then has to guess if she’s lying or telling the truth. If she’s lying, it’s a conflict, if she’s telling the truth, it’s a cooperation. So now the opposing player says, “Sure, you’re telling the truth.” Since he guessed wrong, the player making the offer wins the conflict, and narration happens accordingly (there are some other rules about this, but I’m giving the basics here). If he had guessed right, the player making the offer would have lost the conflict.

Same happens for a cooperation: the “opposing” player guesses if the number offered was right, and gains the upper hand in the cooperation if he guessed right, and loses the upper hand if he guessed wrong.

Okay, so this is why I’m telling you all this, other than some ego that thinks this is a pretty cool mechanic: In response to this, Ben posted,

When I see abstracted fiddly resolutions, I always go “okay, what actually roots this to the imagination?”

That’s what I’m doing right now.

I’ve taken a number of days to think over his question and try to understand what he’s getting at. I think it’s this:

The mechanic pulls you out of the fiction and into the dynamic between players, trying to guess if that girl across from you is lying or not.

So, is it a problem to pull players out of the fiction like this and focus for a moment on the real-world dynamic with another person? If it is a problem, is there a way to rectify it?

I came across this truth through Paul Tevis.

This is my food right now. In the midst of so many blogs to keep up with (which I’m not really doing) and so little time to work on my game, I’m thinking this. Remember. This isn’t about rushing and dreaming about publishing. It’s about the process of making–fiddling with mechanics, snowballing small ideas into a playtest draft, and playing the thing. It’s worthless to want to have made a game; I want to make a game. In that light, I’m exactly where I want to be.

The thing I haven’t articulated yet, but that has been in my mind almost from the start, is that characters have goals (stand-in name. Something will come up that fits better fictionally). These are player-priorities-expressed-through-character a la Burning Wheel. They are also the point of the game. You win by achieving your goal and/or denying the other players their goals. This is still a vague concept, but it’s where I’m pointing.

There may be one or more goals per character, we’ll see. Since I want this to be a competitive game, I want goals to be aimed at cutting each other off–achieving my goal will greatly hinder you in achieving yours. This makes offers of conflict or alliance meaningful.

• Why Make Offers?

This was a question posed by Emily. I’ve come to more conclusions about it (other than what I’ve already stated above about making offers meaningful), and it has made my mechanic better. Let me start at the beginning, and I’ll get around to answering this question.

With the Offer resolution mechanic somewhere more refined than “Ooh, rough,” I wanted to sketch out the elements of a character. I wanted to do this to make sure that characters would have some sort of input into the offer system beyond what’s already been described. If a character is more adept at navigating conflict than agreeing, and vice-versa, I wanted that to reflect in the way that character engaged with the offer system. Rather than give some sort of “+2 to the value for offering axe” to such a character, I wanted to do something that would make it so the character who is supposedly more adept at conflict would succeed more in conflict. Who we say the character is on the character sheet needs to match up with what happens in the fiction. This is what I came up with:

“Characters have abilities that allow them to overturn the result of an offer. Temujin (our conflict-lover non-negotiator), for example, can override 3 offers of Axe in a session (because he’s Heartless. That’s what it says on his character sheet, right next to three boxes waiting to be ticked, with little pictures of axes underneath them). Qasar (his more amicable brother) can override 1 offer of Axe and 2 offers of Lily in a session.”

So if Temujin’s player gets offered Axe, and he guesses wrong (loses the conflict), She can say, “Wait! I’m going to tick one of my ‘Heartless’ boxes. It’s still a conflict, but now I win!” Temujin now wins the conflict with the value of the Axe die, whatever it was.

What to do with the value of  the hidden die, that die that gives the loser of the Offer “other, as-yet-undefined” dice? Well, Temujin’s player now has to give the player she switched the conflict on the number of dice shown on that hidden die. So if it was a [3], she has to give the other player three of her “other” dice, and can’t use her “Heartless” ability unless she has three dice to giv e up. Note: This number is tentative. I was also thinking of having it be n + 1, where n is the value of the die not associated with the offer.

Now: What are these “other” dice, really? Well, for now they’re just chips or beads, because they don’t have a randomizing function yet. They may never have one, but I think it may be better if I do; read on.

These dice or beads are the resource that fuels the fiction in the rest of the game that is outside of Offers. Since there’s no GM, I need some sort of system for players framing scenes and creating adversity. You spend these beads to bid for narrative control. I’m not sure if this will be literal bidding, with araise-and-see kind of thing, or not. I kind of don’t like that for my game, but I’ll have to come up with something that formalizes who gets to spend their beads first.

Spend 1 to get narrative control over framing a scene. Spend 1 for each fact you establish at the beginning of the scene–1 for each Player Character present, 1 for where it is, 1 for something that just happened, etc.

This is pretty simple, and similar things are done in other games (I think it’s done in Universalis, but I had a short and bad experience with it, so I’m not the best judge of it).

Okay, but now look here: This makes it so that Offers directly drive play. As I said before, characters striving for their goals is the meat of play. In an offer you either angle to win (if winning the offer will help you advance your goal in some way), or you hope to lose and get the beads so you can have control later and frame a scene that will get you closer to your goal. In either case, you must make Offers in order to progress toward your goals, and progressing toward your goals is what creates story and is playing the game. Why Make Offers? The economy they create is what directly drives play.

Whether you win or lose an offer is, on paper, a 50/50 game. As I have it now players will have resources to spend to just win in certain cases where they really want to, where the conflict/alliance is very important to their character. What about, though, when the player really wants the extra beads to frame this one scene that they’re just jonesin’ for? I don’t have anything in place to give the players resources to lose when they want to. I may not need that, but it seems like I will.

Last, I want the beads to be d6′s that you roll at some point during the game. Some of this desire can surely be explained away by dice fetishism, but I think there’s something potentially suspenseful about passing these d6′s around the table all night and then, at some crucial point, getting to finally roll them. If this is what I end up doing, then I don’t want to give the players options to fail to get more of these d6′s. If they are important in more ways than one, the players will really have to think before they give them to another player in order to activate their ability and automatically win the offer.

Oh, and this economy is all really elegant in my head. The way I have it set up now, with these beads/d6′s/narrative dice being born out of the non-used die in an Offer, is a good starting point, but playtesting will determine if it creates the economy I need. I’m almost totally sure it will need some tweaking.

So. Tony’s refinement on my mechanic as well as my fictional home in the Mongol Empire really have my juices flowing.

I’ve pared my basic mechanic down to 2 four-siders: a shown die, and a hidden one. Once I did that I had to ask myself: Come on Hans, what’s the point of that shown die? I mean, if the value of an alliance is solely based on the hidden die, and the value of a conflict is based on the difference between what I claimed I rolled and what I actually rolled, the shown die can be cut out completely and all of that will work just peachy. So I either needed to cut out the shown die and just have a simple bluffing game, or do something with that shown die. I wanted it to have meaning, so I set to work.

My first idea was that it would somehow represent the forcefulness or passion with which you offered your conflict or alliance. That’s nebulous and didn’t show me anything, so I threw it out. Then I thought the open die might be the value of some sort of resource that would go to the loser of the offer, that would give them control over the fiction in some other way and time than in the present offer. That was closer to good, but I hadn’t gotten there yet.

Then, in my notebook, I wrote, “Well, shit: on an offer of lily, the hidden die determines the value. On an offer of axe, the shown die determines the value.” In addition to being fairly intuitive (the attack die is out there, bold, while the alliance die is hidden, considering), this had the benefit of making sure that the values of alliances and conflicts had the same range, 1-4.

Now I needed to figure out what to do with the other die, the one that didn’t have a particular meaning depending on whether the offer was lily (the shown one) or axe (the hidden one). One option was to have the other die simply not mean anything. But that seemed like a waste of an opportunity, and I wanted to have some other resource at stake.

I’d been thinking that the value of an axe or lily would make the conflict or alliance weak or strong, depending on how low or high the number of the appropriate die was. That’s vague, and I wanted to nail it down. Perhaps, say, once the offer is resolved, the players must resolve it in-fiction as a back-and-forth exchange between their characters (whether dialogue, gestures, or thoughts), and the winner of the offer gets to control the other player’s character for a number of exchanges equal to the value on his winning die. This is where I am right now. I like it, but it may need work.

Back to that other die that’s not associated with axe or lily. What could it be? How could it expand offers in an interesting way while contributing to the tension of choice between axe and lily? The answer became clear: the other die’s value becomes a resource which gives some other kind of control at another time in the fiction to the loser of the offer. So the winner gets control in the offer, but relinquishes some sort of control (not defined yet, but I like where this is headed) to the loser. This creates tension for the player making the offer. For example:

I roll a 4 (shown), and a 4 (hidden). It looks like this:

4  [4]

Say I offer lily here, and I win, I win big: I get an alliance with a value of 4 (which isn’t quite defined yet; see above). But I also lose big: my opponent gets 4 resources to gain narrative control later in the game. In this example it’s not that difficult of a decision since the numbers are the same: you’re likely going to go with either what makes sense in-fiction, or which resource you desire more: control in this offer, or control later. Let’s look at another example.

I roll a 4 (shown) and a 2 (hidden). It looks like this:

4  [2]

Offering axe will clearly get me the stronger result in the offer, if I win. It will give my opponent 2 resources for later, as well. Or, I could offer lily, and hedge my bets a little: If I win, I win decently, with 2. If I lose, yes, I lose power in control over what happens in this offer, but I win 4 resources for later.

I think it’s quite neat how this all works out, in theory. Throw in some situation, and then you have real choices: Do I stab (offer axe to) my brother Begter, because I hate him and he accused me of being not of my father’s loins, Or do I attempt to reconcile and win him to my side, because I rolled a 1 for axe and a 4 for lily?

Or, say I roll a 4  [1] axe-lily split, and I’m trying to ally with my grandmother O elun, because being close to her will get me approval in the eyes of the Khan. If I really want to ally with her, I’ll go for lily and take the loss. But if it’s not such an incredibly strong inclination, what will I do? Will I be dissuaded by the numbers and go for the axe, or will I stay on course and go for the lily?

There still needs to be real incentive behind those numbers. A 4 needs to be actually better than a 1, 2, or 3. But this is going somewhere.

I don’t have a huge amount of work done since my last post; mostly I’m chewing on questions like these:

Ben said, “okay, what actually roots this to the imagination?”

Hmm. I dunno. I’m having a hard time grasping what is being asked by this question, and I don’t put Ben at fault. I’m thinking it’s along the lines of “what roots this mechanic in the fiction?”, but I could be off. Re-reading Vincent Baker’s Clouds and Boxes posts may help me here, but it’s probably better if I don’t go off on too many tangents. I’m still pondering over it as I refine the mechanic with help like this:

Tony said, “Here’s an idea: if I offer Lily, the value of the alliance is the value on the hidden die. So if I show 4 and claim my total is 5, offering Lily, then the value of the alliance is 1. This is a low value alliance.

If I bluff (offering axe), the value is the different between what I claimed, and what I actually rolled. So in the example above, it’s a high potential axe, because I could have rolled a 4, giving a difference of 3.”

I really like this. It cuts out people having to guess numbers, which was clunky, and attaches a fictional meaning to the numbers. Also, with this way, there’s no reason to roll 3d4 and hide one. Just roll one in the open and hide one. Simple.

The strange thing with this addition of Tony’s is that the possible values of alliances range from 1-4, while the possible values of conflicts range from 1-3. I’m not sure that’s a problem, but I’d like for it to make sense fictionally. Why can alliances be stronger than conflicts?

Emily asked “What kinds of gains will the players get through these offers? What are each of the characters driving for? What will they lose, or what can be threatened by the other players?”

These ones are pointed like arrows at the heart of my game. Thank you for them, they’re going to take me some time to chew on, and if I can answer ‘em I just might have a game.

Perhaps I need to first figure out what I’m trying to do with the fiction. I think I had a minor breakthrough today on that front–we’ll see if it pans out, but I’m very excited about it. I’ve been reading The Blue Wolf: A novel of the life of Chinggis Khan by Inoue Yasushi. It’s historical fiction about the life of Chinggis (better known to many of us as Genghis) Khan. I’m only in the beginning, but seeing the very formalized conflicts and alliances that happened within the community and family of the young man who would be Khan made me think, “aha! This is dramatic conflict!” And what’s perhaps harder to find, “This is dramatic companionship and allying with one another.”

Reading the novel and thinking about it further, I had the thought, “Well, Dogs in the Vineyard does this better.” But if I let that stop me every time I tried to make a game…

Anyway, I spent my entire work day in my head, churning out ideas, like:

• an item creation game where the players are somehow competing with each other through item creation
• some sort of short-form, casual game, along the lines of an RPG poem
• Intrigue=a secret scheme=the universe is a clockwork scheme, we have no free will and the unifying scientific equation has been discovered that proves it
• a game where characters start as templates drawn from the Enneagram (a psychology of personality concept)
• a game about retired people living on a lake in Michigan, titled “Loons and Lakebirds”

These all led me nowhere. I like some of the ideas in them, but I kept hitting a wall. So I decided, screw it, I’m not going to start with a concept, I’m going to start with a mechanic. I looked at “Intrigue”, thought “A secret scheme,” and started thinking about hiding dice. I looked at “Fleur-de-lis” and thought about how it can be a symbol for a flower or an axe. Boom! Things started flowing.

The main thing, mechanically, that happens in the game is an “Offer”. Players can “Offer the Axe,” or “Offer the Lily”. The way you make an offer is by rolling 3d4, and making sure one of the dice stays hidden, while the other two are in the open (player screens, perhaps? Oh-ho!). The player then says a number that is ostensibly the number of all her dice added together. If she’s bluffing, she’s “offering the axe.” If not, she’s “offering the lily.” Offering the axe is an attempt to initiate a conflict, while offering the lily is an attempt to make some sort of alliance/bond/reconciliation/bargain.

Note: the interesting thing about this is that the characters, and players, don’t know, until an offer is resolved, whether or not it’s an offer of peace or of war. This seems to suggest to me characters that are either really suspicious or extremely cautious.

Back to the mechanic. What happens next is that the player getting the offer guesses what the other player is offering. Here’s what happens:

• If I offer axe, and you guess axe, then you have to guess the real number I rolled. Example: I roll 3d4 and get 1, 2, 4. I hide the 4, show you the 1+2 and say, “I have 5.” You say, “Nuh-uh, you’re offering axe. You have 4.” Since you correctly guessed axe, you win the conflict, but you win it by a margin of 3, since that’s how different my real result (7) was from your guess (4). I don’t know what margins mean mechanically yet, but clearly here a smaller margin means more victory (somehow) in the conflict.
• If I offer axe, and you guess lily, you lose the conflict. I win by the margin of my bluff. In the case above, if you had guessed lily, I would have won by a margin of 2 (I said 5, I had 7). The more I’m thinking about these margins of victory, the more they feel shaky. Needs work.
• If I offer lily, and you guess lily, you can turn around and offer axe by rolling 1d4. A result of 1 means I get an alliance on my terms by a margin of 1. Any other result means you win the conflict by that margin. If you don’t want to offer axe, you simply get an alliance on your terms.
• If I offer lily, and you guess axe, then guess the real number I rolled. I get an alliance on my terms and a margin of the difference between what I rolled and you guessed. Example: I roll 2, 2, 3, hiding the 3 and showing you 2+2, saying I got 7. You call axe and say I got 5. I get the alliance and a margin of 2.

Whoo! Isn’t that kind of ugly and clunky? I like the heart of it, but I’m getting more befuddled by the margins the more I write. I kind of want them to translate into extra dice somehow, but what would the dice do? Maybe the dice won in these offers are of a different size than D4, and can come into the game in other places to affect the narration? I’m also thinking that hiding 2 dice and only showing 1 might work better. The highest margin you’ll get in the current setup is 3, whereas if it’s done the other way margins can go up to 6.

So yeah, clearly I’m a novice designer. But I’d love to hear thoughts and critical feedback. Tear it apart if you need to. Please!

Perhaps this is a three-player (no GM) game that’s competitive. Each player is some kind of creator (with the implied caveat that they are a creator of something that follows a blueprint or recipe; potions and machines = yes, visual art = no). There are a number of basic character templates that each player chooses from (Machinist, Poisonmaker, Alchemist, etc.), and then further fleshes out that character mechanically & fictionally, with the two tied together.

The characters are competing for…what? Political power? The hand of a handsome man? Land? A job? I like the idea that the objective of the competition is collaboratively created each session by the group. O-ho! I have just assumed my game will be a one-shot game. I don’t know if I want to assume that yet.

The competition has to do with the characters creating whatever it is they create. This creation happens through engaging the mechanics, which will have to do with creating the recipe for the creation; when the recipe is created by the player, the thing, fictionally, is created by the character. I’m not sure how this is going to work yet, and I’m not sure how to make it tie in well with the competition.

These thoughts don’t really include the ingredients, but I want to keep them in mind and incorporate (some of) them. Intrigue could be ramped up by making the competition a totally veiled thing in the fiction. Perhaps all the characters are in some sort of court (a la 1001 Nights) together and have to smile and say pleasantries every day while at the same vying against each other? The dramatic irony of having the characters unaware of the competition while having the players totally engaged in it seems good, too.

Last thing: I seem to be creating a psuedo-fantasy game. I don’t want to do fantasy, unless there’s room in the game for other things, too. What if it’s, like, an Alchemist and a Machinist in the modern day? Perhaps looking to the ingredients will help me here.

“item/recipe creation rpg.

I want to get into the cool color and description and world-building centered around some sort of intricate art. Description having mechanical effect, or coming out of play with a tangible object, a cool description or mythical blueprint/recipe.”

I think the thought here was that in games where you can be, say, a poisonmaker or something, the promise of discovering and creating really rich, evocative, and effective poisons falls flat when the reality kicks in and says, “Roll 2d6. You create a poison of weakening! That’s it.” I want to get inside the fictional process of doing that. I’m not sure I want it to be poisonmaking; perhaps I’ll be creating something Oracle-like, where the players will make a world where the characters will be creating clockwork steam engine blueprints, or herbal magic recipes, or anything else. Maybe this is Right to Dream play?

So very raw. So how will that apply to the theme and ingredients? Let’s see.

THEME: Intrigue. “A Secret Scheme; a Plot.” “Machination.” Also, interestingly enough, “A Clandestine Love Affair.” Eyebrow raised. I could be cute and use “Machination” as an inspiration to really focus on the mythical blueprint thing. If I marry that with a love affair? Hm.

INGREDIENT: Fleur-de-lis. “Lily Flower”. Ooh, this is a tough one. Lots of associations with France, Spain, and Italy. Apparently it’s been a royal emblem in civilizations spanning the ancient and modern worlds. Connotations of royalty, plants, and weapons (trident, arrowhead, double-axe).

INGREDIENT: Dividers. This one is broad. Physical dividers? Mental, emotional, political, sexual dividers? Any and all of the above? Yes. That Fleur-de-lis as weapon thing brings about thoughts of dividers: You can certainly do some dividing with an axe head. What about with a flower?

INGREDIENT: Seabird. This is just a pleasant word. Seabird. It sounds good to the ear. Fat, dirty, human-overfed-seagulls squawking for more, more, more? Loons, though, are gorgeous and almost never spend time on land. They’re more like lakebirds. Shall I interpret this more broadly? They spend their natural lives on the earth, in the water, and in the air. They exist between elements. I don’t know quite where I’m going with this.

INGREDIENT: Star. Balls of gas burning billions of miles away. Celebrities. Twinkly things. This is the ingredient that I’m not feeling.

Okay. I have a starting point. I want to try hard to go with the theme, and probably Fleur-de-lis and either Dividers or Seabirds. We’ll see where that gets me. Let’s work on the Big 3:

1. What is your game about (and the companion, “How is it about that?)?

2. What do the characters do?

3. What do the players do?

working…