New Gaming Tech

#1

I’ve played two games lately with really fantastic gaming tech that blew me away.

Namely:

  • Fiasco in a box, by Bully Pulpit Games. Which I backed as soon as I saw it!
  • Zombie World, by Magpie.

These two have a similar tech that I want we see more of:

  1. Cards rather than a large rule books.
  2. Game material on cards rather than printing out character sheets separate.
  3. Lots and lots of sample names. Fiasco in particular does this well, which makes making NPCs and even PCs all the easier.
  4. Everything I need to play the game is in the game.

We played Zombie World with only the MC knowing anything about the specific system. Pretty sure this was the ever-amazing @Dylan_R who is, admittedly, pretty great.

At Camp Nerdly a bunch of us played Fiasco in a box having never read it, and just remembering how Fiasco more or less works. Jason brought the box, said “Have fun” and we did.

I think these games represent a new era of ease of gaming. I want to see it happen more, for games to be designed with this in mind. For long-term play to happen this way - I don’t think one shots are special, and that this could work for campaign play, too.

Similarly: Board games are awesome, right? Two classics are Catan and Carc, Castles of Mad King Ludvig and Between Two Cities are both personal favorites. And there are hundreds more. Not one of these has a three hundred page rulebook. Not one of these takes time to explain what board games means to the author, or how this boardgame differs from other board games.

No, they give me short rules on how to play and expect me to know how games work.

This sounds like a whole lot of work. Prices may go up. Ease of use will, too!

Bully Pulpit and Magpie have both done it. Can the rest of us?

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#2

I’m sure as hell trying. When I work on my games I’m always trying to refine the rules so that you can hit the same ease of use as DnD’s “roll a d20, add a related modifier, tell the GM the result. Boom. You know how to play DnD”. Yeah, there are more rules than that, but if you have a 1-3 sentence way to easily communicate the main resolution mechanic, you have a system in which you can hand out a bunch of character sheets and immediately start playing.

I think looking to board games is right on the money. We should be referencing games with amazing rulebooks because they are like fruit flies for biologists; they’re faster to make and it’s easier to track their evolution. If Magic the Gathering can fit their rules on one (admittedly large) double sided sheet, we should be able to as well.

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#3

Something that works against this, actively, is the pricing and distribution model for roleplaying games. These lead to a really toxic “perception of value” among many consumers, where page count equals quality. I bet @JimLikesGames could say a lot about this.

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#4

It is a bit tricky because up to a point, maybe 100 pages, sales are usually around $0.10 / page for a PDF so less is not more for producers. I think this is due to a relationship between what publishers pay per word for fiction content. This makes sone sense when you think of setting or sourcebook materials but no sense at all for game mechanics.

That said, providing something tangible like a map or cards or something like these creates at least an illusion of higher value.

In overall effect, I think the new version of Fiasco gives the feeling of the best value of the game. I will be buying it once it is done with the Kickstarter in large part because of the cards.

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#5

I think this comes down to what sort of experience you’d like players to get out of a game. From a design standpoint, that’s really the first and last question you should be asking yourself, with dozens (if not hundreds) of questions in the middle to support your goals.

Do you want a game that’s ready to pick up and play, easy to teach, and ready to play at a moment’s notice? Board game inspired mechanics may just be the way to go. I’ve had a lot of fun in the past converting board games to RPGs.

I feel traditionally-designed games offer a different kind of play experience though. There’s something to be said about spending time meticulously building your character from a huge list of component parts. To me, half of the fun of the RPG experience is putting characters together, and I’ve spent a lot of outside-the-game time doing just that.

I know I’m not alone on that, either. That’s why there are so many YouTube channels, blogs, and forum topics dedicated to character design in various games. From a designer’s perspective, it’s a great boon to have people thinking and talking about your game because that keeps it top-of-mind for players.

I am not certain what makes people talk about board games in the same way, but I know that happens too. If I were to build an RPG based on the board game model, I’d start looking into what really makes them engaging and then try to find the intersection between that feeling and the feeling of an RPG. Otherwise, it might be really easy to feel like you’re just playing a board game, which is fine if that’s your design goal but misses the mark if it isn’t.

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#6

I think there’s plenty of room for both the experience-in-a-box style of roleplaying games as well as the more traditional ones, just as there is room for smooth and streamlined boardgames as well as the massive wargames with 60 pages of rules. (Not to say that those are direct analogues; I’m just trying to provide a scale.)

I also think there’s still plenty of room for games that approach the line(1) between boardgames and roleplaying games. Boardgames have been exploring their side for quite a while now with games like Tales of the Arabian Nights, This War of Mine, and The Grizzled focusing on telling stories and providing emotional experiences, while roleplaying games have been fairly shy about looking to boardgames for inspiration regarding presentation and mechanisms. (Yes, there are reasons for roleplaying games to not do things the same way as boardgames, but that’s no reason to not try to adapt what’s useful.)

But what I’m really looking forward to is RPG rules explanation videos that reach the level of what’s available for boardgames. People like Rodney Smith of Watch It Played, Becca Scott of Game the Game on Geek & Sundry, and Edward Uhler of Heavy Cardboard make learning even fairly heavy boardgames much, much easier, and while streamers have done a lot to popularize roleplaying games I think there’s still a need for well-produced rules introduction videos, especially with play examples. There’s tons of actual play and general GM advice (at least if you’re playing D&D or something similar), but actual practical instructions from first principles on how to run roleplaying games are pretty rare in my experience (which is not to say they don’t exist). Maybe this goes back on roleplaying games to such a great extent being an oral tradition.

(1) I personally draw that line at drama resolution in the sense of fictional positioning having game mechanical effects. YMMV.

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#7

To be fair to rpgs, World in Flames and Third Reich each have almost 100 pages of rules with 0 fluff. These are both considered very good games. I have played them both and they do have an insane number of options attempting to allow simulation of everything the writers could think to include.

#8

“It’s complicated” says the guy who does this for a living.

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#9

Great observations! Your post triggered an idea: In my experience, the board game world has attracted a more diverse (in terms of race & perhaps gender) player base than ttrpgs. The reason for the board game hobby’s relative success in this area may partly be the abundance of onboarding tools, like the instructional videos that you mentioned. Ttrpg’s reliance on “oral tradition,” in contrast, may function as a barrier to entry for underrepresented groups – you have to know someone who has already played and is willing to teach you – especially in a place like the U.S. which is so racially segregated. Which gives me the idea: Maybe the Gauntlet could produce introduction/instructional videos for our favorite indie & story games! And then we could advertise these videos in places where diverse potential players in adjacent fields of interests (board games, comics, etc.) are likely to see it. I know I’d totally be willing to work on such a project for some of my favorite games, like Lovecraftesque (by @BeckyA & @rabalias). What do you all think?

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