Mikethinkstwice - My Public Notebook - Tumblr Blog

Played the board game Arcs for the first time yesterday! There are a lot of good things to say about this game's design. The turns are snappy, the trick-taking action system is genius, and declaring/scoring ambitions makes you think long and hard on the hand of cards you're given. But I wanted to draw attention to one specific design choice that likely went unnoticed by many, but is invaluable in my eyes.

The design choice in question is the way which HP is tracked on buildings and units! For those of you who have never played a war game before, HP can be a pain to track for individual units, and Arc's entire design philosophy is to deliver the war game experience while minimizing the busywork. And when you have up to a dozen individual pieces on the board per-faction, that can become a real problem.

How Arcs solves this is to use the geometry of the game pieces. Every ship can either be upright (2 HP), on its side (1 HP), or removed from the board (0 HP).

Likewise, every building token is double sided, having both "healthy" and "damaged" sides which you can flip over when taking damage. This also simplifies the math in the game to mere counting. No need to use a calculator here!

Choices like this, while not particularly impactful with how players interact with the rules of the game, are vital to how players interact with the experience of the game.

Simply put, when making a game, keep in mind the physical space your players will be playing in. It might alert you to some problems, and if you're wise, might even offer you some solutions!

What if there was a TTRPG where you're only a part-time adventurer? So all of your abilities and toolkit are specific to your mundane job and you need to find ways as the player to apply them to dungeon crawling.

So I just discovered that elephants can communicate via seismics!

And now I want to design a fantasy proboscidea species for my world that are intelligent, nonverbal, and communicate with said seismic waves. Maybe they can even harness magic this way!

I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.

Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.

Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.

Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.

And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.

Sword and sorcery tabletop RPG which includes a long, rambling list of magic spells with weirdly specific affects and annoyingly particular casting requirements, kind of like if Dungeons & Dragons decided to be about 40% more precious about its magic system, except it's a group worldbuilding game, and one of the first steps is for the group to collectively choose exactly seven of those spells to be the only ones anyone still knows how to cast. All of the spells that didn't get picked might be spoken of in legend, but the knowledge of them has been lost over time. The remainder of the group worldbuilding phase consists principally of brainstorming what a society built around these seven annoyingly specific spells would look like; for example, perhaps the knowledge of their working is jealously guarded, with each of the setting's great nations constructing their entire cultural identity around Their Spell, or perhaps the setting's industrial base is dependent on combining these spells in increasingly unintended ways to form a sort of sorcerous Rube Goldberg machine of production.

(One of the default campaign premises for this hypothetical game would, of course, cast the player characters as a gang of mercenary scholars on a quest to rediscover an eighth spell. Depending on what sort of setting the group initially brainstormed, keeping their intentions under wraps may be strongly advisable.)

Solving this exact design problem is why I've been toying with the idea of a GM-less horror game where the details of the monster are revealed via playing cards as the players encounter the monster in increasingly dire situations.

The card system would be inspired by Sleepaway's Lindworm events, but each encounter would then be logged into a Monster Sheet that documents what the players have learned about the monster so far.

if you want to make your players roleplay out the process of trying things on the monster to learn its weaknesses in a challenge game, it behooves you to invent a monster they don't know about.

them playing dumb until you arbitrarily decide they've experimented enough to be allowed to try what everyone knew was the correct answer going in is not a satisfying play experience for anyone

All good points here, but I also wanted to add on that there has been some flanderization of this nugget of advice. I remember when this hack was first being passed around, it was a much more nuanced take. It was something along the lines of "if you have a riddle or puzzle and if the Players devise a reasonable solution that was not your intended answer, reward their problem solving and let them pass".

Somewhere along the dreaded content creation chain it was warped into the subject of your post. But it wasn't always that way. At one point, it was just applying the rule of cool to puzzles.

My least favourite GMing "hack" that gets passed around is "make puzzles/riddles with no fixed answer, and then whatever answer the players guess, make that the right answer."

If the game I'm running is going to have riddles, it's because I have players at the table who... like riddles? And for those players, the fun of a riddle is the moment where it clicks and you get the satisfaction of figuring it out. Which just isn't likely to happen if the riddle is just some vague, evocative nonsense that validates whatever guess they make.

So, presumably, this hack is for making riddles for a table full of only people who do not like riddles. Which invites the question, "why are you making riddles for a table full of only people who do not like riddles?" Do you just feel obligated to?

I guess if so, then here is my hack for you: I absolve you. You are no longer obligated to include riddles in your game of people who don't like them. Go forth, my child, and riddle no more.

TTRPG where instead of levelling up to get new abilities you can just yell and new abilities appear on your character sheet.

Will they be good abilities? Not always. But they will certainly be new abilities.

Just finished my first playtest of my wild west horror game, and my biggest takeaway is this:

It is equally important to be good at communicating your rules as it is to have fun an interesting rules.

Now, this is an obvious token of advice that any game designer worth their salt should be aware of, but it's not until I sat down to playtest that I understood the GRAVITY of it.

Because my poor players, my dearest friends who were willing to take time out of their day to understand my game and play it through, read the rulebook up and down multiple times. And each and every one of them came to the table with a sheepish admittance of guilt that they didn't understand the rules.

But they shouldn't feel guilty for that, that's MY fault as a communicator of the game's rules. See, I initially wrote the rules of my game for myself, as a designer. I made a step-by-step list of the procedures between the GM and the Player. But to someone that isn't a designer, my rules were described in a way that was positively USELESS.

My point is, it's very difficult as a game designer to communicate your mechanics to non-designers without hands-on demonstration. But you don't have that luxury when selling that game to strangers once the playtest is over. It's a skill you have to develop, a skill where you need to view your game from the perspective of someone who has never encountered it before. That's difficult.

Now, once the Players understood the mechanics, they actually got really into my game. And for that I'm very proud, and even more so relieved. I was worried I would have to rewrite my rules from scratch because the game wouldn't be fun.

Turns out I will be rewriting my rules from scratch, but not because the rules were bad, but because my communication was bad!

I'm just about level 100 in Elden Ring and my favorite quest line BY FAR has been Ranni the Witch and Starscourge Radhan.

My jaw dropped the first time I wandered down into Siofra River and saw the starry night beneath the earth. My jaw dropped twofold when I was told how those stars got there.

A lot of fantasy games should take notes on this kind of worldbuilding. Too often I find that settings (my own included) are unwilling to do things as outlandish as "arresting the stars and imprisoning them underground" because the writer is worried that such a concept won't be taken seriously by Players. Perhaps this is because said writer is concerned that it will ruin the suspension of disbelief for Players, as it directly contradicts the cosmology of our own world.

But brother this is FANTASY, let your cosmology go wild and let your Players get elbow deep in that cosmology in turn. Freeing the stars from Radhan's grasp and watching that crater to Nokron appear on the map has been one of the coolest things in the first 100 levels of Elden Ring.

i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back

Ever since I learned about the concept of the Philosopher King during a greek philosophy class I took in college, I've implemented something adjacent to my worldbuilding on multiple occasions. It doesn't pan out exactly like the original concept of a Philosopher King, but normally it goes like this:

The Players meet the beaurocratic leader of a people.This leader has a scholarly background, usually having been mentored by a missing/deceased/retired great thinker in their youth. The leader demonstrates this background by introducing the Players to an ethical or philosophical dilemma that they are both familiar with, asking the Player Characters how the problem ought to be solved. The Philosopher King then shares their own insights, revealing either a different, but respectable perspective or a cunning and tricky solution.

Throughout the story, the Philosopher King acts as a mostly benevolent wild card character. Sometimes I'll pit the Philosopher King against a BBEG counterpart, typically a generically evil monarch. When I do this, the Philosopher King runs circles around the monarch with their wit, but there are always a few quirks about their philosophy that concern the Players.

This might manifest into the Players questioning who is truly the "good guy" in the scenario, or whether or not they can actually trust the Philosopher King to not betray them in service of themselves, their people, or some other value made clearly important to the Philosopher King.

I'm sure this "niche trope" might just be a sub-category of an already well-documented one, but I think the ethical/philosophical angle adds an interesting dimension in TTRPGs. Because of Player Agency, Players can really sink their teeth into the implications of said philosophy in ways that a passive audience member cannot.

BotW? Nah, I'm on that CotW shit

Chicken

Of

The

Woods

I made tacos :)

They were very tasty

*furiously taking notes for nostromo-inspired setting playbook in a sci-fi horror game I haven't even started*

part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.

RAAAAAH I LOVE WHEN GAMES HAVE NON-STANDARD COMPONENTS FOR PLAY

Gonna start posting my one pagers on Tumblr because why not. This one is about a weird dome I saw five minutes from my house that I’d somehow missed for an entire year

Finally playing Elden Ring and wow it has exceeded my expectations as a designer. From the ways the game handles difficulty scaling with summoning ashes, its diverse methods of player expression via a more comprehensive magic system, and the map design all have me impressed.

But I've got one (singular) thorn in my side about Elden Ring that has made me think about the pros and cons of... prose and cons.

So, From Software games have a reputation for cryptic lore veiled behind equally cryptic prose, usually squirreled away in item descriptions. In past From Software games, this has mostly been an opt-in experience for Players. Want to dive into analyzing that prose to find some interesting world building nuggets? Knock yourself out. Think that's too much work? That's fine too! Since past From Software titles are linear experiences with minimal narrative player choice, one could ignore the prose-veiled lore and just enjoy the game from a mechanical and power fantasy perspective.

But just like Elden Ring is different from past From Software games in a myriad of other ways, Elden Ring is different in this regard too. On one hand, the open world nature of the game helps couch this prose in a more intense sense of discovery. Instead of walking down a fairly narrow exploration space and then being delivered these nuggets of lore, you (the player) are actively venturing out to a location because it looks interesting to you. Therefore, there's a sense of personal investment in what you find there and what you learn! And that's really cool!

But on the other hand, From Software's tendency to veil its lore in this way can sometimes work against Elden Ring's nareative design. Specifically when what you find is a who and not a what. Sometimes those NPCs you meet will want something of you that requires you to make a choice between people, factions, or even cosmic powers in the world. Now of course in any story there is bound to be hidden information to the Player, but due to how From Software lore is presented, it can be difficult for a Player to make an informed choice about the actions their character is taking.

This can lead to situations where an NPC attempts to con a Player or undermine their belief in a faction in the lands between. But due to the cryptic nature of Elden Ring's prose, these important decisions can go right over a Player's head! And if the Player doesn't know what they're getting themselves into, they might feel confused or even cheated when their character does something that doesn't match the Player's expectation of how their Character has acted thus far.

For some Players, this could manifest as the Player being ambivalent and not particularly invested in the Characters within the story. But overall this is a minor bump in an otherwise pretty fantastic game, and I wouldn't be surprised if I received comments saying that this Player experience absolutely didn't happen to others.

The easiest way to fix this would simply to be a modicum more transparent to the Player about the choice they are about to make once said choice is in front of them. That way, Elden Ring could throw as much cryptic prose as they wanted at the Player, and then when it becomes decision time, the curtain could be pulled back juuuust a little bit to give the Players key context to what their deciding to do with their character.

Hell, doing this could even expand the design space From Software has to work with regarding their quest lines! It could allow for more meaningful and interesting narrative choices on the Player's part to foster further replayability.

One of the strangest things about writing a TTRPG in the Horror genre is that many of the typical trappings of TTRPG design get flipped on their head. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that you're not writing to fulfill a power fantasy.

I've run into this phenomenon a few times while working on my wild west horror rpg. Here are two of the most relevant incidents:

1. Started the game with traditional Classes. Switched to a table of flawed character Traits. Turns out, giving the Characters flaws was way more interesting than giving them skills and abilities. Instead of answering the question "How does this character solve problems?" it's more entertaining to answer the question "How does this character create problems?". So I've opted to let the Players themselves answer the former question, but only give tools for the Players to expand upon the latter question.

2. Up until recently, the Players could harness the magic of the setting whenever they wanted, as long as they sacrificed something for it. While the sacrifice concept does narratively fit into the rest of my game, I've found that Players having unregulated access to magic meant that Players could reasonably "chop-finger-off-ex-machina" anything the GM throws at them. I want the Horror of a session to have some staying power, and it'd be best if the Players interacted with a specific narrative thread to harm a Horror instead of having a catch-all rule for interacting with the setting's magic.

This thread helped me design my first game. Thanks guys!

I'm working on a Wild West/Horror fusion RPG that uses playing cards instead of dice. The main conflict resolution system has The Dealer (GM) lay out 2 or more cards face-up and the final card face-down to represent the difficulty of the action. This is a Challenge Hand!

The Player then must choose cards from their hand to beat the Challenge Hand. Only there are a few obstacles in their way:

1. How many cards the Player can choose is restricted by how they're handling the situation. Are they bashing down a door? That's Strength, aka Clubs. Say the Player's Character has a Clubs of 3. They can only play up to 3 cards to beat the Challenge Hand!

2. The suit of the highest card the Player chooses must match how they're handling thr Challenge Hand. In the aforementioned example, that would mean the highest card the Player chooses from their hand would have to be a Clubs card. Spades are wild-cards in this system so those can be used in place of the required suit if necessary.

3. Because the last card in the Challenge Hand is face-down, the Player only has partial information of the score they need to beat the Challenge Hand. It could be anywhere from +2 to +11 more than the face-up cards show!

4. Players don't get to refill their hand of cards back to 6 until their hand is empty! This means the Player will occasionally have to face a Challenge Hand with very few cards in hand. This creates intense situations where players really have to cross their fingers and pray that the face-down card in a Challenge Hand is low.

So Challenge Hands use both the partial information from face-up vs face-down cards, as well as the extra values a card can have instead of dice, namely the suit.

I've also got additional mechanics that tie into other points mentioned in this post, like using the cards in character creation to determine what personality traits a Character has through a large random table, but I've gone on long enough for one post.

Just wanted to say thanks to the people I'm rebloging and share what I've done with their ideas!

Ultimately an RPG that uses playing cards as a randomizer but doesn't actually utilize the cards for. You know. The things that cards can do. Is just using them as a fancy, weirdly shaped die.

A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.

You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.

You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.

There's suits as an added bit of information that can be utilized for some mechanics. Maybe matching suit with an action type results in an extra benefit?

At some point in time, a man used a deer antler to knock walnuts out of a tree.

That time was 2024. That man was me. I am the weirdo in the park.

I also don't pay corporations for walnuts. It's all about perspective.