Ryan Macklin mentioned in Have Master, Will Plan that his group doesn't play Polaris much because their bi-weekly schedule requires the players to remember too much about each other's characters over two weeks.

This gave me some ideas about incorporating real-time elements into the interlude between episodes of Do. Presently, the order in which you answer letters determines how much trouble will be present in that episode. The longer you wait to answer a letter, the more danger will be there when you finally touch ground. In this way, the second letter has more trouble than the first, the third more than the second, and so on.

The idea I tossed at Ryan was an alternative method of trouble-distribution based on real-time.

In this method, the time between sessions is the actual travel-time you required to reach the next destination of your pilgrimage. Say, a new trouble card or trouble stone for every three days between sessions. Something like that.

x-posted on Storygames

I'm hosting a playtest this Sunday with a mixture of friends, new acquaintances, one co-worker and one semistranger. Most have had some exposure to video games, a few to some board games and two are what we'd call tabletop gamers. I'm trying to make the game fairly accessible to non-gamers, so I'm pleased to have such a mixed group assembled.

I'm serving lunch before the game and as part of that, I'd like to interview everyone to assess how their individual backgrounds might influence their perspective and feedback after the playtest. Also, I want to create some fictional players to use in a running example throughout the text, so I'd use the playtesters answers as a template.

I've got a few questions in mind already, but I'd like to get your input as well.

What previous exposure have you had to roleplaying or story games?
What games have you played and enjoyed recently?
What are your academic interests?
Are there "fantasy martial arts" movies or anime you've seen and enjoyed?

Stuff like that. Just trying to get a frame of reference for the playtesters' familiarity with the source material. Are these questions phrased properly to elicit discussion? Are there any others I should ask?

I've got some bad spotlight paralysis. This is most evidenced by the numerous momentum-stopping clam-ups I had at some GenCon demos last year. Maybe I was just out of practice, I dunno.

Anyway, I had two ideas while I was sleeping.

If you recall an early draft had you come up with some elaborately named abilities that, in time, were reduced to single words. That proved to be a far clunkier endgame condition than simple keeping track of beads. Since then, I've been trying to avoid skill lists.

I liked the idea that your narrative guidelines were just your name, which is pretty descriptive on its own; and your Bonds, each of which provides some guidance for what sort of actions they motivate.

Skill lists felt contradictory one of the game's central ideas: What you do isn't nearly as important as why you do it and what happens as a result. This is why success is always assumed. This is why I've posited that the temple trains pilgrims in all the skills they'll need for their journey. Doesn't matter if you resolve a trouble through negotiation, action, thoughtful intervention, detached manipulation, whatever.

You can do all things with equal competence as your companions, leaving the only distinguishing feature being your motivations, your relationships and the complications you've created or resolved for each other.

But there is still a certain value for skill lists as a quick n' dirty inspiration for players who can't come up with something to do at a moment's notice. (Like me.) I dreamed two ideas for how to approach Skills in Do. Again, nothing final, just some loose thoughts immediately after waking up.

~*~

Option 1: Bond Skills

For each of your Bonds, you'll write down three skills:

1) Black Skill: Write a skill that you'll use when the Bond motivates you to resolve a trouble. This is the skill you'll be using when you transfer black beads from your draw into your bowl. Using this skill to resolve a trouble brings the second Ideal in a Crisis closer to victory. This skill also leads you closer to choosing to leave the temple after your pilgrimage.

2) White Skill: Write another skill that you'll use when the Bond motivates you to resolve a trouble. This is the skill you'll be using when you transfer white beads from your draw into your bowl. Using this skill to resolve a trouble brings the first Ideal in a Crisis closer to victory. This skill also leads you closer to choosing to return to the temple after your pilgrimage.

3) Break Skill: Write a skill that you'll use when you to break this Bond. This is an action that is entirely contrary to the nature of this relationship and will irrevocably change it.

Please note that a Pilgrim doesn't necessarily know that the White or Black skills is leading her, or the world she's visiting, towards a particular destiny. If you choose for your character to have that degree of self-awareness, that's fine, it won't break the game, but it can be just as fun to guide your character towards a destiny they have no idea they're heading towards.

For example:

Charles is choosing skills for Antonius, the Smashing Crest. Antonius has a Bond of Rivalry to Laura's character, Kara, the Risen Starlight.

Bond of Rivalry: You like to compete with your companion in a friendly rivalry.

In choosing skills for this Bond, Charles has to examine the actual nuances of Antonius' rivalry. He surmises that at some point during their training, Antonius felt that Kara was favored by the teachers. Specifically in the classes relating to diplomacy and social interactions. He tries very hard to show off his social abilities, out of a sense of competition with Kara.

Black Skill: Diplomacy. Antonius wants to prove that he can best Kara in any delicate negotiation, be it haggling for a fair price on bread or establishing the terms of a treaty between two empires.

White Skill: Peaceful Intervention. Though he struggles against his more action-oriented nature, he tries to face any violence with a peaceful reaction.

Break Skill: Smash. Antonius knows that he cannot compete with Kara in the social arena. If he ever resorts to violence, he's admitted defeat and his rivalry is ended.

What's nice about this option is that it forced players to examine their bonds on an individual basis, coming up with rationale for why certain skills are tied to a Bond and how those Bonds developed. What's even nicer is that there are no competence-based values attributed to each skill. This keeps Do a relatively numberless system.

~*~

Option 2: Skill Hourglass

This is pretty directly ripped off of the Skill Pyramid in Spirit of the Century. It doesn't require the same navel-gazing as option 2 and doesn't tie any skill to any particular bond. This is a more traditional list-o-stuff-you-can-do.

All you have to do is fill in the blanks of this hourglass-shaped thingie.

When you use a skill, check to see how many black or white dots are next to it. Those dots represent a bonus to your draw, but only for the purposes of resolving an action. They otherwise have no effect on the bag or your bowl.

For example:

If you had Diplomacy assigned to the two-black space, you would automatically get the effect of two black beads in your draw in addition to whatever beads you would draw normally.

So let's say you're using Diplomacy to resolve a trouble. You draw two black beads and one white beads. Because you've got two black dots for this skill, you effectively have four black beads and one white bead.

If you choose black as your action-set, that puts you up to the fourth rank on the ladder. If you choose black as the motivation-set, you only get the two black beads you drew added to your bowl.

The bonuses granted by your skills are basically phantom beads. They do not give you extra beads to add to your bowl or to the bag.

If I go with this option, I may have to reorganize the ladder a bit so that it isn't so easy to take actions without complications. That, and introduce some additional disincentive to hitting the three-black or three-white skills all the time.

~*~

Analysis

The Skill Hourglass seems easier at first glance, but I wonder if that's only because it's more familiar. Certainly it would require the most augmentation to the system, which is not something I want to do right now.

The Bond Skills require even more time and energy in an already lengthy character creation process. But they can be pretty easily be incorporated into the tutorial. The examination and rationale for the Bond elicits a mini-narrative, which is what drives that whole process in the first place.

I'm not sold on either of these, but if I were to include some kind of optional sidebar for Skills, the first option seems like the winner.

I'm transcribing my notes, trust me! Problem is that I tend to ramble and meander, so I end up transcribing notes for three sections at once and I only want to post relatively complete sections here so it's taking a while.

What I'm thinking about now.... I am curious about the potential for quick a Reign-style character generator for Do. Instead of giving you stats, it would randomly generate Bonds and maybe some other information, like your pilgrim name, some skills or something.

ORE is a very different sort of system though. Rolling multiple dice produces results that are just not possible with Do's beads-in-a-bag system. Similarly, Do's bag produces probabilities that cannot be done with dice without some continuously updated arithmetic and record-keeping.

And yet, I can't shake the notion that Do's bag could be used in a manner similar to Reign's One-Roll Character Generator. If you're not familiar with it, you roll 11d10. You roll eleven dice to guarantee that you'll at least get one pair of matched results. Any matched sets are compared to a table that tells you your character's past professions and experiences (and stats). The unmatched dice are compared to another set of tables that describe unusual events, like being kidnapped or having a mistaken identity.

On the narrative side, this is a great little engine because it allows Greg to describe some of the more unusual aspects of the setting that you might not have noticed if they weren't a part of your character's background. Because there's no chronological order implied by the engine, you can take these disparate events and arrange them however you wish.

On the mechanical side, it's clever because it's essentially a method of randomly distributing build points. See, there's an alternate chargen method based on point-buying. Because both methods are essentially based on the same limited set of points, you could mix n' match both methods. Spend a few points to cherry-pick some stats, then leave some dice to randomly generate other stuff. It's really quite cool.

Here's the problem with applying something like this to Do: I still don't want to use dice in the system. Call it being stubborn, but it ain't happening. That means any random chargen method would need to be based on black and white beads randomly drawn from a bag.

The easy solution is to have players draw, say, five beads from the bag and then compare that to a table of six possible results.

WWWWW WWWWB WWWBB WWBBB WBBBB BBBBB

But it would be nice if such a system took advantage of the weird economies and probabilities of this artifact.

I could theoretically create a lifepath system where you draw three beads, one at a time. Drawing a bead leads you down one of two forks in the path.



Unfortunately, the order in which you draw beads becomes important and as I mentioned earlier, I like that the Reign chargen has no implied chronological order to its events.

The other problem with this branching lifepath method is that it's very constrained. Unless I offered a number of different possible origins, most randomly generated characters would be very similar to each another.

The alternative to this is to simply strip out all the preceding branches of those lifepaths. That is, make players draw three stones, paying attention to the order in which they're drawn, but not assigning preceding branches to that order. This produces eight possible results.

WWW WWB WBW WBB BWW BWB BBW BBB

...

Now the sun rises, and I realize this might just be one of those fool's errands I get on when I can't sleep. :P

Problem: Busy weekend. Picking up SHARE at 10, but Shannon will be asleep until 9. I'm up now at 7ish. That's enough time for me to get in my long run for the week, but maybe I should spend that time writing? I'm under no obligations to run, but I do have many people anticipating progress on Do. But I'm such a slow writer, would I get more out of the hours by running? Argh.

Solution: Ryan suggested that I should dictate the entire game and transcribe that as the rough draft. I like this idea because I've always considered games to be an oral tradition, only recently being bound up in thick manuals.

I'm going to bring my cellphone on my run and hold it like a mic. I'll bring an index card with some bullet points, speak the game's rules as I run around the circuit, recording it to drop.io/voice. Tomorrow, I'll transcribe the mp3 and hopefully bang out at least a whole page of the flowchart, if not more.

I can read aloud 400 words in about 2:30, but I imagine coming up with original material while huffing and puffing will slow down that pace. Let's be conservative and say I get 100 words a minute. My long run is 13 miles, which I did in about 129 minutes last time. That's 12900 words for the whole run, if I go the same speed as last time.

Because I want to expand each panel of the flow chart to at least 400 words, that's least 32 panels. Fewer, if I decide to elaborate on some panels more than others, which will no doubt happen. That gets me at least halfway through the tutorial section. Hm. I wonder if it would be more prudent to write the core system first, then extrapolate that into the tutorial?

Of course, I've spent an hour planning this whole thing now. Dangit.

Let's just hope modern technology doesn't cause me to fall on my ass.

Okay, okay. Hypothetically speaking, if I were crazy enough to attempt this thing a few of you have encouraged. This bizarre second-person voice, written as a letter addressed to the player. Here's how I could package the premise:

Dear Monks of the Temple,

I've only recently learned about your pilgrims, your temple and what really lies beyond the stars. The pilgrims you sent last month helped me my family immensely, but my problems now seem far less dangerous than what the pilgrims normally encounter. I feel obliged to repay the favor you've given to my our worlds, so I humbly offer this gift.

Here, you'll find my brief notes of what your pilgrims revealed to me about the universe. The loose scraps of philosophy and anecdotes I could glean from my brief encounter helped inspire a kind of game. This game can I think this game can help would-be pilgrims prepare for their journey.

I understand that this pilgrimage can be quite dramat complicated, so why not try giving them a small preview of what they have in store? I offer some simple rules, advice, examples of how to play, and some advice on how to teach the game.

Please, accept this small token, created in humble gratitude to your selfless efforts. On behalf of my clan family.

Yours,
Sun Pendola

Last name generated by the Kleimo name generator.

So the whole game is written to the temple as a simulation exercise to give would-be pilgrims an idea of how what their pilgrimage will be like. This gives me an excuse to not write extensively about the setting or the temple's philosophy, because it's from Sun's limited frame of reference. Maybe once or twice per spread, there could be some crossed out words hinting at some ongoing mystery behind the encounter that led Sun to create this game.

How to address issues that break the fourth wall? I think I'd use sidebars and call-outs pretty extensively. The examples of play can remain in-voice, I think. A lot of it can, really. I know I'll come across something that would be too much of a pain in the ass to write as Sun though, so that's where I drop the illusion for a little bit. No sense in the metaphor interfering with the message.

Hypothetically. For now, I'm writing the rough draft normally. But when all that it settled, I could easily tweak certain sections and words to accommodate this premise.

Hypothetically.

Heh. This episode of That's How We Roll briefly discusses the matter of "voice" in game text. This is one of those authorial nuances that reveal my total ineptitude with the written word.

Still, if I understand it correctly, I wonder what twist to the voice I could have in Do. It's already a fairly conversational tone, referring directly to the reader most of the time.

Might be laying it on a bit thick, but I wonder if I could actually write each section of the game as a letter to the reader.

Forget it. That's just too crazy.

Back to work.

This is not part of the ongoing rough draft. These are just some loose thoughts about how to expand and codify the Bonds to reflect relationships besides those between two individuals.

It occurs to me that Bonds, just like their inspiration the Aspects from Spirit of the Century and Keys from Shadow of Yesterday, can be possessed by a whole culture, not just one person. But Bond are a very particular sort of descendant of these concepts, referring specifically to relationships, not descriptions or abilities. This implies that at least one end of the Bond has some degree of sentience.

Let's say there are three components to any possible Bond:

Actor: An active character in the story who has some relationship to something or someone else.
Extras: A large group of individuals, acting as an active gestalt-character, who all share a relationship to something or someone else, this could be a loosely defined culture or well-defined group like a nation or religion.
Scene or Prop: A place or thing. This has no relationship or opinions of its own, it's just a location or object about which an actor or extras can have an opinion.

Every bond must have at least an actor or extras at its source, but the opinion they hold can be directed at any of the three types of Bond components.

An actor may have a bond to another actor, obviously: "Aang has the Bond of the Crush to Katara."
An actor may have a bond to extras: "Jet has a Bond of Revenge to the Fire Nation."
An actor may have a bond to a prop: "Katara has a Bond of the Caretaker to the bottle of healing water given to her by her mother."
An actor may have a bond to a scene: "Aang has a Bond of the Homeland to the Southern Air Temple."
Extras can have a bond to an actor: "The Fire Nation has the Bond of the Hunt to the Avatar."
Extras can have a bond to other extras: "The Fire Nation has the Bond of the Occupier to the Earth Kingdom."
Extras can have a bond to scene: "The Water Tribes have a Bond of Reverence for the moon."
But scenes or props don't have bonds to anything, they're just the object of an actor's or extras' bonds.

Where this is relevant to Do is that I might include Bond-forging in the very first step of character creation, when you play out a scene from your life before the temple. Perhaps a cultural bond that you've inherited from this past life.

Other thoughts:

* I wonder of bonds should have representative objects that players can use as they strengthen, change or end those relationships. These "tokens" would be like a locket bearing a portrait of your spouse representing a Bond of True Love or a blade inherited by your ancestors representing a Bond of Legacy.

* Perhaps the phrasing of Bonds should be changed to "X is bonded to Y by Z" where X is the actor or extras; Y is an actor, extras or scene to which X is bonded; and Z is the nature of that bond. For example, instead of saying "Aang has the Bond of the Crush to Katara" you would say "Aang is bonded to Katara by a crush."

For as little sleep as I get, I sure do have a lot of epiphanies when I wake up. Sometimes I even remember them.

Case in point: I went to sleep thinking about the Do flowcharts. I do plan on eventually expanding those into proper text, but I also wanted to include some kind of chart encapsulating the flow of play at-a-glance. Therein lies the dilemma. If I want the book to be a semi-immersive experience, how do I present a friggin flowchart...

So yeah, I went to sleep. Had odd, totally unrelated dreams, then woke up with the answer: A Map.

Not a literal map, per se, but the flow chart could easily have enough trappings of a hand-drawn map that it doesn't totally break the fourth wall.

I think I was inspired by this analysis of megadungeon theory. That post features some highly abstracted maps of dungeons. Little more than lines and labels, kind of like the London Underground map. My subconscious must have though: "Hey, if you can make a realistic map abstract, maybe you can make an abstract map realistic."

In my case, I think this map/flowchart hybrid will still lean towards the abstract, for the sake of clarity.

Anyway, I'm not touching a pencil until the actual system and subsequent flowchart are d-o-n-e.

(x-posted on storygames)

I've heard a few people talk about the different styles of learning. The linked wikipedia article lists a number of learning models, but there seems to be a general categorization of people who "learn by doing," "learn by hearing," and/or "learn by seeing." The point has been put forward that game books can do well by incorporating awareness of all these styles into their presentation of rules.

I get that, and I do hope to use this knowledge to present rules more clearly in my own work, but I'm curious about the other end of the educational relationship.

One of my goals for Do is to empower each player/reader to also become a teacher of the game to others. Towards that end, I'm curious if there are styles of teaching, as a counterpart to the styles of learning. I suppose those styles would be "teaching by doing," "teaching by saying," and/or "teaching by showing."

If there are no such styles formally defined, how would you define them? How do you teach your games? What advice would you give differently styled teachers on how to teach a game to others?