Randoms & You

I've heard it said that the easiest way to make an event decent is to run randoms every 20 minutes.  For me, that doesn't make my event, and I don't really like randoms at all as a PC.  Usually they are not presented in any interesting way, they can break game momentum, they can roll PCs who just want a break, and as Staff they can drain resources that PCs would prefer to use on mods.  And worst for me, they don't make sense.  Why did a squad of orcs decide to attack superior numbers of armed adventurers in what is supposed to be a well-established and guarded settlement?  I don't know :)

That being said, I think they might be necessary in a lot of games, and can add a lot.  So how can randoms work for you?

That being said, randoms can work to your advantage.  When you have a larger PC group, they're not going to be going on all your mods, and giving them something to fight can help entertain them.  Newer players or players who just like the thrill of killing things can enjoy random monster slaying.  And you also don't want your PC areas to feel too safe - the thrill of danger is part of the draw for a lot of players. 

So, how to do it right?

First, timing is everything.  If you send randoms out at the wrong time, you could derail mods - which most people enjoy much more than any random!  Be aware of what the rest of your team is doing and what mods need to get done.  Don't take resources away from them if you can help it (you can be a one-man random!).  And try to keep an eye on what the PCs are doing.  Ask your NPCs who were just in town, or PCs who are at the shack, how things are going.  Also, if your PCs have set up some major event, like a ceremony or festival, try not to ruin it (unless it's good plot, of course! :) ). 

Second, scaling is still important.  If you're sending out goblins into a town that's all above level 20, it's probably not going to be as fun (unless there's plot or you do something interesting).  And if you send down a horde of death knights and there are only 2 people awake, that can make for grumpy PCs.  Again, ask people what the town atmosphere is like and scout it out. If you're not sure if people are around, try starting out with something small and work your way up to the big guns if needed.  Also, make sure that your NPCs aren't out to kill people. Always make sure they know the limits you want on the encounter and how tough they should be.  No one likes to resurrect from random spiders :)

Make it worth their while.  PCs hate it when they get through a fight and the NPC doesn't have treasure.  Don't over-reward, but make sure and put appropriate treasure on the monsters.  You can then use this to even out treasure distribution for your event as well.  If you have the space, put a couple random minor magic items on the occasional kobold, and people will be more interested in engaging them!

Spread the love - alternate where the randoms come from and what they're doing.  If you do the same thing every time, you can get those types of folks who just sit and splatter the NPC as it spawns before anyone else can get to it.  Especially if you start giving out good items here and there.  Changing it up can help keep more people entertained.

And finally, my favorite point.  Try to make the randoms make sense.  A pack of wolves isn't going to attack a town under normal circumstances, so think about things that might.  You can really use this to your advantage to reinforce plot lines.  If there's an evil druid plot, maybe they are sending their new twisted tree creations in to test their strength.  Maybe the goblin army has suicide bombers trying to destroy morale.  Or the mad alchemist is sending minions to plant poison distributors.  Or the ancient elder dragon's presence is driving the forest creatures mad.  Not only are you entertaining people, you're fleshing out your plot lines!

If you run out of those ideas, try "hook randoms."  These are mini encounters that take place within eye/ear shot of town. They're not just monster x attacking the PCs, but they can still be of any level, and the entire town can engage.  Example - a traveling merchant runs in saying orcs attacked his wagon on his way to the tavern. Something that requires basically no prep, and you can run it in town.  You're adding a little bit of extra depth to the random to have it make sense and be a little more exciting to the PCs, but you can use the exact same resources and monsters.  All you need is a little creativity and a few minutes of planning to figure out an idea that will work.  This is basically putting hook mods in Staff's hands from time to time.

Don't forget that role-play NPCs entertain people too.  Not every random has to be for fighters!  Your role-players and puzzle-solvers are also waiting around town for their next mod, so send in a strange merchant, an old story-teller, or some other engaging NPC.  These tend to entertain smaller amounts of people, but can be very welcome to those PCs who don't like killing poor, defenseless bugbears all day :)  You can use random time to put in an informative NPC for your plot line, or to engage a character's back story.  Or just for fun.  To get a little wider appeal, have them do things like host impromptu contests (riddles? singing?  stories from the PCs?). You can even use these types of characters to help recharge a drained PC group by selling or giving out supplies or recharges - for the right price. 

Purposeful randoms can be a great chance for Staff & NPCs who had some wacky ideas that don't quite work for plots or mods to use them!

In smaller games where PCs can go on more mods, randoms may not be as necessary.  In these cases, if the PCs aren't modding, they're probably resting or refreshing and randoms can actually hurt more than they help by draining resources on both sides of the table.  But then again, you can use a few of these ideas to bring danger into the town - instead of hooking a mod, have it happen there! 

What ideas do you have for making random monsters fun and useful?

New Blog on the Block: Gamesthetic

I'm always a fan of new LARP blogs that come out, no matter what the information is about.  I'm also a bit of a nut for theory on rules and game design.

So it's no surprise that I'm pretty excited about Rob Ciccolini's new blog, Gamesthetic.

For those of you who are not familiar with Rob's work, you need look no further than the Madrigal and the Accelerant ruleset.  He's been involved with LARPing for a very long time and has played in tons of different systems, and those experiences have shaped the simple and intuitive nature of his game.

Even though he only has a few posts so far, I find that most of them contain some gem of information that sparks insight in my mind, such as his suggestion to focus on player interaction rather than plot interaction if you want to become involved.

If you consider yourself a connoisseur of game design, or are running a game and really want to take it to the next level, I highly suggest that you subscribe to his blog and read it religiously.

You can get to his blog at http://gamesthetic.blogspot.com/ or in the blogroll on this blog.   

Conquest of Appalachia

I'm super excited and can't contain myself.

You may have noticed a lot of posts recently about immersion, tents, etc.  Well, as usual, I write about the things that I'm working on.  And finally I can announce the thing I've been working on.

Conquest of Appalachia.  

We're bringing Conquest of Mythodea to the US and we'll hopefully break through the stigma that comes with playing LARP.

For those of you who are not familiar, this is a "Fest LARP" which means it's treated a lot like a long running concert/renaissance faire.  Except, everyone is in costume.  We'll have vendors, inns where you can get drunk, comedians, and vomitoriums, all fully immersive and participation for all.

And all you need to bring is a costume, your wallet, and an open mind.

I don't want to get into too many details, but here are some of the things we've improved upon from the Conquest system.

Combat Everywhere
To improve upon the feel of the game, doctors are suggested to carry flasks and give shots to players that are injured as a form of anestetic.  In order to keep the immersion factor up, the alcohol should be real and should be terrible (ideally grain alcohol).  This also acts to balance the game, as weaker players can team up on a powerful person to force them to take shots and reduce their battle effectiveness.

Because of this, we figured there's no reason to limit combat to non-drinking areas.  Players can be attacked at the inn, in their sleep, or when they're on the toilet.

Furry Friendly
In order to bring as many people into the hobby as possible, we're making the game 100% furry friendly.  In order to encourage interactions between our Furry friends and the rest of the roleplayers, we've implemented an interactive and revolutionary system for mounted combat.  Bronies unite!

River Styx
We've also designed the death system so that it would be fully immersive.  Characters who die must go to the area that represents the River Styx and deal with Charon the boatman.  Hopefully you brought your two silver, or else Charon might make you do your best rendition of Renegade to get across.

Sponsors
Players are encouraged to get sponsorship from one of the many companies that will be vendors at the game, such as Wizards of the Coast, Edhellen Armory, and Walmart.  However, to keep in the spirit of immersion, characters who are sponsored by companies must come from the place that bears their name.  So characters may actually be Wizards from the coast or hail from Edhellen or the Mart of Wall.

This is going to be seriously wicked.   The Conquest of Appalachia will be held exactly 1 year from today.  Get pumped and mark your calendar!

Making People Mingle: Part 2

Yesterday I showed you all an example from Final Haven on how you can drive the Zero NPC moment home with game design that fosters a high level of PC on PC interaction.

So now you're interested in trying to put something like this in your game. Here are some things you need to know.

1. Greater Than a Team
LARPs tend to already be team sports. Adding mechanics that require 2-4 people is probably not going to change a whole lot for the game. In order to get people to go outside of their normal group, you're going to have to set goals at a much higher number of people than normally travel together.

2. Competitive Nature
While the system should encourage cooperation, it should also foster a form of competition. Anyone who has played a German board game like Settlers of Catan should have an idea of what we're talking about. To be successful, you need to work well with others. However, as Dan put it yesterday, your success may mean that someone else does not succeed. This is how you create the political aspect of the game, where start making deals to get the support they need.

3. Sky's the Limit
You don't want to build the system to a point where it caps out. Once that happens, people will go back to business as usual. Make it so that people can continue to grow, but like most things, slow down the rate of growth. That way up-and-comers can at least try and compete with the big dogs.

4. Emphasize Players
There are a lot of things in LARPs that higher players can do way better than lower level players. But when we're talking about politicking and gaining support, try and balance the power towards number of players instead of number of levels. Now, feel free to give a little bit more power to higher level players (like Final Haven did), but make sure that everyone has a chance to have a voice and to create sway in your system. That helps it feel like an immersive world where even a new player can feel like they're making a difference.

Get crackin'!

Making People Mingle: Part 1

I've talked before about the legendary Zero NPC Moment, and how you as plot can get there. But now I want to take a step back and talk about how game designers can make that step.

I recently heard a story from Dan Comstock about a game (Final Haven) whose entire political and macro-economic system was organically created by the players based off a very simple principle - Influence.

Dan, forgive me if I get details wrong. Feel free to elaborate in the comments!

You see, in order to buy new skills in this game, you need experience and you need a consumable item that matches the type of skill. So mages would need scrolls, psionic skills would require crystals, and so on.

Back to influence! Each player had a certain amount of influence based on their level and race. The sole purpose of this influence was to throw it behind someone in hopes of creating a guild. Guilds were the primary means of making the items used for purchasing new skills. But each guild can only produce one type of item.

Shortly after the game started, they formed the first guild. Inevitably, some of the people in that guild were disappointed, as they didn't choose the items they wanted. At some point, a large portion of the first guild broke off to form a second one.

4 years later, those two guilds represent two warring kingdoms...

Tomorrow, I'll talk about how you can try and get these moments in your game.

Why Anecdotal Evidence is Balls

Everyone who is involved in anything thinks that they're an expert. They think they have a pulse on what the people want, simply because they've heard some people talk about stuff. And then they use this information to guide judgement.

So here's your public service announcement, followed by a wall of text!

Friends don't let friends use anecdotal evidence to make decisions on how a game should operate.

Kickstarter for LARPs

A while back, I posted about my interest in running an Osiris Sanction game. I was pretty pumped about it. But as it turns out, the cost of the equipment is pretty steep, and it's going to take far more than I'm willing to invest for a project like this.

And then I had the post on Friday where I wrote about the show LARPers on Indiegogo, and how they're raising money, and it really made me think.

Do you think that there's a place for raising funds for a LARP on Kickstarter?

For those of you who aren't familiar with the site, it allows for people to give donations to a proposed project. There are various donation levels, and the creator will post some sort of benefit, usually related to the project (be it signed material, copies of media, etc). If the project makes their goal, they get the money. If they don't reach the goal, no one is charged anything.

The way I was thinking about doing it, almost all of the donations would include some form of membership fee (which is there for players only participating in alpha/beta phases of Osiris Sanction). But there's also some other cool stuff that you could add in for some of the higher donation levels without breaking the game.

How would you feel if someone tried to raise money for their LARP via Kickstarter?

Keep It Simple

I'm sure we've beaten this dead horse far long enough, but I find it's useful to come back to this topic again and again.

The more stuff people have to remember, the more likely they are to mess it up.

In game design, we often try to add interesting elements to a game without thinking of the most basic consequence - that it's something else people have to be aware of.

The WAR Rules council is finalizing the local policy for 2012 at this moment. While some of the policies they've used in the past have added options to the game, those options were rarely, if ever, utilized by the players.

Since these are extra rules to remember, particularly for traveling players, I'm always in favor of dropping anything that isn't amazing and useful to the game. Is the Archery Modification playtest going to stay in effect? Of course, because florentine with a bow is crazy awesome and really should be a part of the core rules (as it is in that other game). On the other hand, do we really need a policy indicating how a smith can make a weapon out of bone or build a portcullis? I think not.

Here's an idea - you can be a smith and bring a portcullis to game, or make your weapon look like bone and you can tell people you made them. Done.

What do you think?

Internal Conflict Between Character and Player

Everyone's run into that moment. You know, the one where your character wouldn't do something but you totally would? Or maybe vice-versa?

In a recent podcast (which I assume will be posted soon), Mickey told me all about some of the mechanisms that are used at Madrigal in order to mitigate these internal conflicts between player and character, and I must say, I was blown away. Something that wasn't even on my radar before that conversation is now very prominent in my field of vision.

The big example Mickey gave me was "the plague." If a player isn't feeling well or doesn't want to go on a module due to OOG circumstances, they might say something like "The plague has taken me." That is a sign to all the other players that while the character would definitely go, the player isn't up to it. The plague exists as a concept in the game, so there's very little break in immersion. And what might be more important, other players cannot refute or "dog" that person into going, because he or she has the plague!

So without stealing any thunder from the podcast, I'd like to talk about some important points to remember when trying to implement these conventions into your game.

1. Everyone Accepts the Rule
Obviously, if someone says they've got the plague and someone else tells them to tough it up or starts trying to convince the player that they should go on the module, the convention doesn't actually save immersion. All players need to understand that conventions like this shouldn't be challenged or discussed. If players aren't going to be willing to do that, then your game might not be the kind of heavy immersion game that would benefit from mechanisms like this.

2. Build It Into Setting
These mechanics should fit somewhere in the setting, so that they can be discussed IG and so that all characters understand the meaning. This trick can also be used in reference to use of various pieces of anachronistic safety equipment.

For example, Babylon (Knutepunkt 2011) used airsoft equipment which required face protection. In that game, the world was known to have poisonous gas/airborne viruses that characters had to protect themselves against. So whenever fighting was going to commence, sirens went off indicating that the air was contaminated, so players put on their masks.

Osiris Sanction uses this mechanic to explain all the laser tag equipment on the players as well as why players don't really feel pain. All of the fighting in that game takes place on a surreal data network, where a person's avatar is very close to their real self.

3. Empower the Player to Control the Character
Now, these mechanics are designed to give the player the comfort level they need at a LARP. So when you're designing these systems, try and find ways of actually empowering the player to invoke the mechanic, rather than the system or the character. I know this might seem like a no-brainer, but some games would rather put those controls in the hands of the staff running it rather than an individual player.

Simply put, you have to trust your players to use these mechanics appropriately, and just deal with players that you think might be abusing a system. This is definitely one aspect of the game that shouldn't have to be micromanaged by the staff.

What do you think? Does your game use any concepts like this? Do you think they would benefit from having a mechanic like "the plague?"

NERO: Developing a Playtest

I figured I'd do a little talk about developing playtests for NERO, since it's one of the major jobs for National Rules right now, and that there's some talk about the Nature Magic Playtest in WAR.

As it stands, the Nature Playtest gives some examples of things that should not be included in Playtest submissions. Even though the system as a whole is a decent idea, there are a number of small details that derail the objective of the system. This post will use examples from Nature Magic on what not to do. Next post will be on the aspects of the Nature Playtest that are beneficial and would make for a good playtest.

So without further ado, here are things that you shouldn't do when writing a playtest.

1. Violate Core Concepts without that being the Goal of the Playtest
Nature does three things that are basically in gross violation of core concepts of NERO.

First, the Cocoon spell states that you cannot refuse touch casting. That rule that allows refusal regardless of the situation is in place in part to curb uncomfortable and unwanted physical contact. Cocoon basically allows other players to continue to touch a player while they are essentially helpless, causing an uncomfortable situation for players who don't want to ruin immersion, but don't want to be touched.

The second instance is from the Natural Carapace Cantrip, which is the only in-game effect that actually varies based on class. All distinctions between the various classes are intended to be off-board.

The third instance is the Revival ability (cantrip and formal) which prevents players from resurrecting normally, which is a pretty significant part of the game.

Now, if the goal of the playtest was to reduce the chance of death, then Revival might be appropriate for that playtest (but still might not be accepted if that goal isn't shared by National). But that's not the goal of Nature. Nature is supposed to add more choices and add an archetype that isn't currently represented by the game.

2. Add Excessive Effects and Complexity
Adding effects to the game is something that should be done slowly to prevent players from having to remember more effects. Nature has at least four new effects to 9th edition and a new damage type. These can be overwhelming for new or traveling players who don't use the playtest. Simply put, there's too much going on.

Mend could just as easily be cure light wounds without causing too much trouble. Entangles could just be made into physical pins/binds/webs (with the spell level brought to the appropriate point). Pestilence is too complicated. Petrify is very close to another effect, so again, it could be a physical imprison instead of it's own effect.

Those small changes would remove half the complexity from nature without a lot of substance/balance changes. So when there's an effect that almost works for what you're going for, use it. Additionally, don't use flavor as an excuse to add complexity where it's not needed.

3. Consistency with Other Skills
There are some serious consistency issues with Nature. Regenerate operates differently and is a different spell level from an identical spell. The moving of bind effects from key attack levels 5 and 8 causes some imbalance with regards to takedowns. Armor buffs are not congruent with other magic schools.

Rules are a lot easier to follow when they follow a pattern. Additionally, some of the things that you think are a minor change (reducing entangle spell levels by 1) might actually cause a greater imbalance than expected. In general, try and keep the bulk of things identical, if possible.

What do you think?

The Theory of "Play More" Mechanics

Today's post was prompted by a discussion over at the Wasteland's forum about the magic rules in the game.

You see, there is some concern about the power level of the mage. But a lot of this is really a faux issue. You see, the mechanic for regaining your magic skills is intended to let mages "play more" instead of playing harder.

In short, mages can meditate to regain their "focus" (magic points). This process takes 5 minutes, which makes it difficult to pull off on the battlefield. If you use a consumable item, you just get back the maximum focus. If you do not use that item, you get back your focus, but your max focus drops by 5 points until the end of the game day.

Truth be told, this is a really solid design for a "play more" skill. It has most of the features you want. It's hard to restore it on a module, so building encounters around conserving resources would be easy. It answers the problem of frivolous use.

Really, the only problem I see with the system is that it doesn't scale perfectly from low level to high level.

Players who start a mage will probably have a maximum of about 20 focus, and that's if they void themselves of anything non-magical. Players who decide to pick up a gun skill (important, as this is an airsoft game) will have less. When I played, I think I had 9 focus.

Obviously, the hit to max focus at that level is pretty significant. Even the best starting mages lose 25% of their effectiveness if they meditate without an item. And to top it off, Wastelands is a game where resources are quite sparse, so getting your hands on those items isn't the easiest thing.

On the other side of the coin, high level mages have a lot of focus, so depending on the number of modules they play, they might not care much about the hit to max focus. Additionally, the magic crafting skill doesn't have a lot of stuff going on there, so higher level mages who have that skill have pretty regular access to those items. Magical healing is still more expensive than regular healing (unless you have a godly mage, but I don't think anyone has that level of magic yet).

I think a percentage of focus would work better and help bridge the gap between low and high level mages, but I'm a math person and that math might be confusing for non-math people. But all in all, I don't think the system is really as bad as some people make it out to be.

But the point is, stop treating a "Play More" mechanic like it's giving someone more power. It's meant to let the mage play the entire day, rather than using their spells and then sitting out.

YouTube Friday: The Invasion of Games

Anyone who knows me knows that I totally dig the theories behind gaming and game design. Today's video is a little old, but it's still totally awesome. And for the astute reader, you might recognize the name Jesse Schell from an earlier post (or you can just follow the link).

This is from the DICE Summit (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) in 2010. It's another one of those marvelous conventions for innovation in gaming, held by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS). LOVE THOSE ACRONYMS.

So gaming has changed a ton in the past 10 years, but have you really tracked what's happened in the past 2 years? Jesse talks about how invasive games have become in our culture and can be found everywhere. I found that final part that talks about what it will be like in the future was most appealing.



Part 2

Part 3

Would a Club LARP Work?

We had a nice discussion last night at our gaming group, in which Tim gave his vision of how a LARP group should be run - as a club.

Now, we're not talking about the NERO, "Is it a club or is it a business?" debate. We're talking about a full fledged club, more like Amtgard. Only more expensive/more exclusive (local rather than national).

What if you had a group of about 50-60 people, and each person paid a certain amount up front to be a member of this club (for the sake of things, let's say $100 dollars). You would then know exactly how much you have to spend and could have the group vote on where to spend it, aside from events. It is a LARP, after all.

There would be no profit - only a game treasury which could be spent on events for its members. Clearly, it would be a labor of love, but ideally it wouldn't fall too much on one person's shoulders.

On the other hand, events themselves would be free (or at least very inexpensive), as opposed to the pay as you go method of most LARPs running today.

So, if you were given the opportunity to participate in a club like this, and most events were included in your dues fee at the beginning of the year, and you had a partial say in where the money goes, would you join?

The Exit Strategy

I thought this would be an interesting topic to talk about, as it's something that's near and dear to many NERO players.

For those of you unfamiliar with the NERO world, the game system has been around for over 20 years now, with some characters being almost that old. Unfortunately, the game was never designed to handle characters over level 30 well, and with 20 years of gameplay, NERO has many characters who breach that mark, with some going as high as level 50+. Add that to the fact that there is a pretty significant gap in effectiveness between low and high level players, and you've got a serious problem.

See, NERO has no "Exit Strategy."

There comes a point in every game where it makes sense to start getting high level characters out of there. Some games do this by trying to make it more deadly so that those high level characters permanently die, but this is a very weak strategy.

On the other hand, some games offer some kind of compensation for players to retire their characters, or have a set timeline before a full reset, thus providing more effective exit strategies. The Dreaming even had a system of experience decay that made it so that you eventually could only maintain the abilities you already bought (unless you wanted to learn something else and let your skills lapse).

So if you're designing a new LARP that has advancement built into it, please think about an exit strategy for characters. Otherwise, when you're game's being run 20 years down the road (good for you!), you'll run into issues like NERO.

Why Gaming Is Awesome

So this post is not specific to LARPers, but is totally worth talking about anyways.

A while back, I talked about a few youtube videos that I got from TED (via Ruthless Diastema) about how we can break the stigma if we use games the right way. Turns out, one company did just that.

Foldit is a company that takes real world algorithmic puzzles and turns them into a competitive online gaming environment. I know it sounds like it wouldn't ever be worth anything, but preliminary reports show that they have helped make major steps in the war on HIV.

If you have a lot of empirical work to do, make it seem fun and get people who spend hours on gaming do the work for you. Games build pattern recognition in gamers, which is something that's still somewhat hard to do with computer programming.

As a note, this is exactly what Jane McGonigal talked about at TED.

PS: Here is the full document in regards to steps made in protein structure predictions.

Chaos Theory in Game Design

The post about nature's revival reminded me about a very important concept in game design.

Chaos Theory

And I'm not talking about the bullshit that Malcolm talks about in the movie Jurassic Park. And I'm not talking about the classic "butterfly flaps it's wings and causes a tidal wave."

I'm talking about the fact that a subtle, seemingly small change made can cause an incredible impact on a system.

I think the greatest example of the importance of subtle changes in game design comes from the game Dominion. If you haven't played it, I highly suggest it.

In that game, there are literally over 100 cards to choose from, and each game is played with 10 of those cards. And yet, the actual range of effects from those cards are pretty limited. As such, there are a number of cards that are very close in what they do.

As an example of subtlety changes in cards, I want to look at the cards Adventurer and Venture. Adventurer is an action, while Venture is a treasure. Adventurer goes into your deck and grabs the next two treasures while Venture only grabs 1. Venture is also worth $1. Now, if someone untrained were to look at these two cards, they'd say they pretty much do the same thing and have pretty much the same value.

As it turns out, statistically* Adventurer is one of the worst cards in the game, and Venture is one of better cards. Just because the venture can fetch more ventures and adventurer makes you discard your other adventurers.

Game balance is an extremely difficult thing. Just ask Blizzard. In order to get an accurate vision of how something changes a game, you have to look at how it fits into the grand scheme and see how well or poorly it's adopted by the players of the game.

Note: If you'd like to give Dominion a try at some time, you can play it online at www.boardgamearena.com or http://dominion.isotropic.org/. And if you want a little help learning the game, hit me up.

*There is a site online where they track all the games played and mark whether a card was bought or avoided in a win and loss, and compiles all that information. Math don't lie.

Balancing Power With Frustration

So WAR and NCN recently changed nature rules to adjust the way that nature's revival works. Originally, it simply brought you back when you would have resurrected. Now, it brings you back as an animal with no skills and only a few options in which to remove it.

I must say, I absolutely hate this change.

Don't get me wrong, I always thought that revival was way overpowered. It definitely needed scaled back. However, the way they chose to balance it wasn't specifically to bring the power level back. Instead, they decided to counter the power of the skill by making it less fun to use.

Nobody want's to be stuck as a wolf until the end of the game day. There is a potential for that to happen in the current design. I know, you say you can always resurrect to end this ability. Correct. But let's take a step back and look at it this way.

A player now has to make a decision on whether he plays a gimped monster for the rest of the game day or he can take a death on his sheet. They have to balance discomfort (OOG concept) against staying alive (IG concept).

I know, there's a potential for roleplay. But that would get old pretty fast. Imagine having to play a character that's different than your own for as much as 8 hours. How horrifying.

I always cringe whenever I see people try and balance power by making a skill un-fun to use. If you're going to do that, just take the skill out of the game altogether. There are always ways to make people pay for hard decisions. But you should never make them pay in frustration. This is a game, after all. It's supposed to be a way to relax. It's supposed to be fun.

They could have simply said that a person could only be affected by the cantrip or formal magic 1/day, and it would have put more of a limitation on the revival skill than there is now. And it wouldn't have made players suffer in any way.

The skill is still overpowered. It's just more likely to be abused by the players who value IG strength over OOG fun, which isn't really the point.

Anyways, that's my 2 cents.

Pervasive LARP Design

Thanks go out to Dan Comstock for finding This Little Gem. It's a chapter or part of a book that talks about all the strategies involved in Pervasive LARP designs (which can also be known as Alternate Reality Gaming or ARG).

This is an interesting read for anyone who's interested in participating in, or even better, running one of these games.

This is kind of a sidetrack from our normal discussions about combat based LARPs, because Pervasive LARPs are more social than combative. Still Interesting.

Just wondering, would the readers of this blog participate in a pervasive, social LARP if given the chance?

PS: Anyone know what the full book is called or if it's even out?

Your Inner Gamer

Dan over at Nerology made a good post about the different types of gamers. I think it's important that people understand this concept. Sure, there is some benefit in knowing this when running a LARP, but there's a lot of benefit in identifying what kind of gamer you are.

If it's not obvious from reading the blog, I would consider myself a Gamist (challenge based) first and foremost, with equal parts narrativist (role playing) and social. I recognize the benefitis of simulationist (immersion) gaming, but I've never been able to play a game that I actually feel immersed in. Invested yes, immersed no.

Maybe it's just my viewpoint, but I really do believe that simulationist gaming is probably the most difficult to run. There are literally millions of things that can happen that will immediately snap players back to reality - Stoppage of play, questions about an effect, OOG chatter, sloughing/cheating, OOG movement, etc. I am of the belief that to run an experience like that, you need a lot more planning up front and usually more bodies/props/effects to get the same points across when going for simulations, and these things can be a difficult for a game staff to pull off.

Anyways, the point is that I know the kind of game that I like to play and the kind of game that I'm good at. But knowing this gives me two options when approached with a simulationist experience.

- Step outside my comfort zone
- Let someone else take my spot

I know that everyone plays a different game, and that's fine. I'm of the thought that there is no wrong way to play the game (aside from cheating). If you come to a game for a merchant experience, that's cool for you. If you want to roleplay and tell stories all day and night, that doesn't bother me at all. If you come to a game just to hit people with foam, rock on stick jock.

But by identifying your strengths/weaknesses and likes/dislikes, you're better able to identify situations where your gaming style might be at odds with those of other players. All gaming styles are fine, until they start to affect other people's ability to enjoy their game. So if you find yourself in a game style you're unfamiliar with, you may have to work harder to keep up with those around you. After all, succeeding outside your comfort zone can be very fulfilling.

So what kind of LARPer are you?

Game Design: Looking Through Lenses

I've always been a sucker for game design and try to read everything I can get my hands on. One of the presents I got for Christmas was a book I've been lusting over called "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses," by Jesse Schell.

Even after just starting this book, I can tell you that it's amazing. It is a text book (which means expensive, long, and boring), but what is really great is that they teach you to look at your game from specific points of view - something I think many game designers lack the discipline to do.

I could easily design a game that I think is fun, but what about other people? What would be the main goal of various rules? What about a theme?

This book provides 100 different lenses in which you should analyze your game, complete with the questions you should ask. Lenses include:

Lens of Fairness
Lens of Economy
Lens of Reward
Lens of Punishment
Lens of Griefing
Lens of Simplicity/Complexity

And many more. So for all you aspiring game designers out there, I would heartily suggest that you pick up this book and use the lenses it gives you.