The Case for Fourth Edition
Wizards of the Coast has gone and done it. They’ve announced that Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition will be released mid-year 2008.
And I’m totally pumped.
Marketing and digital stuff aside, looking through what the announcements are consisting of, it’s clear to me that Wizards is concerned about game design. And not just about fixing broken prestige classes or whatever. They took a long look at what works in the game, what doesn’t, what doesn’t end up “playing”, how to make the game most interesting, how to make it easier to remember all the rules in play.
In short, they focused on making the game simpler, more elegant, and more thematic. They sound like they’re taking a pretty strong tear down approach to the game, and tossing out some “sacred cows” of D&D design. The end result is making a leaner, meaner, better game. In my style of game design, it’s hitting all the right notes.
Here’s some of the design issues they looked at: [Read the rest of this article]
A Compedium of Critical Threat Worthy Posts 8/10/7
Here’s a few articles that I’ve been reading over the past few weeks that I highly recommend for any of you in the field of thinking about games or even just those with an interest in games. [Read the rest of this article]
Who You Calling Heavy?
Over on Boardgamegeek, you’ll see plenty of references to weight. And I’m not talking about the size of the players.
Games tend to be divided in a spectrum from Light to Heavy among the BGG ratings. Something like Coloretto, or the great Loopin’ Louie is in the light category. Light-Medium includes such favorites as Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. Medium is Settlers of Catan. Medium-Heavy is Power Grid, and Heavy is Twilight Imperium 3rd ed.
There are some generalizations to be made, with which there are plenty of exceptions. Card games tend to fall on the lighter side of games. The more pieces a game has, the more likely it is to be heavy. The longer it takes, the heavier it tends to be. And in general, the higher luck or chaos factor there is, the lighter it is considered.
To me, though, the distinction is mostly psychological. (This is part of the reason that BGG has the users rate the heaviness of a game instead of there being some kind of weird formula, and why there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on nearly any games.) When people feel like there’s a lot going on, that’s a heavy game. If the game can be played “thought optional”, even if that means you lose, then that’s a light game. [Read the rest of this article]
Hidden Trackable
As often happens, I found myself involved in a minor argument online. This is one of those arguments that can’t entirely chalked up to different tastes.
“Hidden Trackable” refers to any element of the game that could be tracked by a player with a perfect memory (or pencil and paper) but is supposed to be hidden using one mechanism or another. Hidden trackable comes in many forms, and is in a game for different reasons.
Boardgame Design (Graphically, Of Course)
With Origins out of the way, and none of us going to Comic-Con, we can get back to actually playing games and blogging. Of course, silly things like life are taking their toll on those two pursuits, but hopefully soon we’ll be back up and running at full force.
One of those silly distractions has been my last few undergrad classes, which is now complete. For one of my final assignments, I had to give an informative speech. Of course, I picked something about games. So summarized here is my talk on Functional Design in Boardgames.
First, why should you care about the design of your game? You want nothing to distract from the actual play of the game. The more frustrated people are with having to overcome the design to understand what’s going on, the less they’ll enjoy it no matter how good your game is. The goal is to give your players as little as possible to think about it terms of non-play related tasks so they can focus all their mental energy on making decisions in the game. This is not just for game publishers: when you design a prototype for playtesting or making a prototype to give to a publisher, you don’t want either audience to reject playing because of graphical gaffe. [Read the rest of this article]
Review: Tales of the Arabian Nights
Tales of the Arabian Nights (hereafter refered to just as Tales) was originally published in 1985 here in the US. It was reprinted recently in Germany as Geschichten aus 1001 Nacht.
Tales is one of the most famous of the “paragraph games”. A paragraph game, essentially, is multi-player choose your own adventure. The similarities are there: Tales comes with a large book with numbered paragraphs. Each of these paragraphs has a story fragment, describing an encounter the player has. Sometimes there are choices, and sometimes you are checked to see if you have a certain skill specific to the situation. Regardless, the goal is to make it as if you are progressing through a story… albeit a very choppy, unconnected story.
I ordered the German edition from a seller off eBay, and after 6 nerve racking weeks without a tracking number for the package, it arrived at my doorstep. A translation is available from kind gamers on Boardgamegeek, who only ask that you prove that you own the game. I was provided with some files that allow for a conversion of the game in English through some book printing and stickering. This review is from the translated edition perspective.
Rug-Sweeping and the Party Game Problem
Thanks again to Bartoneus for filling in for me last week. (Guess this means I need to make a comic for a Random Encounter- there’s a scary thought.) As a short rebuttal to the question he posed, I generally don’t talk about fun specifically because it’s hard to design to be fun, and it’s a very subjective measure. We have someone in our design group whose job it is to make sure that a game is fun enough to proceed in designing after it passes the simple/elegant/not-broken tests. However, there is the other factor of whether a game is compelling or not, which is like fun but different. That elaboration will have to be a column by itself.
Now that I’ve swept the fun issue under the rug, it’s time to talk about another issue: rug-sweeping. This is a brand new game design term that we coined this past weekend at the retreat. This refers to a designer specifically ignoring an issue with a game and hoping that the players will not exploit this issue. This tends to happen most in party games. Why is that? Read on…
Why Do We Play Games Anyway?
Dave’s out of town this week, doing whatever it is that those “gamey” types of people do, and so I’m posting a (late) Critical Threat to keep the trend. Every week he discusses a new idea or concept that comes up to him about game design, playing board games, and living in the world of trying to be a professional in an overlooked field. He’s discussed things ranging from elegance in overall design to how theme interacts with a game’s mechanics, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that theme comes up in pretty much every one of these posts. He’s even discussed how theme effects which games we decide to play. There is one word that I have rarely if at all seen in his posts, that word is FUN.
Why do we even play these cursed things?! I discussed what seems like a hell of a long time ago (1.5 years) that having friends who are game designers somehow ruins many of your naive experiences with playing games. The first thing you have to understand is that these people are not human, they are game designers. They’re the exceptions to the following rule: We play games to have fun. I say “we”, but that excludes them, only satan really knows why they do it, possibly the only explanation is to hone their dark arts.
I view this exemption of the word ‘fun’ from his articles as a dangerous oversight, and I am challenging him to define what it is that makes some games fun and some games the opposite – not fun. As we were talking earlier this week, Candyland is not really much of a game because there are only two decisions involved in playing it. It’s so far from a game that I didn’t even italicize its name, that’s how serious it is. Now we come to a definitive problem area though, as it is quite clear many people can have loads of fun whilst playing the game Candyland. Surely not everything that is fun is therefore a game, but does everything that is a game also not need to be fun? [Read the rest of this article]
Balticon Panel Recap / Crappy First Prototypes
First, thanks to everyone who came out and attended the panel I was on at Balticon. The guys with me on the panel are geniuses who I always like comparing ideas too, and I’m glad we had a good discussion with an audience that seemed genuinely interested.
Some random points that I remember from the panel:
- Playtesters are very important. Get people who can be brutal.
Conventions are important. Not only do you have access to a wider variety of playtesters who can give you new feedback, it also allows you to network with game publishers.- Focus on what makes a game fun, and make sure that people are doing that as much as possible.
- The one piece of advice 100% shared by all the panel members is that simplicity should be your main goal.
- Kingmaker is bad.
- One audience member described his hatred of what he termed “reverse kingmaker” (but not how I’d characterize it) where one player is essentially playing the game for another person. This can be because the rules are too complex or the decisions are too opaque, and so one person has to rely upon another who gets it more.
- Short games can also fix that problem, in addition to solving the problem of someone losing for long periods of time. It can also minimize kingmaker. [Read the rest of this article]
Handslap!
In our group, if you make a rules mistake and inadvertently try to cheat, Jake will say “Give me your hand.” He becomes quite insistent until you present your hand, at which point, he will slap it on the backside like a nun’s yardstick. This is his way of enforcing the rules, and I believe, trying to give a negative stimulus to enforce a rule in people’s minds.
This may be way we have the term “handslap issue.” A handslap issue, in our game design parlance, when a rule is accidentally broken by a player, often repeatedly. Sometimes handslap issues arise from unclear rules explanation, or by not paying enough attention to the board.
However, if a rule has a consistent handslap issue with everyone, then it becomes a game design problem. Clearly, something in the players’ heads is telling them that an action SHOULD be legal. Should you just beat them silly until they get the rule? Maybe, but more likely, you should address the issue.
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