pelagia et al

Some time ago I was really intrigued with oceanic adventure. I tinkered with two games around that time, neither of which really sang but both of which still, I think, have some promise in their premise.

The first was Navigator.

The second was Pelagia.

There might be a third — there’s a way in which Polyp fits in there too.

Navigator was about modern (ish) pirates and criminals making a living on the ocean around Thailand, smuggling and otherwise getting into trouble between exotic and poorly policed coastal cities and villages. It’s obviously a rip-off of Black Lagoon but no one has ripped that off very well yet, so it’s still viable.

Maybe it’s not obvious, but the matrix I built it on is Traveller. Or bits of Traveller. It’s very much, I realized, a Traveller premise — you have a ship, there are places on a map to visit, you use your ship, the law is relatively weak. You do crimes, make ends meet, keep the ship running.

I don’t think I have anything written for it any more — my recollection of it is that I was using paper notes exclusively and so they are gone. But it’s a kernel of an idea and I don’t think the actual game was all the interesting. Just the idea. So that could easily happen again.

It definitely had a life path system because I did find this:

Choose: NATIONALITY

Choose NATURE: HUGE, FAST, SMART, or CONNECTED

• • • Huge: Unarmed Hold, Armed Heavy Weapon or Melee, Finesse Intimidate
    • Fast: Unarmed Karate (or whatever), Armed light weapon, Finesse Evade
    • Smart: Unarmed Hide, Armed Thrown weapon, Finesse Hack
    • Connected: Unarmed Talk, Armed Found weapon, Finesse Negotiate

Choose PLAN: CAREFUL, LUCKY, BRAZEN, or CALCULATING

• • • Careful: when unprepared you have a HIDING SPOT
    • Lucky: when unprepared you have a WEAPON
    • Brazen: when unprepared you have NO WEAPON
    • Calculating: when unprepared you have SOMEONE ELSE’S WEAPON

Write a paragraph about yourself that integrates these. Don’t talk history, talk personality.

Choose first career path, COLLEGE, MILITARY, BUSINESS or CRIMINAL. Roll 1d6 on the appropriate chart. Write a bit about that. Write your skill as an aspect but make it clear.

So yeah, pretty much what you’d expect though certainly there are some novel ideas in there. I’m pretty sure it was asymmetric too — player character simulation is not the same as environment simulation. I think it’s also one where the ref never rolls (since that goes hand-in-hand with that kind of asymmetry).

Pelagia I have even fewer notes on. From what I can find it looks like it dates from a period where I was still mostly hacking Fate. It’s also related to Deluge, perhaps a less or at least very differently apocalyptic. You would be people who live in these oceanic cities or villages, mostly underwater, after some event flooded all of the land masses of the world — everything you need you have to find in the ocean.

Since it’s something you bolt onto Fate, it’s mostly about the world and the technology. I never really figured out what you do. Just where you are.

I still think it’s pretty cool. If I ever figure out what characters do here I might restart work on it. If I know what you do, I can find a system for it.

Finally there is the very strange Polyp. In Polyp you are the strange unspecified animal avatars of a god that lives in the middle of a world composed entirely of water. Yeah, not a waterworld in the sense of being covered in water, but in the sense of being only water. This meant I could piss away hundreds of hours researching the states of water at various extraordinary pressures (which is really cool, go do that a little) even though that had little to do with the game. The important part of the game as that your cute little larval gods spent their time (your time at the table) sculpting a civilization out of the permanent ocean.

Now this game had a whole system but I don’t think it was really playable. I’m not sure I can ever find out because the only content I have is in an InDesign file and I cancelled my Adobe subscription ages ago. Maybe it was playable. You know what, since we will never know for sure, let’s just say it was awesome.

What I can recover (and this is not easy since it is also stored in software I am know longer allowed to use, but for different reasons) has this in it:

Yshtra. The water-engine of the world. She is both being and monster, machine and mind. Her name is also the name of this world composed only of water.

The history of Yshtra is one of oscillations, of waves. Over the tens of thousands of years recorded in her memory the world has been many things — civilization, wilderness, heaven, hell, destination and origin. Today it is a wasteland — the last cycle left the world deeply damaged. But you will change that. As the Polyps of Yshtra, you are designed to bring about the next great cycle though it is up to you to decide how. You are empowered with her authority: what you decide will not only be supported by Ysthra, but it will become her doctrine in the next cycle: you will start the world on a course of reconstruction and you will decide what that will be at its peak. You may also find you have sown the seeds for its inevitable decline. This is as it should be.

Of course since I was (and am) always thinking harder about the setting than the system, there is a way to generate the apocalyptic (hmm, that’s happening again too; I wonder why) starting form of the world that you will fix.

The state of life

The current state of life on Yshtra determines what your early conflicts will be about. As you progress through the oracles and tell the story of the world as it is now, codify the degree of fantasy in this reality — are you playing a science fiction game? A fantasy with relatively strict physics? A pure fantasy where physics are subservient to magic? Or will you be causing the physics to take shape as you go? When you know which you want to play, speak it out loud and write it on the map.

1. None. Whatever happened here, even if it was just entropy, it ended all life processes. The chemistry is still possible but there is nothing in the water that swims or eats or metabolizes in any way. Draw your DEATH symbol near Yshtra. Your FIRST CONFLICT could be fixing things so life can start already. Pick a new roller and roll again:

1. It’s dead cold. Solid ice. To kickstart this place again you’re going to need to start from outside the ice.
2. It’s cold. Everything has halted because the world is ice. Some warmth flows in myriad tiny crevices between the bulk of the ice, but not enough for life to sustain itself. Enough to kickstart something, maybe, though.
3. It’s warm. It’s fine. Just that nothing is running.
4. It’s hot. The upper part of the globe is water vapour and the parts that are low enough pressure to be useful are way too hot. Why’s it so hot?
5. It’s so damned hot. The world is vastly larger than it should be because of the heat. Something keeps it so hot that it’s almost entirely water vapour. Again, you might have to go outside the world to solve this one.

2. Some. There is some protozoic life here and so all of the necessary components to sustain life exist. But it can’t yet evolve and it’s not clear what it will become if it does. Draw your SIMPLICITY symbol near Yshtra. Your FIRST CONFLICT can be the jump-starting of life on a correct path. Pick a new roller and roll again:

1. It’s dark. Even the upper layers are too dark for photosynthesis and so the core life forms must do without. They live on some other energy source entirely — some heat source perhaps? An abundance of an active chemical compound? Radioactivity?
2. It’s bright. A sterilizing radiation from the sun penetrates the upper regions of the world forcing life to operate in the low-energy depths. Is something wrong with the sun? Or just the atmosphere?
3. Monoculture. There’s some life here but it’s all the same and lives in a relative equilibrium meaning there is no competition — no trigger to evolve. This world needs some change.
4. Simple. It’s just not complex enough — it’s a chemical dead-end for life. No amount of competition is going to trigger any interesting complexity. It would make a great food source for something that did, though!
5. Climactic chaos. Something external — weather, asteroid storms, solar instability, something — causes vast periodic extinctions before anything can take hold.

It just goes on like that. There is actually a ton of material here and I might reconsider it. Maybe I have enough tools now to make this one work. There’s an example of play that implies we’re working with some Hollowpoint variant here. This might be a branch of an early Soft Horizon game then.

For example, let’s say we’ve just come out of the Preparation session with the following world:

(Rolled 2 and 2): There is some simple life in the sphere of Yshtra, but the upper reaches of the water are savaged by harsh ultraviolet and worse from the sun.

(Rolled 3): The last cycle ended in disaster — a flourishing civilization damaged the atmosphere of the world (something they thought they didn’t need) and ruined the protection it provided. The sun flares at regular intervals and when it last flared, the habitable areas of the world were sterilized.

The group considers the problem and decides they can either fix the sun, fix the air, change the water so that it acts as its own radiation filter, or change the life so that it is impervious. They decide that they will bend their efforts to changing the water. As this is the opening action and there are four players, the referee rolls 8 dice: 6 6 6 1 1 4 4 3

A daunting opposition!

The players have rolled as follows:

Diisha, a Convert prime, rolls her Observe (3). She is whirling throughout the globe attempting to find more information about the water’s mineral contents and see if there is some way to use it to create a chemical cascade that will make a shield. She rolls: 5 3 4

Amal, a Deceive prime, rolls her Edit (4). She is moving through the past to find times when the water was more resilient and she will nudge some reactions to make them persistent. She rolls: 6 5 4 3

Benek, an Edit prim, rolls her Edit (5). She is moving through the past to find asteroids that were near misses that can be diverted into hits to alter the chemistry of the water. She rolls: 5 5 2 2 3

Since Diisha has rolled no sets, Amal asks to borrow her 4 since it will all make a set for her! Diisha agrees and the agree on the narration: in her travels Diisha has discovered a molecule with extra-physical properties that can be polymerized to create a floating shield on the surface of the water. It would require the presence of some magic in the distant past though. Amal now has: 4 4 6 5 3

Benek would also like a die, the 5, and suggests the narration that Diisha has discovered evidence of a huge asteroid storm in the past that grazed the planet. It would be a rich time period to mine for impacts. Benek now has: 5 5 5 2 2 3

Diisha’s remaining dice are irrelevant as she cannot be attacked since Observe was used to increase team resources.

We begin! The Widest, highest set is the Oppositions’s 6 6 6. The referee narrates: The problem is a crushing one. Time is vast and the things you seek may not even exist. She decides to apply her 6 6 6 to Amal. Amal can choose to take her hit on a 4, ruining a set, or be damaged by the attack. She chooses to take the hit and now has an Immediacy of Sticky — she is finding it hard to move in time. The sets are now:

Diisha: 3
Amal: 5 4 4 3
Benek: 5 5 5 2 2 3
Opposition: 4 4 1 1 3

Benek is next with her trio of 5s. She narrates: But in the depths of time, in that long void between then and now, there is a hope, a shower of asteroids that nearly missed. They contain elements critical to the creation of the Barrier Layer and I change the chances in time so subtly as to cause them to impact instead of miss. She chooses to take out one of the Opposition’s 4s:

Diisha: 3
Amal: 5 4 4 3
Benek: 2 2 3
Opposition: 1 1 3

Amal has the next move with the pair of 4s. She realizes she is vulnerable here and so starts by burning a trait (Justice — a facet of Yshtra that she now no longer believes in) and adds a die rolling a 6 — no help at all). She narrates: There are now minerals in the deep past with the mystical properties needed to form the shield. I nudge them together, trigger the cascade and it begins but will it hold? She takes a 1 from the opposition to protect herself.

Diisha: 3
Amal: 6 5 3
Benek: 2 2 3
Opposition: 3

Finally Benek acts with her pair of 2s. The ancient asteroids mingle with the new reaction and parts of the world are covered for some time. But it isn’t complete and might not be permanent. The job is not yet done. She damages the opposition with a hit from her Edit: it now has an Amenable Past.

It seems this tactic will not work, but neither has it entirely failed. The polyps will need to come up with something new.

This is obviously a game that puts an enormous creative burden on the players.

Lots of apocalyptic water in there.

 

social combat in diaspora

In the first edition of Diaspora we kind of made a hash of a great idea, tricked by successful playtests into thinking we’d written excellent rules. And for a small number of people we probably had, but not for everyone and not even for most.

I think the idea was first brought to my attention (nothing is original) in an RPG.net post in 2008 or so by Fred Hicks. I can’t find it now, but the gist was that maybe you could just use the existing zone combat rules and change the map to something notional rather that geographical and get a social combat system. Zones would be ideas or beliefs or other abstractions, but otherwise you’d leave the system intact.

This sounded like a brilliant idea. In practice it wasn’t — it led to the same problem I always had with social combat: you’re just figuratively beating each other, reducing a different kind of hit point. While the narrative is different, it’s still constrained to make sense of a combative scene, so it’s actually very limited. Like using the combat system to model acrobatics as well as gunfights. Yeah, yeah, Fate fractal, I hear you. Sorry, but endlessly and reductively using the same complex system for everything is boring. And strangely confining. It’s like saying Lego is best used for making a wide variety of giant Lego bricks with which you can make more and bigger bricks. Literally any kind of brick! Eventually you realize you haven’t got around to making anything but building materials.

Anyway, it sounded enough like a good idea that we wrote it up for Diaspora and what we published is pretty much where we stopped thinking about it. The rules give some unfortunately vague advice about what a map should look like and some contradictory rules for how to interact with the map. The thing is, our playtests with it were great. They were great, though, because we stumbled on some specific uses (that actually disobeyed many of the rules we wrote down) that were huge fun. I had actually failed to analyze what I did as a ref so I could mechanize that and instead mostly just wrote down the core idea that led us to a fun space. I had failed to give you the tools to reliably reproduce those good times. Since I hadn’t done the analysis, I didn’t even know why it worked when it worked or why it sometimes failed. Not all of the examples were every tested — they were just ideas that might or might not work.

Since then I’ve thought a lot harder about this. There are actually two different ways I’ve obeyed these rules (sort of) with good results and they are substantially different. These differences should be codified for a decent system to exist, and we might even want to just pick one.

The first is to have the protagonists and antagonists on the map. The objective is to move yourself to the Idea you want to dominate and to move your opponents to some place inert or favourable to you. Since this is the most important part of the resolution, the whole idea of beating each other’s composure hit points down should be dropped — that’s an attrition battle that distracts from the maneuver battle where we’ve invested all our energy. The map is a creative burden on the ref — what best handles the scene’s needs? But this is the biggest problem: not all maps work and there’s limited guidance as to what does work. And a lot of maps that look different are topographically identical.

The other way is to invert this and make ideas the pawns on the table and the map can be people, places, cultures. The geography becomes static and we move the ideas around it. The objective is to cluster ideas where we want them but now who rolls and against who become unclear. The few I’ve run with this inversion have been great but entirely ad libbed. I have no way to tell you how to reproduce this but, as it turns out, I have no way to tell you what maps will work in either case. So we’re not further ahead.

While tinkering with a very early version of Soft Horizon I started thinking about formalizing the map: let’s have one kind of map and all combat is social at this scope. How you resolve the map (where you move all the pawns to) determines just what kind of event this will be (warfare, violence, diplomacy, sorcery, and so on) and this has largely narrative impact: you make the final roll in the determined resolution space and if it’s WARFARE then you narrate your success or failure as a war. That is, the whole minigame is in the preparatory moves for the conflict and one roll resolves the conflict. This never got tested but I think it’s a step in the right direction: develop a single, generalized social combat map. I still think is possible. I still haven’t done it.

It did get me thinking about a single abstract map for combat, though: surely if it was possible to generalize social combat to use a single map, then maybe you could do the same for combat! This is of course the same trap as thinking you can use a hit points combat system and relabel everything to make a decent social combat system. But I still think it might work, especially for mass combat which seems to demand more abstraction.

Could we find a similar common abstraction for social combat? Or is this physical combat really one sub-map of many different kinds of conflict? That seems to be more the case (and I’m excited by the idea of having a vastly richer social system than violence system: one that subsumes violence as a single special case of conflict and not the most interesting). A separate system for romance, persuasion, grifting, …

Can these be enumerated? Can all of them be reduced to a model that is fundamentally about maneuver and action in the context of position? I think if the categories are general enough the answer to the first is yes — but I haven’t found the categories for this to work yet. And I’m not working all that hard on it. And I’m pretty sure that all of them can be reduced to a maneuver model, to be put on a map. Lots of maps.

But the point of this was that I am still, ten years later, flailing around trying to find good maps for this concept of social combat. So the idea that we could make a rule in Diaspora that basically said “first, invent a good map” was absurd. That’s why that section fails: we told you to take on the part that needs all the thought, all the testing, and was most likely to fail. And told you to do it on the fly.

Sorry about that, that was bullshit.

 

 

bugging out

Yeah I’m bugging out.

Making games for sale has become tedious. I like inventing games. I like writing and editing. I like illustrating. I like layout out. I just hate with an increasing passion all of the pressures attendant with selling them. I realized today that I am just not getting paid enough to care what anyone thinks, and when you sell something with an eye to making a buck you are literally investing in what other people think.

Part of the problem is just how many awful people there are in the industry/hobby/whatever-I-am-not-here-for-definitional-debate. I feel like I can’t distance myself enough sometimes. So this is as far as I can go.

The other issue is reach and what really cut the heart out of the pursuit for me was the death of Google+. One day I reached four to five thousand people with every musing. The next day I reach half a thousand on Twitter and two thirds of those are robots. My interaction went from tens or hundreds every week to three or four. Since I’m not interested in any of the banal work that goes into “building a brand” that’s not going to change. So fuck it. It stopped being fun when G+ shut the doors, it just took me a couple of years to realize it.

The last couple of media purchases I’ve made were magazine subscriptions — one to Nature and one to Lapham’s Quarterly. Each reveal in a different way a creative and analytical world so profoundly richer than musing on game design that I can’t leave the bathroom (where I read my magazines) without feeling like I should go back in since it’s so much more…relevant.

This is not about you. You are all, as far as I can tell, awesome. I love you. You know who you are.

And it’s not about playing games. I love playing the games I make. I will keep playing them, keep keeping that company, and maybe now play more. Maybe even make more. I’m just not going to engage with all of the senseless (to me) work that goes into selling them to you. I love these games. I’m just exhausted by the idea of having to care what everyone else likes while I’m doing it, and that’s intrinsic in turning it into a business. I don’t need the money that badly and it wasn’t much anyway.

I don’t know yet what will happen with Diaspora Anabasis. There are other creatives involved and I owe them something. There’s a lot of work already done that I love and I’m having trouble summoning the kind of energy I would need to revise it so that you (notional, aggregate, and non-specific you) will love it to. It’s going to have to be enough that I love it but I’d rather not ask you to pay for a vision that doesn’t deliberately include you. I will settle for all my accidentally coincident gamer fiends.

I’ll keep writing here. Maybe more than usual. But mostly I’m going to sit with my wife and laugh at Monty Python.

Love to you all.

ADDENDUM

I’m still working all this out. I decided on a gut instinct and my brain is slowly catching up.

One thing that bothers me about these games and that has increasingly depressed me is the focus on violence. It’s gone from discomfort to disgust. I can’t even look at most game artwork without reflexively despising the fact that everyone on the cover is threatening me with a weapon or behaving as through the dismemberment of a foe was the pinnacle expression of healthy comraderie. I’ve talked about this before so I won’t elaborate. It’s all in the blog somewhere. It’s just so normalized in this hobby; so expected. And that normalization is extremely disturbing to me.

I’ve talked about this before of course.