Game stuff I wanna do soon

[prog]

Since starting to reclaim some life-space due to paring away extraneous projects and applying some long-overdue organization to what's left, I've been feeling the urge to move my game-playing life in new directions.

Here is some stuff I wanna do soon. Not really making plans yet, but I reserve the right to link back to this post later. If you're totally into any of these ideas (or wish to tell me how wrong I am), feel free to make your interest known!

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After listening to podcasts about them for years, I am hell-bent on trying one of the latter-day crop of storytelling RPGs. Finally picked up a copy of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach, and decree that it shall be the one I finally try first. I appreciate both its tone (which sounds like it plays out something like an R-rated Toon game[1]) and the fact that it has gamey framing elements like cards, scoring, and a win condition.

Role-playing games that are basically audience-free improv theater, or grown-up versions of "Let's Pretend" (and I mean that in the best possible way) do not appeal to me, and that discounts a wide swath of the otherwise really cool-sounding games I keep hearing about. Even though you can lose a game of Roach by an unlucky card draw, I still appreciate just having something to aim for.

[1] Really, I want to say "It sounds like Monty Python at its best and bleakest", but, sadly, "Monty Python" is such a loaded term, especially when we're talking about RPGs. It unavoidably invokes the image of some Cheeto-stained wretches sitting around a table barking "Bring me a shrubbery!" and giggling. No, that is not the game I am trying to describe.

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I wanna host a Race for the Galaxy tournament, maybe in the brief slice of time between classicaljunkie's spring and summer semesters (rather soon). She and I are both absolutely apeshit-bonkers for this game, and so are lots of our local friends. I think everyone I know who loves games loves this game, except for, like, misuba. (What the hell, dude.) UPDATE: ok, ok, several of you don't like Race! I still name it a overall rare phenomenon in my game-playing social circle.

I have never hosted a tournament of anything before. I've barely even played in any. I am not entirely sure what a "bye" is, that's how ignorant I am on the concept. So this is a novelty-driven desire, too. (Which I can sell for two cards, plus applicable trade-phase bonuses. HA HA HA.)

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One of the Gameshelf eps I wanna shoot this year is "The Diplomacy show", an idea I've been kicking around since the Gameshelf started. Both taskboy3000 and I now live in nice roomy houses, and I need something to kick-start my excitement about working on this show again, so now's the time.

The idea is that we shoot a complete, face-to-face game of Diplomacy, but direct and edit it like a reality show. There'll be cameras rolling continuously in the map room, and camcorders following people around during the discussion phase. Players must dress in costume appropriate to the Major Power they represent.

I recognize that this will be... logistically tricky. I've written my crew about it, and await their opinion. I've also written Wizards of the Coast asking if they'd like to get on this action.

Comments

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I haven't yet fallen for Race (though I've placed a couple of times and even managed to win once), but I am willing to give it another go. Something about it just hasn't clicked for me. I'd like to play it more since people whose tastes I generally do mesh with love it so much.

(Dominion, on the other hand, I loved at the first.)

[prog.livejournal.com]

I like Dominion a lot, but I don't think it'll ever get up to the always-up-for-a-game quality that Race has for me (and for many of my friends). It may be a tactics-versus-strategy thing; because of the deep common draw pile, Race has you constantly in the mode of making the best of what you're dealt. Sometimes you'll stumble into supreme luck, and sometimes you get into hopeless dry spells. I happen to love this, probably because I love always being able to blame the random number generator...

In Dominion, even though you have no control over your deck's card order, you still quite literally make your own luck by having total control over what goes into it. It is more likely to reward skillful planning.

[wrog]

One of the Gameshelf eps I wanna shoot this year is "The Diplomacy show"

Forget the costumes. Just do it with a group of people in which there is at least one asshole and one or more others with short tempers or who otherwise don't really cope well with the idea of keeping the game separate from RL, so you can have backstabs turning into real knock-down, drag-out fights.

Then intersperse with random WWI documentary footage.

[prog.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you've had the pleasure to play?

I never have. It's been something I've been meaning to correct for some time.

[wrog]

I never have. It's been something I've been meaning to correct for some time.

Oh my, yes. Do so if you can.

This is one of the classics. It's also particularly illustrative in that it's one of the rare games where you can sit down with the rulebook and the map beforehand, work out all sorts of strategies, and from that get an almost completely wrong idea of what the game is really about, something you don't find out until you get into a room and have to play it live with People That You Actually Know. Even the anonymous on-line versions never really capture the spirit of the game.

(hint: there's a reason it's called Diplomacy. The individual players start out quite weak, so everything depends on what alliances you can make and on being able to figure out who's going to backstab whom when, and a lot of times this is only marginally based on the actual board position. It can be quite nasty. The notion of doing a reality show based on this is brilliant, though perhaps not for the reasons you might have originally envisioned...)

admittedly, I haven't played for something like 20 years -- the game sucks up a lot of time and once one gets out of college it's hard to find sufficiently large groups of people with large blocks of time to blow...

[prog.livejournal.com]

I would wager that most adult Diplomacy players take advantage of its well-suitedness to play-by-mail games.

A local group of friends runs a vaguely annual event called "Civ Foo", a weekend-long retreat which is explicitly for playing games that, due to their time demands, are hard to play as a grown-up. This includes Civilization, and any number of other Avalon Hilly little-tiny-counterfests, among more modern fare.

Still haven't managed to encounter Diplomacy in the wild, despite my exposure to such things...

[wrog]

I imagine if they're willing to do Civilization, they ought to be up for trying Diplomacy.

It's probably true that my concept of the game has been colored by playing it a fair amount with less-than-adult folks. On the other hand I've also seen ostensibly adult folks getting blindsided, so I still think there's a psychological element there that needs to be seen to be appreciated -- probably present to some extent in all multiplayer games where alliances are possible/encouraged, but Diplomacy seems to really bring it out...
(and it's something you generally don't see in RPGs because most of them have this everybody-vs-the-DM dynamic that tends to keep the players together.)

And I suppose it's probably also true that the influx of Reinergames (i.e., games that are interesting at an adult level, that have short rulebooks, and can actually be played in less than 3 hours) over the past decade or so has largely supplanted the AH portfolio (... back in the 1970s, AH was pretty much the only game in town, so to speak, at least until my friends discovered AD&D...)

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I don't like Race for the Galaxy, at least not yet. I can't get over the learning curve, I guess.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

For the record, I also am not a fan of RftG. As for Dominion, I'll play it but I'm not particularly enthused.

[dictator555.livejournal.com]

I've always wanted to try Diplomacy and never known of an open game. I'm not sure I'd really like to be on camera, but if you need more players I'd be interested.

The Junkie also mentioned like six months ago you wanted girls some girls in your RPG group?

Short answer: yes

[prog.livejournal.com]

I haven't been part of anything you'd call an RPG group in years, so I dunno what context you and Amy were talking in, exactly... maybe this was after the last time I purchased an RPG book ("Dogs in the Vineyard") and was muttering about it.

But yeah, definitely; you know I always prefer to be in mixed company for any activity, RPGs included. Plus, you're awesome, so yeah, you'd be very welcome. I'll contact you off-channel about it.

And I'll find ways to cajole you onto the Diplomacy show when the time comes. :)

[queue.livejournal.com]

The first thing you'll probably need to decide is whether you want to make the tournament 2-player games or 3- or 4-player games. For my Boggle tournaments, I really wanted the interaction of more people.

I did some research at the time but couldn't find any tournament-scheduling algorithms where more than 2 individuals compete in one game. For one of the tournaments, I remember writing a program that came up with a bunch of random schedules (who plays at what table in what round) and then did some kind of fitness test on them (I think it was to minimize the number of times people played the same people). That didn't seem to make people happy, so for later tournaments I just abandoned that idea and did it completely randomly at the time of the tournament (with playing cards, I believe).

I did an initial 10 rounds, and people got 1 for first place, 2 for second, etc. And then the 4 people with the lowest scores after 10 rounds went into a 4 or 5 round final. Maybe something similar would work for a Race tournament (unless you decide you want to just do 2-player games, in which case tournament scheduling is easy, and you can do a best of 3 or best of 5 between each pair (to try to downplay the effect of luck)).

I'd be happy to help in whatever way with a Race tournament, including contributing my copy to be used for the tournament.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

For tournaments of four-person games, try to find Eeyore's planning documents for Icehouse tournaments. The same model should work, since it's a score-based game. Playoff round in which everybody plays N games against a rotating list; assign a round score of (total points) * (wins+1); top four players play one final game (or 3 final games, if you have time and you want to reduce the effect of luck).

[queue.livejournal.com]

This?

http://www.wunderland.com/icehouse/TourneyRules.html

Sounds fun, and it might work for a Race tournament pretty well, too.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Somewhere he has charts of how to do the play-off ("Ice-Off") round with N players, for various values of N. (So that everyone plays the same number of games, and the games quartets are as evenly distributed as possible, with no "cliques".)

[queue.livejournal.com]

Hmm, need to look for that more. I think the "restaurant style" would probably work OK depending on the exact makeup of the group, but, yes, finding good scheduling for N players playing 4-player games would be nice.

Diplomacy

[queue.livejournal.com]

I would definitely be up for playing Diplomacy for the Gameshelf. Never played before, always wanted to.

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

Regarding my recent comments to you about Dogs in the Vineyard, I am now 100% positive that I was getting it confused with another game.

And count me as another who doesn't like RftG. I found it too complicated, and not fun enough to want to try to get over the learning curve.

Confusion

[prog.livejournal.com]

That's OK, because, er, I don't recall which comments these would be...?!

Re: Confusion

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

The comments about how I thought I remembered seeing it on a list of Worst RPGs Ever.