Some of you may be aware that my local gaming community hosts semi-regular game design brunches. We basically get together on a Sunday and chat about game design, and everyone brings a problem with them if they have it, and we'll discuss things, do rapid playtesting, try out designs, bring prototypes, and all of that. I've discussed them before, but I want to delve a little more into some of the stuff I find valuable.
The first thing is that we have a wide variety of experience levels, backgrounds, and types of expertise in the group. I, for example, am mostly a writer and player (aside from now designing), with experience playing more traditional games as well as story games. Stras is an ace playtester, a designer, and has tons of experience with trad and story games alike. He also has a lot of technical knowledge and baseline design knowledge that I don't have. John, on the other hand, is our graphics genius, and is a really good designer, with traditional experience and the same level of story games experience as me - however, both he and Stras have GM'd WAY more than me. Paul is a designer (the only one paid-published of us, I think) and writer, with a ton of trad experience and story game experience, and one of his biggest points of value (imo) is that he plays with games that most of us have not or don't anymore (like GURPs and Gumshoe). Marc is almost exclusively traditional/OSR, and has a great mind for math, and is a designer who does most of his own writing. Rachel is mostly a player, but offers a unique perspective, is a great storyteller, and provides us with a good sounding board. Jeff and Heather both have traditional and story game experience, and both offer a good player perspective. Nick, who just started coming, is a really fantastic designer and writer with a lot of experience developing his own games.
I don't think I'm forgetting anyone! I hope not.
Reading that, I think most people can see how we'd have a huge variety of input and different perspectives at every brunch, even if some people can't make it. We also have a good group that gets along pretty well.
It's awesome. It allows us a lot of opportunities to find flaws in design, or just redirect design that seems to be going away from its purpose. We also can focus on a variety of things: writing, graphics, technique, development, and prototyping.
This week, we playtested Nick's Medical Bay 3 creation, evaluated Tabletop Blockbuster playsheets, discussed Stras's Calamity Engine (super excited about that) and looked at his art inspiration for another project he's working on, and had a long discussion about scenarios for Clash. All in a few hours! (We also talked about Patreons, Creative Commons, power dynamics in the indie RPG industry, and gatekeeping.)
The conversation about Clash was really interesting for me. One of my first scenarios is based on Romeo and Juliet and written by Stras, and I am planning on doing a couple more in the main book with some as stretch goals if/when we crowdfund. I have some great creators in mind and a few already signed up. I am hoping to make this a successful product, and I think scenarios are essential to doing that.
Anyway, one of the coolest things about this is that with all of this variety in input, we have managed to create things by collaborating. Clash would not be where it is without the input of the group, nor would Tabletop Blockbuster. I know that we have put a lot of input into Stras's Hexes and Eights (which you should check out, btw). We also often run into solving problems for each other - I've written monsters for Marc's Paramount, while John has created character sheets, free-to-use dice icons, and other such things for the group. The others have contributed so many things, it's impossible to list them all.
We've had some shakeups in people's availability so we might have to start working around an occasional design dinner but I am hoping we can keep this up. I think it's really valuable.
Do you discuss design with your group? Do you have any regular get-togethers?
Do you find you design better alone, or with outside input?
Showing posts with label daedalum ap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daedalum ap. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Game Design Brunch 1-19-14
We had a game design brunch on Sunday. This time it was just four of us, thanks to the plague hitting Pittsburgh and taking out multiple members, plus people being busy due to work, etc. I missed people but it was still good to get together and do the business we needed to do.
First up was Clash. I'm taking Clash to Dreamation in February (OMG NERVOUS), which is exciting and challenging all at once! Problem is, I'm terrible at pitching games and explaining what they're about. Cue me bothering my Game Design Brunchers for phrases, keywords, and the like about Clash.
(the following is not verbatim)
Marc said: It's a game where you give up what you want in order to get what you need.
Rachel said: It's a game about relationships and how strained they can be.
Everyone agreed that it really is a game about conflict and that I should zoom in on that, and the sacrifice aspect. I also asked for a few examples of stories that could be told with Clash. Number one, as usual, is Romeo & Juliet. I wish I knew more about the play! Others included our current game-in-progress (the Untouchables vs. the Mob), as well as high school rivalries (which can get surprisingly messy), and John says Eastern Europe during WWII. I know nothing about WWII so I'm not helpful there, but it seems rich for the taking.
Finally, for Clash, I had some thinky time about how the game requires specific things, based on comments at the table. John, Marc, and Rachel said that they noticed that they needed to have time interacting with each other, so it's hard to do people on distant battlefields, you need people forced together in space. One of the best examples of this in media I can think of is North & South, which I saw multiple times as a kid. I'm sure it's epically problematic, but I <3 Patrick Swayze and was a big fan. The big thing about the miniseries is that the characters are literally at war with each other but still find themselves in the same places - family gatherings, business meetings, etc. That's the kind of thing I'm looking at for Clash. Take tons of bad blood and problems, shake 'em up, and put everyone into one place. Bam. Done.
With this in mind, I added a new mechanic to the game. Locations are now like, a thing! And there are mechanical bonuses based on your location, plus some narrative stuff with locations. I'm pretty excited about that.
Up next, we discussed Tabletop Blockbuster and the possibility for going back to positive and negative traits. So far, all of our players have liked the idea, we just need to playtest it now. I think it will work out just fine.
Finally, we did some work with Marc's Legends of Bardic Distortion game, which he needs to be writing more about. We helped out putting together some new talents for the Kensei tier of talents, and it sounds like we also figured out some stuff that he'd been sitting on. Cool beans.
It was pretty damn productive! I love these brunches.
First up was Clash. I'm taking Clash to Dreamation in February (OMG NERVOUS), which is exciting and challenging all at once! Problem is, I'm terrible at pitching games and explaining what they're about. Cue me bothering my Game Design Brunchers for phrases, keywords, and the like about Clash.
(the following is not verbatim)
Marc said: It's a game where you give up what you want in order to get what you need.
Rachel said: It's a game about relationships and how strained they can be.
Everyone agreed that it really is a game about conflict and that I should zoom in on that, and the sacrifice aspect. I also asked for a few examples of stories that could be told with Clash. Number one, as usual, is Romeo & Juliet. I wish I knew more about the play! Others included our current game-in-progress (the Untouchables vs. the Mob), as well as high school rivalries (which can get surprisingly messy), and John says Eastern Europe during WWII. I know nothing about WWII so I'm not helpful there, but it seems rich for the taking.
Finally, for Clash, I had some thinky time about how the game requires specific things, based on comments at the table. John, Marc, and Rachel said that they noticed that they needed to have time interacting with each other, so it's hard to do people on distant battlefields, you need people forced together in space. One of the best examples of this in media I can think of is North & South, which I saw multiple times as a kid. I'm sure it's epically problematic, but I <3 Patrick Swayze and was a big fan. The big thing about the miniseries is that the characters are literally at war with each other but still find themselves in the same places - family gatherings, business meetings, etc. That's the kind of thing I'm looking at for Clash. Take tons of bad blood and problems, shake 'em up, and put everyone into one place. Bam. Done.
With this in mind, I added a new mechanic to the game. Locations are now like, a thing! And there are mechanical bonuses based on your location, plus some narrative stuff with locations. I'm pretty excited about that.
Up next, we discussed Tabletop Blockbuster and the possibility for going back to positive and negative traits. So far, all of our players have liked the idea, we just need to playtest it now. I think it will work out just fine.
Finally, we did some work with Marc's Legends of Bardic Distortion game, which he needs to be writing more about. We helped out putting together some new talents for the Kensei tier of talents, and it sounds like we also figured out some stuff that he'd been sitting on. Cool beans.
It was pretty damn productive! I love these brunches.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Clash Playtest 1-11-2014
Yesterday I playtested my in-progress tabletop roleplaying "story game," Clash. Clash is a game about exploring big conflicts from a small perspective. You fight, you argue, and you look at the moments that change the world. It's a GM-less, team-based game with a table you roll against to have "The World" act against the players.
Clash has been a big challenge for me. It was put together in a single day and then fiddled with and messed with for about a year before I got the courage to playtest it. I've had near-zero luck getting playtesters outside my group to play, but I've finally got my group into it. I have a lot of emotional investment in it, as it's my first solo game, so playtesting was really a tough subject to broach with my group.
Anyway, we finally started playtesting, and this is session 2. We had 4 players and the session was about 3 hours.
The setting is Chicago during the height of prohibition, where one team is playing the Mob and the other team is the Untouchables. We have a pretty nice mix of characters, including a young rookie on one side and the son of the woman mob boss on the other. We've fiddled with history a bit in part to allow for some women characters, such as my Untouchable, Penelope Wilson, who is a woman fighting against the Mob and against the discrimination within her own organization.
We had a shoot out, an arrest, threatening notes left on doorsteps, and generally a great time. My biggest goal with Clash is for it to be fun, so that was good to see. Players enjoying themselves, cracking jokes when the time is appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate), getting into the gritty parts of conflict - that part of the game is happening.
The mechanics work. Right now I'm fiddling with some numbers to make it run more smoothly, but it seems to be going pretty much right. I don't think I'll have many more changes, honestly, because most of it is rewording or fiddly bits. I haven't made any big alterations so far, and it seems to be working well. I'm going to keep playtesting for a bit, but more than anything I want to get the game in other people's hands to see if they run into problems.
The biggest change (addition, really) this time around was to write in rules about how to handle multiple actor conflicts. It was just simply adding some wording and I think the rules I wrote in work great for the narrative and mechanical purposes.
Overall I think the playtest went really well. I'm hoping to do a crunch and play some more but I don't know how much success I will have there. I just want to play more!
Clash has been a big challenge for me. It was put together in a single day and then fiddled with and messed with for about a year before I got the courage to playtest it. I've had near-zero luck getting playtesters outside my group to play, but I've finally got my group into it. I have a lot of emotional investment in it, as it's my first solo game, so playtesting was really a tough subject to broach with my group.
Anyway, we finally started playtesting, and this is session 2. We had 4 players and the session was about 3 hours.
The setting is Chicago during the height of prohibition, where one team is playing the Mob and the other team is the Untouchables. We have a pretty nice mix of characters, including a young rookie on one side and the son of the woman mob boss on the other. We've fiddled with history a bit in part to allow for some women characters, such as my Untouchable, Penelope Wilson, who is a woman fighting against the Mob and against the discrimination within her own organization.
We had a shoot out, an arrest, threatening notes left on doorsteps, and generally a great time. My biggest goal with Clash is for it to be fun, so that was good to see. Players enjoying themselves, cracking jokes when the time is appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate), getting into the gritty parts of conflict - that part of the game is happening.
The mechanics work. Right now I'm fiddling with some numbers to make it run more smoothly, but it seems to be going pretty much right. I don't think I'll have many more changes, honestly, because most of it is rewording or fiddly bits. I haven't made any big alterations so far, and it seems to be working well. I'm going to keep playtesting for a bit, but more than anything I want to get the game in other people's hands to see if they run into problems.
The biggest change (addition, really) this time around was to write in rules about how to handle multiple actor conflicts. It was just simply adding some wording and I think the rules I wrote in work great for the narrative and mechanical purposes.
Overall I think the playtest went really well. I'm hoping to do a crunch and play some more but I don't know how much success I will have there. I just want to play more!
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