Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary From: bc@lnec.pt (Luis Miguel Sequeira) Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1993 08:07:39 +0000 rwallace@cs.tcd.ie (Russell Wallace) wrote, some time ago: >Thanks for the compliment! :-) This is precisely one of my main design >criteria; that the rules should be simple enough that clocking up 100 >hours on a supercomputer is not a prerequisite to play the game well! >(Are you reading this, Rich Skrenta? :-)). I believe that a simple set >of rules, which come together in many possible ways, can provide all the >required complexity of gameplay. (Back to the comparison with >roleplaying, I have seen the argument seriously put forward, that >gratuitously complicated character generation rules are required in >order to make things too difficult for rules lawyers to cope with. This >is nonsense, since rules lawyers love this sort of thing, and will find >it easier to cope with than anyone else will.) Perhaps I fail to grasp the concept of hyper-complex PBeMs, just because I'm primarily a role-player, and only secundarily a boardgamer. Thus, my emphasis is - and will always be - on simple, workable rules (if you want to include formulas or not, that depends...), and rely on player interaction and not necessarily on spreadsheet programming... Mind that there _are_, in fact, 300-pages, 60-volume RPGs around. However, I won't play them any more. Why should I? The simple, 10-page leaflet which covers _ALL_ the rules I _really_ need to play is enough for me. If I want to discuss rules, I grab a copy of 2nd Edition AD&D, and that's that. If I want to PLAY - and that's mostly what I _really_ want to - I get the simplest game available... Note that a "simple" RPG doesn't necessary mean one with just a couple of pages. Take "The Lord of the Rings RPG" from ICE, for instance: 16 pages of rules - but what about BACKGROUND? :-) Tolkien wrote a few thousand pages just on the background... :-) I would even admit a player questioning if all Balrogs are blue or black, because that happens to be a scenario fault, but discussing if the rule on page #543 superceded the rule on page #6537, well, that's not playing - to me. Thus, I assume that I'm seriously influenced by this spirit of simple rules games. I really _don't_ like a 500-page rulebook for _any_ type of game, specially if it's a PBEM I'm playing from work and have to send in the orders in my spare time (thus, being unable to get my spreadsheets loaded...). On the other hand, just replying to messages from other players is great fun, most are very short and need but a quick reply to get things going. This is, for me, the fun part. I admit it - I never played Olympia (I joined it too late). I really don't know if it had too many rules, or too few. But Atlantis seems to have about what I consider to be a fair amount of rules, without being too complex. Space 1992, a game designed by a friend of mine, was quite simple, and had perhaps too few rules. Galaxy, for my taste, has a little too much complexity, but it's rather bearable. Triplicating the number of formulas and rules in Galaxy isn't a solution! >>And besides that, why is _winning_ the game enforced, anyway? :-) > >>What's the problem of just having fun? :-) > >None whatsoever. My point was that warfare etc. is *one element* even >of open-ended games geared towards role playing; and an important >element at that. (Example from Olympia: Dr. Pain's military prowess >added a lot of spice to the game for lots of other players who would not >have initiated any such warfare themselves.) Obviously, if there is absolutely no warfare incentive, the game would be rather dull... :-) Unless, of course, we're talking a Monopoly PBeM, for instance (economic conquest). >I think the best way to design a game is to have a simple, fully >documented set of rules, which can be used in many different ways. The >game *doesn't* come down to who can clock up the most CPU hours >analyzing this or that paragraph of the rulebook with their spreadsheet >program, but who can make best use of what they have in terms of >strategy, diplomacy, or just roleplaying to have fun. I agree to this wholeheartedly! :-) >I don't think anyone would argue for example that any of the formulas in >Atlantis should be hidden. The game is too simple for that... >But consider the case where the rules are very complicated. (This >thread was started by Rich Skrenta, who has the avowed intention of >making Olympia 2 so complicated as to "make Russell Wallace nauseous" >:-).) Good luck, Rich! ;-) >Having lots of complicated rules is I think a bad start. The best way to >avoid making matters worse is to at least publish them so they can be >got out of the way as quickly as possible. There will be enough of a >tendency anyway for the game to be dominated not by the best strategist >or the best diplomat, but the one who can spend the most hours wading >throught the rulebook. This will be made much worse if one first of all >has to clock up months of trial and error to figure out what all the >*!@#@*! rules are in the first place. That's exactly what I think. This applies to _all_ types of games. I remember my frustrating first six or seven months of learning how to play Empires and Arms... and I still don't know the *brand new* naval rules... :-) If you have no chance to win but to know _all_ the rules _extremely well_, I think that's missing the point entirely. The rules ought to be just a guideline, a framework to give your game consistency, and _not_ the game in itself. Consider programming, for instance. Programming in Microsoft Windows is a good example. You have a quite large number of "rules" (ie. the 650+ functions offered by the libraries...). However, to be sincere, you really _don't_ need to know them _all_ in order to be a "good" Windows programmer. Ie. you can get an application quickly written just by copying a few examples and get the thing done. Obviously, you _can_ know _all_ the functions supplied by Windows, and perhaps you can write the most obtruse Windows application if you know them all by heart, but, in fact, you can get a few excellent results just by using a few of them... That's what games ought to offer: enough diversity so that the game isn't a bore (ie. different ways of accomplishing the same objective), a not-too-large ruleset (simple IS beautiful, or, as my teachers would put it, The KISS Technology: Keep It Simple, Stupid!), and having the players enjoy themselves even if they aren't master strategists/economicists/mathematicians, etc. Luis Sequeira, a simple player living in a simple world _________________________________________________________________________ / / Computer scientists do it byte by byte. _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/_/ _/_/ _/ We don't ask for miracles to get the job _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ done, we RELY upon them! _/ _/ _/ _/ If the job still isn't done, we'll stick _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ with Emacs instead... bc@lnec.pt Luis Miguel Sequeira Laboratorio Nacional de Engenharia Civil Phone 351-1-8482131 Ext. 2752 Centro Informatica/Grupo Sistemas Centrais "Don't call me, I'll call you" Av. Brasil, 101 - 1700 Lisboa, Portugal / _________________________________________________________________________/ Up