Re: PBM design and formulae - a fresh start From: bc@lnec.pt (Luis Miguel Sequeira) Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1993 08:48:16 +0000 markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu (Andrew Markiel) wrote: >>The only way to counter this is to let the players treat experience >>equitably by helping newbies or by playing with people of the same >>experience. >> >One way of helping newbies is telling them the formulas :-) Unfortunately, this is quite true. I've seen games where knowing or not knowing a particular formula made all the difference. For instance, I've been playing a game without knowing how the market economy worked (it surely behaved funny... :-) ), and was a quite poor lad. Strangely enough, all my neighbours were quite rich, and getting richer all the time, even if they were weaker than I was. Hmmm. Well, then, one particular day someone told me the "secret formula of the market economy". I was delighted, as the thing actually worked, and was getting slowly richer... until the GM found out that this "secret formula" was just a bug he overlooked, and simply reprogrammed it... :-( [mind you, the game has no rulebook, just an introdutory leaflet so that you know how to fill in the forms] Well, that's precisely what I hate most about the d**n formulas. Most of them, in many abstract games, aren't intuitive, they're just something the GM invented on the spot. Thus, on those games, it's very hard to "survive", if a) you're not a mathematician; b) you don't have the formulas... But *if* the formulas make sense, and all of the game makes sense (note: "making sense" as in "is intuitive"), knowing the formulas or not is really the same thing (either you know the formulas, and you know EXACTLY what to expect; or you don't know the formulas exactly, but have a very strong feeling about things work, thus expect APPROXIMATELY this or that to happen, which is good enough), thus I'm for _not_ giving them away. On the other hand, if the formulas aren't intuitive (say, as in Chess, for instance) at all, then I'd surely publish them. The question which arises is, "what is intuitive, and what isn't". Ah well... that's the game designer's problem, of course! :-) Perhaps I'm seriously influenced by a game I play where the formulas _and_ the rules are COMPLETELY CRAZY :-) (ie, totally non-intuitive), and there is NO RULEBOOK. You wonder how many people play this (eg. if you don't know the formulas, and you don't know the rules, and even if you did [which some players obviously do, due to their experience], they would sound completely crazy to you [yes they are!!], then there isn't much difference between that game and a completely random one!). Actually, a lot. At least 300+... :-) :-) :-) The point is, make the game as crazy as you want, there will always be people willing to play it... :-) - Luis Sequeira, trying to develop a completely random game :-) _________________________________________________________________________ / / 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