Two Dice in my Pocket

[rob_donoghue]

Chris Hanrahan, being an intensely cool guy, sent me a pair of dice from the Endgame 8 mini-con out in Endgame, Oakland . They’re gorgeous six siders with a mother-of-pearl finish and the endgame logo where the 6 should be. I found them in my pocket today and have been rattling them around in my hand every now and again, thinking

Comments

[spiritualmonkey]

Dood, Endgame fucking rocks. When Confrontation gets around to releasing the troops for my army, I'm there!

[drivingblind]

I like Endgame so, so much.

[drivingblind]

See, thing is that 4E has given me a fresh appreciation for not getting minimalist. It's like Dominion: if the game was just draw one, play one, buy one, with no crunchy bits to interact with one another and provide unexpected delightful combinations, it just wouldn't be that good to me. Same's true of the truly minimalist game, when it comes down to it. There's a reason I like grafting Stunts onto the Fate engine.

[rob_donoghue]

You'll get no argument from me - god knows how I hate playing D&D. In fact, D&D crystallized this for me in ways that even SOTC didn't, and that's that a) this specific stuff is awesome and b) but sometimes it's a pain in the ass to keep track of.

So the challenge, in my mind, is how to make something awesome and specific, but _easy_ (easy to carry, easy to remember, easy to use on the fly). And that may or may not be possible.

[drivingblind]

Well, me bringing up Dominion is a great example. But for the cards, the *principles* in Dominion are dead easy, and you could easily surmise cards effects to build out of the very simple basic parts.

So is the answer, then, that if you want the satisfying texture of complexity, but a minimal game, you aim for simple building blocks, but let people build more complex structures out of those building blocks themselves? The thing you build yourself is more easily internalized than the prebuilt complexity you select from a menu?

[rob_donoghue]

Yeah, there's definitely a reason I continue to stare at dominion's applicability to rpgs.

The ultimate issue is, I think, one of logistics. Player - constructed ideas are definitely stickier (for them) but their portability is a little suspect. Of course, d&d offers a non-intuituve solution in that you don't need to know all the details of your players sheets to be able to make a decent challenge - broad strokes work just fine.

On some level we're also back to that idea that HERO or Tri-stat could make a fantastic game that is not HERO or Tri-Stat. It's always been a fun theory, but maybe it needs some real kicking around.

[tregenza]

I am growing every more fascinated with how players resolve disputes about the rules, and, as you so cleverly put it, develop a common frame of reference.

Even in tightly defined games, such as D&D, a group will develop their own subtle variations. These may not even go as far as house rules but a group will develop a consensus about what is fair and right for them.

This has led me to thinking about how this can be incorporated into the game itself.

Can the process of forming a common frame of reference be explicitly part of the game?

[samldanach]

Well, to get a little theoretical here...

The rules serve many purposes. Establishing frame of reference is a critical one, but not the only one. Enabling specific points for the players to influence events outside explicit character actions is another (Aspects, in particular, are an excellent example of this). Rules can also serve as an end in themselves, creating a puzzle of a system that is just fun to play with, separate from the story (d20 and 4e being good examples of this).

For a truly minimalist game, all you need is relative measures (is my guy stronger than your guy?) and conflict detection and resolution (if I say I shoot you, how do I know if I hit?). But, as drivingblind pointed out, that gets boring (ignoring the merit of the narrative structure for the moment). Really, all you are doing is enabling collaborative storytelling in a way that reduces arguments. You may not even really be "playing a game" at that point

[joshroby]

Intriguing stuff. I suspect I'll be mulling this over for a while -- especially the Dominion-esque simple building blocks, complex combinations thing...