That’s basically the core of it, although there is a lot of stuff you can layer on top. Like, the first question is what you do with the tokens — I’m thinking that different skills cost tokens to use, and perhaps let you add tokens before/after the roll for additional effect (so like magic the gathering cards that say “spend 1 red mana to cast, then does X damage where X is the number of additional red mana you spend” — or a non-damaging one could be like “To pick a lock, spend a skill token and roll 2d6. If you get at least the lock difficulty, you succeed; if not, you can add +2 to the roll by spending a skill token, as many times as you need, until you succeed.”) I assume you wouldn’t really have custom rules for each specific skill, but you could probably have a half-dozen different kinds of “things you do”, each with a rule set, rather like Storming the Wizard’s Tower. Probably not all skills would cost a token to use; I assume you want to keep them a little special.

The next question is how you buy spots on the number strip. Right now, I’m thinking that you start off extended challenges with zero or more numbers already bought (some higher-skill characters get more numbers bought to show their higher skill), and then certain skills let you buy more numbers as the combat goes along — this’d help sort of escalate the razzle-dazzle and lead to the flashier skills getting used only after some buildup. I don’t know how strict things should be — a skill could be like “you can put a strength token on the 5″ or it could be like “you can put a token of your choice on four pips-worth of numbers” (assuming the 2 and 12 cost one pip each, the 6 and 8 cost five, etc). Somebody who puts a bunch of tokens on one number feels like a different kind of fighter than someone who spreads them out.

I haven’t really touched on what tokens represent, but I’m thinking, basically, “opportunities”, which you can narrate however you want. Like, it could be your opponent rolls the number, so they’re opening themselves up to a later attack by you; or it could be it’s your buddy rolling, so their attack distracts the person you’re fighting. Presumably you can have the people getting the token narrate a line or two as they pick it up.

Also, I imagine you want something juicy for the 7, just like in Settlers of Catan. I’m thinking you keep the same rule where you lose half your tokens if you have more than seven of them (or however many makes sense), and then in addition the situation changes radically in some way. Like, two people swordfighting, one rolls a 7, and … the floor gives way. Or someone shouts that the guards are coming. Or one of the fighters turns out to be in disguise and their mask slips.

I guess that is about it. You could probably layer this into an existing game without too much hassle, though if it was, say, a d20 game, it’s a pity you’d lose out on the bell curve, since having the numbers have different probabilities feels like it adds a little something (though with FATE the curve seems extreme enough I’m not sure it’d work that well — maybe you could have the strip be something besides raw numbers).

Oh, and the last variant is to make the number strip into a shared resource. Obviously one of the interesting things about Settlers of Catan is there’s this board you’re fighting over, and you can crowd people off certain numbers or grab them before they do or whatever. That could be an interesting way to simulate sparring for position and “the long game” in a battle, if you’re fighting for numbers.

• Episode 1, involving asteroids, ambushes, pleasure planets, and bar brawls
• Episode 2, involving infiltration, revolution, sabotage, more bar brawls, and chefs

And a few summarizing quotes:

Zagor says, “This is the most metrosexual spaceship I’ve been on for a while.”

Heron says, “You could put different colors of gum in the pockets and call it bubblesort.”

Reig says, “I probably *do* secrete acid, at that.”

Tesher says, “Well, I am obviously disguising myself so well that even I don’t know who I am yet.”

Squee says, “But, let’s see, I get a free tag for the window sabotage, and I’d also like to tag The Food, It’s Awesome”

Garue hides his mace in a cabbage.

And now a little more detail.

As you can see from my notes, the actual game stuck surprisingly close to my expectations. I’m not sure why this was. I think it’s partly due to the group (including me) having a pretty consistent vision for the setting (which I think is often not the case with the games I run), and partly due to being smarter about writing up GM notes. I’m pretty good at ad-libbing as a GM, so I think it’s been a mistake in the past to focus on writing up NPC groups to interact with or to present pressure on the characters — inevitably the PCs don’t go anywhere near the groups. But this time I tried to focus on possible scenes that individual characters would like, and we actually hit a bunch of them.

Other worked-well stuff: I did a pretty good job getting more aggressive with the scene framing. Our groups can get a little bogged down in discussions and planning, and in trying to follow up every single lead, and I don’t think those go very well with a Star Wars kinda feel, so it was probably good to cut that short (I’d like to figure out a less heavy-handed way to do that sometimes, though — “Ok, she has disappeared and you can’t find her no matter what you do, so you go back to the ship!” is kind of lame GMing). Not having any damage, only consequences, worked well as far as it went — only one person took a consequence in either episode. Also, we seem to be getting a little more familiar with FATE as a system — I saw some blocks and some adding aspects to assist other people’s actions and good stuff like that.

Still need to work on: The main thing that I’m still worrying about is a big snarled problem involving skill levels and challenges and combat. One part of this is I think skill levels were a little too high (or, I suppose, difficulties weren’t high enough — but it seems like with FATE it’s nice to keep stuff in the -5 to 7 range where you have vocab for it, so better to scale stuff down). This was exacerbated by having six players, so generally there was someone with a relevant Superb skill and aspect. Anyway, this felt like it made it a little difficult to get appropriately challenging opposition, both in and out of combat (but players like to succeed, so this isn’t all bad).

The larger part, though, is combat felt like way too much work, and as a result I was simplifying, and I think I’m simplifying the wrong things. Again, part of the problem here is six players — it’s just a lot of combatants to have to deal with. And part of the issue is me being unsure about the right challenge levels to use: if I want to oppose a weapons-specialized player with a group of guards, how many guards should I use if they’re skill Good? How many if they’re skill Great? But also there’s just a thing where I tend to get into combats without knowing exactly what the objective of the combat is (and I tend to keep it purposely a little fuzzy to make up for challenge adjustments on the fly), and without setting up situations in which there is anything more sensible to do than just use your best combat skill repeatedly. I’d had some vague plans about some kind of giant mecha fight the PCs would have to team up against and use aspects to defeat, but it never came up in-game. Oh well.

And speaking of simplifying, I have a bad habit of dropping defense rolls for NPCs, and forgetting to have them make attack rolls; there’s just so many rolls to make! I guess for the first I can switch to just using their defense skill as the target number for the PC’s attack (instead of their skill + 4dF), since in theory it should average out the same. For the latter, maybe I should just sort of have a single “danger” roll for each PC every round on their turn that they resist with some appropriate skill, and work out what the danger is in story terms later on — just to get into the habit of doing this roll every round of combat.

Oh well, live and learn. (I do think the setting is pretty decent, though; I’d probably be up for running more games in it.)

For the pirates game I mostly wrote up interest groups and character names/traits in them, on the assumption that if the players got proactive about something I’d have some opposition to pick from. But what turned out in practice is the players weren’t super-proactive (hmm, that isn’t quite true — but they’re proactive in the sense of “let’s sneak into this guy’s house”, rather than “let’s try to get a scheme going”). Anyway, what I wrote up last time wasn’t useful. So this time I’m going to try something different. Namely, scenes.

In theory, characters’ aspects and stunts show what kind of things they want to be cool doing. So I should write up some scenes that facilitate whatever kind of coolness they want. So let’s see.

Jota’s guy, Tesher Bendros, is a smuggler who is secretly an operative for a rebel group. Stuff that would facilitate what he wants:

• Bureaucrats he can argue with/outwit
• Rich, evil people he can con/give just desserts to
• Getting captured/chased, so he can impersonate one of the background NPCs
• Getting his ship searched while he’s carrying something important, so he can have it not be found (how/when do you make this cool? maybe put off the searching roll until a critical moment?)
• Somebody threatening his cover as smuggler — maybe a dying guy flashing him the recognition signal while he’s with the other folks in the group

Lucian’s guy, Reig the Jarou, is a cute and fuzzy alien who is also a shapeshifter and also some kind of courier and spy for the rebellion. I’m not actually sure there is a real, monolithic Rebellion like folks seem to be assuming — I think probably it’ll work better if it’s more fragmented. I’m not actually sure if he knows about Tesher’s rebellion activities. I should ask. Anyway, stuff that would facilitate what he wants:

• Somebody with a pet he can impersonate (perhaps the rich tyrant has a pet catlizard)? It has to be somebody he can basically talk information out of, though, so they’d need information he could get.
• A chasm to fly across (or perhaps just two buildings, pursuing somebody) or water to swim through
• Everyone getting captured with him, and him getting to smuggle something into the prison like lockpicks or a blaster or something

Sara’s guy, Garue, is a burly fighter-type with a big mace, surprising nobody. Apparently she has done some guard jobs for Tesher and Reig. Let’s see:

• Some helpless people being oppressed that she can stand up for
• Some kind of rioting crowd situation that she can identify, calm, and lead
• And, of course, lots of fighting.

Roger’s guy, Squee Matel, is an engineer type who, I am guessing, is like Tarzan except raised by droids rather than monkeys. He doesn’t really fit into the previous trio, but I think he and the remaining two will form a decent trio of their own. So:

• Some droids for him to talk to, which means they have important information for some reason.
• Some excuse to use his hidden blaster pistol, which means perhaps the capture scene, or perhaps a fight at a party where they have to surrender their weapons, or perhaps he has a chance to shake hands with a dude he wants to kill.
• Some kind of “weird vehicle” to pilot — maybe a mecha?
• Something to analyze in his lab.

Touchy’s guy I don’t have a sheet for but have seen fragments of, and he seems to be kind of a romance novel beta male hero — he’s a nerd, but a hunky nerd. I am thinking he is a slightly more “theory” type than Squee, who is pretty hands-on (or grippers-on). I’m not sure what to do for him. I guess

• Some lady to be enamored by him, perhaps a bureaucrat. Perhaps she is secretly a big fan of his and reads all his publications.
• Some meaty problem to work on. I was thinking maybe the hyperdrive goes out (due to damage? sabotage? a tracer beacon thing?) and they have to refigure their position or something.

Iain’s guy I basically have nothing for except he’s some kind of psychic psychologist, I think maybe a telepath who found out something he shouldn’t. I guess I will have to play things by ear for him.

So, what do we have. It seems like there is a reasonable ‘rebel/smuggler’ trio and a reasonable ‘engineer/academic’ trio. Given Iain’s suggestion, how about this? Iain’s guy discovers something droid-related that is secret, like a secret research project. He needs help getting it (why? perhaps he finds out Bad Guys are trying to get at it, and he wants to get there first), so he gets in touch with first Touchy’s guy and Squee, and then when more physical stuff is required, the other trio.

So probably we could open with them talking about the plan and then run with it. Oh, yeah, and there’s the question of what the mcguffin is. Right now I’m thinking it’s what I am imagining the mcguffin of KOTOR is (I am watching the let’s plays but it’s just getting started on the main plot), namely, a giant factory that turns out droid soldiers. Like, maybe it’s so big it’s a planet in itself. Maybe it turns out giant droid soldiers, ie, mecha.

Anyway, apparently we need to work an evil tyrant into this. It’d be interesting if he’s not the big bad here — like, maybe he’s got more of a Jabba role. I guess given the Jabba setup, maybe there’s a particular person who knows more about this thingy. Maybe that particular person disappeared a while back. Maybe they show up in an image shot of some slave pit deal on this guy’s planet. So first they have to break in and get this info, and then they have to track down this guy, and then they have to make it to the factory. Hopefully tracking down the guy alerts the tyrant that they’re onto something good, and he tracks them down to the factory just as some other bad guy arrives there, so we get some kind of cool three-way thing. And then end the session.

The premise: In the far future, the Terran empire spans the galaxy. Old and decadent, its collapse is now irreversible, though it could be years or it could be centuries, and the final blow could be struck by internal strife and politics or one of the smaller and hungrier empires that pace its borders. Out on the edge of the galaxy, where you are, contact with the government is scarce and planets can be isolated, but the empire still has crushing force it can bring to bear when it chooses.

The characters are heroic rebels seeking to break free of its dark grip, or heroic officers rooting out hidden threats in an attempt to hold back the darkness that threatens to overwhelm the empire. Or more morally-gray versions of the previous, perhaps smugglers looking to make a fast buck via corrupt officials here on the edge of the galaxy.

Psychic powers and high technology exist side by side; psychic powers aren’t exactly common and can be tiring to use, but the nobility are well-advised to have a psychic on staff if they can afford it. Similarly, blaster pistols are a good thing to have but the well-prepared will have personal defense shields, requiring you to get up close and personal with fist or laser sword.

Since this is Space Opera, there are also various alien races and droids around, but humans and near-humans are the vast majority of residents and the rest are discriminated against to varying degrees. Also since this is Space Opera, there are computers but the only actual thinking computers are in the form of droids.

References: Star Wars, Lensmen, Ensign Flandry, James Bond (books more than movies, probably), Dune, Foundation series

The system: This is going to be FATE again, with a couple of tweaks as usual. Specifically, using story aspects and boons. So, in place of the normal aspect and stunt rules, you pick five permanent aspects. These work like regular aspects, and in addition you pick an associated stunt-like mechanical benefit: Notorious Smuggler aspect might give +2 to social rolls involving illicit goods, Survivor of the Elzern Purges could let you spend a fate point to drop into a death-like coma, etc. See the boons link above for more rules, but basically anything that’s a stunt now is fine; in addition, you can use a boon to be psychic: your choice of Telepathy, Mind Control, Telekinesis, or similar.

Beyond the permanent aspects, you have two story-aspect slots you can fill in as the session goes on (these don’t give an additional mechanical benefit, but they’re still aspects and work as such).

Updates: We’ll be using SotC-normal skill points (ie, 35) to build characters with the procedure mentioned last time — skills costs their rank in points, and you must have at least as many of the rank below as as the current rank. Furthermore, in this setting, Good is normal human maximum, so if you have a Great or Superb skill, consider whether that comes from being an alien or having cybernetic implants or latent psychic ability or what (this probably doesn’t have mechanical implications, but please note it anyway).

We’ll also be using the SotC-normal skill list, with the following modifications:

• Drive and Pilot are condensed into Vehicles
• Burglary also covers computer hacking stuff; “normal” computer interactions are part of whatever skill is appropriate for the activity in general, like Investigation or Art or Vehicles or whatever
• Deceit absorbs Sleight of Hand
• Gambling and Contacting are condensed into Socializing and cover all social interactions with groups (vs Rapport for individuals)
• Leadership is renamed Bureaucracy and covers most dealings with the Empire as an institution (and also other bureaucracies as appropriate)
• Mysteries is renamed Psychic and covers the theory and history of psychic ability; it is usually not the skill rolled for using a psychic ability
• The Fists/Weapons/Guns trio are replaced by a similar set: Primitive covers unarmed combat and all low-technology weapons (ie, stuff that existed pre-WW2 or so), Blasters covers normal energy weapons, and Exotics covers other high-technology weapons (most notably, laser swords).

So one way to look at this is that it’s a bunch of people interested in and talking about the game. But another way is that it’s a bunch of additional content that is also part of the game: you can research on the forum to find out how to become Inexplicably Peckish, demonstrate your knowledge by answering questions, and find people to form alliances with and then demonstrate those alliances with in-game actions.

This is supposed to be a short post, so I’m going to skip over the obvious comments about the game probably needing some kind of in-game chat functionality (though, of course, everyone has twitter; but presumably it’d have to be integrated more) and some kind of guild functionality (and, again, twitter friendslist). I’m also going to skip over talking about the social interaction stuff the game does have currently, which is interesting but pretty minor: basically you and someone else can both spend an action on the same thing and get a minor in-game benefit; furthermore, some of these actions let you pretend to help someone else out but actually backstab them. Anyway, I’m going to cut to the good stuff, ideas for much larger-scale social stuff.

Half the fun of having a Tasselled Sword-Cane is getting to tell other people I have one, so it’d be nice to be able to show it off more. Right now the game has a pretty rudimentary display for people, where it shows their stats, lodgings, recent quests, and currently-worn equipment; maybe instead of currently-worn you should just get to make up an outfit for display purposes. Similarly, it’d be cool if you could put up a list of noteworthy quests rather than current quests; somebody who puts up their seductions is rather different than a character who lists their burglary exploits. The other thing you see a lot is collections, where people can show off all the rats-on-a-string they’ve collected. That’s nice gameplay-wise since it’s an inherent quest to collect as many as possible so you can try to have the most.

Related, it’d be nice if lodgings got fancier. Like, I think this game would be totally suited to having lots of gameplay-useless items you could buy for outfits or furniture that have no function other than to look nice, and then let people invite people over to check out their houses (say, when you play chess with someone, it’d describe their library for you; when they have you over for dinner you find out about the quality of their chef). Furniture would also be a nice way to distinguish between kinds of lodgings, which are all pretty similar now (since most let you hold three cards and give a Knife & Candle bonus that doesn’t matter much): you could have different appearance and furniture allowed in different sorts of lodgings.

But ok, I said larger-scale stuff. The main things I see for this elsewhere are economics and games. Economics, in this case, means the game is set up so people can transfer stuff around, and there’s a need to do so. Like, in Kingdom of Loathing and World of Warcraft and so on, there are quests that require ten whatevers, and some of the time you can just buy it from somebody else instead of doing the work to collect it yourself. So avoiding tedium is one obvious reason to cooperate. That often doesn’t apply in Echo Bazaar — the tedium tends to be in the gaining levels rather than the getting items — but I guess I can imagine people trading commodities at below-market exchange rates.

The other major reason is out of necessity, which usually means disparate skills. In, again, World of Warcraft and similar, characters have different “foraging” skills that let them gather different kinds of resources and different “crafting” skills that let them turn resources into items, and the characters can’t have every skill, so they have to cooperate (or forgo the items, which isn’t always a big deal). Puzzle Pirates makes this into an even bigger part of the game, where the midgame is in large part about cooperating with other people to acquire and transport supplies. This has a fair amount of potential for a graft into Echo Bazaar, I think, although I’m not sure what the things you’d be building would be. I guess I can imagine letting people learn to raise spiders for silk or build furniture out of mushrooms, and presumably you’d pick up new crafting-type skills from various quests and opportunity cards.

But actually, what I’m more interested in the context of Echo Bazaar are games. “Games” meaning activities you do with a subset of the players for a limited duration, with minimal impact on the main game. Like, ok, one subset is the one-on-one or many-on-many direct-dueling things like Knife & Candle. I’m not really sold on the current implementation of K&C but it’s obviously a thing that people want. The more interesting subset to me are the semi-competitive, semi-cooperative games. Like, I’d like to see some version of Diplomacy or Mafia/Werewolf: say, a game where you’re all attending a ball, and have to make social alliances and backstab other players, while being careful not to let things spill over too much and cause a scandal. Another example is what (my impression is) the game had during the Valentine’s Day stuff — there’s a competition to get the highest Admired score, so suddenly all the social interaction stuff matter a lot more, and there is genuine reason to want to sabotage other players*, but you still have to cooperate to win.

* There’s a bunch of analysis done on prisoner’s dilemma-type stuff, and one of the interesting things is how the time limit radically changes things: whether you’re playing one game with somebody or multiple games or an infinite number of games. Effectively Echo Bazaar is in infinite-games mode most of the time, which makes things a lot less cutthroat.

Er, ok, this was intended to be shorter but it’s not really that short. Nevertheless I am going to end it here, and more next time.

The combined effect of these is to greatly narrow the game-design space. Let me demonstrate by taking a jump to the item pricing system. If you look at the prices for stuff in the bazaar and how it relates to the bonuses, you can see there are basically two schools of thought at work in the pricing. The first school is what we can call the “D&D” or “standard CRPG-style” school of thought – an item with a smaller bonus costs less than an item with a larger bonus, and an item with a bonus and a penalty costs less than an item that just has an equivalent bonus. So the Neathglass Goggles, which give a +1 to Watchful, cost the same as the Luminous Neathglass Goggles, which give a +2 to Watchful but a -1 to Persuasive. A moment’s thought will point out the flaw in this school, though: you buy the Luminous goggles, and just take them off whenever you have to do a Persuasive test — you know when that’s going to be and can freely change equipment in between adventures, so why not? And indeed the other school of pricing is what we can call the “right” or “correct” school, where basically items are priced according to their largest bonus and anything else is just considered flavor and not really factored in.

But even though individual tests only involve one pre-known stat, there actually are still a lot of things we can do to increase the tactical bite of the game without making radical changes. First off, we can throw in one-use items. One-use items inherently have tactical bite, since at every turn you get the decision of “do I want to use this item now, or save it for later?”*. The most basic one-use item is just a +N to a stat, but there are lots of other ideas. For example (and, actually, besides the first idea, these should work for permanent items as well):

• One-shot items that provide an effect that lasts for the next X adventures. There are a lot of variants here, but the idea behind all of them is they make “what adventure do I do next?” into a tactical choice, suddenly, since you have a limited number of turns under the effect. The most notable sub-variant of this is +X to a stat for a few turns, then -Y to the same stat (or to a different stat, or to all stats) for a few turns. Since you can pick your next adventure this doesn’t have a huge effect, but if it’s +X to a stat then -Y to that same stat, it potentially slows down their overall progression in that stat. If it’s to all stats, then it’s forcing you to lower-difficulty adventures for that time as a tradeoff.
• Success/treasure tradeoff: an item that gives you +X to a stat, but rewards are lowered by Y%. Or the reverse.
• Success/xp tradeoff: an item that gives you +X to a stat, but xp gained from those tests are lowered by Y. Or you lose Y xp points from your total for using the item. It’s not clear that this’d be great in the current system, but see later for more variants. Also, a more plausible version in the current system might be +X to a stat, and some other stat loses Y xp.
• Success/menace tradeoff: an item that gives +X to a stat, but also Y menace xp, as a flat boost, or per-success with the item, or even per-failure (ie, making failure even worse).
• Rare success bonus: the system already has the concept of rare successes for some tests that give a better reward; perhaps an item that makes them more likely to come up.
• Items that let you substitute one stat for another: “Roll your X ability for Y tests” (probably capped at level Z) — this is more a strategic idea than a tactical one (since it provides an alternate strategy of character development, where you don’t raise X but rely on this item instead) but it can also act as a short-term X boost, and potentially interacts with other items
• Set/costume bonuses: this item gives +X, but +Y if you’re using some other item. Again, more of a strategic choice than a tactical one, but it has some potential at the tactical level as well, especially wrt the tactics of how you spend your money. This idea also lets you give items to new players: require them to buy a three-part costume to get a +1 stat, which means effectively each item is only giving a +1/3 bonus.

I’m not listing off story explanations for any of these but I think they’re all pretty plausible — substituting Dangerous for Watchful could be “Combat Reflexes”, an item that reduces items gained for a bonus to Shadowy could be “Sticky-fingered Assistant”, etc.

* Echo Bazaar actually has one-use items that allow you to retry failed stat test, but doesn’t implement them in a great way (from a game-design perspective; I can see the argument from a convenience perspective, but that seems to contain the unstated premise that the gameplay isn’t fun and people want to minimize their interaction with it, which I’m rejecting/working to change). The items get used automatically as soon as you fail a test, so your tactical question is the less-exciting “do I spend a turn accumulating some one-use items now, or do so later?” Worse yet, I know some people are looking into this tactic and seem to be concluding that based on the number of items you get by spending a turn and the benefit you get from them, the answer is always “yes, you should”, which makes this another trivial choice. The game also has one-use items in the form of opportunity cards that benefit “extended” adventures like Inspired, Fascinating, and Running Battle. In my experience, though, people rarely hang onto them long enough to use them; opportunity card space is so limited it’s not worth keeping them.

Another place to change is the reward system. I’m pretty sure adjusting the xp system will lead directly to some tactical interest: if you make it more worth it to do harder tests, people will find ways to do them (and similarly, it’ll be less worth it to just grind away at the easiest and safest possible test). I don’t know what the numbers should look like, but I imagine you’d have what’s now, say, chancy difficulty as giving the standard xp, and things of lower difficulty would give less and things of higher difficulty would give more. To make it clear, I’m not proposing that the xp be tied directly to the effective difficulty (since that would, again, make tactical choices pretty much meaningless), but that it should be tied to the “raw” difficulty — before items and effects and so on are factored in.

But ok, this is all trivial stuff, frankly. Small changes for relatively small effects. And realistically that might be the extent of the change you could make in an existing game. But let’s assume we have a little more freedom and look into some other possibilities.

Most games like this have combat divided into multiple rounds. This is partly just a D&D-ism, but it’s also partly a recognition that you don’t usually want success or failure of an endeavor to depend on a single roll of dice — if you give more rolls, you give more chances for things to swing in the player’s favor, and you also give more spots to let the player interfere, or change tactics if things are going wrong. So one idea would be to just add rounds to the storylet resolutions: you’d roll Watchful repeatedly and have like five rounds to get three successes at a chancy test, say. But frankly this is lame, and doesn’t fit well into the existing model or the existing “feel” of Echo Bazaar, plus it’d require writing a whole bunch more text for the intermediate results. So, alternate plan: roll multiple adventures together into things that give a single resolution. We already see this to some extent with the “Running Battle … / Fascinating … / Inspired …” adventures, which let you do a couple adventures to accumulate points towards a special stat for the adventure, and then roll a test against that stat to conclude the adventure and get the overall reward*. But what about, say, a Tattoo Shop Surveillance adventure, where you can choose between storylets of variable difficulty and stat that include things like spying on the workers, overhearing things, seducing people with tattoos to check them out more closely, getting a tattoo yourself, etc, and each of those storylets gives a small benefit plus points towards the overall Surveillance stat, and then you could cash in the Surveillance stat at some point for a larger reward. Note that I’m not suggesting writing much new text here; these adventures already exist, they would just be reorganized into being part of a group. The benefit of this is now you can have mechanics that cover the whole group, which opens up the design space considerably. For instance, maybe getting a tattoo gives the biggest bang for the buck but you can only do it once or twice before they get suspicious, so you have to decide when the best time to do so is. Or breaking into the tattoo shop after hours will get some good info, but it’ll raise the difficulty of future adventures as they become more vigilant. Or some other adventure might give little benefit in itself, but, if you do it and then successfully complete the whole adventure, there’s a bigger reward.

Note that there are some hints of this already in the game: when you have one storylet that provides jade, and another that is unlocked by jade and gives a larger reward, that’s a similar kind of adventure synergy. Or there’s an adventure where you can become acquainted with a Wry Functionary, but it’s a rare success, so it’ll usually take a few extra turns to do so. If you do, though, then that unlocks another set of adventures elsewhere. I’m mostly proposing expanding these kind of tie-ins between adventures and making them the default, rather than a nice-to-have.

* Incidentally, I’m pretty sure the way extended contests works is bogus math-wise. Like, the basic way these work is you have the choice of two adventures which give you xp towards the special stat (usually the two adventures use two different stats), and then you have the choice of two adventures which let you try to resolve the adventure using that stat. Generally one adventure is easier, gives a smaller reward if you succeed, and deducts a few points from the special stat if you fail; the other is harder, gives a larger reward if you succeed, and resets the special stat to zero if you fail. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t actually work if you can analyze it. Like, I can believe that you could have two tests of equal difficulty, one of which gives a smaller reward and a smaller penalty and one of which gives a larger reward and a larger penalty. Or I could believe in two tests of different difficulty (incidentally, note that difficulty translates pretty directly to time invested in this situation, since the special stat has to be built up by going on these adventures), where the harder test gives the bigger reward but they give the same penalty. But a situation where the harder test both requires that you put a lot more time into it and has a much bigger penalty for lose seems to also require a much larger reward, not just the slightly-larger reward they give in the current system.

Another crazy possibility: substats or sub-approaches or something. Ok, fine, so we don’t want to break the system where it’s a watchful adventure so you make a watchful test. But what if we had different “stances” under watchful, so you could choose to be Intuitive or Meticulous or Scholarly or Observant, and which approach you took to the adventure affected how it came out — either some would be more effective than others in certain situations. Legends of Zork, though in general a massive disappointment, had some interesting seeds of ideas about allowing different approaches in combat and having them interact, and being able to pick approaches up as skills and use weapons that support them.

There’s one other area that ties in with tactics and rewards, and that’s Connections. But Connections, social interactions, and Knife & Candle are a subject for a future post.

To recap, the three basic problems I think the system has right now are 1) the choice of adventure (and adventuring strategy in general) is trivial, and hence other choices in the game are trivial as well 2) the item economy and the xp economy are too separate 3) there’s no overarching goal.

The third is probably the easiest to fix: find a goal and stick it in. From a purely game-design perspective, the goal needs to be something that can be achieved via multiple strategies, something that leads to multiple sub-goals, something that can be done more or less skillfully, and something that can’t be done immediately but can be done eventually. Most games tend to make this a combination of stats and items — in Kingdom of Loathing you have to defeat the Naughty Sorceress, which requires that you be at least level 13, plus you have to have a subset of a particular list of items, plus you have to have certain pets trained to a high level themselves, plus you have to beat the Sorceress in a fight. You’ll notice this pretty much matches the conditions I set out earlier; you can, say, get to level 13 a variety of different ways, and you can do it more or less efficiently, but there’s a definite fixed endpoint you’re aiming at.

Echo Bazaar has a couple obvious candidates for a way to “win”: the ambitions, the Hesperidean Cider of immortality (or something), doing something wrt London’s fallen status. Right now the ambitions have subgoals, but in practice you have to work on them linearly, and they’re all either “get your stat to X level” or “pass test of X difficulty” or “accumulate X worth of item type Y” — which are all things you’re doing anyway in the rest of the game. The cider requires you to accumulate an absurd amount of money, which is a totally reasonable final goal and different from the usual “pass a really hard stat test” ideas, but it doesn’t break down into subgoals at all; and London isn’t something there is any in-game way to deal with, as far as I know. So yeah, I’d pick some or all of these and make them win conditions (and fill them out to make them usable).

Of course, this raises the question as to what happens when the player “wins”. Most games of this kind (Kingdom of Loathing, Tiny Adventures) just let the player kick their character back to level 1 and do it again, usually with some small bonus for having gone through it once. Alternatively, the World of Warcraft/other MMO model is to have “raid content”: stuff you have to group up to do that takes a whole evening and gives a pretty small reward at the end, and you asymptotically approach perfect equipment, but slower than they put in better equipment. Finally, the A Tale in the Desert model is basically “community endgame” — where the entire player population has goals they’re trying to achieve as a group; this is combined with a world reset, that sends the playerbase as a whole back to level 1 to do it all over again. I don’t think the raid content model is substantially different from normal gameplay, frankly, so probably I’d skip that. But it seems like you could have a potential combination of 1 and 3 — like, individual characters could achieve goals and be reset to try some other play style, and in the process they’d be working on a big community goal like doing something with London.

The other two original problems are pretty tied together. Fundamentally, choices in games are made interesting because you have limited resources (and hence can’t make all of them). Resources almost always mean items — they also mean time/turns, but a game where time is the only significant resource is purely grindy (basically, what Echo Bazaar is like today). So, ok. I’m going to make some proposals here, assuming that we don’t want to throw away anything good — existing storylets, pictures of items, that sort of thing — but we can rejigger the mechanics associated with everything all we want. Thus:

1) More unlockable areas. Unlocking the advanced areas of the city is a cool mini-goal — there’s a built-in target, it’s difficult but not out of reach, you can achieve it by a couple different strategies (find an area that gives that specific item as a reward, or just make a lot of money and buy them from the bazaar), and there’s a substantial in-game reward of new content when you achieve it, plus a visual marker on the map. So how about making more areas unlockable? (Naturally, the basic areas would be cheaper, and you’d need to have some open at the start, but not necessarily all of them.) This works well with the next idea, which is:

2) Rearrange the storylets into more, smaller area groups. Like, put all the tattoo-shop adventures together into one location, put all the alley-stalking adventures into a location, etc. Doing this would remove the necessity to hide adventures when the player becomes much higher-level than them (which has very little point now, except to limit the number displayed on screen, and to prevent the player from repeating some things from “earlier in the story” — but that can be done explicitly when necessary). It’d also make it easier to find particular adventures again, and it makes it easier to implement the next change, which is

3) Focus particular adventure sets more tightly around being sources for particular commodities. Like, right now, there are a bunch of adventures that give (say) Jade Fragments as a reward; but the effect of this is to make it hard to remember where to find Jade Fragments when you actually need them for a particular adventure, since the adventures that give Jade Fragments aren’t thematically linked. There are roughly two dozen commodities now; so you could group all the adventures into, say, forty adventure areas, and have each area primarily give out only one or two kinds of commodities. Then if you want Silk Scraps, you’d know you had to deal with the urchins or the sorrow-spiders, and you’d pick an adventure appropriate to your skill level (or to the amount of silk you wanted to get). Once you have this, then you can do things like

4) Minimize the use of Echoes as currency; use commodities directly instead. This is essentially suggesting going to a crafting model. Right now, commodities are pretty fungible — you sell them (for half value, but still) and buy whatever you want, which means if you want to buy something that isn’t a commodity, it doesn’t matter what commodities you have, because you’ll have to convert them to Echoes to buy what you want. This in turn means there isn’t much incentive to go looking for particular commodities. So instead, how about if buying a Tasselled Sword-Cane requires 10 Silk Scraps, 20 Deep Amber, 50 Nevercold Brass, and 10 Echoes? This’d provide for some more definite direction in your adventuring — if you want to buy one, you’ll need to find sources for the commodities (or, if you prefer, buy them in the bazaar for double).

Together these four changes will add substantially more interlinks within the item economy (save up some Silk Scraps and Greyfields 1879 to buy Black Felt Garments, which increase your Shadowy and let you deal more successfully with the urchins to get more Silk Scraps), and make a decent start on linking the item economy and the adventuring one. But there’s still more work to do to make the actual adventuring tactics interesting, and I’ll get into that next time.

Another obvious system feature is that it requires more and more xp to gain each level, which affects the effective benefit of items. At low levels, a +1 Dangerous item is almost totally unaffordable, and you could gain a level of Dangerous in an hour anyway. As you go up, though, you’re accumulating money three or four times as quickly, and going up levels three or four times slower, so items become much more worth it. Or are they? Remember that there’s no greater xp benefit from doing a harder test, so the only reason to do a level 11 test instead of a level 10 test is you get slightly more money, which you can use to buy more items, which you can use to do slightly more difficult tests, which you can — what?

Finally, note the only time I mentioned the word “goal” above was with reference to your ambition. The ambition provides one place where the xp and financial economy cross over — to complete the steps of the ambition, you’ll sometimes need to get a stat to a certain level, and sometimes need a certain amount of a particular item (which usually means a certain amount of money). What I didn’t mention is that the ambitions, in their current state, run out long before the main game content does, so you’ll be spending a lot of time without being able to work on one.

All of these issues point to the same thing, which is that Echo Bazaar, as a game, isn’t much of a game. When I say “game” here, I mean basically “an interactive thing in which players can make meaningful choices towards a game-imposed goal”. The first point I raised means that choosing between adventures is generally trivial, that there’s an obvious best choice; the second point I raised means that items aren’t especially useful either, so there aren’t good economic choices to make; and the third point means there is no game-set goal for large parts of the game, just ones the player sets for themselves.

That said, players are good at setting goals for themselves. Most people who play this game will quickly pick up some long-term goals, probably “Max out my main stats!” and “See all the content!” There are also short-term goals, like “Get my Watchful to 10 so I can use this one opportunity card” and “Accumulate 36 Echoes so I can buy an Tasselled Sword-Cane”. But the thing about player-set goals is that the game doesn’t care. This might seem trivially obvious, but it’s got implications. Like, when you finally save up the money and buy the sword-cane, there aren’t any fireworks. The game just says “ok, 36 Echoes deducted, 1 Sword-Cane added”. Similarly with the opportunity card — the game doesn’t realize that it was a meaningful goal you’d worked on for a couple days, as opposed to something you got later in the game when your Watchful was already 10, and it was a trivial move to use the card. And this eventually starts to wear on the player (or it does for me, anyway). Grindy RPGs like this always threaten to break through the veil and stand exposed as a total waste of time, and when the game doesn’t meet you halfway and reward you for subgoals, it’s harder to maintain the illusion that you’re accomplishing something meaningful.

This pretty much covers the basic analysis of the system. Next time I’ll get into a few more subtleties about the existing system, and then start talking about If-I-Ran-The-Circus type fixes.

I’m going to probably post this in a couple sections. This first one is just an introduction to the game for people not familiar with it; you can probably skim if you’ve played already.

To start off with, I should say that I’m not going to talk much about the setting and writing, because that is generally covered by other people. The premise is basically Victorian England + the Underdark, so you get fancy society parties, spiders that eat eyeballs, mysterious golem dockworkers, and honey-dens where you go for a drug trip that is literally a trip. The writing is generally charming; there are a couple writers and one is notably better than the others (and the setting isn’t totally consistent across them all, which is irritating) but none of it is unbearable. (The easiest way to get a feel for both of these is to poke around the site, or look at some samples.)

I’m also not going to talk much about the twitter integration. You do need to have a twitter account, which it uses for authentication and to get your friends list. You can, once a day, get a boost in the number of actions you can do by tweeting something about the game, and in any case, to start playing, you have to make one tweet. This is about the level of integration I’m fine with — I don’t do the daily tweeting and it doesn’t scale if a lot of your friends are playing, but it’s not as aggravating as, like, Mafia Wars.

So what am I going to talk about? Well, to start out with, here’s how stats work: everything is a stat. You have four core stats (Dangerous, Watchful, Persuasive, Shadowy), each of which you accumulate xp in, and you go up a level when you get enough xp (to go from level N to level N+1, it costs N+1 xp). You can also pick up and lose other stats as the game goes on, stuff like “Connected: The Great Game” to show how spy-connected you are, “Wounds” to track your injuries, and “Seduction: a Rising Artist’s Model” to track an on-going project. These also have you accumulating (and losing) xp, and the level going up and down correspondingly.

There are two basic things stats are good for, unlocks and tests. Generally speaking, adventures don’t show up unless a particular stat is within a certain range of values, and most adventures then have some test which involves matching a stat (usually but not always the unlocking stat) against some difficulty. Unlocking is pretty straightforward in practice: as you start out looking around, say, the neighborhood of Spite, you’ll see a bunch of low-level Shadowy tests. As you raise your Shadowy stat, new adventures show up and old ones drop off the list. In some cases, adventures are nested: the main adventure is unlocked by having a stat of whatever, and then you have multiple ways of dealing with it, which have their own unlock requirements (in some cases items will also act as an unlock — you might have an option you can only choose by using 40 Moon-Pearls; these almost always involve “spending” those items, so you lose them). Tests are marginally more complicated. The model is pretty simple: subtract your stat from the difficulty and look at the difference. The difference converts into a probability of success*, which is rolled against and either succeeds or fails. There is some facility in the system for a rarer super-success, but I’m not sure how that works, if it’s based on your chance of success or just a flat 5-10%. If you succeed in a test, you get 2xp in the stat, plus some other reward — sometimes a boost to some other stat, sometimes items (usually equal in value to the difficulty of the stat). If you fail a test, you get 1xp in the stat and either nothing or (at higher levels) some xp in a “menace” stat like Wounds or Nightmares.

*I don’t know exactly what the probabilities are, but good ballparks for difficulty – stat:

• -5 or less: straightforward — 99% chance of success
• -4 or -3: low-risk — 90% chance of success
• -2 or -1: modest — 75% chance of success
• 0 or 1: chancy — 50% chance of success
• 2 or 3: high-risk — 20% chance of success
• 4 or more: almost impossible — 5% chance of success

To re-emphasize, I’m basically making these numbers up based on my casual observations (and I’m pretty sure that at higher levels of difficulty, the range starts to widen), but the general idea is right — you almost always succeed at straightforward things, you generally succeed at low-risk or modest but may fail, even several times in a row, you often fail chancy tests several times in a row, and it’s generally not worth trying to succeed at a high-risk or almost impossible test.

There are two things you can do to affect the outcome of tests. The four main stats have a “retry” item you can accumulate by spending actions in cooperation with another player (eg, Sudden Insights give you a second chance on Watchful tests) — if you fail a test and have one of these items, you automatically use it and don’t fail the test, though your action is still spent unless you use it immediately afterwards to retry the same test. The other thing you can do is wear items, which give stat bonuses (again, generally just for the main stats, though not always).

This is almost enough background to start talking game design, but let me touch on a couple other features of the game briefly. The opportunity deck is a deck of cards at the top of the screen. Normally your adventures come from your current neighborhood (there are eight neighborhoods, a basic and advanced one for each stat, where the vast majority of adventures are unlocked by and testing that stat), but you also have a number of slots for opportunity cards which depend on your current lodgings. These are drawn randomly from a deck of, I’m guessing, a couple hundred cards*, and you can deal them out into your slots. Once there you can keep them until you decide to use them or discard them to make space for another draw.

*Like the other adventures, opportunity cards are unlocked by having certain stats at certain levels. For the main stats, you’ll usually get the opportunity card at a minimum stat of X, and then the test will be almost impossible until your stat is X+5 or X+10 or X+15, but opportunity cards, more than other adventures, unlock on weirder stats — there are a number of ongoing storylines that weave their way through the opportunity deck, with each step in the story one unlocked by getting the previous.

There are a few other ways to unlock adventures. One particular way of note is your ambition: a long-running goal you can choose relatively early in the game.

Finally, the bazaar is the center of the economy. You can buy and sell items at any time, with the usual thing of the sale price being roughly half the buy price, and probably 95% of the items you go through in the game are available from the bazaar. There are some special items that only come from adventures, but not many and not reliably.

I’ve left out various things, but that’s enough to get a grounding in the game, so I’ll stop here. Next time: implications.

• XYZZY Awards: See you next year! (hopefully more organized next time)
• PAX East/IF Summit: An excess of awesome. I mean that literally, but if that is the only way to get my awesome I will take it.
• New job: Here, starting in, oh, twenty minutes or so. I have done some quick calculations and determined that, based on graphing time started job vs distance between job and house, I will be operating out of my bedroom by 2016 or so.
• Books: ok, that isn’t going to fit into this format.

So, yeah, books.

One Thousand White Women (Jim Fergus): This was recommended by my mom and sister and is slightly women’s-book-clubby but it is still pretty good. It’s one of those stories that is sort of alt-history but not exactly, because it starts off with an alternate premise but we end up in basically our own world so it bends back to the main timeline. The premise is pretty good, though — apparently there actually was a Cheyenne tribe that
requested the US government give them a bunch of American women for brides as part of, essentially, culturally-approved assimilation (in their culture children belong to their mother’s tribe). In the real world this was, unsurprisingly, rejected, but the book’s premise is some political calculation makes the government decide to go for it. So the book has a bunch of good stuff about life in a Cheyenne tribe and in US society in general at the time. Like the title suggests, it’s at least as interesting from a feminist perspective as a racial one, with plenty of stuff about the role of women in the various societies the book looks at. It’s not really a ground-breaking book — the plot is pretty conventional and there are enough characters that few really feel developed — but it’s a good read if you’re interested in the period.

Ink and Steel (Elizabeth Bear): I know it’s not the author’s fault but it is totally irritating to have the only hint that this is book one of two to be a note on the last page of the book (not the back cover, but the last page) saying “hey, you’d better read book two, this is only the first half of the story. I guess I can sort of judge how I felt about the book by the fact that I intend to pick up the second one, but I read it a month ago and haven’t actually done so yet.

So, er, the story. It’s about Shakespeare, which is cool, and Kit Marlowe, who is a little overused (theory: Kit Marlowe is the new Tesla), and faeries, which are extremely overused. But there’s also a certain amount of fighting and politics and subtle magic and stuff so I was reasonably willing to forgive the overused stuff. Not totally, though. Or, rather, I felt like the author was mostly interested in Shakespeare and Marlowe and everything else in the story, the other characters and the politics and the plot in general, were just there to give Shakespeare and Marlowe something to talk about. As is perhaps obvious, I was more interested in the background stuff, and there wasn’t much payoff — though since this is book one of two, perhaps conflicts set up here explode in the second book.

The other thing is I have a bunch of fragmentary questions about how it deals with gay characters. Like, one thing is the book’s treatment of female characters is pretty shallow, even of nominally important questions. And going along with that, the book has a really shallow treatment of male/female relationships (the closing scene with Shakespeare and his wife is just bizarre, though I would be more okay with it if book two opens up with her slapping him). On the other hand, the gay characters get an especially deep treatment, as do their relationships. I don’t know if this is on purpose — I mean, it seems like it must be but I don’t understand the reasoning. Was it just a purposeful attempt to do a book where gay characters and relationships get the same attention that heterosexual relationships tend to get in other books?

The other gay/female proxy thing about this book is it is striking to me how, well. You know how it used to be that if you had a tough female character she would have her backstory be that she was raped? And now if you do that people roll their eyes because it is cliche and an authorial crutch? (Now you will tell me that people still do it all the time, and I will get a pained look and say “but at least most readers agree it’s lame, right? Right?”) Anyway, it seems like it is still totally acceptable to give gay characters backstories full of getting raped and nobody rolls their eyes. Is this because there haven’t been meaningful gay characters around for as long so it hasn’t had time to become as much of a cliche? Or is it because some of this stuff, especially what Bear and some other authors write, comes out of the slashfic tradition at least as much as genre sf, and nursing-after-damage stuff is integral to the slashfic genre? I feel like there’s some interesting stuff here and I just don’t know enough to analyze it properly. I guess I’ll know more if/when I get around to the next book.

The Spirit Lens (Carol Berg): The full title here is “The Spirit Lens: A Novel of the Collegia Magica” but it’s not to be confused with A College of Magics, by Caroline Stevermer. Or maybe it is, and this is one of the skirmishes in the savage battle of genre fantasy.

Anyway, this is one of those fantasy books that is mostly about the setting, and the setting is a combination of good stuff and back stuff. Like, part of the premise is that magic used to be around in the past as a real and dramatic thing, and these days it’s mostly hokum and blarney and getting edged out by science. I can buy that. But I can’t also buy that there is a character in here who knows “real magic” and as far as I can tell it is totally scientific and demonstrable. Like, if that’s the case, why would magic die out? If there was a big dropoff in the mana content in the universe, that would make sense, but then how come this guy can do magic? If it was just gradual lack of knowledge, how would that happen if the magic is basically scientifically analyzable? (repeatable, provable, etc). Similarly, the setting also has a thing where wizards are so powerful and scary they need to be collared and branded. Again, I don’t get how this goes along with the magic-goes-away theme.

Since the book has a subtitle starting with “a novel of”, then possibly all these details are going to be covered in the upcoming sequels. But for it to be unanswered right now is kind of disappointing. Similarly, the ending answers the bare minimum necessary not to enrage me, but it’s got a lot of loose threads.

The other thing about this book, and possibly I was just sensitized by the previous book, but I was expecting a gay relationship to materialize and it never did. I wasn’t sure how it was going to line up, but when you have this savage-but-powerful collared wizard, this disappointed scholar the wizard is tutoring in magic, and this foppish noble who can’t seem to get along with the wizard on anything, it seems like the situation is crying out for makeouts. This in turn led me to think that the book would have better written by Sarah Monette, but that in turn made me think she basically wrote this already. Which made me like this book slightly less. So I dunno.

Coming up soon is a post on Echo Bazaar, wherein I confidently make pronouncements about the whole game even though I’ve only played up to stat 35 or so.