Fresh Releases

The Minimal and Maximal Players - an article continuing my previous one about The Rule Book. This article expands on the concepts I introduced briefly there, talking about the theoretical Minimal and Maximal Players. The article builds to some genuinely useful advice about how to use these theoreticals in order to guide one’s design process.

The Workshop

After last week’s sprint to get the playtest document finished for No One Emerges Triumphantly, I spent this week working on other projects. Notably, I wrote up my article on the Minimal and Maximal Players. Fortunately, I had largely internalized what I was going to write about in that particular article, so I was able to put together the draft with relative alacrity.

My original conception was to finish off with a call to action asking designers to consider the Minimal Player when making games (at the end of the Why It Matters section). After sleeping on the article, though, I realized that I needed a little more. I needed concrete guidance on how to design games that way. So, before editing I put together my thoughts about those concrete steps, which I feel greatly improved the usefulness of the article in the long term.

I’ve also begun work on my next blog post, but this one will take a little while to get done. This time, I’m doing a close reading of Bernard De Koven’s The Well-Played Game. I’m going through it on the Dice Exploder Podcast discord, if you feel like joining up and following along with my progress. Right now, I don’t have an anti-thesis to the book’s thesis, but I am thinking about how the book’s ideas translate into TTRPGs. TTRPGs rarely have the same sort of drive towards excellent play as more competitive games, and that striving is an important part of the well-played game, in my opinion. We’ll see what knocks out of my reading by the time I’m done, though.

In terms of game design, I haven’t done much work. Upon thinking further on No One Emerges Triumphantly, I’ve decided that I don’t need to work on the oracle deck for it. I really don’t know how long each round will take, but I do know that there will be eight of them. Between late starts and early leaving, I have about a hundred minutes for each playtest slot. It’ll probably take somewhere around twenty minutes for the teach and twenty minutes for the debrief, meaning that I only have about sixty minutes to play. With eight rounds, that means that I have an average of seven and a half minutes per round. I highly doubt that the rounds will be significantly shorter than that, and they might be longer than that.

Basically, doing another whole set afterwards is right out the window. I do intend to start doing some online playtests after Metatopia, and I’ll probably devote some time to putting together an oracle list for that. But that’s after Metatopia, and therefore in another world from where I am now. It’s entirely possible that I will drop this mechanic entirely, based on the response I receive.

So, before Metatopia my focus is going to be on trying to get When the Strings Are Cut into a pitchable state and do an edit pass or two over the playtest document. While I’m at Metatopia, I’ll be working on my NaGaDeMon project, starting with figuring out what exactly that is. I’ll also be busy with Metatopia stuff! If you’re there, feel free to say hello, even if I’m typing.

Ludography

OutSMART_HOME - This game takes a lot of what I like about Trophy incursion design and formalizes it into the game itself. The player is given a goal, given obstacles, and given tools to overcome those obstacles. However, in OutSMART_HOME the game formalizes the limitations and capabilities of those tools. The designer intended for the game to be played expressionistically, with the idea that only by breaking the limitations imposed on the tools can the goal can be accomplished, via the negotiation between players. I, however, see a NSR approach as being possible here, of figuring out a combination of tool use that will trigger a scenario where the goal can be achieved in spite of the limitations. Regardless, it’s a piece of tech that I’m not used to seeing, and the specificity of its usage here makes OutSMART_HOME a game worth looking out. Also it’s free and short, so it won’t even cost you time. Consider giving the designer a couple dollars in tip, though.

Works in Progress

No One Emerges Triumphantly (Creepypasta TTRPG) - Playtest Ready - Alpha Due November 6
Well-Played Game Response (Theory Blogpost) - Researching
When the Strings Are Cut (Experimental TTRPG) - First Draft Begun