Sympol Numbers

I've had a few tests of my cooperative game, Sympolis, over the last month or so and am now pretty comfortable with the overall shape of the game, but of course, the devil is in the detail and now I am trying to get that devil pinned down. 

So here's the thing: if you make a competitive game, the players provide a lot of the balance; in a cooperative game, the game systems have to do all the work. I'll unpack that a bit. If I want a cooperative game to feel challenging to experienced players as well as newbies, the mechanisms, set-up parameters, etc. need to provide that challenge and have a way to scale and adapt. With a competitive game, an experienced player can usually get more challenge by playing against other experienced players.

One of my traditional blurry photos of a recent playtest of Sympolis.

The last few playtests of Sympolis have all been won by the players fairly easily, with a period of perceived pressure mid-game, followed by that pressure easing off until we reached a relatively straightforward final round that felt more like a victory lap than a finale. The level of that feeling has reduced as I have tweaked settings, but it hasn't gone away. One of the focuses of the game is the pair of "wrath tracks" for each player, which indicates the level of trouble you are getting from the gods and the people of your city respectively. If either track gets too high, your city falls and everyone loses the game. In recent iterations, if the tracks go too low, you gain complications due to the people being too lazy and hubristic, or the gods getting jealous of the pampered people. It turns out that the "high wrath" situation is currently too easily managed, which reduces pressure far too much.

In essence, the game asks players to walk a tightrope, but that tightrope is more of a footbridge, with handrails that look insubstantial, but are actually pretty solid when you test them. 

And that's what I'm trying to deal with now. My usual approach of making games is to just make general guesses about numbers, quantities, and so on, and then revise as I get a feeling for how a game plays out. I think that in this game, I may have got to the limit of how far I can go by doing that - or at least, further progress will be slowed massively unless I adapt.

So that's what I am attempting to do at the moment. I have a spreadsheet page counting up numbers from my main card data source, which is another page in the same document that I use as an input into a nanDECK script in order to build my card decks. This is giving me a decent view on the state of my card decks, but there are things that aren't easy to capture automatically, like figuring out the number of dice that are likely to be required to complete any given challenge card, or even group of cards. 

I think that a potential approach would be to come up with a system to provide a rating for each challenge card, working initially on the expected number of dice needed to complete it, maybe boosting it a bit if there is some complicating factor like requiring precise numbers. In fact, I could extend this and rate the production use of each card also, maybe with production of a die giving 1 point, and provision of some die or card manipulation ability having probably some fraction of a point. Then I should be able to analyse the likely production rating at any given time and compare it with the likely challenge rating on a given turn. Once I have that information I will be better placed to tweak numbers to get the game to the challenge level I am looking for.

Dining, coffee, side, trestle...

A few years ago I challenged myself to draw something every day, and I managed to keep that going for a full year and have a pile of sketch books as a result, with pages bearing artistic endeavours ranging from a 2-minute pencil scribble to several hours of pen work. This felt like a big achievement and while I'm still not a great artist, I was feeling a lot more confident with a pencil at the end of the year than I was at the start.

I figured the next year I wouldn't do another similar exercise (or continue the drawing), though a couple of weeks in I started doing DuoLingo, which almost counts.

Then Covid.

As part of my attempt to sort myself out, I have started a new challenge. Inspired by recent tinkering with roleplaying games, at the start of the year I began to create a "random table" every day. This is something that is a staple of some types of roleplaying games, where the game master can roll dice to determine a random encounter, loot, or any other twist to the game. Random tables are not to everyone's taste, but they can be a lot of fun for some games and can introduce new twists to a narrative as well as help bail out a GM who needs to come up with content on the fly.

The point of this for me, apart from to build a positive habit, is to address something that I have noticed over the last couple of years. I used to be able to come up with what I will describe as "content" pretty well, by which I mean small elements to fit into my game designs, like names and descriptions for thematic items within the games. I wasn't exactly world class, but I could do it well enough for my purposes. Lately I seem to have got out of the zone for this sort of thing, and it just feels so much harder than it used to be. 

Of course, the classic way to get better at this sort of thing is just to do it, repeatedly, often. 

So that's what I'm doing: every day, coming up with a theme for a table (sandwich fillings, names for fantasy taverns, contents of a desk drawer, etc.), making a list of items fitting that fit that theme, and sharing it online. If you'd like to follow along, I have been posting on my main Mastodon account and on BlueSky - I decided not to post absolutely everywhere that I could.

I'm now 49 days in and it seems to be working. I'm spending less time agonising about what I put into each table, or even what the theme for each table is, so hopefully in a few months' time I'll be able to rattle these out even more easily - or be producing more interesting content. 

A couple of people have already suggested that I could compile all the tables into a book at the end. I suspect a minority of the tables are likely to be of any interest, and the good ones will need a load of editing and rewriting, but a load of them seem to be naturally falling into being part of a slightly whimsical, medieval fantasy world, so maybe I'll be able to combine those ones and polish them into something coherent I can share. We'll see - it's still very early days.

Newish Year, 2024 Edition

While I have done a lot better at blogging over the last year than I did in the previous couple, I still get myself caught in a trap of not wanting to write anything up unless I have something significant to say, and then worrying that the posts I do write and publish aren't "worthy" in some way. 

But that was never meant to be the purpose of this blog - it was meant to be a place for me to write things down in public, whether they increase the sum of human knowledge or not. The act of writing and publishing helps me solidify thoughts and somehow builds a little accountability into the way I do things. 

And actually, I do get comments and feedback from a few people, occasionally on the blog itself, but more often on one of the other social media platforms I share it on. If you are one of the people who has responded in some way, thank you, it's really appreciated.

Anyway, we are now a few weeks into a new year and, while I'm a bit late, I guess it's time for a little reflection and looking forward.

I do feel I turned a corner in 2023 and started getting back into the swing of game design work. I'm still moving very slowly, and being very bad at organising playtests, but it's better than nothing. So this makes for an obvious action for this year: to do more playtesting, especially face-to-face. I have a couple of people in the area who have expressed an interest in helping out with this sort of thing, and I need to get back in touch with a few old contacts, and maybe something can start happening.

I've also done some more proofreading, mostly for game rule books, but not a huge amount. This is something I enjoy doing, which improves my own rule writing (I think), and seems to be appreciated by the people I do the jobs for. I feel that this is a handy side-hustle too. I'll plan to keep doing this as and when the opportunity comes up, maybe pushing myself to do a few more jobs through the year.

Over the last year or two I've also got back into reading roleplaying game material. I've been playing a bit, but mostly reading. This is something that has always been the case for me: acquire what I can, read lots, play some. The thinking is that reading rules, game philosophy, world building, adventure or encounter design, etc. all feeds into the melting pot of ideas. The same goes for board games to an extent, but the playing aspect feels a far more efficient way to absorb the ideas in that case. 

The whole RPG reading stuff has actually got me started on a new "do something every day" project like I did in 2019 with drawings. This time I am creating an RPG-style random table every day, the sort of thing where you roll a die and it tells you something random in a given category. I'll probably write a post about this later, but I feel it is actually giving me some exercise in one of my current weaknesses: creating thematic content. At the time of writing I'm 21 days in and doing OK.

Other than that, events I am planning on going to this year so far amount to the Bastion convention next weekend (for chilling out, kicking back, and actually playing stuff), a private game designers event in February, and UK Games Expo at the end of May and beginning of June (where I'll be mostly crewing the Playtest Zone). I'm sure other stuff will come up, but that's a good start.

So, in the spirit of getting this done and posted, I'll finish off here, before I end up... <fzkt!>