Category Archives: Game Design

Teasers for Adventurer’s Rest

Posted on by Henry

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Sorry about last Wednesday, here’s a present to make up for it.

My apologies for missing my usual post last Wednesday.  I was busy collaborating with several friends to write and produce a LARP game for Staff Week at The Wayfinder Experience (where I’ll be running another game for a considerably younger audience in a few weeks), and as such was pretty much entirely incommunicado.  I still have yet to say happy birthday to my mother and step-father.  I’ll try to get to that as soon as I finish this.

Since Wayfinder (WFE) is all still very much on my mind, I thought I’d offer you a collection of the teasers that I and my friend Thom have made for our upcoming game (Adventurer’s Rest, at WFE’s Intro Camp, July 20th-25th), and some of our thinking behind them.  If you know anyone who might be interested, you should totally tell them about it.  I want lots of players for my game!  Actual entertainment follows after the break…

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Europa Universalis IV: Becoming Leviathan

Posted on by Henry

Leviathan_by_Thomas_Hobbes
Out of many, one.

I wrote a love letter to Crusader Kings 2’s intricate dynastic backstabbing a while ago, and I thought I should let you know about the game’s semi-sequel Europa Universalis 4.  I’ll even toss in a few tidbits about the myriad DLC available for both titles at no additional charge.

First, a brief introduction: Crusader Kings 2 is strategy-as-individual, a fascinating look at the intimately personal nature of politics and power, spanning the years from 1066 CE (867 CE with Old Gods DLC) to 1453 CE.  Europa Universalis 4 follows this with a shift from the myopically personal to the strictly national, covering the years 1444 CE to 1821 CE.  With both games and the appropriate DLC, it’s possible to convert a CK2 save game into an EU4 mod, letting you pick up the reins of your budding nation-state right where your Machiavellian ruler left them.

I loved CK2 from the start, even though it took a long time for me to feel like I could play the game without stumbling over my shoelaces.  Despite having an easier time learning how to play EU4, it took longer for me to really fall into it.  I think it was because the game is simply less personal.  It certainly wasn’t because of the interface, which has only improved.

In my first game of CK2, I was presented with a moderately ugly portrait of a lecherous Irish earl, told that that was me, and told that I really ought to get married.  I lived that earl’s life with gusto, trying (and failing) to better my position in the world, and I still have fond memories of him.  I identified with him, in much the same way that I have since identified with Queen Ximena and several other rulers of mine, and I felt connected.  EU4 simply doesn’t offer that experience, and at first I was dissatisfied.  I didn’t understand why I would want to play this grand strategy game without all the little people desperately trying to grease the wheels of power in order to ease their rise to the top.  I put aside the game and didn’t come back for a few weeks.

I’m still not sure what it was that pulled me back in, but I’m glad it did.  Despite looking so similar to CK2, EU4 is a very different game; it offers you the chance to shape a state as it transitions from the deeply personal politics of feudalism to the larger scale conflicts of colonialism, nationalism, and empire.  It gives you a chance to make Thomas Hobbes proud.

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Game Analysis: Devil’s Tuning Fork

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

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Devil’s Tuning Fork is an interesting exploration in design which seeks to weigh in on the classic question, “What is it like to be a bat?” (don’t worry, this will remain a game review and not an exercise in philosophical discourse) The game places you in control of a child who has fallen into a mysterious coma who must now explore a strange dreamscape in order to awaken. In order to escape what is eventually identified as a sort of dungeon you must rescue other children and traverse multiple platforming exercises/puzzles. And you must do this while experiencing what it is like to be a bat (sorry, I swear I’ll stop referencing Nagel’s paper.)  The overall tone of the game tickles my love of horror and the surreal.  But as it is with most things which I love, it isn’t perfect.

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Game Analysis: The Stanley Parable

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

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Before I get into any discussion I must first say that the game is wonderful and you should play it. If you have already played it, don’t plan on playing it, or just don’t care about spoilers, then you should feel free to read on. Otherwise you should go and play The Stanley Parable and then come back.  Go ahead and read Jim Sterling’s review as a way to motivate yourself.

If you’re still unmotivated to go and play before I go into my analysis, then consider this: How much choice do you really have when you play a game? Do your actions truly affect whatever narrative you are participating in? Does deviating from the defined path truly do anything? The Stanley Parable experiments with these questions in a fantastically intimate way.

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Game Analysis: Broken Age: Act 1

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

Many apologies for my hiatus. But I’m still around and thinking about games! In a rare occurrence I also recently finished one! The game is Broken Age by the amazing Double Fine. I think Double Fine’s strength is their writing, so an adventure game like Monkey Island or their own work Grim Fandango seems like a perfect fit.

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What Flavor Is Your Game?

Posted on by Henry

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I like vanilla ice cream.  I have for a very long time.  Before I knew my alphabet, much less how to read, I knew that hearing my older brother spell out “I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M” meant that I should start asking Mom for ice cream too.  Better yet, as I got older and discovered the joys of living in Vermont (home of Ben & Jerry’s before it was bought out by Unilever), I learned that there were far more flavors of ice cream available, and that many of them were exceedingly tasty as well.

When I was little, I played make-believe all the time.  A number of my friends simply couldn’t understand the appeal, and stopped playing with me, but at the tender age of seven my older siblings harnessed my ambitions and introduced me to 2nd Edition AD&D.  My introduction might actually have been earlier, but that year was the first time I can remember staying up until midnight to play RPGs with them.  Over the next few years, I was introduced to Vampire: The Masquerade (along with a bundle of other White Wolf games), D&D’s 3rd Edition, In Nomine, and GURPS.  More other games followed.  Just like with ice cream, I had discovered a whole new world of flavors to choose from.  I was very nearly overwhelmed by my enthusiasm.  These days, some people refer to me as an RPG snob.  I much prefer the term ‘connoisseur’: through dedicated consumption, I have built an appreciation for the inherent flavors of different game systems.

But what the heck do I mean by “flavor”?  And how do you figure out what a game’s flavor is?

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The Brief Hiatus Continues

Posted on by Henry

I’ve been lax in my duties to this blog.  My apologies.  I should have explained further with my post last week: I’m in Portland, Oregon, and on Monday I spent all day running my Call of Cthulhu game for a number of fellow Reedies.  Today I’ll be co-teaching a stage combat class, and Saturday will see a second run of the same scenario from Monday.

I’m afraid that all means that I won’t have new material for you this week apart from this apology.  On the plus side, I finally cast my eyes upon RimWorld, a fascinating base-building simulation with an AI-managed event-engine that I’m itching to get my hands on and tell you about (yes, I want to tell you about the event engine, follow that link and read about it).  I’m also moving ever closer to having a complete version of my Call of Cthulhu scenario, though I’m not yet certain whether my most recent alterations are progress or regression.  Either way, I’ll be back here to bother you about cool stories, games, and story games next week.

Dungeon-Starter: The Duke’s Men

Posted on by Henry

Happy New Year!

Here’s an abbreviated dungeon-starter for Dungeon World, building somewhat on the material that I came up with for The Duke’s Men.  Agenda, Goals, and Dungeon Moves are at the top as per usual.  This is mostly focused on cultists and such, as the game itself was, but the basic storyline offered in my previous post could easily be altered to deal with any number of different kinds of threats.

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The Duke’s Men: A DungeonWorld Adventure

Posted on by Henry

A few days ago, I ran a game of DungeonWorld for two of my friends.  It went so well, and ended up feeling so much like a classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure, that I thought I would share the basics of the game with you.  It’s somewhere between an actual play and a scenario description.  I’ll put up an honest-to-goodness Dungeon-starter soon, and with a little creativity you should have an easy time converting it into your own single- or double-episode game.

We didn’t look too closely at the backstories of our heroes, but please allow me to introduce you to the adventures of Kate the thief and Jonah the ranger (and Jonah’s wolfhound, Erasmus), the loyal representatives of Duke Blackforest.  What follows should allow you to live out their adventures for yourself, or change things slightly and experience the adventure anew with other people.

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The Attraction of Games: Why?

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

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This article is honestly me cheating a bit as I would have preferred to write a true analysis or something more comprehensive than a question, but I’m busy!  So this is what you get.  But don’t fret, I think this question is actually extremely interesting, and very important.

Why do we play games?  I ask this because I recently got into a debate and one participant countered criticism about a game’s setup with, “I hear people play games for the story.”  Now this very well may be true since many games have fun stories, but so do books and movies, and you don’t have to fight your way to the next bit of stories in those.  You don’t have to spend hours jumping from one plot point to the next.  So why do we turn to games for story when we have books and movies?

To me I think the answer is “participation.”  Games allow you to participate in the story.  But it is with this answer that I then begin to question certain games which don’t let me actively participate in the story, but instead just force me to do task after task that holds no real meaning in the overall narrative.  Along this vein, should we forgive games with great stories for their bad gameplay?  I could go on, but I actually wrote a bit about this previously in my article about games and art, but I think we can go further into this question.

Since I need to get going I’ll leave the floor open for you to counter, explain, extrapolate, divulge, or what-have-you in the comments below.