Badass Dragoons of the Highlands - Player Postmortem

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First of all - thanks to everyone that’s taken the time to provide the excellent observations and feedback. I strive to keep the fun parts fun and improve on the things that didn’t work as well as they should have and roll those lessons into the next game. Game design can be a tricky balancing act, and striving for a level playing field for all players had some unexpected consequences. I’ll try and pull back the curtain a bit on why things were the way they were.

Primary design goal: All players should have a roughly equal shot at winning.

Implications:

  • Hidden mechanics: prevents players that min/max from having an advantage over those that don’t.
  • Indirect ability to choose opponents: prevents factions from forming and prevents those with an early lead from running away with the game. I was concerned that ‘old hands’ would be more likely to form factions with other known quantities, which would put new players lacking that social capital at a disadvantage.
  • Highly obfuscated numbers: levels the playing field between number crunchers with 10 spreadsheets worth of game analysis and players that have no interest in doing that.

I think that the desired outcome was achieved with respect to a level playing field, but as several folks have rightly pointed out - the inability to directly choose an opponent meant surrendering a great deal of agency to the winds of chance. Even worse, once players were allowed to have a limited degree of choice in that process in NYC, a player’s expected outcome and the actual outcome often didn’t match up and that’s frustrating since it negates that sense of agency.

Which leads me to:

Axiom 1: Players should be able to understand the risks and rewards for any specific course of action and make an informed decision based on those risks and rewards. The result should feel like a natural outcome of that decision.

This is no surprise and has been pointed out in previous games.

Design goal: The game should support highly-involved players as well as less-involved players

Implications:

  • No ability to negotiate opponents: If all players are able to actively pair themselves with an opponent, someone that drops in on Monday to submit orders and doesn’t read the forums until the next turn is released puts the game schedule at risk.

Even with two highly-involved players, round 9 was a mess. The process of receiving input from two players was highly asynchronous even before my own scheduling woes. Although I was trying to create a ‘segmented round’ similar to the final round of Scavengers, it really did not work here.

I’d love suggestions for what a solution to this problem might look like. How does one allow 27 players to negotiate opponents among themselves in such a way that supports less-involved players while not demanding hours of GM time?

Design goal: The game should require less GM time the longer the game runs.

Implications:

  • Single-elimination tournament: Once the training wheels are off after the first two turns, the amount of effort to compute the turn, update internal spreadsheets, create forum postings, etc. should be cut in half every week.

Purely selfish design decision on my part, based on my end-of-year time requirements in the real world which worked as designed. As several folks have rightly pointed out, the elimination of players results not only in the loss of delightful and interesting character concepts, but also the game running out of steam the closer it gets to the end as the active player pool gets smaller and smaller. The Necktie lounge did a great job of keeping folks involved in a way that the internal soul threads did not. More on that later.

So although the choices were successful in doing what they intended, I think the game would have been better if players had some mechanism to select opponents. Furthermore, changing the mechanism for opponent selection mid-game in a environment with lots of obfuscated mechanisms was not the best idea.

More specific discussion to come when I have a bit more time.

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Meh. I have played enough tabletop RPGs to know that even with the best stats, the dice can fuck you over. I just had to come up with a narrative to fit. I wasn’t frustrated as a player. Odds were I was going to lose sometime. I was more surprised it took that long.

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What comes to my mind is this:

In the initial rounds, players were only given the choice of where to travel, which wasn’t a very good proxy for opponent selection. You might separate that into a few options:

  • Travel - You choose a destination, and you stay there for the duration of the round. You leave who you’re fighting to the winds of chance and your opponents’ choices.

  • Seek - You choose an Immortal you wish to fight.

  • Flee - You choose an Immortal you don’t wish to fight. If you are not pursued by that person, or either you or your pursuer is ambushed, you will not face that person; otherwise, a mechanism will determine if your flight is successful.

I’d imagine the prioritization as follows, subject to tweaking:

  1. A Seeks B, B Seeks A - A mutual duel happens between A and B in the city of truce, after which the survivor(s) hide(s) out until the next truce.
  2. A Seeks B, B Travels - B travels to the location of their choice, pursued by A, and they fight there. If multiple people seek B, [insert mechanism for deciding].
  3. A Seeks B, B Flees C - B is paying too much attention to the wrong pursuer, and is caught by A in a random location.
  4. A Seeks B, B Seeks C, C Flees B - B is too focused on being a predator to realize that they are now the prey, and is caught by A in a random location.
  5. A Seeks B, B Flees (unsuccessfully) - B tries to escape from A, trusting in luck, their own skill, or that someone else is out to get A. That gamble fails. and B is caught by A in a random location.
  6. A and B Travel to the same location - Two Immortals have similar tastes, and find themselves in the same area. They have no particular desire to fight each other, but the inevitable happens.
  7. A and D Travel to the same location, B and C seek D - only one of B or C can catch D; the other stumbles across A enjoying his vacation and the inevitable happens.
  8. A Travels and B, who is either an unsuccessful Seeker or successful Fleer, shows up - Anyone who is unpaired after scenarios 1-7 are accounted for will first be paired off by someone who has elected to choose a destination
  9. A and B, who are both unsuccessful Seekers or successful Fleers, encounter each other randomly - Anyone who is unpaired after scenarios 1-8 will be paired off with each other and fight in a random location.
  10. A does not submit an action and fights Kurgan.

This gives a player the chance to try to choose an opponent (and makes it trivially easy to mutually decide to fight), makes it possible (but not guaranteed) that the player will be able to avoid a particular opponent, pairs most people off to fight (unless a majority of players choose Travel), the outputs are fairly logical given the inputs (and make for an interesting story for the GM to tell), and it should all be (reasonably) easy to automate as an algorithm.

Obviously, it needs tweaks and mechanisms for resolving edge cases (What happens if A Seeks B, B Seeks C, and C Seeks A? What happens if, in Scenario 9, the two remaining opponents are A in one corner, and B, who has successfully fled from A, in the other?), but I think that it’s good enough as an initial illustration of a mechanism that should work as you describe.

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Oddly enough, I did have something like this baked in - with a high enough PER score, players unlocked the ability to submit a secret order to AVOID (at PER 5) or PURSUE (at PER 7, which no one unlocked). In retrospect, I could have probably done away with PER entirely and made these options available to all at the start but was just too enamored with modeling that aspect of the movie. Hindsight is a bear.

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Yeah, that’s kinda the trouble with hidden mechanics. I’d have spent more on leveling up Perception if I’d had any inkling it would eventually do more than what it initially said on the tin: provide something akin to home field advantage when it came to pairing off opponents.

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[Continuing the discussion]

Design Experiment: Is a zero-plot game possible? Can the players provide everything needed?

Without much lead time to let the larger story bake in my head, I wondered: Is it possible to have an enjoyable game that requires no world building on my part, no NPCs to flesh out, no plot and potential plot arcs to sketch? Given just a framework of play, can the players themselves create everything else by them selves?

Answer: Emphatic yes.

This felt like an enormous risk to take, but after seeing how Scavengers evolved, it felt an acceptable risk. And WOW did the players deliver in spades. A natural villain emerged from the interplay of the stories being tossed back and forth, players wove their adventures into shared experiences, and a coherent larger narrative emerged from the blank page. That was breathtaking to watch.

On the other hand, I regret not having something resembling a larger plot sketched out. When the game went meta in turn 6 and the fourth wall was broken and @teknocholer (backed by @MalevolentPixy and @David_Falkayn) tried to pull the Tyrant Messana into the game as an in-game entity, I was completely unprepared. I didn’t have a place to bring that story in for a landing in the next 3 turns and did not have the mental cycles to come up with one.

I had to invoke GM fiat and say “I can’t let you play the game that way” and it broke my heart. I despise doing that, but desperately wanted to wrap things up before December and risk derailing the schedule. Which wound up happening anyway. Ugh. For a brief moment, the game could have blossomed into something weird and fascinating and I regret not being able to riff off of that in a meaningful way.

In particular, I realize that claiming “Narrative mutability: moderate!” at the start of the game was probably misleading.

So yes, players are so good at collaborative storytelling that an underlying plot is not technically needed. But it’s much better to have a plot and some plot arcs sketched out to be prepared for these sorts of things. That having been said, I’m pretty sure that months of planning would not have made me any more prepared to have the fourth wall broken.

Which brings me to this concept of “disruptive players” - which is a misnomer and should be recast as “creative players”. To a certain extent, I enjoy when players push against the boundaries of the game world. Interesting things happen when the right places get pushed and suddenly I can riff on that and expand the story in ways that were unexpected. But some of the bones of the game world must be rigid and pushing against those will be to no avail. Often I’m not sure where the magic parts are and where the bones are until the players push at them, so consider this a modest exhortation to continue that. You are absolutely welcome and encouraged to be a part of the next one @MalevolentPixy!

Which brings me to The Kurgan. The initial intent was to riff on the idea of the Kurgan character but instead use the spooky, cryptic Kurgan tribe as the culling mechanism. When things got meta in turn 6, I chose to have him suddenly appear as an NPC in a hamfisted attempt to steer things back in the direction I hoped they would take (to no avail).

I’d kept the idea of a Kurgan participant as a card to play in the event that the final round involved 3 people, as the Quickening resulting from a two-person match up would almost certainly flatten the remaining player. Having the Kurgan as an NPC participant would have been interesting, but I tried to stick to my ‘no plot, no NPC’ guns to try and carry out that experiment. In spite of that, the story evolved its own villain in Zero Demos which I feel is a remarkable evolution.

I’ve only seen the movie and know nothing about the TV series except for the fact that the audience that watched it really loved it. I had no idea that a Dark Quickening was a thing! That’s what I get for not being familiar with the entirety of the lore.

I probably have one more wall of text in me that I’ll save for tomorrow. I love talking about this stuff, but if pulling back the curtain takes a little shine off the experience I’ll be glad to put a cork in it.

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A quick mention to say that there was in fact a mechanism to ensure that odd-players-out didn’t wind up disadvantaged, namely: they received stance bonuses for orders they had submitted as it was assumed they were practicing stance katas in lieu of fighting an opponent. This helped ensure they weren’t left behind on bonus improvements and in fact wound up being a much safer way to get through the round.

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ooh. I like this.

very rich. as for the edge cases: the GM is god. stuff happens.

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I feel I should offer some explanation.

In turn 4, @david_falkayn first expressed his regrets at having committed murder, and theorized that “Some new horror has been let loose in our world that compels us to hurt one another. We must expose this menace, or succumb one by one to this other darkness.”

@Donald_Petersen replied that the universe we found ourselves in made no sense to him, and that he was “not entirely my own master” when he killed Maud d’Oilly.

This raised some profound philosophical questions. As I said to Mr. Collins, “Are we the masters of our fate, or is our destiny determined by forces beyond our control? As we journey through our long lives, are we observed by intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, who play with us as their puppets? Consider Lord @messana , who appears to know the future, and who grants boons will ye nill ye to those of us in favour.”

It slowly became clear to me who was responsible for our wretched condition, and I started to wonder, “What if the puppets rebel against the puppet master?”

[raises hand nervously] Yes, that was me. After some discussion via PM, @david_falkayn, @MalevolentPixy and I decided to post our manifesto calling for a general strike. The idea was that we would band together to face the Kurgan, and prevail or go down fighting.

To provide a explanation for how this could work, I brought in Myfanwy (with permission). She was never intended to be a real participant, but rather a Greek chorus and a way of supplying great gobs of exposition.

@messana was extremely patient with all this nonsense, but ruled that what I was trying to do was unacceptably disruptive, and that we could continue with the game or be destroyed individually by the Kurgan. He further ruled that Myf, as an Immortal, must take a combatant role.

Since it wouldn’t be fair for Myf to butt in like that and accidentally eliminate one of the original players, the narrative required that she must die at my hand, with maximum pathos.

I can see now that I probably broke numerous unwritten rules of gaming by being focussed on the narrative to the exclusion of the PvP competition, and I understand that this must have been frustrating to the players with a different focus. @messana did stress the importance of improv at the start of the game, and I took it way too literally. I plead inexperience, and throw myself upon the mercy of the court.

I regret nothing.

1725077-William-Blake-Quote-I-must-create-a-system-or-be-enslaved-by.jpg3840×2160 1.01 MB

Well, it worked great for Mr. Collins. We were supposed to draw, if you recall. Don’t take fighting advice from Quakers, is the lesson here.

And you played it splendidly. You have a knack for getting under the skin with a minimum of words. I’m relieved to hear that that isn’t your true nature.:grinning:

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But oh! What a narrative! I must stand and applaud. The Ballad of Myfanwy’s Other brought me to literal tears. That was simply the greatest RPG-based love story I have ever been privileged to witness.

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Cool, so like, you’re still a happy mutant then. :wink:

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Good job! I don’t have anything like your writing ability.

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so that’s the etymology of “willy-nilly”! I had always wondered. That’s awesome!

Oh – we’re supposed to be talking about game.

@MalevolentPixy – I say, always push the narrative over the game. Dice rolling can provide a thrill in the moment, but it’s narrative that engages.

When people ask about this odd online hobby of mine that occasionally completely takes over my life, I explain “It’s collaborative narrative.” Sometimes I don’t even mention there’s a “game” under it all. They always want to hear about the characters and the hijinx they get up to.

@daneel Thank you again for being such an awesome villain. A couple of times you truly creeped me out. I was ready to bow out in a blaze of non-violence, but several other Characters insisted I stay and fight, as, at that point Mr Collins was the only one strong enough to fight you. I was really, really hoping Jane would take you out, so I could bow out.

@teknocholer About that duel where I killed Other? By my calculations, it should have been draw, with Other more likely to kill Collins than vice versa So it goes with the dice rolling – of which I had a lot of lucky rolls throughout this game. Not just the opening against Zero int the final round.

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Another hidden mechanic that was invisible to those still in possession of their heads. When a character was defeated, they were added to an PM thread that was intended to represent the soul of their opponent, which they now inhabited.

Although beheaded, your Immortal life force somehow lives on inside of Mr. Collins and can exert a small degree of influence over him.

Newly Exposed Secret Game Mechanic
You can submit a limited set of orders to the @archivist via PM each week, specifically:

HELP: A ‘help’ order indicates cooperation with your host, adding your stance bonuses to the rolls of your host that turn.

- or -

HINDER: A ‘hinder’ order indicates not going gently into that good night, subtracting your stance bonuses from the rolls of your host that turn.

I’d hoped this was a way for players to stay engaged after being knocked out of the running and to continue to influence the gamespace. It received a mixed reception, was not the extra-narrative space I’d hoped it would be, and it was difficult for players to understand how their choices were affecting the main game world.

What I expected: players would have a limited ability to act as kingmakers by acting as a headwind or a tailwind on a given player and that player responses would be a mix of HELP and HINDER in most cases.

What actually happened: Y’all be some super helpful folks because with the exception of one player, everyone chose to HELP - which I find to be a fascinating data point. More fascinating is that many players started riffing on the ‘voices in their head’ of defeated opponents, so I assumed that this secret mechanic had been made not so secret via direct player PMs, but it appears that the secret endured and that natural role playing managed to accidentally map onto this mechanic to my surprise and delight.

This should go a long way toward explaining why Mr. Collins’ dice were so hot so often. Zero had HELPers as well, but genuinely had crap rolls at the end that the bonuses just couldn’t overcome.

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Small data set as this was only my second game, but that totally makes sense to me. Everyone who gets drawn to a game like this is a story teller and HELP pushes the narrative forwards; it’s the ‘yes, and’ versus the ‘no, but,’ approach. Now, HINDER could have been an interesting turn of the plot at a key moment, but it didn’t seem to arise. That, and there was no way The Ratchet was going to help The Insufferable Mr. Collins.

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I think I had crap rolls throughout. But on the other hand, I fluked good stances a lot.

(do you have stats for people’s rolls? Averages?)

And where were the dragoons?

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I don’t, but I have all the spreadsheets that have all the rolls in them and could easily generate this information. For Zero, the raw rolls that don’t include any bonuses or penalties:

Mean: 55.6
Median: 60

Zero had an amazing tendency to roll super hot or super cold. Out of 55 rolls, seven rolls were under 10 and ten rolls were over 90. Exact same pair of dice were used throughout for all players.

I’m thinking one takeaway from this experiment is:

  1. Obfuscating the numbers around risks and rewards with adjectives is useful - it saves the number crunchers hours of building the same spreadsheets so that they can focus more on the narrative and less on min/maxing.
  2. Obfuscating game mechanics seems less useful in that all players are not seeing the same gamespace and this can be perceived as the gamespace changing in ways that are not clear to the player on the other end of a mechanic that another player has secretly revealed.

Ummm, in the next game?

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I have to assume that isn’t a very crowded category, but thanks. :smile:

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Some obfuscation is good for me. Without it, even though I don’t want to, I’ll go all spreadsheety.

e.g. I got really worried and defeatist about Other/Collins’ Prescient Tactics. Which was why I was getting frustrated by the matching in NYC; I could see/imagine bonuses getting combined while I was on the outside kicking my heels.

(And as much as I loved the original BSD, knowing exactly what rolls were needed to win made it too easy to spend hours calculating which upgrades to get to maximize percentage chances of winning. It’s its own kind of fun, for me at least, but it gets in the way of the role playing.)

I found it interesting that sturdiness didn’t seem to help much.

How much benefit did the helping/hindering provide? I’m glad I didn’t know about it, I might have played nicer had I done.

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I’m curious about that, too. My character was fairly strong, and once dead I was committed to helping Zero out (since I love @David_Falkayn but found Collins utterly insufferable), but couldn’t see any actual benefit that I might have brought. Of course, Collins had a lot of help, too.

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