The MICA/JHU Gaming Course, Part 2

A brief update on our "Special Edition" offering of 600.355: Video Game Design Project with MICA. Today we had Dan "Delta" Collins as our guest speaker. Dan gave a great talk about simulating the core mechanics of a game to determine how well-balanced everything is. A lack of balance leads to players ignoring certain options because they are not helpful in "winning" the game, which in turn means that (as a designer) you wasted a lot of effort adding things that nobody actually wants in play.

After his talk Dan went around to each team of students and tried to "extract" the core mechanics of their games in order to give them feedback and advice about how they could approach a simulation for their paper prototypes. Here are a few snapshots of this process:

For next week the students have to put together basic simulations of their central "encounter" or "conflict resolution" mechanic to determine if the options they are offering to players are all more-or-less attractive and should therefore stay. Our hope is that this process will help them further refine and simplify their rules, so that next week's final playtest will be a huge success and enable us to hand out lots of A grades for excellent paper prototypes.

This is the first time we're using the idea of simulating game mechanics in order to analyze the balance of a game design in a course, so it was really helpful to have an expert on the subject to introduce the basic ideas behind it. In the future we hope to expand this approach and present it earlier in the course to allow students to use it repeatedly to iterate on their designs.

Thank you Dan for coming all the way down from NYC to help us out! We hope you enjoyed your visit as much as we enjoyed having you.

The MICA/JHU Gaming Course, Part 1

I have been teaching gaming courses at Johns Hopkins for a while now, but this semester we're kicking things up a notch. Our usual 600.355: Video Game Design Project is being offered in a "Special Edition" which means that I am co-teaching it with Jason Corace from MICA. Jason is bringing half of the students for the course from MICA as well, and they are injecting some "groovy art school atmosphere" into the otherwise "cold rationality of engineering" that JHU can be.

The "classic" 600.355 course is focused entirely on developing a sizable video game, but for our "Special Edition" we're doing things very differently. Students start by developing a "paper prototype" of their game to study game mechanics. They then simulate those mechanics to ensure that the game is well-balanced and finally turn the essential ideas and mechanics from their "paper prototype" into a corresponding "digital prototype" for which the engineering students will focus on software development while the art students will focus on the artistic direction of the game. All of them are, of course, responsible for the entirety of the final game they produce together. Now that's how you do an interdisciplinary course!

Tonight we had the first round of playtests for the paper prototypes and I seized the opportunity to take a few snapshots of the "organized chaos" this entails. The first hour was dedicated to each team setting up their games and making some last-minute changes to their rule sets:

Feedback from Jason and finishing the "fate cards" for the game.

Cutting the rules down to size. With axes.

Relaxing with their supposedly already debugged game.

Clarifying the rules and adding illustrations to help new players.

Producing more and more custom game pieces.

Programmers fixing game boards, artists clarifying the rules.

If you have not caught on yet why this Computer Science course is a little different, maybe this picture will do the trick:

Dice and Crayola: Computer Science at work!

After the initial hour of prep-work we started the two rounds of playtesting. One person from each team "stayed behind" to observe what another team would do with their game. The "observers" were encouraged to really observe and only speak up to help the testers if they were really stuck on some iffy part of the rules. Here's how the first round went down:

Debugged rules getting debugged for real.

Jason listening in on a play test.

Wait, what are we supposed to do?

Ballistic Armor and Ninja Throwing Stars?

Cool, fate cards, but how do we move again?

After twenty minutes of rules we're about to start the game.

After 30 minutes each team did a 5-minute debriefing with the observer and then everybody moved on to another game for round two:

Sometimes even a co-designer needs to check the rules.

After six rounds we're still all naked and starving?

Attack or outrun the enemy?

Everything is better with different color game pieces!

Fun is being had interpreting rules.

Everything is better with a pre-configured game board!

We did allow for small adjustments between the playtests, and for several games that led to a much more satisfying second round. So our students saw first-hand how playtesting can improve their games, and we hope that by next week they will incorporate all of the feedback they received and arrive with suitably streamlined and even more enjoyable games.

And they better, because next week we're hosting Dan "Delta" Collins as a guest lecturer and he will be looking at each of their games in detail with his excellent eye for weak mechanics and shoddy design. And I've encouraged him to not hold back and be as cruel as he needs to be with his feedback. Good times!

Just in case you couldn't tell yet, I am having a great time co-teaching this "Special Edition" course, and I hope that we can get MICA and JHU to regularly offer something like this, a course that builds bridges between very different educational worlds and helps our students understand what it means to work on truly interdisciplinary teams.

And the best thing? Class officially ended at 7:30 pm but the first student asking "Wait, are we out of time already?" did so at 7:45 pm. I think they are having fun as well.

Basement Delving: Stuffed Animals

Alright, let's see now. A roleplaying game about stuffed animals. I don't know if this was German innovation through and through or inspired by some other obscure game, but I do know that it was a lot of fun. Sadly we played only a few times, but the "stuffed animals" angle certainly helped in recruiting our girlfriends for the game. Here's the cover of "Plüsch, Power, und Plunder" as the game was called:

Cool bear, eh? Apparently hanging out at a beach somewhere I guess? The background story is awesome (and I still sort of believe it): Stuffed animals are really alive, but they only move when no human is looking. Stuffed animals live in little villages and are made by a magical "seamstress" who runs each village. Sometimes they are captured and sold to kids in stores. But as soon as nobody is looking they come alive and try to escape and have adventures. Here's the table of contents:

As you can see (well, if you read German) all the usual things are there, including a combat system and so on. You may also see something about drugs. Well, stuffed animals easily become addicted to detergent, so it's imperative that they stay clear of that vile stuff. Parents who wash their kid's stuffed animals often inadvertently start the poor buggers on a life of drugs and violence. Sad really. Here are few more interior pages to set the mood:

Yep, that's a "Back to the Future" shot with our stuffed bunny as the hero. We'll see a little more of that below. There were also a large number of supplements and adventures for this game. Here are two of the basic adventures, the first one mostly about breaking out of a department store, the second about the journey back to a secret village (at least if I remember this stuff correctly):

Here is the Cyberpunk supplement and adventure:

And here is a collection of shorter adventures inspired by certain 1980s Hollywood movies like Short Circuit:

Sadly we never played any of the later adventures, after a few sessions things moved back to D&D and one of the girlfriends found her calling as an elven maiden for a while. I'd consider running it again anytime though: It's a cute background story and a workable system with lots of fun little twists. Good times!

Basement Delving: Invincible Mayfair

Ever since I developed an active interest in role-playing again a few years ago, I've been fascinated by the old Judges Guild "City State of the Invincible Overlord" stuff. I even bought quite a few PDFs, with mixed results. But I had forgotten all about these things:

Can someone with real Wilderlands clue say something about these products and how the compare to the "official" Judges Guild version? Is this stuff just "inspired by" the Wilderlands or is it an "updated take" on the setting? Is the stuff compatible, for example regarding cultures and locations described? I know that there was some kind of weird lawsuit between TSR and Mayfair over this, anyone have details about that? And finally: Should I hold on to this stuff or get rid of it? The production values seem pretty high, but if it has nothing to do with the "real" Wilderlands then I doubt it'll hold permanent interest for me.

Basement Delving: Realms of the Unknown

Alright, we're getting into the really obscure games now. Realms of the Unknown is essentially the D&D "endgame" and nothing else: Run a town or barony or kingdom and fight against others on a domain level. That's pretty much it. Note that I have never used this thing and I doubt I even read very much of it, so I can't really say if it is any good, but faoladh has a great review on his blog.

I have to say that I very much like the idea of this game. It seems to me that games like D&D that deal mostly with individuals, games like Chainmail that deal mostly with armies, and games like Realms of the Unknown that deal mostly with domains are each best dealt with separately, with different mechanics suitable for the different "resolutions" required.

In essence that's what BECMI D&D did: You call the result D&D, but really it's a losely connected hodgepodge of rules, different rules for each "level" of play. (If you ask anyone what D&D is they will not say "the war machine" after all.) So maybe it's better to modularize the rules, use independent systems, and then mix-and-match as needed. Of course that's really just a gut feeling, sadly I have never experienced those "upper levels" of play anyway, for the past 25 years it's mostly been dungeon delving for me.

Basement Delving: A Tale of Two Towns

Fantasy cities are always popular and I finally found two of my favorite supplements again: Carse and Tulan. Both of these were originally produced by Midkemia Press but the editions I own were redone under license by Chaosium. Carse is the bigger of the two, in terms of buildings anyway. Let's start with the cover:

That's Callistro the Magician and Ogar the Boar at the Bear's Claw Inn. Pretty awesome, eh? Well maybe only marginally awesome but hey, it's 1986. A few inside impressions:

The last shot illustrates the format for each "quarter" of the town: A short overview list of each building with a map, then a few pages of more detailed descriptions of the same area, often with additional background material. Some of the NPCs get rather nice illustrations as well, check out this lovely family for example:

It may not be what people expect from their supplements these days, but I find these illustrations rather evocative and thoroughly enjoyable. Finally a look at the overview map, ostensibly for players:

As you can see there are quite a few buildings outside of Carse proper as well, fitting for a town that's still growing. I don't want to say too much about the atmosphere and general character of Carse here because I plan to use the town in my next campaign, with slight modifications of course. I bought this thing sometime in the early 1990s and never ended up using it because we played mostly in Mystara and Harn then, both of which have several useful towns already. But in my 2014 campaign I have only sparse notes for each town, so something I can "plop in" relatively easily is most welcome.

Now for Tulan, the other town in the series: Also by Midkemia Press originally, also re-published by Chaosium, also in the late 1980s.

The format is pretty much the same, so without further ado a few examples from inside:

Yep, there's a whole village aside from the town of Tulan itself. Now my memory may be playing tricks on me, but I think some version of Tulan also included ruins of "Old Tulan" somewhere, but I couldn't find that particular thing in this version. Here's the overview map:

I am pretty sure that Tulan will also find a place in that ominous campaign I'll try to push my players through. If anyone stays around after the first TPK that is. Oh well.