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| Robert Bohl posts 61 11:53 pm December 4, 2009
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57:39 long & 52.8 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss the abilities of the hunter-fog-cloud thing, talk a bit more about the tech web, then get into brainstorming some of the possible powers that the different characters in the game have.
Notes taken by Joshua and I before and during the episode, with lots of detail on what we came up with.
- Joshua tells a story about badasses and kukris
- Listener feedback from Renato Raimonda, Dave Michalak, and Noah Trammell (02:54 – 10:00)
- Archetype / Dramatic role as a class / race combination
- Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World
- Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki's (aka "Slash") board game, Salah Ad-Din: Rise of a Leader
- We tried to use Google Wave, and there's a public Wave to look at from our planning session (you need a Wave account)
- The James Herbert novel The Fog, which Joshua conflates with the Stephen King novella, The Mist
- The German boardgame Keep Cool (you may be able to buy this if you speak German), and Vincent Baker's Mechaton
- The Steven Spielberg sci-fi film Minority Report
- The limbic system (for those of you perplexed by Joshua's "limbically")
- The unlinkable but cool Chris Moore game, Psi Run (it was an Ashcan Front game
- Return of singularitarianism
- Return of the tech web!
- Brennan Taylor's Mortal Coil
- DARPANET
Listener homeworks (2 of them):
1) Give us a name for the cloudkill
2) Give us a name for the little quanta of information the cloudkill gets on you
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:
The intro music is "Gotta Whizz" by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is "Games Without Frontiers" by Peter Gabriel.
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Admin
| Robert Bohl posts 61 12:06 am December 5, 2009
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I'll note, for anyone curious about our timing on these episodes, that we basically record every other Thursday, then I try to get them out as soon as I'm able, with a self-imposed deadline of the following Tuesday.
I doubt anyone is sufficiently curious to attempt to make sense of the above paragraph.
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Member | doc posts 15 5:14 pm December 5, 2009
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Haven't finished listening to #9 yet, but I haven't spoken up in a while and I wanted to make a couple of quick comments.
1. By referring so much to Vincent's games, and in particular to two games that aren't even available to the public (Synthia (sp?) and Apocalypse World), the podcast feels a little inaccessible to the general gaming public. You are explaining something unfamiliar to the listener by likening it to something they can't obtain or experience.That's not very transparent.
2. I still listen to you guys, but I will admit that I am waiting for you to get back to designing the basics game (mechanics and general setting or situation generators). This extended trip into the initial teaching scenario would be fascinating, if you were designing the transhumanist edition of Clue (TM). 
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Admin
| Robert Bohl posts 61 6:14 pm December 5, 2009
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Ok cool, thanks Doc. I think I see what you're saying. I also think you'll find now that we know the "what," we're going to do much more "how." Finally, I am going to make a serious effort in the future to talk about a game in enough detail that a novice would know what we're talking about.
This is great feedback, man, and I appreciate it.
(I should note that there's probably going to be a fluff/crunch ratio that people will prefer from this show but I don't know what the median level of that would be.)
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Member | doc posts 15 6:10 pm December 6, 2009
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It's a tough line to walk. The podcast is serving two masters. You are trying to design a game and you are also trying to communicate to an audience. So you are bound to run into spaces where you can only effectively accomplish one of the two, and it's probably a better long range plan to serve the game.
Regarding point 2. I think this podcast was better. Talking about the techweb and the cloudkill feel like more of the core game concept as opposed to the archetype-oriented "training" scenario. I think it would be helpful to once and a while explicitly state "This is part of the core game" or "This is part of the starter scenario." I think the two get confused in the listener's mind some. (Or maybe this is just my problem as a listener. Maybe everyone else gets it.)
Anyway, I enjoy being the audio voyeur to your game design rendezvous.
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Admin
| Robert Bohl posts 61 8:56 pm December 6, 2009
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Great feedback, Doc. Thanks.
And that last bit? That's the bit that matters most to me. So, great.
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Member | lumpley posts 40 2:44 pm December 8, 2009
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I just finished listening. My opinion to free time ratio > 1.
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Member | lumpley posts 40 12:45 pm December 9, 2009
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Post edited 5:46 pm – December 9, 2009 by lumpley
Here's a bit of what J and I talked about last night.
Q: If you're the antagonist player, what's your job?
A: Your job is to drive the protagonist to an end state, any end state. Death, capture, compromise, self-loss, those.
Q: If you're the protagonist player, what's your job?
A: Your job is to pursue your character's interests. Since they aren't all compatible with each other, that means balancing them and sacrificing some for others.
Q: If you're a friend player, what's your job?
A: Your job is to complicate the protagonist's decisions, amplify the incompatibilities within the protagonist's various interests.
(These were J's answers last night. I realize that they therefore aren't official final answers, but I'm going to go forward with them anyway.)
What you need to do as designers, always, is give the various players precisely the tools they need to do their jobs. The antagonist player needs tools to drive the protagonist (character) toward death, capture, compromise, self-transformation – ways to make threats and ways to make good on them. The protagonist player needs the tools to have her character pursue her interests – ways to take action, resources to bring to bear.
What's interesting, given these answers of J's, is the friend player. The friend player needs tools to complicate the protagonist's decisions – ways to bring unwanted consequences to the things the protagonist chooses. What the friend player doesn't need is a character with conflicted interests or problematic decisions of her own to make. Those things interfere with the player doing her job.
The friend character is allied to the protagonist character – or at least attached to the protagonist character. But the friend player is the protagonist player's opponent. Check it: the antagonist player's job is to drive the protagonist to an end state. The protagonist player's job is to make that end state as good and easy as possible for the protagonist – ideally, for the protagonist to get everything she wants. And the friend player's job is the opposite: to make the protagonist's end state as hard and complicated as she can.
Build this framework of interaction between the players first. Give the players their jobs and give them the correct tools to do them. (With, best, a layer of potent metaphor between the jobs and the tools.) Individual characters' superpowers should be built onto this foundation. There's no sense working on them until the foundation exists. The foundation, when it exists, might even deny superpowers altogether – nobody knows yet!
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Member | lumpley posts 40 12:58 pm December 9, 2009
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Post edited 5:59 pm – December 9, 2009 by lumpley
Oh I also have a word suggestion.
For the quantum of knowledge the cloud has, “peek.” You might say something like “the cloud's peeked my consumer habits, damn it” or “as long as I can keep my eye color peek from the cloud, it's going to keep missing me.”
This would make the cloud's limbic actions “pokes.” “The cloud poked the crowd's adrenaline and I'm lucky I got out with my skin.”
I like this because it calls meat and brainmeat RAM.
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Guest
| cinderellaman2112 11:13 pm December 10, 2009
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Long-time listener, first time poster. I'm still working through the episode (I listen to it en route to and from work, 15-20 min commute), but didn't want to wait till I finished it or for my application to forum to come through to post a thought on the homework.
Regarding the quanta acquired by the CloudKill, the first word that popped into my head was 'chicklet' as in the tiny piece of gum (why, I don't know). Since that probably is a copyright issue, the next word that led me to was 'pixel': The CK is painting a picture of it's target, so this seems to fit. It also has a double meaning, like the way soldiers 'paint' a target with a laser so that a computer-guided missile can accurately dispatch said target. Once enough pixels are collected by the CK the image is locked for targeting.
Keep up the great work.
Follow Your Bliss,
JJ
back2rpgbasics.blogspot.com
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Member | cinderellaman2112 Perrysburg, OH USA posts 3 8:43 am December 11, 2009
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Not wanting to be incomplete on this homework assignment I gave thought to a name for CloudKill. While I like the name for the same reasons Robert does, I had a thought that I wanted to share.
While thinking about CK I got this image of an entity that knows things (datamining) and can influence the actions of others (through directing operatives and limbic control). The name Oracle seems appropriate. This works for me because of the predictive qualities of its datamining. Plus, I really like the juxtaposition of refering to something futuristic with such an ancient name.
Thanks again for a great podcast.
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Follow Your Bliss,
JJ
http://back2rpgbasics.blogspot.com
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Admin
| Robert Bohl posts 61 12:35 pm December 17, 2009
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JJ, thanks very much. Your post was very influential in what we chose to name these things.
We're about to record now and we're reviewing posts for planning purposes for the record.
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Member | renatoram Milan, Italy posts 5 3:31 pm December 17, 2009
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I'd be careful about using Oracle, especially if associated with datamining: there is a pretty big corporation with angry lawyers doing databases and datamining software that goes by that name, ya know… :) (kidding, but not much)
As of the name of the Cloud… think of it as a real world thing.
It will have a development name used by the devs in the corporation (think Longhorn, or Mozilla, and so on); this name is probably irrelevant.
It will have an official "commercial" name (even if it's a weapon to begin with: even fighter planes have nicknames). The commercial name will be something chosen by PR and legal department… probably a dull acronym that means mostly nothing, plus a catchy nickname that can be used as a buzzword in flyers and promo material.
Finally, it will have one or more names by which it goes among people that actually use it. This name will generally be much, much less politically correct, and will refer directly to the main features of the thing.
Dev name: "Project Cumaean" (a different Oracle :) )
Commercial name: Multipurpose Intelligent Synthetic Technology aka "Mist"
Practical name(s): "Pixie Dust", "Killer Cloud", "Brainfucker"
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Ciao,
Renato
www.janus-design.it
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Admin
| joshua posts 217 1:16 am December 18, 2009
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I'd be careful about using Oracle, especially if associated with datamining: there is a pretty big corporation with angry lawyers doing databases and datamining software that goes by that name, ya know… :) (kidding, but not much)
Yeah, I'm happy to take that risk. This is firmly within the "parody" part of fair use, and we're not even directly saying it's the same company.
On the other hand, I really like calling it The Brain Fuckler.
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