Jason Lutes is a Cylon:
That’s Jason deciding whether or not to reveal himself in a cutthroat game of Battlestar Galactica at our first annual DeanCon boardgaming convention.
Nice podcast, although it suffered from a lack of tidbits about “Thrilling Tales of Adventure!”…
Yes, I’m hoping that TToA is still under development. Also, I’d be interested to find out if The Frozen Star is still in the works. Of course, I suspect that baby #2 will be getting most of his spare time.
It also reminds me that the Seattle group hasn’t had a boardgame gathering a while. We miss you, Jason!
- Alan
Yes! Jason, would you hurry up and move back to Seattle, already? I miss those board game Saturdays.
Congratulations on the inbound child!
Thanks guys! I miss Seattle and the whole gang, too. We go through a whole “should we stay or should we go” crisis period every winter, which we are currently on the verge of repeating. We still own our house in the CD, so who knows, we may even move back this summer.
Thrilling Tales of Adventure! still lives! It’s pretty much dominated my mental landscape for the past year, and has gone through a ton of changes since you guys played it, and I’m really, really happy with its current state. I finally finished the rulebook last month, and the complete prototype is currently making the rounds of publishers, so fingers are crossed. The BGG page has been updated from time to time, and you can read a couple of scattershot blog entries about the game here and here.
Frozen Star is also still going, but on the back burner. I came up with a much more viable tactical battle module that plays reasonably quickly, and the design itself is much tighter now. If I can manage to not get too distracted by all of the TToA expansion ideas I have, Frozen Star will be the next thing I devote my spare time too.
DeanCon 2010!!!
Among the million things I didn’t get a chance to say in the podcast is just how grateful I am to Tom for raising the tentpole on Qt3 lo some seven years (!) back. As a result, I’ve had the great good fortune of meeting, playing games, and shooting the shit with people I probably would never have met otherwise. Dean, Rob O’Boston, Jonathan Crane (partially visible in the photo above), Alan, Ryan, Anaxagoras, and Don Quixote – all awesome folks with whom I hope to continue crossing paths for years to come.
That Monster Manual looks a bit too pristine. Tell me you have another beat-up one somewhere!
Great discussion. I admit that it’s a bit of a geek thrill to have Lutes on the forum. He’s certainly my personal ‘most-famous’ Qt3’er, as I’m a big admirer of Jason’s work.
Indeed, back in storage in Seattle. The copy in the video was one I picked up on ebay when I wanted to run an AD&D campaign with my students.
So this is a school where you learn how to make comics and play D&D with your prof.
Awesome.
Me too, great choice!
It was pretty natural looking though, like they just stopped you walking along side of the road, and you had your monster manual under your arm. Oh hey, WSJ! Funny meeting you here. Check out this monster manual I just happen to have with me.
I mean, like, what are the odds of that? You are karmically blessed.
Once again I’m home for the holidays which means plenty of time to listen to podcasts I’ve missed. I really enjoyed the discussion here. The idea that you need some imaginative space for emergent narratives to open up is solid but I suspect a full 3D game could do the same thing. They don’t all have to be about car chases. For example some of the random conflicts in Saints Row 2, shit just breaking out on the streets, can create contexts for a player to imagine for himself why they’re happening. It’s not crazy deep but it’s there. Just because everything is rendered doesn’t mean you always have to have a rationale for it beaten over your head.
Two other games that sprang to mind when you’re talking about emergent narrative, for me, are Romance of The Three Kingdoms X (PS2) and Rage (an old CCG).
Romance (and its cousins, to my way of thinking, in Crusader Kings and King of Dragon Pass) really focuses on the role of individual characters in a bigger strategic context and how their personalities effect the flow of events. In all these cases personalities themselves can be randomized between games so that even if the maps are the same each time the way the NPCs interact can change each time. X-Com’s grunts were part of the story in that game every bit as much as the aliens or the random maps. You could get attached to individuals that excelled over time or survived bad odds or pulled off heroic stunts. But they didn’t even have their own personalities.
That focus on characters and their loyalties and proclivities really helps me enjoy an emergent narrative. Whether I’m represented by a character in the game (Romance X and KoDP) or not (CK). The idea of having to think about yourself and your faction in roleplaying terms, as came up in the discussion of Fall from Heaven (which I haven’t played yet) is really true in these games as well as NPCs, even ostensibly friendly ones, will reinforce your decisions, positively or negatively, with how they react to you. In KoDP the strong mythic origins of your clan will really shape how how your decisions impact the flow of the game but slavishly following custom isn’t always optimal either. It’s very much like creating a character in a tabletop RPG and having to thread the needle between portrayal of identity and the needs of the moment as a tactical roleplayer.
Rage was based on the old White Wolf RPG Werewolf. Each player represented a tribe of werewolves vying for dominance which could be achieved through combat or status (as I recall, this was a while back so I may be remembering incorrectly). Each tribe had very peculiar strengths and weaknesses and you deployed individual werewolves onto the field where they might duel with rivals or, more importantly, battle the encroaching evil of The Wyrm. The dynamics remind me a bit of how ya’ll were talking about the LoTR cooperative board game (which I haven’t played). You’d have to weigh the shared threat against the advantages of dealing with your rivals directly. Defeating the Wyrm would lend victors the status they needed to win so you might want to sabotage them. But if the Wyrm wins nobody wins.
My favorite memory of Rage was a tournament I played at a local gaming store. I picked the Bonegnawers, a lowly tribe of urban scum who were looked down upon by all the other tribes. They fight a guerrilla war against the Wyrm. Flea bitten strays to a man. And I remember playing that up during the tournament. RPing the idea that I was beneath notice and, subtly, lending aid to one faction or another until I was in a position to dominate. Nobody thought I could win. They’re mechanically a weak group in Rage. But by playing into preconceptions I won and I won the same way a Bonegnawer would. Obsequiousness and manipulation.
I don’t think I’d ever won a CCG tournament before or after and didn’t play them for very long. But this one was a blast because of the whole roleplaying/emergent narrative aspect of it. Dealing with the politics, the external threats and so on.
I heard about this from a little birdie. I was pretty excited to hear that you were still working on it and it might be near getting published.
I’m rooting for Frozen Star to get made into something cool. I’m still heartbroken it didn’t work out for the Land of Legends engine.
Yeah, I basically agree. A better way to put it from my point of view would be that the more fully-realized the context, the less potential room there is for imaginative interaction. The possibility is still there, you just have a lot less leeway.
Two other games that sprang to mind when you’re talking about emergent narrative, for me, are Romance of The Three Kingdoms X (PS2) and Rage (an old CCG).
Romance (and its cousins, to my way of thinking, in Crusader Kings and King of Dragon Pass) really focuses on the role of individual characters in a bigger strategic context and how their personalities effect the flow of events. In all these cases personalities themselves can be randomized between games so that even if the maps are the same each time the way the NPCs interact can change each time. X-Com’s grunts were part of the story in that game every bit as much as the aliens or the random maps. You could get attached to individuals that excelled over time or survived bad odds or pulled off heroic stunts. But they didn’t even have their own personalities.
That focus on characters and their loyalties and proclivities really helps me enjoy an emergent narrative. Whether I’m represented by a character in the game (Romance X and KoDP) or not (CK). The idea of having to think about yourself and your faction in roleplaying terms, as came up in the discussion of Fall from Heaven (which I haven’t played yet) is really true in these games as well as NPCs, even ostensibly friendly ones, will reinforce your decisions, positively or negatively, with how they react to you. In KoDP the strong mythic origins of your clan will really shape how how your decisions impact the flow of the game but slavishly following custom isn’t always optimal either. It’s very much like creating a character in a tabletop RPG and having to thread the needle between portrayal of identity and the needs of the moment as a tactical roleplayer.
Yeah, I totally agree on that front, and I recognize that potential in the RotK games. I try each new iteration of that series because I want to experience that sort of emergent story, but the presentation is so unrelentingly dry that I rarely have the perseverance. Same with Crusader Kings. I want the character interactions in those games to be less antiseptic. Emergent character interactivity is ripe for exploration, and the one with the greatest potential depth. The Sims is a great example, but I want more of a game in there, dammit.
Simplified, but still effective approaches I can think of would be in the Fire Emblem games, where improving different character relationships improves both their performance in battle and unlocks unique character-specific endings, and Jagged Alliance 2, where every merc has a different relationship and reaction to every other merc. Of course neither of these is particularly emergent, because they’re hard-coded, but the range of possibilities is so wide that it conveys the feeling of something unfolding in response to your actions, instead of being scripted.
Rage was based on the old White Wolf RPG Werewolf. Each player represented a tribe of werewolves vying for dominance which could be achieved through combat or status (as I recall, this was a while back so I may be remembering incorrectly). Each tribe had very peculiar strengths and weaknesses and you deployed individual werewolves onto the field where they might duel with rivals or, more importantly, battle the encroaching evil of The Wyrm. The dynamics remind me a bit of how ya’ll were talking about the LoTR cooperative board game (which I haven’t played). You’d have to weigh the shared threat against the advantages of dealing with your rivals directly. Defeating the Wyrm would lend victors the status they needed to win so you might want to sabotage them. But if the Wyrm wins nobody wins.
My favorite memory of Rage was a tournament I played at a local gaming store. I picked the Bonegnawers, a lowly tribe of urban scum who were looked down upon by all the other tribes. They fight a guerrilla war against the Wyrm. Flea bitten strays to a man. And I remember playing that up during the tournament. RPing the idea that I was beneath notice and, subtly, lending aid to one faction or another until I was in a position to dominate. Nobody thought I could win. They’re mechanically a weak group in Rage. But by playing into preconceptions I won and I won the same way a Bonegnawer would. Obsequiousness and manipulation.
I don’t think I’d ever won a CCG tournament before or after and didn’t play them for very long. But this one was a blast because of the whole roleplaying/emergent narrative aspect of it. Dealing with the politics, the external threats and so on.
That’s awesome. I love that kind of roleplaying in strategy games. Nobody else needs to even know you’re RPing, and if the theme is properly integrated with the mechanics, the game rewards decision-making made “in character.”
One thing I didn’t get a chance to touch on in the podcast was that a lot of games have narrative depth to me if they address their subject on multliple levels or from multiple angles. Civ has a lot of narrative depth in part due to the fact that research, diplomacy, city-building, and warfare represent very different but interlocking aspects of a developing civilization, which together give you a richer experience that you can appreciate from a variety of angles.
I love a lot of of Sid Meier’s old Microprose games for this reason. Pirates!, Covert Action, and Sword of the Samurai all share the structure of an overarching strategic game abetted by and dependent upon a subset of minigames built around various genre cliches. Experienced within the larger freeform narrative, these minigames – and their impact on the bigger picture, made the narrative seem more “full.”
You know what would be cool? A Popcap-produced Puzzle Quest clone set in a certain cartoony post-apocalyptic world! :)
Haha, if only. But if you ever decide you want to work for The Man, we should talk. =)
I haven’t played the more recent Civ games but Civ II, oddly, struck me as being too dry. I really need to be able to put a face and a name to gameplay elements. Generic advisers and fairly monolithic foes take away from the “story” for me.
In Romance all the hundreds of characters can switch factions, betray you or someone else, rise or fall in ranks, make friends and enemies, live or die and even get married and have children in some versions. They’ve all got official histories, those little bio entries, which feed into your ability as a player to imagine narrative rationales for what they do or who they are as people. They’ve all got unique portraits. They’ve got inventories and stats. And they’ve got the dynamic personality traits that directly effect the game like loyalty and proclivities.
If you can keep up with them (the biggest hurdle is learning those Chinese names) it’s almost like watching an ant-farm as much as playing a strategy game. Sims, if you will, on a very grand scale and with a good deal more real drama and higher stakes.
Yes, sorting columns of fiefs by population or rice output can feel very spreadsheet-like and dry but you can get to a point that you understand the identity of provinces as sum of their parts and the numbers melt away as daunting elements. They’re just brush-strokes to flesh out how the world looks and is changing.
I can waste too many hours in this game once I hit my zen. In fact I simply can’t play Romance X unless I’ve got hours charted out in advance and a day off afterwords because I simply lose track of time. There’s so much going on and all of it’s telling a dynamic story and I want to see what happens next! One more turn on steroids.
Getting to that point though requires a good deal of time invested in getting to know the characters, how folks interrelate, and mapping out the world in your mind so that all the activity going on doesn’t overwhelm you and turn into white noise with a Chinese accent.
I may spend an hour on the first turn of a game rereading bios to refresh my memory, looking at all the different maps to see diplomatic relationships or special province attributes and so on, before it all gels. I’m pretty slow though so that could just be me. It’s something to savor. The busy little anthill, and every little detail around it, before you set off the fireworks inside.
It’s true that that many of the mini-games, dueling or city building or even strengthening personal bonds with NPCs or developing your character, in Romance X can be pretty dry affairs in and of themselves. However I think it’s that whole context of possibility that makes them interesting in the moment. It’s not just what I’m doing but why I’m doing it and how that fits into possible plans three or four hours from now. It’s all part of the big story that’s happening.
Podcast addendum: Maximilian Pepper Warren-Lutes was born at 4:49am on December 26th, and everyone involved is doing well. Something significant just emerged into my narrative!
The dreaded Christmas-birthday merge!
Congrats, Jason.