Board to Table: Worker Placement

Mechanic: Worker Placement
Worker placement is a mechanic where players have a limited ability to do actions in a given turn. This limit is represented by “workers” which are typically abstracted and represented via tokens. On a given turn, players go around in order, placing their tokens one-at-a-time on available spaces on the board. Once all meeples have been placed, then the effects of placement take place. Typically, spaces are used to generate or spend resources, in order to make progress towards a win condition.

In most board games with worker placement, there are ways to gain additional workers, though typically at fairly high resource costs. There also tends to be (relatively small) bonuses for players going later in a turn, since going first has a large advantage in being able to block others from performing actions by taking all available spaces.

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Board to Table: Introduction

Index

Board games have a bad reputation in the TTRPG community. Whenever a game with formal rules that are considered too binding comes out, the common complaint is that the game is actually a board game. I find this notion to be mostly ridiculous. Board games and TTRPGs are different kinds of games on a fundamental level. I don’t have specific requirements for either category, and delineating those differences is beyond the scope of this series that I’m due to embark on.

That said, board games excel in something that TTRPGs often struggle with: theme being represented via mechanics. This sort of thematic translation is something that many TTRPGs don’t worry too much about, because there is so much power in the players to represent and push thematic elements. The aesthetic components of mechanics go so much farther in a TTRPG than they do in a board game.

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The Minimal and Maximal Players

In my last blog post, I discussed taking a formalist approach to The Rule Book. One of the ideas that I derived from the text was that of the Minimal and Maximal player, which I left unexplained in that particular blog post. I will instead take on the job of going into detail about those concepts in this article. First, I will talk about my process of conceiving the concepts, then I will outline their definitions and finally I will talk about why the ideas matter.

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A Formalist Approach to The Rule Book

The Rule Book by Jaako Strenros and Markus Montola is a key text in understanding the relationship between games and rules. After reading an intriguing article from Jay Dragon that heavily referenced the book, I realized that I would need to read The Rule Book myself. So, I set to the task, sharing quotes from the text and my thoughts regarding those on Jay’s discord. This led to a spirited discussion and to me honing my thoughts to the point that I realized that a blog post was necessary.

I do not agree with everything in The Rule Book, but I do think that it is, nevertheless, a worthwhile text. Its delineations and its language help to establish the boundaries between different kinds of rules, which help to enable conversation around these kinds of rules, which allows for more advanced discussions around games and games design. This article will not be a summary of The Rule Book, instead it will be a more in-depth look at its philosophies and what I learned from my reading. I highly recommend that anyone interested give The Rule Book a read, it is available via MIT open access for free.

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The Literary TTRPG

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are an transitional medium. They stand between a large number of other media, which they borrow from and interact with in varying ways depending on the specific medium in question. Above all else though, even when they don’t involve tabletops or role-playing, TTRPGs are games.

As games, the media that TTRPGs most easily and readily and greedily borrow from are other games. TTRPGs are significantly smaller as an industry than card game or board games or (especially) video games, and so it’s often from those kinds of games that TTRPGs borrow most heavily. Obviously, there’s also interactions in the other direction. The entire dungeon crawler genre of video games owes its origins to Dungeon and Dragons, for instance. There’s also a large degree of communication between TTRPGs and larps, with a lot of formal similarities between the two media.

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The Challenge and Necessity of Creation

This is going to be a different sort of post from me. I’ll try to get back into more formally analytical writing when I find the strength and energy to do so. For now, this is going to be something more confessional, perhaps even an effort at self-affirmation. I don’t know where I’m going with this, so we’ll be getting there together over the course of this post.

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The Spielegeist

There is a ghost haunting the table, a ghost called the Spielegeist.

The term “zeitgeist” refers to a metaphorical “spirit of the time,” referring to the overall cultural impression of a given period of time. One can think of the zeitgeist of the 1960s or the 1980s, and come to mind with a pastiche of the clothing, music, and overall political sentiment of the time, at least within a given geographical context. Obviously, the 80s were very different in sub-Saharan Africa as compared to western Europe. Nevertheless, the idea of a zeitgeist lingers as a way of thinking about how the combined cultural output of a given time and place creates this overall impression.

The Spielegeist, meanwhile, is the spirit of the game. By this, I mean the overall impact of a game’s text and mechanics upon the playing of the game. It is an abstraction, metaphorical in nature, but there is some value in conceptualizing the Spielegeist as a solid thing, a fellow participant in the act of play, invoked by the magical space of the table.

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Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Literacy: Clocks

Clocks are a relatively new piece of design technology. Unlike earlier entries in this series, Clocks are not especially widespread, nor are they considered fundamental to the act of playing TTRPGs, like Roles. Instead, they represent a relatively novel way to handle a common problem in TTRPGs: tracking progress.

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Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Literacy: Roles

Perhaps the core element structuring The Conversation are the Roles that participants take on. While the roles of GM and Player are reasonably well known, they are only the very basics of Roles available. What is more, the responsibilities and permissions of each role can vary greatly from baseline expectations. Let us explore more together in this week’s Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Literacy.

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Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Literacy: The Conversation

While last week covered the Dice Pool, finishing the series’ introduction to resolution mechanics, this week will cover The Conversation, which is the glue that connects other mechanics together. In short, it is the simple back and forth between participants of a game. At length, well, read on.

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