Levi Kornelsen has just opened up GameCraft, a new forum for developing the technique of RPG enthusiasts. I’ll let his announcement from his LiveJournal say the rest.
Archive for November, 2006|Monthly archive page
Ninety-Nine
In boardgames, reviews on November 12th, 2006 at 9:41 pmNinety-Nine, is a trick-taking card game designed by David Parlett, with rules freely available on his website. Parlett is best known for designing Hare & Tortoise (Hase & Igel in the German editions), the first boardgame to win the Spiel des Jahres award. His first love is card games, though. He has written several books about them, and Ninety-Nine is just one of over a dozen games that use a deck of standard playing cards which Parlett has shared with the public on his website.
My Boardgamer Cluster
In boardgames on November 8th, 2006 at 6:05 pmI found this (based on this GeekList)thanks to Ryan Walberg. My results:
Best cluster match quality: 1.47590361445783
100 Knizia-fans (12 42 555 118 88 9216 7854 171 527)
92 Heavy-Eurogamer (42 555 12 9216 118 171 88 7854)
85 Core-Eurogamer (42 555 12 9216 118 88 171 7854)
31 Family-Eurogamer (42 12 118 555 171 9216 88)
28 Mass-market-gamers (171 7854 527 88)
23 Eclectic-Eurogamers (171 42 12 555)
23 Classic-Gamers (171 42 118)
16 Miniatures-Gamers (171 42)
15 Dripping-with-theme-gamers (42 555)
5 Wargamers ()
I’m a little surprised I’m so highly rated as a Core-Eurogamer, and I would say I’m a bit more of a wargamer than this indicates, although there’s no way for the app to know this.
Otherwise it seems pretty much spot on.
Resolution in RPGs
In mechanics, role-playing games on November 6th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Over on Story Games, Fred Hicks, creator of Don’t Rest Your Head and co-authour of Spirit of the Century, has done a really brilliant job of describing the different forms of resolution in role-playing games [link visible only to Story Games members]. The most commonly used current model for action resolution is based on drawing a distinction between “task” and “conflict” scale resolution. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is a false dichotomy, though. Fred highlights some of the problems with the task-conflict model, and then draws up his own model for describing resolution systems. Since the thread is not available to non-members, and I like the model, I thought I’d share a brief overview of it, and then comment a little on its uses. No doubt it has its own flaws, and it may be closer to being evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen so far, and has some relevance to improving your own games.
Elegance — An Update
In elegance, miscellany on November 4th, 2006 at 2:15 pmThis post is to reassure those of you who are interested in my (alleged) series on elegance that, no, I have not abandoned it, and yes, I am actually working on part 2.
Unfortunately, part 2 is being a bit difficult. My first draft was unusually rough, even by my humble standards. Over the last couple of weeks I have been editing it, but it has been a bit of an uphill struggle. Right now I am wavering on the edge. On the one hand, it has already been well over two months since I posted part one, and people may justifiably be losing patience. I could just put up what I have now, which is complete but rather stilted reading, on Monday or Tuesday. On the other, the perfectionist in me doesn’t want to subject you to rather mediocre writing, especially in a post of this length. Getting a polished essay would mean a couple more weeks of editing, though, and possibly more if I decide to chuck what I have and start again from scratch.
So I ask you, my readers (all three of you :), which would you rather? See it now, but suffer through a rather rough essay, or continue waiting as long as it takes to get a good read, making due with other topics — I have stuff in the hopper that I think is interesting, but isn’t a major production number like this — in the meantime?
P.S. If you’re looking for some good writing about elegance to tide you over, may I suggest Jonathan Degann‘s The Well Constructed Game? I’ve been holding off reading it myself until after I finish up part 2 so that it doesn’t just ape Jonathan, but his stuff always comes highly recommended by me.
My Play 