Time and Mechanics (chope)

Compress that takes too long
-research, politics, romance, anything that should take more than 4 
hours or 10 days that effect the life of your character/the world/etc 
-research is mostly a solved problem 
-some of the other things don't compress so well. Romance is a 
continuing problem. 
-reason we have mechanics for this is that it takes too long to roleplay 
fully 
-when you're shortening things, keep in mind the thing you're shortening 
is something that is important to your character that a research 
notebook isn't. 
-Need a mechanic to make a romance plot work. (Well, possibly not a 
Romeo and Juliet plot where they're in love pregame and have something 
else holding them back) 
-Worse at compressing: politics! 
-in one-nights, we don't even try. 
-in a longer game, keeping politics contrained to an amount of time so 
that it doesn't overwhelm the rest of game 
-in order to make politics work, have to trim people's ability to do 
what they'd actually be doing in the real world (limit what they can do, 
abstract away convincing people of certain things, limit choices) 
-If you open a politics mechanic to all options that would actually 
exist, committee plot will expand to fill all available time, and beyond 
that. 

Expand things to take longer
-Reasons
-- drama (i.e. dueling, so that it's more exciting; weddings; most good 
5-minute wait/conversation mechanic have this reason) 
-- game balance (i.e. siren: if you are about to trigger a big change in 
the world, the world should get a warning so that other people have time 
to react [matters more the more secret the plot starts out]) 
-- making sure you have enough to do and don't finish on Day 3 of ten 
(timelocks). Actual timelocks are irritating. Nicer way is recharge time 
on abilities/resources. 



Things you can't change much
-Information flow. How long it takes people to figure things out. 
Between players, between GMs and players, between GMs. Highly 
descriptive signs that subtly clue things will probably get blown past 
as people try to figure out what they're supposed to do with it. 
-There's very little you can do about how long it takes to find things 
out in game. It's not really in the GMs control. 
-Lengths of games 
-- one nights: most need to compress things. Has issues with expanding 
things because of information flow (i.e. sirens are hard to implement in 
a one-night) 
-- 3-day: more time to play with. Main question: phased 3-day or 
continuous 3-day. Phased lends itself nicely to recharges but have to 
compress other things. Continuous allows you to play with making things 
less structured and compressed 
-- 10-day: information flow games. 

Andrea points out that structuring time so that people can roleplay to
solve politics and romance plots is possible.  Chope agrees it's
nicer, but speeding up information flow is hard and this is something
to keep in mind.

This is not to say politics is impossible in one-nights.

This idea about time is a response to Jake's talk about time
management in games with made-up numbers.
Need to remember that allocating time to talk to each other when they
have plots that require it.  (If A needs to talk to B, C, and D, A
should not have a ton of time-intensive research time.  Also, B, C,
and D should not have all their time taken up by other things,
otherwise A's plot is impossible)

joyp asks how to balanace 5-minute conversation mechanics with the
fact that the Guild is a bunch of paranoid fuckers.  Ken points out
specifically that seduction mechanics are particularly prone to this
(character doesn't _want_ to be seduced).  Chope suggests the solution
to that giving cookies to both sides might help with this.  


Steve Balzac: psychology of goal-setting with game design

-Keep participants acting within the game. Keep players focused on their 
objectives. If people are not focused, they get bored and wander out of 
game. As long as we're collectively agreeing on the shared hallucination 
of the game, we can keep game going. 
-Make game resiliant. Need to handle missing players. 
-Handle the inevitable fact that someone is going to get killed at the 
wrong time. Trick is to keep players invested to keep playing when that 
happens. 
-Players need to discover the world. They do this by interacting with 
other players. 
-Way to do this is by setting goals that work. 
-Goals create several effects on people: 
--focus. Hard to get out of your head. 
--increase people's energy. People become more energetic when they know 
what they need to do; momentum halts when they don't know what to do. 
--decrease distractability. Outside events become less likely to 
penetrate when they're not immediately relevent. When you set up 
interesting goals, it becomes hard to look away from it. 
-When the goal is clear, we get creative when we're blocked the first 
time. 
-Accomplishing goals is fun. Simple goals start off the high. 
-No single player knows the whole game. When you put goals into the 
game, you're defining the world. And when players accomplish their goals 
or uncover other players' goals, they learn more about the world. But be 
careful about putting in goals that are impossible in game, not in the 
"this goal has been blocked by other people", but "this operation is not 
supported", because unless the player knows they're playing someone 
crazy, they'll be unhappy. 
-Goals need to be vivid. Players need a reason to accomplish their 
goals. If it's not vivid and dramatic, players won't care. Make it 
exciting, make it interesting, let the players see how the world can 
change (even if it's their own little section of it) 
-Need to lay out the path between A and B. Spell out enough of the goal 
path so that they're able to start. Too much information without 
direction can lead to player frustration. If you can't write it in a 
bluesheet, players won't either. 
-Players need to feel really connected. Have to see how their actions 
matter. Players need to feel like they contribute to their plots and 
groups. 
-Goals have to be possible. 
-Vague goals and lack of clear purpose does more to harm your game than 
good ones will build it up. -Goals can matter beyond scope of game. Set 
up what happens after game, and people will care about things that 
happen on the last day. (Possibly avoid stupid o'clock?) 
-Feedback mechanisms for players to know how they are on the path to 
accomplishing their goals. 
-3-4 big goals are the most you can ask people of. More and you start 
dividing their attention, and they start not caring about any of them. 

If players have team goals and personal goals that don't match,
they're probably going to chose themselves.

Some aside about how mechanics need to fit the game.  And don't write
the game around the mechanic.


Xavid: Mechanics 2nd run of Black Ships

-Evaluating the mechanics based on certain thigns to make sure it works

-mechanic should contribute to making the setting feel immersive to the 
players. 
-The feel of the mechanic vs the the artificialness of the mechanic 
(since mechanics are often abstractions, sometimes exceedingly so). 
-PC overhead: how much is on the PCs to make it work, how do they need 
to do, keep track of, etc. -Sometimes you don't need a mechanic for 
every plot. 
-How much time for prod, and how much time for GMs during runtime 
-Using something familiar, such as Darkwater and dart guns, can reduce 
PC overhead, since they pretty much accept it/undertstand the basics. 

Ken is bringing up the idea of knocked out when wounded (as in, not),
in that it's hard in the Guild.

Black Ships had a thing where you weren't knocked out when bleeding to
death.  Ken points out that the reason this exists in the Guild is
that the Guild is highly competative, and if you're not allowed to be
paying attention when you're wounded, maybe they don't _actually_ have
to kill you right then.

sniffen is talking about DON'T PULL OUT STUFF OUT OF THE STANDARD
MECHANIC PILE IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHYYYYY.

As in, "mechanics should fit the game, dammit!"

And now we're at the idea of Shadowruns, and too many of them in like
every plot can make the game less interesting because you're
interacting with a wall or the GMs rather than actual other people.


Jim: on Zampolit Mandate

-zamp as manager/auditor
--maintain deadlines, manage GM team, do crazy HR tasks like paying 
attention to GM sanity 
--really mandate extends only as far as GMs have agreed 
-zamp's responsibility is to the GM team, to the HC, and to the Guild as 
a whole. Need to have the ability to veto the game (the one big stick 
they have) if it's going to fail in any respect (detrimental to 
health/san of the GMs, to the existence of the Guild, etc). 
 -unless explicitly given, zamp does not have line-item veto (not liking 
a particular mechanic is not enough to cancel game...) 
-to act fairly/professionally as manager, zamp must attempt to keep 
themselves out of social issues in the GM team (don't take sides in 
disagreements, but note that they exist) and also be honest. 
--"you're the HC's man in here. It matters that you're in the loop and 
can make honest assessments" 
-in hiring a zamp, need to look for someone who you can stand to be the 
bad guy, who you'll listen to when they decide to call game if need be 
--zamp can be the bad guy in social situations to maintain social sanity 
of GM team 
-having a zamp who can enforce deadlines/milestones is important, 
especially if the team isn't doing it themselves. 

ternus: Jim's method here for zampolit's "Care and Managing of GM Teams" 
here has saved Dresden's GM sanity a couple of times over here. There's 
a lot of evidence here it works. 

Someone mentions that zamp ability to manage deadlines is a little weird 
if the GM team has the manager-type already on the team. 

Brian: on game space

-shrinking game space in Wreched Hive increased pressure.
-small enough for interaction, large enough for secrecy, visible enough 
to require subtlety, obscure enough to permit nastiness 

ariels:  adjacentcy matters and whether if rooms have windows.

House interactions in HP7 changed when Slytherin common room moved to
closer to the other common rooms.

People are also a little more paranoid when there are windows in the
doors of rooms.

It changes the secrecy and paranoia dynamics.

brians: space matters and it's sometimes the least controllable thing
by GMs, due to room scheduling.

joyp: some places have a different feel.  Tombs in the basements,
don't have super-isolated thing near the Infinate, etc.

ternus: Doors matter.  Arcadia wanted a common room with more than 1 door. 
GM room farther away from the common room to prevent people from just 
waiting out there. If it's close, it's very hard to go see the GMs 
without everyone know it. 

chope: effectiveness in changing gamespace.  Interactions between the
players changed.

Ability to "lock" the doors also changes the paranoia feel.


Ken: social morality in tendays
-how PCs act and judge each other while they play 
-players are probably under stress. And any individual character will 
feel like "one of the 50 most important people in the world in the most 
important 10 days of their life". PCs are usually only directly 
answerable to each other. 
-Social morality in the typical tenday tends towards "Lord of the 
Flies". 
 -You can do things to create outside morality, but PCs with free will 
and disc guns are generally the authority. Everyone listens to the guy 
with the conch, until they get a boulder dropped on them. 

-The first days of a tenday, probably kind of stable. As the game goes 
on, roleplaying fatigue sets in. That's the point where it falls back to 
"Lord of the Flies". And then social order falls apart. 
-Typical tenday behavior is actually how real people behave in that kind 
of situation (people in enclosed space with no supervision). 
-The expection that you can make everyone play nice won't really work. 
All the bluesheets and greensheets in the world won't help that. In 
fact, they might resent you for ham-handedly making them be a 
law-abinding citizen. 
-If you try, you can cause cognative dissonance: players don't really 
want to act against their natural tendencies in high-stress situations. 

-Not that you can't try. Macondo, Only the Holy See, Xiaolong, and Harry 
Potter either hit it or got very close. 
-Macondo and Vatican had Catholicism: has a moral code, had mechanics 
based on sins, didn't haven to make up a new system for it, big trope of 
Catholic dogma being able to stand up against other weirdshit. Even in 
other movies, shooting a priest or desecration is shown as a terrible, 
terrible thing, evenmorseo than killing some random dudes. 
-Harry Potter had the Heroic Universe. People are also familiar with it. 
HP had problems where they didn't quite make it. 
-Family sticks together, even when shit hits the fan. Violating that 
causes angst and drama naturally. 
-Giant committee plot: if ~everything in the world depends on this, 
it'll probably ground the players. Just be warned it could turn into 
Model UN: the Guild Game, and it'd just be boring as Model UN. 

-People act the way in tendays is natural. They're under stress, 
isolated, they have to make hard decisions, and it's all "Lord of the 
Flies". You can change this, it's just really hard. And it's not just 
going to be writing out a giant scenario or in the charsheets. Using 
real world things the players are familiar with (religion, family) will 
help with this. 

ken: You're likely to trust your friends, but you're also more likely to 
stab the people you trust in the back in games. Because you know they 
won't hold it against you after game. 

ken: if all your plots are something you can talk about publically and 
solve through mutual cooperation, you just wrote Science Lab: the 
Tenday. 

brians: on the other hand, having all secret plot means you have jack
shit to do because you can't admit it to anyone.

jim: good guy mobs are just bad guy mobs with good publicity. They're 
also steerable.