Responses Regarding OPERATION FOOLE (Gamma, Destroyer)

[xiombarg]

Regarding the comments from Judge Gamma:

Interesting commentary. The irony here is that I haven't played this sort of game very often, and not at all in the schoolyard -- I just wrote based on what I thought would be best in order to make this sort of game work. I've been wanting to do a two-person Agent Patriot based game for quite some time now.

As for the constraints that made sense to you, this is because to a certain degree I'm sticking to a form of "canon". There have been a few Patriot stories already written, you see:




And the strange constraints are to keep one within the "feel" of those stories.

Destroyer comments:

Not much to say, other than those different ways of adjudicating disputes are intentional in the different contexts. I admit it's a little confusing.

[a_ninja_judge]

Hi Kirt,

Actually I did track down some of those stories when I judged your game. I found them via Google searches that I did to make sure I wasn't missing something, like for instance that Agent Patriot really was an old radio serial character and everyone knew that but me. (Since the episodes in your blog link back to previous episodes but not forward to subsequent ones, I ended up reading several of the stories in reverse.) Of course, I had to judge the game by what was in the submission itself, so I reported on my initial impressions from the game text alone, which included being reminded of some my own pretend-games from school days. I didn't mean to imply that your game design actually arose from that kind of play, or that the game was a write-up of something you'd already played in the past. (However, I did hypothesize that in addition to the stories on the Web, you perhaps had done some face-to-face telling, shared creation, or performance of Agent Patriot stories, which would be possible origins for certain game details such as the "Problem!" announcement.)

In any case, I certainly didn't deduct any points for perceived unoriginality, of either the game play structure or the story concept. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Even before I found the stories, the constraints did make sense to me, for the reasons I tried to explain in my comments. A large part of the text reads like a style guide simply because, in fact, it is a style guide. (Although interestingly, not all of the constraints in the game appear to have direct precedents in the stories, at least not the ones posted so far.) I do think there might be more constraints than needed or appropriate for a game with so little mechanical structure, but that's a matter of taste. I personally prefer more of the constraints on role playing outcomes to arise from the action of formal system, relative to how much must come from players' self-policing of otherwise arbitrary narrated content. This game seems especially odd in using naked "what must/must not happen in the outcome" rules to get players to stay consistent with a canon that they themselves are, presumably, unfamiliar with! With the time I've had for reflection since writing my judge comments for the game, it's clearer to me that that's the real source of the "weird vibe" I mentioned. Put the game into a different context -- "This is a role playing game for all you Agent Patriot fans out there! (Not an Agent Patriot fan? Then become one, by reading these!)" -- and most of that weirdness would go away.

I'm glad you posted the links here, because I think knowledge of the stories will help readers to understand the game better. (Imagine playing a near-freeform Star Wars game, based on a few pages of description of what Star Wars characters and story elements are like, without ever having seen any Star Wars movies or novels. That's kind of like what you're expecting readers of Operation Foole to do when they try to imagine the game play from reading the text you submitted for the contest.) I'd urge anyone who read the game and found the concept or goals unclear to use those links and then give the game another look.

The stories are also well worth reading in their own right. (Preferably forward, but even read backward they're a hoot.)

Kirt, have you considered designing a more conventional role playing game for Agent Patriot? By "more conventional" I don't mean "conventional;" many of the Forge-moderne rpg techniques (e.g. separating players' story effectiveness from character effectiveness) would appear to serve very well for such a game. By getting away from the strict canonical format of the stories, there would be some interesting ways to configure such play. For instance, Patriot could be shared, or controlled primarily by a GM, and always win in the end, while the players' challenge, playing villains, would be to generate the most grandiose evil schemes before Patriot destroys them.

[xiombarg]

Wow, thank you for your thoughtful reply. I had meant to put a link to the stories in the game itself, but I was running low on time and more conerned about getting the game out than getting a link to work. Probably a mistake, I admit.

Yes, I've considered a slightly more "traditional" but still Forge-radical game for Patriot. I particularly like the idea of PCs are villians, or Patriot being shared between the players, parhaps with a version of the self-hosing technique from ...