Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2006 11:54 am1KM1KT Free RPG Community
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Review submitted: Hegemony
Page 2 of 2
Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2006 11:54 amPosted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 8:10 pmPosted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 8:44 pmYou CAPITALIZE things to emphasize them.
Posted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 9:47 pmAndy,
Nice work. And I'm still interested in helping you use the Internet to further facilitate this game.
Nice work. And I'm still interested in helping you use the Internet to further facilitate this game.
Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2006 2:51 amPosted: Wed Apr 19, 2006 3:02 pmPosted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 9:47 amCrap, and all this time I haven't even posted a suitable reply yet! Bad on me, sorry folks- Been so busy with managing the thing and all that I didn't even have a chance to reply.
So yeah, it was a real interesting series of events that led me to write Hegemony: It was mostly the product of spontaneous food-shopping at Fresh Market (I remember I was looking at Mangos, WTF??) and thinking about MMOs.
The train of thought went (to summarize about 3 paragraphs): MMOs-->Disappointment--> MMO tabletop RPGs ---> No --> Wait, that's the Living X stuff like with RPGs ---> No --> Yes --> No --> YES!!!
So that's around the time when I started thinking about this experience, the equivalent of a mini-campaign one-shot experience that a lot of groups could participate in and could seriously carry over to the other groups.
We had recently played Executive Decision at a local con, and it was pretty disappointing: I loved the debate and immersion, but I didn't like the "Choose-your-own Adventure" outcome (basically at the end of the debate, there are only 5 wholesale plans that the president can choose, and each one has a "gotcha!": You can't combine plans or say "I want to invest 10% of our resources in this plan, 30% in that plan, and 60% in this final plan".
Combining all the above, plus my love of Master of Orion/Galactic Civilizations computer games (just the fun parts: The real fight/expand/politics mojo, not all the leadup and "dumb tech" researching) got me thinking about this experience. The last "Hegemony Only Session" was an afterthought of trying to decide where to stick that "last 1 hour session", but it actually turned out to be awesome, in theory anyway.
OK, that's that, now to respond to comments and reviews (in no particular order):
"Steel Points" (as a name): After thinking upon it, I kinda like the word "steel", something simple to describe something so vast. What I should really do, though, is write like a page of backstory about some "Spice-like" resource that is really scarse and that Everything depends on (maybe some kind of rare star power that powers the warp drives or whatever).
Completeness: Yeah, I wrote the thing more or less in a day, with only a few more hours to put into it. I thought that I'd have the time to do all the cards and everything, but as it turns out I didn't. I think in the next 4-7 months I'm going to finish the game, and focus on turning it into like a serious "Con Game" for play at conventions. But any way I cut it it's going to take 4 hours, and that's assuming everyone's ready to go and has the rules down pat and all. After thinking about it more, I'm probably going to have the "real version", where you choose the number of team sessions to have (from 3 to 6 or so, no more), the number of teams in play (3-6), and then a supplemental Con version where it's just two sessions then the Hegemony session, but all the players that didn't make it to the hegemony can be physically present and participate in the final council, maybe even as the antagonist (the Mysterious Replicators, or something). Anyway, yeah, this is incomplete, and I totally take my licks for that.
Feedback: This is a new slant on roleplaying. I probably couldn’t play it as it is without quite a bit of work, but as a whole it’s nicely executed.
Hmmm. I think the closest thing to it right now is Model Congress, but it does have loose RPG roots in Executive Decision, or any game experience where the party Huddles Up to plan their next strategy; save that the strategy is against other parties, not Bugbears.
Next, Dev P's comments!
So yeah, it was a real interesting series of events that led me to write Hegemony: It was mostly the product of spontaneous food-shopping at Fresh Market (I remember I was looking at Mangos, WTF??) and thinking about MMOs.
The train of thought went (to summarize about 3 paragraphs): MMOs-->Disappointment--> MMO tabletop RPGs ---> No --> Wait, that's the Living X stuff like with RPGs ---> No --> Yes --> No --> YES!!!
So that's around the time when I started thinking about this experience, the equivalent of a mini-campaign one-shot experience that a lot of groups could participate in and could seriously carry over to the other groups.
We had recently played Executive Decision at a local con, and it was pretty disappointing: I loved the debate and immersion, but I didn't like the "Choose-your-own Adventure" outcome (basically at the end of the debate, there are only 5 wholesale plans that the president can choose, and each one has a "gotcha!": You can't combine plans or say "I want to invest 10% of our resources in this plan, 30% in that plan, and 60% in this final plan".
Combining all the above, plus my love of Master of Orion/Galactic Civilizations computer games (just the fun parts: The real fight/expand/politics mojo, not all the leadup and "dumb tech" researching) got me thinking about this experience. The last "Hegemony Only Session" was an afterthought of trying to decide where to stick that "last 1 hour session", but it actually turned out to be awesome, in theory anyway.
OK, that's that, now to respond to comments and reviews (in no particular order):
"Steel Points" (as a name): After thinking upon it, I kinda like the word "steel", something simple to describe something so vast. What I should really do, though, is write like a page of backstory about some "Spice-like" resource that is really scarse and that Everything depends on (maybe some kind of rare star power that powers the warp drives or whatever).
Completeness: Yeah, I wrote the thing more or less in a day, with only a few more hours to put into it. I thought that I'd have the time to do all the cards and everything, but as it turns out I didn't. I think in the next 4-7 months I'm going to finish the game, and focus on turning it into like a serious "Con Game" for play at conventions. But any way I cut it it's going to take 4 hours, and that's assuming everyone's ready to go and has the rules down pat and all. After thinking about it more, I'm probably going to have the "real version", where you choose the number of team sessions to have (from 3 to 6 or so, no more), the number of teams in play (3-6), and then a supplemental Con version where it's just two sessions then the Hegemony session, but all the players that didn't make it to the hegemony can be physically present and participate in the final council, maybe even as the antagonist (the Mysterious Replicators, or something). Anyway, yeah, this is incomplete, and I totally take my licks for that.
Feedback: This is a new slant on roleplaying. I probably couldn’t play it as it is without quite a bit of work, but as a whole it’s nicely executed.
Hmmm. I think the closest thing to it right now is Model Congress, but it does have loose RPG roots in Executive Decision, or any game experience where the party Huddles Up to plan their next strategy; save that the strategy is against other parties, not Bugbears.
Next, Dev P's comments!
Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 10:21 amDev P's comments:
Clarity: Yeah, I feel like I want to give a brief peek into what a session is like, but I think I dived to far in. I still want to give a "peek" into play, but I need to do it in a way that isn't too exhaustive.
Re Completeness:
The crises, sciences and secret agenda are missing, and the political offices could use some going over - to some extent, it feels like you're missing the crunch.
Yeah, I definitely agree. The crisis cards, agenda, and especially tech would all be (in my mind) evocative of "a setting", using specific words and the like ("Dark Fusion Bomb": WTF is 'dark fusion'? Stuff like that).
The groups don't have to be in geographical proximity: They do all their exchanges over the net. Since that level of coordination is complicated, that's why I made the Scribe-Organizer's role and duties as clear as humanly possible, and introduced severe penalties for tardiness (so that one team can't go: "Oh, I thought we were supposed to post tomorrow" and change all their results after having seen the other teams' results). For the last session, the Hegemony session, effectively what happens is that the two "weakest link" characters from the Final Team get "booted", and replaced with two representatives from the other factions, which those players have to play.
Good comments on maintaining cohesiveness for the story behind the culture: I have to think of some guidelines to keep that going.
On building Web Tools to facilitate the game: Yeah, that would be the best condition. I need to learn how to couple PHP with MySQL, or pay someone who will, cheap. Because my ideal tool (whcih doesn't exist, but probably easy to make) is a tool where:
One scribe organizer starts the game, plugs in the names of the other scribe-organizers, and gives everyone a link to the site/thread.
Then, that main organizer sets up the "reveal times", the times when the scores and actions will be revealed to everyone.
After that, the other scribe-organizers post on the thread with their results and hit "save".
When the Reveal Time comes, all the results are revealed to everyone
So it's kinda like a small discussion forum/thread, where the thread comments after the first are invisible until the Reveal Time, after which everyone can see them.
Anyway, we'll see how it works out. If it's too expensive, my system of penalties will work for now.
Re: Adam Dray's East German comments
Hmmm, I'd still fight on the point of "Actor" being stronger than "0". Again, because this game is pulling on sources like Executive Decision and Model Congress, where acting == winning. But within the game itself there are no "Actors" in the setting, etc.
Good feedback on the clarity, I should do something like that:
Summary
HARD TEXT
Conclusion Summary (ala DITV)
As with the other one-hour-session games I have reviewed, I caution the author against shoving too much into an hour session. Debate is especially time-sucking.
For me, I definitely will loosen up the time restriction, but honestly it's still not going to be too much more than an hour, like "80 minutes" will be tops. The reason is that debate IS time-sucking, as well as will-sucking. In the playtests of Executive Decision I played (admittedly with only 4 players total, not 7 or so) there was a point where we realized we could just go on and on and not get anywhere: Everyone had their cards on the table, and yet the book told us that we had to debate for another 20 minutes to get to the next step. Fuck that, we just jumped to the next step to keep it fun for the players. If I open up the debate cycle too much, and require adherence to time, it's going to be a strain.
I didn't like the bureaucracy of it all. The forms, the schedules, the Scribe-Organizer all contributed to making me feel I was playing "Office Space RPG" rather than a science fiction game.
Yeah, for this part I had to dedicate a lot of time to the role of the Scribe, because their job is basically pretty hard: They have to herd cats, not only in their own group, but in other groups as well. Most games I know would have hand-waved this step, going "Oh, and just organize with the others and let them know what the results were", but without telling them How, and How Important it is to be on time, then the game could fall apart by session two from everyone fucking up: Team B's scribe accidentally posts their results early, Team C accidentally posts "internal memos" to the group (who plays which role, how much was really spent on Espionage, etc). For this, I took that overhead and plan on putting it into really easy-on-the-eyes timesheets (with no more than like 10 things to quickly fill out) so that everyone can get back into the game without "doing taxes".
Anyway, I really do appreciate all the feedback! This was a great experience for me, and I hope to have it working by the next NC Gameday for playtesting!
-Andy
-Andy
Clarity: Yeah, I feel like I want to give a brief peek into what a session is like, but I think I dived to far in. I still want to give a "peek" into play, but I need to do it in a way that isn't too exhaustive.
Re Completeness:
The crises, sciences and secret agenda are missing, and the political offices could use some going over - to some extent, it feels like you're missing the crunch.
Yeah, I definitely agree. The crisis cards, agenda, and especially tech would all be (in my mind) evocative of "a setting", using specific words and the like ("Dark Fusion Bomb": WTF is 'dark fusion'? Stuff like that).
The groups don't have to be in geographical proximity: They do all their exchanges over the net. Since that level of coordination is complicated, that's why I made the Scribe-Organizer's role and duties as clear as humanly possible, and introduced severe penalties for tardiness (so that one team can't go: "Oh, I thought we were supposed to post tomorrow" and change all their results after having seen the other teams' results). For the last session, the Hegemony session, effectively what happens is that the two "weakest link" characters from the Final Team get "booted", and replaced with two representatives from the other factions, which those players have to play.
Good comments on maintaining cohesiveness for the story behind the culture: I have to think of some guidelines to keep that going.
On building Web Tools to facilitate the game: Yeah, that would be the best condition. I need to learn how to couple PHP with MySQL, or pay someone who will, cheap. Because my ideal tool (whcih doesn't exist, but probably easy to make) is a tool where:
One scribe organizer starts the game, plugs in the names of the other scribe-organizers, and gives everyone a link to the site/thread.
Then, that main organizer sets up the "reveal times", the times when the scores and actions will be revealed to everyone.
After that, the other scribe-organizers post on the thread with their results and hit "save".
When the Reveal Time comes, all the results are revealed to everyone
So it's kinda like a small discussion forum/thread, where the thread comments after the first are invisible until the Reveal Time, after which everyone can see them.
Anyway, we'll see how it works out. If it's too expensive, my system of penalties will work for now.
Re: Adam Dray's East German comments
Hmmm, I'd still fight on the point of "Actor" being stronger than "0". Again, because this game is pulling on sources like Executive Decision and Model Congress, where acting == winning. But within the game itself there are no "Actors" in the setting, etc.
Good feedback on the clarity, I should do something like that:
Summary
HARD TEXT
Conclusion Summary (ala DITV)
As with the other one-hour-session games I have reviewed, I caution the author against shoving too much into an hour session. Debate is especially time-sucking.
For me, I definitely will loosen up the time restriction, but honestly it's still not going to be too much more than an hour, like "80 minutes" will be tops. The reason is that debate IS time-sucking, as well as will-sucking. In the playtests of Executive Decision I played (admittedly with only 4 players total, not 7 or so) there was a point where we realized we could just go on and on and not get anywhere: Everyone had their cards on the table, and yet the book told us that we had to debate for another 20 minutes to get to the next step. Fuck that, we just jumped to the next step to keep it fun for the players. If I open up the debate cycle too much, and require adherence to time, it's going to be a strain.
I didn't like the bureaucracy of it all. The forms, the schedules, the Scribe-Organizer all contributed to making me feel I was playing "Office Space RPG" rather than a science fiction game.
Yeah, for this part I had to dedicate a lot of time to the role of the Scribe, because their job is basically pretty hard: They have to herd cats, not only in their own group, but in other groups as well. Most games I know would have hand-waved this step, going "Oh, and just organize with the others and let them know what the results were", but without telling them How, and How Important it is to be on time, then the game could fall apart by session two from everyone fucking up: Team B's scribe accidentally posts their results early, Team C accidentally posts "internal memos" to the group (who plays which role, how much was really spent on Espionage, etc). For this, I took that overhead and plan on putting it into really easy-on-the-eyes timesheets (with no more than like 10 things to quickly fill out) so that everyone can get back into the game without "doing taxes".
Anyway, I really do appreciate all the feedback! This was a great experience for me, and I hope to have it working by the next NC Gameday for playtesting!
-Andy
-Andy