"Dirty Little Pleasures in Game Design." Topic

Do you have one? I mean a game design that you like and noodle around with and which may NEVER come to fruition but can lead to useful experiments and ideas which might be transferable to other venues.

I do, it's the West End Games production of Greg Costikyan's "Bug Eyed Monsters from Outer Space: They want our Women!" The game is so hilarious and outrageous in its premise and simple in its play it's a favorite of mine.
Cast against the backdrop of the terribly awful B and C movies (but not B&D) of the 1950's and 1960's there is a canon of reality the game plays against. That canon is of course all sorts of teenage drama and anxieties bound up with it, and a reality that is very "real" to people of my age. In addition to the obvious danger of the Aliens, Costykian hints at other goings on (as do the movies) in the pleasant little hamlet of Freedom New Hampshire. I always got the impression that the aliens picked that place because of some unstated soap opera going on at the same time. Also, what is going on in all those other houses on the map which have no playing pieces associated with them.

For example, where exactly does the "Margolis" of Margolis Real Estate live, and is she some frumpy old woman or a hot babe who the BEM's overlooked! And who is in the unnamed house in 3217, Someone in the Witness Protection Program, Don Tony Innocenzi? Affectionaly know as Tony No No!?

I wonder what would happen if the BEM's broke in on Tony and his pals when they were having a "family meeting" here instead of in Appalacia. Of course they would be drawn by the high concentration of pulchritude from the gun molls and show girls right into the high concentration of fire from the thompsons and BAR's.

I use the game as a test bed to set up personal conflicts and local loyalty chains that I then transfer to the plots of regular games for the political dimension.

Hi Otto, I can't say I've had much experience in game design outside of puttering with some very simple homemade medieval and Victorian Colonial rules. Now that I'm retired and we're just about to move back into our house after a looonnng renovation I'm very much hoping to muck about with a couple games. The first will be John Cape's Sudan Campaign (with many, many thanks to Nick Stern).

I am always puttering with Classic Traveller. I probably have enough material to run weekly games for the rest of my life.

Sadly, no players.

One of the things I always loved about Traveller were all the mini-games that lived inside the main rules: character creation was a game (one you could lose!), planet generation, starship building, trading, ground combat, space combat, et al. I wish all games had littler ones inside to bite 'em.

Random army generation.

I'm pretty convinced I'm the only person alive that actually enjoys that, but I keep messing with the idea.

Dear Weasel

I puttered around with random army generation for a few years but could never get it to work well.

Good luck though

Otto

I have a weakness for puns. I'll work them into a scenario.

Leftenant Blitheringthwaite. Leutenant Bubmann. Leutenant Assmann. Captain Tuftiddie, of the Dinwiddie Tuftiddies.

Sucks County. (Kind of like Springfield, you have one in every state.) The Miasmatic River. Gobbler Knob. Felcher's Bottom. Etc.

I enjoy the research to verify if a mechanic is realistic or not.

Using large (3x man height) deity figures for appropriate ancients armies on the tabletop as part of the mechanic for morale, nerve, competency, frenzy, and the like. The vision is to have simultaneous human and deity battles going on where the state of the associated units affected each other's capabilities. As a rough starter, a god is more powerful if it has more worshipers alive, and a set of worshipers is more powerful when their god is beating up on another one.

I've never actually finished rules that do it, but as described in the OP guidance, I keep resurrecting the idea because it leads to better ways to represent those concepts.

Weasel, I too love the idea of random army generation, but have as yet figured it out in a practical way.

eththeipi that's a great idea. I have been fumbling around with something like that too, but for 20th Century. Angels vs demons fighting overhead while the humans fight below.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

@Bunkermeister – For 20th century angels/demons, assuming from the context, that these are way too powerful for humans to reasonably engage without obscene numbers (or possibly with them), I have a series of scenarios like that.

I gave both sides mirrored asymmetric objectives (open the portal/stop the portal from opening) and had the angels/demons lose massive victory points if they attacked the normal. The victory points were inherently tied to the objectives as "manna".

You had to do certain things like position artifacts, occupy terrain, kill human opponents (with humans) in certain ways to earn manna. Both humans and angels/demons earned manna for achieving objectives, but at different rates. So angels/demons directly killing humans as a means to stop them from achieving objectives was almost always a net loss.

This VP mechanic drove both sides to basically run separated battles in the same space, while indirectly interacting on the objectives.

The best part is it didn't require "rules" to do it. It ran on my QILS simple combat system and manna values were handled with numbered poker chips on the board and a casualty counter.

I've always liked the idea of partially random army generation. In other words, you have a set basic list and then add a number of units from a random table, some of which will be more of the army's basic types. Thinking of ancients especially…

Using large (3x man height) deity figures for appropriate ancients armies on the tabletop as part of the mechanic for morale, nerve, competency, frenzy, and the like.

That is a really cool idea!

What happens when Romans fight Successors…? Do the Roman versions of the gods wear togas, the Greeks tunics? Hmmmm….

- Ix

I have a lot. One I would like to finish soon is the "scripted decision tree" campaign. Instead of using maps and forces and hidden movement (which is typically slow, paperwork-intensive, and likely to generate extremely lopsided battles), just use a decision tree to generate battles and influence the starting relationships of each one.

My instinctive love of maps and lists keeps me from ever completing one of these.

- Ix

Dear Yellow Admiral

I've already done It.

I use exactly that system for my American Civil War Campaigns (basically it's a flow-chart). And for my 18th Century campaigns I use a card system which never makes lopsided battles and is almost instantaneous. You can unpack, run, and repack the game in 15 minutes and get a battle set up in that time and move on to the table top action. There's no paperwork, no record keeping (where there is, but it's handled automatically for you by the flow chart or the deck of cards, and there's no cumbersome record keeping.

It's easy to do…

IF you're willing to make the conceptual leaps to accomplish it.

I love maps too, but I realized long ago that map was the thing that put the monkey-wrench into the machine of the game because most players simply won't put in the work to make a map system work.