"Game Styles" Topic

One of the salient points in the 18th Century Imagi-Nation Campaign game I am running is he open style. Players are allowed pretty mu8ch to do whatever they want within a few general guidelines. The only limit is truly their imaginations. So there are no complicated rules of strategies or paths for the players to run down in their game. They make it up on their own. Their intentions then are submitted to the umpire, me, who decides the results of their interactions. This is quite interesting both because of he simplicity of the design and the results that are forthcoming. Players are given "means" with which to attempt their goals, but what these are or how they are to be obtained (beyond the creation of table top battles) are largely up to them. Thus the strategies in the game are largely the use of these means to attack an opponents means, or to gain victory points, which are entirely dfiffernt from means. The game ends when anyone has 10 or more victory points, and the highest score 9which can be over 10) is the ultimate winner. I am also allowing players to dream up their own "means" if they wish. I am also seeing how players could determine their own "victory conditions."

It's a matrix game then. Sounds like fun.

Ottoathome,

I sure that I am not alone in being a senior with poor eyesight.

Please consider using smaller paragraphs with blank lines between them so that it will be easier to read for our old eyes. Your huge blocks of text are very difficult for my eyes to read.

-- Jeff

Rich Bliss

Not as I underssand matrix games. The intentions lead to table top battles primarily and things that do not lead to table top battles are resolved more or less like a GM does in an AD&D game.

Ottoathome is possibly right for the wrong reason about the system he described not being a matrix game.

The method of resolution for a matrix game is irrelevant. Whether you use differential equations, discrete randomizers, or human adjudication, a game can still be a matrix game.

Allowing players to create their own means and possibly objectives means it is not necessarily a zero-sum game. If it doesn't have a zero-sum form because of the way means are introduced into the game, then it can't be a matrix game.

I'd toss out the victory points.

For each battle, you need a turn length, and you need to identify the conditions under which an army will leave the battlefield regardless of the general's wishes. Leave it to each player to decide whether he was successful that day.

For the campaign as a whole, I don't think you can let each player pick his own objective and still have them in competition. (How do you compare provinces conquered against prosperity? And it could get worse. One of them may just want to collect giants. Or porcelain.)

You could either assign a goal--winner is the first player to increase annual revenue by X thalers, and he can do this by peace and prosperity, conquering provinces or some combination--

OR announce that the campaign will go on for X many years and let the players judge for themselves how successful they've been.

You really, really, don't want to have to decide how many points to for conquering Silesia and how many for a really nice porcelain collection.

Dear Robert

It is difficult to understand the concept. The TACTICAL battles are fought out and decided by Victory points which are objective, that is they are represented by a spot for example which if you have a unit standing on at the end of the battle you get one victory point. The other victory points are for example, taking an enemy or holding your own headquarters, camp, or line of retreat. Others can be for accomplishing certain things, or destroying critical enemy units. The more TACTICAL victory points you have at the end of the battle the better and at the end of the battle the number a person is superior by translates to strategic Victory points.

the players making up their own victory conditions is entirely worthwile and workable, PROVIDED in the pursuit of this you "risk resoures" just as if you were waging war. Collecting porcelain, or for that matter mistresses' is no different than collecting lands or victories. Resoureces are "risked" in the attempt and possibly lost to no effect. If you are inclinced to doubt, ask how much Louis XV risked in "collecting Pompadour or DuBarry) and how much he lost in the attaining and maintaining of them. Frederick collected provinces. Who got the better deal? I dunno, you have to ask Louis or Frederick. Who makes the better deal with Posterity? Frederick? Or is it Augustus the Strong of Saxony whose fame is immortalized in the palaces he built, the bastards he sired and the art colletions he amassed which stuff our museums with little brass plaques with his name on them while Frederick is all but forgotten outside of academia and war gamers.

Personal self-fashioning can be as great a goal and one even more hotly pursued than competition. I once had a player in an ancient campaign I ran who forgot all about conquest and became obsessed with building the Seven wonders of the World at one of his cities. Actually he got nine eventually!

If for example a player wished to attempt atrocious acts of evil, I suppose he could and become renowned for that, but again in all these things resources must be risked for the benefit to be gained.

Wargames is a hobby where human megalomania can be safel encouraged without incarceration to its perpetrators or harm to it's victims.

Yeah, I got that, actually. (Though considering the time I spend indoors painting castings I'm not sure about the "without incarceration" bit. Just because I own the key…)

It's the strategic competition that stops me. Different strategic goals, certainly. But to declare that someone has won the campaign, you have to feed too many different risks and rewards into what must, in the end, be fairly arbitrary "points." It's bad enough assessing the relative merits of a porcelain bowl, a province, a literary reputation and a mistress. (Are there extra points for redheads?) It may be worse when you have to assess the risks represented by tax dollars, wars, bad reviews and a venereal disease. I wouldn't think being able to say that Joe had won because the umpire valued his 10 sonnets and their accompanying reviews above the value of Sam's 10 mistresses--who were not asked to provide reviews--would be worth the trouble and possible bad feeling.

May be bad memories on my part, of course. I once entered into a competition where, once we'd all created out entries, we were shown the scoring sheet. And from the way the scoring sheet was written, I knew I could not possibly win. Write the scoring sheet another way, and it might have been impossible for me to lose.

You could get around this to a degree by placing a value on everything--risks and rewards--before the campaign started, but it doesn't seem worth the trouble. Run the campaign, and let each player judge for himself his success.

I beat out Bill Gates, Warren Buffet Joss Whedon and Barrack Obama this week. I painted a lot more castings.

Dear Robert

As indeed you did. My point exactly. You do not have to quantify everything, nor do you have to be able to prove an ultimate winner. I once designed a game where there were TWELVE categories in which you could attain victory. Amassing of Honors and Titles, Victories on he Field of Mars, Triumphs in the courts of Venus, Internal improvement and development, Riches and Wealth, Patron of the Arts and humanities, Preservation of the Old Order, Acts of Evil and villainy, Vanguard of the Revoluton, man of sorrows and so on. In the game you got "tokens" or points in these fields for various actions. You chose one area at the start of the game to be your "Victory" and at the end of the game if you had MORE points than anyone else in the field, you won. If you had a single point in the field and no one else had chosen that field, you still won. If everyone had chosen that field and everyone had less than you, you won and they lost. So you could have six persons say, choosing "Victories on the field of Mars" and one who chose Patron of the Arts and Humanities, and one person who might have say 12 points in the "Triumph in the Fields of Mars" and won, when all the other five had say 10,8, 5,3, and 1. Meanwhile the patron had say three points. Both he and the top scorer in Mars thing would be the winners. Thus, it was possible as there were twelve players in the game for none, one, some or all to win.

It works. In fact it works very good because the player has to actually form in his own mind that he has won, as it is impossible for him to cheat. Think about it. If he has his own victory conditions and he makes it easily attainable, he does not defeat anyone else, and worse, he knows he cheated. So… cheating becomes absolutely self defeating.

Ah! Yes!! Choose the field and victory within that field. OK, that works. Thank you for your patience. I must back to the painting table. Someone may be gaining on me.