Something that has majorly bugged me in script writing is the use of the word "that" when "the" would suffice.
(Bad guy runs off with a briefcase MacGuffin.)
Movie Star: Let's go get that briefcase!
I know it's technically permissible. In English, it denotes the selection of a particular object - however, in spoken English, especially in television and movies, it is inserted into situations that sound unnatural. Oh, that briefcase? I had no idea which briefcase it was until you said it was that one! Often, the object being referred to is not in sight (so the speaker cannot point to it), and often it is not the object of the previous person's statement (so the speaker cannot argue that the object is a clear antecedent). And always, it seems, the object is one of a kind, and would never be confused with another object of the same kind in the context of the scene.
There is no reason for using the word that in these situations. It is redundant, clunky, and it knocks my right out of my suspension of disbelief. The actor is destined to fail to make bad writing seem natural. Maybe overstating that in a sentence is a part of some linguistic pattern elsewhere in the world, but not in any American dialogue I have ever heard.
While we're at it, I'd like to tell you about how much I hate the phrase "Hang on!" used in EVERY wild ride in a TV show or movie throughout history...but I'll stop now.
Hacks.
Friday, March 21, 2014
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Dread: the game, a review
Last night I ran a game of Dread: the Game. (If you haven't played this neat game, in short, it is this: it's a roleplaying game where, instead of rolling dice, you take a turn at a Jenga tower. If it falls, you die.) I have some good and not so good things to report on it.
Well, let's get the bad out of the way first. It takes 30 or so pulls for any given Jenga tower to even start to be precarious. We had over 40 pulls in the game, and the tower did not fall until the very end. People had died, sure, but in inescapable situations, and even at each other's hands, not from the main mechanic of the game which is supposed to kill people. Given that the game I ran was a) meant to be a one shot adventure, and b) had a larger than usual number of players, I would expect the deaths to come often enough with the number of pulls they were making. We were even drinking beer, and the Jenga tower was sitting on and end table in the middle of the room which was on carpet. The tower swayed, but never fell until it got purposefully knocked over (in the game, this means the character dies but succeeds in his or her action heroically). Near the end of the evening, I was simply killing people off by GM's fiat - they were getting tired of the game, and so was I.
The problem with Dread - the number of pulls it takes to knock over the tower - could be fixed. Each person makes two or even three pulls per attempted action. Still, it was an unexpected problem that put a damper on the fun, in my opinion. The official rules say one pull on the pile per action; I don't know if the game creators realized that, by the time you make 30 pulls, everyone is tired of the tower not falling. Players kept commenting about how the tower needed to fall, and people needed to die. Players were rationalizing reasons for them to off other players, or just go ahead and put themselves into inescapable situations in a sort of player-driven suicide. We'll know better what to do next time, if we play it again, but the main mechanic of the game is a heck of an important thing to get wrong.
What was good about the game? The mechanic was novel. The rules were simple. The "making characters" section made sense, but wasn't necessarily anything we could have thought up out of the blue. Playing Jenga is fun and nerve wracking, and that lends drama to keeping your character alive.
Some of the good things about the game that people really enjoyed - the intriguing assigned characters, the story, the backstabbing - that was all me. Well, maybe not the backstabbing; we're all a vindictive, competitive bunch who enjoyed locking other characters outside the front door to be eaten by the Big Bad. So we made the fun for ourselves using the game as a framework.
I added a house rule that every person had exactly one thing that didn't require a pull, and one thing that required two. (What you were good at, and what you suck at.) Maybe next time I'll only put in what you suck at - anything to keep the number of turns at the Jenga tower high!
If you like the numbers game of roleplaying games, this game is not for you. It's a short game, there's no leveling up, there's no loot. Everyone enjoyed a good horror romp though. For better or worse, the Dread the Game system worked for us. Though really, we will all probably go back to playing Are You A Werewolf? next week.
Well, let's get the bad out of the way first. It takes 30 or so pulls for any given Jenga tower to even start to be precarious. We had over 40 pulls in the game, and the tower did not fall until the very end. People had died, sure, but in inescapable situations, and even at each other's hands, not from the main mechanic of the game which is supposed to kill people. Given that the game I ran was a) meant to be a one shot adventure, and b) had a larger than usual number of players, I would expect the deaths to come often enough with the number of pulls they were making. We were even drinking beer, and the Jenga tower was sitting on and end table in the middle of the room which was on carpet. The tower swayed, but never fell until it got purposefully knocked over (in the game, this means the character dies but succeeds in his or her action heroically). Near the end of the evening, I was simply killing people off by GM's fiat - they were getting tired of the game, and so was I.
The problem with Dread - the number of pulls it takes to knock over the tower - could be fixed. Each person makes two or even three pulls per attempted action. Still, it was an unexpected problem that put a damper on the fun, in my opinion. The official rules say one pull on the pile per action; I don't know if the game creators realized that, by the time you make 30 pulls, everyone is tired of the tower not falling. Players kept commenting about how the tower needed to fall, and people needed to die. Players were rationalizing reasons for them to off other players, or just go ahead and put themselves into inescapable situations in a sort of player-driven suicide. We'll know better what to do next time, if we play it again, but the main mechanic of the game is a heck of an important thing to get wrong.
What was good about the game? The mechanic was novel. The rules were simple. The "making characters" section made sense, but wasn't necessarily anything we could have thought up out of the blue. Playing Jenga is fun and nerve wracking, and that lends drama to keeping your character alive.
Some of the good things about the game that people really enjoyed - the intriguing assigned characters, the story, the backstabbing - that was all me. Well, maybe not the backstabbing; we're all a vindictive, competitive bunch who enjoyed locking other characters outside the front door to be eaten by the Big Bad. So we made the fun for ourselves using the game as a framework.
I added a house rule that every person had exactly one thing that didn't require a pull, and one thing that required two. (What you were good at, and what you suck at.) Maybe next time I'll only put in what you suck at - anything to keep the number of turns at the Jenga tower high!
If you like the numbers game of roleplaying games, this game is not for you. It's a short game, there's no leveling up, there's no loot. Everyone enjoyed a good horror romp though. For better or worse, the Dread the Game system worked for us. Though really, we will all probably go back to playing Are You A Werewolf? next week.
Friday, March 7, 2014
When Game Mechanics and Psychology meet
While mulling about that killer board game rattling around in the back of my mind that will never get published, I googled "game mechanics". I came up with a mechanic that isn't used too much in board or card games, but wanted to see where else it was used. From there I said to myself, "What kind of different game mechanics are there?"
There are the usual good resources like Wikipedia, but there were a few websites that gave me pause. Websites about a company's game-making strategies or a gamification wiki show how insidiously meta the industry can become. Examples such as Blissful Productivity, Extinction, and Loss Aversion read more like psychology textbooks than descriptors of game mechanics. I feel that there are two categories being mixed together here: game mechanics used by the player and game mechanics used on the player. I would want to enjoy studying the former, and understand that studying the latter is important in designing games, though probably less enjoyable for me. I would very much like to categorize the two separately. Perhaps call them game mechanics and game conditionings? (Named after classical conditioning, a la Pavlov.) Or some sort of word that shows that it is what a game uses to entice players to play.
There are the usual good resources like Wikipedia, but there were a few websites that gave me pause. Websites about a company's game-making strategies or a gamification wiki show how insidiously meta the industry can become. Examples such as Blissful Productivity, Extinction, and Loss Aversion read more like psychology textbooks than descriptors of game mechanics. I feel that there are two categories being mixed together here: game mechanics used by the player and game mechanics used on the player. I would want to enjoy studying the former, and understand that studying the latter is important in designing games, though probably less enjoyable for me. I would very much like to categorize the two separately. Perhaps call them game mechanics and game conditionings? (Named after classical conditioning, a la Pavlov.) Or some sort of word that shows that it is what a game uses to entice players to play.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
A statistical analysis: distributing pre-made characters
Last post, I described the problem of distributing pre-made characters to a group of picky roleplayers. Players get to choose or are assigned a character. If they are assigned a character, they may not like it. Let's see what method of distribution works the best.
Let's have ten players and ten pre-made characters. Each player would be satisfied, for example, playing 5 of those characters. The odds of a player getting a character he or she enjoys in a random draw would be 0.5. The odds that all players would get a character they enjoy would be 1024 to 1 (0.098%). Consider it like ten coin tosses, and we calculate the odds of getting ten heads in ten tosses. It would seem fair, since no one person or group of people would have preferential treatment, but odds are, one or more people would not like their character.
Now, imagine each player chose a character, one by one, until they were all gone. Let's not think about how we decide what order to have players choose in. The odds of each person having a character they would enjoy shrinks as the pool of characters shrink. However, the first five picks would have a chance of 100% that they'd find a character they like, because each player likes 5 characters, and less than 5 characters have been chosen, guaranteeing at least one they enjoy. This creates a better opportunity for those who get to choose first, however, it creates the air of unfairness for those who have to choose last.
Let's have ten players and ten pre-made characters. Each player would be satisfied, for example, playing 5 of those characters. The odds of a player getting a character he or she enjoys in a random draw would be 0.5. The odds that all players would get a character they enjoy would be 1024 to 1 (0.098%). Consider it like ten coin tosses, and we calculate the odds of getting ten heads in ten tosses. It would seem fair, since no one person or group of people would have preferential treatment, but odds are, one or more people would not like their character.
Now, imagine each player chose a character, one by one, until they were all gone. Let's not think about how we decide what order to have players choose in. The odds of each person having a character they would enjoy shrinks as the pool of characters shrink. However, the first five picks would have a chance of 100% that they'd find a character they like, because each player likes 5 characters, and less than 5 characters have been chosen, guaranteeing at least one they enjoy. This creates a better opportunity for those who get to choose first, however, it creates the air of unfairness for those who have to choose last.
Enjoyment (all) = 1 * 1 * 1 * 1 * 1 * 0.5 * 0.4 * 0.3 * 0.2 * 0.1 = 0.12% (833.33 to 1)
Now imagine a random draw + trading option. Half of the people will get something they like, half will not. Of those that do not, they are allowed to trade characters. 2 pairs of players could trade if the other person had something they liked. Therefore, the odds of satisfying every player is zero if we have an odd number of unsatisfied players. But what are the odds of either two, four, six or eight players having a character they do not like? Again, we use the coin toss analogy:
Odds of an even number of heads on a coin toss = 0.205 + 0.205 + 0.044 + 0.044 = 0.498
So, it's almost a 50% chance that there are an even number of characters that can be traded. The math seeing if two players can trade is pretty complex, so I will skip it. Suffice to say that it's a greater than 50% chance one or more people will be unhappy.
What about letting players choose the five characters beforehand, and the GM (me) doling out who gets what? What are the odds of each character getting chosen by at least one player? The odds of any of the ten characters not getting chosen by a player is 1024 to 1 (0.097%). This sounds like the best option.
Obviously, there are many confounding issues to the analysis. Maybe players are more or less picky. Maybe some characters seem really fun to play, and some are so boring or unimportant no one wants to play them. Maybe there are some players who would be happy playing anything.
Hopefully you've enjoyed my crappy math. Feel free to correct mistakes.
Dread: the Game aka that Jenga Game, and a few homebrew specifics
I've mentioned Dread: the Game here before. In short, it is a roleplaying game where instead of rolling dice, you pull from a Jenga tower for conflict resolution. Pull from the tower, succeed in an action. Don't pull. and you fail. If the tower falls, the character dies. There are other rules for further effects, but you get the gist of it.
The setting is going to be a farm where the farmer has recently died, and each character has a reason to be there the day before the property auction - the bereaved daughter, the ex-wife, the farmhand, the neighbor, the state executor, real estate buyers, a reporter, the banker, a cop. (Some of my players may be reading this blog, so no spoilers. But yes, Dread is a horror game, so that's what they should be expecting.)
I chose to pre-make characters to have them relate to one another in a specific way. Each character knows of the other but isn't very close - the daughter lived out of state, the ex-wife was married to the farmer when the daughter was too young to remember, the neighbor wasn't too neighborly over the years, the cop and the banker have said hello at the coffeeshop once or twice, etc. This mirrors the general familiarity players have with each other's characters at the beginning of campaigns. A player may say that their character has a past with this other character, but unless they sit down together and write a novel about their backstory, how close are they, really? This way, each character has the familiarity of knowing each other in a small town without having to deal with being too close. I think it is the perfect analogy for "you meet in the tavern" beginnings of your usual hack and slash game.
A tough decision was choosing how to distribute the characters. Complete randomness may create unsatisfied players. Players choosing one by one means the last few players to choose will scrape the bottom of the barrel. For now, I have decided to distribute randomly, then allow people to trade characters if both agree.
There's a juicy mathematical analysis there, I just know it! Maybe next post.
I've been drawing up the layout of the farm and each building. I've detailed the plots and various things that will be happening. Here's hoping it will be loads of fun for everyone.
The setting is going to be a farm where the farmer has recently died, and each character has a reason to be there the day before the property auction - the bereaved daughter, the ex-wife, the farmhand, the neighbor, the state executor, real estate buyers, a reporter, the banker, a cop. (Some of my players may be reading this blog, so no spoilers. But yes, Dread is a horror game, so that's what they should be expecting.)
I chose to pre-make characters to have them relate to one another in a specific way. Each character knows of the other but isn't very close - the daughter lived out of state, the ex-wife was married to the farmer when the daughter was too young to remember, the neighbor wasn't too neighborly over the years, the cop and the banker have said hello at the coffeeshop once or twice, etc. This mirrors the general familiarity players have with each other's characters at the beginning of campaigns. A player may say that their character has a past with this other character, but unless they sit down together and write a novel about their backstory, how close are they, really? This way, each character has the familiarity of knowing each other in a small town without having to deal with being too close. I think it is the perfect analogy for "you meet in the tavern" beginnings of your usual hack and slash game.
A tough decision was choosing how to distribute the characters. Complete randomness may create unsatisfied players. Players choosing one by one means the last few players to choose will scrape the bottom of the barrel. For now, I have decided to distribute randomly, then allow people to trade characters if both agree.
There's a juicy mathematical analysis there, I just know it! Maybe next post.
I've been drawing up the layout of the farm and each building. I've detailed the plots and various things that will be happening. Here's hoping it will be loads of fun for everyone.
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