Awhile back I wrote “Treasure Maps & The Unknown: Goals in the Megadungeon“. This post is just a simple streamlining of an idea that was running throughout that essay:

If an RPG rewards you for a specific tactical method, that method will be preferred and sought out. For example, if the game rewards you only for combat, that provides a strong motivation to seek out combat. There will still be some strategic thought employed (as one differentiates between “challenges that can be overcome” and “shit that’s too tough for us”), but the tactical method being rewarded will be strong pre-selected.

If you shift the game’s reward to a strategic goal, on the other hand, then players are free to pursue any tactical method for achieving that goal. As a result, you game will be more flexible and, in my opinion, more interesting.

Actually, as I write this, I realize this principle probably applies beyond RPGs. For example, Chess provides only one reward (winning the game) and it only awards it when a strategic goal has been achieved (achieving checkmate). Imagine if Chess instead rewarded points based on capturing pieces. The entire focus of the game would be narrowed. And what if the game preferentially rewarded capturing pieces with your Rook instead of your Bishop? The focus of the game would become even more limited.

In a similar fashion,victory in Twilight Imperium is achieved when a player reaches 10 victory points. Virtually every reward in the game is a strategic one (which can be achieved using a variety of tactics depending on the circumstances of the game). The exception? One of the strategy cards gives the player picking it 2 victory points. This specific reward for a tactical method (“pick the Imperial Strategy card”) warps the game by “forcing” everyone to pursue that tactical method. The problem was so significant that Fantasy Flight Games completely revised the strategy cards in order to eliminate it in the first expansion pack for the game.

Couple of bits of site news:

(1) The comments are now working again after being off-line. Not sure how long they were down for (possibly a couple of days), but I really wish WordPress would isolate and fix this bug.

(2) Russian spammers have figured out the math captcha. (I can tell by the dozens of Russian language spam messages filling up my Akismet filter.) Not sure what I’m going to do about it, yet, but this drastically increases the odds that your comment will vanish into the dark abyss of Akismet, never to emerge. Sorry about that.

But if you post a comment and you don’t see it immediately appear on the site, you might want to toss me an e-mail and give me a head’s up so that I can go trolling through the spam filter for it. Thanks!

Tagline: One of four games in WOTC’s family card game line, Pivot has all the potential of becoming a classic card game.

Ultimately, Twitch was definitely the best of the games in this line. Pivot hasn’t gotten as much play through the years, but I did pull it out at a party recently and had a good time with it. I’d still recommend tracking down a copy as a quirky alternative to Uno.

Wizards of the Coast has recently released a series of four games – Twitch, Pivot, Alpha Blitz, and Go Wild! — designed to enter the family marketplace alongside familiar games like Uno and Skip-Bo. After reading a review of Twitch I immediately went out and bought myself a copy of what sounded like a great, addictive game and was anything but disappointed (see my review of Twitch elsewhere on RPGNet).

On the strength of my extremely positive results with Twitch I went out and bought Pivot. After playing this game I would have to say that Twitch is the superior game, but Pivot is fantastic as well – as testament to that fact I’ve played it three nights in a row, and have plans to play it again this evening.

The concept, like Twitch’s, is incredibly simple: You have cards numbered from 1-80 along with a handful of Up cards, Down cards, and Pivot cards. Each player is dealt a hand of seven cards. The first player plays a card and the next player (going clockwise) must play a card higher than the one last played. Play continues in this manner until a Down card is played. When the Down card is played play now goes counterclockwise and each subsequent player must play a card lower than the one before him. This, of course, continues until an Up card is played. Pivot cards have the effect of reversing the direction of play no matter which way it is currently going (if you’re going up, a Pivot card will make you go down – if you’re going down the Pivot card will make you go up). If you can’t play you have to draw a card. If you play a card and no one else can play a card (play goes all the way around the circle and returns to you with no additional cards being played) you can play whatever card you want to. The goal is to get rid of all your cards.

That’s the game in a nutshell. In addition some of the number cards also act as specials – Extra Turn lets you take an extra turn before play goes onto the next player, Next Player Draw makes the next player draw a card before his turn, and Skip Next Player means (surprise, surprise) play skips the player after you. There’s also an optional scoring method if you want to play several games in a row to determine an outcome.

I have only one specific, quantifiable problem with this game. To understand this problem requires a bit of context: The Up card has a picture of a red arrow curving in a clockwise direction (which is the direction play continues when an Up card is in effect). The Down card, on the other hand, is a blue arrow pointing in a counterclockwise direction. The Pivot card has two arrows – one pointing clockwise and the other counterclockwise. So far so good, but for some unknown reason they chose (on the Pivot card) to color the clockwise arrow blue and the counterclockwise arrow red.

No one’s claiming that this isn’t a minor problem, but it confused us several times when we were first trying to get a hang of the game. (“What direction is play going?” “Let’s look at the arrow…” whoops…).

Here’s the final analysis: Twitch is ultra-addictive and a great game – if you haven’t bought it yet, I would say you should buy that one first. Pivot is a fairly addictive game, but also has strategy (which Twitch definitely doesn’t have).

Like Twitch, Pivot isn’t going to find a place on your shelf alongside Magic or the Dune CCG, but it is an admirable addition to your collection of games like Uno or Skip-Bo.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Title: Pivot
Writers: Andre Francois with Jim Lin, Richard Garfield, Robert Gutschera, Paul Peterson, and Teeuwynn Woodruff
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Price: $6.95
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: 1-57530-597-6
Originally Published: 1998/06/23

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Dread is a storytelling game of horror based around a core mechanic in which the players pull blocks from a Jenga tower whenever their characters attempt a meaningful action: If the tower doesn’t collapse, the action is successful. If it does, the character is eliminated from the story, the tower is rebuilt, and play continues.

The intent is that the tower’s steady descent into precariousness models the traditional horror pacing of “tension rises, something bloody happens, and then tension starts rising again”. And, in my experience, this fundamentally works: In a focused gaming environment, the physical act of pulling the block viscerally and collectively immerses the players into the emotional state of the narrative.

So, at a basic level, the mechanic is very, very effective.

Which makes it all the more unfortunate that the game inherently suffers from a systematic pacing failure that arises from the same mechanic.

Let’s assume that you want a collapse or near-collapse state at the end of the game (for a tension-filled conclusion).

Per the designers of the game in this thread, it takes about 30 pulls to reach a collapse-state on the tower. I haven’t done any rigorous testing, but that sounds pretty plausible based on my experience. Unfortunately, this means that Dread only reduces the time between collapse-states by 10% (by pulling 3 additional blocks per character knocked out when you rebuild the tower). That means that in a two-collapse game one of the players will be sitting out of the action for nearly half the game. In a three-collapse game, one of the players will be sitting out for 60% of the game.

(To put that in perspective, it means that in a two hour game featuring three collapses, one of the players will play for 45 minutes and then watch the other players for an hour and a quarter. Even doubling the rate of pulls after the first collapse only mitigates this problem.)

Obviously this isn’t a problem if you’ve got a pool of players who don’t mind being completely passive spectators for long periods of time, but the “no chatter” rule in Dread (prohibiting players from talking out of character) only exacerbates a problem which is widely recognized as being a bad idea in game design for a reason.

THE END GAME PROBLEM

The logical conclusion would seem to be pacing for games featuring a single collapse-state: People aren’t “supposed” to be eliminated except for possibly a single elimination during the final climactic struggle. This makes the game considerably narrower in its utility, but appears to be the only way to easily resolve the “bored player” syndrome.

Unfortunately, this solution only calls attention to the other problem the game has: Tension deflation following a tower collapse.

Theoretically, of course, this models the tension/release cycle of horror movie pacing (as described above). But the player elimination problem forces us to abandon that pacing. And even if we didn’t do that, the same problem exists at the end of the game: There’s no way to quickly ratchet the tension back up.

Bill is killed by the werewolf… and then the werewolf isn’t scary any more and the group mops him up.

For mid-game collapses, of course, the GM should make the werewolf run off and then come back later (once the tension has built again). That, after all, is how horror movies work.

But the problem is repetitive: Whenever the tension ratchets up to the point that you can trigger an effective conclusion, there’s a high-risk for a collapse. And since a collapse always indicates a failure, it means that the actual conclusion will happen AFTER the collapse. This means that the game tends to either (a) end on a whimper or (b) a sacrifice (in which one of the players sacrifices their character by knocking over the tower to achieve a Pyrrhic victory). The latter is effective… but only up to the point where it becomes predictable.

SOLUTIONS?

Unfortunately, I don’t have any.

And it is unfortunate, because, as I mentioned above, the core mechanic is very effective in practice: The Jenga tower not only mechanically creates tension which normally requires a great deal of GM skill to evoke, but also invests the table collectively in that tension as a shared experience.

The game is intensely good at a micro-level. But its inherent pacing problems create a consistently frustrating experience at the macro-level.

Last week I proposed space scurvy, but deficiency diseases can also be interesting to consider in the context of a fantasy setting.

Imagine for a moment that fantastical creatures like dragons, basilisks, or medusa depend on some vitamin (or a complex of vitamins) which allow them to process magical energy or a “supernatural essence”. For the most part this is no big deal: This “magimin” exists as part of the natural food chain in fantasyland and these creatures get plenty of it from their natural diet. (Some of them might produce it naturally under certain conditions, just like we do with vitamin E from sunlight.)

But when these creatures start suffering from a magimin deficiency — for example, if a dragon starts eating livestock who have been raised in a natural antimagic field — things can turn bad. Our dragon, for example, might find his wings withering and falling off while his heart enlarges in an effort to cope with pumping blood through his great bulk. A medusa’s snakes wilt and become lifeless. A basilisk might slowly grow blind as its own eyes turn to stone.

A little too much science in your fantasy? Maybe. But I like to give thought to this sort of thing because it opens up interesting possibilities.

For example, what if we make the magimin deficiencies a little more magical? Without their magimins, dragons slowly begin to shrink… eventually becoming nothing more than large snakes. But what happens if a mad wizard were to superdose an ordinary snake with magimins… would they become a dragon (or some other insanely mutated creature)? Now we have a mechanism for those “mad scientist” wizards to use when they’re creating owlbears. And that means they need a supply of magimin. And gaining that magimin (by harvesting fairies, for example, or simply having it shipped in) will have consequences that can serve as adventure hooks (and also give the PCs non-standard ways of fighting back).

On the other end of the scale, what if magical creatures went away because their magimins went away? But if magimins were to be reintroduced to the food chain, suddenly we’d have a lot of dragons that have been trapped as snakes for a couple hundred years re-appearing.