Right, so.

We've given feedback on all the entries, which will follow in this thread. Not all judges have given feedback on every game, but every game has feedback.

Now, don't expect too much, because here's what will inevitably happen. You've written a beautiful work of art. Unfortunately, it's the 19th roleplaying game we've reviewed, and the 12th that night, and we're really tired. So we totally miss the point and just say "Hey, I like the cards. Sadly, I don't like the setting and I don't think it's playable. Still, cyberpunk, that's cool!".

When this happens (and it will), we're sorry in advance. In fact, looking at the first chunk of feedback I'm about to post, I'm embarrassed how little feedback I've given. However, we're happy to go into more detail if you ask. Even though we didn't like every game, we're supportive of all of them, and happy to engage in dialogue to make them better.

Here we go, then. As you get feedback on your game, please break your anonymity, tell us you wrote the game, ask any questions and either thank us or berate us as appropriate.

Baggage Carousel

Jason: I want to try this! It falls in my “party game” bin, further afield even than a roleplaying poem, but that is not a dishonor in the least. I like the simplicity and the built-in humor that isn’t pushed hard (it doesn’t need to be - the setup is comedy gold). I could see playing this with my Mom. If I had a complaint, it would be that the game is a little too locked down - I think it’d be fussy in play to remember suit/number combinations, and I’m not sure the extreme specificity adds anything. Dividing objects by suit into broad categories, and relying on creative invention, would probably ge”t the job done.

Graham: What fun. It’s a parlour game, but tiptoeing around the edge of being a roleplaying game.
Some things don’t quite fit. For example, “Good days” and “Bad days”: nobody cares about the winner’s holiday, day by day.

I like the contraband.

As for the deck of cards: well, I love the random method of creating objects. Let’s draw some now: a Seven of Spades: an ultra-modern bomb. (Why is that not contraband?) A Three of Diamonds: an expensive artificial leg. Two of Clubs: an offensive cosmetic. That works nicely, although it’s not entirely together: if you draw three spades in a row, you tire of describing weapons and electronics.

It’s a rough gem. There’s the potential for a light storytelling game in there. We need more of those.

Eero: Really quite solid party game design. The core of the game is in the fact that the CO and the players are using the same set of guidelines in interpreting the fictional description of an item - it’s a game of telephone, basically, with the CO wrangling the otherwise straightforward set-making goal by forcing the players to try to guestimate the suit and value of the card he’s describing. Having the CO break ties between claims based on the fiction is crucial, but also a potential weak link: will the CO care about the fiction sufficiently, or will he strategize his descriptions and choices to optimize his own chance of victory? Will this break the game?

I’m not sure that the memory game part is a good idea here, but then I’m often not too hot on memorization in games - too much work, and rewards dull concentration over being a fun co-player. Perhaps, if the game’s fiction is deep enough, this part could work as a sort of immersion clause: the easiest way of remembering what your suitcase has is to be immersed in character, after all. I’m doubtful, though, especially as we’re not really interested in the epilogue stuff - we just want to know who won, that epilogue won’t be necessary.

It comes to me that the game could maybe make use of a chargen question: is your trip for business of pleasure? Fits the theme and might act in interesting ways in inspiring the players when they make claims for the various stuff put up for offer. Also provides a potential tie-breaker for multiple claims situations, as the CO can just award the item to the person whose stated purpose of visit fits the item better.

Also, this probably would benefit from having some mechanics for the players to trade items amongst themselves. Seems like you’ll be collecting much more than the seven (or more realistically, five) cards minimum needed for victory, after all.

All in all, a very solid piece. Has comedy, has ingredients. The roleplaying part is light-weight, but if the game works, that’s no big deal - more important to be a good game than to be good roleplaying.

Buddy Movie

Jason: This seems nice, although I don’t think it is a recipe for humor. It is a recipe for genre emulation, and it seems like it would work well for that. There’s nothing here that will make play funny other than your zany partner, who you picked because he is zany. That said, it is a simple enough framework that I think it will work to model the sort of movie arc you are after. No guidance for when and how to use the four special scenes is sort of weak. But props for keeping it simple and trusting your players.

Graham: The traits are good: characters defined by a single trait is a recipe for comedy. Here, there are two characters defined by two traits, one of which they share. Perfect for a buddy movie.

You can’t just say “Be funny or you’re cheating”! That’s not a comedy mechanic!

How would that central mechanic work? You’d bounce between success and failure, failing often, succeeding only occasionally. But failures in these movies are complex things: you fail when it’s embarrassing; you succeed only at wild and crazy schemes.

The best thing is making a situation worse with your trait. That shouldn’t just be an option. That should be the basis of the whole mechanic.

The Fail Die is kinda thrown in. It’s basically an oracle for comic situations. I like it.

Fun idea. Light and simple. I appreciate all that. Not convinced on the central mechanic, but overall, it’s neatly done.

Eero: I started liking the writing style, but it got pretentious through the first page. Luckily the author reined himself in once he got into the rules proper.

The game itself belongs in the school of comedy that basically tells you to be funny yourself. “If you’re not being funny, you’re breaking the rules” as the text puts it. It’s debatable whether this is sufficient advice on the matter, but I’m inclined to think that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - the game text doesn’t do much to convince me that the author’s faith in self-created comedy over actual game design is justified.

That aside, and assuming players who are ready to bring the funny, my main concern is that I don’t quite see how the pacing of the game is necessarily correct. By this I mean that while the game has pacing in the form of tick marks next to traits, I don’t see why the moment there are two marks next to each trait would necessarily be a good moment for the falling out scene. Perhaps the point is to just have a measurable pacing device the players can see and work towards, but I’m left to wonder whether something more could be done in this regard.

It’s also a shame that there are no separate rules for when the characters are working together and when they’re not - the meaning of falling out and getting back together is strictly narrative and does not actually reflect to the mechanics. This seems like an opportunity lost when the topic is buddy movie.

A separate major concern is the fact that the game does not offer any structure or tools for providing coherent adversity and dramatic arcs. This type of comedy requires a semblance of a plot and colorful secondary characters, so this seems like a clear lack. Of course not insurmountable if the players are up to creating everything themselves without structure, but that’s a pretty heavy requirement.

La Commedia

Graham: Comedy as Commedia dell’arte. How wonderful.

Lots of good stuff here. I like the masks. I like the way players can change masks. (There should actually be masks on the gaming table.)

The Apocalypse World mechanics aren’t quite working for me. Surely your mask, in Commedia dell’arte, shouldn’t simply give you +2. It should define who you are. If you’re Il Capitano, you don’t just get +2 for boasting. You boast all the time. You’re incapable of doing anything else.

I want more details about how hell works. Interestingly, I feel the Fronts mechanics from Apocalypse World would work well here.

Seriously, though, where are the ingredients? Sure, we said we wouldn’t complain about bad ingredient use, but I can’t find any of them here. Perhaps you were so inspired by comedy that you didn’t need anything else. Still. Dude.

All that said, it’s a workable game with comedy as Commedia dell’arte, and that’s good for me.

Jason: I love the notion of turning an existing game engine into something that can sort of run Commedia. I’m not sure this is it, but points for going there. It feels like the Commedia tropes are fighting with the AW rules in an imperfect fit. I have a hard time seeing what we would actually do at the table - this is definitely undercooked but very promising. Not using a single one of the ingredients is a bold choice!

Eero: The topic is excellent, but making it an Apocalypse World hack is not a long-sighted choice; it’s a funny in-joke, but not necessarily good game design. That being said, this is one of the stronger statements on comedy among the contest participants.

I’m torn on the game overall, as the power of the topic clearly overwhelms the design, but then on the other hand it’s also nice to read a short game text instead of the boring long-winded ones. In the final consideration I have to say that I would have liked to see this author create a full-blown game of Commedia with an original rules system - perhaps with the sweeping hellish adventure context, perhaps not - the topic has plenty of meat for this and more.

Quite Indubitably

Graham: That’s a difficult writing style. I skipped the first page. Even afterwards, it’s extremely wordy, like wading through froth. Which is a shame, because that aside, it’s well-structured.

I like it. It’s parlour narration, basically a parlour game, in which I try to incorporate silly words into an ongoing story. That’s fun.

This feels as though it should be a simple game: so why cards and dice? You could do this whole game just with cards. And probably without a character sheet.

Oh, God, Princess Collins. Where on Earth does that name come from? Certainly not England.

Nice to see Kings are exceptionally eloquent, while Queens are nagging aunts and screaming babies. I’ll just call you Mr Patriarchy.

But it’s good. It’s fun. Simplify it and I’d enjoy playing.

Jason: I like the diction cards. The rules are needlessly complicated parlor narration. The tone and presentation are wearing.

Eero: The rules seem to assume that the players care about the fiction despite giving the fiction no manner of influence on the proceedings. This is typical of parlor narration games - I’ve come to see it as a designer preference, some people are just that motivated about storytelling. This reflects on all the design choices in the game, beginning with the fact that your narration has no influence on your dice pool.

The most damning fact about the game from my viewpoint is that the fictional topic is not supremely endearing. A bit of curiousity is piqued by the way the topic and conditions of discussion are randomized out of a deck for the players to compete over, but this isn’t really enough to carry the whole game when the actual fiction has no impact on the proceedings.

The matter of parlor narration aside, it seems to me that the game has a reasonable relationship with the king of the genre, Once Upon a Time. The Diction cards need to be replaced with some mechanic that makes for less random-access searching, though - perhaps only allow the player to access the top five terms on the card at a time or something to make the game less about scanning the card and more about fitting a square peg in a round hole in an amusing manner.

Space Cowboy

Graham: There are fun things here. Brewing drinks is good and the Space Cowboys are pleasingly mundage.

It’s hard to understand, with much forward referencing. For most of the document, I’m thinking: should I know what Trouble is? Or is that going to be explained?

I’m not sure where the comedy is. Lots of comedy colour, but not much in the mechanics. Nevertheless, a fun game.

Jason: Too many words ending in the letter “g”. Not enough Rasslin’. I was digging the extremely gonzo setting until I got to the mechanical bits, which are sort of a brick wall. The game appears to be pretty complicated for no good reason. There’s a ton of color but I don’t know what to do with it. However I love the idea of a color-heavy, richly realized, extremely goofy sandbox to play in.

“Help from your starfish” and immediately thereafter “Involving bondage” is a nice juxtaposition.

Eero: The dicing system is weird. Insofar as I can see, you want to have as many dice as possible for both yourself and the dealer, except that your own dice have a linear effect on your number of successes while the dealer’s dice get a sharply decreasing return. And then all this is mixed up by the special rules such as Infectious Craziness.

The setting is great, sort of psychedelic hippy Americana in space. There’s enough thematic substance in the overwhelming craziness to give a backbone that comedic adventure needs. I like the mix of Buddhism and American libertarianism - few games in this selection took care to have a point in among the zany absurdism.

The only issue is that the game is convoluted, perhaps unnecessarily so. Playtest will tell, and a rewrite for clarity in procedure. And of course a bit more meat is required for a full game text, but that’s for the creator to decide on. Very promising.

Sponge Bob and the Gargoyle

Graham: This is rather sweet. Earning points isn’t working for me: I’d just mechanically remember things I did with Patrick to get points.

I like the different ways to win. I like rolling d6s, which give hindering players Recall points and helping players Bond points.

The central idea is good. The mechanics aren’t together, though: I thoroughly encourage you to steal from other roleplaying games that do similar things.

Eero: The fiction doesn’t breathe a lot as the game is so tight. I like the basic idea that whoever has the most guilt points is currently the gargoyle and has to play opposite to his character description. There’s not much else here game-wise, though.

The Big Tuna

Graham: I wondered, when I read this, why all the players were playing Max Tuna. Why would that be fun? Then I read the original game, at the back, which has everyone playing James Bond. That makes much more sense.

I like the parts of the brain vying for control of 007. I don’t like the tight story structure: unless these are done well, they can kill a game. The bad guy has way too much authority.

It’s parlour narration, but it’s a fun idea and I like the way everyone plays Bond.

Jason: Southern-fried pastiche. Highly structured, everybody plays one dude which is interesting. Author hastily reskinned it (leaving in at least one “spy”) but it hardly matters. He showed his work, anyway. Says it is GMless but it isn’t, “mother may I” mechanic. I really like the idea of the various factions in the protagonists head arguing - that could be really funny - but it is pasted into a game that is pretty limp. I can’t tell if the author is southern and diving into conscious parody of outsider perceptions of southern-ness or ... not from around here.

Eero: Everybody playing a single character certainly is comedy gold, and a pretty unique type of comedy characteristic of roleplaying, too. I don’t know if the reasonableness test is necessary, especially with 2d6 - the bell curve might not feel satisfactory, and it seems potentially unfunny to have your input get shot down by the dice. On the other hand, I find the set-up with the Tunas picking and choosing partially overlapping story pieces with another player doing re-narration to be a fine recipe for comedy. This needs to be rethought, but the core is solid.

I don’t like the act structure, and the game would benefit from making Tuna struggle with the world around him instead of making the players roll dice for whether they get to say their piece. Aside from that, the kernel seems really strong to me - this could be a very funny game.

Recall Notice

Graham: This is a tried-and-tested set of mechanics. I’m glad to see a roleplaying game that plays like a roleplaying game.

The comedy lies in the situation. However, I’m sure the mechanics facilitate comedy. Some mechanics seem to work against it: comedy is, to some extent, about unexpected failure, but Otherkind dice let you choose your failure. The Blasphemy rules might be pretty funny, though.

Ah, Physical, Mental and Social traits. They’re in everything. Put Piety in there or something.

Overall, though, it’d be fun to play. Can’t ask for much more than that.

Jason: I like the hacking, although I think that is somewhat contrary to the rules. The only straight-up humor emerging from mechanics here is Blasphemy, which I could see being really fun in play. The setup is certainly distinctive, and leaves me a little at sea as to what I need to be doing at the table. Easily remedied post-contest I imagine.

Eero: I like the setting, although it could be played a bit more Paranoid. The rules system is bland and, most damningly, non-comedic: nothing in particular encourages comedy here. The situation and setting are comedic, but those could as well be delivered in some other medium.

The Starfish Ambassador

Graham: This is rather magnificent. It’s comedy through etiquette, forcing the players to follow silly rules while speaking. Perfect. There are nice touches: I like the inanimate object that’s the Starfish ambassador.

I’d prefer a more open game, without a GM-figure, in which any player can upbraid another for breaking a rule. And I’d prefer more of a story: something like Baron Munchausen, in which telling stories is, itself, interesting.

So I’m not 100% sure this would be fun, as written. But the central idea is lovely and beautifully comic.

Jason: This game is awesome! It is also a party game, but whatever - it’s the best damn party game in the contest. The speaking rules would be daunting and suitably challenging, perhaps too much so - I could see ways to tune it to group preference and ability pretty easily. Escalating speech rules would, I think, cripple the game in short order as written. I love the Assistant’s role - great fun. This is a smart little game and I really think it has promise - it needs to be ruthlessly tuned through play. Also - TWO PAGES - you are my hero.

Eero: It’s funny and it’s playable. It’s also a parlor game and not very roleplay-ey, but that’s not a big deal at all in context. Seems immediately playtestable and has potential to turn into a card-based family game of some sort. No complaints on my part - lack of feedback here is because of satisfaction.

Valence

Graham: Right, so Bond = Chemical Bond. I like that. This is a concept game: you don’t necessarily expect it to become a publishable game, but it’s a good experiment.

The rules are long and difficult to follow. Lots of forward referencing. And there’s so much going on. Post-It notes, cards, atomic bonds. Do you really need all that? And it’s so abstract. I can’t work out what a story would be like.

Here is a question which I hope doesn’t come across as rude. Do you, Mysterious Author, want to play this game? Can you envisage yourself explaining it to your game group? Would they enjoy it? One problem with games competitions is that they provoke clever games that aren’t quite fun. I’m speaking for myself! God, the number of games I wrote that were technically OK but dull as all hell. (I am not saying your game is dull.)

Another difficult question. Is the Molymod kit essential for the game? Does it work like Jenga, in Dread, adding something to the game? Or is it a bit of a gimmick: so that this is the Game Which Uses Molymod?

There are good things here. The mad grab is wonderful. The emotions, associated with different molecules, would be pretty comic. If you’re at GenCon, Mysterious Author, I hope you’ll explain what you were trying to do, because I don’t quite understand and I’d like to.

Eero: The fiction does not breathe, for the game is much too concerned with making the novelty equipment work. A good example of what happens when strange tools take center stage.

I can sort of see how molecular bonds can inspire a roleplaying game, but this is much too over-structured to be enjoyable as it is - needs simplification.

OK, that's all the games. Whew!

We each chose a game we felt deserved special mention. These are:

Bread Mold Might Be Medicine (Graham’s special mention)
The Starfish Ambassador (Jason’s special mention)
Space Cowboy (Eero’s special mention)

Each of these was a stand-out for one of us, or two of us, or all of us.

JPRussel: You are welcome, and thanks for taking our criticism in the spirit it was intended. It is easy to judge but not so easy to take sometimes.

Congrats to everyone! In my view, comedy games are often a decade ahead of the field in experimentation, and it looks like there's a lot of interesting ideas here.

Hey Leo, definitely take it over to Praxis. It's the nature of contests that stuff is submitted half-baked.

Posted By: JesseHowever the fact that Eero saw the potential for psychological thriller in the game makes me wonder if perhaps the game is broader in its application than originally intended. Along those lines I have considered opening up the games scope a bit because I realized that all you need is an Institution, an Authority of that Institution and an Outsider with an orthogonal philosophy. For example I imagined a coffee house setting. The Doctor is the owner and the Patients are the regular customers. The Deluded then becomes the "new guy" who arrives and stirs up trouble with his skewed world view.

Definitely widen the scope - you'll want to shoot for something similar to MLwM in terms of creative freedom. Have a default flavour - perhaps modernist psych institution - but allow for easy recoloring. This was one of the most promising games of the selection this time around despite my unwillingness to see the topic as a very humorous one.

I'll write some more general commentary on the contest outcome next week, I expect. Have to play TSoY all weekend.

I wrote 6 Degrees of Resolution, which is the first game I've written since middle school. I really appreciate the comments all of you gave, and I totally agree with most all of them. In fact, I got to playtest it on the day before submission, which totally revealed many of its flaws, but I didn't have time to really revise it by then.

Just a couple of thoughts about the comments:

Jason - In our play, it was actually the LDO who had less fun. Since they didn't have a real "stake" in the scene or even a mood to play out, they tended to just sit back and watch while the other players argued and made stuff up and had fun. In some ways, it felt sort of like the party game Who Would Win?, where the LDO was just the judge.

Graham and Eero - Yeah, coherence was a big problem. I had the idea for the random tables because if I was going to have these brief little scenes involving (for the most part) different characters in each, I wanted a way to give the players a loaded gun as far as characterization and scene framing went. But, as you pointed out, the situations were too zany and random to work with in many cases. In our playtest, we also discovered that some personas and moods just didn't work well to drive action. Being numb or lethargic just makes for a pretty uninvolved character.

All of you - Yeah, the d30 is definitely gimmicky. It came about because I started to brainstorm moods and such, and got somewhere between 20 and 30. "Heck," I said, "I have d30, so let's just use that!" So I added in more and used it rather than editing and using something more reasonable.

But I really enjoyed myself, and I found both the process and the participation with reading the other entries to be a lot of fun. Thanks to the judges for all your hard work, and congratulations to The Visitor!

Hey Mark (and everybody),

Feel free to spawn a new thread, here or at Praxis, if you want to dig into your game. To answer your question - I don't think the bidding mechanic in Shaken (a game whose bones are strong and which I quite like) is going to have a strong bearing on the fiction (it determines outcomes, but so does flipping a coin). I am happy to be proven wrong; let's talk about it.

Oh, and Eero needs to videotape his Story of O session. Wait, what am I saying?

Congratulations, Sam! We all really liked it.

Hey, this is really nice. Lots of new people.

Oh, I wanted to give some love to the author of Sponge Bob. Hello, author of Sponge Bob. I don't know the cartoon at all, but I thought you did exactly what we wanted: took a genre of comedy and wrote some mechanics to support it. I wasn't in love with the mechanics, but I appreciate what you did. Stick around and keep designing stuff.

Damn, you're right. That was a fantastic game. It really captured the essence of what comedy was about. What happened to that, Jason?

Congratulations to Sam and everyone else,

I'm responsible for Space Cowboys of Independence. Space Cowboys has a dark history though, it is actually the third in a trilogy of Holiday themed comedy RPGs I've built in design contests. It's brethren are Christmas Ninjas(pdf) and Valentine Knights.

Far from a reskinning, Space Cowboys, unlike the other two, has no GM, because really, would Space Cowboys let anyone tell them what to do? It also changes some significant things in the dice mechanics, so while I'm pretty sure that things will work from how the basic system has worked with Christmas Ninjas and Valentine Knights in the past, I take Eero's concerns to heart about how Infectious Crazy could impact things.

I have trouble in making my rules text more understandable (both Jason and Eero mentioned this...), which is especially frustrating because my mechanics tend to be subtly unusual. In play, folks over the age of ten seem to pick it up after a few rolls. Perhaps I should describe the demonstration process, where "you split the dealer's roll into the three types (ignoring any type that wasn't rolled), and then set up the cowboy's roll along side each. Then the smallest pile that the cowboy has is her number of successes, keeping in mind the smallest pile might have no dice in it."

Jason, you are absolutely right about too many words ending in g, and Wraslin' is what Roughing ought to be called. Technically I'm allowed to do that too, as a second generation Texas emigrant.

Graham, the relationship between Trouble and the Tale (and, you know actually defining what those are) is something that I imply all over but never really state. In retrospect it belongs near the beginning. That I didn't include one was my one regret from after I posted my game.

Eero, I'm glad you enjoyed the more substantive side of the setting. While the world of the cowboys and their peculiar mindset is intended to be silly it is also intended to be uncomfortable. Humour that cannot express some depth just doesn't feel right to me. Of course sometimes the jokes write themselves in this respect, did you notice that Vatican City and Iran share the same Independence Day?

I'm really looking forward to getting Space Cowboys into playtesting, I've got my two regular groups interested at this point, so it should just be a matter of time.

- Mendel

OK, I'll put my hand up to being the author of Baggage Carousel; the contest was a lot of fun and was a good way of putting my thoughts in a new direction (I've written 4 other short form games between submitting Baggage Carousel and the judging, so something must have got shaken loose)

My creative process boiled down to: 9am, read contest thread; 10am, go shopping with the words 'bond, holiday, recall' reverberating around my head; 11am, return home and write Baggage Carousel; 12 noon, defeat Google Docs after a brief struggle and submit the game to Graham's page.

I totally dig the feedback about the end game and that will be the first thing ditched in the second draft, believe me, but at the time I was thinking "I really ought to make sure that 'recall' gets in there somewhere or I'm going to have to go back and put a starfish in'. So, out goes the whole good days/bad days thing, but maybe some kind of scoring related to how many items you can recall from your baggage...? I tend to agree with Eero though, as I also suck at memory games and would rather just focus on the story-telling rather than memorising a list of random objects.

I liked it, Michael. It reminded me of the Dying Earth RPG.

For me, it was one of the games that succeeded in being something more than a parlour game. We'd have got a story out of it.

One massive point of credit. Although the writing style was verbose, it didn't trip my "This is someone parodying English writing" alarm. I thought it was someone parodying Victorian writing, but not necessarily a foreigner writing British English. That is pretty impressive.

Posted By: GrahamHave You Seen The Yellow Sign? was my "entry".

I think it would have been more entertaining, and in the spirit of this year's theme, to have also put up dummy reviews of it then stay quiet about it for a bit to see if anyone questioned why nobody had claimed responsibility for it.

It's really amazing to see all the hard work put into this. Designers, judges, my hat is off to you.

The Visitor looks like fun (as do several others). I'm looking forward to seeing more development.

Hey JWalt, how closely are you going to hew to AW as you develop this? I love the idea behind the game but the engine really seems like a mismatch to me. I guess we'll see!

Actual masks would be pretty fun, especially if anybody could grab any mask and embody that character for whatever effect it might have.

Posted By: J. WaltonYup. My original plan was to have separate moves for each mask, which would make switching masks (and risking discovery by demons) a big deal.

Mind boggles. So fucking cool.

There was a pretty interesting Danish scenario commedia dell'arte scenario some years back, using masks and lazzi. I'll see if I can find a link, if anyone's interested.

Yeah, unfortunately I don't have much background in lazzi or actual commedia. My understanding of the Italian comic tradition comes filtered through Mozart and Shakespeare mostly. Like how Cherubino in the Marriage of Figaro is a version of Harlequin, even though opera buffa is kinda its own thing. So I'd have to do more research if I was really going to develop this.

I spent the first week of the contest researching commedia, and the best I was able to find for the lazzi is the second of Grantham's books Commedia Plays, although these are not generally historical in origin.

As mentioned above, I'm releasing Valence under a "do pretty much whatever you want with it" license, whatever that's worth. Both the PDF and the InDesign source that created may be downloaded from that link as well. This version is slightly corrected, and adds a credits page.

Posted By: Sebastian K. HickeyTheir objective, to find the ticket, remains consistent, but no more constrained, I'd say, than Montsegur 1244, for example.

First of all, "no more constrained [...] than Montsegur 1244" is not a very bold statement. M1244 is one of the most constrained games that I've seen that still manages to be engaging.

Second of all, I think Syndicate is more constrained. Montsegur lets you decide what you want, and what you do. Making decisions about what is important to you... well, that's kind of a driving force in the game, I think. Where is that choice in Syndicate? I want the lotto ticket. The alternative choices (do I abandon the search?) seem pretty insincere.

Not being able to determine your own goals makes this game constrained in a non-engaging way. I, as a player, think lotteries are stupid, and greed is lame. Where do we go from there? What does Syndicate offer me?

Posted By: MatthijsThere was a pretty interesting Danish scenario commedia dell'arte scenario some years back, using masks and lazzi. I'll see if I can find a link, if anyone's interested.

Super interested.

Posted By: majcher

Posted By: MatthijsThere was a pretty interesting Danish scenario commedia dell'arte scenario some years back, using masks and lazzi. I'll see if I can find a link, if anyone's interested.

Super interested.

http://alexandria.dk/data?scenarie=3034 - you can also download it from there.

Hi. "Threes" is my fault. I think the notes about the game being over-structured are spot on. I gave myself just a few hours to cook up something based off the Rule of Threes, and this is what resulted—but it's structured too much, in an effort to make sure there was a game there and not just a premise. As it is, I'm pretty sure it doesn't work now and won't get the development time to be made into something that does work for quite a while.

One gag, which doesn't come across in the text, is that it's a game of a rigidly edited film sequence: the three suspects talking to the camera, cut together in little segments, setting each other up for little jokes and unexpected doses of information. The suspects are each locked away in separate rooms, and it's funny mostly to the Interrogator, who watches these guys turn on each other as their story slowly comes together. The fact that the suspects cannot yell across the table at each other is, therefore, by design. The suspects are trying to keep their story straight without any ability to check in with each other—all they can do is pile on the information and hope.

The sentence-counting mechanism is there, in part, to give the dice more value, and also to keep the characters from saying nothing, as a good suspect would. It's a gross, ill-thought-out mechanism, though. So it goes.

Thanks to everyone who read the thing.

Cheers,
Will

I contributed Rat Race. I pretty much agree with all the judges' comments. It's a party game with too much structure to turn into the sort of story that freer roleplaying can produce. I'm okay with that, as it suits what I'd be in the mood for via roleplaying comedy. I think one of the untapped potentials for comedy in roleplaying is exactly that -- party games with few weighty responsibilities. Kind of an RPG icebreaker for newcomers. And a game easy enough to play drunk.

Jason, regarding your comment about the rules not contributing much:

I had the situation, cards, and roles all in mind first. I wrote it down, looked at it, and thought, "Uh oh, folks will be aimlessly adrift without something to organize play as a whole." That's the only reason I came up with a formal system for trying to maximize your chances of a favorable alien review. My hope was that using up a finite pool of tokens over the course of the whole game would unite the otherwise disparate workers' performance reviews. "Are you saving all your tokens for Brad's turn, or just being a jerk and looking out for yourself?" etc.

If you have any suggestions for other mechanical directions I could have gone in, I'd love to hear 'em. My personal taste is a bit less structured than Rat Race, but aimlessness is a major fear.

Posted By: David BergI'm okay with that, as it suits what I'd be in the mood for via roleplaying comedy.

This, right? Love what you do; hopefully feedback and critique will make it better, but love it yourself.

To answer your question, Dave, that's not a very constructive fear. Try it out! It's top-heavy now; start throwing stuff out as you find it redundant or unnecessary. If it suits you better, start form the other direction - total freeform - and add stuff where it falls down. The bones of this (and most of these games) are strong.

I find it a difficult urge to fight.

Yeah, tell me about it. I'm not above any the pitfalls we call out myself, not by a long shot.

Thanks, Graham. I'm not sure my winking self-deprecation is coming across in that post above, but suffice to say that I'm not real happy with how Threes turned out—I wish I'd had the confidence to leave some rules out. But, yes, it's just a sketch. Perhaps there's something in there that I can make more of one day. I'm certainly not sorry I took the time to participate this year, and I'm glad to have gained however much XP I did in the process. Thanks to you and all the judges for hosting and reading the contest this year.

Finally some time to comment a bit more:

It doesn't probably come through very well in the individual reviews, but in practice I found that the games that participated in this contest were strongly divided into two sorts: on the one hand we had roleplaying games with creative positioning of the characters, on the other there was a range of strongly structural story games, often with parlor narration or boardgamey elements. I found it very interesting that my own gut reaction favoured the former strongly - I was excited about Jinn, for instance, while Syndicate, probably somewhat technically better in terms of concerned design, felt less creatively exciting as a prospect of play. Then again, it seems that this creative "choking" doesn't concern the range of boardgamey stuff like Rat Race, Quite Indubitably, Baggage Carousel and, above others, Starfish Ambassador. I suspect that a lot has to do with the requirements the game sets for me as a player: there is a choke-point in between a freely ranging roleplaying game and a boardgame that uses the fiction merely as a flavourful prop, a point of parlor narration where the game requires you to put immense creative energy into detailing a setting, characters and activities that are regardless strongly predictated by the game's system, causing you to work hard for no more than the privilege of narrating. I found this a reigning theme in the contest and caught myself wishing for more games with traditional creative scope and less of the ones that specify a carefully preplotted structure of play. Time will tell if what I'm seeing is a genuine and common trend in what people want out of roleplaying, or if this is just a passing idiosyncracy on my part.

Interestingly enough the jury was all but unanimous in our preferences this time around, a clearly different case from the last year's competition. I could and would and did pick all of our recommended picks myself, for instance, and I understand that we all agreed on the winner facilely and without needing a debate. No idea if this means anything.

Posted By: lordgoonCampaign mode? Really? For a game based on the "he got bumped on the head" conceit? I am deeply flattered but utterly mystified. Please explain further, and I promise to reward you with your very ownStory of Omission table for private delectation.

Shaken is a good example of the phenomenon I struggle with above - the game seems to me like a basically functional engine block with a missing spark plug, it needs something more... this something could be clear stakes that hook the player, thematic uncertainty (perhaps over whether the guy might be right in his delusion), or it could be some sort of campaign mode that roots the events a bit and looks beyond the immediate into the consequences. The temporary amnesia is a relatively incidental thing in this regard, the real conundrum of the design is the matter of how to make the randomized story arc elevate above Exquisite Corpse in terms of creative engagement. The idea of randomizing scenes and then arranging them seems like a fun and functional mechanic, for instance, but it's left awfully trivial without some creative tension. Appeal of "thin" fiction caused by randomness is fine for boardgames and such, but if the game is predicated on us caring for the characters and manipulating the fictional positioning, then it needs a bit more commitment for play to seem meaningful.

I've struggled with this particular idea a bit lately simply because I'm rather uncertain about how much what I'm saying reflects the preferences of others - how common is it for people to simply crave for roleplaying tools that allow them to tell stories and nothing more? Once Upon a Time is clearly the most successful game of this type, but I'm also seeing it all around me when I squint a little. I'm reflecting on Big Model rpg theory here, sort of contrasting narrativist play against the simple joy of being able to speak and be heard - Exploration, simply put. Several games in this contest point towards a creatively simple wish to have the game tell you what to say so that you can then say it, but it's not the only place where I'm encountering this sort of thing: I've been reading some Nordic design lately, and I'm seeing similar inclinations in the work of eg. our own Matthijs Holter - the pleasure of playing the game is simply in the most basic ability of the group to narrate together, with no further ambition to it. There are Finnish designers also who work on this sort of thing - I've been struggling to find a harmonious viewpoint on the works of Karoliina Korppoo, for example. I'm not quite thinking that these games or designs do not have complete creative goals, but their writing puts all the energy into trying to get the players to talk right and cooperate in creating a story, so that the core of the matter, the why of making the story remains unclear - perhaps because the creator wants you to bring your own goals into it, perhaps because he never saw anything in roleplaying beyond the point of functional cooperation. Perhaps I'm just missing something important that would help me understand where this type of design is coming from.