In my last post on Nth Society 4 months ago I made the following promise:
[...] I pledge to get at least a minimally working distributed server multiplayer text adventure game running which attains at least some of the gameplay requirements set out in previous documents [...]
I will be able to keep this promise more or less but not quite as I described it. What we're going to do is...
Fork Nth Society as a tabletop RPG!
Why? You might ask. Let me explain. Firstly, I'll do my best to explain what a tabletop RPG actually is, skip this if you are already familiar.
Tabletop RPGs
The term tabletop RPG (without any Google / Wikipedia research I can claim) denotes a category of games which have historically been played on a ... tabletop. That is with maps, miniatures (called "minis" in the community), dice, and pen and paper. There is then another type called pen and paper RPGs, and the distinction is not clear to me, maybe I can be corrected on this. As far as I can tell they are almost interchangeable with tabletop being the more widely used term.
Probably the most famous of this type of game is Dungeons and Dragons, abbreviated to DnD or D&D. Now in it's 5th edition and with a very interesting and checkered past, it is gaining popularity every day. This is arguably due to references to it in popular TV such as Stranger Things, the ever increasing geek-cool factor thanks to high paying technology jobs and the decline of the "Satanic Panic".
I got into non-traditional RPGs thanks to @lextenebris from whom I first heard about Microscope, an epic storytelling game with no traditional "Games Master" or GM. You basically zoom in and out of history to create an huge narrative and fill in detail and various levels of zoom. I then tried out the older more traditional games such as DnD and Fate.
Summary of play
There are lots of styles but I find DnD the most fitting style for influence to the Nth Society game, so I'll summarize some game structures for DnD:
Super nerds, please forgive any errors, but also please do correct me 🤓
- Games Master / GM (AKA Dungeon Master / DM) does the heavily lifting to flesh out the world and give players challenges, delights and surprises in the form of non-player characters / NPCs, places to explore, things to kill, loot to get, intrigue to resolve, and generally a big baddy to stop.
- Player characters / PCs are the stars of the action and are generally adventurers. Think Lord of the Rings, to which DnD owes a huge debt of inspiration. All standard PCs are humanoids, and the most relevant aspects of a PC are race, class and background. Like many video game RPGs you have experience / XP, levels, abilities, equipment, weapons, stats conditions, magic, etc.
- Combat is a central focus, and is heavy on "mechanics". Mechanics are hard rules almost always involving chance in the form of specified dice rolls. Think World of Warcraft, but an overlapping turn based system, narratively embellished by the GM.
- There is no "winning" DnD, although a wise GM will make meaningful milestones in the game and make sure PCs can level up.
- The GMs word is law, they are the authority on reality. If they say you lose an arm, you lose an arm. The rules and mechanics are there to keep a bulk of play up front and known, but importantly the GM - player relationship is collaborative and in good faith. It's no fun if the people involve active work against each other or play favorites.
There is much more I could say but that's some of the most relevant stuff to get the discussion going on why we can make Nth Society a game inspired by these kinds of systems.
Nth as tabletop
Note: I'll be making reference to the original game requirements which can be found at the GitHub source page for the project. Also the best primer for the idea of Nth Society is still the ELI5 post.
I didn't know it one year ago when @the-ego-is-you and I developed the ideas for this game, but the tabletop RPG is perfect for an explorative game, though there are additional difficulties for our particular game. This is the stated goal of the project:
To design, develop and play a game which explores life in a voluntary society.
Pretty general, and that was intentional. We did not want to box ourselves in format, something I am not very happy about. We go on to say:
Voluntary and free relationships can be hard to practice within statist societies, where many practical avenues of action are tainted by the hand of the state. [...] Wouldn't it be beneficial to try out some of these ideas in a virtual world to get to know others who are interested in that life, to figure out the unique challenges it would pose, and to decide whether or not we would like to commit to this in the real world? We propose a game world to facilitate this discovery.
Again, if we take liberties with the term "virtual" this still fits.
Pros
- Big emphasis on talking to other people and developing, maintaining and negotiating social relations
- Ultra flexible style, relying on competent GMs and players instead of exceedingly exhaustive programming
- Can leverage a wealth of existing games, not just the classics
- Tabletop RPG rulesets are more concise than verbose computer game RPG programming, and more directly comprehendible by players
- Imagination based games can be more absorbing, allowing each player to tailor their experience to their tastes
Cons
- Narrative roleplaying generally more suited to fantastic adventures, will need other kinds of conflict
- High level of realism required, so will need a lot of mechanics (which can be optional) up front
- Choices will have to be made about simplifying the complexities of life, such as player physical characteristics, resources, etc
- Higher level of community commitment and organization required for play, not just loading a computer game any time.
A quick list of ideas to get you excited!
They certainly excite me 😄 I'll develop detail on these in a further post.
- Develop optional mechanics for things that players do not want to focus on (boring, tedious, etc.) or which are divisive (arguments, combat, external world events)
- Crypto-currency usage can still be required by the rules!
- Multiple / rotating GMing can be, as well as collaboration on a shared world between GMs. (I have an idea for this)
- Backgrounds will be important. In DnD most adventurers do not have strong links to a previous life or family, but we can go for realism here.
- Quick iterative process --- we can get a ruleset written and start play testing relatively in the blink of an eye compared with a full computer game. And in fact I would aim for a Christmas release of v0.1 to play with your family and friends during the holidays.
- Can utilitize existing online tools such as Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds to give a solid but flexible platform for play.
Feedback and call for help
I have started sketching out some ways to take inspiration from various existing RPGs to begin to redefine the set of rules and mechanics for Nth Society. At the point I'd like to renew my call for help with the project. We can a great team of people before who I won't name again in case they'd prefer to move on, but for anyone reading please check out the Discord again with this invite link: https://discord.gg/5uw2SHc
I will admit that this is a compromise as well as a cool new direction. I'm curious to see how people who were intrigued by the idea of Nth Society in the past react to this, as well as people more familiar with tabletop / paper and pencil RPGs react to this new idea. Personal shout to @grimjim and @loreshapergames who would be in this last category, maybe you're interested in commenting as a professional in the area.
"Pen and paper RPGs" and "tabletop RPGs" are basically synonyms. There's not a universal term because originally these were the only kind of RPGs; computer RPGs were created later but got more popular than the tabletop kind and therefore many people's first encounter with RPGs is with the video-game type and they assume that's what the general category of "RPG" refers to.
If you're interested in exploring some other indie games that might be relevant to your project, Shock: Social Science Fiction might be something you want to look at. It's structured more around dramatic stories that highlight the issues of created settings rather than the "realism" focus you seem to be aiming for, but the way it tries to get the stories to explore "issues" related to a core premise seems a bit similar to what I think your goal is with your game so it might be of interest to you. (Personally I didn't enjoy it the one time I played it, but different people have different tastes). You might also find some things of interest in the Burning Wheel family of games. There are conflicts about things other than combat, and there's a focus on trying to make the situations revolve around the "Beliefs" of the players' characters. (I have some examples of some ways that can work if you scroll down to the "The GM’s mission-preparation procedures" in my Mouse Guard review).
Thanks for clearing that up for me regarding terminology. I had thought of namedropping you too by the way but decided against it as I haven't had that much contact with you. Anyway thanks for your input here.
I definitely am interested in exploring relevant existing games. I was unable to find very much in the way of a voluntaryist tabletop RPG (or even "ancap", though I wouldn't find my the general goals there super aligned anyway).
Those games sound like interesting case studies. What I'm interested in is a system without much more than physical or historical restrictions on users. By physcial I mean strength, skills, dexterity, etc., and historical restrictions like people who may know you in the wider world and have a claim to you, etc.
This was a big point in the original computer game design, to not give PCs things like "beliefs" or non tangible attributes and let that come out in RP behavior. In some ways that's anti-RP, or at least it makes things perhaps too unmoored so I would perhaps replace them with goals, aspirations, etc. which might be secret for a player but they'd be encouraged to keep them and could even use something like "inspiration" feature, as in DnD 5e rules.
I know that players will be interested in violent conflict being sensible even if they choose to not engage in it too much. To make a lot of assumptions about where we'll end up, my ideal game would have some people take on antagonistic roles for the sake of testing some of the ideological positions the "good" characters might take.
I would be interested in commenting further, but it's a little bit past my bedtime.
On a more serious note, I've actually been thinking about how to run a more involved game on the blockchain. @simplegame has been doing some really interesting stuff in increasing the complexity of play-by-post, but there's been some lack of ability to do effective simultaneous play.
Discord works, but it's not sufficient for everyone's needs. I think that @v-entertainment may have been working on something like a virtual tabletop that could be used as an equivalent to Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds, but with some integration to the Steem blockchain.
Imagine having a roleplaying game where every important reference document is a post on the Steem blockchain, and anyone can upvote it to support the creators.
And down vote it so that it is almost never seen by anyone, and is unable to be rewarded via the interface provided by every client after seven days – because no one references a role-playing game document after a week, right?
Blockchain technology is not good if you pretend it is a replacement for a real database. Which is kind of a problem.
Downvotes are a potential issue, but you typically don't see that happen so often that it's worth worrying about unless stuff goes really wrong.
You would, of course, probably need a database for some stuff.
However, a lot of content that people make for their games would be good for public consumption, or at least interesting to outside observers, and right now it just sort of gets locked away.
First we need to identify a problem.
Is it actually true that people who want to make their game materials available for public consumption have a problem doing so?
I don't think that's the case. I think that if people want to make their content publicly accessible, they have more options right now than they ever have, whether it be online fora dedicated to that particular game, various social media platforms which accept longform content (farewell Google+, we are sad to see you go), a multitude of free blogging sites, many of which are highly customizable for personalization purposes, a pile of paid blog sites which are also extremely easy to maintain, tons of distributed storage solutions (Dropbox, Google Drive), and no shortage of places to talk about any or all of the above.
Including the steem blockchain.
So I don't think the real problem is that people don't have the ability to share their stuff publicly.
You might be able to make the argument that there is no sufficiently widely adopted micropayment system where interested individuals can reward others for having shared that content – and I would agree with you on that particular point, but I think a solution akin to Flattr or the BAT which doesn't require an individual to be on a particular platform in order to receive the rewards allocated by their consumers would be a far superior methodology to locking all creators into a single platform.
Now, if the problem is "people are locking away content that I want to see," that's a different problem. That's an issue of them making a conscious decision that you would prefer to override, and that's not a path I would be down for. Call me crazy.
Most game folk that I associate with outside of the industry are fiercely protective of the privacy of what they do. Some of them because they have an overblown belief in the idea that other people are constantly looking to steal their ideas, some of them because they are embarrassed about their past time or the kind of content they engage with, some of them just because they don't consider it anybody else's damn business. I'd say they have the right to any of those positions, although I ruthlessly mock the first.
The glass fishbowl is not necessarily a good place for development. It's definitely not the best place for casual individuals to necessarily pursue their entertainment. I am much more comfortable with the burden of discovery and reward falling on those interested in discovery and reward and far less so on those who are doing the creating.
That's cool, I'd love to hear your ideas. Steem posts are suited to the play-by-post style but I think that style would not be attractive to many. I'm going to review what @simplegame has done so far now.
I had a couple of ideas before which involved exploiting the 7 day editing window for a Steem post, that springs to mind as an effective way to craft a "scene" (or whatever appropriate game building block) without spamming the chain, and while commit data to record as it goes.
In terms of integration you cannot call external services in Roll20 even though you can write scripts, and I couldn't find anything similar for Fantasy Grounds. I'm doing a little research on some smaller scale open source tabletop platforms that might be applicable instead.
Regarding @v-entertainment are you talking about Way Finder?
You do know that doing an edit to an existing post within the seven day window creates a relatively hefty blockchain transaction every time you do it, right? And every time that you do it, a client reading posts on the blockchain is required to go through all of the blocks which have been committed since the original post creation time looking for update transactions so that it can have an actual coherent view of a post to present to a reader.
Editing posts is one of the worst things that you can do if your interest is to keep the number of transactions and amount of data and which is needed to be transferred by the witness servers low. They hit hard not just when they change their committed, but for ever after whenever that post is read.
As hefty as a new post, it's technically a rewrite. Clients do not piece edits together, the current version is stored in witness node DB and there is a particular endpoint which just serves that.
In terms of "blockchain spam" it could be pretty bad though, true. I am more thinking about client level spam though, take a look at @simplegame and you'll see what I mean.
One of the things that goes into the blockchain is that you're subject to data bandwidth limits, so you probably want a hybrid on-off system.
Any software used would have to be designed more or less around Steem or whichever blockchain you want to use as your main method, though you could ostensibly have a client/server setup in which nodes only handle game-related content (which isolates you from general purpose networks and avoids spam).
IIRC it should be possible on Steem to make JSON entities that don't appear as posts but can be displayed in special ways; Steem Monsters does something like this, if I am thinking right.
Way Finder is what I was thinking of. I don't remember if that was the one I was looking for or not, but it's the one that I was able to recall today.
Happy to see another Nth society post!
I've always wanted to try an old school tabletop rpg... but alas.. maybe my first chance will come sooner than later :D
Let me counter your proposal with an idea that, perhaps, you already considered.
what about creating a digital tabletop rpg?
otherwise how are we all gonna play together??
I imagine that, while still requiring some developing, it could be ultra simple to begin with, and still contain potential to gradually expand into some of the earlier vision?
either way I look forward to seeing where this goes
I mentioned using Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds which is exactly a digital tabletop RPG platform, so while it is not an easy peasy out of the box thing it's still very possible to play together online using it. I can foresee people creating and sharing resources to use for it and stuff like that.
Thanks for your support again!
I have so much to learn :)
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