During one of my consulting sessions, I told Ron one of my major design concerns regarding my current project is the concept of interdependence: it's a game about a group of people fighting things that should be well beyond the possibilities of the common human being. How do they do this? I want one of the answers to be "together".
On Sunday, October 27th, we finally beat my schedule's cruel tactics and were able to play Circle of Hands again.
I have to say that I am finding each return to the Crescent Land with a character to play has very satisfying.
I played a lot at IndieCON, in a relaxed way. This was a good example, a little bit of messing with my notes for Dreams of Fire. I didn't film the session so the video is just me talking and thinking about it.
On 5/22/2019 our COH group got to play our third venture. As indicated in Anthony's original post about the game, our group is doing things a bit “wonky” & rotating GMs, with each of us running it twice & then passing the baton. The pool of circle knights, our version of the crescent lands, & the timeline remain the same.
This is posted as a PSA or didactic point that game design fumbles and bumps its way along, requiring "encounter with the enemy" in order to know what is and isn't working. Nearly everything you see in the video underwent sandblasting after this discussion, so it's an exercise in discovery.
In keeping with tradition, our group will be learning, playing, and sharing our experiences with Circle of Hands via a sort of round-robin cycle of a shared campaign world of multiple GMs. In this experiment we have 3 GMs who will each create and run Ventures for our pool of Circle Knights.
Our topic this time is the length of play as it relates to game rules. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not as simple as seeing what the rules say and obeying them; people play long or short in defiance of those rules (when present) all the time. The question is when or how the rules facilitate the decision to continue to play.
At this point, we needed to do three things at once. First, to make sure we filled in any missing points or caught up with anything Justin wanted to revisit; second, to lay down some important points about design as a process, as I thought we'd maybe strayed into play-theory at the expense of the real topic of "make a game;" and third, to take the time to address any topics as they occurred to either of us as we went along.
Here's another discussion of Quella Volta Che, aimed at the nuts and bolts of "what happens" in play, due to player choices and statements. We couldn't have done this without the previous session which focused so intently on content.
I’m not making any claims about the logic or organization by this point in our talks, rather, I’m hoping Justin isn’t thinking that I’m totally making it up as I go. It's certainly been helpful to me to recognize what pieces I need to pull into their own how we play discussion so they can be treated as understood for a how we design presentation.