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Sunday, July 24, 2011

Fifteen Minutes of Fame for Dwarf Fortress

Its a slow, lazy Sunday morning in the HC. The ritual of coffee, bagels, and the Sunday New York Times is one that has only been broken by stretches overseas or deep in the wilderness.

Pawing through the magazine section today, I was pleasantly surprised to see a full feature spread, nine pages no less, devoted to that obsessively granular computer strategy game, Dwarf Fortress—a game that commentators on the Borderlands/Domain Game project have noted many times here.

On the surface of it seems like the NYT couldn't have found a more unlikely game to highlight, with the archaic ASCII rogue-like graphic interface and bewilderingly complex domain-play. But you do get the half-baked brilliance behind it—and its appeal to the kind of gamers who love this kind of play-- by reading the piece.

You can find the NYT piece here. And if you are really feeling like you have an extra 20-40 hours a week to dump into a dark hole, you can also download the game for free here.

The article also reminded me that I wanted to return this week on the blogging to talking through the dilemma for tabletop domain-play. What areas can the pen and paper format do better? Can we develop computer-driven tools that will mesh and enhance our tabletop game play? What areas should we just simply cede the field to computer games?

Big questions, ones that I believe broke the backs of the domain-level games of the last two decades.

11 comments:

  1. Is computer chess as satisfying as on a board, face to face?
    --The reason for paper-and-pencil RPG face-to-face gaming is because it is the quickest way to feel the effects of your actions and those of the opposition/allies.

    Your domain rules or ACK, or etc. all do things differently and each no doubt has its strengths and weaknesses, and taken in aggregate or selectively gleaned, will satisfy one group more than others.

    My Luddite tendencies are sensitive to the interest in adding apps or encouraging laptops to be used in an active manner rather than the occasional map display or reminder notes.

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  2. 0d&d was minecraft, dwarf fortress, farmville, rogue-likes, adventure quest, and cowboys and indians all rolled up into one.

    that's the arnesonian promise!

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  3. Domain level play wasn't broken by weight of rules it suffered from lack of rules and weight of paperwork.
    I played in a game for years where we managed whole kingdoms and sent our kings and favored henchmen off on classic adventures . I actually avoided most of the adventures myself as those were the easiest places to die, I focused on warfare and economics and kicked the hell out of higher level players with larger countries (we were all obscenely high level in any case).
    There was a couple pages of loose house rules and a DM willing to plow through the data and just make stuff up so it worked.

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  4. @JD
    Domain level play wasn't broken by weight of rules it suffered from lack of rules and weight of paperwork.

    I agree with you, if I didn't my current choice of projects would really be masochistic.

    I should have been more precise. When I meant the last two decades, I was thinking more of Birthright, d20 and other newer systems like the domain rules in Paizo's Kingmaker.

    All of them had play that was highly reminiscent of computer strategy games. You build structures in a highly artificial way like a Civ game and things like economic activity are highly abstracted.

    But unlike computer games which can have startlingly complicated and detailed things hidden behind the interface, many of these games had no real depth.

    So in other words, many of those rules felt to me like extremely poor imitations of computer games. They don't play to the strengths of tabletop play: open-ended flexibility, improv, the quick reaction time TS alludes to, the ability to re-shift detail and complexity up and down depending on the play experience, etc.

    Birthright almost got around this by drawing back in other kinds of tabletop games, notably with card game for land and naval wargaming.

    Timeshadows likewise adopted some Euro game elements into her game for the domain-level play. Because she added a greater range of activity tied into that part of the game, my gut says that she's going to be a lot more successful in pulling it off.

    There aren't any good examples of complete domain level rules in old school games to compare how they stack up against playing a computer strategy game. But one could probably cobble a working set together from the first and second editions of Chivalry & Sorcery rule and source books. (My first month of writing the Domain Game started to feel like such a beast.)

    What you notice,though, is that you are likely to end up with an unplayable jumble of complex charts--exactly the kind of thing you'd want hidden on the back end. So there's another difficulty on the other end of the granularity pole.

    There was a couple pages of loose house rules and a DM willing to plow through the data and just make stuff up so it worked.

    Increasingly I started finding myself in that position as the Domain Game play-test continued. There were guidelines and mechanics, many still fairly complicated, but I did find myself going with more and more a freeform, rulings based approach. Which is why you'll see more support for that kind of play in the final version.

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  5. @Timeshadows
    Good example, I absolutely hate Chess on the computer. It's not just the speed, but the atmosphere of being across the board from someone.

    Part of what I am trying to get as, is the notion that these projects need to be very intentional about trying to ease this kind of play into the traditional tabletop session.

    Decades of "common sense" in rpgs have unlearned what was a given in older wargaming campaigns, notably that play doesn't have to be limited to the actions of highly-individualized characters.

    Long and short of it is that's why I've spent some space in Borderlands detailing some ways GMs can fit such play into or around traditional rpg sessions.

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  6. @UWS
    0d&d was minecraft, dwarf fortress, farmville, rogue-likes, adventure quest, and cowboys and indians all rolled up into one. That's the arnesonian promise!

    That has to be my favorite summary of what the overall project is all about.

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  7. "Part of what I am trying to get as, is the notion that these projects need to be very intentional about trying to ease this kind of play into the traditional tabletop session."

    Agreed, your statement about wanting to bring 'end-game' play to early-to-mid level characters is a great example.

    "Decades of "common sense" in rpgs have unlearned what was a given in older wargaming campaigns, notably that play doesn't have to be limited to the actions of highly-individualized characters."

    I agree with that, and I think that Dessaux' Searchers do a good job of reminding folks haw simply a figure can be represented.
    --In, for example, the Boxed Set rules, troops are just a feature of the Workforce one has to work with. No names, no stats; RISK style. In Vanguard, each trooper has stats and gear and skills, but fit on a playing card or so, then the rules-lite PCs of the ful RPG have intricately detailed one-ded sheets because that's all the Player needs to run their character. Each meets the objectives its sets out to with the brevity or complexity of detail as suits that scale of focus.

    "Long and short of it is that's why I've spent some space in Borderlands detailing some ways GMs can fit such play into or around traditional rpg sessions.

    I avoided that entire vein of argumentation, instead assuming that players coming to the game new nothing, and only had, at best, Monopoly(tm) experience.
    --No need to un-do bad habits, simply start fresh, with a blank tablet and lead Players through the way you are encouraging play through the design itself.

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  8. I tried to play Dwarf Fortress a few times, and usually just get really frustrated. Played Minecraft for a while, don't have much interest in it anymore. To answer your question: "What areas should we just simply cede the field to computer games?"

    I've been playing computer games since they've been around, especially CRPGs, starting with AD&D on Intellivision all the way to Dragon Age 2. There isn't anything that can be ceded to computers, quite honestly. All the gaming I did with Bard's Tale just made me want to play D&D more, not replace it entirely. Neverwinter Nights was marketed with the underlying premise that DMs could create their world electronically and play over the internet, duplicating tabletop play. As a game NWN was fun, as a replacement it failed miserably.

    I think your idea that computers should augment tabletop games is probably the way to go. How many programs have been written over the past 30 years to roll up dungeons, treasure and monsters? Sure, computerize all the tables and objective rolls for the domain game, but the game itself requires interactive, human play to be memorable.

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  9. I see no proof that you ate a bagel.

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