The idea I have floating in my head at the moment…

Play could be about teams of explorers trying to complete missions (recon, scavenging, escape) on a scary alien planet. A media touchstone here is Alien.

One side plays a team of explorers (scientists, scavengers, military escorts, surveyors, thrill-seeking explorers, etc) and the other plays an alien location (hostile terrain, weird floating-eye scouts, breeder-drones, hive queens, ooze pits, etc).

One of the players creates “the mission” as part of creating their force. So maybe the alien player selects “they need to retrieve a fallen engine component” and “as a secondary objective, they have the desire to steal one of the queen’s eggs.”

While explorers vs. aliens would be the default expectation, there’s no reason why you couldn’t play a game with two alien factions (aliens vs. aliens) or many players (explorers vs. explorers vs. aliens). Freeform scenario design would allow for all sorts of stuff.

In this vision, I’d expect that combat is not the goal (certainly not for the explorers), but an obvious possibility that events could escalate into.

Pitch: It’s a Euro Starcraft.

I’m more interested in Silent Hill as a reference point than in Aliens or Walking Dead or any such. Abstraction and surrealism in monster design. Fighting monsters from the id. It’d be fun to create monster types on the fly with Legos or something.

Oops, hadn’t seen your comment when I wrote that. There is no real reason there can’t be space troopers as well as crazy mind-bent monsters. And I like creating objectives along with your army – feels a bit Mechaton-ish.

Daniel,

That pitch is hella tight. I dig.

Misuba,

Silent Hill monsters from the id sounds really cool. Are you thinking that it’d be modern day, or a different time period/setting?

If we wanted to do this idea using constructed-in-advance teams, how might that be accomplished? (Not saying that constructed-in-advance teams are a necessity, just exploring ideas.)

So, when I was a kid I played the Alien computer game on Commodore 64, without actually seeing the movie (I heard the gist of the story from the COOL kid who actually got to watch R-rated flicks). In that game, you’re directing the crew from room to room on a map of the ship, while the Alien is stalking around and occasionally encountering you. There are all kinds of tools, including weapons, but figuring out what they’re good for, how to use them and which ones are effective at all, is up to you. The goal is to get as many of your people off the ship alive as possible. You get a score based on how “good” your ending was. The best I ever got was the ending of the movie: all crew but one dies, she scuttles the ship and escapes in the shuttle. I got that ending ONCE.

One of the things the game really impressed on me was that while fighting is an option, it’s a really, really shitty option and not likely to accomplish any of your goals. The game was frustrating to interface with, to a degree that I hope this minis game won’t be, but there’s a useful kernel in there, I think. A game that was much, much clearer about what actions are effective and how to get your dude to execute those actions could still maintain the sense that you’re in a desperate situation and you have to think and maneuver and McGuyver your way out, not blast your way out.

Oh, and freak the fuck out. Freaking the fuck out should definitely be a part of the game.

I think the “alien” player designing the mission as their “tinker with the army list” phase is a great idea. If you demo this game for new players, you could do this: tell them to create a team of explorers. Then tell them to create a mission for them, detailing what kind of monsters lurk, what mysteries are present and what objectives they have or will find out they have. Then the new players run their missions for each others’ teams.

Shoot, I hope I’m not jumping ahead too much, but I wanted to talk about the between game part. I wanted to also talk about what each player should contribute a bit, in terms of physical stuff. I’m gonna assume this game/play method is being built for folks who already dig the toys, regardless of whether those are Lego bricks or white metal gaming minis, so no uphill battle there.

Anyhow, individual players should own/contribute good guys, badguys, objectives and place-stuff/terrain. I mean each individual should do all of those, not just say concentrate on their own good guy/bad guy team. So maybe a baseline assumption is something like each player will start with at least one character model, one monster model, one small team of good guy mooks, one squad of bad guy mooks, two small scavenge/objective markers, one unigue terrain piece, some sort of wild card physical item ( a vehicle?), and x number of fictional items/concepts ( not just gear not readily represented, but things like character qualities, or back drop, or events,or setting background that flavors and impacts play[Galactic Civil War!!!] or whatever).

Realistically, you don’t have to start with all of those individually. If you’re the core player, maybe you have a collection that other players can choose that kind of stuff from to get going. You don’t necessarily have to fill out the whole list either. Maybe each player picks four of those kinds of things to start with.

That becomes their individual “collection” for the ongoing series of game sessions/scenarios. After each session, each player gets to increase that collection by one new item. Write it up, add it to the list. Players can sugest stuff to each other. One player after each session/scenario gets a bonus addition to their individual list. Playes choose collectively who that is. It’s a “soft victory bonus”, and it could be based on in-fiction success OR it could be closer to something like Fan Mail- the other players give the bonus just because they like that player’s contributions to the overall fun and want to recognize them for it.

When players meet to play a game, stuff that’s in each player’s “collection” is what gets used for creating the scenario to be played. Note, that isn’t everything totally available to everyone, and some things don’t count as part of those player collections, like general terrain that everybody willbe using.

There probably needs to be a little better thought out limit on how each player develops their collection list over time, but that’s the jist of the thing. The idea is to get people contributing lots of stuff, players collectively tweaking things for their style of fun play, and also allowing a bit of leeway for players who may be jumping into minis gaming and enjoying it, but whoaren’t as commited to being a lead-junkie as the core player is.

Sorry (again) for the double post, but um, you could call that stuff “unlocks”, as in, after each session, everyone gets to unlock a little bit more of the goodies in the setting and among the toys to be used for the overall developing play.

I know you weren’t wildly enthusiastic about using dice or cards as part of play, but I did experiment with some solo minis play and used some dice for it. they weren’t used for resolution much though. Instead, I used them for help coming up with the next “story chunk” to focus on.

The method was simplistic. I had faction Red and faction Brown. I rolled a d6: 1-3 it involved faction Red, 4-6 Faction Brown.

A second die throw told me the level of focus: 1-2 Character/personal, 3-4 Unit, 5 Wing/Column, 6 Above-the-tabletop-level factor becomes important ( overall setting situation, history, politics, etc).

A third die throw was simpy whether the thing was good or bad for the identified faction.(1-3, 4-6).

So, these three rolls in order might look like:4, 3,2, with the result of Faction Brown has a unit ( context applies here) experiences something good. What that means is kinda up to the player rolling and the context of play. There should be multiple things going on that this could mean. In an aliens type scenario, maybe it means soldier drones start awakening and swelling the size of an already existing group or that another group manages to eat through the power cables in an area of an abandoned based and knocks out lights.

You might be able to use something like that as well in a multiplayer game, as each player eventually takes a turn at initating some fiction.

Notethat is says nothing about resolution of any kind, it’s just a creative constraint on what a player inouts next.

I find it easier to think about the reference to *Alien* from the point of view of the humans, obviously, but one of its themes is how disposable the people are from the point of view of the company and its objectives.

I’d be interested in a game that explores the difficult calculus of acceptable risk, loss, and “return on investment,” particularly if the design/build/prep phase between games and the storytelling aspects of resolving situations builds emotional investment in specific units and there are lasting consequences involved in sacrificing a unit.

Here are some quick thoughts on what the game could be about, within the alien scavenger theme.

Alien race far ahead of humans physiologically, technologically and intellectually, to the extent that in any encounter humans would be considered livestock, and not even good livestock at that (the guinea pigs or squirrel meat of this race). We’re toast.

Except said alien race has recently had it’s own massive doomsday – a virus or astronomical event or world war that destroys 99% of the population, 95% of the technology and most of the infrastructure are destroyed.

That’s when the humans show up.

The Silent Hill thing: creating your squad would be equal parts mechanical and philosophical, like Bliss Stage or to a lesser degree Dogs in the Vineyard. You’d have your main avatar of your character, and then the two or three helpers who each represent some aspect of his personality.

I really like the idea that you’d reveal your squad of archetypes and then your opponent would devise monster opposition by spending some kind of currency on the fly. As much as I support your goal of pre-game squad building, I really like the idea of an asymmetric game where one side pre-builds and the other responds on the fly.

Brad: I dig this – perhaps because it’s essentially Planet of the Apes, a survival-horror take on which would be a great fucking time.

In general, I like Brad’s pitch for an overall concept. Plus, I can think of all kinds of cool minis and terrain available for something like that.

I’d like to talk about something a little different though, and that’s the player level stuff. The activities and collecting end, and the putting on sessions end of things.

The thing I’ve been puttering with for my own related minis play concept is that the players _don’t_ have a direct tie to the minis. That is, they don’t collect their own army exclusively and always play that and play it to win.

Instead, the players are more like, I dunno, writers on an ongoing TV series based on, for example, Brad’s pitch.

Which could be kinda good. It encourages people to try to bring in new stuff, and also explains a bit why stuff (toys) are being re-used session to session. It also helps explain why new stuff ( that people create/buy/paint) is being used ( the series is a success and the budget increases) and also why stuff is re-used ( we love those characters!!).

So, I guess what I’m saying is that the characters in focus, and the opposition to them, should be divorced from the individual players between sessions. They can float around. If I was plaing with Joe and Brad, for one session, I might play the focus characters, joe might play the opposition, and Brad might act as a scenario designer/ref/GM. It could ll go in another series of matching for the next session, because we’re all collectively developing the fiction along the way, like writers on a show. And we’re also expanding on it and getting a bigger budget ( which explains the entry of new toys into the fiction).

I think part of the onging game should be that players have to make pitches for the next episode ( with any available unlocks), and then also have to suss out who will portray the focus characters and the opposition for the following episode/scenario/session.

Parrrt of this is based on the creative constraints implied by minis themselves. Presumably, we want to re-use stuff. If it was just a straight wargame, that would be fine, but I get the impression that people want a bit more of sg/rpg stuff in there. The minis are actually individuals, especially the spotlight characters. They aren’t just generic officers and ncos, but are more developed than that. Likewise, we can’t simply toss those representative minis in the ashbin the way we might ( with much sadness admittedly) toss an old character made of notebook paper and personal portrayal away if they died.

“I get the impression that people want a bit more of sg/rpg stuff in there.”

Personally, I’m not hoping for a game with any character dialogue or “acting as a character.”

I would be excited by a game with as much characterization as Necromunda or Mordheim bring with them. In those games, it’s common for people to invent little snippets of colour, like: “This big guy with the heavy bolter is named Chugga. He’s a vet from Catachan.” That’s the sweet spot, in my mind.

Well, I could see things growing from those kinds of snippets. i’d never expect that any of that kind of development would draw away from the minis fun and into non-minis using play though.

I was thinking really more in terms of how a lot of SGs have everyone putting ideas into the idea soup for future games ( or even in-session) and it being an official part of the process.

Ah, cool.

It sounds like your ideas and Misuba’s ideas compliment each other nicely. Both are about coming to the table with a palette of options and putting something together based on what the other player is doing.

Joe, what’s the cool part of the lonely fun of building your “army?” I keep getting mentally squeezed between that and making it story-tactical and not about battle and I think that if you explained that fun, it might help.

For instance, do you need to be designing your guys? Or just guys that are going into the mix? And is the fun thinking of their history and narrative or is it like thinking of how their mechanical tricks interact to form awesome combos?

What is this game about?

This seems like it’s the most well-addressed, if I understand “about.” It’s about people dealing with probably hostile, possibly inscrutable aliens and loot (salvage).

What do the characters do?

Deal with problems. Right? I mean, I had the same idea that Robert posted where everyone comes to the game with folks and challenges and terrain and whatever and they somehow get assembled into a game session and then play happens. Those problems seem like they’re things that each player would bring and they could be dealt with however the players’ imaginations and the characters’ tools and abilities permit. (Exploring, scrounging, defending, attacking, racing, rescuing, parlay, commerce, whatever!)

One thing to clarify is whether “character” is the right notion. Like, if the deepest the characterization gets is “This big guy with the heavy bolter is named Chugga. He’s a vet from Catachan” then is it really a character? Maybe teams is the right notional level of resolution. (Or maybe this doesn’t really matter…I’m not sure.)

What do the players do?

This seems like the big question.

They plan between games — assembling teams and challenges and whatever. Right?

They then play the teams or characters or whatever — directing them like pawns in a tactical, fictional situation. Is this mission based? Who plays which pawns?

Is there a referee? Does that change? Am I the referee for the challenges that I laid on the table and you’re the ref for the ones you brought? Or do we build consensus? Or something else?

(Also, it’s been a week — does this still have traction/currency?)

(As an aside, I built LEGO World as an outgrowth of some of the recent conversation between Robert and Chris along these lines. It’s got none of that lonely fun that seems key to Joe’s goal, but it is a story-ish/mini-ish game.)

Good thoughts, Christopher.

I think you’re right about needing to shift from “what do the characters do” to “what do the teams do”. I ported those questions over from RPG design theory, with no modification, which perhaps explains their focus.

The lonely fun of team assembly for me is: meticulously crafting the perfect list, mixing and matching, weighing the balance of theme and effectiveness, dreaming of game possibilities, tinkering

Games I’ve liked doing this stuff in: Magic the Gathering, Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, Mordheim, deck-building games (although that one isn’t lonely)

In general, I like selecting characters (“one medical officer, and then maybe a sergeant…”) more than I like constructing characters (“maybe he has Keen Awareness, and additionally he’s a Sharp Shooter”). I think middle ground is pretty fun – in Warhammer 40k you can pick Distinctions for certain elite squads, and you can customize the weapons that your specialists carry. That stuff is fun for me, just so long as its simple.