No Numbers Exercise

I like this post Desprez, it's a good idea.

In much the way where (I play guitar) good sounds come from setting yourself challenges: "This song will use C and C#" or "This song will have no more than 10 notes" always produce some really awesome things (as, in designin in this way you set yourself a goal and human minds work better to solve a problem than to create a mass of ideas. Boardgame wise: most of the "problems" we encounter that need solving the idea for a "New and Unique Boardgame" is how to make it new. And how to make it unique - so I like this question a lot: it's cool.

Right: numberless numbers.

Initially my head straight away to jigsawpuzzle like design theory. In normal games (dominion, most games with Victory Points etc) it's always a X + Y + Z = Win. such as: I need to get a farm / a farmer / and the "rain" card - then I make grain to win. So for this challenge you set, (with a very heavy pinch of of abstractism btw) I was thinking jigsaws into jigsaw pieces.

So normal D&D : I need a strength of 10, the Hammer of Ages, in close combat, and flanking the opponent to *win* my current circumstance. As said, my mind went to a "strength 10, hammer of ages, close combat, flanking" card that simply "fits in" to the current situation to overcome it.

Loads of choices, and instead of creating the choices (through various different number based rolls, success percentages, preperations and ideas) you simply have all of them in a big stack of cards. So you would have a "Goblin Attack #2.3" kind of card, it would say: If you are a warrior, you now have enough strength to kill some goblins, you have enough stamina to last the day and only take a mild damage, you have *won* this situational puzzle (which would normally rely on your character stats and combinations of dice to get to the same result, plus or minus some damage either way).

Numbers in RPG's represent portions of time and what has happened. Take away ALL numbers and conditions; you are simply left with "you win" or "you lose" so you would have to find a way of turning the normal representation of a situation (via numbers) into an alternative "choice of options". You would need to define: "Whats going on and what shall I do" without using any numbers.

Another way to do it would be simply convert numbers into worded options. So instead of "10 out of 10 hit points" you would simply be "Healthy" then for "8 out of 10 hp" you would be "uneasy" 5 out of 10 hp : "in pain", "2 out of 10 hp" : "Last legs" and "0 out of 10 hp" would be "dead" as you say. All this is really doing though is changing the semantics of the health system by attributing a verbal description of a situation as opposed to a numbered situation. So instead of the normal: "Shit guys! The wraith hit me hard, I have 46 out of my 120 hit points left. That means I have a bit more than 30% of my total health. That means I'm in trouble and need to get out of there!" you would simply have "Oh no, I am in trouble and need to get out of there!" I suppose this could be accomplished by the wraiths attack being "Your conditional status is lowered one level" so it would go from "Uneasy" to "In pain" but as said, this is essentially lowering the number constant that multiplies all values eg instead of 30 of 120hp it simply goes to 1 of 4 which corresponds to "last legs" on the Conditional Status chart. But again, this is merely disguising the fact that you are using numbers, it is still using them, just not calling them numbers.

So this is why it has to be a totally situational thing I suppose, as in minimising it down to the lowest possible denominator you will always be using numbers, even as you say in your post to a binary system - it still uses numbers "off" and "on" which is always 2 choices. Bloody tricky.

The only other way will have to be some super abstract system where most of the game takes place in peoples heads such as in some other RPG systems (I forget the name) but instead of character sheets filled with stats, they ask you to write a "background description" where the Dungeon Master/Games Moderator would look at it and say: "Ok, so you used to be a circus trapeze artist in your biography, so yes, you are able to wiggle you way out of your bonds and leep onto the rafters to escape the prison" As opposed to "Please roll against your Agility and your Athletics stat with a -1 due to the height of the rafters"

Maybe some Dixit-esque kind of thing, like the above, where the game is only a game if it's played by someone as most of the action takes place in a very verbal and imaginative state. Like to not use any numbers at all, our game would have to be "Not playable by a computer in any form" - wo. That's trippy.

Cog

I'd argue 0 and 1, true/false, yes/no, or any binary concept is not a numbery thing. You definitely can't remove them. Win/lose, fail/success, a [hero], no [penalty], within reach etc all use this. So if a hero moves to an adjacent space, you're not using numbers. Numbers are usually used in scales (level), as countdowns etc. In examples above you can have attack/defense scales (light, medium, heavy attack) as long as you don't subtract light attack from heavy armor :), but you'll have to at least compare them. Some games use wound/life tokens to countdown how wounded you are, or how many rounds are left before something happens. Is that numbers? If for every damage you take you lose one life token, is that mathy? I'd say you're not counting, adding, subtracting, but you still have to check weather you ran out of tokens, so is it called math and numbers when you compare "no tokens left" to "zero tokens"? In some games some units just die when hit, others can sustain one damage (marked with a token or turned upside down) before they die; is that math with numbers? (alive/wounded/dead) What if a wounded character can't move? I'd say there's no numbers here again, it's just a character state. He's not half (1/2) alive when he's wounded. You got a number of characters/enemies. If there are 3 enemy counters/figures, is that 3 a number? Some games use custom dice. Say there are dice for fighting which show either miss or hit, and you roll one die for each character (number of dice to roll = number?) and say you rolled 2 hits and 3 misses, you kill 2 enemies so is that 2 a number? I'm guessing it's more of trying to avoid showing numbers rather than not using them :)

Before I post, just like to say that some of the things you guys are saying are over my head lol. But, I love that idea, it's like playing a game based on what the player wants to do, other then what the dice is telling him that he is doing. For example, all players would want to kill a lot of goblins, for example. No players want to roll the dice and have it say "That was a close fought match, you both lost some health". Players want it to be as descriptive as what you said above. Perhaps that is why numbers, although necessary for most games, do take away from the experience. There's a lot of really cool ideas here, and I still think the idea of destroying certain body parts would work really well with this, as this is something very literal and understood by players. Take out legs, they can't walk, take out arms, they can't attack, etc.

Again, I like the entire idea. I think I can sum it up into one sentence: When Gurzgah the barbarian jumps into combat, smashing the heads of goblins, he doesn't think of numbers. Why should I have to? :P I think that is the key to making a game like this.

For small groups of items, people can subitize them and compare them without counting. Would it be within the challenge to use tokens in groups up to four or five, incrementing and decrementing, and comparing?

Regardless, maybe you could use shapes and templates for comparing whether your fireball took out all of the goblens or not. The player would use a shape showing the swipe of a battleaxe to show where he hit, and it will wound unless it overlays the targets armor or shield.

This could be using cards and small punch out templates, or templates printed on transparent cards. Or it could be like a table-top, um, distance-based game.

The shapes could be color coded representing miss, okay, critical; chosen by a random die. A sword swipe would have progressively larger outlines; a good roll activates the larger outline. A critical roll activates the larger outline. For magic, or other more random events, the colored shaped might not overlap, increasing variability and risk.

Im enjoying thinking about a "broken body parts" system, but if we are being super hardcore: body parts are 2 legs + 2 arms + chest + head = 6 parts which is *sigh* a number.

That's why I think it would need to be "You are feeling pretty bad and are having trouble walking" rather than "minor damage to chest, major to right leg" but how that would actually be shown in the game remains to be seen.

I also like the idea of comparative numbering or "rough" numbering. So something like the Stun and Damage boxes in shadow run: colour in boxes (3 per line) and at the end of a line of boxes something bad happens (-1 to throws / -1 to stats etc) now it is using numbers but a cursory glance at the box chart gives you an idea of the situation without drawing your attention to specific numbers.

Perhaps a better example is the pie slice pieces in trivial pursuit: if you complete a certain line of questions, you add one pie slice colour to your pie slice holder (I'm doing my best with the words here guys, I hope you know what I am going on about) so yes, yes it is using numbers, in as much as the total number of slices you need is one of each colour, say 8 all together (i think its 8) but of course if you are winning, you see this by not counting the number of spaces filled or left, but by assessing that there is "only a bit more to go!" or "No I wont win, Kevin has got more slices than me" so it would be using numbers but not in a active manner.

I have done something similar once. It is not really solid, and it has not been tested. But I think I actually wrote all the rules.

They can be found in my archives here:

http://ha.lariennalibrary.com/index.php?n=RolePlayingGame.RolePlayingGam...

It's called table theater. The primary goal was to increase the game play by removing the most numerical values possible. For example, you could need to explain why would your character traits make sure that you get a bonus for doing this or that action.

Hope it's useful.