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Game #11: Creative Writer

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sedjtroll
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Well, there hasn't been much action in this forum in a while. I'm officially back from surgery and stuff, my shoulder's doing allright. I know I haven't been too active on these boards recently and I apologize.

Curfura, I see on the schedule that your Creative Writer game is up. Do you have a link to the rules?

- Seth

Anonymous
Rules

Many apologies - I've been busy doing other things (and for some reason I had thought I wasn't going to be on until December).

Although it is probably too late now and the schedule has moved on, for any interested the rules are here-

Creative Writer - Board (word)

http://www.curufea.com/games/Creative+Writer+Board.doc

Creative Writer - Cards (word)

http://www.curufea.com/games/Creative+Writer+Cards.doc

Creative Writer - Rules (word)

http://www.curufea.com/games/Creative+Writer.doc

jwarrend
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Game #11: Creative Writer

It turns out waywardclam is unable to use his slot this week, so I propose that we magnanimously extend to curufea the principle of charity and let him take this week's slot.

But, this is very important: we have a lot of people who want to have a game workshopped. If you sign up for a slot, PLEASE, check the calendar to see when your game will be up, and PLEASE, have your game ready to go on time. I understand that stuff comes up and people sometimes need to back out. But, "I forgot" is not going to be an ok answer in the future. The reason for this is that there are lots of people wanting spots, and when one person skips their week, we basically have 2 choices -- move everyone else up, or just have an empty week. The former requires so much effort that in practice, I have been adopting the latter. But, we don't like to have this happen, so please, be ready for your slot when it comes up!

Thanks, and now let's talk about Curufea's game!

-Jeff

zaiga
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Joined: 12/31/1969
Game #11: Creative Writer

OK, here are my first impressions stream-of-conscious style:

I would like to see a list of components. You have cards (how many? different types?), play money, player pawns, a game board... anything else? I would like to see the min and max number of players. I would like to see estimated play time. All of this to get an impression what sort of game it is and what your goals with the design are. For example, if you are trying to make a 30 minute game for 2-4 players my comments would be different than when you would try to make a 2 hour game for up to 8 players. From what I've read it seems that it should be a relatively short game perhaps under an hour or so. I don't think it should be much longer than that, as the strategy seems fairly shallow and the number of options presented to a player seems limited.

You have quite an number of terms and abbrevations, not easy to grasp it all right away. Players probably need a bit of time to get used to all the different words and what they mean in the game. Is it possible to reduce the number of different words, without losing much of the game's theme and options? Each individual card has its own specific text and rules and exceptions. All in all a lot of reading, especially for the kind of game that you seem to be wanting to create (a fairly light game).

Decide whether to move or to go to a corner square

Can I move to any corner square or just the next corner square clockwise?

Or if you moved to Home, refill your hand of cards

Refill to 5 cards I assume?

Place a marker for that publishing company on your Manuscript, so you can keep track of who is publishing which part of your works.

Ah, another component... company markers. :)

The roll-and-move mechanic is done to death, but if it works for your game then it works. However, I wonder if you could continually move between the Home square and another corner square, refreshing your hand each time and never roll the die? Would that break the game somehow?

There are many different cards, which add a lot of atmosphere. I found it fun to read through them. However, with so many different cards it is probably hard to plan ahead and play strategically, but it doesn't seem like that is something you are aiming for anyway. There's lots of die rolling and random card draws, which probably makes the game fairly chaotic and tactical, rather than strategic.

All in all, it seems that you are aiming for a game that captures the atmosphere of writing manuscripts and the rocky road of trying to get them published and earning some royalties. The mechanics used are roll-and-move coupled with a take-that style card play and rolling the die to determine the outcome of certain actions, all of which are not at all original, but which are passable when trying to create a light-hearted family game.

The mechanics are pedestrian, it is the theme and the take-that style cardplay that should hold the interest of the players. I am afraid that once the newness and surprise of the different cards fades away, so will the interest in playing this game. Personally, the game doesn't rock my boat, but it probably isn't designed for me.

Could you tell us what your design goals were? Have you tested the game? If so, how did those games go?

Anyway, good luck with the game!

- Rene Wiersma

Anonymous
Game #11: Creative Writer

I must confess, that I have only inflicted this game on my friends once so far. And even then I realised it requires a fair amount of work. I am mainly looking for suggestions on simplification to increase playability.

The goal of the game is to express the inherent frustration/pain/annoyance and sillines of a creative person trying to get something published, preferrable to become a bestseller.

Unfortunately I don't have the time required to do what must be done to make it playable. But I'll gladly turn it over to anyone who wants it.

Torrent
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Game #11: Creative Writer

Quote:
frustration/pain/annoyance and sillines

...doesn't seem to me like a good theme for a game. Game's in my mind are supposed to be FUN (insert own definition) and/or enjoyable.
My first thought is that if you intend to publish the game, you would probably never get all the publishers to let you use their logos. There are also some with themes that might not be appropriate for family games, if that is what you are going for.
Can you choose any Corner Square? If so, Cafe and Lirbary are useless, as they charge for something that Home gives for free. Other than perhaps positioning on the board?

All in all, I agree with Zaiga, the roll-move thing has been done and doesn't exactly seem to add anything. When you get further in the design, Icons might be a better choice than the 2-3 letter abbreviations and terms. There also don't seem to be that many non-publisher spots that let you play cards on your own manuscript (since several of the light-border ones specifically forbid it).

The idea of having both good and bad things on single cards is kinda neat. You don't get stuck with cards you can't use as much. I don't know somehow wanting both low and high numbers seems like it could be confusing. You want a low Publishing (negatives are Good) but a high royalties(negatives are Bad). It seems like you could flip the publishing numbers and have all the math still work out.

Right now your randomness is based on moving into specific publishing spots and having drawn (and played the right set of cards). The static things are the ability to gather cards (either drawn or bought) or force the published manuscript to produce at a risk of it declining. So basically you can always have ideas, but have to hope for the right publisher.

I don't know about simpiler. What kind of problems did you have in your playtest? It just seems really dependant on luck. THe skill is just having the right combo of cards out to maximize what sort of publishers you could land on, with enough other cards in your hand to protect it's ability to pass the publishing roll.

Andy

jwarrend
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Game #11: Creative Writer

Curufea wrote:

Unfortunately I don't have the time required to do what must be done to make it playable. But I'll gladly turn it over to anyone who wants it.

With all due respect, then what are we looking at the game for if you don't plan to do anything more with the project?

At any rate, I think you have some genuinely good ideas. My impression of the game is that it resemles a game I would have made as a starting point -- lots of complexity, lots of "simulation" elements. My strong recommendation is that you hack out just about everything and whittle it down to a core nucleus that represents "the game", and then start building from there.

So, what I might do, for instance, is cut the game down to this:

You can only be actively working on one manuscript at a time.

You have several cards, some of which modify the work, some of which take your work in a direction that makes it accessible to a new genre, some of which give a base modifier to publication.

Each publisher is represented by a number of icons (get rid of the acronyms). The number of icons in each category represents the "strength" of the company in that genre. So, a company with 2 comic books is a "good" comic book company, a company with 4 comic books is "a very good" comic book company.

On your turn, you roll the die and move to a space, which in general will be a company. If you have a work that has some genre symbols that match some of those of the company, you can attempt to publish. There is some way in which the difference between the company's number of genre symbols is subtracted from the number of genre symbols of your work.

This sort of borrows from Seth's idea a bit, but I think the similarity only extends as far as both include the idea of a genre. What I'm getting at is that let's say you have put together a work that is very strong as a "comic book" genre, it has 5 comic book symbols. You go to a company that has 1 comic book symbol -- you'll have a good chance of them accepting your comic book. On the other hand, going to a company with 4 comic book symbols will have less of a chance of publishing your work.

There will also be cards that affect the inherent "goodness" of your work, and there will also be a sense in which how much you will sell is related both to the "goodness" of your work and to the "market potential" of that company.

So now, the roll and move creates an interesting effect -- you can try to publish with the company you land on, or hold back for a "better fit". Publishing with a "weaker" company may give you a better chance of publishing success, but may not give as much in the way of royalties.
You could even have the companies "grow" over time, but that may be too much complexity.

As another part of your turn, you can either add cards to your active work, or make another work "active".

So, I think these changes would retain the spirit of your game, namely, that you're trying to maximize the quality of your works, but also optimize their suitability for publication, and trying to find a publisher that is a good fit for your works. It would remove the "take that" card play that is, in my opinion, not really very much fun (but I've been soured to that genre by Illuminati and Hacker, which basically are about having the right "power cards" at the right time). It would reduce interaction, but maybe you can sidestep that by limiting the number of works each company will publish this year. That would be cool, because it would set a natural limit to the game length, and would make decisions tougher -- "should I publish my good comic with this weak comic company so as to prevent Joe from publishing his strong graphic novel with that company?" You could even turn it into a bidding game, where you indicate face-down which companies your works are to be submitted to and the company picks the best. You could probably even lift the roll-and-move effect.

So, in summary, my impression is that your game has good core concepts and nice simulation elements, but I wouldn't be terribly interested in playing it in its current form based on the "power card" driven game system that makes planning and decision making more or less superfluous (or worse, requires one to memorize all of the cards that might be in the deck and then plan accordingly. Yikes!) I think it's worth pushing the idea further, with an eye towards simplifying things as much as possible, removing needless "simulation" elements like "being on tour", and trying to put together a tighter game structure than just "do whatever the cards tell you". I hope you keep at it, and keep us informed about your progress! Good luck!

-Jeff

Deviant
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Game #11: Creative Writer

jwarrend got me thinking. How's this for a mechanic?
Each publishing company has a number of genres they are interested in. The more genres a company supports, the greater the chance they'll have what you're writing - but at a cost! For each genre, roll one d6 for the publisher. So if they support 3 genres, roll three dice. Then roll one d6 for each "quality unit" of your manuscript. If the manuscript roll >= publisher roll you are published. So ideally you'll be able to go straight to the publisher that specializes purely in your genre, but the game won't always make that easy.
Other idea - there could be gluts in the market where everyone is sick of romance and wants adventure stories. Either genre possibilities disappear from publishers over time or they become more difficult to roll.
Here's another one - writers tend to build relationships with a single publisher - the one who has published their work in the past. When you successfully publish with a company you receive a counter for that company that allows you to teleport to that company one time in the course of the game. This bends the "roll and move" mechanic without breaking it entirely. I avoid of roll-and move in my own games because I like elegant game models, but for a game of this type I think it can work.

FastLearner
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Game #11: Creative Writer

Jeff's ideas got me thinking, too.

If each company had, say, 0 to 5 of each genre icon (or a rating of 0 to for each genre) that would indicate (a) if they're willing to publish in that genre, and (b) how high their standards are. A company that has, say, 1 comic book icon will publish nearly any comic book, while a company that has 5 will only publish the very best. (Jeff basically said that already... here comes the part that's different.) In order to publish your manuscript with that company the manuscript's total rating in that genre must meet or exceed the company's rating, at which point they'll automatically publish you and pay you. Pay is based on the number of matching icons and the number of "exceeding" icons, something like $1,000 for each matching icon and $200 for each exceedng icon.

Thus if you publish your 4-icon comic book manuscript at a 1-icon puiblisher, they'll happily take it (because their standards are so low you only needed one icon) and will pay you $1,000 (for the matching icon) plus $800 (for the 4 exceeding icons), for a total of $1,800, which makes sense for a low-quality publisher. On the other hand if you publish your 5-icon manuscript with the 4-icon company they'll take it (because you meet or exceed their quality standard) and will pay you $4,000 (for the 4 matching icons) plus $200 (for the one exceeding icon), for a total of $4,200, as befits a pretty-high-quality publisher.

If you had such a 5-icon manuscript then obviously you'd be looking for a 5-icon publisher, but the roll and move mechanic (and what have you) might make that impossible. Your challenge is always in deciding whether to push your manuscript further before working towards a publishing house or just getting it published as is to rake in some bucks and get going on something else.

For the "one manuscript at a time" thing, I like it, though I'd add one thing: you can only have one active manuscript at a time. You're allowed to "freeze" a manuscript and start on a new one at any point, but you can't change the old ones ever. This allows you to build up a stash of older unpublished manuscripts, much like real writers, and allows some additional strategy in the game.

This additional strategy is particularly fun if you add this next idea: the Genre Market (again borrowing from folks above, but different).

This is to implement the concept of market saturation while adding a fun strategic concept. Bascially a grid/chart on the board displays the genre market. There's a column (or row, whichever you prefer) for each genre... for the sake of this example I'll say there are six. Along the other axis is the popularity of the genre with, say, 9 spaces each. The top space indicates that the publishing houses really want that genre because no one has published something good there in a while and it's hot (explained in a moment), while the botom space indicates that the market is very cold right now and publishers aren't paying much. At the beginning of the game all genres start on the middle space, in this case the 5.

Along the side of the market are two columns that indicate pay potential, one column for matched icons and another for exceeded icons. At the very top of the chart the matched icon value might be, say, $10,000 and the unmatched icon value might be $2,000. At the bottom of the chart the matched icon value might be $500 and the unmatched value might be $0.

Whenever someone sells something to a publisher he is paid based on how hot the genre currently is. If the genre is white hot (at the very top) and he sold a 4-icon book to a 3-icon publisher (in that genre) then he'd be paid the $32,000 (as described above). Then the marker that indicates the "hotness" of that genre would be moved down one space per matched icon; in this example it would be moved down 3 spaces. A bunch of people bought the book in a hot genre, but now the genre isn't quite so hot anymore.

But that's not all. The player who sold the manuscript must also increase a number of other genres by one, the same number of genres as matching icons, in our example 3. So he'd pick 3 other genres and increase each of them by 1. This indicates that the other genres are becoming more interesting to publishers.

Over time the genre market will fluctuate a great deal. You might be working on a comic book and so might another player. If he sells his before you get to the market then yours won't be worth as much. Maybe you'll hold off a bit on publishing that one (freeze it) and work on that romance novel you've always wanted to write because that market is getting hotter and hotter nearly every time someone sells something else.

This is something that's been used in a few other games, btw, but I think would work really well in yours. You'd need to decide how "logarithmic" your scale was and how different the top and bottom are, but that's something that could easily be adjusted based on playtests.

You'd probably then greatly simplify the board (having it be mostly publishers and something like "inspiration" spaces -- opportunities to write) and considerably reduce the number of special cards, putting them more in line with the game changes. Cards could includ "market shifts" that allow you to adjust the market before you sell your manuscript (using a similar "move 1 market up x spaces and then x markets all down one space) so that there'd be a "hidden" element to the game, allowing players to have "inside information" about what market is about to become hotter and which are cooling off (by his choices made).

Anyway, there are some thoughts.

jwarrend
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Game #11: Creative Writer

FastLearner wrote:

If you had such a 5-icon manuscript then obviously you'd be looking for a 5-icon publisher, but the roll and move mechanic (and what have you) might make that impossible. Your challenge is always in deciding whether to push your manuscript further before working towards a publishing house or just getting it published as is to rake in some bucks and get going on something else.

Your analysis nicely fleshes out my sketch of an idea, and does just what I was trying to get at -- it makes the "roll and move" interesting. Do I take what I can get, or hold out for something better?

Quote:

For the "one manuscript at a time" thing, I like it, though I'd add one thing: you can only have one active manuscript at a time. You're allowed to "freeze" a manuscript and start on a new one at any point, but you can't change the old ones ever.

This was always my intent as well. (I meant to say "active", if I didn't...)

Quote:

This additional strategy is particularly fun if you add this next idea: the Genre Market (again borrowing from folks above, but different).

I like your genre market, but I think that PLUS the roll and move effect may be too much. It might be better to go with one or the other.

The system you proposed is particularly interesting to me because I'm implementing something similar in the "Disciples" game that I'll be workshopping in January, although in that case it's more about ability to perform an action than reward for performing it. I've never seen a mechanic quite like the one you propose, yet you say it's been done before. Which games have such a thing? I thought it was pretty original, and very clever.

Hope we're inspiring you, Curufea, to keep pushing this one further! There's definitely a good game in here...

-Jeff

FastLearner
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Game #11: Creative Writer

The game Vino uses something similar, though in its case you can move the other types of wine in any combination matching the total downward adjustment you made. I suggested the "x other genres one space" system instead because it more accurately simulates the fact that you don't have a ton of control and can't really spike a certain market even if you want to.

The game Fische Fluppen Frikadellen uses a somewhat similar market system, though it's a little funkier and a bit more complicated.

The Sid Sackson classic Samarkand uses something that effectively works like this, though the mechanism is different.

I'm pretty sure there are other market games that use a similar mechanism as well (as it pretty accurately reflects the concept of supply and demand), though I haven't played enough games to know specifically.

Mind you I think it's an underused mechanism and so I urge you to use it! :)

Scurra
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Game #11: Creative Writer

It's great to see how people can arrive at the same sort of end points after thinking about an idea. :)
One of the games listed in my journal is "The Book Fair", which approaches the same theme but from the publishers' perspective rather than the authors.
But the mechanics aren't actually that dissimilar from what Matthew has suggested - the publishers want to be in "hot" genres, but they don't know what is going to be "hot" next year and what was "hot" this year will not do as well as everyone else jumps on the bandwagon.
And the publishers (the players) have their own preferences, which affects what manuscripts they will buy - sometimes no-one else will want a title, other times there will be a fierce bidding war.
(I've included a publicity aspect too - the publishers also "hype" one of their titles in the hope of making it a best-seller, but the extra sales might not actually cover the marketing budget...)

I'd also like to note that a game like this (or mine) is a prime candidate for the "parody/satire" approach: it's pretty easy to rename the publishing companies and book titles so that everyone knows who they are meant to be.

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