thread: 2011-06-13 : A roleplaying game has two centers
On 2011-06-20, Vincent wrote:
Here's a weird one:
Once upon a time, very soon after Magic: the Gathering, there was a Sim City collectible card game. What we're here to do was something about getting points by building blocs of railway, roadway, and electrical connectivity in the city, to see who had the most points at the end. What we do right now was some technically specific instance of draw a card, play a card, where maybe your hand size or draw varied by the cards you had in play. I forget.
At about the same time, there was a Cheapass Game called Starbase Jeff. What we're here to do in Starbase Jeff was, at core, the same as in the Sim City CCG: get points by building blocs of connectivity in the space station, to see who had the most points at the end. What we do right now was the same at core too: some technically specific instance of draw a card, play a card.
Starbase Jeff was a MUCH better game. It was the same game at core, but it had more clever, brighter rules, easier scoring, and it cut more cleanly to the heart of the core game's tension. You could play three games of Starbase Jeff in the same time as one game of Sim City CCG, and all you'd be missing was more irritating, cluttered, and uncertain gameplay.
So this shows what I mean when I say that a game's rules are elaborations of its conceptual cores, including the mediating systems between them. Sim City CCG took these conceptual cores, this core tension, and elaborated them into this ruleset. Starbase Jeff took the same conceptual cores, in the same tension, and elaborated them into this other ruleset.
Ron, does this make more sense of what I'm saying? Hearts and Spades share their what we're doing right now core, but their different what we're here to do cores make them different games. Sim City CCG and Starbase Jeff, though, share both cores, they're just elaborated into different rulesets.
Check me on this? You know how Dogs in the Vineyard could have been a Sorcerer mini-supplement. What happened was, I wanted some different effects in play than Sorcerer would give me, so I elaborated the same cores and core tension into a different ruleset.
