IN THIS WORLD MICROSCOPE KINGDOM FOLLOW UNION Subscribe More Ars Ludi

Prophecies Can Be Good or Bad

“This is part of the magic of collaborative world-building — that you can start a sentence with no pressure to finish it on your own.

Jump. Your friends will catch you.”

Jack Edward wrote a very thoughtful review of In This World after playing it with his group to brainstorm a campaign world. I highly recommend it.

I really appreciate the honest reflections on the experience, both for Jack as the usual GM and the players that are hoping to play in this world later. Lots of good observations. There’s also a reddit thread discussing the post and In This World in general.

Great stuff.

Ben Robbins | December 3rd, 2023 |

Gameplay Video: Wild Worlds of Dating

We’re back at the table, playing more In This World. What could top our Vacations game? How about Dating..???

In This World: Dating

We recorded this game a while back, shortly after the Vacations session, but technical problems prevented me from editing and posting it when I first intended. Now that In This World is done, I circled back around to finish up and share it with you.

Marc, Caroline, Al and I were joined by Justin, who had never played In This World before. Which is perfect, because it reminded me to explain every step of the game… eventually! Despite having never played before, Justin jumped in fearlessly and made our first world — that’s that Story Game Seattle pedigree shining through!

Ben Robbins | November 30th, 2023 | , ,

In This World Is Out

The full release of In This World is done! You can get it and play right now.

In This World

If you bought the early access release, you should have already received an email with your download link.

The book is about 20 pages longer than I originally planned, not because the rules changed — the rules are rock steady — but because I included more examples of play (at the wise suggestion of my backers) and also because I dug deep into the game theory mines to analyze exactly what goes on when you sit a bunch of people down and ask them to reimagine the world together. If you want to understand game design, there is a whole chapter, just for you.

Next up is doing print tests, so if you spot typos or whatnot, now’s the time to tell me! Give me a holler at info at lamemage.com.

Ben Robbins | November 26th, 2023 | | 2 comments

Summerween

In This World Halloween

You had me at watermelon jack-o-lanterns…

Ben Robbins | October 30th, 2023 | , ,

Voyage of the Astral Swan

Twinkle Twinkle Little Bar…

Calamity Vault is a new podcast playing rare indie gems. Their first game? Kingdom! And they absolutely kill it with the ‘Lost In Luxury Space’ seed:

Calamity Vault: We Make Our Kingdom Together (episode 1 of 3)

One important caveat is that they played the old edition from 2013, not the more recent K2 from 2021. If you listen to their review in the third episode, you’ll see they had some difficulty with the rules, which totally makes sense, because the old text is… cumbersome. Which is exactly why I had such a burning desire to go back and revise it into the sleek and sharp book it is now.

Ben Robbins | October 24th, 2023 | ,

In This House, A Mouse

I’m working on finishing In This World, but I keep thinking of more things I want to add. Just the other night we playtested an “alternate history” rules variant and now that absolutely has to go in the book. Plus there’s my usual perfectionist streak.

But the real thing slowing me down is… a mouse. A tiny frenemy, who has penetrated the perimeter and found a way into the innards of my house.

Tiny feet sneaking around the rafters is… distracting. Like Batman, it haunts the night. I merely adopted the dark, it was born in it.

I am morally opposed to harming the tiny mammal, but the battle to evict it is on. I’ve got motion detector cameras, live capture traps, strategies, tactics, plans within plans, the writings of Sun-Tzu, thousands of years of military history… and yet, the mouse remains completely unconquered.

Thus far the score stands mouse 1, human 0. Pray for me.

Ben Robbins | October 16th, 2023 | | 1 comment

“Was ist eure nächste Queste?”

Plotbunny has translated Follow into German and the crowdfunding launch is underway right now!

Follow in German

Andrea Rick is managing the project, and I’ve been very impressed with her attention to detail and her desire to make sure the translation captures the experience of the original game.

It’s nearly half-funded, so if you’re a German-speaker who wants to bring some gaming goodness to your table, get in there!

Ben Robbins | October 8th, 2023 | ,

Damage Per Second

I was playing Sentinels with the usual crew, and my buddy was playing a character that could play a card to let them play a card to let them play a card, etc. Each turn took… forever. We might still be playing. I’m not sure.

The character wasn’t exactly overpowered, because each of those cards didn’t do a ton, but it took a long while to resolve even a moderately good hit.

I joked that, unlike video games, in tabletop games Damage Per Second (DPS) isn’t just a measure of how effective you are but whether the stuff you did was worth the playtime it took away from everyone else. Yeah you did a big hit that landed a lot of damage on the bad guy, but if we all had to wait ten minutes for that combo to finish, maybe everyone else would have rather you just played one card that did moderate damage and moved on.

Within the fiction and the raw math of the game, it is objectively better to do more damage on your turn, because the game is cooperative and we’re working together to try to beat the bad guy. But to the players, how much real time you take to play out your turn matters. The game does not measure or care how long it takes you to finish your turn, but the players really, really do.

“How are you enjoying my paladin?”

I think this points to a broader issue in games, which is that instead of just evaluating the mechanical effectiveness of a character/class/build/whatever, or how fun that character is to the person playing it, you should absolutely be keeping an eye on how fun that character is for the other players at the table.

Yeah maybe your Witchcross Hunter is reasonably effective and helps the team without overshadowing everyone else, but if your turn is slow, complicated, or boring for the rest of us to sit though, are we really excited to have them on the team?

Dead giveaways are multiple steps to resolve something that really could be resolved with one roll (“okay first I roll to see if my hex mark locks onto them, then I roll to see if I can invoke the Spirits of Wrath to boost my attack, then I roll to attack, and uh now I roll damage… oh wait and now I roll to see if the hex mark gives me bonus damage”) or a lot of moving resources around on your character sheet that no one else understands or cares about.

Even if something is theoretically happening in the fiction and could be interesting it fails if it gets hidden away so no one else at the table is involved (“you just talked to the ghost of your great grandfather to get a +1 to hit? Are you doing that every round???”). Navel-gazing action that does not invite other players in. It also fails if it’s something you have to do over and over again. Overcharging the flux capacitors of your megazord and putting the reactor in the red once is cool, but if you do it every round everyone’s eyes glaze over.

I’m talking about cooperative games like D&D etc but the same thing is true in competitive games. Beat your opponents with cool moves, don’t bore them to death.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: time is the most precious resource. Play-time doubly so. Waste it at your peril.

Ben Robbins | September 4th, 2023 | , | 1 comment