Shenanigans: The Fast, Friendly Word Game

Over the past five years or so my family and family friends have created and refined a letter tile-based crossword game. We call it Shenanigans. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Shenanigans is a fast-paced, friendly word game. Anyone who likes crossword puzzles, anagrams, SCRABBLE®, or just the English language should enjoy Shenanigans.

Click the image below to download the rules PDF.

Programming Online Board and Card Games

I have posted a new article, Playing Games with Python and Volity.Net, on my other blog. In this post I reveal the information I found when looking at creating online games using the Volity.net framework.

Diplomacy for the 21st Century

The popular culture of the United States has become increasingly centered on the concept of peer approval. A mainstay of reality TV is the end-of-the-show vote-off, whether it be the contestants themselves, like Survivor, judges like American Idol, or the public at large as on episodes with caller voting. It is incumbent upon participants to convince others of their worth lest they be sent packing.

Similarly, the internet has become a place rife with "social networks". MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and countless others provide people with the opportunity to find friends, let people know what they are up to, or just market themselves. Other services like del.icio.us, digg, and last.fm have users identifying their favorite web sites and music. The overall goal of this breed of applications is to build and maintain peer approval.

Into this 21st century culture there comes a relative dinosaur. Wizards of the Coast, who now own Avalon Hill (along with almost every other board, role-playing, and card game company) has recently released a 50th anniversary edition of Diplomacy. In case you're not familiar with the game, here is a brief introduction and justification for why today's generation may enjoy this classic board game.

Being half a century old, Diplomacy has a plethora of editions-- reprints, computerized versions, translations to many languages, and rule variations. The fundamentals, however, remain the same. As the title implies, Diplomacy is a game of negotiations. Whereas other conquest games like Risk or Axis and Allies rely on dice to determine the outcome of maneuvers, in Diplomacy everything is decided by what each player does. The primary imperative then is to convince your peers to do what you want them to do.

The game mechanics are simple. Each player controls a European country. There are land units and sea units. On each turn all the players have a predetermined amount of time to consult with each other and decide and secretly note how to move their pieces. Each unit can either try to move to an adjacent territory, support other units (of any player) trying to move into an adjacent territory, or do nothing. As you might expect, this simple game can become quite intricate as conflicts abound.

To understand how the diplomacy aspect enters in, here is an example. On the simplified map below, imagine A represents Player 1's unit and B represents Player 2's. As Player 1, you would like to take over the unoccupied blue space by moving A there. However, given the proximity of B, this is problematic. If Player 2 also tries to move their unit into the blue space, it would result in a draw, and both units would return home, effectively doing nothing. Perhaps even worse B could move into the yellow territory that A is vacating. You as Player 1 would then be gaining a territory but losing a territory at the same time. The name of the game then is trying to figure out (and ideally help influence) what Player 2 is going to do.

Simplified Diplomacy map

You can imagine if the blue territory were adjacent to another country with, say, two units belonging to Player 3, the negotiations can get quite intense. Do you tell the truth about what you're doing? Do you try to make one good ally or influence everyone? Your reputation ends up being extremely important as everyone judges everything you say and do. 

Given the prevalence of peer review in popular culture, a game of Diplomacy should be a great form of entertainment. You can check out the rules at the link above. Then gather six friends and spend a day making allies and enemies trying to control Europe!

Statistics-Based RPG Statistics

The last post looked at some basic mathematics to show why RPG character statistics do not reflect attribute measurement in the real world. We were left with a basic quandary-- if numbers don't work for attributes, then what are we left with?

Fortunately, another class I took comes in handy for explaining a feasible alternative. Introductory statistics teaches the concept of levels of measurement. Depending on what you're measuring and how you are able to do that measurement, there are different operations available on the resulting numbers. For example, if you start classifying objects by color-- red, green, blue-- it is possible to count how many of each you have. You can say what the most common color is (the mode in statistics), but, reasonably enough, you can't say what the average color is. That type of measurement, where things are named with a label, is called nominal.

The next level is of most concern to this discussion. At the ordinal level, measured items can be put into order. There is no detail given as far as the distance between two items in the list, just that A is bigger or better than B. This is the type of measurement done for standardized tests. The test-taker is pitted against other test-takers and given a percentile rank that tells where in the order they fall.

For role-playing games, character statistics almost always come into play when the character is pitted against another character or a challenge in the environment. To use another real-world example, I knew a guy who was in the top ten list of Halo players on XBox Live. The system kept track of their performances and ranked them over time. He was obviously an extremely skilled and experienced player. I, on the other hand, played Halo once in a while and never really got past the stage of being frag bait for whatever experienced player I happened to materialize near.

Imagine the two of us were going to play head to head. In a normal timed death match there would be absolutely no way I would win. Some extremely unlikely circumstances would have to intervene, taking the game out of the realm of skill. For example, if my opponent had been awake for 3 days straight and could not focus on the screen, I might have a chance of killing him. If his controller started randomly changing his movements, I might have a chance. But aside from such outside "miracles" I would stand no chance.

Back to RPG land, a system realizing that character attributes are ordinal would rank all the characters from worst to best. The exact difference in ability between one and the next cannot be known exactly, but we do know who is better in an overall sense. All of the creatures in a current setting (say the adventure) that are capable of a particular trait can be put in order. If ranking intelligence, a small sampling might go: green slime, bugbear child, adult bugbear, Harak the fighter, Grazz the bugbear leader, Shandar the wizard, and the red dragon. Challenges requiring intelligence would be added to the same list, with their difficulty determining the position. So disarming the pole and pit trap may go before Grazz, while answering the ancient's riddle could go after Shandar.

What we end up with is a deterministic list of what any character is capable of. This becomes deterministic in the sense that without any extraordinary circumstances, the lower intelligence character or challenge will be defeated. Grazz or Shandar could disarm the trap, while Harak could not, and only the dragon could answer the ancient's riddle. While this might seem unsettling in games so wrapped up in dice rolling, another view to take is that it opens up the possibilities for strategy, quests, and other ways for the characters to beat the odds.

Imagine the case of Harak the fighter, alone, trying to disarm the pit trap. He is bewildered as he looks at the mechanism involved. But perhaps the inventive player decides on another route. He finds a nearby statue and positions it near the wall to provide cover. Then, he enters the bugbear lair and taunts the adult bugbear into following him, at a run, out into the hall. Harak ducks behind the statue as the bugbear lumbers forward into the trap. Harak watches as it goes off and slowly resets itself. In so doing, he has gained enough experience with that particular trap that he is now able to disarm it.

Of course, there are other implications to a game using this type of statistical statistics system. There are also ways to deal with randomness to introduce more player dice rolling. I will look at some of these issues in the next post.

The Percentile Realism Myth

My high school chemistry teacher was quite a character. Among other things he was (in)famous for starting class the first day of school by announcing, "In this classroom I am God, and [holding up our textbook] this is the Good Book." He was a very demanding teacher, but he was also very smart and treated us like young adults rather than children. One of the lasting things he taught me was the difference between accuracy and precision. In the decades that I have been around gamers, I have often heard the perspective that role-playing games using percentile dice are superior because of the increased realism. To understand why this is a fallacy, one need only look back to my high school chemistry class.

According to Mr. Klaus and the Good Book accuracy and precision are distinct, and this distinction is important to understand. The term accuracy refers only to the correctness of a measurement. I could measure my desk accurately using feet, centimeters, or popsicle sticks. As long as other capable people would get the same number as I did, it was an accurate measurement. Precision, on the other hand, is a statement of how finely the instrument used is able to measure. In the preceding example centimeters is the most precise measurement because it is the smallest unit. I could be more precise by using millimeters or other small scales. Notice that precision says nothing of my ability to measure. If I hold the measuring stick upside-down, the result could still be precise, but it would be wildly inaccurate.

Now consider the mechanics of your favorite RPG. It is likely that characters' abilities are rated with a number on a certain scale. The d20 systems like D&D use 3-18 for normal attributes and 1-20 for most skill rolls. Other games like RoleMaster and WarHammer Fantasy RPG use percentile dice with a value of 1-100 for these numbers. It seems at first glance like the percentile systems would provide superior realism. Thinking this, however, is confusing precision and accuracy.

Let's look at a real world situation for some perspective. Testing of human beings is certainly a complicated topic, but Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is a well-known measure of intelligence that should suffice for illustrating the point. IQ tests are designed to assign a number to a person's general intelligence where 100 is the average. The high and low scores vary by test, but for the purpose of this discussion, assume the range is 30 to 200, from non-verbal to super-genius.

One would assume that grades earned in school could be predicted by looking at IQ. Researchers have found that only 25% of the variance in students' grades can be attributed to IQ. Even more surprisingly, barely half of the variability in college entrance exam scores for mathematics and English correlate to IQ score. (For references and an in-depth discussion of IQ, see the Wikipedia entry.)

The underlying problem is that we have no precise way to measure general intelligence accurately. Even though IQ tests assign a particular number as the score, that measurement is not necessarily reflective of level of performance even in areas that seem to be closely based on intelligence. In addition, repeated testing can give results that vary fairly widely.

Now let's apply this information to gaming. Most systems give characters an Intelligence score. Imagine that your character is a computer hacker in a cyberpunk-style RPG universe. You are attempting to crack a security system to open a door. This reasonably requires a test of your character's Intelligence. However, as we have just seen, the performance of a specific feat cannot be predicted accurately by a measure of general intelligence. Having a score of 10 on a scale of 3-18 is no more meaningful than having a 53 on a scale of 1-100.

If this is the case, then what are we left with? Do we have to throw away numbers entirely and go with a system like The Window? Don't despair. My next post will look at some basic statistics that might help with this dilemma.

Immersive Virtual Worlds

I have posted a new article about artificial intelligence, moral ambiguity, and virtual worlds on my technology blog.

The Problem with Initiative

Comparing game mechanics with reality is the bane of role playing and as a general rule is best avoided. In some cases though those comparisons can yield important insights into how rules could be restructured. This is the case with initiative.

Games being played and moderated by humans obviously need to be turn based on some level. Traditional initiative systems, like that used by d20 games, split up time into discreet units. Each character gets a chance to act usually once each round, and the order in which they act is determined by their speed, reflexes, etc. compiled into an initiative modifier. There is a limit to how much can be done each round very roughly based on reality.

It's easy to come up with situations in which this type of system breaks down. The main problem boils down to the fact that actions take place atomically- either all or nothing. You move 30 ft or not at all, you cast the spell or do nothing, etc.

The sensible alternative is to have actions declared as if atomic (e.g. "I will move to this spot (30 ft away)"), but have time proceed incrementally, second by second or resolved-action by resolved-action. In this way actions suddenly take their true amount of time rather than being crunched into artificial boxes of time. If my character wants to move to a spot 30 ft away, it would never again mean using up 3/4 of their movement and wasting the rest of their turn.

The other advantage is that characters' actions can be changed mid-stream to realistically react to other happenings. The character who has started moving forward and is shot by an arrow from an unseen marksman can duck behind cover rather than finish out the rest of the move. Making such changes could depend upon a character's reflexes (and possibly current level of awareness), more realistically making use of various attributes rather than lumping them all into one initiative score.