kihou: Just a link to a game I think is cool an

Xavid (

kihou) wrote,
@ 2008-04-22 22:39:00

Just a link to a game I think is cool and could make a good Guild Game mechanic: Proximity. Not that it's likely to go into After/Xibalba like Ring Pass Not, though I guess it could... It's somewhat in the ticket-to-ride category, by which I guess I mean it involves territory claiming, not that it's anything like Ticket to Ride.

EDIT: I was going to edit this to fix the spelling of Xibalba, but it turns out that, contrary to my recent statements, I did know how to spell it. Go being phonetic?

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hariyos
2008-04-23 03:57 pm UTC (link)

I just played a game of Proximity. I think it took about 10 minutes. It's fun and I like it. The ruleset is simple and allows for nice strategy.

That said I disagree with you about it being a good mechanic, at least right out of the gate. If you use it as a face-to-face combat mechanic of some sort, you want to hand everyone hexpaper. Fine, that's not too bad. Then, either you bring a d20 along to generate your numbers, which is way too random, or you have a deck of random cards (so you can ensure probabilities), which is kind of a pain in the ass to carry around. Then you have to keep track of the incrementing hex values when you drop neighboring armies. This is *doable* on a hexmap, but it's going to drag things out and make your players cranky.

If you drop the reinforcement rule, players are vulnerable to their enemy rolling a natural 20 and just taking whatever they want. This might be reasonable but it seems kinda brutal. If you drop any sort of random generation and assign strengths of armies based on some kind of in-game stat, the guy who is fielding 10s when his enemies are fielding 13s is just screwed and there's not much you can do about it. If you start doing something with a big hexmap and putting numbers down and starting to use the Proximity capture mechanics, but since they're in-game armies you have to account for attrition in battle and desertion and ... at that point, you may have been *inspired* by Proximity, but really, you just wrote a proprietary Guild wargame. :)

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kihou
2008-04-23 04:07 pm UTC (link)

By "make a good mechanic" I really meant "be the basis/inspiration for a mechanic". I was thinking some sort of setup where there was some sort of communal Proximity board somewhere in gamespace, and to place a tile you needed some sort of in-game item (each of which would have a specific value). I haven't really thought through the consequences of being able to pick the order of which tiles you played from some set, and whether it would totally break if we allowed people to play whenever they wanted instead of taking fixed turns, and how having more than two sides would change it.

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hariyos
2008-04-23 04:43 pm UTC (link)

That's starting to be the kind of central mechanic that you write plots around and link into even more of your plots. (We have one of those, you'll see it this weekend.)

I kind of envision that as a stone table with glowing crystals sticking out of it, like a Minbari control panel or something out of a bad fantasy novel.

You'd need to make it so that anyone who comes up to the table can just take a turn; this is not too bad. You can make a time delay between piece placement to make sure someone can't just drop 7 pieces down on the board and have an unassailable "1" (which would be a good plot: "negotiate with people and have them protect this wicked vulnerable piece on the board so you can do this hard thing") Put it next to a blackboard, have people put themselves on a queue. At that point, you have a system that you can use standard Guild dispute resolution methods (*click*click*click*) to solve any problems with people saying "No, I want to go before you!"

This is probably all obvious.

Gameplay with the strategy used in the normal game would be a lot swingier if you allowed out-of-turn play and multiple sides; people could build up concerted attacks and just take a lot of territory. So I'd think people would play a lot more defensively - build blocks of territory, hard to capture, leave an avenue for expansion. Which is just another way of saying that it's still a viable game.

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	hariyos 2008-04-23 04:35 pm UTC (link)
	Ring Pass Not, on the other hand, is fucking awesome for stealing for a Guild mechanic. Not to mention addictive. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	kihou 2008-04-23 06:45 pm UTC (link)
	If things go according to plan, it'll be featured in a one night next Spring. We haven't gotten past the early planning stages, though, so all sorts of things could happen. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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