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

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

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.

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! :)