I like boards. Especially boards which are maps divided into squares. You roll a die and move that number of squares. Why aren't they used more in RPGs?

Take something like Dungeons and Dragons. A standard dungeon crawl would be great on a board. Roll dice to move the party forward. Fight the monster. Then the positioning on the board can be used in the fighting: your bow can fire an arrow four squares; to hit the monster, you need to be in an adjacent square.

But not just Dungeons and Dragons. You can imagine using this in more story-based games. Say, a Dogs In The Vineyard style game: you’ve got a map of a town, and inside every house there’s a Dilemma Spot (or something), and when you land on it, you draw a card with a moral dilemma on it. Or there are villagers, which move randomly about the board, and, if there’s a mob scene, you can see exactly where they are.

OK, that example’s a bit crap, because it adds another layer to Dogs that doesn’t need to be there. But what I’m suggesting is a game that uses a map and, in some way, uses the positioning of NPCs and items to fuel the narration. Perhaps a game like Pinnacle Empty Quiver, which involves infiltrating an enemy base, might benefit from this.

But! Having said all that, would a board take away from the game? Would the players focus on the board rather the roleplay? I feel, intuitively, that that’s a risk…but then…that’s not how it works with dice, is it? You don’t get players focussing so much on the dice that they forget to roleplay.

Help me sort my thoughts out here. Is there a possibility of using boards, especially boards with maps, to enhance roleplaying games? If so, what about story-based games? Or would the board always draw focus and detract from the roleplaying?

Graham

I picked up that D&D boardgame at a remainder shop for about £10 I think. Sometime last year. It's neat and fun, very much like Hero/Warhammer Quest. There's also Descent, World Of Warcraft and Runebound that I can think of off the top of my head,

There's the other aspect though, of people narrating the actions in a regular boardgame. I mean, I've played Talisman with people who narrated their character's actions. Actually, after a while it became a bit rote, like the "And so it came to pass..." aspect of Polaris.

But yeah, boards can be neat. I use Lego Pirate ships for my 50 Fathom's game, and that rocks.

Mike! I disagree with everything you said* about the D&D board game, which is totally gonzo and great. What's not to like about gaining back hit points for disarming traps? The game's not trying to be realistic, it is trying to be fun. It makes a number of similar concessions to playability, and they are all spot on. And this is me scolding you for saying that it isn't a roleplaying game!

*Except the optimal choice thing, which is true.

Posted By: MattOf course, in some ways character sheets are like boards. One of my current projects uses a character sheet that's a map of a city. You tie each of your stats to a particular neighbourhood and its fortunes are related to your own in play.

That sounds really interesting! One of my many projects (Yesterday's Tomorrow)revolves around a map of a city too, which acts as the physical representation of the various themes and problems in the setting.

Posted By: Graham WalmsleyOr would the board always draw focus and detract from the roleplaying?

This is what I've found. Back when I played dnd3e we used to use a big battle map with squares and minis and the whole shaboodle. It might make it easier to visualise where everyone is, but it also reduces the visualisation to the board and the minis - when you've got minis in front of you to play with, there's not a whole lot of imagination and higher level visualisation going on. At least that's what I found, so I ditched the board and reverted to describing a scene instead.

Jason is smart. The wife is always right... even when she's wrong, she's right.

I think literal maps are pretty lame but boards are all right.

Ok, so everyone seems to be in agreement that boards & maps can distract and they can facilitate different kinds of play. So what kinds of play can they facilitate?

It's a no-brainer to say that boards can facilitate strategy. But what else? Back in my Mage days, when I was a clue-happy GM, we had this evolving map of a fictional city in the mountains of Colorado. At least one of the players delighted in marking landmarks, such as the Dunkin' Doughnuts where strange things regularly occurred, and sharing it with the rest of the group. At the same time I regularly used the map as a sort of anchor-clue. Like when a baddie shows up and starts bottling hatred and rage at the local water bottling plant. During that chapter players used the map of the city to see that the unexplicable bouts of bloody violence were centered in a particular part of town. Could I have just told them, as the GM, that all these fights were just happening in a small neighborhood? Sure. Definately. But there is totally another level of fun to figuring it out with visual aids.

Granted, if the players hadn't figured out to look into water sources in that neighborhood on their own, then I certainly would have eventually pointed their noses at the particular plant I wanted them to find. But at that point there would have been much more violence that potentially could have been stopped earlier. Which would have been awesome too.

All of which is just my long-winded way of saying that boards & maps can support strategy and clue hunting. But there's gotta be other things they can support, right?

-Eric

All of which is just my long-winded way of saying that boards & maps can support strategy and clue hunting. But there's gotta be other things they can support, right?

I believe it's always better to represent any data graphically rather than textually. This is a big gap in modern RPG design.

Graham, it seems like you are finding it difficult to separate the notion of "board" from the notion of "map."

I think that making this distinction more carefully will help your thinking.

"So, as random examples: games with combat, games with sneaking, games with eavesdropping, games about escaping, football games, survival-in-the-wilderness games. That kind of thing."

My point is that all these games can be done with or without a map or board. I don't even think that a visual aid would necessarily facilitate any of these types of games. But, at the same time, if any of these games were strategic in nature, I can imagine the benefit of map or board. So I think it's the strategy factor that makes the visual aid useful. Not that there's football in it.

Harping back to that LotR game:

One of the neato things is that you have one track in the middle of the board that keeps track of everyone's corruptedness*.

I something like, say, Sorcerer, everyone keeps track of their humanity on their own sheet. Try this: Instead make a board out of paper or something like the Agon board, with zero humanity at one end and whatever the maximum is at the other**. Put your little pirate minis on that board to show everyone what your current humanity is. You've just added a board to Sorcerer, it's not a map and it might be useful. At a glance you can tell who's holding out and who's about to flip out.

* It's been a while since I played the game, I can't remember what it's actually called, but you get the idea.
** It's been a while since I read Sorcerer too.

Um... Grey Ranks?

Grey Ranks is on my radar, but I don't know much about it yet. 'Course, Jason's Roach has those cool cards, and I'm introducing that game to a couple guys from the boardgame club on Saturday.

I made a board with a 4x4 "Zone-grid" and the FATE ladder on it for Spirit of the Century a couple months ago that I use with poker chips and it's seen some fun use. Maybe I'll take a picture and post it.

Posted By: Jason Morningstar
Also of note - Clinton's game Face of Angels uses a piece of posterboard as a place to write down everything related to the game - characters, the world's resources, situation, notes, the whole deal.

Linkified for your pleasure.

Face of Angels online? Yay!

The problem with boards is trying to figure out what to put on the board and what to write on a sheet. Like I thought about having characters in Polaris move around in the Cosmos as little minis (this was back when the Cosmos was a shared space that all characters occupied.) But the problem is that it's just easier to write down names than to figure out what mini corresponds with what dude.

Likewise, I could totally do up Bliss Stage as a puerto-rico style board game, which each relationship as its own little cardboard piece, intimacy, trust, and stress chits, and so on and so forth. But, really, it's easier to write things down on a sheet.

What are boards good for that sheets aren't?

yrs--
--Ben

Boards have better "toy quality," more tactile
Boards are more accessible to new players
Boards are more attractive to passersby
Boards are less "nerdy"
Boards don't require resources that aren't in the box

I could totally see having a board when playing With Great Power. In fact, the paper game aids that the GM uses to track the story arc and the place to put the card decks (both of which generally occupy the center of the game table) are essentially a board. It just isn't a nice cardboard board with cool illustrations.

Jason, I'm not talking about realism. The idea that a character can become more experienced in play (represented by gaining HP, which we know are experience abstractions, not a measure of health) not only by killing stuff, but by practicing a skill is quite justifiable.

The problem is that the way the rule is written that it gives the player an incentive to disarm absolutely every trap. Yep, it's actually profitable in the long run to open every trap you come across (has to be, really, or playing that character would be a disadvantage). Whether or not it's in the characters way, or whatever. Realism aside, this is just dull, dull, dull.

The game is simply badly designed. As you agree, it's got the most fatal of flaws - an easily discerned optimal strategy set. Basically there are no decisions for the player to make when playing. The player is merely doing the work of pushing his token and rolling his dice to see if he "wins." Which proves nothing about player ability since everybody's going to be playing the optimal strategy.

DULL!

The game is relying entirely on the color of the game set to save it's ass. And it's pretty, sure. But that only takes me so far. Not far at all, actually.

Anyhow, there's no place for role-playing in that game, unless you consider deciding where your pawn goes as role-playing. In which case Monopoly and Cadoo are role-playing games. Remember, I'm the guy who says that Universalis is not a RPG.

Which is not to say that board-games aren't fun, or Universalis, or any other sort of game. I play them all. Just that the thrill I'm going to get from playing a game like the D&D boardgame is more like Hero Clix than Hero Quest. A whole category apart.


Shreyas, your point about maps vs boards is a good one. That is you can represent a lot more on a board than simply spatial relations.

That said, I'm one of those text folks who doesn't prefer graphics to text. The thing is that you can make the board interesting itself, not just a visual aid. Like the example of Grey Ranks above. You could theoretically do that movement in your head, but it's orders of magnitude simpler to do it on the board.

The board can include matters of strategy, of course, which makes it an important element itself. Similarly, just like Sorcerer bonus dice are not about strategy, but are an element to play around with that improves play in another way, so, too, could boards be used to be elements for more sim or nar play. I think Grey Ranks is already proof of this, but that it's just a start.

Here's a real challenge. Come up with a way to make a map and minis, and spatial arrangement be useful for something other than strategy. How could we use that to, say, help create a story or myth?

I want to use my minis again!

Mike

[Edited to note cross post with Andy. Example 2, WGP! It can be done. Do it.]

Wow, Mike, cool link. Somebody alert Walt Freitag (if he's not already involved).

Facing is one thing I was thinking about, as well as simply sharing personal space and presence. Ability to communicate. Simple distance.

Body language is tough with minis, and a lot easier to deal out using your own body. But there could be some way to indicate this on a board that might be a satisfying part of some sort of play.

Mike

Graham, there's a collaborative project underway to create a story game influenced by modern board game design (among other things), that Shreyas, Thomas Robertson, Selene Tan, and I have been working on. Unfortunately, we don't have any pretty board graphics done to show off yet.

The "scene-framing board" that Matt mentioned (from my Exalted hack) looks like this.

The Grey Ranks and My Life With Master boards are nice. Essentially, though, they're state markers. There's no sense of play taking place on the board.

Imagine either of those two boards with the counters actually interacting: leapfrogging each other, say, or "pushing" each other around the board. Then you'd start using the board for what it's good for (as Ben says), as opposed to a replacement character sheet.

Robert, I really like the stuff about non-tactical minis. It reminds me of Mechaton.

Graham

Stratego is a great game. The key with looking at designs and what to take from them, however, is not to consider them holistically, but to consider the principles that form them.

Read your Game Theory (no, not RPG Theory, the math field). Stratego boils down to "Hidden Information" and "Rock, Paper, Scisors (RPS)" mechanics. Yes, 1 takes 2, and 2 takes 3 and so on down the line, but in the end 9 takes spy, an spy takes 1! And, yes, there's that internal variance that bomb takes all, except for 8, which takes bomb. A relatively complicated "Roshambo" mechanic, but basically the same thing.

If you're familiar with the game theory behind it, the key to winning when such mechanics are present is to be unpredictable. To act randomly. Which is why somebody who puts his stratego board together randomly can sometimes seem to be a savant. Yes, the game is positional. But the more you move to take advantage of that, the more predictable you are, and the easier you are to beat.

Anyhow, when putting together your board-game RPG, look for the underlying principles of the mechanics you steal, and how they're going to affect play. Graham is right about the examples. With Great Power's "board" is also somewhat a state thing, though the state does affect what you can play next. It's just a little "meta" to be felt as ongoing play.

Bob's onto what I'm talking about. Non-tactical minis. I like the "Vision Minis" idea. I've always felt that Warhammer Illustrations were just begging to have answered what all of the darn warrior accoutremont was about. Why does that orc carry that particular skull around on his belt?

The problem with board as plot channel is, well, it's a plot channel. If one could make it so that you can go "any direction" at any time, that would be an improvement, to me. If I'm playing in Middle Earth, I want to be able to play somebody other than the Fellowship, and I want to be able to go explore the Sea of Rhun if I like.


But, yeah, I'm thinking in terms of turns and such. Like imagine a social game where your "move" each turn is to place your mini somewhere on the map (perhaps being able to move as far as you like), and that indicates who the character can interact with. You want to garner favor with the king? Go where he is. Ah, but the Baron is there with him now...do you want to risk his ridicule?

Ever seen the French movie Ridicule?

Versaille is an interesting place. When touring it, the basic fact of it's design became burned into my skull. I'd read abuot how Louis had built the place distinctly to control his courtiers. Essentially he'd allow himself a horse, but not others. If you've seen the grounds, you'd understand that this would mean that he could speak to whom he wanted, when he wanted, or get away from people. Or organize groups of people who he wanted to talk to each other. It's really a brilliant bit of planning that helped forge France into a nation-state by disempowering the nobility to scheme against the central authority.

This is the example that always comes to my mind when I think about this sort of thing. But you see what I mean. Location on the map can simply be about who is in the presence of whom, and, as such, who one can interact with. As just one example of how one could make maps important to play.

Mike

Yeah, ironically the best response to opponent random play is simply to ignore it, and play with the data you do have. Good poker players who do not have tells, will sometimes show that they've bluffed even when they don't have to do so (opponent folded), just to put this fear into the minds of weak players. Good players ignore this, and only work from what they know.

This is why, at it's highest level, poker goes from being a skill game, back to being totally gambling (why Moneymaker, a complete newb to the "pro" scene, could win the tournament one year, and Helmuth never does). It's only against weak players that skill means anything.

Anyhow, again, that's the principle. Both RPS and hidden info are considered by good boardgame designers to be only good design elements if mixed strongly with other, more tactical, design elements. You want, in fact, for there to be better and worse strategies.

On the other hand, you don't want a "known" game either, where the optimal strategy is easily discerned (hopefully, like chess, never discerned until some computer does soon).

To get back to boards, one element that can provide this is non-board regulated movement. That is movement with a ruler. This is in part becase the skill in question becomes eyball ability to estimate distances, and a bewildering array of geometry problems that present themselves. Again, this seems to be a combat thing, but what if we did have movement rates on a map, and it was about whether or not you can intercept Louis on his horse at Versaille to ask him for a tax break for your Duchy? Then you have one such element to mix in with the more deterministic things like hidden info an d RPS mechanics.

By combining these things we can create greater complexity to play, and avoid the pitfalls of optimal strategies.

Mike