Overview
Many players play characters who perform activities such as international negotiation, supply-chain management, scientific research, or running a barony, yet these types of activities are rarely actually played out on stage, and are usually relegated to IBGAs where you often skip directly to the outcome (e.g. Plot says “you look at such-and-such scientific data and discover X”, rather than giving the player the data and allowing the player to discover X on their own) From talking to Plot teams, it seems the reason for this is that creating something approaching real-world complexity would require too much work for Plot teams (e.g. Plot would have to set up a system to generate the data required).
However, it seems that if such complexity could be made to work, it could add a lot to the game. It could provide more interesting non-combat things to do, without requiring nonstandard effects or abilities. It could make playing characters that do these kinds of things more interesting. Ad it could also make these kinds of activities more accessible: if running a barony is done entirely through IBGAs, then only the Baron gets to even see what's going on, but if there's a system where things like e.g. collecting resources to build buildings, setting up infrastructure, etc. can be done in-game and have in-game effects, and this is a system that's learnable by players, then other players could be involved in the process because they could, for instance, learn the system and provide suggestions, or observe the in-game effects and react to them.
So, I have been thinking about how can we solve these problems and include this type of “real world” complexity in the game. It occurred to me that these types of “role-playing” exercises are often used in the real world – for instance in business schools to teach negotiation techniques – and designers of these exercises face a similar problem: they need to come up with a scenario that has a similar structure to a real-world scenario, yet is still simple enough to set up in the time available. So I have been looking at these real-world scenarios to get ideas.
A Case Study: Negotiation Scenario
The following is a negotiation scenario described in the book Negotiating Genius, by Harvard Business School professors Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman. It is a scenario that they have used in their classes and some but not all students come to the optimal agreement, so it seems a good candidate for a scenario complex enough to be nontrivial but simple enough to be easily describable.
The scenario involves a production company selling syndication rights to a TV show to a television station. There are two items which are up for negotiation: licensing fee and number of runs per episode. The following information is provided to both parties:
Incorporating This Into LARP
So, imagine that one wanted to incorporate the above scenario as a roleplay mod in Alliance. (Of course, one would make it fit the time period: one would use, say, a playwright selling his play to a theater rather than a TV production company selling a show to a station.) What would be the challenges:
Another activity sometimes performed by PCs is some form of scientific research – like someone studying the secrets of magic or an alchemist inventing new concoctions. Again, often this is performed in IBGAs with skipping straight to the end result for what is discovered, while it may be more interesting to have the discovery process itself be a part of the game. Here is an example of how such a discovery process could be made a part of the game. Let's say that the PCs discover an area with lots of unknown alchemical ingredients, and the PCs want to mix them together to produce useful items. One could do the following:
Many players play characters who perform activities such as international negotiation, supply-chain management, scientific research, or running a barony, yet these types of activities are rarely actually played out on stage, and are usually relegated to IBGAs where you often skip directly to the outcome (e.g. Plot says “you look at such-and-such scientific data and discover X”, rather than giving the player the data and allowing the player to discover X on their own) From talking to Plot teams, it seems the reason for this is that creating something approaching real-world complexity would require too much work for Plot teams (e.g. Plot would have to set up a system to generate the data required).
However, it seems that if such complexity could be made to work, it could add a lot to the game. It could provide more interesting non-combat things to do, without requiring nonstandard effects or abilities. It could make playing characters that do these kinds of things more interesting. Ad it could also make these kinds of activities more accessible: if running a barony is done entirely through IBGAs, then only the Baron gets to even see what's going on, but if there's a system where things like e.g. collecting resources to build buildings, setting up infrastructure, etc. can be done in-game and have in-game effects, and this is a system that's learnable by players, then other players could be involved in the process because they could, for instance, learn the system and provide suggestions, or observe the in-game effects and react to them.
So, I have been thinking about how can we solve these problems and include this type of “real world” complexity in the game. It occurred to me that these types of “role-playing” exercises are often used in the real world – for instance in business schools to teach negotiation techniques – and designers of these exercises face a similar problem: they need to come up with a scenario that has a similar structure to a real-world scenario, yet is still simple enough to set up in the time available. So I have been looking at these real-world scenarios to get ideas.
A Case Study: Negotiation Scenario
The following is a negotiation scenario described in the book Negotiating Genius, by Harvard Business School professors Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman. It is a scenario that they have used in their classes and some but not all students come to the optimal agreement, so it seems a good candidate for a scenario complex enough to be nontrivial but simple enough to be easily describable.
The scenario involves a production company selling syndication rights to a TV show to a television station. There are two items which are up for negotiation: licensing fee and number of runs per episode. The following information is provided to both parties:
- The show will get a Nielsen rating from 3 to 7.
- The advertising revenue from the show will be $7 million if the rating is 3, increasing by $1 million for each rating point above 3.
- The number of runs per episode can be from 4 to 8 – the production company wants lower (to avoid having the show overexposed) and the station wants higher (to get more revenue)
- You predict that the probability distribution of possible ratings is [10%, 10%, 10%, 50%, 20%] for ratings [3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
- Each run per episode above 6 reduces the residual value of the show by $250,000, while each run per episode below 6 increases the residual value by $250,000.
- If you cannot reach a deal with the station, another station is willing to purchase the rights for $3.5 million for 6 runs per episode.
- You predict that the probability distribution of possible ratings is [20%, 50%, 10%, 10%, 10%] for ratings [3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
- Each run per episode above 6 increases revenue by $800,000, while each run per episode below 6 decreases revenue by $800,000.
- Since the production company's estimate of the ratings is higher than the station's, if the production company holds out for too large a percentage of (their estimate of) potential revenues, this will be higher than what the station is willing to pay.
- One way of sweetening the deal is to add a side payment based on what the ratings turn out to be. For instance, if the station agrees to pay the production company $1 million extra if the ratings end up being 6 or higher in exchange for a $1 million refund if the ratings end up being 5 or lower, then this will increase the perceived value of the deal to both parties (since each party thinks they have a greater-than-even chance of winning the extra “bet”) even though it doesn't add any extra money to the pot. (Another advantage of this kind of side payment is that it reduces the incentive to lie about your estimate, since you might have to “put your money where your mouth is.”)
- Since the value of extra runs per episode to the station is much higher than the cost to the production company, a “compromise” deal of 6 runs per episode is suboptimal. Increasing from 6 to 8 runs per episode, while increasing the licensing fee by $1 million, increases the value of the deal to both parties.
Incorporating This Into LARP
So, imagine that one wanted to incorporate the above scenario as a roleplay mod in Alliance. (Of course, one would make it fit the time period: one would use, say, a playwright selling his play to a theater rather than a TV production company selling a show to a station.) What would be the challenges:
- It would probably not be too complicated or require too much work to set up and explain. I explained the whole scenario above in just a few paragraphs.
- It does not rely on unfamiliar concepts. All the key concepts (different people having different sets of information, distributions of random outcomes, things having different value to different people) are common features of both RPG and tabletop games, so most players will have some experience with these.
- Probably creating a fully fledged business simulation system where a scenario like the above naturally arises out of player interactions would require more complexity than Alliance can really support. While the game has some “business” aspects in e.g. the crafting and ritual system, it's not nearly as well developed as in some other games.
- However, the above “system where the scenario naturally arises” isn't necessary, just as it isn't necessary for anything else that happens in the game. When a plot team sends a bunch of orcs to attack the town, Plot doesn't have some sort of system on the backend to track how the orcs build up their forces and keep track of their readiness to attack so that an attack “naturally” arises – rather, lot just decides this would be a good time for an orc attack, and sends out orcs. Similarly, in the above scenario (let's say it was a PC playwright negotiating with an NPC theater representative) Plot could just print out the playwright's information set and give it to the PC saying “this is your assessment of the situation”, then print out the theater's information set and give it to the NPC as part of their briefing, then send out the NPC.
Another activity sometimes performed by PCs is some form of scientific research – like someone studying the secrets of magic or an alchemist inventing new concoctions. Again, often this is performed in IBGAs with skipping straight to the end result for what is discovered, while it may be more interesting to have the discovery process itself be a part of the game. Here is an example of how such a discovery process could be made a part of the game. Let's say that the PCs discover an area with lots of unknown alchemical ingredients, and the PCs want to mix them together to produce useful items. One could do the following:
- Come up with a system for what determines the effects of a mixture based on what goes into the mixture. For instance, one might use the system from Skyrim (each ingredient has four possible effects; up to 3 items can be mixed together; the mixture has an effect if that effect is on at least two of the mixed ingredients). But unlike in board games or video games, in this scenario nothing about the system is ever told directly to players.
- PCs can, at any time, go to Plot and say “I am mixing ingredients X, Y, and Z together, what do I get?” Then they turn over the ingredient tags, and learn what they make, and get a tag for whatever they made.
- If the PCs want to, they might decide to do systematic experimentation to try different combinations of ingredients to try to figure out the system. Of course, they will have to be strategic about how they do so, because each experiment uses up valuable ingredients. It will be up to the PCs then to record their results and try to figure things out.
- Of course, things might still be useful even if the PCs don't figure out the whole system, for instance, a PC might observe “I mixed ingredients A and B and got something really good, next time I get an A and a B I'll mix them again to get the same thing” even if they don't know the rest of the system. Of course, the more the PCs learn about the system (and they might discover this over the course of several events) the more likely they will be able to discover, new efficient combinations.
