Game Ideas Un limited: Occurences

  I was doing a bit of grocery shopping.  My son, pushing the cart, stopped to look at something, and a box fell off the shelf.  He caught it, and we continued.

  Maybe I needed to notice that; I didn't.  But as we rounded the corner to the next aisle, some stranger tried to pick up a box off the shelf, and boxes began tumbling to the floor.  And this time I noticed it.  But what I noticed is a bit difficult to explain.

  Every time I go to the grocery store, someone drops or knocks something on the floor.  Once in a while the thing that hits the floor breaks.  Once in a while the person who drops it is me.  Once in a great while, those two factors come together.  That is, once in a great while when I'm in the grocery store, I drop something and it breaks.  I suspect that it happens to everyone, or at least to everyone who does any serious amount of grocery shopping more than once a month or so.

  The grocery store is just one place where this sort of thing applies.  Every once in a while someone will knock over a glass or drop a plate in a restaurant.  Sometimes it will make a mess.  Sometimes it will be my fault, and sometimes when it is not my fault it will still be my problem, such as when the soda pours across the table into my lap.  If you do a lot of urban or dense suburban driving, odds are you see an accident at least once a week, and probably have at least bumped bumpers with someone in the past few years.  Amusement park staffers deal with lost kids every day, and every parent has at some time had the panic of realizing that his kid has wandered off.  In short, everywhere you go and all the time things are going wrong for someone, and sometimes it happens to be you, and sometimes it is more serious whether or not it's you.

  On the other hand, on this particular visit to the store one of my favorite cookies was on sale--ninety-nine cents for Keebler Fudge Stripes.  I remember an occasion on which there was no line for the roller coaster when I got there.  Sometimes the diner is serving my wife's favorite soup.  Good things are happening, too.  Sometimes they will happen to you; sometimes the good things that happen to someone will be very good.  Someone is going to be that millionth customer who gets all the attention and goodies.

  The trick is figuring out how to bring these kinds of minor events into a game.  The usual techniques don't work very well.  It's hardly appropriate for me to make a dexterity check for each item I take from the shelves; I'm not nearly so clumsy as would appear from that.  The odds are very much against the bad thing--or the good thing--happening to me; they are also against it being terrible or great.  This ultimately barely rises above the level of color, most of the time.  What is needed is a way to bring these occurrences into play in the very small levels of probability that they seem to have in life.

  In Multiverser, this sort of thing is easily addressed through the use of general effects rolls.  The roll of three ten-sided dice added together creates a bell curve from three to thirty, where the extremes appear once in a thousand rolls.  With the center of the curve representing ordinary results, the higher the roll the worse the events of the day or the situation are, and the lower the better.  Interpretation is up to the referee, but the roll gives that needed framework:  how good or how bad?  And thus I can tell whether you dropped the eggs, or someone was killed in the car accident, or the hot coffee spilled in your lap.

  Something like it might be found in Monopoly.  If you roll doubles, you get to move and roll again; it happens once in six turns.  If you roll doubles a second time, which happens once in thirty-six turns, you get to go yet again.  Once in two hundred sixteen turns you will roll doubles three times in a row; and when you do, you go directly to jail without collecting two hundred dollars.

  This sort of mechanic is not so easy to design; but if done well it gives a touch of reality to the game world that is not so easy to capture.  Good things and bad things are happening around us even now, and some of them are going to affect us at some point.  Our characters should have similar experiences.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.