Fable Rules- Final Post
Fable Rules- The present version of the game after multiple playtests and prototypes ended up looking like the picture above. It has been structured to be a lot more user friendly and helpful to the uninitiated storyteller while keeping the essence of freedom in the joy of storytelling.
The game Fable Rules is a Co-operative chain storytelling game where you don’t really have to be cooperative. The game is structured so that the players keep merging up their stories at different stages of the game, the players have to do a lot of back and forth amongst themselves to come up with a communal story that they like. So even though the game is about making stories together in the end you are all struggling to get your way, which may or may not align with your fellow storytellers. The end goal of the game also gives the winner sole storyteller rights for concluding all stories in play. Thus all the players strive to get to the end first, so that they could tell their own story’s end themselves and also conclude the other’s tale their way; the game is a quest to create, preserve, bond and also maybe making things miserable for the other players (schadenfreude FTW).
The Final prototype description detailing the game and it’s mechanics-
It is a 2-4 player game.
The Game board is designed in a spiral shape, so that “ the story unravels” as they move along the board.
The board was divided into a 3 act structure. Act 1 tiles were marked with grey color, act 2 was marked with a light blue color and act 3 was marked with dark blue. The players pick different story cards as they enter these acts.
There are in total 24 tiles on the board, calculated so as to give a precise balance between enough time to have fun and too long that it gets boring.
The game has 4 type of cards from which players have to pick at different points in the game-
Character cards: In total 8 cards in the deck like “a blind child”, “a living stuffed toy”, “anti-hero”. The players pick from this deck at the beginning of the game to give themselves an idea of what their character is on whom they would tell a story
Story cards: In total 32 cards, these cards were divided into 3 decks namely act 1, act 2 and act 3. The first and last act had 8 cards each, the player take one card each from these decks as they enter into the different act sections of the board. Act 2 has 16 cards and the players have to pick 2 cards which they can use in any order in the act 2 section. This was done in accordance to the 3 act story structure that many stories follow, since act 2 is generally the longest it was made so that this deck was bigger. These cards help the players lead their stories in certain directions helping them tell a tale.
Animate cards: In total 20 cards, the players draw from this deck when they land on an animate tile on the board. They keep these cards on them and can play them whenever in the game. The cards will employ a special rule/event onto the game. But the player who plays this card has to do the activity written on the card IRL, they have to “animate”.
Story Merge cards: When one of the players enter act 2, everyone merges their story with another player in the game. Everyone picks one of these 4 cards and the players with the same colored card get to merge their stories together and also have to an activity which signifies how their story will progress together.
There is the animate tile and then there are 2 two other special tiles on the board called tunnel and sticky mud. Tunnel adds a surprise factor, if players land on a tunnel block they have to wait for their next turn and then their dice roll decides their fate. If the dice gets a number from 1-4 they move ahead as the number says but if they get a higher number like 5 or 6 they go back, if the player gets 5 they go 1 step back and for 6 they have to move back 2 steps . Landing on sticky mud means that the player misses their next turn.
Before the game starts players tell a little background story about their characters. Then after the game begins the players start telling stories at their respective turns after rolling a die and moving their character pieces forward. They pick up various cards at different points as explained above.
When one of the players enters act 3, all the players stories merge. And now everyone has to balance their stories with each others till the end (which is almost there).
The first player who reaches the end is the winner and they get to tell the conclusion of everyone’s story according to their own desires. Making up the ending for everyone’s tales, maybe everyone lives happily ever after or maybe everyone is miserable or maybe just that one guy you want to mess with gets the short end of the stick and their character ‘gets stuck in the office filing papers, while everyone else goes out for ice cream’
The evolution of the concept Fable Rules:
The game that we were approaching was a chain storytelling game inspired by similar games we used to play as kids, but our game had one twist, players also had to make up rules along with the story which would affect the game permanently. The mechanics of the game were focused on the lens of story machine and freedom, from there on out all our aesthetics were to be fulfilled. The original version worked to give complete freedom to players to build a story & a rule that they wanted. We brainstormed different ideas which could give form to a structure under which these conditions could be met, the players would tell stories at each turn but had to bet points to put up rules. We also went through a number of variations for the layout of our board. Which at the end was decided to be like a twisting turning road, to signify the journey the player’s characters were taking.
This is how the board looked for our first prototype.
The game felt like it was creating the experience we wanted it to, however after a few playtests we came to the realization that not everyone is adept at creating stories on the fly. Which was under the realm of our expectations, we also found out that players found it hard to make up and follow the rules being created. So as a result we had to revamp our game idea to fill in this gap, we tried to make up mechanics that helped players in creating stories and also trashed the mechanic of making up rules. Instead the players would draw animate cards which would render a rule onto the game on that turn. Also character and story cards were included to help the players in storytelling. The board design also didn’t give much of an impact on the playtesters so we had it redone as well, coming up with unraveling spiral board.
At this point we had come to proper understanding as to what the game was supposed to be like to get it across to a wider range of audience. However our second prototype still was a bit off, after playtesting it three times we isolated the problems and made corrections accordingly. The animate cards were made so they could be played anytime instead being played as they were drawn and the merging of stories was made more clear with separate story merge cards & act 3 all merge mechanics.
This is what the board looked like at the end of the final prototype.
The evolution of the concept took a rather narrow bend after our first prototype making us adopt more directing mechanics into the game and then as we went forward with it we had to sort out and make decisions as to which of these mechanics were working well and what was the best way to use them till we finally ended up with our final prototype.
Use of concepts from the class:-
As a learning process we took in a lot of different things from our classes. The lenses from Jesse Schell’s book helped us multiple times in focusing onto what we needed from our game. For example, we started out with the lens of Story machine and freedom, which in turn was facilitated by the lens of fantasy. Later on when we had our new problem statement after our first prototype of “how to integrate a wider player base?” we used the lens of fun, what can we introduce to the game to make it fun without the story, so we introduce concept of tunnels, sticky mud and animate cards giving the players to do other things that added some spice to the board and gave players to do activities IRL and keep them engaged via something that wasn’t related to stories; something that was simply silly & fun. Also the lesson over space and objects was very helpful, after that we started looking into how to organize our board and cards (the lense of functional space and state machine). We applied probability when making our final board, the lessons learned during class came in handy when calculating the number tiles on the board and the number of cards in each deck to maintain a proper balance of luck and opportunity.
The other big thing that we learned was that our initial ideas don’t always make to the end as we hoped them to in the beginning. Playtesting and prototyping are very very important in realising what the game needs, the game has to go through multiple iteration and with every loop the game gets better. So we shouldn’t get to attached to our ideas and learn to let go for greater good of our creation. The original idea no matter how good or how bad can always be improved.
Description and analysis of final playtest:-
The overall reception from our final playtest was mostly positive. The playtest was held during class and was played for almost 30 minutes. Sadly we weren’t able to take this playtest till the end of the game due to time constraints. But the data we gathered during this much play time was still pretty useful and ample enough to analyse the construct of our final prototype. The following observations were made during the playtests-
Most players seemed to enjoy the IRL activities they had to do for the animate cards with the exception of one. Also the cards were played only a few times due to time constraints.
The playtesters were having fun throughout telling stories and were not drawing a blank while telling stories.
Story and character cards helped players to make up stories.
The merging of player’s stories after starting off alone seemed as a good change of pace. Players enjoyed the moment when they had to merge their stories and one pair was having a lot of fun telling their joint story.
The inclusion of animate cards was worthwhile, it was mostly appreciated for giving the players unique capabilities which they could use to help themselves or others. The playtesters were helpful and cooperative with each other. They didn’t use the cards to mess with others even though they could have done so.
Since the playtest was cut short due to time constraints we didn’t get a chance see the players get to the end, however we did give them an explanation of what all could have happened and what was to happen at the end. We had to posit the rest of the information about the player’s experience from the playtest questions we asked them-
Did the story and character cards helped players in coming up with story ideas?
The playtesters said that the cards helped them in coming up with stories.
Were the animate cards fun to play?
The animate cards were liked for giving players pre-made rules which they could use whenever. But the IRL activities part was disliked by one player.
Is the winner’s achievement something the player’s can look forward to?
The end goal- of telling everyone's stories endings is a good goal. Something that players can aim towards getting.
The players seemed to enjoy their time with the game even though they weren’t able to play it to the end. They had fun coming up with stories and making tales with their partners starting act 2, even though there seemed to be some miscommunication here and there when players were telling stories, their joint stories were able to bounce back quickly and without much effort. Everyone showed a cooperative and healthy attitude towards each other. It would have been interesting seeing how the winner’s version of every story’s end. Maybe the idea of getting their own way at the end might have turn the cooperative play into fierce competition, which has been observed in other playtests. Anyhow the things that we learned from this playtest were to make the maybe refine on the explanation of the cards and to make clear from the beginning that players are free to discuss over joint stories over each other’s turn.
Lessons learned-
How players experience games, our playtests were very insightful in this aspect. We realized that the players have to be eased into the game or else they feel overburdened by the amount of things they have to do from the get go. Like initially our game had everyone’s story interlinked from the get go. But it became apparent early on that players were having a hard time coming up with interconnected stories. That’s where our 3 act system came into work, it made it so that players were gradually connected with the stories of other players giving them to think about a direction for themselves.
Insights gained about building a specific aesthetic experience through mechanics. Our main aesthetic was that of narrative and fantasy, in a storytelling game these aesthetics kinda go hand in hand with telling stories which is the main mechanic and this part didn’t really need help. But the whole mechanic itself did need a lil bit of hand holding to function efficiently, if the mechanic gives the player too much of a lease it becomes too difficult for the player since now they have such a huge plane of choices to make their decision on. Thus some constraints are needed on mechanics (like our story and character cards) to control the lease in the range of choices and make the experience of the player fixed onto our aesthetic and not run amok fields of choices confused. This breaks from the aesthetic of narrative and makes it harder for the players to reintegrate themselves into the fantasy.
Also we had some other aesthetics that were in play in our final prototype, like challenge, competition, fellowship and expression. By giving players different story and story merge cards we managed to direct them into certain situations of conflict and fellowship alike. Again by controlling some aspects of the game it was possible for use to create the required aesthetic, even though this desired result was left to chance when players drew cards. But this chance could be also be managed by calculating the probability of drawing different types of cards, thus giving the developers some leverage while designing the decks. In the case of challenge and expression, the players were given story cards so that they had a direction to go about while telling their story, however this aspect also lent challenge to players who wanted to tell their own unique story of getting to that unique story by navigating through the given scenario and expressing themselves.
The communication and collaborative process we would bring forward to future projects, would have to be our bi-weekly or sometimes three times a week scrum meetings. In which we would discuss new and old ideas, compare & contrast our vision and finally assign grunt work to each other like physically making the board or cutting and pasting, to make faster progress in coming up with prototypes this was very helpful.
For work that actually need design input from each other, like designing the board or coming up with the cards, we would sit down together and start coming up with multiple concepts which were compared and contrasted. Giving input and improved on the ones which we thought worked the best. We would sometimes also came to these meetings with our concepts ready to get things going faster. This was also very beneficial in making prototypes faster and would like to carry on a similar process in the future.
The communication and collaborative processes we would abandon or change for future projects, the one thing that did not work out for us was our verbal agreements. We on more than one occasion agreed on various aspects for the game verbally, we had an accord which we reached after much deliberation. But these compromises were not recorded and were only verbally agreed on, so what would happen was on the next meeting would try to implement or talk about the same thing we had already discussed about, aspects that shouldn’t come up again as problems. This happened because we forgot about certain discussions and would try to talk our way up again. So the one lesson learned here was to note down our meetings and agreements, making sure that all the teammates are on the same page by having a written copy for review in case of conflicts.
Projection-
We had already thought of a direction we would like to take our game concept next. The most fruitful direction for expanding and refining our final prototype would be-
Getting more options in on the story cards to give the player more variety when picking up story cards.
Making so that the players have to pick a story card on each turn instead of only when they enter a different act. Even though the 3 act structure worked fantastically with the scope of our current game, if we want to expand the size of the game we might need include more opportunities for players to get helpful events such as these story cards.
Adding in a few more mechanics that we had thought of, like the keeper and the helper. The keeper event would block the player's path and they wouldn't be able to continue on with their story without getting help from a helper. The helper would be another player who gains something in return for helping them. This would introduce more cooperative play opportunities and would offset the competitive goal of the game.
Maybe getting rid of the board all together. This was an idea that we had been toying with since after our second prototype phase. We wonder whether having no board and just a turn based storytelling games which was facilitated by multiple card decks would make for a better experience. This might be an interesting direction we could take the game towards.
Though there is always the option of simply increasing the scope of the current board and making sure the chance of getting different events on it is better. Maybe remove and refine some of the current mechanics such as the tunnel event.
There isn’t any reason we could think of why we would want to abandon this game. Except for maybe that people who want to tell stories are gonna tell stories together, they wouldn’t need a board game to facilitate an environment such as this. And maybe if our main target audience doesn’t feel like buying such a board game then there’s a chance of it not selling well. In such a scenario we would like to harvest animate even cards from our game. This mechanic provided players with the power to play rule at anytime on anyone in the game which would affect the game for just one or all players and would also had the user do an interesting activity IRL. We feel as if this mechanic could play well with many different tabletop game concepts.
Detail teamed description-
We communicated with each other through mobile, google docs and many face to face meetings. We mostly met up in the library or the Ryder lab. For designing we used MS paint,Adobe Photoshop, MS word and paper sketches to layout our designs. Other physical materials were used for making the actual game. Most of the things were done together, we first discussed and then implemented our ideas which was conveyed to each other through multiple scrum meetings every week. We equally divided the work amongst ourselves, like the character cards, story cards and animation cards. All the card’s content was created equally for all the types by both the designers. We exchanged each other ideas and if improvisation was needed on them we did that. Similarly we had 3 iteration of our board first time Vaishnavi designed the board and Uttkarsh did other things like printing and improvising the board. And second time Uttkarsh made the board and printing stuff was done by Vaishnavi. And at third and last iteration both worked together for the board and cards.
It was a communal effort that was put through all aspects of the game design through all its stages. Both the designers worked in tandem to each other, giving input and coming up with ideas.
Comparing and contrasting views while designing the game was done and facilitated by Uttkarsh Narayan. He was responsible for keeping order during the design meetups, somewhat of a producer role fell on him more.
Creating a line of communication and setting up meetups was done and facilitated by Vaishnavi Shah. She was was responsible for keeping order outside of meetings, somewhat of a management role fell on her more.
Since both our skill-sets were kinda similar it was better that we didn’t divide the work between ourselves in different aspects and just did equal amounts in all departments. This strategy felt like the best way to get things done between us.
This was the final blogpost for team Fable Rules, hope you enjoyed our game.