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[Actual Play] Bilingual game development

Started by riprock, October 23, 2007, 05:15:50 PM

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riprock

October 23, 2007, 05:15:50 PM
One reason I haven't posted lately is that running a game in both Mandarin and English can be very exhausting.

The playtesters in question are students; the game is intended to teach lateral thinking more than to entertain.

The first scenario was essentially a legal conflict: resolve a dispute concerning archaeological sites.

The player characters were the landowner, a local environmentalist, the national government rep, the local government rep, and the representative of academia.

The players mostly roleplayed relationships well and immediately jumped into character with 1st-person speeches rather than 3rd-person "My guy goes left" instructions.  Unfortunately as play progressed, the Mandarin grew more rapid and complicated and a 3rd party translator claimed that they were just doing out-of-character conflict resolution rather than roleplaying their characters' conflicts.

The ending result was total consensus and an in-game commitment to cooperate on two legal strategies to resolve the dispute.  The proposed strategies were non-technically explained and did not draw geographical boundaries.

Problems:
1) The conflict was essentially legal in nature and a more rigorous outline of the legal conflict was needed in order to judge whether the player solutions were valid.
2) The tendency for players to cooperate needs to be challenged by zero-sum games between players.  This is a problem requiring more detailed representation of the actual economic conflicts between the five parties.
3) More in-game tokens are needed to keep player attention on the details of the game representation.  First and foremost better maps are needed to accentuate the geographical complications of the problem.  Secondly, more detailed representations of money and other "utility functions" are needed so that players can be ranked on how much they gained from the outcome.

Interesting point: Realistic law and urban geography problems provide more emotional conflict than guns, rooftop infiltrations, and steampunk robots in my GURPS Lite campaign.  This might be connected to the players.
"By their way of thinking, gold and experience goes[sic] much further when divided by one. Such shortsighted individuals are quick to stab their fellow players in the back if they think it puts them ahead. They see the game solely as a contest between themselves and their fellow players.  How sad.  Clearly the game is a contest between the players and the GM.  Any contest against your fellow party members is secondary." Hackmaster Player\'s Handbook
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