You know how board games always have something on the side of them that says, “For 2-5 players,” or something like that to indicate how many people the game is sized for? It’s partially a practical thing, they can’t include enough cards or tokens or a board large enough for a group of 30, but it’s also a factor in the game itself. It was never tested for 30 people, for that matter it may just not work very well when scaled to 30, 300, or 3000. There are PBBGs out there with 30,000 people on a single server, how do you even design a game like that?

I have no idea. Literally, no idea whether the game I’m working on now will be fun when I throw lots of people at it. It could suck. It will suck, the creator of BattleMaster virtually guarantees it, and you know what? He’s probably right.

My current hope is that I’ve got a good idea for a game and I’ve taken the same path a lot of games take by giving every player basically the same starting conditions so they’re left to their own devices in competing with other players. But is just starting with a level playing field enough? Is there a way other than playtesting and adjusting, playtesting and adjusting to have a better idea of how to make a game interesting when you don’t even know how many people are going to play it?

One possibility I’ve considered is the idea of forcing division into groups upon the players. Creating a game and really balancing it well for say 25 and then as players join they automatically get assigned to a group until it hits the magic size and the game gets going in earnest. So a single server might be running hundreds of games at the same time rather than one game with thousands of players. Short of sites that let you play real board games online (e.g. http://gametableonline.com/) , I’ve not seen anything like this though and as with all these questions, I’m not very sure how well it would work short of building a complete game and testing it.

I know it does offer some possible advantages because you can actually have certain people fill certain roles. There will be only three people who can be doctors, two police officers, 12 zombies, etc. The roles are set and they play them out till the end of the game. Cooperative games are all the rage in the board game world right now and often they work on this very principal (e.g. Battlestar Galactica). I’m so-and-so and here’s what I can do. I have in-game abilities that maybe nobody else in the game has and vice versa. You can even have traitors who are working against the group but nobody knows who they are or perhaps even if there are any.

But then what do you do when one of them leaves?

Problem #2: Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town

In addition to being the title of a book by Cory Doctorow that I really enjoyed, this is how I describe a problem that I see as one of the worst ones a persistent online game may face. People come, try it, and then leave never to come back. Or they join it to stay but only a couple of days before it is scheduled to end or after all the empires are all built up and the game experience is completely different from players who started the game together.

Board game players don’t face this problem nearly as much. Sure, people get called away for emergencies on occasion, but the social convention is that if you’re coming to play that you’ll stick with it until the end of the game. Board games tend to have fairly short lifespans compared to PBBGs though. With timeframes of weeks or months their games are much more likely to have people quit because of something coming up or losing interest. What happens to those players? Are they a zombie that sits there unresponsive while the player is gone? Do they become a computer controled character when the player is away? Do they fade away as though they never existed?

New players are more easily dealt with. They can be shunted off to a newly opened game in order to keep them from joining too late. Or, if you design an open-ended game then perhaps it won’t matter when they join. Most MMORPGs are constrained to their world needing to exist in a kind of weird stasis. Yes you obliterated that dungeon full of bad guys yesterday. Today, it’s all put back together so someone else can go do the same thing. You’re living in WestWorld and Yul Brenner’s gunslinger will be just fine as soon as we repair him.

Problem #3: Numbers, Complexity, and the Digging of Holes

The last of three big problems that I see PBBGs having to deal with is the problem of numbers and complexity. It’s not that board games don’t have to deal with lots of variables and complexity too, they do. The introduction of a lot of different elements is what keeps a game from being something easily analyzed and “solved” to the point where it’s no longer fun to play. The problem is again one of scale.

Any board game designer has to deal with complexity by saying, “What can my players manage in their head with a few additional play aids I might give them?” Scoring, number of pieces, number of cards, size and complexity of the board are all constrained by what real people can really hold in their hands/calculate/see. But as soon as you get a computer involved the temptation is to throw out all of that. I don’t have to have only four kinds of armor, I can have 40! I can have 150 different weapons, all with subtly different values for attack and defense. I can even have each one keep track of how sharp it is. It can get worn down over time…

But then that complexity comes home to roost when it’s time to actually playtest that game. How do you adjust a game with four thousand variables without getting your own version of the butterfly effect. One little tweak here makes a huge difference over there, or perhaps even worse, a huge change here has almost no effect because of the unforseen influence of some other things you can’t seen working in the background. The more complexity you put in, the richer your game seems. But at the same time you’re digging your own grave deeper and deeper.

This is probably the most solvable of the three big problems; just scale back. But scale back to what? Unless you’re willing to lock the number of players per game at a fairly small number, what are the effects of a small tweak when it may change things for hundreds or thousands of players? Is it going to completely upset the economy in your game?

In Conclusion

What do you think are the biggest design problems PBBGs face? Have you seen solutions to these problems in existing games or have ideas for solutions that no one has tried yet? I know I’m looking forward to hearing from others interested in PBBG game design on these and other problems.

The contest will run for two months, ending on December 11th. The winner of the contest will be the game that is deemed to be ‘most fun’ by the judges(who haven’t been announced just yet). There are a lot of advertising-related prizes available to win – perfect tools to help you get your game to critical mass after you’ve built it. Building Browsergames is also one of the sponsors of the contest – if you win, we’ll review your game and interview you!

One point that needs to be mentioned is that this contest is for new games only – you cannot enter a game that you have already built or been working on. Other than that it’s fair game though.

Sound interesting? Take a look at the contest page for more information, and good luck!

KoL is a class-based game, like most MMORPGs and whatnot. You’ll get new equipment, get new stats, level up, all industry-standard, tried and true boring stuff. Yet KoL is about as unique experience from an RPG as you can get. Replacing wizards? Pastamancers. Replacing thieves? Disco bandits. Awesome. There are 6 classes in KoL, based on the three main statistics of levelling up: Muscle (your attack damage and health stat), Mysticality (the magic stat, increasing MP and magic attack power), and Moxie (your luck stat, determining dodges). The 6 classes are divvied up into the three stats, with 2 classes making use of each stat primarily. It’s a very simple RPG system that lends itself well to the nature of the game; there’s nothing overtly confusing about it. It’s not much deeper than the 3 stats, sadly, but it’s a minor grievance and it barely distracts from the fun of the game.

KoL introduces you to the game in good fashion, establishing the basics through a series of quests. You’re introduced to combat, simple turn-based action, nothing particularly flashy and new about it aside from the fact that you’ll be battling bunny rabbits, cooking trolls, and “bars” which might look like bears but no, it’s just a bar. Grinding involves questing in various areas of the game that you’ll visit, engaging in either a battle, event, or a “choose-your-own-adventure” game where you’ll choose multiple outcomes to arrive at either of the former two ends. Each time you click on an area to grind on, you’ll use one of your “Adventures”, of which are limited (you’ll receive 40 Adventures daily). You can also accumulate Adventures by eating food or drinking booze, until you get too full or too drunk. Choosing where to Adventure is important, as picking a place too high level for you will result in death, giving you a debuff that you’ll likely have to spend some Adventures sleeping at your campground to wear off. Buffs work similarly, in that they last for a certain amount of adventures before wearing off. It’s a rather ingenious system that both penalizes death and promotes strategic gameplay without being too involving.

Which, to be honest, is the main focus point of Kingdom of Loathing. It’s ridiculously laid back. Look at the graphic scheme: stick men, black and white. What’s there is fun to look at not because it’s visually engaging, but because it’s hilarious. It satirizes all the RPG stereotypes while being a rather fun RPG itself. It’s the kind of game that takes a step back from games and just wants to be nothing other than fun. It’s a great game to kick back for a half-hour and just waste some time laughing at the witty dialogue and improving your Seal Clubber’s stats. Really, if you find yourself loathing all the RPG clichés that plague games nowadays, you might fit in playing Kingdom of Loathing.