I suppose now that there’s a chance you’ll read my comments out loud on the show i should cut down on the number of clauses in a sentence.

On the topic of ‘games and their backgrounds’…
I’ll start by making an analogy: @warzan mentioned in this XLBS that he had advised Dave and Andy not to use dice as damage markers in their Dropfleet Commander game. As i understand it the problem here is that the use of dice in this way was inadvertently interfering with the aesthetic of the battlefield. The physical playing area in a game of Dropfleet Commander needs to accommodate the representation of the battle both in terms of the aesthetic and the mechanics. ( Let’s put aside the possible use of screen based game-play tools and assume that the damage markers need to be physically present on the tabletop. ) Using the dice as damage markers failed to take into account the aesthetic aspect of the physical space and, for @warzan at least, conflicted with it. ( It’s a fine line, and this case highlights how peculiar each case can be. @warzan wasn’t saying never to use dice in the game, he was saying not to use dice in this very particular way, and perhaps only for this particular game. Anyway, i digress…. ) The option @warzan suggested instead of using dice was to use dials on the bases of the ships. For @warzan this is preferable because dials better integrate themselves into the aesthetic.

In a similar vein I do not like it when the universe in which a game is set has ‘dice’ plonked all over the place. In the case of game settings these ‘dice’ could be units, story lines, armies, cards, mechanics, miniatures, characters, and so on. As with the actual dice in Dropfleet Commander, what they are, in and of itself, might not be the problem. Rather, the problem might be the a specific combination of what the ‘dice’ are, how they are used, and the setting they are being used for. In any case, whilst i might like ‘dice’ in a game i do not want a minatures game to become a dice game. I would not want to start collecting and playing Dropfleet Commander only to find that because dice were in one way or another the best item to sell, more and more of the game became dice, regardless of the effect that that had on the aesthetic of the physical playing area. I certainly wouldn’t want the ships to start looking and functioning like dice and for the background to be rewritten to accommodate and explain the new ‘dice ships’. ( I wouldn’t want this to happen even if it made the gameplay better in some way. ) This is to some extent what has happened with ‘dice’ in some game settings that i have liked.

Two games i very much liked were WFRP ( Warhammer Fantasy Role Play ) 1st ed., and WFB ( Warhammer Fantasy Battle ) 2nd and 3rd eds. ( You may be familiar with them dear reader. ) The rule sets for these games were riddled with problems. Rules sets are important to me and yet i stuck with these games for some time because i liked the setting. Over time ( it seemed to me ) the setting had various ‘dice’ plonked all over it: ‘Higher’ fantasy tropes were brought in and became more predominant; Miniatures became more ‘heroic’ in scale and the art and ‘fluff’ was rewritten to suit these ‘heroic’ miniatures cum heroic characters; The hidden threat of chaos became less and less hidden, at first becoming more of a chaotic horde, and then more of an army with chaos symbols. Magic became ‘battle magic’; Skulls. For a time WFRP escaped this change in setting because it was no longer supported by GW, leaving the fans to build on what they had started. When an official WRFP 2nd edition did come out it had to accomodate all the ‘dice’ that had been plonked in the setting. Not only did these ‘dice’ change the setting in a way in which i disliked, they also did so in favour of the battle game to the detriment of the RPG. I stopped buying into WFB and i didn’t buy into WFRP 2nd ed. The irony is that at least some of the mechanics for the WFRP 2nd ed. were superior by far to the WFRP 1st ed., and i’m pretty sure i would have liked at least some of the changes because they were changes that i suggested. But it didn’t matter. The setting had been diced.

I realise that these changes weren’t disliked by everyone, but my history with the Warhammer Fantasy universe is given to demonstrate my priorities when it comes to these types of games. I also realise that some of you might be thinking – ‘hey totsuzenhen’i ( https://translate.google.co.uk/#ja/en/%E7%AA%81%E7%84%B6%20%E5%A4%89%E7%95%B0 – japanese school girl accent not essential ), wait a minute, you originally said that you preferred games that were designed for settings rather than settings that were designed for games, and the Warhammer Fantasy setting was always designed for the games’. I think that that’s true to an extent, in that the specific setting was created in tandum with the games, for those games. However, it seems to me that the Warhammer Fantasy setting was ‘inspired’ by and built upon a number of other settings and ideas which weren’t created with games in mind. ( Middle Earth, Cthulhu, and Renaissance Europe all come to mind. ) As such the early versions of the Warhammer Fantasy setting suited me very well, and at first the games were designed with the setting in mind rather than the other way around, even though the setting was ‘unique’ to the games and for the games.

Infinity was also mentioned in the discussion on the show. It’s a game i often look into because i like the setting and despite thinking i might prefer other mechanics. Again in this case, it would seem that the setting was designed with the game in mind. Again though, i would suggest that the creation of the Infinity setting, whilst unique to the Infinity games and for the Infinity games, is inspired by and built upon other settings, both fictional and historical. From what little i know of the game it seems to me that Corvus Belli have consciously done their best not to plonk ‘dice’ everywhere. I think much the same is true for other games that i play or that i am interested in. ( Android: Netrunner; Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander; Necromunda; and Kingdom Death, to name a few. ) Then at the ‘pure setting’ end of the spectrum are Pandemic and GW’s LotR battle game, both of which i think are very good. Both of these are set in pre-existing universes and are designed to recreate the experiences of those settings.

On the other hand, Runewars, the game that i responded to in last week’s XLBS, seems to cobble together a whole bunch of stuff that FFG thinks will be sales worthy and i strongly suspect it’s setting will be written and rewritten to suit, which is one reason why i think it doesn’t interest me.

Fini.