Action Pacing In Play

I really find long action scenes in play, to be tedious.  By which I mean, against a real clock by a real table in real life, and where a play session may only allow as much time playing as the time to watch a movie or two or a few binge episodes of some TV show... I don't want action to take more than the same five or ten minutes (at most) of those action scenes.

OK, so give a little extra room for verbal description, but really, the days in which a set-piece action scene takes two hours is just too long.

Gen Y and Millenials do a lot more gaming online in whatever, and lots of indie gamers do youtube play sessions to which they refer in discussion posts.  I really have only watched Wil Wheaton's Table Top episodes before, and they are genuinely entertaining, largely because of the magic of editing.  I decided to look at a youtube play session by one of the big names associated with Fate the other day.  I really like this guy's thoughtful essays on game play and game design, but I couldn't get through more than 10 minutes of his action scene, due to the pacing.

Now much like golf or tennis, playing is more interesting than watching.  But from that, I have several thoughts.

One of the attractive things is the open, free-form narrative nature of action.  I love that.  Codified formally as overcome or create advantage actions (and attack and defend), you can do everything that is otherwise made in really crunchy lists in, for instance, traditional D&D.  But I don't want to have to memorize lists, I just want to do whatever I can think of in context of the moment, and then want to forget it mechanically.  My favorite action scene in a game ever, was a fight in which I was mechanically outclassed by two opponents, and alone.  I had to think of creative ways to use my environment to tip the scales in my favor, which the rules did not explicitly address, but the GM was flexible and we made a great Jackie Chan kind of action scene.  Fate, with create advantage actions and aspects has this baked into the mechanics.

The problem arises when the rules are stated naked on top of the narrative.  Looking at the video play session, I see the thing that I want to avoid.  I think that he was doing this partly to demo and explain the mechanics, but I want a more seamless way to get past having to state "that sounds like you are being Forceful", or "that sounds like a a create an advantage".  Furthermore, it occurs to me that one thing that seems to be done in Fate games, is overtly making a logistical issue of writing out the aspects on a card, when in more traditional games such things are stated and otherwise just tracked and forgotten as required.  This is related to the same problem I have with the whole multiple die rolling resolution in whatever game, which is to say that it breaks rhythm and thus drags out pacing.  

I don't know how any of the core designers of Fate play at their tables, but other designers have put forward other alternatives like Jadepunk's quick duels method which is essentially a contest rather than a conflict mechanic.  However, Lenny Balsera did make this observation on the Fate G+ forum:

The most important of those is, having the GM roll dice actively increases the swinginess of a conflict scene, which a lot of people perceive as a feature. Having your opponent always present a static difficulty reduces a lot of the variability from round to round, makes outcomes and fate point spending more predictable, etc. So that's basically the trade you make there, added chaos and added handling time vs. less chaos and less handling time. My preference is, if we're gonna agree to engage a system specific to having conflicts, to push in the direction of more chaos.

Also, having the GM roll actively engages the GM in the same kind of economy management stuff as the players, and forces some of the same prioritization, and I think that tension is an important one in Fate play. There's more of a sense of being an equal participant—as the GM, you also have a limited number of FPs, and depending on how your rolls go, you're gonna have to make some decisions. How important is that opponent, really? Should I concede now and take my licks to build resources for the next scene? Etc.  

Which is interesting.  The important elements are 1) the swingy uncertainty of contested die rolls vs. a less swingy single roll bell curve; 2) the chaos of more rolls and thus more chances for a missed success; 3) the more active competition of the fate point economy on both the GM and player side. The cost of doing business this way, is more time on the play session clock.

So this equation is essentially: Uncertainty + Chaos + Balanced Competition = Fun (vis a vis Fate conflicts).

It seems to me that perhaps if the thrill of uncertainty, and the illusion of chaos (or a different kind of chaos), and the balanced competitive element can be mixed, perhaps by reducing the second, time on the clock can be reduced by simplifying mechanics.

...hmmm... how then to change the chaos, and yet reduce the mechanics?...

More precisely, how to shift the mechanics to some kind that does not actually require stopping in real time to manage the mechanical transaction in order to preserve the conversational narrative pace?

How can you get the chaos and pacing of say, the card game War, or Pit, or at very least Mau?

Is An Unexamined Thought Worth Endorsing?

I have a very conflicted view on the value of social media for a number of reasons, but one is that so much of human communication is only apprehended through non-verbal means making about 70% of the message lost when received by text alone.  Another, is that there is so much more of it, that such communication becomes careless either by the sender or the receiver, or both.  The quantity of data consumed by social media users had further become as much about sifting signal from noise, and thus actually thinking critically about a message is often lost on knee-jerk reactions, categorizing the message, and thus for expedience also all further messages from that sender, and then the sender themselves as noise.  We discard thought and people for convenience.  So while I see the value of not embracing Ludite conservatism, I also am continuously reminded of how poor so much social media communication can be.

Case in point... I discovered recently the page of a game designer who makes some of the coolest games in my collection.  I love his stuff.  But I made the mistake of commenting on one of his posts that had nothing to do with his games and was instead about an issue that he felt very sincere about, with which I happened to disagree.  Being neither rude or aggressive, I merely questioned his assumptions in a polite and reasoned fashion, asking what his criteria were for his point of view.  I was rebuffed instead with the statement that that was not an issue he wished to address.

The next post on his page was about this exchange with what I think he believes to be adequate evidence to prove his point.  Here is what he said (italic) and my thoughts on his follow-up:

Today someone told me that they didn't believe in privilege.

What I actually did was question his assumptions about what it means vis a vis an assertion of offense he made about a game design.  "Privilage" as it was used by him is a term with particular meaning in intersectional social/political theory.  I know very well what intersectionalism states to be true, I have studied the philosophy underlying it, I frequently read intersectional media for insight, and I still happen to think that it is philosophically flawed at the very foundation.  More on this below...

He continues:

Today, on a day when an unarmed black man waiting by his broken-down car was gunned down, murdered by police who were supposed to help him, to protect him.

This is a statement of some of the facts, and a misstatement of others in the Terence Crutcher shooting in Tulsa.  Before addressing them in turn, the first big problem is that this poster quickly judged the situation without all the facts or context, and demonstrated a prejudicial preference that privileges the intersectional narrative over all others.  Further facts not mentioned are these:
1) Officer Betty Shelby was en route responding to a domestic violence call when she happened upon Crutcher, not in his vehicle which was stopped in the middle of the two lane road.
2) There were some number of 911 calls just before that by people reporting Crutcher's erratic behavior, shouting that among other things his SUV was going to explode.
3) His behavior was assessed by officer Shelby as being consistent with the erratic behavior of someone on PCP (she did not know a the time but a vial was found in the SUV).
4) Crutcher was non-compliant with the demands of the officer, who then called in backup.
5) When Crutcher approached his SUV while refusing to comply with several officers, Shelby claimed she shot because he was attempting to reach inside the vehicle after having been reaching in his pockets before.
6) Video footage appears to show that at least the driver's window was closed, and possibly the rear window as well.

So without prejudiced conclusions, we can judge in light of the facts that the officer did have reason to be more suspicious of the motorist based on his behavior than usual, prompting a reasonable amount of caution which merely continued to escalate, based still on his behavior.  We can also conclude that there was insufficient evidence to warrant deadly force, especially in light of the fact that one of the other officers had drawn a taser rather than a firearm, which she could have also done.

The poster also failed to note that the officer has been suspended from duty, and charged with the felony of first degree manslaughter.  He also did not note that this was in the same town that a deputy that was allegedly insufficiently trained for the job was also convicted with felony manslaughter for the shooting of Eric Harris.  These facts suggest if anything, that the overall tone of law enforcement in Tulsa is not institutionally racially biased against black men in Tulsa, is not protecting wicked officers, but is actually pro justice in their actions.  We may speculate that there are some training issues that need addressed.  The poster used the term murder rather than manslaughter, I suspect in haste.  It does not prove that he is willfully deceptive, but suggests at least a moment of lazy research in his attempt to offer support for the intersectional view that he feels passionately about; but it is not excusable if his goal really is justice rather than self serving political outrage.  More on this below...

Today, the day after the Republican candidate's son tweeted out a white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee meme.

This has nothing to do with Tulsa, or with police issues in general and the questionable intersectional assertion that there is an institutional oppressive bias by police (especially white police) against black men in America.  It does not bring any actual salient facts on the Tulsa issue he used as an example, it ignores or is oblivious to such facts as the research that shows statistically, white police are far less likely to shoot black suspects than Hispanic or black officers are.

But if we assume this is an attempt to provide another piece of anecdotal evidence to bolster the assertion of validity of his intersectional view, I would have to point out that the meme in question is the Skittles meme, which mostly does not support what the poster asserts it does.  The meme text states, "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?  That's our Syrian refugee problem."  The poster asserts that this is white supremacist.  There is no evidence of this.  While the color of the Skittles in the bowl invite a snarky response, there is in fact no assertion in the meme of a preference of any kind to any race.  The poster further asserts that the meme is anti-immigrant.  Again, there is no statement whatsoever about immigrants in the meme, and if we reasonably assume that it is supposed to follow Trump's stated policy view on immigration, he has generally stated that he supports immigration from anywhere as long as the immigrants are vetted for security, and do so legally.  Trump does say a lot of other wacky things (oh, so many!), some of which he has changed his mind on, but this is a pretty consistent policy position in a pretty sparse field of stated policy positions.  The poster finally states that this is anti-refugee.  To some degree it is.  However, in context with everything else Trump has actually said, he has further noted that he wants all refugees to be vetted before being allowed to come onto our soil.  This position is predicated on the fact that:
1) there are a good many documented posts by terrorist organizations that they are actively seeking to insert agents onto American soil under guise of refugees from Syria, and
2) it is well known that there are multiple terrorist organizations who actively seek to harm Americans, and American interests that have received support from incompetent administration channels operating in Syria.

There is a credible threat from Syria to America, even if the choice of metaphor by Trump Jr. was grossly clumsy (and it was).  But a clumsy meme does not actually prove any institutional oppression or privilege vis a vis intersectional theory... only that the analysis was clumsy, or that it was dumbed down into a straw man argument, and that some people took it seriously anyway.

I read articles like this one and I think, "How can anyone living today be paying the least bit of attention to the world and believe that privilege is imaginary?"

Because articles cited as such are very poor evidence of the validity of intersectional theory.  One can believe that prejudice does occur in America (I certainly do), that oppression happens among humans (it most definitely does), and privilege exists in human societies (without doubt).  One can well believe these things and still not believe that intersectional theory accurately understands any of them (I assert it does not) even if I am actually willing to respect the people who hold the views as I challenge the idea to be discussed.  I just happen to find that my invitations, no matter how humble or polite, are dismissed.  My experience has been either that the supporters of intersectional thinking actually want to avoid genuine discussion in favor of incredulity or outrage that fits their view, or (sadly) unproductive agreement that intersectionalism is just liberal whining, which may or may not be true, but is ultimately ad hominem and not helpful.

Football players taking a knee during the playing of a song are raked through the coals, vilified and lambasted, while police murder black men and routinely get away with it. That's privilege at work.

In the first case, while I might think Kaepernik is a twit for doing what he is (I do) I and his critics
1) also have a right to freedom of expression every bit as much as he does, and
2) predicate the opinion on the proposition that he is applying his expression with poorly thought out assumptions, and
3) am not advocating that he and members of his organization or race should be killed.

Furthermore, the poster seems to again be lazy in
1) his understanding or his use of the assertion of murder (vs. manslaughter), and
2) his misunderstanding or prevarication of the fact that officers who actually did commit a criminal breach of trust and authority have been punished.

It's time to start fixing our broken country, friends. And we can't do it with our eyes closed.

I respectfully agree with the poster on this.  I likewise respectfully disagree with his diagnosis of the problem, because I question who actually has their eyes more open to the situation.  Furthermore, while I am fully persuaded that he is sincere in his feelings that something is wrong, I am disturbed by what appears to be a disinterest in admitting that perhaps, just maybe, he might possibly have not grasped the situation as fully as he seems to assume, nor does he seem to feel that anyone with a challenging opinion could possibly have anything legitimate to offer to the discussion.  He suggests that he has his eyes open, and that those who challenge his view do not.  Where is his evidence though?  I see a pretty thin thread to hang his assertion on, which I to date, have found overwhelmingly typical of intersectional doctrine... 

Edit: this subject is important to me, and I take it very seriously. If you want to chime in with a clever, pithy remark, consider that doing so isn't helpful. I will delete such comments. If you want to tell me how privilege isn't real and that all this social justice malarkey is overblown, know that I consider such remarks to be actively harmful and I do not feel an obligation to give you a space to say such things. I will delete these comments too. 

...and there you go, my friends.  Not only does he not want to critically examine the evidence he offers, but he does not want to examine any evidence anyone else offers that does not fit his view.  He is so committed to the view, that any discussion is by default assumed to be harmful and will be summarily censored.  I get the principle of not feeding trolls, but I was not trolling.  I did bring up the question on his public space, which I could have predicted to end thus, but gave benefit of the doubt because he is otherwise an intelligent and creative fellow from the small window I've seen through his game design discussions.  Politics make people often commit to lazy thinking and bad ideas though...

It does bother me that the intersectional assumption automatically demands that I either agree, or else prove myself actively committed to oppression, racism, sexism, bigotry, and phobia; that I cannot possibly take the issues of policing, or community violence seriously or reasonably; that I can summarily be judged to be wicked because I differ on the analysis of the problem.  This is bothersome further because it seems to be a view held by so many of the designers that I think are really cool and creative, who I'd love to have thoughtful creative discussions with.  But I suspect, based on a pattern of behavior from some of the most forward who adhere to that view, I likely won't be allowed the opportunity because I am in the "other" camp... that group that the intersectional community is quick to accuse of the sin of "othering" others based on biases and unreasonable prejudice, yet hypocritically is so quick to condemn without bothering to even listen.

The very framework, the foundation, the skeleton of intersectional thinking, is at the end of the day, nothing more than one big, often narcissistic genetic fallacy.  It serves to exacerbate grievance against others, but offers little of value to critically examine a problem, bridge the gap, and certainly not offer forgiveness and reconciliation.  Considering the godless roots, it is not surprising.  The cause is always more valuable than people there.  Facts and respect for persons are of little consequence under this worldview.  How much is lost because of that?

Privilege in the dictionary sense obviously exists in the world.  It is practiced in every way possible by every human on the planet.  Privilege, oppression, phobia, bigot... all of these have actual meanings, and the actual meanings are at every turn ignored and twisted by intersectional theory.  The problem we have is in determining the rational criteria by which we decide that a thing is actually fair or unfair, cruel and excessive, illogically pathologically fearful, or unfairly hateful.  Asking this question is flipping on the light switch at threats of the bogey man... committed intersectionalists in my experience almost always prefer the bogey man, and all too often rejoin with ad hominem attacks on the person questioning without first understanding the questioner's assumptions.  This does nothing productive to solving real problems of fairness or equality toward persons.

I have a problem with that too.

...fail foreward...

**sigh**

There are times that looking at progress on something makes one want to just say "that sucks", and toss it in the can, and move on to the next thing, whatever that is...

This is my five minutes of gripey, whiney bits looking at what I trying to do with this blog... the goal is to try to scrape rust off of writing, off of creativity, off of focus... putting it out in the open is an attempt at accountability.

Today it does not feel like it is doing anything useful.

But at least I wrote... right?

OK.

I am done.

Flow Theory And Game Design Questions

Flow theory postulates three conditions that have to be met to achieve a flow state:

1) One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task.
2) The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows them to adjust their performance to maintain the flow state.
3) One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and their own perceived skills. One must have confidence in one's ability to complete the task at hand.

Jared Sorensen's three questions for design are:

1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?

I think Flow Theory really intersects with #3 a lot.  That is the kicker.

There is an interesting essay on Flow HERE.

In it, is an interesting example of using Flow for a really innocuous purpose: picking shoes.

So the loop goes from: challenge >> opportunity to act >> feedback >> new opportunity to act.

Golden Cobra 2016

http://www.goldencobra.org/

5 September to 5 October 2016. 

The goal of the 2016 contest is to generate elegant, expansive, uplifting games. Golden Cobras will be awarded in five categories:

• Best use of somatic elements
• Most culturally responsible design
• Best use of magical realism
• Funniest
• Most Convention Ready

Optional ingredients:

• dinosaurs
• ghosts
• parasites
• stardust

In order to be considered for a Golden Cobra, your game must:

1. Consist of one or both sides of an 8 ½ by 11 inch or A4 sheet of paper. (Minimum point size accepted is 8.)
2. Games should be playable with zero to minimal prep.

Further rules:

1. Be a new, unpublished freeform larp. It is neither a tabletop roleplaying game or a video game.
2. Present your game in a readable, playable format (pdf preferred).
3. Your name can only appear on one entry but teams are welcome.
4. Submit your game by 5 October in .pdf format and in English to submissions@goldencobra.org. Parallel versions in other languages or other formats are encouraged.
5. You retain all rights to your work but grant the judges permission to print out and play the game you submit, and for it to be included in a free anthology after the contest.

Freeform LARP?...:

What we call freeform larp occupies a middle space between tabletop and full-blown live action role playing. They come in all shapes and sizes, all along the spectrum and keep incorporating new things as they come along. As a rule of thumb if there are simple, clever game mechanics but you have to stand up and move around at some point, it's probably freeform larp! 

The Sound Of One Hand Clapping: OR Thoughts On Writing An Adventure Without Writing It

So on of the problems that comes of being a gamer "of a certain age" is that there is so much more of life that demands my time, leaving so much less for being able to play.  This is doubly so as I think of rpgs.  The time and effort that I once had to plan, craft, write, and map careful game adventures simply costs too much compared to the fact that, 1) I'm not getting paid for it (though this is a point for some other discussion), and 2) I may never get a chance to fully use it.  The last time I went all out writing, plotting, drawing out timelines, locations, maps, handouts to include faux news clippings (on newsprint paper), antique book pages, faux email printouts, and matchbooks for exclusive clubs... I only got about 1/3rd of the way through the campaign before it petered out due to player time commitments.  I think that one hurt more than I am consciously aware of, as that was distinctly the last time I gave that much creative effort on a labor of love in a game.

But it was also one of the things that moved me ineluctably down the road toward indie games with more rules light and narrative design principles.  As much as I still think that GURPS and Pathfinder for instance are well designed engines, I really just love Fate (and the host of Fudge-like games of a kind) for it's mechanical simplicity, bounding the mechanics by narrative statements.  This kind of game is to be sure, one for players you trust, but I don't want to play with the other kind anyway.  So the challenge is trying to find a way to get satisfactory story out of minimal prep.

Fate does this by making "Session 0" a critical feature, with issues, and games based on say, Apocalypse World have fronts, but otherwise "play to see what happens".  I suppose that what I am thinking about then, is a way to kind of start with those sorts of things, and add just a little more structure so I can create and thereby provide a little more detail.  So it seems that a good starter question for each session, is to have the players review the issues and their individual character goals, and considering context and continuity of what they did previously, ask the players the following question to start the game:

What are you doing?

Now the answer to this cannot be a weaksauce answer.  No "chilling in the tavern", or "shopping for equipment upgrades".  This has to be a clear, powerful answer that is an expression of what the character wants enough to fight for, perhaps kill for, and perhaps die for.  In Fate, this is easy to do by examining aspects, and then figuring out how that action can go wrong... what can be worse, or what complications are expected.  This should be detailed, and provide the specific picture for the starting scene of the game.  This is also a good time to get fate points, and in a particularly gritty game, rather than refreshing automatically, give FP based only on this.  But the players ought to do this, perhaps as a flashback, creating the starting scene.

Next, based on what trouble they have chosen to get themselves into, they need to suggest two or three steps, or sub goals, or objectives that they need to take in order to get themselves out of that jam.  These can be a bit broader, leaving tags that the GM can plug into an overall scene planner to shape the game in a fashion that provides more build and story unity without a whole bunch of pre-loaded prep.  The players get what they want in broad strokes, and the GM gets to make stone soup - letting much of the heavy lifting be done by others.

This is very close to what It's Not My Fault does, with just a little bit of customizing.

Conflict Currencies In Game Design

So ultimately what separates a story from a documentary or some other kind of mere information media, is the narrative of a normalcy - conflict - normalcy cycle.  The meat of the story, is the conflict and it's resolution.  No big news there, but it does bring to mind a way to frame a design principle in my mind for story games of all kinds.

Going back to Jared Sorenson's three questions for game designers:

1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?

The first question is not about the setting, but rather the theme of the game.  So D&D actually is (at least in most of it's older incarnations) about killing things and taking their stuff.  Star Wars the rpg is not about a galaxy full of aliens and spaceships, but it does begin to tell us something meaningful when it gives us the fairy tale cues "A long time ago" and "a galaxy far, far away", and when we begin to understand it through the sub titles (A New Hope).  Star Wars, is about not giving up living, breathing hope in in the face of an oppressive mechanistically ordered system.  It is about the personal war between choosing Life vs. The Machine.

The second question is identifies the things that the mechanics need to address or ignore in more detail.  D&D (old school) has lots of rules for combat, physically damaging things, surviving physical damage, and advancing with more and better equipment purchased with lots of treasure.  Alternatively, Star Wars is a story centered on moral and spiritual choices, the rpg, to really capture the essence of that story, needs to have strong mechanics for the morality of choices, and mechanics that address temptation and corruption.  Because it is not a piece of military techno-fiction, nor a story about the clever advances of scientists and engineers, any mechanics regarding the finer points of tactical advantages or power to thrust ratios of engines is actually superfluous to the game... Star Trek is the next game over on the shelf.

The third question digs deeper into how you actualize the types of important mechanics.  D&D offers experience points for killing monsters, and for gathering treasure, which put into the player's hands, allow upgrades and bonuses to the character's abilities which make them more effective at fighting and surviving.  Star Wars should have some measure of where the character stands in relation to the light side or dark side of the Force, as well as some kind of way to measure in play changes in status depending on actions taken in the story.

This gets me to my refinement on the second and third questions (is that 2.5?  or 3.5?...).  My question is:

??) What is the Conflict Currency?

Whether the kind of conflicts that are important are sword fights, star ship battles, social brinksmanship, or pitching woo in hopes of enduring love, the meat of any story is about those basic literary questions:

1) What does (character X) want?
2) Why can't they have it now?                              =                  CONFLICT!!!
3) What is at stake if they don't get it?

The Conflict Currency then, is what mechanically represents the things that are important to the kind of conflict in the story the game is telling.  It is safe to say that most rpg's include some king of physical combat.  This is one of the common kinds of conflict then, and needs some kind of conflict currency.  This is often represented by accumulated hit points in some way that are paid as the price for being hit, and weapons with some kind of rating in how many hit points they can cause to be spent.  Another kind of conflict currency is used for the use of magic.  Whether there is a budget of magic points (a.k.a. a "mana" system) or  a budget of slots for pre-packaged spell effects (e.g. a "Vancian" magic system, a la D&D), these get spent and are recovered in some cyclic fashion like hit points, in order to get effects in the game.

To be sure, virtually every rpg has multiple conflict currencies, as there are multiple kinds of conflicts that are available, or at least multiple strategies for confronting and overcoming the arch conflict.  It gets to be problematic if you are playing a game for which there is not any conflict currency, or for which you have some currency that feels undervalued in that economy.  This can be a way to focus a game of course, but it can also make some kinds of play feel short changed.

Not to bully D&D, but I will use it as a case in point (and it is not by any means the only one, and in fact provided the foundation economies by which many game designs have been built).  D&D has a varied and interesting economy for conflicts that are at their core, about killing creatures that you wish to pillage.  There is the basic attack action with weapons that costs the opponent hit points.  There is also a host of magical and magical-like effects that likewise either improve your likelihood of making a successful attack action, or increases the amount of hit points that are expended for a hit.  There is a multi-stage cycle of die rolls that shape the outcome.  However, if the players should instead want to play a battle of wits and cunning, there is a much more simplified pass/fail mechanic for that kind of conflict, generally resolved with a single die roll.  Should the player want to play out the advancement of a romance that sparks, smolders, and ultimately blazes into a bonfire, there are no mechanics whatsoever.  D&D is really not a game for rom-com conflicts then, which is neither here nor there, as that is not the stories that it is designed to tell.

But it does demonstrate why thinking about conflict currency matters to game design.  So if I am designing a game of grand, sweeping, dynastic conflict, I need to ask myself, what kind of Conflict Currency I need for that game.  Fate is a really great toolbox for this as the same basic mechanical blocks can very easily be re-skinned or re-named to match the themes of the story in question.  Does a dynastic political game need rules for the common procedural elements of adventure games like sword fighting and sneaking?  Not really, or not in the normal sense.  But there does need to be some kind of conflict currency for diplomatic treaty resolution, the wax and wane of public opinion, and the strength or weakness of succession faces and factions.  This phrasing makes it a little sharper when deciding how to answer or refine the answers to Sorenson's questions 2 and 3.

Prestige: The Game of Terrible Compliments

The Crown has called a great feast to determine who will be appointed to rule new land on the marches.  All the best have come to seek the honor.  You, however, are the one that will win this.  This is a feast of pomp, and manners, and fine beverages... an event of great boasts... and compliments for all contenders that will with florid politeness grind them all beneath your heel...

THE GAME

All players will see that their cups are filled with a tasty beverage to enhance loquacity and perspicacity.  The host shall sit in role of The Crown, and the rest of the players as peers.

Next, players will in rounds regale the company with a boast, one each in turn, outlining each of the following in such a fashion as will bring amazement to the heart of The Crown:

- First, a claim against your most noble pedigree.  What is the single greatest fact of your most noble birth that sets you above the peasants, and apart from your less worthy peers?
- Second, the fact of your greatest virtue.  What aspect of your character shows you to be more than worthy in heart and mind from churls and villains?
- Third, a deed of great merit.  What is your single greatest accomplishment, showing you fit not only in word but in action, to hold stewardship of the cantankerous marches for The Crown?

When these meritorious boasts have been laid before The Crown, and for all to see, everyone will then take turns giving a compliment to the peer of choice, extolling the greatness of the claimed boast, for it is just, and right, and proper that the peers hold unity before The Crown for only a churl, or villain, or rabble-rousing insurrectionist would not stand firm in the unity of the state.  HOWEVER, let us not forget, that should The Crown be more impressed with your rivals than you, you will gain nothing!

Thus, you must give a compliment of splendid form, that nonetheless shows the truth of the matter such that, in the end there can be no doubt that whatever boasts your rivals claim, they are in fact weak, shabby, and silly accomplishments indeed... proving the boaster unfit to rule the marches.

After everyone has had a chance to lay a compliment, a moment to savor the fine beverage will be observed before another round is taken to address a compliment to another of your peers.  Should the company wish, as many rounds as it takes to compliment each player can be taken, but should brevity be required, two rounds is sufficient.

After the rounds have been completed, the crown will choose who is most worthy based on their accomplishments.  Glory upon their house and their name!