Subject: Re: MN: Whither Mornomic?

From: riffraff@n...
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 17:21:38 -0500

>Ultimately we'd produce a concise, comprehensible ruleset, as user-
>friendly as something you might find packaged with a boardgame;

I don't know everone's stand on this, but personally, I'd like to see this
comment considered literally - i.e. that we end up with a set of rules for
a game that could concievably be played in Real Life, with a map and some
pawns and tokens. (Or at least bits of paper to keep track of tokens and
possessions.) So, we'd have to do away with 295-sided dice, and suchlike.

Anyay, my opinion. Whaddya think?

--Riff

"I'm a non-local quantum event - I exist at _all_ points in space and time!"
--Riff

---

From: "Kevan " <kevan@s...>
Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 12:15:32 -0000

>possessions.) So, we'd have to do away with 295-sided dice, and 
suchlike.

It's a challenging and long-considered balance, though, getting
something that's as playable in real life as it is via sluggish email.
Clearly the existing Mornington Nomic framework is far too fiddly and
complex to make an easy transition to the tabletop (stuff like Game 
Time
would be too much effort for too little purpose, LV and Charge would 
be
a pain to keep tabs on, remembering all the Actions would be a
nightmare, and so forth), just as a normal, information-heavy 
boardgame
(Monopoly or Scrabble, say) would be rather fiddly to convert to email
play.

"Mornington Crescent: The Card Game" (www.stormloader.com/kevan/mccg)
went some way to bridge the gap, of course, putting nearly all of the
movement restrictions in as optional Rule cards, getting around the
problem of having to remember dozens of Actions by limiting Players to
whatever cards they happened to have in their hands at the time. Which
was perfectly good for real-life play, and only slightly clumsy online
(fairly playable in a real-time medium, but mailing play would 
require,
I expect, an impartial "dealer" figure to ensure nobody was stacking
their deck).

Whether MC:CG is worth running with, I'm not sure. I would have
predicted its biggest failing was the need for a board, but we've been
managing alright without one in the world of Mornington Nomic; 
something
that seems rather surprising, in retrospect.

Still, as has been mumbled before, twisting MN into a card game is 
quite
neat, because players aren't expected to memorise huge archives of
Actions, and it cuts down the "Hm, can I do something better?" 
and "Hold
on, I'd better consider every possible counter-attack" angles (which 
are
bad enough for veterans, let alone new players) by just giving you a
hand of seven cards to choose from.

The alternative - having a canonical list of Actions which anyone can
use if they can afford the Tokens - isn't entirely ludicrous, though.
Provided we can develop a snappy language for the game, there's no
reason why it can't be played on a memory-and-reference basis ("Right,
I'll play a Parks and Greens Cascade." "What does that do, again?"
"Denies Moves to non-Park, non-Green Stations, until someone Moves to 
a
Plant Station." "Oh yes.") Providing each player with a little booklet
of Actions (using simple iconic notation for the situations in which
they can be played; has anyone else seen "Zarcana"?) would allow them 
to
both choose their tactics and check on those of other players, and 
it'd
probably work quite nicely.

The only problem, of course, is that this gives a particularly hefty
advantage to veterans, who'd have a far better idea of the Actions 
that
could be useful in a given situation; something that, I fear, has 
maybe
scared away a lot of potential Mornomickers over the years. I suppose
it's not *too* bad in an email environment, where timid players can
spend hours poring over available Actions and past games before making
their move, but in a world of swift real-time play it would become
rather intimidating, and would certainly dampen the "teaching a friend
to play in five minutes" factor (something which I think any game 
should
try and keep in mind).

Boiling down my own conclusions, I think the only way to keep the
wonderful, baroque complexity of Mornington Crescent (for me, most of
the point of the game is being able to cry "But you can't cross-Shunt 
me
to Amersham, not with Higginson's Nullifier in effect!") is to somehow
restrict the Actions available per turn, and having them in a hand of
cards seems the most reasonable way to do it (an alternative might be 
to
have ten publicly-visible Actions playable at any given time, 
shuffling
a new one in each Turn, although this seems less dramatic).

And the alternative is, of course, to have a much simpler game, and I
suppose there's no real reason why we can't do this - maybe a tightly
strategic little shunting-and-blocking affair, something like The 
London
Game, but without the random element. Czech Variant, I suppose. Or the
tile-laying thing that Ole suggested on the MC:CG mailing list. Hmm.

The time has come to jettison the Nomic underbelly, anyway, I think.
Ideally any design decision we make should be unanimous, with 
objecters
being brought around by persuasion rather than blankly out-voted. And
Nomic-style ruleset authoring is invariably very piecemeal and untidy,
in any case - the best approach would be, I think, to just casually
discuss how to do something, and nominate someone to write it down
neatly when we've decided.

Kevan

--
kevan@s...
http://www.stormloader.com/kevan
"I play postal chess with a man who doesn't know me."