Winning and Losing while Journaling
plus The Green Ooze King and other production updates
As production moves along for my recent projects, I am looking at cleaning up a journaling game that I wrote earlier this year and then shelved because of some design challenges. Those challenges mainly revolved around winning and losing the game, and they got me thinking about my other journaling games, and journaling games in general.
Inside
Cometh August, Cometh The Green Ooze King
Winning and Losing while Journaling
July Production Update
Cometh August, Cometh The Green Ooze King
As I mentioned last month, I am changing up my approach for new releases for the foreseeable future. The first project to get a Not Kickstarter™ on my website is The Green Ooze King!
The Green Ooze King is an ooze-drenched hex- and dungeon-crawl for classic fantasy TTRPGs (includes stats and procedures for Cairn and Old-School Essentials). With a 12-hex overland map and a 20-room, 2-level dungeon, there is enough game for 2-3 sessions of play before facing the Green Ooze King.
I decided that on account of some technological limitations, instead of pre-orders, I am just going to be collecting followers to be notified when the book is available. I have ordered the print run already, and it will arrive sometime in August.
As a Thank You for picking up this adventure at launch, I’m offering a special deal: for one week after the release, any order that includes The Green Ooze King gets 30% everything else in the shop!
If this sounds interesting, head on over to my website (click the button below) and then click the “Get notified when this releases” button. You’ll get an email when the book goes live on the web shop.
Winning and Losing while Journaling
Now for my current design challenge. Let’s start with a story.
Flashback to 3 years ago
I am working on Endling, a solo, 1-page RPG about being the last human, writing it for the 2023 1-page RPG Jam. (I had to go check…and it was in fact exactly 3 years ago from the day I am writing this post.)
I never released that version of Endling, because after building it (shown below), and play testing it a bit, I decided it wasn’t fun. It was a LOT of dice rolling, some decision making, and about even odds of winning and losing. There was no roleplaying, however, and the theme felt pasted-on to an abstract dice game using an obscure mechanism called a hex-flower game engine.
Fast forward a year, to October, 2024
Endling is getting ready for a Kickstarter. The breakthrough was taking the dice game shown above and adding journaling prompts. This served to break up the dice rolling with a journaling phase, and made the theme of the game more integral to how the game felt in play.
The game still has about even odds of winning (getting to The Goal) and losing (losing your Will along the way). At the time, it felt important to me that you could lose, as that fit with the theme of the game. Of course, when you’re going on a journey like the one in Endling, it might not work out.
Fast forward two years, to the present
I’ve learned a lot about game design. About game theming, tabletop mechanisms, and different types of fun. I look back at some of my early work and think about what I would do differently today. When I look at Endling, I think:
Does actually losing the dice game make the journaling game more or less fun?
I don’t think there is a definitive answer to this question. Like the answers to many questions in life, it depends. Some players will enjoy losing as much as winning. I doubt there are many that enjoy losing more than winning.
Well, I thought, what if there was no losing? That brings us to a completely different question:
What makes a journaling game a game and not just journaling prompts?
There are plenty of people out there that would look at even the most gamified journaling game and say “It’s just prompts.” How do I ensure that there is still a game in there? (For the sake of this thought experiment, I am ignoring the answer “You don’t need to. It can just be prompts.”)
If I think that the act of losing, it is probably less fun than the act of winning. However, losing is still more fun than playing a game that guarantees winning. This leaves the possibility of losing as being the key. If I can keep the threat of losing in a game, but still have it be a game that the player will probably win, will that create the most fun for the most players?
Wizard Mind Palace
This thought experiment is inspired by Wizard Mind Palace, a journaling game that I wrote and started play testing earlier this year (but then shelved to focus on Out of the Iron Labyrinth for OSE Month). At that time, play testing revealed an issue with the game: everyone was losing.
With each round of play testing, I would tweak the rules to make the game “easier” (i.e. the player is more likely to win). But even when it was more likely, players would lose. Sometimes, they would lose badly, knowing that they were doomed several rounds before the game finished. That is not what I want (obligatory Skeleton Code Machine article about garbage time in games).
So now, as I reopen those files to look at getting this game ready for publication, I am left thinking about winning and losing. I want the game to have interesting prompts that inspire the player to write a compelling story. But I also still want it to be a game, where you need to think about the mechanisms to try to win. But not too much, lest the mechanisms distract from the storytelling!
It’s a tough balance. By the modeling I did, Endling players have about a 50/50 chance of winning or losing. I’d like to make that closer to 90/10 for Wizard Mind Palace, and absolutely avoid the garbage time of multiple rounds after your loss has been assured. There’s work to be done.
(On a more positive note, everyone that tested the game enjoyed the prompts, so at least the bulk of the writing for that game is set. Once I get these mechanisms ironed out, this one will be headed to the printer.)
July Production Update
A few updates to a share:
The Green Ooze King and Out of the Iron Labyrinth are both being printed, and fulfillment will begin as soon as they arrive on my doorstep.
I finished the complete draft of solo tools/rules for MAZES Fantasy Roleplaying, and they are currently being reviewed by the team at 9th Level Games. Really excited for how people will react to this, a party-based solo system for MAZES.
I finished the 4th journey pamphlet for Breathless: Frightmare Edition. This one is going to look amazing, with art by Vil and layout by DNGN CLUB.
Diegesis 1,1 is my main focus of late, a compilation zine of locations, events, items, and enemies for CY_BORG. This is not one adventure, but rather a bunch of things that you can use to fill out the world of your game. I hope to make this a recurring zine, so we’ll see how this one is received.
There are other titles up there, including Wizard Mind Palace that I hope to get to soon, so stick around for updates next month!
Thank you!
That’s it for July. Thanks for reading all the way to the end, and if you like to play old-school fantasy TTRPGs, please give The Green Ooze King a look. I’m really happy with how that one turned out, and Scragend’s art nailed the vibe I was going for perfectly.
—MAH