The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:44am on Friday, 15th March, 2024:
Anecdote
When I was at school, I used to run a postal games magazine. It was mainly for the games Diplomacy and Railway Rivals, but I would also occasionally publish rules for new games that I or my subscribers had invented. If enough people wanted to try them out, I'd run it.
One such game, designed by Russel and Sean Noonan, was a mass caveman melée brawl. The game was fairly simple and the rules weren't entirely complete. Each player had a number of pick points to spend on attributes (strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence) and weapons (bow, rock, small rock, club, bearskin, stone dagger). People of intelligence 5 could opt to be a shaman and have juju powers, but with limits on what weaspons they could use. I asked the readers of my zine what they thought, and from the responses changed some rules and added more. The immediate problem everyone saw was that players would try to avoid getting into a fight and it could well end up with two players on opposite sides of the map each holding position waiting for the other to attack. To counter this, the aim of the game was changed: no longer was the last caveman standing declared the victor, but there'd be a cavewoman over whom each caveman was fighting. The cavewoman was dubbed Raquel, spoofing the movie 1,000,000 Years BC, and the game was named after the movie. It was proposed that if we ran a second game, that one would be 999,999 Years BC, although we never did because when I went to university I folded my zine as I didn't have time to write it any more.
Remember, this was 50 years ago. If you don't like the idea that cavemen would be fighting over a cavewoman then you need to go back to the 1970s to complain about it.
One of my own innovations was to give Raquel some sovereignty. Yes, cavemen could overpower her and try to drag her to the edge of the board (to win the game), but she could struggle free. When she did, she would run to the most attractive caveman nearby. How did she decide who was the most attractive? Well, cavemen were given a looks attribute into which players could put some pick points, but overall attractiveness could be increased by issuing shouts. You got one shout to supply with your movies. If Raquel liked what you shouted then your attractiveness would improve. The gamesmaster (that would be me) decided if Raquel liked what she heard.
This is where it gets interesting, and it's why I thought I'd post about it.
Cavemen being cavemen, their vocabulary was limited. They could use each other's names (and Raquel's), but beyond that they were only allowed to use words from a limited list. The more intelligent the character, the more words they were allowed. In addition, I allowed players to invent one new word, once in the game, which would then also be available to every other player.
There were 80 words on the initial list in total, with five levels of intelligence.
1: AAAGH!, bad, fight, friend, good, HAHA!, happy, her, him, hit, hot, kill, me, not, one, go, pretty, run, sad, strong.
2: big, clever, club, knife, little, lose, spear, stone, stupid, take, throw, two, ugly, weak, win.
3: arrow, bow, can, cut, dead, enemy, give, hard, how, hurt, in, make, out, shoot, shout, soft, three, want, why, will.
4: backward, bearskin, down, fire, forward, four, from, juju, maim, red, side, tell, to, up, when.
5: attack, blood, blue, defend, green, head, help, if, right, yellow.
It takes but a quick glance at that list of fairly innocent words to extract sentences with less-than-innocent meanings. The words 'make' and 'out' are right next to each other, for example, so it's easy to work with those. The word 'spear' quickly developed an agreed-upon metaphor among the players, and because 'bearskin' sounds like 'bare skin', that extended its meaning, too. Raquel didn't like anything too crude ("give me head"), which meant players went with double-entendres and innuendo rather than outright smut.
It was a surprisingly-enjoyable game, largely because of the shouts. It's not the kind of thing you could adapt for computers, as it needs a human to judge the value of the shouts. Still, it did teach me a valuable lesson that has served me well in the years since: no matter how much you limit players' vocabulary, if they want to say something then they'll say it.
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Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).