Sam wrote:Back in 1994, different magic groups had a huge variety of personal house rules, and that all went away once the Pro Tour got big.
The pro tournament was where some pretty egregious rules disputes got worked out or changed for the better. That one guy who got a DQ (later rescinded) for tapping and announcing attackers out of order provoked specific clauses in the text because thousands of people just
did it that way and there's not really any gameplay downside for doing it like that.
But that's not how casuals all got on the same page, that only happened when
Friday Night Magic went big. Because FNM is an immediately and easily accessible place to find some real games anywhere in the country, and it brings together a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be hanging at the same lunch tables. That's what really solidified the rules among the casual crowd and continues to do so: an actual upshot to being an interchangeable participant at interchangable events. And it's also where they got market data to institute sweeping rules changes like "Combat damage doesn't go on the stack" to cut back on the gotchas that new players would have otherwise been unknowingly house-ruling because they just thought it worked that way.
Duels of the Planeswalkers has made an enormous difference with the regimentation of new players, and you can (or could have, at least; I don't know about recently) witness this by going to FNM and asking people how many times they've drafted before. And you'd see a funny thing: Almost
everyone who told you it was their first time would still play very, very square with the rules,
except that they would always want to draw on the first turn. That's a rules idiosyncrasy that used to exist in Duels that is prohibited in the official magic rules. From this observation, two things were clear: One is that Duels was an enormously effective engine for attracting new players and feeding them to the hobby at large. And two, it was
teaching them really well, because except for that one delinquency and a couple bugs, Duels is a computer game that always plays in a regimented, crisp, and perfectly consistent manner. It doesn't have the tenancy that nerds do of explaining the rules by talking over each other and going on long incoherent rants with nested exceptions about advanced tactics and rules that you haven't gotten to yet. It presents every turn in fullness, shows you every trade of priority every time, and it holds you to your mistakes so that when you
do get to FNM you're not asking for quite so many take-backsies of your magnanimous opponents. In short, it's exact the kind of thing that NEEDS to be available so that interested dorks can hide in their rooms and try to build up confidence through competence instead of surmounting social anxieties
at the same time that they're trying to just get a taste of what the fuck a game is even like.
Somebody really does need to get their shit together
vis-à-vis an interactive choose-your-own-adventure style example game. On this point, I saw that the ADM isn't very longwinded, but he is very pointed about how it needs to be
interactive. I remember when I started playing MTG with Starter 2000, it came with two pre-stacked decks and a booklet that literally just said, step by step, what each player was meant to do this turn. Which it could anticipate, because it knew what card came next in the draw order. It also came with a CD where this very same match was availiable to play against the computer as a tutorial,
and as a
video tutorial in the style of Bill Nye the Science guy.
Three options on the same example game. This was
fifteen years ago.
So, seriously: Write two game sessions with one combat encounter and magic tea party a piece. Set one in Faerun, specifically in the location that the last good videogame took place in (note: license FR to somebody and make a fucking videogame) and set the other in Sharn in Ebberron because that's a fresher and more modernist setting with tophats and goggles and shit.
One of them you're going to let people play from the perspective of the player. You're going to sit them down at a table with three other players wearing stupid hats that make them resemble their characters, plus a shifty-eyed DM behind a screen. He's going to explain who they are and what they're doing and then the view will shift down to the combat grid, where the digital participants set up their little figures and immediately present the player with three choices. It is a choose-your-own-adventure game where the player decides what he wants to do
first and then shown how to consult his character sheet and roll the dice to determine how it turned out. It is all deterministic, but the dice rolls different numbers within the range that will make you pass or fail (as necessary) just to give it that organic touch. The thing they did for 3E was actually pretty neat but it really needs skippable dialogue and options that diverge a little more.
The second one you're going to let people play from the perspective of a co-DM. I consider it hugely fucking important because the person going through the trouble of playing your multimedia production is probably going to be the one who was dedicated enough to run the game for his friends. Now all the players are piloted by the computer and the player is assisted by another DM who knows all the rules but can't decide if, for example, it's more appropriate for the Head Cultist to fight to the death or if he is a craven who runs away while his minions stay and cover his escape. But the players are going to be a cunning and challenge the railroading conventions that the person experiencing the presentation has learned from JRPGs; they are going to try breaking through a wall at some point instead of using a door, they are going to try pulling the adamantine door off its hinges to take home as treasure, they are going to send their rogue to pick the guard's pocket for the vault key instead of taking him in a stand-up fight, they are going to try and topple a pillar or cut down a chandelier as a means of attack, and one of them will suggest something totally stupid that wiser minds would have dismissed out of hand. To all of these, the computer DM will urge options that aren't just saying "no," let the human choose one, and then work with them to play it using printed rules as the guideline. Furthermore, she'll chastise one of the players for dicking around on their phone instead of paying attention and saying "so what's happening?" when it's their turn, she'll have a rules dispute about an action one of the players takes and ask them if they would please look up the rule to show her and let somebody else go in the meantime so that the game doesn't slow down, and she'll tell a player who just used an obviously broken combo (using a player option that is mysteriously absent from the printed game) that "okay you can do that THIS turn, but not for the rest of the session, and we'll figure out a good house rule together before next week to preserve game balance."
Hire voice actors and get good takes out of them. Hire some mercenary artists out of the indie game circuit to do something cute. Get a scriptwriter, a real person who muster up something amusing (but probably not really that hilarious) like somebody who wrote for a Joss Whedon show, or one of the guys involved with Portal 2, or even
Andrew Hussie if you have the stones for it.
And finally, make expanded print-out copies of both modules, because some real effort should go into them and it would be a shame not to get that into the hands of people who weren't eager to sit through your audiovisual presentation but who need starter material anyway.
My humble opinion.
