Aside: The Maths of Fighting Fantasy

This blog, at least in name, talks about the maths of RPGs. Most of the time I actually just want to talk about RPGs, ideas and what happened the other night at the table, but I thought the following video was worth sharing, as it follows on a little from my post about Murderous Ghosts from last week, and also from the post that noisms made about us playing it at the weekend.

I'd recently been thinking about doing something similar to what this video does with Island of the Lizard King, which I found in a charity shop, but there is no way I could do it as much justice as this video does.

One follow-up question does occur: I wonder how much difference there is in the graph structure of the various Fighting Fantasy books?

And another interesting problem that might be do-able: what is the probability that a person actually makes it to section 400, given the skill/stamina that they start with?

There's some work in figuring that out, but it's essentially coming up with a general formula for calculating the odds of surviving an encounter, and figuring out the various general paths through the book (taking into account when you come across things like traps that you have to roll under skill or suffer penalties). To solve it you would build up a couple of general results, then plug in numbers. Not simple per se, but not hard... The actuarial tables of the Island of the Lizard King...

Game Night: Murderous Ghosts

Last night Patrick and I played Murderous Ghosts. The short version: it's amazing, really quite a remarkable, fun, scary and plain good game. We had time to play two games, so both got to play as MC and urban explorer.

Some thoughts:

• It works really well as a role-playing game for two people. The playbooks are helpful and not intrusive - it provides you with steering but leaves things up to the imagination of the people playing - and prompts the MC to be as scary as possible.
• Playbooks are really good: each person has their own "choose-your-own-adventure" book.
• The general set up is just great: the MC is the abandoned place and the ghosts, and the other player is an urban explorer who has lost their way. Each moves according to what their place in the playbook says.
• Randomness is in the form of each player drawing cards from a regular deck. The mechanism is somewhere between blackjack and the Apocalypse World under-7/7-9/10+ dice-rolling. It really works. It's a little tactical: if you ace one situation, you will not succeed as well on the next one (statistically).
• It didn't matter that we died (on both occasions). The horror and scares were really satisfying. Dying felt inevitable, surviving was great while it lasted.

Also: Patrick is good at weird scary stuff. My character found himself in an abandoned and haunted animal testing lab. The next forty minutes were terrifying.

Final Thoughts: I wonder how the blackjack/AW mechanic would work in other settings... And I wonder how simple it would be to fashion a "haunted house" game from the basic structure, i.e., a game for more than two players...