Ctss:Old rules

From Ctss

Original Rules to Lexicon

Stolen from [1] via [2]:

The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a scholar, from before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be). You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You are also collaborating with a number of your peers -- the other players -- on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical period (possibly of a fantastic world).

The game is played in 26 turns, one for each letter of the alphabet.

1. On the first turn, each player writes an entry for the letter 'A'. You come up with the name of the entry, and you write 100-200 words on the subject. At the end of the article, you sign your name, and make two citations to other entries in the encyclopedia. These citations will be phantoms -- their names exist, but their content will get filled in only on the appropriate turn. No letter can have more entries than the number of players, either, so all citations made on the first turn have to start with non-A letters.

2. On the second and subsequent turns, you continue to write entries for B, C, D and so on. However, you need to make three citations. One must be a reference to an already-written entry, and two must be to unwritten entries. (On the 25th and 26th turns, you only need to cite one and zero phantom entries, respectively, because there won't be enough phantom entries, otherwise.)

It's an academic sin to cite yourself, you can never cite an entry you've written. (This forces the players to intertwingle their entries, so that everybody depends on everyone else's facts.) Incidentally, once you run out of empty slots, obviously you can only cite the phantom slots.

3. Despite the fact that your peers are self-important, narrow-minded dunderheads, they are honest scholars. No matter how strained their interpretations are, their facts are accurate as historical research can make them. So if you cite an entry, you have to treat its factual content as true! (Though you can argue vociferously with the interpretation and introduce new facts that shade the interpretation.)

4. This little game will probably play best on a wiki, and it should take a month or so to play to completion. At the end of it, you'll have a highly-hyperlinked document that details a nice little piece of collaborative world-building.

Problems with the old rules

(A thread on the Something Awful forums which details these problems is located here.)

Running out of phantoms

I've always had this nagging thought in the back of my mind that something just wasn't quite right with the Lexicon rules, but it wasn't until I looked at them closely that I realized what it was: "No letter can have more entries than the number of players."

Let me give you an example. To simplify, we have a game of Lexicon being played by only one person. It would be a boring game, and it violates the second half of rule #2, but just bear with me for this thought experiment. And not only is it boring because there is only one player, but also because he very methodically creates his phantom articles alphabetically.

On turn A, he creates phantoms for B and C. On turn B, he fills in the B phantom and creates new phantoms for D and E. He keeps up like this, but on turn M, he fills in the M phantom and creates a new one for Z, but is suddenly stuck. He can't create a second phantom for turn M because every letter after M is already full.

The problem is only exacerbated if he does not create phantoms in alphabetical order. If on turn A, he skips creating a phantom for B and creates them for C and D instead, then we will be out of possible phantoms by turn N.

ShoulderDaemon's observations

• Once you have some inertia built up, world creation is much simpler than when you are just starting on a blank slate. The structure that Lexicon provides is exactly the inverse of what you need: at the beginning of the game, you have absolutely nothing to work with, and by the end you are rigidly confined to filling in the blanks left behind by other players.
• It places an upper limit (?!?!) on the interconnectedness of the world created by limiting the number of citations made by each article, so it tends towards rather sparse and shallow creations.
• The structure it provides becomes extremely weird if you try to later use the created world as background for a campaign in some other system. Because the world was created "in alphabetical order", players can monitor their progress through the larger campaign by the first letter of current dungeon/NPC/events. At any given point in the campaign, the world may sound suspiciously alliterative. You can try to fix this by starting each Lexicon player at a different point in the alphabet, but then until they "catch up" with the additions being created by the other players, they will feel like they are playing a single-player Lexicon game.
• The rules state that factual information in articles must not conflict, but there is no procedure for resolution of conflicts. Because the players are writing simultaneously, they cannot individually ensure that facts they introduce will not conflict; two players could simultaneously introduce conflicting facts. So instead of there being at least some writing going on constantly, the game becomes sort of two-phase: everyone writes, then everyone stops and reads, potentially arguing about some edits that need to happen and losing momentum. It's even worse if you just let the conflicts stand or don't notice them, because you wind up with half the articles inconsistent with the other half, depending on which version of the truth they accept.
• Simultaneous turns also means that in order for the game to progress at a reasonable pace, every player has to be highly creative. I'd argue that you'd have difficulty if new content was being posted less than every day or two; with so little structure in the game, you have to keep the players' interest by always having something to look forward to. With simultaneous turns, if someone has a block, you're screwed - the whole game stops, people lose interest, and it never starts again. With sequential turns and 3-5 players, you could have someone posting a bit of new content every day, and still have each writer given several days to think about what they want to add.
• Without any sort of genuine competetive aspect, it's hard to keep interest. If the game world becomes uninteresting for a player, they have very little incentive to work toward a vision that's more fun for them rather than just quitting. This is hard to add to a freeform game, certainly, but it bugs me that Lexicon makes no attempt whatsoever.

Competition

The competitive aspect of Lexicon 2.0 was created in response to SD's final point. Players who wish for a non-competitive game may merely ignore the points and play for the fun of it. _