[Tabletop Gaming] BlockCorp In Three Flavours

lextenebris (62)in #gaming • 7 years ago (edited)

Translating Gaming on the Blockchain Into Gaming About the Blockchain

Not long after I arrived here in this beautiful blockchain, I had the excellent fortune to be greeted by people with a pleasant cast of like-minded, one of which (@reneeneauveau) had already created a play-by-post role-playing game built around the conceit that Steemit, Inc. had been bought out by this new company and all of the subsequent play would be people on the blockchain posting created emails from one department to another, sketching out by indirection the wonderful horror of working in the corporate world combined with the hype train of the cryptocurrency market.

I thought it was brilliant.

BlockCorp Industries is a Hell of a thing.

I've had the pleasure to interact with the game as it exists on the blockchain, and despite the fact that it can be a little hard to find now – it's a ton of fun.

I'm not one to let a ton of fun go by without bringing it to a larger audience or at least trying to, so I'm going to translate BlockCorp Industries into several role-playing game systems which facilitate organizations-as-characters or corporations-as-environments.

As I go through, I'll explain how and why I'm making certain decisions and will see where we come out on the other end, right?

Kingdom

Using Kingdom is so obvious of first target that it is almost unfair – almost. A GM-less game designed specifically to work with situations in which the player characters are all parts of a much larger community, with people outside the immediate circle who will have repercussions based on whatever they do. Running a corporation as a kingdom – it's almost as if it were built for it.

Kingdom Seeds are some "quickstart" set ups for getting a group up to speed and playing at the table, with a few modifications baked right in so that things can be adjusted to suit or flavor. I'm going to build one for BlockCorp, and I'm going to do what I can to make it flexible enough to cover a variety of approaches.

Congratulations, new recruit! It's good to see that you've made it out of business school, the science department, or in from the skilled trades. There's always a place for you in BlockCorp! The first corporation fully based within the blockchain, BlockCorp exists to always achieve more than expected. Being on the blockchain means that we can change the world, and we fully intend to! There will, of course, be challenges. Other corporations will not necessarily be willing to share their market. Internal rivalries have always been a mark of corporate existence. Sometimes, things just don't go as planned. But that's why you're here!

The best, the brightest, completely off the chain – except when they're chained down, BlockCorp!

The Kingdom is BlockCorp, an extremely diverse and sometimes surreal mega-corporation in the near future. Or the far future, it's hard to say. All corporations look alike from the inside.

Customize

Headquarters is based in [ Seattle | a heavy-duty space station orbiting Earth | a parallel dimension populated by sapient insects (drones) who love office work | just down the block in that run-down old warehouse we picked up cheap | your mom's garage ].
Employees are [ a highly motivated go-go bunch of hyper-competent corporates | entirely hyped up on the possibilities of the blockchain to the exclusion of common sense | dead-eyed corporates who gave up their souls for the bottom line a long time ago | newbies who've never run a real business before ].
Business is [ booming | non-existent | going to hit the gas any day now, you'll see | frenetic and scattered everywhere beyond the ability to catch it all ]

Threats

The blockchain is technically owned by another company. Not the front-ends, just the specific chain itself. We have no idea what they're going to do with it.
Free-reign non-governance has resulted in rampant exploitation of the blockchain by spammers, trolls, automated systems, and -- well, us, technically, if you want to be picky about it.
Witnesses/miners are slowly being bought out, one by one, under the table, by other major corporations and State actors.
Content on the blockchain is both trivial to access and utterly without privacy. We'd like to do some stuff, but it would be immediately public – if we used the blockchain. If we don't use the blockchain, is that a betrayal of our founding principles?
We are pending a review by the local government, and there already disinclined to be charitable about so economically disruptive a technology as the blockchain.
The Facilities Department once a 30% pay raise over the next six months or they say there might be some problems with the plumbing.

Locations

The Conference Room. Way more enormous than it needs to be, with a black mahogany table no one quite knows where we found, and a variety of chairs.
Building Maintenance. A twisty maze of hallways, all alike, full of things like buckets half sloshing with water, mops, occasional full workshop desks with brand-new tools, furnaces, and odd stains.
The Cubes. A twisty maze of cubicles, all alike, full of things like bored employees, computer interfaces, toy robots on desks, Newton's cradles, row after row of telephones (some of which have actual dials).
The Bridge. The elevated office with a glass front from which management can watch The Cubes. Privacy is only possible by drawing the curtains, which immediately draws all the attention from The Cubes below. Every call in or out can be monitored from here.
The Gear Closet. Are you looking for a pen? A sheet of paper? A new computer? A new desk? A lightbulb? An entire shelf of documentation for a product that we haven't supported in 25 years, in mint condition? A quick hookup? A place to birth the baby? You found it.
The Lobby. So much chrome and glass that you wonder how the maintenance team gets anything else done during the day. Padded sofa and chair nooks provide the illusion of intimacy before you escort someone through security and up to your office.

Character Seeds

CIO. The blockchain is a joke. That technology is at least five years out of date. The new hotness is in distributed zero trust proof of wokeness.
New Administrative Secretary. You're hot. You know it. And while you have no interest in screwing your boss – screwing your boss over, that's a different thing.
Cube Dweller. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Probably sales, or maybe just grunt tech support. Sometimes both. No one really appreciate you.
Head of the Facilities Department. You're overworked and you love it. 80 hours a week is a good start. It's not that you love the company itself, but it's the job – making sure the trains run on time.
Tech Monkey. You spend a lot of time crawling under people's desks. You wouldn't believe what you see down there if you didn't see it every day. People forget you're there.
CEO. It's all on your head, all the power, all the glory, all of the blame. Really, mostly it's the blame. If things are riding high, you're writing time. If things hit the trough – buy low, sell high.
Head of Accounting. Numbers flow in, numbers flow out, and nobody seems to be able to keep up with them but you. Detailed charts, complicated graphs, if anyone knows what's going to happen tomorrow they probably work for you.
Entrepreneurial Investor. You're not really part of BlockCorp, or just an interested third party. You've sunk a lot of money into the blockchain and you think that earns you a seat at the table when it comes to decision-making but when it comes to accountability – you're just a venture capitalist, right?
Economic Journalist. You got this gig mainly because you can spell "blockchain," but hopefully no one back at the rag will expect you to explain it. If you can get these people to open up to you, you could have a really good scoop – or really good industrial espionage.

Names

Any real-world name will do, but all BlockCorp IDs demand a "login," a string of type double letters, no uppercase, no spaces, only one hyphen, and cannot begin with a number. All IDs are prepended by an @.

More often than not, both internal and casual conversation refer to employees by their IDs and not their given names.

Crossroads

Do we engage in industrial espionage of a rival Corporation to steal their design for a new front end to the social media portion of the blockchain?

Those bastards over at Block City have put together a new social media network that will leverage the extant blockchain. It's perfectly legal, but it's going to seriously eat into our control of the social media space. If we had a copy of the code before it rolls out, however…
Integrate a second blockchain into our products?

Man does not live by bread alone, and maybe BlockCorp shouldn't live on the steem blockchain alone. A new cryptocurrency blockchain has popped up, it's got a lot of heat, and our apps can easily be ported over to use both or either. Should we?
Punish the cubicle drones that have gone on strike?

There's a serious uprising happening in The Cubes. The grunts are saying that they don't get paid nearly enough, even though compensation has been very generous from the beginning. It's not our fault that a culture of HODL is endemic among the employees to the point they're afraid to cash out their paychecks to pay rent and buy food.
Split into two companies for tax purposes?

State governments have been very aggressive about chasing down blockchain businesses and trying to shake them down for ever more taxes. But they seem to have an eye for bigger fish, so maybe if we split into two separate companies, individually will slide under the regulatory radar. Maybe.
Promote a new CTO from outside the company?

The last Chief Technology Officer hanged himself in his office and left a note that said, "I can't take you people anymore." While his second is a competent, intelligent, driven, nearly obsessively focused individual, one which sings the company anthem at every picnic, the board room has been considering pulling in a CTO from Micro-Block, a competing corporation in the block space.

Capes

At first blush, a superhero game might not seem the sort of thing that is amenable to building a corporation in as a character.

But Capes is different.

Because of the way that Attributes work and the way that elements can be brought in and out of a Scene, taking part in Conflicts on the table, Capes is excellent for playing "characters" which aren't really traditional entities at all. The force of time, a rushing river, the threat of nuclear annihilation, all of these have actually been entities in Capes games that I've played.

You can read a more traditional character creation walk-through for Capes that I've written, and I'm going to use the same tool to effectively write up the character sheet for BlockCorp as well. I won't be taking quite as many screenshots as we walk through, but I'll try to be informative.

Abilities

The first big hurdle is deciding what Abilities that BlockCorp should have.

If you remember the first character generation example that I did in Capes, Abilities are broken down into three types, Attitudes, Styles, and Powers or Skills. We'll be going for Hours for BlockCorp because, well, it's an incredibly powerful mega-corp.

We know that no category can have more than five or less than three Abilities and within each category they get numbered sequentially starting at one. And we get 12, total.

I'm thinking that as a mega-corporation, BlockCorp really needs to focus on its Attitudes and Powers. Styles will sort of fall out as we go.

Attitudes

What are the attitudes that I think of when I imagine BlockCorp?

Overbearing. I imagine that it is this sort of ominous, looming experience – even if you are part of its highest echelon. It's omnipresent, omni-attentive, and omni-intent.
Efficient. Part of the terror of a corporation taken from this perspective is that it is terribly efficient. Waste just doesn't happen. Very little energy is expended that isn't directly necessary.
Erratic. Of course, there is the other side of that coin, which is that each Department and each officer is out for themselves. Even when they have the purest of motives, if they don't keep one whether I on which way the wind is blowing and be willing to change their tack, they'll be taken down by a competitor in a hot minute.
Vicious. Both good and bad, really. Sure, there is a good amount of vicious infighting both within the company and against other corporations for market share, but we don't call a mother bad for viciously protecting her children from an attacker.

Powers

We'll cover Powers next because it will make doing Styles a lot easier.

Powers are an interesting question because they are literally the ways that the corporation can influence and be effective in the narrative. The company can do anything, just like any other character in Capes – but if they want to be effective in Conflicts, they have to call on their Abilities.

So what kind of thing does BlockCorp do as a way of interacting with the narrative? We need five of them to fit the sheet.

Blockchain Manipulation. BlockCorp has quite a lot of external power over the blockchain, and while they can't actively turn it off – because that would mean that they were out of business, effectively – they can manipulate the content on the blockchain by control of presentation, slowing down access, making portions temporarily inaccessible to certain systems, etc.
Product Release. It's the good old "I've got an app for that!" move, except this time done by a whole corporation.
Buyout. When you got the kind of money that megacorporations have, a lot of problems go away just by buying them. Or their parent company. Or something they care about.
Corporate Hit Team. Not necessarily a team of assassins, though "assassin" is certainly something on the CV of several employees, but a particularly hand chosen team with high skills, high motivation, and the tools to get things done. Sometimes not actively affiliated, at least publicly, with BlockCorp.
Internal Review. It doesn't sound like much, but when it comes to dealing with issues which arise from within, and internal review can be a big deal. If nothing else, it can put the brakes on a plan for an indeterminate amount of time. If that gives the opportunity for a corporate hit team to get in and take care of the problem – the problem very well may get taken care of.

Blockchain Manipulation seems like the sort of thing that should be steak and potatoes for BlockCorp, so that's going to be rated 1. Product Release is more of a higher level thing because it really shouldn't happen as often, so we will set that at 4. Corporate Hit Team is too much fun to let it be anything but the biggest gun in the caddy, so it's going to be 5. Buyout and Internal Review should probably be 3 and 2 respectively.

Styles

Styles are an interesting question when it comes to a corporation. "How does it do things," as opposed to the intent of outcomes which is better covered by Attitudes.

We now have Powers, so we know what the mechanisms by which BlockCorp affects the narrative are – so now we need to figure out how those things can be used, in a sense, "in what spirit" they can be used.

The traditional mega-corp is always flush on resources, and BlockCorp should probably not be any exception.

Profligate Spending has to be one of their styles, because when they do something, they splash out a lot of long green to make it happen.
An Army of Drones also fits this conception of the Corporation. The company is big, really big. You may think it's a long way down to the corner grocery, but that's peanuts to how large BlockCorp really is. Whatever they might need in terms of personnel, an army of lawyers, an army of security, an army of techno-hackers – they've got it.
Oblivious to Losses. Not every Ability on your sheet has to be something that can be read as an unrestrained positive. BlockCorp has a lot of resources, but even the ones that they are particularly short of they lose track of, they just don't notice. Sometimes that's a side effect of them not caring how many of their security you kill off and sometimes they just shrug when you blow up one of their facilities – even the important ones.

We only needed three Styles, so now we can fill out the bulk of the character sheet.

Drives

Because we are building BlockCorp as a superpowered character in Capes, we need to assign Drives. These are going to be overall pressures that come up all the time when BlockCorp is in the story. I think that sounds interesting, so let's get on that.

Looking at the list of Drives available, it seems obvious that we are going to need a mix of villainous and super heroic choices. While we could come up with an entirely new set of Drives for this game, for our purposes we'll go with the standard set.

Obsession is perfect. So many parts of BlockCorp and the people inside of it are driven by obsession, obsession with the blockchain, obsession with money, obsession with position – there's a lot of obsession going around. That's definitely going to be a Drive.
Pride, likewise. Pride in position, pride in the corporation itself, pride in the product – pride is not inherently negative, and it's definitely something at play here.
Power is an easy one. Everything around BlockCorp is a question of power. Everything within BlockCorp is a question of power. I don't see any way to not have this is one of our primary Drives.
Hope. What good is obsession with accomplishment, pride in that accomplishment, and the power to make that accomplishment if you don't have hope that your achievements will improve your position, improve the company, or even improve the world. The hope of something better to come is definitely something that needs to be part of BlockCorp.
Duty. The thing that makes an organization of individuals really hum is a sense of duty, the question of obligation. Sometimes that duty is best expressed by the abdication of duty, depending on the situation. But questions of duty are big deals, and it definitely deserves a place here at the table.

Now we just need to rate these things one through five and make sure that they total to nine. Power and Obsession are the big two, so they are going to be five and four respectively. As much as I like Pride, it's not really imperative to most of the stories as I conceive of them about BlockCorp itself acting, so it's going to get a one. Which leaves Duty and Hope as two and three respectively.

And that's our sheet.

Sheet

One of the great things about Capes as a game system is that if you wanted to use BlockCorp as an element, it could have multiple character sheets. You could have different sheets for different portions of the company, with entirely different traits. Do you want to the Facilities Department to have an entirely different set of things that they do, and maybe even act in opposition to the greater corporation's intent? Easy. Put it together, bring it out on the table, and start putting in Conflicts that both sides are interested in. Want to have the more civic minded aspects of BlockCorp exemplified? No problem. Put it together, bring it out on the table, and start having Conflicts where the corporation as a whole and its better nature struggle against one another.

I know this starts getting to be a little abstract, but that's the joy. You can have stories about these monumental forces, or shards of a larger enterprise, or even individuals who work inside a department finding themselves in conflict with other individuals and with larger entities – and the stories just work.

Follow

I'm going to be honest with you. I haven't given Follow the attention that it deserves, not even a little bit.

It's written by the same guy who did Kingdom which we've talked about already, and Microscope, which is another of my favorite games of all time. Like these other games, it is GM-less and requires no preparation to run. You show up at the table, you talk to the other players, you go. It is very much focused around a specific quest, and the mechanic of resolution is a random draw of a token in one of two colors from a central hidden repository – like a bag. You'll also need some 3 x 5 cards, but that seems to be such a standard requirement for most of the games that I play lately that it's almost not worth mentioning.

I think it's worth quoting the start page in its entirety. The game is designed to be effectively run cold, with very little preparation even by the person who owns the game and intends to facilitate. Much like A Penny for My Thoughts, Follow is based around sitting down with people who may be complete strangers and being able to play the game immediately.

Follow is a game about working together to achieve a common goal. Slay the dragon. Cure a disease. Overthrow a tyrant. Get your candidate elected. We’ll pick a quest together to decide what kind of game we want to play.

Can we stay united and succeed, or will our differences tear us apart? We’ll play and find out.

Follow isn’t about us coming up with the best plan or a clever solution. It’s about seeing what these characters do, for better or worse. We may even intentionally make bad choices because they seem like decisions our
characters would make.

But even if we do everything perfectly, our quest may fail. As players we can push for the outcome we want to see, but we cannot guarantee it. Our story may surprise us, and that’s part of the fun.

Follow has an interesting set up in that it is very much about the abstract Quest. The Quest might be called "the Cure," and described as "cure the disease," but the characters involved could be from anywhere. Any of these Quests could involve characters from BlockCorp being entangled – including "the Heist: Get the loot and don't get caught," which sounds absolutely awesome as a BlockCorp operation.

But I am going to create a new Quest, just for BlockCorp, and we'll see how this shakes out.

the Company

We've got the will, we've got the intent, and we've got the right people – surely we can be the biggest, most powerful blockchain company in the world.

Our Goal

Become the biggest blockchain company in the world

Challenges

Build the tech
Push an ICO
Promote the platform
Lure in some celebs
Expand the HQ
Punish our biggest opposition in the market
Look good in the spotlight
Find the leaker
Buy out opposition
Deal with trolls
Acquire VC
Get lambos
Outsell Bitcoin
Get endorsed by JP Morgan

Customize Our Quest Together

Where is the headquarters located? Deeply urban, rural, or non-terrestrial?
Are we forging the blockchain from scratch or piggybacking on an established one?

What Makes Our Quest Difficult? (Pick Two)

We're complete unknowns.
The blockchain ecology is extremely well-established.
We're not exactly secretly incompetent.
Bitcoin is going to the Moon.
There's no unity in our ranks.
The financial sector hates us.

Character Concepts

Chief Executive Officer
Chief Technical Officer
Chief Financial Officer
VP in Charge of Security
Community Leader
Cryptocurrency Journalist
Media Relations
Venture Capitalist
Eager Investor
Troll
Blogger
Vigilante Crusader

What I Want From the Quest

Money. All the cryptocurrency in the world.
Wealth. All the fiat currency in the world.
Reputation. The biggest, the best, top dog.
Power. Making people do what you want is awesome.
Revenge. They called me mad on the Internet!
Principles. Save the world.

What I Want From You, But You Won't Give Me

Respect. My accomplishments, my conquests, my talents.
Power. Put me in charge of something; anything.
Education. You know something that I need to know.
Truth. About what's really going on, or how bad it is.
Love. Return my affection! (Or leave me alone.)
Revenge. For overshadowing me, abandoning me, taking my position.

Epilogue

It's probably not a stretch to suggest that the idea of playing the company as if it were character is an unusual approach to gaming. And yet, there are places and times where such things are called for. You could easily run an entire game focusing on just the intrigue within and throughout a major company.

In fact, I haven't even gone through my entire list of games where such a thing is considered the norm, but three is probably enough for now. If there's interest in the future, I'll definitely follow up with some more of this kind of madness.

Thanks go out to:

@reneenouveau for giving birth to the thing in the first place.
@not-a-bird for continuing to not be a bird.
Ben Robbins for indefatigably making cool games without GMs.
Tony Lower-Basch for putting on the cape that fits a whole building.

If any of the things that you've read today excites you or makes you want to pick up one of these games – do it. Don't hesitate. Drop a few dollars, find a few friends, and start playing.

You can even start playing BlockCorp right out-of-the-box.

As always, feel free to leave comments below if you are filled with the milk of human kindness and want me to know that you had a good time. Or the bile of human evil, I'm not really that picky.

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