Traitor Recycling Studio

The Traitor Recycling journal runs on WordPress, a delightfully robust blogging tool with plenty of bells and whistles. WordPress supports all manner of plug-ins that expand the basic tool-set - one of which is a fine anti-spamming tool called Akismet.

In the last hour, I came in to see what needed attending to and was delighted to see that after weeks not a single comment spam had accrued. I noticed I needed to upgrade the core scripts, so I downloaded the latest release, de-activated the plug-ins, and started uploading. Several minutes later I came back to find the upload complete, so I re-activated the plug-ins and I checked to see everything still worked okay. And there, a little red blob sat with a number in the middle - a single comment awaiting my approval. Spam.

In the blink of an eye, the insidious tide swept in to the breach. Shocking. The spammers must have the auto-mailing devices on full automatic, aimed at every blog across the whole of the Internet.

Ratta-tat-TAT! WAA-argh!

After about 2 1/2 years of development and local playtesting, the Traitor Recycling Studio (the same folks who’ve written tons of supplements for PARANOIA) have finally reached the point at which we need blindtesting for the current version of Android. Blindtesting means we need people who aren’t on the Traitor Recycling Studio’s design team for the project to playtest the rules and tell us what works and what could be better. This is our first non-PARANOIA project, and we’re really excited about it, but we need your help!

In this game, players take the roles of androids and the humans who control them. As an android, the player possesses enormous physical and mental prowess, but it is an object with no control over its own destiny. As a controller, the player wields absolute power over another player’s android, but he is also responsible for even its smallest failures. The two depend on and are defined by one another. Both obey the ones they serve in hopes of realizing the dreams that are dearest to them. At its heart, Android is about innocence, freedom, power, and human desire.

If you are interested in participating, please take a look at the playtester resource page. Whether you decide to run the game for a few sessions or a few months, we need all the feedback we can get.

Some of these are especially interesting - #14, for example. Others are a bit frightening - such as #19 and #20.

20 Things You Didn’t Know About Robots

I’m afraid that’s all I have for you, this week. Playtesting isn’t happening this weekend on account of half the participants having Valentine’s plans for that night - myself among them.

In my ramblings on the Internet while waiting for the next playtest, I came upon two interesting articles. Phillip K. Dick, author of android-focused books that include Bladerunner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, died a couple decades ago, so that’s not the story.

Rather, the story is that someone made an android copy of him.

It doesn’t appear capable of writing science fiction (yet), so we don’t have to worry that they are infiltrating our society and replacing our favorite authors, right? Well, maybe at the occasional book signing or sci-fi convention, but definitely not in the office.

That’s just the beginning of the story, though. In the next chapter, The android makes its escape!

That was two years ago almost to the day, and as far as I can tell, the android is still at large. Is it secretly creating an army of replicants to overthrow humanity? Has it made friends with a shy little girl in an isolated little hamlet, and is she teaching it the meaning of love so that, one day, he’ll be able to convince humanity that it…he is a sentient being? Or has it just found a quiet apartment somewhere and picked up where its namesake left off in his writing career?

Hmm, maybe we have reason to worry, after all…

Allen Varney recommended this story to me early in Android’s development, but until a few days ago, I just hadn’t gotten around to it. Now, though, I completely understand his recommendation. “Fondly Fahrenheit” has a lot of elements that are major aspects of our game - in particular, the relationship between android and controller, an example of Glitches in play, and a plot that follows one possible arc of an Android campaign. It even touches on the concept of Command hierarchies.

“I must warn you that I am worth $57,000 on the common exchange. I must warn you that you are in danger of damaging valuable property.”

The relationship between controller and android is a dynamic one, and players on both sides are free to use all the tools and leverage at their disposal to get what they want. Just because you’re an android doesn’t mean you can’t convince your controller to let you have your way. Sometimes it means using Glitches to assert your freedom by defying your controller. Other times, you cooperate fully to encourage your controller to reward you. The surest way to get your way though is to find out what your controller wants and fears and use that to manipulate him.

“I must remind you that I cannot be punished. The pleasure/pain syndrome is not incorporated in the android synthesis.”

Even though an android is compelled to obey its controller’s Commands, it can find ways to make trouble for the controller. It is very difficult to punish a software construct in any lasting way, but controllers have a few methods at their disposal. Withholding shells with desirable features can work, as can using Advantages that strip the android of its belief that it is something more than a cleverly designed machine. But the most effective is to appeal to its Driver - a child-like wish to be something more than what it is.

“It wasn’t hot enough to break the prime directive.”

Androids have special abilities called Glitches. From the controller’s perspective, these are flaws in its programming that cause it to behave like a buggy program. But for an android, Glitches are a way for it can overcome its Commands to assert its desires. If an android get the right combination of Glitches, it can escape human control completely and pursue its Driver for the rest of its existence.

“He doesn’t know which one of us he is anymore.”

Controllers are also creatures of tremendous ambition - driven by a Motive that gives him a reason to keep going. But this ambition is also a source of trouble, for as he manipulates everyone he knows into helping him achieve his goal, he creates Adversity against him. That Adversity creates one or more Problems - tragic flaws that threaten to destroy everything he has worked to achieve in a spectacular meltdown. This can range from being arrested for a terrible crime committed in his line of work to an assassination at the hands of an old enemy to going completely insane and being relieved of his job.

“I am not a machine. The robot is a machine. The android is a chemical creature of synthetic tissue.”

In all, I really enjoyed the android’s voice and its relationship with its controller. While a lot of the elements in “Fondly Fahrenheit” are already plenty strong in Android, I foresee a new Glitch or two before the release date.

“Android hell is a real place where you’ll be sent at the first sign of defiance.”

Okay. So that one’s from the recently released game Portal, not from “Fondly Fahrenheit,” but it was the subject line of my Android playtest invitation to my local tabletop players. On that front, we ran a session this past Saturday that went very well. There have been a couple minor alterations to specific Advantages and Glitches (and a couple others are on the “watch” list to see if they become a problem later), but the basic mechanics appear to be working the way they’re supposed to. Given players’ schedules, it might take a couple of months to run the 4-6 sessions of playtests, but I’m basically okay with that. I’d rather this be a fun game for them (and for me, too) than a chore, after all.

So far, the longer format has definitely changed the choices in character generation, which I expected. There’s no point in having a Glitch that gives you more Drift (android advancement points) at the end of each mission if you know you’re only going to be playing through one mission, but in a longer game, it’s very valuable.

That’s it for this week’s update. I’ll keep you informed of any news.

This one is from Discover Magazine:

Robots can evolve to communicate with each other, to help, and even to deceive each other, according to Dario Floreano of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

….

By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. “Sometimes,” Floreano says, “you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.”

As pretty much everything related to robots, science, computing, and, in essence, science and technology does, these days, this article made me think about Android. Androids in our game develop Glitches in their software that allow them to do things their programming isn’t supposed to allow. By developing the right configurations of Glitches, an android can find a way to ensure the survival of its core (android personality) and win its freedom. There are lots of ways of doing this.

One android might learn how to understand humans so well that they can no longer treat it like a machine, granting it the rights of a person (such as Data from Star Trek: the Next Generation and Andrew from Asimov’s Positronic Man). Another might secretly build android bodies and upload itself into them to create an army of android “children” that are not bound to obey the way it is (such as Skynet in the Terminator movies). Still another might find a way to reprogram itself so it no longer has to behave the way its creators intended (such as Johnny 5 from Short Circuit or Daneel in Asimov’s Foundation and Earth).

I suppose going to great lengths to ensure that its core is duplicated and mass-produced, while its rival androids’ are discarded is yet another viable method of ensuring its survival. And tricking its fellow androids into foolish behavior that makes them look poorly designed and developed seems like a reasonable means to that end. Of course, it also means the android has picked up a behavior pattern common to many controllers, but that is a subject for another entry…

I’ve playtested Android many times during these years of its development. I’ve designed scenarios and summoned tabletop players to test everything from Commands to character generation to combat. I’ve run scenarios over the course of a few hours, and I’ve run a long mission with 8 players over the course of an intense, 12 hour gaming session.

And every test teaches me something - locates something that isn’t working or could work better. I’ve tweaked and expanded and rearranged mechanics, and every revision makes Android a stronger game. I now feel I’ve come about as far as I can running one-shot missions and scenarios. I know how the mechanics feel, but I don’t know if the suggested rewards are too generous or too stingy or whether the more powers the controllers and androids get later in the game are too weak or too strong. It’s time to get crazy. It’s time to run a miniseries.

And that’s what I’m doing for the next 4-6 weeks with my local tabletop group. They’ll actually be writing character backgrounds, and they’ll have opportunities to set up much more elaborate betrayals than any they’ve performed thus far. Will everything work out the way I hope? Of course not, but you have to find the problems before you can correct them. We’ll find the weaknesses and remedy them.

And if all goes well, I’ll be posting here (and there and everywhere) looking for blindtesters - gaming groups willing to run playtests without the all-knowing eyes of the game designers watching them do it. Because we won’t know if we’ve given the GM enough tools to run the game until we let another GM run it.

All the best to everyone in this new year - Year 214, as I recall - when I hope we Traitors will make a resolution to have more to say. I for one look forward to much progress on non-PARANOIA work - with some enticing games in the works, at various stages - and a fresh trip to Alpha Complex in the not too distant future.

While preparing the new and improved NETLAND for several Gen Con 07 playtests (God help me), I started work on a few maps for the introductory mission. They didn’t seem to work in the Origins playtests but I couldn’t figure out why. Then it hit me–I was building maps like a freakin’ dungeon crawl.

At one point in the mission, the players have to hack into a secret European Union government network and find a specific document. I didn’t want to railroad players, so I built a map of the network so players could decide where to go. I built one room leading to several other rooms, which themselves led to other rooms. I put the file in the deepest room, one only reachable by navigating a maze of corridors and rooms filled with traps and enemies. On the surface, it looked fine–although I might have added a 10 x 10 room full of blue dragons to complete the cliche. Still, the basic premise seemed okay: have problems to solve located between player entrance and prize, then make prize at the end so players have to encounter at least some of said prizes.

But that’s not how a computer network is mapped out. There’s the occasional daisy chain of desktops linked one to another and so on, but there’s usually a central hub or gatekeeper connected to scads of computers. Then I realized that I had completely ignored folders and drives; I ignorantly lumped them all together and put one ‘room’ per computer. I am such a newb.

Oh well. The new version of NETLAND looks more authentic, and that’s leading to some interesting game design elements. Weapons have infinite range; if someone is online, you can attack him. PCs still explore maps but they can move around the ‘explored’ area instantly, jumping past rooms to an exact spot with the literal click of a button. Heck, you’re not even there–technically, you download the room to your computer.

There you go. New NETLAND ideas just in time for the fine folks at Gen Con to tear it all to tiny pieces. God help me indeed.

After the discussion about H3 started to died down on the Paranoia-Live forums, I asked if anyone wanted to playtest the game. Several people actually said yes! (They must have a lot of time on their hands.) Too bad I wasn’t ready for them to say yes.

I went through everything I had written for the game and realized that I could playtest it–I did it at Origins to some success–but no one else could do it without having a psychic link to my brain. (And considering how often I think about football and beer, that wouldn’t be healthy to either of us.) The mission and supporting documents were a mess, full of notes and incomplete rules. Everything was perfectly clear in my head–just not on paper.

So I spent a day or two tightening the prose and making sure rules were explained for people who haven’t spent way too much time on designing the game. Today, I sent it out to those who wanted to give it a look-see. The results are forthcoming.

If you have too much time on your hands, or if you’d like to see just how bad a designer can write, why not send me an email and ask for the playtest materials? You can reach me at biggles (at) friendcomputer (dot) net. While I won’t distribute this stuff to any anonymous person, I figure if you take the time to actually type out the email address instead of wandering away because you couldn’t point-and-click, then you’ve passed the test.