Thursday, October 18, 2007

Reader challenge: interpret this chart!

In my experience, the Encounter Critical mailing list/yahoo group thing-a-ma-bob is the grooviest, most low key gamer hang-out on the whole of the internets. The people are all nine shades of awesome and the vibe is just laid back and friendly. Of course, the list is also highly specialized. We normally only talk about this one game, you see. But sometimes we talk about the musty old stuff that inspired Encounter Critical, or games like it but that aren't hoaxes.

Lately we've been talking about Legacy, this weird old RPG that cool guy Christian Conkle (a.k.a. the Evil Schemer) recently found at a garage sale. Christian quoted one passage from Legacy that has me totally fascinated:

Take a circle divided into 10 concentric circles and 10 pie slices. Each sector on the resulting circle represents a member of a tribe. Each sector should be color-coded to represent the age and sex/gender of the individual. Proximity on the chart indicates common interactions between the two individuals. Individuals on opposite sides of the chart are enemies.

I've been trying to make sense of that passage for days. Eventually I had to try my hand at making one of these charts. Dig it:

Click for a large, more legible version.


I was working with MS Paint and my own ineptitude, so I ended up with 8 pie slices instead of ten. And I labeled each person in the tribe with a two-letter name. Now that I've made this chart, could someone please tell me what it means? I'm kinda thinking that slices of the pie might represent families within the tribe and that pie slices pointing at each other are in opposition. I dunno. The color scheme is pretty much random, by the way.

10 comments:

  1. I could see a few ways of interpreting this.

    I expect that the enemies thing is referring to opposite places on the chart. For instance, BG and FG are enemies, as are GA and CA. The problem with this, of course, is that every person has exactly one, single enemy.

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  3. Let me clarify what I inteded to write and just say - I read it pretty much the same way you did Jeff. Each slice represents some kind of faction in the tribe, opposing slices represent factions in opposition. That gets over the "exactly one enemy" weirdness, but adds an element of "every political grouping in the tribe must have exactly ten members" - I'm not sure which interpretation is worse.

    I'd wondered if you were going to follow through on your thought of trying to draw this out. Now, can you explain how to draw the "lifeline" on top of that? Or how you're supposed to run combat using a clear overlay? I swear, reading those quoted bits that evilschemer posted made my brain turn inside-out.

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  4. Maybe proximity to the center of the chart represents relative involvement in the key internal stresses of the tribe? Old farts Fa and Ba hate each others guts, for example. Ca wants to marry Da, but Da is promised to young Ha as an arranged marriage meant to easy tensions between families D & H. Meanwhile Ga has it out for Ca and is supporting the marriage with Ha.

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  5. I like the all-the-same tribe line of thinking, but of course the combination of that and the pie shape makes me immediately cast all of the rivalries in terms of bitterness over pie-eating contests, pie-baking contests, and bake sales.

    Just imagine the mess on the table when two people who are very close to each other have a spat and become enemies. The confusion over how to rearrange the pie would be so total that one of them would have to leave the pie entirely. In this way, primitive peoples would sometimes eject a member of the pie to make room for an infant.

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  6. I notice, BTW, that a lot of the graph-paper-making freeware around do offer the options of making Polar grids of this sort, which could save some time if anyone's interested in making one of these at home (although the program I use won't allow you to make 10 pie-slices, only 8 or 12, but I like the look of the 8-slice pie since that's the way Luciano's, our local pizzeria, likes to do it, and I trust their instincts).

    I'm thinking maybe just Pink and Blue for the gender colors, and darker shades to represent age. And a dusting of powdered sugar on a lattice crust. Not because a lattice crust tastes better or anything; I just think it looks homey :)

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  7. You could put the chart on some sort of wheel/spinner and the colours would all blur together as it spins. I don't know what that would mean for your game. But it would probably be something exciting.

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  8. Anonymous9:20 PM

    I'm not even gonna try to wrap my head around this pie graph thing (yet). but what I wanted to say, was good grief, I don't check my yahoo account for a couple days and somehow I've totally been missing out on a whole EC mailing list thread about Legacy!? And evilschemer found his copy at GARAGE SALE??? lucky find. I had to track one down on the internet with much trouble...
    From reading reviews of it years ago, I'd always been curious. It was the first ever attempt at a "universal" rpg, back in 1977 I believe, but was done at such a level of simulation complexity that the game as written could only handle games set in prehistoric cultures. When I finally found a copy, my mind was indeed boggled. A weird game, probably unplayable, certainly hard to read, but fascinating. A historical curiosity, and quite absurdly amusing. I'll have to check the thread on the EC mailing list to see if evilschemer's copy came with the, what do they call them, "enabler" cards? Like artifact cards in Arduin. One of them is an Incredible Hulk comic book I believe.

    --Allan aka Mool

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  9. Anonymous4:51 PM

    I've seen something like this years ago. It was used to chart a villain's chain of command and work out who might know something when PCs investigated. There were fewer rings and extra lines got drawn in at each level. the line did not reach quite to the centre so that was just a blank circle. Then you'd draw in your 4 or 6 or 8 or whatever lines. So the next ring had 4/6/8 segments. Then in the next ring you'd draw another line between each 2 lines going out to the edge. So the next ring would have 8/12/16 segments.

    You started by filling in the villains name in the centre. In the ring next to that you'd fill in the names of his 4/6/8 closest associates. Then in the ring next to *that* one you'd put the names of the associates underlings, lieutenants, etc - a couple of names for each associate. And so on.

    You ended with a big chart showing all sorts of people who might know something of the villain's plot and could work out what it might be by following the chain of relationships.

    i.e. The villain would tell his second- in-command certain aspects of his plans, second-in-command might tell underling A x,y,z and underling B v,w,x. Then underling A might let x slip to his girlfriend and underling B's cleaning lady might find a paper mentioning w.

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  10. Anonymous2:06 PM

    Perhaps you are not supposed to fill the whole circle. If you left the idea of an entire tribe but only detailed out factions, the table would be very useful. Think about charting the Capulets and the Montegues on this. Going out from the center are generations, siblings sharing a row, friends sharing a row but in a different color. Thus you would see Mercutio being his own faction that is a friend to almost all Montegues and capulets, and romeo and juliet would be at the center of the the circle touching.

    Seems like a good idea but would be better with a little tweaking and more articulation.

    Aaron Webb

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