09-09-2016, 11:20 AM
I was in a meeting the other day with a prospective contributor to Cohorts. I spent a good part of the morning giving him the rundown on what PBM was, how Cohorts worked and what Cohorts was all about.
Inasmuch as there was a lot of information conveyed to the prospective contributor, he made a comment that really stuck with me. His comment was Cohorts, and possibly PBM games in general, have a very high Barrier to Entry.
In this case, he wasn't referring to the traditional barrier of trying to break a new game into a strong market, he was referring to the barrier presented to a new player who might want to get into Cohorts or the PBM world in general.
"There's so much data and so many rules ..."
Now, those of us that have been in the PBM world for a while know this is what we love most about PBM, but newcomers might just as easily see this as an impossible hill to climb. It was suggested that perhaps new players could be introduced with a 'limited ruleset'. I pretty much baulked at that idea because it's the ruleset that makes the game what it is. He countered with a suggestion that perhaps the game could first present the player with high-level dashboard data rather than toss them into the thick of things with the full-on data goodness. That was something that I felt I could get on board with. So for the past few days, the idea of a high-level dashboard that gives a player an instate state of affairs of their position, their characters, their armies, etc. has been percolating in my mind.
What I've come up with at this point is, producing this sort of representation of data is non-trivial. I find it non-trivial because I have trouble separating the critical information from the wonderful noise that is produced by pages and pages of data.
Here is a scenario challenge for anybody that would like to take a crack at a dashboard-like design.
Suppose you have a D&D character sheet. It's got lots of wonderful information on your character. What key bits of information would you take from that sheet, either as a single piece of data or as a set of data summarized into just a few values (or charts/diagrams of some kind)?
Now suppose you have a party of 6 D&D characters. You need to represent that party in just a single pages with no more than a handful of values, charts, etc.
Inasmuch as there was a lot of information conveyed to the prospective contributor, he made a comment that really stuck with me. His comment was Cohorts, and possibly PBM games in general, have a very high Barrier to Entry.
In this case, he wasn't referring to the traditional barrier of trying to break a new game into a strong market, he was referring to the barrier presented to a new player who might want to get into Cohorts or the PBM world in general.
"There's so much data and so many rules ..."
Now, those of us that have been in the PBM world for a while know this is what we love most about PBM, but newcomers might just as easily see this as an impossible hill to climb. It was suggested that perhaps new players could be introduced with a 'limited ruleset'. I pretty much baulked at that idea because it's the ruleset that makes the game what it is. He countered with a suggestion that perhaps the game could first present the player with high-level dashboard data rather than toss them into the thick of things with the full-on data goodness. That was something that I felt I could get on board with. So for the past few days, the idea of a high-level dashboard that gives a player an instate state of affairs of their position, their characters, their armies, etc. has been percolating in my mind.
What I've come up with at this point is, producing this sort of representation of data is non-trivial. I find it non-trivial because I have trouble separating the critical information from the wonderful noise that is produced by pages and pages of data.
Here is a scenario challenge for anybody that would like to take a crack at a dashboard-like design.
Suppose you have a D&D character sheet. It's got lots of wonderful information on your character. What key bits of information would you take from that sheet, either as a single piece of data or as a set of data summarized into just a few values (or charts/diagrams of some kind)?
Now suppose you have a party of 6 D&D characters. You need to represent that party in just a single pages with no more than a handful of values, charts, etc.