How to simplify "Hard Core" Games for "Social" Gamers?

First of all, thank you for all the responses you guys left on my last blog post about social gaming. And thank you Gamasutra for featuring  it. :D

One of the points raised in my blog post about the mind of a social gamer (este my mind), is that can "hard core" games appeal to a broader base of players, if it had cute graphics. My answer is probably, but it not only has to have cute graphics, it would also have to be simpler and easier to pick up.

So basically this blog post will be about how to simplify "Hard Core" games for "Social" gamers. "Hard Core" would mean those shooters, RPGs and tactical games, but for this post, I'm going to look into RPGs the most. "Social" gamers, aside from the fact that I am one, well, because most of my friends are also social gamers. Before Facebook,I could not imagine calling my friends gamers, because they aren't, but with Farmville and Pet Society, they (along with alot of moms and dads and grandparents) are playing games now. So how do we simplify those RPG games? I thought we should look at some board games for ideas.

One of the activities my professor in Game Design (Ms. Luna Cruz), made us do is a board game out of paper. Our group even made a paper dice. Because if a game works on paper, it would probably work in a PC game. Not sure how you can make a paper shooter game though. Although, the ones that involve rubber bands and bullets made out of paper, that can work...

How I thought about looking at board games? Well, during one of our Board Game Nights (it's an event my friends and I picked up from that chic flick with Jennifer Aniston, and started after we spent too much time in Hobbes and Landes),my friend (a med student who logs onto to Facebook first thing after getting home from school everyday, and then she studies) brought her brand new Game of Life : Pirates of the Caribbean edition.

Game of Life : Pirates of the Caribbean edition

Now this version of Game of Life is very different from all the other Game of Lifes I've played before, for one thing, you don't play as yourself anymore, there are character cards that you pick at the start of the game, and the characters are of course, Johnny Depp-I-mean-Jack Sparrow, Elizabeth Swann, Orlando Bloom este Will Turner, and the rest of the gang, and each character has different perks, like Jack Sparrow always seem to get the most loot, etc. And I thought, hey, it's like role playing. And as the game goes along, you can even get a pet,and a ship. Now comes the interesting part, you can buy ships, you can also steal ships from other players, by challenging them to a duel este wheel spin-off, and the one with a  higher number (plus the some other number depending on their character, I think) gets the ship. So this got me thinking, why it's like the dice rolling in Dungeons and Dragons to determine an action. Now D&D is supposedly the classic RPG. And it's also the basis of Neverwinter Nights, right? (correct me, if I'm wrong). So this whole board game thing got me thinking, although it has a few RPG elements, and it was simple enough that my friends (including my friend's 9 yr old cousin) got it and enjoyed it. 

Now another game (on another Board Game Night), my other friend (who now works as a banker) introduced to us is Citadels. It is a card game, but there is a ot of strategy involved. And this too, has some RPG elements.

Citadels

First off, is that this too, has different kind of characters, and at the start of the game, you are assigned a character, like assassin, thief, magician, merchant etc. And each of this characters have specific and unique abilities, like the assassin can, of course, kill someone, and the thief can steal, etc. Well, the goal of the game is to build citadels (in the form of district cards) , and you can build citadels using gold. On a player's turn, he can either get gold, build a citadel or perform any character specific action, after he is done, the next player plays, and so on. So basically, it's a turn based game. What's tricky is that, sometimes, before it even got to your turn, the assassin already killed you, and you loose that turn. Of course, you can always plan your revenge as you wait it out (you can also collaborate with another player). So at the end of the day, we realized that it is actually more of a strategy game. It sounded complicated at first, but we picked it up pretty quickly, and we also love this one.

Okay, one last board game (before I realize that I'm really just forcing it), Bang! (I can't seem to find a picture of us playing it, though). Now Bang! was introduced to us just last Christmas, by my other friend (I think he works in marketing, even though his college degree is similar to mine), it came in a metal case shaped like a bullet (I can't believe we don't have a picture of that!), how adorable is that? Now with Bang!, now this one, you have characters, abilities and roles. It's like the card game, wherein there is a police, a bad guy and some civilians, and the police has to figure out who the bad guy is, and the bad guy, just well, kill peopl. So in Bang!, after we picked our role cards (sheriff, vice sheriff, renegade, outlaw, etc.), we don't show it to the other players (aside from the sheriff, the sheriff's card is shown and he even gets a badge). We also get character cards, like the other games, each character has a different ability. Oh, and the characters also have lives (like any shooter game, right?), different characters have different number of lives. And so the game begins, there is a deck of cards (action cards? I suppose we can call them that), some are Bang! cards, which can be used to shoot any player, and there are also cards can reinforce your Bang! cards, like a scope and burst (why, it's llike weapon attachments in shooter games). There are also heal cards (rum and whiskey, lol). And basically that's it. So after playing that and describing the game in the blog post, it made me realize, hey, it's a bit like a shooter gaame too, I think. We only got to play a round of this game, but after that, we already started planning our next Board Game Night, because this game needs to be played again.

Oh, by the way, the reason why I kept mentioning what my friends does, is to show how diverse we are, and how different our interests are, but even so, we all found those board games amusing.       

So to summarize a bit, this board games obviously have some PC gameplay elements. And yet, they managed to simplify it, so that kids of all ages (I think) and social gamers, non gamers, hard core gamers (?) would understand it and enjoy it (or maybe it's just us, who are board game fans). But how do they do it?

For RPGs, I got the definition of RPG off Wikipedia, and basically it says that RPGs, are games wherein players assume roles of a fictional character and the success rate of the actions taken in the game are determined by rules. Sound simple enough, right?

Oh by the way, when I said that I want to simplify "Hard Core" games for "social" gamers, I was thinking of something along the line of... the best game I played last year... Plants VS Zombies! Now, that is basically a tower defense game, and I am usually not a fan of tower defense games, but Plants VS Zombies is really nice. It was of course, first and foremost cute (I love how the Sunflower sings at the end. There are Zombies on the lawn...), and it was also very simple to understand. And I think that is what I am aiming for, easy to pick up games. Oh three cheers for Plants VS Zombies for being one of the best games last year.

Anyway, back to the topic.

So RPGs that are easy to pick up and play. Exactly, like those board games mentioned above. I know, RPGs (I just realized that I might have said RPG games, instead of just RPG, anyway) usually allow the user to customize their characters, as in, they get to, of course, change the look of your character (my favorite part), they also allow you to customize seemingly every single statistic of the character (my least favorite part), because I don't get it, I just don't. In the board games, they didn't give you a chance to pick your stats anymore or allow you to customize your character. 

Oh by the way, feel free to correct (or bash) me, because I don't really know much about complicated RPGs. For me, what makes an RPG fun is the story and the cutscenes. What makes a RPG complicated is the stats allocation bit at the start of the game.

So, I think the stats bit can be obstructed from the player, or that it can be simplified (remove those that sounds complicated). Strength and speed, we can still understand but, some of the rest just leaves me scratching my head.

Omigosh, could it be, I ran out of things to say?

Oh, another RPG element that confuses me, when it come to abilities. There are just to many kinds of abilities for one character. And it gets confusing, especially if the player is only playing the game between Alt Tabs. What those board games did, they only gave one ability per character. You can of course, have more than one ability still, but try to lessen it, so that the player can master it more. 

What else?

Well, obviously, there is no dice rolling in Facebook, all those are already obstructed, which already makes it simpler. I mean, the player no longer have to add up numbers to figure out if he can do that action or not. Well, obviously, all the existing RPGs already has that down. 

So yeah, so far this is what occured to me. I will probably read my blog post again and come up with even more ideas. I hope this blog post helps you guys too.

Oh and once again, feel free to comment, bash or whatever. Thanks for reading!