Don't know if it helps the discussion, but I have never heard of this. Which cuts down the list of where people might actually be talking about it.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

The Power 19 was started by Troy Costisick.

Examples of it on this site include: Everlasting Empire, Reel Adventures, Orbital and others.

(It was founded around the same time as Chris Chinn's Fun Now Manifesto, which ironically you have to find on Costisick's site as Chris' blog, Deep In The Game, is no more. I found the FNM more compelling for me as it was about _PLAY_)

It's bollocks!

It came about from a Forge thread, where Troy asked what questions were important in designing a game. He compiled them. They're not very focussed.

So you get stupid questions...

What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation?

...oh, shit, never thought of that!

And questions with assumptions...

How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?

Need the setting necessarily reflect this? Can't it just be a setting I like?

And questions that I'm not sure are about the game at all:

What are your publishing goals for your game?

I really don't like it, honestly. It portrays itself as a design tool but I think it's very unfocussed.

Also, it gets used as a promotion tool much more than a design tool. "Who is your target audience?". "Anyone who likes fun games!". Bollocks.

Graham

For me, no, it's not bollocks.

To qualify: I've found the P19 questions very useful for certain games. In some cases the list of questions has helped focus and clarify things that I was thinking, but maybe not articulating. For example: Everlasting Empire. It was stuck in a bit of a hole, I was unclear about the game as complete thing. The P19 questions, upon going through them, gave me greater clarity and in this case were very useful. Other games, not so much because I have greater clarity. However, with many ideas, I don't start out with laser clarity and tools like the P19 can prove useful to provoke thought and provide focus.

The P19 is useful if you find it useful. It's not a universal panacea, it's not for everyone or every game. Some questions in it are far less applicable to the majority of games design. It could very easily be pared down to the Power 10. Still, it can be a useful tool and is not, in and of itself, bollocks.

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

I think that "Power 19" is kinda-sorta-somewhat bollocks, but not entirely.

To clarify:

Reading through the questions can, under certain circumstances, be quite helpful. But I think that this needs to be tempered with a the understanding that, as Malcolm says, not all the questions are relevant to all games. So if you think about a question and the answer is "It doesn't", "Not really" or "Not applicable" you just accept that that question doesn't need to be answered and you move on with designing your game. Used like this, I think the "Power 19" can be a neat tool for making you think about stuff you might not otherwise think of.

But any kind of slavish adherence to those questions is utter bollocks. The belief that you can only design a good game by doing a "Power 19" and working from there is also bollocks. Writing huge internet posts explaining why your game is correctly designed because it has a snappy answer to all of the 19 questions is probably not terribly useful because I don't think that many people actually read through those posts.

I will admit that I'm a big fan of Jared Sorensen' s three questions when thinking about focused game design (What is your game about, how is it about that, and how do the rules make it about that?).

Yes, Rich's summary is fair.

My irritation with the Power 19 is that it doesn't know what it wants to be. Some of the questions are questions to ask yourself when designing a game ("How does your setting reinforce...?").

Then some of them are questions that other people might ask to find out more about your game, but which don't make much sense to ask yourself ("What enthuses you...?").

So, sometimes it thinks it's a design tool. Sometimes, it thinks it's a tool to explain your game to others. And then, often, it gets pushed as a way to advertise your game.

And then lots of people post the Power 19 for their game on the Forge; and nobody reads it, because it's just too much information. It's a bit of a bugbear with me.

Graham

I'm seeing a consensus forming here. Cool! Thanks for the posts so far.

I should admit that I'm reading into it that it is, as a whole for me, bollocks, while made up of subsets of non-bollocks.

I guess the question for me is, should I even bother reading through the whole 19 questions? Or would someone like to cut them down to the "useful" ones for me? How do I know which ones are important for my game? Because I'm not always the best person to know which ones are needed for my games (we all have our blindnesses and arrogances, after all).

Malcolm, you say useful for certain games. Could you clarify? Are there circumstances when I should actually pay attention, and others where it is less important? Any help on that would be good.

The other thing is that I agree with Graham on that last point. I can never really be bothered reading these long, long posts. Maybe I'm missing out, which makes me sad, but really I cannot/will not bring myself to wade through the sewage in an effort to find a diamond that might not be there.

[And thanks to Joe Prince for his "Is X bollocks?" style of questioning, of course.]

Yes, my 'for certain games' probably does need clarification.

It's a personal thing. For example, Cold City did not need a Power 19. I knew what i wanted it to d from the very start. The game itself didn't do that at the very start, but I new what I wanted it to be. The guidance offered by the P19 was unnecessary in the case of Cold City [this is not to say that I didn't use the P19 as a tool to provide clarity and encapsulation of the game for others, but it simply was not necessary for me].

In the case of Everlasting Empire, I was less clear on where I wanted the game to go. I had a firm grasp of setting, but the 'what do we do' part of it was less clear [government agents? Initially. Not much scope though, blah, blah, blah....]. The P19 process helped me to get down on paper what i wanted from the game, how I saw the game, what it did and so forth.

Undoubtedly, there are extraneous questions. To my mind, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18 and 19 could easily be removed and the entire thing condensed.

If you know where you game is going, what you want it to do, then the P19 is an unnecessary waste of time. But, for those moments of wayward indecision, then I find it a valuable tool, caveated as per my previous comments.

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

I think the P19 is bollocks.

It's an exercise in question answering, tells you little about the game and power 19 posts are sooooooo boring to read, I never look at them.

If you think Troy's games are markedly better than designers who ignore the P19 then by all means use it.

I wouldn't bother reading them Gregor. Focus on where the fun is and how the mechanics generate narrative.

+++
JoE
+++

Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....

I think the power 19 can be useful as a guide, and I have fiddled with it for a couple of games. It can help guide you a bit if lost and I have come across some games that could have done with thinking about some of the things it contains.

It does however get over emphasised as a game design tool in the community.

Cheers

Iain

Lead Developer Mob Justice RPG

'The Giant Brain' has launched.

They question of whether games designed with the use of the P19 questions are better or worse is a non-issue and has no bearing on matters. It's a tool, a tool that some people find useful in certain cirucmstances. Other do not find it useful and do not use it. Some people who use it make shit games. Some people who don't use it make shit games. I don't know much about Troys games, I'm not sure I really care how the P19 inputs into other peoples games designs. What I do care about is how people find the best way to design games, the way that gives them the result they want. If that involves the P19, cool. If it doesn't, cool.

Some people use a claw hammer to hammer nails. Some people a ball pein hammer. Some even use a mallet. The nail still gets hammered. You use the tools that you are comfortable with, provided they are appropriate for purpose. And some find the P19 appropriate for purpose. In light of that, I don't think it's bollocks. It's not perfect by any manner of means, there are extraneous elements that even I find ridiculous.

Bloody awful analogy there.

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

I agree with Malcolm here. If people want to use the power 19 that is fine. If it allows them to make better games and have a better understanding of the process then that is superb.

The problem with things like power 19, big model etc. is when people start to say 'Have you done a power 19, if not you aren't designing properly' or something equivalent. As long as people test their mechanics well and are happy with the game they have created then it shouldn't matter how they got there.

Cheers

Iain

Lead Developer Mob Justice RPG

'The Giant Brain' has launched.

OK, at the top of the thread I said:
---
Convince this lazy sod, me, that (a) they're worth reading through, and (b) that I should engage with the process and use it myself.
---

I've read all the points here and (a) I'm not convinceed P19s are worth reading through, and (b) I won't bother with the P19 myself.

Thanks everyone for putting their thoughts on them here, I'm sure it will be useful to other people considering using the P19.

The Power 19 is useful in some respects as a brainstorming tool, but it is neither as important as many people seem to think it is to the development of a game, nor is it essential to be able to answer every question. I mean seriously, "What do the players do?" "Whatever the players like, provided the GM lets them," is the only really truthful answer to that one. I much prefer a game that gently suggests a vast number of different directions that the game might take if the players and GM feel thusly inclined, to one that attempts by virtue of rules or reasoning to force some kind of prearranged situation upon people.

Anyhoo, I'm off on a completely different rant there. My basic opinion is, read the power 19 if you're running short on ideas or feel your game lacks depth, but don't feel that if you can't answer every single question that your game is automatically going to suck.

In the end, railway tracks are only useful if you want to go where the train is headed.

Ash