A thread to discuss My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the tie-in media.
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apply. In addition, please remember that the thread is discussing a kids' show, and it's primarily focused on the work itself, not the fanfic — in particular, we don't want to see lewdness creeping in.
Edited by Mrph1 on Aug 26th 2024 at 10:24:26 AM
Random thought: Is it possible to redesign Monopoly such that it becomes reasonably fun? (And yes, I know that fun is subjective, but humor me.)
So, the issue with Monopoly is that it was designed as a parable before a game. As many of you may know, Monopoly was originally designed to demonstrate the folly of unchecked capitalism. After a certain point in the game it's inevitable that some, or one player will have a monetary and property advantage, thus giving them the advantage for the rest of the game. I'd be interested in seeing the exact statistics, but I'd bet you could guess the winner of any given game by about 45 minutes to an hour in. The issue is that the rest of the game becomes a matter of everyone else trying not to get pulled under, and eventually succumbing to bankruptcy. Assuming they don't just quit from frustration first.
To give another example, this is the exact same reason I can't play Risk with my family. My strategy is always "Go for Australia. Now go for Asia". Once I have that, I get so many extra units per turn I snowball out of control, and am so well defended, I can basically walk across the world at my leisure.
Risk, however, has one thing Monopoly doesn't: a Chance to catch up. In fact, the fact that it has chance at all is a big part of why it's more fun than Monopoly. Yes, monopoly does have some random elements, but once the buildings are established chance no longer plays as large a role. In Risk, my army can always be defeated by bad rolls. In Monopoly, you'd have to have a huge string of bad luck to get brought down.
Which is ultimately the issue: there's no real balancing factors in monopoly. There's no real way to close the gap once it's established, because, as in real life, the rich are in a position to just get richer. In order for it to be fun, there would need to be some negatives for being too rich. Taxation, scandals, the chance of liquid assets disappearing while the more meagre, but solid assets of the Everyman are at least stable.
There's also the fact that it's mean. The goal is to bankrupt everyone else, and get an absolute monopoly. Doing so eliminates another person from play, and given how long the game takes it means that one or two people can be out for hours before it's over, excluding them from the group. Even if that event doesn't occur, you're still actively trying to crush your opponents, rather than just competing for a goal(Though, screwing one another over can be a lot of fun, as long as the chance to do so is even. In school I designed a board game that allowed player to mess with the board, impeding the other players, but everyone had that same power in equal amounts, so it was fun.). I would recommend changing the objective to one similar to Life - end the game with the "most". Perhaps the game ends after a certain amount of turns, or once a variable is met.
So yeah, those are my thoughts on how to make Monopoly fun: change the objective so it's less mean, and add in balancing features to keep the gap from getting ever wider. It loses the element of parable, but it gains the element of actually being a fucking game.
Oh, and Happy Birthday Rainbow! My gift to you is a tedious lecture on game design, apparently!
edited 23rd Jun '14 1:05:16 PM by kegisak
Birthright: an original web novel about Dragons, the Burdens of Leadership, and Mangoes.Yeah, but even in multi player games there's a really fast turnaround rate. Even in the most punishing games you'll have to wait, at most, like... maybe five minutes before you re-spawn and get another go? And the death itself is quick. Monopoly has a really slow defeat, and no turnaround rate. Once you're out, you're out for good, and like I said, it can be hours before the game is over if, for some reason, you want to have another go.
Though, yeah, I guess thematically it's peanuts, heh.
edited 23rd Jun '14 1:12:48 PM by kegisak
Birthright: an original web novel about Dragons, the Burdens of Leadership, and Mangoes.Monopoly would have to be redesigned to the point where it isn't Monopoly anymore. Personally, I think it should be left in the dustbin of history along with some of the really early, horribly-designed first gen video games.
FE: New Mystery Only Feet 7PM PT Sun, Mon, Fri; Umamusume Haru Arima 7PM PT Wed, Thurs: http://www.twitch.tv/kuroitsubasatenshiThank you to everyone who gave me birthday wishes today!
I read my new pony books in the car today and have some comments about them, particularly concerning information about Celestia and Luna that was in the Journal of the Two Sisters, but I'm not sure what would count as spoilers and what is okay to reveal. Something about the books that isn't a spoiler is that in the parts about DJ-Pon3 in the Rainbow Rocks book, she does not speak at all! Instead, she communicates by texting! I thought that was kind of funny given I had thought of an idea of "What if she was quiet and soft-spoken in person to contrast with her love of loud and energetic music?" and that seems to be at least somewhat of the characterization they were giving her (plus she never spoke in the little shorts that the book was based off of anyway).
On the subject of Monopoly, I got into it by playing as characters, like I would just play pretend and have a group of my characters play the game (as in I would just play as all the characters), sometimes I would do that alone or one or both my parents would play as characters too. So I've found it more fun that way rather than playing it as myself, so that I don't get as personally involved in a desire to win. Plus, I pretty rarely played it with anyone (when I would play it with real people) who would be likely to get upset at the outcome of the game, and sometimes just quit and declared a winner if it was taking too long and it was obvious who would win. I guess I also liked playing the various versions that had the street names changed to other things that were based off of real and fictional cities, such as the St. Louis Monopoly I have, since my dad is from St. Louis so several of the places in the game are familiar to me.
edited 23rd Jun '14 1:53:12 PM by Rainbow
@Kegi: Do you know how Monopoly managed to become such a ubiquitous game? Like you said, as a game it isn't actually much fun, so how come it has like a million versions and is owned by everyone? It's like it somehow manages to trick you into thinking it doesn't suck for years before someone slaps you upside the head with Settlers of Catan or something.
To be honest, I have really no idea. Like, it wasn't even made for retail at first. It was made by a college professor, with no intention of marketing it.
If I had to chance a guess, I'd say it's possible that it's one of the first board games ever made without a skill threshold. Like, at the time all the other games on the market were probably things like chess, which require at least a bit of skill to be able to play. Since it was made for economics students, someone who saw it probably had the bright idea to sell it, and it just kind of... caught on. Then actual board games started getting invented, but it kind of stuck out of tradition.
Though that's just a guess, it may well be completely off.
Birthright: an original web novel about Dragons, the Burdens of Leadership, and Mangoes.@Kegi: That makes sense. I guess it's easy to take off when you've got no competition.
Totally unrelated to anything, but this amused me.
edited 23rd Jun '14 2:30:57 PM by Crowfall
Keg and Crow: That would make a lot of sense, not to mention actually be consistent with the rise of some stuff as seen in this very fandom. >.>
FE: New Mystery Only Feet 7PM PT Sun, Mon, Fri; Umamusume Haru Arima 7PM PT Wed, Thurs: http://www.twitch.tv/kuroitsubasatenshiGot a bit further in the original Fallout. I'm pretty surprised at how different it is from the modern games in the franchise.
I mean, I already knew that it'd be different, just given how long ago it was released. But this game feels a lot more... apocalyptic than the ones I've already played. There's less combat, but what combat there is can be quite deadly. There's a lot less to loot, so you end up valuing what you manage to scavenge a lot more. And the tone of it's different, too. It seems to take itself pretty seriously. There was a fair bit of (dark) humor in 3 and New Vegas, but I haven't run into anything so far that gives off the same vibe in this one.
Also, I've found that companions are much more useful in this game. Must be a result of how tactical the combat is compared to the FPS style of the newer games.
It certainly leads to a different experience. In this game, when I find, say, a flare or a knife, I go, "Awesome, I'll sell this for some caps once I get back to town. Then I can pick up some ammunition or something!" Whereas in 3 or Vegas, I would say, "Nope. Too heavy for the price I'd get for it."
yeah, fallout 2 is where a lot of silliness/dark humor starts seeping into things.
XP granted for befriending a giant magical spider!Back from therapy, so just got caught up.
I'll second BF. It's tricky to get, but damn are the stories really good. And is the only eu work to have nearly all the original series actors, brings back all the villains with twists to keep it scary, a lot of great characterization, and Eight's stuff are just simply the best take on him in all the DW eu.
Heck his cameo in the series was all but said outright to be an epilogue to his Big Finish adventures, even namedropping all his audio companions.
Gushing over.
@77681: All of this makes me want to say "Challenge Accepted". (Nevermind the fact that I pretty much issued the challenge myself.)
I think the first thing one could to is to change the objective from "eliminate everyone else" to something more absolute. Maybe "control X properties/houses/hotels" or "have $Y net worth", I dunno. And then restructure the game around that objective, and make sure you can finish it in like an hour tops.
The game needs to stay compelling all the way through, from the beginning to the endgame. Which means tackling the snowball effect of having more properties with which to suck funds, which lets you get even more properties, and so on. Maybe introduce some inherent cost to owning things (maybe a property tax or something), such that you eventually have to decide whether a new property you land on is actually worth buying, or if a deed you've been holding on to the last couple of turns has become more of an albatross than an asset.
This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

@ Scott it's a company that makes audio based stories of shows. Not just making an audio only version of existing episodes. But creates whole new stories designed as radio plays. It's most famous for doing it with Doctor who, and a lot to audio plays it's done are really well loved. Hell it managed to make people like the sixth doctor.