Ravioli Preparation Games

A friend of mine recently had the luxury of attending the Ravioli Preparation Games, the premier competition for ravioli-cooking.

Naturally, they gave out goodie bags, and my friend, ever gracious, offered the entire thing to me, claiming ze didn't need another novelty spatula with the games' logo on it. I accepted, of course, and found something curious inside-- an issue of Stuffed, the official Ravioli Preparation Games periodical! I'd like to share some excerpts of the articles within-- I'm sure you'll find them delightful.

"On tableside guacamole"

...My longtime followers know where I'm going with this. Tableside guacamole is the premier food. While I might enjoy the occasional compound butter or marinara to augment my ravioli, I admit any ingredient I have for either would be better served as a component of a tableside guac. The reason for this is simple: tableside guacamole is interactive. Any old food can taste good, but tableside guacamole has power beyond that. A transcendentally good salsa might give the diner ideas about the recipe for the salsa; even a mediocre tableside guacamole, however, lays its recipe bare and asks its audience to participate.

A friend once told me that he had a bizarre idea about an egg, the process of eating which would inspire diners to call their local congressperson. Surely he expected me to ask how his political egg would work, but I was unconcerned with this-- I incuriously assumed such an egg could exist. I had bigger game, after all.

"Chef," I told him, "I'm sure your egg is good-- but if it were tableside guacamole, a true interactive food, you could involve calling one's local congressperson as an act of eating. Your radical scramble is impressive, but eggs as a medium lack the inherent power of tableside guac."

"Everything is a recipe"

...Every chef worth their kosher salt knows this: everything is a recipe. Even if it is not written down, it is impossible to cook food without performing a number of steps manipulating that food in sequence-- which, of course, is what a recipe really is. Yet let me read you the first words from the world-acclaimed YouTube series "You Can Cook! with Madame Beurre":

"You don't need a recipe!"

She says this sincerely, directly-- bluntly, even. Now I respect Madame Beurre, and it is beyond debate that "You Can Cook!" is invaluable to old and new. She's certainly changed more hearts than me, and anyone who's tasted her banh mi ravioli knows her talent!

But imagine you are new to cooking. What do you have to gain from being told a technical falsehood?

 "The 2020 Competition: Looking Back"

...outrage at the 2020 Ravioli Preparation Games. The reason? The winning entry, deconstruction iii, was not a ravioli-- or so said some detractors! A number of arguments were made to this point, including the following:

• deconstruction iii did not envelop the filling-- it simply surrounded it, leaving room for the inner works to poke out.
  
• deconstruction iii had literally no nutritional value (at the time, this was not thought to be possible). A ravioli, it was widely believed, should use its fillings to provide varied and balanced nutritional value.
• deconstruction iii had more sauce and garnish than filling, decreasing the importance of the filling that is a natural prerequisite for ravioli.
• deconstruction iii advertised itself as not requiring eating to be beautiful or appreciated. This sparked debate over whether a ravioli not intended to be eaten is technically a ravioli.
• deconstruction iii handled mozzarella innovatively. The artist first dissolved a clump of mozzarella in water. They then drew ire by diluting this water in front of an audience until, probabilistically, not a single molecule of mozzarella remained, then used this water as an ingredient. Critics dismissed this as "going too far", "disconnected from any semblance of artistic tradition", and "derivative of un-ravioli for the new millenium".

These complaints, in hindsight, look childish. We can see now that deconstruction iii is certainly more of a ravioli than Narcissus Looks Into The Stadia and Seas, the controversial "bathtub ravioli" from earlier this year...

"Against fanciful sides"

...since nobody else in the ravioli community is willing to say it, it falls to me: the so-called fanciful sides movement is a hoax. I remember my first encounter with one of these fanciful chefs well. Before me was a perfectly passable plate of ravioli, triple-fried (as was the fad at the time) with a creamy lobster stuffing. I was ready to judge-- but also to dig in!

But the chef would not allow me to simply enjoy a meal. Her eyes glittered as she instructed me to perceive what she claimed to be a "fanciful" untasteable side in the empty bowl to my left: polenta. Everything she described was not to my taste-- curious, since she could have described anything. She instructed me to only eat it if I found the lobster raviolis to be getting repetitive.

The other judges on the panel fell for it-- one even pantomimed spooning a dollop of polenta into her mouth, nodding and laughing. Personally, I was disgusted. If this polenta were necessary, shouldn't it be material, rather than fanciful? And if it will never come up (a likely case-- each bite of her ravioli was unlike the last, so I never needed a break) why have it exist at all?

If this were just artsy-fartsy bullshit about the difference between taste and flavor, it would be fine. But when people walk past my stand at the Big Bread Convention and spend their money on some hack who can't even prepare polenta...

"Letter to the editor #1"

I am disappointed that you published "5 Lovely Recipes!" last February. I have written over thirty cookbooks and edited thirty more, including the romantic cookbook "Macademia Nut Hearts". Your "sexy skillet-starters" were cute, if lackluster. Much less cute was your insistence that they share the collective spotlight with my recipes that integrate themes of love into everything from filling to pasta to plating.

You're telling people that they can take their grandpa's cookbook, swap some ingredients, change the oven time to "333, like three pairs of kissy lips", and call it good. You are just a bunch of disgusting men starving your readers who make a living off selling cookbooks.

"My Time With Madame"

...Madame Beurre taught me an important lesson that day. All throughout culinary school I had been taught that food was more than just the sum of its ingredients-- you might like chocolate, and you might like ketchup, but not together. Trying to impress Miss Beurre, I told her this, expecting her to ask me why I agreed or disagreed. But she skipped that step-- she asked why I thought that.

Eventually I mustered an answer, which seemed to impress her: combinations of ingredients invoke cuisines, a form of collective knowledge, and we grow up with cuisines. After some thinking, she agreed, and told me she liked that thought. I was prepared for a complicated, nuanced response.

Her next instruction was simple, though, scraping off years of baggage: Let's make something. A ravioli, let's say, and we'll see what happens. We used the microwave a lot, and integrated everything we knew, from the pancake batter Miss Beurre's kids loved to the toppings on the cheap bagel pizzas I ate every Thursday in college. We even served it on a paper plate like I used to eat, and Beurre showed me her family's dinnertime routine.

It was incoherent. I'd never serve it to anyone. It was also the most fun I've ever had cooking-- and because of that, even if I'd never serve it to anyone other than her, it was one of the most delicious things I've ever tasted...

"On Realities and Teaching"

 ...I love teaching technique. My cooking career is built on them. In a perfect world, I would do nothing but introduce chefs to my beloved techniques, teach them everything I learned at the Tesselation bar and restaurant. I would make dishes out of the change in my coin purse, and serve them to everyone, and feed the world.

The reality, though, is a lose-lose situation: I don't particularly care for the ins and outs of knife work or grill management or which expensive salts to use when, nor do I want to use expensive ingredients or work alongside professional food photographers. Yet in order to demonstrate my ideas about flavor combinations, I must master every step along the way, or pay someone who has. And I had best do so with expensive and exquisite ingredients!

I fear for my students-- and quite frankly, my customers, who are focused on the foreign sensation of seeing a duck press for the first time. They must think my ideas are so much more obscure than they actually are!

"My Lamb Ravioli Recipe (The Point Of It All)"

...a number of artists created sheet music that separated itself from Western notation, or more generally any notation that prioritized notes. Their reasoning was that if the sequence of notes were just as important as dynamics, emotions, imagery, instrumentation, and so on, it was unreasonable to create sheet music that proposed that the notes were the point of it all, resigning concepts like "crescendo", "84 beats per minute", and "like a butterfly's wings" to marginalia...

 

...Now I'll get to the point of it all. Here, for the first time in print, is my infamous lamb ravioli recipe, the very same that won me the 2014 Games:

lamb, five-spice, cornstarch, sesame oil, rice wine, eggs, flour, scallion for sure, some sort of heat, some sort of acidity. You are momentarily an astronaut playing helmetless in Jupiter's gases; breathe them in-- how would you describe those blooming scents to your parents? I am describing what I imagined, looking up at my mother performing alchemy on the stove above me.

 

My child watches me cook, and I selfishly wish for them to imagine the same fantasies I did, just as I simultaneously hope they tell me the worlds they visited someday. Now feel the lapse in inertia as you hit the ground again, O meteorite ablaze, jostling your bones and knocking your heart up your spine into your head. Best piping hot.

SP117: An Item For Fantasy Games

The Item Itself

The SP117 is a wand with the approximate size, shape, and color of a yellow highlighter and the approximate weight of a gallon of yellow paint. There may be various insignia on it, usually matching those of a well-funded army, or a group of protesters that stole it from an army. It has “117” printed on it in bold, uniform type.

Someone familiar with it would offer you approximately the price of a nice piano for it, probably looking to pawn it off on a government or war historian.

When used, it transports any being capable of being injured, and anything they’re touching, to another plane. (The floor won’t come with you, but your bag will, and the rug might.) This looks like vaporization to the untrained eye. After each shot, the wand will prompt the user, by way of an inaudible magical whisper, to “shake or fire again to continue”. If the wand is not waved or fired again within five seconds, it will then transport anyone holding it, and anything they’re carrying other than the wand, in the same way. The wand itself will try to teleport to a nearby shelf or table in the original plane, or, failing that, fall to the floor.

SP117 has five charges. It takes anyone trained in magic worth their salt about ten minutes of repetitive, intense work to charge it up again fully.

The Sanctuary

SP117 transports beings to a gigantic hexagonal room, with mighty, glossy metal walls and floors. It smells as if every scent molecule more interesting than “faint sickly-sweetness” has been eliminated. There is a 10-foot circular rug on the floor, decorated with geometric patterns. It is cheap, but incredibly comfortable.

The text “SP117” is printed along one wall. Below it is simply encrypted text that reads ALUR DEATHTAKER, WITH MUCH RESPECT: STAY OUT OF THESE WALLS when deciphered.

To the right of the labeled wall is a contraption with an interface of buttons, a basin at the top labeled “HOLY SYMBOL OR FOCUS ITEM”, and several smaller drawers, labeled and stocked with common components for healing spells. When operated it allows one to cast a spell hands-free. The interface is difficult to learn, but is barely a hindrance when mastered.

Moving further right, there is a door labeled EXIT. It takes approximately six minutes to leave, most of which is operating well-known magical machinery. Those who leave will arrive in the original plane, in the same room as the wand.

Directly opposite the labeled wall is another door, leading to a room with identical dimensions. In it lie nine adjustable bedframes without mattresses and parts to a tenth, a bookshelf with long, vapid books, and a comfy loveseat. It also contains a stall with a toilet and a kitchenette stocked with a magically never-ending supply of water and palm oil soap. A compartment with a trash receptacle contains a broken but salvagable wand of brisk shrink, a cumbersome wand which causes an item to shrink to pocket-size for approximately ten minutes.

Another wall has an ancient interface embedded in it. By pushing blocks labeled “1”, “2”, “4”, “8”, and so on in and out, it provides a binary representation of important stats of any being standing on the rug-- height, weight, a number corresponding approximately to how many thwacks from a club it would take to kill them, and so forth. It also provides numerical codes corresponding to the strongest curse inflicting them, the last kind of magic they cast, whether they are allergic to various families of healing spells, and so on.

There is a secret compartment below this interface, triggered by pressing one of the blocks with the digit worn off by fingerprint oils. It contains six healing potions, each diluted with seven parts water.

Along the last wall is a locked door labeled NETWORK. To unlock it would take entering a 6-digit passcode. Entering three incorrect codes springs a trap that has long run out of ammunition. It would take a little less than 30 hours to brute-force. What could lie beyond it?

Weapons and Variety (a Weekend Workshop solve)

 Yesterday I posted the following prompt to Twitter:

In your friend's game, to do the basic "attack" move, the attacker rolls Xd6 (X depends on weapon size, skill, etc). For each 4+, they choose an effect from a list in their playbook. They complain that weapons feel the same, and small ones are useless. Can you help?

The responses were real good. The most common one by far was a tuning of "well, separate the playbooks by weapon", but they were far from uninteresting, and it was far from the only response. You can see all the responses here.

I've had a day to think about it, so I wanted to write what I would do, and my answer doesn't fit in a thread of any reasonable size. If my thing resembles your answer and I don't explicitly talk about it, I swear I'm not plagiarizing you, we just both thought an idea was good.

First, establish what it means to have your weapon outside of combat. Kazumi's very good answer touches on this. Their argument, which I take here, is that, rather than try the weapons such that they're equally good at hitting things, we should attempt to construct situations where the worse weapons shine. I'll reword that slightly: People pick weapons because they have an idea of what it looks like to use them. Let's let them do so.

If you have a dagger, you want to stab people in the back, right? So let's do that: if you've set up the perfect situation, you can backstab people, no rolls no shenanigans. Similarly, if you pick a shield, you probably find a theme of protection resonant-- so let's say it makes people feel safe around you. I'm picking up PbtA/FitD vibes, so let's say you can roll the Act Under Fire equivalent for them.

If you have a big ol' axe, you're communicating to the table that you want to have a lot of combat scenes, right? So let's say you can't conceal the axe, ever, in any situation-- you leave it at home or you send a signal to everybody at the dinner party or whatever that you like to cause problems on purpose. And so on, and so forth.

There might be multiple options for each weapon, or these might actually be class traits, or it could just be the one thing. I don't know enough about my hypothetical friend's game to have a preference.

Anyway, this is good, but it only half-solves the problem. So far we've let people use weapons in the situations they want to. However, within actual combat, the weapons feel samey. Worse, they feel like strictly better and worse versions of each other entirely.

This may seem fine to you-- after all, the player gets to make a trade-off between combat abilities and other abilities! I have a story in response: Back when I played more Magic, I did a bunch drafts with my then-girlfriend. The variant we did was pretty feast-or-famine, and it led to a lot of matchups that were fun, but lopsided. Despite this, the only time anybody ever conceded mid-match was when we went for the same strategy (storm) but one of us, by sheer luck, did it better. Players like being weaker than their friends or adversaries; very few like being strictly or basically objectively weaker.

Anyway-- we have a dice pool, which is a canvas that allows for a lot of expression. The most obvious way I can think of to proceed is this:

• Different weapons use d4, d6, or d8 dice. Daggers and such are d4s, big dumb swords are d8s, for "that's what they are in D&D" reasons more than anything else.
• We already have a "Choose one for each 4+" picklist, so let's keep that as is. This is generic stuff like "Impress, dismay, or frighten" or "Do 1-harm" or "Defend a position" or whatever.
• Weapons also have another stat called EDGE. Edge is the maximum number of picklist options you can choose by roling 4+. Flavorfully it represents like, potential backstabbery ability. Large-die weapons have Edge around 2 or 3, small-die ones have more.
  
• Finally, each weapon has "combos" that trigger on patterns in the numbers. For example, a d4-based dagger might have an additional effect when you roll triples or when you roll a 1, 2, 3, and 4. An enchanted d8-based mace might have a boring damage-boosting effect if you rolled an 8, and it might start whispering to you if you roll double 1s. Stuff like that.
  
• To actually attack, roll some number of your weapon's dice (derived from your skill and the fictional position and whatnot). For each 4+, choose one option from the picklist, up to a maximum of MAX. Then, check to see if you rolled any combos, and apply those.

The benefits of this system off the top of my head:

• The daggers and whatever feel weaker, but they do feel cool and distinct, and if a player says "I want a dagger that can actually pull its weight in combat", the table has the tools to make that happen.
• The players who have signaled that they want to be better at combat (i.e. the big-die weapons) have more consistent success. It's real easy to roll 4+ on d8s, actually.
  
• But those high-die players are still doing cool things-- it's not like 5e and whatnot where you have a fighter with "Deal d6 damage. Special ability (1/day): Deal 2d6 damage".
  
• Similarly, it's real easy to make a weapon enchanted, or really old, or poorly-made, or if you wanna break out the d10s really big. Furthermore, all those enchantments will feel different, because caring about rolling 1s vs saving dice vs anything else you do with the dice pool feel different in a really tactile way.
  
• Edge lets you kind of give people whatever buffs you want. That's its main function-- your marginal skill increases from "high" to "really high", your weapon becomes more consistent as opposed to end-the-world powerful.
• This system generalizes nicely to non-weapon combat actions. Remember, we kept the picklist of generic combat goodstuff intact, free for the "throw sand at your enemy" move or an improvised "drop down from the chandelier" move to use.
  
• I used a lot of words, but the stat block for a weapon isn't that big? Die size, edge, like two combos, an out-of-combat effect. Boom. If you wanna go really rules-light you could probably ditch the edge and just promise to be very judicious about giving people skill buffs.

There are downsides, too, but I'm kinda sleepy, and also I'd really need to see this played in a broader context of game to verify them. That's the kind of impartial reporting you've come to expect from Natalie Libre Bigstuffedcat.

Anyway, if I have a broader design point to wrap this up, it's that dice pools are real expressive. They let you differentiate things in a way that feels more tactile and fundamental to me than, say, swapping out picklists in a BoB game. They're like a really intimidating synthesizer with a thousand knobs and settings that theoretically can imitate any instrument in existence, and several not in existence. My benediction to you is to turn those knobs more.

In Development: TERMINAL and Zephrys

So I'm gonna try something. Unless I go into a lyric frenzy and make a microgame, the next game I'll release will be a little thing called TERMINAL. It's not gonna be ready for a hot minute (my fault for making a game that needs playtesting, of all things) but I thought it might interest folks to get a little sneak peek at the game!

I'll talk about the game, but it'll inevitably touch upon broader theory-- so even if you aren't remotely interested in TERMINAL, this is still for you.

Obvious disclaimer that anything I discuss here are subject to change, blablabla.

What's it about?

Thematically, TERMINAL is about a bunch of weird creatures, like a murder of crows in a trenchcoat or a blathering sphinx named Blessica, standing around in an airport chit-chatting. It's absurd and slightly pretentious, and despite the colorful cast it's very much a game about the mundane and disconnected.

Mechanically, TERMINAL is a play-by-post game where you speak mostly in pre-made sentences or structures. Literally, the game can end when someone gets tired of sticking to the pre-made moves.

Personality

All the characters in TERMINAL are a little obtuse. Some might say "cringy".

To show you what I mean, here are some moves from Moonly, a fairy that lives in a ship in a bottle and has her own alternate tarot set. The moves are simple: You just say them at the appropriate time.

At the first possible opportunity: I made my own divination deck. I call it "pigeon tarot". It's not just for pigeons, though.

When you want to be a bit rude: You're a real [made-up arcana], you know that... sorry, you don't know what that means, do you?

I love these moves, because it's how I introduced my projects when I was a kid (and sometimes now)-- shoehorn it into the conversation, often at the cost of whatever other message I was trying to convey. Honestly, it's sort of satisfying that I get to make a game where these are valid moves-- it's a sort of middle finger to every adult who was ever tired of me.

The thing is, all the characters are like this. Myrd, a knight with a quilt for armor and a broom for a spear, will play a variant of the sandwich debate game when there's a lull in the conversation-- not at all bad (in fact, lots of potential to be interesting), just not the way I would go in what broader society considers "conversation". None of the characters really respect social mores.

And that's good, I think, for two reasons. The first is that a lot of small-talk etiquette is boring and incomprehensible to me, and if I had to listen to my playtesters play a game that faithfully replicates "normal" conversation I'd probably lose blood to my ears as a self-defense mechanism. These are weird people, and it's also a game, so it's okay if the way they talk isn't boring.

Wishes

The second reason it's good that these characters don't really have the tools to have a normal conversation brings me to Hearthstone.

See, in Hearthstone there's a card called Zephrys the Great.

Zephrys's effect allows you to "wish for the perfect card". That means that the computer will look at the board state, generate a list of Hearthstone cards that could be useful, and present you with three of them. You put one of them into your hand.

It's sort of like "Put any card that's ever been printed into your hand". As a variant of that card, though, it sort of fails. Remember, the computer has to choose the cards. It's pretty good at the basics (opponent has 6 health? How about a fireball that deals 6 damage?) but, like computers tend to be, it's imperfect. Zephrys doesn't know what cards are in your hand, and often misses non-attack damage already on the board. It certainly won't notice combos based around, for example, returning itself to your hand and playing itself again ad infinitum to turn any card that does something when you play a guy into a win condition. The dude's just not terribly observant.

Because of that, though, the way players interact with Zephrys is very funny-- they treat him sort of like a person! Players will ask "How do I make sure that Zephrys gives me a good card here?". They'll make moves to simplify the board, sometimes making bad trades, to make sure he doesn't get sidetracked by some complicated board state. I've heard of  more than one instance of "It's technically correct to play this first, but that might make Zephrys give me the wrong cards".

Essentially, the player has to enter dialogue with an inanimate object. What could have been frustrating ("Why doesn't the computer find lethal?") becomes a personality quirk ("Oh, silly Zephrys doesn't see that I have 6 damage on the board!"

TERMINAL is like that too. If I presented it as a way to generate a completely natural flow of polite conversation you'd be super disappointed. Thus, the best course of action is to signal that hey, it's okay that this is an unnatural flow of conversation.

The best possible scenario is that a player looks at their playbook and occasionally goes "Well, I may not be able to respond normally... but, oh goodness, I can say that."

Disconnect

Honestly, TERMINAL is going to be a game about disconnect.

You're given these sort of awkward characters with sort of awkward dialogue, stuff that flows into itself enough that the game is fun and playable but not enough that you're like "Ah, this resembles a normal conversation". And while you're supposed to take on these roles, you have an imperfect tool-- so you do the Zephrys thing and enter dialogue with an inanimate object, thoroughly cementing it as something that's not you. Not even something you're embodying or that represents you, like your face on a Zoom call, just something that you're pretending is you for the duration of this social event.

...Oh, sounds queer!