Game Master as parser

“Action Castle” is apparently a tabletop semi-RPG where the game-master pretends to be an IF parser. I found this narrative of play amusing and fascinating — especially because, when I was a young teenager, I would often play the parser this way for my own friends. (I always did allow the parser to understand all the commands, but there were annoying mazes and unfair plot arcs.)

9 thoughts on “Game Master as parser”

  2. Hah! I did the same thing. And here I thought I was the only one.

    The funny thing is, I never quite realized that what I was really doing was running very ad hoc RPG sessions. Somehow, I felt that if it didn’t have dice, it couldn’t be a text adventure.

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  3. There was a game of Action Castle at PAX, actually. Almost as interesting as actually playing it was seeing how cunning the saboteurs were about it.

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  4. I believe that Sorensen has done other, similar games. Parsley used to be posted on his website along with other free games, but now his site seems to be devoid of anything but Inspectres, OctaNe, and Lacuna… and now that I visit it again, a giant ad (but no link to purchase or get more info) for Action Castle.

    I always thought it sounded amusing. But (strangely(?) given that there is only one PC) it seems like a game best attempted with a large number of players, possibly drunk ones. Some day I may have to inflict it upon my friends, however.

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  5. ACTION CASTLE is in the state of being-about-to-be-released. It was available for purchase at Gencon, and I was lucky enough to have it from a friend who had purchased it there. I should say that the rules are changed, for the apparent better, from the version on the website. I hope the newer revisions will be put up sometime soon, so people can more easily make their own games.

    I think that giving each person precisely one command does let the game scale well for a large group (by not keeping any one person waiting for too long), but unlike say, Are You a Werewolf, I don’t think it requires a large group. It was perfectly fun with two people, and adding more would have both increased the groups “parallel puzzle processing power,” and increased the difficulty of cooperation and the odds of saboteurs having fun with it. Even with two players, they had a surprising amount of difficulty just holding the stick in a fire for three turns before it was actually lit.

    Also, if I had to do it again, I think I would make the parser more advanced and input-accepting. I was vastly amused by saying things like “(first taking the unconscious guard) I only understood you as far as wanting to push the unconscious guard,” or “That would be terribly improper!” But part of the players’ joy seemed to be the very familiar (to me, not them) IF experience of figuring out exactly what one can accomplish in the bounds of the simulation. Can I jump off the bridge? Can I feed the guard to the troll? Can I climb down the outside of the tower?

    Not that you have to let them do all of these things, but there’s nothing wrong with giving them a brief and unique acknowledgement of their . In fact, if I had done a better job of tracking points, I would have awarded them for doing those sorts of unexpected things and forcing me to come up with new blurbs. Like playing Alabaster for points, in person.

    Playing the simple parser is one kind of amusement, but playing the sophisticated one might be a better kind (though also a more difficult one).

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    1. Mostly pretty derivative fantasy, inspired a bit by Zork and even more by Enchanter (which was one of my favorites when I was young). Sometimes I would draw up maps first, sometimes just do a sort of improv rendition (which people tended not to get all the way through — but since I had never actually solved an Infocom game at that age, an unfinished IF experience seemed perfectly natural to me).

      The thing I remember most clearly is a “maze” in which every room description was “You are in a deep dark forest”, except that on subsequent rooms it became “You are in a deep dark dense forest”, “You are in a deep dark dense dark forest”, “You are in a deep dark dense dark very deep very dark forest”, etc, with the adjective string becoming more lengthy and baroque. I continued this until the players were frustrated to the verge of quitting and then let them escape. Hard to judge that in an implemented piece of IF, but in the GMed kind you can wait until the players start petulantly kicking your chair.

      Later on I got the idea to do a more thorough and satisfying job, and so I made a big map on graph paper, where each room was numbered; the numbers went to a box of index cards with the room descriptions. I worked on this a lot over the course of one summer, but still never quite got the thing into a playable state, so I never actually ran it as a game. (I can’t now remember to what degree I had worked out puzzles and how to keep track of puzzle state.)

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  7. Oooh! I did something kinda like that, too, with my sister. Though the games we played were more surreal than straight fantasy, generally.

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