Item Cards, Name Badges and Wall Signs
Many Guild games focus on hunts for MacGuffins : items that multiple characters are seeking to possess for personal use, often as crucial components for some larger conspiracy operating in the background of the game. Items may also be useful as tools for furthering one’s goals; weapons are a generic example. Finally, some items may have little competitive use but may still be appropriate for the purposes of roleplaying.
The easiest way to represent items in a game is to use an "item card". These are business-card-sized rectangles of paper, labeled with the name of an item and a short description. With the help of the tool suites, it is simple to ensure that all the players find in their packets a sheet of paper with a card marked “brass knuckles� that they can cut out before the beginning of the game, while a few other players may also find a card marked “blinky helmet � on the same sheet of paper. Most games, however, will also include other information on that card.
Because many item cards often represent items larger than a business card, item cards often describe the “bulkiness� of the object in terms of “hands� or “dots.� As described in the Standard Rules:
- A bulky item is too big or heavy to be carried freely. Bulkiness is measured in ‘hands’ i.e. how many hands it takes to carry it. An item card with N colored dots on it is N-hand bulky. (A dot with a number on it is that many hands worth of bulkiness.)
Thus, a two-hands-bulky object normally requires two hands to carry. Recent GM teams usually do not bother to attach large adhesive dots to the item cards, which means that players have to look at the card carefully to notice that it has “5 dots bulky� printed on it. However, the vocabulary of “dots� has overtaken “hands� for a number of reasons. Many games have characters that are unusually strong and can carry much more than a regular human being while only having two hands. A regular human character would be able to carry a two-dots-bulky object with both hands, whereas King Kong should be able to carry a two-dots-bulky Fay Wray (and more) with a single hand. There are also rules for containers, which would allow normal human characters to use two hands to carry more than two hands of bulky items. As a result of this, many games prefer to use “dots� as a unit of measure of bulkiness rather than “hands.� The slightly more abstract and versatile definition of “dots� clearly describes bulkiness as a property of the item, not the character.
Item cards that list bulkiness provide some information about potential interactions that are possible with the item. Players know that they can only carry a limited number of bulky objects, and there are often rules limiting the storage of bulky objects in pockets. Item cards can have descriptions that explicitly state other potential uses of an item. “Weapon� is a common description on an item card: it defines the item as something useful for combat. Games with more complicated combat mechanics may have item cards that describe exactly how useful they are in combat, with varying numerical bonuses and multipliers that are reminiscent of tabletop roleplaying games.
There are often situations when GMs will not want all the players to know all the potential uses of certain objects. At the same time, GMs may not want characters that "should" know of the uses of an item to know that the item exists at the beginning of game. For instance, some characters may know that magical items can kill monsters but those characters may be unaware that the only magical weapons in games are certain charmed daggers. The GMs might want the process of sorting through all the different items in the game to take up a good deal of time. Thus, they must provide some players with the ability to distinguish the daggers from all the other, non-magical items when the players actually see the item card.
To serve these purposes, item cards often have a series of numerical digits printed along with their text descriptions. These numbers reflect traits of items without stating that information in readable prose. Some players may know that a magical item will have a leftmost digit greater than 5. To further obfuscate information from players who should not be able to tell the difference between certain objects, the digits may require some sort of arithmetic operation to decode their meaning. For instance, if the sum of the rightmost three digits is divisible by three, a character may notice that a certain item is made out of silver.
Even some publicly observable traits can be simplified to a digit. Players are often given name badges with their player’s name, character’s name, physical description and a badge number. Badges are basically item cards for characters; in fact, many game rules state that a player’s name badge represents his character’s body. If the player puts the badge down on a floor and walks away, the character remains in one place; this can be convenient when a character has been “killed� and the player does not want to pretend to be a dead body. The first or last digit on a badge often represents the character’s approximate age in decades; “1� represents a pre-teen, “2� is a young adult or teenager. Rooms and corridors can also have signs that convey information in the same way. Signs are usually full-sized pages taped on a wall with text printed in a large font size for easy reading. Wall signs may include descriptive prose, lists of possible exits and detailed instructions regarding actions that can be performed within the spaces. For example, a room representing a distillery may have a sign that includes its name, a description of its surroundings and a mechanic for drawing beer out of caskets. If it is a secret distillery, the door leading to the room may have a sign that forbids entry or the room may be in a part of the campus designated as “off-limits� by the GMs. Players would then have to find another way in, perhaps a sign elsewhere in the campus that describes a hidden passage and lists the room number of the distillery. The 2001 game Reality Check III: Dinner at the Schloss Himmelbrand written by V. Ken Clary, Peter Litwack and Nicholas Martin combined wall signs with dot hunts with their use of “s-packets,� miniscule printed pieces of paper taped in small nooks and crannies all over campus. Many of them gave no useful information but a few slips allowed players to enter parts of campus originally declared “off-limits� by the GMs to discover a variety of hidden rooms.
The MIT campus is lined with underground tunnels and interconnected corridors that allow people to move from building to building without being exposed to the cold Boston winters. Guild members quickly learn the unmarked forks and turns in “the third longest tunnel system in the world after the Kremlin and the Pentagon � because Guild GMs often use these labyrinthine walkways in games. Because the tunnels intersect and branch off in multiple configurations, by altering information on wall signs, dots or small strips of text, the GMs can change the number of possible routes through the tunnels. In Guild games, a good proportion of players seem to enjoy the exploration and rediscovery of hidden paths around subterranean MIT by means of such “tunnel mechanics.�
However, the nature of item cards, name badges and wall signs also give away a great deal of information. A player finding an item card knows that it represents an item, even if he or she does not know what the item is. Similarly, wall signs represent a space in the game and name badges represent character bodies. Occasionally, GMs only want a few players to notice the existence of a strange space, item or trait. Those players need to be able to easily see and recognize the corresponding signs or envelopes as significant but all other players are expected to completely ignore those same signs or envelopes.
This is accomplished through the use of signs or cards with Greek letters. Players are specifically told in the rules to ignore Greek letters “unless they know otherwise.â€? For those who should “know otherwise,â€? GMs might inform them that an envelope stuck on the wall with a big À is really a hidden panel, and by looking in the envelope, they can find a secret item. The inscrutability of a single Greek letter goes a long way in keeping everybody else blissfully ignorant of the existence of the secret panel; that is, unless they see someone opening it. It might be worth noting that MIT engineering students have a reasonable familiarity with the Greek alphabet, allowing Greek letters to serve a mnemonic function. The È (psi) symbol, for instance, is often used to describe things that would be only noticed by psychic characters.
