Hey Man, well this is Babylon

This morning I hit what I think might be a minor breakthrough in the design blocks I’ve had lately on this project. A lot of my process as of late has been held up with a lot of inner conflict on what kind of play template I want this game to support. I have a few previous posts on this subject. This morning, a new idea came to me, involving splitting the meta-game functions among all the involved players.

I’m calling them Roles of Authority, and every player gets one – maybe more – at the beginning of the game. These roles assign various functions and authority domains to each player that extend above and beyond their standard character-focused realm of game control. For example:

The Mistress of the Rules: Her Role gives her the authority to make rules calls mid-game. She is responsible for reading the book, keeping tabs on the rules, and cutting short any rules arguments or look-ups that happen in a session. When she makes a call, the players must accept it and then return to the story.

The Master of the Many: This guy’s Role gives him the final call on any involvement of “The Many.” In this game, “The Many” is a term applied to any multitudinous force in the game’s setting and story: Noble Houses, riotous mobs, wild tribes, the Unwashed Masses, and more. Any player can involve The Many at any time during their narration, but the master of the many has the final say on such things, if he chooses to execute it.

The Master of the Action: His authority is over the framing and establishment of new scenes. While everyone has the ability to introduce new scenes and add elements to their framing, the Master has the final say, and is responsible to taking all the input and assembling it into something initially cohesive.

Mistress of the Fates: This player is responsible both for calling all ties and for inserting an element of the unexpected into scenes and challenges. Whenever the variables of a challenge are declared, the Master of the Fates can choose to insert one unexpected element into the middle of things, if so inclined.

I have a handful of others as well. The Roles are intended to be broad (mostly) in spectrum. I want there to be gray areas of contested authority. In those cases, anyone with a legitimate claim should speak up, and the authorities should work together to design an outcome.

I’ve read a handful of gaming blogs and campaign-mastery essays online which recommend doing things like this in most every game you play, but my intention here is to incorporate these roles into the very rules of the game, and have them directly affect the atmosphere of the mechanics themselves.

This is good. This breaks my current stalemate with myself. I like this, as it allows me to more freely distribute “central meta-game authority” to everyone at the table, and move back to the subject of actual in-game mechanics and flow.

Following up on the ideas from my last post on this project, I’ve been musing a lot more on both Play Focus and Player Roles. Until now, I’ve been operating under the idea of the players filling the roles of adventurers or wanderers of some sort, going out into the world under the guidance of a GM. I don’t really feel comfortable with that one, though.

So to get myself focused on the proper design mindset, I took some time out to write a first-draft of the back-of-the-book blurb this morning:

“You live in Shroud, a world completely forgotten by its own inhabitants, your pasts lost to the great Unknowing. Every year there are three months of Night, during which you stay inside, because that’s when the Horrible Things come out. But this year, their coming will be the worst ever, and you must push them back, or all is lost. The only way you can overcome them is to tell your stories and, by doing so, remember the Forevergotten.”

This is a game about uncovering the secrets of the forgotten past to defeat a great approaching darkness that can destroy everything you know – which isn’t much to begin with.

Read more

In a previous post I introduced my idea for the Lifetimer, which slowly counts to 12, signaling the end of your character’s journey, be it successful or failure. This morning on the bus, I had an epiphany. I now know what the Lifetimer will be: Read more

In my last post, I spilled out an extremely short-form bit of musings on a new game and setting that has been the most current subject of my creative attention. I am currently calling this project “Forevergotten,” and I’d like to now take a few moments to spill out some more ideas. This time, Let’s focus on what the players of this game actually do.

I have always been an ardent believer in at least one tenet which sets down in words something that I believe all game designers should be able to tell anyone about their games: “In this game, you do ___.” With very rare exception, I will not put money down on a game which can’t fill in that blank for me within the first five minutes of perusing its pages. Preferably, I want that information to be found right smack on the back cover, and if not, within the first three pages of the game’s text. I want to know what a game is about, and I want to know what player actions and ideas the mechanics and setting primarily emphasize. As such, I want to be able to define this on my own game before I spend any more time working out more mechanics. Read more