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I have had a thought pop into my head, such as it is, about representing rules in a very concrete way inside of a game world. This is something that anybody who remembers Final Fantasy Tactics Advance may remember quite fondly. In that video game, there is the concept of combat that is overseen by referees much like you would a soccer match. They would enforce arbitrary combat conditions like, "You can't use magic spells" or "You can't use ranged attacks" even if (or in some cases especially if) it would cause a fight to end faster. These referees were called Judges, and ran around in heavy armor and chocobos and were invincible enforcers of the game systems. People who have played that game also know that they can be manipulated because if they don't perceive an action or cannot get to a place to hand out a penalty, then the rules themselves exist, but have been broken. There may be places where there are no rules - in addition to a whole lot of other consequences, like people who would normally be revived after a fight just...stay dead. If you want to see something rather interesting, go into your first jagd in that game and have your buddy Montblanc not make it out the other side alive. There's actual dialogue (if brief) regarding it, and that game felt way more tense after that, because I didn't save-scum to recover the character. This was a very interesting meta-experience to have in that game (which in and of itself was a game within a game, all very meta-game). However, the idea of "an in-narrative representation of the enforcement of rules" I think is something pretty neat. You can also see this reflected (though maybe I did it subconsciously) by having a clear separation of danger in the Megastrata by having the "Upper" and "Lower" strata. I don't know that all rules or safety guards should be presented in this way since it would get really cumbersome, but I think there is some interesting things here. The most interesting things that players and GMs do are to selectively bend or interpret the rules to allow for emergent gameplay to happen, one might argue, to service the narrative. However, there are also pretty interesting gameplay dynamics for people who have full mastery of the system to create interesting and odd builds, some of which may be highly improbably from a narrative perspective, but are mechanically extremely powerful. Some characters may be extremely powerful on accident - there is an old yarn about how one of the old TGers, the legendary Naar, opened up their rocket scientist brain and made a character in Scion when it was new that accidentally blew the entire system into pieces quite handily. On accident, even! Anyway, I think that there can absolutely be some systems that are similar to how the Judges work in FFTA that can be implemented into any system. For the Megastrata, I might be interested to do this but I think I will use the Mystery subsystem in order to carefully gate this and telegraph it. How would a system like this work? Enforcing rules using narrative vehicles The main thing to understand is, for a lot of game engines like D&D, GURPS, etc. rules are effectively subsystems that fall into one of three categories: - Structural/Essential, which if you rip this out of the system the rest of the engine falls apart or loses its identity ("What if we remove classes/HP/AC/Saving Throws from D&D but only kept the magic system?") - Connectors, where if you removed this it would not necessarily make the game engine fall apart, but it would feel distinctly different ("What if we removed the proficiency bonus from D&D 5e?"). These are systems I feel like can be removed without major consequence, mostly liberally, but that's another topic. - Bells/whistles, which sound exactly like what it sounds like. These serve typically an aesthetic purpose only and can be altered or removed without changing the core engine. ("What if all weapons were made of or shoot laser beams in D&D 4e?") I use D&D in the above examples since even if people might not necessarily like it they are relatable enough. The categorizations though I think are very useful in understanding what it is where change can be induced while avoiding "breaking" a game engine. As an aside, there was a time long ago when I ran Shadowrun 2e or 3e, back in the d6 days. I was quite young at the time and I made a decision for some reason to just let people get all their initiative turns if they had a very high initiative as long as their initiative was still higher than other people. In the game engine, it explicitly states if you get extra actions, they only come after everybody else has had at least one action. You can start to see why in a game where someone playing a street samurai goes "It's Combat Pool time!" and proceeds to unload 30 dice onto the table how important action economy is, so giving them multiple actions ahead of other people was, how you say, extremely loving wack. The above aside is actually useful in understanding how taking a chainsaw to a game engine and making a change that feels right narratively can cause the system to break down quickly. In essence, I was fiddling with a structural system without understanding until much later what horrors I had unleashed, mostly upon myself since I was running the game. When thinking about systems design, then, I'm sure there's a more standardized vocabulary and nomenclature for this, but these three categories should work. Since I've qualified the "game engine" and what "systems" make it into different categories, then we can understand that the things we can insert are specifically systems in the latter two categories that won't jeopardize the functioning of a system. If you wanted to change the core structural systems that make a game engine work, then you likely are on track to make a different game entirely. Thus, using this more specific identification of things, how can we categorize things created and posted to the thread thus far? - Automatons: bells & whistles - Megastrata zone generation: bells & whistles - Mysteries: connectors This also means that some of the things I mentioned earlier in the thread, where the Megastrata Project can be system agnostic, it actually is "game engine agnostic". That explicitly is enabled because it does not depend on the structural game systems which are responsible for making a game engine work, which in this case, is GURPS. This also also means that I can run the Megastrata in all versions of D&D, PDQ, Risus, Mutants and Masterminds, Iron Heroes, Genesys, or literally any other system you can think of, even DramaSystem! I didn't have a good way to think about some of the underpinnings of this but now that I'm rambling it's useful to call it out. Perhaps other people are going "well, no poo poo" and this is all very self-evident, but it wasn't to me. Anyway, moving on: Designing A Connector System for Overriding Other Systems In-Narrative I think at this point you can just say "Take the FFTA Judges system and carbon copy it to the Megastrata Project". This would be fine and require a few things: - An in-world entity that is there for some kind of narrative reason (it is likely someone that has full details only to GMs) - Some kind of randomization from a series of curated tables regarding arbitrary positive or negative constraints to inject into a given encounter (this need not be strictly combat, but may most often be found there) - A penalty that is enforced when specific conditions are met Thus, we could create some kind of thing, we'll just call it a JUDGE for visibility, then create two or three brackets of random tables. - 1, 2: Mechanical constraint. Example: You cannot use "Deceptive Attack". - 3, 4: Mechanical benefit. Example: All enemies on the field cannot use Dodge. - 5: Narrative constraint. You can only use Gesture to communicate with your party. - 6: Narrative benefit. You attract the notice of a Pretender to the encounter. Then, we can bulk out the penalty, maybe with another table and the conditions that "JUDGE must observe a violation in line of sight and can move to a space adjacent to you to penalize you." - 1, 2, 3: Yellow card. You must pay a progressive fine deducted from your guild bank account. Reroll if you already have 6 or more Yellow Cards. - 4, 5: Red card. You are temporarily jailed and cannot make actions for 1 second. If this is your second or more Red Card this session, you are jailed, and roll again. - 6: Black card. Your party is ejected from the Megastrata in 1 second. This might be too mean but at least it's something. However, this system is generally ready to package up and move to another design phase, which is asking the questions to challenge it: "Is this fun for someone? Is this easy to understand? Does this make players want to interact with it more?" In all likelihood unless there is a compelling drive to continue working with this system, then it likely will not hold up because it has no good reward structure, but that could be easily remediated. Then you have a carrot-and-stick type of thing instead of purely a stick. It might also be fun to create larger tables of arbitrary rules to put in, and they would know that the rules are in effect because a JUDGE is on the field. --- Anyway, that was maybe thirty minutes of thinking on the system, so what do you think?
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| ← # ? Dec 16, 2020 09:30 |
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