Random thought in the middle of the night.

 So I have typed for the last three or four hours. I know I need to go to bed mainly for my baby bird… but I always make sure she has two or three hours out of the cage a day. I think I Will let her out when the sun comes up till about nine and then crash.

But why my mind is racing has to do with grim metal bedlam. I am utterly overwhelmed with ideas but don’t want to finish the game tonight because it needs play testing. 

and no one has commented on the calls for play testing on prior notes I published. So I am going to ramble just spewing ideas and frustrations with design process.

Narrative skirmish game are story first: meaning emergent story telling.  Not like a choose your own path game books. It’s about object rules and mechanisms interacting in unpredictable ways. And those string of interactions add up to the result of a story that did not exist until your brain interpreted a die roll.

The hard part of game design is using rules to open doors and not close them. I think in many ways narrative are a small ecosystem of simple interaction tricking the brain (what tarn Adam calls a story making machine) to be invested in the nonexistent life of a toy soldier.

The hard part is that the player is cocreating the game. I mean if you have seen these guys build game tables there as much effort and though put in a single table… as in most game systems.

So my approach to try to create cool situations and complex mechanisms to those situation factories where the floor is lava style insta death happens. Giant sentient guardians where the whole point of the mission is to sneak treasure away from it without being caught. Does it all work… don’t know needs play testing however. I am pretty confident in the core mechanism and I think the strong of how simple it is will make these overriding missions not have as balanced as they would in a crunchier system.

Simple thing I am thinking about doing like adding a rock paper scissors check because it is the immediate to get the advance and disadvantage system to most people…. Because we know paper beats rock. Rock shatters scissors. And scissors cuts paper. It is more abstract system but creates a series choices that interacts with other systems that is kind of ominously interesting.

 

So in closing the simpler the mechanism that drive the core interactions are. Then the more diverse the outlying systems can be. or put another way on strong foundation you can go wild.

Another is designing the game books to work like menus when do so and so turn to this page then the list of potential action are listed with the page numbers of where to turn next. Your choices are always listed and you only need to keep track of where you’re at really. Instead of trying to be lawyer in the doctorate of what ever system you’re playing. It seems obvious BUT… most game books are a dense clusterfuck of infuriating madness.

I don’t know what I am trying to get across here other than the push your luck elements of solo wargaming are the least interesting aspects.

The creatively stimulating quality of a solitaire is the reaction it provokes from the player are on an interactive interpretive level rather then a break the system kind of cunning found in competitive play.

We are not only actively suspending our disbelief but we’re trying to take it out back and make it disapear.

One last note I am going to post a poll on mastodon tonight asking I should release grim metal bedlam narrative rules before play-testing them thoroughly. Just to get what I sprinting forward without play testing them so they can be out in the world  shaming me into polishing them to efficiency. Which in-spite of my track record of abandon half finished project all over the internet sometimes the shame of an unfinished draft shame me into finishing… kind of a count toss really. 

Until later, peace and love.