Parenthesis Press

Whenever one game is nearly finished, I double back and pick up other projects that I put into “cold storage” for a while. In this case, now that Corona‘s getting nearly ready to release, I’m revisiting Project Atlantis, and finding that the idea of Paths I had previously discussed for Daisho might be a better fit here.

Because I want to encourage a dramatic structure – particularly echoing classical tragedy – I want scenes to be logically structured together. They should build deterministically, where the results of prior scenes have a hard mechanical influence on what follows, which I had previously wanted to implement through investing dice ahead in time toward the final outcome of the plot.

I have since introduced a second currency into the game system – elemental tokens – that can be used to charge traits just like dice, with the differentiation that dice count as mundane applications of concentration and skill when used to charge traits, whereas using a token is overtly magical.

But that’s neither here nor there! What’s important is that I now have a viable method of letting players both contribute to and steer the course of events. Five Paths (one per element) contain different rewards for following them. You follow a Path by behaving in line with its elemental affiliation: go into a scene with high emotions and lots of energy, for instance, and you’re said to be walking on the Fire Path. If the scene resolves in a way commensurate with Fire’s ideals, then you get a reward for having a hand in that. You also then nudge the final scene closer to a Fire-based resolution. (I’ll explain more on how that works mechanically later, but the general principle is that scenes’ “dispositions” are based on elemental tokens that have been banked in the scene ahead of time.)

I’m still working on how to balance an ever-increasing dominant element against the others in order to prevent one or two early scenes from “steamrolling” everyone into having to walk one specific Path if they want any rewards at all, but the fundamental idea seems sound. I have the inkling that rotating the power of narrator through the players, and allowing them to populate scenes before they start with tokens that can be acquired, used, or saved might help mitigate an overpowering reward spiral for those who get early scenes to go in their favor. There will also be counterweight to using tokens for long-term benefit by making them really useful in the moment to affect scenes as they play out. I’m hoping to actually test out a brief three-act structure sometime in the near future and see if it actually holds up.

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Dice: do you prefer your own, or is it okay to share?

Recently, a new designer on a forum I frequent tossed out an idea for a system for a game that used dice as a physical currency to represent narrative control. (I didn’t mention that I had already done this with Diceconomy, because I didn’t want to skew the discussion, but the concept in general obviously appeals to me, and I like the thought of seeing more games do this.) One of the flaws in the idea was that the game required a huge number of dice. How huge? Over 20 per player. And because they represent a player asset, they can’t really be shared, meaning a 4-person game would approach 90 dice on the table.

Project Atlantis uses four dice, by comparison, and as such it may not seem directly related, but there is a point that bears consideration, and that’s how to manage the logistics of dice that do things other than serve as randomizers. Because one mode of activating character traits in the system for Project Atlantis requires a player to invest one or more dice in the trait, one quickly runs into a dilemma: if you’re playing with one shared set of Fudge dice, then a player who invests even one die has messed up the die pool for the rest. (Rerolling a die isn’t a good option because of the way die rolls interact with magic – to wit, magic manipulates the lay of rolled dice, so rerolling a die complicates the resolution mechanic.)

This isn’t a problem if everyone has their own dice, of course. But while statistics don’t seem to be available, I’m guessing the number of players with a set of Fudge dice remains comparatively small, and if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s requiring players to buy too much proprietary equipment to play a game when it can be avoided. (One can convert regular six-siders into dF, but I recognize that many gamers like having the “proper” die for a roll). Another workaround dictates that one simply relies on non-dice tokens to mark investments and then just rolls fewer dice, which allows for sharing in the event that not everyone has appropriate dice.

As problems go, this one is rather insignificant, but it represents some of the factors game designers should take into account when creating a game. An early commenter on the Diceconomy games joked that I must have stock in one or more of the dice-making companies because of the number required to play (although compared to the example that prompted this post, Diceconomy is, if you’ll pardon the expression, rather economical: only 28 of a given color of die can possibly be on the table at a given time, and that’s an extraordinarily unlikely occurrence that practically requires collusion between the players to accomplish). Nonetheless, I’ll be considering the proper procedure for handling dice to please the most number of potential Atlanteans.

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