New art, and thinking about procedures
Game Design Log #28
Lately, I have been making some new art (and updating old art) so I wanted to share with you some spreads I have been working on.
Well, that’s some of the art that has kept me from finishing the big post where I want to show you the procedure to randomly generate dead-holy-wheeled-towns (the dungeon-like adventure sites of NPFTH) which may be the last post of the year, or that probably I will push to the second-third week of the year because, ideally, to everything make sense, I will have first to show you the Vice Incarnated that can inhabit these places (yes the first week of the year I will be in chilling mood so probably there will be no post).
But apart from drawing I have been…
Thinking about procedures
What I have been thinking about isn’t revolutionary or fundamentally different from how procedures have been presented in other OSR-adjacent games. Mostly, I have been trying to decide how many types of procedures I would like to include on NPFTH and how I can use them to guide GMs and players to… well, play the game.
Obviously, NPFTH already has some procedures baked into it, with the main procedure being combat (“rites of calling” and “eating to change blood tint” being others).
The combat-loop is the procedure for combat, this is the frame through which players can interact with combat in the game, but (as I have already talked about in previous posts → this one and this other one), I separated combat into two approaches; “Tactical” and “Narrative”, giving the possibility for players to play within the combat loop in the way they prefer.
The thing is that “Tactical” and “Narrative” are just two ways of dealing with the space where PCs are moving (and the resources that this space provides to them).
In the “Tactical” approach, space is represented more directly through a map, terrain, and figures. In the “Narrative” approach, all the minutia of the space, and how PCs can take advantage of it, is condensed into one meta-currency; Dominance.
And what I realized is that this approach might be extended to exploration and social encounters.
For example, for exploration, you can have a procedure, an exploration-loop, and have two ways to interact with the spaces and the resources, “Tactical” and “Narrative”
In the “Tactical” mode of exploration, bookkeeping, and map drawing, will be the analog of using terrain and figures in the “Tactical” combat mode.
In the “Narrative” mode of exploration, all the minutia of bookkeeping and drawing maps could be replaced by something like Dominance, a meta-currency that requires players to roll but that encompasses everything they do in the exploration loop.
Maybe this is not very revolutionary but I like the idea of having three procedures/loops which can be set on two modes of granularity (narrative/tactical), depending on the taste of the players. And if for the three of them, this granularity degree is set in an analogous way (using something like Dominance), well the symmetry is always welcome.