No peace for the heathen — Grief as XP (experience earned through violence)
Game Design Log #23
I've been thinking about a note I wrote that might be more interesting as a post because I have the feeling that the reach of substack’s notes is quite limited (I don't know if it's something that even subscribers read as much as regular posts).
So here it is, a note that, I felt, should have been a post from the beginning.
I realized that when I was writing about sentient relics, I forgot to define Grief, as I assumed that was something I had already done in this post.
The short answer to “What is Grief ?” is that it is the same as XP, but some enemies can use it as a weapon against you.
Here is the longer answer…
The mechanics of the game are a lens to the world, a way to interact with it that is very specific. It is not the world itself, not even a truth or a piece of the cosmology (because of this, I think that it makes a lot of sense to have different mechanics, disconnected from each other, to play the different aspects of “being”).
In “No Peace For the Heathen” (NPFTH) the main mechanics of the game are things that are related to combat and violences, to the agency one has over the lives of others. Just because this is one of the many things that these people who are being invaded by colonists experience and is the way in which colonist interact with their world.
Everything of how they interact with the world in the game is set by this lens.
Most of the experience that they can obtain through the tools of the game, and that can be used as a tool in the game, relates to these mechanics of violence and brutality.
That's why I wrote in NPFTH that experience was earned as Grief: something that will help you become better at exerting violence, but —because it will make your being more present in the world seen through the lens of violence— makes you prone to the will of those that use violence (that's why many of the sentient relics can use the Grief of your character against you).
This does not mean that everything your character will experience is set by this lens, just that the interface of the mechanics and the character sheet allows interacting just with this portion of their experience. The rest of their experiences are mostly unconstrained by the tools of the game (blood magic and the rites to call the spirits of the land are two exceptions to this), and they can be explored by simple free-form role-playing or by using other self-contained games/tools. Perhaps, in the end, having more than one character sheet for the same character to facilitate the exploration of different aspects of their being is not such a bad idea.1
On a side note; possibly coins/money should also be a source of Grief(XP) because coins/money is deeply interwoven with the thirst of colonists, and works as one of the many tools they use to exert violence and domination.
When rewriting this note as a post, this idea of using different game-rules in parallel, in the same game-session, began to sound a lot like MOSAIC strict RPG design.
But then I realized that MOSAIC strict RPG design is very strict, and requires from the games to meet seven criteria (Modular, Optional, Short, Attested, Independent, and Coreless), and if you just grab any two or more games to use in parallel you don’t need from them to fulfil any of these criteria.
For example I could grab any OSR game to play exploration, combat, dungeon delving, etc, and then, when someone wants to explore something different, we could grab a copy of Pasion de las Pasiones and go deep into the most melodramatic, soap-opera-like experience, while keeping the same characters.However, I do think that MOSAIC strict RPG design could be a more effective, and manageable, approach to fulfil the same goal.