Welcome back!, let’s continue.
The path I laid out in front of you in the last post maybe looked too well-defined, too straight, to be something akin to the real process of creating a game.
And the thing is, it's never that easy.
Because before finding the “real heart” of the game, before answering the question of “What is this game about?” and “What will the player characters do?” —that in the previous post I associated with finding the “characters” whose adventures would be the core of the game— before all this, I struggled with a tension between the mechanics that my first character-sheet suggested, and the idea of a game in which the characters would be influenced by the world in a more noticeable way through the changes in their character-sheets.
Perhaps this seems to contradict what I said before —that the creation of a game has to start with the themes and the characters and that mechanics come next, to serve them both— but the thing is that I was trying to grab this “core-feeling-and-theme” standing in an ill and vague ground. The character sheet, of this supposedly osr-style generalized slot-system game didn't give me enough to work with, I felt it barren and ethereal.
Regardless, I pushed on. But what I ended up doing was creating a scaffolding of sub-systems that interact with this simple slot system, and at the end all the meat of the game was being built onto these decoupled sub-systems. Everything the game was supposed to “be” —and how the characters could act upon the fantasy— was not on the character sheet, but somewhere else.1
For my taste, the whole game was disjointed and diluted.
From this sensation about the game, and the frustration that followed it, I realized that something had to change.
I needed somewhere else to start. I required another terrain for my ideas to grow. Maybe they will not define the game I want to finally build, but at least I had to allow myself to explore other spaces where this potential game could grow.
And I looked to my right —literary, in my desk— and there it was, a small game I had written for the DriveThruRPG’s 2022 jam, “Summer Myth Hunt”. A pressure strangling my brain was released. I felt inspired again.
This was the moment when the character-sheet had its first substantial transformation.
With this new character-sheet, there were some frustrations I was able to rapidly overcome.2
But more important, this new character-sheet —for some strange reason— gave me space to imagine a setting, characters and conflicts, that felt more defined, and less of pale shadows. I began to hear the beating heart of it all.
Here, on this new soil, they sprouted, “The Promised Ones”, of whom I will tell you more in the next post.
Maybe this is ok for some playing styles/philosophies. However, in this case, the problem was that the game was not on the character-sheet nor in the mind of the players. Because I tried to build it into the subsystem, and because there was no theme previously defined —and efficiently incorporated into the minds of the players— to make up for the deficiency and fragmented nature of the mechanics I built to support the fantasy of the game. Bad design from my side.
However, there are other games, like Errant —that use this kind of sub-system approach coupled to simple mechanics— that work beautiful because their theme hits with power and presence, and we have plenty of former expectations that are totally in line with how the themes are presented.
In particular, that I didn't like how the layout suggested that physical/emotional/psychological conditions will affect only Objects/Bonds/Memories —decoupling them— and that the game seemed unnecessary, and derivative from others osr-games, without having anything new to express.