The promised ones – 7. Rules as abstractions and guiding-stones.
Game Design Log #7
I have been thinking a lot about how to use rules to guide and facilitate the narrative-play of the game.
As I told you some months ago, I wanted to use this post to talk about “paths” as a kind of vehicle for agency (paths in TPO1 were akin to the “classes” of fantasy games in their inception).
Paths in TPO are the jobs and tasks that promised ones are specially good at, due to the powers they have got by, well…, being promised ones.
As I told you before, some of these are:
Beggar: You use your special connection with great spirits to negotiate with them on the name of others.
Death’s seer: You use your ability to see the future, by the ingestion of death pearls, to give advice and guidance to others.
Scavenger: As a promised one you have an extra-censorial attraction toward death pearls. You use it by working as a seeker and harvester of death pearl.
Soul Hunter: You use your ability to bind your essences with soul fragments to collect them. You collect this soul fragment to take them to a great spirit, or to sell them to the bank of souls, or help families finding out what happened to a loved one who has disappeared, or simply to calm the suffering of soul aberrations.
At first I was thinking of using these as classes and allow players to select one of them during character creation. However, I realized that for TPO this will not work and will hinder part of the narrative I will like players to experience in the game; self realization and coming-of-age (a narrative that stretches out of the restrictions of age and has more to do with finding one’s place in the world).
So my thought was: if this coming-of-age narrative is so important for TPO, why don't use it as a vehicle on the game instead of a predefined option to define who the characters are before the game even starts?, why not give space to characters to find this by themselves while playing? (Also, it is funny to think that “classes” as a concept in fantasy games are so common, while in the fantasy genre the arch of finding what you are good at, or which is your place, is at the core of many of these stories. I see it as a missing opportunity, as something that needs to be included more often in the tools that a game gives to their players so they can engage with the full fantasy experience).
The funny thing is that the term path has already something of this idea hidden inside it, even before I decided to move paths from character creation to transform them into something else.
Paths as adventures
What I decided to do was to transform paths in adventures, to make them one of the ways players could interact with the world, making them one of the toy-tools outside character creation. I think that by presenting them in this way, they have helped me to set a scheme to display what an adventure, or a session, of TPO would look like.
So paths became some sort of guiding-stone to the game and also a way to allow characters to find some meaning, or at least usefulness, in a world which regards them as rarities and potential threats.
What are rules for?
I was happy with the prospect of writing some adventures using this label of “paths”, and I began to create a structure of different layers that allowed these adventures, and their outcomes, to interact with different levels of the world (family-characters-arcs and world-arcs).
But then I got somewhat stuck. Because I was looking at all the rules that I was constructing (which I thought of them as helping me define what-the-games-is-about), and then I realized that maybe some of these rules were working against me and the things I wanted players to focus on.
The thing is that rules are a double-edged weapon. They can make you engage with a particular kind of play as guiding-stones, or to by-pass an in-world moment by abstracting it to rules outside the game-world.
For example; a game that has a very granular set of rules for social conflict may be presented as a game that focuses on social interaction, but the same rules may hinder the conversation of players at the table, abstracting what a social conflict is, and reducing that conflict to some roles, or some random tables, or looking at some cards (or wherever is the abstraction that the game uses for it).
But then, how to make a game that focuses on social conflict?, perhaps without any rule for it?, but if that is the case, how will players know that this is the core of the game if there is no guide from the game to help them see that?
This is more a set of open questions, it is not something I know how to define and less how to answer, but as in many things, the trick may be in finding a place of balance.2
One way in which I have been thinking about this, is running in my head different scenarios and trying to imagine what kind of conversations will naturally occur between players if they follow the rules as written. In this way, I can detect rules that can help me guide the game in the ways I want, and find which rules transform a conversation that I would like players to have into something no more interesting than a few rolls.
This may appear as a thin conclusion for so many months of no posts, but there are a lot of things happening, things written and then burnt and taken out of the game, and even if it may appear as a thin thought, I wanted to share it with you, as it has been very important on the way I have been thinking about TPO in the last months.
Also, I have been writing some short stories in English (I typically write fiction in Spanish) so if you would like to see some of them here let me know in the comments!
I’m thinking of changing the name of the game, to “The Tale of the nine shards: The promised ones” or “The promised ones and the tale of the nine shards”, or something in that vein. Some thoughts?
I was super happy to find that Ben Milton just upload a youtube video talking about this, which helped me a lot to organize my thoughts about it.