RPG Design Thoughts

Here's the things that interest me while I'm building games. In general I want to build something mechanically dynamic, forcing changes in the narrative as time goes on. I want each session to feel as fresh as the first one, and for longer-term play to yield scenarios that couldn't happen at the beginning, categorically. And this means making the games about change themselves, while subverting expectations about what that change may look like.

A caveat: nothing in here has really been playtested yet. Crescendo hasn't gotten to the point of adding in sparks, while Nephilim and Shadow are hardly even written yet, being in a much rougher point of development. And Crescendo's rough as it is.

So, y'know, caveat emptor and all that.

Subverting Notions of Control and Progression

I do not like the end-game of most RPGs. At the beginning of most games the resolution mechanics work just fine, but then the players get more control... and then the experience begins to die. What made the game so dynamic was the unexpected, the lack of actual control. In my experience an increased amount of control is only fun right at the very end of the story, and even that is debatable. 

So one of my design goals is to always find a way to keep the unexpected in the story. For Crescendo that means the Black Swan and how expending Thaumaturgy (which let you muck with the dice rolls) always ripples out into the narrative, creating larger stories that you now fit inside. You're constantly creating a larger thing than you anticipated when exert control over the narrative. And the Black Swan, one of which always happens at the ends of a session, always introduces a twist into the narrative, forcing everyone to renegotiate their place in the story.

Nephilim, however, will be entirely diceless. Outside of combat you simply say whether your succeed or fail, depending on how you think the situation should go, which earns you tokens you can spend in combat. The tension, of course, is in how many tokens you can pick up before everyone agrees a battle should start. When you run out of tokens you're removed from the fight, so you want to get as many as you can. An idea I'm currently tossing around is to give more tokens for failures that the players narrate. This not only allows their battles to go more smoothly but then gives the GM more room to work with when coming up with new battles.

Shadow will use a jenga tower. Each time you pull a block and the tower doesn't fall over you have to tell a comforting lie to yourself about why you succeeded in the narrative. Obviously, no matter how good you get at pulling out those blocks, eventually the tower is going to fall over. And when it does one of the lies you told then comes back to haunt you, which is engineered by the GM. There may be a mechanic where  the surface the tower is on will be hit, jarring the tower, from time to time.

Defeating Entropy

I view gaming as one way you can experience things without consequence, without entropy ruling the roost. However, as I've come to understand myself and what I like playing... I like mechanical entropy. I like it when the ground inevitably shifts beneath your feet. I don't want static stuff.

But I do like having control to respond to changes. I like going "Well, time for a new plan!" So anything I build is going to just... rot.... on a mechanical level. But you will have the ability to deal with it.

Crescendo's biggest example of this is Stress. Failing rolls gets you Stress, which either needs to be gotten rid of or it generates Conditions. Conditions make your rolls harder, which necessitates you having to stop and get rid of them. There's a very deliberate death spiral that, if not respected, will screw you up. Fortunately, getting rid of Conditions can be pretty simple and, in some cases, involve some really deep RP, which is the point of the game. There's also the Crisis Point: your character is always weak to Stressors, that the players chose, which the GM can throw in to get the character to act out. If they fail badly enough they actually get hurt. And these Crisis Points can happen pretty frequently. Succeeding at a Crisis Point, however, allows you to spend XP.

Nephilim's entropic features are that of the Overload mechanic. Every time you actually injure/kill an opponent everyone else has to resist the urge to one up that action. Did you cut someone in the stomach and they fall over? Then everyone else will want to cut them in half, and will have to do something to counter that urge. Without a strong Code and inter-group rules the group will descend into barbarism.

Shadow will have Stress and Crisis Points as well, but they'll come in the form of hitting the table/surface the jenga tower is on. Repeated shocks to the tower will eventually collapse it, and you don't want the tower to collapse; your lies will come a-knocking! I'm not sure what else needs to be added in, as that's already a lot of stress to begin with.

Mechanical Change

As stories progress differing things become important. I find it weird that as stories in RPGs progress they don't add in or swap out mechanics to represent changes in the story type they're emulating. 

Crescendo's initial player focus are Ideals: statements that the player can use to direct the narrative in a specific direction. They're what the character thinks the world is like. The GM hammers and subverts and destroys these Ideals. Eventually the player may swap out Ideals for Sparks, which are important events that happened to the character, along with what they think of that event. The GM then begins replicating the event, changing the context, trying to get the player to change the Spark. While that sounds like a small change, the change in focus leads to a more thematically-based campaign, where the characters gradually find themselves in the position of mentor and hero, as they've seen the same event from so many different angels. From seeker to master.

Nephilim's arc tracks player relationships, which are also written as a memory of an event the two characters went through, along with what the character in question thinks of it. The Relationship then has a number, which is the number of times that number can be applied as a bonus to an action. Only thing is that you,the player who wrote it, cannot use it. The person you wrote the Relationship with? They can invoke the Relationship to get you to help them. You give them that bonus to their action (so you'd give 2 tokens if you had a Relationship at 2) and then the Relationship goes down by 1. When you hit zero a new Relationship is forged, but at a higher rate than before. This means that, as you explore the bonds your characters forge with each other, each time the bond is deeper, more powerful, and harder to get rid of.

Shadow's sliding scale is Perception. As time goes on and as you get more and more exposed to the horrors of the world  what you see actually changes.  I don't have this one as nailed down, but the idea is that, as time goes on you are less able to connect with others in the normal world, as the world of myth pulls you in, whether you like it or not. 

That's just kinda what I'm working with at the moment. I don't know if anyone finds that interesting, but I really like the idea of having a game changing the story that gets told. These sorts of changes should allow for stories to mature and morph in unexpected ways, creating a thematic shift acrost the course of a game.