Game Design as Alchemy

 

As I continue to go back through Breath of the Wild like an addict that really can quit at any time, I have decided to record the positive outcomes of my perpetual imprisonment. Think of this as my far lighter Gulag Archipelago of captivity. Today we'll be talking about the tight economy of Breath of the Wild and the need for mechanically using every single part of the buffalo. From combat to climbing every single action in Breath of the Wild is a mechanical exchange. This mechanical alchemy is a good thing, and is the center of what makes a game a game: a miniaturization and simplification of the world's processes into something manageable.

We'll start with the most obvious one: base movement, aka walking. This one's pretty simple: you give up time by not doing anything special. If you walk you turn time into distance. It's not the most economical trade-off, which means people don't want to do it.

That's where the game comes in, by the way: trying to figure out how to max out your output.

Anyways.

So you exchange time for distance. The fun comes in trying to cheat that. So you get something with a speed boost and now you have "beaten" the system: you exchange whatever you put in the pot for less time while traveling. An alchemy has occurred. You exchanged something to get something else, and there's a definite feeling that you accomplished something. Breath of the Wild capitalizes on this feeling everywhere in the game.

Yes, that includes combat. And weapon breakage.

So the core of this idea isn't that you get something else with effort, it's that you give up something for a chance of getting something else. You walk in a direction and hope you'll find something worth your time. You swing your weapon, giving up some hardiness, for the chance to kill the monster and farm their remains.  Once again, it's an alchemical exchange: weapon hardiness for materials or time. This keeps the situation changing, and thus requires focus to figure out, and is thusly amusing.

Why do I bring this up?

Because I think this is the heart of a lot of good game design: nothing is wasted. There's no moment when the player feels like their careful attempts to manipulate the system are for nothing. That doesn't mean that players are always succeeding at their intents, only that they affect the game world somehow. If you're using dice "failing forward" is a version of this, as you get your intent, but not how you wanted it: the world dicks you around a bit and you have to work with the new situation you accidentally generated. There's a good reason why "failing forward" should have the failure announced before you roll. Players should feel like they have a good feeling of what's going on. Turn structures also work, in the vein of encounter dice or BDnD's turn orders. You also don't necessarily have to tell someone whether they succeeded or failed,  but I think they should know the likelihood they succeeded or not. Take below, for instance, from the 1e DMG:

Yes I know the image is too large. It's readable now.

I think those odds should be public, or at least findable. Long as the player knows that there are numbers for this sort of thing and trusts the GM to not fudge the rolls then all is well and good. As long as the player knows where his actions might go, all is well and good. What the player did mattered, even if it wasn't what they expected.

It should always feel like player action matters. While mechanical stuff shouldn't be guaranteed, there should always be the feeling that what the player did impacted the game and story, in equal measure. I think that's part of what keeps me coming back to my not addiction: nothing ever feels wasted. The buffalo is always stripped down and there's nothing left.

Ah, crap I need to go play some more.

I mean.

I want to. I can quit anytime I want.