How BoTW and TOTK Inspired My Design

I have made no secret of my love for BOTW. The reason I'm not writing about my love of Tears of the Kingdom is because I'm busy playing Tears of the Kingdom please go away. But, as I was playing and not writing and not studying for my Security Plus test, I realized just how much of what these games are has really informed the way I design games. And, I mean, I have one game out (Apex, check it out here!) so that does make me a published designer... kinda. 

Point is.

I have an opinion, totally non-existent clout, and a blog. Read at your peril.

I’m also not making the case that I used the following consciously. I started designing Crescendo two years ago, so this is more of a hindsight being 20/20 than any else. Any snarky comments about me attempting to capitalize on the current TOTK craze can be shut up by even a cursory glance at this blog: I’m not exactly blogging for the views!

Both of these games do a lot, but it's all towards the same goal: crafting your own story. And the way that they do this is actually really interesting. By making different classes of narrative events and sprinkling them acrost the map, BOTW/TOTK make narrative inevitable, because you picked a direction and you walked.  

But first, the  trick to TTRPGs and BOTW/TOTK is reincorporation. Reincorporation is defined thusly by dictionary.cambridge.org:

"the act of making something part of something larger again after a period when it was not part of that thing"

TTRPGs reincorporate on a level that's impossible to overstate. TTRPGs are reincorporation unchained. And BOTW/TOTK is reincorporation on steroids. They do this with what I call trailers: you see an item and pick it up, planning to use it later. BOTW/TOTK just showers you in this class. It's this "use it later" that's so important. The beginning of the reincorporation beings here. The rest of the game are classes of reincorporations.

So what are the classes?

• Transitions: climbing, flying, swimming, building, anything that transports or prepares you to transport without walking. 
• Cooking: grab Trailers known as food and make new, better Trailers with them!
• Conflicts: Obviously, fights. TOTK does this way better than BOTW just in about every way possible, what with the ability to fuse weapons and stuff to your arrows and just the ability to throw things, in general.
• Rewards: different from Trailers because you actually have to work to get these, via shrines, combats, quests, etc.
• Story: Dragon's tears and quest endings are the usual story beats, but something happens to make you feel like you're telling your own story.

Once you start combining the trailers with these elements you create reincorporation and thus a narrative. But it usually doesn't stop at just the trailer to another event: you usually string all these events together with Trailers along the way, weaving your own narrative of play. And then, by providing a guided framework of quests you actually increase the reincorporation, because the handing out of a quest is itself an event, and thus fits into the string of narrative. 

BOTW/TOTK are easily the best reincorporation video games on the market today, probably ever. Both games are essentially complete TTRPG engines put into a videogame: they take each of the classes and give them little rules. Nothing terribly deep or difficult, but wrinkles that let you reincorporate the Trailers just a bit differently for each class. So, if I’m in combat I’ll be using the Trailers I picked up very differently than for transitions or even story beats. The thing that makes this work is how flexible the system is, allowing you to fulfill the promise of the Trailers in many unexpected ways. 

And all so that everything you do makes you want to explore more. Everything. The experience is holistic, grabbing all these little things that most open-world designers don't even consider and making them integral to the experience. So, when I started designing Crescendo and my other games I looked at the tabletop experience in entirety and asked "How can I make it work to the design goal of character and setting development?" And when I say the experience, I mean players missing sessions, as well as how visitors usually end session, as well as best practices. such as journaling.

Journaling is essential to a good roleplaying game. The GM forgets stuff, the players forget stuff, and it's not hard to see why; most stories happen over the course of at least a month, making it difficult to remember details. The problem is that journaling is a pain in the ass and isn't directly a part of the gameplay... usually. I am going to be changing that in all of my games, to make journaling itself a part of the game. So far I've used journaling as a means of constructing Trailers in a method I've dubbed Hitting the Books: open up to a random page you know there's writing on, close your eyes, and put your finger down on a random passage, and read it aloud for the GM to stitch together. When you write down a passage you know it'll probably come back later, but you don't know how it will influence the game. My game Apex is entirely about Trailers and making new ones as quickly as possible.

People are going to miss sessions. It happens. There's no way it won't happen. But if you give mechanics for missing sessions and let that absence matter, turning an absence from a bummer to a Trailer. In Crescendo players answer a few questions when they come back, allowing them to just make up new lore right off the cuff. This creates huge twists in the story, allowing the story to twist and turn all on its own, without the GM's constant intervention. This one little change can really make a huge difference in the flow of your game, and I can't recommend it enough.

RPGs are normally an insular activity; because of the long-running format of most American games new people usually have an awkward time incorporating into a previously existing group, needing to be caught up on story they weren’t actually a part of previously. Worse, friends or family who are visiting are a virtual guarantee of missed players or even canceled sessions. So I’ve crafted rules in Crescendo, The Truth Found in Death, and Great is the Difference, for Visitors! Crescendo utilizes Servants, powerful spirits that serve the immortals, and The Chorus, minor spirits who basically can mess around and do whatever they like. Crescendo's visitor rules are defined by the fact the characters they play are specifically passing through, and do not know what is currently going on; this allows visitors to have a great impact without needing to get up to speed on things. The Truth Found in Death doesn't have visitor mechanics strictly,  but it does have nephilim, powerful and bloodthirsty characters that cause a lot of trouble; this allows people to show up, kill a bunch of people, and then walk off into the sunset. Great is the Difference will let visitors play The Grizzled, heroes from a prior generation who retired and who are having a bad day. So the visitors get to walk in and screw around and walk away, with the regular players holding the bag. It's fantastic.

Beyond putting making the experience of the table into the game rules itself, I deliberately have made each mechanic do something different within the story of the game. Each mechanic, similar to BOTW/TOTK, is deliberately set to change the narrative in a pre-determined way, allowing the players to make a narrative more easily, as well as defining actual ending mechanics. Reading "World Ending Game" blew my brain clean open. Endings are hard to do if you know what you're doing, and isn't the point of an RPG that you're not really supposed to know what you're doing, you're playing a game? So all my games have some form of transitioning and ending mechanics: Crescendo has Book mechanics, with unexpected consequences and satisfying endings that require almost no effort on the part of the GM. You have to read the book and just follow the directions. With these more meta mechanics in place you just play and don't worry about where it's going. The Truth Found in Death has story transitions and endings based upon the type of character classes playing in the session. Great is the Difference has a deliberately formulaic story structure, allowing players to focus on kicking ass and taking names, right there in the moment.

All this is all well and good, but it doesn't matter if the actual mechanics that we're usually familiar with aren't integrated into these more holistic systems. But in my three games they do: Saves in Crescendo push all these mechanics forward, everytime, The Truth Found in Death does the same with Struggles, and the meta structure of Great is The Difference dictates when you roll at all! Pushing on anything in any of these games moves the gears in unexpected ways, creating situations that are practically a cakewalk for the GM to run. Just figure out when the basic mechanic triggers and watch the fireworks ensue. And that feeling of "I just decided to do X and then all this crap hapened" from BOTW/TOTK is the core of everything my designs. As I begin to close the writing on Crescendo and look more to The Truth Found in Death and Great is the Difference, I've come to really appreciate how these two Zelda games have influenced everything I've done.