thread: 2009-09-09 : Waah
On 2009-09-10, Simon C wrote:
This is kind of a synthesis of "fruitful void" and "design for how the players interact with each other" thinking, right?
A lot of this stuff is SO much clearer to me after playing a full "arc" of Dogs from character creation through to that character deciding not to be a Dog anymore.
I realise you're talking about "subsystem" in a very general sense of specific applications of rules, but I think some of this also applies to the more everyday-use meaning of the word in the sense of seperate discrete systems for handling different aspects of play.
I think as a design element, the subsystem has been denigrated for a long while in favour of unified mechanics. I think partly that's a reaction against the bloat of AD&D and similar games, where there are all these subsystems but they never really do anything in the game, they're just dead weight. I think the urge in design was to move as much as possible to simple, elegant systems that could handle anything, and for indie games it became a kind of badge of membership to use the same system for resolving all kinds of conflicts.
So it's exciting to look at the potential for subsystems of this kind in design, for exactly the reasons you describe. Thinking about subsystems as producing a certain experience, and the interactions between those subsystems creating a kind of tension. Like how our Dogs play changed a lot once we worked out just how nasty getting shot really was. The subsystems influence play even when they're not in use.
