thread: 2010-02-16 : Things on Character Sheets (2)
On 2010-02-17, Vincent wrote:
Adam: Great! Okay.
Yes, the red shapes are relationships between mechanical elements. Mostly they're rules, things like these:
- When an attacker lands a hit on your character, mark off wound boxes according to the attacker's weapon's damage.
- When you go up from warrior level 2 to warrior level 3, you get 2d6 HP and +1 to your Brawn, and if your character serves a king, the king will grant you land.
- Each time you mark a new adrenaline box, roll an additional die into your Will to Action pool.
The blue shapes are relationships between fictional things, yes, but more: they're your basic suppositions about how things work, across the range of fiction that your game allows. You can state them as rules too, but not mechanical ones:
- A more experienced fighter's greatest advantage is that he's better able to keep his cool.
- People under increasing stress act increasingly unpredictably.
- Wizards are powerful, but they get their power by defying God.
This is a different thing than "the fiction" that I usually talk about. Usually when I talk about the fiction, I'm talking about the current, live fiction that the players are creating right now. Not today! Today I'm talking about all the possible fiction that your game can create. You're the designer of it: how should it work?
(We used to call this the game world, conflating a game's setting with the structure of its causality.)
Finally the green shapes: I've drawn them one-way, yeah. That's how they are when you're designing a game - they're the relationship between your game's rules and, essentially, the way you think your game should work.
- A more experienced fighter's greatest advantage is that he's better able to keep his cool, and when you go up to warrior level 3 you get more HP, +1 Brawn, and maybe some land. Is this a good match?
- People under increasing stress act increasingly unpredictably, and each time you mark a new adrenaline box, roll an additional die into your Will to Action Pool. Is this a good match?
- Wizards are powerful, but they get their power by defying God. Do your rules for wizards make this true? (Ars Magica's almost do, but don't.)
In play, the green arrows reverse direction, and your rules impose a structured causality upon your game's fiction. If they were a good match in design, then in play the game works the way you meant it to. If they were a bad match in design, then in play the game doesn't work how you intended. Bold barbarian warriors maximize their armor and when they go into battle it's a matter of grinding ablation, not decisive action; your grim & gritty noir detective has to carry an assault rifle because a .38 won't kill a dude; the team of morning-cartoon superheroes bicker, bean-count their resources, and wind up working for the highest bidder.
Make sense?
