thread: 2006-03-20 : Creating Situation: a practical example
On 2006-03-31, Marhault wrote:
Okay, I'm with you. One more question for anybody still reading this.
What makes the game longer is the ratio of action to interest. How much doing does it take to resolve the conflicts?
and
1. Small-scale actions + short-term interests = short play.
2. Large-scale actions + long-term interests = short play.
3. Small-scale actions + long-term interests = long play.
What games (if any) have addressed this explicitly? Trollbabe touches on it somewhat, at least as far as the scale of actions are concerned. It's something I'd really like to explore further.
This makes BL go "Polaris scales your actions to your interests"
I know this because I came about it exactly ass-backwards. I had a complicated "scale" mechanic in the game, by which increased investment became increased scale. Then I had wierd ways of shuffling it, until I finally realized that it all summed to zero -- people who wanted to achieve big things could do big things, people who wanted to achieve small things could do small things.
