LEVEL 0.5: Progress report, first quest and level up!

Progress report on designing my tabletop role-playing games` concept.

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In my previous article, I promised that I would do the assignment that I gave to everyone else myself, by answering the questionnaire that I provided in the article.

Below are my answers. Longer than they need to be, but I wanted you to understand a bit of my thought process as I was answering the questions.

1. What is the experience you want your players to go through in the game? Put simply — What is your game about?

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My problem answering this question was that I wanted my game to provide a lot of things at the same time. I knew that as I am going to design the game I will need to get rid of some of the ideas and focus more on only a couple of them. The first thing I did was write all the ideas I wanted the game to be about on a piece of paper. Then I chose the three things from the list that I was more excited to work on. The end result is as follows:

1. I want the players to reach a state of catharsis** in the game. What that means is that the game is going to support the creation of a non-traditional horror story. Characters actually are going to have a chance to win against the horrors. To do this the game is going to introduce a monster/horrific situation. The monster is going to take the players from the normal state to its disruption. Then to the final confrontation where everything, hopefully, goes back to normal again. To achieve this, the game needs the characters to be and do stuff that will bring them closer to the abnormal that could disrupt the situation. That brings us to the second element;
2. Have you noticed that in most fiction, there are no systems set in place to protect those who are psychologically vulnerable? Nobody ever cares about the children who watched their parents being murdered. Nobody cares that leaving them bee might lead to suicide, revenge homicide, or fighting crime without due process. This isn’t saying that the solution to every mental problem is to go and get a “head shrink.”*** Yet, the player character`s job is going to be to provide support to a broken community, to shepherd the people in the community. To be pathfinders that will guide the community to safety when the disruption happens;
3. Right now, we have monsters that disrupt the normal and players that have to deal with that disruption. Is this enough to create a horror game? No. We are missing one last thing (not necessarily last, but last as in the scope of this exercise) we need tension, the possibility to lose things. Thus the game system is going to add pressure that occurs when the player experiences a loss of resources, which may prevent them from accomplishing goals.

**Catharsis — purging negative emotions that result in renewal and restoration. Its the act of expressing, or more accurately, experiencing the deep emotions often associated with events in the individual’s past which had originally been repressed or ignored, and had never been adequately addressed or experienced. It is motivated by the desire for a firm answer to a question and an aversion toward ambiguity. In other words — sharing emotions.

***This can be justified, as you can hardly expect a rag-tag band of rebels in an oppressive dystopia to open up to a potential informant and a historical setting may predate therapy altogether or the therapists themselves are all afraid of being driven crazy by their patients and thus only handle cases outside the main cast.

In short: The game is going to be about a disruption that happens in a community. The disruption forces the player characters to throw themselves in tense circumstances to confront the disruption, thus hopefully bringing life back to normal and achieving catharsis.

2. How will the players be able to experience that in the game? — How is the game mechanically reinforcing the above-mentioned experience?

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Now that I have answered the first question it should show what elements of the game need mechanics to be made for. Based on my answer there are three main things that need mechanics to be made for. There are other things implied as well, but I am going to talk about them those in latter articles.

2.1. Mechanics that are going to create catharsis:

1. Catharsis in many ways is connected to the stories pacing. Catharsis requires the build up of an emotion and then the release of the emotion — this creates catharsis. Meaning that the game needs mechanics for controlling elements of pacing: Movement Impetus — the will of the player to move; Threat — the notion of danger; Tension — the atmosphere and mood of the level or perceived danger which is reflected in the player. ; Tempo — the level of actual action currently being experienced by the player. This is very abstract. Let me give you an example — in an investigation scene you can only ask 5 questions. This limits the amount of time the player will be able to spend in this one scene and makes every asked question bear more value.
2. Pacing can`t create horror alone it needs stakes. Thus the introduction of a kind of “tension system” is going to be needed. I am going to discuss this system in sub-headline 2.3.
3. Stakes can only appear if people are trying to accomplish something. Have goals or motivations that are being threatened by someone. My idea is to “mechanize” this by using the classical Freudian theory Death drive — the drive towards death and self-destruction. This concept has been translated as “opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts”. What that means is that to a certain level people are compelled to do certain things. Some are compelled towards destruction, others towards creation. This compulsion can lead to addiction. The more addicted we become the stronger versions of those addiction agents we need to indulge us. In this case, the death drive would be a scale. The scale would determine the needs and motivations of the characters (and monsters) that would motivate them to accomplish certain actions;

2.2. Mechanics, that create the disruption, the community, the characters or setting?

1. This goes hand in hand with the death drive. People have taboo desires. If they can’tpleasey them in a safe way they will find other ways to please them, even illegal ones. This can create the disruption. Notice how things are starting to be integrated with one another.
2. We have the prerequisite for creating disruption. Now we need a community where the disruption can happen. This is more about creating the setting. Yet there needs to be some mechanics that allow the GM/players to manage the community. The mechanics need to help everyone to answer questions like… How bad is the disruption and what is the effects of it? Right now the idea is to use this as an inspiration. To make the process more visual rather than mathematical.
3. Of course, we need characters for the players to play as. Yet, right now the most important part is not how to create them, but how to motivate them to try and fix the disruption and to go where the disruption is in the first place? Again, the death drive mechanic comes to the rescue. In short, the players will have and will need to act on their drives and please them. If the character is healthy he is going to wish to help people and be rewarded for that. If the death drive is too strong he might be motivated to do bad stuff and be rewarded for that. Yet, they need to please them or the death drive will consume them.

2.3. Mechanics that create tension in the game:

1. Obfuscation of game state — the game is going to keep the players in a constant state of uncertainty. To that end the game is going to obfuscate all kinds of details that are considered incisive in other genres: health, ammo supplies, enemy locations u.c. ;
2. Progress clocks, inspired from John Harpers Blades in the Dark, are going to help remind the players of what they need to do and add time pressure;
3. Tension points (working name) — in order for a player to do a deed that his character is not able to do he can choose to acquire Tension (points). As the Tension points increase: 1) the GM is going to be allowed to introduce more conflict situations in the game; 2) The players will be allowed to remove some of the tension points if they willingly create a conflict situation. Tensions points are gained by the players by loosing or allowing bad stuff to happen to further their goals.

3. What is the reward/punishment structure you are going to put in the game to encourage players to go through that experience? — How will you motivate the players to interact/use the above-mentioned mechanics?

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The reward mechanics is the most subjective of the discussed elements. Each player can be motivated by different motivators. Right now two things need to be remembered.

1. Rewards can be intrinsic (come from the player) or external (come from the game);
2. Reward mechanics need to create a loop (reinforce one another) and be integrated with other mechanics they can`t only be random. Meaning that one reward should motivate the players to use the already established mechanics over and over again.

Intrinsic rewards:

The satisfaction of fixing a broken community, a persistent world that reacts to the player choices, the possibility to discuss and experience topics that would not be allowed in other places/games, to share bottled up emotions.

External rewards:

• You gain character advancement options for saving the community from the disruption;
• Positive Disintegration — psychological tension and anxiety are necessary for growth. You can not grow if you are in a comfort zone. The more the characters are going to be willing to go to please their death drives, the more advancement options they will gain.
• If a character takes the time to move his death drive away from self-destruction then they will gain advancement options.

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The three questions have been answered. That means that the main assignment has been accomplished as well. Right now I am going to skip talking about the optional questionnaire. Why? Because I am going to go in depth about those questions in other articles. Also, I believe I have done a good job in establishing how to do this assignment and the article is long enough as it is.

So… Let`s level up to Level One and see what we are going to have to deal with in the next article.

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