So far over break, I have played not one, but two games, that changed my perceptions on how a game could be played, and how a story can be told. Strangely enough, neither game had anything to do with an RPG, or at least not in any way that I could easily discern; seeing as how one was 10 minute PC game that I had barely any sort of real interaction with, the other is a variation on the board game Risk, but yet both profoundly affected me in such a way that I want to somehow include some of their concepts into our game.
The question is how?
But first let's talk about the two games in question: the first, the PC game, was an independent game called Thirty Flights of Loving. I bought it on Steam for $2 on sale, installed it, played it, and beat it, all in 25 minutes or so. Now, that might seem like too short of a game to have an impact on me, and quite frankly for most games it would be, but for whatever reason, TFoL really affected me, and affected me quite well. The reason is this: it said everything it needed to say in under 20 minutes, it didn't lead me by the hand, and it left me to figure things out by myself.
Now that might not seem like a lot, but if you think about video games, as a general rule, they feel the need to explain everything to you. There's sort of a joke that comes from a Youtube video called "Sequelitis: Megaman", that talks about the amount of times you say "yeah, I get it" during a game back in the 80s compared to now. And now, with all the tutorial levels, the fact that you have a person in your ear explaining everything to you all the time, etc., players are always saying "yeah, I get it". (The worst offender in my opinion is Assassin's Creed ... the goddamn tutorial level that takes an hour to fucking get through...) Sure, some games sort of break the trend, like Fallout 3's wonderful opening level that's sort of a tutorial in disguise that also doubles as a character building mini game. But by and large, most games really feel the need to hold the player by the hand and guide them through everything.
Thirty Flights of Loving doesn't.
Hell, it doesn't actually tell you anything at all. There is no dialogue in the game, there are some signs scattered about that you can read here and there, but none of them really present any information that is necessary to the story that the game is telling, they are just there to help flesh out the game world. As for the story itself, it's told in a dozen or so minute long vignettes that are shown to you out of chronological order. At first, it's confusing, but after you understand what's going on, everything snaps into place, and then shortly after the whole thing is over.
And it's beautiful.
See, I think one of things that was so impacting about the whole experience was that it didn't tell me everything, hell, it hardly told me anything at all. But it told me just enough to figure it out on my own, to draw my own connections, to put the pieces together to form my own picture that may or may not be the one the creators intended me to create, but that's okay. There was no wrong answer, no wrong message, and that really struck me. The idea of "less is more" is something that you consistently see in movies and books, but not something that you generally catch in video games, so seeing it used in one was quite impressive.
Now, how we include this in our game ... I have no idea. Maybe if we make a module or something for it, I could see it, however as it stands now, I'm not sure there's any real mechanical way to do it, the best way might just be to include it in a blurb in the book or whatever and let the GMs look at it and read it. Honestly though I'm not entirely sure.
As for the other game, we could probably use some of the ideas mechanically.
Now the other game, Risk Legacy, does perhaps the single-most game changing thing I've ever seen: the board game changes depending on how you play it. Now how does that work exactly? Well, for one, you play a series of 25 games of Risk, the winner of each game is entitled to change/add one thing to the board permanently, like a city, or remove a territory, etc. On top of that, there are card game packs that you only open after certain things have happened: such as 9 games are played a new pack of cards is opened that completely changes everything on the board, so on and so forth. The result is that the 15th game is completely different mechanically and tactically than the first game.
On top of that, no groups' 25 games will ever go the same route, making each person's experience with the game, a very different beast from anyone else's. The whole idea is fairly incredible, and the permanency of it is something that has only barely been rivaled in video games. (Mass Effect was looking like it might do it, but then the 3rd game bombed it) Personally, I like the concept, I like it a lot. When certain things happen, certain rules change, etc.
Now how do we add an idea like this to our game?
Well, the pillars are already there, I mean the thing about RPGs is that your decisions drastically affect the outcome of any given situation. That is, and has always been, one of the main strengths of RPGs, and one of the reasons that even after the rise of video games, table top RPGs are still there and still holding out fairly strongly. But what can we do to enhance this feeling? What can we do to add to the feeling that what they do, and what decisions they make will ultimately change the game world, and the way they play it?
One idea I had was that since we're thinking of including cards, why not add extra card packs that they open after certain things have happened to them in game: like, after a player has started a business open this pack, after a player has killed 10+ enemies open this pack, after a player has saved a victim, etc. They would include more powers or grant different bonuses, skills, or something.
Another idea I had was to purposely leave certain rules out of the rule book, and only add them when they came into play. Such as: "When a player is reduced to 0 HP or less, open this pack", then there would be the rules for death and dying in that pack. That way, the panic would be on the players the first time they hit 0 HP, making them worried and stressed, much like a real situation of a party member being killed. I really think that this would be something really cool, and would add a lot to the game.
In fact, I think that I'm going to go ahead and make a post based on healing and interesting ways we could deal with that.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas everyone.
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