Gamedev thoughts: Necromancy and traits (Patreon)

Hello folks! Here's a weekend bonus post.
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Everyone's creative method is a little bit different. Mine is heavily trial-and-error based: Usually I start by writing what I know, and then looking at the design and seeing what's wrong with that.

One of the more important skills to develop in game design is "listening to the design." If you're designing RPGs, it is probably because you yourself love games and have been playing them for years. This has wired you with certain instincts that will tell you, quietly, whether something feels good or not. If your gut says "this isn't right," it's your job to figure out where that feeling is coming from and to do something about it. Eventually, like any practiced skill, you get better at this until the feedback loop speeds up and it feels like the game you're building is telling you where you've gone wrong and how to correct it.

The game will tell you what it needs, if you listen to it.

In the case of Necromancy, I started by working with a very stock Powered by the Apocalypse engine, essentially the Monsterhearts version of the engine with a couple of bits of Dungeon World stuck on. I did this because I started the project knowing only a few things:

1) I knew the broad look and feel and themes of the setting, and that I wanted exploring and sustaining the world to be central, rather than just whatever adventure the characters bumble into that week.

2) I knew the inspirational sources I wanted to tap for play: the oppressive menace of Dark Souls; the grand monster hunts of Monster Hunter; and the carefully obscurist presentation of Dark Souls and Fallen London.

3) I knew that I wanted a system much lighter than Exalted had been, both because I was burned out on super-heavy maximalist design for the moment, and because I knew I was going to be doing all the writing work myself. 

4) I wanted well-textured mechanics, because that is always my preference in any RPG, full-stop, and if you are going to build a game, you ought to be building the kind of game you enjoy.

#3 pretty much narrowed things down to FATE or PbtA, and #4 winnowed it down further to PbtA. So I started out with the version of PbtA I was most familiar with: Monsterhearts.

When starting a project, I think it's best to move in fast, broad strokes, just to get work down. You're really learning more than doing at this point, and you can afford to throw everything out later if you need to. So I started by making a list of things any *World game is going to need:

• Traits (four seemed like a round, easy number to work with)

• Moves (two per trait seemed like a good balance to have all of the traits pulling their weight)

• Additional important stats that don't follow the basic traits/moves structure, like health, conditions, bonds, money, gear, etc. Of these, I only knew for certain I needed health, and I thought probably conditions.

**

If you've read the Necromancy core rules preview, and are familiar with other Apocalypse World-inspired games, you probably noticed the absence of any Traits. They're not sitting off in another part of the book that hasn't been previewed yet. They're not there.

So what happened?

**

Traits and Moves are the beating heart of almost any PbtA game. PbtA is an engine designed to build games that are about something, and the Traits and Moves highlight what, exactly, your game is about. Apocalypse World is about raw, harsh, unfiltered survival in the wasteland; it's meant to be equal parts desperate, violent, and sexy. Monsterhearts is about messy teenage sexuality and self-discovery, with strongly queer undertones. Dungeon World is about capturing the distilled spirit of AD&D in a much sleeker, more stylish package that flenses off all the parts that don't look like how people actually played AD&D.

So I started off by immediately making a bunch of mistakes.

PbtA Traits are often very abstract. Rather than Strength, Charisma, and so on, you tend to see things like Hot, Cold, Sharp, Dark, Weird, Hard, and the like. However, the abstractions are meaningful. Rather than speaking directly to the characters, they speak to the themes the game intends to explore; they signal intent to players.

I quickly settled on using the suits of the minor arcana for my four traits. The tarot pointed to the murky mysticism of the setting, and I could spin divinatory symbols to mean basically whatever I needed; and I knew I could always change them later if a better idea came along.

To be honest, even from the moment I wrote the four traits down in a note file, the idea felt sort of precious. But like I said, at the outset, it's best to just cover ground and worry about right or wrong later. This is what I ended up with after a little tinkering:

Sword: The sword is how hard you are, how sharp you are, how much it hurts when you get mad. It’s your capacity for violence in an already-desperate world. The sword hurts people.

Cup: The cup can be filled with empathy, wine, or poison. It’s your ability to understand and connect. It’s how well you can be human in an endless night of death. It’s your portion of joy in this awful world.

Coin: The coin counts, measures, and opens the way. It’s smarts, savvy, cool under fire. The coin takes proper stock of people and situations. It keeps you safe. It pays the ferryman.

Wand: The wand is power: knowledge, presence, magic. It’s what makes you the master of the dark rather than its prey. Hold it aloft and its light reveals what was lost—but also what you’ve become.

That seemed pretty good, and I ended up spending several months working with it. It had the right "patter" voice and style common to *World games, was flexible enough that I could load Moves in as needed, and so on.

As for Moves, I kept monkeying with them, but the most frequent configuration went something like this:

Sword got Shed Blood (the fighting move!) and Protect Someone.

Cup got Establish a Connection and Present as Something False.

Coin got Read the Room and Defy the Dark (which was basically the "defy danger" move from Dungeon World).

Wand got Reveal the Strange and Throw Your Weight Around.

**

At this point I had a couple of monsters and preliminary playbooks sketched up, and had settled on the centrality of the settlement to play, and of biomes (we'll get to them in another update, soon) to game-structure. I also knew I had problems. In ascending order of seriousness:

• The traits only made sense with their slick, huckster-y explanations attached; pull those off and the names weren't remotely self-explanatory. If I'd changed them to Hard, Smooth, Savvy, and Strange, they'd have been a lot easier to remember and work with. I was leaning on my prose to sell a weak idea.

• Sword sold itself on being the trait of hurting things, but by sticking Protect Someone there, I was treating it as just The Combat Trait. However, take Protect Someone away, and... Shed Blood was the only thing that fit. And I disliked the notion of a trait that only governed a single Move.

• Wand's moves kept changing. There's a lot of weird going on in Necromancy, and the Wand wanted more than just two moves; as it stood, I was making that trait carry too much water. It was your capacity to reveal setting mysteries and to understand bizarre magic and also to intimidate people with your deathly nature and to reveal the truth of yourself and the plan was for playbooks that cast spells to also use it to do that. It was just loaded too heavily, suggesting I probably wanted five traits, not four. But I didn't see a clean division to split Wand into.

• The mechanical centrality of the traits, whose function is to describe your character, suggested that your character was the most important, central part of the story being told. In most RPGs, that's true. In most PbtA games I'm familiar with, it's true. In Necromancy, I already knew that was not the case; Necromancy is the story of your settlement's fate. Your characters are the most important actors in that story, but they're still not the centerpiece. If they abandon the settlement to its fate and wander off into the dark, the story doesn't follow them to their next adventure; the game simply ends. The structural centering of the traits wasn't communicating the game's play priorities.

• The big issue, though, was that the traits spread the game's play-focus around in a fallacious manner.

**

Let me elaborate on that last one.

I've said many times that if your game has a mandatory activity that all the characters do, you're a fool to make it into a skill. If, for example, you are making a game about piloting mechs, where every PC is a mech pilot, don't put in a "mech piloting" skill; you don't want every single action to come down to "roll (Attribute) + Mech Piloting." D&D is a game about fighting monsters in dungeons. It has skills for climbing and disarming traps, but it has no "fighting" skill because everybody fights, so everyone can fight.

My trait/move distribution suggested that the game had four equally important pillars of play:

• Undertaking violence

• Connecting with people, or concealing your monstrousness from them

• Adventuring stuff like figuring out enigmas and avoiding danger

• Fucking with weird magic

But I'd come to realize this was very wrong. The big centerpiece activity of Necromancy is protecting or advancing your settlement by hunting incredibly awful and powerful monsters. Social development is part of play but the PCs are just too powerful for angst to slow them down much. Likewise, overcoming obstacles and dicking with weird magic are either rare-but-potent moments in a campaign, or odds and ends to make the trip to or from a monster hunt more interesting.

I was, in short, putting together a presentation that laid out three sides of garnish as big as the main course, and making the core play loop of the game into something you could use as a dump stat.

The design was speaking. It was saying "Hey, listen, this is all wrong. The basic miss/partial success/success model is great, but I want something a lot fightier than Dungeon World, and this other stuff can be around but it's not central."

So I looked at the playbooks for a while. Thought about XP systems for a while. Thought about how PbtA's signature miss/7-9/10+ mechanic could act as the beating heart of a dedicated combat engine. 

In the end, I scrapped the traits completely, and also scrapped having a central short-list of dedicated Moves. Instead, the MC would decide when to call for a roll, as in most traditional RPGs, rather than the game explicitly telling you when moves happen; and all moves would be rolled at +0, unless your playbook said you were good or bad at a certain kind of thing. In that case, if the category seemed to apply, you'd use a bonus or penalty. Characters would, in short, be "made out of perks" rather than categorized traits.

Characters would all be able to fight. And they'd need those skills, because the monsters in Necromancy are uniquely awful things to share a never-ending night with.

When the design speaks, listen, even if it tells you to do something weird like throw out all your traits and build a boss-fight-centric PbtA game.