Story Planner Tools for Games

So this took a bit because in explaining how I use this tool, I thought I might also explain _why_ I use this tool in preference to another.  This is more about designer explanation than player explanation.  If designer thinking is not of interest to you, skip down to the paragraph headed "ADVENTURE PLANNER IN PLAY".  I am going to explain a little about my design thinking first, and then I will use two examples to illustrate my tools in action, one that is familiar (Star Wars: E IV), and then an adventure that I plotted.

Seriously... if you are not really interested in design theory, or games as art discussion, SKIP this part.  For theater, TV/film, or literature geeks, there is nothing new here, move along.  Otherwise, proceed.

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OK... rpgs have in their DNA a little of oral folktales, a little of literature, a little of theater, and a little of TV/film.  Modern games often use the vocabulary of TV/film to discuss play, and as such, it is worth understanding what is in the DNA.  So... there are lots of dramatic structures through history.  One act, two act, three act, four act, five act... beyond that you get something that is more episodic than serial, and might find literature scholars and critics who delve into really really abstruse discussions on structures that are distinctly "art-house" in character.  I won't even go into that playground because very little of the adventure fiction that 90% of rpgs are inspired by follows structures remotely resembling them.  To reiterate, there are some great stories that have something other than three acts (e.g. all of Shakespeare, many of Spielberg's films, a lot of Hitchcock), but three acts is quick, easy shorthand for providing structure, and one of the reasons I have turned to Fate as my first choice game system, is that it is built on quick easy shorthand that is very suitable for telling powerful narrative stories.  Further, because three act structure is what most genre films (and much of television) that gamers are familiar with and use in their own cook books, it provides a very accessible structure to work within.

Is it the only structure?  Nope.  Is it the best?  If you are an avid student of Blake Snyder who wrote Save the Cat which is practically the required playbook for Hollywood writers, absolutely... if you look at the rest of story telling history from Homer to about 1980, then poppycock.  Some literary snobs are adamantly against three act structure for just that reason.  Rigidly codified three act structure is what has given us such films as Battleship, or The Amazing Spiderman, Transformers 2, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and X-Men: Apocolypse (all very formula though not especially good).  Snyder is still following the same basic structure introduced in antiquity, and you can take as much of the skin of his formula as you like and leave what you don't.  See, while the above examples are Snyder playbook scripts, so are the latest Bond films, the new reboot of Star Trek, The Avengers, and the Captain America movies.  The key is the basic structure as an organizing dramatic principle, with the willingness to weave a little when the mood strikes.  But a little more on formula.

Formula is everywhere in genre films now.  This tends to take the principles of structure and make them rigid rules, at which point creativity is more likely to break than not.  Sometimes it gets pulled off well but often not.  Escalation of conflict is something that is a principle assumed in many including the standard three act structure, as it tests the resolve of the protagonist to act within a story.  If the protagonist just gives up and goes home, the story tends to fall flat, so an escalation of conflict in pursuit of what is at stake should make both protagonist and antagonist commit to see a dramatic conclusion.  Done as a principle rather than a hidebound exact formula, this can be done in a host of creative ways.  But forced into the exact formula, it gets predictable and lazy.

Case in point... a tired trope, that absolutely should not be, is blowing-up-the-world threats in every single film of a series (X-Men: Apocolypse ... the most exciting piece of boredom in years).  It's only slightly less obnoxious sibling is the threat more-is-better problem.  Pirates of the Carribean for example, is a good film.  The stakes matter to both the protagonists and antagonists, and you curiously, don't find the rest of the world shaken.  But by At the World's End, the stakes have become global, and while not a bad film per se, it is weaker because in part, there is too much going on and it stretches too thin.  Same for all of the most recent X-Men (and other superhero) movies, and oh so many of the Bond films.  Regarding the last, look again at the Craig Casino Royal.  Excellent movie, with stakes serious enough for the characters to commit everything, but without blowing up the world.  

Finding ways to provide dramatic interest in talky rather than fighty ways between hero and villain provides another creative challenge, because on the one hand it allows a slower but continuous escalation, and reveals things that are more personal to the characters than you get when they are busy punching.  One particular plot device that feels very de ja vu is common to The Avengers, ST: Into Darkness, and Skyfall (all made about the same time)... they all have a formula plot in which the villain gets caught on purpose.  We can argue that this was done well or badly (IMO, Avengers pulls it off, the other two not so much, and that partly because Loki should be a trickster which is not the same as criminal mastermind).  For that matter, Dark Knight does it too very well.  There are other examples in the last two decades.  The reason for this plot device is to allow hero and villain a justified talky scene rather than a fighty scene, but as some have pointed out, the problem when used as a hidebound device, is that it ends up being predictable, and lazy. Indy and Belloq have a perfectly talky scene in Raiders in the bar... the original Wrath of Khan has plenty of talky scenes via view screen... Die Hard has plenty via radio.  This is where hard formula is proven to be unimaginative.

All of this is to point out that structure makes a stronger story than no structure, but following that hidebound formula can also lead to the horrible no-no of "railroading" . The basic framework helps clarify how to both allow player agency in an emergent story (I won't argue with the people who think emergent story is an invisible unicorn) and a dramatic arc that serves both plot and character.

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ADVENTURE PLANNER IN PLAY


This is the first page.  This should be filled out not in full before a campaign starts, but rather as story emerges through play.  So at the start of a campaign, the Title, Story Question, Themes, and Tone would be noted, and the Teaser and Inciting incident of Act I summarized.  The rest is only filled in as subsequent sessions are played.

For example, The Herald or Threshold Guardian might be alluded to in the first session of play, but not defined till after the session, and then introduced in the second session.  The rest of Act one might be very simply outlined and prepared for before the second session based on what the players do in the first, and then the player's actions of the second session suggest what would be planned for and outlined in Act two, which would also take about two sessions.  Act three would follow a similar model, though it might be resolved in one session, as the resolution might best be summarized by the players after the final climax.  The point of using this to structure things, is 1) to keep track of where the story has been, and 2) to try to focus the direction it is going while trimming off things that are emerging as superfluous.



This is the second page, and is likewise updated throughout play.  It is a quick recall tool of the things that need to be included meaningfully in the story.  If it is on here, it probably needs stats.  If not, things that come up in play can be thrown out on an ad hoc basis in play and only upgraded to mention here if they become important to the players.



This one drills down to individual scenes.  Here is where notes can be made for specific elements that will keep the action focused on driving the main story forward, and making clear what the scene is for, and what consequences it might have later.

 
And this supports the previous page by essentially breaking the scene into a fractal of it's own with a sort of three act structure.

So there they are.  They are not the only ones I have worked on, and they are still a work in progress.  I will undoubtedly continue to work on and revise them, as they are a little cumbersome at this point.  I would ideally prefer to cut down the set by at least half, and if I can find a satisfactory way to make it work on a single sheet, I will.  But here is this version.

Cheers.

Conflict Currencies In Game Design

So ultimately what separates a story from a documentary or some other kind of mere information media, is the narrative of a normalcy - conflict - normalcy cycle.  The meat of the story, is the conflict and it's resolution.  No big news there, but it does bring to mind a way to frame a design principle in my mind for story games of all kinds.

Going back to Jared Sorenson's three questions for game designers:

1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?

The first question is not about the setting, but rather the theme of the game.  So D&D actually is (at least in most of it's older incarnations) about killing things and taking their stuff.  Star Wars the rpg is not about a galaxy full of aliens and spaceships, but it does begin to tell us something meaningful when it gives us the fairy tale cues "A long time ago" and "a galaxy far, far away", and when we begin to understand it through the sub titles (A New Hope).  Star Wars, is about not giving up living, breathing hope in in the face of an oppressive mechanistically ordered system.  It is about the personal war between choosing Life vs. The Machine.

The second question is identifies the things that the mechanics need to address or ignore in more detail.  D&D (old school) has lots of rules for combat, physically damaging things, surviving physical damage, and advancing with more and better equipment purchased with lots of treasure.  Alternatively, Star Wars is a story centered on moral and spiritual choices, the rpg, to really capture the essence of that story, needs to have strong mechanics for the morality of choices, and mechanics that address temptation and corruption.  Because it is not a piece of military techno-fiction, nor a story about the clever advances of scientists and engineers, any mechanics regarding the finer points of tactical advantages or power to thrust ratios of engines is actually superfluous to the game... Star Trek is the next game over on the shelf.

The third question digs deeper into how you actualize the types of important mechanics.  D&D offers experience points for killing monsters, and for gathering treasure, which put into the player's hands, allow upgrades and bonuses to the character's abilities which make them more effective at fighting and surviving.  Star Wars should have some measure of where the character stands in relation to the light side or dark side of the Force, as well as some kind of way to measure in play changes in status depending on actions taken in the story.

This gets me to my refinement on the second and third questions (is that 2.5?  or 3.5?...).  My question is:

??) What is the Conflict Currency?

Whether the kind of conflicts that are important are sword fights, star ship battles, social brinksmanship, or pitching woo in hopes of enduring love, the meat of any story is about those basic literary questions:

1) What does (character X) want?
2) Why can't they have it now?                              =                  CONFLICT!!!
3) What is at stake if they don't get it?

The Conflict Currency then, is what mechanically represents the things that are important to the kind of conflict in the story the game is telling.  It is safe to say that most rpg's include some king of physical combat.  This is one of the common kinds of conflict then, and needs some kind of conflict currency.  This is often represented by accumulated hit points in some way that are paid as the price for being hit, and weapons with some kind of rating in how many hit points they can cause to be spent.  Another kind of conflict currency is used for the use of magic.  Whether there is a budget of magic points (a.k.a. a "mana" system) or  a budget of slots for pre-packaged spell effects (e.g. a "Vancian" magic system, a la D&D), these get spent and are recovered in some cyclic fashion like hit points, in order to get effects in the game.

To be sure, virtually every rpg has multiple conflict currencies, as there are multiple kinds of conflicts that are available, or at least multiple strategies for confronting and overcoming the arch conflict.  It gets to be problematic if you are playing a game for which there is not any conflict currency, or for which you have some currency that feels undervalued in that economy.  This can be a way to focus a game of course, but it can also make some kinds of play feel short changed.

Not to bully D&D, but I will use it as a case in point (and it is not by any means the only one, and in fact provided the foundation economies by which many game designs have been built).  D&D has a varied and interesting economy for conflicts that are at their core, about killing creatures that you wish to pillage.  There is the basic attack action with weapons that costs the opponent hit points.  There is also a host of magical and magical-like effects that likewise either improve your likelihood of making a successful attack action, or increases the amount of hit points that are expended for a hit.  There is a multi-stage cycle of die rolls that shape the outcome.  However, if the players should instead want to play a battle of wits and cunning, there is a much more simplified pass/fail mechanic for that kind of conflict, generally resolved with a single die roll.  Should the player want to play out the advancement of a romance that sparks, smolders, and ultimately blazes into a bonfire, there are no mechanics whatsoever.  D&D is really not a game for rom-com conflicts then, which is neither here nor there, as that is not the stories that it is designed to tell.

But it does demonstrate why thinking about conflict currency matters to game design.  So if I am designing a game of grand, sweeping, dynastic conflict, I need to ask myself, what kind of Conflict Currency I need for that game.  Fate is a really great toolbox for this as the same basic mechanical blocks can very easily be re-skinned or re-named to match the themes of the story in question.  Does a dynastic political game need rules for the common procedural elements of adventure games like sword fighting and sneaking?  Not really, or not in the normal sense.  But there does need to be some kind of conflict currency for diplomatic treaty resolution, the wax and wane of public opinion, and the strength or weakness of succession faces and factions.  This phrasing makes it a little sharper when deciding how to answer or refine the answers to Sorenson's questions 2 and 3.

Design Journal III: Markets and Flexible Economy in Fate

This has been another one of the tough nuts to crack in my design thinking.

The problem, is that Fate is a narrative and story oriented game.  It is about people's choices more than it is about the crunchy bits of simulating physics or maths.  On the other hand, economies and markets are entities of many parts and can be very complex indeed.

Part of what makes stories of clever traders, tricky fixers, and cunning grifters interesting, is that there is enough of a tip of the hat to these entities to the audience that they can vicariously feel clever too when the score is made honestly or otherwise.  Even so simple a scene as THIS is interesting because of the details.  Now the scale of the political game I have in mind is quite a bit larger, but through the faces of the player state, this kind of trading should be possible.  Though there are few films that tell the stories, much of my interest in the history of trade and virtually all my interest in economics has to do with the constellation of mad, daring, world spanning adventures, schemes, and adventurers who at the end of the day just wanted to make a buck.  The clever trading may not be the meat of the story, but it is the culmination.  But then too, is the gamist satisfaction of "winning" in a way that directly supports the narrative.  This is not a market simulation, but it should have enough complexity to make daring a journey half way round the world to bargain for a shipload of cheap goods that can be sold for a fortune back home.

My favorite part of the board game version of Civilization, was not the tech cards or the war part; it was blind trading three cards for three, two of which had to be truthful.  Skins for dye... gold for wheat.  Trading is a fun side business to raiding in Sid Meyer's Pirates! too.  Several of my favorite non-fiction books are histories of trade... Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Scents of Eden, The Devil's Cup.  The idea of a ship of adventurers looking to make a king's ransom with one big score leading to a war from a rival nation that ends in a peace treaty that grants an island territory on the opposite side of the planet... is just too crazy not to be ripe for fun.  HERE, and HERE we can learn about Port Royal, a city chock full of murder hobos, a veritable Babylon of the West, in which the continuous fencing and resale of cargo to (more) legitimate merchants (for a commission) is a setting in which some level of mechanical detail beyond a single die roll to support the narrative might be in order.  There should be some way beyond mere hand-waving to get some fun out of this kind of story focus.

So, I have two levels of resolution that I'm looking at.  One is a much simpler Fate style challenge mechanic that can make less important trade, or more uninterested players move smoothly past trade to play in which ever ring of the political circus game they prefer.  But I have been racking my brains trying to figure out how to explode this into a satisfactory fractal that has the right level of granularity to feel like a live, dynamic market economy, but still not get outside of the Fate play space.

I think the editing process for the 200 Word RPG contest kick-started my designer brain again, and I had an epiphany this afternoon.

Ultimately, it goes back to economics 101... Supply and Demand.  I will have to expand a little more on the acquisition of resources later, but the core of the exploded, Fate fractal market starts with goods.  There has to be a quick way to get an idea of some relative value of goods in order to give trading some verisimilitude.  The simplified version will merely abstract this, and transactions will have no markers for the value or quantity of goods in trade; they will merely be narrative flavor like a created advantage or stunt.  Transactions will be a contest of trade between the player merchant and the target market (PC or NPC).  However, the fractal version determines the value of goods based on a quick calculation from three stats (R, F, L)

Raw Materials:  - Common                   1
                           - Uncommon              2
                           - Rare                          3

Finished Goods: - Few materials          1
                           - Many materials        2
                           - Complex materials   3
 
Labor:                 - Basic skill                1
                            - Advanced skill        2
                            - Specialized skill      3

So for instance, Wheat is stated as R 1, F 0, L 1, for a (V) value of 2.  Quick intuition can figure out that it is a raw commodity (seed), it is not a finished good, and it takes basic labor to put in the ground and to gather at harvest.  There is obviously a fair amount of abstraction in the modeling of farming, but it gives a fair narrative model.  Compare this to Iron ore (R 2, F 0, L 2, V=4) which can be turned into Iron ingots (R 2, F 1, L 2, V=5), that is used to make Armor (R 2, F 2, L 3, V=7) for values of 4, 5, and 7 respectively.  Quick, easy, and can pretty much apply to anything that can be traded in scale.  This gives a relative value between a load of Wheat at market, and a load of Armor.  You could hand wave this if there was no narrative importance, but just the fact that one has more value than the other mechanically (though possibly not precisely as a simulation) gives 1) some relative narrative importance to which wagon matters more to the story of the guards, 2) a model for further market value that can also contribute to an abstract but still dynamic market for the merchants.

With that scratch-pad reckoning, that gets an idea of market value at the point of origin.  But cost must also figure in getting it to market.  At point of origin, silk in China was far cheaper than by the time it went thousands of miles west to Roman markets.  The cost at every transfer port increased price.  As such, zones are taken into account based on the difficulty of crossing from one zone into another zone.  Essentially, you could travel a thousand miles across the Asian steppe in summer and it would be one zone, as there is little challenge between entering the zone and crossing into the next.  Zones are measured by their final borders in other words; you can come in for free, but it costs to succeed in leaving (passing through).  But, crossing the Tarim desert might count as a zone change calling for a +3 difficulty to pass through, and moving from the Tarim into and over the Tian Mountains along the Northern Silk Road is yet another zone change calling for a +4 difficulty before moving into the Steppes (easy enough... call it a +0 difficulty).  So the basic distance mechanic calls for a +1 to the base value for every full +3 of difficulty in crossing zones to market.



So a load of silk in the Roman market at Antioch would be scratch pad priced thus:

Silk: R 1, F 1, L 2 (V=4) + shipping (quick estimate +4).  It is an exotic item indeed, to Roman wives at a (C) cost of 7.

But while all of that deals more with the supply side of the market, there is also the demand side. This was also a tough part to crack, but I ultimately simplified it into a value based on how much the item is needed (or wanted enough to not distinguish a difference), and subtract the cost from that, dropping the integer to make a difficulty number to overcome by the merchant at sale.

Need:  - Few need it     1
            - Many need it  2
            - Everybody      3

So again, in the case of Wheat (V 2) / (C 2) everybody needs it (N 3).  N - C = -1, drop the integer, and you get 1, so the difficulty in selling wheat in a local market is +1.  That means that the merchant has to overcome that difficulty to make a profit.  Selling a load of Silk (V 7) imported from afar however, may prove harder.  While most people would certainly like silk, probably you could judge it to have N 1.  N - C = -6, drop integer and difficulty to sell it is +6 simply because it is exotic and expensive... most people simply can't pay the price.

Now the third ingredient mechanically, is to take into account a dynamic market.  If you flood a market with wheat,  the value of wheat is going to drop drastically as the supply outstrips the demand.  Or if you can increase the supply of silk on the market, you can lower the price, and more people will be able to buy, which means that you can make up the profit over time.  Since this is Fate though, we don't want to track a hundred commodities in real time, only the ones we are interested in for our story.  So we need a way to put a lens on that.  Thus, markets all have a stress boxes and consequences.  In effect, the merchant player is attacking the market, and taking the stress as profit which goes back into replenishing that player's Resources stat, which I will discuss in another post.  But if you attack the market too much, you put a narrative consequence which mechanically has enough detail to provide verisimilitude.

So in one last example, suppose your character sent a caravan east to bring back a load of silk to begin a trade monopoly so you could get filthy rich enough to buy the armies you need to keep your northern border safe from the stinky barbarians.  The caravan does return from the daring venture (a whole separate series of sessions of story in play).  Having cleverly used two create-an-advantage boosts (The Softest Clothes in the Empire, and Everyone Important in Tyre is Wearing Silk) to overcome the market in Antioch, ticks off two shifts of stress, and gives a consequence (Demand for Silk is Up) which allows an extra invoke the next time a silk shipment is in.  Suppose another consequence came up though, and the market had so much silk that even the senior servants are wearing it?  You might have the moderate consequence be Silk Demand Down.  Anything important to the story about the market can be adequately, intuitively, and pretty realistically dealt with in this fashion.

So next, I need to deal a little more with Resources.

Here is a cool map that shows a little about the markets along the classic silk road.  Too Cool!

Politics of the Mob

Conscience is quelled by the approval of the masses.

Wickedness is made invisible by the complacence of peers.

Guilt is discarded by the indifference of leaders.

Righteousness is forgotten when self-interest is held sacrosanct.

This is how the banality of evil can come to wreck nations long before the bloodshed begins amidst the flames of revolt.  Becoming used to some new idea does not make the idea right.  Either it was right to begin with, or not... familiarity or comfort with it does not make it otherwise.

It rarely comes all at once, but by one compromise, after another.  Those compromises become more and more common when actual Truth is discarded in favor of "my truth".  There may be little practical difference between the ubiquitous human proclivity for justifying excuses for wickedness, but stepping over the line of excusing objective evil to the point that evil is a politically negotiable fiction does velocitize the avalanche cascading down the slope.

Whether we can agree to call these facts or not, history is rife with the repetition of these propositions in societies and civilizations.  The plain truth, is that each new generation must relearn them, or suffer their horrors, and to learn at all means for the previous generation not to be lax in teaching.

I may write more about the increase of social consciousness in game design, and the ways in which I differ with them... but these principles are where I can agree with the notion that games can have be more than mere entertainment or distraction.  If in playing out the role of a nation and it's interests, no matter what those interests are, and playing aggressively in that role, is it not possible that in addition to the entertainment of playing the game well, that the fiction may speak truth about us in fact?

That is what I want to try to get my head around in designing my political game.

3+3 Questions for Game Design and Criticism

I found an interesting list of questions by Goethe regarding criticism that I thought was interesting as an addition to Jared Sorensen's three questions for designers.

Goethe's questions for criticism are:

1) What is the artist trying to do?
2) How well is it done?
3) Was it worth doing?

Sorensen's three questions for design are:

1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?

I think that both sets of questions are really useful for thinking about side by side when considering games as art.

Design Journal II: Geography and Politics

I am thinking through just what how much narrative weight to give to geography in my design. Furthermore, how much mechanical weight would it need then, and what mechanics would best support that idea?

At a glance, I am looking at some other design takes on political games, and none of them include geography as an element, and I'm sure that these games work well enough for the lenses and filters the writers chose.  However, I have been thinking about what sort of game I want to play for a long time, and through to the current incarnation in a Fate framework, I keep coming back to the land as the stage for the play, and the stage the players play on matters to the kind of stories I am looking for.

I mean, imagine right off the top, Dune without the starkness of Arakis.

In real history, geography matters... a lot.  Russia is a vast country and was even before the Soviets began gobbling up even more, but much if Russian history in the last two hundred years (and longer) has been shaped by the need for a port that didn't freeze in the winter.  This was critical because in order to keep up with the advance of the industrialized world, it behooved Russia to not be land-locked into a backwater.  The Russo-Japanese wars contributed to Japan taking control of Manchuria which was the springboard for the invasion of China decades later.  The Soviet bear licking it's chops after the appetizer of eastern Europe in 1945 was not lost to the rest of the allies who saw it ready to gobble up some or all of Japan after the Japanese were defeated.  More recent scholarship has given credence to the notion that the atomic bomb was at least as much to stop the advance of the bear as to beat the Japanese.  All for want of a port...

When the Roman Republic went to war with Carthage in the Punic Wars, what started as a local squabble in Sicily, brought Rome and Carthage on opposite sides initially to settle things.  The initiating powers were ultimately eclipsed by the Republic and the Empire who clashed for the first time, but not for the last.  Ultimately, of course, multiple wars led to the fame of Hannibal, the Carthagenian who unimaginably marched an army including war elephants over Alpine passes difficult enough to traverse for experienced climbers, to harass the Romans for years before his defeat.  That story matters in large part because Sicily was a cosmopolitan island crossroads, and the Alps an absurdly imposing obstacle.

Denmark and Sweden sit at the mouth of the Baltic Sea.  In the era of the Hanseatic League, proxy wars with pirates were fought partly because control of the mouth of the sea gave the trading edge to whoever could safely enter and exit into the North Sea, and from there, on to business with ports in the rest of Europe to the warm and sunny south.  Just add some chrome.  Times change, people don't.  And landscape matters to how people maneuver.

I have also recently been reading the book Revenge of Geography which I thought might be another fun study to add while I'm writing.  So far there are lots of interesting points, including more on Russia.  Being a huge country of vast steppes in the south and vast forests in the north, it faced the conundrum of being mostly indefensible whenever it wanted to expand civilization out of the forests into the warmer and more farmable southern expanses.  Sure it could grow wheat down in the Ukraine, but then it had wave after wave of barbarian horsemen pillaging it over and over again, which aspect of geography led to a more aggressive expansionist way of expanding civilization.  The book argues that the need to push back the frontiers for safety was part of what shaped the brutality of the modern Soviets.  Greece is a mountainous region with very limited space or soil to grow grain, but suitable for growing tougher olive trees and grape arbors which grow in more marginal conditions.  Also, the region is just full of excellent harbors.  Becoming far reaching, inquisitive maritime traders with ships laden with wine and olive oil seems to have been destiny.

England and Japan, both island empires at some point, became so because they faced the choice of being annexed or relegated to insignificance by their larger neighbors if they did not take to the seas.  They had both the benefit of a maritime buffer for safety, but not at such a distance that they could not easily trade with their neighbors if they became capable naval powers.  The opportunity to enjoy the safety to grow, the need to capably expand and control other territory by a variety of means, and the access to the thassaline highway all made them the nations they became.

Now I want a good many other things to provide lenses and filters for my game, but this does explain why I think geography should not be left out, and furthermore, why it makes the stories better because it provides very tangible motives and methods and locations for interesting action.

Design Journal I: Looking at Fate from the inside out

Design decisions in setting the dials

I'm working on designing for Fate, and so I've been breaking down the system to its screws and gears.

By default, Fate Core has 47 discrete mechanical elements to keep track of:  five aspects, three stunts, two refresh, ten skills, twenty skill points, and two two-box stress tracks with three consequence slots.  Fate Accelerated has 32 discrete mechanical elements to keep track of:  five aspects, three stunts, two refresh, six approaches, nine approach points, and one four-box stress track with three consequence slots.  So an ideal goal in designing an equally simple, elegant setting for Fate, is to have no more than 32-47 discrete mechanical elements to build from.

If you break down stunts into further quanta, you find that the default character in Fate Core has two physical and two mental stress boxes, with the potential for up to two more of each.  However this breaks down into a base of three shifts of physical and three of mental for a total of six stress shifts before getting to consequences.  If the character has a third stress box in one or both, they have a total of twelve shifts, and if they have four stress boxes in each they have a maximum of twenty shifts of stress.  Six, nine, twelve, sixteen, or twenty shifts… that makes the potential for a lot of granularity if you break down Resources into individual stress boxes, and makes it possible to connect Resources to treasury and storehouse type stress or conditions depending on how you design it.  That was a key issue in my decision to break up stress into individual single stress boxes; see FST 60.

So, what's the point?

As a mechanics light system, Fate requires a whole lot less to digest the crunch, and a whole lot less bookkeeping than say Pathfinder, or GURPS.  That is neither bad nor good in and of itself, as both of these are very well designed games, and both have a lot of thought behind their extensive mechanical crunch.  It is however a difference that is very important to my present taste in games, as spare time is much more precious a commodity for me at this time in my life.  But here's the problem; I am working on designing a political game and Fate is the engine I want to use.  However, a political game can be very much a very large wheels-within-wheels affair, and the level of mechanical complication could potentially add up very fast.  That is something I want to avoid which is what brought me to dig Fate in the first place, and yet I want the ability to account for many of those wheels within wheels anyway because I like verisimilitude.

So how do I get the big machine without big maintenance?  How can I get something that feels as big as reading Dune or A Distant Mirror or watching Game of Thrones?

Currently I have copies of two published Fate world books that beat me to print on settings that include a political angle (Romance in the Air, and House of Bards), but fortunately, they each fill a different niche, and neither one fits the niche that I want to design for.  The first assumes nations are important to the narrative, but they act in a distant canvas backdrop shaping the context for personal drama.  The second puts the point of view characters in the position of wheeling and dealing for influence in the districts that compose a large city.  I am looking for the middle ground with the faces and factions that push the action across the broad canvas.  As such, I need to address issues of not only personal and party political power, but all the tools of power from diplomatic to legal, from production to foreign trade, from spies to warfare.

The dials for this build are five aspects, five stunts, three refresh, and six approaches one of which includes a separate stress track.  In addition, there can be a number of extras in play at any given time that may regularly change, and multiple issues that are shared by some or all.

The prime movers in my design thinking should be the factions with their associated faces, and the treaties, accords, and compacts that provide soft leverage in the game.  Through these should be backed by the various tools of power from the soft power of diplomacy and trade to cajole, to the hard power of spies and armies to threaten, all backed by the factional agendas and signed treaties.  I did not want to have a massive amount of book keeping (I don't want a tabletop game about number crunching) but I wanted lots of options available on an ad hoc basis since cities and states have a lot more than individuals.

I chose five aspects for many of the reasons that Ryan Macklin discussed in Fateful Concepts: Character Aspects.  However, I knew that I wanted to create a stronger funneling mechanism for conflicting agendas which is why two treaty aspects each of which more or less inverts the more conventional crossing paths aspects in the default phase trio by creating links of conflict rather than cooperation.  Another design benefit of this decision, is that it dovetails nicely with the fact that the stunts dial is increased above standard, while the refresh dial is still default; there had to be a way to create more opportunities for compels to fuel the fate point economy, and at the same time, it encourages more use of the create an advantage action which is in my opinion, the most narrative oriented action which encourages more colorful story moments.

The resource stress track seemed to be an important consideration as I wanted to provide a more solid mechanical hook to hang the concept of abundance and destitution; this needed to be something that feels realistic and sometimes antagonistic in political decisions, without requiring a lot of mechanical book keeping.  A full treasury can directly add to your power to bargain, trade, and wage war, while the lack of resources can mercilessly drive your people into a morass of despair, desperation, and anarchy.  Mechanically in game, this also provided a neat way to essentially pay for ad hoc extras that are more or less equal to a stunt or aspect in play for that scene or season, and can then be disposed of to clean up the book keeping until you want or need them again unless you pay to keep them active in play.  An active trade fleet, assassin, or diplomatic mission, or army should be able to do a little more than the single use of an aspect or one refresh stunt, but still be disposable.  Thus, they are paid for by a combination of a successful created advantage supported by resources depending on their level of capability.  They should be disposable, so that other players can screw with you by pirating your ships, and sending your diplomats heads back home in a basket.

On the other hand, another factor in my design thinking, was trying to think of how to crack the nut of a problem that I had from the very first time I tried to make a political game:  the players almost immediately resorted to war as the most expedient method to get results.  In reality, war is costly and should as one Prussian general observed, be kept as diplomacy carried to its furthest extreme.  I wanted keeping armies to be a headache unless you really had burned all your other bridges.  By making armies expensive to keep, and factions and faces essentially free, the players will naturally discover that they can get more done for less that way… unless they have no more leverage with factions and faces and are backed into a corner.  War is very possible here, but costs a lot to keep up.

One thing I did not want was a vast amount of mandatory book keeping that has no immediate effect in a scene, but still give the feel of real capability and consequences in each arena of decision making as represented by the approaches.  That is why I settled on fire and forget or fragile economics, warfare, etc.  Armies, caravans, gold mines, and even patriotic movements are all as maintainable as you want and easily disposable when you have no more interest in them by making them largely ad hoc aspects introduced by create an advantage, and maintained by resources or simple overcome actions as long as you need them.  More important examples of the same can be promoted to stunt level elements which essentially equate to a permanently accessible invokable aspect in mechanical terms.

I plan to add more of my design thinking as I go.