When you’re designing a game, it can be helpful to ask—and answer—”what do I want my players to describe?” It’s probably not the first question you want to answer, but when you need to ask it, you know you will. It’s not quite the same as “what happens in my game”[1] because, importantly, it’s about what details your players will dwell on, what will give the game its texture.
Once you have some answers to that question, the next thing to consider is how to get your players to actually spend some effort describing those things. This is part of what Vincent’s whole thing about “rightward pointing arrows” was about. They’re one possible technique for making the things described in the fiction meaningful and important enough that people don’t gloss over details, and thus describe what you want them to.
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- Look at the wonderful illustrations from Dylan Meconis for the Italian edition of Dogs in the Vineyard for a great expression of “what happens” in Dogs. [↩]
Don’t overwork a mechanic.
For the purposes of this post, a mechanic is a set of procedures, defined by the game, that players go through at a table to resolve a conflict of player interest with respect to the world of the fiction. It may rely a lot or a little on randomness, but that’s not the point. The point is that this is something that the game designer has laid out as the way to sort out cruxes in the game’s story.
Right now, I’m working on Et in Arcadia Ego, a game about magicians in Regency England. It owes a lot to Susanna Clarke and Jane Austen. I’m trying to work out how to make the conflict mechanic work well. Like in any design process, I’ve been through many iterations of it. At this point, the mechanic has come back around to looking more like it did at the beginning than it did in the middle, but there have been a few darlings to kill along the way—tying the mechanic to various period card games, for example. At each step of the way, though, the changes I’ve made have made perfect sense to me, as they are responses to things I found to be wrong with a previous iteration. Sometimes the flaws were seen instantly, just on thinking about the mechanic, and sometimes they were seen only after playing with the mechanic a bit to get a feel for it. In any case, the changes grow out of the previous mechanic.
There’s a real risk here. The final mechanic, whatever it may be, makes perfect sense to me in terms of the history I have gone through to get there. I will be able to point to each bit of its design and say “the mechanic is this way because…”. But to someone who has just picked up the game, and who reads it, that mechanic may look very strange. Avoid this!
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