Design Update #5 - Killing Your Darlings

It’s time for another design update!

If you’re new here, I’m working on my first ever TTRPG, a spooky Halloween game where players take the rolls of trick-or-treaters who gain powers from their costumes and fight decorations. I’m sharing the design process of this game in not only in these design updates, but also through a podcast! You can find the latest episode here, where I work out a character creation system.

Last Time

In the last design update article, I looked at starting the character creation process, and I compared two different player character systems, one skill-tree based and one a Powered By The Apocalypse style playbook based.

I wondered if either system was the right fit, and struggled to come up with a concrete answer. As I’d discover over the next few weeks, my struggles were rooted in a deeper issue…

The Right System?

Okay, I know, the last update was literally called “The Right Direction?”. I wondered if I was being a bit too ambitious with the project, and could instead find a solution that connected players with the fantasy of creating a magical costume to the character building process.

In last week’s episode, I took that research and developed a character creation system, and put it to the test! It worked quite well, and Zoe, my playtester, seemed to connect to her character despite a lack of finalized mechanics.

I went back to work on those mechanics, and also to develop out a relationship system that would connect the players to one another.

Let’s recap what the game looks like as of right now:

• Players take the role of teenagers who use magically enchanted costumes to fight possessed Halloween decorations.

• These characters are built up of three mechanical elements: an archetype, a costume genre, and an offensive style.

• The dice system follows the Powered By The Apocalypse system, which uses moves and a 2d6 system to resolve action.

• Combat is taken in turns, where each player can spend ‘turn points’ to make specific actions on their turn. Different abilities cost a different number of turn points. Combat also uses an entirely different 2d6 based system.

• Relationships are mechanically important, where the tensions of the player characters assist or hinder them from their goal.

That’s a lot of elements! I sat down to design the relationship system, and I was stuck. I tried designing two approaches to the system.

The first approach used a sliding scale of conditions that define individual relationships. Something like Strained - Stable - Supportive, or with a more engaging name. Having a Strained relationship between your character and another players might mean you couldn’t support one another mechanically, whereas a Supportive relationship could give you bonuses in combat or with recovering wounds.

The second system I tried had players generating a resource, Tension, throughout the session to spend on their abilities.

Neither of these systems were working, and I was forced to try something else.

The “Rainbow”

I took to the discord for fellow Substack podcast Dice Exploder to ask some of the designers there about my struggles. I knew what I wanted the game to be about, but I haven’t felt that the game has been capturing that feeling yet.

I was asked to describe the feeling I wanted to evoke a the table, and this was my answer.

Sam, the host of Dice Exploder, gave me some good feedback, clearly getting to the heart of that feeling.

It’s about the tension between being the hero your costume enables you to be, or being the scared kid facing the dangers of the night. THAT’S a eureka moment. That tension felt hidden beneath layers of mechanical complexity that didn’t speak to the themes I wanted the game to explore. That’s the rainbow I’d found back in the first episode, and I’d let myself drift too far away from it.

A New Direction

What does that discovery mean? Well, it’s basically inspired me to change a lot of the underlying systems in the game. I think I’m not going to go with the PBTA engine, or the 2d6 combat system I was working on, and instead try something else that makes the aforementioned tension mechanically present.

I think what this means is more abstraction than the previous system. More options for actions in the game might be covered by a single type of action, and more of the decision making will be up to narrative description and the base conversation of the game!

Essentially, I’ve suddenly made a lot more work for myself! On next week’s episode, we’ll be breaking down the dice system and talking about layout and design, so I’ll see you there!

Other cool things

This past week, I got to write about Wait, Roll That Again! in Victoria University of Wellington’s student magazine, Salient. You can check out that article here.

And in issue #159 of The Indie RPG Newsletter, Wait Roll That Again! was featured in the Media of the Week section! Thanks for the shoutout, Thomas!

We’ll be back with another episode next Thursday!