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So, after doing some testing, playing around with various mechanisms, writing out some flow charts, I realized that this wasn't working - that the foundation I was hoping to build on was, simply put, not there.
And going back and looking at why, it was because I was trying to make a game about the big picture, and make all games played fit into a fairly rigid loop of what the players were doing. And that tied back to my conceit that the players were, for narrative/anthropic/game reasons, the Important People whose decisions would Change The Future in big, mechanically spelled-out ways. And that kind of big picture play is really more appropriate to a game that has players in much more narrative roles than one in which their only levers on the setting are a single character's actions, with most of the narration offloaded on the GM. And while that's a valid game to play, it's not the game I wanted to create; it demands more of its players creatively and gives them more concrete, primitive actions to work with.
There were really two or more very different games being built, and eventually the contradictions piled up to the point where the whole thing couldn't stand up. So I'm backing up, looking at the wreck, seeing what pieces I can pull out, what I actually want to do, and where we go from here.
I think I need to continue designing DT as a much more 'conventional' RPG that has mechanics that support doing the things I want, rather than prescribing a specific game flow and campaign goals. As much as I admire the 'games as mind control' and 'every RPG is a one page RPG', it might not be the correct decision to approach this project from that angle. At the end of the day what I suspect I really want is an RPG that's explicitly simulationist, that gives GMs and players the tools to create a fantasy world of transhuman adventure - and that what I have been missing, what I have really wanted, is simply a better toolbox. In a sense I have always been doing this, insofar as I've been assuming distinct roles for GMs and players along the well-trodden lines of basically every RPG out there.
With that in mind, I'm going to start listing some of the thoughts I have on specific mechanics, specific systems, and some open questions I have with regard to big design questions.
Skills, Direct
I think I've pretty much settled on a "Skill + 2d10 vs Difficulty" as my most likely main mechanic; the 2d10 because it's a fairly flat curve, and to keep the numbers small and manageable. I've chosen the "roll, add and compare" method rather than "roll under" because it cleanly separates the inherent difficulty of the task from the various factors that might aid or hinder a character.
It's familiar, it's simple, and we can load the variance one way or another by allowing players to roll extra dice (and keep only the top/bottom two).
I'd be looking to condense the core skills down to a fairly small list - no more than fifteen distinct skills, and then some subsystems to allow specialization. Note that skills here mostly refers to things that are done in the context of the character's immediate actions and surroundings, and not things like 'what the character knows', or handling long-term projects. I'm trying to think about the level of specialization I need to recognize here; my goal with "characters have skills" as a thing is to create the fantasy of controlling skilled individuals with distinct histories, talents. There are a couple of different possibilities that I might end up using to support that:
- Familiarity: A kind of binary 'are they familiar enough with this thing to apply their skills in this context'.
- Specialization: A distinct subcategory of a skill that would have its own rating and apply a bonus. Some specializations might function as familiarity gates.
- Tricks/Stunts: Specific things you can do using a skill in a way others can't.
- Synergy: Ways of combining skills in unexpected ways in certain situations, with a character's own skills or with other characters.
Skills, Indirect
In Eclipse Phase, and a lot of other games, skills like 'doing scientific research' and 'shooting a person with a gun' are unified by the same mechanics. This is done for a good reason (keeping mechanics simple and consistent), but in some areas the way different activities are carried out - when they're carried out, how they're carried out, are different enough that it's worth considering if they need to be separate mechanics. In the case where the dice and the character's skill are answering questions like "how well do I evade someone I'm running from" and "how do coax the information out of the nervous contact", the simple unified system to decided based on weighted randomness is probably the best solution.
However, for activities that are long duration, highly abstract, and more creatively involved, different mechanics are needed. Having two different 'basic' mechanics seems like the right choice in two ways. First in that giving explicit mechanics and rules to create things is the most straightforward way of getting players to do those things. Second in that handing off control to a more abstracted mechanic with more narrative 'push' is a way to avoid create fantasy of controlling a competent character without needing to bog down the game in hours of planning and micromanagement, especially when that planning and micromanagement involve situations that are literally beyond human comprehension (as I would expect a transhumanist game to quickly run into).
My assumption thus far has been than this sort of mechanic will involve spending points from a pool, where the points represent some abstract level of time or resources; this could be separate pools for different things (one pool for business contacts, one for military planning, etc) or a single pool (shared among a party or team?) with skills modifying how much 'bang' you get for each pool point spent. I'm less certain on this. To the extent that these sorts of 'skills' represent things external to the character (their contacts, the institutions they embody or control, their wealth), they might be different from 'skills' that are more literally skills, even if they function in a similar manner. Those that function more explicitly as social context might have a component of worldbuilding to them in addition to defining the character.
In the original DT concept this would be spending points to create 'nodes' where 'nodes' represent institutions, advantages, etc, with strong mechanical representation and effects on the state of technology and tipping points. I'm not sure how much of this concept will survive, given the decreased emphasis on that play mode.
Characteristics, Motivations, Psychology
I've thus far avoided having anything like 'basic stats' for a character, and I think that that's going to continue. Having something like 'basic stats' for a character's perception, strength, etc, tend to be just a layer of obfuscation on top of skills or a mechanism to juggle buying costs, which I don't really think of as a useful measure.
That said, how to represent a character's basic psychology is a big part of what I want to touch on, but it's something that I think will need to be handled...fairly delicately. If you're ever having a rule dictate to the player what their character does, you have a problem.
So there is a need for a system here to incentivize player behavior. The closest thing I've seen is something like WoD's Virtue/Vice or Nature system, though that isn't really sufficient. My current thoughts on what I need are a bit scattered, but include:
- Players should be incentivized to play their character's psychology, and have an interesting psychology in the first place.
- Players should be capable of changing their psychology, through experience but also through technology.
- Some psychological traits are straight up better than others in significant ways. Sometimes, experience just makes you a better person - and sometimes, technology does. Similarly, this same system should be able to handle mental incapability and illness.
- For extra fancy points, things like brilliant pattern recognition and obsessive compulsive disorder might be linked in non-obvious ways - not always, but as an option.
- I don't know yet whether or not the players need the ability to use this system against non-player characters (as part of persuasion, manipulation, or more direct subversion), but I suspect that I will.
- Ideally this will tie into more general purpose mechanics to subvert a system, but that seems difficult in practice.
Ideally, this would be unified with the skill system, and things like "being good at piloting aircraft" would be psychological trait that could be modified via experience or technology like any other trait, though this might prove unwieldy for actual play.
This is a big chunk of what I want to accomplish and the least fleshed out, so there's a lot of work to be done here. I might go so far as to say that, if there's a one page RPG in this, this is where it would need to be found.
Setting
My initial assumptions with Diamond Tangent was that it was, essentially, settingless; to the extent that it offered a setting at all it was 'sometime in the future', and what it was offering was not a setting full of details and places and interesting things but rather a set of paints and brushes to paint a future in broad strokes, according to the dictates of a particular game and its assumptions or questions about technology and the future.
Now...I'm less sure that that's the right course. On the one hand, it's easy to horribly fuck up world building, and even when you don't fuck up people might disagree with you because of politics, or for any number of communication issues. On the other hand, not doing the worldbuilding just means that the GM has to do (some) of it, deny both player and GM the chance to look over a world and decide where they want to play, and robs me, the game designer, of the ability to support the game's themes, aesthetic, and gameplay through setting.
This one I'm torn on. If I do any worldbuilding, I'll do it last (because that's a big, addictive rabbit hole to go down), but I'm at the point where I'm not sure it's possible to avoid doing it entirely.
Technology
The initial concept of the technology tree was something of an inverted mirror of Night's Black Agents' Conspyramid and Vampyramid; it took the tropes of 4X games and re-imagined them as a combination of tools that the GM could use to plot out a future course by imagining the course future technology could take - and then, critically, allowed players or events in-game to change how a technology is expressed or where it goes.
Ultimately this seemed to fall apart, for the simple reason that it was trying to make simple and mechanical parts of the game that couldn't afford to be. So while the goal of the game is no longer, necessarily, the management of technological and existential revolutions in the abstract, I still want DT to be a game at least partially about changing technology.
My current thought on the matter is that this might be an excellent use of the equipment pages. It seems, if you've read many RPG books, that inevitably, tables and lists of equipment (or magic spells, which are basically equipment) seem to take over far larger chunks of the book than their ostensible importance to the RPG itself. For a game about technology, however, using equipment - how a device is introduced to the world, what happens when it becomes ubiquitous, what the initial prototypes can do compared to the refined versions - can reinforce the idea that the current technological state is transitory, provide players (or antagonists) concrete advantages for being on the bleeding edge of technology, and highlight how advancing technology can be frightening, no matter which side of the bleeding edge you're on. An actual explicit tech tree may or may not be needed; if there's one thing that will get players to sit down and pay attention to questions of setting technology, it's making their toybox dependent on details of the setting.
Of course, all of this implicitly assumes that there's a setting, or something close enough to one that 'table of equipment' can be a thing.
(And, of course, you still need to support players advancing technology, trying to prevent specific advances, etc.)
Action, Initiative, and Stalking
The simple, expected method of handling action is to basically have everyone roll some kind of 'initiative' dice, and then have everyone act in order in bursts of a few seconds, and then rinse and repeat. While I'm stealing a lot of underlying assumptions from other RPGs, this isn't necessarily one of them.
I have a bunch of things that I want to question or look for alternatives in terms of conventional RPG design, and a few ideas for things that seem like they might work (but for the life of me I can't figure out how).
- The dichotomy between 'slow' time where everything is tracked to small numbers of seconds and 'fast' time where time is essentially not tracked seems like a false one. Hell, in old school D&D a 'turn' was ten minutes, and most of the game took place in those. Perhaps resurrecting the concept of a turn, or at least more tightly coupling mechanics to some sort of implied time frame, would be worth it?
- The assumption that everyone sees everyone else when 'in combat'. The problem being, of course, when you're going around shooting each other with modern firearms - nevermind future railguns and smart missiles - most 'combat' takes place with the different sides either at large distances or not in direct line of sight to each other. If you think of movie or video game conflict between armed gunman, the game is often one of cat and mouse, rather than direct standup brawl where one eventually burns through the other's luck/shields/armor and lands the killing blow.
- Presumably, this involves making tradeoffs between motion to get into position or evade an enemy, observation to locate an opponent (or at least where they aren't), and stealth (ie, hiding).
- One experience I had recently was playtesting someone else's homebrew RPG system. One thing that struck me was the system for turn order - in this game, everyone declared their actions from the lowest initiative to the highest, and then resolved those actions from the highest to the lowest. Being higher in the initiative order was a huge advantage, but it was an interesting advantage, as, with the ability to preempt and second-guess the opponent's moves, an otherwise rote tactical system became an interesting puzzle to decipher. The ability to mechanically 'outguess' the opponent strikes me as a great way of representing transhuman capability (or simply being 'inside the decision cycle' of an opponent), and allows the GM to create deadly, numerous, competent (ie, the GM doesn't need to pull punches on their tactics) opposition and let the players have the tools to outsmart and defeat them.
- Obviously, this is easier said than done - and ideally, there would be some kind of interplay, room for feints and deception. Still, if you uncouple the precise timing, and are willing to uncouple the declaration and resolution of actions, there may be plenty of room to build a combat system that by its nature creates these sorts of interesting tactical problems by putting players ahead of the information curve (most of the time, anyway).
How exactly to implement stalking gameplay, is a big question, and as far as I know I've never seen it done. I have some ideas - the idea of an 'evasion' counter that you build up and expend (and throw away if you start sprinting, or shooting) - but it's a big question, as is whether or not the idea of stalking gameplay is compatible with variant initiative ideas discussed above.
Subversion
Subversion, in my view, is getting a system to do something you want, that it wasn't intended to do, by using knowledge of deeper/lower-level components. Hacking gets the computer to do what you want by using your knowledge of the code that makes it up. Social engineering gets the bureaucracy to do something its rules forbid by using your knowledge of the humans that make it up. Persuasion causes a human to change their beliefs or actions in a way they otherwise wouldn't by leveraging knowledge of underlying impulses, desires, and mental shortcuts.
I don't know if these things need a unified system, but I sure would like one - it fits the theme of the game perfectly, and since 'subversion' describes a basic, common activity for an adventure-centric game, giving players a tool kit they can proactively go out there and use on the world can be almost nothing but good.
Transhumanism/Posthumanism
I toyed around with the idea of explicitly making characters swap out character sheets as they upgrade. Something like that still might be around (if only to get players to clear off their damned sheets), but I've turned pretty hard against the idea of making transhumanism explicit in the mechanics. The fact that you can upgrade your own psychology is transhumanism; if you include that, I think the rest follows.
One of the original ideas was that, as technology advanced, you were on an inevitable course for posthumanity, and once you got there the game ended. As much as I liked what the said (or just the fact that it was saying something), I don't think that's appropriate. A more interesting question is whether or not non-human (AGI, Uplift, Synthetic, etc) characters are appropriate, and whether or not, or at what point, a character is 'unplayable'. I think that I need to explicitly answer that question, especially if I'm going to include some kind of 'posthuman' or 'exhuman' designation.
I was also initially considering engaging posthumanism; more specifically the idea that we're blurring the lines between our selves and our (social, ecological, technological) environment, but...well, to be honest I've already got enough stuff that I'd like to add that posthumanism doesn't make the priority queue. Maybe it will emerge naturally from some other system, but I'm not holding my breath.
On the gripping hand...
I started out this whole thing by turning against open_sketchbook's "one page RPG design philosophy". But maybe it would pay to revisit the idea, and after having spilt all that digital ink, see where we originally started and if there are other ways we can re-phrase the original concept into one or more different ideas that might be the seed for a new game (and that might grow like some sort of game-Shoggoth to encompass its protoplasmic siblings and add their strength to it).
The design document skeleton from open_sketchbook's "Cancel Your Fantasy Heartbreaker" presentation:
- Devise a Tone
- Match to a Conceit
- Determine the Conflicts in the Conceit
- Determine Outcomes of the Conflict
- Create your Mechanism
The original skeleton of Diamond Tangent:
Diamond Tangent is a cold, speculative game about transhumans managing technological change and existential crises. Players seek to push tipping points in a favored direction by subversion and manipulation and are drawn into often violent conflict with reactionary forces. The push and pull of the conflict tilts the tipping point into a resolution (sometimes chaotically), so the players use lateral thinking and transhuman capabilities to push things in the right direction.
I still think this could be a very good game, but it wasn't the direction I ended up going. The mechanism in particular is lacking (how exactly do you 'use lateral thinking'?), but there's definitely the core of something there.
Is there a viable method to re-rail the project back to this (or, at least, make this work and see if I still feel the need to make this other thing)? Are there any other game 'skeletons' that make sense for this document, or for what it seems like I've been grasping towards? Well:
ALEPH is a
tense, thrilling game about
transhuman agents attempting to conspire for security and certainty in chaotic times. Players are
both hunter and hunted in search for technology and secrets, and
so risk discovery, capture, death and worse to secure their objectives. This is accomplished by
balancing patient exploitation of information advantages against limited resources/time and omnipresent chances of failure.
BETA is a
tense, speculative game about
transhuman conspiracies on the bleeding edge of technology and society.
Competing visions over what the future of humanity will be create confrontations between players and other factions, so
finances, social orders, and technologies are won and lost . This is
accomplished by spending limited resources to create assets and tools that can influence outcomes.
GAMMA is a
speculative, psychological game about
transhuman creations involved in conspiracies on the bleeding edge of technology.
Existential shocks create technological horrors that must be contained or survived, so
players must choose what they will sacrifice to defeat the threat. This is accomplished by
subverting systems and people by manipulation of their deeper layers.
...there seems to be something there. I might be able to do more, even, and all of these seem like good ideas. It's also possible I'm just bad at recognizing good ideas. In any case, it's another line of attack on the problem (though not on the 'Acat cannot design mechanisms' problem).
(Basically: help me,
@open_sketchbook Kenobi. I am super confuse. Also other people who design games and stuff.
@MJ12 Commando ? Other people I've bothered with this stuff?)
