QM's Retrospect
Looks like the votes feedback is in, and the consensus is that the narrative captures the struggle of living in the City, and that we can feed the mechanics to the Rats. For those curious about what the quest looked like from the QM's perspective, and if there's any lessons to be learned on what to do and what not to do for other QM hopefuls, read on!
I. What went right - the writing
II. What went wrong - the mechanics
III. What went interesting - the players
IV. Responses
I. What went right - the writing
Brainstorming
At first, I wanted to let the players be the President of W Corp. Raising a company from walnut to Wing! The drama of acquiring a Singularity, researching the commercial potential, expanding business to other Districts, protecting trade secrets, dealing with Old W Corp... the rise of a Wing is fit for a grand epic.
Except Limbus Company was coming out. I had a lot of anxiety about canon stabbing my ideas in the face because nothing wrecks immersion like contradicting canon. And I had no idea about what the rest of the City would be like.
I then played MetaHuman Inc., and that scratched my "raise a Wing" itch (I still hate time travel plots, but I can recommend giving it a shot!).
In the end, a month went into scenario-planning before I decided to scrap my original idea.
What else could I do? Go small-scale for a more personal story.
Cleanup crews embody the banality of evil. Show up to work, suppress passengers, clock out. What about the story of such a corporate drone trying to make it in a soulless City? And then, because W Corp. must operate their train stations under the eyes of a wary host Wing in every District... which Wing would be the most interesting host?
Through gritted teeth, W Corp. has to pay an arm and leg to that awful L Corp.
And if L Corp. is hated so much, I bet that'll cause an interesting family rift. The old generation that wants the child to follow the worn path, but the new generation that wants to make a better future. The parents can physically embody L Corp. as the antagonists.
A good interactive story should have multiple variables to create a variety of possible endings, analogous to a normal fiction's subplots to enrich the story. And so, I have:
Plotting
Mythcreants has a nice word for plotting: fractals. A big story is the combination of smaller stories (I'll call these "scenes"), which I used to keep an eye on word counts and pacing. The actual structure I use is three (four?) acts: I, IIa, IIb, and III to develop tension.
At the macro level, each story path (asset, love, and cooking) has a specific story. We're familiar with assets; love would've been a romance with the goal of keeping Ji-Min and the Fixer love interest alive after L Corp. learns that they know too much; and cooking would've been like the League of Nine, District 12 edition (this was before Limbus Company came out!).
I had a rough idea of what missions would happen each week at the macro level. Missions were there to advance the macro plot as a logical progression and followed a general three-week pattern for each act: preparation, battle, then rest / interlude and revelation. For example, Act IIb's first half goes: tour District 11, terrorize District 11, then rest and learn about the Seven's investigation, all occurring because Dias wants W Corp. to push buttons (and because I mentioned fractals, tour is act IIb's act I, and terrorize is act IIb's act IIa... and to really blow minds, events in the tour scene and terrorize scene were each plotted with the same structure, but that's blurrier). Because W Corp. was pushing buttons, W Corp. must deal with the Seven investigation, setting up Act IIb's second half. And so on.
The weekly level is based on crew politics and QM opportunism (e.g., Kandy scandal). A week is made up of multiple scenes, including the missions and passenger-of-the-week.
Passengers were ideas and whoever struck my fancy during brainstorming. Companies make for great combatants. G Corp. makes insect people, but I bet that the subsidiaries can find markets for different animal people. Associations and Syndicates are freebies. One idea that didn't get a chance was dealing with a passenger who didn't restore properly due to a scanner malfunction.
The actual fighting, as you might guess, follows act structure: enemy introduction, initial struggles and triumph, enemy comeback, and climax.
Setting and Worldbuilding
What kind of place is the City? I figured that there might be some influences from South Korean society for context, given that Project Moon is based in South Korea, and so I researched.
I concluded that the City is a couple dozen South Koreas thrown onto a genre salad.
For those who haven't seen it, there's a video essay saying South Korea is a cyberpunk dystopia. I find it hard not to compare a Nest and South Korea.
When you have terms for death by overwork like Gwarosa and a 69-hour national workweek can even be proposed (and defeated, thankfully), I can conclude that the South Korea already shares the hypercompetitive zeitgeist with the City.
South Korea has obligatory military service.
With a little imagination, in a world where the 69-hour workweek has the clout to pass and the military that everyone needs to participates in finds more "active" usage (e.g., megacorp gets ideas), Wings and Fixers aren't far away. When we start blending it all together, we can get an idea of how the Nests and the City at large works. That is, keep your head down and do what you can to survive.
Next, I go from high-level setting to the next lower level, Districts. For L Corp.'s District 12, when I think "authoritarian and smoggy", I think of China. In a District where smog is prevalent, it becomes natural to wear gas masks as part of the culture. Conveniently, gas masks also serve to conceal identities. For Wings working in District 12, they should have some way to deal with smog; W Corp. has their gas masks as a "technology" Wing, and L Corp. provides augments to let their Fixers "embrace" the smog.
For the Backstreets, although it features briefly, I again borrowed a few elements from China.
When it comes to worldbuilding, it's about finding ways to depict the shared life experience. Lots of smog? Smog mask fashion. Lots of theft and violence? Practical clothing is always chic. Affluent communities can have television and watch popular shows. Even the poorest can sing and dance. Lots of people enjoy sports. Omnipotent overlord with a thing for purging? Language can incorporate it as idioms and phrases.
Concept Generator: Characters
Anyone who wasn't submitted by the voters was assembled from multiple generators, because I wouldn't be surprised if Project Moon does the same. Name is RNG (but reselected if the first letter is also someone else's first letter to make tracking easier), gender is RNG (40% M, 40% F, 20% T), personality is RNG (with the exception of a few major NPCs). Description is employer-themed and caught my interest at the time. Everyone also has a randomly-generated hobby to help me know them, even if it doesn't get into the quest (e.g., the Director watched "City's Got Fixers").
Special shoutout to Naveed; I briefly tried out another generator and got a spoiled serial murderer ("Killed her sister when she was young!? And... has the unfortunate tendency to bump off her friends!?")
Writing Process
There's a thing called "life" that I need to deal with before I get to write. It's either wake up early ("Who's going to wake up to write at three in the morning?" "Oh boy, 3AM!") or fight off the exhaustion after a long day ("Two minutes shuteye, then I finish this scene before sl... ahhh it's 2AM.").
My schedule is ideally: Mon - chapter plotting; Tue - more plotting and rolling dice; Wed-Sat - writing (which is about 500 words for me, and Sat. is usually 1000+ words), Sun - Craft decisions, editing, and posting.
The power of deadlines helped me a lot because I know what it's like to expect the next chapter of a serial to post at its usual time. Good habits of writing regularly make it more likely to happen. Chunking the chapter into actionable milestones and spreading it out daily makes writing less intimidating.
I still sometimes procrastinate, and my self-hack is to make myself start something for a few minutes and let the flow take over.
II. What went wrong - the mechanics
For those who hated the mechanics, you'll get a kick from the next line.
I spent three months "perfecting" the mechanics.
One month to iterate the mechanics to v4. One month to playtest the mechanics (and narrative!) and iterate to v5. One more month of playtesting and then iterating to v5.1. 1 can't tell you how sick I was of W Corp. when the quest finally opened on SV, but at least I can now look back on it with nostalgia. Fun fact: the "Hell Month" that Blaine mentioned was the stress test on the v5 passenger battle system!
But all the time spent on perfecting the mechanics doesn't matter if it flops. In that case, let's review the development process and identify what may have become confusing and off-putting.
The best mechanics should:
Tension is the development of stress to the boiling point, and relief is the release of tension, and it appears everywhere: games, stories, deadlines etc. For example, boosting speed at the cost of health. Dare I boost with a 10% health bar? Ahh, here comes the recharge strip.
Theme should reflect the mechanics. Pilots risking their life to eke out a little advantage will probably be larger-than-life machos, not a baby with the pacifier still in her mouth.
How did I apply it for this quest?
Rapport-Favors? To gain allies, the player should develop positive relations and social capital with NPCs. A positive relationship should be fair and not one-sided; give-and-take in this quest should look like work-related help. The request-for-favors portion, however, was a confusing black box for the players despite my goal of transparency and the huge role that it had in v5. I would keep this in some form across any iterations, but for a v6, make increasing rapport easier (e.g., group chats or select up to two agents) and change how favors get used mechanically.
Effort Rolls? For reasons of self-interest, agents will hold back on the job; politics is managing others' self-interests to achieve a community objective. In v5.1, it went agent-by-agent to account for the player's individual relations and the NPC's immediate needs and narrative actions. For a v6, I would revise this into a summary crew effort roll for simplicity.
HP? Great for measuring how close the player is to dying and representing how much "effort" the player has left to spend. For a v6, I would remove NPC's HP and let a bad crew effort roll kill someone. And because I'd remove permadeath (more below), change the consequences of a "dead" player.
AP? The intention here was to force self-interest vs. crew interest by divvying where "effort" gets spent and stop the player from overexertion. For v6, in combination with other changes and choice presentation, AP would become redundant and I can get rid of certain confusing calculations.
PAR? Varies the enemy difficulty and warning. W Corp. is a megacorp with access to tons of personal data, so Cleanup shouldn't be caught off-guard too often. I would keep this in any iteration.
Asset's crew powers? This got a massive buff from v5 to v5.1; previously, only the no-strike benefit existed. Because there would be changes for a v6, the functionality for asset's crew powers would change in some form.
Meltdown? Counterbalanced easy enemies and encourages NPCs to open up about themselves. For a v6, tying this to the summary crew effort roll would make this mechanic redundant.
Emergencies? Dangerous enemies make bad situations worse. With better choice presentation, this mechanic would become redundant.
Captainship? My big regret with the mechanic is that it doesn't capture the NPC's leadership abilities. For a v6, I would like to add bonuses or modify how the choices get presented somehow.
Strikes? It would've played a larger role in a non-asset playthrough, so not much data here. In v6, it would probably deal mechanically with the player alone, and the narrative handles it for NPCs.
Saving throws? Safety feature as of v2, I would keep this in some form across all iterations.
Rabbit Protocol? I'd keep the get-out-of-train free card in any iteration.
Assets? The part where all the plot happens... the mechanics are a lot simpler than Cleanup, as of v5. For a v6, I would utilize more guest characters; letting the player considering whether to visit District 11 and satisfy Katherine has more meaning than an easy-hard battle.
Permadeath? In this quest, the theme and mechanics literally revolve around survival in an uncaring hostile environment. I also wanted to suppress the players' desire to be kind and helpful at the expense of self; when they want to bet everything to be a hero, they'll actually be a hero. Therefore, I included permadeath with the balance of disclosing the impact of each decision to maximize perception of fair play and increase odds of survivability. Where possible, I made options that risked permadeath avoidable. And yet, despite being a compatible quest... for v6, I would remove permadeath. Despite my original precautions, the quest almost sank regardless. I kid you not, nothing scares a QM with a story to share more than a single saving throw with the quest at stake. Don't learn the hard way; QMs should avoid the player permadeath mechanic at all costs.
...Lots of room for improvement, huh.
"Hey QM, why didn't you catch all this before starting the quest?"
I stopped the worst of it! If I barfed v1 and crossed my fingers, battles would've had math for blow-by-blow, PAR for every day of the in-game week, Rabbits that kill half the crew when called, and selecting the best weapon for ATK / DEF / SPD / Ability / Charge against the enemy's stats. I barely finished playtesting a single battle before moving into v2.
What I want to emphasize is that, at some point, the product needs to ship. Development time was already two months narrative and three months of mechanics; that's five months for a quest by an unknown QM that others may or may not want to play. When I was comfortable enough to run the quest as a v5 expert and only felt like minor changes were necessary to go from v5 to v5.1, I made the call that the cost of more mechanical development and playtesting outweighed the benefits.
Development is only a third of the battle. The rest is revisions / playtesting.
Bonus! Potential v6 passenger battle:
[] Hustler. Team with Rama and Blaine. Spend 30HP and roll d6. If d6 = 1, Rama dies. If d6 = 2, decrease Favors -1 with Blaine.
[] Opportunist. Team with Lorine and Irmtraud. Spend 10HP and roll d6. If d6 < 4, decrease Favors -1 with Lorine and Ji-Min takes -10HP. In addition, if d6 = 1, Lorine dies.
[] Slacker. Roll d6. If d6 = 3, Ji-Min takes -50HP and decease Rapport -4 with Chelsey. If d6 < 3, kill two of the following agents: Lorine, Rama, Blaine.
[] Rabbit Protocol. Clear the battle.
...The choices available and stakes at play would depend on the Captain's mood and the bonds with other agents. And since this decision stands on its own, a nice chunk of the v5 rules becomes unnecessary.
What went interesting - the players
Before I opened the quest on SV, my research suggested that the average player wants to do the nice thing where possible. That conflicts with the average City denizen's mindset of everyone-for-themselves. Indeed, I envisioned this quest as the story of gradually losing everything while dying inside.
This quest, like living in the City, is more painful when fighting for someone. Naturally, the players chose to make it hard on themselves.
When the players decided to be an asset, I figured that we'd be slamming the door in the face of Ji-Min's mother. I mean, we're a loyal asset, obviously we're going to sever our family ties because the family aligns with L Corp., right? I had a thing planned where the Director would make himself Ji-Min's pillar of support to increase her reliance on W Corp., then come to think of her as the daughter he never had.
Well.
Despite zero obvious benefits and very obvious drawbacks, the players elected to spend time with Ji-Min's mother, which set the stage for major future events.
When the decision to kill or spare Ji-Min's father came up, I was really curious about what would happen. The desire to keep Ji-Min close to her parents vs. the rightfully-feared brain surgery. It was close, but "kill" edged out. This might sound a little twisted, but I'm pleased that I was able to watch a Wing's influence overpower even familial relations.
For those curious about the alternate timeline where "spare" won, the plan was to program Ji-Min so that she would black out and attack her parents on sight. Teresa would introduce himself as L Corp.'s spy and have Ji-Min find a way during her missions to relay intelligence to L Corp.; in exchange, he would incrementally undo her programming. Teresa would still betray W Corp. and flee alone, leaving Ji-Min to her fate. W Corp. would accuse Ji-Min of treason based on her frequent interactions with Teresa, but if crew rapport was high enough, "accept" that she was innocent. During the Smoke War, Ji-Min would be "marked for death", running a mission disguised as suicide. Her parents would intercept, then ask her to flee District 12 and lay out a plan to do so. The final showdown would be Ji-Min and her parents against Katherine and other W Corp. assets. At the end, Ji-Min is alone in the Backstreets, rebuilding her life and hiding her status as W Corp. property, and knows that her parents opted to erase their own memories to protect where she's hiding in case W Corp. captures them.
All that work to be with her parents. Because I'm a nice QM, I would've granted five minutes for Ji-Min to be truly united with her family.
What else is there... ah. The players were also pro-crew in situations that I think were self-detrimental.
Remember how that cat girl passenger, Cahaya, nearly killed Bahij during an emergency and he needed rescue? Bahij was more-or-less a fresh recruit without ties to others; that's a strong candidate for sacrifice, especially considering that a major mission was coming up and Ji-Min needed to be in good shape to do a good job. The mission... was forgotten in the heat of the moment.
And of course, there's that whole Kandy scandal. At this point in the quest, the players had a low Max HP Ji-Min. W Corp. would need to balance that by rewarding the players a 1-UP so that she could stay alive for the side project. Ji-Min nearly died, so it became more like a bribe to convince Ji-Min to allow Teresa to repair her brain. Since a good roleplay allows players to make decisions, one option that I included was to use the Kandy to help others, which I figured would be ignored. I mean, after a brush with death and the freaking Branch Manager's warning about helping others, I thought that the players would make it to the end of the quest easily.
Well.
That lead to the scandal and another interesting decision: Director or Branch Manager? I thought that the players would pick Branch Manager; the dude has resources, a less-strained relation than Ji-Min & Director, and is more likely to have positive connections with HQ.
Well!
For those curious about a Branch Manager timeline... he would question whether Ji-Min should stay alive. The Branch Manager has enough enemies, after all, and if those enemies could get Ji-Min's brain to Internal Affairs, that would be swell. The players would need to convince the Branch Manager that she was worth the risk.
But we live in a Director timeline, where the big question is what Blaine had in mind. Yes, she was reluctantly working against Ji-Min, and if the players declined mind-reading, the post-Teresa battle would've had Blaine and some "assets" show up, announce that Kwame was dead and escape route compromised, and ask Ji-Min and co. to follow her. After all, the Branch Manager needs to ensure that his enemies can't use Ji-Min before Internal Affairs issues the verdict. Katherine would call out Blaine as a traitor, and Ji-Min would have to decide who to trust. Trusting Blaine there would've been a bad ending. Upon winning with Katherine, Blaine's head would be delivered as a smoking gun to Internal Affairs.
I don't think that I could've ever picked an interesting route through the quest like the players, but the story that we created was stronger for it.
IV. Responses
...And append each of these with "Thank you for riding with WARP!"
I'm glad to see that I achieved an emotion that I wanted.
Be they Rats or Feathers, they all get to suffer in their unique ways.
Project Moon does a great job of balancing levity and grittiness, and I'll strive to do the same if I run a similar quest like this one. And I'll take a look at Katherine & Ji-Min and reflect on where I could develop it better.
It's not enough to win; others must fail.
I'll work on finding a better balance of heavy and light for next time. Looks like I got the dilemmas down, at least.
I'm glad that it managed to find an end, too, and not a Game Over end.
A lot of characters sure died on his quest, huh. More crew died than I thought would actually die based on playtesting. But Ji-Min and co. are still alive and still have opportunities in their future because they fought for it, which is actually better than what I managed in my playtesting; my protagonist was dead-eyed and depressed, being hated by the entire crew but strongly liked by management, while boarding a train to HQ.
The template plans were also there to keep me covered in case there were zero voters. I was also getting nervous that key mechanics would be overlooked and that a plan would drive the quest to an early death.
I went into more detail in the writing section above, but I can summarize missions and train scenarios for you as brainstorming and act-structured plotting to manage tension.
The moment that we started walking the asset path, a bittersweet ending became the happy ending. And the rolls! None of you are going to District 10 with me, that's for sure.
I think the number-crunching posters were the only ones who understood the system. If I do another quest, it'll be much simpler.
Ji-Min will meet her spouse at the wedding altar.
Yup, Blaine reluctantly bad. Her last words: "Please save me... my family needs me..." Had she lived, Blaine would've had to decide whether she could deceive and kill Ji-Min during the Teresa mission... and she would have, but maybe not without tears.
Think keeping a romance in the City is hard? It's even harder when L Corp. thinks you know too much. Cooking route would've been like the League of Nine.
If I run another quest, I'll look forward to seeing you again.
I'm glad that I was able to write Katherine correctly. There's something enjoyable about getting into a creator's head and Interpreting their desires.
I felt like a sack of garbage back after I plotted the quest. And I thought, if I feel like garbage, maybe someone else will feel something.
You picked a good time to pick up on Blaine.
The saving grace with the mechanics was that I could set it aside and just use it as the NPC death calculator. Being able to convert into a more narrative-style helped, and if I were to redesign the voting system, I already have ideas on how to make it simpler.
I've got so much relief that I didn't have to inflict an awful ending on the players. I was never expecting anything close to happy when I first started the quest.
The Branch Manager and Blaine wanted to show Ji-Min that Blaine was a useful insider, so Branch Manager called them in so that Blaine had a pretext for lying.
I ended up with a bunch of possible plot outlines for different scenarios, which I added in section III above. No worries about missing anything; all trains lead to Traumaville.
First minute, last minute, always glad to have another one.
It wouldn't be a quest without an Aesop.
Feels good to be done. I drew a lot of inspiration from parts of our world to imagine the City, and I don't want to think of what that says about our world.
Survival was pretty high, if we're just looking at survival. As QM, one of my roles istorture tension management, which is throwing as much pain at the players as I can without breaking something. I was a lot less certain about whether we'd have something resembling a good ending.
Wing shares is a difficult element to incorporate without disrupting the narrative. If I was thinking about it in the early quest planning stages, small maybe for the cooking path. But if this was "raise a Wing" quest, then shares would obviously play a larger role.
The 23 weeks was a happy coincidence.
Presentation could definitely have benefitted from having something to just glance at for all the relevant information. I'm thinking a nice report document with W Corp. letterhead.
Tl; dr:
I. What went right - the writing... Comments on my writing process
II. What went wrong - the mechanics... Dissection of what went wrong and what could be simplified
III. What went interesting - the players... Decisions that surpassed expectations
IV. Responses... A few words for each person who left feedback.
Again, I'd like to extend my congratulations to all of you and gratitude for everyone's support!
I. What went right - the writing
II. What went wrong - the mechanics
III. What went interesting - the players
IV. Responses
I. What went right - the writing
Brainstorming
At first, I wanted to let the players be the President of W Corp. Raising a company from walnut to Wing! The drama of acquiring a Singularity, researching the commercial potential, expanding business to other Districts, protecting trade secrets, dealing with Old W Corp... the rise of a Wing is fit for a grand epic.
Except Limbus Company was coming out. I had a lot of anxiety about canon stabbing my ideas in the face because nothing wrecks immersion like contradicting canon. And I had no idea about what the rest of the City would be like.
I then played MetaHuman Inc., and that scratched my "raise a Wing" itch (I still hate time travel plots, but I can recommend giving it a shot!).
In the end, a month went into scenario-planning before I decided to scrap my original idea.
What else could I do? Go small-scale for a more personal story.
Cleanup crews embody the banality of evil. Show up to work, suppress passengers, clock out. What about the story of such a corporate drone trying to make it in a soulless City? And then, because W Corp. must operate their train stations under the eyes of a wary host Wing in every District... which Wing would be the most interesting host?
Through gritted teeth, W Corp. has to pay an arm and leg to that awful L Corp.
And if L Corp. is hated so much, I bet that'll cause an interesting family rift. The old generation that wants the child to follow the worn path, but the new generation that wants to make a better future. The parents can physically embody L Corp. as the antagonists.
A good interactive story should have multiple variables to create a variety of possible endings, analogous to a normal fiction's subplots to enrich the story. And so, I have:
- Main conflict: Find meaning in the hostile corporate world.
- Subplot: Generational differences threaten estrangement.
Plotting
Mythcreants has a nice word for plotting: fractals. A big story is the combination of smaller stories (I'll call these "scenes"), which I used to keep an eye on word counts and pacing. The actual structure I use is three (four?) acts: I, IIa, IIb, and III to develop tension.
At the macro level, each story path (asset, love, and cooking) has a specific story. We're familiar with assets; love would've been a romance with the goal of keeping Ji-Min and the Fixer love interest alive after L Corp. learns that they know too much; and cooking would've been like the League of Nine, District 12 edition (this was before Limbus Company came out!).
I had a rough idea of what missions would happen each week at the macro level. Missions were there to advance the macro plot as a logical progression and followed a general three-week pattern for each act: preparation, battle, then rest / interlude and revelation. For example, Act IIb's first half goes: tour District 11, terrorize District 11, then rest and learn about the Seven's investigation, all occurring because Dias wants W Corp. to push buttons (and because I mentioned fractals, tour is act IIb's act I, and terrorize is act IIb's act IIa... and to really blow minds, events in the tour scene and terrorize scene were each plotted with the same structure, but that's blurrier). Because W Corp. was pushing buttons, W Corp. must deal with the Seven investigation, setting up Act IIb's second half. And so on.
The weekly level is based on crew politics and QM opportunism (e.g., Kandy scandal). A week is made up of multiple scenes, including the missions and passenger-of-the-week.
Passengers were ideas and whoever struck my fancy during brainstorming. Companies make for great combatants. G Corp. makes insect people, but I bet that the subsidiaries can find markets for different animal people. Associations and Syndicates are freebies. One idea that didn't get a chance was dealing with a passenger who didn't restore properly due to a scanner malfunction.
The actual fighting, as you might guess, follows act structure: enemy introduction, initial struggles and triumph, enemy comeback, and climax.
Setting and Worldbuilding
What kind of place is the City? I figured that there might be some influences from South Korean society for context, given that Project Moon is based in South Korea, and so I researched.
I concluded that the City is a couple dozen South Koreas thrown onto a genre salad.
For those who haven't seen it, there's a video essay saying South Korea is a cyberpunk dystopia. I find it hard not to compare a Nest and South Korea.
When you have terms for death by overwork like Gwarosa and a 69-hour national workweek can even be proposed (and defeated, thankfully), I can conclude that the South Korea already shares the hypercompetitive zeitgeist with the City.
South Korea has obligatory military service.
With a little imagination, in a world where the 69-hour workweek has the clout to pass and the military that everyone needs to participates in finds more "active" usage (e.g., megacorp gets ideas), Wings and Fixers aren't far away. When we start blending it all together, we can get an idea of how the Nests and the City at large works. That is, keep your head down and do what you can to survive.
Next, I go from high-level setting to the next lower level, Districts. For L Corp.'s District 12, when I think "authoritarian and smoggy", I think of China. In a District where smog is prevalent, it becomes natural to wear gas masks as part of the culture. Conveniently, gas masks also serve to conceal identities. For Wings working in District 12, they should have some way to deal with smog; W Corp. has their gas masks as a "technology" Wing, and L Corp. provides augments to let their Fixers "embrace" the smog.
For the Backstreets, although it features briefly, I again borrowed a few elements from China.
When it comes to worldbuilding, it's about finding ways to depict the shared life experience. Lots of smog? Smog mask fashion. Lots of theft and violence? Practical clothing is always chic. Affluent communities can have television and watch popular shows. Even the poorest can sing and dance. Lots of people enjoy sports. Omnipotent overlord with a thing for purging? Language can incorporate it as idioms and phrases.
Concept Generator: Characters
Anyone who wasn't submitted by the voters was assembled from multiple generators, because I wouldn't be surprised if Project Moon does the same. Name is RNG (but reselected if the first letter is also someone else's first letter to make tracking easier), gender is RNG (40% M, 40% F, 20% T), personality is RNG (with the exception of a few major NPCs). Description is employer-themed and caught my interest at the time. Everyone also has a randomly-generated hobby to help me know them, even if it doesn't get into the quest (e.g., the Director watched "City's Got Fixers").
Special shoutout to Naveed; I briefly tried out another generator and got a spoiled serial murderer ("Killed her sister when she was young!? And... has the unfortunate tendency to bump off her friends!?")
Writing Process
There's a thing called "life" that I need to deal with before I get to write. It's either wake up early ("Who's going to wake up to write at three in the morning?" "Oh boy, 3AM!") or fight off the exhaustion after a long day ("Two minutes shuteye, then I finish this scene before sl... ahhh it's 2AM.").
My schedule is ideally: Mon - chapter plotting; Tue - more plotting and rolling dice; Wed-Sat - writing (which is about 500 words for me, and Sat. is usually 1000+ words), Sun - Craft decisions, editing, and posting.
The power of deadlines helped me a lot because I know what it's like to expect the next chapter of a serial to post at its usual time. Good habits of writing regularly make it more likely to happen. Chunking the chapter into actionable milestones and spreading it out daily makes writing less intimidating.
I still sometimes procrastinate, and my self-hack is to make myself start something for a few minutes and let the flow take over.
II. What went wrong - the mechanics
For those who hated the mechanics, you'll get a kick from the next line.
I spent three months "perfecting" the mechanics.
One month to iterate the mechanics to v4. One month to playtest the mechanics (and narrative!) and iterate to v5. One more month of playtesting and then iterating to v5.1. 1 can't tell you how sick I was of W Corp. when the quest finally opened on SV, but at least I can now look back on it with nostalgia. Fun fact: the "Hell Month" that Blaine mentioned was the stress test on the v5 passenger battle system!
But all the time spent on perfecting the mechanics doesn't matter if it flops. In that case, let's review the development process and identify what may have become confusing and off-putting.
The best mechanics should:
- Rely on a simple concept
- Build tension
- Support theme
Tension is the development of stress to the boiling point, and relief is the release of tension, and it appears everywhere: games, stories, deadlines etc. For example, boosting speed at the cost of health. Dare I boost with a 10% health bar? Ahh, here comes the recharge strip.
Theme should reflect the mechanics. Pilots risking their life to eke out a little advantage will probably be larger-than-life machos, not a baby with the pacifier still in her mouth.
How did I apply it for this quest?
- Concept: NPC meat grinder. The mechanics should be able to kill a bunch of NPCs (and fairly).
- Tension: NPCs can support the player... if the NPC is friendly and alive, that is.
- Theme: Working together to survive a hostile job with a high fatality rate.
Rapport-Favors? To gain allies, the player should develop positive relations and social capital with NPCs. A positive relationship should be fair and not one-sided; give-and-take in this quest should look like work-related help. The request-for-favors portion, however, was a confusing black box for the players despite my goal of transparency and the huge role that it had in v5. I would keep this in some form across any iterations, but for a v6, make increasing rapport easier (e.g., group chats or select up to two agents) and change how favors get used mechanically.
Effort Rolls? For reasons of self-interest, agents will hold back on the job; politics is managing others' self-interests to achieve a community objective. In v5.1, it went agent-by-agent to account for the player's individual relations and the NPC's immediate needs and narrative actions. For a v6, I would revise this into a summary crew effort roll for simplicity.
HP? Great for measuring how close the player is to dying and representing how much "effort" the player has left to spend. For a v6, I would remove NPC's HP and let a bad crew effort roll kill someone. And because I'd remove permadeath (more below), change the consequences of a "dead" player.
AP? The intention here was to force self-interest vs. crew interest by divvying where "effort" gets spent and stop the player from overexertion. For v6, in combination with other changes and choice presentation, AP would become redundant and I can get rid of certain confusing calculations.
PAR? Varies the enemy difficulty and warning. W Corp. is a megacorp with access to tons of personal data, so Cleanup shouldn't be caught off-guard too often. I would keep this in any iteration.
Asset's crew powers? This got a massive buff from v5 to v5.1; previously, only the no-strike benefit existed. Because there would be changes for a v6, the functionality for asset's crew powers would change in some form.
Meltdown? Counterbalanced easy enemies and encourages NPCs to open up about themselves. For a v6, tying this to the summary crew effort roll would make this mechanic redundant.
Emergencies? Dangerous enemies make bad situations worse. With better choice presentation, this mechanic would become redundant.
Captainship? My big regret with the mechanic is that it doesn't capture the NPC's leadership abilities. For a v6, I would like to add bonuses or modify how the choices get presented somehow.
Strikes? It would've played a larger role in a non-asset playthrough, so not much data here. In v6, it would probably deal mechanically with the player alone, and the narrative handles it for NPCs.
Saving throws? Safety feature as of v2, I would keep this in some form across all iterations.
Rabbit Protocol? I'd keep the get-out-of-train free card in any iteration.
Assets? The part where all the plot happens... the mechanics are a lot simpler than Cleanup, as of v5. For a v6, I would utilize more guest characters; letting the player considering whether to visit District 11 and satisfy Katherine has more meaning than an easy-hard battle.
Permadeath? In this quest, the theme and mechanics literally revolve around survival in an uncaring hostile environment. I also wanted to suppress the players' desire to be kind and helpful at the expense of self; when they want to bet everything to be a hero, they'll actually be a hero. Therefore, I included permadeath with the balance of disclosing the impact of each decision to maximize perception of fair play and increase odds of survivability. Where possible, I made options that risked permadeath avoidable. And yet, despite being a compatible quest... for v6, I would remove permadeath. Despite my original precautions, the quest almost sank regardless. I kid you not, nothing scares a QM with a story to share more than a single saving throw with the quest at stake. Don't learn the hard way; QMs should avoid the player permadeath mechanic at all costs.
...Lots of room for improvement, huh.
"Hey QM, why didn't you catch all this before starting the quest?"
I stopped the worst of it! If I barfed v1 and crossed my fingers, battles would've had math for blow-by-blow, PAR for every day of the in-game week, Rabbits that kill half the crew when called, and selecting the best weapon for ATK / DEF / SPD / Ability / Charge against the enemy's stats. I barely finished playtesting a single battle before moving into v2.
What I want to emphasize is that, at some point, the product needs to ship. Development time was already two months narrative and three months of mechanics; that's five months for a quest by an unknown QM that others may or may not want to play. When I was comfortable enough to run the quest as a v5 expert and only felt like minor changes were necessary to go from v5 to v5.1, I made the call that the cost of more mechanical development and playtesting outweighed the benefits.
Development is only a third of the battle. The rest is revisions / playtesting.
Bonus! Potential v6 passenger battle:
[] Hustler. Team with Rama and Blaine. Spend 30HP and roll d6. If d6 = 1, Rama dies. If d6 = 2, decrease Favors -1 with Blaine.
[] Opportunist. Team with Lorine and Irmtraud. Spend 10HP and roll d6. If d6 < 4, decrease Favors -1 with Lorine and Ji-Min takes -10HP. In addition, if d6 = 1, Lorine dies.
[] Slacker. Roll d6. If d6 = 3, Ji-Min takes -50HP and decease Rapport -4 with Chelsey. If d6 < 3, kill two of the following agents: Lorine, Rama, Blaine.
[] Rabbit Protocol. Clear the battle.
...The choices available and stakes at play would depend on the Captain's mood and the bonds with other agents. And since this decision stands on its own, a nice chunk of the v5 rules becomes unnecessary.
What went interesting - the players
Before I opened the quest on SV, my research suggested that the average player wants to do the nice thing where possible. That conflicts with the average City denizen's mindset of everyone-for-themselves. Indeed, I envisioned this quest as the story of gradually losing everything while dying inside.
This quest, like living in the City, is more painful when fighting for someone. Naturally, the players chose to make it hard on themselves.
When the players decided to be an asset, I figured that we'd be slamming the door in the face of Ji-Min's mother. I mean, we're a loyal asset, obviously we're going to sever our family ties because the family aligns with L Corp., right? I had a thing planned where the Director would make himself Ji-Min's pillar of support to increase her reliance on W Corp., then come to think of her as the daughter he never had.
Well.
Despite zero obvious benefits and very obvious drawbacks, the players elected to spend time with Ji-Min's mother, which set the stage for major future events.
When the decision to kill or spare Ji-Min's father came up, I was really curious about what would happen. The desire to keep Ji-Min close to her parents vs. the rightfully-feared brain surgery. It was close, but "kill" edged out. This might sound a little twisted, but I'm pleased that I was able to watch a Wing's influence overpower even familial relations.
For those curious about the alternate timeline where "spare" won, the plan was to program Ji-Min so that she would black out and attack her parents on sight. Teresa would introduce himself as L Corp.'s spy and have Ji-Min find a way during her missions to relay intelligence to L Corp.; in exchange, he would incrementally undo her programming. Teresa would still betray W Corp. and flee alone, leaving Ji-Min to her fate. W Corp. would accuse Ji-Min of treason based on her frequent interactions with Teresa, but if crew rapport was high enough, "accept" that she was innocent. During the Smoke War, Ji-Min would be "marked for death", running a mission disguised as suicide. Her parents would intercept, then ask her to flee District 12 and lay out a plan to do so. The final showdown would be Ji-Min and her parents against Katherine and other W Corp. assets. At the end, Ji-Min is alone in the Backstreets, rebuilding her life and hiding her status as W Corp. property, and knows that her parents opted to erase their own memories to protect where she's hiding in case W Corp. captures them.
All that work to be with her parents. Because I'm a nice QM, I would've granted five minutes for Ji-Min to be truly united with her family.
What else is there... ah. The players were also pro-crew in situations that I think were self-detrimental.
Remember how that cat girl passenger, Cahaya, nearly killed Bahij during an emergency and he needed rescue? Bahij was more-or-less a fresh recruit without ties to others; that's a strong candidate for sacrifice, especially considering that a major mission was coming up and Ji-Min needed to be in good shape to do a good job. The mission... was forgotten in the heat of the moment.
And of course, there's that whole Kandy scandal. At this point in the quest, the players had a low Max HP Ji-Min. W Corp. would need to balance that by rewarding the players a 1-UP so that she could stay alive for the side project. Ji-Min nearly died, so it became more like a bribe to convince Ji-Min to allow Teresa to repair her brain. Since a good roleplay allows players to make decisions, one option that I included was to use the Kandy to help others, which I figured would be ignored. I mean, after a brush with death and the freaking Branch Manager's warning about helping others, I thought that the players would make it to the end of the quest easily.
Well.
That lead to the scandal and another interesting decision: Director or Branch Manager? I thought that the players would pick Branch Manager; the dude has resources, a less-strained relation than Ji-Min & Director, and is more likely to have positive connections with HQ.
Well!
For those curious about a Branch Manager timeline... he would question whether Ji-Min should stay alive. The Branch Manager has enough enemies, after all, and if those enemies could get Ji-Min's brain to Internal Affairs, that would be swell. The players would need to convince the Branch Manager that she was worth the risk.
But we live in a Director timeline, where the big question is what Blaine had in mind. Yes, she was reluctantly working against Ji-Min, and if the players declined mind-reading, the post-Teresa battle would've had Blaine and some "assets" show up, announce that Kwame was dead and escape route compromised, and ask Ji-Min and co. to follow her. After all, the Branch Manager needs to ensure that his enemies can't use Ji-Min before Internal Affairs issues the verdict. Katherine would call out Blaine as a traitor, and Ji-Min would have to decide who to trust. Trusting Blaine there would've been a bad ending. Upon winning with Katherine, Blaine's head would be delivered as a smoking gun to Internal Affairs.
I don't think that I could've ever picked an interesting route through the quest like the players, but the story that we created was stronger for it.
IV. Responses
...And append each of these with "Thank you for riding with WARP!"
Oh neat, we survived!
...burning almost every single bridge we had, but hey.
Well this quest was often very stressful, but it's nice to see it's conclusion. Congrats!
I'm glad to see that I achieved an emotion that I wanted.
Be they Rats or Feathers, they all get to suffer in their unique ways.
Project Moon does a great job of balancing levity and grittiness, and I'll strive to do the same if I run a similar quest like this one. And I'll take a look at Katherine & Ji-Min and reflect on where I could develop it better.
It's not enough to win; others must fail.
I'll work on finding a better balance of heavy and light for next time. Looks like I got the dilemmas down, at least.
I'm glad that it managed to find an end, too, and not a Game Over end.
A lot of characters sure died on his quest, huh. More crew died than I thought would actually die based on playtesting. But Ji-Min and co. are still alive and still have opportunities in their future because they fought for it, which is actually better than what I managed in my playtesting; my protagonist was dead-eyed and depressed, being hated by the entire crew but strongly liked by management, while boarding a train to HQ.
The template plans were also there to keep me covered in case there were zero voters. I was also getting nervous that key mechanics would be overlooked and that a plan would drive the quest to an early death.
I went into more detail in the writing section above, but I can summarize missions and train scenarios for you as brainstorming and act-structured plotting to manage tension.
The moment that we started walking the asset path, a bittersweet ending became the happy ending. And the rolls! None of you are going to District 10 with me, that's for sure.
I think the number-crunching posters were the only ones who understood the system. If I do another quest, it'll be much simpler.
Yup, Blaine reluctantly bad. Her last words: "Please save me... my family needs me..." Had she lived, Blaine would've had to decide whether she could deceive and kill Ji-Min during the Teresa mission... and she would have, but maybe not without tears.
Think keeping a romance in the City is hard? It's even harder when L Corp. thinks you know too much. Cooking route would've been like the League of Nine.
If I run another quest, I'll look forward to seeing you again.
I'm glad that I was able to write Katherine correctly. There's something enjoyable about getting into a creator's head and Interpreting their desires.
I felt like a sack of garbage back after I plotted the quest. And I thought, if I feel like garbage, maybe someone else will feel something.
You picked a good time to pick up on Blaine.
The saving grace with the mechanics was that I could set it aside and just use it as the NPC death calculator. Being able to convert into a more narrative-style helped, and if I were to redesign the voting system, I already have ideas on how to make it simpler.
I've got so much relief that I didn't have to inflict an awful ending on the players. I was never expecting anything close to happy when I first started the quest.
The Branch Manager and Blaine wanted to show Ji-Min that Blaine was a useful insider, so Branch Manager called them in so that Blaine had a pretext for lying.
I ended up with a bunch of possible plot outlines for different scenarios, which I added in section III above. No worries about missing anything; all trains lead to Traumaville.
First minute, last minute, always glad to have another one.
It wouldn't be a quest without an Aesop.
Feels good to be done. I drew a lot of inspiration from parts of our world to imagine the City, and I don't want to think of what that says about our world.
Survival was pretty high, if we're just looking at survival. As QM, one of my roles is
Wing shares is a difficult element to incorporate without disrupting the narrative. If I was thinking about it in the early quest planning stages, small maybe for the cooking path. But if this was "raise a Wing" quest, then shares would obviously play a larger role.
The 23 weeks was a happy coincidence.
Presentation could definitely have benefitted from having something to just glance at for all the relevant information. I'm thinking a nice report document with W Corp. letterhead.
Tl; dr:
I. What went right - the writing... Comments on my writing process
II. What went wrong - the mechanics... Dissection of what went wrong and what could be simplified
III. What went interesting - the players... Decisions that surpassed expectations
IV. Responses... A few words for each person who left feedback.
Again, I'd like to extend my congratulations to all of you and gratitude for everyone's support!
