This week, I’ve started work on the new draft of the playtest scenario. Although the basic story is still the same, it’s going to be quite different in detail. For one thing, I’m over 3,000 words and I still haven’t got to the place where the previous version started. This is only to be expected, of course. One of the biggest criticisms of the last version was that it introduced too many ideas too quickly, and that people were expected to play personae before they knew anything about them. So this time, I’m taking things much more slowly, and introducing rule and background elements as close to one at a time as is possible. Obviously, because the whole system fits together, there are limits to how far I can do that, and some things do refer ahead.
One thing I’m noticing as I design this is how many conceptual parallels I can see with recent games. There are a things that resemble Conditions and Tilts from The God Machine Chronicle for the new World of Darkness, and things that resemble Aspects from Fate Core. I have things that are conceptually similar to moves from Apocalypse World or Dungeon World. I’m using cards and tokens to help with record keeping. There is no gamemaster.
This isn’t really surprising, as we are all working in the same environment, on the same problems. People should be expected to come up with similar solutions, particularly when they’ve read the other solutions and have them available. Of course, there are differences from all the previous versions, and they fit together to do something very different, but there’s clear continuity with recent game design trends.
Today’s breakthrough was part of persona creation. The mechanic lets the players define the persona’s personality, and gives clear mechanical consequences for it.
Each personality trait comes with four mechanical bits. One is an action that lets that persona gain musubi. Another is an action that other personae can do with that persona to gain musubi. The third defines a set of actions within which the persona can spend musubi on her own actions. (So, basically an Aspect from Fate.) The last one is a complication that can apply just to that persona. Three of them encourage that player to play along with the personality. One encourages other players to reinforce it. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.
Incidentally, in keeping with the general philosophy of Kannagara, all of the personality traits given as options are positive.
I think that the same mechanical structure should work for a lot of background traits, but background traits will also pull in abilities. Most likely, there will be minimum ability requirements to have a certain level of background. Since I haven’t written the part of the scenario that introduces abilities yet, I haven’t introduced this part of the background. Furthermore, since at least some of the possible backgrounds will be closely connected to Shinto, I need to introduce a lot more setting information before I can do that. Right now, however, things are progressing very well.
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