Staggering back from the latest disaster (also a fresh take on scene mechanics)

Sorry about that bump in service; had a minor life-altering catastrophe. But nothing says "healing and moving on" like returning to the exact same self-destructive habits you always plague yourself with. In the spirit of a lifetime of bad decisions, here's some more design for ya'll to enjoy.

The scene rules suck

Well, not to be too on-the-nose about it, but I'm not happy with the way scenes work right now. I've been running my in-house playtest alongside the out-of-house playtest and it's become very apparent that the rules leave you adrift in a lot of critical circumstances.

But one of the upswings of your life turning upside down is that it gives you pause to reflect on your current course of action in every endeavor, and Tian Shang was no exception. So after pondering what I needed to run the game at my own table, I realized that I needed something that my old idol Justin Alexander always stumped for in games: I needed clean processes!

Cleaner Processes for a Better Game

The rules are supposed to do a few critical things:

1. Allow the transformation of description into game mechanics and vice versa
2. Give players and GMs multiple viable approaches to interacting with the game world
3. Allow the game play to flow naturally at the table

All of the design orients itself to doing those three things. But all of the best-intentioned design in the world falls apart at the table if you can't cleanly shift between the disparate mechanics. It's like a perfectly design car without a drive train; you just can't make it do what it's capable of doing, because your ability to tell it to do those things is missing.

Justin calls the gears that we use to shift between game systems game processes, and that's an outstanding term because it recognizes the game as an ongoing but structured activity. Clear, clean processes inform GMs of how to approach the game on three fronts:

1. Mechanically, they tell us what systems and rules to use to resolve actions, and what those actions cost in terms of time, effort, and resources
2. Descriptively, they tell us how to describe the in-game action by telling us what "speed" the game is running at (a deliberate nail-biter of a dungeon crawl has a different "speed" than a bloody and chaotic melee)
3. Conversationally, they tell us how to interact with the players by clarifying what challenges they're facing (Picking a trapped lock or methodically searching a room for hidden treasure is a different variety of challenge from escaping a horde of rampaging Gnolls)

Many games have sloppy, ill-defined or missing processes, but great games pay very close attention to them. Clearly, I want this to be a great game. 

Process-based scene rules

What would the current rules look like if they were fused together, streamlined towards this playtest-informed "process-direction"? They might look something like this:

Let's break down what this is and what it does.

First, the Effect Charts for all of the skills are referenced here, fixing some of the vagaries of the timing mechanics on those. How does one go about changing the taboos of a society? Well clearly you take a Heart action during a Montage scene: you can't just spout off to Joe Nobody during a Real-Time scene and expect that to alter the civil order. This stuff takes some campaigning!

This has the knock-on effect of broadening skills which are too narrow, while staggering those that are too broad. F'rex, Power isn't well-defined in terms of long-term projects, but with this chart it becomes more clear that Power is used similarly to heavy construction equipment during these longer scenes. 

Ditto with Heart, again; it's restricted in faster scenes to generating Imbalances on single targets, quantifying the powerful skill in more immediate terms.

Second, it gives some context to what actions are appropriate in different kinds of scenes, which helps GMs to determine when to transition between them. If you're in a Real-Time scene, and your attack isn't being used to either show off or beat somebody in a nonviolent contest, then you're probably pushing the game into an Action scene. 

Finally, it contextualizes the mechanics around the player's approach to solving in-game challenges. Do they want to personally sneak into the enemy base and cause havoc, or do they want to engage in a longer-term campaign of low-risk sabotage? Their answer determines what rules they use, and how quickly time passes in the game as a result of their strategic approach.

Bringing all the scattered pieces together

Currently there are lots of "dangling" chunks of design (the long-term project rules spring to mind). This approach unifies all of those back into the Effect Charts where they belong.

It also re-contextualizes attacks/defenses in terms of different scenes. I like "launching an offensive" as a contextual action you can just, like, take during a war. That's neat.

It straightens out and cleans up all those weird things like the travel mechanics so they work a bit better. Probably going to delve back into those and re-do the Agility movement actions with difficulties along with speeds and distances, to give you an idea.

It creates opportunities for new design: I noticed, for example, a lack of "listen for rumors" rules in a system where that oversight is really painful. It's easy as pie to add a new function to Heart mechanics in Real-time scenes to fix that up.

It gives me a template to approach the Content rules more thoroughly and specifically. They're currently not quite what they need to be; this is going to help me focus them immensely.

It gives me a way of approaching the Gupt Kala in terms of larger setting-impact and overall strategic approach. They've been crying out for the clarity provided by this new approach, so I'll want to have a go at a first draft for them in the near.

It's just so much more elegant. Like seriously, this talk should lead off the rules section to get players and GMs into the mindset of running and structuring the game. It's a deep impact, this approach, and one I'm excited about.