metapunk

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted any game news.  This is mainly because I’ve been rethinking a whole lot of things about the game, and then taking a much needed break from the whole thing.

The decision I’ve come to is this: I’ll create two games; one relatively traditional tactical game with some room for thematic play (which we’ll keep calling Martian Cycles for now), and another, much more thematic game called Gangs of the Factory Zone, which will be more focused on an area of the world called “the Zone.”

The Zone is a sort of slum or shanty town that has grown up around and among a collection of large corporate factories.  Built outside the border wall of the main spaceport city on Mars, there are no labour laws in the Zone.  So the factories can employ people off the street for almost no wages, and these unfortunates have no real recourse except to wander off into the badlands beyond the zone, or try to become a citizen of the city.  In the meantime, there’s all sorts of trouble to get into within the zone, as many criminal elements thrive there.

So, in Gangs, characters have to decide what moral path they’re going to take to try and make a better life for themselves and their loved ones.

I wrote a little more about it on First Thoughts forum at the Forge (hey, I finally joined the Forge!), which you can find here, if you’re interested.

So what does this mean, design-wise?

Well, for Martian Cycles I’ll more or less keep the skill system and dynamic initiative combat system I was planning to do.  And for Gangs I’ll do something a little more radical.

I’m hoping to create a central mechanic where the players bet points in order to demonstrate their commitment to an impending conflict.  Then the conflict unfolds as actions are resolved and narrated.  The plan is to build up tension in the betting phase, then unleash it in the resolution phase.  The idea was also to set it up so that characters could “fold” out of the conflict if the stakes got too high.

[rant begins]

See, because this is a big problem with the tactical games I’ve played (including and especially the ones I’ve GM’d—I’m just as responsible).  In those games, it’s just been assumed that whatever threat you face is going to fight you to the death without thinking about it.  But that’s not realistic (or thematically sensible) at all.

I don’t want the PC’s to be killing machines mowing through countless hordes of mooks whose only purpose is to die in extravagant ways.  I want the mooks, and the PC’s, to be able to back out of a fight if it looks like it’s going to lead somewhere too troublesome.  Real people will do just about anything to avoid a fight; even if it means running away, trying to talk their way out of it, or, failing that, submitting to the stronger person’s demands.  Even bad folks don’t jump into combat at the first sign of trouble, and as a rule they tend not to leap joyfully onto the heroes’ swords.

This makes a lot more sense from a storytelling angle too… Gangs is really a space western, and in classic westerns, there’s frequently a series of confrontations where the stakes get progressively higher.

At first, a few coarse words are exchanged, and all that’s at stake is somebody’s pride.  In the next encounter, the opponents may have a heated argument or even come to blows, and the stakes might be somebody’s reputation and maybe a few bruises.  Next time, somebody draws a gun; lives are at stake, and everybody backs down… until finally you have a confrontation that nobody can back out of, and an honest to goodness gunfight breaks out at the climax of the movie.

This is how stories build tension; and I’ve really noticed how that’s missing from the games I’ve usually been involved in.  But when every conflict in the game is a fight to the death, the stakes are always the same, life has no value, and game play becomes a series of tedious encounters where your biggest concern is whether or not you’ll have to make a new character.  It’s boring as hell.

[/rant]

But I digress…

I don’t know how much of this is a lack of GM experience/imagination and how much is a failure of the game designs I’ve played in facilitating realistic and tension building character behaviour.  That’s a question for the Forge.

In any case, I’m hoping to foster more interesting play with Gangs.  I want the threat of a violence to be at least as powerful a motivator of character behaviour as the violence itself.

I ran into a small problem with that: I was planning to base the points used for the betting mechanic on the character’s relevant effectiveness scores for the coming conflict.  But that doesn’t quite work…  You might be the best fighter in the world, but your ability to intimidate somebody before a fight acutally breaks out is going to be based more on your swagger or cool or determination, on your reputation, and on whether or not you are brandishing any vicious looking weaponry.  In other words, stuff that is only loosely related to combat effectiveness.

So, there’s still a lot of hard thinking to be done before I’m close to a solid design.  But I’ll keep at it.

Until next time, this is Andre signing off…