I’ve hammered out the core of farming in Project: Greenbriar. It’s pretty simple, all in all. Crops are placed into a grid. Crops have requirements that they need. They provide or subtract resources from adjacent plots on the grid. The PCs then expend effort to fill out the remaining requirements. Once enough turns have passed with the crops having all of their requirements met, they can be harvested.

The math will need hammering out, but I’ve been thinking about that a lot actually. The obvious choice would be to go for an economic model here, of forcing the players to make choices about scarcity and devoting resources where it would be most instrumental. This is not the model I want to go with. I want to go with a model focused on incremental growth. The effort expended is more of a ritual sacrifice than a hard economic decision. It’s the characters putting in sweat and toil in order to make something better, but with the knowledge that it can be done, without giving up other parts of life.

It’s those other parts of the characters’ lives that I’m struggling with. Most people would not play Stardew if it wasn’t for the villagers, or for the other ways of interacting with the world beyond just farming. Farming is relatively easy to understand, relatively easy to implement, relatively easy to get bored with. When I first began this project, I was deeply worried that the game would be a board game. I’m not opposed to board games, but I’m not conversant in them. I’m not a board game designer, and people don’t expect board games from me. I also don’t know enough about the current scene to feel comfortable putting my foot into that world.

But if I introduce villagers, well now we’re entering into a space closer to what TTRPGs are best at. Adding in other characters to interact with, and the player base for my games is going to roleplay with them. There probably will be more than a little romance into the mix, too, knowing how people interact with NPCs in these kinds of games. This does introduce the question of how do I bring NPCs in, how do I integrate them into my model in a way that reduces cognitive load.

What’s more, do I have a set list of NPCs? Or do I instead have a methodology for creating them? The latter is probably less work for me, which I’m a fan of, but also people tend to connect with specifics, especially when it comes to people. Having specific NPCs for the players to read about and interact with would create a solid foundation for talking about the game, as well as an incentive to just read the game. People talk a lot more about the residents and guests of Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast than they do about the playbooks of Wanderhome, for example, because you can understand the former with having only read the text.

The downside is that now I have to write up a list of NPCs.

I’ve always thought of this game as being one that is inherently expandable. The engine is relatively simple, but the real shine to the game is going to be in the specifics. To that end, I’m hoping to have a demo out by the end of the month. No promises, obviously, but I really want to try to hit that for the end of NaGaDeMon. I’ve been struggling to hit deadlines lately, so getting a little extra fire beneath me would go a long way.

Work on my next blog has also been going slow. Digging into The Well Played Game has been more difficult than anticipated. I’ve mostly been using my reading time to unwind, rather than to work, which hasn’t been great for really getting into the meat of De Koven. It doesn’t help that I have a couple other blog ideas that are floating to the surface. I want to write something about the function of rules, but that’s going to need to wait until after De Koven, I think. I also am planning on a deep dive into Surrealism at Play, thanks to my rising interest in Surrealist art games thanks to my work on No One Emerges Triumphantly. I’m also working on developing an argument against the use of RNGs in TTRPGs, despite their prominent placement. Finally, I want to return to the Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Literacy, and talk about more mechanics in TTRPGs.

Still, my focus is going to be on Project: Greenbriar for the next week. You’ll find out next newsletter whether I hit my deadline or not!

On the Analytical Depth of TTRPGs

I’ve been reading through Costikyan’s Uncertainty in Games and it’s been an interesting read so far, highly recommend it to folks interested in design. Its main thesis is that uncertainty is good in games, and that different games have different kinds of uncertainty that underpin their play experience. When discussing the game Chess, Costikyan says that its primary source of uncertainty comes from its sheer complexity.

Each player on their turn has a access to a truly massive number of moves, all of which change the board state in complex ways. Indeed, the more experienced a player is, the more they come to understand the sheer degree of complexity that each board state has, with it not simply being the pieces in their place, but also the branching possibility paths of their potential actions. Each action changes that state, and so predicting more than a handful moves ahead is nearly impossible for human players, and even computers struggle at farther than that.

In contrast, most games of contemporary design are significantly less complex when it comes to analyzing potential moves. With board games, this analytical complexity is typically replaced with more complex core rules. A player may have fewer actions possible, but those actions will have a greater ludic impact. I believe that this is done in large part to prevent “analysis paralysis,” where a player delays the flow of the game to devote time and energy to trying to determine the ideal move, usually to the detriment of the fun of the other players.

TTRPGs meanwhile have an additional factor that prevents them from reaching the kind of analytical complexity of Chess. Every TTRPG I am familiar with is fiction-forward, with the presence of things like Rule Zero or the primacy of the conversation meaning that the mechanics take a back stage to what is happening in the story being told. I personally push back against this with my own design, but it is a way that players have been taught to engage with systems.

With a fiction-first perspective, it becomes impossible to imagine every potential next board state, because the potentiality of narrative is significantly less constrained than the potentiality of ludic interactions, even the broadest possible set of ludic actions. A participant in a storytelling perspective is bound only by what has been established, and is free to extemporize within and beyond that space. Established details restrict by forbidding specific things, rather than restricting the potentiality of what has not been mentioned.

With this limitless narrative space, it becomes impossible for a player to think analytically beyond the most immediate surroundings, to consider more than the moment, except for when the table agrees to limit the fiction more broadly. By accepting the limits of the system as limits on narrative, rather than having a free roaming narrative, it is possible to create games where analytical decision making is more possible. Yes, the unexpected may always appear, but it is also possible to limit the timing and presence of the uncertain via ludic frameworks.

By restricting the fiction, ironically, we are able to give the participants greater control over their actions, by allowing them to have a better understanding of what is to come next.

Asbury Pines - A bit of a weird one this week! Asbury Pines is a narrative forward idle game. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, especially for fans of idle games. At first glance, it’s pretty Melvor-like, with your various categories of tasks and resources that need to be filled, but it soon branches out over space and time, with more and more characters being managed. The narrative is simultaneously sprawling and intimate, covering millennia within this one area, but deeply focused on the characters. We see their births and their deaths, we see their triumphs and their failures, all through these small snippets from their lives, which are collected by expending resources to advance their stories. In a lot of ways, the story segments are the reward for managing the resources of the rest of the game. I don’t want to spoil this game, but there’s this delightful sense of discovery as new elements open up, and the scope of the narrative reveals itself.

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Until next week,