The Town > Exploration > Dungeon cycle of DIY Elfgames really does strike me as a three-act structure, but it's really funny to me that like, the Dungeon and Exploration get more attention than the town. The Town is structurally a place that you leave as fast as possible.
- He/Him + They/Them
One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.
Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
Priv: @Scampriv
You must log in to comment.
in reply to @Scampir's post:
The JRPG Design.
Wondering if the worry is that if you spend too much time in town, you've just jumped to a "Dungeon", or if that's treated as the "Free RP Zone", so you don't need silly things like Rules.
The tricky bit is if you make the Town too appealing, folks don't want to leave it. Which can be fine, but you're playing a DIY Elfgame and the referee has probably spent a year making a dungeon and overworld, heh.
haha true true. For ICON i've been thinking about how it's a good place to foreshadow everything going on in the dungeon, where doing the prep work there becomes rewarding later, but there's like 40 years of design inertia suggesting the contrary so who's to say?
I think the inertia's steadily being overcome. The proliferation of downtime in games is playing a huge role there. I kind of hope the next step is integrating the three, and the interplay between them, a bit better. Most dungeon games still focus on just the dungeon and leave mechanics for exploration, travel, and towns to supplements or referees to sort out. Like... how many games go "Here's a Ranger. They do all the wilderness stuff" and leave it at that? No design for encouraging every character to hook into those forms of play.