the devil on my shoulder: write this big long thread about a game design thing on twitter
the angel on my shoulder: do it on cohost instead
anyway this is a post about some game design subtweeting I saw this weekend but was too busy to react to immediately, which probably is for the best, but I AM still thinking about it, so I am not going to just ignore it entirely
there was some Posting™️ going around about someone in the 5e space bringing some "innovation" to the game, claiming to have been the first one to come up with some house-rule or other when indie games had been doing that same thing for... basically ever. tale as old as time, right? the specifics of the mechanic are less important here than the idea of claiming to be the first person to do a thing in a creative space.
I have always been extremely reluctant to claim to be the first to do something, or to have "invented" certain things in my games. when I was promoting The Price of Coal, I always tried to be extremely clear about the games that inspired me and how I felt I was remixing elements from games that I loved to create a different experience, but to call it "invention" felt really wrong to me. especially for the type of hippie-dippie game I make, saying that I "invented" anything for that feels like saying that I invented "questions" or "seasons". like, just patently, demonstrably false.
I had this feeling last week, like two days before this mini-discourse started, because I was working on Collegiate Gothic, one of my two PbtA games in progress right now, and I had been trying to come up with a way to mechanize a certain kind of group dynamic. and when I posted about it, I was so sure to use the terminology "I landed on a really juicy mechanic here" because while I have never SEEN this rule specifically in a PbtA game before, there's approximately eleventy zillion PbtA games, of which I have only played and read a very small fraction. it's entirely possible I saw someone talking about doing something similar somewhere and forgot about it, or I had misread a game I was aware of and didn't know it was doing the same thing. who fucking knows! but it's such a simple concept, tied so closely to one of the most common things to see in PbtA games that I HAVE to assume I did not invent this!
and that's me saying that WITH a general familiarity with the space and a good bit of experience with a broad variety of games. so it's SO WEIRD to me when someone with very LITTLE familiarity with indie games can be like "yes I am the first person to come up with this thing" HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY KNOW?
like I guess it's just the same thing where the more you know, the more you realize you don't know, and it shouldn't bother me because ultimately it doesn't really matter, but like. I don't know, it just grates me to see people - anyone! - being like "yes my thing is so innovative and all-new and I did it all by myself" when I typically feel more "standing on the shoulders of giants" about... basically every creative pursuit I've ever had
as a post-script, the specific mechanic I was thinking of for this group dynamic is like a kind of gross inversion of the team pool from Masks, which is why I say it's so closely tied to something really common in PbtA games. LOADS of PbtA games have some kind of relationship currency! I don't think it's intrinsic to the system, like I don't think you HAVE to have it, but many games do!
because I am specifically trying to model a kind of very tight-knit, very exclusive, very head-over-heels kind of friendship, and I am specifically trying to show how it becomes ugly and codependent (maybe even STARTS ugly and codependent), what I want to do is have this pool of group points that get added as a modifier whenever you use specific moves to help or hurt each other, and that the pool of points (and thus, the modifier) increases when you take certain group actions together that bring you closer together as a group. that "or hurt" is really important, because being closer to each other also makes you much more able to hurt each other in this little scenario.
but the inversion here is that normally, in other games where I've seen this, those points get spent somehow. that's part of how they're currency, you gain them and then you spend them to do certain things. in this version, because I want the game to END when your group completely falls apart, there is no way to decrease the number in the pool, there is no way to cool things down, there is no detente. you just get more and more fucked up by this group relationship until eventually you can no longer function together.
so I guess it is like a clock (also extremely common to PbtA games), in that sense, albeit one with a different kind of visual representation, but you don't actually KNOW how many segments it has, you don't know how far you can go before the group falls apart. and many games with clocks DO give you ways to slow down their progression or un-fill segments, IIRC.
so anyway, yeah! I do not feel like an "inventor" coming up with that! I am, at best, a remixer!
