nic

game? designer??

  • they/them

various credits on:
The Banished Vault
Arcsmith
John Wick Hex
Quarantine Circular
Subsurface Circular
Vienna Automobile Society
Sun Dogs

 

P&P microgames:
In the Court of the Skeleton King
The Garden
Tallships

 
Chicago



FreyjaKatra
@FreyjaKatra

There's a certain kind of thought that runs in traditional tabletop circles. It is this: When you look at your character sheet, you should be able to see who the person is first.

Let's take the classic example of basketweaving. You want to be a basketweaver. You want to write it on your character sheet. It is important to your conception of this character. But in traditional thought, not only is basketweaving not a skill supported by the game's system - it has no procedures of play to game around or to roll for - but the times it comes up are vanishingly rare.

There's been a ton of thoughts on this through the years. Just let the player write it down. No, that's too much agency, they have to spend the same skill point resources as everyone else. No, that's unbalanced, because some skills come up more in the game's fictional environment and procedures (stealth, hacking, axing someone a question) than others. Well, let's try to make set of game procedures (combat, hacking, basketweaving...) to make them useful. No, that's way too much cruft and load, or becomes too generic to be interestin if it tries to cover everything in one system. So don't make them spend resources and just let them write etc etc it goes in circles it is maddening and has been going on for 50 years make it stop aaa

Fundamentally, people want to write that they are a basketweaver on their character sheet. They don't want it to be subsumed under an umbrella header, or collapse everything into just 10 categories, of which Perception matters the most.

Let's take a step back and lay down some foundational ideas;

1. This is not automatically a problem player behaviour. They are creating a character. It's what we are supposed to be doing. If someone seeks out ways to not buy into a game's fiction constantly or tries to always do something outside the fictional narrative the game's designed for, that is a problem. This isn't. We don't punish this, and don't need to. Literally previous versions of D&D have had systems like this, for example.

2. Tactility is important. You don't play a board game exclusively in your mind, you offload cognitive thjngs like "where you are" onto a game piece on a board that has a defined space. Therefore, simply saying "you are one but you don't have to write it down" is not a solution in much the same way that "simply memorize your position and the board" is not; the character sheet is our primary tool for interaction with the fictional space.

3. Ideally, it should matter. Creative interpretation of the role of "basketweaver" should be allowed, even encouraged. Consider a TV drama character who is, first and foremost, a chess player. They will interpret the world through the lens of chess (Beth Harmon, Queen's Gambit). A historian will interpret it through history (Yang Wenli, Legend of the Galactic Heroes). For one of these, their show is about their skill; for the other, it is only thematic to the show (a history of war) but the actual thing the character does is being a genius admiral. In either case, this is natural cognitive behaviour in a human being. Our basketweaver should also be able to interpret the world through the lens of basketweaving, in a flexible way, and in a way where investment in being a basketweaver will come up in unexpected or unique ways supported by the system.

4. If it matters, balancing solves itself. We don't have to worry about skills being too more or too less useful in the game environment if we just insure that things can come up in the narrative space of the game organically. It's impossible to make everything equal, but that's not the point; we just want to reward any concept you can come up with.

Hard Wired Island lets you be a basketweaver. Here is how.

You can self-define your skills within the fictional space of the universe. The game points out specialties that matter for the game, like hacking and stealth, so you know they will come up, but you still get to define them in some way. For example, "hacked The Gibson when I was twelve" is a valid skill name in HWI, and can count as the Hacking skill for tasks that call for it.

The name is important, also. "hacked The Gibson when I was twelve" implies history, implies talent, implies character. "Basketweaver" is a name you can simply write down, on your character sheet.

Skills apply creatively to tasks in Hard Wired Island. Normally, rolls call for "relevant specialty." Who decides what is relevant? You and the GM and the other players, working in concert. You can use "hacked The Gibson" as a social skill in the specific instance where that would be an interesting social skill to have, for example when talking with people who'd be impressed with that kind of cred - or feel threatened by it. "Basketweaver" is something you can bring up in conversation, recall knowledge of, apply knowledge from to other things - for example, you understand the types of reeds and bamboo and other materials used to make baskets, which could help you break out of a bamboo chair you're tied to, or understand the knots of the rope on your wrist, or any task in which having nimble basket-weaving fingers might conceivably help, so long as you just sell everyone at the table on that application of "basketweaver."

Basketweaver matters, is on your character sheet in a tactile way, and it's not a problem. And it's as balanced as any other self defined skill. Hell, you can use it in combat if you spend a resource on it. HWI is fun like that.

Self definition of skills covers even more things than this. They can imply history. One of my first HWI characters in a game I wasn't running learned how to fight after levelling up during the game, gaining one fighting-related skill. I named it "X taught me how to fight" after another player character in that game. It implies a bond formed between two comrades. It might come up if my character would ever be betrayed by her teacher, or if their teacher shows up and recognizes the style I've been taught. It's character history, not just as a note, but as integral part of the character sheet itself.

You can write basketweaver on your character sheet. It rules.


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in reply to @FreyjaKatra's post:

I think the place this falls down, to an extent, can be if the question is left up to the GM and the table, and you do not have exactly the charisma as a real life person to convince them that your experience with the lore of basketweaving is in fact applicable in the cases where it should be applicable. Of course all games can fall down at the point of interpersonal difference of ideas, but if every skill is only and always a judgment call — if the game doesn't give guidelines for how generous to be, where to err on the side of, or how the math should usually work out over the course of a roll or the course of a session — then you end up in a nebulous position of "well this should work but it never does" (feels terrible) or "everything always works without needing to try" (is fine, but only really supports shorter games, as it grows tiring); or worse, not knowing at all which of the two you may end up in.

I do give guidelines on interpreting these things, except I call them "rules" and if people don't follow them it's not my problem. EZ

More seriously, there is a very detailed section on this in my game that I know for a fact many people interpret far more strictly than intended and I can't fix people who want to interpret my writing in a hostile way, so I don't try. It is, in a real sense, a different way to kill my darlings; rather than try to write for the hypothetical people who willfully or otherwise misinterpret me to make their own game experience miserable, I write for the best case I can deliver and trust in the people who want to interpret things openly or in good faith.

That said, there are those are vanishingly rare cases where there's just a misunderstanding happening in good faith that is usually cleared up with a simple question tossed at me online. Because people can do that, and do that, and I respond! I love designing in the age of the internet. The rest I simply refuse to design around.