eternity:thoughts_on_game_design [redemption]

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(This page contains the opinions of individual GMs on the design of the game)


===== Mike =====

Well, that was a thing!  Redemption came out of me wanting several things:  
  * A game on a smaller scale, where the players were a relatively small part of the universe, rather than dealing directly with world-changing events
  * A game with darker themes, giving players the opportunity to play nastier characters (with the assumption of everyone being a criminal)
  * A higher PvP game

The game was sci-fi pretty much from the get-go (the original concept was "Shawshank Redemption //IN SPACE//", and that working title stuck around).  Because of the desire for darker themes, particularly discrimination, we decided to set it in an entirely fictional universe (the Homeworld is explicitly not Earth), to avoid any real-world races, religions, nations or other elements where we wished to allow discrimination (gender and sexuality discrimination were always going to be excluded).

For the most part, the game went as planned - the one major exception being that we had planned for the armoury raid in turn 2 to be successful (with the prisoner revolt happening the turn after), which meant that we were struggling a bit to come up with workgroup tasks in the mid-game, and a lot of the plot happened all at once in turn 5.

The Elysian Empire mostly existed as a backdrop for the game - one of the early decisions was between a dystopia and a utopia (where the players were the dregs of an otherwise functional society, and almost universally deserved to be locked up).  In the end, we went with the dystopia, because it allowed for a wider variety of character concepts, and more interesting plot (the war, the bioweapon).

==== System ====

I remain a massive fan of binary skill systems (i.e. you either have a skill or you don't, no numbered levels). For this game, we made a concerted effort to make sure that there was as little overlap between skills as possible, even within the same "tree" (e.g. Theft let you do things that Stealth would not, it was not just a better version of Stealth).  The exception to this was Combat, where some overlapping specialisations helped in resolving PvP actions.

The workgroups were a deliberate attempt to force players into certain group actions - limiting the number of writeups the GM team needed to prepare, while still giving them an opportunity to further their own ends.  As it turned out, we had fewer players than expected so the workload was never particularly high.

The Wound system worked well to give players consequences short of death which were still somewhat meaningful.  The only flaw was that we had a large number of medics (possibly because Cybernetic Engineering required medicine), so getting healed was actually relatively easy.  If I was to do this again, wounds would probably have at minimum a full turnsheet of effect (i.e. being healed at the end of the turn, rather than the start) to make them more meaningful, and Cybernetic Engineering would only depend on Technology.

Calls are often controversial in the Society Game.  Our calls came mostly from game design considerations - Mute and Paralyse are very useful to control players, and Rend allowed us to showcase the cruelty of the guards without having to narrate in-session violence.  The collars came from a wish to make the calls "more IC" by having them be actually said by the guards, and as a mechanism to prevent in-session violence even after the prisoners had revolted.

I am still not a fan of "physical" calls (i.e. those which require movement like Strikedown or Repel) in a society game setting, but I think that other calls are a useful tool in the game design arsenal.

==== Other Stuff ====

The space travel "metaphysic" was worked out to allow the Empire to be governable, but keep the prison isolated.  This worked up to a point, but resulted in some rather strange consequences in the metaplot and the later turns.

For a start, due to the distances involved, any Prisoners of War had to have been arrested in the first year or two of the war - otherwise there was not time for them to get to b-Exagora before game start.  Also, the war itself made no sense, since it takes years if not decades for ships to deploy to combat zones, and diplomacy is much easier.  This can be somewhat handwaved by the Elysian Empire wanting an enemy to be at war with, so refusing diplomatic overtures, but was still a large crack in the setting.

Oh, also, in a setting with near-light speed travel, the New Prima weapon could literally have just been a ship that didn't decelerate - but that's less fun than the alternative of a mysterious superweapon.

===== Cameron =====
During the game design, my focus was largely on the system elements. My general approach to system is that it exists primarily to facilitate the game you are playing, and will largely inform how your game plays out. In a society game context there are usually some things we inherit, such as turnsheets, and while we could have done interesting things with these, both time constraints and the fact they work reasonably well for what we wanted means this stuff was largely just copied over. There were a number of things that we changed/created though:

===Character creation===
The system was largely based off of the [[http://princess.chaosdeathfish.com/skills|Princess]] skills system. The setting and a lot of the activities were inherently very similar to the Princess system, so it was mostly a matter of removing the space-travel related items. The major modification we made was converting it into a points-buy system. The main issue this resolved is that in some settings, some skills just aren't that useful compared to others, but people still want to occasionally be good at them((obvious example; fighting related skills are a lot more useful in a prison setting than art skills)). At this point we were considering a point-buy system for Skills, and point-buy for quirks, so we elected to get rid of the differentiation, and unite them into a single system.

This change ended up working quite well, with the quirks definitely feeling a little meatier than they ended up in some other games.

The only real problem I found was that we had quite a small number of skills, due to the small nature of the game and limited thoughts about what sort of actions we expected people to do. This in turn made it harder to have a very "distinct" character, and I suspect if the game had gone on much longer then people would have started to get a bit too powerful. We didn't have as many training actions as we could have, but I suspect this was largely down to most people already having all the skills they wanted from game start, more or less.

===Wounds===

One of the big additions we had was wounds. This definitely helped the related quirks feel more valuable from a GM perspective. Ultimately it facilitated the PvP nature of the game, where we were expecting people to attack others, giving a level of consequences for actions.

The only issue I really found was that ultimately the effect was not necessarily punishing players for doing dangerous stuff/annoying others. When someone had a wound, it tended to fall to a medic to help them out, which meant a medic would be the one putting their time/actions into sorting the problem, not the character who was effected. This was mainly an issue as I was concerned some healing actions may seem a little repetitive; there's only so many times you can write someone patching up kneecaps before things can get a bit same-y, and these actions tended to fall to the bottom of the list of the ones GMs were interested in writing (similar to training).

===Drugs===
Drugs were a nice idea, but ultimately didn't get used as much as we'd have liked. People either mostly didn't take them, or they were too available for the few people who had some drug-related things, meaning we didn't really see much of the effects of overdoses or withdrawals.

===Calls===
I have very mixed feelings about calls. Ultimately I think they worked quite well in this game, giving some weight behind the threat of guards. The use of collars as a mechanic solved a lot of the problems of running this setting with a limit to in-session violence, and nicely presented an obvious obstacle for people to overcome.
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