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.
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