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--- eternity:thoughts_on_game_design [2017/06/12 12:12]
gm_michael created
+++ eternity:thoughts_on_game_design [2017/06/12 13:30] (current)
gm_cameron [Cameron]
@@ Line 34: / Line 34: @@
 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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