Each game design is a unique problem, with its own set of conditions and requirements. This is especially true when the design in question is by request. When people request a game design, the core of the request is often for a particular setting or specific genre. Designing for a particular personal or published setting seriously narrows your options. These options only become more narrowed when specific mechanical requirements are imposed.
This is not like designing an expansion to an existing game. Your task as a designer remains to make the final product cohesive and functional, despite the limitations imposed. While this makes design more difficult, it can also make it more rewarding. But the key, like any other limitation placed on design, is to examine where your limits actually lie. For example, when I was asked to design a d20 game to be used with the Firefly setting the idea of specific classes clashed against the themes of freedom within the setting. So I found a way (pdf) to keep both.
This month, I will be discussing another design, which incorporates the stack structures from last month's article, into a another design request, a diceless RPG for the anime and manga series Hellsing.
Blood and Choices
The Hellsing series is about the mysterious Hellsing Organization and their war against vampires. The story follows Serras Victoria, a police woman who in the midst of a mission gone wrong chooses to become a vampire rather that to die. She and Arucard, the vampire who changed her, both work for the Hellsing Organization in their never-ending war.
Thematically speaking, Hellsing focuses on two things. First it contains noble families and vampires of different stripes, giving a stratification of both the supernatural and the mortal worlds. But heritage is only part of the story, the other half is the choices made by each character, choices that either realize or deny that heritage.
The design goal for a setting like this is for the RPG to drive the same sorts of stories as the source material, rather than simply letting players replay that source material, with minor changes. This means the thematic motifs of the setting are more important than idiosyncratic details of a specific character. For example, Hellsing's own monster, Arucard has an almost game mechanical aspect to his powers, where he must access different release levels for the different supernatural feats he wishes to perform. This feature could certainly be used as a game mechanic for supernatural powers, but the result would only be a hodge-podge of various elements, and ultimately a poor design.
Surface and Depth
In a setting-based design like this the first step is to build on the themes as seeds. In this case, that seed is whether choices or heritage define who you are. And what more, I needed to make the game diceless. Now, diceless to me means not only no dice, but no randomizers. Cards and even games of rock-paper-scissors do not belong in a truly diceless game, because diceless implies that players are masters of their fates, and so are responsible for both their successes and failures.
This fits nicely with the choices part of the theme, but doesn't build on heritage. To do that I decided that characters were built, literally, by their blood. Called vitae, various different colors existed, letting players choose to mix red vitae (common and inexpensive), with green or blue vitae (bestial or martial respectively, both somewhat costly), with more esoteric options like black or white vitae (vampire or immortal respectively, both expensive). Characters became at the heart pools of vitae, with the exact mixture describing what they are and what they can do. To do something difficult, vitae would need to be spent.
But spending from a pool doesn't stress the choices made, nor does it make those choices as important as what vitae a character has chosen. So rather than simply spending from a pool, I incorporated a stack structure, allowing only the top vitae of the stack to be spent. This introduced a strategic and thematic element. Some aspects of a character lie at the surface, used often, but not held strongly. Others lie deeper, and only come about when all appears lost.
Having the right vitae for an action or to cancel an opponent's action is extremely useful, otherwise it might as well be red vitae. Likewise restacking the vitae from rest, ritual, or feeding can only add to the top of the stack. Thus the stack changes over time, with the most significant changes requiring a low stack, and hence events of great peril.
In actual play the stack is physically constructed and manipulated, by coloring and stacking poker chips. This avoids one of the dangers of stacks, they can often be difficult to players to keep track. As a stack grows larger it becomes harder and harder to remember the order. A physical representation solves this problem directly. In addition by physically have a stack, the height of the stack cues the players into the current reserves of a character, especially their own. A visceral representation helps a player to relate to the the character, as they both are about to hit bottom.
At the End of the Day
The result is a fairly simple mechanic, which brings a depth of complexity, and whose complexity gives rise to the very themes that are at the center of Hellsing. This is the goal of genre emulation, to make a game that naturally produces the structure and themes of the genre, rather than simply giving you tools with similar names.
Next month I'll be discussing a very different topic. Some time ago I talked about how people affect the games they play. Next month I'll talk about how the games we play can affect us long after we play them.
Next Month: What Stays with You
