A few years ago, I described a RPG design experiment, Homeworld Project. The premise of the design was to build a game based on a mix of two genres: the high adventure of space opera and the mystic journeys through astral space (or other spiritual realms). This mixture produces a place where heroic journey's commence in the midst of high adventures and personal growth, and that growth is reflected back in the events of astral space.
More recently I've attacked this problem again, taking and revising dramatically each aspect of Homeworld Project, while keeping it true to my design goals. This means ensuring the holistic design principles are maintained, each change in the system is explored and responded to by further changes, until the game emerges as a whole once more.
Back and Forth
The following is an overview of the revised Homeworld Project. I've put it between design comments to better show where each piece stems from the original design, and how the design goals are met by each piece of the game.
Homeworld Project is a RPG that is built somewhat differently than most. It is a dynamic game where each piece of the game interacts with other pieces, in an almost cyclic manner. So it is especially important to understand how all the pieces fit together, before delving into each one.
Holistic design tends to marry the different mechanical and setting components of the game tightly. This makes them work well together, but also makes them more difficult to separate into self-contained pieces. This makes communicating those connections that much more important.
One of the starting places is the action. The action is where everything interesting occurs, a flow of events, people, ships, and plots. If you are in the action then you can be influenced by others in the action. And if you are not, you cannot do anything consequential. One of the important parts of the action are manifests. These are people, groups, ships, or events introduced by a player or the GM to help drive things. In addition to manifests, the action also has the characters and ships directly belonging to the players.
The idea of "the action" is another way to formulate the place we (as players) are paying attention. Many games these days use scenes for this purpose. The written space opera story is something I'm trying to emulate here. These rarely meets the scene structure of TV, movies, or theater. Instead, there is a more intuitive sense of "what is going on". The action is intended to capture that.
At any given point of the action there can be a bout, a contest between any two elements in the action. The outcome of a bout is determined by dice, as well as aspects of the characters, ships, and manifests involved. And the result of a bout is called a consequence. This gives some difficulty or after effect to the loser, as determined by the bout's winner. How much of these consequences someone or something can bear before being driven out of the action is based on their importance.
Bouts and consequences help give a bit more structure to the action. Manifests are, loosely, the supporting characters, although they can be ships, gangs, or even faceless events. What more, players can bring in their own manifests, such as hiring a gunman or causing an uprising. This ties to the astral space feel of the game, where believing is often enough to make something happen.
One way of affecting a bout is to spend the layers of a grain (if you are a player) or a reflection (if you are the GM). That can change the dice you compare to determine the winner of the bout. But if that changes a die to a 12 it will also help increase that grain or reflection, and if it changes a die to a 1 it will help decrease that grain or reflection. In some ways this is the purpose of the bouts. While consequences are the immediate outcome, the longer term goals are to raise a grain to thirteen layers or to diminish it to zero layers.
What ties this together is the fact that grains and reflections are not independent. Indeed each grain has a reflection, which shares the same number of layers. Grains describe inner or personal aspects of a character or ship. On the other hand, reflections are the global scale counterparts. So your Quest for Vengeance can be mirrored in The Pirate Fleet that slew your family.
This is a major thing I kept from the earlier version. The idea of grains and reflections is one of the central parts of the game. Removing this meant the whole idea of striving to make a new world for yourself falls flat. The difference is that now reflections are the resources for the GM, not simply aspects of the world in general. This helps to tie the GM's plots together with the goals of the players.
Even as your grains and reflections change, each time a 1 or a 12 appears the game moves toward a partial climax, called a Turning Point. Turning Points occurs periodically, and reset the expended grains and reflections, as well as allowing the GM to describe a global change to the action. Everyone can be affected, and some will even be removed from the action. Then play continues once more, eventually building to a new Turning Point.
Turning Points are a big change, and a big deal. The reason is that Turning Points directly emulate the end of a chapter in the novel you are playing. The sudden twist or change in events brought about by a turning point puts a natural closure to what has happened, but also drives the next chapter of the action.
A Turning Point occurs because each time a 1 or a 12 appears two numbers are brought closer together. These numbers affect the dice as they are used. The higher of these numbers starts at 11, and any die showing that number or above will increase by one up to 12 on its next use. Likewise the lower number starts at 2, and causes dice to reduce. Grains can change this, to a point. A grain layer allows you to skip a use of your die, so if the low number was 4 and you rolled a 3, then you could skip the 3 and the 2, and go directly to 1.
But 1's and 12's cannot be skipped, and they roll randomly for their next use. Also, high rolls win bouts. So you can be stuck at a low number for several bouts, or spend layers to jump to 1 directly. But if you do, you will be weakening that grain or reflection. On the other hand, you can jump directly to a 12 to strengthen your grain or reflection, but that usually means giving up a few bouts of assuredly high rolls.
Thus choosing to succeed affects your grains, which in turn affect those grain's reflections. And like wise, the GM's choices can affect the reflections, in turn affecting the grains they mirror. In both cases that changes how the action will evolve, feeding back into the cycle.
Which brings us, oddly enough to the smallest mechanic in the game, the dice mechanic itself. This dramatic d12 mechanic (as I've called it), is taken directly from the earlier version. The sense of drama and back and forth bouts is too appropriate to space opera to cut out. And since it links with the Turning Points, it should produce a natural build-up before the chapter ending.
However, one part did change. Unlike the earlier version, where the high and low thresholds were fixed for each character separately, they now change, but remain the same for everyone. This is an important idea, revising the design should not increase the complexity without seeking another way to simplify. It is very easy in revising a RPG to keep adding extra parts without trimming the game back down. Remember, part of rule number one is knowing when not to do something in your design.
Don't expect to control everything that happens in Homeworld Project. Instead, try to go with the flow, and see where it takes you. Heroics and villainy, cunning and brute force, they all have their place in the action. And if you are careful you will be able to find your homeworld.
This describes some of the changes to Homeworld Project. There were a few others. For example, Panache and Modes went through some changes, to synch them up with the other revisions.
These changes went into a playtest version of Homeworld Project (pdf). After a cursory playtesting, the revisions seem to be largely beneficial. However, while playtesting is a vital design tool, it is often limited by the accessible player base and their assumptions about RPGs. Another useful tool is the statistical metagame, or ur-game I described some time ago. Last time I described some theories of player motivations for use in building ur-games. Next article I'll show how some metagames can test Homeworld Project with different motivations and perspectives of play.
Next Month: Metagames of Astral Space
