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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9652482" data-attributes="member: 7040941">Tl;dr - Lot change, updated docs, lot thoughts. So over the past two weeks, Labyrinthian has undergone a rather fun flurry of design work, as while my focus is still on bringing the Engine up to a single hollistic revision, I did begin to let my mind wander into what Im calling Content Synthesis, where I'll be building the playable content the Engine needs to, well, be a game.And apropos, this actually resulted in a number of assumptions being challenged, and half the Engine ended up changing significantly because of it. Not to the point doesn't still do the same things, but to the point that it does them much more elegantly.The first thing that prompted this is that I started scoping out my concept for the World Guide and what that was going to look like, and as we can see in the new Memory outline, this became quite extensive.The idea in a nutshell is that the World Guide is that it is going to directly embody the idea of a CYOA book, hybridized with the typical Module and Setting Books we see in RPGs, with, to own surprise, a little bit of Where's Waldo.So, from Adventuring's Exploration system, I'm already going to have the gameworld broken up into a hierarchy of Areas between Regions, the Cities within them, and the Locations that may be within or without the Cities.This gives me the structure to draw on for organizing the World Guide. Regions become "chapters", and the Cities and Locations, and everything needed for them, their individual pages.This also reveals an organic "Zoom In, Zoom Out" order to this organization, which will, presuming I nail it, make navigating the book intuitive once one is used to using the book like this.Now, that was more or less what I already envisioned when I first came up with the World Guide, but verifying it through a proof of concept (which I won't share as I basically cobbled together a bunch of paid for content) was what I had been putting off for a while.But the key thing this revealed was that in order to maximalize the fidelity of the gameworld, the World Guide was going to need as much page space as I can give it.This prompted to also scope out my Sheet system, and what all was going to be needed for it. While I call them sheets, the intention is that Sheets are meant to include the colloquial sense, like a Character Sheet, but then also larger Stat Block structures, which will often take up an entire page.Hence, they're Sheets. So I wouldn't assume based on whats in Memory that you're expected to have a dozen different Sheets in front of you just to play. What you'd actually need is the dual Character Sheets, the overall World Sheet, and the World Guide. Everything else is either going to be embedded in either the World Guide or the Player's Guide, and both will have specific constraints to them on how and why you'd need to look something up.For one, the Player's Guide is going to be incorporating what you'd need for any kind of look up or referencing, but with the constraint that doing so is always opt-in; the game should never prompt you to go look something up, unless you're engaging a system of your own accord.Obvious example here would be the extensive Material Sheets and the Crafting System in general. But also things like generic Quest Blocks, and the Mechanic Index, which would both go towards assisting with improvised situations stemming out of Diversions, and things like Enemy Blocks, for whenever you want to spice up an Encounter (and thus have multiple Reaction Tables overlaid with one another) or need to improvise a fight.This opt-in constraint basically smooths over what would otherwise be a lot of stuff to gave to lookup, because its always consentual. Obviously one can split hairs over whether or not thats true philosophically, but from my experiments with, my intent has proven out. It does feel better when you're only diving into a book when you're wanting to versus when the game just doesn't do anything to organize itself better.For two, with the World Guide, the idea is that there will be no lookup, at all, other than shifting to new Regions where that can't be avoided. Very much like a gameworld in a video game, you're going to have to physically travel, in-game, to the things you want to interact with, and so lookup (as in, needing to know where something is in some other part of the book, and if you don't know, having to search for it) isn't needed at all.When you go somewhere, everything you'd need to look up is always a couple pages away, in a predictable, intuitive pattern. And this also begat another Opacity solution, to help players who don't want to spoil themselves. The Corner mechanism basically dedicates page space (the page number corner most likely), so that you can always go directly to what you're interacting with.Say for example you're in a dungeon with multiple secret rooms. You'll likely know these rooms exist sooner or later and thats unavoidable (but okay; just means you're aware theres more to find, which means more opportunity to keep playing or revisit). But through the Corner mechanism, you can physically restrain spoiling whats in those secret rooms.While this isn't something new, as its pretty much how most people try to look things up by page number, dedicating the space to it opens up design space to make the corners enticing; the "corners" of those secret rooms can have subtle artwork hints embedded into them, not only to hint at whats in them, but also how you'd find them. And then this gets extrapolated to every page after the initial World Map and World Sheet for the Area.That was the real key idea, because I am not shy about full sending on something when it linguistically sings like that. But, it also prompted another idea, because if I'm making artwork an integrated part of how you play, what else could I do with it?This lead me to Where's Waldo. Essentially, my idea was to use artwork somewhat similiar to a Where's Waldo page to depict certain physical vantage points or key sections within Areas, and each little thing you can find in these art pieces will effectively be prompts for exploration.They might be things the World Guide hard-defines, or they might be things you'd have to improvise your interactions with using the Adventuring system. But either way, these pages will effectively give you a brand new dimension to how you'd explore, and all without me having to define and fill up a huge gameworld inch by inch. I can instead fill in the bigger details, and let the smaller ones be personal to the player's own volition, which is lovely.But beyond this, scoping out the World Guide also revealed some other novel things. Namely, the idea of the Encounter Sheet, to eliminate needing to look up stat blocks, which in turn gave me the design space to make Encounters much more bespoke, and opened up a unified space to define what I call Bouts, which are basically Skill Challenges.The Dungeon Sheet was another, as while I did not, and still don't want to do procedural generation, I did want to support players who may want to explore strange small scale places out in the world. Not so much the full scale Labyrinths I'll be providing, but things like random caves, old ruins, etc. While I'm going to wait to define it more clearly, what I'm envisioning for it is a combination of my Prompt Table and Encounter Sheet systems, with elements taken from World Sheets. It should come together well, just isn't a priority just yet to build it out.But anyways, the World Guide definitely exists in a far more defined way now, and as I move into Content synthesis I'll be building a formal prototype after I take my Sheets out of mockup (which is all priority one, before I get into the really fun stuff).But, getting this scoped out prompted several changes, which ended up changing the Engine.The first of which ended up being rethinking Character Development, again. In general I've always been partial to the BRP/Elder Scrolls style of Skill-based systems, but due to a combination of the extensive and wild Class ideas I had generated, and me not finding a satisfactory way to go Skill-only, I tended to waffle back and forth, and that was still the case even though I was convinced I finally solved it.But, I hadn't, because as wonderful as my Class system would have been, I couldn't justify the space it would've required, so I started thinking about it again, and eventually I figured I could split the difference, and get the best of both worlds.Essentially, I just took everything my Class system would have done (except Bastions, which will still be present in more or less the same implementation), broke them up into their parts, and compressed them into the other parts of Character Development.Class Core Mechanics became Talents, and are now being retuned to work with any character type, so now players can mix and match this even more than they could have with Classes. Everything else, from Subclasses to other Abilities, is getting folded into Birthsigns, Bloodlines, and Backstories, wherever they fit best.So this ensures that, while they won't exist in name, each thing I came up with still exists in the system, but now it will be delivered in a much cleaner way.But this also begat a reconsideration of how development was structured, and this lead to the the Dual Progression Tracks, which to keep it short, better supported players actually engaging both their mechanical and narrative development as now both tracks (which has existed ever since I devised the Luck system) is now formalized and integrated better. I can give more details on it if desired, as I've built and rebuilt this particular system so many times over I was able to rapidly prototype and reverify the new iteration, which I'm happy to say is definitively the last iteration of it, barring some other problem anyway.So that definitely helped, and opens up a lot of page space, even with Backstories becoming more robust than they were before.But for the World Guide, there was a pretty big elephant in the room, which was the nature of the Living World system that was intended to work with it. Which means, by the old design, I would have needed just, far too many NPCs. So many, half the World Guide would have just been NPCs if I wanted any sort of believable fidelity or a gameworld that wasn't incredibly tiny. So something had to be done, as no amount of clever compression would have made that viable relative to what I wanted to do with the World Guide, without dedicating an entire book of its own just to NPCs, and that was just dumb, even if it would have let me maximalize everythin. Resolving this was what the bulk of these last two weeks ended up being dedicated to figuring out.When I originally came up with this system, basically adapting Ken Levine's Narrative Legos word for word, and adding my Quest Block system to it as a interpretative scripting mechanism, I never really questioned how he had set it up, because even in tabletop, its not unheard of to have explicitly designed NPCs, so as I proceeded with experimenting with it and implementing versions into my DCC and COC games, and then eventually into Labyrinthian, the baseline assumption just never got put into question.As it turned out, questioning the importance of having explicitly defined NPCs was the key question, and I had to answer no to that question, at least sort of.So I knew that, one way or another, I still needed the same dynamics to play out with the Living World. The World State needs to shift, not just in terms of ambient statistics, but also narratives. As Memory says, the gameworld needs to be able to cause and solve its own problems.While I think it should have been obvious to me way earlier, I eventually came up with the idea of abstract Nodes as a replacement.Nodes can be thought of like Factions, but they go a bit farther than that, as Nodes can also still be individual People where its most appropriate (this is important for later), and they have far more systemic behavior, as they interact with each other and the player nearly autonomously, just as the older 'Nobles' could have.And in so doing, we collapse the sheer volume of pages needed to generate these dynamics, and can even compress a lot of whats needed into the World Sheets, meaning I only need new pages for Nodes that wouldn't be covered there. Very clean, very efficient.But now, I still obviously need NPCs, and whats more, I still need them to be as potentially robust as the old Nobles would have been. Quite the thinker for how to square that.While all of this reconfiguring was going on, another motivation was actually at play for why a lot of these shifts happened, as I realized that I had leaned a bit too hard on the Epic side of things, to the neglect of slice of life, as after all, the game is supposed to blend both. This is what smoothed over breaking up the Class system, and what eventually got me to my lateral solution for NPCs, by way of giving Social Interaction a dedicated system of its own rather than assuming it as a crammed in part of the Living World.Luckily, this didn't require much design work, as the Talking Table and the Reputation and Renown systems already existed (but the pair are now more elegantly described). But the third aspect, Relationships, was new.While some of these dynamics always existed, as it was intended that you could form relationships, I never really put too much thought into systematizing it formally, until I needed a solution to make NPCs work in a game with relatively few predefined ones; a game where its very important that things are always themed from the in-world, first person perspective.Some lateral thinking later, the idea of "crafting" NPCs came up, and then the idea to theme this as Relationship building came soon after, and this was to be a pretty brilliant idea, as does a dozen things at once.It not only better systematizes something thats very near and dear to what slice of life fiction is about, but also provides a non-nebulous basis for what my Project DND concept is going to be focusing on.But at the same time, it also bakes the tone of the game that I wanted right into its dynamics, as Relationships you don't care to build or maintain simply fade into the aether over time, which in turn makes the Relationships you do build all the more special.And meanwhile, this is also providing a ton of new hooks for the Living World to utilize, BUT also provides clean pathways for looping in the other three interactive systems.You might decide to give your own Sword a name, but what if what you did with that sword earned it its own Reputation? Labyrinthian can now gamify how Glamdrimg becomes known as the Foe-Hammer.Shadow of Mordor style antagonists have always been an aim of the system, and not only can Combat loop in the same dynamics, Labyrinthian can give your rivals more fully rounded behavior and characteristics, not just those related to what you did to them.And Adventuring, as it was always going to do, gives the metronome that brings these characters to life and allows them to act autonomously. You might not always let them, but they will come and go of their own accord, and will be affected by their own comings and goings through the Quest system, which I should mention will actually be directly embedded into every corner of the gameworld. No matter where your friends and rivals, or the copious murky NPCs that the Nodes imply are out and about, they will all be able to interact with the gameworld, and be interacted with in turn.And with the right implementation, which Im highly confident in now more than ever, this will all be without any egregious tracking being necessary; the only tracking needed will be that which meaningfully contributes to the ongoing Canon of the gameworld.And that, naturally, opened up the idea of Keepsake games and directly adding the things you generate to the World Guide. A lot of this was already intended, what with Bastions becoming independent parts of the gameworld after the character dies or is retired and the recycling item cards (and now NPCs) along the same lines, but now its more formalized alongside how tracking would work, where I'd expect you to start scribbling in your guide. But, its totally fair to expect people to not want to deface their book, so providing a suite of Canon tools is in the line up to allow the book to stay clean, whilst you build up a separate binder as your Keepsake.So yeah, all in all its been an exciting couple of weeks figuring this all out and working through the prototyping and testing of the new systems. They still need some work, which will come when I do their respective revisions, but in terms of slotting right into Labyrinthian's design, they're solid.</blockquote>

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