[Game Chef 2011] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric
JeffR:
Okay, this game is going to be 3 scenes plus an endgame. I'm going to go for a mix between freestyle and ritualistic structure: each player is going to end up having written a verse by the end of each scene, but the order of individual lines written is going to vary based on the play.
The central conflict in each scene for each character will be between keeping faith with one's oaths or being true to one's nature. And each scene will continually escalate to the point where everyone will eventually have to break with one or the other. I have in mind a bidding or bluffing mechanic here; if I can see a way to create enough interesting nondeterminism without fortune I'll do it but I'm not at all unwilling to turn to dice if needed.
Exile is still what happens when a player runs out of all currency and has no more verses left to write.
Two currencies: the low is associated with your nature, and the high with your oaths. The low regenerates each scene (so you get the low from every previous verse, in other words. And all three verses in whatever winds up going on in the heroic couplet/endgame), but the high is worth more.
Big question: exactly what does it mean to 'win' a scene/verse? What motivates the players to want to do so, here? Also, should I a pure competitive game aiming at a single winner, or a system in which each player independently wins or loses? Either way, I need to make sure that whatever goes on in the verses doesn't make the final winner/loser predetermined before the endgame begins, even in 'worst-case' scenario where the same player 'wins' all three scenes.
Kadrin:
I'm entirely interested in this idea - I love games where the mechanics really do advise the story. The original things you've brought up are a little reminiscent, for me, of Happy Birthday Robot! - have you played that? If not, you might look into it, I don't know, it might have some good ideas.
(Full disclosure: my idea also centres heavily on sonnets and the words 'blood, love, and rhetoric' - Stoppard being fantastic - so I may be biased here.)
JeffR:
So, as a last thing for today, I've made a (very) tentative wordcount budget for this thing, all numbers being approximate of course:
Introduction-150 words
Preparing for Play-250 words
Boxout On Sonnets-300 words
Scenes and Verses-1500 words
Heroic Couplet Endgame-500 words
Boxout/Table on High and Low Rhetoric-300 words
It's going to be tough fitting everything I want in the boxouts into those wordcounts, but I think that's the maximum I can possibly afford here.
JeffR:
Okay, so I now have the general scenario for this game: Courtiers/Suitors in the court of a Queen as capricious as she is deadly. The generic/default here is, of course, Elizabeth I: Blackadder 2, but played straight, but it will work just as well for Titania or Princess Aludra of Chiron or the heiress CEO of Transpacific Widgetronics. (Or, of course, with genders inverted or ignored, in settings or groups where that sort of thing is desired or expected.)
This lets me use 'exile' more literally in the mechanics, which is good. Each scene will be about securing her assent in some particular policy dispute or another, while the subtext here and the sonnet text generated is going toward the overall courtship. Still working out the overall scene mechanics, particularly with regard to drawing in the nature/oath conflict, but the central escalation/bidding mechanic is going to be about the Queen's favor, and since her caprice is part of the premise I feel better about using Fortune in it at least.
I have a vague idea in mind to try and make the system such that everything mechanical is being done entirely with the hands (manipulating tokens or dice), and all speech is in character, but I'm not wedded to this one.
JeffR:
Okay, I have the bones of how my mechanic is going to work: We'll have a board a row of boxes, number 2 through 12. During each scene people will be bidding on those boxes, with the currencies gained during the sonnet-writing portion of the game (and maybe in other ways). At the end of the scene, and maybe at other points, a pair of dice are rolled, and the result box's owner is the victor. There may be mid-scene rolls, in which a winner gets more currency, and I might forbid 7, 2, and 12 from all bids; I have some other rule ideas for them. You go into exile when you are out of currency and hold no boxes at all (and have already written all of your lines for the scene)
I need to work on tethering this activity more tightly to the banter/RP elements of the scenes, and getting the nature/oath conflict naturally expressed there rather than being mechanic buzzwords only.
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