This is the 3rd entry in my design diary for the design of PREQUEL, a one-shot tactical tabletop roleplaying game of heroic sacrifices. You can find the first entry here.
In an effort to drum up interest in PREQUEL, a game James Quigley and I are developing, we’ve decided to put out monthly developer diaries/logs that document some of our design thoughts and goals. You can find James’ devlogs on his blog, the Lab.
If you’re interested in getting notified when the game goes live for crowdfunding, you can sign up here: https://bit.ly/prequel-rpg
Tactical Storytelling
James talks about the lessons we learned during our early playtest in his devlog. In it, one of the main feedback points we received was that the worldbuilding/storytelling portion of the game was enjoyable, but felt like it did not have any substantial impact on the Final Fight which is both the narrative framing device and tactical combat portion of the game. (Note: I realize worldbuilding and storytelling are two different things, but both are used in PREQUEL, so I’m going to just use the term storytelling from here on out.)
As a reminder, PREQUEL is played in two simultaneous parts. The first part is a collaborative storytelling game where players recall the Quest of the Heroes from when they first met to where they are now fighting the Evil. This is accomplished by taking elements of a shared world and creating a timeline of events. The second part is the tactical Final Fight between the Heroes and Evil that takes place upon a grid battlefield. These parts are blended together in a turn-based structure where the act of choosing what to do in the Final Fight directly influences how a player recalls part of the Quest, and the current state of the Quest impacts the Hero’s effectiveness in the Final Fight. Narratively, you can think of this as the Heroes recalling their exploits as they fight to fuel their actions.
James and I knew that this tension between storytelling and tactical combat was going to be a core issue to address, so we brainstormed a few ways to make the storytelling portion of the game have direct impacts on the tactics of the Final Fight. To put the question another way: how do we make the storytelling more relevant to the final fight such that the two experiences don’t feel disconnected?
We brainstormed two possible ideas:
Achievement Upgrades
This idea consists of each Hero having four storytelling “achievements” that award the Hero with combat bonuses in the Final Fight. Achievements could be tropes such as “The Tragic Mentor, which would have the following requirements as defined by which Chapter (part of the game) the Event is created:
The Tragic Mentor
Any Chapter, One Individual who is a mentor to one or more Heroes
Chapter 1 or 2, one Event where the mentor is killed by the Evil or Individual allied with the Evil
Once the requirements are met through storytelling, the achievement is gained, and a Hero gains a benefit such as dealing additional Harm, moving through more spaces, or some other upgrade to a Power. In this way, the storytelling provides direct combat bonuses for the Final Fight. In essence, it’s “do X thing in the Quest, get Y combat powerup” It’s a straightforward approach to making the Quest matter to the Final Fight.
These requirements also act as inspirations to answer the storytelling prompts, or in some instances, could simply be the answer to the prompt. For players less experienced with worldbuilding/storytelling games these achievements could be seen as helpful guide rails. For optimizers, this could present a unique challenge of “how can I answer a prompt that also incorporates part of an Achievement?”
However, Achievements requires some list that players would need to peruse at least once (if not multiple times) so they have an idea of what they want to work towards during their turn. This has the potential to slow down the game as players decide the achievements and then how to create an event that satisfies that achievement. For players that are more experienced with storytelling games, achievements risk feeling somewhat restrictive as to the types of stories they can tell.
Story Element-based Combat
This method relies on the structure of the story elements used in the worldbuilding/storytelling portion of the game. For background, there are four types of story elements: Locations, Individuals, Factions, and Events. Locations, Individuals, and Factions are worldbuilding blocks, which are used to create Events each turn to respond to prompts associated with Powers used in combat.
Story Element-based combat requires reconfiguring the design of Events and the design of Powers so that Powers rely on Events just as much as Events are generated by the prompts in the Powers.
For instance, the current iteration of the Swiftblade’s Power, Slash is written as such:
Slash [BASIC]. Range: 1. Effect: Deal 1 Harm and Move 1 Space. Recall a time when an Individual or Faction had to sever something of their self to succeed.
In this design, the combat portion of this Power is static. It always has the same effect, no matter when it is used during the game. The storytelling portion of the Power, the prompt, is static in its prompt, but will generate dynamic results. Each time you answer the prompt, you’re (ideally) creating a new prompt. (Note: writing the Prompts such that they are descriptive enough to inspire without being too detailed to prevent repetition is another challenge we are tackling).
This method proposes to make the combat portion dynamic, not static. To do this, we look at what are the ways we can describe the story elements of the game. We have:
- Locations. During playtesting, Locations varied widely and were just generally inserted whenever we felt. However some prompts mentioned that locations would be destroyed/taken over by the Evil. So this suggests we could categorize Locations as something like “intact, destroyed, conquered.”
- Factions or Individuals. During playtesting, the prompts we used implied certain categories for these factions which we naturally gravitated towards as “classifications” which could easily have mechanical implications: “allies, antagonists, or leaders/lieutenants” (on the side of Good or Evil). During the creation of a Faction, we’d need to indicate what type of Faction is created.
- Events. Events had no categorization as of yet. But if we are to look to Microscope as a reference, we could categorize them as “Dark” or “Light.” Events can also result in changing the categories of Factions and Locations. The power to change these categories must be given by the Power itself.
Based on these element categories, we can tie these to the Powers, such that our Power can be written as:
Slash [BASIC]. Range: 1. Effect: Deal Harm equal to the number of Allied Factions and Move 1 Space. Recall a time when an Individual or Faction had to sever something of their self to succeed.
Now we have a Power that has a more dynamic combat effect as the story changes. The more Allied Factions created, the greater Harm is dealt. In general, more Factions will be created which means the Harm will go up which may also have interesting interaction with the Health of the Evil and having the Health go down quicker as the game progresses (which at that point, Health doesn’t matter as much, it’s finding the weaknesses). Having players constantly create allied Factions is great for this Power, but using this Power also somewhat limits it due to the prompt. The prompt now has a mechanical effect, it changes the category of a Faction from ally to antagonist, so if there’s another Power by some other Player that relies on the number of antagonist factions, one way to increase those is to use this Power. This kind of relationship (Power A gets better with the use of Power B), hopefully helps encourage the use of different Powers.
However, Powers based on the current categories of elements can make for a confusing Timeline if the events created are not in chronological order. For instance, if a Faction is an ally at a later point, but an event that takes place before it turns the ally into an enemy. Using this strategy would require events to be created in chronological order, which could be seen as a more guided form of storytelling, or too restrictive for players who are more familiar with games like Microscope.
A possible way to address this is that the changing states are not tracked on the element cards themselves, but as a new Event. So if a Faction goes from antagonist to ally, that is represented as an Event card, and not marked in any way on the Faction card itself.
Conclusions
Ultimately, I think our solution to the tactical storytelling challenge is somewhere between Achievement Upgrades and Story Element-based Combat. We are currently working on a playtest iteration of the game that uses Achievement Upgrades as a way to increase powers or, to increase Approaches. Approaches are PREQUEL’s way of describing Heroes with stats (Bravery, Haste, and Guile) and are spent to reveal weaknesses and use Legacy Powers. Powers are then re-written to not scale off of story elements (which are difficult to track), but instead off of Approaches, so that a Slash could deal Harm equal to the Hero’s Haste score.
The benefit of this strategy is to incorporate an existing mechanic we had in the game, which didn’t have much time in the spotlight during our first playtest. I am a big proponent of “slimming games down” by modifying pre-existing mechanics to address design challenges rather than adding on new stand-alone mechanics. I believe it keeps cognitive load while playing the game down, while also making the game easier to learn. We don’t have any concrete answers to our tactical storytelling challenge, but I’m excited to see where it leads with successive playtests!