Daemons of Strife and Love post-mortem

[talysman]

as part of the process of rewriting my Iron Game Chef contribution for actual distribution, I've decided to go back through the game and analyze what was wrong, what was missed, and what needs to be changed. also, I figured this might be a good opportunity to record my thought-processes on how I designed the game.

first, the inspiration. as I mentioned before, when Mike selected the words "Blood", "Song" and "Volcano" as three of the available seed-words, I was very tempted to write a Beavis and Butt-head Sim game, especially since I was watching some old B&B videos around the time the competition started. I thought: "that would be cool! heh hmm heh... there could be like fire in the volcano. FIRE!"

but then I thought better of it.

I also was tempted to make an rpg based on the Big Secret History of the World according to Scientology, but decided against that as well, although it was an eerily prescient idea, as it turned out...

what I wound up doing was going to the Lexical Freenet and entering the various words to see what potential links existed between the terms. one of the chains -- "blood" to "volcano" -- mentioned Empedocles, and I thought "wait a minute, that name sounds familiar..." and looked him up. AH! a greek philosopher who thought blood contained a daemon of fire that reincarnated in various forms... and there was a legend that Empedocles claimed he would rise as a god if he were to kill himself, then threw himself into a volcano to prove it! damned spiffy.

second, the appearances. the title "Daemons of Strife and Love", although suggestive of the game's content, is just too long. I think the new working title will be "Empedocles", with "Daemons of Strife and Love" as a subtitle. still, it lacks a certain excitement, so I may settle on an entirely different title. also, I attempted to use the five areas of Exploration as an organizing principle, but I don't think that worked out very well; the next draft should be re-organized.

third, the mechanics. I decided early on that I was going to use my TFT-like game mechanics, which I had mentioned previously. they were still very bare-bones at this point: roll dice based on difficulty to beat a stat, traits reduce the number of dice rolled, earned experience points based on number of dice rolled, experience points are spent on "experiences". not much detail, but my intention was to modify this basic mechanic for each game in a series of "fantasy inversions", adding a few extra mechanics for the Setting, Character and Situation elements unique for that game. still, I would need some basic rules for money, speed, size and other factors used to calculate difficulties, and I didn't have these yet.

for the mechanics specific to this game, I knew I needed reincarnation rules and some kind of carrot-and-stick related to the philosophy of Empedocles, which is where all the stuff about Strife came from. Empedocles practiced vegetarianism and abhored animal sacrifice at a time and place when failure to make blood sacrifice was pretty blasphemous. this seemed to be a good source of game conflict... plus, there was a comment about how the daemon was forced to live in the flesh because of sins it had committed -- the Strife it caused caused it to be attracted to the lower realm. this helped me frame the Strife and metampsychosis mechanics.

some things are missing or done incorrectly in the game as it now stands. for one, Empedocles had this primitive theory of evolution: the first living things were actually individual disembodied body-parts, which over millennia evolved into colonies of mismatched body parts (goat combined with human to form a satyr, for example.) these then evolved into beings with matched body parts -- humans and animals. the disembodied parts are actually an interesting setting twist and should have been included. the hybrids were included, but they should probably be lower on the Ladder of Life than ordinary animals. I will probably rewrite the Ladder and come up with rules to handle the disembodied parts.

another error: I meant to actually give an experience point bonus for characters who threw themselves into volcanos or otherwise immolated themselves, but I didn't. ack! but there is another error in the experience point system, anyways: although lowering Strife should cost more experience points than adding a Trait (because lowering Strife is central to play,) increasing Blood or Breath is actually less effective than adding a Trait, so the experience point values should be changed to reflect that. the 4-to-1 ratio is correct, just inverted. however, I would want characters to spend a little more time having encounters, so 10 experience points to increase an attribute or add a Trait is just too low; it should be at least double.

there is also a general error with the die-roll mechanics: special and critical success/failure do not work right for 2-dice rolls. I think part of this is because I don't really need two kinds of special results. I will probably drop criticals.

I also need to describe play better. I did at least choose to address IIEE specifically in this game, whereas I have usually left this vague. in Daemons, Intention comes first, which helps specify the number of dice to roll; the action is Initiated at the moment of the roll, with the order of Execution determined by who has the highest roll. finally, Effect is determined from the results of the rolls. die rolls are sort of in between task resolution and conflict resolution, but if I'm going to do something that weird, I need to define it better.

there's a lot more to do as well. the setting needs to be described a bit more, especially in the final product. details for weapons, armor, and Traits need to be worked out. still, I'm fairly happy with this game.[/url]

[Mike Holmes]

I like the body parts thing. I'll have to use that elsewhere as well.

The only problem that I have thematically is that the game seems to be all about nature lovin'. What I'd like to see to spice that up, is some sort of mechanism whereby the conflict becomes human to human in terms of potential conflicts outside of just the "protecting nature" realm. It just seems a bit narrow. So can you figure out a way to spread it out?

If you can incorporate something with the "primitive" mismatched beings that would be a real bonus.

I'd call the game just Strife. Simple, grabby, punchy.

Mike

[talysman]

The only problem that I have thematically is that the game seems to be all about nature lovin'. What I'd like to see to spice that up, is some sort of mechanism whereby the conflict becomes human to human in terms of potential conflicts outside of just the "protecting nature" realm. It just seems a bit narrow. So can you figure out a way to spread it out?

hmmm. I will certainly try.

curiously enough, I didn't think of it as a "nature lovin'" game. perhaps, in the sense that the actions of the characters may be seen as a commentary on animal-rights activists, vegans, and others like them... but modern day nature lovers tend to focus on saving forests and wetlands, whereas I didn't see anything like this when I was reading up on Empedocles.

I was actually thinking of the game more as a twist on D&D clerics. certainly, when I rewrite the text, I need to fill in more details about the benefits of reducing Strife in others; I'd hinted at the wars and banditry, but didn't really work it in well to the character actions. I think I even briefly mentioned centaur raids as a possibility, but the half-beasts definitely need to be fleshed out (so to speak.)

incidentally, I'm thinking of the new Ladder of Life being something more like this:

[*]gods
[*]empyreans (fiery beings)
[*]aerial beings
[*]demigods & nymphs
[*]humans
[*]animals
[*]half-beasts
[*]incompletes (disembodied parts)
[*]invertebrates
[*]plants
[/list:u]

characters leave the game once they ascend to godhood or descend to planthood. I need a better way to describe the incompletes, however; I'm thinking of spinning this slightly by having all the incompletes as a single organ with its own arms and legs, like the creatures with faces in their bellies (which would really be disembodied heads with legs growing from their necks and arms growing from their temples.) I forget the name of this kind of creature... but the greeks had a name for 'em, believe it or not.

the cyclopes would be rewritten to be giant eyeballs with mouths, arms and legs, to fit into this scheme as incompletes. I'm seeing a lot of potential here for exotic creatures reminescent of the monsters in GURPS Fantasy II.

[Mike Holmes]

Could be just one person's faulty reading. Anyone else see it as narrowly as I did? Need more datapoints on that.

the cyclopes would be rewritten to be giant eyeballs with mouths, arms and legs, to fit into this scheme as incompletes. I'm seeing a lot of potential here for exotic creatures reminescent of the monsters in GURPS Fantasy II.

Now that's an obscure reference. But, yeah, that'd be cool. Maybe not as gory as GFII, but I get the picture.

Mike