#beneath pirate flags

hey, welcome back. lets get into the details:

bpf makes a critical break from the original ndnm games in the way its environmental playbooks work. mine are things like "the fort" and "the map" (see images) — individual iterations of broader concepts, much like the character playbooks ("legend", "dandy", "monkey" etc) are iterations of common pirate types. there are, almost certainly, multiple "monkeys" in one world — much as there are almost certainly multiple forts.

this contrasts with Askew / Apart's setting books — things like "varied scarcities," "society intact," and "goyishe world." these are intentionally broad environmental pressures. although "society intact" may be encountered different times in different places — with different names and different faces — it is, fundamentally, the same force.

2. this isn't necessarily a thing i want to change (although there are tweaks i'll be making to just about all the playbooks) but it is real interesting to think about how bpf got here, from a design perspective. the story is simple: bpf didn't start from playing either dream. it started with me reading wanderhome, and this design is borrowed (nearly) directly from there.

wanderhome, like bpf, has players create new environmental elements again and again over the course of a campaign — from the smallest kith to the largest citadel, you might be doing generation multiple times in a single session. wanderhome handles this by simplifying, simplifying, simplifying — a trait has one picklist, a nature two, and so the process of generation is quick and nondisruptive, and you're quickly able to create a populated world without losing yourself in any particular moment of generation.

(che, i hear you shouting, you baited us in with an inflammatory claim about d&d's bad design. get to the point already. ok. i will)

one of the things i like most about possum creek games as a whole (ha, got you again) is the way they can become sprawling without ever overwhelming players. this has been talked about a lot in advance of the yazeba's release — but it's true for wanderhome, too.

where both dream askew and dream apart have just six setting elements, wanderhome has (even if you disregard the seasons and holidays) a whopping forty-eight traits and thirty-six natures. it is — despite seeming small in the shadow of yazeba's — a sprawling game, and it's only through a tremendous efficiency and elegance in design that the whole thing doesn't come bursting apart at the seams. some of that is thanks to the ndnm token economy as a whole and some of it is good writing specific to wanderhome, but none of it is possible without an ethic that prioritizes simplicity — cutting the building blocks into their smallest fundamentals, so they can fit into something huge and, more importantly, comprehensible.

this all stands in sharp contrast to what seems to be the tendency in dice- and percentage- based games (told you i'd get there eventually), who — out of a need for a bespoke, simulationist tool for every situation, maybe — have a tendency towards appendices, supplemental books, and a proliferation of minutiae. i am talking about d&d here, although i don't think it's the worst offender — i still have nightmares about the hand-to-hand system from top secret, a game my dad only recently admitted he was "basically only pretending to understand the rules of" when he ran it for my friends and i when we were kids. i'm not saying all crunchy game design is like this — honestly, i think crunchiness is a totally different spectrum from rules-complexity — but i do think that, sometimes, in an effort to feel sprawling and more importantly substantial, games become inefficient and more or less illegible. it is hard to play d&d. it is hard to hold all those rules in your head. by comparison, dream askew, dream apart, and wanderhome can held pretty easily in your head. you could probably even reconstruct some of the playbooks from the design fundamentals (act weak = gain token, act strong = spend token, evocative picklist). the most important thing about these games is that the rules are evocative and they let you stay in the fun part of play for as long as possible, interrupted as little as possible.

let me make this totally clear: the fun part of a game can absolutely be tallying numbers and consulting armor ratings, but i don't think that's the reason some of these games get so big. the real answer is: cutting shit is hard! eliminating systems is hard! saying "this is not helpful, let it go" is really tough, especially when you're left with a design document that was shorter (and by extension, whispers the awful voice in the back of your head, worth less) than you were expecting. still, it's important to remember: 'good system design' is not the same thing as 'filling as many pages as possible.', even if that's hard to accept in an industry that feels like it has to be prices and paid by the page.