One of the most positive pieces of feedback I’ve had about Mythic
Bastionland is that “it runs itself”.
This was a big thing I wanted to achieve with the game, so
it’s awesome that I’ve had so many people say this specific phrase to me.
At a recent con, somebody said something that really stuck
with me. They said “it ran itself once I understood the workflow”.
Workflow. A word I hadn’t heard used toward an RPG before.
While I might wince at the idea of “work” in a game, I regularly hear it used
in an area that’s just as playful.
That’s right, it’s time for another
tortured music analogy.
There’s a lot of crossover between TTRPG-people and
synth-people. At our lowest point, we both believe that buying just one more
thing will open up the gates to heaven that we’ve been imagining within our
hobby. If I buy that campaign box set I will run a five year saga with
my friends. If I buy one more drum machine I’ll have the perfect home studio
setup and finally find my sound.
Whether it’s games or grooveboxes, I’m not here to tell you
that gear doesn’t matter, but I think it matters in different ways that are
worth considering separately. In particular, with music gear, I’m more
interested in workflow than features.
Workflow is, in short, how you operate the piece of gear.
Which settings have a knob to turn, and which require navigating a menu screen?
How easily can I program a sequence or is it easier to just play it live? Does
this thing come with presets or do I have to make stuff from scratch?
Now, believe it or not, there’s no right answer to
any of those (a lie, knobs always beat menus), but each of them will affect the
way you use the instrument, which in turn affects the music you make. Modular
synthesis is an entire niche-within-a-niche that promises limitless sound
opportunities, but its extremely specific workflow tends to produce a
very specific type of music. Always? No. Often? Well... yeah (sorry, modular
guys!).
This isn’t necessarily about making things simpler or more
accessible, just considering different options for how each part of the
experience is presented and interacted with, including which parts sit
partially or fully concealed, and what choices are given for how to interact
with each part.
Meanwhile, features are the things you could generally reel
off as a spec list. Three fully analogue oscillators with each with six
shapeable waveforms, hardsync, PWM, ring modulation, cross mod, into a resonant
filter with high-pass, low-pass and band-pass plus three ADSR envelopes and
LFOs assigned via mod matrix all controlled by a Euclidean sequencer, on board
plate and spring reverb unit and so on.
Now does that mean features don’t matter? Of course not.
As much as it was written like a joke, that synth sounds great! I love shaping
a wave and assigning an LFO as much as the next guy, but how I do that
matters just as much as the fact I can do that.
I have Synth A that has an LFO I can assign to modulate one
of three destinations (bear with me, you don’t need to actually understand
this) using a simple switch. I have Synth B that has two LFOs I can assign to
many more locations, but doing so involves using buttons to navigate a menu
with a tiny LCD screen. Synth B can make sounds impossible with Synth A, but
Synth A lets me play in a way that Synth B obstructs.
Dragging ourselves back to RPGs, I’ve definitely played in
games where I feel like the workflow is preventing me from enjoying, or even
accessing, some of its headline features. Mythic offers a comparatively
narrow feature list, but my goal is that the workflow is encouraging people to
actually play with them, perhaps even shoving them encouragingly into that
playspace.
So will Intergalactic Bastionland “run itself” like this? It’s one of my goals for the system, but I think the workflow will feel different, something I’ll discuss a little more next week.
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I'm not sure this is exactly aligned with the topic of the post, but 'the game runs itself!' got me thinking about what I've really appreciated about MB since I started running it. One of the things I think is deceptive about simply *reading* the book of MB is that the magic of the world isn't necessarily baked into an individual myth - it's that when you start to play, these myths start instantly interacting.
ReplyDeleteWith a fairly tight tonal frame around the game, you inevitably get thematic overlap between the myths which players instantly pick up on; you even have some myths (like the Glade) which are compelling primarily *in combination with* other myths (or at least, with the world).
I think the benefit here is allowing my prep work to focus really on things like setting the mood, or figuring out the higher level political conflicts, knowing that the myths handle the day-to-day running of the Company's lives.
And further - without wanting to diminish Chris' *insane* work writing 72 of the bloody things to fill a book, I *don't* think it's difficult to insert myths (or myth-a-likes?) or even other conflicts into the same model to create a world that instantly feels more alive than it would if I wrote 6x6 entry random encounter tables (for only marginal additional effort).
Was just thinking about exactly this after reading through yet another hot new RPG system that tells you all about its world, how to create characters, and how to resolve skill checks, but has nothing to say about how to structure gameplay beyond giving the players a starting contact, ending with a big boss fight, and winging it in between.
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