Thread by @nicholasmasyk

Some thoughts on game design.

I've been cooking all my life, and professionally so about two decades. One of the things you'll see inexperienced cooks do when they're working on a dish is add as many high-end ingredients as possible to the dish. Surely that makes it good, right?

But when you throw lobster, truffles, foie gras, jamon iberico and saffron all together, you're gonna get something that tastes like none of it. The flavors don't compliment, they clash.

Same with game mechanics.

I'm a big fan of two things: brevity, and purposeful design. You could make a solid argument to say those things are the same thing, but not always.

First off: ALL OF US could write shorter, and should. Everyone. Even you.

But don't take it just from me! Listen to the GZA:
"Yo, too many songs, weak rhymes that's mad long
Make it brief Son, half short and twice strong."

And that's the GZA, aka the Genius, aka if the Wu Tang form like Voltron, he's the head.

The point is, you're identifying and cutting away the things that aren't necessary. The shorter it is, the more important and impactful what you keep in is. Too much stuff, and whats important gets lost in the sauce.

A far, far better designer than I, @infinite_mao, is big on "one perfect sentence." Just taking a hacksaw to entire pages to distill it into one encompassing, meaningful thought.

I'm not very good at that! But it's something to strive towards.

And this feeds into purposeful design: identifying that which is meaningful in mechanics, retaining it, removing what is not meaningful or necessary.

I can tell you as someone currently editing +100k words, this is Difficult.

I am a Big Fan of the theory that the most important game design happens at the table, not in the book.
UNCONQUERED, THE MILLION-MILLION SPHERES is not a game. It is a toolkit by which I hope to facilitate people to run *their* game.

With that in mind, I identified what I wanted to "say" with this toolkit - things 8 prioritize, that are important. Exploration, community building, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, unreliable narratives and timelines.

You should do this before you even think about systems.

Systems and mechanics exist to facilitate play. PTBA isn't a game any more than a d20 is a game: they're tools for interacting with a world, not the world itself.
Those tools you prioritize are effectively what your game is "about," insomuch that the game is anything before play.

This is (one of many reasons) why the Dragon Game fails - the primary method of interaction the game provides is through violence. Most of the game text is dedicated to killing things.
And we're expected to believe otherwise? Naw.

Think about some of the elements of your game. Do any mechanical elements only do a single thing? Why is that?

To be clear - that isn't *bad* or *wrong.* but it's something we should maybe consider?

Is it because that's a Very Important Thing?
Or are we including things we don't need just because we think we need them?

In many games and drafts I've included mechanics I don't even /like/ just because I didn't think about why I included them.

Like experience points.

I /hate/ xp (generally).

I don't really buy into core feedback loops, but I think if you provide cookies for a specific element of play, people are going to pursue the cookies.

And how many of my games use xp? Lots, because game design is hard and inconsistent and sometimes it's easier to include elements you dont like or are bad bc you can't think of something better 🤣

BUT (using jared as an example again, sorry) look at TVG (The Vanilla Game), which does the old-school d&d thing where currency is tied to xp.

Now this doesn't fully address why I specifically don't like xp, but what it does do is more than one thing at once. Dual purpose elements are wonderful. Why have individual mechanics for six things when you can have three mechanics that do everything?

Im on record finding playtesting largely unhelpful in game design (if you find otherwise? cool) but I will say that a critical eye with your development editing? you're gonna find the things you would maybe playtest out just the same.

Things you use, things you don't, things that don't fit, things that are missing.

A critical eye to what we're including in our games is /key/. Asking yourself why you're including what elements you're including should be at the forefront of our minds, not an afterthought.

To loop it back to food, your mechanics are elements of the plate - are they in harmony, creating expressive flavor and sensation? are they overpowering or jarring? why did you include them? are there any you could take out? what happens?

What happens when you take an element out of your game? what happens if you take out another? what are you left with?

These are the questions we should be asking ourselves.