mean_liar's Fantasy Heartbreaker

[mean_liar]

I'm continuing work on a personal Fantasy Heart-breaker and I've come across some difficulties and peculiarities with the design that I'm not sure what I want to do with, and I thought I'd share for some feedback. I haven't even fully fleshed out some of these issues I'm talking about, but they're taking up some brain space and I wanted to fish for thoughts. There's also the additional benefit of enjoying the fruits of some reflection and synthesis.

Ultimately, I was looking to create a game that provided an integrated high-fantasy ruleset that enabled heroes to progress as ass-kickers, rulers, and gods. I'm not overly worried about getting the individual bits to work - I'm finding it's the integration that's difficult.

I started with some basics of how I want the various minigames to go so that there would be some parallels between ruling a faction and executing heroic hand-to-hand combat, but it quickly extended past that with the meta-concerns that came up.

EXAMPLE: the basic structure of the Faction portion of the game involves a society housing the various Factions being affected by Events. The Events are basically the Faction-level version of monsters, and they have various characteristics and what-not that require some Faction resource allocation to deal with.


ISSUE 1 - maintaining universal player interest in micro-level resolutions to Events

Well, when integrating things I figured that it would be nice if those Events could be handled by a Faction action, but also to provide a method that individual Heroics could deal with it. At this point there's a problem: how to tie a group of heroes together such that they're mutually interested in the outcome of any Events sufficiently to sustain an adventure? If Drought comes up and only some of the players are interested in resolving it's outcome at the Heroic level due to its Rewards not being universally convincing, how do I work with that or overcome that design flaw?

I have a few resolutions in mind, but I'm curious in others. One is that not all Events can be resolved by any Faction: some will require individual Heroics that would presumably draw in the whole party. Another is a variant on the first, in that there are some Events whose Magnitude is such that without Heroics aiding in their resolution the Factions wouldn't be able to deal with them. Also, since I can hardcode in a setting I was thinking that the more Heroes that involve themselves in an Event the more important it becomes, so that an individual action could be resolved by a few die rolls, but the more Heroes involved the more "fate" takes an interest and the more complicated it's resolution becomes (with a commensurate increase in rewards)... but then I'm still left with what to do with an Event that only interests half the Heroes at the table.

I could kludge and call the active Heroes some kind of Exalted-style Circle or whatever, such that the full "Heroic Adventure" is only unlocked when there's universal buy-in to tackle the Event at the micro level, with a corresponding increase in rewards.


ISSUE 2 - how much focus on Factions is appropriate

One element that comes out of the Faction and Event system is that the game's integration becomes the game itself. I'm worried about losing focus from the Heroes. I mean, they're ostensibly still the ones calling the Faction shots, but I'm concerned about the players seeing the Heroes as extensions of their Factions, rather than as characters in their own right.

My design hasn't really come up with any ideas on this, but I'm aware enough of this issue to be concerned with achieving its resolution at some point.

I'm planning to include for pro-active Hero/Faction activity rather than endlessly re-acting to Events, so that's a place where the player/Hero might feel a little weightier.


ISSUE 3 - how many Factions should a party be involved with

The base Faction design is such that it can model an element of society such as a merchant's guild, or religious order, or city, or region; basically, any social organization (including spirits of the woods or the creatures of the swamp or whatever) can be modeled well enough. However, the larger issue is then how to manage the various Factions that each Hero is going to want to be aligned with? The differing (but not openly antagonistic) agendas of the players/Heroes/Factions is currently part of the game and I think I want to eliminate that, but I do have some concerns about maintaining some kind of cohesion while simultaneously allowing a Crime Lord, a Warmaster, the Merchant Prince and The Divine Chosen of Light to have something unique to do at the table.

[Judging__Eagle]

Use Freemind to help organize these ideas out.