[Dork] The Lightning and the Ghost

It occurred to me that when I am picking at my game system, I am designing it to teach me how to design games.  It's interesting, but something I get to circle around every so often when I feel I have done enough real writing.  Today, for instance.  

Two things happened.  I started browsing the archives of Deeper in the Game, and I wrote out the things you can do in my system the way I would have if it were a hack of Apocalypse World.  I may not like the tone or the subject matter of that game (I don't dislike them, either, except that I will never play a Hardholder around anyone whose opinion of me I cherish, because I assumed LARP form* and that was not cool), but holy shit, dissecting it is how I learned anything useful I know about making games.

One thing I realized about the game I made was that I have designed it so that, some meta-stuff aside, there are six different kinds of things players can do: Face Disaster, Face Hardship, Face Ignorance, Face Malevolence, Face Violence and Face Want.  This are the things you do.  That's the world I made, that's the stories you can make.  Conflict is dictated by those choices I made.  Resolution runs along those lines.  

This realization has something whirring in my head.  One of the things that I have sought after in design, in my head, anyway, is the possibility of an adventure game in which combat and violence are not major options, or not really options at all, possibly, and how to design that in such a way that all us gamers, who have been conditioned with combat=adventure.  

I come back to Autumn War all the damned time.  I tried using the system above, but it never quite worked because I didn't know what the hell I was doing with it.  I liked the idea of Facing things instead of being Strong or Smart or Agile, but I was facing things that were very generic, when everything I wanted was a lot more specific.  If I were going to go back to the Provinces (which I won't do until Motherfucking Pirates is finished), this is how I might define the Nature of the characters.
Face Fear - Try to accomplish things that are frightening; rescuing someone from a river, talking to the Oak deserters, going into the dark thicket.Face Grief - Social things and help, make connections with others, bolster those who are despairing, not despair. Help out, in general.  In fact, unlike other versions of this system, you helping another person reach their goals is as much a Fight for you as reaching their goals is for them.Face Darkness - Both in terms of what is hidden and what is supernatural and ooky.  Reach into the dark and feel what reaches back.Face Hardship - Again, pretty standard, do things that demand your stamina and will.Face Wilderness - The forest is your enemy and your friend.  It can hide you, shelter you, give you what you need, or it can freeze you, strand you and feed you to Ugly Birds.Abilities in the basic system give you special things you can do.  Here it would be similar, but I am thinking I would tie them closer to the actual Aspects of Nature - for instance, if you want to be able to initiate violence against someone, that's an Ability that goes along with Facing Fear.  You can buy it, but unless you do, you can't win a violent altercation, or get anything useful out of it, you can only not lose.  That's not to say you're prohibited from saying "I hit that guy," just that it isn't going to get you very far.  You win and the guy is hit, so unless all you wanted was to inflict harm on a guy, then you're not really getting anything out of it. 

Another thing I realized in writing this is that, not only is it important what buckets I choose to put actions in, but also how I divide actions between the buckets.  With what I am working on now, supernatural fuckery and social head-to-head argument and persuasion is grouped up together.  In the thing above, information gathering and supernatural stuff is together.  If I were going to try TLA/LOKverse, then supernatural stuff (bending) would be in with physical violence.  

Even names might be important.  Face Disaster for a Motherfucking Pirates game would probably become Face Danger and Face Action, because there is a setting where action is extremely violent.  Face Ignorance would be Face Mysteries.

It's all coming out of moves.  Moves are powerful.

*LARP form is like getting infected with the rage virus from 28 Days Later, only instead of killing people and vomiting blood, you become a raging douche.