Reconstructing the Bits

I'm generally pretty happy with the way mystic characters will be built in the "Familiar" game, but the mystic characters are just temporary shells for interacting with the environment.

I've been tryng to work out a simple point-buy system for creating the familiars, something that doesn't rely on randomness, and which can be customised before the first session of play. If I had to create an analogy to another game system, this might be like a set of procedures allowing you to build PbtA playbooks. The familiar allows a predefined set of playbooks, or adds a certain set of manuoevres to the playbooks chosen. The mystics are the playbooks, which come and go, the familiar is a constant modifier applied to any chosen playbook.

Maybe the mystics could be described as a set of story fragments, while the familiars are the over-arching themes linking these fragments into wider narratives.

Part of the problem is that I've been tryng to define familiars in a way that is distinctly different to the mystics. Trying to reinforce the idea that the familiars and the mystics come from completely different worlds, but that just hasn't felt right.

I'm starting to feed a few ideas into this system that I started exploring many years ago. Doing my regular thing where go full circle with ideas, revisting things with new perspectives.

To get this straight in my head, this process has required drawing things out. In some ways ths seems overly complicated, so I probably need to streamline things... or at least find a better way to explain how the moving parts fit together. In turn, this has got me thinking about the SNAFU cookbook. This project was designed to cover my design rationale, and to explain what everything in the system is, why it's there, and what might happen if the component were changed. There are a lot of people who take systems and make modificatons to them, I'm one of them... but a quick look at many online forums and facebook groups shows that a lot of homebrewers make changes without understandng what could happen when they tinker with a single part of a game, or add an element without considering how it might impact on other parts of the system. Similarly, there are numerous game-masters, dungeon-masters, and amateur designers who think they're adding new elements when they're contributing stuff that is reinventing the wheel in ways that dozens of people have done before them.  

Cortex has done something similar (a few times now), and there have been plent of other guides to different games providing a bunch of components that can be interlocked to create a functioning system. GURPS and other generic systems have similarly thrown a whole heap of elements that can be added to a functional core system, but in my experience rarely do they explain why things are being added. It's all just a recipe book... add this component, a pinch of that one, and a slider on that one allows you to adjust it to taste... but how it affects the game is something that you'll have to work out for yourself. 

I know that we don't need every amateur cook to have a thorough grasp of molecular gastronomy, and similarly we don't need every homebrewer and game tinkerer to have a thorough grasp of game theory and the socio-dynamics of play, but for those who do want to dig a bit deeper and for those who do want to refine their game ecosystem it could be useful to have the knowledge available.

This will draw on work from The Forge (including GNS theory, even though that is considered controversial in many circles, and completely forgotten in others), but will also add a lot of digging through my own ideas from the past posts on this blog (notably Vector Theory, and the varous elements that led to building FUBAR, and then the fundamental concepts underlying SNAFU).

In my head, I'm aiming toward a magnum opus in the vein of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, and while I know that it probably won't see the same degree of critical influence as that tome, it's a good intended destination.

For the moment though, I need to rework the Familiars for my game, and avoid getting distracted by the grander goals.