Codifying the Basics

So many games use shorthand and assumption to get their points across. The idea generally seems to be that gamers know certain things intuitively, so they don't need to be clarified in detail. Even when you read through a "What is an RPG?" section in various games there are elements of the experience that are glossed over or left out completely. This is further complicated by the notion that an actual play session of the game may look quite different to the examples written, because the GM/Narrator and the Players are pulling against the intended rules to play a game quite different to the designers intentions.

When it comes to writing rules, I'm not immune to this. However, when writing for a computer program, certain elements need to be explicit, and if there are elements of "the fruitful void" existing between rules, then you just have to accept that these elements can't be quantified in the code. 

That means I need to be really pedantic about certain elements of this program. and completely ignore elements where the program struggles and would probably just get in the way. This is partially dependent on my own skills, where If I can't make it work I'll discard an idea to enhance clarity in the program... but if someone else were to make it, they might make an element work in a way I hadn't previously considered. 

I liked the idea of generating the basis for a character with a five card Tarot spread. 

We get the character's past, present and future in the central row, with a potential element impacting them from above, and their reasoning coming up from below. For a game about magic, it feels like a good mechaphor (a mechanical metaphor for play), and it's got a few other great advantages too. There start with over 2.5 billion potential starting combinations (2,533,330,000 to be exact) just by laying 5 cards on the table. Each card can be read for it's ranks value, it's suit, and for the metaphysical meanings associated with it (rather than simply a numerical value).

The question is working out what these cards mean and how to codify them. 

We'll start by saying that the past, present, potential, and reason cards impact the current state of the character, while the fuure card indicates where their current life path is taking them. This means they get bonuses from every card but the "future", but this final card gives them a direction (unless they specifically chance their direction through the course of the story). 

Attributes and Agency

The SNAFU game system generally uses 4 attributes: Physical, Social, Mental, and Paranormal. This generally lines up with the standard correspondences on a suit of cards (Physical = Clubs, Social = Hearts, Mental = Spades, Paranormal = Diamonds), and therefore also line up with a tarot deck's minor arcana (Physical = Wands/Staves, Social = Cups, Mental = Swords, Paranormal = Coins/Pentacles). That leaves the major arcana, which I've linked to the major arcana.

Basically, the attributes work with a scale where d4 is low, d6 is average for most people, d8 is good, d10 is great, and d12 is legendary. Each minor arcana card coming up with a suit corresponding to an attribute increases it. 

With 4 attributes and 4 cards contributing to them, if each card comes up with a different suit then each attribute goes up from the basic d4 level to d6. We get "average" characters across the board. There's a decent chance this will occur, but probably more likely that a character will end up with two cards of a matching suit, and another suit missing (leaving a character with an attribute at d8, two at d6, and one at d4). It's pretty unlikely that a character will get all four cards of a matching suit, but if this were to occur, they'd have a single legendary attribute at the expense of their others (one at d12, and the remianing three at d4).   

However, we've got major arcana to deal with. For each of these that appears in the spread, an attribute wouldn't be raised. Instead it raises the character's "Agency" which is applies to every die roll made. This is quite an advantage, so something needs to offset it....but we'll get to that.  

Abilities

The first time I created this kind of system, I gave each of the cards a single ability that linked to the meaning... for example the major arcana "The Chariot" gave a character the ability to "drive". I was also basing the system on my previous game "The Law" which specifically linked abilities to attributes (for example "Athletics" was a physical ability, and "Research" was a mental ability). With the revisions made to Walkabout last year, I've pulled the abilities away from the attributes, and have developed a system where abilities are combined to give a separate die to roll. (I was generally able to link abilities from cards to their respective suit's attributes, but in a few cases there were stretches, and in others the abilities that best matched the cards didn't fit the attributes at all...so it's probably good that I've separated attributes from abilites now). I've also been working on the idea of abilities being pencilled onto the character sheet where they have the chance to be learned...or inked onto the character sheet if they've been mastered. 

Considering this, each minor arcana is being given three abilities, and major arcana are only given two abilities. All abilities are pencilled onto the character sheet, but there is overlap in the abilities and if a character's spread indicates the same ability multiple times, it is inked onto the sheet instead. It's how I did the lifepaths in Walkabout...and it basically works (in my mind at least, I haven't had a lot of feedback on it). 

Depending on the spread of cards, a character could possibly end up with 12 potential abilities, or could master a couple of skills, but would end up one or two skills less as they focused on those they mastered.

(This has been a slow part of the process, researching each tarot card and working out what three abilities seemed to fit best out of a list of 60 or so. I then tallied which abilities were used and how many times they were being used. Along the way I added a few more abilities that made sense for the cards, but which I hadn't thought to include in the list. I also eliminated a couple of abilities once I realised no cards were directing characters toward them. There were a couple that I thought were still useful to the game so I had to find another way for characters to access them.)

Elemental Affinity

Here's something quite unrelated to the tarot spread, and the first part where a player really gets to customise who they'll be portraying in the story. The suits of tarot do have traditional elemental affinities, but I'm feeling that tying to much together will construct the types of characters that may be central to our stories. So I'm making this separate, where each elemental affinity is broken down into the inner nature of the character and their inner tendencies toward certain activities. For example...Fire tends to be passionate and destructive, Air tends to be superficial and always moving to new things. I'm breaking each element into a few archetypes, and characters with specific elemental affinities will have an automatic benefit associated with the magic they produce... earth-affinity tends to instill more permanence in its effects, fire-affinity tends to be more destructive.

Within the archetypes, there are six abilites that basically suggest the kinds of things stereotypically associated with them. These are easy to code into effect.

There's a few more bits and pieces, but this post is already starting to get lengthy. I'll get to the rest in the next post.