Unfortunately, all the games I’ve found with that scale of “now direct your dudes to go chop down trees” are inextricably linked to some tedious “Also, you have to fight off enemies” game.

And, frankly, if I want to fight off enemies, I’ll go play Starcraft or something. I like my city-building separate from my fighty games, thank you very much. But they seem to always come hand in hand. No, I can’t just build my dairy farms for cheese and my lovely little castle, I need to deal with frickin’ knights and invaders…

Whereupon it occurred to me that this is one of the big reasons I don’t play Dwarf Fortress anymore. The parts of DF that I enjoy are city-building, prospecting for minerals to make stuff out of, and trade. Manufacturing is too much of a micromanagey pain in the ass, and everything to do with building up an army bores me to tears (it doesn’t help that that is also far too micromanagey for my taste, and depends on manufacturing). Further, all the development since the first 3D version has been focused on precisely the parts I don’t like. But it’s a damn shame, because I really enjoy the city-building and the mining.

At about the same time, Minecraft had just started making the big news. I tried to get it to run, discovered that this would require more than zero messing with a Java installation, and gave up. But I watched a bunch of the “X’s Adventures in Minecraft” Let’s Play videos, enough to get a pretty good idea of what the gameplay is like. It seems like I’d have much the same opinion of it that I do of DF: yay exploring, yay building, boo micromanagement, boo having to fight monsters.

And this was also about the time I gave up on Lord of Ultima, which is a massively-multiplayer territorial competition game that billed itself as allowing a purely economic strategy—but it turned out that past a certain point everyone has far more resources than they need, so the only remaining thing to do is fight; I have absolutely no interest in PvP army duels, and guess what? Also with the way too much micromanagement! (You can pay for UX enhancements that mitigate this, but it didn’t appear that they improved it enough, and the only way I’ll pay for a premium game is if I’m already having tons of fun with the free edition.)

Finally, longtime readers will remember that the last thing I said about that roguelike I’m not writing was that perhaps the world does not need another game where what you do is kill the monsters and take their stuff. But I’m still interested in the notion of a game where you’re exploring an otherworld that’s coming apart at the seams, and maybe trying to put it back together again. So here’s a set of design elements, that feel like they add up to a game:

• Gameplay is about exploration, construction, manufacturing, and trade.
  • Multiplayer interaction, if any, is all about the trading.
  • Micromanagement is to be avoided with extreme prejudice.
• No fighting.
  • No crafting of legendary weapons or armor, either.
• “Like reality unless noted” applies to geology, biology, and technology.
• Magic is not tame.
  • Magic is not only for special people.
• It might be nice to try to subvert “Our Dwarves Are All The Same” but then again, there’s a reason why that characterization works so well.

The tricky part is finding a source of conflict, since we’ve taken out all the fighting. Perhaps the “coming apart at the seams” thing is enough of an issue to hang a plot on? If not, there is always politics and diplomacy, particularly if we make it hard for a settlement to be entirely self-sufficient. Not all minerals are found under the same mountain; not all biomes are suitable for subsistence farming.

I think this would work well with a zoom level roughly the same as DF fortress mode: player sets goals, individual simulated characters carry them out to the best of their ability. Simulated characters push back on the player to fulfill their desires and carry out their agendas, but (unlike DF nobility, for instance) there is a way for the player to say no. Which has consequences, of course, but less-bad consequences than what happens if you ignore a production order in DF.

This game is worth playing just for the chance to drive the protagonist’s hot rod around and see all the epic scenery. The art department had fun with this game. So did the character modelers. They licensed about a hundred classic metal tracks for the background music, which means it’s thematically appropriate, and never gets repetitive enough to earworm you. (The magical guitar solos, on the other hand, I got a bit tired of.) The gameplay itself is a little spotty, but I think that’s been well covered elsewhere. My main beef was with poor integration of the side quests into the story line—you don’t benefit much from doing them, even though they could have added quite a bit of interest and strategic ramification. The up side of that, though, is that I never felt like I was being forced to level-grind. There was one infuriating point where me and Pam spent three hours losing one stage battle over and over again, but that was because we were doing it wrong.

So that’s all good, but now I want to complain, at length, about the storyline.

I am about to spoil the ENTIRE PLOT. You have been warned.

Problem numero uno is, of course, that the entire Drowning Doom arc could have been avoided if Eddie hadn’t picked up the idiot ball upon overhearing Doviculus in the ruins of Lionwhyte’s castle. Eddie is genre-savvy enough that he should have assumed Doviculus knew they were there and was deliberately trying to deceive them. (I think Doviculus doesn’t ever lie in the technical sense, but I think we all know just how little that means.) Eddie is level-headed enough to be head roadie for a boyband whose members are all too dumb to live. Eddie is perfectly aware that Lita is wound way too tight, has issues with Ophelia, and has just had to watch her brother get killed. Eddie isn’t the kind of asshole who claims to trust someone when nobody else does, in order to get them into bed. Ditching Ophelia was way the hell out of character. Yeah, she’s clearly not telling him something important, but I see his in-character reaction as something like “Now is not the time for this, but when we get somewhere safe, you and me and Lita are going to sit down and have a long talk. I still trust you, but I need you to trust me with the whole story.” This does take away Doviculus’ big reveal at the end, but screw him, why should the antagonist always get the big reveal?

It’s not like there was no other way to arrange for the “Metal versus Goth” battles, either. The most obvious fix would be for the protagonists to decide they have to have the power of the Sea of Black Tears to stand a chance against the Tainted Coil. It’s Ophelia who has the best odds of being able to control it, but at first she can’t, and they have to fight her a bit. Or else it’s Lita who loses it and throws herself into the Sea. Either way, this probably couldn’t have been dragged out as far as the as-written storyline did, but the Tainted Coil deserved a bit more screen time as the immediate enemy, anyway. And would it not have been even more awesome if Ironheade and the Drowning Doom could have teamed up?

I was also disappointed in the, um, complete lack of closure at the end of the game. Okay, Drowned Ophelia was a doppelganger created by the Sea of Black Tears, and now we have the real one back, but it was the real Ophelia who got ditched in the snow outside the ruined, demon-infested castle. I’d expect her to be more than a little angry and hurt, still. The antagonist leaders are all dead but all four armies still have squads running around the map attacking each other, with no explanation given. In the closing sequence Eddie drives off into the sunset, without Ophelia (wtf?), we see her shed one black tear (I have to assume this is a sequel hook because otherwise it makes no sense), and after that all the protagonists are off in their own corners of the map and you can have a little wordless scene with each one, but that’s it. Yeah, they’re giving you a chance to drive around and finish up side-quests, ok. Still not satisfying, and I cannot be bothered to get to 100% completion just to see if there’s another cutscene. (Might be different if someone assured me there was another cutscene, although maybe I should just go find it on Youtube.)

Even if these small-scale plot problems were resolved, it doesn’t seem to me that the story that the game tells is the story it should have told. Is the ultimate metal epic really just about how generic bondage demons manipulate power metal musicians into fighting first their hair metal counterparts and then some goths? I don’t think so. It’s not about subgenres of rock fighting each other, it’s not about rock and roll versus the blues, it’s not both of those versus country and western, it’s not even about electric versus acoustic. (Although it certainly could appear to be about each of these in turn, as we peel back layer upon layer of manipulative level bosses.) The ultimate metal epic ought to be about nothing less than good music versus bad music; to be precise, Music With Rocks In versus Extruded Music Product. Eddie, Ophelia, Lars, and Lita travel the land assembling a motley crew (pun intended) of every kind of musician who ever played, because no lesser force can stand against the ultimate evil. And what could that be but … the record industry? (It occurs to me that this is the plot of We Will Rock You, and that’s just about right.)

I’m not sure there’s a place for the Tainted Coil in a game that’s telling that story, but you know, I’m okay with that. They weren’t that interesting. I’d rather have had more shout-outs to the great heroes of music, anyway. Where were Freddie Mercury and Janis Joplin and John Lennon and Bob Marley? Buddy Holly? B.B. King? Heck, where was Leo Fender? (Okay, Leo Fender was probably one of the Titans. BUT STILL.)

Conventions

I assume that your RPG system has some (probably dice-based) mechanism for deciding whether an action succeeds, subject to numeric modifiers. In this supplement, positive modifiers are bonuses, negative modifiers are penalties, and the smallest possible modifier is ±1.

Modifiers apply to some subset of actions, described after the number. For instance, “−1 to mental actions” means a penalty of 1 to every action that involves thinking. Since this is a generic supplement, I avoid talking about specific character statistics. One exception: “initiative” is the mechanism for deciding who gets to act first in adversarial situations (e.g. combat).

From this point on, “you” refers to the character suffering sleep deprivation.

Tracking sleep deprivation

You have a new statistic: the amount of sleep you require. The default for this is the requirement for normal adult humans: eight hours per 24-hour day. When you don’t make your sleep requirement, you accumulate an hour of sleep debt for every extra hour fully awake. You must spend extra time asleep in the future to pay off the debt. Until then, you are subject to penalties.

Even if you spend all the necessary time resting, you might not make your full sleep quota for various reasons: light, noise, vibration, chronic pain, uncomfortable position or surface, etc. For simplicity, we just say that eight hours of “disturbed” sleep, whatever the cause, is equivalent to seven hours of fully restful sleep.

If you wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle and remain awake for more than a few minutes, that is “interrupted” sleep. Interrupted sleep is not as bad as not sleeping at all, but not as good as continuous sleep. For each hour of wakefulness inside a sleep cycle that, taken as a whole, meets your sleep requirement, you suffer half an hour of sleep debt.

Sleeping too much can also add sleep debt, by throwing off your circadian rhythm. This is at the GM’s discretion, but should never add more than an hour of debt in total.

Sleep debt is repaid at a rate of one hour per sleep cycle, plus two hours for every extra hour of sleep. It cannot be repaid faster than six hours per sleep cycle, under normal circumstances (see below). Thus, an adult human who regularly gets only seven hours of sleep a night will remain at one hour of sleep debt indefinitely, and a single all-nighter will take at least two days to recover from.

If you deliberately go to sleep (for any period) while suffering more than 24 hours of sleep debt, you might collapse from exhaustion! See below.

Permanent modifiers

If your basic sleep requirement is permanently different from the norm of 8 consecutive undisturbed hours per 24-hour day, you have a character advantage or disadvantage, requiring a rationale and subject to GM approval. For instance:

• You are a robot, so you need no sleep at all. (Racial advantage.)
• Thanks to a quirk of genetics, you need only six hours of sleep a night. (Personal advantage purchased at character creation.)
• You suffer insomnia: all your sleep is interrupted, and you can sleep no more than 1d4−1 extra hours a day (roll daily) to make up for it. (Personal disadvantage sold at character creation.)
• Cybernetic modifications allow you to derive full rest from interrupted sleep, and delay sleep for up to 48 hours with no penalty, but you must still get 24 hours of sleep in any 72-hour period. (Personal advantage, can be purchased as an upgrade.)

Stimulants

Anything that compensates temporarily for sleep debt is a stimulant. Stimulants have two statistics: strength and duration, both measured in hours. When you use a stimulant, your effective sleep debt is reduced by the stimulant’s strength, for its duration. Here are some sample stimulants:

• Regular coffee, caffeinated soda: strength 1, duration 4
• Double espresso, No-Doz: strength 3, duration 4
• Amphetamines: strength 5, duration 5

These all happen to be chemicals, but cybernetic stimulant “chips,” magical sleep compensation, and whatever else you can think of should fit into these rules as well.

Strength stacks, but duration does not. Thus, two cups of coffee and a shot of speed will compensate for seven hours of sleep debt, but only for four hours; then the coffee wears off and you’re left with five hours’ compensation for the remaining hour that the amphetamines are effective.

Stimulants become less effective if used habitually: adjustments are at the GM’s discretion, but as a guideline, daily use should start reducing the duration after a couple weeks, and more-than-daily use should eventually reduce the strength. A serious stimulant habit will trigger withdrawal symptoms when you stop; again, as a guideline, one extra hour of sleep debt for every week of habitual use, which you are stuck with for at least one week.

You cannot fall asleep while under the influence of stimulants, unless the effect tables say you do.

Sleep enhancers

There are two kinds of sleep enhancer. One kind simply converts disturbed or interrupted sleep into normal sleep: for instance, anti-insomnia medicine. Another kind allows you to pay off sleep debt faster, by raising the “six hours of recovery per cycle” cap and/or allowing each hour of sleep under the influence to pay off more than one hour of debt. There are no real-world drugs with this effect, but in a high-tech future there certainly could be, likewise healing magic.

Naps

Taking a nap in the middle of a day is surprisingly helpful. If you intentionally nap for one hour, that will subtract 1d4 hours from your sleep debt. However, if you have at least 8 hours of sleep debt, you might collapse from exhaustion.

You cannot nap while under the influence of stimulants, and for simplicity’s sake, you cannot nap for more than an hour—it becomes a regular interrupted sleep cycle.

Collapse from exhaustion

When your limbic system just will not permit any more time awake, you collapse. This happens in three different circumstances:

• If the major sleep deprivation effect table says so.
• If you have at least 8 hours of sleep debt, attempt to nap, and roll 4 on the d4.
• If you have at least 24 hours of sleep debt, you must flip a coin when you go to sleep for any length of time, whether deliberately or because of a deprivation effect. If it’s tails, you’ve collapsed.

However it happens, once you collapse you will remain asleep for as many hours as your total sleep debt, unless forcibly awakened. External stimuli that would normally be sufficient to cause disturbed sleep are not enough to wake up someone who has collapsed. A bucket of ice water will do it, though.

If forcibly awakened, the collapse does not help at all. If you are allowed to wake up on your own, however, your sleep debt is reset to two hours.

Interaction with other game mechanics

You can either treat the sleep-debt mechanic as separate from other sources of fatigue penalties in your game system, or you can combine them. If you combine them, I recommend converting fatigue penalties to additional hours of effective sleep debt at a ratio of one to two, but continuing to let them wear off as specified in your core rule set. For instance, a PC who pulled an all-nighter for eight hours of true sleep debt, and then played a strenuous basketball game which put them at −2 due to fatigue, would suffer 12 hours of effective sleep debt instead of the −2 penalty, but four of those hours would wear off as specified for the original penalty instead of being paid back by extra sleep.

Effects

With at least one hour of effective sleep debt (that is, after subtracting stimulant strength and adding other fatigue modifiers) you suffer a −1 penalty to all mental actions. Every additional two hours of sleep debt adds another −1 to mental actions, to a maximum of −4.

With at least two hours of effective sleep debt, you suffer a −1 penalty to all physical actions. Again, every additional two hours adds another −1, to a maximum of −4.

With at least three hours of effective sleep debt, you must, once every hour that you remain awake, roll against the master sleep effects table. This table directs you to the specific effect tables. Follow the instructions in the Tables section, below.

If you are on stimulants, you must, once an hour, roll against the stimulant effects table.

All effects stack; a character with maxed-out basic penalties can and will suffer additional penalties from the sleep debt and stimulant tables.

Effect Tables

Effects last for a full hour unless otherwise specified.

Master Sleep Debt Table

Roll 1d4 and add one-third of your effective sleep debt, rounded down. For each effect listed, go to the appropriate table below and follow the instructions.

1.

None

2.

None

3.

One minor effect

4.

One minor effect

5.

Two minor effects

6.

One moderate effect

7.

One minor and one moderate effect

8.

One major effect

9.

One moderate and one major effect

10+.

Two major effects

Stimulant Effects

Divide the total strength of all stimulants you are on by three, and roll that many d10s. You suffer all of the effects rolled, for a full hour.

1–4.

No effect.

5–6.

Shaky hands. −1 to all fine motor actions.

7–8.

Attention deficit. −1 to all mental actions.

9.

Hyperfocus. +1 to actions requiring concentration, −1 to notice anything going on around you.

0.

One moderate sleep effect.

Minor Effects

Roll 1d20.

1. You react slowly. −1 to initiative.
2. You react sloooowly. −3 to initiative.
3. Your eyes do not want to focus.
4. Everyone sounds like they are mumbling. −2 to understand them.
5. You can’t manage to enunciate. Other people are at −2 to understand you.
6. You keep almost falling asleep.
7. You keep dropping off for a minute or so (this does not help any).
8. You have trouble remembering the word you need next in your sentences. Speaking is not a free action.
9. You are hyper. −2 to attention span.
10. Everything is funny. −1 to avoid cracking up.
11. Everything is hilarious. −3 to avoid cracking up.
12. Any unexpected noise makes you jump.
13. All actions take twice as long as they should.
14. You keep getting lost, even in totally familar surroundings.
15. Keeping your eyes focused is painful. −1 to any action that involves looking at anything.
16. You have severe jitters; −3 to fine motor movements.
17. You are dizzy. −1 to walk.
18. You are antsy. −1 to sit still. −1 to refuse any suggestion of physical activity.
19. Distractions fall away. +2 to concentration and mental activity. −2 to notice anything going on around you.
20. Roll a moderate effect. (If you came here from the moderate effects table, reroll on this one instead.)

Moderate Effects

Roll 1d20.

1. Roll a minor effect. (If you came here from the minor effects table, reroll on this one instead.)
2. You react sloooooooowly. −6 to initiative.
3. You keep dropping off for ten minutes or so (this does not help any).
4. You doze off for an hour. This counts as a nap.
5. You are antsy. −1 to sit still. −1 to refuse any suggestion of physical activity.
6. You are hyper. −2 to attention span.
7. You cannot maintain a train of thought. Additional −2 (on top of mental action penalties) to do anything that requires a sequence of actions.
8. Make a willpower check or spend the entire hour doing something pointless.
9. Bright light is painful. −1 to visual tasks in brightly lit areas.
10. Keeping your eyes focused is painful. −1 to any action that involves looking at anything.
11. You cannot keep your eyes focused, no matter how hard you try. −2 to any action that involves looking at anything.
12. You have vertigo. −2 to move without falling over.
13. You are stressed out.
14. You are depressed.
15. You’re freezing cold.
16. You have a screaming case of the munchies.
17. You cannot stop cracking jokes. −1 to social interaction; you’re too tired to be funny.
18. You take anything anyone says to you as an excuse to start an argument.
19. You continually ramble away from the topic of conversation.
20. Roll a major effect. (If you came here from the major effects table, reroll on this one instead.)

Major Effects

Roll 1d20.

1. Roll a moderate effect. (If you came here from the moderate effects table, reroll on this one instead.)
2. You have achieved zanshin, the state of no-mind. For this hour, all current penalties for physical action are suspended; instead you have a bonus of +2 for physical action, and a +2 to initiative. However, you are at an additional −2 on top of current mental penalties to act other than on reflex. (This will not be a problem for skilled fighters and others who have trained to take the proper action by reflex.)
3. All actions take ten times as long as they should.
4. Having eyes is painful. −1 to everything.
5. You have severe vertigo. −4 to move without falling over.
6. You put things down in midair and are surprised when they fall.
7. You put things down on solid surfaces and are surprised when they don’t fall.
8. You have an urge to juggle nearby objects, whether or not you know how.
9. You have an urge to repair or at least disassemble something, again whether or not you know how.
10. You are hypnotized by a nearby small object and cannot do anything but examine it. If someone takes it away from you, you find another one to fixate on.
11. You become obsessed with whatever it is you are currently doing, and must continue for the next hour without interruption.
12. Any unexpected event whatsoever brings on a full-fledged panic attack.
13. You are stressed out beyond belief, and snap at anyone who says anything to you.
14. Everything and everyone is indeed out to get you.
15. Roll a hallucination every 30 minutes.
16. Roll a hallucination every 20 minutes.
17. Roll a hallucination every 10 minutes.
18. Roll a hallucination every 5 minutes.
19. You doze off for an hour. This counts as a nap.
20. You collapse from exhaustion.

Hallucinations

Roll 1d20. Hallucinations last until the next hallucination or effect roll. The GM should elaborate on them so they don’t get repetitive. Making up your own hallucination table is encouraged.

1. The world looks like a Monet painting.
2. You keep thinking you saw a rabbit hiding behind something.
3. You can see the auras of living things. +1 to empathy; −1 to physical actions, due to disorientation. If you already have this ability, you find you can’t turn it off.
4. A nearby piece of furniture is talking to you.
5. You can hear the ticking of the gears in your head as you think.
6. Advanced philosophy makes sense.
7. ARGH! GIANT RABBIT! You have an urge to try to kill it, using whatever is convenient.
8. Shadows on the nearby walls begin to move, acting out a complex play. The room is still.
9. Quantum chromodynamics makes sense.
10. A short, bald fellow in brown clothes, carrying a shotgun, inquires whether you have seen any wabbits around here?
11. You understand foreign languages you have never heard before. Which is a good thing, because everyone around you is speaking one.
12. You put out your hands and fall through the window. Clawing at nothing, you drop through the void; your terrified screams are inaudible, drowned in the spiral ahead.
13. You can hear the ticking of the gears of the clock that drives the universe. You feel insignificant next to such immensity.
14. You see a white rabbit with pink eyes about ten feet away. It takes a watch out of its waistcoat pocket, looks at it, exclaims “Oh dear! I shall be too late!” and dives down a hole.
15. You are much too big for this room. Your head is scraping the ceiling; your arms can reach both walls at once.
16. Your phone rings; it’s someone you know to be dead.
17. You doze off for a few minutes; when you awake you discover that everything around you has been removed and replaced with an exact duplicate.
18. Post-modern literary criticism makes sense.
19. There are bugs crawling on everything. EVERYTHING.
20. You are in the presence of the Prince with a Thousand Enemies. His ears glow faintly of starlight. You hear him whisper to you the secrets of the universe.

Author’s Note

The original version of this supplement was written in December 2002, as an exercise in pure silliness instigated by Sumana. This marginally less silly version occurred to me as a way of getting my writerly brain back in gear after a long time doing nothing but coding.

As always, fabulous no-prizes are available to those who spot the references.

This has gotten me thinking about cultural appropriation and privileged narratives in the context of video games, and especially that roguelike I’m not writing. Video games are not where one generally goes for great storytelling or cultural sensitivity, but (assuming I were writing one) why should I make that any worse than it is? And the major motivation for the hypothetical roguelike is that the storytelling in roguelikes is threadbare, so if I’m wanting to make that better, why not be really ambitious and try to fix everything at once? So let’s have another look at the plot of that game with privilege and appropriation in mind.

I posted a plot sketch and some flavor notes the last time I talked about this. The condensed version is: the player character lives in a country with a geographic border with Faerie. Faerie is reportedly all torn up with war and disaster, so the PC decides to go exploring, because maybe there is treasure to be looted. Of course there is, but also it turns out that the entire otherworld is coming apart at the seams, and the PC is in a position to stop that, encourage it, or take advantage of it. I hadn’t decided why this was happening in the first place. Being a roguelike, the PC will die a lot, but there are a whole group of people back in the border country doing this, so the player can just switch to a new one.

The problem I see with this narrative is that it can easily turn into either straight-up colonialism (if the PCs take advantage of the mess to take over Faerie or just steal all the gold and nifty magic doodads) or what these people need is a honky (if the PCs make everything better for the fair folk). But is this really the narrative’s fault? This is a roguelike we’re talking about here. The core gameplay is, by definition, about killing monsters and taking their stuff. And any video game with a plot is going to have some degree of what these people need is a player character, or else the PC has no agency and the player is bored.

Perhaps the problem is with the genre, then? Perhaps the world does not need another game where what you do is kill the monsters and take their stuff. The obvious way to fit that into the roguelike milieu is if it initially appears that you are out to kill the monsters and take their stuff, but then that turns out to be a really bad idea. Consider: even in the midst of war and disaster, we humans take the time to hunt down murderers. Why wouldn’t goblins, kappas, nagas do the same? Kill a monster and the police come after you. Put together a gang of bandits and terrorize a village, and the local military comes after you (like in The Seven Samurai). You can keep fighting but the difficulty curve goes up way faster than you can level. This can even be extended to non-sentient species; there are plenty of stories where the local spirits (or the local game wardens) become homicidally angry when you hunt in the wrong place. Conversely, help out that lion with a thorn in its paw, and you’ve got a friend; be consistently kind to animals and you have a pack.

Okay, so the PC is not killing the monsters and taking their stuff, so what is he or she doing instead? War implies factions, and disasters have causes. If there is a long history of wary relations across the border, one or more of the factions could easily reach out for allies in a troubled time. I envision this as much more of an exploration game than a tactics game, so perhaps the war is over, everyone lost, and the hope is that the mundane PCs are resistant to the magical fallout that is stopping the fair folk from reclaiming their cities. Or at least they’re more expendable. This puts a lot more load on the AI for non-combat interactions with NPCs but I don’t think it’s intractable; over in console RPG land people have been doing amazing things with canned dialogue trees for some time.

elsmi had another idea: perhaps the abandoned castles were built by a previous wave of colonists, and there may come a point when [the PCs] gain an urgent interest in why the last guys felt they needed big castles, and why exactly they aren’t there anymore… I like this notion, but I hesitate to have the previous wave of colonists come from the same country as the PCs, because then you’d expect all the locals to hate the PCs on sight. It’s tempting to borrow a notion from Doc Sidhe and have there have been an indigenous oppressor class, those High Elves that Pratchett and Moorcock are at pains to remind us were as cruel as they were beautiful. elsmi also suggests a vaguely modern setting for the nonmagical land, which is attractive just because it hasn’t been done much.

If you’re still reading: Is this still potentially a fun game? What do you think of the revised setting? What overused and/or privileged tropes am I still not avoiding/subverting?

Anyway, every time he dies we just restart from the convenient save point at the beginning of the room with the rafters. Often we think of save points are an entirely out-of-game-world mechanism for making death be a minor frustration (or a major one, as in this case) rather than end of story. In light of my previous rant about the inappropriateness of the “send the hero off to the deathtrap of a temple” strategy for saving Athens, though … what if we construe them as in-world? Every time Kratos dies, the gods restore him to life and dump him back at the most recent save point or checkpoint. (I guess they aren’t allowed to put him ahead of the trap that keeps killing him, for the same reason they can’t just teleport him to the room with the godslayer weapon…) There’s nothing overt in the game to indicate this, unlike some (e.g. Ultima, as madmanatw pointed out last time) but the save points do say “Zeus offers you the opportunity to save your progress”.

If so, Athena’s strategy is less horrible than it seemed - Kratos will eventually, if only by sheer luck, get through the temple. Perhaps there won’t be any of the city left to save, but at least she can have her revenge on Ares. On the other hand, it’s a good thing Kratos is completely insane already, because otherwise he would be after a few dozen cycles of that treatment!

[ETA: Ok, so now we hit a completely different headache: the minotaur boss. All the walkthroughs seem to assume that the O-button minigame is trivial; we are finding it impossible (well, we got it once but only by chance). I don’t have any idea how to integrate that into this theory.]

[SON OF EDIT: Pam, having gotten sick of it, informs me that she knows how to do the minigame now, but that you have to do it just exactly right or you fail. We do not approve.]

These games all feel very different, but fundamentally they’re the same kind of game: single PC (possibly with one or two helpers) goes through 3D world in over-the-shoulder-vision, fights monsters using a variety of hand-to-hand and ranged weapons, solves lethal puzzles, eventually confronts Big Bad, saves world. (Or maybe just Athens. Or his dead girlfriend.) And they all have the same odd relation to time: time only advances when player actions trigger plot events. This is most blatant in Kingdom Hearts. You fight the Nobodies all the way to the top of their castle and drive their leader to retreat into the giant floating candy heart. Mickey Mouse¹ tells you that you must follow immediately, and defeat him once and for all. But there is a save point. Like all save points, it allows you to warp back to the over-map, which means you (the player) can spend as long as you like polishing off all the optional challenges, collecting every single treasure chest, and leveling up the PC until the final battle is a cakewalk. In terms of gameplay hours, I think we spent almost as long doing optional challenges as we did playing the main game, and we weren’t done! We gave up on some of the ridiculously hard or irritating ones.

This doesn’t especially bother me in Kingdom Hearts, because, after all, most of zones in the game are the settings of various Disney movies. You’re not playing this game for the internal self-consistency. Also, I haven’t ever played a Final Fantasy game from beginning to end, but I have the impression that this is part of the furniture of that series. It would bother me more in Ratchet and Clank, which is trying for internal self-consistency (if not for plausibility), but it’s also rather less blatant there: you have the option of delaying the final confrontation as long as you like, even though the Big Bad is going to destroy your planet Real Soon Now (and you may need to, in order to earn enough bolts to pay for the uberweapon without which defeating the Big Bad is ridiculously hard) but the Big Bad is the sort of lunatic who would postpone the completion of his project just to laugh at you for showing up just barely too late. (Also, you can go back and do the optional challenges after you defeat him.)

It really, really bugs me in God of War, even though they may not be doing the postpone the final confrontation indefinitely blatant version (we haven’t got there yet) — the PC has to go off to some desert and find a weapon that can kill a god, so he can defeat Ares, who is laying waste to Athens. Right then. With an army of monsters. Retrieving the weapon takes something like a week of in-game time. I don’t see how there can possibly be any of Athens left by the time the PC gets back! … Really, though, my objection here is not to the timescale, but to the whole plan of saving Athens by sending a hero off to the desert to retrieve a god-slaying weapon from such a deathtrap of a temple that Indiana Jones himself would quail. We got him smashed into the wall at least two dozen times. That’s twenty-four universes in which he never came back. Never mind all the other traps, many of which killed him at least once. And did I mention the monsters? If I were Athena I would go kill Ares myself, and worry about how to patch things up with Zeus later. (Or maybe I should just kill him too! He ate my mother because he was afraid their child, me, would kill him! This is Ancient Greece! You know that means I’ve got to do it one of these days!)

It doesn’t come up at all in Shadow of the Colossus, but only because that game’s more linear than any of the above. You can’t even kill the colossi out of order. (There must be something preventing your dead girlfriend from rotting away all this time, but I’m prepared to assume the disembodied voice who’s promised to resurrect her if you just do this small favor for it first [Wikipedia tells me its name is Dormin] can do that.)

… I had a point somewhere in here. Maybe it’s that this is another way it’s hard to make a game also be a convincing secondary world. My suspension of disbelief is impaired because these games have done enough that my brain is filling in things that should happen and being tripped up when they don’t. But if you made those things happen, the game would actually be a worse game! You don’t want to force the player to do the final battle before they’re good and ready. Also, I probably wouldn’t have noticed so much if the optional side quests had all been interesting rather than tedious; and if there are simple adjustments one could make to the plot to alleviate these problems (like, Ares’ army is going to be in Athens in a week, and Athena wants you standing at the gates with the godslayer weapon when they get there) one should make those adjustments.

¹ Yes, that Mickey Mouse. The same one who’s in Steamboat Willie.

Is this good enough to cover all the times when the computer’s got to pick a random number, is the question.

• magic is wild; somewhat unpredictable, from the heart as well as the head
• The High Elves were Not Nice. I’m thinking more like Pratchett’s depiction than e.g. Michael Moorcock’s. Also, they’re all dead.
• from Earthdawn: putting back together a very broken world
• keep the horror subtle, though (rugose, squamous ascii art! ha.)
• references to high fantasy kept small - mob monsters ok, plot monsters not
• take plot monsters from where? perhaps mythology?
• references to real world should not be exclusively European
• e.g. Chinese dragons, not European (also, dragons are much too badass to fight)
• steampunk technology is fun and could add interest
• high technology doesn’t fit, though

Fun stuff:

• Ursula Vernon wombats and weird fruit
• Secrets of the Gnomes gnomes
• Nomadic carpet makers? Flying!
• Non-Euclidean overworld map
• …gets more Euclidean as the plot advances?
• Jelaza Kazone-type sapient trees
• At least one type of magic done with bells.

The game begins in a country not unlike that of Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist. It has a geographical boundary with Faerie. At one time (within the memory of the older inhabitants) there was regular trade, but lately relations have deteriorated, with the merchant caravans being replaced by waves of … refugees. They are all what you might call “little people” — no cosmic powers, relatively friendly (but sometimes mischievous), and wanting to escape what they describe as wars and catastrophes. They have been received cautiously.

As the game begins, these benign refugees have begun to be supplanted by hostiles. Think boggarts, redcaps, kelpies, and so on. This, in turn, attracts adventurers. At first, they’re hoping for money from the town and farmers for eliminating the menaces, but it doesn’t take long for them to think of crossing the boundary. After all, if Faerie’s all torn up by war and disaster, perhaps there are … abandoned castles! With treasure!

Naturally, your avatar is one of these adventurers. And indeed, on the other side of the boundary, there are abandoned castles, with treasure. Not to mention somewhat nastier monsters than the ones menacing our sleepy little non-magical country. However, the deeper you go (in either the overworld or the dungeons), the more messed-up things get. It appears that between war, natural disasters, and outright magical calamities, the entire of Faerie is coming to pieces. And the more powerful of the fair folk, the ones who built the castles you’ve been looting, it seems they’re all dead.

The core plot, then, is to figure out what happened and why, and maybe do something about it. I want to keep the player’s options for doing things about it as wide open as possible. Putting the landscape back just the way it was should be possible; redesigning everything to suit the player and their NPC comrades, possible; torch the entire dimension and watch the fireworks, also possible. I think I’m going to decree that you can’t resurrect the High Elves, though (this ties into my ideas for what exactly happened to start all this, which I shall hold for a separate spoiler post).

This overall scheme works well with a persistent overworld, relatively short dungeon crawls, and plot levers in the “outer” game, per Leonard’s recommendation. Avatar death means you-the-player get to pick up another n00b back in town. The things that were done in Faerie by previous avatars remain done, but the board isn’t static when the avatar is elsewhere. New monsters can move into a previously cleared out dungeon, for instance. Thus, the n00b should have no trouble finding encounters at their level.

As the plot progresses, news will spread in the non-Faerie world that interesting things are going on in this particular country. More experienced adventurers may start turning up; this allows for not having to reset quite all the way to the beginning of the experience tree when you die. Also, NPCs will appear, probably tied to bringing interesting artifacts out, and offer side quests.

I need a name for the border country.

Leonard linked to You Only Live Once. I have not tried it, despite the “only about an hour of gameplay” label; I want to call attention to one element of the blurb.

Extremely tactical combat. There is no randomness in combat. You always hit and always do full damage. This means that careful placement is the difference between success and failure.

I can’t decide whether this is a terrible idea or complete freaking genius. (I assume it applies to the monsters as well.)