So, TL;DR, I have a lot of thoughts and I'm going to share them. If you like, you can peruse the attached docs though don't expect anything you can play or even necessarily grok. These are just some interesting things I've been putting together that will help give context to my game, whilst also helping me as I continue developing it to prevent recursive labor on my part.
Note as well I probably won't go into too much detail about how things work in the thoughts below either; by all means ask for specifics of you're interested. I'm in the process of working the full revision of the game's actual rules text and First Pages, so this is a good time to talk about that.
But in the meantime, I'm mostly just looking to share my (numerous) thoughts and may be spark some lively discussion.
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A good long while ago, I made the decision to move Labyrinthian to being solo, or single player as I've taken to saying nowadays, which was around the same time I was also leaning on no longer calling my game an RPG at all.
Initially, this was just because a part of me was getting bitter at certain people insisting I wasn't making one, so I logic'd my way out of that negativity by just owning it.
However. The move to single player (and co-op, though I've pushed this out) actually ended up having a profound effect on the design of the game, leading to an overflow of creativity (completely destroying my writers block for everything), and over time what I had decided to call Labyrinthian took on a much more deliberate meaning as the game strayed further and further from conventional RPG design.
So, an Immersive Improv Game, or MMG, can be accurately described as an Improv Game hybridized and integrated with an analog systemic game engine. This naturally means that Improv dynamics are core to the game, but that they integrate with a series of interconnected subsystems that, both within themselves and through interactions with each other, are designed to foster emergent play.
In other words, it takes what Immersive Sim video games do, brings it into an analog space, and then integrates Improv to make it functional in that space. The use of Improv, however, shouldn't be taken to mean that the game is just made up on the fly. If one peruses the attached document Memory, they'll find there is a vast array of systems and structures involved in the game, and eventually Content as well.
Instead, Improv is utilized to guide the 'mental model' of the game. What does that mean? Well, this goes to the heart of why I specifically chose 'Immersive', as the word alone implies a lot of what I'm talking about.
But to be more specific, mental models are the player's internal understanding of how a game system works and what actions lead to success, either as the game defines it, and in our case, as the player does.
By leveraging Improv to influence this mental model, I can dramatically reduce the actual operational complexity of a lot of different systems, and build each one to encourage and support expression, whilst still curating the game towards the genre blend its aiming for.
To put it in more direct terms, I skip the need for things like computers to handle, say, a true Living World that can and will act on its own, with minimal (and sometimes zero) required upkeep from the player.
But obviously this is all a lot of arcane design theory talk that I am 100% not being terribly specific in explaining. So let's look at the game.
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When I made the shift to single player, I pretty quickly realized the game was going to have to go back into the oven, because long before that decision I knew I wanted to support solo play one way or another, and as I'm wont to do, I knew I was going to need to address some endemic issues with playing something like an RPG solo.
Not only is soloplay often murky to get into the groove of, but if a game wasn't designed from the get go to work for solo, then there tends to be a lot of iffy workarounds involved getting them to work. And most often, few of these ever get around what I call the Opacity Problem; the fact that players have the full ability to spoil themselves inherently just by the nature of the books these games occupy.
The latter two problems were ones I knew early on how I'd want to tackle, which was by essentially building out a guide book that crossed the Adventure Module with a CYOA book, and over time this became what I'm calling The World Guide, which also combines a setting/lore book and a beastiary with it.
Essentially, this book is going to be structured in such a way that players will have a clean procedure to use it and not spoil themselves in terms of content. While accidents will surely happen, as well as the fact that I can't physically barr you from looking at something arbitrarily, the structure and procedures will be there for those that want it.
That solution tracked for me a long time ago, and as I'm getting prepared to move into Content Synthesis for the game (pending my formal write up of the entire Engine), its only going to get better as I actually build it.
Now, the former problem, the murkiness of play, was something I didn't already have a solution for. While my systems were mostly player-driven to begin with, without a GM or some equivalent, a lot of the game's dynamics would be lost. Especially when it comes to the Living World.
The solution I eventually landed on was what I dubbed the Prompt Table. This is a player facing system where a d20 table is split between them, with the even numbers, and the gameworld, using the odd numbers.
The idea is that when a Prompt is selected, not only does a number of potential mechanical or systemic things get triggered, so does a flavorful prompt for the Player to interpret based on whatever it is they're doing. This, in tandem with what the World Guide is already going to be doing, made the whole thing start to click.
The fun part was that the idea already existed in the game; originally I used a less formalized version of it as an isolated mechanic in Adventuring to drive Diversions, which I had designed as a kind of attractor system, inviting players to go off on side tangents via interpretative prompts, which in co-op can beautifully spiral out, but even solo, as I found, are just as compelling if you lean into them.
This is what lead to me applying 'Recursion' as a constraint for the game; remixing and reusing things across the entire Engine. This obviously helps for onboarding reasons as now the different subsystems all work off the same ontology. But it also gave me a buttload (technical term) of new vectors to hook the Living World into, the visibility of which was always the biggest problem with that particular aspect. Likewise, eliminating orphan mechanics was another; everything has to be integrated within a system. If it wasn't and I couldn't fit it or redesign, it got nixed.
===
Adapting the new Prompt Table into Adventuring was pretty easy, given its where it came from, and actually just made that whole thing easier to deal with, so that was lovely. And adapting the overall subsystem for solo was also a breeze, as it was just a matter of bringing the Time Pool to be player facing, which wasn't too difficult.
However, Recursion touched this one as well, with the pollination of 2d20 IR (Input Random) back into it. This was originally my Combat mechanic, and while how Combat worked was rebuilt numerous times (its on its 10th, but largely final, iteration
), 2d20 IR was always a part of it.
Adapting it for Adventuring was initially tricky, as how it worked at the time was that you generate two potential Actions simultaneously, which you then decide how you want to use. And in this subsystem, this just a little bit too much with for what its gameplay entails, namely because Activities were always more involved than the Actions of Combat.
Working the problem, I actually came to a solution from two different directions. First, I was acutely aware that, because of the Opacity Problem, there was no practical way to have explicitly designed maps and trust players to still run into dangerous places (Procedural Generation not being of interest to me). And second, Combat was increasingly following in the footsteps of DOOM Eternal's 'push forward combat' as I rebuilt it.
These two things sparked the idea of 'Pulled Forward traversal'. Essentially, I figured I could design the system in such a way that players near literally get dragged forward through the gameworld, and this gave me a way to incorporate these potential unideal behaviors I was anticipating as part of the game. If you, for example, use the game mechanics to just run in circles so you can cheese a dungeon, this is fine, as that still tracks with what a hesitant coward would do (aesthetic), but also gives me the space to deliver consequence to that action by way of the systems I already had, and new ones I can embed into the World Guide (mechanical).
And this all just sings, because it further emphasizes what I was originally emphasizing about Adventuring, is that Time is the antagonist above all. So the more time you waste, the more the game keeps gaming. And beyond that, the idea behind the Crawl, the overall system you use to get around in the gameworld, gets enhanced as well, as now there's a lot more enjoyable, expressive gaming to be had from it. Getting around is a lot more fun, in other words, and that's the biggest thing this particular subsystem needed to do.
But! It didn't stop there, because while two full actions were still too much, I did come up with the idea of utilizing Skill Dice (non-d20/d% dice) to allow Players to make lesser simultaneous actions by using them as a replacement base Die, which in turn meant I don't have to have players making a decision over whether or not to, say, investigate a chest OR be sneaky, but between which one they think they should focus on more.
Organically balances out the two Actions, and makes 2d20IR mechanic more interesting, and this all bore out in testing, where even my two testers (my group broke up
) were able to grok it independently despite having to make up content to use with it.
===
Combat was an interesting system to work out, as around the same time, I had taken some time to try and adapt what I had at the time for GunFu. This adaptation proved so potent right off the bat, I made the decision to cross pollinate its ideas back into Labyrinthian, and that begat a whole new revision of the system which I was still in the middle of when I then added Solo to the mix. Quite the conundrum and it took a couple tries to really nail it down.
The principal problem of course was how do I nip the whole "I need to be the GM half the time" problem when its single player. This is what lead to the idea of the Prompt Table, which I rechristened 'The Reaction Table' for Combat, not just handing out a Prompt, but also calling for mechanical or systemic triggers. While it took some doing to find the right prompt template that fit my vision for Combat, mechanically I found my AI system, and it just became a matter of not just laying down Reaction Tables for Enemies, but a set of Tactics and Actions that players can easily and dutifully engage.
Ezpz, and quite elegant, as the Prompts on top of this made for a much more compelling jumping off point for improvised actions in Combat, which in tandem with the GunFu innovations, like Lethality or the Hit Location system, actually allowed me to collapse some more complexity out of it. Ironic as that is that Hit Locations, the crunchy bane of most tactical games, proved to be so simple and compelling its now the basic mode of combat.
But, as I was working through these changes and testing them out, thats when I ended up deep in the DOOM rabbithole. While I had already picked up on push forward with GunFu to inform its gunplay dynamics, it was Eternal's enemy design that started captivating me, and while I don't strictly mention it in the attached docs, I have a mini-design bible going thats going to be my northstar when I start designing formal Enemies, which mixes what I took from DOOM with my own ideas, and washes the pair through the new kind of combat the latest revision was turning into.
Which, it has to be said, is pretty killer. I was coming into the idea of 'Tactical Improv' already, but like the idea of the game being an MMG, it was this latest revision that really brought that idea home.
Its expressive and even without any bespoke content yet, really does let you define your own fighting style. In a way, its kind of a mental sleight of hand. Its very deliberately a choreographical system, being directly emulative of post-John Wick fight choreo (best exemplified in a fantasy context by DND: Honor Among Thieves), but by way of emulating the underlying logic and rhythm of such choreography.
Which isn't just fluff either; for example, the Netflix film Extraction wasn't a film I was directly using as a northstar (Atomic Blonde was for GunFu, and the base ideas were just me thinking through a more first person take on Combat), but there's a kill early on where Hemsworth's character kills this cop by brutally cutting his neck open by slashing at the wound just, way too many times to be serious. In the context of realism this is absurd, as the guys neck was split open from the first hit, the excess brutality is just that. Awesome, but hardly realistic.
Labyrinthian, however, retroactively gives logic to that kind of brutality, with the Lethality mechanics, which as I adapted them to Labyrinthian became wrapped up in the already existing Wound mechanics. Basically, in game terms, this would be you inflicting and then escalating a Wound before you could finally score a killing blow on the target, bypassing his Composure. This was a completely unintentional consequence of combining a fantasy combat system with a gunplay combat system, and it isn't the first time either; DNDHAT came out much later, and Xenk's fight with the Thayan assassin leader goes the same way. Numerous Wounds inflicted and escalated before he finally takes the killing blow. (And even his slaughtering of the Thayan mooks correlated to an already existing idea for how Combat would be balanced for speed of play)
Kind of upends the idea of 'cinematic' combat when you really get into it, particularly once we move fast melee and see the same dynamics become the root of 3 other combat styles players can riff off of.
===
Crafting and Gathering for the longest time was actually the one part of the game I basically never had to touch past its original inception. It just worked and did what I set out for it to do.
But, with the new constraints, changing it became prudent, though not much was lost. The overall system is still identical, I just changed its core mechanic to utilize 2d20IR instead, which then let me integrate what I amazingly christened 'The Crafting Table'.
You'll have to forgive me, I really do love my smart ass name schemes. And alliteration. Boy do I love alliteration.
While many will of course have problems with it no matter how its designed, because its just one of those things that is seldom done right, I really do think its hit the sweet spot. Not only have I massaged out the common pain points with such systems, but I've also gone farther in justifying them.
Item Durability as a gateway to ongoing Customization and expressive load out dynamics (you could go for a golf bag, or just keep customizing Ol' Reliable, or you could do both) pretty much completes the thought Tears of the Kingdom had for not making its Durability system not suck. And, finding a way to make the idea of 'Spell Components' actually interesting was a pretty great way to keep Mage characters in particular involved.
And ultimately, one way or another, this subsystem is pretty vital. Slice of Life without the ability to create things is pretty anemic, and I think I nailed extrapolating that out to epic fantasy.
Plus, given the nature of Crafting, I'm actually able to leverage it for a whole lot more than just making 'things'. The docs call out Construction and Husbandry, and even Artistry (singing, painting, etc). And we even see mention, through the Mystics, of using its mechanics as a basis for my take on Psionics.
But they're also going to apply towards things like esoteric Animist, Arcane, and Divine Rituals. So even just from a gameplay standpoint, even if you're not specifically interested in crafting in of itself, you'll still likely enjoy the expressive creation the mechanics enable elsewhere.
===
Character Development was a peculiar one, as I didn't formally consider it a subsystem until I really started to organize the game on a hollistic level (which also lead to the expansion, more on that later).
The key thing for the longest time is that I kept waffling on what was and wasn't going to be included, and there was numerous periods where the game shifted through different configurations.
What I eventually settled on was the Six B's, which only really clicked for me when I realized the problem I was dancing around was actually an organization problem.
One of my original ideas, given I was going to have a big damn Skill List anyway, was to use Skills as a repository for different rules and other things. This to me seemed a clever way to organize things, but as it became clear, this was a causing the waffling because I couldn't square the circle on what all I would and wouldn't need versus the kind of space I'd be able to dedicate to it.
So, the solution for that came from killing that idea, and pushing those into the UX of the game; instead of having things granularly referenced via 32 different Skills, I'm just going to consolidate nearly everything they would have covered into the Sheet system, which will make play a lot more straightforward.
That then made it easy to settle on a final design, and is when I realized I was touching on an alliterative subsystem, so the Six B's were formalized. The dual progression track was a bit of a hurdle though, as my original idea was to actually fold it all up into the Luck system, and while that wasn't a bad idea as it baked in player driven narrative, aesthetically I just did not like losing the usage based progression of Skill development.
Doing both, and splitting up how the Derived Stats Composure and Acuity are generated turned out to be a pretty compelling solution, if not as elegant as a single track would have been, but I was able to smooth that over by simply managing the frequency of updates. The Composure track progresses daily from Skill use, the Acuity track progresses roughly monthly based on what stars are in the gameworld's sky (aka, which one of four states the Sky id in). Pretty clean, and helps emphasize long term progression as well.
And of course, doing all this also lead to me sticking by my take on a Class system, which is pretty well honed now. While I haven't formally designed them (they're all still napkin notes), if you want to hear some really kookoo bananas ideas you could ask me what my Banner/Blazons/Bastions all actually do. Memory has some details, but only very broadly.
===
The Reach is an interesting one. Originally I called this The Alliance when the game was still multiplayer first, and while thats still the case in the Expansion, I had to rename for singleplayer.
But anyway, the Reach is less a system unto itself, and more of a metastructure for the game, where characters as they progress past the point where normal fantasy adventuring is a challenge, can be taken into a higher scope of play. This is an idea still rooted in the 5e supplement Arora: Age of Desolation, which was a key inspiration for Adventuring, and essentially involves the evolution of a character's responsibilities in the gameworld as a vector for new challenges, rather than just juicing the math.
Past a certain point, something like Survival should be trivial for an individual character, especially if they're distinctly powerful relative to the world around them. Trying to make Survival still an individual challenge for them is kind of a dead end, and ultimately tends to still just be a matter of juicing the numbers when it comes down to it.
So what do we do? Well, while any powerful character could trivialize something like Survival for themselves, its a different story when they have a village to manage and take care of. New, meaningful challenges can be built in this context that don't need to juice the math to still be interesting to tackle.
So, the Reach facilitates this logic stretching out across the entire Engine, with the same procedures and gameplay just organically taking on a new scope. There's new rules yes, but it all just hooks into the same control scheme, if you will, that you would be used to by this point.
With the expansion splitting out a number of things, I essentially had to think up a way to make the Reach interesting for the solo player, and as I originally was going to pilfer the idea of Domains from the game that shall not be named, it turned out this was a fun vector to put a middle ground between the core game and the expansions bonkersness.
Bastions, as I call them, key off the Banners (Classes, if you haven't checked the docs) and Backstories, and essentially give you a unique station in the gameworld that develops how you interact with it.
This all came together as a no-brainer, and also handily solved the question of how the core game was going to still support things like bakeries and other whimsical things; Backstories combine my ideas for 'Civilian' classes, professions, and a bunch of other things, and then hook right into Bastions. Lovely!
===
The Living World of course is what I consider the crown jewel, given what it does. While it hasn't changed much (other than figuring out how I could get it to be Active rather than just Passive), I was able to refine it considerably as I started hooking in the new expressive vectors I had for it.
The Culture Pool in particular is new, however, and was the key thing I had to come up with, as I wanted to give players enough leeway to ignore the system, but still make it work and do what it does. With Quest fallouts being easily accumulated and then distributed with minimal upkeep (basically if you can't be bothered, just use the shorthand and empty the Pool when you don't have room or the game prompts you to), this lead to the idea of formalizing Noble Intrigue versus Ambient Intrigue.
Essentially, if you don't mind keeping up with it, you can drive Nobles to be really active and dynamic, really letting the gameworld get up to some naughty word, and at the same time, if you do mind, then the game still facilitates a more passive effect, where what happens in the gameworld can still interject into what you're doing and cause different things to happen.
And of course, if you don't mind, both of these are going simultaneously up to whatever scale you care to let the World run at, which was always a core idea of the system. You can shrink it down to just a city, or blow it up to the whole planet (and then some...).
And then meanwhile, I of course bring in the Prompt Table and 2d20 IR to run the Talking Table, a solo conversation tool, rooting the entire system in the Core mechanics.
But I think the most interesting thing about the Living World is actually how I came to realize the Quest Block/Line tools are actually a shockingly clever way to facilitate Foresight mechanics, and that lead to the idea of literal time travel. While, of course, neither one is going to be all that powerful in the scheme of things, the Banners that make use of them are going to be a lot more fun, as they basically gamify the act of spoiling yourself.
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So, Project D.N.D. Pretty much the epitome of me being an absolute smart ass, but in my defense I didn't do it intentionally. I didn't realize the acronym until I figured it'd read better as an acronym, so I like to think this is just the universe telling me something.
Anyway, if one looks at the Memory Doc, the whole idea of this Project is to basically take the things I didn't think we're going to fit well in the core game, as I would have had to slim them down, and giving them their own space to juice up and start raging.
Multiplayer support eventually migrated over here, because ultimately these new subsystems are multiplayer centric to begin with, though will still be very useful for single player, and I was able to lay down some refinements for where these new subsystems will go, and while I don't state it, the idea is that its aimed at bringing a third genre to Labyrinthian, mythic fantasy.
Expanding the game to the absolute limits of what I think I could cleanly support, it pretty much embodies that idea. And whats more, its not even theory, because all I'm really doing is breaking off the layer beyond The Reach.
Each new subsystem is still rooted in the core ones. Legacies build off Character Development and the Reach, Settlements and Nations off Adventuring and Crafting/Gathering, and then Warfare off Combat.
And the Living World just expands keying off all the new systems and the vectors they provide, and it doubles up as the means for solo players to still make use of them, even if they don't want to go nuts with that extreme high scope play it talks about; new sets of Quest Blocks, PMLs, and other things will greatly enhance the normal gameplay, but not so much that it feels like a different game altogether.
And meanwhile, codifying co-op of course will be pretty easy, just following on from the core game's emphasis on teaching Improv transparently, and providing guidance for utilizing the solo systems in co-op. (Which I already figured out due to how I was testing them
)
The World Keeper will probably be tricky. Not so much because I don't know where I'm going with it, but just because its going to be pretty critical that people understand that it isn't going to be a GM role. People will inevitably use it like that Im sure, but its meant to be a different kind of player role built from the ground up, which definitely has gotten a lot easier to codify the basic idea of since the shift to solo.
Which I think is best exemplified by the open group make up. You can just be a Keeper with no players, or you can run multiple Keepers, or you can go for the traditional GM set up of one Keeper to however many players.
And essentially the whole idea is that Keepers are essentially playing analog Dwarf Fortress (but coherent!) and acting as the gameworld for the Players, assisted by the solo tools.
Should be pretty cool, and will open the game up to a lot of different ways to play, which it definitely wants with the sheer breadth its going for.
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Which, of course, is the collossal elephant in the room, if you're looking at Memory. But, as the Core Design notes, this is intentional maximalism, driven by breadth and expression.
One of the easiest things to do looking at ny game is to get completely overwhelmed by its breadth. But this isn't any different than looking at something like Pathfinder or DND and assuming you have to learn the book front to back just to play. And that simply isn't the case.
For one, the First Pages. Each subsystem collapses down to a singular letter-sized page of actual rules (the living World collapses to two; the Talking Table takes up one). These are going to serve two purposes.
One they frontload the actual things you need to know to use them, and two, they double as a handy one-page reference as you internalize the ruled and procedures. Barring me screwing it up, you will be able to just take these and jump in blind once you've got the core mechanics down.
And likewise, the game through the World Guide is going to be structured around doing just that letting you learn as you play, and then meanwhile the rest of the page count can be dedicated to more indepth play examples and optional content baked right in. Very efficient, and should make onboarding a breeze, as long as people trust the game and give it the time to teach you.
Ultimately, I've put a lot of thought and anticipation into the UX, and while Memory breaks down some of my definites in this regard, theres a while lot more I'm still experimenting with to really get people into the space to not just play but thrive as they do.
And this even goes as deep as being fundamental to how the Character Development system is paced. Your first character is going to be highly encouraged to be fully randomized, just so you can learn to play without being swamped by the choices available. The Origins are going to be designed to teach you how to play systematically, and get you set up to play with all the gizmos turned on (if you want), eliminating any special prep.
There's just a lot of great ways to approach the problem that I've been anticipating, because it isn't lost on me just how damn big the game is, but its also just not all that complex. In terms of design, it absolutely is and there's no question about it.
But I've taught children to play with these systems, despite it currently only existing on napkins, notepads, and scribbled on write ups from the past iterations. If I can get that to work, then the question of accessibility isn't really up for debate; its basically just a writing and polish problem to make that accessibility apparent.
And I'm pretty confident I'm on the right track with that, especially now as the the game is pretty much locked in from a design standpoint. The key thing about it, is that people will have to learn to play.
While RPG fans will find a lot of familiarity, how the system wants you to do things isn't going to resemble all that much thats out there. This is actually why I'm not afraid of nor concerned with the volume of bespoke jargon, as you'll pick this up as you learn. And you'll also find that most of the jargon isn't jargon anyway; if you see 'The X Table' somewhere, it doesn't matter what X is, its all just the same Prompt Table you'll learn going in.
So I don't suspect it to be an issue, because I can always keep polishing it, testing it, and iterating until its done.
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But those are my thoughts. As I said earlier, feel free to peruse the attached. The Thematic Outline is a good look at what gameplay is meant to feel and look like, and the story I conveyed literally came directly from the game, and is effectively the rought story of my personal characters life that I started when I was testing all the new systems. (The Goblin and the Claimant I talk about were my testers who intermittently were able to sit in)
The Memory Outline, as it notes, is just a birds eye blueprint more or less. Its just me talking to myself in such a way that I can remind myself of how different parts of the game works.
Its happened more than once due to its design where I'll be in the weeds with a subsystem, or taking a break, and I'll just straight up forget how something was supposed to work. And then I'll end up running back into the same design problems, just to waste time reinventing my own solutions.
On the one hand its nice my brain and this design work like that, as I haven't lost anything, but on the other its an incredible pain in the ass.
So, the Memory Outline helps with that, and incidentally, is pretty good to convey where things sit in relation to one another, even if it doesn't really tell you how anything works; I only included short explanations where I either don't have a hard design behind it yet (which is 99% Content at this point, which is the next big project once the Engine is written up properly) or where I've forgotten things before, which is the bulk of the ones in the Engine.
Note as well I probably won't go into too much detail about how things work in the thoughts below either; by all means ask for specifics of you're interested. I'm in the process of working the full revision of the game's actual rules text and First Pages, so this is a good time to talk about that.
But in the meantime, I'm mostly just looking to share my (numerous) thoughts and may be spark some lively discussion.
==
A good long while ago, I made the decision to move Labyrinthian to being solo, or single player as I've taken to saying nowadays, which was around the same time I was also leaning on no longer calling my game an RPG at all.
Initially, this was just because a part of me was getting bitter at certain people insisting I wasn't making one, so I logic'd my way out of that negativity by just owning it.
However. The move to single player (and co-op, though I've pushed this out) actually ended up having a profound effect on the design of the game, leading to an overflow of creativity (completely destroying my writers block for everything), and over time what I had decided to call Labyrinthian took on a much more deliberate meaning as the game strayed further and further from conventional RPG design.
So, an Immersive Improv Game, or MMG, can be accurately described as an Improv Game hybridized and integrated with an analog systemic game engine. This naturally means that Improv dynamics are core to the game, but that they integrate with a series of interconnected subsystems that, both within themselves and through interactions with each other, are designed to foster emergent play.
In other words, it takes what Immersive Sim video games do, brings it into an analog space, and then integrates Improv to make it functional in that space. The use of Improv, however, shouldn't be taken to mean that the game is just made up on the fly. If one peruses the attached document Memory, they'll find there is a vast array of systems and structures involved in the game, and eventually Content as well.
Instead, Improv is utilized to guide the 'mental model' of the game. What does that mean? Well, this goes to the heart of why I specifically chose 'Immersive', as the word alone implies a lot of what I'm talking about.
But to be more specific, mental models are the player's internal understanding of how a game system works and what actions lead to success, either as the game defines it, and in our case, as the player does.
By leveraging Improv to influence this mental model, I can dramatically reduce the actual operational complexity of a lot of different systems, and build each one to encourage and support expression, whilst still curating the game towards the genre blend its aiming for.
To put it in more direct terms, I skip the need for things like computers to handle, say, a true Living World that can and will act on its own, with minimal (and sometimes zero) required upkeep from the player.
But obviously this is all a lot of arcane design theory talk that I am 100% not being terribly specific in explaining. So let's look at the game.
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When I made the shift to single player, I pretty quickly realized the game was going to have to go back into the oven, because long before that decision I knew I wanted to support solo play one way or another, and as I'm wont to do, I knew I was going to need to address some endemic issues with playing something like an RPG solo.
Not only is soloplay often murky to get into the groove of, but if a game wasn't designed from the get go to work for solo, then there tends to be a lot of iffy workarounds involved getting them to work. And most often, few of these ever get around what I call the Opacity Problem; the fact that players have the full ability to spoil themselves inherently just by the nature of the books these games occupy.
The latter two problems were ones I knew early on how I'd want to tackle, which was by essentially building out a guide book that crossed the Adventure Module with a CYOA book, and over time this became what I'm calling The World Guide, which also combines a setting/lore book and a beastiary with it.
Essentially, this book is going to be structured in such a way that players will have a clean procedure to use it and not spoil themselves in terms of content. While accidents will surely happen, as well as the fact that I can't physically barr you from looking at something arbitrarily, the structure and procedures will be there for those that want it.
That solution tracked for me a long time ago, and as I'm getting prepared to move into Content Synthesis for the game (pending my formal write up of the entire Engine), its only going to get better as I actually build it.
Now, the former problem, the murkiness of play, was something I didn't already have a solution for. While my systems were mostly player-driven to begin with, without a GM or some equivalent, a lot of the game's dynamics would be lost. Especially when it comes to the Living World.
The solution I eventually landed on was what I dubbed the Prompt Table. This is a player facing system where a d20 table is split between them, with the even numbers, and the gameworld, using the odd numbers.
The idea is that when a Prompt is selected, not only does a number of potential mechanical or systemic things get triggered, so does a flavorful prompt for the Player to interpret based on whatever it is they're doing. This, in tandem with what the World Guide is already going to be doing, made the whole thing start to click.
The fun part was that the idea already existed in the game; originally I used a less formalized version of it as an isolated mechanic in Adventuring to drive Diversions, which I had designed as a kind of attractor system, inviting players to go off on side tangents via interpretative prompts, which in co-op can beautifully spiral out, but even solo, as I found, are just as compelling if you lean into them.
This is what lead to me applying 'Recursion' as a constraint for the game; remixing and reusing things across the entire Engine. This obviously helps for onboarding reasons as now the different subsystems all work off the same ontology. But it also gave me a buttload (technical term) of new vectors to hook the Living World into, the visibility of which was always the biggest problem with that particular aspect. Likewise, eliminating orphan mechanics was another; everything has to be integrated within a system. If it wasn't and I couldn't fit it or redesign, it got nixed.
===
Adapting the new Prompt Table into Adventuring was pretty easy, given its where it came from, and actually just made that whole thing easier to deal with, so that was lovely. And adapting the overall subsystem for solo was also a breeze, as it was just a matter of bringing the Time Pool to be player facing, which wasn't too difficult.
However, Recursion touched this one as well, with the pollination of 2d20 IR (Input Random) back into it. This was originally my Combat mechanic, and while how Combat worked was rebuilt numerous times (its on its 10th, but largely final, iteration
), 2d20 IR was always a part of it.Adapting it for Adventuring was initially tricky, as how it worked at the time was that you generate two potential Actions simultaneously, which you then decide how you want to use. And in this subsystem, this just a little bit too much with for what its gameplay entails, namely because Activities were always more involved than the Actions of Combat.
Working the problem, I actually came to a solution from two different directions. First, I was acutely aware that, because of the Opacity Problem, there was no practical way to have explicitly designed maps and trust players to still run into dangerous places (Procedural Generation not being of interest to me). And second, Combat was increasingly following in the footsteps of DOOM Eternal's 'push forward combat' as I rebuilt it.
These two things sparked the idea of 'Pulled Forward traversal'. Essentially, I figured I could design the system in such a way that players near literally get dragged forward through the gameworld, and this gave me a way to incorporate these potential unideal behaviors I was anticipating as part of the game. If you, for example, use the game mechanics to just run in circles so you can cheese a dungeon, this is fine, as that still tracks with what a hesitant coward would do (aesthetic), but also gives me the space to deliver consequence to that action by way of the systems I already had, and new ones I can embed into the World Guide (mechanical).
And this all just sings, because it further emphasizes what I was originally emphasizing about Adventuring, is that Time is the antagonist above all. So the more time you waste, the more the game keeps gaming. And beyond that, the idea behind the Crawl, the overall system you use to get around in the gameworld, gets enhanced as well, as now there's a lot more enjoyable, expressive gaming to be had from it. Getting around is a lot more fun, in other words, and that's the biggest thing this particular subsystem needed to do.
But! It didn't stop there, because while two full actions were still too much, I did come up with the idea of utilizing Skill Dice (non-d20/d% dice) to allow Players to make lesser simultaneous actions by using them as a replacement base Die, which in turn meant I don't have to have players making a decision over whether or not to, say, investigate a chest OR be sneaky, but between which one they think they should focus on more.
Organically balances out the two Actions, and makes 2d20IR mechanic more interesting, and this all bore out in testing, where even my two testers (my group broke up
) were able to grok it independently despite having to make up content to use with it. ===
Combat was an interesting system to work out, as around the same time, I had taken some time to try and adapt what I had at the time for GunFu. This adaptation proved so potent right off the bat, I made the decision to cross pollinate its ideas back into Labyrinthian, and that begat a whole new revision of the system which I was still in the middle of when I then added Solo to the mix. Quite the conundrum and it took a couple tries to really nail it down.
The principal problem of course was how do I nip the whole "I need to be the GM half the time" problem when its single player. This is what lead to the idea of the Prompt Table, which I rechristened 'The Reaction Table' for Combat, not just handing out a Prompt, but also calling for mechanical or systemic triggers. While it took some doing to find the right prompt template that fit my vision for Combat, mechanically I found my AI system, and it just became a matter of not just laying down Reaction Tables for Enemies, but a set of Tactics and Actions that players can easily and dutifully engage.
Ezpz, and quite elegant, as the Prompts on top of this made for a much more compelling jumping off point for improvised actions in Combat, which in tandem with the GunFu innovations, like Lethality or the Hit Location system, actually allowed me to collapse some more complexity out of it. Ironic as that is that Hit Locations, the crunchy bane of most tactical games, proved to be so simple and compelling its now the basic mode of combat.
But, as I was working through these changes and testing them out, thats when I ended up deep in the DOOM rabbithole. While I had already picked up on push forward with GunFu to inform its gunplay dynamics, it was Eternal's enemy design that started captivating me, and while I don't strictly mention it in the attached docs, I have a mini-design bible going thats going to be my northstar when I start designing formal Enemies, which mixes what I took from DOOM with my own ideas, and washes the pair through the new kind of combat the latest revision was turning into.
Which, it has to be said, is pretty killer. I was coming into the idea of 'Tactical Improv' already, but like the idea of the game being an MMG, it was this latest revision that really brought that idea home.
Its expressive and even without any bespoke content yet, really does let you define your own fighting style. In a way, its kind of a mental sleight of hand. Its very deliberately a choreographical system, being directly emulative of post-John Wick fight choreo (best exemplified in a fantasy context by DND: Honor Among Thieves), but by way of emulating the underlying logic and rhythm of such choreography.
Which isn't just fluff either; for example, the Netflix film Extraction wasn't a film I was directly using as a northstar (Atomic Blonde was for GunFu, and the base ideas were just me thinking through a more first person take on Combat), but there's a kill early on where Hemsworth's character kills this cop by brutally cutting his neck open by slashing at the wound just, way too many times to be serious. In the context of realism this is absurd, as the guys neck was split open from the first hit, the excess brutality is just that. Awesome, but hardly realistic.
Labyrinthian, however, retroactively gives logic to that kind of brutality, with the Lethality mechanics, which as I adapted them to Labyrinthian became wrapped up in the already existing Wound mechanics. Basically, in game terms, this would be you inflicting and then escalating a Wound before you could finally score a killing blow on the target, bypassing his Composure. This was a completely unintentional consequence of combining a fantasy combat system with a gunplay combat system, and it isn't the first time either; DNDHAT came out much later, and Xenk's fight with the Thayan assassin leader goes the same way. Numerous Wounds inflicted and escalated before he finally takes the killing blow. (And even his slaughtering of the Thayan mooks correlated to an already existing idea for how Combat would be balanced for speed of play)
Kind of upends the idea of 'cinematic' combat when you really get into it, particularly once we move fast melee and see the same dynamics become the root of 3 other combat styles players can riff off of.
===
Crafting and Gathering for the longest time was actually the one part of the game I basically never had to touch past its original inception. It just worked and did what I set out for it to do.
But, with the new constraints, changing it became prudent, though not much was lost. The overall system is still identical, I just changed its core mechanic to utilize 2d20IR instead, which then let me integrate what I amazingly christened 'The Crafting Table'.
You'll have to forgive me, I really do love my smart ass name schemes. And alliteration. Boy do I love alliteration.
While many will of course have problems with it no matter how its designed, because its just one of those things that is seldom done right, I really do think its hit the sweet spot. Not only have I massaged out the common pain points with such systems, but I've also gone farther in justifying them.
Item Durability as a gateway to ongoing Customization and expressive load out dynamics (you could go for a golf bag, or just keep customizing Ol' Reliable, or you could do both) pretty much completes the thought Tears of the Kingdom had for not making its Durability system not suck. And, finding a way to make the idea of 'Spell Components' actually interesting was a pretty great way to keep Mage characters in particular involved.
And ultimately, one way or another, this subsystem is pretty vital. Slice of Life without the ability to create things is pretty anemic, and I think I nailed extrapolating that out to epic fantasy.
Plus, given the nature of Crafting, I'm actually able to leverage it for a whole lot more than just making 'things'. The docs call out Construction and Husbandry, and even Artistry (singing, painting, etc). And we even see mention, through the Mystics, of using its mechanics as a basis for my take on Psionics.
But they're also going to apply towards things like esoteric Animist, Arcane, and Divine Rituals. So even just from a gameplay standpoint, even if you're not specifically interested in crafting in of itself, you'll still likely enjoy the expressive creation the mechanics enable elsewhere.
===
Character Development was a peculiar one, as I didn't formally consider it a subsystem until I really started to organize the game on a hollistic level (which also lead to the expansion, more on that later).
The key thing for the longest time is that I kept waffling on what was and wasn't going to be included, and there was numerous periods where the game shifted through different configurations.
What I eventually settled on was the Six B's, which only really clicked for me when I realized the problem I was dancing around was actually an organization problem.
One of my original ideas, given I was going to have a big damn Skill List anyway, was to use Skills as a repository for different rules and other things. This to me seemed a clever way to organize things, but as it became clear, this was a causing the waffling because I couldn't square the circle on what all I would and wouldn't need versus the kind of space I'd be able to dedicate to it.
So, the solution for that came from killing that idea, and pushing those into the UX of the game; instead of having things granularly referenced via 32 different Skills, I'm just going to consolidate nearly everything they would have covered into the Sheet system, which will make play a lot more straightforward.
That then made it easy to settle on a final design, and is when I realized I was touching on an alliterative subsystem, so the Six B's were formalized. The dual progression track was a bit of a hurdle though, as my original idea was to actually fold it all up into the Luck system, and while that wasn't a bad idea as it baked in player driven narrative, aesthetically I just did not like losing the usage based progression of Skill development.
Doing both, and splitting up how the Derived Stats Composure and Acuity are generated turned out to be a pretty compelling solution, if not as elegant as a single track would have been, but I was able to smooth that over by simply managing the frequency of updates. The Composure track progresses daily from Skill use, the Acuity track progresses roughly monthly based on what stars are in the gameworld's sky (aka, which one of four states the Sky id in). Pretty clean, and helps emphasize long term progression as well.
And of course, doing all this also lead to me sticking by my take on a Class system, which is pretty well honed now. While I haven't formally designed them (they're all still napkin notes), if you want to hear some really kookoo bananas ideas you could ask me what my Banner/Blazons/Bastions all actually do. Memory has some details, but only very broadly.
===
The Reach is an interesting one. Originally I called this The Alliance when the game was still multiplayer first, and while thats still the case in the Expansion, I had to rename for singleplayer.
But anyway, the Reach is less a system unto itself, and more of a metastructure for the game, where characters as they progress past the point where normal fantasy adventuring is a challenge, can be taken into a higher scope of play. This is an idea still rooted in the 5e supplement Arora: Age of Desolation, which was a key inspiration for Adventuring, and essentially involves the evolution of a character's responsibilities in the gameworld as a vector for new challenges, rather than just juicing the math.
Past a certain point, something like Survival should be trivial for an individual character, especially if they're distinctly powerful relative to the world around them. Trying to make Survival still an individual challenge for them is kind of a dead end, and ultimately tends to still just be a matter of juicing the numbers when it comes down to it.
So what do we do? Well, while any powerful character could trivialize something like Survival for themselves, its a different story when they have a village to manage and take care of. New, meaningful challenges can be built in this context that don't need to juice the math to still be interesting to tackle.
So, the Reach facilitates this logic stretching out across the entire Engine, with the same procedures and gameplay just organically taking on a new scope. There's new rules yes, but it all just hooks into the same control scheme, if you will, that you would be used to by this point.
With the expansion splitting out a number of things, I essentially had to think up a way to make the Reach interesting for the solo player, and as I originally was going to pilfer the idea of Domains from the game that shall not be named, it turned out this was a fun vector to put a middle ground between the core game and the expansions bonkersness.
Bastions, as I call them, key off the Banners (Classes, if you haven't checked the docs) and Backstories, and essentially give you a unique station in the gameworld that develops how you interact with it.
This all came together as a no-brainer, and also handily solved the question of how the core game was going to still support things like bakeries and other whimsical things; Backstories combine my ideas for 'Civilian' classes, professions, and a bunch of other things, and then hook right into Bastions. Lovely!
===
The Living World of course is what I consider the crown jewel, given what it does. While it hasn't changed much (other than figuring out how I could get it to be Active rather than just Passive), I was able to refine it considerably as I started hooking in the new expressive vectors I had for it.
The Culture Pool in particular is new, however, and was the key thing I had to come up with, as I wanted to give players enough leeway to ignore the system, but still make it work and do what it does. With Quest fallouts being easily accumulated and then distributed with minimal upkeep (basically if you can't be bothered, just use the shorthand and empty the Pool when you don't have room or the game prompts you to), this lead to the idea of formalizing Noble Intrigue versus Ambient Intrigue.
Essentially, if you don't mind keeping up with it, you can drive Nobles to be really active and dynamic, really letting the gameworld get up to some naughty word, and at the same time, if you do mind, then the game still facilitates a more passive effect, where what happens in the gameworld can still interject into what you're doing and cause different things to happen.
And of course, if you don't mind, both of these are going simultaneously up to whatever scale you care to let the World run at, which was always a core idea of the system. You can shrink it down to just a city, or blow it up to the whole planet (and then some...).
And then meanwhile, I of course bring in the Prompt Table and 2d20 IR to run the Talking Table, a solo conversation tool, rooting the entire system in the Core mechanics.
But I think the most interesting thing about the Living World is actually how I came to realize the Quest Block/Line tools are actually a shockingly clever way to facilitate Foresight mechanics, and that lead to the idea of literal time travel. While, of course, neither one is going to be all that powerful in the scheme of things, the Banners that make use of them are going to be a lot more fun, as they basically gamify the act of spoiling yourself.
===
So, Project D.N.D. Pretty much the epitome of me being an absolute smart ass, but in my defense I didn't do it intentionally. I didn't realize the acronym until I figured it'd read better as an acronym, so I like to think this is just the universe telling me something.
Anyway, if one looks at the Memory Doc, the whole idea of this Project is to basically take the things I didn't think we're going to fit well in the core game, as I would have had to slim them down, and giving them their own space to juice up and start raging.
Multiplayer support eventually migrated over here, because ultimately these new subsystems are multiplayer centric to begin with, though will still be very useful for single player, and I was able to lay down some refinements for where these new subsystems will go, and while I don't state it, the idea is that its aimed at bringing a third genre to Labyrinthian, mythic fantasy.
Expanding the game to the absolute limits of what I think I could cleanly support, it pretty much embodies that idea. And whats more, its not even theory, because all I'm really doing is breaking off the layer beyond The Reach.
Each new subsystem is still rooted in the core ones. Legacies build off Character Development and the Reach, Settlements and Nations off Adventuring and Crafting/Gathering, and then Warfare off Combat.
And the Living World just expands keying off all the new systems and the vectors they provide, and it doubles up as the means for solo players to still make use of them, even if they don't want to go nuts with that extreme high scope play it talks about; new sets of Quest Blocks, PMLs, and other things will greatly enhance the normal gameplay, but not so much that it feels like a different game altogether.
And meanwhile, codifying co-op of course will be pretty easy, just following on from the core game's emphasis on teaching Improv transparently, and providing guidance for utilizing the solo systems in co-op. (Which I already figured out due to how I was testing them
)The World Keeper will probably be tricky. Not so much because I don't know where I'm going with it, but just because its going to be pretty critical that people understand that it isn't going to be a GM role. People will inevitably use it like that Im sure, but its meant to be a different kind of player role built from the ground up, which definitely has gotten a lot easier to codify the basic idea of since the shift to solo.
Which I think is best exemplified by the open group make up. You can just be a Keeper with no players, or you can run multiple Keepers, or you can go for the traditional GM set up of one Keeper to however many players.
And essentially the whole idea is that Keepers are essentially playing analog Dwarf Fortress (but coherent!) and acting as the gameworld for the Players, assisted by the solo tools.
Should be pretty cool, and will open the game up to a lot of different ways to play, which it definitely wants with the sheer breadth its going for.
===
Which, of course, is the collossal elephant in the room, if you're looking at Memory. But, as the Core Design notes, this is intentional maximalism, driven by breadth and expression.
One of the easiest things to do looking at ny game is to get completely overwhelmed by its breadth. But this isn't any different than looking at something like Pathfinder or DND and assuming you have to learn the book front to back just to play. And that simply isn't the case.
For one, the First Pages. Each subsystem collapses down to a singular letter-sized page of actual rules (the living World collapses to two; the Talking Table takes up one). These are going to serve two purposes.
One they frontload the actual things you need to know to use them, and two, they double as a handy one-page reference as you internalize the ruled and procedures. Barring me screwing it up, you will be able to just take these and jump in blind once you've got the core mechanics down.
And likewise, the game through the World Guide is going to be structured around doing just that letting you learn as you play, and then meanwhile the rest of the page count can be dedicated to more indepth play examples and optional content baked right in. Very efficient, and should make onboarding a breeze, as long as people trust the game and give it the time to teach you.
Ultimately, I've put a lot of thought and anticipation into the UX, and while Memory breaks down some of my definites in this regard, theres a while lot more I'm still experimenting with to really get people into the space to not just play but thrive as they do.
And this even goes as deep as being fundamental to how the Character Development system is paced. Your first character is going to be highly encouraged to be fully randomized, just so you can learn to play without being swamped by the choices available. The Origins are going to be designed to teach you how to play systematically, and get you set up to play with all the gizmos turned on (if you want), eliminating any special prep.
There's just a lot of great ways to approach the problem that I've been anticipating, because it isn't lost on me just how damn big the game is, but its also just not all that complex. In terms of design, it absolutely is and there's no question about it.
But I've taught children to play with these systems, despite it currently only existing on napkins, notepads, and scribbled on write ups from the past iterations. If I can get that to work, then the question of accessibility isn't really up for debate; its basically just a writing and polish problem to make that accessibility apparent.
And I'm pretty confident I'm on the right track with that, especially now as the the game is pretty much locked in from a design standpoint. The key thing about it, is that people will have to learn to play.
While RPG fans will find a lot of familiarity, how the system wants you to do things isn't going to resemble all that much thats out there. This is actually why I'm not afraid of nor concerned with the volume of bespoke jargon, as you'll pick this up as you learn. And you'll also find that most of the jargon isn't jargon anyway; if you see 'The X Table' somewhere, it doesn't matter what X is, its all just the same Prompt Table you'll learn going in.
So I don't suspect it to be an issue, because I can always keep polishing it, testing it, and iterating until its done.
===
But those are my thoughts. As I said earlier, feel free to peruse the attached. The Thematic Outline is a good look at what gameplay is meant to feel and look like, and the story I conveyed literally came directly from the game, and is effectively the rought story of my personal characters life that I started when I was testing all the new systems. (The Goblin and the Claimant I talk about were my testers who intermittently were able to sit in)
The Memory Outline, as it notes, is just a birds eye blueprint more or less. Its just me talking to myself in such a way that I can remind myself of how different parts of the game works.
Its happened more than once due to its design where I'll be in the weeds with a subsystem, or taking a break, and I'll just straight up forget how something was supposed to work. And then I'll end up running back into the same design problems, just to waste time reinventing my own solutions.
On the one hand its nice my brain and this design work like that, as I haven't lost anything, but on the other its an incredible pain in the ass.
So, the Memory Outline helps with that, and incidentally, is pretty good to convey where things sit in relation to one another, even if it doesn't really tell you how anything works; I only included short explanations where I either don't have a hard design behind it yet (which is 99% Content at this point, which is the next big project once the Engine is written up properly) or where I've forgotten things before, which is the bulk of the ones in the Engine.
