Small Space Symphony

Happy Cosmonautics Day!

In this article I’ll talk a little about how my desktop role-playing game about the world of small planets is arranged. The rules book itself is attached.



Earlier, I wrote about various role systems of my own composition. Sharpened by miniatures and tactical battles, “Monstroy” , the concept of a story-building generator using a calculator, a game about demiurges engaged in creating the world.

In the first case, the game has a lead and the process itself is close to the classic desktop role-playing experience. In the following two systems, there is no leader in the game, that is, it is understood that the game mechanics themselves control what is happening.

The system can control the game in different ways. Let’s say, in the “divine simulator” a game-mechanical cycle is created, similar to a board game, only the idea is not to mathematically win it, but to create a joint story. In a system with calculated stories, on the contrary, there is essentially no cycle, but there are rules for the infinite generation of new entities and conditions for exiting this process, which can be interpreted as victory.

As for the "Small Space Symphony" - this is another one of my developments about the generation of joint stories, but with a presenter who plays for the world around him. That "divine system", which was discussed above, was originally supposed to be the "reskin" of this game about intelligent small planets. But space openings are one thing, and the gods are another thing - the latter were more suited to live within a particular territory. Therefore, the deities came up with a completely different game mechanics, from which the leader could already be excluded.

But back to the fantastic fantasy space, to the "Symphony". The core of this system implements a very simple and effective concept - replacing the game “not” with the game “when”. You can order the construction of anything, everything is possible, the question is only in time. If the classic role-playing game was built on this, then it would look rather strange, like the player says to the master “I want to remove this dungeon from the bowels of the earth and make it a flying labyrinth city,” and he answers “Yes, this will happen, but it will take two hundred years for your hero. ”

How it works: players build their planets, submit applications for various buildings / inventions. Something will be built quickly, something will not be soon, but something at first seems too impossible and therefore unrealistically long. But the world is changing, accidents occur, the level of forces is growing, what seemed impossible before becomes real, the planet abandons utopian projects and switches to achievable ones, breakthroughs happen with the discovery of new circumstances, and so on. Something happening is like a computer cosmos. However, if you transfer the computer rules to a board game, you would need to build a whole system of discoveries, a technology tree, the exact types of planets / races, and everything else. Some kind of desktop civilization is already obtained with a bunch of cards and parameters.

But I wanted to emphasize precisely that feature of desktop role-playing systems that they allow living players much more freedom than a computer. To do this, it was necessary to transform the familiar cosmos concept into a more “human” version, so that you would not have to make any very complicated calculations and manage with some minimum available tools - paper, pen, cube, something like that.

In the end, everything turned out to be quite simple, if we consider what is happening in the right way. Since we have a host, he will weigh the game requests in the amount of game time required for them. It’s not so difficult to measure any arbitrary application in daylight.

It’s just that we don’t pursue a certain universal balance, since this is not a computer game. In our case, the criteria are simple: the incredible - will be performed for a long time, the simple - quickly. Each planet turns out some kind of progress bars showing the execution time of different applications. And when there are these stripes, they can be manipulated - accelerating / replacing / combining / canceling. And somewhere around this moment the process captures the players.

For added convenience of playing the game (do not forget about the psychological aspect), instead of indicating a specific number of days, the host says that “the application will be executed on day N,” where N is the number of one of the following daylight hours. Mathematically, it’s the same as if he each time voiced the time of construction and added to the current day, but it becomes easier for the presenter to control all this breakthrough of the inventions planned by the players when he does not do unnecessary operations. In a word, not only the code can be optimized.

If we again touch on psychology, then in the process of the game we will see the following - players try to adapt to the picture of the leader’s world, depending on how he evaluates their applications. He considered laser weapons too cool technology, and airships some elementary? Players draw conclusions, players adapt. At the same time, it is interesting what and by whom they populate / build up their planets, what their plans are. You can look at the life of a neighboring planetoid, admire his inventions and the general course of the race living there, come up with something no less cool at home, cooperate, share groundwork, and so on.

In an interesting way, even the “impossible buildings” ordered by the players influence the game, because they still move the story, the players think about them, the host begins to better understand what the players want, and so on.



The rules book can be viewed here:

SMALL SPACE SYMPHONY

Players come up with their own planets and develop them, writing down open inventions and other important things. The host keeps records of their orders and progress on them, also he can gradually move some kind of external plot or just toss different players objects for research. A specific game cycle is described where a special deck of 14 zodiac cards is used as a random generator.

Finally, a few words about how important it is to submit an idea in a successful design.

Game mechanics from the "Small Space Symphony" could be present in the game not about the development of planets, but it was in this presentation that they were very well received both in the first tests and after, in the forum and in live games.

And also, in my opinion, this game is a good way to create a story and generate basic content with unique races and buildings for the same computer game. Because it is precisely practical activity, in contrast to inventing different cosmic races, classes, types and chains of development in a vacuum, without any support.


made a small intro for the atmosphere