Starting Out Small
I have spent a week thinking about and even playing some tile laying games. Carcassone, Berenpark, and many more. I think we want to begin with a relatively simple system and iterate on it. That system is going to need to close the gap for the initial characters and a baseline of interesting and useful character. To that end, we are short some skills and have no modular powers, which is readily resolved. If we ask what our starting settlement must have narratively, there are a couple of directions, but shelter and food really stand out.
How can we structure our game so that we can provide characters with some combat skills, some additional choices, and one of the modular powers (Kata, Shuji, Ritual). One option would be to have tiles/buildings produce resources and those resources compound into unlocking things. Something like:
A fishing hut provides 5 food, and 5 extra food if it is place adjacent to water.
Then we could create a table that scales non-linearly to say; Gain +1 Ring of your choice if the settlement has 5 food to spare, +2 with 15 food, an so on and so forth. Then we simply make some other buildings cost food. But this is sort of...creating an additional layer, so we could make it even simpler. Perhaps like:
A training ground gives you +1 to a combat skill of your choice. If it is staffed you also get any Kata from the list of ....
Rather than creating a pool of resources that then need to be converted it more directly converts into character power. But I think tile laying games and puzzles are more interesting when there are additional considerations beyond "can it fit on the board". We can make it more complex with adjacency rules, sets, odd shapes, or by adding in another piece and tying it to our narrative. So we have the idea of staffing. A finite list of NPCs associated with the village (not enough at start to staff everything the players might want) can be used to populate buildings and unlock their potential.
Let's say we want color, staffing, and sometimes adjacency/placement to all matter, even at the start. The color could represent the family the building is associated with narratively. We know we want players to have a few things starting out that are missing - access to Kata and Shuji, a few more skills, and some equipment. As I'm thinking I'm also realizing we can use the settlement to place an upper limit on skills and rings, which has some utility. So let's say we start out with:
Shared Housing - Allows healing of damage or Strain, with a bonus to the amount healed if staffed with a Caretaker.
Training Ground - Gives a martial skill, bonus access to a low level kata if staffed with a Armsmaster.
Meeting Hall - Mandatory. Counts as all colors. Limits Skills and Rings to 3. Cannot be staffed.
Food Production - Gives a Trade Skill, or any skill if staffed with a Seakeeper or Landkeeper.
Forge - Produces basic equipment, bonus equipment if staffed with a Master Craftsman.
If we then give the players the ability to choose which families own the specific buildings (changing their color), such that shared housing could belong to any family, the training ground could belong to Raiders, Scouts, or Storytellers, and the others are divided
such that the players can create a grouping of three buildings of one color we could give them access to an extra unlock like:
Family Role | Size 3 Cluster - Rank 1 Technique of Ring: |
Builders | Earth or Fire |
Farmers | Earth or Water |
Fisherfolk | Water or Self |
Mystics | Fire or Self |
Raiders | Water or Fire |
Sailors | Water or Air |
Scouts | Air or Self |
Smiths | Fire or Air |
Storytellers | Earth or Self |
Traders | Earth or Air |
By opening up to a broad set we can let the players sort of decide what is interesting to them. For a starting group I would likely just pick the most common family in the group or the one I am most interested in and then provide them the shortlist of techniques they can pick from.
Of these ideas I think we have a) gotten to a baseline for characters to be playable and interesting, with at least a little flexibility in their specialization and b) tied in the narrative to this mechanical game via the staffing npcs. I like that as a step, and think it's worth continuing to explore. I don't know if I like the adjacency/grouping rules as much but I do want there to be a third layer of interest beyond - the tile on the board and the presence or absence of staff. I'll need to continue cogitating on that.
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