A Functional Family
Under my understanding of them every roleplaying game is made up of one or more interlocking systems. This includes a layer of freeform roleplay and narration that exists in almost every game. Arguably this exists in many non-roleplaying games as well but I digress. If we take this level of freeform narration as a given, what are the mechanical systems applied on top of it in this project. These systems should gesture at what the game cares about and what the players find interesting. We care about community (material and social), discovery (of the self and the world), and personal power (with methods to demonstrate the growth or change of that power). These will each have systems, albeit not necessarily explicit ones.
Areas of Systemization
The areas to be given systems include several that are pretty standard to roleplaying games. Thus there is call to identify all those areas and find games which are in alignment and use them as a basis or inspiration. When it comes to combat, social intrigue, magic, and personal growth many traditional and non-traditional tabletop roleplaying games suffice. Frankly, versions of D&D or Apocalypse World Derivatives could suffice. But there are other elements I want to dig deeper into as well. I want to explore young people empowered by society yet on the edge of it. I want to put pressure on them to deal with ultimately impossible sets of social rules. I want them to take a hand in shaping their communities.
The reason I have narrowed in on the L5R 5E rules is that I find them a useful starting point for the kinds of things we are interesting in and modular enough to accept other rules. They push characters into friction with their communities and each other. They also produce qualified failures and complex successes - a personal favorite in games.
So we are provided by that framework with the rules for combat, social intrigue, magic, personal growth, as well as a ruleset for chafing against cultural and social constraints. It also has a system for creating and advancing characters - but one of these will be tweaked and one obliterated utterly.
New Systems
There is not a sufficient system for settlement building, but there is an easy method to tie it to your character. Characters in this system are modular enough that character elements can be removed from their traditional location and instead attached elsewhere. Rather than spending experience to increase a skill, I imagine spending resources to construct a building which improves that skill. Depending on location it might effect all players or only one or a few. This creates an intrinsic social reason for growth as well as an explicit and manipulatable one - elements which open up a lot of possibilities.
Given a loop of play such as receive requests from people within the community -> venture out to satisfy those requests - > succeed or fail -> receive rewards and punishments -> improve or change the community -> repeat we can replace the classic "level up" with "build up". This is a relatively simple insertion here into the system. Otherwise with some minor renaming and redesign of character creation we can largely run with the system as written.
One way to problematize and introduce constraints and interest around the settlement building is to produce restrictions. Perhaps some families will not build their structures near others, perhaps some buildings have negative impacts on nearby buildings. But a simple and straightforward one is one of the classics. Limited space and weird shapes. That's right. It's time to steal N-minos from tile laying board games once again. It is desirable for players to feel constrained at first by the options available to them (buildings that won't fit, land that is unusable) and set before them the challenge of figuring that out.
Character creation requires tweaking. We are moving to a new setting and a different scale of power, so we need to adjust the methodology and the characters produced. Happily the system in L5R 5E is itself modular so it is easily adjusted.
I will cover the plans for the settlement building/advancement in a future post, as well as character creation.
Changed Rules
Lots of things will need to be renamed from the slightly distasteful japanese-ish of L5R to something fitting the setting or something generic. Social skills should be adjusted to instead represent social pressure rather than control over the subjects interiority (as part of the move towards thinking about community and personal constraint by the community). Magic might want to be reflavored or adjusted, especially once it becomes available to players (a benefit of the settlement building style is that it can plausible gate rules complexity behind game progress).
But the change I am most interested in currently is character creation. L5R 5E's process is to ask the player twenty questions and to assign mechanical outcomes to some of the answers. It produces competent, often highly skilled characters. I want a little lower power level and to make it align with the setting. But to do that, I need to discuss the setting. That will be the next post, followed by the detailed information on character creation, then followed by the first draft of the player-facing settlement building rules.
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