Brain Dump

My primary roleplaying game design project at the moment is The Suburban Crucible (alpha version). This is a game that I wrote for the September Ronnies in 2005. It’s a project that I’m still pretty excited about, even though it’s pretty discouraging.

It’s a game about racism, especially subtle and institutional forms of racism. Living in the U.S. deep south, this is an issue that’s pretty close to my heart, and one that often hits uncomfortably close to home. It also turns out that it’s incredibly hard to design for. I mean, how do you develop game structures that model the incredibly complex social issues tied up in institutional prejudice? It’s tough.

But that’s all background for what I really want to talk about. I see The Suburban Crucible as a game designed to educate and raise awareness. Yes, I want it to be a game of powerful stories, but I want those stories to be about exploring and better understanding racism. I want people to walk away from any session of play with a new way of looking at racism, and some new tools for identifying it and fighting it.

And my game calls for d10s.

Now, at first glance, that’s no biggie. I mean, d10s are pretty common in gaming, probably the second most common die-type after the d6. But, man, I don’t really want to write a game for gamers. I want to write a game for people, and most people don’t even know that polyhedral dice exist.

So I realized that I’d need to either shift target audiences, or find a new prop for play. I considered d6s, which are significantly more common and easy to come by than d10s, but the mechanic I’m currently using is pool-based, and not everyone has a handful of d6s lying around the house.

Which brought me to cards. Standard playing-card decks are even more familiar, not to mention more common, than any form of dice. I took a look at my core mechanics, and figured out a way to make them work using a deck of cards instead of handfuls of dice.

And while the probability curves change, and some of the interactions shift, the change to cards allows for a couple of new interactions that dice wouldn’t have allowed for. At this point I’m not sure I like the mechanics more this way, though I think I like them at least as much, but the important part for me is that the game becomes more accessible this way.

This realization was important more generally than The Suburban Crucible. In fact, it made me think about some of my other games-in-progress. I know think that Vampiric Flying Lycanthropic Catpeople Demigods (working title) will use d10s, for instance, because it is something of a commentary on the White Wolf paradigm.

Anyway, the lesson I learned, and that I think is important is to consider your audience. Not just in how you present and promote your game, but in the design. Think about what props you’re requiring, and what sorts of game structures you’re utilizing. What things are going to be familiar, and what things are going to take some learning? Are you making your target audience learn things that aren’t important to the game, or are you restricting the learning to the stuff you think matters?

Tags: Publishing

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 03:14 and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.