Excuse me, but I was wrapped up in procedures and mechanics and had a hard time getting out. So, as always happens, I said to myself “Turn to the characters, detail their structure and you can’t go wrong”.
Calvino talks about Resistance, but he’s very clever at it: what interests him is a bildungsroman set in the period of Resistance. It’s no coincidence that one of the inspirations is Treasure Island.
The funny thing is that all the events in which Pin is involved stem from the kid’s initial mischief: stealing a gun from a sailor and hiding it along the spider’s nest path. From there, except for some of the kid’s decisions, Pin actually reacts to the world he comes into contact with. It is a world of adults who do not consider him one of them: he is still in that phase where you are no longer a child but you are certainly not an adult. So I started thinking that probably, in addition to the classic information about the characters (name, battle name and age), it makes sense that they are marked by some reactions. I mean, the way they react to events and people around them.
In the beginning, each character has only three reactions:
- Belonging;
- Evasion;
- Mischief.
The first is what they aspire to: to be part of that handful of adults. The other two are the reactions they have always had: running away from things and problems or mocking them.
The other players throw balls at the main characters and they react. In doing so, the protagonist’s player outlines their character and carries the story forward. The other players use a superstructure for the management of secondary characters, divided into three parts: family, comrades and the Enemy.
In addition to the three basic reactions, there is Friendship (which is another aspiration of the protagonists). This reaction is difficult to use because it’s very rare (the player has few resources to react with friendship, ergo a small number of tokens) and costs a lot because it exposes to disappointment. For friendship, I want to make sure there’s a system of checks and balances. When you use it, it’s the others who react to you, but they do it according to certain balances in that superstructure system for handling secondary characters.
Other reactions are “purchasable” during the game (they come from the basic ones) but often at a high price (it means becoming an adult):
- Courage (derived from Mischief);
- Cruelty (derived from Mischief);
- Despair (derived from Evasion);
- Duty (derived from Belonging);
- Idealism (derived from Belonging);
- Loyalty (derived from Friendship);
- Pragmatism (derived from Evasion).
That’s all for now.