It’s time to cover our first problem! Which is actually time itself! Specifically, how many actions, debates and resolutions we have per game as this has a finite ending. In short, how many times do we let the loop occur before the end?
Okay, so if we stick to the single year concept, that’s 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8760 hours and…
Behold. The gif that my fiancé will leave me for.
Now we have to quantify that in gameplay. 365 sessions (or any larger denomination of that) is not something we can fill feasibly for the course of this month, even if we have a random generation table for a possible event or choice for each one. (Also something like that adds a lot of steps and goes against my concept of elegance.)
If we did go with that it would mean we’d need over 900 choices for every active day to decide upon (if I had a team and a budget it would be a hell of an achievement), or at least double the number of days (730) if we have a mechanic that things we don’t decide to keep still exist until the end of the year.
Are you all still with me?
Cool. So let’s scale it down.
The 52 week model: Every week the players, roleplaying as gods, meet to decide what will survive in the new world. Whatever else DOESN’T make that list is gone for good.
Pros: That is something with an interesting real time life cycle and definitely creates a long term solution.
Cons: We need multiple choices for each week and more than two to add diversity. Which means if we have three options a week we would need to create 156 options per week or 212 for four to make this viable.
Granted there are more than 212 fields of study, interest, and just straight up stuff. We also run the risk of this becoming routine and blasé. We can’t guarantee that each of the 52 weeks will be meaningful. Also group members dropping off.
However a fun hack would be having each player bring in an article for the week and using each article as a prompt as a debate what to keep. But again, the duration is imperfect.
So let’s go with twelve.
Twelve sessions to decide the fate of the world. Now that’s something with resonance. If you only had twelve decisions to make, twelve sessions to play as your god, then you as the player, would be encouraged to make the most of each one.
So the gods meet once a month to decide on what lives and what dies. Fuck that gives me chills. Has a real corporate executive coldness to it.
Then going by the previous criteria, each month the group must pick from a list of three to four options to decide what will survive the new world. That’s 36 or 48. That is far more manageable.
Now that we have a relatively solid session number we can move on to designing the phases of gameplay and figuring out what even goes in on a single session. For that I’m going to need to start asking you fine people who read this for your feedback on what you’d like to see in there! Expect it later today as I neglected to put one up yesterday!
Motherfucker Count: 0