I'm giving up on the 'Making RPGs in public' thing, as the fact that it's here and you can read about it sort of gives the game away.
I've been thinking about spirit conflict in my game. Characters are spirits who possess the bodies of townsfolk around them to have some physical interaction with the world. But what about other spirits? I think the characters are broadly good and aiming to protect the town (and hopefully the townspeople too), which should be the hook for some adventures, but there should be other spirits in the game that are less good.
Cue looking through folklore accounts on Twitter, leafing through the 2ed AD&D Monstrous Manual and then one of my favourite learning-about-stuff activities, a good trawl through Wikipedia.
So now I have a list of candidates and need to think about what makes them different, what they are there for and how they interact with the characters. There's going to come a point where a spirit comes into conflict with another spirit and I want it to feel different to 'normal' physical combat or 'normal' mental conflict. For those, you pick a card, you add your trait and compare and highest score wins. The idea is that should be quick and simple to resolve who hits who.
For the spirit vs. spirit conflict, I want it to feel more thoughtful and more like ancient beings circling each other, looking for a weakness. As I went to bed last night, I had an idea and scrawled 'hand of cards' on a scrap of paper so I wouldn't forget it. Say your spirit has a hand of cards and your opponent has a hand of cards. Maybe you could try to win tricks, and the one who wins the most is successful (I still need to define what success looks like in the context). I don't want it to take forever, so let's say we play three cards? Each character has a Willpower score, initially from 1-4. Why don't we say that this is the number of cards you get to hold in your hand and the same for your opponent.
But you might have a Willpower of 1, so what do you do then? Well, you draw extra cards to get you to 3, but you place them face up in front of you so everyone can see them. Initially, I was thinking that if both spirits have Willpower less than 3 then you'd just play the one or two rounds, but I think that distorts how mechanism works quite badly.
Guess what? If I have a Willpower of 4, then I have an extra card which means more choice/agility in how to play.
So how does it work? One side plays a card (I'm working on opponent plays first at the moment, but not sure I'll keep it that way) and the other responds. Spades beats Hearts beats Clubs beats Diamonds beats Spades etc... but cards of the same colour win on value. I need to think about what a draw means - so 4 Spades and 4 Clubs, for example, though with multiple packs in the deck it could as easily be two 4 Spades. Play your three tricks and the winner is the one who takes most tricks at the end.
I've played it through for a while, with different Willpower scores and it seems to work pretty much as I'd hope. Lots more to testing and lots more "what-if" to think about as well as the effect of winning or losing one of these contests.
Did you know that Spriggans, while appearing to be wiry old men are actually the ghosts of giants and have kept their giant strength? How cool is that?
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