Core Gameplay Loop

I quite despise the fetishisation of ‘core gameplay loop’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop)  and it’s variants (often applied to digital games and how to monetise attention etc), but they are a useful tool set for thinking about games – not in ‘monetisation of attention’ or any of that crap, but in building how players engage with an RPG. I want every part of the game to feel as if it really MATTERS and acts to engage people and ‘hook’ them back into the developing plot we are creating.

Nir Eyal wrote the book on this with ‘Hooked’ – brilliant stuff, but also terrifying in it’s simple explanations for gambling, social media, and other addictions of that nature. The hook model has a trigger (need to do something), an action (a response to that trigger), a variable reward for action (bennies/points/tokens), and the reinvestment of that reward back into the system to reinforce it. That last one is of critical importance in my view of things here, I need people to feel invested in the story they have created, and I need that to be mechanically supported.

Flow States

Following on from that thought, Mihaly in his book ‘Flow’ (based on decades of research) wrote extensively about the state of flow, and how things seem effortless and ‘time flies when you are having fun’ when you experience this state. In a game of any kind, if anything feels even slightly vestigial from earlier iterations or ‘tacked on’ to solve a perceived gap, then the flow of the game is ruined. That’s why some parts of games that are subsystems for handling something out of the norm for that game (i.e. ‘inspiration’ in the dragons game for example) tend to grate and grind the minds of players, and are also the often forgotten or underused parts of those same games.

I wanted to get this game to be as close as possible that I could get to a state of ‘flow’ for its intended audience. This is oft likened to the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ – the mechanical actions do not gel with the fiction.

An Exit

Those two thoughts – flow and hooked – made me consider a third aspect of what I needed here, which is an ‘exit’. There has to be a way off the merry-go-round in order for there to be stakes and risks. It’s like watching Marvel movies – none of the heroes can really ever die, so there are no stakes. Each film in the franchise has a beginning, middle, and end, but over the life of the ‘phases’ and the entire ‘MCU’ doesn’t really mean much to us emotionally. Failure occurs in act 2, and we the audience know this. The heroes always bounce back – and weirdly, some RPGs (dragons game again) can’t even handle simple act 2 failure without completely collapsing. Do I want characters to risk death in Oppian Wives? No. But I want there to be an exit, and one of those options there can indeed be character death if that is the narrative best thing and is desired by the player(s).

A core part of the game play in Drama System revolves around the generation of ‘Drama Tokens’, but I find it challenging to know what to do with these, they just feed into a cyclical mechanism which has no real end point in my experience. Yes, sure they help with forces and things, and they contribute to the generation of bennies between episodes… but they just fall flat as a mechanism for me. A force is essentially paying someone to emotionally concede… hmm. There is no ‘exit sign’ that gets you out of the loop. A bit like in Nir Eyal’s hook model, if there is no uncertainty (i.e. I cannot ‘die’ – or equivalent – then we have a lack of risk and interest.

Now I do appreciate the position from supporters (of which I genuinely am one!) of the Drama System as set out in the SRD and Hillfolk. They say, ‘just play with the sort of people who like roleplaying for the sake of roleplaying and tell a good story together’ and yes, this is the right way to do Drama System, but it isn’t realistic for many of us. It just isn’t that easy – I wish we could all find these groups of people who want to do that, but most RPG players want a bit more… game in their game. So I needed to mechanise that a little.

Society / Judgement / The Roman Mob – ‘Fortunes’

This all led me to acknowledge my need for a third type of scene, something which is already baked into Drama System, just not explicitly named as a ‘scene’ or mechanically defined – a macro scene, that shows the impacts of the player characters on the broader milieu. I felt that this sort of scene needs to be a ‘summing up’ scene, where the Drama Tokens / Points / Bennies / meta currencies are accounted for and an outcome of the session / round determined which changes the playing field slightly.

I am calling this ‘Fortunes’ for now. Fortunes rise and fall, and not always in the ways which the player characters want them to. Fortunes in Rome are especially susceptible to the whim of the mob, and how public perception can be used against political opponents. 

My intent is that at the end of the session, there is a ‘true up’ or a ‘netting off’ of cards held (cards being Drama Tokens), so that everyone discards until one player is left (or none, if there are ties). This player gains the narrative power to move others along a sliding scale, and can move themselves or the other player characters towards either end equal to the number of cards they remain holding after the netting off process. At one end of the scale, provisionally named ‘Hawk / Tyrant’ is the perception (true or false is irrelevant) that the character is working to undermine the democracy of Rome. At the other, ‘Dove / Traditionalist’ is the perception that the character is working to uphold the status quo of Roman society and politics. Either end is dangerous, and exposes the character to risk and harm.

If a character is at either extreme on the scale after all Fortunes movements, their time in Rome is over. Perhaps the mob tears them limb from limb (for a Tyrant), or flee to their estates in Spain, never to set foot in the beloved city again - ousted by the new Equites senators (for a Traditionalist).

I’ll tackle Procedural Scenes shortly.