Welcome back to the Rat Wave Newsletter. I kept busy in June, bouncing from thing to thing mainly. I made an announcement near the end of the month about my new crowdfunding project: I’m with the Damned & Other Games. You can find the pre-launch page here or check out a blog post I made explaining the book in more detail and covering some of my motivations behind the campaign.
I’ve been doing some work for Laurie O’Connel’s next game Full Send, a doomed mountaineering game. Last week I worked on layout for the games quickstart, and for the main book I’ll be contributing some art for the Major Arcana. This, as well the work on I’m with the Damned, lead me to writing a post about how I approach photo collage art work . You can find that post (Frankenstein’s Artwork) here. This does bring me to a question I wanted to ask subscribers. If I write multiple blogs in a month would you prefer more frequent emails, or would you prefer this format of just linking the off-newsletter posts at the start?
On Game Soup we spent two weeks making games with prompts that Chloe got from UKGE stalls. There’s also an episode where we take a deep dive into what we’re both working on, which means more I’m with the Damned talk.
This month’s blog is a look at one of the games in the compilation. It started life as a new edition of The Infinite Dancefloor and evolved into something new (working title: You Wanna Go?) and the post explores that process.
Next month will likely bring more reflections on how this new project is going. Though I’m likely to be busy with things other than games, which may mean there’s less news. See you there!
Working It Out On the Remix
Have you ever seen The Five Obstructions? It's a documentary by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth where Leth is challenged to remake a film five times with different conditions imposed each time. I haven't actually seen it in full, I saw the first half while taking a film module at uni called Manifestos and Practice. Are you aware of the story about how the reason they don't show the shark in Jaws is because the animatronic wasn't good enough? Did you know Heat was a remake of a TV movie Michael Mann did six years prior? Stick with me, there's a reason those have all been on my mind.
In a previous blog I announced my next Kickstarter project I'm with the Damned & Other Games. It's a collection of multiple games played with music and tarot cards. In my UKGE reflections blog I talked a bit about how I put together the most recent Out of the Fold collection. I'll talk a little bit about this process for the upcoming project and how it lead to the game I'll talk about today: You Wanna Go?
The starting point for this book was the lead title, like with Out of the Fold. I have I'm with the Damned at completion and after the collection format was successful for me at UKGE I decided to try it out for a Kickstarter and see what titles could pair well with I'm with the Damned. The immediate thing to jump on is how music is a tool in play, which I've done in previous games. Both those games (Follow Me in the Night and the Infinite Dancefloor) were in print but at low enough levels they could sell through before the project would fulfil. Like for the previous collection I wanted the game to use the same utensils for play. They both also used cards as a mechanic, though Follow Me in the Night used playing cards instead of tarot and both also make partial use of dice. I decided to make new editions of both game.
In the process of making the new edition of The Infinite Dancefloor it ended up becoming something different, something it feels more accurate to describe as a new game using the same premise. A remix or a cover. I'm calling this new game You Wanna Go? and I'll explain how being reactive to self-imposed restraints led to this new game.
The Infinite Dancefloor is a hack of Time to Drop by Marn S. It's GMless, the group interpret tarot to decide obstacles together and roll dice to resolve actions. They have to defeat all the obstacles before the end of an album or they loop back to the start and begin again.
There were certain small elements I'd long had the idea of "thing I'd have done differently." I wanted the obstacles order to be reshuffled between attempts as this felt more like a constantly remixing environment, rather than linear attempts (Time to Drop is a time loop game, and I didn't think enough at the time about how changing to something not time based should have a impact on the games structure). I wanted to encourage the use of playlists rather than an album. I also wanted to write prompts for each of the Major Arcana, to support players who find it harder to come up with ideas on the spot. If these were the only tweaks I made it'd probably be accurate to call the resulting game The Infinite Dancefloor 2nd Edition.
For the collection I wanted everything to be playable with just a deck of tarot, so that the preparation needed for playing an game is small. Changes resulting from that need ended up spiraling further. The main elements of Time to Drop that remain in You Wanna Go? are the loop, the music as a timer and obstacles that can be defeated and removed from the loop at high enough success.
Removing dice meant having to change action resolution to work with Tarot. This involved bringing in the Minor Arcana (which were unused in the original) with characters now drawing from the Minor Arcana rather than rolling dice. This altered the probability and meant writing a new result rubric with a different number of outcomes (these were inspired by Witch of the Westmoreland as a starting point, though they ended up working differently even from that by the end of development.)
The other place dice were used in The Infinite Dancefloor was rolling to stay chill. It was an addition to the system I made and it actually has no mechanical impact in the game but it focuses the roleplaying. Also it had became an important part of the pitch for the game: "Your only stat is your ability to not lash out at your friend's." I wanted to preserve that but just changing the mechanic to cards didn't feel good. There's a curve to a 2d6 roll that isn't there for cards especially when the deck is being depleted through play. There was also a question if what do you do with the card you'd draw for a check and would it feel annoying if you draw a card you'd rather have used on an action. Bouncing around I thought about blackjack mechanic instead, making it that instead of a check if you can stay cool you're instead building up stress to a breaking point. This did seem fun, and felt thematic, but making it work ended up massively changing the rest of the game.
So this mechanic, which we'll call Stress rather than Chill, immediately brings up the possibility of someone having a pile of cards that they'd much rather be using to resolve actions. How do those cards re-enter play? I decided by default the only way out was through and busting out would lead you to taking cards into hand and being able to play them from there. It's a trade off as the argument that results from this will cost you time in this run. Now this mechanic has gone from something that only impacted fiction in the Infinite Dancefloor to something essential for succeeding. To give greater options for card control I decided each character should have an ability, like how Out of the Fold worked, and those ability's could all be themed around ways of managing stress, healthily or otherwise. So the need to remove dice has lead to basically reorientated this game and the tactical focus around this mechanic.
It continued to have reverberations. The idea for abilities lead me to giving the game classes, with each class given a focus by their ability. That lead me to basically redesigning the entirety of character creation. At this point I began to describe it more as a remix of the Infinite Dancefloor rather than a new edition.
When writing up the new rules and text properly I originally planned to describe the game as GM agnostic, a term I first saw in Galacte 2e and have been using for a lot of my games lately. Games that can be played with or without a GM. I've been using it a lot especially with games where whoever frames a scene rotates around the table, I acknowledge if a group wanted to play with a GM they could have one player not make a character and instead act as that role persistently.
In those games usually an action brings a scene to a close, regardless of success or failure, and the change in scene is a chance to hand over the role. In this game a failed action means you stay in the scene until someone can deal the obstacle, scenes lengths aren't going to have a consistent length so they don't feel like a good point for a hand over but at the same time changing after each action would be exhausting and break up the flow of a scene. Combined with the Stress influenced card play feeling it had more tactical possibilities than rolling dice I decided to pivot You Wanna Go? to presuming a GM by default (called the DJ in the game).
I mentioned in the announcement blog that the overall project is still in development. I explained the reasons why that is if you're curious. Honestly parts of the project are completely in flux. My exact mobility equipment needs will influence the exact goal. My launch will be influenced by how feasible the campaign looks by the time I'd need the money. As I draft the text the actual make-up of the book could change. In this case what I expected to be a simple update to a text became an entirely new game. Creatively at least I think this flux could be a very exciting thing.
I'll share a playtest version of the full You Wanna Go? over on Patreon soon. The next title to work on is updates to Follow Me in the Night. My gut impulse is that changing Follow Me in the Night over to tarot will be much simpler, and this game will much more cleanly be a new edition. Let's wait and see though, the state of flux isn't over yet.