Design Diary: Flip It Turnways

The Seven-Part Pact patreon docs are out — lots of people are checking them out, I'm getting a lot of good feedback, I'm running some playtests, all is well. However I quickly spotted a pretty major problem. The Sorcerer, the Great Lord of Magic himself, is built all wrong! He's certainly better than he was when he was the Librarian (see my previous Design Diary) but he's still not clicking together right. But I think I've found a solution. Let me go into how he's set up, the issues, I encountered, and how I plan to flip his mechanics sideways in order to make them work again.

So the Sorcerer, as currently built, is all about maintaining the history of the Pact, plotting events microscope-style with actors and connections to other events, and ratifying them using his collection of books. He's framed as an academic working on his big theory of history, piecing it together into something meaningful. 

But some issues emerged from that:

• The mechanics were putting emphasis on the wrong spot. The books are by far the most interesting part of the Sorcerer's game, but the mechanics emphasized the historical events above all else.

• Goal-based Domain games don't work well in Seven-Part Pact. When a Wizard's Domain has a clear "win state," or when complexity is an unambiguously good thing to have, the game starts feeling out of rhythm with everyone else.

• It was all very ungrounded. The historical events are abstract concepts, not tied to real places, and so it all had a very "floaty" quality. Because it's very floaty, it's hard to meaningfully tether to other Domains.

• The Sorcerer himself is not an academic. Academia emerges as a form of "soft power" (or, as I joked to a friend, "I can't bash your head in with a rock, so instead I'll write a strongly-worded dissertation explaining why you're wrong.") Wizards are hard power incarnate, and it doesn't feel right that the biggest concern the Sorcerer could have is about whether such-and-such king is believed to have been a good guy. The Sorcerer isn't at the whims of academia, but rather, academia is a system the Sorcerer would implement to control people under him.

• The Sorcerer is also the only Wizard whose Keeper role and Domain game aren't intwined. The history of Isha isn't directly connected to interpreting the Grimoire. 

And then I realized — what if I flipped it sideways? What if I took the part that I think should be most important (books of magic) and made that the mechanical centerpoint? How does everything shift from there?

The Sorcerer's Domain was composed of solidifying Nodes in a flowchart, each with Entities and Connectors. These Entities and Connectors have Tags associated with Sources. The more Tags a Node's corresponding Entities/Connectors have, the more stable it is. 

Previously, Nodes were Events, Entities were Actors, Connectors were historical cause/effect, and Tags were book sources. What if instead the Nodes were themselves the books, entities were copies of the books, scholars connected books together, and tags were the archives that possess those copies?

So this means now the Sorcerer is concerned with a list of Archives throughout Isha, each which possess Copies of certain Tomes of Magic. These Tomes are connected by Scholars, funded by Archives, who study them and maintain their relevance. Now there's no clear "success" state — too many copies of a Tome or too many Archives leaves the system vulnerable to theft, while too few Archives or Copies threatens the possibility that a Tome is completely destroyed, and in doing so, cutting off the Pact's access to a particular corner of magic.

This solves issue #1, because now the mechanics are emphasizing the right thing. This solves #2, because now the goal is more about maintaining balance than building a perfect history. This solves #3, because the Tomes are physical objects and the Archives are places in Isha tied to Communities, Temples, Noble Clans, and so on. This solves #4 because the Sorcerer is now properly producing Academia, without himself being directly at the whims of public scrutiny. And this solves #5, where now the stakes of the Sorcerer's failure is a much more pertinent threat of archive decay — the very real possibility that magic itself will be forgotten, and lost from this world. 

There's gonna be other challenges here — I can't just 1-for-1 replace every concept in the system with its "turned 90 degrees" counterpart. I'm going to need to think through the fictional logic this new system represents and build up new scaffolding to support that. But I hope this is a cool example for those interested in how sometimes game design is about taking a system and a fictional mechanism and slotting them together in new and interesting ways.