Untitled Tabletop Role-Playing Game: 2 Setting Basics

 In the end the two things that a ttrpg designer offers, a setting and a set of rules, act only as  suggestions as to the type of stories and games that will be eventually played. If you present a world of espionage and intrigue the player might be drawn to a spy caper. If you offer detailed rules on firearms the player will expect gun fights.

If there is a dissidence between these two, if the settings and rules seem to be suggesting two different things, it muddies the water. If the setting speaks of the power of friendship but the rules focus on combat the player won’t know what type of game to expect. The designer is effectively asking the player to fix the game, do their job, for them. If instead there’s harmony between the two elements, if you have rules that not only support but reward teamwork to go along with that theme of friendship, then the game because even more compelling, more attractive to players.

This all means that there is a limit to how much game design you can do focusing purely on the mechanical half of the equation. The details and themes of the setting should influence the rules. So maybe I should nail down some of that setting.

Untitled Tabletop Role-Playing Game: A Lovecraftian Sentai Adventure

That tagline is not great, and the title’s nonexistent, but it should give some idea as to the direction I’m headed; a team of transforming heroes fighting incursions from beyond reality. Beyond being a potentially attractive hook for players this starting point has several advantages during design process. Like all urban fantasies, the squishy genre this broadly fits into, the world building starts with “what’s outside your window except where noted” and if there’s some mechanism to enforce secrecy, to keep the supernatural hidden, it can basically end there.

It gives me two fairly deep genres (cosmic horror and sentai/henshin) to draw inspiration from. And that’s also the first potential issue as in all that depth there’s not a lot of overlap between those two. One is all about how small and powerless the individual is while the other is all about the power of a handful of determined individuals. Even if it’s just keeping the threat of the week at bay that is a much more positive outcome than you can expect from most cosmic horror. That is a bit of tough needle to thread, almost any thematic decision I make will end up favoring one over the other. About the only thing they share is a rather binary view of good and evil. So why am I sticking myself with that challenge? Because I think I can use the tropes of one to reinforce the other. 

The world is under assault; creatures, things from  beyond the very bounds of reality are invading, Breaking down the rules of physics as they go. Thankfully those very same rules appear to be toxic to them limiting their influence until they’ve created a foothold.

Those handful of lines establish an in universe for the escalation of threat; Rita Repulsa can’t start with the heavy hitters, she has to send in the Putties first. Only a handful more lines need to be added to create symmetry. To lock the player characters into the same pattern of escalation.  

As miraculous as the our heroes use to fight back are they are sadly just that; miracles, things that shouldn’t be possible and normally wouldn’t be if not for the damage our enemies have down to reality.

It’s this parallelism that first drew me to this setting, the idea that the abilities of both the player characters and the threats would be capped by the same environmental condition seemed like the perfect way to blend the two genres. The idea that incursions break down the fabric of reality, making the impossible possible, feels very appropriate for a cosmic horror tale. But it also completely justifies a sentai series repeats the same steps every episode.

This is a good starting point, and suggests some questions to be addressed early on. Is this corruption (do we even call it “corruption”) binary, the PCs can either transform or they can’t, or is some sort of gradated scale with different abilities unlocking along it? There is a certain simplicity to tiers but a scale offers flexibility; players could choose to favor more flexible low-powered abilities over anything at the upper end of the scale which would change the type of game they were playing.

I think having a distinction between a character’s civilian and costumed guardian forms is core to the concept which points towards tiers. But if we divide those tiers into a number of steps we’d recreate a scale and give us the best of both worlds so pencil that in for now. I also think that an ability unlocked in tier should have an improved effect in higher tiers, really because that just feels nice.

Speaking of tiers I’m thinking there’ll be three, one for the PCs’ Civilian form, on for their costumed Guardian forms, and a third to represent the mecha (zord) equivalent. Now that third one is a low priory and definite expansion fodder; a complex ruleset not required for the core concept and greatly expands the range of play. Even setting that aside there’s still questions to be asked about the basic costume transformation.

Like is costumed even the way to go or would a more horrific bodily transformation be more in keeping with the cosmic horror inspiration? How do we address the traditional color coding? Is it purely cosmetic or is there a mechanical component? Maybe it should be mechanical, the obvious solution is to make the “colors” synonymous with the splats  (classes or what have you) but there’s a risk of forcing players into builds they don’t want in the name of party “balance”. One way to help mitigate this risk is make the splats so numerous that there is little risk of overlap. Or making each splat flexible enough to fill more than one role. That is definitely the path I prefer but that’s a discussion for a later day.

-Comments welcome.