I just spent the last hour or so trying to figure out how I ended up becoming fascinated by the 1001 Arabian Nights stories many, many years ago. I’m pretty sure it was to impress a girl.
Well, technically I started reading the works of Jorge Luis Borges to impress a girl, and that lead me to the 1001 Nights.
By the way, Borges is an absolutely legit writer and you should check out some of his stories if given the chance, even if there are no girls to impress with them. His works are both literary and completely mind-blowing, kind of like an Argentinian Vonnegut. He had some really cool ideas about infinity and parallel universes.
Anyway, Arabian Nights…yeah, those stories were a big influence on Borges and they were the original conception of the idea of stories within stories. Right? Like a story of a person telling a story about a person telling a story. Um, it’s more interesting than it sounds.
So for a while I’ve been struggling with how to get more of the atmosphere and setting of Gloomhaven across to the players – to build a theme that is more than just hitting demons and giant snakes with big swords. Each scenario has accompanying story text that propels the action, but getting across information about the workings of the town and its history has been harder to do.
Players needed more stories within the story to interact with and absorb, so I decided to create a deck of “Town Event” cards that players could draw from whenever they return to town after an adventure. It would give them a greater chance to experience the town of Gloomhaven.
Because I liken Gloomhaven to a “Choose Your Own Adventure” game, these town events needed to have choices, as well. Choices are what life is all about after all. So while the adventurers are hanging out in their down-time, shopping or drinking at a bar, they’ll encounter some event and have to make a choice about what to do, then find out the consequences of their choice.
Mechanically, the consequences could be that they lose money, gain experience, increase the town’s prosperity or find a long-lost artifact. They could also increase or decrease their reputation – a new metric I’m developing that will affect things like shop prices, unlocking hero classes or special scenarios, and how the town events themselves play out. With this feedback loop of town event decisions affecting a party’s reputation and the party’s reputation affecting how the town events play out, I’m hoping that a party will develop it’s own narrative over time.
Admittedly, this system does sound a little similar to the crossroad cards in Dead of Winter or the recent Kickstarter game Above and Below, but I’m hoping that the persistent nature of the game and the impact of things like reputation and town prosperity give the story beats more of an impact in the overall player experience. Players are going to inhabit this town and its characters for a while, and I hope to give more meaning to their interactions, such that going into a dungeon and chopping up bad guys is only a piece of a larger whole.
A game within a game, if you will.
I’m also toying with the idea of “Road Events.” I’ve been running into a bit of a problem with story continuity and players going back to town after each scenario even when doing so makes no thematic sense – say, after the first part of a two-part dungeon. Obviously with town events there is now more incentive to travel back to town, but doing so should also incur some cost from a thematic perspective, and the “Town Event” system could easily be expanded to incorporate this issue. So the more you travel back to town, the more often you will draw “Road Event” cards, which also offer you choices, but more often than not incur some small penalty to the party as a result (say, starting the next scenario down a few hit points because you had to fight a few wolves beforehand).
Nothing too harsh, but just a bit of a negative tone to relate the sense that there is a cost to going back to town. Just like in the old Baldur’s Gate video games where travelling anywhere took time. Time was largely meaningless – I didn’t really matter if you beat the game in 5 days of game time versus 5 weeks – but some base part of your brain was always reluctant to travel around all willy-nilly because you didn’t want to waste time.
I don’t know, maybe that was just me.
Having these event decks also opens up a lot more cool aspects of persistent storytelling. Completing certain scenarios might cause you to shuffle new cards into the deck – repercussions of actions that will only shake out much later down the line (sort of similar to some of the events in Robinson Crusoe). Certain world-changing events might even cause the players to switch out the event deck for an entirely new deck of cards. So many possibilities.
Of course production costs are always an issue. Every new mechanic means new costs and more box weight, but I think adding another deck or two of these event cards will add a whole new dimension to the game and really bring forward the intricacies of the world that the players are inhabiting.
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As always, I enjoyed reading this post, especially in terms of how you’re trying to make thematic elements like reputation and time work in terms of game mechanisms. This brought to mind an article I read on Kotaku the other day about a “nemesis system” in a recent video game called Shadow of Mordor. I haven’t played the game, so I don’t completely understand it, but it has to do with certain persistent enemies that grow stronger over time as you also learn more and more about them until you figure out their biggest weakness. The system goes well beyond that and apparently contributes to the storytelling in a huge, innovative way–it might be work reading about.
Cool, I’ll definitely check that out.
While reading your post, I came up with another idea that could be interesting to implement here (feel free to use or ignore it as you see fit, of course ;)):
The town cards might represent locations and entities that exist and live in the town with every card containing three aspects (main, secondary and support) on it that influence what happens during a town stay and at the same time connects those entities and locations.
Every time the group has an event coming up, three cards are drawn from the deck.
The first card’s main effect initiates and defines the event.
The second card’s secondary effect further defines, who/what the target of the event is or who/what is entangled in the event in some way.
The third card’s support effect then could help or hinder the characters in some way, depending on what is drawn and how that entity / location is related to the characters.
An example of some cards could be like these (I had fun thinking of these, so I just went on and thought of three just because 🙂 ):
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King of Thieves
Main effect:
A thief from the thieves guild approaches the characters and offers them to steal something for the King of Thieves himself. The second card is the [victim] of the job. The support card defines who helps / hinders the characters. If the characters accept, roll [whatever value makes sense here] 8+ to succeed. Success: Gain:3 Gold, Reputation -1 with target.
Secondary effect:
If [target] or [victim], roll [search]9+ to find him first to succeed. Success: [Reputation] x2, [Loot] +2, [Reward]+1.
If [influence], Event is canceled. If roll D6+[Reputation] > 5, you may choose to not cancel the event.
Support effect:
Modify [search] rolls for the event by Reputation and gain -1 for each.
————
————
Local Tavern
Main Effect: May stay for the night for 4 gold minus [Reputation] (min. 1). In the morning, a stranger contacts you and tells you that he is trying to find someone. Maybe you can help him. The second card is the [target] of the search. If the characters accept, roll [search] 7+ to succeed. Success: [Reward] 1 Gold and [Reputation] +1 in tavern.
Secondary Effect:
If [target], [Reward] -1 and [Reputation] +1 in tavern.
If [victim], [Loot]-2. If unsuccessful: [Reputation]-1.
If [influence], all talent rolls are -1, [Reputation] x2
Support Effect:
May hire help for 2 Gold. Modify [combat] or [search] rolls by +2.
————–
————–
Beggar
Main effect:
A beggar sits at the side of the street and begs for gold. The second card is the [influence] for this event.
Choose: 1 – Give him nothing. Roll [luck] 5+ or he steals D3 gold.
2 – Give him Gold. Roll D6+Gold amount. If < 3, Reputation with [Influence] is -1.
Secondary effect:
If [target], [Reward]-1.
If [victim], [Loot]-1. Roll [hide]7+ or lose 2 life when you are attacked by honest townsfolk and Reputation -2.
If [influence], no change.
Support effect:
A distraction, just when you really didn't need one. Modify all talent rolls by -1.
—————
Or something like that. Just like you combine the game concepts with Friedemann Frieses new game 504. You would get a LOT of combinations from a relatively small amount of cards, combining the persons and locations of the town with each other and affecting each other.
And when you combine this with some way to record the Reputation of the characters with every person or location, this could really model a relationship of the players and the game that is unique to each player group and that evolves over time.
Maybe the cards themselves could be modified (afterall it should be kind of a legacy game, no?).
Wow, thanks for sharing your ideas Dennis. I really like them. Your system may be a little more complicated than what I am aiming for, but I am intrigued by the combination of multiple cards to get more variety with less components (as that is my main concern with the current system). Worth some thought.
try not to squeeze too much into Gloomhaven. Travelevents and Townevents remind me pretty much of Descent JitD and Kindom Death: Monsters. They certainly help to build a world around your story but might be something for an expansion module rather than the basegame, as your content is already in the 5digit pieces range.