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| Day 25. |
Lever.
Sometimes you need a lever to raise the game to a higher level. You see this a lot in the more independent games. Powered by the Apocalypse engined games do this wonderfully with the dedicated moves in playbooks. These tell you what the character is all about and what they do. The bonds and relationships serve a similar purpose. They help you to engage with character and what they are for.
In many games using this engine, the characters are unique; you can't have two characters with the same playbook. What makes you special is very clear.
Another lever in Powered by the Apocalypse games is the inherent "Yes, but..." built into the mechanics. This gives you choices and also adds complications which drive the plot and the imagination.
The game engine drives interaction and story.
That's not saying that other systems - D&D5e or Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition, for example - don't do this, but they rely much more on the players (or the GM upfront with pre-generated characters and backgrounds) to drive this. In the Apocalypse Engine, this is built in.
I played a wonderful game of Cartel at Revelation. The four hours we played felt like we'd been in a mini-series and were invested in the characters. We didn't do any real preparation, and Nigel - our GM - had some outline notes and beats, but the story and relationships flowed from the relationships we'd defined and the moves that we had. Brilliant stuff; the rules provide a lever to get a level of immersion and investment that would take many sessions in a more traditional system.
I like that elements from this type of game are starting to appear in more traditional games. We all need levers for our minds sometimes.
25 August 2020
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