Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday: Relative Positioning

It’s Monday! Time for a Mechanic.  Something something theatre, my childhood blah blah, yadda the joy of teaching yadda, anyway.  You get the gist. We were all there, we were all moved. On to the mechanic!

Relative Movement Rules
In GREEM, two players begin with an equal number of pawns, all isolated an equidistance from one another.  A pawn may move a number of spaces equal to the number of its allies within three spaces. A pawn must always move within a row or column that contains another allied pawn.  A pawn may capture another pawn if it is the only pawn that could do so. The game ends when all of one player’s pawns are eliminated, or if the advantage between remaining pawns meets or exceeds five.

This is one of my most placeholder-filled sample rules, and it’s because it should be quite a simple game, so the unknowns loom disproportionately large.  But you can go a couple of directions with this: it can be a square grid, a hex grid, a ring grid, a quadrilateral but non-square grid, whatever. You can futz with any of the above numbers, or do away with the capture or directional  limitations. Really comes down to the experience design: what do you picture players being able to pull off in a cool, fun way? I dunno, it’s late, and this is well-trod but shallowly explored territory for me, so no need to tumble personally down the rabbit hole.  Have a non-hellish rest of the week! Til next time!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for Alice, left for Cat) and thro
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the application was rather more literal, which was a fascinat
Post a Comment
Read more