Fairy Rings and Stone Soup
On a recent stream of Why we roll, I digressed, hopefully comprehensibly, about the question “how do you know when to scrap an idea and move on?”
Darling murder
There is a writing adage that I heard in college, “murder your darlings”: it means that if you feel particularly attached to an idea, if you allow it to be included across iterations without question or challenge, it might be a “darling idea,” and you might holding back your creative process because of sentimentality.
The solution in those cases is to remove it and either toss it in the bin or put it on a shelf.
Stone soup
The old parable about the Stone Soup is a story about cooperation through catalysis. The eponymous “stone” (sometimes an “axe” or other object) is added to a large soup pot. Through this prompt, various other villagers decide to also contribute things they think would improve the soup. At the end, the stone is removed and what is left is the soup that formed around it.
The soup would not have been created without it, but also it was better off without it.
Fairy rings
A fairy ring (or I suppose, fairy ring) is a naturally occurring phenomenon where mushrooms grow in a circular formation, with nothing in the middle. The genesis is presumably because the mushrooms (the “flower” of a mycelium network) sprout where they have not already sprouted. Beginning in a singular point, they expand outwards in rings, growing larger and (I imagine) reflecting the mycelium network just beneath the surface.
The fairy ring builds on what was there before, and is its own standalone structure. The ring is an emergent quality, and not the original “intention” (which was “produce a bloom to distribute spores”).
Making a fairy ring from stone soup
Sometimes, when I have an idea for a feature or mechanism, I will begin with the first apparent idea and see what else I can add to it. Maybe the inception is a borrowed mechanism that I enjoyed, or some flavorful nugget from source material.
Introducing this new addition will generally lead to immediate decoration – adding flavor or linking it to other concepts within the game. Essentially “adding ingredients” or “expanding the fairy ring” around it. When enough has been added, I will try removing the original idea and see if the emergent structure can hold its own.
In MALINGER!
With MALINGER!, we began with the idea of an individual voidminer having a “die type” (similar to how scores are in the source TTRPG). Instead of 5 scores with individual die types, it was a singular die type meant to represent the efficacy of that character overall.
The problem we encountered was that rolling dice was both:
- it was a little too stochastic – players were unable to confidently make plans or strategic choices fully because they couldn’t know for sure which of their plans would work.
- it shifted the perspective of the player – spending more time rolling dice “as a voidminer” (“worker”) meant the players identified more closely with the voidminers than as the boss, whom was meant to most closely represent the player.
The solution was to instead use static scores. Initially, I tried using just a single number (the average of whatever the dice would roll) but later changed it to closer emulate the source material by choosing 3 of the 5 original scores. The values range from 1 to 7 (‘1’ is intentionally low and only used for specific cases, otherwise this fairly accurately emulates a spread of dice from d3 to d12). By using static values, players can now make more elaborate plans for their workers each turn.