From the moment I read the Horror TTRPG example with players refusing to leave the room, I couldn't help but think about Mothership and how it uses game mechanisms to mitigate its own fragility and even more importantly, synthesizes it into another decision space for the players.
From the moment I read the Horror TTRPG example with players refusing to leave the room, I couldn't help but think about Mothership and how it uses game mechanisms to mitigate its own fragility and even more importantly, synthesizes it into another decision space for the players.
Stress is the equivalent of XP in Mothership since players can take shore leave to convert their stress points to save increases. Knowing they can do this gives the players a built-in incentive to engage in "horror movie" tropes that will cause their characters to accumulate stress. However, for it to actually work, the players do have to understand all of the above. Also, since Mothership is so incredibly lethal by design, this creates a dynamic of risk vs. reward decisions where the players have to ask themselves "is it worth it to go investigate that noise I heard, or crawl into that open vent?"
Agree. I think Mothership RPG does a lot of things really well, or at least does things in a way that I personally appreciate. I just ran a session of it recently, and once players realized that the way to improve their characters was to get more stress, they started taking riskier actions. Also the stress + panic mechanisms would help with the "We aren't leaving the room." scenario.
I feel like looking at the fragility in these different kinds of games and thinking about how we can convert those directly into a decision space is a ripe area for some interesting game design. As a proud owner of a (printed!) copy of Make your own one-page RPG (Thank you for making it - I'm still reading it, I am a self-proclaimed starter of too many projects), hopefully this is something I can explore more and share with others in the future.
Excellent article!
From the moment I read the Horror TTRPG example with players refusing to leave the room, I couldn't help but think about Mothership and how it uses game mechanisms to mitigate its own fragility and even more importantly, synthesizes it into another decision space for the players.
Stress is the equivalent of XP in Mothership since players can take shore leave to convert their stress points to save increases. Knowing they can do this gives the players a built-in incentive to engage in "horror movie" tropes that will cause their characters to accumulate stress. However, for it to actually work, the players do have to understand all of the above. Also, since Mothership is so incredibly lethal by design, this creates a dynamic of risk vs. reward decisions where the players have to ask themselves "is it worth it to go investigate that noise I heard, or crawl into that open vent?"
Thank you so much!
Agree. I think Mothership RPG does a lot of things really well, or at least does things in a way that I personally appreciate. I just ran a session of it recently, and once players realized that the way to improve their characters was to get more stress, they started taking riskier actions. Also the stress + panic mechanisms would help with the "We aren't leaving the room." scenario.
I feel like looking at the fragility in these different kinds of games and thinking about how we can convert those directly into a decision space is a ripe area for some interesting game design. As a proud owner of a (printed!) copy of Make your own one-page RPG (Thank you for making it - I'm still reading it, I am a self-proclaimed starter of too many projects), hopefully this is something I can explore more and share with others in the future.
Thank you so much for getting a copy of the One-Page RPG guide! Glad it arrived safely!