Starting on a new RPG inspired by Grant Howitt’s We Set Out, and games in the belonging outside belonging family such as Wanderhome, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, and The Glass Dream Game
I really dig Grant Howitt’s We Set Out. It came to mind about a year ago and after reading it thru again, I got the urge to make a cleaned up version for personal use and a character sheet. As I was fiddling around with the layout and thinking about adding in some clarifications for things I’d run into, I realized there was something more tickling at the back of my mind.
Buying traits for your and other characters, investing points in locations, and gathering resources was evoking vibes of a token economy for me. Similar to belonging outside belonging games.
So I started messing around to see what would shake out. If I could leverage some alternate mechanics to breathe a different kind of life into the skeleton of We Set Out.
I initially went thru a few design iterations, trying to not add too much complexity...and adding too much complexity. I tried reducing the entire action economy down to one type of resource, then maybe two (location resources & character resources, or boon & challenge resources). I eventually figured out I wanted to nab one of the central ideas from Yazeba’s: each location would have a different resolution mechanic that reenforces feeling I want to evoke.
I want to try to express most of the rules using Moves like PtbA or belonging outside belonging but I’m not sure if it will end up feeling too awkward; this will be a bit more procedural than most other games in this area.
The Challenge move:
WHEN you tell the tale of facing a Challenge, starting with the player who created the location, narrate all of the problems the party faced and place a coin on the location for each problem. When the group is done recounting all of the problems, gather all the coins and drop them on the table:
If there are more heads than tails, everyone loses Resources equal to the number of coins
If there are more tails than heads, everyone gains Resources equal to the number of coins
If the coins are all tails, everyone gains Resources equal to double the number of coins
For each relevant trait you have, you may narrate how that trait helped overcome the Challenge and re-flip one coin.
I’ll probably do a more in depth post about mechanics.
I’m going back and forth between making it fairly theme agnostic while giving suggestions for themes and going all in on one theme and supplying alternative themes in an appendix.
If I go with a main theme it’s tentatively going to be: boarding school kids telling the story of a recent adventure outside of the school grounds. I want to inject a bit of a different vibe from We Set Out to make this feel like more than just a quick hack.
The working title is Tales from the Outside. Not a huge fan of “Tales of [Whatever]”, but it’s good enough to stop me from bikeshedding over the name.