Polyamarous Game Design
Being Polyamarous is an extremally important part of me. Having had multiple partners for many years now, lasting, loving relationships that have made me the woman I am it's important that the art I create also reflects this. However, I've failed many times to kind of capture the polyamorous spirit in my work and it's something I think is complicated to capture in the shorter narrative work I used to do. Now that I am mostly working in TTRPGs I am presented with a new questions of how to do this kind of representation.
While I've done several TTRPG projects over my couple of years of having moved into this space I think the biggest examples of me working poly forward design are my Story Synth game The Polycule's Grand Multiverse Adventure! and my work on Thirsty Sword Lesbians.
[Art from Thirsty Sword Lesbians by Matte Bat] A thing that really attracted to me to Thirsty Sword Lesbians when I was just a fan of it and not yet brought on to write Yuisa Revolution and The Matriarch was how polyamorous the game itself was. Getting smitten was never limited to one person at a time, you could finally kiss in a dangerous moment with multiple people, you could exchange strings for people, The Scoundrel's one in every port had serial monogamy that could easily bleed into polyamory. As far as I know a lot of like how polyamarous the game was at the time wasn't intended but sometimes the simple act of just not placing limits and making something feelings forwards makes something more polyam than most.
When I was working on Yuisa Revolution I was trying to make a setting that encourage polyamory but never like made you feel pressured into being polyamorous. I made sure to really encourage open love as a part of the culture of Yuisa. I was looking to create a little anarchist utopia in this setting.
With The Matriarch I took a different approach which was the Family Mechanic. While the gut instinct is to go mom for the playbook I mention in the information section that your family can be a Polycule. I designed the core mechanic to not just work for a caretaker type relationship but equals meaning your family could be two partners and a dog, two partners and a kid, three partners, or whatever kind of orientation you want to do. I wanted a lot of room for The Matarich to be more then one thing and to hold the level of flexibility that other playbooks had.
With The Polycule's Grand Multiverse Adventure! I was taking For The Queen's formula then shifting it to become a player lead force of curiosity. It's a fairly simple game but one I put a lot of thought into. The biggest concern for me was the end point of the game, I didn't want to make it feel like now everyone get peer pressured into picking one universe. So I made sure to include a reassurance that everyone could pick the universe that felt like home to them and it would be easy to visit each other. The little ending section serves as a little way for the players to also debrief about what they enjoyed, what they didn't and things like that.
This moves me to the present where in Thirsty Sword Lesbians: Falling Deeper the biggest focus of the expansion is on long term relationships. These kinds of relationships are really important to me. I've been with my Fiancé for over 14 years, been with some of my GFs now for over 7 years, and been with my most recent GF for over a year. I'll probably talk more about this specifically later but it's relevant here because notably I am polyamorous and in relationships of various forms of long term. Yet, most narratives around relationships are monogamous and creating polyamarous mechanics that are less like "no one is stopping you" and more like supporting the actual relationships presents a requirement to actually really consider how to "gamify" the relationships.
As of now the direction we're going is to do coupling but basically allow unlimited amounts of using these mechanics. Focus on the individual dynamics between particular partners as opposed to the widder Polycule's interactions. I think they can be tweaked though to allow for the whole table to engage in them, it's just currently designed with the pairing in mind. Which is consistent with how TSL works in general anyway. I am really happy with how it looks so far but I want to see in playtesting how it looks for a polycule with a few relationship playbooks in action.
The way relationship playbooks work right now is they push a drama for the characters based on their type of relationship or a particular conflict the players want to see. So seeing how a player has a few of these plus their playbook will really be the test for this kind of system.
Outside of this I want to experiment with ways to do polyamory mechanically, in my card game, Soul Of The Hero, that is currently in development right now I am playing with a polycule symbol and that indicates a character is part of a particular polycule and that also gives them a bonus. Where as individual extra strong relationships might be mention the character by name.
If you know any games that have done polyamory in a neat way please let me know, I would love to study some more polyamorous games and see the other ways people use the medium of games to express polyam life.