We'll do 🌤️ first: favorite mechanic from a game I'm working on. My focus at the moment is tentatively titled Szlachta Emblem, a ttrpg inspired by the GBA Fire Emblem games set in Nowa Polska, my Yiddish Fantasy setting. The game is a mashup of gba FE's mechanics transported into heximal (d66 math, essentially) with Belonging Outside Belonging to replicate the melodrama and angst that makes fe games so unique.
Getting both halves to play nicely with each other has been kind of tricky, but one of my breakthroughs today was adding a new type of Move: the Support Dynamic. In BOB games, there are four categories of Moves: strong, standard, lateral, and weak moves. Strong moves are powerful but require tokens, standard moves aren't as potent but don't require spending a token, and weak moves put your character in peril/make the situation worse in order to get a token. Lateral moves (from Galactic) let you give a token you have to another player. The only other way characters get moves is by taking advantage of another character's Lure, which grants a token to a character for reinforcing the fantasy/archetype of the Luring player. The thing is, I wanted to have the functionality of lateral moves, but I had a healthy number of strong, standard, and weak ones already that I didn't want to convert into lateral ones or cut to make space for new lateral moves. Then I had a moment of inspiration and figured out how to have my cake and eat it as well.
Last digression, I promise.
In FE, characters build Supports by fighting alongside each other. In the GBA games (and here), each character has a maximum number of supports they can have, so players have to choose carefully which relationships they want to formalize with a Support. As time passes, the characters grow closer, the player gets to read dialogue between them, and each gets mechanical boosts to their combat from having the other character near. So: how do we begin to meld the BOB framework and FE core mechanics while also solving the token economy problem described earlier? Support Dynamic.
Each class has both a Lure and a Support Dynamic. The Lure rewards other characters for playing into this class's central idea (characters who depend on the strength of a Hajduk to solve their problem gets a token, for example). The Support Dynamic lets the class give a token to someone they have a support relationship with (whenever the Hajduk enlivens someone they support, you gift them a token). Each class has their own, unique Lateral Move, limited by the degree to which they've invested in their personal relationships with the other characters. I'm quite pleased with this.
Now for ☔. This is really hard to answer, tbh. Are there any game ideas that I'm not sure I'll ever write? OK, sure. I had a setting before Nowa Polska that I'd spent years working on and writing a custom game for. It drew inspiration from a lot of different places, times, and folklores: ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Irish folktales, and a lot from SE Asia. A lot from SE Asia. And then I went and did my research on ttrpgs drawing from SE Asia. And there are a ton of amazing games by designers who are, y'know, from/in SE Asia. I was just reading Balikbayan. Gubat Banwa is another phenomenal game. A Thousand Thousand Islands is just incredible. Diwata ng Manila's written some phenomenal games as well. The RPGSEA community is strong and vibrant and just incredible. I'm excited to have the chance to play some of their games. But I won't ever publish the setting that I was working on, nor the game I made for it. I don't think I could ever doe enough research or give enough due diligence to feel comfortable releasing it to the wider world. That's not to say some of the ideas I had won't be recycled into something in the future; some of them already have. But I'm happy to leave the setting as a whole behind me as I move forward to new projects and new horizons.
