Prototypes and Why They'll Remain That Way
I wish they wouldn't though.
I have 3 or 4 prototypes I've been kicking around for a while now. Whether it's the lack of motivation, getting stuck on a concept or mechanic, or just wanting to get the idea out for the sake of it, frankly, I'll probably never finish them.
This started as a card game for a jam. I really liked the setting I built for it, so I decided to turn it into a proper trrpg. With the card game, I set out to include as many Mastodon references as possible and carried that on into the rpg. It has notes of Battlestar, in that the players are part of a fleet that has to find a new home planet. The players are hunters. They pierce the FTL space, known as the High Road, and hunt down leviathans, massive alien beast. Their blood is used to power prescient abilities to help guide the fleet through this space to new stars, though the visions of normal space is exceptionally vague. The High Road feels like heaven. Breathable air, perfect temperature, suffused with golden light. But it's also wracked by energy storms that can make it chaotic.
The leviathan hunt needs a lot of work. It's the major part of the game so it needs to be good, engaging, and not just an obnoxious mini game.
This is a game that will never see the light of day for one reason. TTRPGs are not good at complex 3D spaces.
The Stack is a game about movement. You play as some kind of mercenary/courier taking all kind of odd jobs. The earth below has become poisoned, and the world as you know it is a series of mega towers in close proximity to one another. Before everything went bad, skyscrapers got wider and taller, their height extended even more so by gravity stabilizing anchors. When it all collapsed, the anchors went with it too, twisting local pockets of gravity, tearing chunks of building away and leaving it floating. Some people are even born now with weird gravity bending abilities.
The issue is, this is a parkour game at its core. You character has a movement style, kind of like a playbook, that defines abilities, ways to earn XP, and so on. But even just taking the basic parkour movement style, how do you define where the lines are, what the terrain is like in a 3d space enough to give them an idea of how they plan to move, how do you map it out? Pure theater of the mind isn't great because of how much everyone is moving around all the time. Zones might work but they leave a lot of detail out. A top down grid loses the verticality. I'm sure there's a solution here, but I've yet to find it.
While playing back through the Arkham series a while back, I had a thought. What if Batman wasn't here? How would the city handle all these maniac supervillains, discarding the idea they exist because Batman exists. What started to form is a game where you play as a semi-legal operator tasked with doing the things Batman did, stopping villains. But the city, Not!Gotham, is corrupt so your handlers, of which there would be three, have competing interests. This time around, the one giving you the mission tells you to bring in a mobster. Another tells you to leave the drug manufacturing operation intact. The third wants the mobster's lieutenants captured as well but dropped off at a specific location. The other handlers should be doling out optional objectives that interfere and complicate the main mission, but don't contradict it and ideally don't contradict one another.
Operators have gear and gadgets R6 Siege style. This I haven't really worked on but it'll be a chore to brainstorm all of it, at least at first. But right now, it's just the very frame of a game. It doesn't even have a proper name, just a generic working title. This I might get a proper game out of, but it's on the back burner. I think I planned a d20 roll under system for it, nothing too fancy.
Like any good writer, I also have a couple text documents that are blank except for a name. I don't remember what "Code of the West" was supposed to be but I can assume it was cowboys. Or "Untitled Sea Whatever." Not very helpful.
Of all my prototypes, I really want The Stack to work out. It has the most interesting setting and mechanical direction, just need to figure out how to implement it right.
