Drive: A Mechanical Post mortum (and other updates)

I actually had a pretty good birthday this year (outside of the the toothpain). I got a couple games I love, some kitchen stuff, and a new dresser. As soon as I can eat properly  I'll make frybread tacos and show you pics! Most of my month however has been me being in and out of mouth surgeries. Somehow I got work done despite this.

I think the ability to step back however did me some good. I realized my workflow was feeling a little clog and I went to work. I realized two very important things.

1. I needed a pipeline that tracks my progress to keep me moving forward

2: One of my mechanics was getting in the way and it had to go.

So lets talk about the cut mechanic, Drive.

A big pillar of Protect The Sacred's design is I wanted to explore new ways to use narrative tags. Almost every game out there uses it in the exact same way. A tag lets you get a minor bonus (like a +1) on a roll. It's fine but really lacks a level of evocativeness I want in a mechanic. I did a bit of this in Exceptionals with the protocols. Each tag was a specific exploration of character and answering a question.  Each tag was a narrative hall pass, but still fell into "bonus for a roll" (working on that).

But another way I wanted to use tags was "Drive". Drive was supposed to represent sort of this moment you see in a lot of pulp action narratives where the hero is on their back foot. They've been beat up and it feels like the world is against them. But for some reason, they find something to fight for and pull through to victory.

I was going to represent this with a tag that stood in for a character's motivations. When people evoked it, they'd get a burst of health healed and some of the games "do cool things" resource. I liked the ability to give the player a way to say "I'm not done yet."

But there was one very big issue. It undercut the protocol/playbooks in a major way. So many of the more interesting questions that really fleshed out who a character was dove into a characters motivations in a major and minor ways. And it did it better. When I put it in a mechanic like drive it undercuts a lot of what makes character creation in my games cool. It made it harder to make interesting playbooks. And if I kept it in it'd just frustrate players as they try to find multiple ways to express what might be one idea.

I had to cut it, but I still wanted that moment. It felt important to keeping the momentum of a pulp hero. So maybe cut isn't the right word as much as refurnished and repurposed.

So now protect the sacred is going to have a new thing you can spend that aforementioned currency on. Drive is now a thing you spend X currency (to be playtested for the exact amount), which can be reduced in price by relevant tags from the playbooks, to ignore an injury for a scene. At the cost of getting the injury "exhausted" added after the scene is done.

It lets people have that moment. It allows those tags to matter without undercutting them. It allows people to make interesting choices (do I want to push myself now?)

I think it's a happy ending.

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Other Updates

-You can check my progress here on the Trello I made to keep me organized.
https://trello.com/b/y9yJU7HH/protect-the-sacred

-The anthology I wrote for is working on getting a cover

-The novel I'm working on writing is proceeding in worldbuilding. I have a pretty good plot pitch in my head

Everything hurts. I had two root canals today