Design Goals, part two

The last post was mostly about world building goals in the last post, so this one is more about game mechanics. Specifically, bookkeeping, and how I want to get rid of it.

Bookkeeping creeps in to a game in a variety of ways, and there are a variety of ways to stop it. Let's look at a few of them, under the cut.

Design Goals, part one

So what sort of game is Cursed World, anyway? While designing it, I had a few goals in mind. The first was to make room for some moral ambiguity alongside old school gaming's good vs evil.

The clear-cut, black and white morality of D&D is both a strength and a weakness. Bright shining heroes facing off against black-hearted foes can make for a great story, but but so many other good stories can't happen in a world where detect evil exists.

The solution is to downplay the cosmic good vs evil struggle. Don't get me wrong, capital-e Evil still exists, but a generic bandit isn't it. Mundane evil is familiar and complicated. Cosmic evil is inhuman and implacable. There's room for both in the same game.

In my notes, I have the phrase "Orcs are people too." This doesn't mean CW orcs are nice, it means that people are often nasty, and you can't tell who's a good guy by the pointyness of their teeth. Goblin heroes are great fun. Elves and dwarves make great villains. A touch of moral ambiguity widens the range of stories that can be told, and that can only be a good thing.

What is Cursed World?

Cursed World is a Dungeons & Dragons homage, but it is not an old school game. It's an attempt at a less tactical, more narrative approach to the familiar tropes.

Every gamer knows D&D. The monsters, spells, and tropes are ingrained in gamer culture. Love or hate it, practically every gamer has played it and had fun with it at some point. But in spite of multiple editions and years of expansion, most veteran gamers consider it dated and primitive.

So why not take what people love about D&D, and modernize it? Rather than re-create the original game like retro-clones do, Cursed World is a complete reconstruction of the dungeon fantasy experience. Outdated concepts have been reexamined. Classic tropes have been polished to a high sheen.

It's an old-school setting without the old school rules. It uses FATE, the state-of-the-art system that powered two Origin award-winning games. But to connect Cursed World to the D&D tradition, it will include quick conversion rules for d20 or Pathfinder monsters and and traps.