Putting the pressure on

My previous design goal documents were mostly about what I didn't like about old school fantasy. So I thought I should write about what I want to keep. Most of all, the feeling of danger.

Too often, that danger came in the form of unexpected, arbitrary death. That's not heroic fantasy, that's "subterranean fantasy fucking Vietnam" The sort of danger I want is more like slow torture. Fate mirrors this idea nicely. Even minor fights can leave a PC limping around with a consequence or two. All I'm doing is broadening the concept.

The Cursed World is a dangerous place, and adventurers are those who venture into the most dangerous parts of it. No one survives these places for long. Supplies dwindle, magic fades, and raw endurance is put to the test. An adventure is also a slowly tightening trap.

Unfortunately, this will require a bit of bookkeeping. After I did a whole post about the terrible bookkeeping that I'm getting rid of, here is some of the acceptable bookkeeping that I'm going to keep.

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.