honours progress
I'm doing a practice led honours thesis this year, focused on utilising game design elements found in tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) in game pieces, a subset of compositional techniques where the performance has elements of both playing music and playing games. Currently it's titled Playing Music: Reconsidering Game Pieces Through Tabletop Roleplaying Game Design. Get it, because you're playing music, but you're also playing in another sense- it's dumb.
game one prototype
The first game is going to focus on the more traditional side of TTRPG, taking inspiration from games like D&D, Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark, Apocalypse World, Troika!, and so forth. The main element of design to focus on here is the idea of character creation and playbooks, which are an essential set of rules which gives the player interesting and somewhat unique ways to interact with the world. Below are some examples of playbooks/backgrounds/classes from a variety of games, and how simple or complex they can be. My aim at the moment is somewhere between Troika! and Blades in the Dark. A couple problems with this design: it needs a base system, just like all these games have dice systems, to show both success and failure. How is a win-lose state defined in music? Can it be defined? Secondly, rules are often not supposed to be memorised, and are rarely done so in practice. However, not remembering the rules may impede on the smoothness of performance and roleplaying. I need to look into LARP and the rules in there, because I feel like that has some good pointers into how to play games like Troika! and Blades in the Dark without breaking the fantasy every few minutes. The game will be separated into two points - character creation and play. The character creation will go through what abilities you get in the improvisation, including unique sounds and interactions. Then the play is putting those parameters in practice. How to police the rules is, or what the rules are, is entirely up in the air at the moment. |
|
game two prototype
The second game is based on a more modern and less commercial form of TTRPG; games that take inspiration from post-modern ideologies. It's hard to concisely explain what these games are, but the gist is that the table as a physical object can be moved away from, and other planes of existence (ie the ground, trees) can become "tables". This sub-genre of TTRPG is based heavily in chaos magik traditions, and thus two prominent values of chaos magik (understanding the world through a personal fiction and community-based work) are prominent as playstyles (solo and GM-less, which means that no one, but the community as a whole, dictates the fiction). The hypothetical game especially will reference Fruit of Law and An Anthology of Cozy RPGs, as games that break away from the heroic fantasy typical of the genre in place of strange and new group dynamics. Though unsure of what it will turn out to be, I'm most confident in it's success due to doing something similar in first year. |
|
game three prototype
The final game made for this thesis is based on the tradition of solo journaling games. These types of games are mostly played solo, and are often revered for their self-reflection and introspectiveness. These games often have players writing their own responses to prompts from the perspective of someone who isn't them (hence roleplay). I'm going to appropriate this mechanic with different techniques by the surrealists to create a game that uses cards and dice and luck to create a piece, while still holding on to the narrative and inwardness found in the TTRPGs. How successful it'll be I do not know. |
|