This doesn't mean it will help you come up with the plot for your breakout novel, or that you can use it to create a new world or idea.
This does mean that, within the game's finite creation-space, players have the chance to tell unique stories based on generated characters and narrative content that is both directly expressed and implied. This is its own source of fun, intended to layer over the game-mechanics (which are hopefully fun as well) to make this rewarding game-lasagna that you can enjoy in the moment and carry memory of beyond the digital world.
It's important to me that the creation-space in Legacy is as wide and various as reasonably possible. I hope to achieve a scope to fit any given player's vision, even as that vision might vary from day to day. The jumping off point for that, at least in my view, will be hero history.
Hero history, made up of multiple "history lines," was always a way to impose concrete narrative into each character, give them origins, stories, and motivations.
Here is what that has looked like, following a couple passes, and up to the current moment.
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| Tilly Cope has a specific story that gives the player hints about her character, her personality, her ambitions. If you look in the Aspects sidebar, you see that history is bound to stat-adjustments, which will affect the character at a mechanical level. |
Much of what I have been occupied with over the past month or two has been refining this system. Refining means a couple of things, here. It means integrating the system more directly with other systems, such as combat, events, relationships, narrative-content. It also means improving the writing, attempting to remove generated inconsistencies of character, and working to create more specificity to match characters' personalities. Lastly, I'd add that an important component of the task is just increasing the sheer number and variety of lines a hero receives.
And. I'm almost. Done.
Here's a screen capture of the work I'm looking at, and adding to, day by day.
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| First column denotes the type of line, which places it in history (mote stands for motivation); second column is the line content itself, which draws on personality traits of a generated character to often add flavor to a given line; third column is tags associated with the line; fourth column is tags with which the line is incompatible (a way to cull cases of inconsistency where two lines say conflicting things about a character); fifth column denotes a primary-stat boost; additional columns give story-role (personality) boosts and state the hook that the line applies. |
It's a relatively simple data-table, but represents a lot of cringing and backspacing (see also: writing things) and some fairly important material in the narrative aspect of the game.
There will always be more words to fix and wonky gibberish, because. Well, because I'm writing this stuff, and I'm a bit of a word-cow, whatever that might be, and also quite pretentious. The exciting part about completing this initial history-dump is that it should give us a clear indication of how character personalities come off, and what sorts of adjustments or provisions may be needed to ensure they are impactful while not becoming intrusive or obnoxious. That being a vital feature of our story-telling model, it's important to get it in, and get it running.
Additionally, new history implementation will put hooks in place, which will open up the potential implementation of relationships, and hook quests, as well as providing a key interaction with events. Events themselves will go into serious production relatively soon, and this is a big component of being able to interact with those in a meaningful way, and thus being able to test and assure quality.
TL;DR - Character history is getting a huge overhaul, and narrative content will be ramping up. I'm freakin' out.
P.S. Apologies for the fuzzy graphics. The important impression for you to take from these graphics is 'That looks like some words about things.'
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