Life is about swords and changing clothes. Everything else is an old crofter's dream. What is a crofter? Don't worry, I googled it for ya! A crofter is a person who farms a croft. If you google croft, you get a bunch of fairly compromising pictures of Lara Croft. So.
But the point is: Gear.
Gear is everything characters use and wear in the game.
Currently, gear is somewhat implemented, in that there are items and outfits to equip. What hasn't been clear since forever is how exactly the player can acquire new or upgrade existing gear.
Designing this system and process has been far more difficult than I would have expected. I've never had a part in designing a game before, so that goes with the territory. But I think a lot of blithely ignorant folks like me sort of assume that, okay, at some point, I'll encounter item-get, and that will be nice, and I'll put it on my character-doll, and be pleased because, look, she's wearing a top-hat, hahaha, but. So that doesn't seem tough.
Doesn't that, just like walking into Mordor, not seem tough?
Boromir's right, and by the transitive property of equality I think, that applies to designing gear-get and gear systems. He's also attractive and sensible. Look at him. There's a guy that never loses his head...
Wildermyth, as a general rule, wants to bind as much advancement and game-mechanical power to narrative pathways as possible. We exclude some expected features like research, resources, and crafting (I say expected and I mean we expected to use these sorts of familiar systems), in favor of what we want to call a more character-driven model.
That model is: equipment must improve through the story, rather than alongside it. In other words, everything needs appropriate context! Sorry, chest in the middle of a clearing, full of riches and a mage-masher probably, that for some reason no one else but Bardurk Boldenface has ever bothered to open. We don't think you're very credible.
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| Who, me? Just hangin' out. One of the barrels. |
So while that model of story-supported gear-advancement is fine and simple enough, it means we are trying to ensure that weapons and armor and all the miscellanea heroes collect has a story that is at least implied.
An implied story for a piece of gear can be as simple as, "Well, we got it from finishing combat. I assume one of the dudes we killed was holding or stashing it. It's a good weapon, and I'll use it to kill everything." Most of this is never consciously sifted through by the player, but exists as a subconscious impression in the player's mind.
Every implied story necessarily says something about the morphology of an item and its relevance to the world. For instance, in the case of finding it after combat, we have to believe it was something our enemy valued, or at least thought was worth hanging onto. It can't be so remarkable that it doesn't make sense for it to be drifting around, and nor can it be so ordinary that we're like, okay, so why don't we just mass-produce these, or why don't we pick up every piece of a weapon or armor we find? (By the way, those are perfectly viable concepts we've made a conscious decision to avoid as part of the effort to create more momentous and meaningful gear.)
This may seem trivial, but it becomes important when designing a rationally supportable way for a late-game piece of gear to be more powerful than an early-game piece. Both pieces of gear need their own mystique, so why is the Cloak of Gronn so inferior to Mystral's Weatherlight Cloak?
Sometimes, games get away with explaining this through materials. For instance, an iron to steel to mythril weapon-progression that has no real weight (or rationale!) storywise. This totally works for some games, but it's hard to feel comfortable pulling it off in our world.
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| This, basically. |
We need ways to nest power in the tales a piece of gear might tell, meaning the places it was found or the foes who fear it. And all that needs to happen without relying on huge amounts of text because.
Well, because who's gonna write that stuff, Boromir?
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| Not Boromir. |
Our breakthrough on a uniquely Wildermyth gear design came with a monster-specific upgrade-system we imagined for our weapons.
Our new design, forged in a video-call like every great idea, would let weapons have an implied story and gain power as a single movement, without going to great lengths to explain it all textually. Sounds amazing? I don't know, I designed it and have practically no oversight!
How it works is that when you get a 'weapon upgrade,' you pick three digital cards. You select one and the rest are trashed. Each card has a specific upgrade on it, so one might say "+1 damage against gorgon deer" another might say "+15 stunt chance against thrixl" and the third could be "+10 hit against gorgon deer and gorgon boars".
The player will, theoretically, look at these upgrades seriously as moments of implied narrative, that define a character's legacy, and are born from the character's deeds. The upgrade you choose tells a different story about the weapon, and changes how you'll use it. Players will be encouraged to think of the character wielding it differently, going forward, without being explicitly told to do so.
Now, does it make tons of sense for a weapon to get stronger over time, because of the person using it, and the fights it's been in? Yes and no. No, because that implies that the weapon is a living organism that evolves. The reason it works for us is that Wildermyth is about telling stories. As the weapon gets stronger, we are saying that it is becoming more legendary, and the stories it accrues and the power it gains are reflections of each other, rather than two sides of a cause-and-effect relationship.
The invention of this system for our weapons then led us to looking at our other large gear-group, Augments, and saying, okay, so why not put a similar activation + effect system in place here? That way, we derive more specific characters as the game goes on; they grow more powerful while also growing more iconic to the player, using the same [+story = +power] equation.
The expected effect is that a player will develop a hero who is excellent at fighting gorgons in the forest, who might not be as strong fighting thrixl underground (importantly, the hero is not un-useful in this latter case, but is simply not operating optimally). The player will then have a reason to train multiple new heroes, with different specialties, who each have their moments to shine in the diverse situations and against the diverse opponents they encounter. Why that's great is we don't need to put caps on advancement in order to encourage squad-diversity, and thus we don't run into the problem of "Welp, there's no point in giving capped-out Sheena any more experience or items. No reason to use her now."
And that's about where we are. These designs are going in as I write this. Or. Well, actually, I'm the one that has to make the specific data for them to be art-able and actionable, so no. In any case, they will be filled out soon. And yes, yes, as the Specter of My Latent Self-Doubt likes to say, a lot could go wrong. But.
It feels we're on the cusp of something. I'm starting to feel that a lot with Wildermyth. That we're reaching the thresholds of who we are as a game, coming into an identity we've sought, but never quite inhabited. And it feels like.
I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes, by Miles Davis:
"Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself."
We are getting there. Gear is a large part of it. Designing gear for the modern hero, you've got to make sure that stuff fits right. Even Lara seems to be dressing more sensibly these days.
Anyway. If you've learned anything, reading this rambling post, I hope that thing is the meaning of life. It's all swords and clothes-changes.
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