Time for a Little Blathering

I know, I keep making blog posts but nobody's even aware this exists, so they aren't seeing it. Kind of makes you wonder what the point is, eh? Sometimes, I just need to braindump, and this helps. This is one of those times.

Firstly, I've been wrestling with what I want to do with stats and mechanics -- I want them to be present, I know. I feel like a game of the sort I'm going for needs some kind of character advancement. It's one thing to be slowly transformed into a bimbos, cow girl, or whatever and another thing to be able to increase your character's strongliness or stamina or whatnot.

Which brings me to an interesting point. Tempestreturns over on the TF Games Site forum made a comment in a thread about their own game, HERS-3X, that the health stat implies physical challenges, and having events that affect your health was getting too close to violence, which they don't want to write about in a sexytimes game. Reading that particular point in the post was kind of a 'well, duh' moment for me. It's one of those things that makes perfect sense, so why didn't it occur to me before? When I ponder what gameplay would be like in Bimbpocalypse, here, I lean a little too close to mimicking Dead Rising, I think. Wading through a crowd of bimbos and wailing on them with a baseball bat is probably not very appropriate for the overall theme of the game -- it's supposed to be sexytimes.


I'm leaning towards not simulating hit points as I had originally planned. When I think about the sorts of things that would affect hit points, only a few situations come up -- if you go too long without food/water, I had planned for your health to drain slowly as you succumbed to starvation/dehydration, or you take physical damage -- like via falling or the very rare chance of actually getting attacked. Neither of those are really things that feel quite right for a game of this nature. Really, hit points feel very superfluous, so they should be nixed.

I came across an interesting tabletop system the other day, and I'm eager to try it out on something -- it's called Window. In a nutshell, characters in the system are defined by traits and skills, like most other tabletop RPGs, but these traits and skills are described via adjectives, rather than numbers. You would not have, say, a Strength of 3. You would have mediocre Strength. It is a subtle difference, but helps to emphasize the narrative aspects of the character, rather than the mechanics.

It feels right. So, rather than having numbers representing how aroused, damaged, hungry, strong, perceptive, or intelligent the character is, we have adjectives. Ok, so internally it's still stored as a number. But we don't show the player that number. They might have maxed out their lust/libido/whatever and it'd be displayed as 'Insatiable libido', rather than 'Libido: 7'.

Rar.