Broken is Itchfunding Now! Some Expanded Thoughts on Broken's Design for Launch Day
Today is the day! Broken is live itchfunding now. While writing this, we're already more than halfway to funding our first goal, but we have a long way to go. The first goal simply pays for expenses so far that makes up the Ashcan Edition of the game. If you've been following the project, you know how important it is we fully fund the e-book so that we can finalize the game with safety design and consulting from Beau Jagr Sheldon, designer of Script Change, edits from Zack Garth, layout and design consultation, and more. Plus we have a really exciting stretch goal we want to fund to create a book of Scenarios to be part of the full, final e-book. Thank you so much for considering supporting Broken as its live, and for your interest in the game's design and my design thoughts.
I've been thinking about doing an expanded post about one aspect of the game's design: investment. In certain genres of ttrpg, investment is really important because the goal is to get an emotional investment and reaction to the content of the game. Last night on Holy Happy Hour Batman, I discussed this exact topic with Jason Cordova of The Gauntlet, designer of Brindlewood Bay and The Between. I actually had started to write about this topic on The Gauntlet blog even before that. You can check out my Gauntlet interview here.
In that interview, I wrote:
"I think the challenge is to design something that equalizes investment from both players. I used the rituals in the game to do that, so that each person is continually involved and participating, or that you take turns performing certain rituals, such as breaking a physical object. I knew that the scenario and character creation portion of the game would be especially important for getting both players invested early in the experience, and so I tried to design that to be really easy to understand and simple to do, while kind of folding in or "hiding" investment into it so that you get pulled into this scenario and these characters before you even realize it. Similarly, scene setting is participatory from both players. You use a ritual in the game that you repeat to set scenes where one player says "Remember when...." and the other players adds a twist by saying "But you forgot about....". This gets both players invested in the creative process of setting scenes."
I expanded that thought process a little bit in the interview with Jason last night.
I think the trick is to pull investment, or another way of describing it, hide investment under the surface of character creation. That's what I tried to do with character creation in Broken. In the game, you create five traits as part of character creation. These traits are kind of "reverse traits," by that I mean, they are things that your character is attracted to about the other character, or that they like about being in a relationship with them. By making them traits not just about your own player character but about the relationship and the other character, I tried to naturally pull the players into being invested into the relationship right from the beginning.
Another thing I've noticed while either playing Broken, watching others play, or listening to games, is that the more objects are broken, the more invested players seem to get. It is almost like the act of breaking off the relationship actually pulls people in deeper, and the more items get broken, the more people try to hold on. This is a really interesting reverse-psychology aspect to the game that I did not anticipate.
How designers intentionally build investment into their games intrigues me. Perhaps this is comparing apples and oranges, but there's something from traditional character creation and ttrpgs I wanted to avoid. Growing up, my gaming friends and I would make tons of characters. We loved making new characters. Every new D&D campaign we'd play, we'd get invested in new characters. But it wouldn't take long before we were kind of apathetic or tired of those characters, and ready to make the next new character. While Broken is not a campaign-based game like D&D obviously, I still wanted to bridge the gap between being excited to play a character and having that character very invested in the story about to be played. To me, they needed to be the same. My hope is that in Broken, getting invested in the character is the same as getting invested in the fictional relationship, is the same as trying to tell a great story together at the table. I hope we achieved this in the design.
What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear them. Thanks again for considering the campaign for Broken. If you can help spread the word about the game, it would mean so much to us as we fully fund the completed e-book edition of the game.