This Project Creator Wants to Respect Your Time

I grew up playing RPGs, but it’s been increasingly hard to keep up a campaign with work and life commitments getting in the way. I turned to board games that go for a similar feel and Gloomhaven is my absolute favourite. I love the game, but it’s been very difficult keeping a campaign of it up since both myself and various play groups I am part of play only on weekday evenings after work and find it hard to keep up a regular slot of 3+ hours. Many of us also play campaign games with our partners, but once again, meatier games of this ilk can be hard to bring to the table, due to both rule complexity as well as setup/tear down and play time. So I wanted to create a game experience whose minimum time-unit fit within this limited window of leisure time many of us have, while allowing groups to have longer sessions if they wanted to.

As a player, the minimum time unit of a campaign game is a really important factor to consider, both when playing with my groups or partner. I found that campaign games that can have a fun, meaningful session of an hour got to the table a lot more, even if sometimes we’ll troop through 2 or 3 games in an evening. There are now many great campaign games that fit the 1 hour length criteria and in fact these were the ones whose campaigns we manage to complete, but we were missing one that fit this length and is also more of a character-based adventure that brings together the story and tactical combat sequences we love so much.

Session length is, however, only half the equation. How much happens in that session, especially for adventure games, is an important complementary factor. I wanted to create more story worthy events during every aspect of the game, especially combat, in 1 hour than tends to be the case in similar games of 2+ hours.

Let’s go to TV series for a minute. In some hour-long shows a lot happens, while in others the events are slower. Peaky Blinders, for instance, roars through a dizzying string of story events in one episode. The Handmaid’s Tale, on the other hand, tends to have far less events happen in each episode. This is not to say that one is better than the other! The Handmaid’s Tale is a masterpiece on many fronts, and one of my favourite shows of all time, but I do find the pace in Peaky Blinders to be exciting.

Recently, I started feeling this growing sense of dissatisfaction with how few story events happen during a 2-3 hour session of most dungeon crawlers. By story events I don’t mean bits of actual, written story I read out, but, more importantly, the story-worthy events in combat. In most similar games, at the end of a 2-3 hour session I don’t feel like many story worthy events have occurred aside from a few highlights of dramatic moments. For the most part, most actions are abstracted into a series of numbers or mechanical operations/calculations that are great at engaging me with their mechanical system, but they do not generate many interesting story events in my mind. I wanted to shift the balance of the experience from one focused primarily on the mechanical aspects to balance it out with the story that emerges from each action during combat.

One way of doing that was to compress the time in the game. Each combat scene lasts 3 to 5 rounds and then it’s over. Every turn heroes do quite a lot. A common turn has a hero sneak into a room, open a chest, come of the shadows to down an opponent and backflip out. That is roughly a standard turn’s worth of actions, and as a result, story events. I wanted players to experience imaginable events as actions, rather than moving 4 hexes and inflicting 5 damage to an enemy, which is a more abstracted way of interpreting in-game actions, not to mention limited in story event generation.

These two elements intertwine to form the foundation of the game’s design direction, with many other decisions following on from them. Flexible session times that can go as short as 1 hour including setup and tear-down to however long the group wants to play and the richness of stories generated during that session by compressing time in the game-world and how much happens in each player’s turn.