Darling Murders

I mentioned in a previous post that I had largely left The Queen Must Die untouched for the better part of a year. In that time I did push some imaginary cardboard around in my head as I lay in bed on a great number of nights, but both the IRL version and the TTS version remained untouched. This was all due to my early Covid crisis responsibilities and then, essentially, momentum.

It was actually really useful time. I was – and kinda knew it at the time – overly connected to too much of the game. I desperately needed to trim.

“Kill your darlings” they say. This is also a well-worn philosophy in film. It seems however that the psychology between taking a beloved scene out of a screenplay or an edit is very different from taking a favourite mechanic or phase out of a game. A lot of this difference is simply practical. Hit ‘delete’ and read or play the screenplay or film over and see what damage you’ve done and what has benefitted – apply fixes as necessary (which may actually be ‘just add the scene back in – cutting it didn’t work’). The process is nowhere near as clean in games… well, I’m going to demonstrably contradict myself later – but let’s stick with this thought for the moment, it's the prevailing notion dictating my instincts.

Pull something out of a game and there WILL be a fix required. “How do players get cards into their hands now?” or; “Now there is only one VP to be claimed.” (Perhaps not actually an issue, that one.) or; “So, how do we get a combat result out of this now?” or; “Then everyone can immediately figure out who the spy is.” The list goes on.
 Any fix is going to significantly necessitate both mental and physical (or digital) work… with a very real spectre looming that it may not provide answers, just hours of lost time and effort. Okay, the latter can happen in film too, but in that medium I have developed a sense of both what is likely to work, and the most efficient means by which to complete it (or at least to mock-up a workable test-facsimile) will be.

For me, not having a comfortable understanding of how to best strategize the killing-of-darlings process in game design has been daunting. In fact, having an understanding of how to do it in another art form may have even held me back – ‘cause I understood that I wasn’t prepared to do it well and thus was risking greater loss of effort.

I knew that the two biggest obstacles between a 3-ish hour game and a 90 minute game of The Queen Must Die were the Crafting Mechanic and the Combat.

The Crafting was cool. Fun. Play testers regularly commented upon it positively. And I had spent a lot of time with the gray-matter on high-boil developing it.
It had begun as a simple matter of players having to find both parts of a specific piece of equipment they desired. Find the sword hilt and find the sword blade – then you have a complete sword. But it was regularly an issue that someone would be stuck with an unpaired piece that was just taking up room in their hand.
The next iteration (the one that really took the work) was that any given piece could be used in four different ways. The “hilt” became a “grip” that could be used to build a sword with a blade, a shield when combined with a metal plate, brass knuckles with some nails, or a club with a big chunk of timber. Meanwhile the blade could be a sword, a chain scythe, a broad axe, or a halberd. And so on and so on, option after option… with every component available to players. There were tweaks to this version, but as presented, it is what essentially persisted in the game. However, as much as people liked it, did it ever cause analysis paralysis. Yikes! Loads of AP.

Meanwhile, the Combat was rich and varied, and not actually that complicated… but I could see that for the weight and duration of game I am aiming for, it was too complicated. But the richness – the wide variety of approaches that would need to be applied from game to game depending on what combination of foes one faced and how they were uniquely outfitted – was… IS! central to one of The Queen Must Die’s core appeals. How to strip away the complication without losing the richness… and would it really be necessary? Really truly?

Excising the Crafting hurt my soul. But I had come to terms with it by the time I had first met with my mentor – Jonathan – and I had papered over the hole in the game and was ready to test it. The Combat though, was a much bigger puzzle – and there exists a direct line from crafting weapons to the combat downstream of it, so I kind of wanted to have some faith in the first issue before moving on to the second – in part because I knew that the connective material between the two (the various bits of equipment and weaponry) would need revisiting somewhere in the process too.

I acknowledged both 'darlings' in our meeting. Jonathan said the thing that I kind of already knew – that the crafting, if it really was so great, was just waiting for a home in another game… perhaps even WAS the other game. And that was all I needed to freely let go – knowing that I could bring it back if it was a total disaster. I had already come up with an alternate version where players essentially found equipment fully-formed instead of the components with which to make the equipment. It needed a bit of polish (less than I feared), and looking back (all the way to last week) it already seems silly that the solution wasn’t clear from the start. Easy peasy – in spite of my expectation.

A younger, more innocent game,
from a time before the murders began.

Simplifying Combat. Yeah, well… I didn’t say it was all going to be easy.

I kept Combat as-was throughout this past week’s playtests. I maintain that the richness is still important (though perhaps I can scale it back a bit?). However, without the complication-level of the crafting mechanic setting an expectation of weight upon the game, it really stood out. Particularly when faced by the more casual gamers in my test-group. So it’s got to go – or be simplified. I’ve got to find ways to make the edge cases more consistent with the primary mechanics. I don’t really know how this is going to happen. I do have an idea that will require more dice… but I have reached the point in the design where I am taking in to consideration the production costs and consequent MSRP. More dice are not very conducive to keeping those aspects in check.

I’ve got a meeting with Jonathan later today. I don’t expect answers. But I am hoping for a fresh way of thinking about this. A new path to killing at least a portion of this darling.