When playing a new RPG for the first time, there’s a few things you know that you’re going to encounter.
There’s going to be monsters, there’s going to be magic and, more often than not, there’s going to be minigames.
The minigame for this world, called The Five Fates, is something I’ve been trying to figure out for over two years. I’d come back to it every now and again, try a new idea, get frustrated and then move on to something else.
Unlike a lot of other problems that are of my own making, this one can be traced back to the advice of a sole individual – namely Brandon Sanderson.
Brandon Sanderson AKA my arch nemesis
For those that are unfamiliar, Brandon Sanderson is a massively successful and equally prolific author of high fantasy and science fiction books. He also teaches a creative writing course at an American university – which is available for free on YouTube.
In this course, when discussing the subject of worldbuilding (which I wrote about back in October), he likens his approach to that of an iceberg.
If you choose a handful of elements to focus on and cover in great depth (the visible tip of the iceberg above the water), then you can drop in other elements without needing the same depth (the unseen iceberg below the water).
This approach offers an alternative to the Tolkien way of worldbuilding – you don’t necessarily have to detail literally everything from the dawn of time to the present day in order to tell a good story.
I love Middle Earth but I don’t have it in me to create a detailed history and lineage of every significant character in this world. My passions lie elsewhere – in creating diverse ecosystems and demonstrating character growth through character arcs.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t considered history and lineage – I have, very much so – though it’s only really important for a small number of characters.
The Five Fates of House Breccan
It’s quite a famous piece of trivia, now, that the Game of Thrones series by George R. R. Martin was heavily inspired by the Wars of the Roses.
In high school, I studied a much earlier period of English history wherein seven ‘petty kingdoms’ held control over different areas of the country before they eventually unified at some point in the 10th century.
These genuinely fascinating lessons would eventually inspire the early history of Astaria (the now-sole ruling kingdom in our world) and is where The Five Fates enters this long-winded equation.
House Breccan was one of ten petty kingdoms and, unfortunately for them, the first to fall. As the story is told:
The heir of House Breccan, in a fit of madness, murdered his lover and was imprisoned. The Lord of House Breccan, desperate to preserve his family’s power and influence, ordered his brother to raise an army and return his son.
Knowing this would cause a war, his brother refused – and thus was sent into exile. His son was executed shortly thereafter.
With the other houses already circling, the Lord quickly arranged a marriage for his daughter. Believing it to be her duty, she accepted – suffering at the hand of her much older husband before dying in childbirth.
The Lady of House Breccan, overcome with grief, took her own life. Having overseen the destruction of his family and his house, the Lord, orchestrator of his own ruin, was left with nothing.
In order to achieve a ‘below the iceberg’ level of depth, I wanted the five different fates – madness, exile, duty, grief and ruin – to be incorporated into the game as unique mechanics… somehow.
This is ultimately why it was such a hard problem for me to solve – instead of building out from a fun game concept, I was building in from an existing (and somewhat restricting) set of parameters.
Back to the drawing (chess) board
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I set out to come up with a simple and fun game idea based on games that already existed. I really enjoy chess – which doesn’t mean I’m good at chess, in case you’re wondering – so that’s where I started.
Leaning into the ‘five’ of The Five Fates, I cut the board down to a 5 x 5 grid. Chess has a few different pieces with different movement patterns so I thought I’d just cut it down to much simpler tokens – like checkers.
One of the great things about chess – and many other board games – is that there’s a definitive win condition. This game needed one too, so when I was imagining my 5 x 5 grid, I thought about pushing tokens off the edge.
At this point I have a game that’s conceptually a love child between chess and sumo-wrestling. Now what?
This seemed like a natural point for our different fates to work their way back in. After a few experiments, each fate gives a one-time movement effect to a token on the board. It adds an element of chaotic (and hopefully fun) randomness as well as ‘victory from the jaws of defeat’ potential.
The perfect recipe for a minigame… or so I let myself believe.
Playtesting The Five Fates
I’m fortunate that some of my friends are pretty solid board game players. Kathryn in particular plays both Go and Chess, meaning she’s kinda perfect to test The Five Fates.
On top of that, Dan also plays chess and Adam… has resisted all attempts for me to add chess into our competitive friendship league. Which is sneaky because, when he played a couple games of The Five Fates (perhaps stylised as 5ates?) against Kathryn, he was actually thinking about the game far more strategically than I intended.
They both were. It was very annoying.
Obviously I’m beyond grateful – the point of this was to find problems in the game and that’s exactly what they did. Within a few turns they were both thinking 8 moves into the future and arrived at a stalemate position in the middle of the board.
We tossed around a few ideas that’d potentially fix some of the issues and then conversation naturally flowed onto something else. That night, I lay in bed imagining the updated game on my ceiling like Beth Harmon would – trying to poke holes and solve problems.
Community Q & A
A few days later in our group chat, the subject of conversation turned back to The Five Fates.
Being the intellectual group of so-and-so’s that they are, here’s a range of questions they proposed:
- General merits and design principles of ‘games within games’
- How minigames expand, contrast and synergise with the main game
- Determining the appropriate level of complexity
All of the above would be really fun to unpack and discuss, however I’m going to take this question from Kathryn and run with it:
How are you going to determine difficulty (of the minigame) within the game?
That’s been on my mind, too. So much so, in fact, that I casually asked Leon (developer) what he thought about setting up a neural network.
The long and short of his answer was that, depending on how we go about it, there’s potentially more complexity in that than we have in the entirety of Garrison.
He’s right, of course, and I’m well aware that I’m approaching this like a mad scientist. At the same time, I do think there’s a lot of upside – we’d be able to test it a lot easier and, thinking about the future, we’d have a built-in gauge for difficulty levels.
That, I think, is where the next part of this series will begin. There’s a lot of important work to do at the moment so this might have to take a back seat for a little while. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out on part 2!
We’re on discord, too, if you want to drop in and say hello.
Cheers, Andrew