Starwrath is a campy dark humor space opera about honor, courage, and punching people so hard they explode. The game definitely delivers on that premise and the designer has a great idea of what they want the game to be.
This week I reviewed the in development Starwrath by the designer hairyhobbittoes (@StarwrathR). If you are familiar with these posts, I looked at it from the lens of a Player, focusing on rules clarity and choices and decisions available to the player.
Starwrath is a very crunchy game with a book chalk full of options for the players. The game has a plethora of character options to choose from with weapons, species, nations, lifepaths, and fighting styles all equally important as the standard stats/skills/talents that are found in most RPGs. After reading about 100 pages, I can assure the game delivers on the core experience. It’s got campy covered with skills like Intimidating Slow Walk and moments specifically for banter baked into encounters. It has metal covered with skills like Bleeding from the eyes and action to turn dead bodies into ammo. Finally, you can punch enemies 10 different ways to Sunday with its unique fighting styles (there are 10 of them).
temporary art provided by hairyhobbittoes
Crunchy games are great, trust me, I’m making one, but there is a problem that arises with crunchy games and Starwrath doesn’t avoid it. The more complex a game is the more difficult it is to explain. Just remember from this point on, these are my opinions that the designer may not share. From my experience reading the game, I feel like the sheer number of options has diluted the core experience. I feel that as a player I will be too concerned with which weapon and specific size each monster is and which of the 20 combat options I have to really appreciate the core experience of the game.
This is still in development so there is plenty of time to fix this. Now, I think there are at least two ways to handle this, the first can be with clear explanation and introducing mechanics gradually as to not overwhelm the reader. If you want to learn basics of that and technical writing, go read the section from my review of Shifting Tides.
The other way to handle this, while also working well in tandem with the first, is to take a look at the features and comparing them to the core experience and reevaluating if you really need them in the game. Let’s talk about a few design processes I know to help with this. I will be using my advice to hairyhobbittoes as an example, but you can also use these processes for your games and homebrews as well.
First make sure you have clearly defined your pillars of design. You’ve probably heard this concept before but in case you haven’t, don’t worry, I’ll explain it again. Pillars of design are like guiding posts for your design decisions. They help you focus what you develop by providing concrete pillars to refer to. A few examples made from my understanding of Starwrath would be the following:
Campy – this game channels the energy of B movies and what makes them great.
Space Opera - think Star Wars, Mass Effect, or Warhammer 40k.
Heavy Metal - Punching people so hard they explode in a fireball.
Martial Arts
Martial Arts Styles Tree
Once you have those set, get an idea of all the features and options you have for your characters and list them. Then order that list from most important to least important based on what you value as the designer. Then compare each one to your Pillars, mark how many pillars they fulfil. The ones that you ranked as most important should have higher numbers, as they fulfil more pillars than the ones lower on the list. If that is not the case, you should reevaluate your pillars.
After that, take a look at the features, especially the ones that don’t meet many of your pillars and see if you truly need them in the game. If you don’t, put them in another document as to remove them from the game. This allows you to reference them later and add them back if you change your mind. I find that this process makes it easier to remove features from the game because I can trick myself with the idea that it might be temporary. I am only moving them to this other document.
For the rest of the mechanics, see how many you can combine into similar sections. Maybe weapons can all be explained together, or explosions and knockback can be explained in a different, status effect only section. As for YOU reader, this process is very specific to your particular game and while I cannot give you examples directly related to your project, I can provide a few examples that may help.
Let’s say you have a long list of combat options, for example 20. Not all 20 of them would reasonably options at a single time in combat. An experienced player will understand that and would quickly parse out which ones do not fit each particular situation. Take a look at when each of these may become good options, focus on grouping them into specific scenarios and then explain them during those scenarios. In this way, you can do the work for the player, which would help newer players particularly.
Another example, for the first year of development for C22 I had players always draw two cards for magic and combat, and one card for skills. This caused confusion because there would be one card for skills outside of combat but then two cards in combat, but then magic was always two cards. Players would often ask how many cards they needed to draw for each situation. I changed the system so that out of combat, it was always one card, and inside encounters, it was always two cards. Streamlining the process and combining a few features to make them easier to understand.
You can also do this for your game and expand the mechanics outside of just character creation. I mostly read character creation for Starwrath so most of my comments were about that aspect, but you can cover your whole system. What are the pillars of design for your project? Have they changed as your game or homebrew developed? Let me know in the comments below. If you like what I’m doing, let me know and follow me on Twitter (@c22system)