The Besswox Design Notes which will not be in Beeswox

I've reached the point in assembling Beeswox (a flippintly-launched project I envisioned as taking a couple weeks which is now in its sixth month) of cutting things out to fit in my self-imposed limit of 64 pages (the traditional max size for saddle-stitch binding).

One of the bigger cuts is an appendix of design notes I intended for the last page. Normally I'm a big proponent of the writer taking a moment to explicitly explain how they approached the design and what they want it to do. But under my tight limits, I couldn't justify spending the space on what was essentially a reiteration things said elsewhere (PbtA rules are nothing if not explicit in their process) with some admittedly indulgent proselytizing on top.

But still, I sweated over it enough that I hate to just dump it unseen, so here it is for future posterity (or embarrassment).

Design Notes

Beeswox was more or less begat by Offworlders, a space-adventure WoX-based game with some clever ideas for handling wealth and equipment. It offered a nimble and versatile system that, with just a little work, was easily turned to all sorts of genres and settings. In pursuing that expansion I incorporated bits from other WoX games and useful elaborations from the main Powered by the Apocalypse school. Putting all that together turned into this unified generic WoX rules-set I hadn’t realized I wanted.

But why “World of X” at all? Why the ultra-lite fringe offshoot instead of the more prestigious main PbtA family it spawned from? As much as I respect the excellent work that has gone into many PbtA games, in practice I’ve found moving through their various formalized processes is a bit too esoteric for me. However, approaching those same excellent design principles through traditional elements like Hit Points, Experience Points and damage-rolls comes very easily.

Also, I’m all about minimal rules systems. Role-playing games for me are, before anything else, social gatherings for sharing imagination. The play I enjoy the most is filled with surprises and improvisation and joy sparked by communal creativity. And ever since I first put aside my D&D books in favor of Tunnels & Trolls, I’ve felt that using the fewest rules necessary encourages a focus on the natural conversation where all that great stuff happens. I prefer a sparse toolbox: some guidelines to structure the session, prompts to help the participants imagine the hell out of things, consequences to give a thrill of danger, and spurs to keep the pace up. Anything beyond that drags on momentum.

A significant secondary influence on Beeswox is the “Old School Renaissance.” Of course, given that the first WoX game, World of Dungeons, is a direct evocation of original D&D, and Offworlders is a near-emulation of original Traveller, not much more fine-tuning was needed in that direction, besides making allowances for open-table campaigning.

The Beeswox Thickens

I'm still chugging along at Beeswox, in fact writing (re-writing, and re-re-writing...) the text has become my primary quarantine pastime. I'm hopeful I'll be able to release it by the end of May.

I'd like to make a couple updates on previous posts about Beeswox.

 First, I've modified Verve a bit. To review, it's a pool of points a player spends to activate their character's special abilities. I referred to them as a fixed allowance for "doing an awesome" a number of times per session. But while that mostly worked, it still felt a little abrupt. I don't entirely agree with Dissociated Mechanics criticisms, but Verve was feeling like it suffered from that a bit. Eventually I realized that, if the problem was the artificiality of the hard terminus, then I could just make that line much softer. So now, after a player runs out of Verve, they can still use their abilities, but the referee can optionally impose side effects, call for rolls of the dice, or whatever. I'm much more comfortable with the mechanic now.

Second, I've redone the cover ... twice. While I liked the last design, the dice images on it increasingly struck me as sloppy, and I couldn't verify their copyright permissions. So I stacked every ivory or yellow-toned d6 I had, took a picture with my cheap phone and made a new arrangement on top of the image. I admit it's a little goofy, but that just makes me like it more:

 

Then, while digging up graphic resources, I found a great color photo in the Flickr Commons. But I didn't have a place for it, until I took it as a prompt to make an alternate minimalist cover:

The stark "all-business" contrast to the original cover amuses me, so when it comes time to offer POD, I'll post both versions.

Subtle Verve

In putting together Beeswox, I ended up adding a couple rules without precedent from the original sources, but I feel they tighten up the system as a whole.

In full PbtA games nearly all character actions and resources are expressed as Moves, little distinct resolution packets that broadly define an action and its potential outcomes. A typical Move is structured more or less like this:

In situation X, roll the dice and add Attribute Y to see if Z1, Z2 or Z3 happens.

In contrast, WoX doesn't use Moves. Instead, for broad actions that any character can attempt it uses simplified general-purpose attribute rolls, results interpreted on the spot based on context. Unique PC resources are expressed by Abilities, which are structured tersely:

Your character can do Z.

As I thought about it, that seemed too broad. Without the "in situation X" limit, there's really nothing to urge a player to consider if an ability is appropriate or not. Some implementations account for this by saying "you can attempt to do Y," but that implies anyone without the ability can't attempt it all, which is a headache of permissions to track.

Other Abilities do add an "in situation X" limit, but on consideration I decided against expanding that to all Abilities because it would have been more text to track in play.

My solution is to give PC's a pool of points, called Verve. New characters start with three, they regenerate to full at the start of each session (one of the things you can get when you advance is an improved Verve pool). To use most Abilities, the player has to spend a Verve point (Abilities of more limited scope are just always on). Basically, each session a player can buy a limited number of pre-defined "I do an awesome" moments, enough for their character to shine but not so many as to bury the developing fiction under spam-attacks.

Pretty simple as a pacing mechanic, and I think it does what I want. However, I was concerned that there really isn't a precedent for this in either PbtA or WoX (that I know of), so I asked around for input. Most replies I got felt it seemed workable, but were concerned it might make play feel like Fate.

That may be true from a very broad perspective, but I don't think it will come close in the details. One of the things I find off-putting about Fate is that keeping on top of the flow of Fate Points and all the Aspects producing and consuming them in a scene can lead to disconnection from the fiction. Players can end up intent on making things happen, but without actually experiencing it viscerally. Big moments become just an exercise in cultivating and deploying Fate Points efficiently. I deliberately set up Verve to have no economy flow to avoid that.





 

Keeping Under Cover

I've been working on a new project:

It's a compilation and weaving together of rules and guidelines from the many rules-light "Powered by the Apocalypse" games which followed John Harper's World of Dungeons (a three page take on what Dungeon World would have looked like in it's "original" 1974 version).

I'll have more to say about the game's rules and my goals for the book, but for now I feel like musing on the synergy between rules design and graphic design. Y'see, originally I designed a cover like this:

I almost always get sidelined into layout and art long before I finish a text. Common wisdom says this is a sloppy way to work, but increasingly I'm seeing it as a productive expression of my mindset. I'm pretty good with words, but I'm at least as visually oriented, and organizing things graphically helps me understand things I don't catch when they're just text.

In this case, the name "Pocket Wox" at first sounded dashingly clever, with allusions to being a useful tool that's also conveniently portable. But as I fussed trying to figure out how to arrange those watch faces, looking at those precise gearworks prompted me to wonder if that was really what I was going for. Am I really making something meticulous and metal-hard? No, it's subjective and pleasingly malleable. With that insight I took another look at the text and spotted areas where I had gotten overly technical and started rewriting with better understanding of where I was going.

And then I changed the name and started browsing the Flickr Commons for pictures of bees.