20th of February 2025
While thinking about this initial idea for a competitive Role Playing Game, Matt Colville, a famous D&D youtuber who is creating his own RPG, released this video. In essence, he uses four key words to help define the parameters of the game, thereby helping to focus design on supporting those four key words or goals. In their case, the keywords were Tactical Heroic Cinematic Fantasy. If we were to write an equivalent set of keywords for The VOW (and I did), they would be “Competitive, Political, Epic”.
Competitive
This game is intended to be something players can win. Unlike other RPG’s, players are not necessarily working together. They may, if their goals align, but just as often, they may not. Ideally, this cut-throat competitive nature will play well into the second keyword:
Political
Players are encouraged to wheel and deal constantly while playing the VOW. Doing everything they can to gain an advantage, whether that is trading resources, promises, or even military power. Players should be encouraged to play the other players at the table off against one another in order to gain an advantage, or find alliances to further consolidate their strength.
Epic
Epic in the sense of greek poetry, as opposed to the modern usage. Players should witness great changes across the course of the world, and the deals and decisions that they make should change the history of the game that they are playing within.
These keywords will help inform decision making and feedback by giving a metric by which to compare these against. Rather than making completely subjective decisions, I can consider to what extent changes I make will improve the feelings of a competitive, political, epic RPG.
In comparing to Matt Colville’s keywords though, you may have noticed something distinctly missing. A genre. While their game is explicitly “fantasy”, the VOW is intended to be setting agnostic, which comes with some benefits and downsides. Specificity is useful for understanding, as vague concepts such as “resources” can appear nebulous to players. On the other hand, players should be able to choose in what world their game takes place, from the interactions between bronze age tribes to the universe spanning movements of science fiction alien races, or even play a full campaign from one to the other. In theory, the only thing that needs changing is how long a “turn” is in game time, and how far a “tile” is in game distance. Something which adjusts as the size of the game world gets larger. Everything else, the theming and “magic” of the world, is placed by the players and their GM.
For now, these keywords reflect the game that I’m trying to make, and are something I will revisit throughout the design process.
