First Strategies

I was reading something I wrote a few years back and pulled a thought out. I’ve been thinking about reducing the kinds of actions a player character starts out with to make games less complicated for beginning players. That turns out to be a complicated thing to accomplish. I realized while reading, that maybe it’s not the specific actions that need to be narrowed down, maybe it’s the goals.

My thought is that a character in this hypothetical game would have to go through a right of passage that is their first goal. Once the character has accomplished this goal, they are more free to move in a direction they make up for themselves.

In simple terms, lets imagine that this right of passage is hunting your first bull elk. Imagine a society that requires you to take down the elk to make their weapons from, to pay back their family in food and hide. Now the child is no longer bound to their parents and can go out on their own.

I don’t have much interest in making that game, but it serves as an example of what the first goal could look like.

Why do I feel this is important? I am frequently asked “How do you win?” A question I usually make up some long and complicated answer to. If the answer was the first right of passage of a society, then the game becomes more concrete.

Now imagine a string of societal goals that a character can go after, each which give a character specific rights in the society. The goals of the players are defined and the reasons they go after them have to be clear too.

I have heard of a game that does this explicitly. The players have to first gain a title that allows them to move up in society. I don’t think it helped in the game’s adoption, but that may just be an anomaly. Maybe it means that the thought is garbage.

It could be said that in a lot of games, the first goal is to amass wealth to become a formidable opponent. The point where the PC has reached this point is fuzzy though and makes it hard for an early player to know when they’ve arrived at their goal.