Boy, you said it. I was hoping to keep each Round three days apart, and after two Rounds we’re already 12 hours behind (or more), but a big part of that was that Round Two got so damned much story (and so many groovy animated maps), coupled with the fact that calculating Round One’s Results was our first time doing Results, and my writing those Results into a post was my first time doing that, too, which further delayed me getting Round Two’s Missions written. Many, many things needed to be reiterated and refined, and we’ve learned a lot from it all, and most especially from you guys. We’ll be tighter this time, but speaking for myself, I have to really keep a tight grip on my natural tendency toward narrative complexity (or “bloat,” not to put too fine a point on it), and just concentrate on shaving everything down to a (hopefully) compelling and yet easily digestible mouthful.
Just about everything that’s frustratingly complicated about the gameplay is my fault. I don’t want things to be so easy or straightforward that no thought at all is required to play. After all, this is a text-based game that takes place almost entirely in our imaginations, fancy animated GIFs aside. We can’t rely on eye-grabbing graphics or cool sound effects. We have to evoke the players’ imaginations through, let’s face it, piles of words.
And like I was telling someone else in a PM, I have some fetish for making certain things make sense. I could make Repair as easy and mindless as running over a Health Pack in Halo. But in our game, that would signify a loss of complexity that would be counterproductive. I’m not saying fixing cars is an inherently fun part of a game, but if fixing damage requires nothing more than money (or running over a Health Pack), then there’s no point in having damage at all.
This is a postapocalyptic world of finite resources, and those resources must be husbanded carefully, and played against each other with forethought and a willingness to experiment. Somebody asked if they might craft Repair Parts out of scrap metal. Well, Skyrim and Fallout would certainly let you do that, but I’m not planning on our players (or me, for that matter) putting 150 hours of playtime into BDW, like I did for both those games. As you say, this game should be playable by those without the time for the narrative and interpersonal stuff, though the experience is richer for those of us who play that way.
I have the low-reward, extremely-low-risk Mule Train option for those who want (or need) to sit out a Round or Rounds, so we have that. We also have a mechanism in place to prevent death from being dismayingly permanent, as those of us who mourn the bold Hobar in BSD can appreciate.
We’ll do our best to keep the pace brisk, and we’ll simplify what we can (especially the more hair-pulling parts of the Repair system), but it all has to work in a way that make sense with the world as we’ve created it so far. Things can and will change and evolve, but out-and-out reinvention won’t happen. Player-characters are still going to have to figure out how to work together, or try to go it alone (which won’t always be a suicidal strategy).
