Often, my brainstorming starts with a simple statement: “I’m not happy about how this works.” I then brainstorm and write all of the thoughts I have about the topic, even if they don’t seem to be connected. The data collection phase leads me to the actual writing phase. And getting other people’s thoughts, especially people playing in the game I’m trying to refine, is very helpful.

I won’t say that I directly respond to what players say. But I filter their description of the experience through my own. It’s good to see what and how they think about mechanics and story. From there, new things can grow.

Like, for example, my new method of Town Development. I had some system previously that tracked gold spent in town, recording the investment in various buildings and such, but it wasn’t anything super useful. It was half a system. The data, without the conclusion. And as I was reflecting on the system, I realized the big flaw: None of it was player facing.

There are places where the DM should be running things behind the scenes. It’s one of their hats. But part of the campaign’s premise was players shaping the town to be more useful to them, and having all details hidden behind the Screen was not a good way of making them feel ownership. So as I designed a system, I knew I wanted it to be very visible, with choices in the players’ hands.

I also knew that I had this new idea for Complications that I came up with in my last post. And that Town Development would be a good foil to that system. The town gives benefits, the outside world provides detriments. 

I do want to say that I had the germ of this idea appear Tuesday night and I spent a lot of dev time getting this, Complications, some magic items, and other considerations all ready for my Wednesday night game. So while I think this is internally consistent, I’ve not spent a lot of reflection time on it yet. It might have some glaring flaws that more consideration may uncover. But I do think it’s a step in a better direction than what I was running before.

The Mechanics

Town Development is handled with a deck of Town Cards. These represent buildings, businesses, organizations, and other ways that the players can gain benefits from the town. Many of these cards have a level and a progression track. Town Cards start at level 1, and gain pips of progress in three main ways:

1. When the card is drawn and played
2. When another card gives progress as its effect
3. When the players contribute to it

It takes 6 pips of progress to advance from level 1 to level 2, 12 pips to go from level 2 to level 3, and 24 pips to go from level 3 to level 4.

Player contribution can be handled in a few ways. That might be investing or donating funds to the business. Even buying and selling with that business can be helpful to its progress.

At the beginning of each Expedition, before players leave town, a number of Town Cards are drawn and played. A level 1 Town draws two Town Cards. This number can go up as specific buildings in the town develop, and as the number of Town Cards and their level increase.

A Town’s level is based on the sum of the levels of the buildings and the number of bonus cards. Every time this number reaches a multiple of 10, the Town increases in level. When the town reaches an even level, it draws an additional Town Card. When the town reaches an odd level, it has an additional Development Slot.

New Town Cards begin in a Development slot of the Town. These are buildings which have not yet been constructed in the town. When the slot is open, the players get to make a choice of what building to put in there. There is an additional deck of Potential Town Cards that is drawn from. The players draw two cards and pick which card fills the slot. These buildings require 6 pips of progress before they are moved to the Town Card Deck. They gain progress exactly like Town Cards do, except that once selected these are always played at the start of a new Expedition. They don’t currently have a store that can do business with the players, limiting their options for passively supporting the establishment.

While some Town Cards are unique, some have properties that are seen commonly.

• “For each level of this building, ignore a <type of> Complication.” These Town Cards allow players to have longer Expeditions, as they essentially prevent a few complications from accumulating.
• “Choose 1 per level:” These buildings have a bullet list of choices. Players get to decide which items are selected. Often, these represent stores in town gaining quantities of special stock. 
• “Add progress to a different building for each level of this.” This building gives progress. The progress cannot be given to the Town Card giving that benefit, and the benefit cannot be doubled up on another building. Each Town Card selected has to be a different card, and can’t be the originating card.

Some cards have abilities marked with the phrase “Passive”. These abilities are unlocked when the building reaches a certain level, and the effect applies even if the card is not drawn for a particular Expedition.

Some cards have abilities that are locked behind progress. Once the building reaches that level, the card gives that bonus during the Town Development phase. The unlocked ability activates the same expedition that it is unlocked.

Some abilities reflect the Town’s stats. For instance, the scrolls that are produced by a particular printer may be influenced by the Town’s Arcane stat, which is a count of all of the buildings that have the Arcane tag.

Some Town Cards interact with the game differently. Diplomacy Cards represent the development between other City States and the Town. Other Cards represent the growth of colonies and outposts into places of their own. Powerful blessings from the Gods may be treated as Town Cards. And finally, the Town itself may have a representing card that does something special.

In abstraction

Towns in RPGs fill several roles. 

First, mechanically, this is the place where gold is exchanged for things. All of the bits and bobs that adventurers have come from somewhere, and that place is a town. Often, you won’t need anything like this to support that aspect of RPGs. A quick description of the town and a confirmation that yes, they have a general store where you can buy rope is enough. 

Second, towns are a setting. Specifically, they are a map where things happen. Could be combat, could be other things. But knowing the height of a roof, the style of cobblestones, how far the docks with the marauding Vikings are, that’s important to people who are using the town as a space where things happen. 

Third, towns are characters. What the people feel are like, how the people are treated the atmosphere, all of that is things that give a town its personality. The character of a town is going to be reflected in its constabulary, its nobles, its pickpockets, its merchants, everything about the town can be felt in its character. Most of the time this doesn’t matter a lot, but there are certain towns where you want to try and capture that feel. New York feels different than Savannah. Ravnica and Coruscant are both World sized cities, but they are going to be different. Knowing the character is going to inform a lot. 

Fourth, towns are dungeons. There’s adventure hiding there. And while navigation might be more social than spatial, if you dig around you might uncover secrets and treasures. 

Fifth, towns are also quest givers. While a lot of quests are just given out by people who live in the town, you might find that players may take on quests on their own initiative, not because someone specifically has contracted them to deal with a problem, but because they see a problem and people suffering, and want to resolve it. 

Sixth, towns are also a stage. Role-playing can occur anywhere. Your players may or may not be interested, but any interaction might turn into a scene.

Seventh, particularly for this system, towns should provide benefits. While my system isn’t there yet, I can foresee a time when players are looking to start in a particular town because of the benefits that they would get from there. 

Through all of this, I have a particular set of guidelines as I was designing buildings. First, each building should be mechanically useful to the players. If I can, they should be able to look at the card and easily see how it is going to help them on an expedition. And if they can’t see how to help on an expedition, it should be pretty easy to see how the town grows because this building is part of it. 

But, the expeditions aren’t the only way that players are going to interact with these buildings. One of the reasons my players selected the Hunter’s Guild when presented with the options of what to develop was because it was going to be a place where they could hire trappers, and learn those style of skills. That made a difference to them. One of my players made a comment based on the name of a potential establishment that he wants to meet the person behind it. Even though I have abstracted these buildings fully into the gameplay quadrant, that’s not their only place where they reside. Players are going to be reaching for mechanics, for verisimilitude, and for story. 

If I was developing this as a video game, I could easily see each time a building comes up at the start of an expedition for there to be a small visual novel style interaction with those characters of that place, where the more Featherfoot Training Hall comes up, the more you fall in love with Jordan LaFoote as a character, as you see his foibles, and maybe have small quests that can kind of happen inside of town. 

I have two big concerns over this system. And sadly they conflict. 

On one hand, the bigger the town gets, the less likely it is that any particular Town card is going to come up. At the moment, my deck has 16 cards, which means on a given session, there’s something like a 10% chance that a card will come up. I’m unsure at the moment if I’m going to have the deck be shuffled every expedition, or if it will shuffle once the Town’s name card comes up, or if I’ll do something different, where the deck gets down below 50%, and then it’s shuffled for the next expedition. I want people to see all of the town, and that gets harder the bigger the town is. 

On the flip side, I don’t want this to take a long time. This should be at most 10, maybe 15 minutes of seeing the town’s growth and development. But no longer than that. And I’m afraid that as the town levels up, it’s going to take longer and longer just to handle all of the effects. And I don’t know the best way of splitting the difference. 

I’m sure there’s other problems with this system. I know that the town doesn’t really feel like guided growth at the moment. Sure, the players are making a choice, but they aren’t really shaping it. New buildings that have meta effects on the town and its development could help. For example, a civil service department of planning. Instead of grabbing two random cards from the needs-to-develop deck, the department of planning has a lot more buildings on top, and the players interact with that somehow to guide the growth. 

As I was designing my note cards for this, there are a lot of buildings that are reaching level four. I might just make that the endpoint of that building. Once it’s hit level four, it’s removed from the deck and it just applies a passive effect all the time. For example: once the quarry reaches level four, every expedition is granted an additional pip of progress as if it always comes up at level one every time, but the card itself is removed from the deck.. 

That is the basics of my system. There’s still a lot of development work and play testing that needs to go into it. It’s also tricky, as this mechanic is going to come up once a month instead of every week like my sessions are. That is going to make it hard for players to learn and embrace the system, and hard for me to see where things are failing. I just don’t have enough data yet. 

I do know however, that I can always spend time writing up a few more development cards. There’s a lot of buildings that I don’t have. And building a good library of cards would be helpful towards making this into either a standalone game or a supplemental RPG product. 

But that’s a future concern. For now, I’ll play with what I have and see how it does. If you have any questions or ideas, let me know!

Ciao