Randomness and Scrap
I have a particular distrust for randomness steering the ship of TTRPG games.
In the Mythic Bastionland discord channel, more than one discussion was had by my suggestions of manipulating the dice result in order to make a more engaging story, to the dismay of many.
Random tables of content usually become sources of selected inspiration instead of dice rolls. Take your pick, kill the author.
And yet, my mind went to random tables when structuring how to make Scrap work inbetween its sources.
Motivated by the Blogwagon, some self reflection came into play; is that design true to what I think TTRPGs should be?
What are, after all, the alternatives? The center issue in this specific game design is:
Scrap can't be abundant nor insufficient.
It reminds me of the miserable [complimentary] balance of Papers Please (critically acclaimed 2013 game by Lucas Pope), where you are constantly challenged to make hard choices in order to get more cash and maybe buy heat for the day, or do "the right thing" and maybe your uncle dies of a cold because you couldn't buy medicine.
Players need to be motivated to pick between healing, upgrading, saving for trade and also pay the cost for traveling. If they are constantly stuffed with Scrap and all their needs are covered, there is no choice; if they can't even travel around without breaking down, the riskier options become too out of reach.
So then, we can conclude the number of Scrap yielded by each source is quite relevant to provide an environment of choice, which is in itself the core behavior I want to push players to do; so there needs to be a structure to balance it correctly.
What are our options?
A game could go by simply trusting the Game Master. Hey, balance the Scrap, keep them on their toes, good luck and godspeed.
Or on the opposite end, a game could make it a brutalist calculation, a cage of numbers reminiscent of rules-heavy games deep into EXP multiplied by Encounter Difficulty divided by # of Players.
The former will have the Game Master fighting for his life in the trenches alone; the latter haunts my dreams.
So, let's reach the conclusion many before already did: if I want to do my best to codify it without formulas, here's an acceptable range you can choose from.
Better yet, if you let randomness be the arbiter, you may relinquish the responsibility of any particular consequence; zero Scrap looted from that particularly nasty Droid? Sorry, the dice god spoke. That's part of the game.
But if you are like me, you will look at this random table and think: does this dice knows this game, this session, this scene, in this room, better than we do right now? They fought hard, the nasty Droid had a sick laser gun arm, how fun would it be to loot that? Screw that table, this arbitrary writer and his silly ideas.
But it's there to be ignored.
Do you know that one critical person that will watch a tv show and say, "well, this storyline is badly written, the character could have actually done this because of that"? My instinct these days is to remember: you can only think that better choice because the story is written for you to pick it. For the author to be killed, they have to offer their lives
A table exists for it to be ignored. To be picked apart, and to be picked from. But it must exist to allow you to ignore it.
So, to answer the question, is this design true to what I think TTRPG design should be?
Yes, because it's the one design that suggests and invites you to kill me.