awesome

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
apas-95
apas-95

You move from the city to a cozy rural town. You inherit your grandfather's land, and set to working it. It's a big plot, so once you make enough, you can even pay some of the townsfolk to harvest and plant for you. The mayor thanks you for revitalising the village, and bestows upon you a shiny medal. One day, the civil unrest creeps closer, and a battalion of the revolutionary peoples army comes to town. They oust the mayor, and have the townsfolk establish a council. You can't sell your crops at market right now. The council, ultimately, decides to collectivise the town's farmland, most of which is yours. Do you work on the farmland that was once yours as a labourer, and accept only your share of the collective's wealth? Do you help the mayor, who is returning with the national guard? and whoch of these seven fuckable sprites do you chose to be your wife/boywife?

thydungeongal

legorockraiders asked:

I'm really interested in the mechanics of tabletops, which makes me want to know about the mechanics of disco elysium, but instead of a detailed mechanical analysis I can only (understandably!) find narrative commentary. As a Very Smart Cookie, I would love to hear what you have to say on topics such as... How does disco elysium work? What makes it different than other games? Is it *just* the quality of the writing? How do the mechanics synergize with the quality of the writing?

thydungeongal answered:

So okay, it’s not just the quality of the writing, although to be fair; the writing is like really good.

But as for the mechanics: Disco Elysium is ultimately a video game. It is clearly inspired heavily by tabletop RPGs, even more so than most CRPGs are (like, Disco Elysium is pretty much a masterclass in terms of how well it manages to make a CRPG feel very close to a tabletop RPG in terms of player expression and the marriage of fiction and mechanics). Disco Elysium’s actual game mechanics are not all that remarkable, but the game uses them in such a way that pretty much necessitates it being a video game.

At its core, Disco Elysium’s resolution mechanic is based on a roll of two six-sided dice plus a skill rating, trying to roll greater than or equal to a target number determined by the difficulty of the action, and it uses a very traditional type of Pass/Fail method of determining results based on those rolls. It is, at the end of the day, unremarkable as a resolution mechanic. There is something to be said for the distribution of results on the 2d6 and how even a single plus can actually skew the probabilities in the player’s favor and how this combined with the fact that the game makes various individual +1 bonuses from drugs and clothes and whatever easily available to the player is a great example of ludonarrative harmony. But ultimately the system isn’t one that would exactly make tabletop enthusiasts hoot and holler.

But the game still uses that very simple mechanic effectively, not only because of the aforementioned stacking of bonuses (which is really easy to do in a video game but in a tabletop context often results in tedium) but also because the game is actually doing lots of hidden and rapid fire checks under the hood ALL THE TIME. When in a tabletop RPG you probably shouldn’t want to stop the flow of a scene where everyone at the table is jamming and narrating together for the sake of rolling a knowledge check, Disco Elysium is doing that for you all of the time. That is something where the game is making the most out of the fact that it can offload that stuff to the program, to be handled in the background at a rapid fire pace.

There is definitely stuff that can be taken away from Disco Elysium for the sake of tabletop RPGs, but its prose is hard to imitate without sounding pretentious or insincere, and its mechanics would be hard to replicate in a tabletop format because they ultimately rely on a lot of book-keeping that may be tedious to do manually as well as doing LOTS of rolls in the background that could potentially introduce unnecessary friction into gameplay if replicated at the table.

imsobadatnicknames2

I think the two most mechanically remarkable parts of Disco Elysium are the white check vs. red check mechanic (white checks are often required to progress quests but they can always be retried, red checks can only be tried once but there isn't a single red check in the entire game where success is required to be able to actually finish the game) and the fact that it doesn't have a combat system (at least not in a traditional sense. There are scenes in which you engage in combat but mechanically it's handled identically to a conversation or any other challenge instead of having its own dedicated gameplay subsystem, which I think is the only part of the game that clearly reflects a bit of PbtA heritage).

This last one might seem weird, i.e. defining what it DOESN'T do as one of the most remarkable parts of its mechanics, but I think that defining what a game cares and doesn't care about and being willing to do away with traditional elements of the genre that are unnecessary for the experience is something that a lot of rpg developers (both of the tabletop and videogame variety) would benefit from doing more often. E.g. As much as it's considered one of the greatest RPGs of all time (and one of DE's main influences), I think Planescape: Torment would have massively benefitted from its developers realizing that if your game largely doesn't care about combat it shouldn't have a combat system and hostile encounters every few minutes.