So, if this is a development log, let’s have some development talking around the birth of a mechanic in the game that is important to me: Schism.
The TL;DR is that since the games which inspire Chorus are about how violence, even for the‘right’ reason, cannot fix the world on its own and in the process makes people miserable, crazy, or dead, then Chorus should also seek to find a way to realize this. Thus, a mechanic which makes it so the more blood you shed, the more fucked up you become.
This post contains spoilers for Drakengard 3/Drag-On Dragoon 3and minor-ish spoilers for NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... (and probably the original version as well, but I haven’t played that) as part of the discussion.
On the one side, Chorus is derived from and plays in similar spaces as games like D&D and its many derivatives. But on the other, it’s trying to problematize the whole fantasy of the games, where you can kill monsters and take their stuff and that’s how you save the world.
There are, of course, many many shades to that which are introduced by the DMing player, but at the end of the day, the game mechanics mostly support killing monsters (READ: other, often sentient, creatures) and taking their stuff.
As such, Chorus also involves that. Sure, with different dice and different math, sure there’s a much-reduced spread of swag, but it’s still there. You’re going to go out and wreck shop and carve a bloody swath through a bunch of creatures who would rather you did not do that and remember that you did.
The other side of all that violenceis that while your character absolutely wants and needs to do a bunch of violence to achieve their goals, they also take on an ongoing effect called Schism that's about trying to highlight that all this violence is REAL BAD for your character.
One of the most striking scenes at the end of Drakengard 3′s Branch C ending where, having destroyed all her targets but lost the promise of her own death (and, thus, damning the world), our protagonist, Zero, stumbles past the corpse of one of her allies and spends a goodly while just vomiting.
Because, again, even if the ends we’re after are ones we can get down with, the means to that end are bad for you and probably won’t go well for you.
By the ending of this game (and most other games in the series and most D&D games), your character has killed literally thousands of people. They have not done this in the background; that killing is most of the action.
Why should you or your character get a happy ending for doing all that violence?
Please understand, I’m not trying to condemn anyone for playing the game in front of them, instead I just want to inspire us to think about it. Examine it. Problematize it.
I think that's the greatest strength of the material inspiring Chorus, after all: Yes, it's absolutely critical of violence as a vector for heroism, but it's not "you are bad because you want to do *gasp shock* v-v-v-violence!" it's "Right, well, you achieved your goal violently; here's what else happens." It’s not "You are stupid because you believe this", but "Here's another side of that same thing." Not "good things and bad things are the same" but "can you achieve different ends using the same means?"
Not answers, but questions.
Because much as the Socratic method is the favorite of bad faith asshats and equivocating pricks, it’s also one of the most powerful tools in philosophy because once you ask certain questions, you can’t un-ask them, much like a person who does harm to another person, no matter how much they might wish otherwise, cannot un-do it.
And, look, I’m definitely putting my thumb on the scales here because Chorus is written to have the subtitle "a game of heroic intentions and tragic ends" but that's neither here nor there. It’s not about condemning you for playing the game. I want people to play the game! I want people to get to the end of the inbuilt Act III and have a sense of discomfort because they murdered their way across the countryside to get there and that’s not an easy thing.
Again, the purpose is to encourage people to problematize their engagement with the game. I find that asking some of those questions, even if you don't always have answers, creates a space for the questions to be asked in other games.
Now, I don't think Chorus has a shot at being as transformative to a lot of spaces as the “roll to see what happens” and decentralized worldbuilding of the Powered by the Apocalypse games, but I want to inspire similar tweaks. Now, look, a lot of the changes PbtA inspired are homebrew as opposed to actual real changes in D&D, but mass-homebrew & house-rulings-at-scale have their effects and I know a lot of DMing styles I've seen improve a lot with the thing where, hey, instead of having the whole world, you invite other people to build it, too. By the same token, I want Chorus to inspire folks to stop and think about how, even though it's what the game wants and rewards, all the killing really should do something to the PCs.
It'd have to.
How could it not?
The answer, of course, is “because this is heroic fantasy so we’re doing the right thing so don’t sweat it”, but I want people to need to come to that conclusion themselves.
While I was talking about my thoughts around this, my partner (who is absurdly smart) made the call that instead of explaining it in the rules, just put it out there. “After all this killing, you're changed. You can reconnect to the world and bring it into yourself, but you can't become the person who hasn't killed a city's worth of people."
First instinct was to do a trade-off with the penalties that were going to accrue from having this massive, unaddressed trauma, like "You can hit harder but you get hit harder", that sort of thing.
Then I realized something: fuck it. This violence is destructive. It’s bad for you. It’s corrosive. So doing a lot of violence is ultimately self-destructive.
So when you take on Schism in significant quantities, there is no trade-off in your abilities, there are only penalties.
The biggest thing I'm realizing about the game is that because I want to make it very easy to get bonuses from a variety of sources, and you’re able to reduce Schism by interacting with your community and things like that, but I’m the designer. I dictate the physics. I can just say "No, if you do XYZ, you're fucked up. Period."
"Can I be unfucked?"
"Ah... no. Not entirely."
The things you have done have left their mark and as the game winds up to Act III, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities to bridge your connection to humanity, so you’ll just be fucked up as you stumble your way toward the final battle and all your friends start dying because big heroic deaths is a requirement of the game. And that’s going to do some fucky shit.
I just keep smiling at the thought of the last character to the endboss chamber, do the first few rounds of combat of this tired and traumatized character and then cut away from the Big Climactic Battle. Put the character somewhere else, months or years later, recounting the story.
Why did they do it? How did it go?
For whom were they fighting at the end?
How do they talk about what happened? Just want that last character to limp into the final boss chamber after watching all their adventuring companions die and surviving increasingly-heavy onslaughts, shellshocked and half-dead. I want all of that to be mechanically reflected and inspired. That’s why Schism is there.
They can survive, but I want the fiction to make it clear that there's no *winning*. I want to make a game where the outcome is for everyone to need to break between the short combats in the final session for tears.
I want for there to be a moment where someone says "No, we're going a little late because I don't want this to last a second longer than it needs to".
You don't get to the end of Chorus feeling like you’ve won. At the end, no matter what you do to the corrupt old overlord, you don’t become king.
Or if you do, it's very much a "rule over the ashes" thing.
Yay, you're the king over all these corpses!
Wheeee.
It’s that thing where winning the fight doesn't prove you were right, it just proves you won the fight.
Anyway, this is all to say that while I don't expect it to ever get massive, I hope through a little mechanic like "hey, all this violence fucks you up and changes how you interact with the world; some will feel more sympathy, others less” will inspire some questioning and excitement and a flair for a certain flavor of drama in people.
And on top of everything else, we get to reframe things like carousing in town after a fight.
Like, sure, you’re all at the tavern, drinking hard to blow off steam and have a good time, whatever, but it's also your character trying to remember how to be more than their combat dice. More than the thing we make them by putting them on the battlefield.
In doing this, we create incentives for roleplay and for finding sidequests here and there because roleplay and sidequests and other sundry little events are the things that help your character process things and reconnect with their personhood and their community.
And we do it mechanically, not just roleplay-wise.
It’s that game design adage that says “what a game rewards is what the game is about”. This game rewards hurting other people on an industrial scale and trying to be a person anyway.
You'll never not have done it, but maybe you can still be a person.
This also ties back to the lessons of the DrakeNieR games: you level up and whatever, fine, that's great, but the big to-do is about the combos and the bodycount.
So we turn doing damage into a resource. Wanna use your cool ability? Better rip and/or tear all these chumps. You need to do 120 points of damage before you can use this awesome fucking spell.
Same time: You wanna use that cool ability, it's going to fuck you up. You’ll know you’ve used a big spell and killed a lot of people to do it. You’ve done that. It's on your sheet. You've been tracking it.
That’s not a thing most people can easily bear.
So just as you can't use your equivalent of the gravity-wave cannon without racking up the damage, you also can’t do so and not rack up trauma, which is why damage output is tied to your Schism score.
So when you're cool and wipe out a town, you have wiping out a town on you. Mechanically. You can see something on your sheet that proves you did that. And if you don’t try to distract yourself, don’t try to reconnect with humanity, don’t find a way to convince yourself it was the right thing, that knowledge is going to make your game a fucking misery.
You wanna be cool in combat, prepare for the stumbling around being sick on the ground because oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck
And that's the friction I want to put at the core of it all, at all times.
It's a game about killing people and taking their stuff in service of a heroic goal, but also a game about how, holy shit, you just killed those people because you wanted their stuff, what the FUCK.
I dunno. It's all very circular when I explain it but it's a thing I'd like to put out there and for people to consider because maybe it makes people ask, in a game like the double-Ds or other sorts of heroic fantasy imaginations, if maybe there's another option than killing people who prevent you from getting what you want.
Of course, part of the cruel everything about Chorus is that even as it’s a game trying to inspire that question, it is alsoa game where the answer will pretty much always be "no". What you want and what they want are in total opposition. You’re trying to put an end to the evil overlord who keeps their society stable and who maybe seems to be actively good for them. You’re trying to steal the holy relic they revere to unlock the massive lock on the front of the overlord’s castle.
So if you accede, you end the story. In so doing, prove your ambitions false. All those other people you killed? Guess it wasn't that big a deal. You killed them for something you didn’t really believe in.
Is that better than killing even more people for a cause you passionately believe in?
It's a game about questioning shit like that. About how ugly it all is, even if you're doing it for reasons you think are good.
It’s all back to one of my favorite quotes from Yoko Taro: "You don't have to be crazy to kill people, you just have to think you're right".
I also want to inspire some of the quotes from NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139...:
"You cut down my sister like an animal and you tell me to stop!? No one stops!!"
"You want me to understand your sadness? You think I'm gonna sympathize with you? I swore to protect my sister and my friends! If someone puts them in danger, they must stand aside or be cut down!"
I’m not pretending any of this is gonna change the landscape of wargame-derived heroic fantasy games or anything like that, but I feel like it'll inspire a couple people.
And ain't nothing better than that.