There’s a mechanic in CHORUS which is how I want to make it easier and rewarding for players to track their character’s damage output (which, in turn, has some math done to it and becomes a character’s Schism later on).
In a lot of these entries and, indeed, in my working document of the book, this is so far just called “damage” and while that’s an accurate reflection of what it is, as a name it’s kind of uninspired.
So let’s talk a little about names for things while I see if talking to the duck doesn’t help me out a little.
Gonna warn you, this post crawls right up its own backside real quick.
The thing about names for things in a TTRPG is that they’re all at once the least important thing possible and the most important thing ever.
This is, by the way, true of names in every other context as well.
In this context, names are unimportant because they’re how we describe a mechanic. The mechanic in this case is “you can interact with the system in new ways if you accrue enough resources through interacting with it using the tools you already possess”. Break things down further, of course, and it’s “If you roll enough dice on your turn, you get to roll more dice on a later turn.” Further, it’s “generate a number; later generate a different number with slightly-higher odds of the number being big” Further than that and it’s “pretend a thing that doesn’t matter matters”.
Which is where names come in.
In TTRPGs, dice have a kind of fetishistic (in the magical sense, not necessarily the sexual sense [I don’t know your life and I’m not here to judge]) power to them. They represent possibility. They are the deciders of the next immediate part of the story. When your character casts a spell, it’s through dice. When they’re cleverer than you can be, that’s the dice deciding it is so. For this reason, even when we’re on a virtual tabletop (as I often am), without real dice, we don’t say “generate some numbers with a random-generation tool” or “hit the button which contains the macros we’ve put together and which represent your character’s actions in this space”, we still say “roll for it”. In roll20 (the VTT with which I am most acquainted), the command to generate numbers is expressed in terms of dice.
I explain this to express that it’s all nonsense. We keep the names because the names mean something to us and because that meaning becomes part of the game, even if you can’t make a mechanic for it.
More, if a game decided that the dice were always to be called “bones” (as in “roll them bones”) but didn’t go at that decision with conviction (e.g. still referred to rolling two 6-bones as ‘2d6′ instead of, say, 6b*2 or something similar), you’d never buy that the game* really wanted to call dice ‘bones’, and the whole exercise would feel flimsy somehow.
*note that I refer to this hypothetical game as if it were an entity all its own as opposed to a hypothetical product created by hypothetical people.
So moving up the hierarchy of breaking things down, we come to game mechanics and why names are important.
See, you can call a mechanic anything, but if that anything doesn’t have a good name, at best there’ll be a little thematic dissonance, middling there’ll be confusion, and worst it’ll completely break the thing the game’s going for and the whole artistic endeavor loses its ability to make an impact.
An example of this is D&D 4e’s decision to rename all the combat actions the characters take as “powers”. No attacks vs. spells, no weird extra kinds of class-specific actions, not even different levels of spells as the other editions have*. There are different kinds of powers, but those are based more on utility: once-a-day powers, at-will powers, once-per-battle powers, etc. Differences in degree rather than differences in kind. And on a certain level, "powers” makes sense: it takes out the idea of all the complicated stuff that might dissuade someone from engaging in certain kinds of play and replaces it with the idea that all of the characters are on some superhuman level to the point that even running in and swinging your sword in a really good way is called a power. Neat!
*Let’s not even get into how your character has a level but spells work on their own level system which can confound someone: your character is 4th level, which means they have access to 2nd level spells; why don’t they have access to 4th level spells? Because those are for characters of 7th level and up.
But the frustrating part of this is that for all the upsides of flattening all these kinds of combat actions (spells, sneak attacks, combat, etc.) into “powers”, the downside is that the fantasy becomes different in a way that put a lot of people off. Superheroes (as in the folks in the spandex with logos on their chests) have powers; pulpy fantasy heroes have abilities or skills. It’s hard to play a certain kind of character when the game starts from the assumption that your character is already some kind of minor legendary hero. And this fed into the criticism that 4e was trying to turn the D&D franchise into something more akin to a computer MMO, complete with new names for class roles which felt like MMO descriptors of DPS, Healer, Tank, etc.
Having not played 4e myself, I’ve no clue if the system itself is any good (it sounds like it is and there’s some bits I heard about that inspired some bits of CHORUS), but the names they picked mess with my fantasy of what I think of when I think of a D&D character.
So, the trouble of names generally discussed, let’s get specific.
CHORUS, as longer-term readers will doubtless have noticed (brief aside: who are you? why are you here? this is a silly place to be. it barely makes sense for ME to be here), is a game focused on violence in the context of heroic fantasy. It’s reacting to D&D as a pop-cultural thing even as it’s inspired by the works of Yoko Taro (whose name is often used by me as a synecdoche for the whole team behind the Drakengard and NieR games because there’s been a lot of carryover on the creative side throughout the years) and is as much about examining our relationship to violence as a fantastical element as it is about finding people who stand in our way and tearing them apart.
So to that end, what do we call this mechanic by which you gain the ability to do more spectacular forms of violence?
As noted at the start, it’s presently called “damage” but that’s a bad name for a mechanic. Why is it bad? Because if I say “add the resulting damage to your Damage”, that’s confusing and circular. Similarly, if it’s called something like “Damage Tally” (because that’s where you’re tallying all the damage you do), it still feels like it could bring about some confusion because it feels like it might involve you also tallying the damage you take. It’s too broad a name with too specific a purpose. And since it’s the counterpart to “Schism”, a mechanic which represents your increasing alienation from the world as a result of the trauma and bloodlust and other forms of psychological changes you undergo when you set out to do a lot of killing, it’s even worse because--not to toot my own horn--it would put “damage tally” next to something that feels much more successfully evocative.
So now we go through the work of finding a new and better name.
This post isn’t even meant to be the end of that journey, more a chronicle of it so that if you, dear reader, also want to undergo the immense and immensely silly task of designing a mid-scale TTRPG from scratch, you can know that you aren’t alone.
So here we go.
The impetus for this post came from a thought earlier to rename this damage-tallying “momentum”.
And suddenly I realized I was on the right track because that’s an evocative name. Not ‘Schism’ level evocative, but it does a lot. Feels good while also describing what it’s for. You aren’t tallying damage done so you can do more damage, you’re gaining momentum so you can use higher-tier attacks. These are, mechanically, the same things, but the feel is different. “Using my once-an-encounter power of FIREBALL” vs. “Using my 3rd level spell FIREBALL” different.
But it’s imperfect. Incomplete. Because while it describes the mechanical feel of what you’re doing, it does so while ignoring the core theme of the game, which (at the risk of repeating myself too very much) is “solving your problems with violence is not healthy for you”. You’re not slaughtering a bunch of people so you can use bigger powers to look cool, you’re “gaining momentum” so you can be effective on the battlefield.
As euphemisms go, you could do worse.
But in this game, I want to keep attention focused on what’s actually going on in the fiction. At least to some extent. Though hopefully, it's not so focused that the violence being done becomes background noise. There again, there’s no way to introduce this much violence as a core game mechanic and expect the death of every normal person with 1hp to hit as hard as it really fucking should. And much as we don’t want to hide what all these things are behind euphemism, we also don’t want the violence itself to become fetishistic or gloating. Words like “slaughter” or “bloodbath” should, in many contexts, bring up images of horror, but in games of violence, there’s a lot of precedence for those to be used as gloating or congratulatory titles. Indeed, there’s a lot of thrill associated with things like that because of how transgressive they sound. Polite society doesn’t WANT you to be a mass murderer, after all, so you can have this bit of thrilling rebellion by killing all these pretend people and getting rewarded for it. The deathmatch first-person shooter genre, for example, uses a lot of things like that. I happily remember playing Unreal Tournament (hi, yes, I am An Old) and getting excited when I heard “MULTI KILL” or vaguely jealous at people who were skilled enough to get “ULTRA KILL”.
So, then, what to do with the name?
The first thought was change it from “momentum” to “violent momentum”. This would give it some specificity while easing off the euphemistic quality of ‘momentum’, but also... it’s a bit clunky, isn’t it? And for some reason, the thought of abbreviating it to “VM” makes me think of the word “vomit” and while a part of me thinks that’s not exactly a bad thing in this context (that much killing should make you want to vomit), AND it’s probably not an association people who aren’t me would make, it just feels wrong. The mouthfeel is off. The thematic ‘oomph’ isn’t there even as I do think it aptly describes what is going on.
So, then, we start falling down the synonym hole. Bust out your thesaurus and see what we can find.
The best word that’s a kind of sidelong synonym to ‘momentum’ is “impulse” and now we’re talking. I don’t know that “impulse” really describes the thing going on (you aren’t being impulsive, this is at least a kiiiinda tactics-ish game) but if we swap it straight across and make the mechanic “violent impulse”, we’re starting to get something closer to what we’re going for. We’ve gone from the euphemism of building momentum to... what? Indulging in your violent impulses. We could go a step further into “dark impulses” and just say explicitly that your character’s feeding their own darkness, maybe play it off as part of the cursed weapons, but there again we hit the difficulty with the thrill of transgression that might come with someone acting on their dark impulses.
More than that, if we take that step into “dark”, on top of the transgressive thrill, we also get to the part where the game is pretty explicitly judging people for deciding to play it, and that’s the wrong feeling. The game is meant to inspire introspection on the nature of violence in a fantasy like this. You’re meant to come to the end, where most (if not all) of the heroes are dead, leaving a long and bloody swath behind them as they acted to achieve their goals (which were often against a power of equal or greater violent power which was brought to bear upon them) and sit in that ugly, bittersweet emotion. The misery is cathartic because your characters did the best they could with the information they had in this awful situation in which they were placed.
We call what they’re doing awful or violent, yes, but the game doesn’t go straight to “darkness” or “evil”. Things like that have to come from the players or the game isn’t doing its job. To do otherwise, to invite people to play a game and then insult them as somehow bad for playing it, is absolutely against the thing I want the game to be about.
So for the moment, I feel like I’m stuck with “violent momentum”. I’m gonna be revisiting this name for the next while and trying to find the right nuance of meaning, but at least until then this feels like a better-than-decent placeholder that isn’t also just explicating that this is the game-mechanical version of “powering up” or “charging up” or similar video game mechanics or other ways I want to use design to reward people for playing the way I want them to--particularly since “how I want them to” play is a pretty straightforward thing that a lot of people already know how to do and which will, hopefully, be easy to teach.
But that, too, is for another time.