12/08/2021 - DEVLOG #11: Archetypes And Reputation
It’s no secret that a large part of this game’s mechanics were inspired by Disco Elysium’s various RPG systems. Skills with weird names and weirder descriptions instead of your regular charisma, strength, intelligence, and so on. Dice rolls behind a lot of interactions, which can result in hilarious failures. Self-contained bits of story and lore that have gameplay implications once you’re done with them.
Disco’s systems worked for the kind of game Disco was. Doesn’t necessarily translate 1:1 to Infimus. I copied the homework without making any changes. That doesn’t work. The teacher notices. So, after testing the current RPG systems extensively through development, I’ve decided to revamp them. Better now than later: the longer I wait, the more work I will have to do. Let’s analyze the intended purpose of every single one of them, its problems, and how I plan to fix them. Today, I’ll focus specifically on Archetypes.
You Are Not You, But Many
Archetypes, in my original design, were supposed to be similar to Disco’s copotypes and Fallout: New Vegas’ reputation system. You’d make your name known as a particular kind of villain: an Operator, getting right into the thick of it, preferring to deal with things personally and decisively; a Mastermind, manipulating others and the world for your own ends, always plotting in the shadows, using your creativity and intelligence for nefarious purposes; and finally an Eccentric, doing things your own way which is literally no one else’s way because oh god why would you do that. What are you doing. Stop. This would help define your supervillain’s style, and let me have the world react accordingly. If you’re known as a Mastermind, people will be wary of your schemes. If you’re an Eccentric, they will know to expect the unexpected. An Operator, they won’t cross you. At least not overtly. And so on.
There were three problems with this system. One, I really couldn’t think of good ways to make it play into the game’s recent developments, so it wasn’t at all integrated with it. Two, it’s reductive. Not all supervillains can be constrained into these three archetypes. Three, it’s completely opaque that the system works this way.
You Are Not You, But What You Think Of You
I’m going to do the following to address the issues with the Archetypes system:
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Rename it to “Reputation” to make it clear what it’s about, and add flavor text pointing at what it does.
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Instead of 3 broad archetypes and fitting various styles of play into them, introduce various statistics that reflect the way you play and then go from there. What do I mean? Instead of you deciding to take a civilian hostage and me going “ok I guess that makes you a bit like a Mastermind” and raising the related stat, you taking a civilian hostage raises your “Ruthlessness” stat. The world will then react accordingly: the more ruthless you are known to be, the more afraid civilians will be of you, and the harder the legal system will punish you if they capture you.
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Archetypes are still present, but are now more about the way you choose to present yourself. Think of it like classes in RPGs, but you get to pick them as a consequence of things you do. Going back to the previous example: if you’re ruthless, if you don’t care about the lives and well being of others, you will move closer to roles like Beast, Reveller, Mastermind. And further from something like Antihero or Smooth Criminal. All of these are separate “classes” that you can opt into if you have a particular stat distribution, and you can switch from one to the other if your methods, and by consequence those stats, change.
What do you think?
Of course, all of the above is subject to change. If you have any feedback about it, lemme know.