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Okay so yesterday we talked about narrative calculus, the art of boiling down a genre to component parts so people can easily build their own. RPGs should be launch pads: with little to no effort, you should be able to leap into the stars of story. #Partners
So to get the most oomph to your launch you often need to narrow the focus right down WITHOUT cutting off too much. It's a delicate balancing act. It's got to feel like Star Wars to the nth degree but let you play ANYTHING
So sometimes you narrow things down by tropes of substance - you're from these planets, you're one of these people, you own these things - but I prefer to narrow things down with tropes of THEME. So in #Partners you can be anything you want as long as you fit some rules.
The strict rules are: the game is (mostly) only for two players. And one of you has to be the wild card and one of you has to be the straight shooter. You have to decide that first up. No ifs no buts. Although you saw the mostly there, of course...
Any sane RPG likes to give people the escape clause. Because of COURSE people want to mess with your game. So there's always an asterisk. It's not EASY to modify #Partners to work with more than two but it's also not that hard. You can see the pathway.
You also have to solve mysteries that generally take a single episode/arc to solve. You can shrink the episodes down to Brooklyn 99 length, or with slow pacing stretch it out to almost True Detective length.
Also we give you a lot of leeway on what the wild card MEANS. Temperance Brennan is the wild card BECAUSE she follows the rules. The Good Cop is the wild card for the same reason. Monk isn't exactly "wild" but he's the wild card.
And your straight shooter can be pretty "not straight". They just fit in better than others. They say the things that people generally expect them to say. Ice T is the straight shooter to Munch. (But he can also be the wild card too - and you can switch it up)
But the FUN part of locking down tropes of THEME is you can then have the other tropes be LITERALLY anything you want. Maybe the wild card is a revitalised Ichabod Crane. Maybe you're a superhuman genetic experiment. Maybe you're time travelling wizards with a magic box. Anything
In fact, #Partners is specifically designed so that going in, you can't predict anything about the show's setting, concept, genre or tone much, except that it will be partners solving mysteries. That's unpredictable. That chaos is PARTNERED to the restrictions.
Next time, we'll talk about how that's done. #Partners comes out next year.
