Okay now that I'm done with a totally different voice conversation about came design I can expand on this. So, thread. (1/?) https://twitter.com/quantumdotdot/status/1345825435964366849

For those who haven't played, Phasmophobia has a very unique (in my experience) approach to mission prep and gear.

After each mission, each person individually receives money for personal and group objectives they completed, much like individual XP in FITD games.

This money is then used to buy gear at the start of a new mission.

The catch, and what makes it really interesting, is gear is shared as a group. In order to have the gear on the mission, you have to remove it from your inventory, and add it to the crew's pool of shared gear.

So, if someone has way more money or a higher level, they can quickly outfit lower-leveled friends, or buy extra gear to help out people who don't have as much money.

It's a really cool collaborative system, even if in the game the UI is a little janky. (It's a one-dev game)

Here's the catch: if you survive during the mission, your gear gets returned to your personal stash, to be contributed towards group gear on future missions.

If you die, you lose ALL GEAR you contributed to the group pool, but you get some "life insurance" money as a trade-off.

Also important to note: you die due to ghosts hunting you. How violent the ghost is, and your likelihood of death, varies based both on the mission type, and HOW MUCH YOUR CREW MANAGES TO PISS OFF THE GHOST.

And IMO, Phasmophobia encourages you to drive like you stole it.

As you may have already figured out, this all leads to a very cool risk/reward decision:

Do you share expensive new gadgets you were finally able to afford with the group, even knowing that one sideways ghost encounter could take it from you?

Or do you selfishly hold onto it?

To bring it back to Forged in the Dark design...

In my experience, Load and Gear systems can often feel basically perfunctory, with no real stakes in them, other than having enough load to get the cool thing when you need it.

Folks often tend to forget that you can lose use of/access to gear as a consequence.

Even when you do, redundancies mean that another PC can lend a slightly less good sword, or still has access to one.

Most of the non-playbook gear never sees the light of day in a campaign.

Players stick to their 3-4 most-used items.

You always have just enough load for the job, and all the gear you want.

Any of these sound familiar?

By building that risk/reward I mentioned into the core loop of the crew gear system, Phasmophobia fixes a lot of these issues and makes each piece of gear feel important.

Actively selecting gear for a mission has meaning and weight.

Expensive, higher-level gear feels special.

There are some FITD games that somewhat retool the approach to gear to better suit the premise and genre of their game! @songsforthedusk and @Notaninn's Beam Saber come to mind.

However, I think there's a lot of unexplored space to rethink what gear/load systems CAN be

The gear/load system in base Blades was intended for daring scoundrels defying trouble at a breakneck pace and looking out for their own skin before others.

Looking to other solutions as FITD games branch out in genre is worth doing!

My game isn't using load as such, which is why this is a tweet thread, and not me tinkering with my design lol.

Anyway, I hope this inspired some cool ideas, and if you want to talk shop or ask me more about Phasmophobia, please do, I love to talk game design

(end thread)