I do these things and more: Write as Your Commissioned Elyrian Author, Design Interesting & Helpful Graphics, Create a CK2 - CoE Mod, Curated Anthology of Show Us Your Domain Entries.
In a peerless chamber of celestial luster and metalwork by unknown hands, with cavities filled by lives passed and passing, and generations not yet lived, speaks a pair of artisans. They plan a life with astral complexity. Their words are punctuated, not by some grammar sense, but by creamy dunes of milky light, and hollow spreads between the stars, and connections drawn by the pass of eyes, which are nothing such matched by ours….
Thank you in advance for taking your time to explore this thread. It is my effort to investigate CoE’s Personal Destiny system as we know it, a journey to bridge public information with inferred mechanics, and to answer my greatest concerns as they pertain to the application of dynamic narrative in digital settings. My interest is understanding whether this broadly dynamic narrative delivery can provide deep, expressive, and stunning arcs that on its face seems profoundly conditional.
We learned in the June 20th video on the Personal Destiny System, this system is designed to (1) permeate a massive landscape with quest content, and (2) ensure the content is meaningful to a player, such that he or she might feel their character is fulfilling their destiny through their resolutions of these unique encounters. The system promises subversion of linear quest delivery that commonly queues people into heroics, or otherwise drain players into gaunt, glaze-eyed sufferers for the sake of enjoying other goals.
I say in defense of established systems, however—linear story systems can deliver, at best, good single-player content, but I struggle to find a narrative system that truly suits a multiplayer setting. An essential single-player transplant tends to pale in comparison against the backdrop of diverse online experiences—and that’s what I really want to get at: divining if this Personal Destiny system is naturally suited to diverse multiplayer experiences, without suffering dilution of the deep, expressive and stunning arcs a truly tailored personal story might hold.
Working to that end, it’s imperative to illustrate how far I’ve gotten into picking apart this system to satisfy many of the voiced mechanics yielded in the video. I do link relevant timestamps of the video so you can see to what I am referring, if you want. If you’ve not seen the video in total, this explanation may be dense, so I recommend doing that. I believe the system to work as follows:
1 - Choose Character Birthdate
Celestial bodies (planets, comets, the binary star) move in their Keplerian orbits.
Each celestial body configures in an alignment w/ at least one of 12 Houses (These houses, while joined with esoteric tags, I believe actually describe facets of gameplay, i.e. “Labor,” meaning, mining, lumbering, building, etc. There are 47 sufficiently unique tags across all 12 Houses, however, spread amongst them are repeats of some tags which increase their spread for possible combinations in later steps. This creates a spread of at least 53 tags across 12 Houses.
The celestial bodies float about with 36 sufficiently unique tags (at least 41 tags otherwise) which describe a greatly modified version of the highly mutable 36 Dramatic Situations. As such, it is my belief that the tags attached to the celestial bodies describe an inciting situation which takes place in the facets of gameplay described in the tags of the 12 Houses. Most importantly, the Celestial Body tags describe Roles necessary for Players/AI to fulfill—and if you look over the 36 situations, you’ll rightly wonder how all 36 situations, even if greatly modified would fit in all facets of gameplay, and the answer is: they don’t.
2 - Celestial bodies aligned with Houses—both of them break into their constituent tags.
3 - Next, it is my expectation another combination formula is executed, combining a House’s facet of gameplay-to-Celestial-tag—which is the same step that yields “millions of combinations,” of which your character for one life will obtain dozens of these pairings.
It is my expectation this step only combines ONE compatible Celestial Body tag a compatible House tag, and I expect would exhaust combinations of other celestial bodies aligned to the House, to the point every House tag is paired.
So, in practice it would actually look something like this, where one of the planets, say Pudoros falls in alignment with the House of Connections. One of The House of Connection’s tags is “Land.” A compatible tag pair for “Land” could be “Aid,” which is a tag under Pudoros. Other combinations for “Land” could also exist, either among Pudoros’s other tags, as well as any other tags for additional Celestial Bodies in alignment with the House of Connection. ONE of the 5-9 Celestial Body tags in alignment emerges as the combination for “Land,” looking something like: Land-Aid, Romance-Success, etc., until such time that all Houses containing a Celestial Body receives its successful pairing for its facet of gameplay.
4 - A full character destiny is compiled. It governs:
Facets of Gameplay, or even environments you can trigger a story arc.
Roles your character can satisfy within an arc.
The Roles available to you in other player-character destinies
and, at the conclusions of story arcs, the effect of Resolutions on your Character Affinity (which influences future Roles you may enter,) and Soul Affinity (which behaves similar, yet with stronger weight in granting Roles suitable for your style of play (A soul also has its own destiny and I expect to behave similarly to character Personal Destiny)).
Next, with a Personal Destiny, the second half of the story engine, “Story Finder,” comes in and it governs, as I expect:
Triggers in environments/facets of gameplay
Locating & attracting Actors to satisfy Roles
Checklist of Conflicts and their Resolutions along a story arc
Now, given the above, I believe we have distilled the system enough to identify whether broad content defaults to shallow content, and it seems it doesn’t have to be the case. Snipehunter describes the Personal Destiny System as being the core to flavor your character’s life with thematic encounters (00:20:03 - 00:20:29). It is as though the Personal Destiny system is only charged with assigning you books from a library of content, of which you serve as a main actor—and it thereby serves the narrative content widely. It is then on the onus of another system to produce the narrative content with attention, giving it depth, and allure, and compelling stakes. Ultimately then, what an SBS narrative designer just needs to concern him or herself with is the following list:
Conflict suitable to facet of gameplay
Thematic tag under which story would trigger
Roles necessary to fill and their conditions, such as other destiny types operated by other players, i.e. Labor-Misfortune/Failure to trigger a landslide.
Any necessary props
Trigger(s) for the narrative’s begin state
Triggers along the story arc.
Multiple resolutions
Predictable consequences to each resolution, including direction change for character and soul affinity.
This seeming division of duty seems to suggest some extent of narrative design can turn any result of the Personal Destiny roulette wheel into a deep and personal story, disrupting the traditional queue for heroics and the necessary disinterest that hangs over quest hubs. In the video, Caspian discusses how a personal story arc plays out (00:27:06 - 00:29:13), and in my above example, I provide how you might come to possess that story arc, additionally where such an arc could be sculpted with narrative design. It is a small division of duties that expresses how a seemingly random story can cover the interests of a player who might care about compelling stories.
My worry, after going through this exploration of the Personal Destiny system and its constituent parts is that I could be far-far off my assessment. I worry that Snipehunter and Caspian’s repeated use of “story arc” was one that held more of a vague and implied meaning than actually presenting on occasion, a story arc with stakes, meaningful interaction and all it might include. Toward the end of both the landslide example and Q&A, I felt I could account for an interpretation where destiny content could be void of sculpted story content—leading to my fear of broad and shallow delivery. This was worrying, but overwhelmingly, I have found details from the SBS short stories, to the Silver Run Mine Design Walkthrough that there will be some necessary interaction that presents a profound and new way of serving multiplayer narratives.
TL;DR: I check out if broad delivery means shallow delivery of narrative. Made big old spreadsheet testing various ways Personal Destiny might work. Settle on a way that convinces me. Infer a separation of delivering destinies widely that maintains impact sculpted narrative could have for players. Express concern I could be way off and the risk of delivering shallow content could still exist, but SBS may yet have a method of satisfying, at least my desire, for gameplay to serve up meaningful narrative. Again, thanks for sticking it through.
I do these things and more: Write as Your Commissioned Elyrian Author, Design Interesting & Helpful Graphics, Create a CK2 - CoE Mod, Curated Anthology of Show Us Your Domain Entries.