Go-y

Created Thursday 10 August 2023

Yeah, this is the part that'll probably never be made. Not by me, and that narrows it down quick. But still a miniature-based board game.
When you play "nornal" roleplay---interact with other players & NPCs, do things in the world, even campaign---you just RP as usual. But any time there is a battle, you've got to stop any other play and lay out the battle. Battles are serious. Maybe it's VP not HP, but in many cases of battles it's this unit and its lives. You've got to set those pieces up ("position" them in some way) and play the game out, or tell some computer to fight it for you and tell you who won and with what cost. (And, yes, presuming players include Deciders, the AI the player uses to calculate that battle is the one you're Second-Avatar to. Most do about the same, but some---like H0---do a heck of a lot better.

(But, yeah, the makers of the game---I mean the actual board-game I for one won't ever make---ought to have the actual game playable through differents Ais. All Human players get an Ai, but you've got to somehow be a "spwcial player" to have more than a 9° Ai---an Ai that has a 10% chance of moving 1 OP. That's the Ai that is available to any Human anywhere (well, within any Human-occupied space. Any other space, there is either at least a 8° Avatar spent for and sent, or there is no Ai in play for Humans.

Oh! That was it. Phew. Moments that must happen. In the design of any campaign (i.e., a "campagin" is in part defined by having these things) must be X number of scenarios / scripts, scenes, that must happen.

Yeah, some of those are those telling stories I'll never write.

But part of those are also things like, "at some point, a car crash must kill an unexpected character" (and the GM, of course, decides if that moments was good enough or not. In which case that player can, sure, try again, but it's got to now be an order of magnitude better for him to still have a shot.
Storied Moments. Sure, some I may eventually actually do. Things like, "The Common Populous rise up in a reallly cheesy and Hollywood-ended / Peotic Justic way to succeed in a way that more helkps than hurts them," Kitune's Moment that Must Happen. Even a 9° Kitty has to have some moment end up like that; and that can matter well- and cleverly-played.

Moments that Must Happen don't have to be used in combat, but since the winner and looser of a campaign---a loss that comes with the loss of 1 Strategic Point (the winner wins not loosing any of hos precious SPs)---is determined in OP scores, you want to use maybe make sure something happens when you need it to happen.

Anyway, battles are decided by the "board game provisionally now just bad Go" are decided by points. The most points the winner.

A side's base points---ones they can't have taken away---are their HP. A side has 3 HP for each character, when a given character's HPs have been lost to capture on the board, that character is dead in the story.
A side also gets a certain number of OP points to play with as well. (Ideally, each OP is indeed a wirtten moment in the story, which is why I'll never write this into a real book) These can be used (and lost to catpure (but not otherwise gained by the other side)) in a given scenario. How many that are available is decided before the scenarios is played out.
The winner of a round is determine by the side that captured more of the other side's stones, but didn't loose the match; winning an actual game of Go trumps loosing more stones.

So, the HP you loose in a round doesn't get you closer to loosing the sceanrio; you can expend those character points all you want to save your OPs. But once a character looses the 3 HP, they are out of the story (including being unable to "be characters in" any subsequent moments, scenarios, etc. There are no ghosts here. But, then you kill off your caste. And you caste includes characters with Moments that Must Happen. They don't happen, you loose all of the OPs in the Moment (which is usually 1, yeah, but sometimes more) plus one. This is deducted from their final campaign score.