Designer Diary

After working on Singularity and running countless tests at various levels, I noticed that many players, especially those who are into classic role-playing games, struggle to come up with stories without having their own character, something personal to care for and develop. Infact, these are very different mental and creative challenges, which got me thinking about a narrative game where each player would have their own character and could tell their story.

The initial idea was that a group of superheroes would meet for the first time and tell their origin stories in the first person. So, right from the start, I realized we needed a character sheet that included some of the classic traits of superheroes, in the most common sense of the word. Generally, I like giving players a lot of freedom because I enjoy seeing their creativity and imagination come alive. So, initially, players had a lot of freedom in creating their characters, starting with their superpowers.

The first playtests quickly revealed two big problems, which were kind of connected. Coming up with names, nemeses, places, motivations, and powers in just a few minutes can be tough and frustrating for those who aren’t used to flexing their creative muscles. I noticed that players especially struggled with inventing a decent superpower. Trying too hard to be original, they often came up with silly, useless things and sometimes even a bit crude. But the game, as I envisioned it, had a dark and somewhat serious tone, our heroes needed to be capable of staging epic battles! So, unfortunately, the solution was to limit the players' decision-making power and introduce some mandatory choices on the character sheets. That's how, little by little, we ended up with five booklets filled with guidelines, superpowers to choose from, and so on.

The following playtests showed that it’s hard to create a "decent" story with over-the-top superpowers because they can make the narrative too predictable or unrealistic. So, I introduced a rule to heavily limit each superpower, but how to do that is entirely up to the players.

As for the starting point of the story, it was tricky to make it believable that the heroes were meeting for the first time. How could they be so famous and never have crossed paths before? Players struggled to keep that detail in, so we removed it. But removing it created a new problem: if they already know each other, why would they need to share their origin stories? This led to the idea that the heroes, while waiting for the final battle, decide to leave a record for posterity, to tell who they are, what happened to the planet and how they tried to stop the threat.

So, the game took its final shape in four phases: two where the heroes talk about their past in the first person (their origin story and a feat that made them famous) and two where the players narrate the present, the nerve-wracking wait and the final battle, fleshing out the world they live in and the very nature of the terrible threat.