How can Fantasy/Magic impact our Mechanics

[D-D-2]

The Fantasy of the Game

Currently, there seems to be a separation between how decisions are made regarding the rules of the game system and the rules of our magic/fantasy system. I believe if the Fantasy system is made more concrete, we can use that to inform decisions about mechanics.

Examples

• Fate Cards: What are fate cards, really? What is it in the world that creates room for such tampering with Fate, and what is the philosophy of Fate as a concept in the game world? How does that philosophy manifest itself into the world?
• Stamina: Stamina is well established mechanically, however I'm still fuzzy on what it is in terms of the magic system. It's what allows you to harness magic, but it's also what allows you to swing a sword to kill someone or find out if someone is lying. All of those separate things run down someone's "Stamina." What does that really mean?

Additional Comments
I believe this to be separate from the world of Erdania and Erd Rock. Every GM who plays this game will have these core mechanics, and unless they take the time to establish their own answers to those questions to inform a homebrew campaign structure, we should work to give some level of guidance here. I didn't see it in the player guide or GM guide, but that's not to say I didn't miss it somewhere.

Some Ideas
Perhaps Fate is so relevant in the world due to the palpable feeling of the bendability of time & space for some people. Similarly to "The Force" in Star Wars, or wizards/witches in Harry Potter.
Maybe there are so many outside forces pulling and pushing through the leylines of the universe and the "Material Plane" is caught in the middle of it, allowing some individuals to harness that byproduct of energy in the form of powers.
Perhaps individuals with these abilities are in a constant state of high stamina depletion when not resting, with every action they take beyond the average person burning up some of their stamina when harnessing the universe's energy.

[CBroz1]

Part of the design so far has been 'setting agnostic' - one could play in a high-magic world or a zero-magic world so long as certain powers were excluded. There's no core mechanic that relies on a specific setting conceit.

Sure, there could be flavor text around certain mechanics - but does that change how they work? Is there a new mechanic you think the game needs along these lines?

[D-D-2]

I think the thought comes in part from MtG, where each color has an assigned personality, and that personality informs the abilities of each color.

I view it as informing the game world in the same capacity as Sublantis informing our creation of aquatic races, or Spark making 1/2 human 1/2 animal races. Narrative has informed the races and some magic items, so I'm inclined to think it can inform powers and fate abilities as well. Other GMs don't need to run a game in Erdania to include the stat block of Jek-Reth, but the story informed what the stats were.

I'm not sure how much or how little including the metaphysical elements I mentioned would inform items/mechanics/powers, but I imagine it's more than 0.

[LockerM]

I like this proposal @D-D-2 and I think it brings up interesting questions we'll want to solve in 2 places:

1. The core ruleset in TheGame especially in the Player Guide Full
2. The setting-specific ruleset of Erdania, where we can infuse these allusions with more concrete lore/basis in Fantasy

To clarify @CBroz1 's point, as part of the development process we've decided to strip out the majority of lore/setting-based detail in TheGame in hopes that people who come to play can use our core system to tell all sorts of stories: Fantasy, Mystery, Horror, Sci-Fi, Apocalyptic, Futuristic, Historical, etc. By avoiding full allusion to magic or fantasy within the core ruleset we allow for and encourage this possibility rather than building a fantasy-based game that people would then need to figure out how to customize/tweak to their setting of choice, which is similar to the existing landscape with other major TTRPGs out there.

However, I think because we introduce the idea of 'Fate' and that is relevant across any story regarding Agency of characters, we can find something interesting to say in the PGF about how the Fate of the character is in the Player's hands, and the manipulation of Fate is one of the main mechanically interesting things about the Fate Card system.

In the setting-specific ruleset of Erdania, we will have the freedom to expand significantly upon these ideas and introduce more of a broad fantasy-based approach to how fate works, how stamina works, etc. with flavor that is relevant to the setting. Since Erdania will be the first official setting of DofA, this gives future GMs working on Fantasy-based games (or in general) an additional framework of how these questions are resolved and answered without us bringing them into the core ruleset of "TheGame".

I would agree that overall there's going to be a lot of interpellation between TheGame and TheAdventures (Erdania especially) given that they are being developed in tandem, but our hope by keeping the development of these two separate is to ensure that DofA as a core ruleset becomes Genre-agnostic and can be leveraged equally effectively by a GM hoping to create a rich Fantasy world and a GM looking to set a game in a futuristic sci-fi setting.

[D-D-2]

thanks @LockerM, sorry @CBroz1 for not understanding.

With this, I'm thinking that it may benefit GMs to have a bit more detail written about the Genre-agnostic potential about the game on top of the advertisement theme of, "Your Cards, Your Game." Perhaps we should make it a point to have at least one of our first publicly available adventures be something entirely separate from the Fantasy genre. A mystery set in Boston, or a historical fiction adventure set during the Roman Empire. The contrast of a fantasy world with animal folk and something grounded on Earth could turn some heads.