I recently had the pleasure of working on something for the 5 Powers jam over on itch.io!
You can check out the submission here:
Wandering Stars (PDF) (itch.io)
This is a set of alternate and expansion rules for the base WuDe game which I intended for darker and fantasy campaign settings. It introduces some new mechanics, and also includes a redesigned character sheet to accommodate them.
If you’re unfamiliar with WuDe, the game centers around the use of the Element Dice system, a narrative framework that uses interpretations of 6-sided dice to guide RPG storytelling.
The system is based on the East-Asian philosophy of Yin & Yang and the 5 elements, using dice faces to represent the different elements and black and white dice to represent yin and yang, respectively. For more about Element Dice, check out the 5 powers blog.
I unfortunately am writing this post much after the fact and no longer have all my design notes, so the breakdown will be brief, but there are some thoughts/process notes below the cut for those interested.
Again, thank you very much to Ralf Meyenberger for hosting the jam and providing wonderful support. Please check out WuDe if you have the chance! It’s a really interesting system.
Enjoy!
I Was Totally in My Element
I first heard about WuDe from an itch.io ad, actually, and was immediately struck by the uniqueness of the system. I love its simplicity, and the way it values player narratives over mechanics, striving to lift them up in every aspect of its design. The game has a lot of potential while also being easy to pick up and granting an extraordinary amount of creative freedom to its players. And at the end of the day, the dice mechanic—all about balancing the chaos of the elements in a roll—is just plain fun.
In my submission, i added two main changes to the concept of character element: I set up a framework allowing players to play their character’s element as a set of magical powers, and also a dice mechanic which prompts players to bring them into play during individual scenes (it was super fun to puzzle out how each element could be expressed as actual magic). This is purely indulgent, coming from a catalogue of traditional fantasy games, if told my character has an “element”, I would want them to be able to mold the earth, shoot fire from their hands, etc.
I also posited the idea of character aspect and the balance track, a way for players to track yin and yang within their character in addition to element. Characters have an aspect (yin or yang) just as the dice do, and they can switch between them by tracking how much positivity/stress their character accumulates during play. When there is too much stress, the character’s energies are unbalanced, and they have to balance themselves or have their roll outcomes affected.
This was borne of my desire to see the yin/yang dichotomy hold more weight on a mechanical level. The interplay between the black and white dice and the resulting narrative implications were perhaps the most intriguing part of the game to me, and I was disappointed that the players never actually got to use yin dice themselves.
Mind you, this is not to knock the base game in any way. Having players always roll yang for themselves and yin for their apposing force keeps play simple—which is pretty much always better; who wants to break immersion to debate rules?—and keeps the focus on the interactions between the elements, allowing it to become the star of the game. From a playability standpoint, I think it’s a great design decision.
But I could not stop thinking about how dissonant, philosophically, it was to me that a player would roll yang (which carries with it all kinds of positive connotations) even if they were doing something utterly heinous. I wanted to puzzle out a way to highlight the black dice—for the game to care about the morality behind player choices—even if just as a hypothetical. (In hindsight, this was probably influenced by the fact that Fiasco is my favorite game, and my main point of reference for purely narrative RPGs)
Process Notes
The original idea for this project was actually a standalone module a-la Returning Maiden or Hiroin, in which players were students of a Magical Order and would be guided through the outlines of a story in a pseudo choose-your-own-adventure. I scrapped that idea completely when I realized:
- What I wanted to do would take way too much time to produce
- It actually wouldn’t even be that fun, as it was over-complicated and ultimately wanted to shoehorn players into its set narrative, ruining all the fun of the system
The mechanics went through 4238942 stages of revision and rearrangement, but the idea was always to give significance to the colors of the dice the player is rolling. I originally had the balance tracker as a kind of horizontal scale, and then a fillable grid, but as soon as I started drawing it out, I realized it had to be circular. The cyclical design fits well with the theming anyway, it’s a nice visual representation of the the constantly shifting balance/cyclical nature of the energies that I’m happy I landed on.
The design lesson I learned from this project was definitely “keep it simple“. It wasn’t until I began shaving things off my mechanics that the themes actually shone through. Even if I still had my notes, I wouldn’t show you what aspect originally looked like. It was a mess.
Oddly enough, the biggest headache was aptly naming the balance tracker. It had just about every other name imaginable at some point (despite “balance” being the only word that actually conveys what the mechanic does). I had resigned myself to calling it something like “Heart Tracker” when the word—and the concept of being unbalanced—came to me as an epiphany like, as I was editing the text for submission. I’m glad it happened before I published, but I definitely wanted to kick myself a little for missing it.
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