Creating Lumen Ryder Core #2: Rethinking "Dead Air"
In this blog series, I talk about designing LUMEN RYDER CORE and sharing my experiences with developing it (as well as giving you a reason to buy the game). Hopefully, you’ll be able to benefit from reading this as I am benefitting from processing my design journey as a whole.
Midway through writing my article on addressing the problem of “dead air”, the realization dawns on me that I’m been looking at it the wrong way.
Previously, I had defined “dead air” as
that period of time in a game where you zone out in the middle of combat when it’s someone else’s turn, and no matter how hard you try to be invested your mind just slips away and you go off and check your phone. That moment of silence where the current player has no idea what to do,
which is hardly as big of an issue as I had once thought it was - having continued to playtest Lumen Ryder Core and a bunch of other games.
All in all, the real issue here is “cognitive load” which can be described as "how much your brain can handle the game at any given point”. Sometimes, connectivity issues for online play can make this frustrating to deal with. Other times, it’s an issue with how the game teaches you how to play with it or a confusing piece of UI or layout.
The specific circumstances for how “dead air” comes about and can be addressed varies from game to game and table to table - so honestly, the best thing I can do for Lumen Ryder right now is to try my best at scaffolding and presenting the game in most painless way possible.
Maybe what this looks like is providing simpler, weaker “Tutorial Forms” (like Kamen Rider Kuuga’s Growing Form in the video below) which are built to get players and GMs alike accustomed to the very basic rules of combat e.g. how turns, ranges, and combo work.
Maybe this also looks like thinking carefully about how I want to present the game in the book and character sheets (or well-formatted introductory comics). So far, so good. Playtesters have been able to grok the system fairly quickly with the main hiccups lying in managing groups larger than 4.
Maybe the solution to that is simply suggesting that player groups don’t exceed four to begin with (lots of GMs like myself will attest to the beauty of running groups with only 2-3 players as well)!
But what I am certain about, and this is the most important thing for me to internalize, is that no matter how well I can design my game to work in the best way possible - ultimately, how well it runs will depend on the table that picks it up. Here’s hoping that the decisions I make now will help mitigate or prevent whatever issues might arise.
Right now, the game is at a place where things are slowly beginning to fall into place and I’m feeling more confident as to what I’m trying to accomplish with it. The main challenge now is making each piece feels rewarding to use and laying it out in such a way that the “game” itself does not get in the way of play.
If you wanna do “the thing”, you should definitely be able to do “the thing”.