The Design of BCS I: Episode Structure

I'm starting a new series where I'll be going in depth on the design of BCS, in the vein of the old BCG Restrospective, but instead of doing it for a finished game it's for one that is still in development instead. 

We'll be going in the order that the content is presented in v0.1b. Because it's a beta, some aspects of the game may change in the future, but the general theory behind the bulk of the design will be the same (and any changes are likely to get in-depth blog posts of their own, so they're still going to get covered). Much like when I did the Retrospective, these posts will be short but frequent, and weekly rather than monthly.

Episodes in a Nutshell

We're going to start with this, a boring setup section, not just because it's the first, but because it's actually different from BCG's. The most obvious difference is that the episode structure now includes Downtime. As I've explained earlier, Downtime Scenes help players unused to the genre by establishing them in the world and giving them a direction to roleplay in.

Thus the duality of Intermissions and Operations is now a trinity of Intermissions, Operations and Downtime. There was a part of me that wanted to rename Downtime into Intermissions, and to rename Intermissions as something else. The term "Intermission" technically works better for something that takes place between sessions than for story roleplaying scenes. Unfortunately, after a bit of brainstorming there wasn't a better name for roleplaying scenes, so I opted to name the downtime scenes... Well, Downtime. Accurately naming Downtime by calling out specifically that it is the part that happens offscreen is an acceptable enough tradeoff to keep things this way.

Playing out Scenes

This section is worth noting because, for the first time in my long game-writing history, I actually bother to define Conflict as the thing that pauses the free-flowing narrative time, and the first mention is even capitalized (I will probably capitalize other mentons that follow it in future updates). 

That's it, that's all that merits pointing out about this section.

Conflict, Turns and Actions

I named a section after Conflict to ensure people would read it. Conflict, whether during Intermissions or Operations, has a Turn-based structure, and most Intermission Tests are a Full Turn Action.

This helps make the game rules more formal and consistent, should there ever be confusion about how long it takes to do a thing. BCS makes it easier for characters out of the mech to interact with characters inside of the mech (and vice-versa). It also handles Intermission combat through a single Skill Test (or Group Test), making it unclear how long a fight scene should take. With this distinction, it mechanically takes a Full Turn, even if narratively it can take a lot longer. This kind of detail can come in handy to help smooth out moments of confusion.

Boring but Necessary

And that's all for now. Not the most exciting beginning, but it sets the foundation for the next set of posts and this is the order things are in the book. Some designers start their manuals with character creation, and others with lore. I firmly believe this is the best way to write a TRPG manual, but that's a whole other discussion of its own.

Gimmick Out.