Step 2. Mechanics Part 1

Before we can create a character, we need to work on the mechanics.

Mechanics is how something works. In this case, how does our gamified life work? How do we track things?

There are guides online that tell you how level up and gain experience, and a lot of it is complicated, requiring spreadsheets and a lot of numbers.

I’m going to be honest, I’m not a numbers person. I like numbers and I find them useful, but I don’t want to have to keep track of too many of them. That’s not fun, and the whole point of this is to be fun and motivating.

Going in to this, I have two main influences: Dawn Michell, a tarot and planner YouTuber, and Emerald Specter, an indie game developer who has built a Bullet Journal RPG. I feel like these are two extremes of the complication spectrum, so I feel confident that I can do something in between.

This is a BIG topic, because the mechanics are the basis of your system and if these don’t work, the rest of the system isn’t going to work either. Because it’s so big, I’m breaking this up into two sections: the influences today and the mechanics I got out of it tomorrow.

Guidelines

Before I set out my mechanics, I have a few rules:

1. It has to be easy to track. I’m a pen and paper planner girl, so whatever system I use, I need to make sure it’s something that I don’t need spreadsheets to track and keep up with.
2. It has to be focused on daily actions as much as possible, but flexible enough that I can take days off/miss days without being punishing.
3. It needs to be able to adjust /change over time.

Before we look at my inspirations, I feel like i need to say that I’m working off video games. I know some do a more Table Top style, but that’s not what Im most familiar or comfortable with.

In order to get an idea of how I want my game to look, I wanted to look at games that I enjoy the levelling system. So, let’s look at my influences and how they are going to guide my mechanics.

Influence: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Oblivion has one of my favourite level up systems, and some really kick ass music. When you do something, you gain experience in that. So, if you sprinted, you got Athletics experience, if you used magic, you got experience for that kind of magic. When you gained a certain amount of experience, your skill levelled up and, when you levelled up enough of your key skills for your class, your character levelled up. Other games have done this since, and it still works.

I like this because it makes you choose specific skills to focus on that allow you to play the game how you want. Unfortunately, it’s a bit static. If you decide part way through the play-through that you don’t like how magic plays, then you can’t change to a class that doesn’t need magic to level-up, potentially soft-capping you and forcing a restart.

Many games today will have character levels and skills separate, allowing you to allocate them as you go. Cyberpunk 2077, for example, has skills that you level-up based on how you play. Your character level is based on everything you do, adding together the experience you gain from all the ways you play. Levelling a skill/play style gets you benefits that match that play style.

Influence: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

*FFXIV *is one of the top MMORPGs of the day. One of the things that makes it so popular is probably the class system. Unlike the other most popular MMO, World of Warcraft, your one character can play all classes, or ‘jobs’ as they are called in game. If you want to change up how you play, you switch class, and suddenly, you are a ranged DPS instead of a healer. Quick, instant.

Your character doesn’t have a level. Instead, each job has its own level based on how much you have played it.

Unlike Oblivion or Cyberpunk, each job plays very differently and is fairly inflexible. The strength is that you can have a dozen different play styles with only one bank for items and currency, and you only have to do the main story once to get all of it. Because FFXIV is an MMO and people play the same character for years, the ability too change your job really adds in longevity, making it easier to keep through all the expansions with this one character you have created a bond to.

I like this as a metaphor for life because a job can be used to describe different parts of our life. Your work is a job, your hobbies could each be a job, taking care of the house is a job, budgeting is a job, and you can change them when you need to. Don’t want to learn to play the guitar anymore? Just pick something else to go in it’s place.

How does this become Mechanics?

Now that I’ve analysed what I like about the levelling systems from my inspirations, I have an idea about how I want to set this up. I did a lot of brainstorming and mind-mapping to figure out what this would look like, and this is what I came up with:

1. My character will have multiple jobs that will level up over time, based on how much work I put into that job. Each job will represent something I want to focus on or improve in.
2. To keep it simple, I'm going to focus on no more than 3 to 5 jobs at once.
3. At any time, I can change my focus and swap one job out for another. If I swap out a job, I do not lose the gained xp/levels in that job.
4. XP is gained through doing tasks that support one of the jobs I have chosen.

Tomorrow, I'll go into how I'm going to track XP and levels, aka the day to day of it.