I’m getting old. I’ll struggle for days with a problem, making no progress, and then a rush of ideas will hit me out of nowhere. Today I had two realizations:
First, I realized that I am still stuck in my old ways as a wargame designer. Here’s a screenshot of the portion of the verb cluster prepatory to battle:
These verbs all present issues of military judgement, not interpersonal judgement. Will I never shake the wargame mindset? Out they go!
Second, I realized that I can have lots of secondary characters. The social hierarchy would look something like this:
This should be represented as a tree, but there’s so much branching that the tree would be impossibly large. This shows only the social hierarchy. I had assumed that only the top two levels would be represented by characters in the storyworld, but now I realize that I can have characters from each of the social levels. Remember, I can have as many characters as I want, and can easily restrict most behavior to the top two levels, while still permitting the extra color that I would get from having characters from the lower levels. I would certainly want to have one Knight assigned to each Lord or Lady; that Knight would be the leader of the fighters. That Knight could be killed, greatly demoralizing the fighters.
By extending the reach of the cast down to the very bottom, we can have representatives of all the social levels show up occasionally, vastly increasing the sense of social reality. I would, of course, have to write custom verbs for many of these characters, but I’m OK with that.
This idea bears much further development.
