Game design deals with real experiences. Even when we’re sitting around a table, rolling dice and pretending to be Elves, we are bringing our real-world experiences to the table.
Over at Monkey’s Paw Games, Labyrinth Lesbian has been writing about The Dungeon Problem: namely, given that dungeons are notoriously deadly territory, how do you motivate your players to explore?
One option is debt.
One day, just after the bank crash in 2007 I got a letter from the Government of the Canadian Northwest Territories informing them that I owed them a preposterous amount of money—five digits. The charge was for interest on an unpaid $3000 student loan. The statute of limitations was beyond long past. The amount was supposed to be forgiven if I worked in the North for a year (I had). But for some administrative reason, that fact was never recorded, and I certainly didn’t have the records to prove it. The story I’m telling myself is that the banking crisis cut into government revenue, and they decided to dig up a bunch of ancient loans to make up the difference. It was a crappy move at a crappy time.
Fictional motivations build on real feelings. Fictional debt has teeth because of our knowledge and experience of real debt. Strange as the world we adventure in may be, we imagine our characters with feelings and debt similar to our own.
High debt for high adventure
I remember the first time we played the Traveller RPG. We were a confident crew of experienced adventurers, tooling around the sector, taking whatever jobs we could find, working every hustle we could work to make the payments on the well-worn scout ship we called home
The way I remember it, that setup was baked into the game—a ship, a debt, a bunch of jobs to do. Going back, I was a little surprised to see that getting a ship at all is a crapshoot in Traveller. You can just as easily end up with a few bucks and a couple of passenger vouchers on the next freighter out of town.
Traveller’s rules for making payments on an starship are pretty simple. You take your debt and divide it by 480 months. That’s your payment. Then you calculate the costs for fuel, oxygen, food, and maintenance. That tells you just how much your crew needs to pull in every month to keep flying. Better go find that next job!
That’s a formula that has become standard fare for sci-fi jobs-and-trade games. Years later we did the same thing for Stars Without Number, right down to the Excel spreadsheet where we tracked our resources, expenses, cargo, and cash flow.
Traveller was written in a time when going into debt to buy a house—and then eventually paying it off, was the common dream and reality for a huge chunk of America. That’s a very useful model of debt for gaming, and it translates well to a game of high adventure. I’m going to call it “high” debt. High debt is a positive motivator. Yes, it imposes burdens and limits on the characters, but it’s temporary, at least from the characters’ point of view.
Debt out of control
Once you delve into the mechanics of debt several side-quests or complications appear, spawning, potentially, difficult and interesting decision points of their own. Once you complete that big score or sell that fancy cargo, minus costs for fuel and repairs, is there enough left for the debt payment? What if you decide you’d rather not make that payment after all? Does it start out as harmlessly dodging the bill collector? Does it escalate into outright default? What happens if we just don’t pay? Suddenly, we’re moving into a whole new area of play, and a new set of motivations.
What if the debt isn’t so “high”? What if the debt holders are corrupt? Or what if the payments and the principle are too high to be paid? Does the debt holder really want you to pay it off? Or is it more useful to keep you on the hook.
Gameplay has a way of spiraling into new directions. In the next article of this series, I want to talk about some of the ways that debt takes on a darker hue. What happens when the holders of the debt are corrupt? What if the debt is crushing or unjustified? What if the debt is so large that repayments isn’t even realistically on the table? There are several games that take that approach, and they make an interesting counterpoint to Traveller.
Epilogue
So, to complete the story I started at the top of this article, that unexpected debt kind of deranged me for about a year. It became an obsession. Eventually, after a year of stalling, I called up the Government agent and told them I’d pay it off for what was in my bank account. Still a lot, but less than they asked for. In return, they’d send me a letter saying I was 10% free and clear with the Government. They took the deal.