Episode 14: Relationships in Play feat. Avery Alder
In this relatable episode, we’re joined by special guest Avery Alder - creator of Monsterhearts, Dream Askew, and The Quiet Year - to talk about relationship mechanics.
How does your game change when you model relationships as variable stats, states of being, currencies, cycles, roles, or power dynamics?
How do you provide mechanical handles for specific types of relationships, while allowing them to be messy and emergent? What happens when two characters have wildly different interpretations of their mutual relationship? Where do relationships even exist, in terms of the physical sheet or game component that bears them?
Avery sees the kids for the trees. Violet hassles her vassals. Freya sticks to the classics. Avery seizes the means of narration. Violet doctors the narrative. Freya draws her friends close.
*** Check out Avery’s Stuff! ***
https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/
*** Check out JourneyMon! ***
https://ilgingell.itch.io/journeymon
*** Check out Freya’s Blue Skies Sabbatical, Volume 1! ***
https://severalseals.itch.io/drake-barcode-morse-inspector
https://severalseals.itch.io/foleynauts
*** Timestamps ***
No mailbag this time!
Intro to topic [*1] - 0:15:16
Why mechanise relationships? - 0:20:37
Design questions - 0:31:00
History - 0:53:47
Three angles on the Taxonomicon - 1:01:30
Rivalries - 1:07:51
Digression about Shock and conceptual poles - 1:13:45
Authority hierarchies - 1:21:46
Peer relationships - 1:30:49
Relationships as a resource - 1:39:00
Parasocial relationships - 1:45:16
Odds and ends and anecdotes - 1:53:17
Difficult relationships (and more Monsterhearts) - 2:02:16
Design Dreams - 2:12:27
Wrapup - 2:27:45
*** Design Dreams ***
Freya: the League of Super Frenemies
Violet: Hand Inarticulate Hand
Avery: Love’s Letters Lost
Bonus: The Dream Ghost Conspiracy [*2]
*** Games discussed ***
Monsterhearts
Dream Askew / Dream Apart
The Quiet Year
JourneyMon
Underwhelming Acolytes of an Ageing Immortal [-]
D&D 3.5e
D&D 4e
AD&D
Good Society
The Deep Forest
Masks
Exalted Essence
Vampire: The Masquerade
Delta Green
Pendragon
Sagas of the Icelanders
Girl Frame
Hot Guys Making Out
Star Crossed
Interstitial
Riddle of Steel
Burning Wheel
Blades in the Dark
Reign
A Place To Fuck Each Other
Thirsty Sword Lesbians
Lady Blackbird
Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine
Dogs in the Vineyard
Apocalypse World
Masks
Dungeon World
Bluebeard’s Bride
World of Darkness (assorted)
Aberrant
Genius: the Transgression
Over The Moon
Tournament Arc
Transit
Shock
Lasers & Feelings
Avatar Legends
Flabbergasted
The Between
Pathfinder
Everyone Is John
Belonging Outside Belonging
Mad Alien With A Box
Golden Sky Stories
Blue Rose
The Serpent’s Tooth
Lost Kingdom (The many gm one streamer game)
Dialect
Going For Broke
Smallville
Last Fleet
Exalted (not Essence)
The Thunder Perfect Mind
Silver And White [-]
Microscope
Children of Time [-] [*3]
Seven-Part Pact [-]
Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast
Voidheart Symphony
Midnight Muscadines
*** Other media discussed ***
Earthborne Rangers
Steven Universe (obliquely)
The L Word
Animal Crossing
Homestuck (inevitably)
Kingdom Hearts
Beastieball
Pride & Prejudice
Jeeves & Wooster
Dr Who
The Order Of The Stick
Mage Knight
Gloomhaven
Battlestar Galactica [*4]
Final Fantasy XIV
Buffy the Vampire Slayer [*5]
Dispatch
Persuasion
Portal 2
Philosophers in Space
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
A Close And Common Orbit
Shogun (the board game, not the show)
The World Ends With You: NEO
*** Notes & Links ***
[*1] …and apparently a local dog immediately goes wild in the background of Freya’s audio, sorry! It doesn’t last forever.
[*2] if you know of a game that already implements Dream Ghost Conspiracy’s mechanics, tell us about it! It saves us having to write it ourselves.
[*3] Predictably, the Children of Time crowdfunder ended some time before we finished editing this episode.
[*4] the board game, but also the licensed RPG I guess!
[*5] all this Monsterhearts talk and it took us two hours to mention Buffy. Spoilers at ~2:12:00!
[-] games with this tag are unpublished (not yet released) or un-published (un-released).
It is a fact universally acknowledged that when you make a joke and say “that was rubbish, you can edit it out,” that makes it funny enough to leave in.
According to the dictionary wot I done red, a pastiche does not have to also be parody. The term, delightfully, is derived from a name of a pie with a melange of many ingredients.
Sorry, Francis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
*** Contact us! ***
Thank you to everyone who has emailed into our mailbag - If you too have a question, idea, or interesting game you’d like to share with us, email systemshoppodcast@gmail.com
*** Additional Credits ***
Our intro music is
"Magic Escape Room" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
System Shop is made by humans. We do not use generative AI at any stage of our process, from research to editing.
