Mercury Synthetic is now available on itch.io!
I worked primarily in Affinity Publisher, and I was surprised by the game that resulted. It turned out at around 10,000 words (which is why Driftwood Souls is not going to come out this week, sadly), and took a few different twists than I had originally planned.
One of the things that I love about game jams is experimentation, and Mercury Synthetic is a study in blending roleplaying games with their mechanics-driven approach to conflict resolution with storytelling games that can do flexible storytelling following narrative structures rather than mimetic ones.
Or, in short: it supports some narrative features I don't see often in roleplaying games, with a lot of Microscope in its genes.
It's an odd blend; it's not lite as it were, because there's a lot of rules content and structure to the text, but characters are fairly simple. Each player also plays multiple characters, and characters are not exclusively limited to a single player (though each is "owned" by a player, they can be delegated out).
The mechanics function a little differently than is traditional:
- Actions are resolved mechanically with complications and other elements coming as a result of a bidding process. Players use their characters to declare actions, then the GM sets a difficulty.
- Based on the results, the players or GM bid based on the differences. An exceptionally good result can give future boosts or lead to a smooth resolution of the scene even if the characters haven't yet solved the problem (e.g. skip forward). Alternatively, coming in with a low result lets the GM add complications or have the characters fail. This is presented as a dramatic structure and not a competition.
- After enough actions have been completed for a scene to resolve, the results are reviewed and the scene is narrated.
Is it a perfect game?
It's an experiment, I'll give it that. Characters are defined narratively rather than numerically. However, from a crunchy side, I think the dice mechanic and roleplaying element are solid.
There are really two things I think I might do differently if I had to do it over again:
- Either do more setting work to flesh out the universe more or do none at all and make the system setting agnostic. About 25% of the text is setting, and that's enough to give a sliver but not enough to really flesh things out.
- One idea is to do this Microscope style where the players get together to form the world together.
- Another idea is to use a modular system for the setting.
- If I were to expand the setting, I'd want it to be at least 50/50 with rules content.
- Work on the timeline system a little more so that flashbacks and flashforwards are more of a central focus on the system; that's really one of the places where the system stands above a generic roleplaying system.
I'm not 100% convinced with the dice mechanics' viability outside this one very specific use case. There's an interesting shared dice pool system where characters are encouraged to cooperate a lot and actions merge together rather than being separate and distinct, but mathematically I think it leads us toward some unusual and peculiar cases. Because there's no resource management, success and failure isn't the primary driver of the way the game works, but it still would be nice to see more direct positive/negative outcome correlation to skills.
Another element here is that characters are going to be stagnant. Advancement is possible, but there's a mixture of diminishing return and randomness loss as characters get more powerful. Timelines also mean that having characters advance along a linear path rather than using relationship connections or the like can cause plot holes ("oh, so now you can pickpocket across all timelines?").
That could be a fun concept for a time-traveling game, but the causality is questionable in a more mild narrative.
All the same, I think that Mercury Synthetic is unique and interesting in a way that few other games can claim to be. I also think it could be quite fun with the right group, though its experimental nature means that it's probably not suited for everyone.
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