Living In the War, a Dev Journal

I’ve talked about how This Means War strives to simulate a believable (but surprising) war. But now I want to talk about the other half of the game: the character-side. The idea all along was that this was a war-game that wasn’t really about war, it was about the people living through the war. All those dice and tables are just a backdrop for role-playing their stories. And week after week we’ve had surprisingly wonderful and grave sessions playing all these different characters, so I wanted to go behind the scenes and walk through how the mechanics of the game are making that happen, because there are a lot of different things going on. Mechanic #1: Characters Without Connections The young hydroponics engineer has been unemployed and living with his parents ever since the attack on the Agri-Center. He’s living in the same city as the influential Senator debating the political response to the war (another player’s character) but their lives could not be farther apart. It is a lot…