To recap, Meat is being designed for one-shot play. Play structure will include a minor and major chapter with book-ended solo scenes and some randomness happening as an intermission. After chargen, players will be asked to create setting.
Meat won’t be laboriously mechanical in play but there may be a lot of numbers thrown around. I’m trying to implement a bidding system for Setting development. I’m not sure how to make it mechanically relevant in a rules light game. If each player has X points to spend during Setting Development and Setting = the number of players times Y, the result is a Setting that has a number of elements that are descriptive and story relevant. The remainder of the points will determine which player is first in order to play in the Minor scene that plays out.
If this is the case then there needs to be not only an advantage over location but then too there needs to be some advantage to order of play.
Is play sequential and not simultaneous?
Triggers and Biases. I’m not certain how i want the intrigue to play out, but an initial idea is that there would be Enemies and Nemesis’. Enemies would be other player characters in a pvp sense; Nemesis would relate to backstory and be tied into the alter-ego or former life. Part of the pacing of the Minor and Major scenes would be to encroach the Nemesis upon the PC. The Nemesis would continue to be an unassailable nuisance unless the PC ran another one-shot with that character and the clock on the Nemesis would escalate until a final showdown was triggered by a pre-determined clock. At these Nemesis intervals the characters would be offered some manner of feedback (or colloquially, a manner of leveling up.)
NPCs, Enemies, and Nemesis’ would all be triggers. There may be a way to load some of that into the Setting buy-in. Also, Setting development is going to have to factor in all PC biases in order to knit the character stories into an immediate first adversarial scene. Maybe it’s possible to favor some of those biases mechanically in Setting?