tragic backstories

Grave Error Design - Backstory and Banishment

Grave Error Design - Backstory and Banishment

There is a huge distinction between a storytelling game and a game that tells a story. Storytelling games are about players developing the ups and downs of characters and worlds as the tale goes forward. Games presenting a story give you dramatic tension as the mechanics unfold and play off of your machinations of victory. The difference is upon whom the onus of challenge lays: the players or the game. Do the characters have problems because of the game or because players want them to have such problems? Grave Error, our in-development, spooky, hidden-movement game, tries to blend in the players’ storytelling creativity with concrete mechanics and traditional board game components. In this blog, we will explore the in-game systems straddling this line and discuss how we arrived at the current iterations.