Intriguing mechanics (and oh, so sorry!)

Posted by screamingcat on September 22, 2009

This post comes after a long silence from us… the bad part of being a duo is that while everything is shared fun, creativity and thoughts, our burden is double too: work, stress and much more.

But to great dismay of our detractors and haters (if we ever had any), we’re back!

So, what we’re going to talk about?

BC: “Mechanics, you fool. You’ve written that in the post title!”

Oh, Right. Then…

When I think about intrigue in RL, I can observe two macro-situations:

1. When the intriguer prepares a plan of actions, and it unfolds onto an off-guard victim. That happens in lies, ambushes, financial trading, and scams in general;


2. Having a chance, the intriguer must do something quickly to take advantage of this situation: carpe diem; this is true even if the intriguer is in a bad situation and could improve his situation or even turn the tide!

In this manner, every lie or plan could be defined as one of these actions, which could also be chained.

Example: a married man wants to meet his lover, and plans (intrigue type 1) some lies to tell to his wife, books a table in a restaurant and calls his lover. Things go well until at the restaurant he meets his wife, and he needs to pull together a believable lie for not being beaten by her on the spot (intrigue type 2). To manage to keep at bay his wife, he needs to come up with something to make up with her (intrigue type 2).

I could shorten them with the terms plan and blow (even if this one doesn’t convince me much).

The blow is pretty straight: you make it or not. Maybe you are very succesful, or your failure isn’t a total failure, but I feel that this one is a unit.

I can hardly say the same about the plan: plans require preparation, risk assessment, resource collection, pulling the threads together and, finally, action.

Having come this far, I could list the parts as:

1. Planning (including risk assessment)


2. Preparation (including resource collection)


3. Carrying Out (including corrections on the fly)

With thess in mind, we could proceed to design the resolution mechanism… but we need still another important element: resources.

BC: “I think I’ll take it up from here! But not now. I want to let this stew a bit.”