@Halfjack has been writing about soft horizontal monsters. He’s been writing about *Soft Horizons* every now and then. The thing I really liked about this one is that instead of making monsters more like *characters* he’s making them more like the *environment*. They simply are and they impose their negative effects on the player characters like lava, like an avalanche, like a bad harvest. The question is simply: what are you going to do about it? And what he provides is suggestions for the referee in terms of *risks*. Setting the risk is Brad’s favourite design concept for his *Soft Horizon* project as far as I can tell. When talking about locating the creative burden, he says: “the critical place where we lay out a creative burden is on the ref when setting the risks.”
Anyway, I love the idea of a monster just consisting of a name, a description, some lore, and whatever else you think it needs (”fluff”) and the only aspects that interface with the actual rules (”mechanics”) of the game are a list of risks your character runs when doing something against them (”crunch”).
When I told Brad that I liked how me made monsters more like the environment instead of like characters, he answered: “Exactly – making them like characters would mean inviting the ref into the dice rolling game and that’s contrary to the design.”
#RPG #Indie