When you boil it all the way down, RimWorld is a game where you assign tasks to your colonists and optimize how they get performed. Every time you place down blueprints, place a zone, or add a ‘bill’ to a production structure, you’re effectively communicating a specific task. When it comes to our tabletop colony sim, these sorts of tasks are going to be a cornerstone of the gameplay loop just like how they are in RimWorld. The actual implementation, though, is going to be quite different.

Structured time in RPGs is seen as something to be avoided, at least outside of combat. In most trad games, the passage of time is something either tracked closely in increments no more than a few seconds, or glossed over entirely. We have started to see games, especially games using Free League’s YZE system, paying more attention to the passage of time, while Edge’s new DPS mechanics used in Arkham Horror are assigning a mechanical bounding to the typically loose definition of a ‘scene’ by anchoring characters with a dice pool that exhausts over the span of one scene. It’s useful to consider rules like these for our game, but a Colony Sim is going to require something different. With productive tasks being primary, constant and consistent time tracking is going to be needed to fairly assess what’s going on in the colony.

Day by day

When it comes to resource management, a day is a convenient unit of time. As we consider food, stress, equipment wear, and other constants, starting or ending each day with resource checks makes a lot of sense. When it comes to other projects, a bit more granularity will be helpful. With that in mind, let’s build up how time passes in the game, and what we want the passage of time to mean.

Hours are not necessarily a requisite way to break up the day. The abovementioned YZE games break days into four phases, which can then be optionally broken down further. When projects are some of the key units of productivity in the game, though, it makes sense to stay at this lower level for the most part. Days can be broken into 24 or 25 hours; it’s a science fiction game so the correct number is whatever makes things easiest. 24 hours is a good place to start simply because we already subconsciously segment our time this way, but the actual number can be tweaked as we get into more detail.

The core loop of most colonists should be relatively fixed; we don’t actually want to allocate 24 hours every game day and that’s not how people work, anyway. For every full day, colonists should start with pre-allocated sleeping and eating hours, probably roughly eight sleeping hours and two eating hours as an initial swag. This leaves 14 hours in the day for other things, which players will have to balance between labor (making checks against tasks to be done in the colony) and recreation (making checks to reduce stress). There will likely be other gameplay elements tracked at the hourly level too, like convalescing to heal from illness or injury, but those will come up only in specific circumstances.

Once we pull back out a little further, we need to look at how time passes at a higher level. The next level of granularity we need is seasonal; shifts between winter, spring, summer, and fall will affect agriculture and heating needs, and we want to model those in some way. There are intermediate time steps, though. It is certainly possible to see the use of a ‘week’ construct where colonists have separate weekdays and weekends, but given that you’re managing recreational time every day, that may just end up being too much complexity. Months also don’t give too much to the mechanical detail of time tracking, but they do let you break up the year and pinpoint specific days for special reasons, like ingame holidays or colonist birthdays. Another potential compromise here is the RimWorld ‘quadrum’, a pseudo-month that is also aligned with seasons and serves both purposes effectively.

The RimWorld year is 60 days, with each quadrum being 15 days and seasons passing at the end of each quadrum. Especially with things being so abstracted, sticking to the RimWorld time passage may be effective in our tabletop version as well. We’re going to need to make sure our task timing is such that progress is made as the seasons pass, but it’s a level of abstraction that splits the difference between granularity and ease of tracking.

How to get things done

The Cortex Prime dice pool provides a great way to model long-term tasks, which will be the cornerstone of the mechanics for this System Hack. Each task is a pool of dice, which is rolled as an opposing pool to whoever is trying to work on it. If the worker succeeds and has a large enough Effect Die, they step down a die in the pool. Once a die is stepped down to a d4, it goes into the next worker’s dice pool and then goes away. This basic mechanic should be able to encompass essentially every task we’d want to model, though the exact number of dice and types of dice will need some work and playtesting to pin down. Still, the idea makes sense. Building, say, a stove could be 2d8, which will mean it’ll require six working hours to do (at minimum) and a minimum skill rating of d8 (so that the Effect Die is large enough at the beginning). This does tend to mean the hard parts come first and the easier parts are later, in terms of how projects are executed, but this is meant to be a game so that works fine for our purposes.

On the flip side, colonists will have pools, notably stress pools. The default consequence of a ‘hitch’ in this system will be to add that die to the colonist’s stress pool, or step up the stress die if there’s already one there. This is going to be the way towards RimWorld’s ‘mental break’ system among other things, but it also will make the impacts of sleep and recreation concrete. There are different ways to do this; I’m pretty sure recreation tasks will include a roll against the stress pool to step it down, but it’s less clear whether sleep should reduce stress or a lack of sleep merely increases it. Both are valid, it just changes where the balance point is.

Most projects are going to take multiple hours, where each roll gives the opportunity to step down the project dice. Some tasks, though, will resolve every hour, like planting or harvesting crops, or cooking. There, it would make sense that if the roll passes the difficulty level, the effect die would indicate the yield of the action, allowing you to create or step up dice that indicate pools of resources. The exact resource mechanics will likely be investigated more fully in base building, as both defining what the resources are and what you need to store them will be important for those mechanics.

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To summarize, we’re going to have mechanics at the hourly and daily levels. Hours are spent on tasks, which are either making progress on longer projects or producing a certain degree of results within a single hour. Hours spent for recreation will generate rolls to step down stress pools. There’s also room for social mechanics in here, but how complex I want to go with that isn’t yet decided and it’ll probably require its own article either way considering relationships are a secondary Prime Set in the rules as we envision them.

Daily mechanics will see the use of resources and tracking of passive activities. Food supplies will be used at the end of the day, plant growth will be incremented, and other ‘off-screen’ mechanics like events will be tracked. The goal will be to keep hourly tracking specific to what the characters are doing, and not overcomplicate everything else going on in the background (because as it is, we’re likely to complicate it plenty without going that granular).

There is of course an underlying question to this structure that goes beyond the mechanics of tracking time. In this game, ostensibly a roleplaying game, when is there roleplay? Since we are delineating time as much as we are, I think we also need some mechanics to enable ‘zooming in’ to individual moments throughout the day. This starts simple; each character schedules out their hours and whenever two or more characters overlap, there can be a scene there. Make playing out scenes the only way to recover social stress, and now there’s incentive to do so, even. What does ‘overlap’ mean, though? Some tasks, like farming and mining (to use common RimWorld examples) can always involve multiple people doing the same thing. Others, like combat, basically force a scene (though there will be separate combat mechanics for that). In other cases, ‘overlap’ is more tricky. It gets into a big fruitful void we haven’t discussed yet: space. It would be difficult (and not necessarily desirable) to emulate RimWorld in terms of physical base design. However, we are going to want some degree of specification as to what the base looks like and what its layout is. That layout is what’s going to indicate if characters are in the same room when doing specific tasks, and therefore if they ‘overlap’ and can have a social scene.

The interdependencies continue to mount in this System Hack. We have a basic idea of what character generation is going to look like, and what the basic ‘do-loop’ looks like. To start locking down specific skills, resources, and tasks, though, we’re going to need to talk about the base. Character needs can be simplified fairly readily: Food, heat, and shelter are really all we need to work with, while also including the implied needs of medicine, recreation, and socialization to manage the stress pools already defined in the mechanics. The base is going to be a bit more complicated, though. What do you build it out of? Where do you build it? What can you do in it? Those decisions are going to be what anchor the tasks and work system, because they’re going to be establishing the tasks. Once we know how deep we want to go with the base, tech tree, skills, and resources all naturally emerge, and then we have a minimum viable product for the game’s main loop. Sounds easy, right? Well, even if I don’t exactly know what to do next, I know where to start, and that’s really all you can ask for in a System Hack.

Check out the earlier entries in Colony Sim Cortex here.

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