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Caveats

• These documents are living documents and will change over time as the design of Space Station 14 evolves.
• Forks and other communities may have different ideas and directions that they want to take the game, which is fine and something we want to encourage!

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Wizard’s Den

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Core Pillars

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Vanilla

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Stability

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Mechanics Over Rules

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Space Station 14

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Core Pillars

• These pillars and definitions are specific to Wizard’s Den’s vision of Space Station 14.

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Unpredictability and Chaos

• No two rounds should play alike. The combination of antagonists, incompetence, and disasters should create situations where players have to deal with rapidly changing and escalating situations.
• There should rarely be guarantees. Problems should arise, and solutions may not always be immediately available. Players should be forced to adapt to rapid changes in their environment.
• Chaos should also be unpredictable. Some rounds may be slow, some may be blazingly fast; the variety of round flow is what keeps the game interesting.

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Darkly Comedic/Surrealist

• The game’s tone floats between a Surrealist Comedy and Dark Comedy, both defying expectations with absurd situations, such as the clown throwing acid pies at a mega-corporation’s special forces team.
• The game should be able to balance this tone, never becoming so absurd that it breaks immersion, but never being so serious or grim that it becomes depressing.
• Mechanics should be designed with this tone in mind, silly mechanics shouldn’t be so silly as to not be grounded, and grounded mechanics shouldn’t be mundane, and all should play a part in a catastrophe.

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Dynamic Environment

• The gameworld should be malleable, allowing for the dynamics of a station to change throughout the round. Walls may get blown open by explosions, and areas of the station may be totally renovated by a dedicated passenger.
• The station should avoid unique properties that cannot be replicated. Even abstract intangible player facing systems should still be tied to tangible objects whenever possible.

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Intuitive and Inter-Connected Simulation

• Simulated systems should be complex enough to create engaging gameplay decisions while still being intuitive enough to learn without wiki-diving.
• Simulated systems should be interactive and reactive, not only with players but with each other.
• Systems should interact with each other as much as feasible to create new emergent gameplay opportunities.
• Systems should clearly communicate all necessary information a player needs to make actionable judgments. No player should require knowledge outside the game to interact with a mechanic; black boxes are bad.
• Players should be able to find optimal strategies and discover emergent interactions solely with what information is available to them in-game.

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Player Interaction/Agency

• Mechanics and design should encourage players to interact with other players naturally. Players should feel like they have agency in these interactions.
• Interactions should not be an afterthought when designing mechanics. Player interactions should be part of the design rather than an extra step added arbitrarily.
• Players should never feel forced into a specific interaction or action. Avoid situations where players default to a specific choice because it is consistently better than other options.
• A player genuinely interacting with a mechanic should not end up completely isolated from the rest of the game. No mechanics should run parallel or tangential to the rest of the game.