Book genres and literary preferences

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Recently I see new books added - instead of generic “thriller novel” we now have actual titles. But the problem with them is it is basically the same system as old books - whatever character you roll, you will always react to same books with same amount of (un)fun.
Idea: book genres and literary preferences.

  • each book should have at least 1 genre, probably multiple;
  • your character have a set of preferred and dislike genres, set at character creation;
  • fun value of a book is a sum of all its genres’ values. Or maybe even some more complex function than a sum.

Bam, now your character actually does have literary preferences, instead of always stashing westerns and swashbuckling novels.

1 Like
2

Bookworm trait costs one more point and makes you prefer all genre’s.

3

So this seems like an RP oriented idea, but I wonder if you could tether some gameplay to them.

  • Novels - take a while to finish but award very long lasting morale boosts. If a character gets “hooked” (could be trait dependent) they might not want to do or read anything else until they finish.

  • Religious texts - can be read as a regular ritual. You don’t “finish” them, but you can only read so much at a time (per day). Morale loss if you miss too many days in a row (depending on character traits I guess).

  • Smut/romance - effortless morale gain but you tear through them fast. Also reading in the presence of npcs might be embarrassing.

  • Gossip magazines/tabloids - easy morale with the right traits (fashionable, etc?)

I dunno, that’s about as much as I can come up with. Might not be worth approaching it that way if rp variety is the goal since it will get difficult to designate specific properties to the wide variety of genres.

4

Decent idea. It can be both RP oriented as well as non-specific gameplay.

Could also add in(if added to the game) other angles to this. Character actors that have mental problems could pick up a work of fiction. Read through it and the game catalogs what the actor reads. This could make the actor hallucinate visual themes from the book that are of course not actually there. Same goes for psychotropic drugs and state of mind substance contamination.

To much radiation? You start going bonkers and see pirates walking around screaming “AVAST YE MATEY!! YAR HAR!!”. Perhaps that scifi novel has you seeing Mork and Mindy “NANoo Nanoo!” or whatever else.

Maybe paranoia sets in after reading something top secret and “They are all out to get you :cold_sweat:”