Golden Sky Stories [Review/Analysis]

I've been trying to go and look at a bunch of storytelling-focused games recently to try and hone my craft, since I feel like I tend to be weaker in that domain than I am with regards to more crunch/mechanics-heavy games.

One of the games that I saw perpetually recommended when I was refreshing myself on novice-friendly games was Golden Sky Stories (affiliate link), so I grabbed a copy while it was on sale on DriveThruRPG and started going through it.

Golden Sky Stories cover, from DriveThruRPG

Golden Sky Stories has an interesting premise; being built around telling heartwarming stories, the sort of thing you might expect from a children's television show, but with supernatural animal guardians called henge driving the action.

It's heavily inspired by Japanese anime, and this shows throughout the game. On one hand, if that's your jam, you'll probably totally love Golden Sky Stories' aesthetic. I appreciate a lot of the visual design, but a lot of the conventions that carry over into writing feel awkward; whether this is because it's a translation and it didn't translate well because the creators wanted to have it be more true-to-feel to the original Japanese setup, or it's just a case of my own personal preferences showing, I wasn't a giant fan of some of the extra cues. They just felt redundant to me, like the writers thought it wasn't enough to let the reader/player come to their own conclusions.

When I started doing game design, I started out at a place called 1km1kt, and the general gameplay reminds me of some of the experimental designs that occasionally got bandied about there.

It's weird in a sense that the mechanics are there, and they're clearly built to push people toward a certain form of storytelling, but if you changed the directions to the players about when to handle resources and the like you'd have a game that could be applied to anything. You could change a few words and wind up with a hyper-gory Viking myth storytelling apparatus, which is something that you can't say about something like The Quiet Year (affiliate link), which I also wrote an overview of and manages to ensure that the sort of storytelling it promotes is much more reflected in its "mechanics" (though The Quiet Year has very unobtrusive, nearly nonexistent mechanics).

There are limitations to using static numbers and resource bidding as the main game mechanics, and Golden Sky Stories acknowledges this. It's intentionally designed for a maximum size group of five players (Narrator + 4 henge players), and characters are largely defined by a limited set of core attributes and special abilities that are typically unique to them.

The advantages of this system are that it's as fast as you can get without throwing out rules entirely, and that it does do a good job of pushing players in the right direction, so long as everyone follows the rules.

There are downsides, however. Players who don't get into the game are definitely going to come out losers, and it takes more skill to be a Narrator in Golden Sky Stories than you would typically expect from a GM of another mechanics-light game because of the fact that you need to be handling a lot of resource management and keep the story going in a direction that pushes the action forward while the resource bid mechanic encourages a lot of compromise and stasis.

In its defense, the general trend of the game tends to be toward short self-contained stories with the players getting more resources fairly quickly, but the biggest issue I can see with Golden Sky Stories is this:

The rules do very few things, but they're not really light themselves.

I don't want to unfairly simplify the rules, but a lot of the core references can be tracked via the character sheet. You have the four attributes, powers, Dreams (which are a sort of amalgamation of XP and a more immediate reward), Connections, Wonder, Feelings, and Threads.

At any point in play, you're using the strength of your Connections to fuel your Wonder and Feelings, which are both expendable resources. Special abilities are fueled by Wonder, while Feelings are the bidding resource to drive the game forward. Separating these does have some small positive effects, since it encourages the use of powers, but they also have shared uses when a henge wishes to change into to their human form. Dreams are a currency used to strengthen Connections, which then pay off in Wonder and Feelings down the road.

Does that make sense?

From a design perspective, it's a functional gameplay loop. However, there's no real reference for these things, so even after going back a couple times I'm not 100% sure I've gotten this correct. There's a lot of moving parts here, but many of them don't move very far.

The big thing I'm noticing here has something to do with the notion of mechanics and meaning. I don't feel like the mechanics of Golden Sky Stories are particularly tied to the meaning it's going for. It uses a lot of wording to try and make people think it is, but it's really a storytelling flowchart. You could easily hack it to be about pretty much anything, which isn't necessarily a black mark on it, but there are places where it uses heavy-handed approaches to keep things in line, for instance telling players when they can award Dreams and having a heavy penalty for getting into a fight. While it does a good job of encouraging relationships and rewarding them, the relationships themselves are merely a resource-bearing vehicle.

Of course, from the actual performance side, there's a lot of ways you could tell a good story with this system. I'm being kind of harsh to the game because I think that the storytellers, both Narrator and player, are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and that while Golden Sky Stories serves as a constraint on that storytelling and a reminder to have some conflict and drama in there, it's not doing a whole lot to facilitate those stories.

I think Golden Sky Stories has three main lessons to be learned from.

First, that it's okay to experiment. The resource bid system is bold, but it's one that I think is a good idea, if executed properly. Despite my overall negative tone, I think Golden Sky Stories is a good game; maybe not for me and my group, but certainly for a particular target audience and for more general gamers.

Second, you need to be really aware of your purpose for mechanics. I think that Golden Sky Stories was made with a lot of awareness, but not necessarily a lot of concern, for what the systems were turning out to be. As a tool for encouraging a certain type of collaborative storytelling, they work well, but the fundamental approach to Golden Sky Stories is more about channeling player agency in a particular direction.

I tend to think of games in an opposite fashion; rather than saying what a character will do, the rules of many games are built to encourage agency: anyone can try anything, but they may not be good at it. Of course, this is truer of some games than others (try getting the Fighter to cast a spell in D&D 3.5), but the general notion is that players start out as "average" and are defined by the ways they buck the norm. When I was looking at The Expanse Roleplaying Game's Quick-Start I was impressed by how they did this; each character has a single page of data, which is not particularly compact, and is generally focused on how they are better than the baseline, with a sort of resting basis for most characters of a null modifier.

In a sense, the characters can attempt anything, but they get bonuses when they act in certain ways.

In Golden Sky Stories, attributes function as sort of a "free bid", and it's probably the bidding mechanic that leads to some of what I perceive as a focus on limitation rather than empowerment in the core mechanics. Nonetheless, because there's a heavy focus on player skill (Dreams are awarded for skillful, on-topic contributions to the story), and few ways to customize a character in Golden Sky Stories, a low attribute makes things feel impossible for a character.

The counterpoint to this is that Golden Sky Stories is built around the notion that failure shouldn't be final, and even a mistake can be constructive. There's nothing wrong with that–in fact it's probably one of the best points the designers make–but it does seem sort of self-defeating.

This is where I think the third lesson can be learned from Golden Sky Stories, and it's the only one where I think there's something that can clearly be pointed to as a fault of the system. There's no reason to prefer success to failure, because the rewards mechanism is entirely detached from that and the plot is supposed to work itself out. The things that define a character have, essentially, zero impact in play, because you could come up with any narrative system to tell people when they succeed or fail and it would, essentially, function identically.

There's no chance involved, and while information uncertainty plays a role in a strictly game theory sense, the fact of the matter is that the actual exercise of playing the game is meaningless from a design standpoint. That doesn't mean Golden Sky Stories isn't a good storytelling framework, but when compared to something like The Quiet Year it doesn't hold up quite so well; there's a lot of game stuff here that is just dead weight trying to masquerade as an engine to drive the story onward.

The point where this feels exceptionally strong to me is when I recall the card system used by The Quiet Year. You can be going along and suddenly draw a card that involves having a member of the community die, or you can draw a card that adds a new member of the community. You then tell a story based on how that happens, and the game has set the inflection for your description but not your final description of the events (I'm hyper-simplifying The Quiet Year, which is also about making a map and a community, and has a more involved process than this).

In Golden Sky Stories, there's no deck of cards to set the mood. In its place are standing orders about what kind of story will be told. The Narrator has a role to play in that, but it's essentially either scripted or anarchic, and it's secondary to the overarching goal of the story. The main mechanic of The Quiet Year is figuring out what to do with the events that you're unfolding, while the main mechanic of Golden Sky Stories is to have a game to draw you away from the storytelling.