Career Plans

[The Masked Orange]

This one's been cooking for a while. I've been thinking about situations which increase the volatility of worker decisions. This is both to better reflect the real world for mods, but also to help the game in general which can feel very promotion-dictated at the level of the written-contract in particular. SWF outbid USPW for X, so X moves. Y stayed at TCW until TCW decided they were too old. Z was in a tag team which EILL broke up and then forgot about him. That kind of stuff. The decision making has always felt very promotion-led.

 

My solution is for wrestlers to have 'Career Plans' that you can see on their profile. I see this as being a counterpart to the excellent attribute system, in that not all wrestlers need to have one. Most wrestlers will have a non-specific career plan. Why would Z care that EILL isn't pushing them if the money is good and they're on tv? That's most wrestlers.

 

But some wrestlers from game start or over time will pick up a 'Career Plan'. This may be something innocuous like 'Wants to find a tag partner' to something career-changing like 'Wants to make a name in Japan'. These Career Plans will have different levels of severity. A Career Plan should start off as 'Vague', something they maybe see for themselves in the future, then either disappear or graduate to 'Significant', something that is increasingly on their mind, and then either decline again or eventually go up to 'Urgent'. At that point it will be the primary concern of their decision making. Your young wannabe-globetrotter you've hired and clipped the wings of at 23 to be your star in your territory might over time give up on their globetrotting ambitions, but (just like in real life) it may be an itch they just have to scratch and they will eventually refuse contract terms that do not fit their 'Urgent' Career Plan. If all they want to do is their tag team work in their 'Career Plan' and you split them up, it will impact morale. The usual game consequence kind of stuff.

 

I like this for a few reasons. I like that a Career Plan doesn't have to happen. It makes saves different. I think the different severity levels and the fact that it's on their profile allows for the player to make informed decisions without just having a narrative get forced upon them at short notice. I think it is also a softer approach than using the Attribute system for this kind of probabilistic behaviour. An attribute (not that there are any in game currently I would put in this category) that forces someone to, at some indeterminate point, leave your company because they've decided for unexplained reasons that now is the time feels like a design a lot of people wouldn't warm too. Even if that is how things are in the real world sometimes. I think players can have that random obstacle itch scratched by turning up the injury frequency if that's the sudden challenge they want. If you've had a guy under contract for ten years and then he tells you he's finally going to go home back to Canada to wind things up, and you've been aware of this being on his mind for a few years, that feels like a more understandable bit of organic storytelling, and less like just some random occurrence in your save game. If your #6 guy says that he's leaving because he wants to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond and he hasn't reached the top here, they might piss you off in doing so but it's understandable. This could also give more utility to the 'Talk to Worker' mechanic, which I feel like at the moment 90% of my usage of is to get guys ripped. A few existing attributes, stuff like Fame Hungry or Musician, could eventually be swallowed up by this mechanic.

 

I also have in the back of my mind that this is a mechanic which might help workers make career choices based on tag work. It may help with that, it may be totally irrelevant. Just an idea. Especially for people in game that are designed to be tag-workers maybe having them start in-game with something like an 'Urgent' plan which is 'Does Not Want To Split From Partner' would help. And then, if you notice that plan soften on one/both of them, that feels like an organic opportunity.

 

Forcing myself to make it no longer than this. Hope there are some good, simple ideas in here.

[Jaysin]

I really like this one a lot!