We know a lot about the Bliss Stage tabletop RPG, but how much do we know about the upcoming Bliss Stage: Love is Your Weapon computer game? Not a whole lot, but we’ve just learned a whole bunch. Elliott tossed us a preview document for the story, and we’re posting it up on all its glory. For those unfamiliar with Bliss Stage, it’s about teenagers using giant psychic-construct robots made out of their relationships and motivations to fight aliens that put all of the adults to sleep years ago, creating a post-apocalyptic world of strife. So, without further ado, here’s a preview of what you can expect to play:
The story of Bliss Stage: Love Is Your Weapon branches horizontally more than it does vertically, and have many different scenes rather than a single storyline. You’re almost never going to get the exact same Interludes in the same play through, and there are a lot of different factors that determine what happens.
That said, the Bliss Stage VN’s storyline has four main strategic goals, each one with an attached plot line. These are based on the system of choosing Hopes for your Resistance in tabletop: roughly, they’re campaigns to militarily defeat the Nightmares, to communicate with the aliens and end the war, to build a better society, and to raise a second generation. Note that these paths aren’t mutually exclusive – if you have the time and are on a roll, you can probably complete two.
You default to the military campaign: guerilla warfare against the Nightmare war machine. The war in the Bliss Stage VN is one decided by legs instead of arms: there are a handful of ANIMa against an army of Nightmares, but those ANIMa have speed, range, and fire-power on their side. You’re going to have to pick your targets well and strike hard: there is never enough time to do everything before the next full moon and another attack on the base. It’s going to be a lot easier going if you have a good strategy.
As the game begins, the living situation on Treasure Island is spartan, and the outlying settlements of San Francisco are in bad shape. There are neutrals on the map, kids and gang wars, and intervening on the behalf of the neutrals and building up communities is also a path to victory – one community even joins you in the fight, a crèche in the Mission that also has an ANIMa unit! This is how you meet Pilot Gabriel Winter and get allies in your war.
You can make it impossible for the Nightmares to win a siege through refinements of the ANIMa and by creating new defensive technology – including ways to slow or prevent the Bliss. That’s not enough to raise another generation, though – there’s a wide gap between children and teenagers in the base at game start, and you’re going to need some kids in-between to raise your child in the interim.
By design, the most difficult path of all is learning to communicate with the aliens, but I think that players will find that one uniquely rewarding. We’ve put a lot of thought into who and what the Nightmares are and in making them, well, alien. Without spoiling anything, I can say that they aren’t as monolithic as they seem. In the tabletop game the nature of the aliens isn’t set but obviously that doesn’t work as easily for a video game. We’ve created an interesting enemy based on our campaigns that the player will be able to explore the mysteries of.
The three biggest factors in the interludes you see are your reputation, your Intimacy and Trust with your allies, and your Trauma and Stress, in that order.
First off, Reputation. I want to name this ‘morality,’ but that term has been hijacked in most video games to mean a karma meter – you can be either beautific or horrific in those systems, and that’s emphatically not what the Reputation system is. It’s got more in common with the morality system of the Ultima games, in that they’re reputations for three different moral outlooks – none of which are mutually exclusive in theory, but in practice you have to have priorities.
In this game, the three moral axes of your Reputation are Idealism, Pragmatism, and Sensitivity: roughly, whether your moral priorities are for truth and conviction, honesty and temperance, or love and compassion respectively. Romantic partners and allies respond well if you have similar world-views, and seek you out for Interludes on their own, without your having to seek them out.
Intimacy and Trust have been ported from tabletop Bliss Stage to the VN completely intact; how much someone trusts you and how close they are to you have an obvious effect on your interactions. Particularly flighty partners need to have high Trust before even considering some intimate activities, and even more Trust to suggest them. It’s also easier to get into fights or disagreements, even minor ones, if you have low Trust even if you ARE close.
It becomes even harder if you’ve taken battle damage – pilot Trauma or relationship Stress. The psychic attacks of the Nightmares can make you less than rational, sometimes, and this is reflected in dialog choices that reflect considerably less cool than you normally have. While some of it will roll off a Trusting partner’s back, it’s possible to offend or horrify someone when you’re Stressed or Traumatized, doing further damage to your Trust. When that happens, you’ll still get a stat boost off that Interlude and another Interlude with someone (to cool off or commiserate), but the relationship is still weakened.
Mechanically these relationships are the core of the combat system just as in the tabletop game. A Trusting relationship is more stable, a more Intimate one is more powerful. Now in the tabletop game the components of the ANIMa are determined in play, like the aliens’ nature. Again we’ve had to deviate from that. We know in advance the nature of each relationship and how it can manifest for each pilot. This doesn’t mean your ANIMa is set in advance. We’ve simply mapped out the possibilities before hand. On each play through you will see the form of the ANIMa vary somewhat based on the relationships in that game.
We’ve also expanded the combat rules to better suit tactical and strategic play. This is a game about relationships and we wanted to add some more depth while keeping that emphasis. When a relationship reaches a certain threshold you will gain specific passive or activation abilities based on that relationship and the component it forms. These abilities play in to the existing mechanics and allow you to do things like rely upon armour components to provide a Success in Safety outside of your normal roll. This comes before the normal roll, so those familiar with tabletop will see this choice guarantees safety but comes at the risk of more Bliss on an extreme combat roll. As another example, a powerful weapon can combine two Neutral results to place a Success against a Nightmare objective.
Of course it’s not all good news for the pilots. In the tabletop game consequences for failing any particular portion of a mission are abstract and up to the players and authority figure. Total mission failure is a matter of a Pilot cutting their losses and abandoning the mission. We’ve given some detail to the objectives as well. Many, but not all, have consequences for failure specific to the objective you are dealing with. Nightmares have weapons and if you botch your attempt to damage an artillery Nightmare it will be free to fire upon the resistance base and injure your comrades. Other objectives may have no specific penalty but a timer after which they fail and you won’t be able to gain the benefits of completing them.
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Remember, people: The Bliss Stage: Love is Your Weapon Kickstarter ends Sunday night, so get your pledges in! It’s almost there. $10 will get you a copy of the game, $25 will get you a copy of the game and the upcoming second edition of the tabletop game, and $55 will get you a physical copy of the computer game, the manual, a soundtrack, and a poster.
Stay tuned to MiniEnt for a character preview and a combat preview within the next few days.