System mechanic — added v221 · pays nothing, on purpose

The Leading

Bringing something WITH you — the one system that cares where something else in the world ends up, not where you do

By the time this system shipped, the game already had over a dozen quiet layers measuring the shape of the player's own path — going up, going through, going back, going round, carrying, arriving. Every single one of them is about a person alone in a landscape. The Leading is the first task in the game whose objective is another creature's position rather than your own: get a live hostile creature to follow you out of the named place it lives in, and stay with it — both of you, at the same time — until you're standing somewhere else that has a name.

Why it's an activity and not just a walk

The world's creatures don't wander on their own. They stand exactly where they were made until you come within aggro range, and from that moment they move for exactly one reason: you. That's the whole mechanism a leading runs on — travel at a monster's own pace, with it hitting you the entire way, over ground where the next named region might be the better part of a kilometre off. You can't sprint it; sprinting is how you lose the thing behind you. You can't fight your way past the boredom either — killing it is exactly how the attempt fails. A leading spends the whole trip on the one thing this game otherwise never asks of you: going slowly enough for something else to keep up.

What ends it before it counts

• Outpacing it is the fail state, and the common one. Let it fall far enough behind and the leading is simply over — nothing is lost or taken, you were just moving faster than the thing you were bringing. Slowing down, or stopping and letting it catch up, is allowed and often the whole of the activity.
• Killing it fails it. The creature is the point of the trip, not an obstacle on it.
• Dying fails it. You don't arrive by respawning.
• Flying fails it. Get well clear of the ground and it's void by definition — an aircraft leaves whatever you were leading behind.

What it deliberately doesn't do

• No marker on the creature. No highlight, no leash line, no distance readout, no arrow to the nearest other region. Looking back over your shoulder to check it's still coming is the activity — a tether drawn on screen would reduce the whole thing to holding down a button.
• No timer, ever. A leading isn't a race. Stop, wait for it, take an hour if you need to.
• No way to declare one in advance. You never announce a leading and never choose a destination for it ahead of time. The game only notices — and tells you — once something has already come a long way with you.
• Pays absolutely nothing. No coin, items, experience, stats, drops, or reputation, at any number of leadings, and it declares no denominator of its own, so nothing about it can ever read as a fraction to chase.

Version history

• v221 — added. Ships exactly as described above, one version after The Crossing — a single new save field, created lazily, so a character who saved before this version loads with no leadings behind them and loses nothing at all.

Trivia

• It runs on the same lightweight 5Hz timer The Crossing does rather than the game's main frame loop, so tracking an active leading costs almost nothing regardless of how long the trip actually takes.
• The game's own development notes counted thirteen separate, quiet systems measuring the shape of a player's own path through the world by the time this one shipped — The Leading was the first of them to measure anyone else's path instead.