Last time we talked about Arcs and Quests in Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine and how they help you run a low prep game that still keeps you on neat narrative rails. But there is another structure in Chuubo's that is also dealing with narratives driven by player actions that overlaps with Quests but not entirely that makes it harder to nail down what is a Quest and what is not - Issues. And while their existance might be a bit confusing, they kind of deal with the fundamental realities of playing RPGs, so let's dig in!
(for those that know Chuubos I'm going to be keeping things simple and ignoring edge cases that would just add complexity and not clarity)
XP Actions and Issues - the fundamentals
Chuubos, for being a game that wants you to play neat slice of life pastoral scenes, wants you to have a structure for every scene and account for it. Those are XP Actions, as in actions that give you experience points. If you hang out with someone, helping them do some household chores that's a Shared Action - a simple Shepherd moment you'd see in a Pastoral genre:
But if you'd spend a whole scene paying a lot of attention to something that cought your attention, that is a Storyteller moment you'd see in something like an Immersive Fantasy:
Every session each player has two XP Actions to do, and at the end you figure out which of these stood out the most or were the most important for that character. Based on that key Action you start building up an Issue.
Issues are something that gives structure and meaning to seemingly unrelated things that your character has experienced. So instead of forgetting that you have been dealing with weird stuff and paying a lot of attention to things that seemingly don't matter because it's been a few weeks, you look at your character sheet and see that you have a Mystery Issue relating to all that Foreshadowing and you get prompted to maybe resolve that at some point to wrap a neat bow around the last few sessions:
And after a few sessions your character is going full on Pepe Silvia since their Mystery progressed to level 5...
And that is kind of neat. Sure, a lot of players can do this kind of thing unprompted, but it's always good to have some kind of guidance in place. This both helps newer players remember things and prompt them to pay attention to what's going on and act appropriately, and for more veteran players to know when to wrap things into a satisfying conclusion.
Mystery might be the simplest Issue to act and overact with, but Chuubos has a number of these that each carry a different narrative. You could be dealing with Sickness, or your character can be suffering from a Vice, or maybe they are trying to be a Hero even when they are scared. There is an Issue for every kind of narrative genre.But how does this compare to what we've discussed last time - Quests?Issues vs Quests
So an Issue is a narrative and mechanical structure that gives meaning to character actions in a simple to understand way with mechanical rewards. But the Quests are also a narrative and mechanical structure that gives meaning to character actions in a simple to understand way with mechanical rewards... So why are we doubling up on this?
From my experience, they kind of compliment one another. Quests are things you set up for your character in advance to follow, while Issues are a reaction to what has actually transpired in a session. Plans vs actions, active vs reactive. Quests feel more aspirational and are also much more specific (as with the quest to Blackmail your Dog into Learning Martial Arts), while Issues arise from the flow of the session and show you what was actually important.
Technically, you could have Quests that cover the same things as Issues. You could totally write up a Quest about being sick that covers the same ground as Sickness and it could resolve in a similar timeframe. But here we get into the fundamental reality of playing TTRPGs that set it apart from other mediums - we often make shit up as we go.
Flowing with the narrative in TTRPG sessions
So while thinking of the topic I was trying to come up with some examples in popular media that would showcare the clear difference of Issues and Quests and honestly, I couldn't think of concrete examples. I think a big part of this comes down to how the TTRPG stories come to be versus how traditional media is created, and the fundamental difference is being able to make revisions to your story and plan things ahead.
TTRPGs are an improv story that always flows forward, while writing for a book you can always go back and change things a bit earlier in the story to fit better with what's going on later. While you can plan to have neat setups and payoffs during your sessions, you're not always in control of what's going on as you would be in a TV show. TTRPGs generally don't let you take your time coming up with a perfect script for what the situation called for (unless you are doing play-by-post or the like).
If you could have narrative control, you wouldn't need Issues, everything could just be a Quest. But we don't live in that reality. We play games where you come in with a plan that gets derailed after the first scene because something more interesting came along. We compromise between the visions all the players have individually and that of the GM. And so, the Issues are a useful way to track that and give emergent meaning to the chaos of a session. I think this might be best summed up in what Chuubos calls Out Of Genre Actions.
Breaking the Genre and the Cerebus Syndrome
When you make a game of Chuubos you pick the genre your game will be sitting in. Given that the game is a product of the mind of the mad (affectionate) genius Jenna Moran, the RPG can fit into most fiction - from slice of life Pastoral, through Epic Fantasy down to Fairy Tales (not the nice ones, the ones where misbehaving kids get turned into donkeys and are sold to the mines for heavy labour). So you pick your genre and that is the baseline your game sits in. Each genre comes with a few set XP Actions that are in-genre and you are expected to be doing them all of the time.
But you are by no means limited to that. You can at any point to an XP Action that falls outside of that genre. It's fine, but the game notices it...
Remember much earlier in this post when I mentioned that at the end of a session you pick which XP Action stood out the most to advance your Issue relating to that? Well, Out of Genre Actions stand out. They automatically get picked for their Issue because you are breaking the genre convention. Your actions are being seen.
If this was a normal narrative in a traditional medium, you'd often say it's bad writing. The show doesn't know what tone it wants to be, or the author is trying to be too clever with their writing and "subvert" the audience expectations by writing a Superman that says "fuck" and kills someone.
But, well, we are dealing with TTRPGs. Sometimes we latch onto the smallest oddity in a game and hyperfocus on it. Sometimes the spiders in our brains take over and we do something stupid. Sometimes our actions have unintended consequences and the table rolls with it. So breaking the genre from time to time is unavoidable.
The Issues noticing that help you realise you were acting out of the norm and give you space to get back on track. Or they let you structure that change in a more focused way so if you want to lean into something you do it more conciously. Sometimes it's fine to go Out of Genre for a bit if you're not veering too far and it has some kind of point.
And if your game is constantly moving in a direction of a different genre like it has the case of the Cerberus Syndrome, hey, maybe it's time to officially change your game's genre? There is no harm in it, and the Issues point you to the change perhaps being needed!
Limited by mechanical benefits
With all that being said, Issues are not a perfect tool. Recently my group and I have been playing a game of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist in Chuubos and towards the end of the second season my character got into a very unpleasant situation. This was the case of Be In Trouble XP Action, which is out of genre for Pastoral, giving him a new issue of Hero.I'm the type of gamer that wants to play kind of optimally, which in this situation meant following through with that Hero Issue and playing the next few sessions in a slightly different genre, because when you complete an Issue you get experience points, while ignoring an Issue causes it to fade and doesn't give you XP. This kind of wanting to optimise things meant playing the game differently due to a scene another player wanted to have (one where their character gets stabbed for reasons).
This is kind of like my old post of Punch me in the face for XP where the XP rewards incentivises the players to play the game in a rather stupid way. I know it's mainly on me and 1XP isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, but alas, the spiders in my head won't let me not get it ;).
So if I was to change anything it would be not to tie mechanical rewards like that to narrative structures like Issues and instead just use them to frame the story being told. It's interesting enough when the game tells you to pay attention to what's going on and also gives structure to your actions, you don't necesarily need to give players rewards for following the cool structure if they want to do it themselves for the flavour...
