Homunculus characters, stat readjustment and character change in RPGs

My group and I play a lot of games with interesting mechanics. Lately, we've been trying Cortex, a modular RPG system where you can tailor the engine to your game needs. One part of the system you can plug into your game are Trait Statements - some statement that focuses and refines a trait for the character that's meant to be challenged in the course of the game. So for example, you can have a Perception trait at D10 with a Statement "Trust No One" attached to it. This would tell you about the character's worldview. Mechanically more importantly, you are supposed to challenge these Statements to get a bonus to a roll and to change your character. So if say, you decide that you can trust someone, you would roll 3D10 instead of 1D10 for that roll, but then you would have to either change the Statement, or change the die associated with the trait, either turning into "Perception D8 Trust No One (and a bonus to something else)", or "Perception D10 I Can Count On Others".

While this mechanic in itself is all well and good, from playing various games over the years, I'm yet to see anyone embrace such character changes / sideways growth as a part of their gaming experience. Let me elaborate.

Homunculus character

More often than not in my experience, when someone makes a character for an RPG they come out as a homunculus, a small version of what the character will be later in the story. When you make a warrior that's all about being honourable and just, they start out as a honourable and just warrior with weak stats, and over the course of the game, they grow into being a honourable and just warrior with strong stats and minor tweaks here and there. If you want to play a crafter, you build a crafter and invest in them being a crafter, etc. Rarely do you see a shift from one to another, or from one fundamental set of beliefs to the next.

Medieval art and homunculus baby Jesus - "perfectly formed and unchaned"

Sure, you could come into a game with a blank slate of a character and form them as they grow. From what I heard this was especially prevalent in oldschool RPGs where most level 1 characters of a given class were about the same, a lot of them wouldn't survive the meat grinder and you wouldn't care about their backstory if they would just die one session later. This kind of attitude is literally related to the term "grognard" in its original meaning.

Similarly, you could build a character and aim for them to have a character arc where they go from a naive child to a grizzled grognard and then to a quiet farmer, but unless you are playing something like Chuubo's where you can literally create an arc for your character, it might be hard to execute.

From my experience, you generally see homunculus characters - a fully formed idea of what the character will be like, with minor wiggle room for the details. If you want to play someone else, you generally don't shift your character from one thing to another using mechanics like the above, you just make a new character.

Similar mechanics

Cortex is not the only game that has mechanics for such character shifts.

In Star Trek Adventures every character has a set of Values, which basically reflect their moral centre. Things like "The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few, or the One", "Holds Everyone to the Highest Standards", "Duty above all else", etc. Those are used to either challenge the characters and make the situation more complicated because of their beliefs, or to let the character challenge that value and change their worldview based on that experience.

This of course is very much keeping with the themes of Star Trek and character development. However, in the game it can feel like you should make characters that don't believe what they should be believing, and your reward for having that character growth is a simple stat readjustment. I've heard a player be frustrated with the game expecting them not to make a character the way they want them to act and constantly questioning what they believe in, and perhaps giving a mechanic to what otherwise might be organic character growth is having the opposite effect (reminds me of Freakonomics...).

In City of Mist your character is built out of themes. Things like "trained boxer", "man of steel", "diviner", "the guy with a van". These themes accrue "fades and cracks" over the course of the game if they are neglected. If you don't show up to your boxing practice, solve problems with guns or generally make that part of your character not important, you will eventually have to replace that themebook for another to reflect what has taken its place in your character's life. While this can be an interesting flow of a story, especially when replacing your themes can turn you fully superhuman or fully mundane with some serious repercussions for either, if the players are too loss-averse or make their characters just right, they might not engage with this mechanic at all.

Many Powered by the Apocalypse games we came across feature an interesting character option for late-game levelling - "make a new character". This is example from The Veil:

In most games this feels a bit strange, but there is perhaps one game where an option like this works - The Sprawl:

The Sprawl is a Cyberpunk game, which comes with its genre expectations of character life being rather cheap and expendable. Since this character level up option costs additionally a good chunk of money, you can see it as "your character gets to retire", rather than being a given for any character. It's something you work extra hard towards.

How we handle these things

I hope our group is not alone in this, but seeing as True Friend needed to be a merit it might not be universal, but we have a relaxed attitude to character building. If you need to tweak your character, just do it, it's fine. If you want to do a complete rewrite of a character for new mechanics, the GM will usually agree (we've done that once in Heaven for Everyone after a new supplement with a new character splats came out). If you want to make a new character because the old one doesn't play that well, pretty much the same applies (we've done that in a yet unpublished Humblewood game).

Couple that with us generally knowing what kind of characters we want to play (and GM being pretty much always on-board with whatever the players come up with), we rarely engage in any of those mechanics. We have character growth and changes as a part of playing our characters in the world (for example in The Living Years demigod Atrus didn't want to form a religion around himself not to impose his worldview onto foreign people, but since they came to him for guidance and after being reassured by one of the NPCs he trusts it's fine, he changed his character's outlook organically).

So perhaps it would be good to make such kind of attitudes something acceptable in more games without necessarily needing to put in mechanics around retiring an old character and making a new one...

Conclusions

A number of games feature mechanics for tweaking your character's stats and worldview. Often, however, these might not be all that useful to the players if they already made the characters exactly the way they want to play them. It's good to give the players options to tweak their characters to better suit their games as they get some hands-on experience with how they play, but making entire mechanics around it might be a bit much...

Rainbow shields, damage of the gaps, prescribed and ad lib skills

In a lot of RPGs, players have skills, stats or whatever you want to call them that are well defined. Things like Medicine, Nature, Insight, etc. in D&D, or Occult, Drive, Larceny in Chronicles of Darkness. Then there are some games that are more flexible where the players are asked to fill in their own ad lib skills and stats - games like DOGS, Godbound or Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, where you can pretty much write anything in as a stat - "Memory of my dead brother", "Fastest gun in the west", or "underwater basket weaving".

The problem with the latter is the fuzzy boarders each such statement creates about when a given skill should be used, when it shouldn't apply, and avoiding skills that are too broad or too narrow.

Broad vs narrow skill applications

There are RPGs out there that like to break skills down to minutia. In Burning Wheel there are a lot of skills - under Carpentry alone you have Fence Building, Ditch Digging, Carving, Carpentry, Rude Carpentry, Cooping (making barrels), Boatwright, Shipwright, Cartwright and a few more. This creates a sort of Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem, where the game basically forces the GM's hand to say "sorry, you only have Carpentry, you can't carve and decorate what you build and you can't seem to know how to make a barrel". It can also create traps if characters specialise in some skill that doesn't come up that often - "I know you're a master Cooper, but no matter how great that barrel you make will be it still won't help you sail the sea, you need Boatwright for that".

You can run into similar problems in games where players can define their own ad lib skills, but those also sway in the other direction - they can be too broadly applicable. You could have players put ranks into "underwater basket weaving" only for that to come in handy once or twice in the entire game, while someone else makes a stat called "fast" and they want to use it all the time - "I shoot him, but like, fast", "I read, fast", "I sleep, fast", etc. The boarders where such player-defined skills apply are fuzzy - you can't really tell them that because there is some other skill that also works for the situation theirs might not apply. Moreover, players will often skew the problem in their favour just so they can use their best skills - "I make a basket under water and it's so well crafted I can use it as a raft with a sail to navigate the rough sea. It's all baskets, just different shapes."

City of Mist tried addressing this problem by classifying its tags into "specific" and "broad". Most tags on a character sheet should be specific - only letting the character use them in specific, limited scenarios. One tag could be broad - applicable in wide variety of situations.

Rainbow shields and damage of the gaps

While playing Exalted / Godbound with my group we would often reference a "rainbow shield" defence - a power to negate any kind of incoming damage, no matter whether it's physical, magical, fire, electricity, etc. A system that would allow for such widely-applicable defence to exist wouldn't be too fun to play really. Exalted 2nd edition suffered from something like that from what I heard - someone created an optimal way of playing the game called "paranoia combat" that's all about using perfect defence against the high-lethality rocket-tag and outlast your opponent.

In our first round of playing Godbound we ended up being too generous with defences, letting the players counter most attacks with most power sets - "I use Artifice to instantly build a wall around myself to deflect the incoming blow!". As we later found out, Godbound was not intended to work like that - any given Word should only counter a very narrow range of powers that are thematically linked to it. You could use Sea to counter a Fire power, but not say, Sword.

However, the game had a different problem, one which I'll call "damage of the gaps". The system did not have a specified, finite list of damage types. A number of powers did either give you things you could be immune to, or let you specify said immunity - for example, if you had the Word of Fire you had "an invincible defence against flame and smoke". But since "smoke" was ill-defined, we had an argument about whether that Word would apply against chemical fumes and poisonous gasses. Similarly, in the Ancalia expansion introduced an Incendiary Court - fire-golem-like creatures from outside of reality that while clearly having fire-based attacks nonetheless came with a note that their "flaming powers are not wholly of natural fire, and so enemies with invincible defences against fire still take half damage from them". This was probably to prevent players circumventing a big boss fight entirely, but still felt like a weird way to make a power less useful.

In a similar vein you could start splitting hairs on many things - if you are immune to mental attacks and someone uses music or mean words on you, does that count? Where does mental damage end and emotional damage begin? Is a psychic blow magic, mental or physical? Is a laser attack fire, sunlight, or neither? Can I make some very snowflake-y Word that has its own damage type that none of the statted enemies have defence against?

Because the game had no finite and well-defined list of damage types, you either have to make one yourself before the game starts, or possibly have to argue about this kind of damage of the gaps...

Conclusions

While being able to get creative with skills and powers can be fun, having things that are well-defined and concise can help everyone at the table know when something is applicable and avoid the problems of things being either too narrowly or too broadly useful.

Meat and potatoes of RPG powers

When it comes to character progression in RPGs, you generally rely on two kinds of upgrades - boosts to stats, and new powers. The first one is simple, you get your +X to some rolls, HP or other things you need. These are your potatoes of the mix - a bit bland, but filling, they get the job done.

The second is a bit more complicated, with each power having its own little rule or condition attached to it. These are your Moves in Fellowship, Charms or even Merits in Exalted, or Foci in Stars Without Number. Those are the meat of things usually - something flavourful and interesting.

However, sometimes those powers are very bland, amounting to nothing more than a to-roll bonus under certain circumstances, essentially turning into conditional stat bonuses. It's important to keep this difference in mind when designing an RPG.

To illustrate this point a bit more, let's talk about some examples.

City of Mist - heavy on the stats

Our first kind of powers are essentially stat boosters - something that modifies some specific roll for your character. They can give flat bonuses to rolls, change the odds of a roll, give some conditional re-roll, or something to that effect.

Stars Without Number's Specialist Focus,

a good example of a bland power.

One of the more prominent examples of a game that is heavy on the stat powers that I've come across is City of Mist. It's a Powered by the Apocalypse game about being a super-powered person in a mysterious city. You build your character by choosing their themes (Mythos - magical powers, and Logos - mundane experiences) and picking power tags from those themes. For example, if you had a Divination Mythos, you could pick "Sense minute earth tremors" and "can hear a pin drop".

Power Tag questions and answers

Now, knowing that this is essentially a Powered by the Apocalypse game about being superheroes, one would expect the characters to have some cool, unique powers to play with. But no, most of the system is just the core moves everyone has access to. If you want to attack someone, you "Hit With All You've Got", roll your dice, and then add +1 for every tag that's appropriate. So if you have "fast as lightning", "predict a foe's next move", "see in complete darkness" and they apply to the situation, you roll with a +3.

The powers you have don't change what you can do, only reflavour how you do it. Someone with an Adaptation Mythos could throw lightnings, one with Mobility Mythos would strike fast, while one with Training Logos would punch them like a boxer, but the roll and the rules are the same in either case. Almost every power you get in the game is just a conditional +1 stat.

There are some other mechanics at play in the game of course, how if you specialise in one Move you can roll well and have some more interesting Dynamite effects, how your powers define who you are and if you neglect some aspects of yourself you get a replacement Mythos / Logos, etc. The core of the game, however, relies on powers that give you just stats.

Chronicles of Darkness - when quantity turns to quality

One asterisk that one could perhaps add to stat-heavy powers is that sometimes given a large enough shift in the stat, the game could feel vastly different. For example, in our Creepy Rashomon Marine Buffet game of Vampire the Requiem, my character had a Dynasty Membership Merit that let them become Tasked and give them an 8-again quality on rolls (basically - you could snowball your successes a lot easier, meaning you were more likely to get exceptional successes). This combined with some high dice pools meant that for a very specific goal my character turned into a hyper-focused, hyper-efficient machine akin to T-1000...

Nothing can stop a Tasked vampire! Exceptional success!

So eventually, given a power that shifts the probabilities of your rolls a lot, or otherwise helps your rolls a lot, even a bland stat boost power can feel amazing for a time.

Magic - mostly powers, few stats

While I couldn't think of a system that relies mostly on unique powers without much in the way of stats, one aspect of games that usually falls in this category is the magic system. Even in D&D a good number of spells each come with their own rules and special systems unique to that spell, and spells themselves take up about 1/3rd of the Player's Handbook.

Even a simple Alarm spell adds something unique to the game

Stats vs powers

So, on one hand of the spectrum we have bonuses to stats (numerical increases or other special but simple modifiers, rerolls, etc.), and on the other we have powers that each come with their unique rules attached. One is not better than the other, however.

Stat powers are easy to add and test. You can predict what changing a stat by +1 would do to a roll.

Powers that come with their own mechanic have to not only be tested by themselves, but also against and in combination with other mechanics and powers. Each is a special use case and an exception, possibly bloating the game (how many "harm someone" or "heal someone" spells do you really need?). Adding more and more special rules can also be a burden when you have to remember to use them, unless they are well segregated into their niches (you don't need to think about special hacking rules during a shootout, and your battle spells aren't needed during a conversation).

Ideally, you'd want a complimentary mix of both in your system - powers that rely on stats to perform better and better, and stats that are varied enough to cover the basic rules without having to resort to powers for everything. Chronicles of Darkness lines are a pretty good example of this.