The flavour is free - looking past genre boxes with Fellowship

Years back our group found Fellowship, the best PbtA game we've played before or since. We played it a bunch and had a lot of fun with how versatile of a framework it provides. We used it for Star Wars, Transformers, Exalted and heck, even Warhammer 40k. Which is why it was a surpsise for us to hear some people bounce from it because it was "just generic fantasy" and not looking past the genre box they put the game in to see what it is trying to do underneath the surface.

But since we have a good deal of experience reflavouring RPGs to suit what we need, let's talk about the issue more broadly! Let's talk about how you can look past the game's exterior and possibly have more fun tailoring the game to your needs!

When an Elf is not an Elf - Fellowship's Playbooks

The main way Fellowship seems to have lead people astray is with some of its names. The game itself brings to mind the Fellowship of the Ring book, and if you look at its Playbooks you see such fantasy staples as Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Orc, etc. You glance at the surface and think to yourself "yup, this sure is a generic fantasy game drawing from everyone's first fantasy book inspiration" and if you're not in the mood for playing fantasy you move on. But the looks can be deceiving!

So for example, let's look at the Elf Playbook. Here is most of what it can do:

Elf: Everyone can see what an elf is.

The Elven Core Moves is the baseline for the Playbook - the Elf can use magic to hide, see well, sense magic and send messages. It also can move without leaving a trail. The Elven Custom Moves further enhance these abilities and also gives them an option to be a performer.

On the surface it's pretty Tolkien-esque elf stuff. Wield a bow, climb some trees, attack unseen, etc. But we need to look past what the flavour and theming of the mechanics is and look at what you can actually do with this mechanical set!

Because you see, with the same set of mechanics you are not only describing Legolas, but also Solid Snake, the Predator and the hecking Batman. Any character that focuses on stealth and ranged attacks can easily slot into this Playbook. If you need to add some other character-specific doodad like Batman's wealth or gadgets you can do so with the Half-Elf Custom.

Sure looks like an Elf, even has pointy ears!

The same treatment can be applied to all the other Playbooks. Dwarves are characters that are tough and into clearing a path forward (like, say, a footbal quarterback), Halflings are sneaky tricksters that like fighting big things (like Antman), Orcs are people that fight with whatever they can kitbash together (like a LEGO Master Builder).

Heck, grab the right expansion and Playbooks for Fellowship and you can just straight up play Star Trek with it...

But this idea of reflavouring mechanics and character concepts doesn't just apply to games like Fellowship. We've done it elsewhere too!

Mechanics vs flavour - Blackstar and cybernetics in SWN

A while back we played a game of Stars Without Number called Blackstar. Midway through the game we wanted to make an introduce new combat character. The character was going to be a cool cybered-up mercenary, but then when we looked at the cybernetic loadouts available in the game we were rather underwhelmed. They were prohibitively expensive for a starting level character and not as cost efficient as just getting regular gear to do similar combat stuff (these things got addressed a bit in Cities Without Number years later).

But we found a clever workaround. All we wanted was for the character to be tough and be able to punch things really well, and what covered all of our needs were the Foci the characters could take - Ironhide and Unarmed Combatant. Thematically those are there to represent some kind of space shaolin monks or tough aliens, but there isn't really anything stopping you from saying those represent your character's cyberware. You get the mechanics you need and keep the flavour you wanted without having to deal with the cumbersome cybernetics system or getting any kind of mechanical advantage over a regular character.

Cybernetics? Nah, just Foci!

Conclusions

While you don't want to carelessly mess with game's mechanics while trying to make it fit the story you want to play, reflavouring existing mechanics to suit your needs works quite well with many games. When you're trying to customize a game like that, don't look at its aesthetical trappings, but instead at what the game wants to be mechanically.

And as for Fellowship, from what I've been hearing its third edition is currently in the works that might address some of the leading names for the Playbooks. Currently its Elf is the Star, Halfing is the Rascal, Dwarf is the Mountain, Orc is War Torn and so on.

So fingers crossed the game gets the recognition and accolades it deserves!

Storytelling with money in RPGs

Recently while browsing /r/RPGdesign I stumbled on a post describing someone's monetary system in their work-in-progress RPG. It was rather bland - "100 copper is 1 silver, 100 silver is 1 gold", plus some stuff about who gets to use what kind of coin and so on. Then I thought to myself - I have a Master of Science in Cryptocurrency, I can put some interesting ideas together from various things I've read in the past. Well, here they are - a few ideas to adding some storytelling flavour to your game with money.

Coinage and taxation as political means

Anyone can create their own currency, but governments (and similar institutions of power) have a way of also forcing that money to circulate. By simply having the government print their own currency as well as require taxes to be collected specifically in that currency you can force the entire population to work towards the government's goals without having to coordinate everything.

If you want to maintain an army, pay them in those coins. If you want to build a monument, pay those workers. If you need to store grain, pay for the grain. Whatever the government Wants is where the money enters the system. Then by that invisible hand of the market everyone has to align themselves with that Want in order to pay their taxes.

If you pay the military, you will have people that feed them, clothe them, make their weapons. Those in turn will require other people to supply grain, cloth, iron and so on.

You could then tell some stories by twisting this formula. Maybe some region doesn't have many coins so everyone is desperate to sell their wares for cheap to get their dues before the taxes are due. Maybe the priorities shift and suddenly you have masons that are out of the job once the castle is done. Maybe you have the land be recently conquered and there is a frenzy to exchange the old currency for the new and re-establish oneself - something some merchants might want to capitalise on if they still do trading with the old rulers of the land.

This one might be subtle, but it serves as a nice shandification of your world.

Shandification of Fallout

("What do they eat?")

Multiple currencies and mercantile campaigns

Something that might not be for every group, but if you're into mercantile campaigns you might dig this - put multiple currencies in your world with no fixed exchange rate. This can be especially good for a campaign that involves a lot of travelling and trading - having currencies be worth different amounts based on the location and the political situation.

Maybe you have Dwarf Silver and Elven Silver that would be worth $1 in their home countries, $0.50 in one another's kingdoms, $0.90 in the human realm, but everything would also fluctuate by ~20% each season. This could encourage the players to plan ahead before they travel as to whether they want to keep cash in coin that might not be worth as much, or buy some goods for trade that should keep their value. Again, not for everyone, but something for people that love spreadsheets.

Then you can try spicing things up by letting players try doing market speculation akin to Spice and Wolf:

Spice and Wolf - an anime about fantasy capitalism

Maybe they earned a large cache of coins from a kingdom that's down on its luck. Now they would be invested in making that kingdom prosper in order to turn their profit into a small fortune. Or maybe they would just hype up the return of a king to power to drive up the demand for that currency only to dump it. Or maybe they buy war bonds of a losing army only to turn that around - it worked for Timothy Dexter...

This could be your party, for good or ill...

Best look at Suns of Gold for a neat way to fluctuate the value of goods and so on, which can apply to currencies as well.

Fiat and political control

In Exalted the most powerful kingdom of the land, the Realm, uses money as means of political control. Their money is based on jade, one of the magical elements of that world that's useful for making artefacts, magic, etc. However, most people will never handle a jade coin - instead, they use fiat banknotes issued by the Realm that are backed by jade. It's even a crime for a non-noble to be using actual jade coins.

By doing this the Realm makes itself indispensable - all the money is backed by it, and if you rebel against it, that will make your money worth less due to the shaken confidence. If you print your own money, that will be treason, if you try using a hard currency that will be a crime, so you have to play along.

Now you can start twisting the formula - what if the government turned a bit incompetent and started printing away the banknotes without the jade to back it? That's some way to get rich for a brief before the system becomes unsustainable in the long-term with fractional reserve banking.

What if jade was a key ingredients for running all magic and magical weapons? Then suddenly the government can start rationing how much power anyone can hold. You can't start a magitech rebellion if you don't have that key raw material to build your army since it was confiscated.

What if you still had to pay taxes in actual jade? That would mean it would have to be extracted from somewhere, bought from abroad or you'd need to go conquer some new lands to get some. Now you have a struggle for driving the big picture conflict.

So how do you rebel against someone that inflicts such control over your life? That's up for the players to tell you!

Moneyless societies

Not everyone in history used money or even barter (shocking, I know. Read Debt: The First 5000 Years to learn more). Now how would players interact with such societies?

First could be a smaller community that operates on doing favours for one another. One day I catch some fish so I give you some, other day your turnips are ready so you'll give me one, etc. The players might come into such village or town and be delighted that they don't need to pay for their food or lodging, only to find the next day the locals ask them for something of theirs - a broche, shoes, etc. Maybe they don't even realise that when someone says "that's a fine bow you have there" they mean "I would like you to give me the bow". Could be an interesting situation to throw your party into to see how they interact with a culture they might not understand.

Another one comes from our Crew Expendable campaign - what if the players found themselves on a planet that's true, functioning communism. Maybe one that uses money for trading with passing merchants, but also one where you can't bribe people because money has no meaning for them. I actually had one player try bribing a government official to let them skip a customs lockdown only for that to fail miserably since of course all the capitalist traders would try bribing them and not understanding their culture...

When you owe a bank a billion dollars...

There is another aspect to money that's not evident when you look at the small picture - money is deeply political. As the saying goes - "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.". The same can be true in your world.

You could have a kingdom that always pays its debts to whoever runs the iron bank, and one that's constantly in debt. When they go to war, you might expect the bank to side with the kingdom that has always paid back, but in reality they stand to gain a lot more by supporting the one that's their debtor. If that kingdom falls, they lose all that money. If it wins, they can exert their power to get that money back.

Similarly, if the ruler gives the power to print the money to a bank, they might be bowing down to them soon enough ("Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!"). Or maybe the trust in money comes from the royal lineage that's in decline so now the rich are scrambling to find a way to secure their position in the future - either by preserving the bloodline, or by changing their allegiances.

You can create a good deal of political intrigue by just focusing on who owed who how much, whether that's money or favours. After all, the creditor will want to make sure their investment gets repaid...

Choke on your gold

This one comes from a weird source. Back in the day in Poland someone released Play Dirty booklet. Then the same company released a few more booklets in the same series (but spoilet alert - John Wick did not write those, instead they were written by Ignacy Trzewiczek, a polish board game designer). In one of those books, he described a scenario for one of his Neuroshima campaigns (basically different take on Fallout): the players find a hoard of treasure that's immensely valuable (in that world old-world artefacts were valuable, so the treasure was a complete collection of Playboy magazines). The catch it - it's worth so much they will be hunted by everyone and not able to cash out their ill-gotten gains unless they find someone fabulously wealthy to buy it off of them. As soon as anyone would catch a whiff of this kind of wealth, they would be gunned down by raiders, bounty hunters, thieves, you name it.

So this is another way of storytelling with money - give players something so valuable they choke on it. Give them a priceless artefact they can't find anyone with enough gold to buy it, a shiny ship they can't pawn off,  nor crew fully, etc. and challenge them to go nuts with it.

Working poor and #iHunt

As I already touched in "The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor" - lack of money can also be a statement for your game. It could be that money is only important in rough income brackets like in World of Darkness, or maybe it's only useful as a resource like in Fellowship, or it could be like #iHunt. In that game, you will always be a working poor. You will be doing gigs killing monsters and bringing in some dough, but money is fickle and it never sticks - there are always more debts to pay, more expenses that keep appearing, and you will be back to being broke and in debt in no time. Some might find that stressful, but because the game never tracks your money, it's liberating - you will always be broke, so don't worry. Life will always kick you when you're down, but you will always get back on your feet. It's an interesting twist on the idea of money in games, and it's also a good statement for the game.

Conclusions

There is a lot you can bring into an RPG world or session if you look at money more than just a way of keeping track of players' coffers. It can be a volatile tool, drenched in politics, influence and greed. If those stories work for your table or game - tell them!

Related posts:

• Ships, Shares and Startups - for an interesting way of handling a spaceship like a startup in RPGs
• The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor - a discussion on a game about being working poor and mechanics focusing on what's important

See also:

• Spice and Wolf - for interesting mercantile-focused anime
• Suns of Gold - best sourcebook for running a trader game
• Debt: The First 5000 Years - for exploration of how money systems worked in the past
• Money as Debt - for an interesting view of how modern money works

Plot Elephants

Sometimes when you play a TTRPG someone introduces a seemingly small element into the plot that ends up changing the game and unintentionally grabbing a lot of attention to itself. They are Plot Elephants, because you just have to acknowledge the elephant in the room when it appears.

Let's talk about some examples.

DnD's Amulet of the Planes

Amulet of the Planes is an artefact that lets you transport yourself and nearby creatures to another Plane of Existence you know. If you fail a roll, everyone gets scattered across that Plane and possibly every other Plane. So basically you have a pocket device from Sliders with notable chance to scatter the entire party across the multiverse each time you use it.

It is a powerful artefact, but one with a pretty high chance of throwing en entire adventure haywire. So either you make the point of  avoiding using it, figure a way around its limitations, or YOLO it and ravel in the chaos to the GM's dismay. It's not really the type of artefact you just go "oh cool" and forget on your inventory sheet.

Taking20 listing Amulet of the Planes as a campaign-breaking item

"It doesn't matter what your campaign was about, it is now a plane-hopping campaign"

Exalted's Dragon Kings

In Exalted there is an old race of creatures called the Dragon Kings. They are creatures of perfect resurrection - their souls retain the memories of all of their previous lives when they are reborn. Couple that with them being one of the most ancient races of the setting and being heavily intertwined with the highest deity of the setting and his Exalted heroes, introducing a Dragon King into the game opens up a large can of worms.

Dragon Kings!

First of all, they have been around when the land was ruled by titans and a lot of them would probably have first-hand experience of their cruelty and how the world was put together. This history goes strongly against the cosmology put forth by the biggest faction of the setting, the Realm, but also many other players like Autochtonia, etc. They have dangerous knowledge.

Secondly, they've lived through multiple apocalypses and many of them could know of a number of ancient tombs filled with treasure and weapons from the height of the Deliberative. If anyone would know where some mad warmonger keeps their stash of doomsday weapons, it would be these guys.

Thirdly, depending on how you play them, they might be a terrible influence on some of the Exalts, particularly Solars. Our GM likes to portray them as sycophants, and there is no easier way of making a character do horrible things than to inflate their ego with flattery and tales of how they once were the rulers of the world. If their word was law and they could do no wrong, how can this time be different? They deserve to subjugate their enemies after all...

During the Congenials Season 1 Episode 7 our GM introduced a ghost of one of the Dragon Kings as a story hook for one of the players and it absorbed most of the attention from the party. The Solar wanted to cleanse its soul right there and then, the Alchemical wanted to extract the heretical history out of their head and mess with its reincarnation so they'd have a knowledgeable companion, and the Dragon King wanted to whisper honeyed words into the Solar's ear. That character alone sparked a large deal of debates for the players, both in character and out.

SWN's True AI

In Stars Without Number Revised the players can choose from a few key character classes - Warrior, Expert or Psychic. These are all pretty standard and pretty balanced between one another. However, in the Deluxe edition, you can also pick a fourth option - to play a True AI.

In SWN, a True AI is not just a normal robot like R2D2 or C-3PO (that would be a Virtual Intelligence character "race"). A True AI is Ultron:

True AI in a nutshell

Straight away at character creation you can take the murderbot frame (Omen) and be able to rip and tear way above your weight class and tear through even ship hulls:

This is your starting PC.

Yes, the one in the background that looks like

Michael Bay's Megatron

If you have a ship with the correct modifications, you can run it by yourself by level 2. If you had a hacker in your group, by level 3 they are outclassed by your innate hacking skills. At the same level you can control almost 3000 drones and it only gets crazier from here. By the time you're at level 9 you can teleport, rewind time, dictate how events will unfold in the future, and retcon almost any level of preparation out of your hat ("why yes, I did bury a spare spaceship with months of life support and power armour on this desert planet for this exact eventuality"), so you're outclassing a lot of psychics (oh, and unlike them, your powers can't be countered or detected by psychics).

All the while you have a lich-like phylactery which makes you a lot more immortal than anything in the universe, and you can swap your shells to get high bonuses to specific things ("need a medic? I can be a medic in 5 minutes. Need a mechanic? I can be one as well").

In-universe, the value of a True AI far exceeds what any player or even entire planets could earn, and they are also extremely dangerous if they turn malicious. Heck, in-fiction True AI have to have breaks on them to dumb them down to human-level thinking. Otherwise, these "unbreaked" AIs turn extinction-level-entity very rapidly.

So the moment a True AI gets introduced into the game, you're dealing with a large elephant that needs addressing. If it's a PC, they can make the game interesting very quickly (especially since SWN encourages the GMs not to "keep the PCs poor" and so on). If the PCs find a True AI, they can get either very rich, or very dead, depending on how things roll. Heck, RollPlay's SwanSong was a game about dealing with unbreaked AIs and the nightmare even one of them can be.

EvWoD's Ceasing to Exist Approach

In Exalted vs the World of Darkness Sidereals have a Charm called "Ceasing to Exist Approach". It lets your current self stop existing while you take on the life of any person you want, whether they are human or supernatural. The past reweaves your new existence into itself to fit you, so if you are a vampire prince's daughter you have the backstory to back it rather than appear out of thin air. You also get a lot of dots in Backgrounds, meaning you can have a lot of potential influence as a character - you could be a high-ranking member of the vampiric society and a millionaire at the same time, etc.

The thing is, when you end this power and go back to being yourself, that other story doesn't vanish, just the person goes missing. Suddenly the prince's daughter is missing, or a politician is nowhere to be seen, or what have you. Their stuff is also there, and since you know their bank account passwords or could arrange some other transfer to your old self, you can bootstrap a lot of interesting stuff to yourself. You could for a moment create a Bruce Wayne-like figure in your town, complete with an Alfred, tell them what's going on, then come in as yourself and enjoy your life of luxury and a hyper-competent and loyal butler.

So the Charm is very powerful, but also has strong drawbacks that have vague consequences. You could use it to bypass a lot of problems ("our target is locked up in his doomsday bunker? Good thing he was his loyal butler by his side! Disappears!"), which can make the game a bit boring and very frustrating for the GM. It's also a very expensive Charm, so it's a Plot Elephant - either the game is about hopping identities and you make the investment, or you just spend a good chunk of XP on something you don't want to use or can't utilise.

Sidereals Ceasing to Exist everywhere...

Conclusions

When introducing elements into your game that are very strong, have a lot of knowledge to share, or have the chance to derail the plot, you should be prepared for what you're getting into. Once a Plot Elephant is in the game, your whole game could revolve around it, or be shaped by it. This of course can make for some excellent stories and even entire games, but if they weren't meant to be the focus, they can take away from everyone's enjoyment. Teleporting someone into the Elemental Plane of Fire might be a fun joke once and getting your party back together from across the multiverse might be an interesting story, but both can be frustrating the second and third time around...

Respect and acknowledge the elephant in the room...

Manage your game's mental load

A concept I don't see discussed often when it comes to RPGs is that of a "mental load". To put it simply, there is a limit to how many things a human mind can keep track of, and the same is true for RPGs. Once that limit is reached, you tend to either forget things you should be doing, or slow down considerably. Ideally, you want your game to work under that limit, where you can reach the flow state.

Lets break things down into a few categories.

First of all, complicated rules take up a lot of our mental limit. Remembering all the rules for something like Contact would take a lot of effort, so you're most likely be going over it step by step each time you engage in combat. Fewer special cases, exceptions and so on are much less strenuous on the players and GMs alike.

Secondly, more rules means more mental strain, understandably. You can either start off with a system that has a lot of rules for everything, or gradually build up as PCs gain more powers and abilities (which often come with their own little special rules as discussed last time). An example of that from our group would be Exalted, where after a few seasons of Princes of the Universe our character sheets turned into character booklets, with everyone having too many incremental charms to use effectively. This problem was solved when we switched to Godbound where powers were bigger in scope, but smaller in number.

Just one of many of Exalted's charm trees.

Most of those nodes are incremental powers, a small rule to remember...

On a similar note, letting players have limited access to a really large pool of powers can also lead to choice paralysis and increased mental load. A good example of this would be the power Brilliant Invention from Godbound. It's a power that lets you mimic any Lesser Gift from almost any Word. That's over 300 different Gifts you can conjure at a moment's notice - good luck trying to remember the best thing to use for any given situation off the top of your head (then again, 90% of the time you just use Purity of Brilliant Law with this one and call it a day)...

You can use 60% of all Gifts.

Hope you remember them all!

Thirdly, GMs have to juggle more things than players, so it's easier for them to reach their limit. When it comes to NPCs, you ideally want them to be much simpler than PCs. Fellowship handles this pretty well - NPCs only have one to two powers that also serve as their HP. They are much simpler than PCs that take up at least two pages of stats, powers and what have you. It's much easier on the GMs.

Fourthly, context switching can help to compartmentalise the rules and alleviate the mental load. While trying to say, hold 50 different powers in mind at one time can be hard, having 5 distinct and separate game systems each with 10 different powers can be much simpler. You don't need to remember rules for investigation or hacking during a shootout, and bulk trading rules don't apply during space combat. Being able to switch context and only consider a smaller subset of rules and powers can let you handle bigger things. For example, in our Stars Without Number game we use the Suns of Gold expansion that features a big trading system. It's not the easiest thing to use, but since when we are doing the trading there isn't anything else going on, everyone can focus on just this one thing and it flows pretty smoothly.

Fifthly, game aides can help a lot. It's much easier to remember rules when you've trimmed off all the fat and put them on a simple cheatsheet. Having all the rules you need for something on one sheet is ideal - you can context switch to that single page whenever you need to use those rules and follow along to make sure you're not missing anything. For example, while playing Mage the Awakening, having a printout of the Spellcasting Quick Reference pages really made the magic flow, rather than getting bogged down whenever we'd try to engage with the core system of the game.

Page 3 of 4 of MtA's Spellcasting Quick Reference

Sixthly, changing numbers doesn't increase the load. As discussed last time, RPGs usually have powers that come with their own little rules, and stats, which just alter the numbers you roll. Changing the stats doesn't really change your mental load for dealing with them (unless you have to deal with some weird dice mechanics). So if you want to balance your own mental load in a point buy system like Chronicles of Darkness, you can do so by buying powers when things are too simple, and stats when you are reaching your own limits. It can be an interesting way to balance the system without hampering character growth.

So all in all, there are many ways a game can manage the mental load of their players - by keeping its rules simple, avoiding too many small extra rules, keeping things simple for the GM, segmenting systems from one another, providing concise game aides, and letting you buy into more powers or stats to adjust your own load.

A story of gaming transhumanism in SWN

Awhile back I heard an interesting story in one of the Discords I frequent. One of the GMs ran a campaign of Stars Without Number Revised Edition using the transhumanism rules.

When making a transhumanist character, you star with up to 50 Face (reputation credits essentially) worth of a shell (augmented body that houses your consciousness). However, if you don't start as a transhuman character, you get to spend that 50 Face on gear at highly reduced prices (being in a post-scarcity society gets you that).

So as the story goes, one of the characters decided to be a normie, while everyone else was transhuman. He got to start the game with like, two high-tech hovertanks, and some other military gear to spare, while everyone else had their lab-grown enhanced bodies - someone went for superhuman, someone else for a murder robot, someone else had a flying frame, etc.. The GM wasn't amused by the hovertanks and what have you, but he let that slip.

Not a bad way to start a campaign, being a murder robot

After an adventure, everyone in the group has earned like, 20 Face each, barely enough for the lowest-end replacement body, a crude box design. However, apparently the one normie player has convinced his 4 buddies to pool their payout together and give it to him, which meant he was able to afford the top-of-the-line shell, the Terminus. Max in all physical stats, built-in armour, being able to survive in vacuum for awhile, you name it.

Understandably, the GM was a bit vexed. He didn't expect that played to game the system twice and now be ahead of everyone else that played by the spirit of the game. The GM vented a bit about the situation on Discord, and we commended that player for being clever, and there was a fair bit of story potential created now that he owes so much Face to the rest of the group. We had some good chuckle out of the situation.

Thinking about it, there was a way for the GM to play an interesting trick at the player's expense in that situation. The situation would be a bit like some concepts found in Soma:

So here is how I'd handle it, in hindsight, and if I was the GM. I'd let the player go through the process, and roleplay his transition into being transhuman. Roleplay how he'd go to get his brain digitised so it can be uploaded into his new body. Then the next scene would switch over to the other characters welcoming the new version of their friend. The twist here would be that that version wouldn't be played by the player, but the GM. They'd tell other players that this person is their friend and acts just like him, except he'd still be controlled by the GM.

Then, the GM would let the normie character walk in as himself, and cue the awkwardness as the process is explained. The process is actually copying the original person, doing a "copy and paste", not "cut and paste". The original would then perhaps be allowed to leave, or something else to indicate to the player that that character still has rights and so on. Then the GM could let the players work out what to do next, how to split possessions, who should go with the team and so on. If the normie character would leave the party, the GM could then sternly look at the player and tell them to make a new character. Then finally after a small pause laugh it off and give them their now transhuman character to play as.

With this approach, the GM would deliver on the heavy themes relating to transhumanism, let the players know that playing cheeky can have repercussions, while still not denying the players the rewards for being clever.

Nitpicks about RPG PDFs

My group and I play a lot of RPGs. While some groups prefer to stick to traditional printed books and paper character sheets, we are pretty comfortable all sitting on our laptops, have our Google Drive character sheets open and a PDF of the rulebook handy. Unfortunately, we have seen our share of bad PDF rulebooks out there, which can make the process of running a game all the more frustrating. Below are some of our gripes and nitpicks around various PDFs we had to deal with over the years.

A number of the examples below may come off a bit harsh especially against small, self-published RPGs. This article is not meant to be an attack against anyone, or a criticism of the RPGs themselves, but it merely uses various RPG PDFs as an example of various mistakes you can make. Most of the RPGs used as examples are things we really enjoy playing - hence why we notice those problems in the first place - by being exposed to them through regular play. With that out of the way...

Good Index is important

First thing that is a must for a PDF or physical books is the Index. When you need to search a 300 something book to find a section explaining a specific topic, you naturally check the Index. Well, it seems that some people may have forgotten that. For example - Mage the Awakening 2nd Edition, a book with almost 100 pages of spells, released their PDF without an Index. Good luck finding Sympathetic Names out of the blue if you don't remember them being described under Space Arcanum.

Luckily, the second version of the PDF did come with an Index. It wasn't Bookmarked, but at least it was there. And it was a pretty exhaustive Index too, listing all the important pages something is discussed and highlighting the primary definition of something:

Now, if you want to earn your final brownie points for a good Index, look at what Broken Worlds did and hyperlink every page number, so that you can click on it and be taken straight into that page. Really solid work!

Speaking of Broken Worlds...

Hyperlink your PDF

This one might take some extra effort, but it is REALLY nice to have - hyperlinks everywhere. Whenever you refer to a specific concept, rule, power, spell or anything that has rules attached to it, make it a hyperlink. It really helps with navigating the PDF. At least do it for key concepts.

Broken Worlds does this pretty well. Take this part of the page from Character Creation section:

It links you to the Train Move, as well as rules for damage, armour, wounds and stamina. The PDF is pretty good when it comes to linking the core rules you might be interested in while reading certain sections and it really works.

Make your PDF copy friendly

Obviously, when you have a PDF, you will want to be able to copy parts of it for your own reference. I personally like making my own character sheets that have a copy of all the relevant powers my character has access to. There are a few things that make the process harder unfortunately.

Have a look at this Elven power from Fellowship playbook PDF

Looks pretty simple, has some bolds, italics and so on, but should be a simple thing to copy, right? Well, this is how it looks when you actually try to copy it:

enchanting performance (grace)
When you perform an Elven art for an attentive
audienceL roll (GraceE On a 10KL you may Forge a Bond with
as many audience members as you6d likeE The Bond should
relate to how much they adore and appreciate youE On a 7U9L
you may only Forge a Bond with a single listenerE On a 6UL no
one caresE

For some reason, every non-alphanumerical character is a special character or something. This means you have to manually correct anything you copy as some sort of copy protection mechanism or something. Luckily, this sort of thing is quite rare (although I have a bad luck with headers / power names...).

Other than that, you have a small issue of the power name being all lowercase, and then using hard breaks on every line rather than making the PDF format itself. The latter means if you want to make something into an actual paragraph, you have to delete every newline and add a space instead. Can get a bit tedious on bigger chunks of text.

But that's generally something you have to deal with infrequently, now let's talk about probably our favourite pet peeve - Bookmarks!

Bookmarks are important!

Having a good Index is crucial for having a good, accessible book. Having Bookmarks is crucial for having a good PDF. There are so many ways we have seen Bookmarks messed up it's not even funny. So let's start going over some things one by one.

So first, here is what you'd ideally see when you first open up the Bookmarks bar:

Clear, top-level categories, everything collapsed and visible on one page. You can instantly tell where to look. This would be an ideal version, but this example comes from Stars Without Number Revised, which has a few problems with its Bookmarks.

First of all, you shouldn't ever Bookmark trife. For example, the PDF has bookmarks to individual Backgrounds (which are irrelevant once you make your character) and individual Foci (which are only relevant during levelling up). Things that are so small you can fit 8 of them on a single page, yet you devote Bookmark real estate to each of them individually:

On top of that, that neat, top-level set of Bookmarks is all open when you load the PDF up, meaning this is what you see every time:

So if you want to use those Bookmarks, you have to devote a few extra clicks on closing the categories down one by one.

On a similar note, the same publisher has released Lexicon of the Throne which had some new problem with its Bookmarks:

Where some items in the Bookmarks turned into categories (Birds, Cities and Dance should be on the same level, but they aren't).

As nit-picky I might be about Sine Nomine while still enjoying it, at least the Bookmarks themselves are generally readable and usable. The same can't be said for Werewolf the Forsaken 2nd Edition:

First of all, the custom colour scheme looks awful in Acrobat Reader under dark mode. Something you'd expect a fair number of people to be using, but apparently nobody checked against. Similarly, the book itself uses flowery chapter names, which are pretty useless when it comes to quick navigation. Where would you look for character creation rules? "A Wolf I Am"? Wrong! That's where the lore is. "Laws of the Kill" is where you have those rules. Now you open up that tab and what do you see?

Sections like the Soul, Body and Spirit of the Wolf. What do those reference? Soul of the Wolf talks about the basic character concepts, creating your character and the pack. Body of the Wolf talks about various tricks you can do and transformations. Spirit of the Wolf describes various powers you have, Triggers is a half-page panel in the middle of the previous section, and Spirit Magic talks about even more powers you have but of a different variety. In general, a lot of flowery language that doesn't tell you much beyond a hint of what's present.

Vampire the Requiem 2nd Edition suffers from similar mistakes, except they also bookmarked the fiction that comes between all of the chapters:

Honestly, looking at the various PDFs we used in our games recently, I think Broken Worlds hits the mark again with a pretty decent set of Bookmarks that aren't immediately a mess when you open the PDF:

They tend to unfurl a bit on the lower levels, but it's still better than a lot of the other examples used (especially a few systems that didn't bother putting in any Bookmarks at all).

Quick reference rules

Explaining rules in detail is fine, but when you play the same game over and over, you only want to have some quick reference rules. So either offer some free / low cost GM screen with all of the core rules on it, or at the very least stick a few extra pages at the end of the book with only the core rules and dice modifiers. For example, Mage did it pretty well with their Spellcasting Quick Reference:

While we're at it...

While we're talking nitpicks, here are some other, small tips to keep in mind when creating the PDF / book as a whole:

Avoid homonyms. In The Veil you can pierce the veil to gain information from the Veil. First veil is the name of the game, second is a phrase for a Move, third is the in-universe name for the Internet. You wonder how many times "veil" is used in the book? A lot. Good luck finding the correct information if you want to know about anything besides talking about what you can do in The Veil the game.

Be unambiguous. Again in The Veil, you have a Playbook The Dying that is dying from a disease.

The Disease's symptoms progress and will eventually kill the Dying (Prognosis). The Dying Special allows you to spend hold to keep the symptoms at bay when the Disease triggers. Now, does that refer to the things under the Prognosis section, or the move Trigger? Initially when we played, we thought it was the former, but turns it was the latter. Generally, when you use some common words for names of powers or moves, you should make them distinct - make them bold, or use capital letters. "when your disease would trigger" is ambiguous, "when your Disease would Trigger" is less so. Fellowship is pretty good at this in comparison.

Offer low-weight PDFs. Sometimes all you care for in a PDF is being able to quickly flip through it on your phone. It would be useful to have some low-weight PDFs for that reason, and they could double as printer-friendly PDFs.

Conclusions

Offering a high-quality PDF experience can mean a lot of work, but in the end you will be saving your players a lot time and effort. So please, if you can, put the effort in to make the lives of us players that use PDFs a little less grating.

Categories of XP Systems

For some, the XP systems are the lifeblood of the campaign, the juicy reward you work for through your adventure. However, as with any system, the Experience Points can be much more than a simple carrot to dangle in front of your players. Ideally, it would be one of the systems used to reinforce the themes of the game and the intended playstyle.

In a well designed system, any system should reinforce the intended set of playstyles or general things to happen in a session. Human brains are designed to optimise a reward-seeking behaviour, so if the characters in our game get rewarded with XP for doing something, we are naturally encouraged to do that thing more to get the same reward. If you get XP for killing monsters, you will seek out more monsters to kill, etc.

Below is a large compilation of various XP systems that I tried arranging into a somewhat cohesive whole. However, because sometimes the systems have odd edge cases with how XP is given out, some of them might not fit as neatly. I've also tried briefly explaining any important mechanics relating to XP in any given system, but by no means is it an exhaustive explanation - that would take too long. Finally the various sections feature an insight into what the given XP systems might encourage from the players and the game as a whole.

Goal-Based XP - Dungeons and Dragons, Stars Without Number

Goal-Based XP systems are very focused on characters accomplishing set goals.

Dungeons and Dragons is a staple when it comes to Goal-Based XP rewards. Most of you should have come across this infamous XP table for how much XP to reward based off what sort of adventure the party is having:

You use it to figure out how much XP to give out per encounter the party completes, and you multiply it by factors such as the number of monsters and so on. It's very cut and dry this way. In short - you have your goal ("a monster is attacking you, stop it") and you get XP for completing your goal ("kill the monster").

The Dungeon Master's Guide also gives you a few alternative ways to reward XP - for completing noncombat challenges, for reaching significant milestones, or per-story / per-session rewards. All of those are a variation of "Goal-Based XP".

Stars Without Number features a similar system. By default, you get flat XP per session, but you can change it to getting XP for achieving a personal goal, completing a mission, or more interestingly - loot. The group can decide they would tie their character progression based on how much money they get, or how much money they "waste" on things other than themselves.

All in all, Goal-Based XP encourages the players to think of the game as a series of challenges to overcome in a vein of more modern computer RPGs - "here is your quest, do a quest, get reward". It is a fairly straightforward system, but it doesn't encourage much nuance - you're not really rewarded for having an introspection as a character, having some meaningful interactions or the like.

XP by Practice - Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu, Mouse Guard

A different approach to gaining XP is to reward a player for using a particular skill. A few old-school and more modern RPGs use this system.

In Cyberpunk 2020, characters have a list of skills, stuff like Rifle, Drive, First Aid, Personal Grooming, etc. When a character uses that skill in a session and succeeds, they mark it, and at the end of the session the GM awards the player skill-specific XP (called Improvement Points) based on how critical that skill was to the character or the party this adventure. If you accumulate enough Improvement Points for that skill, you level it up.

While you will get the bulk of your IPs from using a given skill, you can also get some basic IPs from studying or training that skill as a way to get at least a few ranks in a skill in a safer environment.

An interesting paradigm my old GM pointed out in regards to this system is that you tend to get more IPs the more you fuck up a mission (while if you succeed a mission you get more cash). Surviving by the skin of your teeth by driving away action movie style is more important to the character than driving away from a heist that went smoothly, so it nets you more IP. If GM is generous, if you are the last person alive from the party, you count as the entire party, ergo netting you even more IP for critical successes.

 A similar but less bombastic system is in play in Call of Cthulhu. Whenever the character uses a skill successfully, the GM can prompt them to mark it. At the end of the session you roll for every skill you have marked - if your roll fails (aka - more often for things you are bad at, and less often for things you are good at), it goes up. Simple and straightforward.

Contact has a system where you get a flat XP (based on your int) for using a skill, whether it's a pass or fail (critical successes double the XP, critical failures net you a 0). When you accumulate enough points, your skill goes up. You can train / study for another flat XP gain.

Mouse Guard adds a twist to the formula - you track how many times you have succeeded and failed in a given skill separately, and you have to get both of those numbers high enough in order to level up that skill. During the GM turn you have to pretty much go with the flow as to whether you can succeed or fail, but during the players' turn, you can influence your odds by doing harder or easier challenges to get that specific pass / fail you need.

All in all, XP by Practice encourages the players to be active - to be the person that drives, shoots, talks, gets into trouble, etc. The more rolls you make, the better your character becomes. While this solves the issue of players being passive or not wanting to take initiative, it can be a dangerous tool if you have an attention hog in your party. The system encourages you to be active all the time, even if that would be hogging the spotlight from someone else. Even if that is not an issue in your party, it can encourage hyper-specialisation - "you are the best healer, therefore you should roll to heal. Because you rolled to heal, you become better at healing". You can break up the monotony by forcing characters into a situation where they have to roll out of their comfort zone, but if you are behind on some skill, you have to put in a lot of effort to catch up.

Character Growth XP - Apocalypse World, The Veil, Star Trek Adventures

Systems that use Character Growth XP tend to focus more inwards. The adventure of the session is a way for the player characters to reflect on themselves and the characters around them. These XP criteria can get a bit complicated, so please bear with me.

In Apocalypse World, you get XP for rolling a highlighted stat (stats that best highlight the character), but more importantly - for getting your relationship with another player character (the relationship is called Hx) to "roll over and reset" (either by being very positive or very negative). You gain relationships with other characters either by causing that character to get hurt, or at the end of the session by selection a character that "knows you better than they used to". You lose relationship if someone "doesn’t know you as well as they thought". You also get XP for being manipulated by another PC, or by a few other moves. All in all, the system revolves around relationships with other characters and moving them up or down, even if it has a few other things going for it.

In The Veil, you get a point of XP when you attempt to do something for your own benefit and fail, but also more importantly for things revolving around your Beliefs. A Belief is what it says on the tin - a belief that drives your PC. If your Belief is tested, you get an XP, if it gets you into trouble, you get 2XP, and if your Belief is erased, resolved or changed after being tested - you get 3XP. The system thus encourages you to have Beliefs that would be challenged every session so you can see what ideas will persevere.

Star Trek Adventures is another big and a bit complicated system. First, the character can earn Normal Milestones for challenging their Values ("duty above all else", "we will persevere", etc.) and Directives ("The Prime Directive", "Seek Out New Life", etc.), using those two in a positive or negative way, or getting hurt by an attack. These encourage you to test and question your beliefs and to better yourself - the reward for getting Normal Milestones is usually a shift in focus and replacing your Values, rather than adding more things onto your character.

Characters that were particularly prominent during an adventure receive Spotlight Milestones. Those are used to further shift the focus of your character, but also to alter your Ship's stats as well (refocusing it based on the major events of the adventure). Every few Spotlight Milestones you get an Arc Milestone, which allow you to improve yourself or the ship (by adding points, rather than shifting them around).

Similarly, your character can also gain and lose Reputation based on their actions. They gain it for acting according to orders and Directives, preventing combat, establishing an alliance with an enemy, saving lives and acting above and beyond the call of duty. You lose reputation for challenging a Directive, personnel under your command getting killed, resorting to lethal force without cause and taking unnecessary risks. Reputation is used to gain ranks, privileges and responsibilities in the Starfleet and it is a mostly roleplay progression.

All in all, Character Growth XP is pretty useful when you want the game to focus on the characters at play. Everything loops back onto them and their relationships with themselves and each other, and the adventures of a session are useful mostly when they let the characters have those moments of introspection.

Cinematic XP - Broken Worlds, Fellowship, Chronicles of Darkness

Systems with Cinematic XP put an emphasis on things you would see in a movie or TV show.

In Broken Worlds, you can get XP by using a Train move (which is required to actually level up), but more importantly you will be getting XP at the end of the session for "failing in some regard", "exposing yourself to danger, cost or retribution through your actions" and "progressing your story in a meaningful way". Those three things you could easily see in any TV series - you want the characters to fail because that builds more complicated stories. You want them to expose themselves to danger, since playing safely is boring. And finally, you want all of that to have a meaning to the overall story.

Fellowship has a similar system, although it could just as accurately be described as Goal-Based XP. At the end of the session, you progress if you "saved or protected a community in need", "strike a blow against the Overlord and their minions" and "learn more about the world and its people". The system fits the narrative structure of the Fellowship where you're supposed to be on a somewhat serialised quest like Avatar the Last Airbender.

Finally, there is Chronicles of Darkness, a system with many ways of earning experience. Firstly, a character can get XP for fulfilling or making significant headway towards an Aspiration. Aspirations are either short-term, or long-term things you as the player want to happen with the character. This distinction is important - Aspirations are a Doylist choice by the player, not the character ("my character Watson doesn't want to get hurt, but me, Doyle the writer want him to get into trouble"). For Vampires, some of their aspirations revolve around the vampiric world, and some around the human world instead of being short-term and long-term.

Then, you earn XP for dramatic things that happen to the character - when they get hurt badly enough to be in danger, when a Condition ("Guilt", "Fugue", "Spooked", etc.) impedes them or gets overcome, or when you make your failure a dramatic failure. These generally denote some serious complications the characters might face.

CoD gives you a standard 1 Beat (partial XP) automatically at the end of the session, any dramatic scene can reward additional Beats at storyteller's discretion, and similarly exceptional roleplaying, tactics or character development might merit another Beat.

Another major source of Beats is risking a Breaking Point - when you challenge what it is to be human, when you are faced with supernatural forces beyond your comprehension or the like (appropriate to the supernatural type you are playing), you get a Beat. The Breaking Point check usually also results in a Condition that gives more Beats.

Some supernatural splats also reward different kind of Beats. Playing a Mage you can earn Arcane Beats for following your Obsessions (Mage Aspirations), dealing with consequences of your Magic (Act of Hubris, Paradox), being tutored or tutoring others, and encountering supernatural creatures. Playing a Demon nets you Cover Beats for living under the radar, acting according to your Cover (fake identity / skin you wear to hide in plain sight), or for forging demonic pacts.

This long long list should about cover most of the Chronicles of Darkness splats and systems.

So all in all, Cinematic XP is focused on creating "cinematic" moments in your sessions - moments of high tension, high drama and high consequences. Your story might be one of beating up baddies wuxia style, being the hero that rises up against an evil Overlord, or of a film noire detective getting beaten up on the curb. Whatever it is, it is your story to tell.

Hodge Podge XP - World of Darkness, Exalted

For the sake of completeness and to contrast against the Chronicles of Darkness, lets have a look at Old World of Darkness (Vampire the Masquerade, etc.) / New World of Darkness (Chronicles of Darkness 1st edition - Vampire the Requiem 1st ed, etc.). The system presented by these systems is a bit hard to categorise. You get XP for completing a session, for your character learning something new, for roleplaying your character well, and for acts of heroism. At the end of a story arc, you get additional XP for succeeding at the adventure, for surviving dangerous situations, and for displaying wisdom and coming up with clever plans. In nWoD, you would also get bonus XP when a Flaw you took would impede your actions.

All in all, it's a bit of a Hodge Podge when it comes to categorising. Some are for Character Growth, some are for Cinematic, and some could be considered Goal-Based. The system generally seems to just give you rewards for things you are expected to have in an RPG, without any special focus.

A bit of a more focused Hodge Podge XP system can be found in Exalted. In the 3rd edition, you get a flat mount of XP per session. You also get a bonus Solar XP for two things - Expression and Role Bonus. Expression Bonus comes in when you are impeded by a Flaw, reveal something about your character by expressing / supporting / engaging their Intimacies or being challenged, endangered or harmed while protecting or upholding your Intimacy. Role Bonus comes into play when you cede your "spotlight" and let another character shine in their Caste, or by doing something impressive in accordance with your Caste.

Exalted's Hodge Podge system, despite drawing from Character Growth and Cinematic systems, works much better than World of Darkness since it is used to highlight the key mechanics of the system. Intimacies are important in the system, so you get rewarded for engaging with them. Castes are important to what the characters are, so you should express yourself with them. Sharing the spotlight is important, so even if you don't get to shine, you still get rewarded for not interfering with someone else's moment to shine. It's quite coherent in its design.

Conclusions

Well, that was a long and varied list. If anything, this goes to show how varied the RPG experience can be. You can try to draw a number of conclusions from the comparison.

First of all, if you are designing or homebrewing / homeruling a system, take a moment to think about the XP system and see what sort of games and sessions it encourages. Are those elements congruent with the themes of the system? If so - great! If not - you might want to tweak them. XP system is like any other part of the game you're playing - a tool to help you tell the stories you want to tell. It's best when it encourages the playstyle and experience you want to get, not work against it.

Secondly, you should be aware of what sort of playstyle is encouraged by the game you're playing. Just like other mechanics and themes of the game, it will shape your play. Keep that in mind.

Thirdly, if you are playing a system where the XP system feels bad or like an afterthought, you should probably change it to suit your individual playstyle. In our game of Exalted vs World of Darkness we did exactly that - we threw away the oWoD XP system and made our own that encouraged us to keep looping back into the core themes of our game (it being a game set in high school, we were encouraged to engage with the high school and home life setting, despite being avatars of ancient demigods that fight vampires on the regular basis).

Finally, comparing the systems, it seems that mostly "XP by Practice" could be a detrimental system for an overall constructive play under the wrong conditions. All other systems can be made to serve your story just as well. You can mix and match elements from either to create the perfect experience for your game as long as you are aware of what purpose a given system serves. You want an XP system to reinforce your themes and other mechanics, even if you have to draw from different inspirations. That is fine.

All in all, your XP system will shape your game to a greater or lesser extent. Just like with any tool in your arsenal, make sure it is aligned with the vision of what you want your game to be.

Dexterity is King

While playing various RPGs, you sometimes see tropes and patterns emerge. We recently started playing Exalted vs the World of Darkness (a "fan" expansion for Old World of Darkness from a former Exalted and 20th edition oWoD writer), and coming back from playing a fair share of Chronicles of Darkness, we were reminded of an old trope - Dexterity is King.

Dexterity is King means that among all stats a character has, one of them is clearly more important than others. That one stat is usually Dexterity. Here are some examples of why that might be.

Godbound

Godbound is an OSR-based system that uses the well known stats of Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. You can use any of those stats for rolling checks ("roll vs Charisma to try to persuade someone") and two stats always contribute to a saving throw. However, when it comes to combat, you only use the first three stats.

Constitution gives you HP, and that's all it does. Strength and Dexterity are used when you attack something. If you are doing melee, you use Strength, and if you do ranged, you use Dexterity. Your to-hit is determined by the attribute used, your damage modifier is also determined by the attribute used. In that regard, they are interchangeable. However, on top of that, Dexterity is also used to determine your Armour Class, something that's useful for any combat character.

With all of that, if you are going strictly for optimal play, why wouldn't you always take max Dexterity and dump Strength? Being able to not only hit things at a range but also get better armour while you're at it is clearly a better option. Of course, flavouring your character and the choice of Words will encourage you to pick the other option, but usually you'll never make Dexterity your dump stat in Godbound.

Stars Without Number - Int is king too!

Stars Without Number (looking at the Revised Edition here) is another OSR-based system from the same author. Unsurprisingly, Dexterity is also King here - it still modifies your Armour Class, is used by ranged weapons, etc. On top of that it modifies your Initiative, and can be used for a variety of spaceship rolls.

The system does have a few things going for it though - melee weapons have an additional Shock amount of damage they inflict even on a miss, and there are a few Foci around you can use to make yourself quite viable as a melee or hand-to-hand combatant in a scifi setting with plasma guns.

While running a game in SWN, we came across another interesting quirk however - Intelligence can be King too. My specific character was a True AI and was very starship-focused. As it turned out, the system around using spaceships was built around the concept that some characters might not have Dexterity since they could lack a humanoid, physical body (such as a Virtual Intelligence that is the ship, or an AI that gets plugged into the ship). So now pretty much every starship-related roll can be made with Intelligence - piloting, gunnery, star navigation, ECM jamming, etc. On top of that, True AI use Intelligence modifier to get more Processing (power points used to power their "magic"). Int became such a dominant attribute that I developed a 6 level plan for my character to increase it by 4 ranks just to get that extra +1, which was a more optimal strategy than increasing my skills.

Mouse Guard - Attack is King

Mouse Guard is an RPG set in the comic book setting sharing the same name. In this system, the conflict resolution revolves around picking a series of actions to carry out against your opponent. You can Attack, Defend, Manoeuvre or Feint. Attack trumps Feint, Feint trumps Defend, and the other combinations carry out either independently or based on the difference between successes. Attack and Manoeuvre don't have any hard counters. Manoeuvre lets you gain some advantage over your next action, while Attack directly helps you resolve a conflict.

As such, after playing through an entire season of Mouse Guard, we came to the conclusion that you should "never not be Attacking" - it helps you achieve your goal directly, do it fast (which is always good - you don't want to take too long and be attacked more yourself), and there is no way to directly counter it. If the system even had one hard counter to Attack, this wouldn't be the case, but alas.

Old World of Darkness - Dex for everything

Old World of Darkness, even with its 20th anniversary editions, still uses Dexterity for everything. Rolling to-hit, whether it's with a gun, a thrown rock, a sword or with a fist, is a Dexterity roll with an appropriate skill. Block, Dodge, Parry? That's also Dexterity! Bite, Claw, Disarm, Kick, Sweep? All Dex! Initiative? Dex plus Wits. Moreover, after you roll to-hit, your successes carry over to become damage dice, so even if you are using a Sword that does Strength +2 damage, you can basically add half of your Dexterity on top of that. Since the system is also very minmaxy, if you are not starting the game with Dexterity 4 or 5, you are doing yourself a disservice!

Chronicles of Darkness - the king is mostly dead

With the release of the New World of Darkness, or later the Chronicles of Darkness, we finally have a system where Dexterity has been reigned in. In this system a lot of other stats have been given more usefulness. When you roll to-hit, you use Strength for melee or unarmed, and Dexterity only for ranged. Your to-hit roll is also your damage roll, so there is no weird carry-over. Your Defence is the lower of your Dexterity or Wits plus Athletics skill, so even if you don't have high Dex you can compensate. Initiative is Dexterity and Composure, while Speed is Strength and Dexterity. Your Stamina determines your hit points.

All in all, the many uses for Attributes allow you to build some very interesting characters without making them entirely useless - you can have a high Dexterity character that is hard to hit, but you'll probably be sacrificing Willpower or Stamina. You can have a character that doesn't have any Dexterity but can still brawl like a boss. Or you can have a tank that compensates for his lack of Dexterity, Wits or Strength by hitting the gym to get more Athletics to raise their Defence. And with the system being much more forgiving on the XP costs, you can easily tailor your build to match what is needed.

Conclusions

When designing an RPG system, you should avoid putting too much power into a single attribute or other gameplay element. The game is much more enjoyable when there are multiple "good solutions" rather than one "right solution".