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...

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.

Player agency over dice randomness

As I explained last time, I'm a mechanically-focused gamer. I enjoy engaging with various game systems to figure out in what ways they work, and in what ways they don't. Last time I covered the difference rolling two dice instead of one can have on game feel, and this time I would like to talk about how a few systems handle player agency over dice randomness. By that I mean various mechanics and resources the players can use to influence their dice rolls, especially the important ones.

The problem - roll and pray

At least once every session a player will come across a situation that is very important to them - perhaps they are down to one last hit point and need to kill the enemy before they themselves are killed, or the character is preparing for a hack that is a culmination of the adventure and their paycheck depends on it. Those dramatic moments where the players wish there was anything they could do to improve the odds, but alas - they can only roll and pray.

I really don't like such situations of being powerless and not having some mechanic one can leverage to improve those odds. Luckily, there are a number of options that various systems have implemented.

Rerolls

The simplest approach to addressing the issue is letting the players have a reroll handy. Those often are a resource shared either between the party or given to the characters individually. Stars Without Number has an Expert class that can reroll one non-combat roll each scene, Savage Worlds gives players a few Bennys per session they can use as a reroll, Godbound has a Word of Luck that is all about manipulating rolls and causing rerolls in various ways.

In general, rerolls are a good option when the characters are somewhat competent at a task and should be able to normally succeed at it. It's a bit less useful when the character is trying to tackle something they are woefully unprepared for - if it's unlikely they will succeed, they will likely still fail with a reroll.

Improving the odds

Another approach that can be taken is improving the odds of the roll before it is made. Chronicles of Darkness gives you more dice to roll if you have the proper gear, and you can further improve your odds by spending Willpower - a limited, refreshable resource. The system also features a number of ways to fudge the dice math to imrove the chance of an exceptional success by using 9-again or 8-again rules. Star Trek Adventures makes you accrue Momentum by performing tasks you're good as so you can buy more dice for a roll when it's really needed. CoD, STA and Stars Without Number give the option of other characters assisting the primary character performing a roll - usually a success by the assistant gives a small boon to the primary roll.

Overall, improving the odds can be especially useful when the character isn't as competent - even a small boon to an unskilled character usually translates to much better odds than adding a simple reroll. They also usually are simpler to justify narratively - you have a clear explanation of why you're getting that +2 to the roll.

Success, but at a cost

Success in a role playing game is often seen as binary - you either succeed, or you don't. Maybe you also have a botch or an exceptional success, but either way - the line is drawn hard. However, there are a few systems where there is a gradient to the failure.

In The Veil (or Powered by the Apocalypse in general), you almost always have two or three gradients of a success. You can outright fail, succeed completely, or in the middle - succeed at a cost. Perhaps you don't get everything you wanted, or there is some complication that occurred as a result of your actions. Star Trek Adventures gives players an option to Succeed At a Cost instead of accepting a failed loss. This allows the task to be successful, but some complication will arise as a result of that roll.

This option is useful for fudging the numbers a little - if the player is just slightly off from succeeding. It's always useful to have it as an option to allow the player to decide whether their task is important enough to warrant the extra cost.

Controlled botches

Somewhat related to the previous section, although distinct enough to warrant its own. In a lot of games you will find rules for botching a roll - failing so badly it's causing some trouble. World of Darkness up to Chronicles of Darkness had a rule where rolling 1s meant subtracting from successes and causing botches if their amount got too big for example. While fun in their own right at times, it's perhaps best when this option is left to the player - letting them decide when they want to be discovered, mislead and so on to create a more interesting game.

Chronicles of Darkness is perhaps a good example of how to give players agency over their botches. When a roll is a failure, the player can opt to make it a dramatic failure to get a beat (a point of XP basically). Outside of attempting a roll with only a chance die, this is the only way to botch in the system, giving the players agency over when it occurs, and rewarding them for allowing it to happen (hopefully giving the GM a chance to make the game more interesting as a result).

Trumping the roll

Some games allow the characters to outright trump the roll with some usually high-end powers or skills. Stars Without Number have some Psychic and True AI powers that roll back an entire turn or a single roll, or go as far as dictating an entire turn and all of its rolls completely (max level True AI power). The same system also features a Warrior class that can auto-succeed at one combat roll per scene, or negate an incoming attack completely. Godbound has one Gift that once per character's entire life they can succeed at any undertaking, albeit only at a basic level.

Those powers are neat, but they need to be carefully balanced not to throw the entire game off balance.

Conclusions

There are many ways RPG systems have figured out how to allow the players to influence their rolls. It's good to have at least once option available to the players, and multiple of these examples can be used simultaneously without feeling like they're overlapping too much.