Spend XP to cure cancer and be a good person - expensive fluff charms in EvWoD

Our group tends to play big games like Godbound or Exalted where the players get to shape the world to their whims and even when we're not doing that we enjoy games like Fellowship where you are having a large, positive impact on the world by saving it from an evil Overlord or an Empire. We enjoy being able to improve fictional worlds for the better by more direct actions than "slay some monsters". But then when we find cool powers in various systems that let us cure cancer or the like, they never feel as fun as they ought to. Let's figure out why...

Cure cancer or feed the hungry, decisions decisions...

Cure Cancer Powers

So what do I mean by "Cure Cancer Powers"? Basically, any power the character can have that would have a large impact on the world the game takes place in, but will rarely have any tangible effects on the session-to-session gameplay. Take Wholeness-Restoring Meditation from Exalted vs World of Darkness for example:

Cure anything!

Spend a few hours, cure anyone of any debilitating ailment. You would be hailed as a miracle worker and you could change the lives of hundreds of people each year. But how often this would come up in a game you're playing as something important? Maybe once or twice you save some key NPCs and get some good reputation for being such a good surgeon, but in a normal session of being a vampire hunting hero it probably wouldn't come up all that often in comparison to say, being able to punch holes in vampires on the regular.

You could also expand this category into "powers that are narratively cool but rarely useful". For example, Neighborhood Relocation Scheme lets you magically drag one part of the local geography somewhere else:

Drag one location somewhere else.

The power can be really useful in a very specific situation ("Let's break everyone out of Alcatraz by dragging the island onto the shore so they don't drown!"), isn't as universally, unequivocally good as curing cancer, but it still will only come up so often in a game in comparison to being able to punch holes in vampires.

Some other powers that for us fell into these categories:

• Tiger Warrior Training Technique / Legendary Scholar's Curriculum - supercharged teaching, letting you train people to be world leading experts in science or black belt martial artists in a week. Very useful for supercharging some key NPCs, would only be a background thing otherwise.
• You Can Be More - turn mortals into Mages after a very difficult roll - again, uplifts some key NPCs.
• Faultless Ceremony - bless a ceremony with good fortune - thematic, but very nebulous as to how it would impact a game.
• Ceasing to Exist Approach - turn yourself into someone completely different for a time - very useful, but at the same time it requires a lot of upkeep and you can't really just be someone completely removed from the group without hogging a bit too much spotlight.
• Smooth Transition - give people painless deaths - very thematic, but how often would you do this in a regular game?
• The King and the Kingdom: The Thousand and First Hell - create your own pocket realm of existence - very thematic and can serve as a neat mobile base of operation, but at the same time it's mostly creating a walled-garden for yourself really...

Have a look at them yourself if you'd like to get into more details, Exalted vs World of Darkness is available for free!

Cure Cancer Powers in practical games

These kind of powers came up a few times in our games. Most recently, in our upcoming EvWoD game, City of the Bull God, we had our veteran GM Devon play End of Sadness, an Infernal Exalted (hell-themed hero essentially). The core of his character was built around Latter-Day Devil Implants, a charm that lets him graft helltech implants onto people and turn them into Fomori (demon-possessed people). However, he built his character to be benevolent, so while normally Fomori would be monsters, while they work for him they are immune to all the bad effects of being a monster. Then to further refine them, he took Verdant Emptiness Endowment, which let him grant wishes to people once a year each. This would let him remove any and all inherent problems the Fomori would have (such as mental derangements caused by being possessed by an evil spirit, physical deformities, etc.).

The intended loop for the character was to find disenfranchised people that wanted to heal something they wouldn't be able to otherwise (not in an "exploit the weak" kind of way, nor "throw off the disability" way either, but finding people that would seek out this kind of treatment themselves), then working with them for a few years to stabilise them and then letting them go better than ever. It's probably one of the more benevolent ways an Infernal can interact with a person (who can very easily be cruel tyrants).

After one season of the game and investing about 27 XP into this one loop (about half of the generous XP our GM has given us), these Powers and the loop came up a total of about twice. First time in S01E02 when End of Sadness explicitly wanted to show off his character loop and cured one person of her sickness, and a second time in S01E04 when he brought some Fomori dogs to a fight. Beyond that everything else was fluff about how his followers look and operate.

The worst part was that the player noticed that they essentially built themselves a fancy walled garden out of XP and very situational powers that don't bring them joy. Sure, they and the GM could contrive a way for those powers to come into play but that would be pretty obvious to everyone and not make anyone feel better.

A much simpler example of similar Cure Cancer Power usage was in our Heaven for Everyone game, S01E12, where one player decided to buy Instant Treatment Methodology charm that let them do very fast medical treatments and decided to break into a children's hospital to cure everyone there overnight. Really cool thing to do once, not necessarily worth spending 2-3 session's worth of XP to say you've done it.

Another example from City of the Bull God - I played a superpowered university professor Rigel Star. My initial idea for the character was to take Legendary Scholar's Curriculum to be able to churn through dozens of students per week, condensing their entire university learning into days and even taking in underprivileged youths to give them all that education for free to help lift them into a higher position in society. Ultimately however, I decided not to take it because it would be all fluff and nothing actionable in a game where we explore strange supernatural occurrences in Boleskine House, stop evil vampires from preying on people and go to the hollow earth to go back in time to fight nazi mages and werewolves.

A different take - Godbound's Miracles and Changes

Godbound had a different approach to this problem. While sure, some powers could be seen as Cure Cancer Powers (such as Birth Blessing that can cure infertility and give people really healthy children), most ways you would use to improve the world were universally accessible under Dominion Changes. Every player would gather Dominion over time and they could spend it to change the world for the better based on their divine portfolio. So if you were a Godbound of Health, you could cure cancer in a given kingdom, if you had the power of Knowledge you could make everyone in the world literate, while having the power of Sky you could give everyone angel wings.

The system also solved the problem of "powers that are only sometimes useful" by the use of Miracles. While you could buy some specific powers when levelling up, you had access to your entire divine portfolio in a limited fashion. You would have to pay a little bit extra and deal with some other minor constraints but you could, say, feed an entire town with Cornucopian Blessing to address an ongoing famine in the short term.

Of course these approaches might not be universally applicable, I understand that. You could also argue that spending XP on something makes it an important sacrifice - being generous means a lot more when you spend something you have in short supply than when it doesn't inconvenience you. But at the end of the day we're here to have fun together in an RPG, not play "my character shoots themselves in the foot to show what a selfless person they are".

Solutions attract problems

Of course, sometimes when a player picks a power they are signalling to the GM that they want to be using it regularly. In an ideal world, such solutions would attract problems - if you have the ability to sneak really well, you want to use that to solve problems, so the GM could give you more opportunities to sneak. So if you have invested in the power to cure any ailment suddenly a good deal of NPCs start having such problems the character can fix. It doesn't have to be a wave of magical cancer everywhere, but old scars, small persistent pains and aches, some family member struggling with a chronic condition, etc. Suddenly you have social leverage to use on people (even if you act selflessly, never turn anyone away and don't ask for payment not to be an asshole that prays on people, they can still feel in your debt). Of course sometimes it might be harder to figure out how to work such Cancer Curing Powers into a game - there are only so many situations being able to train black belt martial arts master by the dozen could realistically solve without turning into some kind of wuxia action flick about making a dojo city to fight against another evil dojo army...

Conclusions

While people do want to play good and selfless characters (of course not in every game), making them spend their limited character resources away from things that would be useful regularly and into niche powers that make their characters really good, helpless and selfless people can give players a buyer's remorse. Some of it could be addressed by tailoring what appears in a session to give the players a chance to highlight the cool and expensive powers their character has, but that could feel a bit pandering if done too much.

In general, it might be better for games to be consciously designed with this problem in mind.

RPG betrayals and the meta game of friendship - the finale of the Crown of Candy

Recently, I've been watching some Dimension 20's Crown of Candy series, which was a somewhat ruthless game reminiscent of Game of Thrones wrapped in a sentient food aesthetic. Spoiler warning for the series - at the end of the series when the players won their decisive victory, they were faced with a dilemma - do they keep their fragile alliance, or do they backstab one another to have it all. This was an interesting example of the meta game of friendship you build around the table I'd like to discuss today.

The Crown of Candy trailer

Trust, friendships and bleed at the table

As discussed before, different tables will have a different level of trust built up over time of playing together for a while. If you're playing with randos online, chances are someone might turn out to be an asshole and backstab everyone at a drop of a hat. If you have a stable game going, usually you learn not to do that and respect one another's characters (unless everyone is into playing a backstab game of course, then all bets are off).

Along with that, you build friendships with the people you play, bonding over the many adventures you had together.

Every now and then, you also can experience bleed - mixing in-game and out-of-game feelings, grudges, etc. If someone hurt your character, you can feel personally hurt. It comes with the territory of being really invested in a game and a character.

Those three factors contribute to the meta game of friendship - when you play an RPG, you're not only playing the game, but also engaging with your fellow players at the table at the same time. Because of this, you tend to avoid doing something that might upset the other players, even if it would fit the narrative to do so (at least not without checking in with them first). If you don't, you might "win" something in the game, but lose someone's trust or friendship that would carry over to your future games.

This is kind of reminiscent of GeekNights' "Practical Game Theory" panel where they discuss threats and trust - if you play a game repeatedly, you can make credible threats that will affect the games you're playing. If you always punish anyone that messes with you to ensure they don't win even if you lose, eventually they will learn not to mess with you:

So the trust and betrayal in RPG would work similarly to game theory - by cooperating everyone gains something, but if you betray someone you break their trust and everyone is worse off in the long-term.

The Crown of Candy situation

The dilemma at the end of the Crown of Candy was like this - On one side you had Queen Saccharina, played by Emily Axford, daughter of King Amethar from his first marriage, abandoned by her mother at a church orphanage due to her magical prowess (non-cleric magic in the setting was heretical). She later became a queen of outlaws living at the edge of Candian society. After joining the game, she was crowned the Queen of Candia (after her father lost his claim to the throne), obtained a hatchling dragon and let it feed on the hearts of the priests to let it grow to an adult size by the time of the final battle. On the other side you had Princess Ruby, played by Siobhan Thompson, was a rogue princess, twin to Emily's previous character, Princess Jet, and half-sister to Saccharina. She didn't approve of Saccharina's ways and knew what kind of future her reign might bring.

Those two players were given an option to backstab one another at the end of the game. Ruby knew Saccharina would upend the status quo and go on a crusade to eradicate much of the church, and would probably be unfit to rule Candia. Saccharina was advised that the nobles look down on her due to her upbringing and would gladly kill her now that they don't need her to retake Candia.

So did either of them do it?

Watching the video, I had no doubt of the outcome. Siobhan and Emily have played through 5 series together, everyone at the table has been nice to each other, they have faced many hardships together in this series, playing inseparable twins that schemed together. They wouldn't backstab each other's characters, especially given that this was the end of the series - there was nothing for them to gain beyond a different epilogue. And yeah, shocking nobody, they decided to trust one another and have a happy ending together.

Last minute betrayal would certainly make for a shocking moment in the show, but would probably cause some strife between the caste members and some longer-term distrust. Sure, they are professionals, but if you watch the behind the scenes of the series they are jokingly dissing on the GM for backstabbing and killing their characters a few times in the series.

Backstabs in other actual plays

Thinking about it, I haven't really seen that many other actual plays that have the characters backstabbing one another. I've watched a number of other Dimension 20 shows, as well as various games by Arms of the Tide, A Pair of Dice Lost, RPG Clinic, etc. and played a lot of games on our very own podcast - Sponsored by Nobody. Sure, we had a number of "a character does whatever they want disregarding what others think" moments in Evicting Epistle, Princes of the Universe, Conspiracy at Krezk, etc. However, only one series had a genuine betrayal.

In Princes of the Universe (spoilers), there was one situation that was almost that, and one that was a full-on "I'm the bad guy". The first one was when the party managed to find the Eye of Autochthon, an ancient relict of nigh-infinite power. They wanted to use it to wake up a titan, but not before everyone had a mexican standoff to make sure nobody else would steal it and use it for their own goals. My character was a Night Caste (a hero-thief essentially) and was the only one that could actually steal it without anyone having a counter to his powers, so the GM asked me if I do it. In the end I decided not to, since it would turn the game into PVP, and being 1v4 had really poor odds. Plus it would be an asshole thing to do.

The other situation came at the end of the whole game, where after fighting the Scarlet Empress, the ruler of the world, the party was faced with a secret foe that was pulling the strings all along. During that fight, one of the PCs, Longhorn Desertwolf, turned on the rest of the party and was revealed to have been working for that foe all along. The reason why that twist worked though was because of how that character entered the story.

See, while getting the Eye of Autochthon, the party went to a weird proto-dimension that was all weird and wonky. They met alternative versions of themselves from another part of the multiverse. One of the PCs, Longhorn Seawolf, was already on a hit list for two other PCs due to letting a number of their children die in a fight, so it was only a matter of time before he'd be killed. So instead, we decided to trade our Seawolf for their Desertwolf to solve the issue of a character needing to be gotten rid of and also to give the player a similar character they could wrap the series with. None of the NPCs believed what happened, but they learned not to question our crazy antics a long time ago. But at the end of the series it turned out they were right - we did inadvertently trade an ally for a wolf in sheep's clothing that turned out to be orchestrated by the big bad evil guy. So that betrayal and backstab felt alright, especially since in the end we managed to kick both of their asses and win. If Desertwolf would've turned out to be victorious, I know of one or two players that would've flipped the table and not forgiven it - it would've felt that the last two or so years the game was running was a complete waste.

So lesson learned - if you want to have someone betray and backstab the party, they should probably lose to make the game less unsatisfying...

Conclusions

While one character betraying another might be an interesting twist in a TV show, it's usually unsatisfying in an RPG if you're talking about two PCs. Unless the game is set up from the get-go to support it, or the player explicitly allow for such an ending to their character, it can be more damaging to the long-term relationships between the players than it is worth.

Crown of Thunders and incorporating player ideas into the game

RPGs are an inherently collaborative medium. Often the GM will be put in the position of the authority to shape the world and direct how it responds to players' actions, but that doesn't strictly need to be the case. In Fellowship there is a clear distinction in who can Command Lore about various things, usually giving Players the control over the lore surrounding their people (so an Elf character Commands who elves are in the setting, whether they are pixies, aliens or what have you). While this approach might not be useful in all games (such as games with established lore, like Star Wars), you can still incorporate the players' creativity in how the world works on a smaller level.

In our lengthy Princes of the Universe Exalted campaign we ran into an interesting situation. My character wanted to unite the setting's dysfunctional bureaucratic heaven to work for our characters. To that end, I suggested the character would go on a quest to find an artefact, the Crown of Thunders, and use it as a symbol to rally the bickering gods. The Crown had an important symbolic meaning to the gods and the Exalts, but it wasn't a concrete "this crown makes you a ruler of the heaven and solves your issue" thing. As such, some other players dismissed the idea, but the GM rolled with it without hesitation, and even the various NPCs started reinforcing the idea soon after. It was a nice way of approaching problem solving in RPGs - a player's idea becomes a solution to the problem by the dint of player suggesting it as a solution.

Sol Invictus giving Queen Merela the Crown of Thunders
and establishing the Creation Ruling Mandate

While this might be a no-brainer for some people, it's an approach that I don't see mentioned in too many RPGs or adventure modules - you should be aiming to use players' ideas on how things should work in your game. They might miss hints or clues on how some adventure wants them to approach a problem, not know some part of the setting their character might know, or in general not be in the same mindset as the GM. That shouldn't stop them from suggesting how things should be. You don't need to roll with every single thing, but it's definitely a good conversation starter.

As Fellowship hints, the GM is there to create problems for the players to solve. If they were to create solutions, you would either run into GM-PCs that have the foresight given to them by reading the script, or else they might be forcing the players to figure out their moon logic to solve a problem the way they envisioned. Either solution wouldn't be good. Since you can't expect the players to come up with the same ideas as the GM, then of course you need to allow for some leeway in how things can be solved, how the world will react and so on.

You should be leaning into those ideas as a GM - not only asking your players what they want to do, but also what they want to accomplish with their actions. There is a difference between "I want to beat the guard up" and "I want to beat the guard up to rally the common people to storm the bastille with me" - one sounds like the combat is the end-point, while in the others the violence is a means to an end that might not be clear if it's not spelled out explicitly.

By talking about the desired outcomes you can set the correct expectations and let the players know if their actions won't have the desired outcome. It's best to be up-front about such things than to let players go goblin brain down a dead end. Sometimes that can be a "no", sometimes that can be a compromise ("if you beat this guard, that will work in your favour for convincing the people to rise up"), and sometimes it can lead to some different ideas being worked out ("maybe if you rally the people first and come in as a mob, the guards will actually join your just cause?").

Conclusions

Try  to incorporate your player ideas into the game - you are here to create the story together, and it's good when the world conforms narratively to the player actions and ideas (whether that's reinforcing it, or fighting back against it in a satisfying way ("hey, would you want the system to try crushing you and throwing you in jail for daring to fight the guard to show how the government will oppress you, making your character a martyr?")). Just saying something "won't work" without offering some alternatives isn't as fun as championing even some wacky ideas.

Sidereals, Fate, gods and prophecies - morality of a puppet

Recently, I was playing a character in Exalted vs World of Darkness that was a Sidereal, a troubleshooter of Fate. Basically, his heroic job description was to right the things according to how Fate wills it - uncover secrets that should be revealed, end people that should be ended, bring joy to the people that need it, etc. However, that got me thinking - what decides those things anyway? Unlike in some systems and settings, Exalted's Sidereals are agents of Fate, which is something that exists outside the control of any deities or similar entities. But since it's not controlled by anyone with an agenda, what agenda does it serve? What does Fate really want in the end? What is it's agenda and morality? If that couldn't be established, should my character go along with it and trust in Fate, or should they try imposing their own morality on the world instead?

Sure, in meta terms, Fate is basically "plot" of an RPG - the story wants the characters to get from A to B and kill C, so the Sidereal gets to make leaps of logic to get them there like a Holistic Detective. Even the EvWoD book calls out Sidereals as being GM's best friend because they always have an excuse to get the right people to the right places for the plot to move on. That can be fun if you want to enjoy the ride and don't overthink it, but as writing goes a Sidereal following Fate is like saying people are following the Force to know where to go next - feels a bit like a cop out.

Dirk Gently the holistic detective is basically a Sidereal

If a character leans into following Fate too much, it can also start turning them into a lawful stupid, a puppet, or a Morty on a Death Crystal - basically an automaton that doesn't think much for themselves just follows orders - "this person is supposed to die? Oh boy, here I go killing again!".

Chosen of Endings without remorse

A comparison to D&D paladins and clerics isn't really that far off, although with those at least you know the deity you're following and their view on morality, so you know there is something that dictates that will. That just means you know what you're signing up for though, not that strict adherence to it will make you less of an extremist murderhobo.

Another popular manifestation of the same problem would be prophecies - should a character in a prophecy that they will do something or kill someone, or should they try to defy it? If they are "the chosen one", can they do no wrong because it's their destiny? Do they have a say in the matter, or are they a slave to the whims of Fate?

What all of those have in common is they tend to turn the characters into puppets of whatever they resign their character to. Whether it's a deity, a code of conduct, Fate, philosophy, etc., the characters can become less interesting for it. When you turn yourself into a hammer, you treat everything as nails or something...

Making it interesting - cutting the strings

Now that is all not to say you can't have interesting and thought provoking ideas some from those tropes, but you have to approach them the right way.

A character that follows some morality 100% of the time is a bit dull. Sure, RPGs encourage you to see how many problems you can solve with your hammer of choice ("I want to see how a good and naive person would fare in Ravenloft! That sounds like a fun game!"), but challenging the character's beliefs can lead to some powerful moments. Try focusing on that - start with the character believing one thing and then make them re-examine their stance when confronted with what Fate wants them to do - would they kill baby Hitler if they were Minority Report? Or would they re-evaluate their stance and vow not to kill people that are innocent save for that they might commit future-crime? Make your character have doubts and define their own morality consciously. Similarly, reward your players for doing so and don't punish them for not being lawful stupid. Screw what the gods might want from your paladin, a paladin with a crysis of fate is much more interesting than one that's an automaton! Don't punish them for it!

You could similarly involve the players in defining what is the will of the Fate. Don't hand them a script telling them what to do, whatever they end up doing might be exactly what Fate wants. To borrow a phrase from Fellowship - let them Command Lore about it and tell you what Fate wants of their character (with room for negotiation as with all things of course).

When it comes to prophecies specifically, they are probably best played as mundanely self-fulfilling - characters believing in them and putting stock in them are inevitably causing them to come true with their actions. A person believing themselves to be a hero rises up to the legend and becomes a hero. However, if you reject the prophecy, there is no other shoe that drops - there is no magic here, the prophecy was always just a fable and a guess. As long as both the players and the GM are on-board and aware of this, such prophecies might not take agency away from the characters and the game.

Finally, you could have the character's morality explicitly affect Fate - someone's fated to die not because the unknowable cosmic force willed it, but because the player character wants them dead and therefore they spin that Loom of Fate and make it a reality with their actions. This retains the character's agency and makes their actions and decisions have meaning in the game and the setting. They are no longer only the puppet, but also the puppet master.

Conclusions

Making your character beholden to an external system of morality or something else that dictates their choices can take away agency from the character, the player, and make the game a bit less interesting. On the other side, confronting the character's morality and making them actively engage with it can be more engaging. Embrace it.

Problems with character Cults in RPGs

In our group, we enjoy playing a good deal of demigod games with character Cults, ranging from Exalted (1, 2), through Godbound (1, 2), and to a smaller extent even Chronicles of Darkness could fall under this umbrella (in CRMB one of the PCs runs a masonic society which basically is a Cult to their supernatural self). While a demigod Cult is pretty much a staple of the genre and something that can be pretty interesting if done well, they often bring some issues whenever they appear.

Roles of cults in RPGs

As a baseline, Cults in RPGs generally come with some mechanical benefits to the player. In Exalted they give you some free Willpower, in Chronicles of Darkness they give you some free Merits, in the New Gods of Mankind they are key to getting faith to power your miracles, and in Godbound Cults give you more Dominion to change the world and come with some other benefits.

Beyond the mechanical, Cults are an expression of the demigod PC and their beliefs on how people should behave. Swallows of the South's Godwin was a musician, so his cults were his groupies. In Princes of the Universe, the Royal was all about being a merchant prince and trade, so his cult focused on heavy capitalism, paying taxes and accruing as much wealth as you could to get a high score when you die. In the same series the Majestic was a narcissistic scholar and his cult focused on people becoming educated. He was also heavily themed after mesoamerican themes of Exalted, which meant a lot of human sacrifices. But since only the best would do for him, the sacrifices had to be of the best examplars of his cult and willing because Majestic was against slavery.

Similarly, Cults are a way for the players to shape their world - to introduce a new religion into the world and possibly affect a large number of NPCs. Similarly, the Cults are often a resource the PC can tap into to engage the world more broadly - if you have a kingdom that worships you, you can rally troops from it and send that army to conquer other territories for you after all.

There are some problems that appear when you start dealing with the Cults in practice however...

Possession of NPCs

In demigod games we ran we often ran into this situation - a new mortal NPC is introduced, they join our society, and then comes the question of who will "own them" (so to say) by which Cult they will join. After that the PCs can get possessive over the NPCs that are their worshippers, and those NPCs rarely interact with PCs that are not their chosen deity.

For example, in Princes of the Universe a young girl named Conna is one of the last survivors from Wanderer's village. Early in the series the Majestic takes her under his wing to educate her properly and so on, later making her an important figure in his cult. Pretty much from that point she doesn't interact with anyone else anymore, and later Majestic basically refers to her as his adopted child. Similar patterns also appear in The Living Years where various mummified saints are raised from the dead and become worshippers of the Litch King and not interact much with other PCs, despite one of them being a devout of the faith they were the saints of, etc.

It's perhaps a bit subtle at times, since in a lot of situations you will have certain PCs and NPCs gravitate closer together and you may have NPCs that don't interact with anyone but one PC in general, but an NPC becoming someone's worshipper is certainly a strong indication to other players to not mess with them because they "belong" to that player.

On a larger scale, the same principle applies whenever the players visit a new location. Since some systems like Godbound punish you for divvying up a population between characters (Cult scale is exponential, but breakdown is linear. A Scale 1 Cult is 1000 people, a Scale 2 town is 100k people, but you can either get one Scale 2 Cult out of it, or two Scale 1 Cults, and combining two Scale 1 Cults from two places doesn't give you a Scale 2 Cult), meaning you often have to pick who owns what new town you visit or save. It starts to feel very transactional, especially when players start expecting towns to convert to their religion after saving them.

On a similar note...

Transactional worship

Growing your Cult in games like Godbound is generally a reward for completing some major quest. You liberate a town from some evil monster that has been plaguing it, and now the people give you praise. Because having a bigger Cult means you get a mechanical benefit, you sort of expect that as a reward or at least an option when you enter a new location. This makes the whole process feel a bit transactional, since even if you try being selfless you might get worshippers regardless due to them being so grateful, etc. This can feel even worse if you realise your character can be essentially uprooting an existing culture and replacing it with their own in the process.

That was an important character arc for Atrus in The Living Years - he was an outsider to the kingdom of Ancalia and the world of Arcem as a whole and he was really conscious about starting a cult of his own and imposing his ideas on the people that were foreign to him. For similar reasons in Evicting Epistle (a setting where the world was destroyed in the future so people went back to the past to conquer it anew since they didn't have anything left in their time) I couldn't justify playing a character from the future to avoid these kind of themes, and the themes of colonialism. It would be really hard to avoid a hyper-tech future demigod interacting with prehistoric proto-humans without some form of "need to uplift these 'savages'".

Religion defining the NPCs

A character can appear in the story and later join one of the PC Cults, or they can be introduced as someone from the Cult outright. In the second case especially (although not exclusively) the NPC's involvement in the Cult tends to define their personality. Godwin's groupies exist only as his fans with a little bit of individual mannerisms sprinkled on top. In CRMB every member of the masonic Cult tends to act in a similar, scheming way. etc.

Sure, sometimes when you create disposable NPCs, they tend to be one note, but unfortunately it seems with NPCs that are a part of a PC Cult that note tends to gravitate on what religion they subscribe to. This can make them a bit less interesting than if one would build characters first and then figure out if they'd follow any of the Cults.

In a similar vein, it is also rather easy to portray these Cults as a homogeneous group of people, rather than a collection of individuals. They tend to be characterised as a collective, display uniform traits and generally just be that one-note character from the previous paragraph smeared across a larger group.

Of course, this can come down to how much time and effort one wants to devote to fleshing out the characters. There is nothing stopping you from adding more depth and nuance to Cults and its members, but it takes that little bit extra effort over going with the flow of the least resistance and using stereotypes when describing the NPCs.

Mechanics influence characters

As discussed before, the mechanics of a game inform the playstyle of the characters, and the same can be said for Cults. I've noticed this especially with Godbound - in this system the characters can either be a demigod with a cult, or a free divinity that doesn't have worshippers to suit your playstyle. However, mechanically, having a cult more often than not is a better choice - you get more Dominion out of it, you get a neat Faction you can use to do your large-scale bidding, and generally have more stuff to interact with. Mechanically, the game is rewarding you for having a Cult, which means almost every character in the game will end up having a Cult (in our multiple campaigns using the system, totalling to about 15 characters, only one PC didn't have a cult - Adina from The Living Years, and that was only because I ended up insisting she wouldn't get one if it couldn't be a part of the religion she followed herself). This in turn changes the sort of characters you play - you won't want to play someone who is selfless and doesn't accept people worshipping them because that would put you at an advantage, so you make a character that would want the worship.

One solution - make it all cosmetic

One possible solution to a number of the listed problems would be to make the Cults a cosmetic thing to a character, rather than something that has mechanical benefits. A narcissist demigod that demands adulation can still make a Cult because that suits the character, while someone that doesn't feel the need won't feel bad for missing out on the mechanical benefits. Now because Cults stop being such a dominant thing every player has to focus on, the NPCs are under less pressure to pick a side and they can remain their own people. Being praised as "the town's hero" for saving it feels a bit less of a commitment than having the town worship you as their deity of choice.

Conclusions

Character Cults can be a really interesting part of a demigod game. They can serve as an extension or a compliment of any character, a way for them to express themselves on a large scale. However, it is very easy to fall into traps of defining NPCs by the religion they follow, and to get territorial and transactional about individual and group NPCs and which bucket they will fall into. When the system promotes having Cults, you also tend to see characters more skewed in that direction, changing what kind of PCs you see in those games.

Ideally, you would focus on making NPCs defined people first and then putting them in a Cult if they fit, and you would have a system where choosing to have or not to have a Cult would be balanced to encourage making characters that fit what the players want to play, rather than rewarding one kind of characters.

"What are you willing to sacrifice?" A hollow question... - Planning RPG stories

Last year I've watched through Exaltwitch, an Exalted actual play (you can read my review of it here). One of the big plot points of that campaign was the quest to cleanse the party's ancient ally, Three Fates Shadow, from being an Abyssal under the influence of a Deathlord (an ancient spectre that rules the underworld and is generally evil). The culmination of that arc, after it's been built up for the majority of the actual play was the party going to the highest authority in heaven, The Unconquered Sun, and demanding his help. He agreed to do it under one condition - he asked each member of the party "what are you willing to sacrifice?" and then one of them would have to make that sacrifice.

That question, at that moment, rang very hollow. In Exalted, the player characters are capital H Heroes of legends in the vein of Gilgamesh or Sun Wukong. They are the once-kings of the world who can move mountains with their bare hands and who have saved the world from tyrannical titans of old. The question being about some thing they'd have to give up in the future, rather than asking them for what great feats have they already done in pursuit of the goal felt very transactional, rather than heroic.

I understand that it was time to wrap that plot up as the game was beginning to draw to a close. Leaving that plot unresolved because the players didn't put in that much effort to fix things would be anticlimactic. Ideally, it would be communicated between the GM and the players way ahead of time. As it was now, it basically felt like throwing the character at the glory most high and tossing some coins in his face demanding "it's broken, fix it" because the players wanted it really bad.

The GM did state later that if the PCs had not offered enough their ally wouldn't have been redeemed. However, the PCs also did gamble a bit about who would have to make the sacrifice, and to make matters worse it turned out they had to sacrifice nothing since the person that drew the shortest straw was the comatosed ally, who on the count of being in that state did not volunteer to sacrifice anything. So the PCs earned a free Deus Ex Machina resolution to their arc for free.

Now imagine if the resolution was instead tied to the themes of being a tragic hero, someone larger than life, or doing impossible feats. What if Three Fates Saved would have to live the life of virtue, despite the Deathlord influences, and sacrifice her life selflessly in order to achieve redemption in death? What if she had to confront the Deathlord that held her in a binding and make him achieve peace and pass on (which would be a monumental accomplishment), or accomplish a great feat of peace, like reconciling the differences and bringing peace between the Realm and the Solars (while the party that were the Solar by now essentially wanted to conquer the Realm and subjugate them essentially). Any mighty deed that would play on the themes of "redemption", while avoiding things tied to the aspects of death and destruction.

Instead, we had Rey offering to sacrifice ever seeing her home town of Nexus (central location of the series), her father (her central relationship), and any glory she would gain in the future. Jorek offered his chance of revenge at those who have wronged him. Valeria offered giving up what makes her the most happy - her relationship with Speaks-of-Silence. Sure, any of them would be noble sacrifices and an interesting plot to explore, except the series was already drawing to a close with 13 episodes left to go, so you'd barely see any of them play out.

Worst of all, I don't think this was the GM's intended resolution for this arc. A few episodes earlier the characters were also trying to figure out how to redeem Three Fates Shadow, which eventually drove her to the coma. At that time I noticed the GM tried telegraph some solution to her problem, spelling out the clues to her condition, but the player did not pick up on it and the moment was lost.

In situations like this, especially when you're making Actual Plays, it feels important to communicate with everyone about what they want to see accomplished in the game, about how they want the game to progress, etc. This also goes both ways - sometimes the players want to communicate with the GM about what they want to see in the game, and sometimes the GM wants to talk about how some things should play out. Some might balk at that since it's a bit close to railroading, but if your intent is to improve the game, make it more fun for everyone involved and for the people watching, it might be for the best. We've done that on a number of occasions. Heck, one time we played through a module, discussed it at length, workshopped a better version of it and played through it while still having fun.

It's a fine line to thread, but it probably works for the best when everyone's involved in the process and there is a back-and-forth on how things should go down. It might not be for everyone or every game, but it can make some key moments land better.

Conclusions

When you have a long story arc in a game you hope the payoff would be worth the long buildup. The longer and more epic the arc the more satisfying payoff you need for it to feel rewarding. However, if the resolution hinges on what the players do, it might be worth having a chat about it ahead of time so everyone would be onboard with what would produce the most satisfying ending to that story. This is especially important when producing media for other people to consume.

If you don't plan ahead, together between the GM and the players, you might just have to ask your characters "what are you willing to pay in the future for a resolution to this plot in the present?"...

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...

Gaming and solving the fun out of RPG systems

Over the last few years my group and I have played a number of systems that had mechanics you could game to get XP or other advantages, or had some of their mechanics boil down to a solvable math problem. Both of those situations ended up detracting from the experience, either drawing more attention to themselves rather to the game being played, or just being bland mechanics.

RPG mechanics as math problems

The first category of mechanics are essentially math problems - mechanics that for any given situation have a correct solution on what to do to maximise your outcome.

oWoD Automated Fire

First one of these is Automatic Fire from Vampire the Masquerade:

This attack basically gives you a lot of extra dice to a roll, but makes the roll Difficulty higher. It's basically a move you want to use either when you need a hail mary, or the Difficulty is already so low it doesn't matter much. For other scenarios, whether or not to use this move would require running the numbers, but there is still a definitive yes or no answer to whether using it is a good move or not. Figuring it out for certain however requires some complicated math of using your AnyDice-fu.

DOGS Growth

DOGS presented a similar math problem to its players when it came to Growth.

DOGS is a system in which you have stats that take form of multiple dice of a given size - "3D4", "4D6", etc. When you undergo Growth, you get to either increase the number of dice for a given stat, or increase the size of those dice - so from "3D4" you can go into either "4D4" or "3D6". Turns out there is an optimal way of progressing through those dice to get the best result on average:

So for example, 3D6 gives you on average 0.5 higher roll than 4D4, while 5D8 is better than 7D4 by 5 whole points on average. The game doesn't explain those concepts to the players and it's simple and abstract enough that these things shouldn't matter, but for a problem-solving player it's a solvable mechanic.

Mouse Guard and optimal combat

Mouse Guard is a system with its own little combat / conflict engine that relies on picking actions (Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre) and seeing how they interact with one another. Attack lowers opponent's Disposition (HP essentially), Defend heals your Disposition, Manoeuvre is a way to get an advantage on next rolls, while a Feint is like an Attack with caveats - if played against an Attack, Feint does nothing, but if played against a Defend, Defend does nothing.

During our first game of Mouse Guard we soon learned that this setup creates a simple First Order Optimal Strategy - just always Attack. Attack vs Attack or Defend gets you closer to resolving the conflict, Attack trumps Feint, and Manoeuvre often isn't useful enough to trump dealing damage to an opponent. Attack, Attack, Attack!

FOO (First Order Optimal) Strategy

Towards the end of the game this has ended up being such a simple and optimal strategy that for our next game of Mouse Guard we had to switch the rules to give Attack a hard counter not to devolve every conflict of any type into "press A to win if you press it faster than your enemy".

Cortex and marginally useful SFXs

Recently our group picked up the modular system Cortex. We only played a few sessions of it so far, but one thing that stood out to me was how "starchy" (boring) some of its special powers were.

First of all, Cortex is another mixed-die system that puts a big emphasis on making pool of dice and manipulating your dice. So if you're Iron Man, you can have say, Eccentric Billionaire at D10, Ganius Scientist at D12 and Mk1 Iron Man Suit at D6 and roll those all together to do something.

On top of that, one module you can use in Cortex are Power SFX (special effects). Those are some extra powers your character can use that are tied to a Power Set that can alter the game a bit. So for example you can be Tony Stark with Iron Man Power Set, and one of your SFX could be "Immunity" where you spend a Power Point to negate a specific attack, simple enough.

However, a lot of those SFX are boring dice manipulators. For example - Focus lets you take two dice and turn them into one bigger die. Boost lets you shut down one power to increase the die on another die. Dangerous gives you an extra small die to roll, but changes the size of other dice. Multipower lets you use more than one dice from a given pool but they all are decreased a step or more. Versatile lets you split one die into two or more smaller dice. The list goes on.

I've ran some numbers and a lot of these powers are marginally useful. Say, turning 3D8 into 2D8+2D6 with Versatile gives you an average roll that's 0.42 higher, but gives you 0.45 smaller Effect and 0.2 more Hitches. Without going into what those are, those numbers are marginally useful. Sometimes the numbers increase marginally, sometimes they decrease, but from what I've seen it's not a big effect overall.

Unfortunately to get those numbers I had to spend a few hours programming and debugging a Cortex dice simulator. It's hard to make an informed decision as to whether a power is useful or not without a chart, and trying to play a game well that's filled with unknowable probabilities would just be the case of blind luck.

One way or another - the stat-focused SFX and similar mechanics can be one of two things - either boring because they don't change much about the roll, or having an optimal way to play it, in which case you're not engaging with the mechanics, you're solving a math problem. Either way the mechanics become irrelevant because they're either "use them always", "don't bother with them ever", or "use them under specific circumstances". Since Cortex is based on complex math with no glaringly obvious answer, I honestly can't be bothered to use these SFX.

Honourable mention - Exalted, Paranoia Combat

Honourable mention in this category should also go to Exalted. I won't elaborate much on it since this section is already getting long, but there are two things that are worth mentioning that make this epic game of sword and sandal capital H Heroes boring: Paranoia Combat and Minuscule Incremental Charms.

Paranoia Combat was a strategy from 2nd edition Exalted where the optimal way of winning the Rocket Tag combat was to turtle up and play in the most boring way possible.

Minuscule Incremental Charms were special powers you could buy with XP that would give you just small bonuses to rolls or change tiny things that were rather boring in themselves. Things like Triumph-Forged God-Body that gave you double-9s on Athletic rolls instead of double-10s, or Wyld-Forging Focus that started wyld-shaping at a higher phase. All of those were such small tweaks that they might not be worth the mental load, and weighing their effect vs XP cost would be a small math problem in itself.

Gaming mechanics for profit

Most RPG mechanics that you can game for profit I've come across were focused on being able to farm XP, or at least streamline the way you earn XP. While not a problem in itself (who cares if the party got more XP if they're having fun doing it - you're not competing with anyone), it can start to become a problem when it draws too much attention away from doing things in the game and having fun and onto "brrrr the number goes up"

Chronicles of Darkness - punch me in the face for XP

I've covered this one before in the "Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system" article, so I won't repeat much here. Basically, in Chronicles of Darkness you can basically earn XP by being beaten up a bit at the start of every scene, and some systems like Mage the Awakening 2nd Edition even call out a similar way to farm magic XP.

In a similar vein, the systems also let you earn XP by a number of other ways, like turning fails into botches. This can create some animosity between players when someone is invested in some scene going well, while other players are there to mess things up just to farm up some extra XP - "I failed to impress this character, I opt to botch it instead and make them hate us. Too bad they knew something about your lost sister, guess we'll never find what they knew!".

DOGS - Growth vs Consequences optimisation

Another entry for DOGS, this time about maximising the rate at which your character growths, as opposed to optimising how they grow.

DOGS is a system where you Grow when you suffer Consequences as a result of a conflict you had. To become stronger, you have to get into conflicts, get beaten up a bit, etc. However, Consequences can also have lasting effects if they are bad enough - if you roll too high on them, you may even have to step down your stats, essentially netting you zero, or potentially giving you some net negative sessions. Once again, there is a mathematically optimal way of playing:

Which is basically to get a 3D4 Consequence - it has the best chances of being a net gain. You get such small Consequences by essentially keeping non-violent in conflicts, which to an extent is a "mechanic as a metaphor" for the system.

Mouse Guard and farming Checks

Mouse Guard is a system where you grow your character by practice - aka the more you use a skill, the better you get essentially. As with any such system, the first way of farming it is by doing things all the time, which can encourage you to hog the spotlight. This can be a bit of a problem, but then there is more.

The game is broken up into two parts - the GM turn and the players' turn. During the GM's turn (which lasts about half of the session, not "a turn"...) you can earn "Checks", which you spend during the players' turn to do things and make rolls. You earn those Checks by using your Traits against yourself ("I am Small, therefore I have problems lifting this large log!"). You can use a Trait against yourself once per roll, which means the more you act and roll on GM's turn, the more Checks you can earn to act more during the players' turn.

Moreover, during a conflict you can easily earn a lot of Checks if you play in a very boring way. Essentially, during a conflict you pick actions to take - Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre. When you Defend, you essentially try to recover your HP. Since the conflict only ends when one of the party's HP goes down to zero, if you turtle up you will be rolling for a long time, letting you earn Checks for every roll. In a lot of cases you can also earn a lot more Checks during a fight under specific circumstances - breaking a tie in enemy's favour or giving an enemy more dice in a vs conflict. So if you play like a turtling asshole and have enough dice, you can in theory earn a lot of Checks.

This strategy has one counter though, Feinting makes you unable to roll Defend. You can try anticipating it though by throwing an Attack that trumps Feint into the mix to make your opponent have to Defend and recover. It's not perfect, but it can work...

While that turtle Defence is an extreme example, I have played in some sessions where a less extreme form of Check farming was involved, which later resulted in pretty neat things being accomplished during the players' turn.

Conclusions

There are a number of games out there that rely on math obscurity to give a sense of depth or agency. However, solving the game mechanic from a mathematical sense is only so fun, and once solved the complexity is replaced with an optimal way to play the game, which isn't fun. Making the math behind it harder is not making the choices more meaningful, just the decisions harder to make informed. Try pruning such mechanics from your game if possible.

Similarly, there are games that can be exploited by players to gain some disproportionate amount of XP and what have you that detract from the game by rewarding boring play.

Or in other words - if you are designing a new game system, try asking a math nerd or a game developer to break it. They might do the math and show you how balanced your system can be, and you can guide your players to playing the game well with that math as well.

Related Articles:

• Categories of XP Systems
• Meat and potatoes of RPG powers
• Manage your game's mental load
• Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system
• Net negative sessions

What do you do? What do you want to accomplish? Why do you do it? Three core questions for PC actions

A good part of any RPG session revolves around character actions, asking questions like "a goblin jumps out of a bush with a sword, what do you do?". However, what might be overlooked at times is that there is more to character actions than just what they are literally doing, often it's more important to ask the players what do they want to accomplish, as well as why are their characters doing something?

In general, any action would focus on "A character does an Action because they want to achieve an Outcome in service of their Goal or Belief". An Action is what the character does - "I punch him". An Outcome is what the character wants to accomplish - "I want to intimidate this guard into running away by punching him". Their Goal or Belief should be guiding their actions - "I need to get to the palace to do X, therefore I will intimidate this guard into running away by punching him".

The problem arises when there is a disconnect between these parts. When a pacifist gets the case of a goblin brain and decides to kill someone for no reason, when the characters get too caught up in the turn-to-turn action and lose sight of why they are doing something, or when a desired Outcome is not communicated clearly and say, instead of rolling to intimidate with punching you break out the combat rules to track individual HP, the session can start suffering for it.

In a good deal of older games, it's up to the GM and the players to figure these things out and call for rolls appropriately.

There are some games that focus on the Outcomes more explicitly, such as Burning Wheel or Mouse Guard, where both sides in each conflict have to explicitly state what they want to achieve if they win. Similarly, many Powered by the Apocalypse games like Fellowship codify actions into Moves that provide the players with outcomes that can guide them into choosing the correct Action to take.

Few games that I've come across seem to focus on asking the characters "why do you do it?". Often they come up in a form of characters having explicit beliefs that should be invoked and challenged regularly, such as in the case of Burning Wheel or Star Trek Adventures. These either give mechanical advantage to a roll, or give the character XP for reflecting on them after they are challenged in pursue of their immediate goals.

You will also often see the difference between Action and Outcome focus when comparing lighter systems with something more crunchy. Comparing Exalted with Fellowship for example, in the former you can attempt to dodge or parry an attack, while in the latter you would Overcome it, aka avoid the damage by whatever narrative means you need. Similarly, in Exalted you can try hurting someone with Brawl, Archery, Melee, or even Athletics, while in Fellowship you would just Finish Them with Blood to kill them. The former focuses on the Actions, while the latter - on Outcomes - "I don't want to be hurt", "I want to hurt them".

While often things are very simple - "I want to kill the goblin, because the goblin wants to kill me and they are what stands between me and the loot" - when things get muddled it's often good to pause and make sure everyone is on the right page before going deeper into the weeds.

If you are a GM and the players seem to go off the rails in some weird way, maybe it's time to ask them those magical questions - "What do you do? What do you want to accomplish? Why do you do it?". It can help players ground themselves and explain their logic so that the adventure can resume with everyone knowing what's going on.

Agree on your game's vision before you start playing

Over the years, my group has learned that it's important to nail one thing down before a game starts - its vision, an agreed vision of what the game is about, what are the core assumptions, etc. Having something like that in place can help a lot when it comes to keeping the game focused.

A game's vision can be something very simple. In our Fellowship - The Deeps it started off as "we want to play a Fellowship game about sailing the ocean". This informed the setting - an archipelago with plenty of water to go about, the characters - all having to have a reason to be on the boat together, etc. Later, as characters got fleshed out the concept evolved further - the game was also about an Heir opposing an evil ruler Overlord to dethrone them and take their place, and other characters whose goals would align with that objective.

The vision will also help you figure out what the game is not about. In the Deeps, we weren't going to turn our sailing ship into a flying ship, because that would go against our goal of sailing the ocean and having ocean adventures. In Heaven For Everyone, our goal was to:

1. Play teenage demigods in the 80s
2. Have no clue what's going on
3. Focus on family life and school life
4. Try to be good people
5. Have our actions have consequences

With such clear goals, you could fall back on them whenever you'd want to do something drastic with your character. Would it be useful for a character to run away from their family and ditch school not to be bogged down? Sure, but that goes against the game's vision, so you won't do it. Would it be easy to declare yourself a living god-king and kill all the other supernaturals? Yes, but that's not what the game is about. Should the GM introduce a character that knows what's going on and explains everything to the players? Probably not, because we're meant to not have a clue of what's going on - it's part of the fun.

Making the vision does not mean you have to reveal everything the game is about. For our Conspiracy at Krezk game, we as players decided to be in the dark as to what would be the mystery of the game, so the GM kept us in the dark about those things. We still agreed what some other constraints about the game were (something along the lines of "you live in Krezk, you want what's best for the town, you're 'adventurers', so you'll put yourself in trouble because it needs to be done, etc."), but we had fun experiencing the mysteries slowly revealing themselves over time.

Of course, your game's vision is not set in stone - over time you ought to revisit it and maybe change it as it suits your game. Maybe some assumptions didn't make sense, or maybe you've gotten all the fun you could've had out of these ideas. For example, after a dozen episodes of Heaven for Everyone, we're pretty much done with our characters doing bits of school life, and we'll probably be transitioning that into some other scenarios, like internships or what have you. Your visions are your game's guiding compass, but it's okay to change course if that's what you want to do consciously.

Our group also has a few good examples of when we didn't nail down a vision in mind and things went a bit awry.

For our Fellowship of Cybertron game the GM wanted us "to be Autobots that fought in the Great War", but didn't state that clearly enough, so our party consisted of two Decepticons, an unaligned character and one Autobot. One character slept through most of the war, one was on a colony for the entirety of it, one was made not so long ago, and only one had some deeper connection with the war. We still had fun in the game and the GM still ran it, but for the follow-up season he made sure to clearly state and enforce the vision.

In our Godbound: Living Years game, we had two characters that were nobles. One of them wanted to restore the land of Ancalia that has been devastated by a zombie plague and give ownership of it back to the mortal nobles, while the other wanted to rule the land himself and do away with a lot of the old ways. The two character concepts were often at odds with one another through the entire game since neither of those goals were clearly stated before the game started, and both character concepts were very focused on bending the setting to their vision. It caused a lot of tension in the party and was very stressful to play through.

So if you are starting a game, consider sitting down together and deciding on what your game's vision will be. Once everyone has agreed on what it is through whatever means, it might be easier to keep the game focused and have something to point to when deciding if a character or story idea fits with the game.

Hopefully this will help you avoid having that one loner evil character in a game where you're all supposed to be heroic good people ;).

Related posts:

• The Doylist choices in role play games

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.