Adjudicating different PCs differently - a look at Sidereals

In pretty much every RPG and beyond you want to treat everyone fairly. Everyone has to follow the same rules, the same judgements should apply to all the players and their characters and the GM should be impartial under normal circumstances. But what if there was a character class where that meta assumption shouldn't apply, as a feature?

Exalted is a game about playing capital H Heroes like Gilgamesh, Hercules, Sun Wukong, etc. There are many types of Exalted out there, from the peak human Solars that can punch through mountains, through elemental scion Dragonblooded that combine Avatar elemental bending with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, down to some out there concepts like golem Alchemicals that fight for communism and keeping their mechanical world alive.

Amongst all of them, we find Sidereals, the troubleshooters of Fate. They aren't very strong, their numbers are pitiful, and they have the most thankless job in the whole world - cleaning up everyone's messes and making sure the reality doesn't break down so there can be a next day. But they have one important trick up their sleeve to level the playing field - they cheat.

Sidereals, they be like that.

When they needed to disappear from history in order to be able to manipulate the entire world in order to save it, they broke an entire constellation to erase the memory of themselves from existance. When their power set wasn't enough to defeat their enemies, they developed magic kung fu powerful enough to kick people out of reality. When they couldn't overthrow the tyrants of the world, they turned their allies against them.

So I would posit the same ought to apply to how a GM would handle them in a game. This isn't to say they should have a carte blanche permission to fudge their dice or cheat at the actual game, but that the way you interpret the rules for them should be more leniant towards being bent in their direction.

This kind of approach is especially important when you take an important part of Sidereals' design into consideration - their power set is fixed and intentionally broken. The peak human Solar might have a Charm that lets them convince a crowd that they are speaking the truth and everyone will believe them through the sheer power of their charisma. Sidereals, since they broke one of the constellations that housed some of their power, don't have a Charm like that. Instead, they can only convince people that the truth they are saying is a lie. You never get a straightforward solution to a problem out of them.

Similarly, because their Charm set is fixed, they can't invent new powers. A Solar could decide that they want to be the best wingsuit glider out there and they can make new Charms around wingsuit gliders to help them assault some air temple, a Sidereal must rely only on the printed Charms in the book. So they would have to make do with being able to turn a mortal into a dragon and using them as a mount to try sneaking into an air temple.

Their sacred task of resolving troubles of destiny also encourages them to cheat their way through their jobs. Maybe a king of some land should've died but due to the snag in the Loom of Fate they survived a battle and now the Sidereal needs to ensure the king dies. But when they get to the place and realize the king is a little boy they might feel guilty about drowning them in a pond. So instead they can get them to abdicate their throne to their evil uncle who promptly gets an arrow to the head just after their coronation and everything is back as it should be.

So by the dint of the game encouraging the Sidereal characters to cheat, it wouldn't be an invalid approach for the GM to allow the characters to cheat within the system as well. A Solar having a Charm that lets them move instantly to anywhere they see could be stopped by the GM when they try to squeeze in through a crack in a mountain cave since they can't fit, while a Sidereal with the same Charm would be allowed to do it since obviously they could cloak themselves from reality for a split second and be at the destination they can see since that is the text of the Charm.

And it's not like other Exalted types don't have some game-breaking powers of their own. In an even fight a Solar will beat a Sidereal nine times out of ten since they get to throw raw numbers at anything they do. This isn't Munchkin where the players must pull a fast one over one another, it's more like Dune or Cosmic Encounter board games where everyone has some kind of powers that makes everyone go "Wait, you can do WHAT?". It would be an interesting and under-explored design space though to have character powers that come from being handled differently at the adjudication part of the game.

Conclusions

Exalted's Sidereals are a splat built around inherent limitations in their power sets and being encouraged to break the rules in order to succeed. As such, an interesting approach to handling them at the table might be to have the GM handle them differently from other PCs, letting them break some meta conventions of the game.

State your intentions clearly - a look at in-universe laws in TTRPGs

Many RPGs out there as part of their worldbuilding establish in-universe rules and laws the player characters ought to obide by. But since those are separate from game and mechanical rules, their interpretation is often fuzzy. Do those laws exist as absolutes and GMs ought to be enforcing them, or are they meant to be broken and existing as something the PCs ought to fight against and win?

Since this topic seems to be cropping up in many RPGs, I figured it might be good to explore it!

Nobilis and the Windflower Law

Recently, our group has been talking about Nobilis, a game by Jenna Moran. One of the players wanted to have a Noble NPC be in love with another character, simple backstory building stuff. But then we were reminded by one particular passage in Nobilis, a law passed down from Lord Entropy, which simply states:

THE WINDFLOWER LAW: Thou shalt not love.

Which sparked a debate about whether that law is meant to be absolute, or something that adds to the drama of the game. Lord Entropy is the absolute ruler of Earth in Nobilis (and since the PCs will most likely play on Earth, they will be under his dominion), he laid down the Code Fidelitatis for Nobles to follow, so you'd think the players ought to follow them as absolute laws, right?

But if you think of the game in context of its genre it is kind of implied that such rules exist to characterise and paint Lord Entropy as a sad ruler that has been scorned by love and thus shuns it, as well as giving your character an excuse to indulge in a "forbidden love" narrative to play into the genre and show how much their love means to them. As Randy Paush said in his Last Lecture - "The brick walls are not to keep us out, the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something, because the brick walls are there to stop people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the OTHER people."

The brick walls are there to stop the OTHER people.

Which reading is correct, I can't say. I find Jenna's writing to be needlessly obtuse to the point I can't slog through the 300 page Nobilis, or the 400 page Glitch, or the 550 page Chuubo's, nor did I immerse myself in paratext about the game that might explain the meaning of such parts of the game.

World of Darkness, its Traditions and lawful stupid enforcement of them

An example of a similar topic that I have read and experienced much more of is the World of Darkness, and its Vampire Traditions, Mage Protocols, Werewolf Litany or whatever else might crop up in each specific gameline.

Each of those games has a set of rules that the societies the PCs are a part of follow and they keep the world in a stable state. But then when PCs come along and start going against those age old Traditions, what ought the GM do?

The nanosecond you break the Traditions the fun police get dispatched to get you

On one hand, since you have those Traditions, people put in place to enforce them and a good top-down pressure to use them to keep the newbies in-line, why wouldn't you make your supernatural society into the most authoritarian state out there where every transgression is instantly detected with the supernatural senses of Auspex (after all, why wouldn't everyone pat down your aura each time you enter Elysium?) and punished with execution.

Understandably though, this is the most boring, most player-vs-storyteller way to play the game. It's the lawful stupid of World of Darkness. Heck, Vampire the Requiem 2nd edition actually recognised it and finally added a textbox addressing it - "The Traditions are broken regularly enough that there’s a need for law, but not enough to break down vampire society or the veneer of the ordinary world that the Kindred hide behind. [...] The Traditions are deliberately designed so that vampires have motivation to break them, and so that there will be drama when they do.". Finally, a clear indicator that rules are meant to be broken!

Such direct, unambiguous communication is vital to letting the players and the GMs know how a game ought to be played so we don't end up with decades of party pooper NPCs in every campaign coming in to stop players from having fun breaking the rules.

Genre conventions and laws that improve the game

While we discussed times when in-universe laws were meant to be broken, there is also a flipside to this argument - rules that enforce genre conventions and improve the game.

An example of this would be Legen of the Five Rings' Bushido. Since that game is steeped in the samurai cinema and its romanticised view of the Japanese history, its bushido is inspired by its real-life counterpart. Since the players are expected to play honourable samurai, these rules exist to steer the players and their characters into how they are supposed to be playing.

Of course, even such genre conventions and rules can still be broken, but ought to be done with intention and good reason. After all, Forty-Seven Rōnin is a big cultural touchstone for just such a thing!

Sometimes the most honourable thing is to act dishonourably... for a time.

Similarly, you can have the drama that comes from such rules coming in conflict with one another, or the tragedy of having to uphold them in extreme situations. It would be a much different game after all if PCs decided to go and murder the emperor because they decided he's weak and they would be much better suited to rule Rokugan...

All of that is to say, sometimes in-universe rules are actually meant to be followed.

Conclusions

When you are writing an RPG book, pay close attention to what you are stating as norms of any given setting. Be explicit about the differences between the setting as it sees itself and the setting as it is in practice. Use an appropriate voice to communicate such intent and don't leave things ambiguous. Make your point clear in the same spot you state those societal norms - don't expect the players to read the entire book to see a correction elsewhere. Don't expect the readers to have any knowledge of any ofther paratext that is not explicitly called out and referenced. Your work needs to stand on its own and can't rely on any clarifications made outside of it. It is okay to be direct and blunt, it's okay to call on genre conventions, it's better to state the obvious than let something that is not obvious remain unstated.

Boundaries, genre conventions and breaking kayfabe in RPGs

Recently I ran into a post on reddit asking for advice on how to deal with a player having an emotional response and getting depressed over a death of an NPC they couldn't save. OP did want to remove them from the group not to ruin everyone else's fun, which a number of people chastised (and is one of the reasons I won't link it here). The whole situation did remind me of an idea we had in our podcasting group though about how to handle similar situations.

Draw boundaries

If you want to have a game where everyone is comfortable in playing, you ought to communicate both what you expect out of the game, as well as discussing boundaries. The latter is often overlooked since a lot of people just go off of what's been acceptable in their circle of friends and so on. A good deal of the time that's fine, but sometimes you do have to be more explicit since RPGs are prone to a lot more bleed than other games.

If you want to establish boundaries more explicitly, it might be handy to use #iHunt's Levels Worksheet:

Part of #iHunt's Level Worksheet, expanded edition from
Kissing Monsters in the Gig Economy

It will help you make sure everyone is comfortable with various topics, scenes and so on, and know what things to avoid not to make someone uncomfortable. If the game you wanted to play would feature those elements (say, the problematic "romance" present in Curse of Stradth or Bluebeard's Bride), it would be a good time to discuss them and consider altering those elements, or picking something else to play entirely.

Establish genre conventions

Talking about the boundaries is not only about what a person is comfortable with, but it's also a good time to discuss genre conventions. There is a world of difference between MCU, The Tick, Watchmen and Invincible, even though they all fall under the "superhero" genre.

So establish your genre conventions! Talk about what kind of things you do and don't want to happen. Maybe you want to be a hero and make sure no innocent bystander would die. That is a valid way to play, and as long as everyone is on the same page, it can be fun.

Not every game has to have character or NPC death be the price of failure. Sure, if people want that, it's a valid way of playing, but sometimes you do want to get invested in various characters and stay with them. You can also get a bit more creative with things...

Breaking kayfabe

Kayfabe is a term from professional wrestling that focuses on portrayals of wrestling events as if they were real. Basically, wrestlers always have to stay in character in front of the general public even if they are not in the ring not to break the illusion of wrestling.

In the World Wide Wrestling RPG that part of the genre is emulated - the outcomes of matches are fixed and you're supposed to play into it most of the time. However, you can explicitly Break Kayfabe to change the script and get what you want, but that can risk bad things happening to you since you're going against the genre convention.

If you want to have fun with your game (and everyone at the table similarly are into this), you can play around with that idea of breaking kayfabe. Basically, as long as the players follow their role in the story, the GM similarly is bound by the rules of the genre convention and can't hurt them too much. But then the players can start bending and breaking the rules slowly shifting the overton window to get what they want, at the cost of losing the protection of the genre because they are breaking kayfabe. This could set up an interesting "fall from grace" story akin to:

"A Street Thug Beat A God"

Or on the other hand you could make it into a genre deconstruction where the characters realise that being a superhero that doesn't kill doesn't make you the good guy. There is a good amount of stuff that can be done with this kind of premise.

Conclusions

So in conclusion, make sure you establish boundaries of what everyone at the table is comfortable with, have a chat about what kind of things you want to see within those boundaries, and if you're feeling like toying with those assumptions, see what comes when you tear them down methodically.

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.

"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...

Power Inflation in RPGs

For a few years my group had some fun playing a few games of  Godbound, a demigod OSR RPG. It was a game letting you play level 20 D&D characters and beyond pretty much off the bat, but with much streamlined rules. It was pretty fun at first, but since the game is very much focused on combat, you could notice a problem that in other games might've been obscured by complex mechanics - Godbound had a Power Inflation problem.

Basically, in Godbound and probably most RPGs, your character will grow in power as they gain XP, gather loot and so on. Their HP, damage output, etc. will increase and you will feel good because "bigger numbers are more better". However, at the same time, the game has to compensate for the extra power you gained. Now fighting low-level enemies feels too easy, so the GM has to throw bigger and meaner things at you, with more HP and higher damage output to challenge you. If you haven't noticed, nothing has changed with the level up - your numbers have increased, but enemy numbers have also increased, you still take a comparable amount of hits / turns to kill them, but now the numbers are bigger. This is basically Inflation, as you have entered a treadmill where you run in place...

Arms race ruining fun

Another aspect of the Power Inflation that might be even more explicitly worse would be an arms race between the players and the GM. Basically, if you have a rather open-ended character creation system that's vast enough, you can find some really broken combinations of spells, abilities or what have you that would let you punch way above your weight class. In response, the GM would have to throw even more challenging enemies at you, or possibly also resort to using some dirty tricks, broken combos or some other shenanigans to keep up "to challenge the party". This path pretty much leads to frustration if left unchecked:

"Narrated D&D Story:

How I Accidentally Triggered A Cold War

Between The Dungeon Master And The Party"

Basically, RPGs are supposed to be a collaborative storytelling tools that help both the GM and the players tell interesting stories, not a war gaming competition to see who can be the strongest. Sure, if that's the group's jam, go for it, but more often than not it's one or two players powergaming, while others might be left behind the power curve, making balancing combat harder than it would usually be. This is not to mention how much enjoyment players that aren't combat-focused would get out of sessions like these, or being told that they can't even hit the enemies.

One way or the other, it circles back to the same Power Inflation problem - combat gets too easy or too complicated, the other side of the table compensates and we're back to square one - combat taking X amount of hits / turns, except the numbers are bigger and the process is more complex. If one side overcompensates, then you have to get back to balancing things. This can get especially problematic when you have unstable combat systems (ones where it's hard to land the balance where you intend, often resulting in things being too easy or too hard).

Avoiding Power Inflation

Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to avoid Power Inflation in games.

Modules might sidestep the issue by giving you fixed enemies to encounter. This fixes the GM side of things to an extent, meaning it's up to the players to be the balancing factor - either doing some more prepwork if the going gets tough, or taking on a bigger challenge if things get too easy. If someone brings an OP build, they are ruining their own fun, which might not be that big of an issue. That being said, this assumes the module is well-balanced, which is a big problem in itself (although you'd expect some hard balancing work being done by the authors that were paid to make these, but that might be a pipe dream in the industry...).

Shorter games might not suffer from this issue as much, because the Inflation doesn't have time to set in, but this mostly avoids the issue by not engaging in character progression.

Similarly, there are games out there that have really slow progression system, like Star Trek Adventures. In that example you start as a fully capable characters on the level as Picard or Spock and you only get to directly increase your attributes every 6+ sessions. Even those increases are not that big, meaning the Power Inflation from levelling is glacial, and since you're expected to have a roster of secondary characters to use on adventures, the GM can expect the player characters to be competent and play their enemies accordingly.

This sort of approach practically means you don't level your character. You can shift their attributes and other things about them about more, but that's mostly it. Some games like Fellowship or other Powered by the Apocalypse also don't see much in the vein of character's power growth over the course of the game.

What else could be out there?

While the previously mentioned are about the only ways I've seen games avoid Power Inflation, but one could think of a few more that I haven't encountered in the wild.

You could have a game that's about players creating their own encounters in the spirit of Monster Hunter and "lets grind this for resources". This way it's up to the players to pick their own battles, prepare for them, get the rewards they want and so on. Add some time pressure in the vein of Kingdom Death: Monster and you have pressure on players to optimise getting as much from any given encounter as they can, so they are incentivised to push themselves to the limit and battle the meanest set of enemies they can survive. It would probably make the game very focused on that one loop unfortunately, and you're basically reinventing Kingdom Death:Monster...

A different approach would be to move the Power Inflation focus away from stats and onto a "scale factor". So say, a rookie warrior would be fighting with "+2 to hit Scale 1" and fighting "Scale 1 rats", resolve things as normal. Eventually they level up but instead of increasing their to-hit, you bump their Scale up. Eventually you are a veteran warrior with "+2 to hit Scale 10" and fighting "Scale 10 demon". If you want some growth, you could reset the "+x" each time you go up a Scale and then focus on buying it back.

This perhaps makes the Power Inflation very explicit, but allows game designers to laser-focus on refining the engagement at any Scale, because the Scale is only a set dressing. You could perhaps compare this to something like Dragonball - after awhile, the character power level is meaningless, but every arc you find a new villain that's stronger than the heroes, and then you have to train to get strong enough to beat them, etc. Everything is cyclical, you just move the reference power level sliding scale higher and higher to always have the characters in view. Every now and then show the players how weak lower Scale enemies are and introduce a big bad that's a higher Scale than them to show them they have a new challenge to beat and you have something to work with...

Of course, this might get into the criticism I sometimes hear about universal RPGs, where there isn't a difference between two snails fighting and two gods fighting, everything's still the same mechanically. You want those to feel different, but how you do that without over-complicating the mechanics and over-inflating the numbers...

Conclusions

Power Inflation in RPGs is a tricky problem to handle. On one hand, you expect your character to grow over the course of the game and become more capable, but on the other hand, you always want to be challenged on your adventures, so the enemies have to grow alongside you. Even if you over-focus on something to be the best at it, the GM only has to compensate harder to give you the challenge when it's needed.

It's hard to address the issue of Power Inflation without removing character advancement in its entirety, or making it really flat. Ideally, you'd have a system that deals with the issue and gives the GM the tools to balance things for their party, but that might be easier said than done...

Plot Elephants

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

Let's talk about some examples.

DnD's Amulet of the Planes

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

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

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

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

Exalted's Dragon Kings

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

Dragon Kings!

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

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

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

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

SWN's True AI

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

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

True AI in a nutshell

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

This is your starting PC.

Yes, the one in the background that looks like

Michael Bay's Megatron

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

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

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

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

EvWoD's Ceasing to Exist Approach

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

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

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

Sidereals Ceasing to Exist everywhere...

Conclusions

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

Respect and acknowledge the elephant in the room...

Levels of Trust in RPGs

When you start playing tabletop RPGs with new people you quickly start figuring out the level of trust that's the norm in the group - how much can you trust those people not to screw you over given the opportunity. Taking a more conscious look at it might help start a conversation about what is the expected gaming etiquette.

Trust Level 0 - the weak are meat

At Trust Level 0, everyone is always on guard and looking for a way to got one over the other players and NPCs. You can expect stuff like mind control, mind reading, vampiric blood bonds, actively stealing from one another, backstabs, betrayals, or even stuff like murdering another PC and stripping their corpse of anything valuable. The GM might also be in on it, using cheap tricks against the PCs, trying "gotchas" to get them poisoned, mind controlled or the like.

Metagaming is the norm - any information you have about the other characters can and will be used against them, and metagrudges will be held - "you killed my previous character, now his son is here to avenge his father".

Generally, this is the sort of stuff you see on /r/RPGHorrorStories. Games filled with munchkins, murderhobos, minmaxers, metagamers and everything in between, because the weak are meat, and the strong do eat. But there is hope on the horizon if the players grow tired of this type of gaming...

Trust Level 1 - Mexican Standoff / Mutually Assured Destruction

At Trust Level 1, the players along with the GM are at a Mexican Standoff or a Mutually Assured Destruction. They don't want to be the ones to start descending to Trust Level 0, but they don't trust others not to screw them over if given the chance. There is still plenty of distrust around, but at least the bullets and the missiles are not actively flying.

This Trust Level is less about actively fighting other players, but more about keeping things secret and keeping your guard up. You still pass secret notes to the GM, you still go off to roleplay away from others when you have something you need to do in secret, etc. Metaknowledge is still valuable after all - stock up on those nukes in case the cold war goes hot.

If things stay calm and no incidents happen, things can move to the next Trust Level.

Trust Level 2 - Deescalation

At Trust Level 2, you have a group that actually starts to open up and lower one's guard. The players learn that you don't need to keep everything a secret from one another, that there is no active threat of someone screwing you over, etc. There is a general understanding that you shouldn't be using your powers against one another, and even the GM doesn't try pulling anything dirty on you.

At this Trust Level you can still see players try to metagame the game, but mostly by reading the GM - "Me and my friends are invited to another party? I remember the last time we had a party it turned into a few people getting murdered. I'm taking all of the NPCs I care about and hiding in my panic room until it's over!".

If things continue the way they do, things should quickly turn into...

Trust Level 3 - Everything in the open

At Trust Level 3, the group finally starts to really trust one another. People don't mind doing anything secretive out in the open and they know the other players won't betray them. The GM plays fair and doesn't wish for your PC to die.

At this Trust Level, a bit of meta-trust begins to form. If the GM assures you there is nothing to worry about something, you trust their word and go along whatever they were planning. If they put your character in a vulnerable position (capturing you, stealing from you, etc.), you can expect everything to return to normal sooner than later. You can even expect them to go out of their way to save your ass if things don't go the way you planned - if you surrender to your enemies, you can expect a way to get back into the game, but maybe with a hefty life debt to repay...

This Trust Level is a good plateau for most groups, where everyone gets along and there is no (undeserved) PVP, but there is still further one can go.

Trust Level 4 - Trust Fall

At Trust Level 4, things begin to horseshoe a bit. While at Trust Level 3 you knew other players wouldn't do anything against you, on Trust Level 4 you once again encourage other players and the GM to do bad things with your character. Once again things like mind control, mind reading and so on are on the table, but this time with a strong understanding that it's not a malicious action between the players.

This Trust Level allows you to roleplay those various aspects of the system and the setting with the focus on making a good story, rather than getting one over the other players. When a GM NPC mind controls you, you jump at the opportunity to cross the party in good faith. When it would be cool for another player to betray you, you encourage them. It's all about having fun and trying new things, even if that's something your character wouldn't like to experience.

Why is trust important?

Some of you might be wondering why is trust important in the game. After all, roleplaying a paranoid person should be equivalent to roleplaying someone trusting, right? Well, there are a few things to it.

First of all, short-term stress can be fun (roller coasters anyone?), but a prolonged stress just induces anxiety and other negative feelings. At low Trust Levels, you might not be looking forward to your game, but feeling stressed about the prospect of spending another long evening worrying. It's not a fun space to be in repeatedly.

Secondly, being paranoid eats away your time. You spend hours worrying about stuff, both in-game and out, and you waste a lot of game time preparing for something that might not come. Recently I've listened to the first episode of Congenials, wherein one player spends over half an hour just setting up plans to secure a safe storage facility for loot they might be getting from some ancient tomb. This was despite them already having an okay storage facility operated by the Guild. But because the player was paranoid of that security not being enough, they spend that extra half an hour lining things up, only for the party to end up not taking the loot from the tomb in the end. So not only was that preparation needless in the end, the GM is not the kind of person to steal stuff from the players, so it was double unnecessary in the end.

Thirdly, having to devote so much resources to protecting yourself means you don't get to explore some weirder character options. Maybe you have an idea for a character that's pretty weak and can't defend themselves, one that's so far from being min-maxed anyone could take them in a fight. At Trust Level 0, they would probably be killed for their starting gear, but at Trust Level 3, you could actually have fun with them.

Lastly, it can be frustrating for a GM to deal with paranoid players. It might be a funny to joke about not wanting to go into the creepy mansion that's obviously haunted, but if that's the encounter the GM prepared for the evening, that's where the characters should be heading. It's not fun trying to wrangle and herd the cats that don't trust the GM not to walk them to their doom. Same about players that take half an hour to cross an empty hallway because they have been conditioned to expect traps, and same with ones that don't want to engage with your plot mcguffin because "never use unidentified magical items, they might be cursed".

Because of all of these reasons, and probably many more, building a level of trust in your group is important. It makes the game more enjoyable and saves you time.

Conclusions

There are different levels of trust you can have in a tabletop RPG, with different behaviours being the norm from both the players and the GM. If you find yourself wanting to play at a higher Trust Level than the one you're stuck in, talk to each other about it and maybe you can start de-escalating the tensions until you reach your happy level and enjoy your game more.