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.

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...

The Goblin Brain in RPGs

Every now and then, each tabletop RPG group will come up with a solution to an issue so bizarre and appalling that will leave the GM gobsmacked in horror or in laughter. Not sure if there is a proper term for this, but my group calls it the Goblin Brain.

Goblin Brain

Goblins don't think like people. They are ruthless, direct, and have no moral qualms about anything. Finding the simplest, most direct solution to a problem, consequences be damned, is the way of the Goblin, and this frame of mind is the Goblin Brain.

There are many stories out there about Goblin Brain's way of thinking, some are even cannon to the RPG sourcebooks. Let me tell you a few of them.

Puffin Forest's goblin brain in action - a student figuring out a peculiar way to solve an issue...

Heists, fire and heads on sticks

Recently, my group has decided to play a one shot using San Jenaro Co-op's The Roleplayer's Guide To Heists preview. We were playing a scenario about stealing a priceless movie reel from a cinema event. The theatre was heavily guarded by mob goons, the display was under constant surveillance by 4 guards, under a bulletproof glass dome and secured by an electronic security system that locks the entire room down instantly. We had only two players playing the game, so we had to punch way above our pay grade in order to have a chance of pulling off this hit.

In preparation for this scenario, our Goblin Brains kicked in. Some of our plans included burning the place down, chloroforming the entire room, kidnapping people, killing all the guards and anyone else who might be in the room, locking the cinema down and smoking people to death, etc. All very direct and horrible methods of solving the issue. In the end, we figured out some less gruesome way of solving the issue, but some fire was still involved...

We glanced at another scenario in the preview - one where you have to steal a space shuttle. After figuring out that pretending to be the astronauts with visors down would be suspicious the Goblin Brains kicked back in and said "what if we kill them, put their heads on a stick and walk in their suits holding their heads up so nobody would notice?". That's when we knew we had to stop ;) .

Exalted and Dragonblooded Breeding Camps

Exalted is a game about playing mythic sword and sandal heroes. There are two main types of Exalted heroes in the setting, Celestial Exalted (Solars, Lunars, Sidereals) which are directly empowered by gods, and Terrestrial Exalted, aka the Dragonblooded, which derive their power from the five elements and a strong lineage. The former have a fixed, limited number to them, the latter don't - hence why they are called the Ten Thousand Dragons.

So, how do you make an army of Dragonblooded, heroes that are born from a strong lineage? Well, the Goblin Brain kicks in and your answer is "breeding camps!" - make the strong blood multiply and create more Dragonblooded this way. You can bet this idea came about soon after the first Exalted book was published and has remained an infamous meme in the community ever since...

Vampire the Requiem and the Hungarian Marriage

In Vampire the Requiem there is a vampiric Covenant called Ordo Dracul. They are essentially transhumanist vampires looking for ways of overcoming their vampiric weaknesses. Rites of the Dragon even describes how two weaknesses are pitted against one weakness to overcome it. With this practice, they have developed the Coils of the Dragon, rituals that transform the vampiric bodies. In the 1st edition specifically, under the Coil of Blood you had the power "Perspicacious Blood", which let you gain more blood points than you drank from someone else (you get 3 points per 2 blood you drink from a mortal, or 2 per 1 for vampire blood). The power is simple enough, letting you feed more efficiently, but then the Goblin Brain kicks in...

In the Ordo Dracul book the writers describe a practice known as the Hungarian Marriage. You would have a pair of vampires with the power feeding from one another to produce infinite blood points. However, those that know their Requiem already realise there are two problems with this - Vinculum and blood addiction. Blood addiction means that a vampire drinking other vampire blood gets addicted to the sensation and may crave it more and more. Vinculum on the other hand is a blood bond forming in someone that has drank from the same vampire repeatedly, making them a thrall to the vampire. This would result in a lot of strong, conflicting feelings in those two vampires that may cause problems to a lot of other people around them. Needless to say, this practice can be severely punished, such as by throwing the two "lovers" in a metal coffin into the sea while they remain awake and able to feed off one another in perpetuity...

Slave worship and making your own followers

Once again in Exalted - in the setting, gods derive their power and wealth from being venerated. The bigger the god's cult the more prominent figure they become and the more money they have to bribe other celestial bureaucrats with. On the flip side, a god that doesn't get any prayers loses power and can even go insane.

Here is where the entrepreneurial Guild comes in. As any world-spanning merchant organisation it seems, they deal with slaves. So their Goblin Brain says - what simpler way of making easy money than to sell the gods the service of being worshipped by the slaves? Coincidentally, a player's Goblin Brain might also chip in analysing how much money can you make laundering prayers and conclude that a person worshipping for a whole day produces more wealth than one working all day, hence all the economy is a sham.

On a similar note, in our Godbound game, Evicting Epistle, we had a god of Artifice and Fertility. Since in that system you get more Dominion points each month based on the amount of people that worship your character, the simplest Goblin Brain solution was to make more followers. So the character went ahead and created a race of Units, smallest creatures capable of having a soul and producing worship, then putting them in a life-sustaining cell where they could worship them all day, every day for the rest of their lives. The cells were self-replicating too!

Rick and Morty's Microverse Battery, used as a literal prototype document for the Units' enclosure

I could be going on and on about more Goblin Brain examples, but I think you get the point by now...

Conclusions

When players come up with the most blunt, straightforward solution to a problem that would be appalling to a normal human being, you know they were thinking with their Goblin Brain. It can be fun to theorise, sometimes it can be fun to actually carry out, but keep in mind that a Goblin Brain might not be thematically fitting for all sorts of games. 

Dexterity is King

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

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

Godbound

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

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

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

Stars Without Number - Int is king too!

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

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

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

Mouse Guard - Attack is King

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

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

Old World of Darkness - Dex for everything

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

Chronicles of Darkness - the king is mostly dead

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

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

Conclusions

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

The mixed bag that is CoD Beast

I'm a long time World of Darkness fan. I used to mostly play Vampire the Masquarade and Vampire the Requiem, but recently my group decided to give most splats a try. We set out to see how they play in the system's newest iteration - the Chronicles of Darkness. One of the newer lines I was interested to try was Beast: The Primordial, a system where you play an embodiment of the primal nightmare that haunts all humanity. Reading through it however, the game seems a bit of a mixed bag - some parts of the setting look brilliant, while others may make you not want to pick it up at all.

So, without further ado, here are various interesting things I found about Beast, for good or ill. The post might feel a bit meandering, but it's meant to highlight what's noteworthy about the system, mechanics and the setting.

First off, everyone's favourite topic - lore!

Place in the cosmology

While Chronicles of Darkness were designed to be light on the metaplot and vague on the cosmology, one could argue there exists some connecting thread between some ideas presented in Beast and the lore from the first edition of Mage the Awakening.

In Mage, in the Arcanus Mundus chapter, it is basically established that the collective unconscious of proto-humanity, the Primordial Dream, shaped the world. These Dreams created the Atlantis, the place where first humans Awoke. They also created various supernatural creatures that are part of the reality of the world - vampires, werewolves, etc.

In similar vein, Beast talks about the Dark Mother, the first of the Beasts, that travelled into the Primordial Dream and became the first of all monsters.

Another aspect of Beast is their Inheritance and the Beast Incarnate. Basically, the end game of any Begotten (another term for Beast), is to become a perfect embodiment of the horror they represent so that they become that horror. They become something akin to the Boogeyman, or Jack the Ripper, or Bloody Mary - horror much bigger than themselves.

Based on that you could argue that all of the supernatural creatures are a reflection of a proto-being formed by some ancient Beast Incarnate. Some Begotten might've been a blood drinking creature of the night, thus creating the myth of a vampire in the fabric of the Primordial Dream, while a different Begotten might've been a man that takes the shape of a wolf and become Father Wolf. All of this fits so nicely - the Dark Mother creating the concept of Beasts, and then the Begotten filling the Primordial Dreams with subsequent kinds of horrors, all sharing a common kinship.

There is only one piece of the puzzle that to me is a bit misaligned. Beasts feel a kinship with all supernatural creatures except Demons. This probably hints that Demons came from somewhere else and are wholly alien to the world, which is an interesting notion. However, the Beasts also share a kinship with Mages - beings that are explicitly Awoken. They woke up from the Primordial Dream, so one would think they would hold Beasts in contempt as creatures of the Dream that they exert some dominion over. But apparently that's not the case...

A different part of the Beast lore are the Insatiables (detailed in Night Horrors Conquering Heroes), one of those "antagonist types" every CoD game seems to have, like the Strix to Vampires or the Pure Werewolves. The Insatiables represent different types of horrors - the Clashing Faults, the Freezing Hell, the Molten Earth, the Primordial Seas, and the Void. In my theory they represent horrors too grand for the human mind to comprehend completely. The concept of a vampire or a werewolf, however alien, is understandable - it's a horror that wants to murder you. The same can't be said for "the horror that is the unending winter of the ice age", or "the infinite cosmic horror of the emptiness of endless vacuum of space". The human mind can't think on such scales, and thus the Insatiables are like Beasts, but are still distinct from their brethren.

But enough about the philosophical waxing of the lore, let's talk about something much more immediate...

Lack of Integrity system

In Chronicles of Darkness, Integrity is a measurement of how human or alien you are. It can take many forms - mortals just have Integrity, a basic measurement of being a human in a civilised society - avoiding murder, torture, injury, or even contact with the supernatural. Vampires have Humanity - a measure of how connected they are to the mortal world by the means of maintaining contacts with actual people and not acting like a bloodsucker. Werewolves have a balancing act of Harmony - trying to remain true to both their human and wolf natures and keeping their life in balance. Mages have Wisdom, showing how single-minded they are in their pursuit of knowledge over being an actual person. You get the picture - each supernatural splat has a different flavour of balancing their supernatural nature with still being a person.

Unfortunately, Beast has none of that. There is no limit to what a Begotten can do without any consequences (save perhaps of creating a Hero if they "disrupt the Primordial Dream"). This is almost a step back in how Chronicles of Darkness have progressed from the old World of Darkness. See, back in the olden days, creatures like Vampires could arbitrarily choose their morality. Those came neatly packed into "Paths of Enlightenment". Did you want to diablerise your fellow vampires without remorse? Path of Blood! Run around in the woods like a wolf? Path of the Beast! Torture people for "science"? Path of Metamorphosis!

So in other words, whatever you decided to do, you would take "the path of doing whatever I wanted to do anyway" as your moral compass and you would be on your way, avoiding having to worry about descending into madness or trying to cling to the last few shreds of your humanity.

It is a bit of a missed opportunity that Beast lacks an Integrity system. It could've been interesting to see something perhaps akin to Werewolf's Harmony - trying to strike a balance between being a horror of the night and an actual person. Balancing being Rorschach and Walter Kovacs, or Batman and Bruce Wayne.

Because of their lack of Integrity to draw boundaries, as well as their kinship with the other supernaturals of the world, Beasts become...

Supernatural cheerleaders and a bad influence on their buddies

Beasts are naturally drawn to other supernaturals of the setting, and those supernaturals are in turn drawn to the Beasts. This is expressed through a number of mechanics. First is Kinship - any supernatural being (including vampires, werewolves, mages, slashers, and even mediums and psychics) starts off with positive first impressions of the Beast. Second is Family Ties - if a Beast and some other supernatural spend enough time together, they develop a deep connection, granting both sides of the party bonuses to support one another.

Skipping a few minor mechanics, we come to the last and perhaps the most powerful boon a Beast can draw from other supernaturals - Family Dinner. Thanks to this mechanic, if a Beast watches another supernatural hunt or feed, they themselves gain Satiety. The hunt must be genuine however, meaning a Vampire can't just drink from their blood doll to trigger Family Dinner - they must stalk and catch the prey.

Since gaining Satiety through Beast's normal Feeding is much more cumbersome and unpredictable than going with your Vampire buddy to watch him drink blood, the Beasts might be naturally inclined to use it as a natural means of gaining sustenance. Add to this the want to expand their Lairs with some quality Chambers and the lack of an Integrity system, may lead them to being a bad influence on their buddies.

It would be really easy for a Beast to goat a Vampire into feeding more than they need, or getting them to lose that one dot of Integrity somewhere "because I really want this place as a new Chamber". It's so easy for a Beast to tell the Vampire that they will take care of that body for them, it's not a big deal really. The Beast doesn't care - it doesn't have Integrity to lose. All it cares about is getting its next fix, so it becomes a supernatural cheerleader for their kin. Hanging around a Beast is like having a friend that wants to do crack with you on a daily basis, except somehow they only get the high and none of the side effects, while your skin itches and your teeth are falling out...

Since we're on the subject of feeding...

Live to eat, don't eat to live

One categorical lie the Beast book states explicitly is "Eat to Live, Don’t Live to Eat", which really goes against what the mechanics and tones of Beast is really all about. The Begotten are supposed to "teach people lessons" and further their Legend, but at the same time - that's how the Beasts also feed. So if say, you were playing Batman, you would strike fear into the hearts of criminals, beat them up for being bad and teach them that crime is illegal. This is the lesson you impart, and by teaching that lesson, you also become more ingrained into the Primordial Dream as "the dark knight". More likely then not, this also feeds into your hunger as a Nemesis - you feed by punishing people for their crimes.

Unfortunately, teaching lessons, furthering your legend and feeding are pretty much the only core things a Beast does (other than expanding their lair and fighting heroes). Now compare this to Vampires, creatures that probably share the closest thematic connection to the Begotten.

Vampires need to feed, sure. Having to hurt people on daily basis is taxing, but you can manage that over time with Herd or Feeding Ground. You also have obligations to your sire, your Clan and your Covenant. Maybe you are obliged to spy on someone for your Mekhet brothers, or are expected to take care of your fledgling Carthian brothers, all the while your sire is telling you to represent him well during Elysium meetings because any faux pas will reflect badly on them. At the same time you also need to maintain a facade of being human, otherwise your Humanity will suffer, and you want to maintain your Touchstones that keep you grounded. Vampires are very social creatures by necessity, and that plays to their themes.

Beast has none of that. There are no Begotten societies save perhaps of the local brood. You're not responsible for say, feeding some new Beast that is still learning the ropes. You don't have to maintain human contacts.

Worse yet, due to the mechanics of feeding, you often want to plan your meals ahead of time. The more sated you are, the more elaborate a lesson you need to give. A hungry Batman will be fine just beating a few thugs up, but one that has been somewhat sated would need to confront a supervillain and punish them in a very unique way, perhaps even killing them in the process. So while you have just sated your hunger for the night or week, you also want to start preparing for the next meal - start looking for the next prey and put the plan into motion.

Now let's move to another resource the Beasts accrue...

Lairs, the hidden landscape of the city, and the Apex

Each Beast has a Lair, a network of Chambers weaved together into a land of their own. Those Chambers are a reflections of the real world. They are impressions made on the Primordial Dream by some trauma - either a loss of Integrity, or a powerful Nightmare caused by the Beast. As the book Building a Legend suggests, this basically means the supernatural activity of the city will leave long lasting markings on the Primordial Dream in form of those Chambers.

Lack of unclaimed Chambers would usually mean there are a lot of Beasts in the area looking for them. Clusters of them mean there is some sort of predator frequenting the area and causing harm. Some old chambers might be clues to something that happened years back. This paints a new, hidden landscape to the city the Beasts get to explore.

This gives the Begotten a lot of opportunity to investigate what happened at a given place so they might add that Chamber to their Lair. Tracking the supernatural culprit and figuring out what transpired can be interesting story seeds playing on similar themes to Mage or Hunter. This can be really interesting! Alternatively of course, the Beasts can just cause some trauma themselves to create new Chambers and skip that fun...

Another part of the Beast lore tied to the above is the Apex - the top supernatural dog of the city. The Apex is the supernatural creature that has the most impact on the Primordial Dream of the area. Not necessarily the oldest or the strongest, but the one that is the most present in people's minds. The Batman of Gotham, Jack the Ripper of London, the Boruta of Łęczyca. Figuring out who the local Apex is can be an interesting investigative story in itself, and a Beast trying to become the Apex themselves is an aspiration for a good campaign.

To attain such prestige, a Beast will need its repertoire of powers...

Atavisms, Nightmares and Advanced Merits - three flavours of power

Initially reading over the various Beast powers, I misunderstood what was being presented, and I'm wondering if more people could make a similar error and not see the interesting potential of the mechanics.

Reading things initially, Atavisms were the obvious "Disciplines" of the Begotten - the main cool powers that make Beasts Beasts. These powers didn't have any obvious "levels" to them, you could basically choose any of them at any point, but that was fine - each power had three distinct things you could do with it either by default, when you have low Satiety, or when you spend Satiety. This was cool and thematic - the Beasts would get tougher when pushed to their limits, and each Satiety expenditure were meaningful in comparison to spending a single point of Vitae, Mana, Essense or the like, since Beasts can only ever have 10 points of Satiety at any given time.

However, looking at the Atavisms, I was missing a few key types of powers one would come to expect from the supernatural splats. A lot of the powers were combat oriented, or were otherwise physical (dragon breath, flying, hiding, etc.). Beasts seemed to be lacking mind-reading or mind-control, and their ability to influence people's emotions were usually limited to conversations with Alien Allure and Siren's Treacherous Song, making them more of a temptress or seductress, rather than king among men.

Advanced Merits were interesting boons for the character - not as powerful as Atavisms, but still interesting enough in their own right as to be cool.

The Nightmares initially appeared as "those powers to scare people". With powers such as "All Your Teeth Are Falling Out", "You Are Alone", "You Are Not Alone", it was easy to dismiss this category of powers as some flavouring to add to the Beast character, rather than anything worthwhile in its own right. Here is where I was really wrong.

As it turns out, Nightmares are the more subtle powers for the Begotten. They are at their most effective when the beast has high Satiety. Those basically reflect a cat playing with its food, rather than a cat on a hunt. Those are the powers that were missing from the Atavisms. "You Must Obey" is basically Vampiric Dominate. "We Know All Your Secrets" is a way to have the victim lead the character to their darkest secrets. "Fear is Contagious" is a way to affect a larger group of people. Between this and being able to create one's own Nightmares, this covers a lot of ground the Atavisms were missing.

The last overlooked power of the Beast are the Primordial Pathways. These allow Beasts to move between their Lair and anywhere else in the World of Darkness universe like a horror movie villain. They can reach Temenos, Anima Mundi, Oneiros, Shadow, Hedge, Underworld, or the real world. This is an incredibly open-ended and flexible power, but unfortunately it seems to be left underutilised. There aren't that many mechanics to how a Beast can benefit from going to the Underworld, nor are there that many story prompts as to what the Beast should do with this power (say, become a therapist that goes into peoples' mind and hunt the embodiment of their fear and trauma to help their patients recover). It's pretty much left as a way for Beast to go anywhere, do anything, and bring their buddies along...

Conclusions

Beast is an interesting but flawed game. It set out to create a class of characters that were supposed to represent something akin to a universal monster, hunted by evil heroes, monsters being the good guys and hanging out with other monsters like some interesting team mashup. It turns out that the monster is more of a Rorschach (a crazy, obsessed person you definitely don't want to be around), the heroes had to be one dimensional not to be likeable, and the team doesn't have a strong theme or mechanic to connect them.

Vampire the Requiem tells a better story where the monster has to hurt other people to survive, but also wants to remain themselves. Werewolf the Forsaken tells a better story of being a part of a misfit family (especially if you look at the Pack book).

With that being said, I still feel there might be some enjoyment to be had playing as a Beast character. As long as you embrace what the game is, have a strong idea of the character, and the GM is on board with it (especially if your build would upset the power scale at the table - Beasts can be rough!), it can be compelling to play a character like that. As you might've guessed by now, it seems that Beast is less geared towards playing The Beast from Beauty and the Beast, and seems to be better suited to letting you play Batman or Rorschach. And if you should always be Batman given the opportunity, why not take it now? ;)

Scifi media as a blueprint for scifi elements in your game

Recently, my group started playing a game of Stars Without Number. The setting of that game is very light on the backstory and the sector you play in will be a giant sandbox you fill in yourself. The game is very conducive to a lot of scifi - you could play it as Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Cowboy Bebop, Altered Carbon, Fading Suns, etc. What you decide to fill your sector with is up to you.

This gives the GM and the players a lot of flexibility as to how to create the setting. The vanilla Stars Without Number assumes present history happened, humanity built its own FLT ships in the near future, expanded outwards into the far reaches of space, everything collapsed 600 years ago due to The Scream, and now the worlds are connecting up again. This means you can get very varied levels of technology, very varied types of societies, and very specific feels for each solar system.

Swan Song for example decided to build a few planets and organisations around the current or past cultures of Earth. You had the Sunbeam Multistellar megacorporation that was heavily steeped in cowboy culture and mannerisms. The Hoveydan Caliphate was influenced by the cultures of the middle east. Sigrid is viking and Norse through and through.

In our game of Blackstar, we stumbled upon our gimmick for the sector by chance.

Scifi as a blueprint

So here's the idea - in the modern world, a lot of things are influenced by what came before. Scifi has inspired modern technology, the US government was built on the ideas of a classical Greek ideas and the Roman Republic, and even a lot of our fiction draws from the history - talking about emperors, feudal societies, pirates, etc. A lot of things are built on top of blueprints that came before.

So the core conceit for our game is that since the modern history we live in today did happen in the Stars Without Number universe, it's quite possible a lot of modern books, novels, films, or culture in general was passed down over generations, being remixed and remade over and over. Because of that, those stories have become ingrained into the society - you can reference the Alien movie and describe something as a xenomorph just as casually as you can reference the Odyssey and call something a siren or a cyclops.

With the scifi proliferation that exists in the universe, it would then be natural for people and societies to build things based on those concepts. A xenomorph is not only a creature of legends, but a blueprint for a gene engineered killer machine. Starship Troopers is a series of stories from a past, but also an idea on which to build a society. Lightsabres are mythical weapons, but they have also been made real with futuristic technology.

In other words - the scifi contemporary to us the players formed a set of blueprints for the game setting to build around. While the events of that scifi didn't happen (you did not have the God Emperor of Mankind undertake the Great Crusade against the xenos), but the ideas from them did influence the development of the future timeline, and they did inspire various entities to turn some of those ideas into reality with the future tech.

Heck, even Stars Without Number's supplement Suns of Gold refers to space merchants that rule over primitive societies with their future tech as a "kurtzer" in reference to Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Kurtz went from being a character in a 1899 novella to a template of behaviour that is recognised in the universe of the game in year 3200.

Because of this you could have things like one of the PCs, as a True AI in a Synth shell, looking like Roy Batty, a replicant from Bladerunner. Obviously, whoever designed that shell took inspiration from the old fiction and based the shell on the designs from ancient Earth. Or you could have predators from the Predator franchise appearing as a society - some gene engineer obviously modified some rich big game hunter and gave them powerful weapons so they could go across the galaxy and hunt the most dangerous prey.

This sort of approach to filling a scifi universe gives the GM and the players an excuse to draw from any number of sources without having to reconcile why you would suddenly have stormtroopers shooting xenomorphs - neither of those franchises did happen, but the ideas from those works of fiction did take place. If Picard can quote Shakespeare, he should also be able to quote Star Wars after all ;).

Conclusions

In a sandbox scifi game that branches off our real world timeline like Stars Without Number, it's not unreasonable to use modern scifi as a blueprint for elements that can be found in the game. With sufficiently advanced technology, it would be possible to copy ideas and concept from such works of fiction and make them real in the game's world. This would allow the GM and the players to build on top of such scifi and take elements from them as needed without worrying about keeping the world consistent with those works of fiction.

The Doylist choices in role play games

In the culmination of a recent game of Stars Without Number an interesting trope sneaked up on us. We were fighting the cartoonish villain Thanatosis and her Hungry Boys in a Mad Max style dust thunderstorm. (episode end spoiler alert) After having her tank blown open and surviving a sniper rifle shot to the back of her head, she decided to retreat away from battle and ride away into the dust storm cursing the name of one of the PCs.

Our characters could've pursued her and put her down without too much trouble, and at least one PC did want to do that, but as players we decided to let her go. On one hand, it was because our characters had other things to attend to, on the other hand, it made more sense from the narrative perspective to have her as a new nemesis that may one day return to fight our characters.

Thinking and talking it over later, that's how I stumbled upon the "Watsonian vs. Doylist" trope.

Watsonian vs. Doylist trope

The Watsonian vs. Doylist trope related to the dichotomy between the character in a story and the author of that story, or in RPG space - the player character and the player. It refers to Sherlock Holmes and two types of commentary you could have on the events of the book - the perspective of the in-universe Dr. Watson, explaining things as he understands them, or from the out-of-universe perspective of the book's author, Arthur Conan Doyle, explaining things as the author of the book.

An example of this trope is trying to answer the question of "why are there so many human-like aliens in Star Trek?" Watsonian answer is that an ancient humanoid race seeded the galaxy with all of those aliens. The Doylist answer is that making human-like aliens is cheaper for the show and allows the audience to understand the characters easier. Both sides answer the same question in a relevant manner, but give incompatibly different reasonings.

The Watsonian choices

In terms of role play games, we often focus on playing our characters in a Watsonian way - we are very attached to our character, want to play them "optimally" and make sure we don't leave any hanging threads the GM could try to weaponize against us later. This is basic human nature - we are very loss-averse, and since we associate our characters as being a representations of us, we don't want to see them die.

This is a fine approach to take, but at the same time, it makes the characters act too neatly and perfectly. They don't make too many mistakes, they don't act impulsively against their better judgement, etc.

One approach I've seen this issue addressed was the Limit Break mechanic in Exalted. This is a mechanic that helps the characters act like the classical tragic hero of myth they are meant to emulate. Basically, the characters accumulate emotional baggage over time until they snap and take the self-destructive course of action - they might blindly charge into battle to their possible death, lash out at their allies straining that relationship, or may be frozen with indecision at the climax of a conflict.

The Doylist choices

On the other end of the spectrum, we would have the idea of playing the character in a Doylist way - making decisions that tell the better story, but may go against what's best for the character in question. This would mean letting some antagonists live so they may become a nemesis for the character, or deciding to go on a drunken bender and break the law so the player could be cased with the challenge of escaping the police or having to cover something up.

A good example of taking the Doylist choice comes from Roll Play Swan Song, an actual play game of Stars Without Number. (spoiler alert for Week 1 and a game-long side-plot) In the first session of the game, one of the PCs, Higgins, ran into an old contact, Randy, that helped them get off the planet with an unknown parcel for their mission. In exchange, Randy wanted to get a ride off the planet - easy enough, basically a free favour. However, Higgins' player decided it would be more interesting to betray Randy at the last moment, shooting him in the head on the landing pad, in order "not to leave any lose threads".

Because of that action, the character has antagonised a criminal to whom Randy owed some money. This would later mean they would have a bounty hunter come after their heads. When the players would return to the planet later to help save some civilians, Higgins would be recognised by the military, making him have to flee and possibly leaving a lot of people to die. In the final episode of the game, Randy would also make a return with a cybernetically fixed head only to snipe Higgins dead as a revenge (luckily, Piani was there to psi-heal his exploded head back up).

All of this happened because the player decided to take the Doylist choice (the player even confirmed the choice was deliberately made to make the game more interesting). The game and the podcast were better for it, even if the character had to suffer because of it.

I think I saw the Doylist approach in the actual game books only twice. Chronicles of Darkness give the player the choice when their characters botch their rolls in exchange for XP.

The only diegetic example of this approach could perhaps be found in Exalted: The Fair Folk. In the world of Exalted, there exist entities known as Rakshasa, The Fair Folk. They are being made out of the primordial chaos from outside of the world that assume humanoid shapes to weave narratives to strengthen themselves. Essentially, they act out stories and conflict like actors (meaning playing Rakshasa is the player playing a character playing a character). Rakshasa become more powerful the more connections they have, meaning they seek to cultivate a web of nemesis, rivals, lovers, underlings and so on. This means for them the Watsonian and Doylist choices are one and the same - the players want to make mistakes because their characters want to make mistakes because that creates a more compelling narrative for them.

But let's reel this back a bit from this crazy meta-example ;).

An agreement between the player and the GM

Obviously, making the Doylist choice in a game leaves the PC and thus the player more exposed to the GM and their narrative. It would therefore be good to discuss this topic ahead of time and develop a mutual understanding between the players and the GM. The GMs shouldn't take those vulnerabilities and possible nemesis and just use them to screw over the player willy-nilly. Just as the player made a wink to the GM while letting that villain go, so should the GM at some point in the future wink back to the player.

If you want to quantify this relationship in some sense, perhaps each time the player makes such conscious Doylist choice, they would get some point or token. In exchange, the GM would get to keep that plot thread or character that would later come back "to take revenge" on that character (in a more narrative sense, there may be no actual killing involved). However, the player could cash those tokens in at any time to get something significant they want. It could be that they would escape being killed in some situation, or be able to get some artefact that would normally be out of their reach, or the like. It would have to be something significant enough to make the Doylist choice worth it, although not as significant as to make it some sort of wish-granting engine ( ;) ). You'd be basically cashing in "I'm not doing the adventure that would've enabled me to get this thing" in exchange for an "IOU of an adventure surrounding this plot at some point in the future".

If the GM brings back that same villain back and they are out for revenge, or the situation bites the players in the ass because of their past mistake, the debt is settled. If that character or plot would come back later again, it shouldn't be any more dangerous than any other adventure would be - you don't necessarily want to have to deal with some crazy person plotting to murder you every other session just because you let them live once.

On the other hand, if the player's overcome the obstacle and they get the upper hand, there is nothing stopping the player from taking another Doylist choice, earning another token and letting the GM keep the villain once more.

Also worth noting is that the "revenge" part of the deal can come in at any point really - if the GM wants the villain to try shooting the PC in the back right after they have been spared by the player, that's fine. If it worked for Dragonball (Goku sparing Frieza only to be shot in the back), it can work for your game too ;).

Conclusions

Players are often inclined to make Watsonian choices to do what's best for their characters and avoid leaving any lose threats least they be used against them. However, sometimes making a Doylist choice would make the story and the character more interesting.

It's good for the GM and the players to discuss this topic and come to some mutual understanding of how they would want to use this approach in their games. The players would be more encouraged to make Doylist choices if they knew the GM would handle that in a responsible manner.