Problems with character Cults in RPGs

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

Roles of cults in RPGs

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

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

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

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

Possession of NPCs

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

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

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

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

On a similar note...

Transactional worship

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

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

Religion defining the NPCs

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

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

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

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

Mechanics influence characters

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

One solution - make it all cosmetic

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

Homunculus characters, stat readjustment and character change in RPGs

My group and I play a lot of games with interesting mechanics. Lately, we've been trying Cortex, a modular RPG system where you can tailor the engine to your game needs. One part of the system you can plug into your game are Trait Statements - some statement that focuses and refines a trait for the character that's meant to be challenged in the course of the game. So for example, you can have a Perception trait at D10 with a Statement "Trust No One" attached to it. This would tell you about the character's worldview. Mechanically more importantly, you are supposed to challenge these Statements to get a bonus to a roll and to change your character. So if say, you decide that you can trust someone, you would roll 3D10 instead of 1D10 for that roll, but then you would have to either change the Statement, or change the die associated with the trait, either turning into "Perception D8 Trust No One (and a bonus to something else)", or "Perception D10 I Can Count On Others".

While this mechanic in itself is all well and good, from playing various games over the years, I'm yet to see anyone embrace such character changes / sideways growth as a part of their gaming experience. Let me elaborate.

Homunculus character

More often than not in my experience, when someone makes a character for an RPG they come out as a homunculus, a small version of what the character will be later in the story. When you make a warrior that's all about being honourable and just, they start out as a honourable and just warrior with weak stats, and over the course of the game, they grow into being a honourable and just warrior with strong stats and minor tweaks here and there. If you want to play a crafter, you build a crafter and invest in them being a crafter, etc. Rarely do you see a shift from one to another, or from one fundamental set of beliefs to the next.

Medieval art and homunculus baby Jesus - "perfectly formed and unchaned"

Sure, you could come into a game with a blank slate of a character and form them as they grow. From what I heard this was especially prevalent in oldschool RPGs where most level 1 characters of a given class were about the same, a lot of them wouldn't survive the meat grinder and you wouldn't care about their backstory if they would just die one session later. This kind of attitude is literally related to the term "grognard" in its original meaning.

Similarly, you could build a character and aim for them to have a character arc where they go from a naive child to a grizzled grognard and then to a quiet farmer, but unless you are playing something like Chuubo's where you can literally create an arc for your character, it might be hard to execute.

From my experience, you generally see homunculus characters - a fully formed idea of what the character will be like, with minor wiggle room for the details. If you want to play someone else, you generally don't shift your character from one thing to another using mechanics like the above, you just make a new character.

Similar mechanics

Cortex is not the only game that has mechanics for such character shifts.

In Star Trek Adventures every character has a set of Values, which basically reflect their moral centre. Things like "The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few, or the One", "Holds Everyone to the Highest Standards", "Duty above all else", etc. Those are used to either challenge the characters and make the situation more complicated because of their beliefs, or to let the character challenge that value and change their worldview based on that experience.

This of course is very much keeping with the themes of Star Trek and character development. However, in the game it can feel like you should make characters that don't believe what they should be believing, and your reward for having that character growth is a simple stat readjustment. I've heard a player be frustrated with the game expecting them not to make a character the way they want them to act and constantly questioning what they believe in, and perhaps giving a mechanic to what otherwise might be organic character growth is having the opposite effect (reminds me of Freakonomics...).

In City of Mist your character is built out of themes. Things like "trained boxer", "man of steel", "diviner", "the guy with a van". These themes accrue "fades and cracks" over the course of the game if they are neglected. If you don't show up to your boxing practice, solve problems with guns or generally make that part of your character not important, you will eventually have to replace that themebook for another to reflect what has taken its place in your character's life. While this can be an interesting flow of a story, especially when replacing your themes can turn you fully superhuman or fully mundane with some serious repercussions for either, if the players are too loss-averse or make their characters just right, they might not engage with this mechanic at all.

Many Powered by the Apocalypse games we came across feature an interesting character option for late-game levelling - "make a new character". This is example from The Veil:

In most games this feels a bit strange, but there is perhaps one game where an option like this works - The Sprawl:

The Sprawl is a Cyberpunk game, which comes with its genre expectations of character life being rather cheap and expendable. Since this character level up option costs additionally a good chunk of money, you can see it as "your character gets to retire", rather than being a given for any character. It's something you work extra hard towards.

How we handle these things

I hope our group is not alone in this, but seeing as True Friend needed to be a merit it might not be universal, but we have a relaxed attitude to character building. If you need to tweak your character, just do it, it's fine. If you want to do a complete rewrite of a character for new mechanics, the GM will usually agree (we've done that once in Heaven for Everyone after a new supplement with a new character splats came out). If you want to make a new character because the old one doesn't play that well, pretty much the same applies (we've done that in a yet unpublished Humblewood game).

Couple that with us generally knowing what kind of characters we want to play (and GM being pretty much always on-board with whatever the players come up with), we rarely engage in any of those mechanics. We have character growth and changes as a part of playing our characters in the world (for example in The Living Years demigod Atrus didn't want to form a religion around himself not to impose his worldview onto foreign people, but since they came to him for guidance and after being reassured by one of the NPCs he trusts it's fine, he changed his character's outlook organically).

So perhaps it would be good to make such kind of attitudes something acceptable in more games without necessarily needing to put in mechanics around retiring an old character and making a new one...

Conclusions

A number of games feature mechanics for tweaking your character's stats and worldview. Often, however, these might not be all that useful to the players if they already made the characters exactly the way they want to play them. It's good to give the players options to tweak their characters to better suit their games as they get some hands-on experience with how they play, but making entire mechanics around it might be a bit much...

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...

Problem of Crafting solving every problem

Technology and the industrial revolution have been an unprecedented boon to the global standard of living. With them, we escaped the Malthusian trap and have achieved things that were inconceivable before. However, what would applying a similar scale of progress do in an RPG?

In our Princes of the Universe Exalted game we explored a high-scale, high-power game that involved a character that hyper-specialised in Crafting. By mid-Season 2, they were able to create basically a post-scarcity utopia city in the middle of the desert, complete with climate control, automatic food dispensers, crafting facilities, Big Brother-style AI, etc. Basically, everyone could live your entire life there in luxury and not have to lift a finger, everything was provided for them. Things only escalated from there.

After awhile a lot of problems could just be hand waved away with Crafting. Resource shortages? Throw automated mining at a mountain. Food problems? Automated farms. Money problems? Start selling perfectly crafted luxury items and dominate each and every market out there. Military problems? Create automated drones, power armour, a fleet of airships, etc.

While in Exalted if you wanted to focus on the minutia of Crafting it would boil down to a lot of rolling, in systems like Godbound (which Princes of Universe eventually adopted) such large-scale changes are ingrained into its Dominion system. Heck, in vanilla Godbound you can even make new worshippers to boost yourself even further...

Solving every problem

But back to the topic at hand. Just like technology has solved basically every problem that plagued our civilisations in the past, so too can high-end Crafting solve pretty much every problem a system might have. This is pretty similar to the Quadratic Wizards Problem (where in games like D&D warriors' powers grow linearly, while wizards' power grows quadratically and inevitably they dominate everything) - if there is no balancing factor, Crafting can make anyone else obsolete. A warrior might train a hundred elite monks, but a Crafter might bring a machine gun to a knife fight.

Moreover, if anything can be solved with Crafting, you can run into the Paradox of Plenty - if you don't need people to extract natural resources, till the fields, make things, etc., what good are they?

Sure, you can have them create art, engage in science and philosophy and do everything else that's not manual labour. That can work if you don't push automation too far, but I'm yet to see an RPG where the art output of a nation would be a factor (sounds like a pretty neat concept).

In the end the only thing that's the limit is the setting. In Exalted, pretty much the only thing you couldn't automate was prayers - you needed actual souls for those to work. This was ultimately the use for humans in our game - to generate worship for the demigod player characters.

It takes something from the man

While in real life having a post-scarcity fully automation powered society would be an undeniable good, in RPGs it can "take something from the man" (or the setting) so to say. It takes away a lot of the strife from the setting - you don't have to choose whether sending people to war would mean your civilisation would starve if they didn't return for the harvest, or whether to farm cash crops to pay for a civic project, or food crops to feed the populous. If a single character can solve any problem with Crafting / technology, characters that are not Crafting-focused feel inferior in comparison, and if Crafting can start making other player characters obsolete, the game can just feel bad to play.

This touches on the idea of hard magic systems, where while magic can be awesome, it also needs to have some limits, and it's those limits that make the magic system interesting.

For example, in Godbound, a lot of the high-end Artefact creation requires the use of Celestial Shards, parts of the Engines that run reality. Obtaining them is always an ordeal, and using them essentially always means you are letting the broken world stay broken rather than try fixing it. Similarly, every player character has access to the same ability to change the world with Dominion even if they are not a Crafter, so you don't feel like you're that lesser at fixing problems with your powers.

Technology as corruption

In most games, especially scifi ones, players will almost never not want to get their hands on some cool gadgets, shiny toys or useful gear. Whether that's through looting places or making their own if they can, they will want to get some tech. However, some settings have introduced a counterbalance to the wonders of technology.

The Fading Suns universe is built on the remains of a post scarcity corporate techno utopia. However, the current setting is a space feudal empire built around the Universal Church, whose central doctrine is that technology makes your soul impure and leads to the stars fading. While PCs will fall under the various factions that are given indulgences to use technology for the good of the people (an inquisitor using a spaceship will save more souls than it they couldn't use a spaceship for example), a lot of the setting will carry a stigma attached to the excessive use of technology. So while you could build be more machine than man and run robotic farms, you will be shunned by the peasants you displaced and the church might extradite you all the while keeping a close eye on what other heresy you might be committing.

This kind of thing would of course require some buy-in from the players and a balanced touch from the GM not to be a party pooper, but it can provide an excuse why you can't just rely on technology to solve all your problems in the setting.

Modern thinking

Another interesting topic relating to Crafting and technology solving a lot of problems is that it is a very modern way of thinking. We know where technological progress leads, so we may want our characters to start pushing the setting towards modernity by inventing / reinventing even such simple concepts as basic sanitation or an assembly line. However, we have to remember that sometimes it took forever for new technologies to be created. The first steam engine was first described in the 1st century AD, but it still took 17 centuries for the Industrial Revolution to start. It's fine to work within what the setting is and not having to push it to modernity.

Conclusions

If taken to extremes, Crafting, innovation and technology in RPGs can be setting-changing. On one hand that can be a pretty awesome feeling of bringing a world from the dark ages to a post-scarcity society as a result of one's character's actions, but on the other hand it can detract from the game if people wanted to engage in the sword and sandal fantasy rather than going into scifi territories. 

You can try addressing the problem by choosing a system that balanced Crafting vs other professions or sets some limits on what is possible. Alternatively, you can actively try avoiding the problem by choosing not to have a focused Crafter in your game (we did that with The Living Years, where it was the more challenging way to play, and our motto almost became "if we only took Artifice...").

Like with anything, it's good to talk about your game's vision before the game starts. If you want to turn the setting from fantasy to scifi and people are onboard, go for it. If a game starts getting exponential and snowballing because of Crafting or something similar and you don't want to do that, you can ask people not to do that, etc.

Winning the game in Session 0 with Learning and Teaching...

The Criminal Class - Rogues, Night Caste and their ilk

Many RPGs let you play character types that can only be described by our modern sensibilities as "criminal" or "outcast", whether it's talking about characters that are thieves, assassins, necromancers or something else. This can create an attitude problem, especially when the rest of the party sees themselves as "righteous", or the world doesn't see the "criminal hero" as a "hero".

Scoundrel amongst heroes - the Night Caste

In the base game of Exalted the players play Solars, returning heroes of the world in the vein of Gilgamesh and Hercules. The character "classes" are named after the stations of the sun. The Dawns are the generals and warriors. Zeniths are the priests and leaders. Twilight are sorcerers and scholars. Eclipses are the diplomats. All of them you can see as heroes to be glorified, praised and love by all of their people, getting along and being praised by their fellows. And then you have the last Caste - the Night Caste, the assassins and spies - doesn't sound like something you can trust or be friends with.

Sure, the Night Caste are very valuable when you want to get things done and they compliment the rest of the Castes pretty well, but as far as RPG mentality goes, they feel different.

First of all, they appear less trustworthy than other party members because they are sneaky. They can steal from you, sabotage you, backstab you, lie to your face, etc., that's what they are good at. If you are a paranoid player, you will be paranoid about them, and that's never good.

Secondly, by their nature of being assassins and so on, most of the things they excel at they will try doing alone. This gives them a lot of opportunity to do things without oversight and often give them free reign to call some shots or get the first pick of whatever they steal. They can negotiate with your enemies, steal the best treasure, keep secrets to themselves and so on that the other party members wouldn't be privy to. This again breed more paranoia.

Thirdly, they can be hard to balance encounter-wise and fun-wise. An assassin is supposed to kill people, so if they infiltrate the base of the BBEG, they might want to kill that BBEG by themselves. If they are able to, the rest of the party doesn't get to do some cool fight. If they can't, they might feel like they can't have fun their way. So it's a hard balancing act on how strong they should be vs opponents that might be designed to take most of the party to beat.

Fourthly, if they are too good, they can negate the need for a lot of encounters. We had this problem in Heaven for Everyone - we had a character that cranked Stealth to such a ridiculous degree they could infiltrate whatever they wanted, get all the information they need and sneak out without leaving a trace and avoiding all human and even supernatural guards. We joked that they could just sneak their way to figure out who's the person at the tippe top of a conspiracy pyramid, kill that one person and solve the entire campaign by themselves, but that wouldn't be fun. So we opted not to do that so everyone can have fun.

Fifthly, a lot of what they do is "villain-coded". A Night Caste is all about doing things sneakily, and a lot of activities that require being sneaky are often also shady - running a criminal underground, stealing, assassinations, kidnapping people, espionage, blackmail, stalking, etc. all have negative associations to them, even if they are used for "good" in big quotations. All of these fall under what a Night Caste could easily do, but if they do engage in them they are seen as the bad guys, and perhaps rightfully so.

And finally, these kind of characters are not something you typically glorify - a famous spy is an oxymoron. Sure, in-universe it might not be uncommon, but it still would take a perspective shift for the players at the table to glorify someone running a secret stasi-esque police and a criminal underground silencing dissidents and killing people for future-crimes against the state, in comparison to a Twilight that makes pretty music. All of these sound like something a villain would do from our, modern day perspective, and defending it often is a Thermian Argument.

While a Night Caste might not be the most common go-to when discussing the problem of a criminal RPG class, it is perhaps one of the more fully realised because of the high character agency and power level in Exalted. I've had some experience with that - even in a group of five larger than life narcissists a hero that was all about human sacrifice did not trust me because my character was capable of shady dealings...

A killer is a killer

Going down to more D&D-like things, another similar attitude was perhaps well encompassed by a recent video from All Things DnD:

A paladin and an assassin are one and the same...

Beyond the usual fears of a sneaky character wanting to steal from the party, the characters can argue about the morality of their professions, the honour they possess and so on while at the core of things most if not all D&D characters are killers. This is not through the fault of their own, but by the focus of the game - a combat-focused game like D&D informs the combat-focused characters that play it.

Whether you're a warrior, a paladin, an assassin or the like, in D&D, you kill. One might kill for glory, another for a deity, and yet another for money, but they all kill. To hold that one is immoral while others aren't above one character class can feel bad to play. Sure, most of the time the player opted to play that class on their own "so they should accept its downsides", but it can still be demoralising when other characters boast about how heroic they are or how everyone welcomes them with open arms while potentially shunning the rogue because they are clearly criminal. If they get past that and are all treated like "adventurers" then the situation can graduate upwards to being a Night Caste problem...

Dark magic, evil races, taboo things

In a similar vein you can run into similar type of hang-ups from different kinds of characters. Obviously necromancers, warlocks, orcs, tieflings, or any characters that by default fall on the "evil" side of the alignment chart can be similarly discriminated against by the setting or other players at the table. All such hang-ups should be cleared up before the game starts so everyone would know what they are getting into, how will the game world react to their characters, how will the other players react, etc.

One time we played a game of Godbound in a zombie post-apocalypse setting with one of the characters being a demigod of death. We forgot to discuss how the people of the setting and the PCs from the land that got ravaged by zombies would treat someone that will raise more undead as their main powerset, so we had an argument about it during the game before realising that it would be a really shitty thing to do to tell a player that they couldn't use a large part of their power set due to a hang-up like that mid-game. It was an important lesson to learn.

A pirate is a pirate

On a flip side, sometimes you have to acknowledge when the players are criminals.

A few months back I was looking into running a Stars Without Number campaign. Someone suggested I ran The Pirates of Drinax, one of the more well known campaigns from Traveller. In it, the party is given letters of marque by the king of Drinax so they can be privateers helping restore the kingdom to its former glory.

However, all things considered, it just means the party is a bunch of pirates. The kingdom might have some history, but it's been reduced to a single floating palace. The party will be raiding ships passing by, taking over planets, etc. The only difference between what they are doing and piracy is some descendant of a ruler putting their name on it. Until the actual kingdom is rebuilt, those letters of marque mean nothing.

It's good to call things by what they are so that the players won't be surprised when someone hunts them down like pirates down the line or they get the idea that maybe they should be in charge in this new kingdom. As long as everyone's onboard, have fun!

The same applies to all other potentially criminal or evil activities, like usurping a throne of a kingdom in D&D, or aiding the BBEG...

Conclusions

Before you start playing with "a criminal class" PC in a party that features "good" or "righteous" PCs, it's best to talk with one another about how the characters might be perceived in the setting, the GM or by other PCs. As long as everyone's onboard with how things will be handled, that should be fine. Just remember to stick to it - if you agree that an assassin will be treated like any other adventurer, don't complain about them doing their assassin business (provided they don't betray the party's trust more than other PCs, etc.).

Similarly, it's important for game designers to put extra consideration when introducing "a criminal class" into their game and how they should be treated. Ideally you'd write it broad enough that you could use that same class or character option in a more positive manner, or maybe just let anyone "minor" in the sneaky, subversive arts without making any one class specifically "the criminal class" - warriors could turn into ninjas, diplomats could turn into criminal bosses, sorcerers could turn necromancers and so on so anyone would have the potential to see themselves in heroic or villainous light as needed.

Congenials - an Exalted Podcast Review

I’ve spent the last few months listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.

In today's episode, I will cover Congenials by Sponsored By Nobody.

Disclaimers

There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.

First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.

Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.

Thirdly, I’ve been a part of this podcasting group (but not this specific game) both when those episodes were being recorded and since. I intend to go into this review as objectively as I can, but you should be aware of the potential bias at play. Here is your disclaimer.

Finally, there will be some spoilers for the show, it would be rather hard to discuss some things without that...

Overview and minor things

Congenials is an Exalted actual play hosted by @Tavelgorge and part of the Sponsored By Nobody podcast. It was made up of the same GM that ran Princes of the Universe Exalted game, as well as fans of that podcast as players (some of which are starting their own podcast, PodPodCastCast). It features a shifting cast of 7 Exalts, almost all of which from a different splat.

The game’s system is GM’s very own homebrew hack of Godbound - Godbound Conversion of Exalted.

The series takes the form of an audio-only podcast with 2-4 hour episodes with minor editing, recorded over the Internet. The cast consists of casual RPG fans (so no voice actors or improv artists this time).

Player Characters

The game features seven PCs that come and go:

Sola Bright Light, a Zenith Solar priestess.
Mocking White Wind, a New Moon Lunar.
Mirage of Ideal Destinations, a Sidereal Chosen of Journeys.
Magister Invil, a Getimian scholar.
Heroism Advancing Algorithm (HAAL), an Orichalcum Achemical from Classlat.
Multitudinous Mask, a Changing Moon Lunar, very spider-like.
Hunter of Shades, a Liminal.

The party’s theme for this game was twofold:

• They are monster hunters
• They are nice people (which is an important contrast to the Princes of the Universe game…)

General Plot

The game starts with the group of Exalts hunting monsters in Kingdom of Halta, the Chanta region in the North-East of Creation. The local area has been attacked by Kaiju, large augmented monsters. After slaying a few of these beasts, the group discovers the mastermind behind this - an Exigent of Kaiju that’s unleashing those monsters on the world for heroes to rise up and earn their glory fighting them. The group strikes a deal with him to use his powers to help train Solars and work with the Cult of the Illuminated.

Meanwhile, the Autochtonian nation of Classlat has completed Project Razor and established a colony in the nearby area. They are looking for resources to send back to the Land of Brass and Shadow and are establishing relationships with the Kingdom of Halta, as well as the local Fairfolk. It’s soon revealed, however, that the Fae have made deal with the Guild to enslave Classlat. To that end, the Fae have reached into the Wyld and brought Aradd the Hunter, an ancient Behemoth to get through their defences.

During the second Season the Exalts look for ways to deal with this threat, seeking help from the Jadeborn, confronting the Guild in Nexus, using the Rathess Observatory, and finally enlisting the aid of an ancient Sphinx of the South to stand a chance at defeating Aradd before he can get to Classlat.

Highlights

Variety of Exalts, no Solar problems

After listening to Swallows of the South, ExalTwitch, Demon City Slickers and even Princes of the Universe, with a total of 20 Solar PCs between them with a sporadic sprinkle of one-off non-Solar PC guests, it was a breath of fresh air to have a diverse group of PC Exalt types.

A large part of the podcast focused on the Alchemical HAAL, his culture and enclave of his people. Secondary to that were the stories of a Sidereal and a Getimian, both being rather novel and unique. Tertiary we saw a glimpse at what a Liminal might be up to, some Lunar shenanigans, and a minor Solar business.

Very notably, the game also didn’t fall into the typical trappings of a Solar-focused game - there was no Wyld Hunt, there was no Realm invading the place, there were no Sidereals out to hunt the PCs, etc.

So if you’re done watching any of the other Exalted podcasts that I listed and want a breath of fresh air to get a palette cleanser on Solar stuff, this series is a good place to go.

Autochtonia and HAAL

Since one of the player characters was an Alchemical the game had an opportunity to explore the concepts associated with them - the Autochtonian culture, the industrial aesthetics, the purveying propaganda, the concepts of 1984 mixed with communism and everything that’s usually quite alien to Exalted and Creation. Both the GM and the player portraying Heroism Advancing Algorithm nailed that portrayal, making it both the highlight of the series as well as the centre focus of much of the campaign. It is clear both of them were very familiar with the source material and had fun depicting that culture.

Morality of monsters

One fun part of RPGs is being able to explore worlds and cultures that are different and alien to our own. Congenials offered its own interesting twist when dealing with the Exigent of Kaiju.

In our world a person making giant monsters and unleashing them onto the world would be really bad. However, Creation is a different place. It’s a land of capital H Heroes. Those heroes don’t rise up without a challenge, and they need to forge their legend, so what better way than engineering opportunities for that to happen?

Enter the Exigent of Kaiju, an Exalt who took on the task of creating monsters so that heroes might rise up to defeat them. The PCs were just such heroes, rising up to protect Halta from kaijus disrupting trade, killing people, etc. When they finally tracked down where those monsters are coming from and why they were made it became an interesting engagement for the players and the characters - they had to make a judgement whether this is something they want to allow to continue and if so - how to make the best use of it.

Garfield Minus Garfield

Season 1 Episode 6 is a very unique episode. Since this game was recorded online, by accident this episode did not record audio from the players, which resulted in almost an hour and a half of just the GM describing things, reacting to players, etc. It could’ve been a disaster to redo or a lost episode instead turned out to be an okay listen in the spirit of Garfield Minus Garfield. The GM is expressive enough that you can infer most of the context and still enjoy the show. Congenials Minus Congenials!

Everyone is Magister

Born out of the joke that Magister the Getimian is full of spiders constantly chattering inside of him and telling him to do awful things, the Congenials decided to run a more joke episode of Everyone is John. Suddenly, the character of Magister was controlled by The Ebon Dragon, The Perfect Magister, Grand Defensive Buttress Engineer, Edumaster, Old Cat Lady Magister and The Perfect of Paragon.

That episode went off the rails pretty quick as I’d guess any Everyone is John did, but even more so because the characters are living demigods. So you have cities being conquered, major NPCs being killed like chums, multiple second circle demons being summoned and bound in service of an Old Cat Lady, etc.

The episode was a fun if silly romp!

Opulence of Yu-Shan

Yu-Shan, the city of the gods, could be portrayed in a few ways in Exalted. The GM had some fun playing up its opulence as the golden metropolis when it came to describing how life has been treating Mirage the Sidereal. It’s a fun contrast hearing about how he’s moving up in the world into a giant palatial estate with a host of servants and hand-bedazzled butterflies, meanwhile in Creation people are struggling to get by. It was similarly a bit of a fun scene when the other PCs went to Yu-Shan by themselves and visited Mirage’s estate. There was much judgement and condescension, but in a fun way.

Criticism

No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what Congenials has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve...

Some character duds

As with all RPGs, some character concepts or portrayals work better on paper than in practice. Congenials was unfortunately no exception.

I would like to once again remind that a critique of characters and their actions should not reflect on the players portraying those characters. Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes we try playing a character one way that comes off different from what we had in mind, etc. With that out of the way…

I personally wasn’t fond of the character of Mocking White Wind, the Lunar, for a few reasons. First of all, I think the player operated on a lower Level of Trust than the rest of the party and the GM. In the very first episode the group transported a stash of magical materials they acquired into Chanta. They rented a secure storage room and deposited their precious bits. Unsatisfied with that however, Mocking spent the next half an hour or more working his way through a Lunar spy network to work out a deal for a more secure holding spot in exchange for clearing a manse out. It played out overly paranoid and felt like a waste of time in the grand scheme of things because the GM wasn’t going to have anyone try to steal their stuff - he never does that. The character had a similar level of distrust permeate the rest of the series, setting up extra fortified ways of capturing people, etc.

Secondly, the character came off as rather condescending and moralising, judging people and telling them what not to do and what’s good and bad. Sure, that’s what Exalts do, but it can be stressful to even listen to. He wanted to completely shut down the concept of the Exigent of Kaiju and all of his work, and tried to lecture a Guild Acquirer about how she could be starting a war by trying to enslave people in the Classlat Enclave. It all rang a bit hollow and a bit annoying to listen to. Understandably, that sort of thing could be a tough balancing act to pull off between having a strong moral code and being a moralising prick. Unfortunately, this one didn’t stick the landing.

The other Lunar of the group, Mask, was also a bit of a problem. His introduction was basically V for Vendetta speech, which got promptly interrupted and diffused by another character noticing his name being a part of Mask’s long name, which made that already failing bit flop. After that he played a bit of a self-absorbed loner, but one that wanted to have a say on everything, which seems to fall under one of those RPG tropes of a dark brooding character with an edgy backstory. In general, I didn’t enjoy this character either.

And finally, we have two characters that make you want to say “and they were there too”, those being Sola Bright Light and Hunter of Shades. Both of those characters were introduced and contributed to some fights and solving some problems, but you would often forget they were there. Sola had one bit with her cult that was interesting (we’ll get to that soon), and Hunter had his character introduction which gave him a goal to achieve (kill the Perfect of Paragon), but other than those I couldn’t tell you much more about what they did. Part of it could be because of how often they appeared in the story (4 episodes for Sola, only in Season 1, and 8 for Hunter, only in Season 2), part of it could be because not everyone likes to take centre stage, so it’s understandable if some characters don’t leave a mark.

Dragon King plot elephants

Dragon Kings in the Exalted world can be a bit of a plot elephant - drawing a lot of attention to themselves when introduced and possibly being a fountain of exposition when introduced - something you can’t ignore and have to address. Mai, an ancient spirit of a Dragon King was such an elephant - quickly acting as a sycophant to Sola, talking about the First Age, the Usurpation, undermining Autochtonian teaching by telling what Autochton was really like, etc. It’s hard to argue with such Dragon Kings, especially as played by this GM, as they present everything they talk about as facts and first hands accounts very convincingly.

What’s worse is that Mai’s plotline just gets dropped soon after they’re introduced because Sola’s player stopped appearing in the show.

Mediocre audio quality

Since the game was run online and featured eight different people each on their own computer, the audio quality varied a lot from person to person. Unfortunately, the final product had an overall mediocre audio quality - you could hear a number of notification pings being recorded, people talked over one another a bit (at one point the GM muted himself in the game but not on the recording and proceeded to talk with someone about the game while two PCs were talking at the same time), etc. As much as I enjoyed the character of HAAL, the enjoyment was always dampened by a poor audio quality unfortunately.

Out of all Exalted podcasts I’ve covered so far, this one had the poorest audio quality.

Journey quick travel

The old problem of Exalted being a gigantic world while at the same time having many means of quick travelling and skipping through it also made its way to Congenials. It was further compounded by having a Sidereal Chosen of Journeys as one of the main PCs, meaning most of the travel by the group could be done at a rapid pace while avoiding all the problems in between. So while something like ExalTwitch condensed a journey of 4000 miles into a scene swipe, Congenials were doing something similar but also their characters didn’t experience much of the downtime.

Ignoring cult problems

This one has been a personal gripe of mine for a while now. In games like Exalted or Godbound where the PCs have their own cults, they often end up being neglected by their patrons or becoming caricatures of how people behave, rather than being an important part of that character.

Sola was a high priestess in her village before she Exalted. After killing the village’s former god, the villagers decided to worship her instead and followed her from the West into the deep North-East that is Halta. They were quite a lot out of their comfort zone almost living in a squaller, but their main problem was a lack of direction. When presented with this problem characters like HAAL started helping the village out and offering them some guidance but Sola didn’t engage with them or express what she wants out of them at all. It was a bit disappointing, and at least the PCs called her out on it a bit.

The problem probably comes from a few things.

Firstly, the Godbound system that this homebrew was based on really rewarded characters for having a cult. You not only gained more Dominion (power to change the world), but you could also turn it into an army or a big power in the world. Opting not to have a cult was a bad choice in almost all situations.

Secondly, it can also be a problem to play a character with a cult. Some players might like the idea on paper, but when push comes to shove it could be something the player might not be comfortable or enjoy dealing with.

Unfortunately, Sola did not appear in the game after the episode when she interacted with her cult, so that thread was dropped without a conclusion.

Conclusions

Congenials was an interesting Exalted podcast that unfortunately is dragged down by its audio quality. It’s pretty much the only Exalted Actual Play that focused predominantly on non-Solar characters and breaking away from Solar-related tropes. With cherry picking the right players from the ones that played the game, you could have a pretty good set of characters for an interesting continuation of the story. It’s unfortunate that probably won’t happen, but some of the players from the Congenials cast have started their own PodPodCastCast.

Now, onto listening to the other Sponsored By Nobody Exalted podcasts...

Related links:

• Congenials episode synopsis