Flat shared XP and Geist's Beats per minute

In the past we have discussed a few topics related to what I'd like to bring up today - how Chronicles of Darkness improved the game experience with small tweaks, how it almost fixed minmaxing, how it failed with some Beat systems, and the general discussion of various ways of handing XP in RPGs.

With that in mind, today I heard Geist The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition was doing away with the choice between Individual and Group Beats you could use in Chronicles of Darkness, instead making Group Beats the only option.

I don't have the PDF, so I'm going off what was mentioned here...

Personally, I think it's a good idea, but the reason for this needs a bit more explanation.

Beats mechanics

In Chronicles of Darkness, XP is awarded to the players in form of Beats. Five Beats make 1 XP. Those are earned in a number of ways - you can get a Beat for fulfilling your aspirations, for dealing with trauma, botching a roll, getting beaten up, and dealing with something that shakes your character's Integrity. All in all, whenever your character faces an important or pivotal moment in a scene, you earn a Beat.

Of course, the system can be gained a bit. You can build characters more for farming Beats, and if you play them right, you can get double the amount of XP other players do, which just can breed resentment at the table - never a good thing.

It becomes less pronounced when you just use the Shared Beats system, but that creates another problem...

Beats per minute

Under the Shared Beats system, whenever a player earns a Beat, it gets put into a shared pool. At the end of the session, you take the Beats and divy them up between all players equally. Everyone advances at the same pace and everyone's fine, right?

Well, there is a small issue with that. Tabletop games are a shared past time - you share the story and the time between a group of friends. However, the groups can be small or big, and that can affect the Shared Beats.

In any game session, you will usually have the flow of the game focus on and spotlight different characters at a different time. With how the Beat system is structured, if your character is in the spotlight you will usually get about a Beat or two per scene. However, it's usually harder to have scenes with multiple characters where everyone gets a Beat, unless you are fighting or facing off some horror (unless everyone starts to have the same encounters, same aspirations and so on, which detracts a bit from the individualism of the characters).

In other words, if this was a TV show, the more characters you have, the less spotlight each gets, and the less character development that is happening. Every session you will usually get a similar amount of story points (and thus Beats) no matter the amount of characters, but the more characters you have the more you have to divide the Shared Beats pool.

This is a similar issue to one discussed under "XP by practice" - there are only so many actions you can take in a scene, so many scenes in a session, so the more players you have the fewer XP you get.

Geist's solution

The solution to this issue is fairly straightforward - don't scale the XP to the number of players, make it more flat. Whether you scale it to "5 Beats and everyone gets 1 XP" (same as Individual Beats), or tweak the number a bit to hit some sweet spot, it's still going to be more enjoyable than "punishing" larger groups of players. This way if you have a scene where only one character is present, working away on their plans or dealing with a personal moment, you can take more time and focus on what's going on than trying to fit some time quota to make sure everyone had time to gain their Beats.

Honestly, I had this idea for this solution and this blog post for awhile, and I'm glad it was put into the system.

Conclusions

Geist's approach to dividing Beats / XP flatly between all the players at the table, without adjusting for character count is an interesting one. It alleviates the pressure to increase the game's "Beats per minute" to compensate for larger number of players at the table, while still keeping a similar per-session character progression for everyone involved.

This puts the game more in-line with systems like Broken Worlds or Fellowship.

Taste of things to come - Miracles and Improvised Spells

A few times I've found myself in an RPG saying "man, that one power I didn't take could be really useful in this narrow situation we are currently in". It's usually a game with a diverse move / power set, things like Godbound, Mage the Awakening, or even Fellowship. It's not just "I missed the roll by 1, I wish I had that extra +1", but more interesting powers like "being able to transform into someone else" or "being able to trace back emotional resonance of someone being murdered". For most systems, you would be pretty much out of luck, but some games let you have a taste of the powers you can wield before you buy them.

Godbound's Miracles

Godbound is a game where you play as an epic hero empowered with divine Words - portfolios of power like "Dragon", "Sorcery" or "Intoxication". A lot of your powers come in form of Gifts - codified powers you can use easily like breathing fire, or flying. However, the game also encourages you to use Miracles - improvised magic that either copies the power of an existing Gift or creates a new power from your portfolio. So if you had the Word of Dragon, you could miracle breathing fire if you don't have that Gift, or you could, say, spread terrors in the hearts of men at your sight.

All of your magic if fuelled by one resource - Effort. Using Gifts is usually free, or costs you a bit of Effort for the Scene, but Miracles are always more expensive and don't last as long as actual Gifts. Taking a Gift of flight would let you fly forever for free, while a flight Miracle would drain your Effort and you could only do it for a Scene.

Overall, it's a very versatile system that lets you improvise the solution you need whenever the situation comes up while still rewarding you for committing to certain powers.

Mage's Creative Thaumaturgy

Mage is a game where you play as the titular mage - a mortal imbued with the True Magic. Magic is divided into a few Arcana (Life, Matter, Space, etc.), and codified into Rotes (fixed, known spells). You can cast the Rotes pretty easily and often for free, but you can also try Improvising with Creative Thaumaturgy.

An Improvised Spell usually costs a bit more Mana than a Rote, and you have to work harder to get it to work, but you can easily mimic the effect of any Rote or improvise your own and even combine a few Arcana.

For example, calling lightning from the sky is a simple Forces Rote. However, if you want the spell to go off in the future when your target will be walking down the street, you would be combining Forces (lightning), Time (trigger condition) and Space (remotely targeting a specific target).

All in all, Mage allows and encourages you to go wild with its Magic system, while letting you commit some of your favourite spells into Rotes as needed as well.

Conclusions

Mage and Godbound both feature interesting systems that allow you to tap into powers you might not yet have bought, or improvise new powers as needed. Systems like these could be fun in a lot of other RPGs, like Fellowship, Legacy, Stars Without Number, etc. Few people would want to spend their precious XP on a shark repellent, but that one day when you actually do face off a shark, you just might want to pay premium to have it right there and then.

The four voices of RPG writing

When it comes to RPG books, there appear to be four distinct styles to the writing, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. It's good to keep those voices in mind when writing your books.

The In-Universe Voice

The first voice is the voice that's the voice of someone living within the universe of your game. This can take the form of dialogue, diaries, notes, in-universe advertisements, etc. Often, this is reserved for fluff text or intro fiction.

If you want to see a book heavily leaning on the In-Universe Voice, check out Secrets of the Covenants from Vampire the Requiem 2nd edition. It's about 85% written using that voice (even if it features a plethora of individual characters and writing styles):

Long exposition writing, short scribbled notes,
extra tangent side-note, this book has it all!

While this voice can be interesting for establishing the mood of a setting or telling a story, it's not very concise and rarely if ever to the point. Add in the possibility of an unreliable narrator and you can be left extrapolating what is true about a setting, and what is true only from a certain perspective.

The Academic Voice

The second voice in RPG writing is the Academic Voice - a voice of someone compiling a large amount of information to present it in a compact, factual and approachable way. This does away with a lot of fluff while delivering the same information you could've gleaned from the In-Universe Voice in much smaller word count.

For example, here is an excerpt from The Invictus (Vampire the Requiem 1st edition):

The writing is straight and to the point. Everything is presented as facts, no personal opinions, no narration or "talk-like" text. It can be presented as something existing within the universe of the game, but more often than not it will be an outsider's perspective viewing the whole picture.

While the Academic Voice can be a bit dry, it's probably the most effective way of conveying all kinds of information to your reader.

If you want to have a good comparison of the differences between The In-Universe Voice and The Academic Voice, compare Vampire the Requiem 1st and 2nd editions. They are explaining similar concepts but in a much different way, and while I really dig 2nd edition's mechanical changes, I despise it for overusing the In-Universe Voice. Heck, I bought Secrets of the Covenants for the 15% of it that is mechanics and threw away the 85% that was fluff I'd rather read in the 1st edition Covenant books...

The Technical Manual Voice

The third voice is the Technical Manual Voice. It's used when you convey the game mechanics to the reader. You do away with the fiction and roll out dice, tables, numbers and so on. This voice is used to explain how things work on the mechanical level.

For example, here is a page from Vampire the Requiem 2nd Edition explaining how Cruac works:

Tables, dice mechanics, dots, points...

The writing in this Voice is technical and can get to the point of making your eyes glaze over, but it's the only way of conveying the mechanics of how the game works.

The Meta Voice

The final Voice of RPG Writing is the Meta Voice. At the end of the day when you peel off all the fiction, all the descriptions and all of the mechanics you are left with what is implied - a frank conversation between the game writer and you, the reader. While this voice is rarely used in books, when used correctly, it can convey the most amount of meaning with the highest clarity. You are no longer covering what you mean with layers of depth, but instead say exactly what you mean.

Perhaps the best example of this I've seen was in Ravenloft Reincarnated, a fan conversion of Ravenloft into Savage Worlds by Jeremy Puckett:

Talking directly to you, the fans of the setting

Laying the themes and tropes of the setting bare

The Meta Voice is perhaps the only way to clearly talk about the game directly, rather than trying to imply themes and ideas. It's a way for the author of the book to directly turn to the camera and convey what they had in mind when they were writing the book. When used sparingly, it can add the sometimes much needed clarity to what's being described and assure the reader that certain choices were made intentionally.

Comparison

To reiterate the points mentioned and directly contrast the ideas, here is a simple comparison of the same concept described in the four Voices.

The In-Universe Voice:

"You're wondering why that gal recoiled from your touch? Well, that's because you're a walking corpse - room temperature at best. HA! But don't worry, there is a trick for that. First, you have to get your old ticker going. CPR it with your muscles, then concentrate to get the blood burning up inside of you. Then, you have to dilate your capillaries to spread that love around. Give it a few minutes and you should be good to go. Just remember to keep pumping it - you're no longer on automatic."

The Academic Voice:

"Vampires can use Blood to appear more human through the use of Blush of Life. This makes their bodies life-like and warm to the touch."

The Technical Manual Voice:

"Vampires can use 1 Blood Point to activate the Blush of Life. This allows them to pass for humans and negates the usual -2 penalty of social interactions imposed by their corpse-like appearance."

The Meta Voice:

"Blush of Life has been introduced to proof it against silly things like vampire hunters using thermal imaging to pick out vampires from the crowds, vampires having to resort to carrying around heated blankets to keep themselves warm and constantly applying a tonne of make-up just to appear human. This is to make the game focus more on character interactions rather than figuring out the physics of keeping your undead body at 37 degrees Celsius..."

Conclusions

There are four different Voices when it comes to writing RPG books, each with their own application, strength and weaknesses. Figuring out the balance between those voices is important.

Use the In-Universe Voice when you want to convey the fiction and add some character to the writing. Use the Academic Voice when you want to convey a lot of information clearly. Use the Technical Manual Voice when it's time to talk about the mechanics of the game, and use the Meta Voice when you need to convey big ideas and meta-information directly to the reader.

Keep in mind that your readers might have a preference between the In-Universe Voice and the Academic Voice - some people will dig 200 pages of fluff, while others will resent you for it...