Heroes For Heroes (The Super Bowl and Fantasy Gaming)

This post will actually have very little to do about the Super Bowl, and I'm not even going to make any mention of Blood Bowl beyond this first paragraph. I'm just going to do a little reflection, inspired by this famous event. I also don't expect this post to get much readership today, seeing as so many people are watching said Super Bowl. At any rate, here it is: what the Super Bowl has to do with your fantasy world.

The Journey System: Wyrd

Well, hopefully you people aren't quite tired of hearing about the Journey System. This time through, I'm going into something which should end up as one of the core concepts of the game, and that's Wyrd. Coming from the Old English "weohrtan", "to become", wyrd sometimes gets tossed around a lot in fantasy settings, because it deals with the concept of fate, of destiny. This RPG aims to make it a central focus, but not a required part of the game. If your character doesn't feel like following destiny, they'll not be able to become as powerful, but they'll also be freer to pursue their own ends. Characters who take on a Wyrd become more powerful, but they end up sacrificing their own freedom in exchange. If they defy their Wyrd too much, they can end up losing that power.

The Basic Idea
The concept of Wyrd is going to be a hybrid of sorts between traditional RPG levels and a dash of the Morality system of World of Darkness fame. You gain features as your Wyrd increases, but as your Wyrd increases, the things you must do to maintain it become more and more difficult. To stay true to Wyrd, a character must make a lot of sacrifices, and undergo many hardships. Fortunately, Wyrd is custom-made for each character. Depending on how you want the story to run, either the player or the GM can be in charge of how the Wyrd evolves...in fact, both of them can collaborate if they wish, to craft a destiny for the character.

Each time your Wyrd increases in level (something accomplished by spending Experience Points), you add a piece to your character's Wyrd. This is the destiny that they have been chosen to accomplish, and the abilities gained by following this Wyrd (called "Boons") are gifted specifically for the purpose of fulfilling the Wyrd. The more specific a piece of the Wyrd it is, the greater the Boon granted. These bits of wyrd stay with your character, and cannot be erased unless the character deliberately rebels against them. Even if the character rejects them at some time, pushing them aside and ignoring them, they still remain, nagging away at the character here and there.

Your Wyrd level also acts as a cap. Each ability that your character can purchase has a cost in experience points. Your Wyrd level serves as a cap on the amount of abilities that your character can have. If purchasing an ability would take your power level beyond your Wyrd cap, you are not allowed to purchase that ability. If your Wyrd lowers, however, beneath your current cap, you may still use the abilities you've acquired; you may not acquire any more, though, without sacrificing some of your existing abilities (which requires a good story explanation).

Some Examples...(probably to be balanced later)
Leader-- You have been chosen to lead in some way, either by leading a party of adventurers, a nation, or even an entire race.
Boon: When leading, you may reroll one 12 per Dilemma.
Obligation: If an opportunity to lead arises, you must take it. (Belief, Affinity 4)

Against the Great Foe-- You have been called to fight against the dark evil which threatens to conquer these lands.
Boon: When taking action against this dark evil or its servants/minions, the Affinity of all your tasks is +2.
Obligation: If you can inflict harm upon the Foe, you must take action to do so. (Passion-1, Affinity 3)

You'll notice that each entry has a Boon and Obligation. The Boon is the benefit you gain from the bit of Wyrd. The Obligation is what you must do to avoid ignoring/rejecting this bit of Wyrd, and decreasing your Wyrd. If you disobey the Obligation, you must make an attribute roll, indicated by the entry at the end of the Obligation. If you fail the roll, this means that your character's action reflects a change of heart about the Wyrd, and you decrease in Wyrd. You may not use that piece's Boon, and your Wyrd Cap is likewise decreased. If you succeed the roll, your action is considered to not reflect your true faith in your Wyrd, but rather an action that, because of necessity or inculpability, wasn't truly a rejection of the Wyrd.

Roleplaying will be important here, because the GM is at liberty to give bonuses or penalties to the Affinity of a Wyrd Roll, based on your explanation of your character's actions. Would following one bit of your Wyrd lead to the death of innocents, for instance, and your character values life heavily, this can provide a substantial Affinity bonus, making it far easier to succeed. Not only that, but if you can show that following this bit of Wyrd in this one case would contradict another bit of the Wyrd, you don't need to make a Wyrd Roll; the Wyrd remains, because it does not contradict.

Sound interesting? I hope it does! Stay tuned, for what I think will be a post on Beliefs in the Journey System...

A Modest Proposal, Part I

So, this is going to be a bit of a rule-breaking post, for a Saturday post, but I get the feeling that Saturday will quickly become my "Miscellaneous" day for posting. It all started when I read a little post called The Lost Art of Running Away, which tackles a common issue in classically-styled RPGs: players are far more interested in winning combats than in retreating to fight another day, and so DMs have to constantly tone down the challenge level so that PCs don't feel cheated when they spring an "impossible" encounter upon them. The result? PCs never run from a fight, because they have no reason to.

An Outline of the Problem
The way things run, it all boils down to some simple economics. The cost of a combat is whatever damage you sustain, which in the end is typically negated out of combat. Even in 4th Edition D&D, with healing limitations, characters are assumed to be able to make it through a certain amount of combat encounters before each rest, and it's a fairly regular model. End result: the cost is minimal...almost. The exception is when the players die. At that point, the cost skyrockets. The benefit of a combat is XP and loot, along with any in-game rewards the party may encounter. End result?

You have an event which has only positive rewards for victory, and either no penalties or a prohibitive penalty for loss. In this day and age, that prohibitive penalty of loss is such a dramatic change from the "all healed up" of victory that DMs are hesitant to go there. Now, the "third option" of retreat is never really even considered, then, because DMs don't want to submit characters, very often, to the dreaded TPK, unless they're mean and awful and very lethal DMs. The types of DMs that laugh at Tomb of Horrors, that is. Those DMs. Which means that players never think of running away.

What to Do?
The first, immediate answer is to shift the cost of combat around a little. In the current model, there's a huge cost gap between victory and loss, in some cases an absolute gap, where victory = full heal and loss = death. There's a couple things that can be done here: reduce the cost of loss, and increase the cost of victory. Can it be done? I certainly think it's possible.

First things first, that whole "reduce the cost of loss", because it's quite easy to accomplish. The best solution in this case is, quite simply, to pit PCs against foes who don't fight to kill. As long as the PCs fight sentient beings, the DM can say "you got knocked to 0 HP, and fall unconscious"; a default in D&D now. Those beings then capture the PCs, and try and wring what reward they can out of them. Bandits, for instance, holding them for ransom. Now, the truth is, higher-level characters will find fewer and fewer beings wanting to hold them alive, I'm sure, but there's always that possibility.

Next, a DM should look into making victory a little more painful. Perhaps, in the vein of Dark Sun, you could put a bit of a clamp on healing for characters. Make characters count the cost of victory or defeat, and then let them decide whether to fight. Furthermore, make other characters who depend on the PCs. Sure, they can take on this crazy fight, but if they don't survive...well, there goes the neighborhood. Instill the idea that sometimes living is better than winning.

The Crazy Part...
Now comes the other half of the equation. So far, we've talked about making the cost of defeat spread a little to victory. But what about the reward? Is there reason to change the reward system? This is where things take a crazy turn on their heads...

We've all seen the traditional "loot and XP" reward model, like I've mentioned. What if it didn't always quite work like that, though? I found one place online, a game-in-development called Kenshi, that presented an interesting idea...and it suddenly clicked. The developer of the game has developed an interesting approach: you gain more XP from losing a fight than from winning it. You heard that right...more experience gained from losing a fight than from winning it.

I gave it some thought, and then decided that it made sense. From Batman Begins ("Why do we fall? So that we can learn to pick ourselves back up.") to The Matrix (Neo being beaten again and again by Morpheus in the simulator), the hero learns by making mistakes and learning from them, again and again. Only in D&D (as far as I know) and similar RPGs do we have heroes who get better by being, well...good. It's really a matter of two paradigms.

The D&D paradigm is an endless cycle: do good, get better and get better stuff so you can do even better and get way better and way better stuff, etc... The other way? It's more like this: mess up, get better to make up for it, mess up again, get better to make up for it, etc., until you finally break out into a Crowning Moment of Awesome. In my mind, that makes for a way cooler story.

A Temporary Conclusion
I'm definitely not done with this topic, but my main purpose here was to lay out the ideas, and present a little bit of crazy brainstorming. Am I merely trying to solve the problem? Not quite. I've got a bit more in mind than merely that. In a way, I'm slowly sculpting out a completely new philosophy to approach RPGs from. You might not agree, and that's definitely fine. Stick around, though. You may find some interesting things in here and the posts to come.