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| This year's RPGaDay (full text list here) |
A. City of Mist.
Again, a prompt rather than a question.
I think that you need one of two things to make a game strong; compelling characters or a compelling environment/situation where the characters can emerge. In a perfect world, you’d want both.
Compelling situations & environments are those that pull actions from the players to make their characters do things. For example, the classic D&D dungeon does that. You usually start with a rag-tag group of heroes who have somewhat tenuous reasons to be together, and the actions that they take against the (mostly) hostile environment help the players to explore and build the characters. In an OSR style environment, there’s also a sense of fragility and likelihood that death may strike at any time if your luck runs away. D&D 3e onwards is more about a heroic journey and death is much less of threat than its older siblings (but that’s a whole other discussion).
A lot of earlier games don’t really build compelling characters. I think that the first edition of King Arthur Pendragon was the first time I started to see mechanics being used in games to start to make characters more compelling; the paired personality traits and passions gave mechanics to drive character behaviour and make them more than just a set of numbers that determined how you could fight.
When I was more regularly writing material for gaming conventions, I’d spend around half the time on the character sheets, giving the characters a short backstory and reasons to engage with each other. These were hooks to drive engagement quickly. I realised that if the players were having fun by riffing off each other, they tended to have a great time whether or not they succeeded at the story. This was all built on top of the core Traveller character sheet; a second page with table that gave the hooks on how they felt about or what they wanted from other characters along with a background to draw in.
These days, I tend to use games which will lend themselves to doing this with their mechanics. When I run Powered by the Apocalypse based games, a key part of this is completing the character playbooks at the table so people can build the interactions between their characters which are baked into the game engine. They create stronger signposts about how the GM should engage with their characters. This isn’t exclusive to PbtA; games like Numenera have really clear signposts when they describe a character as ‘I am an adjective noun who verbs’. Creating bonds and links between characters and motivations for the whole groupare at the core of modern game design.
A game that I particularly like that does this is City of Mist. Each character is a combination of four themes, each of which describes a core aspect of their identity or a mystery that they absolutely want to get to the bottom of. There are potential consequences if you fail to lean into these areas. There are also weaknesses that mean that the character can get into trouble but learn from it. At a group (Crew) level, there’s also a shared theme card for them as a whole. This is packaged with some glorious looking character sheets of you want to use them at the table, with great artwork and all the key mechanics showing on them. So I’ll choose City of Mist for this answer.
14 August 2024
City of Mist Character sheets
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