Defining Characters: Great RPG Mechanics

#RPGMechanics Week Four

The Veil offers several rpg innovations; I mentioned on an earlier list how it uses States to reflect the emotions and motives of an actions. But another new trick appears early, during character creation. The Veil’s a PbtA game of cyberpunk life. Other PbtA games, including Apocalypse World, contain world-building elements in their playbooks. How you describe your Battle Babe, Brainer, or Maestro D’ tells us something about the world. 

But The Veil goes further– with questions in each playbook which giving players authority over a slice of the world.

To go back a little further, the first time I remember seeing something like this was in Questlandia by Hannah Shaffer. That GMless game begins with a strong phase of world-building, establishing elements for the setting. But during that process authority gets assigned to different players. So if the group decides on Elves as a major thing in the setting, someone becomes the expert on them. If there’s a question about canon or what Elvish society, players can turn to that person to establish those facts.

The Veil provides players with narrative authority based on the playbook chosen. So if you play The Architect, a hacker-like manipulator of augmented reality, you get to answer questions about what that looks like, how it works, and how much the constant Veil hanging over reality impacts things. If you play the Oathbound, you define how debts function in society– are they personal and implied, or something concrete and tracked? Other playbooks tell us about artificial life, psychic powers, corporate control, the interaction of the natural & constructed, and so on. 

This approach blends the process of character creation and world building tightly. The players really craft the world as they go– giving shape to their own vision. When that comes into dialogue with the elements determined by the rest of the table, it is wild and magical. Every single Veil game I’ve run has been strikingly different– dramatically shaped by those player choices. 

This is one of those game play elements which I would love to see in other games. When I started thinking about doing a Fading Suns style game, I imagined making richer questions and pick lists to help define things. You can see my initial swing at that here. In my recent attempt to take Free from the Yoke elements to create a Samurai Fantasy campaign, I built the different clans around this. So the Mystical Clan gets to say what magic looks like; the Elegant Clan gets to say what arts are valued or disowned; the Inhuman Clan gets to establish the relation of non-humans to the rest of society. 

I can imagine this in a lot of contexts– though you need to shape playbooks to really focus on a world aspect. You want them to be able to establish interesting elements. Like I’m not sure you could bolt a system like that on to something like Masks: A New Generation wholesale. Some would work. For example The Legacy gets to define things about superhero history, The Star says what social media and superherodom look like, and The Soldier establishes the place of super-agencies. But if I wanted to do a supers version of this I might do different playbooks: The Vigilante (the place of street level heroes), The Techno (what super tech looks like), The Legacy (again, supers history), The Mutant (defining outsider status for supers), The Alien (setting up non-human peoples). I think you could develop that even further.