Poker RPG Character Generation: Special Interest
Earlier this year, Kobayashi of The Merry Mushmen kickstarted a great lightweight NSR game called Golem Parade. Mechanically, Golem Parade runs on a familiar D20+mod system; the juice of the game isn't that it has the most novel mechanics in tabletop, it's that it's got exactly what you need to play a scarecrow imbued with life by a morally dubious wizard. One element that is endlessly charming is that golems need to perform two hours of art per day or else they run out of intrinsic magic.
Golems don't need to drink or eat. Poisons and gases don't affect them. They don't sleep either but they need to daydream and have an artistic occupation at least two hours per day.
Relatable! Mythic Bastionland ascribes a similar requirement to each knight, a Passion which restores SPIrit when fulfilled. Passions are a similar role-play-to-enact-mechanical-benefit to Bonds in his Majesty the Worm and Faux Pas, both of which we discussed the other day.
I like this. I like mechanics that incentivize in-character decisions, and I like when characters have something weird that they do that isn't just a proclivity for murder. We already have one weird role-playing prompt from our Creditor, so I'd like for something a little more positive like Golem Parade...or at least value neutral. When I was thinking about these mechanics that I find charming, I started to think about what they might look like in a more contemporary setting like the one we have been discussing in here. At the risk of dating this concept squarely in the 2015-2025 decade, the current iteration I've been working on is Special Interests.
What Makes a Lost Soul?
We have now talked about Past Lives and Creditors. They represent your character's problem solving style and the types of problems they've found themselves in, respectively. I think Special Interests reflect what your character would do to relax; it's your character's hobby, their field of research, or any other pursuit that keeps them sane. At character creation, their Special Interest nets them another domain of knowledge and a relevant piece of gear.
I've got a table of 52 special interests that players could draw on at character generation, but my intent is that as a game progresses, players would spend downtime to either advance their special interest or pick up more special interests. If you invest resources in your special interest, it could help you to cultivate NPC friends and contacts - everyone loves having a conversation with an enthusiastic hobbyist!
You probably noticed in my post about Past Lives that I am highly motivated to provide narrative benefits and narrative tools to players in this game. I want players to feel like they are impacting and contributing to the world through things like Legacy and the ability to cultivate NPC contacts. The rules for cultivating long-term benefits as a form of character advancement in Cypher are so clever but the fact that they compete for metacurrency with the classic "leveling up" form of advancement is the topic of truly endless discourse.
I'm not going to markdown format a table of 52 rows, but example special interests would be baking, carpentry, Historic European Martial Arts, occultism, or ventriloquism.
So What Next?
I still have some work to do to get a workable draft of a few more Creditors before I take character generation to playtest, but the core concept of chargen feels workable as of today:
- Draw three cards
- Pick one card to be your Past Life (suit)
- Pick one card to be your creditor (rank)
- Pick one card to be your special interest (unique)
I think we have a solid enough draft of exploration rules to bring to the table, at least in the sense of having the right hooks to tie into our to-be-resolved resolution mechanics.
So I think we have a workable list of tasks to get through before we get some table time!
- Make an initial decision about stats and stat distributions. Notably, standard array or randomly determined.
- Tightly coupled to the first, what is our method of resolving actions and uncertainty, and can we write about it in fewer than 1500 words of comparing/contrasting cards and dice as random number generators
- What is a draft list of actions that can be taken in combat and how do we marry that to our raison d'etre (playing poker hands)
I think a lot of the other sort of hooks and open questions that have come up will be better understood by the time we have drafted these three high points. I'd like to have something that looks like "level one" characters described in the next week or two and I appreciate you all being here on the journey with me. Stay frosty out there.