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John Musings 1: Stress Test
Throughout my years of GMing (coming up on 25 years!), I've always been accused of spending too much time working on any given game I run.
And it's true! When I'm running a game, I spend way too much time each week on the game - writing new NPCcs, coming up with mini-games, writing sidequests the PCs might never encounter, etc.
Imagine I've littered this with YOU ARE HERE and YOU LAST KILLED A WURM HERE and ON MAY 2014 YOU TALKED TO ADVAR HERE,
and then drew snakes and ladders all over it
So I'm giving myself a test:
I've overloaded myself with work and games to run. There are currently three playtest games each week. There's no way I can work all week, design HJ, do other normal human stuff, run three games, sleep, AND spend as much time as I normally do writing the games.
So each week, I'm giving myself one hour PER game to write it. That includes encounters, NPCs, storylines, communication with players, everything. This is about 1/4 the amount of time I'm used to spending and it already makes me look for ways to cheat.
I'm doing this for more reasons than just because I don't have time, though - it's also to make sure that HJ isnt just a game for GMs who have a lot of time, but can also be run by GMs who have a WIDE spectrum of time available to them, OR GMs who just don't enjoy spending a ton of time working on the game. Games can have any amount of prep time baked in and be good, but we want this to be one that people can play without a ton of investment.
A man who is winging it
My expectations:
Things that I take for granted as things someone would want to create for themselves should probably be included. For example, Odyssey Event tables - right now we give a couple of tables and expect GMs to mostly create their own, but I expect I'll wish there were a bunch pre-generated in the book. Which will let us know to go add some. Encounters will also be an issue. We don't have the page space to put a LOT of creatures or encounters in the book, but I suspect that I'll be wanting more and will probably try to at least get them in a free-to-download PDF at or a little after release.
(Note: We definitely do have creatures and encounters in the main book. I just think we'll need more.)
We're a couple weeks in and everything is going fine so far. It's a bit overwhelming, but I haven't hit any major snags. I have had to do a lot more references on the fly than usual (pictures of NPCs, places, things), but other than that its been smooth.
What things do you all need when you're winging it or don't want to spend a lot of time on setup?
Labels: mechanics, updates
Mechanics Talk: Fire in the Sky
All right, so time to talk about some more mechanics! There have been recent rumblings about Domains and Spheres, and since we already talked about their Talent counterparts a little while ago, now seems good.
Domains and Aspects use roughly the same mechanics - they provide dice to roll on the same scales and have sub-specialties, the Spheres, which provide mechanical benefit to those rolls just like the Talents do to the Aspects. And they have nodes to specialize in, so that just like the Aspects and Talents, two different Heroes who have Domains and Spheres in common aren't necessarily identical (although the trees for the Spheres are less extensive, so there's more overlap potential).
The Domains and Spheres are mostly different in that you don't use them for heroic actions, regardless of the situation. Adventuring calls for rolls from the Aspects and Talents, but there aren't any situations where you'll be called upon to just roll Elemental or Spiritual (at least, not in the base system, although I'm sure a creative Destiny might come up with a situation now and then where it might become relevant). They instead roll purely for their own Blessings, which are magical powers that by nature are the sort that regular, non-Heroic folks just don't have access to. (This is a little different from the Talents, which have Blessings that regular, skilled specialists like scientists or artists might have access to, as well as Blessings that are purely Heroic.)
The Sphere Trees look different from the Web of Fate as a result, with a smaller total number of nodes (because investment into Domains and Spheres is more optional than Aspects and Talents) and more of them dedicated to Blessings, which are the main point of the Spheres. There are still nodes that grant bonuses and resources, just like in the Web, but a smaller percentage. And the Blessings in them are, on the whole, more powerful than those in the Talents: the first reason is because they don't come with the side benefit of a dot that is relevant to everyday rolls in a Hero's career, and the second reason is because the Spheres are where the truly supernatural powers are, and being a wielder of them is impressive!
The neat thing about Domains is that characters can one hundred percent choose to get them, or not, and still be valid and exciting Heroes either way. There are Heroes and deities throughout different mythologies who both clearly have Domains and who clearly don't; the example we usually use when we talk about it in character generation is Herakles, who like many of the hyper-specialized Greek heroes just does basically one thing. Since that one thing is represented over in the Aspects - Warrior, for the most part - he's an example of an effective hero with no Domains at all. On the other hand, a Hero with obvious Domains might be the Sybil of Cumae, whose obvious powers in the Death Sphere allowed her to help guide the future father of Rome, Aeneas, on his journey through the underworld. More pop culture examples are everywhere - for example, in DC's Justice League, Cyborg, Flash, and Batman are great examples of Heroes all in on Aspects and Talents (Trickster, Creator, Warrior), while right next to them Superman, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman are obviously asserting powers from the Domains and Spheres (Celestial, Elemental).
Neither is "better" than the other - it'd be hard to say Ares is "worse" than Apollo just because he only does Aspects instead of Domains, so a lot just depends on what a given player wants their Hero to do and represent. Domains are impressive, supernatural, flashy; Aspects are workhorses, needed all the time and capable of heroic feats without the aid of, to all intents and purposes, extra "magic". Domains are Heroes tapping into cosmic, universal forces to help them; Aspects are their own personal, inborn purpose and skills.
Since Domains are optional, and they require a Renown investment that isn't going to Aspects, most Heroes in playtests have tended toward not really expanding into them until they've had enough time to feel comfortable about their Aspects and Talents first, so progress in them has been slow. For the most part, the older a character is and the more time they've had to develop, the more likely they are to have Domains, which makes sense in a narrative sense - "higher level" characters in stories, heading up toward Immortal and Divine, usually tend to have more of those obviously cosmic powers! There are however, brief spates of Domain excitement now and then whenever a character uses a Sphere power and all the other players go, "oh my god, did you just call up mist out of the sea/set that guy on lightning/beat the house at roulette, where is that power", so the coolness factor sometimes overwhelms people.
Domains are expandable, with six more Spheres planned for the future after the first core set comes out (so if you're one of those people going "why on earth can I get an Elemental Domain but it doesn't have any Earth powers?", that's why!).
Io Saturnalia!
It's right around holiday time, so we're on vacation in our living room for a day or two. In the meantime, please enjoy the season yourselves!
Whether you're observing Mandala Puja or celebrating Yemanja at the turn of the new year (or any other religion or festival of your choice), we hope you're having an awesome time!
Posted by JOHN at 12:00 PM 6 comments:
Mechanics Talk: The Birth of a Hero
All right, y'all, tomorrow is my birthday so I'm queuing this up ahead of time, and I hope you all enjoy it! Here's a quick walk through character creation - let's follow a fictional player, Lola, as she builds her first Hero!
Lola is a playtester and has access to the character creation chapter of HJ, so she looks over the list of steps and starts with the basics: what kind of Hero does she want to play? She isn't really very sure on the details yet - she's more of a develop-as-you-go-along type - but she's pretty sure she wants to save people who need it, and she likes the idea of being a sort of action archaeologist like Indiana Jones. She considers the list of Archetypes, and decides that her archaeologist idea could work for Preserver (a character who wants to help find and put important artifacts into museums), but ultimately that Explorer (a character who wants to go new places and experience new things) is a better fit, since she might end up damaging or stealing things in the process. For her second Archetype, she considers both Champion and Savior; Champions are about meeting new challenges and overcoming dangers, which is appealing, but she decides that Saviors get to do that, too, when they're saving people from them, and it matches better with her idea of rescuing people who need it.
So now that Lola knows her character is an Explorer/Savior with a background of traveling the world investigating archaeological sites, she gives her a name - Julia Islington III, from a long line of intrepid lady explorers - and that gives her the idea that maybe some of her ancestors might have been part of the British archaeological craze in Egypt in the nineteenth century, and she decides it'd be neat that an Egyptian god remembers it and has chosen her as a Hero. She isn't sure which one yet, since she isn't very familiar with them, but she'll keep it in mind as she goes on to get her stats.
Each Archetype grants a package of specific Aspect and Talent dots, designed to make sure that a starting Hero can do things that their Archetype will push them to do. Because Julia is an Explorer, she starts with a lot of Hunter, designed to let her travel in the wilderness and survive outside the comforting embrace of civilization if she has to; specifically, she gets a dot each of Mettle, Naturalism, and Pursuit, representing that she's good at traveling and navigating in the wild, and two dots of Tracking to represent that finding her way and investigating things is something she's especially good at. The Explorer Archetype also gives her a little bit of Trickster, representing that she can also explore in more urban environments, and she specifically gets a dot each of Legerdemain, representing manipulating and maybe even breaking into places if she has to, and Streetwise, representing that she can find her way and blend in in human-settled areas as well.
That's good for exploring, but Julia's also a Savior, so Lola goes to check out the stats she gets from that Archetype. Saviors wear a lot of hats in their quest to help people out, so she gets three stats for this one; first, she gets a little Creator, with a dot each of Energy, which will let her sustain and heal people as needed; Vision, which will let her come up with creative comforts and solutions; and Willpower, which will help her keep going so she doesn't collapse when people need her. She also gets some Lover, with a dot each of Beauty (for attracting positive attention), Inspiration (for helping others be their best selves), and Persuasion (for convincing people to let her help or at least get out of her way; and she rounds out with a drop of Sage, giving her a dot of Mysticism so that she can meddle in magical forces if she has to in order to help someone (or at least not be completely clueless about it).
Lola notes that Julia doesn't have any Warrior or Leader; the first one worries her a little since it means that bad guys would be hard to fight, but she reasons that her archaeologist isn't here to fight people anyway - she's here to find information and maybe make her fortune, and rescue people from cave-ins along the way! She's not concerned about not having any Leader, since she's used to being more of a solo flyer and isn't interested in bossing other people around. There are other Heroes in the group as well, so she thinks it's likely someone will have some skill in those areas (and if not, they'll just have to solve bad-guy problems some other way besides punching them, like running away or leading them into hostile swamps).
Now that she has her base stats, Lola gets to choose her Endowments - the two extra systems she has access to as a Mortal. One of them is automatically the Hunter Endowment, Persistence, since she has two dots of it; she marks down that her Persistence applies to Mettle, since she plans to have more of that than the other passive Talent points. Normally, her other highest Aspect would give her her second Endowment, but since she has everything else tied at one dot, she gets to choose; after some deliberation, she decides to go with the Trickster Endowment of Gambits, since she anticipates that Julia's career as a tomb robber and people-saver might call for some close escapes from danger.
In addition to Archetypes and Aspects, Julia will start with one Domain and one of its Spheres, so Lola investigates the nine options. She isn't sure if the mighty powers of the Elementals are for her - they seem kind of bombastic - and the Celestials are neat but abstract, so she decides that she'll go for Spiritual, choosing Fortune so that Julia can have a little more luck than the average Hero. She also likes that in the future, she'll be able to spread easily out into the other Spiritual Spheres, Life and Death, which might help her in her role as a Savior because they could help people. She gets the first Blessing in Fortune, Lucky Break, and notes it down for the future.
Lola adds the basics that all characters start with: a certain number of health boxes, a Defense of 1, two Reserves (equal to her Archetype dots), and the base points of Inspiration and Mettle that she gets from having dots in them. She starts with three of each kind of Labor, but then realizes she has to choose her divine patron to get her bonus Labors, so it's time to go read up on the Egyptian gods! She doesn't know much about them, but she looks at their bonus Labors to see which ones she might get the most use out of, and decides on Anubis, since she's a tomb-robber and he's a tomb-guardian and she thinks he might find the idea of kicking her out to right some of the wrongs her ancestors committed cosmically appropriate. He grants her one extra Labor that can only be used for Creator Blessings, one that can only be used for Sage Blessings, and four that can only be used for Spiritual Blessings, so she has lots of motivation to keep advancing in Fortune!
Finally, it's time to go the Web of Fate. Each dot she has in a Talent gives her one node in the Web in that area, and once she's spent those, she gets twelve bonus nodes to put anywhere else she likes. Once she's done so (she puts her extras into Energy and Naturalism, and Fortune over in the Spheres), she ends up with ten Blessings in various areas as well as five more health boxes, three more passive Talent points, three bonus successes to resistance Talents, and an extra success to Disguise. Finally, she knows she's a Hero for the Egyptian gods now, so she begins with Serekh, the first of the Devotional Blessings on the Divinity track, and decides to choose Nefer on the Ritual track for her second one, hoping to progress down both tracks in the future.
And now Julia Islington III, professional ruin-crawler and rescuer of children fallen down wells, is ready to start her first Chapter!
Obviously, Lola will probably do a little more work to come up with things about her Hero's backstory and goals to help Destiny plan the story along, but she has everything she needs mechanically to jump in. In the future, she'll gain a node to put anywhere on the Web or in the spheres each Chapter, and one point of Renown to spend toward buying new dots - but for now, she's an exploration machine ready to start her journey!
Posted by Anne at 12:00 PM 18 comments:
Mythology Talk: Gods of Korea
Question: When/if you guys write up a Korean pantheon for HJ, who are your frontrunners for it?
This is one of those pantheons that would require a lot more direct research than we've had time for yet. We've got a few good books on the subject, but not enough to feel fully rounded out about things like overall divine landscape and Devotional themes. I won't lie; the Korean deities probably aren't up soon as new additions to the work of HJ, but in a beautiful future I'd love them to be, so here are some of their awesome deities who could be featured!
Chach'ŏngbi
Chach'ŏngbi is the goddess of agriculture and fertility, helping ensure that crops grow and people have enough to eat, but she also has an incredible number of myths about her exploits before she took up this important role. A goddess with low social standing, she had to go undercover to convince her higher-standing deity husband to marry her, infiltrating his country while in disguise as a man, winning combats and suppressing riots, and eventually moving the entire family down to earth in order to reside where she could do the most good with the five new varieties of grain she granted to humanity.
There are tons of stories of Chach'ŏngbi being generally badass, but one of the perennial favorite myths about her is about how, during the time period when she was impersonating a man, she was nearly discovered because several of the guards were having a contest to see how far they could piss. Since she lacked a penis, she ran behind a tree and quickly invented a system of flexible reeds that she slipped into her pants, and then used it to not only successfully prevent anyone from noticing her different equipment, but also to piss twice as far as the frontrunner and demolish everyone at the competition. (She is also in charge of reeds, as an agriculture goddess, in case anyone was wondering.)
Ch'ilsŏng
Sometimes a single goddess and sometimes the head of a group of similar goddesses who assist her, Ch'ilsŏng ("serpent") was a woman who was exiled from her family and community after it was discovered that she had an illicit relationship with a monk, and as a result she retreated to a remote island, transformed herself into a serpent, and gave birth to seven more serpent daughters, all of whom are now guardians of fortune and prosperity. She is usually depicted as a serpent goddess guarding a jar of grain, which represents worldly riches, and her daughters sometimes get broken down into specific smaller fortune goddesses who help her out (for example, one who is in charge of protecting outdoor riches, another in charge of savings, another in charge of gifts received from others, and so on).
Kaksi Sonnim
The Sonnim are a class of gods, in charge of good luck and happiness; there are a lot of them, with some of them distinct personalities with their own myths - like Kaksi here, who is specifically considered the goddess of smallpox. All of the Sonnim are prone to granting good luck to people who revere them and inflicting disease on people who aren't, but Kaksi in particular is actually famous for giving out smallpox as a reward: smallpox that is easily recovered from and then grants immunity for the future, so that families might pray to her for a quick and easily recovered-from bout of the disease to be sure their children wouldn't die of a severe case later on. Most of the other Sonnim just inflict smallpox on people who are misbehaving, but Kaksi here understands the finer points of the human immune system.
Kungsan & Myongwol
Korean mythology has several deities associated with the celestial lights, and Kungsan (a scholarly dude) and Myongwol (a beautiful lady) appear as personifications of the sun and moon, respectively. They appear frequently as deities to be impersonated in shamanistic ritual, and depending on the story they are sometimes brother and sister or sometimes a married pair, and were deified to become the moon and sun after their sacrificial deaths.
Kunung
The Kunung are another class of gods, one made up of great war heroes who became deified upon their deaths so that they could continue to protect and serve their people, and their leader is also named Kunung and is the most powerful of the divine soldiers of the pantheon. The lesser Kunung are usually protectors of a specific area (probably related to where they lived or fought in life), but also appear as a unified force when Korea needs them most, such as when outside armies threaten the country and they must be called upon to attempt to defend their homeland from the spiritual threat of invasion. Their leader, the eponymous Kunung, combated the terrible Dragon King (probably a personification of tsunami storms from the eastern sea), and defeated him to permanently prevent the ocean from trying to swallow the land, although he continues to patrol even now just to make sure.
Mirŭk
The great creator god of the universe, Mirŭk invented humanity (he made them out of bugs, actually, in at least one myth, so there's a nice ego bring-down for all of us) and set in place its natural laws, making up the overall landscape of earth, sea, heaven, seasons, and so on in a reasonable and orderly manner. This was mostly blown up by his counterpart Sŏkga, who is the leading cause of chaos and nonsense in the world after its original creation, but Mirŭk still hangs out up there, being sort of vaguely uncomfortable about how everything turned out. (In fact, depending on the version, he won several contests against Sŏkga before giving up in a snit when Sŏkga finally cheated at the last one, and basically giving the world over to him just to not have to deal with him anymore.)
In later Korean myth, Mirŭk becomes referred to as Maitreya, from the Buddhist boddhisattva; ironic, since Maitreya is the future Buddha who hasn't yet arrived on earth in most Buddhist belief and the two figures don't have much in common, but it makes sense that such a major and influential figure would be incorporated into the local pantheon in name at least.
Onŭli
Goddess of joy and pleasure, Onŭli is associated with life (human, animal, and plant), protection, happiness, and freedom from danger and worry, although she is not commonly called upon in shamanic rites and is therefore harder to convince to come grant her benefits to a specific person. She's considered to have had to suffer a long and difficult journey when she was young in order to escape adversity and come into her powers, and as a result she tends to attempt to spread her joy across the world where it's most needed on her own time, rather than being directed by anyone calling for help via prayer from below.
Paridegi
Paridegi (or Princess Pari) functions as a psychopompos, a deity who leads the dead to the underworld properly to prevent them from becoming lost between realms. She was once a mortal, a shaman famed for her healing and disease-curing powers, and was so powerful that she was able to project herself into the spirit world to assist the souls of the dead and dying; as a result, when she finally died herself, the gods of death were worried that she would be too powerful and usurp them, so they refused to allow her to become a god of death, and she took on the responsibility of delivering the dead to their underworld instead. (As a result, she's a much more positive and well-loved figure than many of the more intimidating death gods, and is called upon to help living shamans who want to bring the dead peace or heal those who are in danger of dying of illness.)
Sobyolwang & Taebyolwang
A pair of brother celestial gods in charge of regulating the heavenly bodies, Sobyolwang and Taebyolwang (literally "sun king" and "moon king", also referred to as Sŏnmuni and Humuni) are in charge of removing the excess suns and moons from the sky that threatened the orderly running of the world, as well as monitoring and controlling the remaining one of each we have now. Destroying and moderating the sun includes preventing drought and famine and controlling the advance of deserts, and destroying and moderating the moon includes preventing flooding and crop devastation. They also sometimes appear as rulers over humanity, with Sobyolwang as king over the living and Taebyolwang as king over the dead (often as the result of a bet on a game of chance, with the loser being stuck with charge of the dead), although other gods also take on those roles depending on the area and tradition.
Sŏkga
Sŏkga is the opposite number of Mirŭk, above; while he could not create the world with the skill Mirŭk displayed, he could take control of it now that it existed and start messing with it for his own preference and gain. This is the reason that the orderliness of creation was disrupted and things like evil and chaos entered the world, specifically because Sŏkga played against Mirŭk in a game of chance in order to win the world and cheated to make sure that he won - Korean myth has a strong emphasis on stories of evil or chaotic figures cheating at games in order to mess literally everything up, and Sŏkga is the first and largest figure to do so. He's often reduced down to "god of evil", but might also be referred to less angrily as a god of mischief, cheatery, and selfishness, one who isn't actively trying to wreck things, but just causing problems as an accident of his behavior.
Like Mirŭk/Maitreya, Sŏkga gained names and attributes from the introduction of Buddhism, becoming popularly referred to as Sakyamuni - the name of the current Buddha, the one that Maitreya will supposedly succeed in the future. The relationship between the two gods doesn't really match up to that between the two Buddhas, again probably because the ancient Korean religion just went right ahead doing what it was doing and only layered a little Buddhism on top!
Samsŭnghalmang
Samsŭnghalmang is the goddess of birth, in charge of making sure that babies are born healthy and alive and that their parents survive the delivery, and taught humanity helpful techniques for cutting the umbilical cord and cleaning wounds to try to make sure that they can manage it on their own when she's busy. Interestingly enough, her most major myth involves the fact that she took over the job from her grandmother, the previous goddess of birth, and that it wasn't a peaceful exchange of power; the younger Samsŭnghalmang began assisting with births only to be confronted by her predecessor for moving onto her turf, and the quarrel escalated until the older goddess physically struck the younger one, at which point they both had to go before Mirŭk for judgment and were forced to divide their responsibilities equally.
Yŏmradaewang
The king of the dead, Yŏmradaewang (King Yŏmra) is the ruler over the underworld and undisputed authority when it comes to those who dwell there (although he is not the only death god, and is in fact in charge of a team of nine other lesser kings who help keep the place in running order). Most of his myths have to do with making sure things are going the way they're Supposed To - for example, hearing petitions from heroes who want to let him know that someone's death has happened at the wrong time instead of when it was fated to occur, or tracking down people who have somehow evaded their proper deaths, which he considers something of a personal affront.
As his name suggests, he is probably fairly strongly influenced by the Hindu death god Yama, and has a lot of features in common, such as functioning as a judge for those who have died and aggressively administrating and keeping track of living people to make sure they wind up where they need to go.
Mechanics Talk: Stats and their Mission Statement
All right, here's a great big post about base mechanics, because we've had people asking: how do stats work in HJ, and why do they work that way? So here we go!
So what are HJ's stats?
Hero's Journey doesn't use an ability/attribute type of mechanical setup, where characters have a certain score in a characteristic like Strength or Wisdom that affects how good they are at things. (To be clear, lots of games do use this sort of system, including some of the big ones, like Dungeons and Dragons or the World of Darkness games, and they're great! It's a solid approach.) Instead, HJ uses a role-based system, where characters have a certain score in a certain role, like Trickster or Hunter, and how invested they are in that role determines how good they are at things. It has a little in common with games that have classes (like Paladin or Mage), but differs in that these are the specific things you roll to do and achieve things, rather than signifiers that attach things to a character. (Which pantheon your character works for is closer to a traditional view of a class!)
These stats are rolled against a difficulty, for most actions - that is, Destiny will determine that the Heroes need a 6 or better to notice this sneaky ghost or to successfully disarm this bomb, letting different tasks be flexible on roll requirements depending on how difficult a task should be and how good at it the Heroes probably are.
What's the difference? Isn't one stat that means "dice you roll" basically the same as another?
Mechanically, yes - you can call a stat pretty much anything and just say "represents X dice", easy enough. But past the basics there, the difference is that when you build and play a Hero, you're not trying to get a score on how much of a certain static quality you have, and figuring out what you can do from there; you're getting a score on how good you are at being a certain type of character, and figuring out what you can do from there.
For example: in a game with an Agility/Dexterity type of stat, that stat would give you a measurement of how agile the character was. This might then be applied to a lot of different actions - am I agile enough to dodge an attack? To hit an enemy? To jump over a pit? To juggle a set of balls? To beat someone in a race? Depending on the system, there might or might not be additional skills that modified the stat (maybe I need to get the Acrobatics skill to juggle or tumble effectively, or at least better than my naked Agility can do), but at core, if I'm not agile, I can't do those things, or I'll be bad at them. Essentially, it's a stat that measures a real-life capability range and applies it to a character, which can be really neat because it allows for flexibility - it's a kind of stat that can conceivably be applied to anything that you could argue involves being physically agile in some way.
HJ, on the other hand, isn't concerned with measuring how agile a character is. Because it's a game about being a Hero - a mythic Hero, who does things because they're heroic and because the story is about them, rather than because they're gifted in X area - the stats are concerned with the kind of Hero a character is supposed to be. HJ doesn't really care about measuring how many miles per hour a character can run, or how many megatons of force they can employ against something, or exactly how measurably charismatic they are when confronted with other people; it cares about whether or not they're fulfilling the role of a Leader Hero in this moment of the Saga, and the stats are shaped accordingly. Instead of saying "which stat will let me do X?" and buying that, players are encouraged to say "what kind of character do I want to be?", and the stats accordingly are designed to give a character with them all the skillset they need to successfully do so.
This is partly because one of HJ's goals is to design around the ideas of what kind of Hero your character wants to be - who are they and what do they want to do? What heroic tradition are they following? Do they change the world by being a Lover who affects the hearts and minds of those around them, or by being a Sage whose knowledge and learning move things behind the scenes or bring new innovations to the world, or by being a Warrior who fights evil and saves the downtrodden? The packages of Talents that go with each Aspect represent the kinds of sub-skills that go under that umbrella, but the overall message is this: design your character based on who they are and what they want to do, not based on what an abstraction of their capabilities might be.
With ability-style stats, players have to try to match abilities to what they might eventually do with them - if I want to fight monsters, I need Strength to hurt them and maybe also Agility to chase them and maybe also Endurance to survive the combat, and are there other ones I'm missing? - and they also find that they end up sometimes with stat spreads that oddly branch out into other roles that may or may not be part of their character or role. A character with a stacked up Agility stat who purchased it because they're an agile rogue-type character who can juggle and throw knives and play card tricks with aplomb may also find that, bewilderingly, they're suddenly the best combatant in their group, because Agility is also used for accuracy in attacks, or that they're a faster marathon runner than the athlete in their group because Agility is also used for that, which can end up with some weird overlaps. (Not that having extra abilities is a bad thing, of course. It's just a different kind of theme than we're looking for with HJ.)
Okay, so stats represent a kind of character, not a kind of capability. Doesn't that make every character that is that "kind" of character kind of samey?
It doesn't, and the reason it doesn't is because HJ has lots of different avenues for nuance! We'd probably all agree that just because two different Heroes in mythology or pop culture are both "tricksters" doesn't necessarily mean they're identical - Odysseus and Maui are certainly not the same, nor are the Doctor from Doctor Who and Ed from Cowboy Bebop, but they're all great examples of Tricksters and they all invest in the same Trickster stat. Here are some of the things that let you have a massively wide range of different Tricksters that go in all sorts of different directions:
Additional Aspects. Every character has multiple Aspects that can interact in multiple ways - no character is ever just a Trickster, even if they're primarily a Trickster. Beginning characters start with some investment in a minimum of three out of the seven Aspects and a maximum of six, and anyone can purchase dots in any of them as the game goes on as they please. A Trickster-Creator-Warrior has a significantly different overall skillset and opportunities than a Trickster-Lover-Sage, even thought they have some skills and powers in common.
Talents. Every Aspect has four Talents, and which ones a character invests in has a significant impact on what they can do. Of course a Trickster has a leg up on Trickster Talents by virtue of their Trickster dots, even if they don't get the accompanying Talent dots - but only over someone who doesn't have Trickster in the first place. One Trickster who gets a bunch of Legerdemain and Streetwise is good at different things from another Trickster who gets a bunch of Disguise and Determination - the first one is great at sleight of hand, sneaking the streets, hiding, and manipulating machinery, while the second one is immune to mind-control shenanigans and excellent at forgery, disguises, and impersonation.
The Web of Fate. Within each Talent, the Web of Fate branches in a ton of directions, and even two Tricksters who invest in the same Talent might have very different benefits and powers depending on where they go in there. For example, here are two different Tricksters investing in Disguise:
Not only do both of them have completely different Blessings, with only the beginning power Improvised Disguise in common, but they also have different extra benefits as well - the character headed off to the right is picking up a lot of extra physical bolsters by gaining extra Defense, Mettle, and health boxes, while the one headed to the left has instead invested in more Blessings and bonuses to less direct things like Art and Augments.
Spheres. Every character has access to the Spheres - which they may or may not invest in as they wish. Not only do you have significant differences between a Trickster who also has Fire powers and one who has the more subtle powers of Fortune, but each Sphere has their own branching paths, similar to those in the Web of Fate, and Heroes can get bonuses to different things as they navigate them.
Archetypes. Every character has their own set of two Archetypes, which describe their motivations and have a strong effect on what they're doing with their Aspects and why. A Trickster who is a Rebel/Scholar is likely use their Trickster skills to do very different things than one who is an Artisan/Ruler.
Pantheon. Every character has both their Devotional powers, which are specific to their patron's pantheon, and the bonus Labors granted to them by their patron, which are specific to each deity. One Trickster might be called to action by Vishnu, who gives them access to a wide range of extra Labors and the personalized powers of the Hindu Devotional tree, and another will have a very different experience when called to action by Ares, who gives them a ton of extra Labors for only one Aspect and the enhancing, amping-up powers of the Greek Devotional tree. Even before roleplaying based on their patron and relationship, they both have access to a very different range of resources and powers.
After all that... the odds of two Heroes, even when both are primarily Trickster, being even close to identical are extremely low. You'd really have to intentionally aim for that for it to happen. (Which of course we wouldn't stop anyone from doing if they had a concept for it, like "our characters are twins and are trying to be the same" or something, but the game is intentionally weighted toward customization and individuality within the broad Heroic Aspects.)
The time characters are going to be closest to each other will be right at beginning character creation, before they've had a chance to progress anywhere; it is technically possible to get characters who start identically, assuming that a lot of choices are made the same way, but they won't stay that way. (Character creation will get its own post later. Y'all are suffering through enough words in this one as it is.)
Isn't there overlap sometimes between things different Aspects can do? Can't Lovers and Leaders both sometimes have the same effect on a group of people, and how do we know which one does what?
Like all "what does X" questions in any game with any stat setup, there will inevitably be some cases where there's wiggle room, or more than one Aspect might theoretically come into play. That's one of Destiny's jobs, to make judgment calls on those things; usually, because the goal is to let characters do things based on their character types via the Aspects, just asking "is the thing we want to do here a Lover thing or a Trickster thing" and going with the answer will get you there. The book does of course give lists of common actions and what Aspects and Talents they roll, and hopefully those fringe cases should be few and far between.
What about things that really ARE qualities, instead of things only one Aspect has? Like Beauty, or Athleticism?
There aren't many of these, but there are a few! In those cases, they're under the umbrella of a specific Aspect because that Aspect is the one that actively uses those qualities in a way that changes and affects a heroic story. Beauty is the easy example; it's not that characters who aren't Lovers can't be beautiful. They can be as beautiful as you want to describe them. But their beauty isn't a story vehicle; their hotness or grace just doesn't affect the story around them, because that's not their role. Whatever else they invested in is what changes the story, whereas a Lover actually weaponizes Beauty into something that can effect political change or distract enemies at a critical moment.
It's important to remember that because your stats are about your role as a Hero in this story, you can describe your Hero however you want; you're not constrained by whether or not a stat says you're "allowed" to present your character in some way. If you want to describe your character as graceful and serene in spite of their complete lack of Athleticism, because they're not a Warrior, that's okay - they're graceful and serene and it's expressed when they're gracefully flitting through the woods with their Hunter/Naturalism or when they walk with utmost poise through the middle of a committee meeting and wow those assembled with their Leader/Diplomacy. They're not going to use grace and athletic ability alone to do anything useful (the Warriors are the ones doing Olympic athletic feats that actually affect the story's flow), but that doesn't mean they can't be described as graceful when they're doing the things they are good at.
So if I'm not a Warrior, I can't ever do basic stuff like dodging out of the way of a falling rock? That sucks!
That's what the Strive for Glory mechanic is for! Remember, Heroes can always Strive if they need to do something outside their normal role for a small cost, so that the Sages can still dive for cover in moments of crisis and the Creators can sometimes marshal their social resources and try to give direction to a team that is taken seriously when the actual Leaders are unavailable. It's no substitute for a Hero having the actual Aspect or Talent in question, but it's an option for moments when you need to say, "look, I'm a Hero and I need to be able to succeed here just on the strength of that alone."
Remember, also, that several things in the game don't require you to use Aspects at all. Your Defense in combat is a completely different stat that you get by investing in the Web of Fate or the Spheres, for example, and insignificant actions like jogging down the stairs in your building or making a sandwich for lunch don't require rolls, so no one is helpless to perform everyday, story-unimportant actions just because they don't have the stat that would correspond if this were an action that mattered to the Saga at large.
I think I hit most of the big questions, but comments are open, of course!
Elks on Parade
It's hard to be productive in December. But we soldier on.
This is both an example and an image of us realizing there are no rules for elephant combat
What's Up With Writing
Anne tanked some this week (she wants me to say sorry there was no Wednesday post this week). But she's working hard on some mechanics posts and is trying to get a queue up to carry through the holidays. We continued working on the Archetype update and then updating all the Blessings that relied on the old Archetype system, which was... more than we thought. It's always more than we thought. The playtesters are patient and good natured about the transition period, thanks guys.
Devotionals are going to need the biggest redraft after that, but we're getting close to all done there!
It'll be okay, they promised our Divinity power will work again someday soon
What's Up With Playtesting
Finally, Team Elk is ready to rock! They'll be playing on Thursdays, and are trying out some different things from the other group as well as being created with the updated character creation and archetype rules right off the bat. The game can be looked in on here.
Here are some quick peeks at the characters:
Team Elk: The Jock, the Brain, and the Dropout
Character #1: Miguel Micco, called by Ares
Miguel is a war veteran with the skills to match: he's the Warrior Champion ready to meet and overcome any obstacle, and his team is counting on him to kick ass and take names as needed (because their patrons all collectively know they probably aren't about to do it). He relies on his allies for skills outside the realm of action sports and woodscraft, which leads to...
Character #2: Mika Eriksson, called by Loki
...Mika, who is decidedly not the same type. Charming, smooth-talking, and liable to walk off with peoples' wallets and keys, Mika is a problem child who skates by on the strength of his ability to blame others or look innocent at the right moment, and runs for it when that doesn't work out. He may at some point stop couch-surfing and start taking responsibility for himself... but he hopes not any time soon.
Character #3: Randall Ivarsson, called by Odin
Randall is a classic Sage Scholar - smart, creative, and disdainful of those around him, full of grandiose schemes about changing the world but possibly not 100% solid on how exactly he's going to pull them off yet. His brains support his teammates' endeavors and theoretically contribute to mission success... if he feels like it, anyway.
Since they're just starting out, we don't know what their big moments will be yet... but we're excited to find out!
The Personal Stuff
The team is mostly holidaying this month, so there aren't a lot of personal updates to be had. We'll keep information and posts coming so you have something to read if you have downtime though!
Holiday revels or beloved family pets gone bad?
This was a small update, but hopefully better ones soon since Anne will have some time off work (which is time ON work for us). Until then!
Posted by JOHN at 12:00 PM No comments:
Setting Talk: The Hero's Journey
So we haven't really talked about the Hero's Journey yet... which is ridiculous, considering that's the literal name of the game, right? So here's a quick rundown on what the HJ is, why it's in HJ, and what it does!
The Hero's Journey (also called the Monomyth after James Joyce's works, which influenced it), and is based on the work of Joseph Campbell, a notable mythographer and psychologist in the 1940s-1970s or so who was all about looking for patterns in worldwide mythology and comparing the stories of different time periods and cultures. The idea of the Hero's Journey is that there is a repeating pattern in most, if not all, of the world's mythological stories of a hero (divine or otherwise) going on an adventure, and that this says something about the collective psychology of human beings that we look for and retell that story over and over and over forever. (Campbell based a lot of his work on that of Karl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology, who came up with a lot of ideas about different personality types and archetypes appearing in stories and what people usually mean them to represent.)
When people talk about the idea of a Call to Adventure that a hero has to answer to start their journey, or about the idea of "crossing the threshold" into an adventure proper, they're talking about bits of Campbell's Hero's Journey, which have at this point filtered down into our cultural consciousness and become part of storytelling theory. There are tons of videos and walkthroughs of what the journey looks like and how it's set up and why online, so we won't go into in depth here, but here's a personal favorite:
HJ is loosely based on this idea - that your Hero's adventures will likely follow that ancient pattern tradition, and that doing so is actually part of the game's mechanics and design.
So how does the Hero's Journey work in HJ? As you can see from the graphic above (and bazillions more like it online), there are a lot of "steps" a Hero goes through as they travel along the journey, with the overall shape being one of leaving a "normal" life, crossing into adventure or danger, confronting obstacles and unfamiliarity, changing and growing to become capable of taking on a new challenge or fulfilling a new role, and ultimately returning home again, changed forever. HJ lays out the steps for Destiny to take the Heroes through, and some of them have particular mechanical events attached to them, meaning that as the Saga progresses, Heroes find themselves experiencing their own unique journey somewhat organically in order, both through their efforts and Destiny's. We've found in playtesting that players tend to barrel directly toward the steps of the journey even without being guided - we've all seen so many movies, read so many books, or heard so many stories that use the format that lots of folks tend to unconsciously do it all on their own - so the goal is for the mechanical events to pop up as exciting and fun bonuses or appropriate moments when players and the story overall expect them to.
Mechanics in HJ also draw from works that Campbell based his theory on, most notably with the Archetypes, which are based on (but not identical to) Karl Jung's psychological archetypes of heroes in various myths. (Depth Psychology is a very deep well down which both Jung and Campbell inevitably journey in their attempt to apply mythological story archetypes and patterns to the lives and consciousness of everyday people, but since HJ is a game about literal mythological stories, we leave most of the depth theorizing to the psychologists!)
The Hero's Journey, as a concept, isn't an unflawed one. It's the product of a western writer who, in spite of traveling and studying religions and mythologies extensively worldwide, was still a product of his time and culture, and it doesn't always perfectly line up with every hero - especially ones who deviate from the general expected mythological hero mold (like, for example, being female, or being a child, or being heroic in a way that primarily involves social change instead of individual accomplishment, etc). There are stories out there that don't follow the journey, and they're valid stories in their own right. The concept has plenty of critics and should, and lots of very neat works have been written on how the idea of the Hero's Journey applies differently in different cultures or styles of stories, or may or may not apply to some things at all.
Since HJ isn't here to insist the Campbell's theory is an infallible reality in all mythology, but instead to use it as a tool for telling mythic stories, so the version of the journey in the game is altered and shaped to make it more accessible to all players; for example, some steps that make more sense in a journey that is explicitly about a male Hero have been altered so that they can apply resonantly to characters of any gender, and some steps that are more common in European mythologies but not as universal worldwide have been made "minor steps", ones that Heroes can (and should, if they want to!) fulfill as they go but that aren't required for every Hero to get to the end of their story. Our resulting journey looks like this:
The biggest question new players generally ask us is whether or not having a structure like the Hero's Journey will make all the Sagas seem samey - if every story has the same setup, or close to the same setup, won't they all feel the same, too? The answer is no: every story has individual features and there are an incredible number ways for a character to fulfill a step of the Hero's Journey, many of which substantially change the story; and genre and tone make a vast difference to stories regardless of their structure; and some Hero's Journeys skip a few of the minor steps but hit all the major ones, or might do all the steps but do a couple of them out of order, and those kinds of deviations are totally legitimate stories, too. There are parts of the journey that are basically freeform (the Road of Trials, for example!), and anything can happen within them. We've all probably seen countless stories that follow the Hero's Journey format in our lives, and the concept of leaving for a transformative journey and returning changed has endless opportunities for variation!
There have been hundreds of thousands of pages written about the Hero's Journey and its variants, so we're not going to cover them all in this blog post, but we're going to do a series of posts about how the Hero's Journey appears in various movies and TV shows in the future, so look in the future for us to yell about various story examples!
If you're interested in reading about the Hero's Journey on your own, the following are some great places to start:
The Hero with an African Face by Clyde W. Ford
The Heroine's Journey by Maureen Murdock
The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler
Labels: mechanics, mythology