As the Hammercalled Roleplaying Game nears its first alpha release (and probably a delay, because my planning may have predicted many more effective working hours than I get outside weekends on the weekdays), I felt it was a good time to talk about some simple do and don't methods for using mechanics to get good characters in games.
While this nominally links to storytelling, I'm going to be referring more to raw mechanical practices that help characters feel like they matter in a game, rather than moving into any complicated explanations of archetypes or plot devices.
Without further ado:
• Give characters a role to fill.
• Give characters a second role to fill.
• Give characters a third... Give characters a firm foundation in mechanics.
• Give characters narrative agency through special abilities.
• Give each character one unique thing.
• Give different characters access to distinct mechanical schemes.
• Give characters weaknesses.
• Don't forget how your core mechanics work.
• Don't forget the power of emergent systems.
• Don't overburden the players.
Your goal as a game designer is to create the framework for a story to be told, with some mathematics behind it to make sure that the process is distributed and interesting for everyone involved. In a good game, characters are given power that allots shares of agency to them, allowing them to function in their own domain while still permitting other characters to have a chance to shine.
Think of this like the story of Icarus: you want your mechanics to be wings that allow a character to fly, but you still need to worry about them flying too high; weak characters can't get off the ground, and over-powered characters fly too close to the sun–they seem tantalizing for a moment, but will destroy themselves as they fail to provide a meaningful catalyst for stories.
The Fall of Icarus, from a 17th century scupture
Each character should have their own part. You can do this in a highly-structured form, like D&D does with its classes, or in a free-form system by allowing players to distribute points.
One thing to note is that I'm a fan of having minimums or incentives to maximize at least one area in games. This is to provide characters with a particular thing that they are good at, and they alone.
In my game velotha's flock, I take the approach of giving each character a "role", some special and fantastic ability that they get to do that would be otherwise impossible (like speaking to the dead) or the ability to exploit a game mechanic in an interesting, but still balanced, way.
Don't think that having a role is simply having a high aptitude for something.
Having a role means that a character should be significantly better than the average at a certain task, to the point of being the one clear choice to do it.
Now, sometimes these roles may not be immediately clear (in Hammercalled, for instance, combat is built in such a way that you could pursue a number of strategies: act first and hit hard, harass people with mobility, attack from massive range, or sustain a lot of hits without suffering penalties to name just four, and these characters still have the ability to specialize in a non-combat role fairly easily).
A second role is important to characters, most notably for two reasons:
First, you might not find a situation to use their first role.
Second, you might have two characters with the same role.
In Hammercalled, characters have very broad Specializations that make up the equivalent of a group of skills in other games. These are defined by the players themselves, and they grow better and broader as they are improved in play.
At character creation, each character gains two Specializations. One broad and powerful, the other specific and weak. This takes some of the pressure off min-maxing Specializations, but also gives a back-up role to the characters who have a Specialization that might not be useful in a particular area, or who are outshone by their companions.
I've seen a lot of narrative-focused games that have characters that are just a little too floppy to work well in some situations. I'm not against narrative games by any means, but I think it's important to remember why games have mechanics.
Mechanics serve as a way to push play forward. There are a number of different things people want when they play a game; socialization, escapism, victories, and learning are just the tip of the iceberg. A truly narrative game can deliver these, but there are a few caveats to consider.
There's an old saying that goes "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
That's how a lot of people, especially newcomers with video-game experience, view roleplaying games; they choose or create a character who has a certain set of aptitudes and go into the game to see how they solve those problems.
In a strongly narrative game, these players may not connect well with the storytelling aspect, especially if they're not people who consider themselves storytellers (storytelling is actually a pretty basic human skill, and more people are good at it than they give themselves credit for).
Giving a ground in mechanics allows players to compare characters, and it also lets them build confidence, knowing that they can do certain things without challenge.
I recall hearing a game designer once talk about traits in a game (I believe it was actually Perks for one of the Fallout games) in which they said something like the following:
You don't want to have too many perks that just push numbers around.
When I was playtesting Open Legend with Brian Feister, I got to see some of the potency of that method.
Special abilities are a great way to define characters. They allow you to breach into supernatural and fantastical realms that you wouldn't normally go into with your core mechanics. Games that really excel at giving you the cold shivers of excitement when you think about their setting almost always do this really well, and it's not an accident.
If mechanics allow characters to be compared, adding narrative-focused special abilities provides ways for them to be distinguished. velotha's flock has were-ravens that have a whole set of special abilities dealing with their connection to the supernatural world, mortals (in a coming expansion) that have a strong connection to their Creator, and fallen angels dealing with a demonic nature. Each of these opens up distinct abilities.
I'm not good at this myself, but at least I'm honest. That makes me not a hypocrite, right?
If you want characters to be interesting, give each one a single unique thing. 13th Age introduced me to this concept back when I was a game reviewer, and it still stands.
One of the dangers that many people see with such a system is that depending on how it works it can give "too much control" to the players with regards to how much the setting unfolds.
For instance "I'm the only goblin who's not a hot pink color."
Now, one way to deal with this is to have a sort of pre-allocated unique thing bank, but that's precisely zero fun (and it's what special abilities are, essentially, in most games).
Another is to have a reasonable safeguard against this: a GM or the other players can veto anything that seems too surreal or outlandish.
A third approach, which I've seen done to some really good effect, is to run with this. All the consequences of whatever decisions players make play out exactly as planned. This allows the players to really set the mood of the game, which works well when you have a strong Session Zero.
Finally, you can rely on emergence in systems to create unique abilities. By complex interactions between the various mechanics and systems, characters wind up building a specialty that is at least unlikely to be duplicated.
I think Hammercalled actually does this decently, but I'm getting ahead of myself and I'll explain that later when I talk about emergent systems.
This advice doesn't need a whole lot written about this, so I'll keep it short.
Put an entry barrier to some actions. Not everyone is a spellcaster. You need a particular cybernetic implant to enter the Matrix. Only elves can see the Feylines (without some grievous sacrifice).
Obviously, you will need to deal with the complications of this somehow, but that's not too bad.
I'm a big fan of putting flaws into games, or otherwise encouraging players to have a noteworthy weakness.
I'm also a fan of making people choose this weakness, though there are times when weaknesses are inherent to mechanics.
One problem that I see with hyper-mechanical weaknesses are things like D&D's health system, where a level 1 wizard can get flattened by a house-cat in some editions (though, with a cat of my own, I can confirm they have some dreadful and terrible power to them).
Rather, make these weaknesses vulnerabilities to be capitalized on. Maybe the half-fire elemental really shouldn't get wet. The machine man can't heal from rest; he needs to have someone work on him. The vampire gets a little crazy if he doesn't get his dose of blood. The very wealthy businesswoman must keep an eye on her fortune at all times lest it be stolen.
Degenesis does an interesting thing with this in its Background system. Each character has six backgrounds (correlating to things like fame, wealth, allies inside their faction, etc.) and as they rise the character nominally becomes more powerful. However, because of the fact that these Backgrounds reflect some positive development in their lives, they are suspect to losing them again, where characters who are not at all invested in a Background have no reason to care if their Background would decrease.
This lets storytellers lead people on adventures. Weaknesses, not strengths, make great drivers of reaction.
It is a very poignant thing when a character ignores the rules of the universe because their actions are reshaping the world.
It is a very annoying thing when the character does so by having an entirely different system at play than anyone else in the game, resulting in more down-time and confusion.
D&D's fifth edition is an exercise in mastering the core mechanic. A simple d20, with limited modifiers and the ability to roll advantage or disadvantage, goes quite a far way.
There are few places in fifth edition where there are obvious exploits that involve this core mechanic.
Don't create a game where players often build characters whose main job is to work outside your core mechanic.
This means a new set of rules for everyone, and the novelty has to be really good to pay off.
The most memorable thing I did in an Open Legend playtest was breaking one of Brian's boss fights by teleporting people into and out of areas. Something that was intended to be a hard-won victory became an exercise in cunning and a triumph for the player characters.
Now, that probably didn't make Brian much happier, but as I continued to play gunslingers, shapeshifters, and magicians in Open Legend I found that there was a lot of fun to be had in a variety of play-styles.
No two characters looked exactly alike, even though there were some themes I tended to go with.
Hammercalled attempts to provide characters with a similar degree of flexibility by packaging rules to create content with the game, and making them simple enough to be desirable as a main course of play. For example, you could go through a list and pick a plasma rifle, or you could make a ranged weapon that lights foes on fire and bypasses armor.
Both have a similar end effect (toasty baddies), but in Hammercalled the player has made the decision that they want to choose certain mechanics for their play-style. All gear works this way (though I think the combat side is currently far more robust than the non-combat side), as do specializations.
Let the players have more tools to build with, and you'll find characters become unique and interesting much quicker.
I remember SLA Industries as having quite a fond place in my collection until I tried to play it. The setting's interesting (if very macabre), the writing was well-done by my angsty teen standards, and then I tried to play it.
I couldn't make it past the sheer amount of information involved.
Then I tried to play a game using GURPS. I actually got some progress here (making it through the core system and character creation), but found that to play the game I wanted to play I had to put a lot more effort in than I had originally expected.
Characters should feel like an expression of interest and purpose. I remember playing Twilight: 2000 with my friends. I was super into it, given my personal tastes and my love of games from that time, but the rest of my group felt like the life-path character creation was focusing too much on minutiae, and they weren't feeling all the numbers they had to use for things that we would have abstracted (or conveniently "forgotten" about) in any other game we had played together at that point.
When you build characters, you aren't trying to tell their life story (unless that's the point). Limit the information you collect to the things that really matter, and drop the rest. Aim to have no more than twenty numbers on a character sheet, and see if you're able to succeed.
This will allow players to quickly reference content, without becoming bogged down or forgetting what goes where in which equation.
