Fantasy Heartbreaker
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Good and Evil
Characters have four numerical ratings for Good and Evil. These are metagame traits that give players a way to affect the dice pools of protagonists or antagonists during conflicts.
- Good points are represented by white stones. They are used during play to add successes to protagonists' rolls.
- Evil points, represented by black stones, are used during play to subtract successes from the rolls of protagonists.
I've considered Chaos and Law, too, and they could be represented by adding and subtracting dice and increasing or decreasing randomness during conflicts. Law could replace any die with an average, or slightly above average, roll or perhaps decrease the number of sides on dice rolled or something, or turn dice into sure successes. Chaos would do the opposite, increasing randomness.
Players would be encouraged to spend all of their stones and dice. Any left over at the end of the session would somehow penalize the character. Evil and good stones not cast against other protagonists would be converted into some kind of penalty on the character.
Good and Evil should somehow also form a personality mechanic that contraints character action, like Love and Self-loathing in My Life with Master.
Characters
Characters are described with boxed traits (FATE-like) but no skills. Characters get a healthy number of boxes. The rules provide some structure for how to allocate them. For example, a breakdown like this:
- 4 boxes of Personality traits (at least 1 must be a Strength and at least 1 must be a Weakness)
- 2 boxes of Childhood History traits
- 2 boxes of Adult History traits
- 2 boxes of Profession traits
- 4 boxes of Connection traits
- 4 boxes of Knowledge traits
- 6 boxes of Power/Skill traits
- 4 boxes of Life (a specific trait)
Using the example breakdown above, one might create a character like this:
- Storman the Bold
- Personality: Arrogant [ ], Talkative [ ], Impatient [ ], Knowledgeable [ ]
- Childhood History: Bullied [ ], Abandoned by Father [ ]
- Adult History: Apprenticed to Archmage [ ], Betrayed his Master [ ], Discovered Necromantic Secrets [ ][ ]
- Profession: Necromancer [ ][ ]
- Connections: Hobble (Apprentice) [ ][ ], Lord Cramine, Mayor of Storisvil (Minion) [ ], Eveliese, Arch Druid of Fenterwyvn (Enemy) [ ]
- Knowledge: Dark Lore [ ][ ], Ancient History [ ], Storisvil (town) [ ]
- Powers and Skills: Control Necromantic Magic [ ][ ][ ], Create Alchemical Potions [ ], Intimidate [ ], Fight with a Dagger [ ]
- Life [ ][ ][ ][ ]
Throughout the game, characters draw upon their traits to win conflicts. Each time a trait is used, one of its boxes is checked and that box cannot be used again till refreshed (usually at the end of a game session). Life boxes are never used to win conflicts. When a character runs out of Life, the character dies, so Life is generally not checked off unless the player is desperate -- either because the character has no other unchecked boxes and the character loses a conflict, or because the player is saving other boxes for future conflicts.
Refreshing
At the end of every story, all trait boxes are refreshed (they are unchecked), except for Life. Life can only be unchecked by spending Rewards (see below), at the cost of 2 Life for 1 Reward point.
Rewards
At the end of every story, once the main conflicts have been overcome, each character receives Reward points equal to their total Life (checked or unchecked). These are spent on adding new traits, adding boxes to existing traits, and buying Treasure. Treasure are items that have traits.
With 1 Reward point, a player may:
- add a new trait with one box
- add a box to an existing trait
- create an item that has 3 trait boxes
- add 2 trait boxes to an existing item
Stories
The Game Master's job is to put the characters in harm's way and try to kill them. Note that the only way a character can die is if the player checks off the character's last Life box. This can only happen when a character is in a conflict. In fact, the player almost always has the option to check off any other box on the sheet as long as he can justify how that trait is being used, so checking off Life is a last resort. It is the GM's job to wear down the characters and deplete the character's traits by forcing them to check off boxes.
That said, the players determine the nature of the threats they face. They frame the story by narrating a setting and premise. For example, the framing player might say, "After a long, bitter trek into the Dark Wood through the rain, we locate the lair of the Skeleton Lord in the heart of the Black Swamp." Then the GM takes up the story and starts crafting conflicts for the characters to face.
The GM determines the nature of the story's conflicts by looking at the traits of characters. The GM looks at all the characters and ignores any trait with only one box. He counts up the number of traits with 2 boxes, with 3 boxes, with 4 boxes, and so on. For example, if Storman the Bold were the only character, the GM would count up his boxes. There are four 2-box traits (Discovered Necromantic Secrets, Necromancer, Hobble (Apprentice), Dark Lore), one 3-box trait (Control Necromantic Magic), and one 4-box trait (Life) -- for a total of six traits. Each of those traits becomes an encounter related to that trait.
Because the player has assigned high scores to those traits, the player is signaling to the GM that those things are important to that character's story and the GM is obliged to include them in the story. Each encounter must relate to that trait. So Storman the Bold can expect one encounter or conflict related to "Discovered Necromantic Secrets." The GM can interpret that loosely, so the conflict might require Sturman to destroy some of the Skeleton Lord's zombie minions or it might require Sturman to puzzle out an ancient Necromantic spell to determine that the Skeleton Lord hides his dark soul in a gem buried beneath the oldest grave.
The GM has a pool of stones equal to the total of boxes in all of those traits. So for Sturman, the GM has 15 stones (4x2 1x3 1x4). If a story has multiple characters, the GM's stone pool is the combined total of all the pools from each of the characters.
The number of stones a GM can spend on any character during any single conflict is limited by the Life (checked and unchecked) of that character. So the GM can use no more than 4 stones against Sturman in any single conflict.
