Light
From AdamWiki
Contents |
Overview
This is a role-playing game. You create a setting and characters, then act out scenes with those characters within your setting. Over time, you add to the setting and develop your characters in more detail.
Roles
There are three distinct roles that you, the players, take during the course of a game: actor, director, and judge. You will change roles often and without much fanfare. It's easier than it sounds.
- You are an actor when you tell the other players what one of your characters is doing or saying.
- You are a director when you describe the setting or establishes a scene or creates conflict.
- You are a judge when you vote whether something another player has done should be allowed or not.
There is no single Game Master; rather, the GM's normal "director" and "judge" responsibilities are shared among the players. In fact, the director role is passed among the players like a hot potato.
Characters
You and every other player create a character. Feel free to create more than one, but it's generally a good idea to only have one character per player in a scene at a time (you'll seem schizophrenic if you have to play two characters talking to each other).
The process for creating characters is described later.
Setting
Whenever you and your friends sit down to play Light, you need a setting. A setting is a combination of things that describe the world in which their characters will exist. It includes time and place descriptions, thematic elements, and genre customs.
Each setting is (at first) described in a single sentence. The setting is created by a process called Construction (described later). Every player has a voice in the setting of the game.
You don't have to create a new setting every time you play. You can use the same setting, and even the same characters, from the previous play session. This allows you to create a connected series of stories.
Scenes
Every play session creates one or more scenes. A scene is a set of circumstances that involves one or more of the characters. In each scene, the characters face one or more conflicts of some kind and come to some sort of resolution. Scenes are created in much the same way the setting is created, through the Construction process.
Risk and Rewards
Rolling dice creates risk. Sometimes you roll dice to find out what happens in a conflict. The dice create a bit of uncertainty and keep things exciting. You never have to roll dice, but if you don't, you gain no rewards either. You and the other players get to choose the amount of risk in a scene and, by setting the level of risk, also determine the size of the reward.
Rewards are the benefit of winning a conflict when there is risk involved. Rewards can be used to develop characters and "steal" some extra directorial control when you want it.
Consensus
The game is ruled by consensus, with a twist. Every player has an equal vote at the table, and any disagreement is settled by a near-unanimous vote. You must abide by any decision made by all of the players or by all but one of the players. That is, with zero or one dissenting vote, an issue passes.
This applies to everything during the game: disputes over the rules, disputes over the setting, disputes over a character, disputes over who calls for pizza.
The twist is that you get a certain number of tokens that can flip someone's vote. Need one more vote in your favor? Flip a dissenter's NO to a YES by spending a token. They can flip it back with a token of their own though. The rules discuss these tokens in greater detail later on.
