EVENTS
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Make room on your character sheet to record events that happen to your character as you play them.
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After each session of play, you may record a noteworthy event that occurred during that session for your character. Try to write that event as a single descriptive line. (See below for examples.)
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An event can be invoked to grant your character inspiration if you can relate how that past experience is helping them in the current situation.
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A character can only have five events from past sessions recorded on their character sheet at a time.
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After accumulating five events, you can choose to replace one with a new event your character has just experienced after a session concludes—you get to decide which events are shaping your character’s personality, outlook, or growing infamy.
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The Game Master may wish to set a limit on the number of events a character can invoke per game session.
EVENT
EXAMPLES
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Fought against overwhelming odds in a desperate melee.
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Convinced the invaders not to execute an ally.
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Nearly died from a poisoned arrow.
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Impressed a great warlord with my balalaika playing.
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Contracted the plague but survived.
planning to use this for a game next year. thanks!
ReplyDeleteAwesome! I hope it works well for you.
DeleteI think this is nice as a straight-up replacement for traits, bonds, etc as sources of inspiration.
ReplyDeleteConversely, inspiration is a nice mechanic for making momentous events gameable, since it's such an all-purpose bonus. I could easily imagine each event granting a small but meaningful boon that can be used once a session. (It would need to be a little better than the inspiration bonus, since it would also be more specific.)
At an extreme, I could imagine momentous events replacing skills, spells, fighting techniques, maybe even "character levels" entirely ... but that seems like kind of a deep rabbit hole to go down.
I like the way you're using it here, and keeping a running list of your top 5 favorite character memories seems like a great way to define your character for roleplaying purposes. But this is also a mechanic with much deeper potential, I think is what I'm saying.
I've thought about a system where the whole of "advancement" is inventing new powers, bonuses, and other widgets that correspond to those momentous events. It would be impossible to fully quantify, I think. The best you could do, if you wanted to write it up, would be some basic guidelines or ideas about what those benefits would look like.
DeleteI did do something like that in my old B/X games: we added custom stuff to characters depending on what happened, but it was also alongside the usual level-advancement in the books.
That reminds me, I think I actually posted a bit about it before: http://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-character-advancement-in-book.html
Oh right, I actually remember reading that one. The idea that "the character advancement in the book should only be half the story" is a really powerful thought - and one not widely shared by most GMs or publishers, I don't think.
DeleteI remember reading about various character "builds" back in the 3e / Pathfinder days and contemplating a question of fairness. Should characters who advance through play be better than characters who are generated to start at a higher level? Or is that unfair to "builders"?
A lot of the rules of 3e seemed to me to come down in favor of the idea that a character that emerges through play should be no better than one you build. On the other hand, Pathfinder's Gamemastery Guide recommends awarding "boons" as rewards for successful adventures. I'm not sure those would accumulate as fast as momentous events, although in principle they're not capped at 5 at a time.
One thing I think you're right about though is that it would be impossible to make a complete list. I do think it would be good to have a list of what you think are the most likely rewards, and yeah, good guidelines for writing new ones at home. Both Torchbearer (with its "wises") and 13th Age (with its "one unique thing") suffer a bit on both fronts. I don't think either of them give enough examples. I also don't think either of them give enough guidance about how to write your own.
One thing I would suggest might be an important consideration is establishing a common power level among the party. It's fine to have boons that are mostly cosmetic, and fine to have ones that are quite powerful, but I don't think it's a great idea to award wildly disparate power levels to different party members.
I've got one of those One Unique Things-style posts too: http://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2017/08/singular-curiosities.html
DeleteCovered a lot of ground over the years.
But yeah, I think not only would it be impossible to make a complete list of add-on character advancements, it would be antithetical to the idea to do so. It seems to me that they have to be organic elements of growth; as soon as you limit the possibilities of what those advancements look like, you lose that organic element.
Still, a nice list of examples would be welcome, I think.
Power level among characters in a party is something I think about quite a bit, especially since I favor running "drop-in for as many sessions as you can, when you want" style games online--and that gets trickier in games where power disparity adds complications.
Older editions of D&D handle that somewhat better than newer ones, but still not all that well. A game like Fate, or maybe Dungeon World, honestly feels better suited for that kind of online play because advancement is more horizontal than vertical. (A bit sticking point is increasing hit points.)