Monday 5 January 2015

It's a character building experience - Experiences, Beats and Aspirations in Dark Metropolis

In the World of Darkness, your character learns and adapts to the world - after all, if they don’t, things will likely get worse before they get better. This is represented by Experiences, which are earned by playing (and surviving) and can be spent to make your character better at things or increase their influence.

The Blood and Smoke rules make some sizeable changes to the character advancement rules for Vampire: the Requiem.  We've provided a summary of those changes below, along with how we’re planning on implementing those rules in Dark Metropolis.

Beats are the individual moments of character development, when a character learns from their failure, suffers the consequences of someone else’s actions or achieves a goal that they have been working towards. These add up into Experiences that change your character’s ability to interact with the world.

Aspirations are the goals your character has, consciously or unconsciously, and they learn things by achieving these goals. You as the player set these goals with the intention of making the game fun for you and others. Your character gains Beats for fulfilling their aspirations.

We’ll go into more detail about these below.

Experiences:

Experience Points (XP) are replaced with Experiences.  Rather than having a multiplying cost to buy higher dots in a given trait, you pay a single flat cost for increasing a given trait.

Experience costs are listed below:

  • Attribute: 4 Experiences per dot
  • Merit: 1 Experience per dot
  • Skill Specialty: 1 Experience
  • Skill: 2 Experiences per dot
  • Clan Discipline: 3 Experiences per dot
  • Out-of-Clan Discipline: 4 Experiences per dot
  • Coil of the Dragon (within chosen Mystery): 3 Experiences per dot
  • Coil of the Dragon (outside chosen Mystery): 4 Experiences per dot
  •  Crúac: 4 Experiences per dot
  • Theban Sorcery: 4 Experiences per dot
  • Blood Sorcery Ritual: 2 Experiences
  • Scale of the Dragon: 2 Experiences
  • Humanity: 2 Experiences per dot
  • Blood Potency: 5 Experiences per dot
  • Lost Willpower dot: 1 Experience

Example: Buying your first dot of a Skill would cost 2 Experiences.  Buying your second dot of that Skill would cost 2 more Experiences.  Buying all five dots in a Skill would cost a total of 10 Experiences (and a few downtimes!).

Beats:

Beats represents moments of character growth, or challenging situations your character learns from.  You can earn Beats in a variety of ways, and you can trade in five Beats for an Experience.

Ways of gaining Beats:

  • Fulfilling an Aspiration.
  • Resolving a Condition.
  • Meeting the Beat criteria for a persistent Condition.
  • Turning a failure into a Dramatic Failure.
  • Taking damage in one of your last three Health boxes.  (Vampires and ghouls do not gain Beats from Bashing damage.)
  • Risking Humanity detachment.
  • Entering frenzy (not Riding the Wave).

All Beats can only come from dramatic situations with consequences, so you can’t “farm” Beats from no-risk situations. Each player can gain up to a maximum of five Beats from each cycle (a game and downtime period) - see below.

During the game, if you feel that you have earned a Beat by any of the above means then note it down on your character sheet including how you feel you earned it. At the end of the game, during sign-out, inform your ST how many Beats you earned and how. They may ask you further questions about how this came about. Only STs can dispense and approve Beats, though many of the above situations should already warrant getting an ST to oversee them!

Character Advancement:

Every character gains 1 Experience for each game that takes place.  This Experience award is automatic, and a character doesn't need to have attended that game to gain this automatic Experience.  In addition, this automatic Experience will be added to the Experiences that all new characters start with.  (So after three games, new characters will start with 3 extra Experiences.)

Characters can earn Beats in addition to this automatic Experience however, through the means listed above.  A character can gain a maximum of 5 Beats in any given game and downtime cycle, and only once for each of the ways of gaining Beats listed above, with a couple of exceptions:

  • If you resolve several different Conditions, you gain a Beat for each individual Condition you resolve.  (Or meet the Beat criteria for in the case of persistent Conditions.)
  • You can potentially earn up to three Beats by fulfilling all three of your Aspirations.


Aspirations:

Aspirations are a new game mechanic in Blood and Smoke that serves two purposes.  Firstly, they’re one of the major ways of gaining Beats (and so Experiences) in the game, so play an important role in character advancement.  Secondly, although no less importantly, they work as a reminder to both you and the STs about what your character is trying to achieve, and where their priorities currently lie.

Aspirations are simple statements of intent – things that you can accomplish in the game (in uptime or downtime).  However, we've got some recommendations on what makes a good Aspiration, and some guidelines on how to create them.

Aspirations should be active accomplishments, not avoiding specific behaviours.  So, “Do not betray my friends” isn't a suitable Aspiration.  “Prove my loyalty to my friends” is – although it’s still quite vague.

Try to be specific about what you’re trying to accomplish.  Using the example above “Prove my loyalty to my friends” gives a general idea of your goals, but lacks specifics.  You might turn that into “Help my coterie find a new Haven”, “Steal an artefact from my friend’s rival”, “Be injured protecting my friends”, or any number of other goals.

All characters have three Aspirations, but we’re providing a bit of extra structure in Dark Metropolis.  Of your three Aspirations:

  • At least one of your Aspirations should involve another PC.  Speak to the player in question to figure out what would be a fun goal for you both.
  • At least one Aspiration should deal with your relationship with the mortal world.
  • At least one Aspiration should reflect your Kindred existence.
  • One of your Aspirations should be something you plan on achieving in uptime at your next game.  It doesn't have to be wildly ambitious, but it’s a clear flag to both you and the STs of what you’re hoping to do!
  • One of your Aspirations should be a step towards a longer-term goal.

Some sample Aspirations are included below:

  • Learn a secret about one of the Harpies
  • Develop a new Cruac ritual.
  • Buy out my competitor’s business

Uptime Aspirations should be limited in scope, and focused on goals that you can realistically accomplish.  Examples might include:

  • Perform a Cruac ritual in front of the Court
  • Talk to another Kindred about my “scientific” experiments
  • Pass a new piece of information on to a Harpy

Long-term goals generally benefit from being split into small, shorter-term Aspirations.  As an example, your character might want to become a Harpy – an achievable but significant undertaking.  You could break that down into the following Aspirations:

  • Tell a Harpy a secret you know
  • Get a Boon from a Harpy
  • Find out an embarrassing secret about a Harpy

And so on.  If you’re not sure how to break down a goal into Aspiration-sized chunks, the STs will be happy to offer advice.

Finally, it’s worth noting that not all Aspirations have to be positive.  Aspirations like “Succumb to frenzy in front of my rivals”, “Fail at an exorcism”, or “Lose a fight” are all valid Aspirations if that’s the story you want to tell!

Choosing new Aspirations:

When you've completed an Aspiration, you gain a Beat and it’s removed from your character sheet.  During your next downtime period you can choose a new Aspiration to replace it.  Aspirations should be emailed through to the Storyteller team before the downtime deadline, so you can potentially start working towards them in your downtime.

If you decide that an Aspiration is no longer suitable for your character, or impossible to complete, email the Storyteller team and we’ll help you pick a new one.

Development Notes

We want to remove the pressure of participating-to-earn-XP. We feel that players should be attending games or submitting downtimes to play the game, not solely to earn Experiences!

We also feel that the Beats system encourages thoughtful, reflective and considerate play. Inflicting Conditions on each other stops being antagonistic and instead can be fun and cooperative, giving each other opportunities to earn Beats. In our experience, live games are at their best when players think about how to further their character’s story in a risk-embracing way, so encouraging players to take risks and allow ‘bad’ things to happen to their character to earn Beats will keep things fun and exciting! Earning Beats by fulfilling Aspirations will hopefully encourage players to make sure their Aspirations are both relevant and achievable.

It’s not about rewarding the people who roleplay loudest - many of the methods of earning Beats do not require you to be loud or super confident or take all the ST’s attention. There’s an unlimited supply of Beats, so it’s not a competition!

Remember, not all methods of earning Beats need STs to be present at the time - for some you will be able to explain to us after the game what happened and we will very likely confirm it for you.

In short, we want to take off the pressure to turn up, but once you are in the room, playing Dark Metropolis, we want to give you as much incentive as possible to play hard, to be enthusiastic and engaged, and to help others gain Beats and be helped in return.

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