#02 : THE STARTING POINT OF THE SYSTEM

Marcelo and I have been discussing via Skype, looking for a starting point. And by that, I mean the possibility of thinking a way for a game system to be not only interesting, but also open enough so it can host characters that won't be able to coexist otherwise.

I'll begin this post with my motivation behind this thing we are creating, and I'll tell you all about characters coexisting later on. Ready? Go.

I was talking with some good old gamers in the RPG community via Facebook and one of them reminded me an old urban myth. It's about an RPG game based on "Sandman", where you start with an blank page, and you fill it with your character as you play along. The idea of having a blank page and make the system fully customizable got stuck in my head. And it became the main goal to reach during this process. But how can we do it?

If we want a character sheet to be fully customizable, we can't have a list of attributes or abilities. The game must be able to absorb and use the information and commonsense we all have regarding our navigational points in the world, meaning: we all know that going to the gym doesn't make you a specialist martial artist, and we all know that reading philosophy doesn't make you a medical doctor. So why do we need to specify this in our character sheets? Is it because of a fear from the Narrator about the players tricking the system?

So first problem: many rules exist because they assume we won't use commonsense in the game and/or the Narrator and the players are in opposite sides of the adventure. The old "I'm the Master and I can kill all of you! Muahaha!" a-la Dexter's Lab RPG episode.

We believe a game session must be a situation of common aid and conjoint narrative interaction. Not a fight between somebody telling the story and players struggling to survive the most random traps you can imagine. Aaand... maybe that's our heritage after eleven years of AD&D.

Second problem (and here comes what I said at the beginning): Marcelo raised a pretty good question: "How could Gandalf and Bilbo be the characters of two players in the game, in the first session?". A super-mage and a random halfling meet and go on an adventure. How can a system guarantee both players have the same opportunity of having fun and surviving? This is a question also targeted indirectly towards the MIN/MAX players (a.k.a. Munchkins), who look for every loophole in the system to "win" the game. Which also relates to the first problem I told you about.

As we can see, this two things are more or less interconnected. But there's still a third element: randomness. So let's play a game of detectives with some traditional rules. We have dices. And we have abilities and attributes. I'll be the best detective, ok? Let's imagine I'm Sherlock Fucking Holmes, ok? Imagine the system is "ability + atribute + 1d10" and if I roll a 10 I can dice again. GO: Sherlock is smoking his beloved pipe while watching a horrible scene, where a woman was stabbed in the back. No footprints, no signs of fighting. I decide to roll for investigation. I get a 10, then another 10, then another 10, then an 8. I get a total dice roll of 58. How is it possible that Sherlock Fucking Holmes doesn't solve the whole mystery with a natural 58 on a dice roll? The whole game should be solved. It's over. The Narrator should just tell me who the bad guy is and thank you for playing. Why not? What's the use of the dice if there's always a limit to its action, but uses a non-limited system?

These are not groundbreaking questions. These are things we have all thought for ourselves. So in the next post we'll be talking about the different options we are working in to solve this problems, and the new problems that arise from our particular answers.

Hint: we believe there's no need for dices nor character sheets.