Re: from me this time...hansandersenJanuary 28 2011, 06:05:26 UTC
Here's my grab bag of ideas:
1) Maybe when the stakes are about helping someone else out (rather than directly Fighting The Darkness), all your dice shrink in size - from d8 to d6, or d6 to d4. You'll lose a lot of those conflicts; you can't convince other people to be happy, you can't solve their problems for them. It's not your job to. But it's the right and good thing to try. So you accumulate some d4 and maybe d6 fallout along the way; minor setbacks, old memories brought to the fore, a few scrapes and bruises. Get some good dialog going.
And then hoard the fallout dice earned from helping others out, and cash it in for BIG FAT DICE when you go head to head against The Darkness in town. The energy you spend reaching out and empathizing (NOT fixing, just reaching out) is paid back big time. So you don't just roll into town, kill the baddies, and move on; you have a mechanical - AND a thematic - reason to get to know the locals first. You're a hero because you care. You care because you're a hero.
2) A lot of games with humanity scores climax at that point where the light-or-dark decision must be made, often during the end of their Heroic origin story. And a lot of heroes end up with scars from their initiation. Not old wounds, but memories, mementos, and life-experiences. Ged's scar, Jedi Luke's robo-hand & Obi-Wan-style lightsaber, the Elfstone that Aragorn worked so long and hard to be worthy of.
So even though you're a hero, you might still have a few d4 traits, not because they are weaknesses, but because they let the characters empathize with weakness. They are symbolic of past weaknesses that you overcame in your backstory (a fragment of which is told in Initiation.) You call them into play when you want to incur fallout in an interpersonal scene so you can cash it in later.
3) Maybe instead of post-town Reflection, you do an Initiation scene for each character EACH SESSION, and build the story of how your character came to be the fully-formed hero that he or she is during the main chapter body of every session, from the first session onward. In fact, turn initiation on its head - DON'T DO INITIATION until the start of the SECOND session.
1) Maybe when the stakes are about helping someone else out (rather than directly Fighting The Darkness), all your dice shrink in size - from d8 to d6, or d6 to d4. You'll lose a lot of those conflicts; you can't convince other people to be happy, you can't solve their problems for them. It's not your job to. But it's the right and good thing to try. So you accumulate some d4 and maybe d6 fallout along the way; minor setbacks, old memories brought to the fore, a few scrapes and bruises. Get some good dialog going.
And then hoard the fallout dice earned from helping others out, and cash it in for BIG FAT DICE when you go head to head against The Darkness in town. The energy you spend reaching out and empathizing (NOT fixing, just reaching out) is paid back big time. So you don't just roll into town, kill the baddies, and move on; you have a mechanical - AND a thematic - reason to get to know the locals first. You're a hero because you care. You care because you're a hero.
2) A lot of games with humanity scores climax at that point where the light-or-dark decision must be made, often during the end of their Heroic origin story. And a lot of heroes end up with scars from their initiation. Not old wounds, but memories, mementos, and life-experiences. Ged's scar, Jedi Luke's robo-hand & Obi-Wan-style lightsaber, the Elfstone that Aragorn worked so long and hard to be worthy of.
So even though you're a hero, you might still have a few d4 traits, not because they are weaknesses, but because they let the characters empathize with weakness. They are symbolic of past weaknesses that you overcame in your backstory (a fragment of which is told in Initiation.) You call them into play when you want to incur fallout in an interpersonal scene so you can cash it in later.
3) Maybe instead of post-town Reflection, you do an Initiation scene for each character EACH SESSION, and build the story of how your character came to be the fully-formed hero that he or she is during the main chapter body of every session, from the first session onward. In fact, turn initiation on its head - DON'T DO INITIATION until the start of the SECOND session.
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