My brain is a little addled with the mechanics at the moment. I want to do a read-through of Warhammer Fantasy RP before continuing. It’s been suggested reading from a few different folks, so I’ll hit that up. Maybe find an actual play podcast.
So what am I gonna talk about if I’m not exploring more mechanics? Well, a lot of the systems I’m working off of here have some incredible ways of bringing your players’ characters into the game world. D&D 4e brings us Backgrounds (small snippets of story with a very minor mechanical benefit) and Themes (direct connection to game world, with tiered mechanical benefits throughout advancement). For the setting books (Dark Sun, Neverwinter, Shadowfell, etc) this is actually very well done, and IMO blows previous editions out of the water. There’s a lot of ways to tell the Dungeon Master where you want the story to go, and ways for the DM to guide players.
What About… Not D&D?
13th Age introduces the One Unique Thing (driving force for character development, with no mechanical effect), Icons (direct relationships with high-powered setting elements), and Backgrounds (skills, redux – name your skills anything you want and apply in story-driven ways). Edge of the Empire gives the players Obligation (a powerful method to drive players in certain directions, mechanically and story-wise) and Motivation (simply an extra roleplay hook with no mechanical impact). Smallville uses a very complex method called Pathways that makes Visio look like a necessary RPG aid. There’s also precedent for using Fiasco (which is a wonderful game in and of itself) to generate backgrounds and story links for the characters – I did it for my PbP Star Wars game, and @GeekyLindsay did it for her Pathfinder game.
Why am I waxing all poetical about all these wildly different story developing systems? Which one do I want to include with Edge of the Dungeon? Heck. All of them. And none of them. The basic system should be perfect for one-shot hack-n-slash dungeon crawls or Team Deathmatch – just drop the pretenses of roleplay and use the numbers. Old school adventures? Call the game elements things like “Backstab”, “Nystul’s Magic Aura”, and “Turn Undead” – don’t add any fiddly plot handles and just let the characters be themselves. Or use one of the half dozen variations on the pre-game character development tools, and enjoy!
Is It… Legal?
Some of these tools are easy to pick up. In the preview document for Fantasy Heroic Roleplaying (and, I assume, the final book), the designers specifically call out other systems for their ideas. A lot of these referenced games (I think) have a CC license on them. If I go in the direction of making this a commercial venture, I will definitely have to make sure all my ducks are in a row before including rules text on these story-building methods.
Next time, I’m gonna build a character, using the current conceptual ruleset. After I’ve read a bunch of WFRP. So might be a bit. Then after that, I think I’ll try to hit up a live play example. We’ll get there, folks. We will.
Previous Posts
- Love Letter to D&D – Where I outline the intent of the as-yet-unnamed Edge of the Dungeon
- Edge of the Dungeon Part 1 – Core Mechanic and Skill advancement
- Edge of the Dungeon Part 2 – Starting Hit Points, Defenses, and other Career features