RPG Design Patterns

Provide players with a character aspect that mechanically rewards them for role-playing a previously declared personality type.

Humanity, Path, Spiritual Attributes

Alignment

The Idiom pattern rewards players for accurate portrayal of a character’s persona. A game follows the Idiom pattern if it does the following:

1. Provides characters with a standard of behavior. (Whether that standard is chosen by the character’s player, another player, the entire gaming group, or the game itself is irrelevant to identifying the pattern.)
2. Gives characters a gauge whose value raises or lowers based on how well the characters’ actions conform to that standard. Commonly, values are numerical but this is not demanded by the pattern.

Idioms may be associated with attributes, traits, skills, or any other graduated gauge used in a game. Although the Idiom pattern does not require it, some games also restrict the situations to which an Idiom’s value applies, such as when a character’s morals or emotions come into play. Thus, players are encouraged to seek out situations in which the characteristic(s) apply.

The idea is to give players rational and potent reasons to portray their characters with real human emotions and personalities. Players following Idiom guidelines will continually seek out opportunities to act on their characters’ emotions even if those actions would appear irrational to an outside observer. The Idiom pattern amply rewards players that pay attention to their character’s passions and beliefs, so even near-suicidal actions to attain selfless goals can make sense from a game mechanics standpoint.

You should consider the Idiom pattern for your game if your goals include:

1. A desire to have players imbue their characters with strong beliefs and/or complex human emotions,
2. A willingness to give character “feelings” a real mechanical impact on game play.

The Idiom pattern is a potent means to encourage players to portray character beliefs and emotions. In fact, players will often remain faithful to them even in circumstances where doing so has detrimental consequences to the character’s well being. Such actions can have great dramatic impact, because they make a strong statement about what makes a character “tick.”

Idioms can easily become a central focus of any game incorporating them. This quality can be quite useful if your game is about some core moral or emotional issue or strives to make each character’s persona unique. However, its use could be detrimental to games having other agendas. As Jack Aidley observed in his game Great Ork Gods, “No Ork Is A Unique And Special Butterfly.” In such a game, giving an ork an Idiom would merely distract play from the mayhem and destruction that the game is all about.

To ensure that an Idiom has a fair representation of a player’s role-playing history with his character, opportunities for Idiom values decreasing should approximately match the opportunities for it increasing. Incidentally, that does not mean that the values actually will decrease as often as they increase because player choice becomes the deciding factor on which direction it will go. What is important is that real choices be presented to players so that they have actual decisions to make concerning their character’s actions.

If the Idiom is a resource, you should also strive to make role-playing opportunities for Idiom gain approximately equal from character to character. That is, a character with one type of Idiom should not automatically get opportunities to raise his Idiom by twice the value as characters with differing Idioms over an extended period. (If all characters have the same Idiom in your game, this point is moot.) Doing so will unfairly advantage the character with the rapidly advancing Idiom merely because of the Idiom he chose rather than from any role-playing merit. The character will be more successful because he will have greater resources from which to draw and the players of other characters may feel cheated. Unfortunately, you may find it difficult or impossible to balance the frequency of Idiom raising opportunities among all Idiom types. If this is the case, you can alleviate the problem by varying the number of points that can be raised by a single Idiom raising opportunity or, if Idiom values are raised through some kind of random roll, by varying the odds of increasing a character’s Idiom value.

Likewise, you should strive to make the opportunities to apply the Idiom’s value approximately equal from player to player. Failure to do so will again unfairly favor one Idiom type over another, which could easily lead to many players selecting the same Idioms for their characters. If you want your game to support many different Idiom types, this can be a difficult issue to balance properly. Unfortunately, such issues are likely to remain hidden until some significant play testing of the Idiom system has been undertaken. Fixes for this problem include narrowing the applicability of “overly active” Idioms and expanding the applicability of others.

In a game about mythological heroes, the game could give each character an Idiom Attribute named Fate. One possible Idiom for such a game would be the following:

If you choose to follow this Idiom, you will portray your character with an eye toward his eventual, inevitable demise. Your character’s primary virtue is courage and steadfastness in the face of great adversity. His greatest hope is to meet a fitting end that will do honor to his heritage. As such, he admires those who stand in battle and continue the struggle even after all hope appears lost.

Your tragic character will start his career with the inheritance of an ancestral weapon whose form you will choose to fit your character concept. If you decide it is magical or made of unusual or exceptional materials then it will always start out broken, being handed down from some great hero in your lineage. You can have the weapon re-forged as soon as you find someone capable of restoring it to its original glory and are yourself able to afford the required fee. Alternately, you and your Game Master may decide to have your ancestral weapon be lost or stolen, ripe for re-acquisition when your character attains sufficient power to seek it. The important restriction here is that your character does not possess a weapon with capabilities far beyond his ability to master or retain. The ancestral weapon is not an endowment meant to elevate your character’s power far above the norm, but rather an interesting accessory intended to embellish your character’s persona.

A tragic hero will stand and fight no matter what the odds and will always revere his heritage. As such the following actions entitle a tragic hero to a roll to determine if his Fate increases by one point:

1. Battling courageously until his Hit Points fall to zero.
2. Doing some great honor to his ancestors, such as refusing to take permanent possession of a weapon of greater material worth than his ancestral one.

Similarly, the following actions will force a tragic hero to make a roll to determine if his Fate decreases by one point:

1. Retreating from battle no matter what the reason. (This includes “backing up” after having been directly assaulted so that the character can shoot his bow from the “back line.” Tragic heroes handle their own melee affairs, thank you very much. Giving ground to draw an assailant along in order to gain some combat advantage is another thing entirely. Such actions incur no penalty.)
2. Dishonoring his ancestors in any way, such as failing to avenge any insult to his parentage or haggling too much over the price of re-forging his ancestral weapon.

When Fate Applies If a tragic hero’s Fate is positive, it applies to the following:

1. All Attack Rolls when wielding his ancestral weapon.
2. All Attack and Defense rolls in any battle where he continues fighting after his Hit Points have fallen below ½ maximum or where a comrade has fallen at his side due to injuries.

If his Fate is negative, it applies to all the following:

1. All Attack Rolls when wielding a weapon other than a family heirloom.
2. Rolls where he is not in a desperate circumstance. That is, when his Hit Points are above ½ maximum and no comrade has fallen at his side due to injuries. Even so, a negative Fate will never apply to a character’s Attack rolls when wielding his ancestral weapon.

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My Life with Master is a game where players portray deformed and unappreciated minions of Evil Masters. All characters have a “Love” attribute which players can raise by having their characters seek out and interact with their in-town “Connections” to demonstrate their inner humanity. The Idiom is crucial to the successful completion of the game, because accumulating enough Love is the only way a minion can disobey and overthrow his Master. The game ensures that every player has an equal number of opportunities to interact with Connections by keeping a fairly tight control over the sequence of scenes (see the Structured Story pattern), so all players have equal opportunities to raise their Love.

The Riddle of Steel has six “Spiritual Attributes” that follow the Idiom Trait pattern. (See the description of The Riddle of Steel in the Game Summaries section for why these are traits rather than attributes according to the definitions in this book.) These traits are “Conscience”, “Destiny,” “Drive,” “Faith,” “Luck,” and “Passion.” Each of these has specific rules describing when the trait ranks are raised and lowered and for when and how the trait values are applied. Players have some control over the applicability of Drive, Faith, and Passion. Destiny might also fall under player control, depending on the flexibility of the “Seneschal” (Game Master). In any case, Drive applies when seeking some player defined “higher purpose.” Faith deals with the character’s religious beliefs, which are detailed by the player. Passion describes some great personal love or hatred toward a specific person or entity that the player elects. Passion applies when performing actions related to the beloved or despised subject. Players draw from all six Spiritual Attributes to improve their abilities (see the Resource pattern). This all-important characteristic makes Spiritual Attributes even more of a central focus of the game. The only way to raise Spiritual Attribute values is to demonstrate them through role-play.

Sorcerer characters are powerful humans that summon and bind demons to their will. The game gives each character a “Humanity” attribute that loosely follows the Idiom pattern. Exactly what Humanity represents is up to the gaming group, so players can explore various moral issues of their choosing. Humanity represents the very core of the game. “What are you willing to give up to get what you want?” Mechanically, Humanity is risked whenever demons are contacted, summoned, or bound and can be lost by inhumane acts (whatever the group decides constitutes inhumanity). If Humanity drops to zero, the player loses control of the character. The attribute can be raised by banishing sufficiently powerful demons and by acting humane (again, depending on the group’s definition of what constitutes humanity). But, the analysis of Humanity is complicated by the fact that it is also conflicted. High values are good sometimes, but low values are good at others. So, it is somewhat inaccurate to describe a bonus to Humanity as a reward, making any classification of it as an Idiom problematic. Note that Humanity may also satisfy the Resource pattern, since it is gambled anytime a character contacts, summons, or binds a demon and gambling can be interpreted as a form of “spending.” But, that is also debatable since it can be argued that performing any of these acts is inhumane and therefore these kinds of gambles fall squarely under the Idiom pattern already.