Reading Against the Darkmaster Part 2

 I kept the subchapters about Passions, Drive and advancement for the second installment, because I want to stray a little further afield here.

In vsD, there's an interesting relationship between Passions/Drive and Achievements/Experience. Both are about getting yourself into trouble and feed into character development, with Passions being more about each individual character and achievements being more about the experiences the party makes as a whole.

Passions and Drive

Usually, a character has three Passions: A Nature ("I'll never harm a creature that hasn't tried to harm me first"), an Allegiance ("I'd give my life for the rightful king") and a Motivation ("I'll punish Morgar the Mage for his evil deeds!"). These can and probably will change, which is simply a matter of player decision (however, it is suggested to give each Passion a chance to shine before scratching it).

Each time you get yourself into trouble on behalf of one of your Passions - or when you bring it into play in an entertaining way, like having your character question it in a crucial moment -, you get a point of Drive.

Drive is your basic Luck/Fate Point/Bennie ressource. It allows you to reroll dice with a bonus, get a substancial bonus in a skill for a whole scene, save your life or at least a limb by downgrading a critical hit, or even to treat a roll as a natural 100 on a D100. Each point of Drive you spend this way goes into your "Heroic Path", and once that reaches 10, you have earned a Milestone. A Milestone can be spent for certain special advances: The most prosaic use is to get 10 extra Hit Points, but Milestones are also the only way to raise core characteristics, and they allow you to upgrade magic items in your possession by making them more powerful or granting them totally new powers (which basically represents you mastering the item).

This basically means that to turn your Passions into character advancement, you must get yourself into trouble with them AND spend the Drive points earned to be awesome. Which means that Drive points spent are not lost, quite the contrary: by spending them, you turn them into character advancement currency.

There's two specific things I like about this system:

For one thing, it looks like it will create a nice rhythm of getting into trouble and getting out of it by spending Drive to the hilt, and it achieves it without getting the GM involved (beyond her role as a potential arbiter about handing out Drive). A lot of systems, like Fate and Modphius' 2D20, create back-and-forth economies of Fate points between players and GM, and frankly, I don't like it. It means more bookkeeping for the GM and always seems to pose problematic questions about when the GM should spend points to make the character's life difficult and when it is just par for the course. Keeping the Drive point economy about the characters and their Passions is also a way to make sure that the spotlight is on them.

Also, the system manages to tie Drive points into advancement without forcing the players to decide whether they want to get a short-term advantage or save their points for character advancement - they always get both. In that, it's actually pretty much the equivalent of the houserule I introduced in my Numenera campaign. And it also makes sure that the players that tend to put themselves into the spotlight more often don't get much of an undue advancement, because Drive and Milestones are more about the small cherry on top, while the core levelling is done by, well, levelling, which is a separate system, namely

 

Achievements and Experience Points

At the beginning of the campaign, the group decides which achievements shall be worth XP. The usual core list is "Travelling somewhere you've never seen before", "facing Dangerous foes and/or situations" and "Completing a mission, quest or story arc". There's additional suggestions, like discovering secrets or treasures, suffering a serious wound or interacting with another named character in a meaningful way, which can be added freely, thereby suggesting the main themes of the campaign. Each time a character meets one of these achievements, her player can checkmark it to get an XP for it at the end of the session. I'd surmise that most of the time, all the characters will get about the same amount of XP for a session that way (since they'll travel together, face foes and dangers together and complete their quests together), so levelling will probably be pretty balanced, but there's still some incentive to play to certain themes and get yourself into danger to earn XP.

After that, it's pretty much your usual skill-focussed levelling system: You reach a new level, you spend a number of points determined by your Vocation in your skill categories. (As I mentioned, characteristics are only increased by spending Milestones).

Again, this looks like a pretty solid system to incentivise players to do interesting things, without straying too far into the dangerous territory of handing out XP for "good roleplaying" (shudder). I can see this working nicely in a long campaign, and I'm pretty sure the Heroic Path and Milestones can be used for all kinds of little thematic advances.

 

That's it for today, next time, we'll get to the actual resolution system.