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Help me save a darling system

Story Points

Story Points let a PC start without any backstory - instead you get 5 Story Points, and spend them to:

  • know an obscure fact
  • know a language/ culture
  • introduce an ally to help with the current mission
  • et c.

By the time players spend them all, they should have a chonky backstory which was always relevant to the current mission, so no info-dumping required.

  • If all your points were spent introducing cousins and siblings, we have established the character has a big family.
  • If all your points were spent knowing languages, and knowing highly obscure knowledge, we have established the character as a very clever, and well-travelled person.

Good features

  • Speeds up game (no lore dump!).
  • Players are less pissed about their characters dying early on session 2 they haven't invested the work of writing an essay on their origin story.
  • It's probably the most popular part of the game whenever I receive feedback from someone reading (not playing) the game.

Bad features

Nobody spends Story Points

It doesn't replenish, so players hoard the points, refusing to spend them.

So far, I've tried:

  • granting 1 new Story Point over a long Downtime period.
  • granting XP in return for spending Story Points
  • adding a one-page rules summary to the table, including notes on what you can spend Story Points on.
  • demanding all new characters come from the pool of allies created through Story Points, meaning that:
    • it's better to have more allies, so new people have a wider pool of characters to select from, and
    • new PCs are never entirely new - they're known to the party.

...nothing works. Everyone likes it in theory, nobody uses it in practice.

The only idea so far is massively raising XP rewards for spending Story Points.

Is there another rule, or a better way to present this system, which would encourage actual use?

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  • I have a similar-ish mechanic in Meteor, where you have "Undefined Skills" which you define on the fly. They're included for some similar reasons as you give, reduces analysis paralysis at character creation, gets the game running faster, and gives player a chance to suddenly declare they're good at something.

    I've not really had issues getting players to spend them, but most of my playtests have been in one shots, so I might just be side stepping the hoarding problem. The other potential difference is that I'm usually running high tensions, life or death scenarios, so being able to say, "actually I'm Skilled at this thing" to avoid a difficult roll (or just be able to roll it better) is valuable enough that players will jump on the chance.

    As for ideas to make players more likely to use them:

    • Most of the benefits are longer term, if you make one, "reveal you're good at a thing right now," that might temp players. Or some other immediately impactful option.
    • Auto-succeed or large bonus to a roll immediately on spending the point.
    • A "use it or lose it" system. You get 1 per session (or 1 per in game unit of time/downtime). They don't roll over.
    • Some combo of the above, pair a short term immediate benefit with a long term addition like it currently does.
      • For example, "My cousin Big Joan used to tell me all sorts of stories about hunting Mega-Weasels, that why I know their weak point is just below the jaw." The player has introduced their cousin, but also gets an immediate bonus to a roll, or reduction in TN (or however you system would handle such a thing).

    • Also, Meteor looks nice. I notice it's CC; are the source files available? It's pretty much impossible to build on a pdf without them, unless you want to spend a month resetting everything by hand.

    • If the XP rewards go up to 5XP per Story Point spent, it's enough to buy the first level of a Skill, so that could work.

      Auto-success is already in the system for knowledge-checks - still unused, but maybe it could be emphasized somewhere? ...though auto-success for attacks wouldn't make much sense. If someone's attacking a mimic for the third time, it wouldn't make much sense to gain a single attack bonus.

      I'd be worried that 'use it or lose it' would result in bad outcomes:

      • optimized players would be tripping over each other to spend points with any excuse, prompting a string of cousins to 'help tie my shoes'.
      • shy players would lose 5 XP.

      • That's a fair concern, although it sorta sounds like you're currently in a position where both shy and bold players aren't interacting with the system, so maybe getting just one group in is an improvement? Haha.

        If you want a sort of radically different approach to the same idea, take a look at how Burning Wheel does it. There's a Circles stat that characters have, and you roll it like you would any other check to try and declare you know someone useful. A failure likely means they exist but they hate you (or similar), so there's a built in check against using it constantly.

18 comments