Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Not Amber: Chargen Baseline


In a multi-world (and multi-genre) game like Argent, this gets a bit more interesting. Certainly, you have a local baseline, "Scion of Argent" or whatnot, and it probably covers all the basics of a courtly fantasy upbringing - swordplay, horsemanship, poetry, chess and so on - but that's not the only case. Some characters grew up on other worlds, or have spent enough time in them to go native, and the baseline for such places is likely quite different. A child who has grown up on the neon-lit streets of a cyberpunk city probably knows very little about riding horses and has a very different idea about poetry, but he can also probably drive and operate a computer and a gun.[1]

This is not mechanically hard to represent. The creation of new baselines is a simple enough act of bookkeeping, and even games which don't explicitly call this out mechanically can do it implicitly by simply respecting backgrounds. However, I think it's underutilized for one simple reason - every single one of these new baselines is a powerful bit of worldbuilding.

One of the classic problems in Amber, which I anticipate also being true in Argent, is where the opposition comes from. If you establish a place as the center of the universe and give it maybe one comparable power, you've undercut some of the awesomeness of supporting every reality. In many games, powerful groups or individuals come from the infinite spread of worlds in order to liven up games. The problem is that usually those are born from the GM's mind, and they don't necessarily fit the game as the players envisioned it because they had no way to envision this element.


A good example of this can be found in a comic I like, Invincible. Among its many features is a world-spanning government organization that deals with serious threats, something akin to S.H.I.E.L.D.. It's role in the setting is interestingly gray, and if a character comes from this sort of setting, that organization might be a great element to bring into the game. They find out about other worlds ("dimensions", as they see it) and their agenda of protection and info/power gathering starts extending on those lines.[3]

The bottom line is that whatever makes that world interesting to the character should also make it interesting to the game as a whole. Sure, it creates the possibility of direct ties to the problem, and that's great, but it doesn't necessitate them. The personal relationship to the problem can take any number of forms.


This is also a fuzzy idea, but it's also not unreasonable to tie baselines to powers, especially if they're based on a firm understanding of the underlying concepts. This is equally true if powers are mystical things as it is if they're educational. Computer science is powerful magic if you can apply it to things outside of its normal sphere, for example.[4]

1 - This gets a little more hairy when the new baseline is "better" than the normal one, such as a world of courtly aristocrats AND computers.
2 - Need a better name

3 - It doesn't hurt that Invincible, like most supers, already has the idea of multiple worlds, but the model could work just as well with the NSA.





  2. "'Things have grown far worse,' she said, 'and the Shadows contain more horrors than any had thought....'"


  3. A very interesting read, thank you for sharing.

    One of the things I hope we get to do after Jason Durall completes "Lords of Gossamer and Shadow" is to work on a Supers game "Powered by Eric Wujcik's Diceless Role-Playing"

    Steve Russell
    Rite Publishing


    And I provide that in spades in my PBEM. Sure, Chaos is a problem, and some old, "missing" family members...but its the Old Powers, Old Gods and other stuff from before the Pattern and Chaos in shadow that are (one of)the real threats in my game.

