Here’s something that the RPG system ORE, particularly as seen in Greg Stolze’s Reign, does super well. It rewards focus and it does it in a way that requires no book keeping. This is awesome. Its delivery is ephemeral but highly desirable by players. It doesn’t tie to character advancement (directly) or anything like that but still players steer right into it, on purpose, every single time. The thing is the Passions.

And you can jam these into any system and it will be just as awesome.

In Reign, each character has three Passions. They are:

Duty: this is the thing that you are compelled to do according to your personal ethics. “Keep the peace,” “Get the mail through,” “Destroy evil,” “Never compromise” … you get the idea. It can change, but infrequently.

Craving: this is the thing you are compelled to do because of your own weakness. “I like killing,” “Another beer couldn’t hurt,” “Blondes.” It never changes.

Mission: this is the thing you are compelled to do because it’s of immediate interest. It changes whenever it’s resolved, so it could easily change every session.

Now, whenever a character is involved in a conflict where dice get thrown, if the player can reasonably claim that one of these is progressed by the conflict, then she gets a die (a bonus to success basically). If she can narrate two in, two dice. All three? Awesome; three dice.

The important part of this is that it can happen as often as the player likes because it’s ephemeral — the only payoff is immediate and then it goes away. But the ramifications are deep — now what used to be just a brawl is actually about your sociopathy (“I like killing”). That simple brawl is now character-defining. We’re seeing the real thing now. And characters that have some nobility do well when they exercise it, if that’s their duty and so players, who love to succeed, get paid in social/psychological currencies for doing it. You’d be surprised at how many people will pay to succeed at something that will be detrimental to them. Yay I win! I won custody of the kid! Now I can stay home and not adventure forever or at least until college! Maybe that’s a bad example.

Anyway, that’s scaffolding. What I really want to erect here has to do with the last one, the Mission. In Reign the player sets this, but I stumbled on something really swell and obvious-looking: if the GM sets this, things become wonderful.

It’s generally accepted (with some dissent, of course, and we don’t need to cover that here) that railroading is bad. GM as storyteller manipulating players so their characters will behave according to script is boring and aggravating and sours milk, encourages fungal growth, and decays teeth. We all agree to that (well, “people like us” do, as my old philosophy prof would say). But what setting the Mission for the characters does is far more fertile. It more cuts a path than puts them on the rails.

If the GM sets the Mission for all characters to “Get the mail to Burnaby Mountain”, several things happen that are desirable:

The group, all having the same Mission, have a mechanically relevant common goal.

The GM is allowed to talk explicitly to the players through a mechanical medium about what she wants. No embarrassing meta-discussion, just a scene and then, “Here’s your Mission statements.”

The players are not in any way constrained to this objective. They just succeed slightly more often when the act in service of it. Or can convince the others that they are, which when generating narration, is practically the same thing. This is downright Darwinian.

Players can wonder well wide of the path, but they succeed a little more often when they are on it, and they succeed a little more often when they are trying to get back to it. This gives everyone the freedom to do as they please within the game world, which is sometimes desirable, but also gives the GM good reason to expect that certain points in her preparation will actually get revealed. The plot may not unfold as expected (which I love love love) but at least we have reason to expect that the objective will get pursued somehow.

This, it seems to me, is a powerful tool for most play styles — usually at the very least the GM is holding some secret that she wants to reveal. She wants the little thrill of seeing the players react with surprise and say, “Wow, cool.” But to deliver secrets, she needs the players to have their characters pursue them, and most existing mechanism are unreliable or unsatisfying (silent expectation being the most common).

So that’s my big Reign mod. Have the GM set the characters’ Missions.

–BMurray