Adding Aspects

I wrote a piece for Cannibal Halfling about superhero games*, and in the process of writing the piece I learned about a game called Masks, which combines the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG with some FATE-isms. Specifically, the game uses Aspects in an otherwise "trad" system. I already had talked in my previous devlog about how Kagegami High also uses Aspects.

[*This link won't work until the post goes live on the 7th of May.]

I'd been thinking of putting Aspects into Goth Witches for a while, but Masks made me want to upend my current design more thoroughly. I began to draw a new character sheet, also taking into account my metacurrency thoughts, and realized there were some problems with adding Aspects into my game. Most notably, Aspects come into conflict with Ghostbusters / D6-style Talents; they can be very redundant.

[By the way, if you're feeling a bit stuck with your RPG design, try making a character sheet that has all the things you think you'll need on it. It might bring some clarity to what you're doing.]

If you're an RPG fan, you probably already know what FATE Aspects are, but maybe not D6 Talents. Basically, in D6 system games, characters have certain talents that correspond to certain stats. A character can have a "Computer Whiz" talent that corresponds to their Intelligence stat, and in Ghostbusters this would mean that they roll as many dice as they have in their Intelligence stat, plus another three dice when they're doing something related to computers.

You're maybe seeing the conflicts here; something notable enough to be a D6 Talent would probably also be notable enough to be a FATE aspect, or at least there would be some overlap. Or maybe not; FATE does, after all, have Skills, which one could say are analogous to Talents in this context. Perhaps the issue is moreso the weird kludge of mechanics that having a dice pool bonus and FATE Aspects ends up creating.

Something that does make me think there needs to be one or the other is that, in Goth Witches, all of the player characters are very similar; teenage girls who practice witchcraft. Players might have a hard time thinking of Aspects that make their characters feel truly distinct, especially if everyone wants to be similar flavors of goths and / or punks. In a highschool setting, being a "Computer Whiz" would probably function as an Aspect more so than it would in the adult world, where knowing how to do computer stuff doesn't have as much social weight as it would in a fictional highschool setting.

Making the new character sheet further confirmed to me that I need to figure out the "Juice Points" and "Level Dice" stuff, because they're just too redundant. There's a lot of stuff I need to work through and think about. I began to panic a bit when the West Virginia Trans Rights bundle went live, because I realized a ton of people were downloading my game and I already had so many new things I wanted to change about it.

Thankfully, I'm going to finish some posts I've been working on for various websites in the near-ish future, which should give me the clean slate to return to my game and make a significant update.

By the way, I don't love how the current character sheet looks either, but I haven't learned Affinity Publisher yet and that will be a whole endeavor.

Completely unrelated, but I'm thinking of adding Dysnomia as a Goddess of Lawlessness. I think she'll be distinct enough from Eris, Goddess of Discord.