Tips

Narrative Control

The control of the narrative belongs to the players and thus they can do whatever they want with it, including granting narrative privileges to one or more players, which they could also revoke at any time.

The decisions of which rules will be used, how they will be interpreted, if and how they will be changed, etc., also belong to all players, but they may elect a referee to make these decisions alone.

All players have an equal say about everything but the conscious thoughts and intentions, and voluntary decisions and actions of a core character, which are under the control of the player who created it.

Characters and Traits

Anything can be a character: an animal, a person, a group of people, a place, an institution, an event, etc. However, there is no need to create a character every time a core character finds some form of opposition. Characters are for those important and recurring elements of the narrative. For everything else, a difficulty level is often enough.

As long as there is some kind of standard along all characters, especially core characters, essential traits can range from a single trait that describes a character’s background, occupation, specialization, and personality, to many traits describing specific attributes, abilities, skills, etc. Just don’t make an essential trait that covers all areas and activities with no flaws.

For all non-essential traits, it is very important to describe the circumstances in which they may or may not apply.

The costs in trait points, trait level limits, and other optional character and trait rules are guidelines to make characters somewhat balanced. They may be broken or ignored, especially for non-core characters.

Tests

The players should make a test when they disagree about what should happen in the narrative. They should ask a question when they do not know or do not want to decide themselves what should happen in the narrative.

The narrative control gained through a test should be restricted to the situation that asked for a test, which is usually some kind of conflict, and its direct consequences. If details are added, they must be related to that same situation and its consequences.

Though optional, the rule of inapt traits is of high importance. It allows the characters to participate in most tests, even if their essential traits are only marginally related to the conflict in question. However, it should not allow the characters to make any kind of test with any essential trait.

Damage and its recovery do not have to work uniformly. Damage may be used to represent how a competitor gets closer to defeating its adversary, and may be recovered as soon as the competition ends; in the same game, it may be used to represent an injury that lingers and takes months or even years to be fully healed.