[Fall of Prometheus] Demigods, Karma, and Powers

[Sarah Gould]

Fall of Prometheus is a game about fallen gods trying to regain heaven, struggling along the way with conceptions of morality and mortality. I wrote earlier about my first playtest, and I've modified the rules somewhat since then. Sorry for the length, but I've no game text yet to link to!

The Director chooses or creates the setting and frames the scenes, and the rest of the players collaborate in suggesting conflicts and narrating their resolutions, generally controlling their own characters but also NPC extras and the environment that are involved in the conflicts. The Director can also suggest conflicts and control important NPC's. Issues with credibility are taken up with conflicts, and any uncontested narration is what actually is/happens in the game world.

During character creation, players create demigods which are mortal (though powerful) versions of their original god forms. Essentially each player must answer these questions about her character: 1) What was he like as a god? What were his responsibilities? 2) Why did he fall? 3) What does he miss most about heaven? 4) What is his earthly form and powers does he have? 5) What provokes him to use his powers? 6) What makes him hesitate to use his powers?

Specifically, this entails choosing a name and epithet, an avatar (whatever mythical shape the character takes on earth), scores for each of his five Principles (Might, Agility, Cleverness, Will, and Presence), and several supernatural Powers. Each Power has an associated Provocation and Hesitation: situations in which the Power 'must' be used and 'cannot' be used respectively. These should be used as flags to create situations in which the characters must overcome their default behaviors in order to reach their goals.

The game uses conflict resolution resolved with opposing dice pools. Someone suggests a conflict and everyone involved agrees on the stakes and the Scope. Scope is a specific value representing how important the conflict is to the world and/or the story. You then roll a number of d6's equal to the value of the relevant Principle: 4's, 5's, and 6's count as successes, and 6's are re-rolled. Any related bonuses and penalties you choose to apply are flipped as coins; heads on bonus coins count as additional successes and heads on penalty coins count against your successes. The difference between your success total and your opponent's is your success value, which must be at least equal to the Scope in order to win. Roll/flip everything again if needed, accumulating success values until someone wins. Everyone then narrates how the stakes get resolved.

I like Manaka's Experience system: it gives the winner a Positive Experience and the loser a Negative Experience. Positive Experiences can only be applied to a related conflict as a bonus by spending Karma, while applying Negative Experiences as penalties awards Karma. The idea is that in order to get into heaven, the players must win conflicts; but to win the important conflicts they will have to lose some of the minor ones. Losing conflicts should always complicate matters, increasing the ultimate cost of getting back into heaven. Players are encouraged to make life difficult for their characters by applying penalties to conflicts, netting Karma that can be used to get bonuses later on.

I still have to work out the details of the conflict resolution system, especially since I'm new to conflict resolution in general. A lot of specifics need working out, but I'm especially looking for ideas on Scope, other sources of bonuses and penalties (if any), conflict resolution aftermath (especially the whole Karma/Experience thing I have going), and Powers. I have almost no idea how Powers should work, except for some vague notion of making them like d20 feats or even much-simplified Ars Magica spells. I would greatly appreciate any ideas, critiques, or comments on these or other issues.

[Anders Larsen]

Hi, and welcome to The Forge!

One way to do power is to let the player invent there own powers, and then put a number on like:

Control water 3

Every time the player uses this power in a conflict, he will get 3 extra dices. There should properly be a downside of using powers. Maybe it will affect the karma if he fails in a conflict where he uses a power.


- Anders