Backstory mechanic

[DevP]

My game (that space-western thing) may want to emphasize:
past inethical actions (subsequent angst and desire for redemption)
rivals from your past
past illegal action (and the law catching up with you)
...more general consequences for actions.

I may also want to encourage people to spontaneously create some backstory, and take some liberties with narration. (This system is supposed to be a thin layer that goes above/with whatever mechanical system people play with. I've sort of pitched this before...) So:

(a) Spontaneously create a Connection or Resource from your past; GM gives you one Favor point secretly upon its creation, and when invoked to be brought into play, the GM may add 0 or 1 points of Favor

(b) Spontanously create a past Exploit (bit of Backstory); GM will assign 1-3 points of Bounty (if it was an illegal action), Payback (if you personally crossed someone), or Jinx (if neither apply). Whenever invoked, the GM may add 0-3 points secretly to the player's score.

Invocation of Exploits gives you a slight edge in resolution, or lets you "renarrate" some aspect form the task. ("I flashback to the firefight at Raven Port; the tactic I used last time - firing from the bridge - might work this time around.")

(c) In-game events may give Exploits to players for actions they've done, or Connections they've gained.

(d) It is assumed that Exploits may have some kind of "resolution". Dealing with a rival, making amends for some past deed, or cutting ties to some favor you owe - in which case, the "exploit" is strucken from play, and you can increase some relevant attribute to show for it. This sort of encourage taking negative sort of "exploits" that can be resolved, resulting in some sort of character advancement.

(e) Each of those values previously mentioned - Favor, Payback, Bounty, Jinx - would normally go down by 1 in a turn where they are not invoked. Each of them will have some thresholds, at which they will come into play. (i.e. once Payback hit 20, you will have a serious encounter with a past rival; once Bounty hits 5, you will have issues with the Militia).

In the case of Jinx, it allows for "bad luck" to occur in some mechanical way (other then pure GM fiat, even if I'm describing it's invocations). In the case of Favors, it was more of  way to keep track of how often players were using their connections, and a reminder to make sure that their contacts and friends are complicatiosn in themselves. As for Payback and Bounty, I'm trying to give at atmosphere that the law or your enemies will generally catch up with you in some deterministic fashion.

It's easy to see that the more often that a past exploit/connection is invoked, the more quickly it "hits back" in-play. My reasoning is that the frequency of your use of the exploit shows how central it is to your life, in a sort of backwards way. If you can frequently use your Criminal Exploits to give you an edge, then those exploits were probably an important part of your life; it suggests that your actions in general have attracted enough criminal attention that eventual clashes with the Law are inevitable.

Thoughts?

[DevP]

Some other issues:

Will a mechanic like this bring issues of the past too much into play? Might it overrun play of the story with the frequent interpolation of past elements into current play? (I don't want every session to become dealing with "this week's old monster-in-the-closet"..)

A different way of managing these "exploits" might be to allow them to be used, once per episode, to change or introduce some novel fact into play (suddenly create cover or validate some tactic or such), not strictly in a mechanical/resolution way. In this fashion, there wouldn't be a "penalty" for invoking aspects into play, only for creating them in-play. This isn't penalizing the players so much, but trying to creating an impetus for past aspects to come to light (other than through my intervention).

[DevP]

(I'm starting to kind of waffle a bit...)

I'm trying out that idea of using mechanics to emphasize certain themes in gameplay. For example, escaping the law (hence I keep a secret running tally of their "Bounty", representing how valuable they are to law enforcement and such; depending on their actions, this will go up or down).

I'm starting to wonder which kinds of things are best done mechanistically or not. I'd like opinions on these, too (in addition to my scraps of ideas up there):

evading the law
(Bounty)

making/keeping enemies
(Payback: at some threshold, you will encounter old foes again)

friends with strings attached
(Favor: at some threshold, they will want favors back)

eventual karmic jinx
(Jinx: because it's funny when bands of outlaws have unfortunate things happen to them an inopportune times)

the (perhaps inevitable) consequences of one's actions, leading to some kind of resolution (Payback + Bounty; but do I want to focus to much on this kind of determinism?)

Thoughts are appreciated. I'm wondering if I should keep this as a thin meta-system for fleshing out characters, or just push ahead with the other aspects of my setting.

[Tony Irwin]

It sounds like it could be hard to keep track of all the different things for each character. Have you considered having a more universal mechanic underlying it? Like when the player is making up good things for themselves they pay dice/points/coins to the GM. The GM can later use these to represent any kind of opposing force that seems appropriate - old enemies, bounty hunters, curses, bad credit...

Decipher's Lord of the Rings CCG does this well - the player pays tokens for all the good cards he plays (members of the fellowship, allies, weapons, provisions, fortuitous events) then the opposing player can spend those tokens to pay for any evil cards in response (monters, bad luck, bad weather conditions, evil spells, whatever). So although both sides can use an incredible variety of cards, its the same currency that they're both playing off.

Another alternative might be scales just like you have them:

evasion/bounty

conman/enemies

good luck/jinx

So like the player can take permanent bonus to their evasion ability (and justify it through narrating how they have a long history of this skill and used it in previous illegal exploits), but then they get an equal bonus to their bounty number which is for the GM to use against them. Gives the player a lot more control over what is going to happen in the game (If I don't use my conman ability then I never need to worry about enemies) and gives more direction to the GM for what kind of complications to introduce - I guess the challeng ther is can you come up with a set of descriptors that will really sum up the genre and feel like they make sense to the players without them feeling that you're limiting them. I suppose you could leave a couple of blank ones for players to fill in themselves?

Invocation of Exploits gives you a slight edge in resolution, or lets you "renarrate" some aspect form the task. ("I flashback to the firefight at Raven Port; the tactic I used last time - firing from the bridge - might work this time around.")

(c) In-game events may give Exploits to players for actions they've done, or Connections they've gained.

(d) It is assumed that Exploits may have some kind of "resolution". Dealing with a rival, making amends for some past deed, or cutting ties to some favor you owe - in which case, the "exploit" is strucken from play, and you can increase some relevant attribute to show for it. This sort of encourage taking negative sort of "exploits" that can be resolved, resulting in some sort of character advancement.

Have you considered how you'll define Exploits on the character sheet? Like would it be a sentence "That time I took out the Galactic Bank"? Or something else?

Also about character advancement, sounds good but I was wondering if whether in the genres you're looking at the resolution usually takes up the entire book/movie. If you have a nice meaty exploit it could be the material for 3 or 4 sessions if not a whole campaign. Jabba causes trouble for Han right through the 3 Star Wars movies, it doesn't get resolved till the last one and when it does Han's character is effectively "closed" - he starts a new life with a wife and good friends. Exploits that provide for whole character plot arcs might be an option to think about.

[Chris Goodwin]

It sounds like it could be hard to keep track of all the different things for each character. Have you considered having a more universal mechanic underlying it? Like when the player is making up good things for themselves they pay dice/points/coins to the GM. The GM can later use these to represent any kind of opposing force that seems appropriate - old enemies, bounty hunters, curses, bad credit...

I do something like this in my Dramatis Personae game.  I'll quote:  

Backstory: These can represent things like contacts, an old flame, old army buddies showing up, basically anything that is in the character's background that doesn't always come up in play. A character can spend one Drama Point during play (which comes back at the end of the adventure) to bring in a Backstory element for one adventure, or three points (permanently) to make the Backstory element a permanent part of the character (and thus available in future adventures). A Backstory can't contradict a character's already described background without Director approval ("Hey! I thought you told us your ex-wife was dead!" "She is!" "Then who's that?!").

If a character needs a Trait, and no one else has it as their Schtick or a Talent, a character can permanently spend three Drama Points to gain an additional Talent as part of his Backstory. ("It just so happens I was a demolitions expert in the Army. I can defuse this bomb!") When spending the Drama Points, note the new Talent on the character sheet. Again, these can't contradict anything already in the character's background.

Backstory elements can't be used to improve Traits the character already has, only to gain ones the character may have had all along.

It's intended more for things like the aforementioned demolitions expert, or when the GM brings in a character who "just so happens" to be someone's old flame, or ex-spouse, or old enemy, etc.

[DevP]

Have you considered how you'll define Exploits on the character sheet? Like would it be a sentence "That time I took out the Galactic Bank"? Or something else?

One line could be enough - extra "exploits" could add extra detail - and this way they could fit on a character sheet.

It sounds like it could be hard to keep track of all the different things for each character. Have you considered having a more universal mechanic underlying it?
...
Another alternative might be scales just like you have them:
evasion/bounty
conman/enemies
good luck/jinx

On one hand: I'd rather evasion be a product of play, rather than a skill as such; I'm starting to see the advantage in unifying the "karma pools", and using my discretion to determine how it plays out.

However, it does give me an idea: I could use the players' choice in skill sets as a basis of their initial karma pool. I was considering removing the character creation limits, and letting players select their own skills; the flipside would be creating karmatic consequences for excelling in "illicit" skils (criminal arts, marksmanship, etc.)

Also about character advancement, sounds good but I was wondering if whether in the genres you're looking at the resolution usually takes up the entire book/movie.

And Chris: that kind of use of Drama Points is precisely what I was going for. Perhaps a different kind of cost systems (take a penalty rather than pay from a pool), but I'm right with you.

I'm going to give it some more thought of where I want things to go from here; I'm waffling a bit, and worrying about putting on overly constricting rules... I'm leaning towards a simple Karma pool for each players (secretly kept), and keeping a communal notebook in which to keep track of both events they've come accross in the current narrative, and new "expoits" they've revealed about their owns pasts. Essentially, the GM could flip through this notebook to find an appropriate Bad Thing to do when their Karma pool gets critical.

Thanks for the input.

[Chris Goodwin]

And Chris: that kind of use of Drama Points is precisely what I was going for. Perhaps a different kind of cost systems (take a penalty rather than pay from a pool), but I'm right with you.

I've gone around and around with myself on this.  At one point I'd been working on two different types: Triumph Points and Tragedy Points (possibly stolen from somewhere else?).  Triumph Points are the basic karma or dramatic editing points that you can spend for yourself.  Tragedy Points are the same kind of points, only the GM can use them against you.  I was never sure whether they should be mutually exclusive or whether you could have both; one idea was that if you needed a dramatic moment but were out of Triumph Points, you could accept a Tragedy Point instead.  

Anyway, I hope it helps!