Urban Mythos: Schticks, an idea (not sure it's a great one!)

[Rich Stokes]

Urban Mythos is an urban fantasy setting and I'm trying to capture the feel of action TV shows rather than realism.  You can read a bit more here http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=4876 or at Urbanmythos.com

Basically one of the mechanics for the game is that character have a popularity rating to gauge how much the audience likes them.  The more popular the character, the more you can get away with as far as "coincedence" goes.  Think of a cross between Extreme Vengence's Coincidence stat and Brownie points in Ghostbusters (or any other "karma pool" style thing really).  Players can spend popularity to add to their skills for a roll, or spend 3 times as many to up their skill total "after the fact" (ie spend a point for each +1 before you roll, or 3 poinsts for each +1 after you roll.  Succeeding after you've obviously failed looks more lame on screen, but really popular characters only fail when it's really dramatically appropriate).

Characters gain Popularity for doing things that the audience likes.  But the idea of a character's Shtick is that different characters gain popularity for different things.  Shticks are a bit like the Nature/demeanour thing in Storyteller, but far more broard.  Current Shticks (ones used in playtest) are:

Cool  - character gains extra pop for "looking cool"
Action - character gains extra pop for "doing physical stuff"
Funny - character gains extra pop for "being comedy relief"
Cunning - charcter goins extra pop for "being cunning"

I'd imagine that there are loads of other shticks possible.  Characters can gain popularity from doing lots of different things, but gain more if they fullfill their shtick.

The rationalle is that each character in a cheesey TV show has a roll that they play: BA is the tough Action guy, Hannibal always has a Cunning Plan, Face acts Cool and Murdoch is basically comedy relief.  But they all get popularity when they do other things too: Face can handle himself in a fight and people laugh when BA gets drugged.

So far this hasn't lead to horrible cliches, or at least, no more than it should.  Characters in the playtest also have rather more specific things that they tend to do: one character has a habbit of fluffing a spell at least once per episode.  Another character always ends up covered in something icky (dived into a dumpster one week and got puked on by a chimera the next episode).  I'm figurig that the audience EXPECTS these things to happen, and feel gratified when they do.  So those characters gain Pop when those things happen.

I'm not sure whether this is really a big deal for the game: it sounds good it theory and it's been fun to play so far, but I think that it might get tired over a longterm game.  I've already though about characters changing their Shticks: it can be done, but the audience will "have reservations about the new direction that the character is taking" (ie' it'll cost popularity to thange your Shtick).

Ideas?  Thoughts?

[iago]

Well, inasmuch as the other players and the GM is the "audience", you could have them provide secret or open "ratings" (votes) on the new direction the character's taking.  The GM could compile these things and then talk about what's showing up on the show's "fan sites" on the internet, even.

Or, you could make a conscious division of the campaign into "seasons", and allow schtick changes to occur between seasons.  Willow starts out as Geeky Girl, eventually becomes Novice Witch, then Badass Witch, then Addicted Witch, and then Repentant Witch -- on a per-season basis.

[Mike Holmes]

This is very much like a game I wrote for an Iron Game Chef contest called Final Fight. In it, what sort of character you were determined what sort of action you had to take to get plot points. These were used to trigger the endgame, and in fighting the Big Boss.

IOW, sounds good to me.

Mike

[Rich Stokes]

Nominations:
I've never really formalised this, but actually that's the way this works for the playtest group.  That's for historical reasons: Popularity is similar in a lot of ways to what most games call XP, and my group usually has a nomination for XP or whatever at the end of a game.  So I'd kind of assumed that it'd be given out in whatever method your group uses.  Thanks for mentioning it, I'd prolly have forgotten to put it in the rulebook if you hadn't.  

Fansites!  Love it!  What an idea :)  Maybe a Fansite = 10 popularity :)

Seasons:
I've had the idea for Seasons brought up before, and what you say makes a lot of sense.  I'd always assumed that a Season would be a longish story-arc, but what you say (ie making the end of a season the time to spend Popularity to improve your character and alter their Shtick a bit, make minor re-writes etc) is also a great idea.