system part: Karmic character design

[anonymouse]

Sprung from some discussion in #indiegames tonight and simmered for awhile..


A character accumulates Karma over the course of its life. When it dies, its Karma is totalled up and compared to a chart. Different species have different thresholds; say you need at least 20 KP to reincarnate as a human.

A character cannot accumulate any more than n KP over its life, and Transcendance - the ultimate goal - has some incredibly huge threshold number. You have to reincarnate a lot to meet that number.

This would probably work well for short 3-4 session "lives", at the end of which the character meets some untimely end. Fastforward through its life at various points, maybe, and repeat..

I dunno. The mechanics we were talking about were 'carryover' points; you'd take some points accumulated by your current character, and then spend them towards beefing up a new one if you died. It just seems like you could build a game specifically around this idea, or at least put an nice big juicy goal at the end instead of a simple "yeah, you start with a better sword and can hit things great!".

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

This technique is pretty well-established in a variety of game texts. The most recent is The Riddle of Steel, in which it's called Insight.

Your addition of a sort of Transcendence threshold is new-ish, but it seems fairly equivalent to saying, "Well, I'm done with that chain of characters." Seems to me that option exists already even without a numerical threshold.

Best,
Ron

[LordSmerf]

Well, as a mechanic for making character death more palatable, it has been done.  However, i think that there is a good idea here at the core.  A game about a set of characters that simply must die for the game to go on.  What would really be interesting would be playing with the reincarnation thing such that you end up watching characters face the souls of their nemisis over a vast period of time.  A sort of inevitability to relationships...  This could actually be rather interesting...

Thomas

[Paganini]

A character accumulates Karma over the course of its life. When it dies, its Karma is totalled up and compared to a chart. Different species have different thresholds; say you need at least 20 KP to reincarnate as a human.

Ooh, cool idea. I want to reincarnate as a mantis! This poses some interesting system challengens. I mean, if in one game you're all humans, and the next game you're a mosquito and your buddy is bat... issues of scaling aside, you're gonna need some pretty snazzy method of communicating exactly what you're supposed to *do* while being a bug, or a dog, or whatever.

[Paganini]

Hello,

This technique is pretty well-established in a variety of game texts. The most recent is The Riddle of Steel, in which it's called Insight.

Your addition of a sort of Transcendence threshold is new-ish, but it seems fairly equivalent to saying, "Well, I'm done with that chain of characters." Seems to me that option exists already even without a numerical threshold.

Ron, I don't think you quit dig Mouse's point. This isn't about mechanics, this is about moving up the cosmic food chain. Sure that mechanic has been done before, but here it's *the entire point of play.* Eventual death is a given (in fact, death should probably happen pretty often to keep people from getting bored) - the main point of living is to accumulate enough karma that you find the Great Gold Fuzzy State instead of coming back as a dung beetle.

The transcendence threshold is a limiter. The more karma you have, the better your selection of reincarnations to choose from. If you're mean to dogs, and don't give to the poor, and stuff, you're el toast. If you come back as a gnat, or something, you might even get squished before you accumulate enough karma to get anything better.

Hey, Mouse, what happens if you die with no Karma? Does tradition have any kind of "hell" equivalent for those who progress (degress?) in the direction opposite nirvanna?

[Shreyas Sampat]

If we're talking about real-world reincarnation traditions, Nate, there are countless different solutions for transgression:

Folk Hinduism as my mother explains it has karma=debt, so that it's at 0 karma, when you've cut off all spiritual ties, that you're free, and you have to repay karmic debts to specific souls.  There are some interesting implications in this one.

Jainism has sin as spiritual mass; when you are reborn, you reappear in various points on the heaven-earth-hell spectrum depending on the weight of your soul.  When you expunge yourself of all impurity, you enter Jain nirvana.

Depending on the flavor of Buddhism, there's a similar 'spectrum' situation.  However, it's asserted that human birth is especially desirable, because demons have few opportunities to improve their karma, and saints/heavenly beings have little motivation to do so.


One interesting thing you could do with a game like this is to have the different incarnations have different amounts of karma capacity: as a human, you have near-infinite leeway to improve or taint your soul, while it's more or less incomprehensible for a firefly to be a saint or sinner.

[anonymouse]

Re: done before: yes, absolutely. TROS' Insight points were one of the things being discussed. But as someone else pointed out, it wasn't about a new mechanic, but a new focus for it.

[MachMoth]

Agreed.  I've mentioned this before, but for context sake:  A group of mine used to run something similar, and yet not.  The average character lived no more than 6 sessions.  A session was some major point in the character's life.  They got older, and croked.  Usually the next character in line had some relation to the previous one, but that came about when a player realized it was a good way of keepin' his stuff.  The focus in our game was on some greater story, that all the characters were a part of.  The idea of a "greater connection" never dawned on us.