Man, it's been a long time since I've had a thread in this forum.

Anyway, I'm trying to put some finishing touches on this concept called Vespertine that I've been developing almost since I first came the Forge. If you search for it, you can find the original threads and the notes from the 24-hour game version, but that's not really important since I'm junking most of the system. The setting's pretty much down, but I need some system help.

Vespertine is a sequel to Jason Blair's Little Fears. Not THE sequel, necessarily, but a possible one. Little Fears is a horror game about kids trying to survive, escape, and triumph over scary monsters. Vespertine is a game about teenagers trying not to become monsters themselves. Little Fears is the battle for Innocence. Vespertine is about resisting and indulging in the so-called Seven Deadly Sins: Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath. The system challange is to make it enough like Little Fears that the games make some sense together (are family, if a bit distant), but not be trapped by a system that's not meant to handle the issues that Vespertine deals with. Also, we're trying to bring to teenage issues the kind of dark seriousness that Jason tried to get across in handling the disturbing terrors of childhood.

So here's where I'm heading...

The Seven Deadly Sins are attributes, things that you collect quantities of, signifiers of your social standing, and the "patron" traits of individual groups of monsters. They are, in effect, the entire system of the game, because they're what the game is about. Take a look at these associations:

Envy --> Cool --> Gothy Suicidal Social Outcasts --> Vampires
Gluttony --> Athletic --> Jock Party-Animal Booze-Hounds --> Zombies
Greed --> Rich --> Glittering Tommy Hilfiger Preps --> Goblins
Lust --> Hot --> Hippie Pagan Vegan Lesbians --> Faeries
Pride --> Smart --> Geeky Studious Valedictorians --> Aliens
Sloth --> Sneaky --> Drop Out Stoner Shoe-Gazing Losers --> Ghosts
Wrath --> Dangerous --> Punk/Metal Anarchist Rockers --> Werewolves

So, you gain quantities of a specific Deadly Sin, which indicates that your character is somewhat X (Cool, Athletic, etc.), which lets them fit in with social group Y (Goth, Jocks, etc.), which means that they are in danger of transforming into monster of type Z (Vampires, Zombies, etc.). So your Sins tell you a great deal about your character: what they've indulged in in the past, what their key qualities are, and what crowd they're likely to hang with.

I'm imagining that characters will begin with 3-5 points of Sin distributed however they like. Before play begins, the group plays "Truth or Dare" or some other kind of teenage confessional game, revealing where they acquired their Sins (shades of Argonauts here, for those of you following my RPGnet column and the design process). So, if your character starts with Gluttony 2, Wrath 1, Lust 1, you'd have to come up with two instances where your character indulged in wasteful consumption (went to a frat party once and got puking-drunk, bought a 50" TV for the hell of it), one instance of rage & violence (broke some kid's nose for calling you fat), and one instance of desire & passion (snuck into an empty classroom and fondled your Winter Ball date).

Little Fears uses d6s, so I was planning on rating Sins 0-6 and having you roll under them to succeed at being Cool, Athletic, etc. You'll notice that this means your character will start with abysmally low attributes (0s mostly) and won't be able to succeed at hardly anything at the beginning. Well, that's why they have to gain more Sin. I'm also imagining this to be a rather low-roll system, meaning you don't roll Athletics for climbing over a fence; only roll if a mad dog is chasing you and Old Man Phelps is screaming at the top of his lungs and loading his shotgun. Otherwise, who cares? Climb the frickin' fence already.

So what do I need, system wise? Well, I need a concrete way for characters to gain Sin, which I'm currently missing. I was thinking about having players request specific scenes where their character would do something appropriately sinful (and every Sin level requires something worse than the level before it), and then the GM tries to set those up. For instance, if you want your character to seduce some guy and push him past his comfort point, gaining a level of Lust, you'd tell them GM that and together you'd figure out how to setup the scenes preceeding that for it to happen. So not quite the instant service of scene requests in My Life with Master, but something a bit more negotiated. And I need a way for the group to decide whether the character has successfully done something sinful enough to gain the level. Also, if the character does something sufficiently sinful in the course of normal play, without requesting a scene, should they gain the level? Or do we want to encourage scene requests by making it a requirement for raising Sin?

What else? Well, I want the characters to be able to draw on "the power of Sin" to do neat supernatural things, like using Lust to appeal mystically beguiling or using Gluttony to break through a locked metal fence. And then, when they do that, they have to roll over their Sin or turn into a monster of the appropriate Sin type (which can be very embarassing, to say the least). But I want the level of their Sin to limit the supernaturalness of their actions, semi-Nobilis style. But I'm not sure whether the levels are good ways of dividing that up. You know, something Fudge-like: 1 is Coincidental, 2 is Surprising, 3 is Impossible, 4 is Mythic, 5 is Horrifying, 6 is Monstrous. That seems a little too grainy for me, actually. I'd like something even more intuitive. Maybe characters could resort to calling on Sin after failing normal rolls or as a way to "up the stakes" of an encounter (damn you, Vincent! get out of my head!), calling everyone to pull out the big guns and do even worse things, especially in opposed conflicts.

Additionally, Sin needs to be desirable until level 4 or so, and then quickly become addictive and dangerous. Characters with 5 or 6 Sin need to be at risk of turning into monsters permanently. I'm trying to decide if monsters can still be played or if that removes them from the game. There might be some chance of the group changing their friend back, but it should be harrowing and an intense roleplaying experience. Characters who manage to gain 6 Sin levels in three attributes have completed the Number of the Beast and become Demons instead of monsters of a particular variety, but that's a side note.

Adults, by the way, are completely oblivious to any supernatural goings on. Can you do supernatural stuff in their presence? Maybe. I don't want to pull a Mage and make it harder with more adults around, but I don't want people becoming Werewolves in the middle of Geometry either. Maybe you can only invoke Sin powers in high stress situations, like being yelled at by your parents, but not just sitting around doing nothing. Other suggestions?

Finally, I've been thinking more and more about a iconic setting for this game, like My Life with Master and vs. Monsters. So maybe all the kids would attend some repressive school, maybe Catholic school, maybe just a public school with a high reputation for discipline. Maybe it should have to be a private boarding school, at least in the default setting. I'm still thinking about this. Thoughts?

Thanks in advance for the help.

The Seven Deadly Sins are attributes, things that you collect quantities of, signifiers of your social standing, and the "patron" traits of individual groups of monsters. They are, in effect, the entire system of the game, because they're what the game is about. Take a look at these associations:

Envy --> Cool --> Gothy Suicidal Social Outcasts --> Vampires
Gluttony --> Athletic --> Jock Party-Animal Booze-Hounds --> Zombies
Greed --> Rich --> Glittering Tommy Hilfiger Preps --> Goblins
Lust --> Hot --> Hippie Pagan Vegan Lesbians --> Faeries
Pride --> Smart --> Geeky Studious Valedictorians --> Aliens
Sloth --> Sneaky --> Drop Out Stoner Shoe-Gazing Losers --> Ghosts
Wrath --> Dangerous --> Punk/Metal Anarchist Rockers --> Werewolves

So what do I need, system wise? Well, I need a concrete way for characters to gain Sin, which I'm currently missing

Is Sin meant to be addictive to the characters, or to the players?

And in terms of "Adults don't perceive", have you considered full Post-modernism?

Specifically, suppose a Goth-chick actively fears and avoids the sun, flees crosses, leaps into peoples windows in the dead of night and has a mesmeric ability to command the loyalty of a geeky freshman side-kick. Is it important to know whether she is actually a Vampire, anywhere other than the shared perceptual space of teenagerdom?

TonyLB wrote: And in terms of "Adults don't perceive", have you considered full Post-modernism?

This is a hard one. You already have everything a trad game needs, but there's a clear need for structure in there to make it attractive in a defined way. Let me suggest a viewpoint:

The game is about teenagers trying to survive Sin while growing up, right? That's as I remember it, at least. The inbuilt thematic of the game is that teenage cliques are inherently Sinful - they are defined through their associate sins, after all. This is a strong theme, and it gives us the answer to how sin is gained: from other people.

Now, the game needs an uber-statistic in addition to the Sins themselves to reflect the importance of peer groups. Let's call this statistic Maturity for now. High Maturity means that the character has strong social ties to his peers, while low Maturity means an outcast. Also high Maturity means greater self-deception and authority, and vice versa.

Characters gain Maturity by inflicting their own Sins onto others. A character can only inflict Sin through appropriate in-game situations, and only on characters that have less of the given Sin than the character himself. This dynamic is why cliques form: innocents want to dabble in Sin, while experienced sinners want to gain some maturity from initiating their peers. Cliques are formed around types of Sin because a character can only inflict sins he's proficient in himself.

Of course GM characters can also inflict sin when appropriate, and the highest levels of Sin are probably only learnable from adults (see below) or monsters. Thus Sin levels are not capped by players' initial choices.

Now, this solves the problem of gaining Sin quite elegantly, putting it out of the player's hands and into the hands of the other players. But why Maturity? The technical reason is that IMO you'll be anyway needing an additional statistic to do all kinds of fancy correlations. I'll give some examples below, but you probably see yourself how much easier it is to work with two-dimensional structure when determining end-game conditions, for example.

Maturity itself is not good or bad per se. Characters will want it because it's the thing that helps them control their Sin: Sin itself cannot be removed, but high Maturity helps in controlling it. Maturity can drop, though, through means yet to be developed.

As I see it, there's only two endings for a Vespertine character. Either he becomes permanently a monster (the demon idea kicks ass, by the way), or he becomes an adult. The latter is not necessarily the better option, because it just means that the character has become so adept in hiding and lying about his Sin that it sublimates inside him instead of monsterizing his outsides. Monsters are honest, at least. A character would probably become an adult with a high enough Maturity value or something. Just how hollow an adult he'd be would depend on how much Sin he'd have.

Maturity is used when checking on becoming monster. Only immature or extremely corrupted characters become monsters. When a character is a monster it's up to his or his friends' Maturity to tame the monster so he can return into humanity. There's probably another option that concerns lack of sin, although it'd probably be rare, this being a horror game. Teenagers do not become monsters near adults because the highest Maturity present can be used in resisting monsterizing. The character in question can order the other to calm down or something. "Mr. Clod, do please pay attention, instead of staring at me like some kind of walking dead!" That kind of thing.

As to how to do super powers, I suggest going with upping stakes: a given conflict will always have sin values, just like a character. These will start from zero, but any participant can up the stakes instead of giving up after each round of rolling. This is only possible up to the sin value of the character and gives a simple reroll: this is represented narratively simply by more ferocious efforts, up to and including supernatural. I suggest that you not differentiate between natural and supernatural in any way rules-wise; rather, let the conflicts slide into supernatural after the natural narrative options of a given situation are used up. Like, how many ways can you try to break a door before you have to grow some fur and bigger muscles?

As to why not up the stakes, the reason is simple: the last side to up the stakes in a conflict will have to make the monsterizing roll, difficulty and type of sin depending on all the sins used during the conflict. So, if a particularly crucial conflict has my character using three points of Lust and your character using three points of Gluttony, the winning side runs the risk of becoming either a zombie or a fairy, or both, which would be wicked cool if the rules would support multiclass monsters.

The above kind of rules would encourage choices like "Do I stand up to my rights against the bully and risk taking the consequences of his violence on myself?" It works with passive participants, too, with the character taking the consequences of his own actions on himself if he fails to resist monsterizing.

To clarify, what I'm suggesting about the superpowers is that characters can always do the superpowered thing the situation requires if they are willing to up the stakes. Thus, how many rises are needed to reach actual supernatural would depend on the conflict. In a fist fight the first Wrath raise could be "I become really angry", the second "I grab the crowbar and use that", and only the third would be "I break through the door to reach him". Likewise, in a shootout (if the characters hang around with real bad people), the first raise could be supernatural: "I take the bullets without even feeling them." Thus, no difference mechanically between supernatural and natural.

Finally, about iconic setting: the assumptions about the cliques and types of Sin already define your iconic setting: an american school. This is about as strict as in MLwM, so I don't see any need to define it further. To the contrary, you could give some advice on how to redesign the sins and the cliques for a different milieu, like a MLwM Master creation.

For the game, if you're thinking of doing this for a compilation, I suggest leaving setting information altogether from the text. Just tell that it's set in a school and explain about the cliques and their monsters.

I hope some of the above is usable. Only improvised musings, as usual. I really like the game, by the way.

First: I like it as well:

Second: is 'sneaky' really the best term to use together with sloth? I think I can see your reasoning (especially since it would be an interesting attribute to 'use' during play), but something like 'slouch' (which has a connotation of stealth as well - at least to me) can be cool as well.

Third: as to setting - yeah, your definately on the school-theme here, but might I suggest - the week-long trip to camp (or something like it) with that same school? Part leisure and uncontrolled freedom, part education and 'good old healthy putting your back into it'. And the nice creepiness of dark woods or other nature settings. With the rich kids sneaking away from camp to the nearby mall, the sloth kids not getting out of their tents, the wrath kid secretly mutilating cattle (cow-tipping!) in the night.

Fourth: As to system, I'm uninspired as of yet (as in - I like what you're doing, but can think of no suggestions).

Good luck with it.

I like the stats and their indication of level of sin. And I like your desire to have those levels limit the characters' supernatural abilities. What if sinful actions gain points of generic sin. Sin goes up and down as it's gained and used. You can gain sin from slothful action and spend it on lustful supernatural effects. But the most you can spend in any one action (and thus the most dramatic your effect can be) is limited by your specific seven stats.

In order to devise how the players raise their sins, I think you need to present more about the game's theme. If you adopt Eero's maturity and growing up idea, then I think the system for how sins are raised is different than if the point is to discover the monsterous nature of teenagers and fight to rescue your friends. Are there good guys in this game? How are the PCs protagonized?

Is it more horrific (and is that a goal?) for the players to actively request sin-raises or to have them happen spontaneously through play? Making it only at the specific request of the player give it a more directed feel, but I'm not sure it's altogether good to limit the way players have characters respond to situation based on their perceived rewards. But maybe it's not a big issue.

It feels like achieving the desire/danger effect of raising the sin stats is the hardest part. But if you have whatever the supernatural abilites are, stiffly scaled (logarithmically?) so that five is much more powerful than four then there will be obvious lure. If becoming a monster and being pulled back into humanity is normal for the game and expected to happen more than once, then you could make the ease of recovery inversely related to the level of sin that caused the transformation.

What if monsters have different goals (game-player reward systems?) but the other PCs are rewarded for enacting recovery? Monsters can still be played, but they're somewhat adversarial (or something).

I like the idea that adults simply can't perceive the supernatural. The big idots just don't have the imagination for it. (Maybe this is why those cliques seem so much more important when you're actually a teen?)

I agree with others about the setting. In general it's school, but could be other stuff like summer camp. I guess I mildly disagree with your base assumption that it should be a fairly regimented and oppresive institution. My own experiences all come from quite hands-off public schools and it seemed like my friends in catholic schools had much less of the teen-clique infighting to deal with.

Chris (somewhat rambly)

I'm with Tobias on "Sneaky" not being quite what you're looking for on Sloth. I think "Slacker" is a far more evocative and high-schoolish choice, but that's up to you.

But, to be honest, I think the game may sing better if you never explicitly tie the seven traits to the seven deadly sins.

You could name the stats "Cool Kid", "Jock", "Rich Bitch", "Hottie", "Geek", "Slacker" and "Psycho", and I think (my personal opinion, of course) that it will help people to see the up sides of them as well as the down sides.

I love Eero's idea that these traits are actively sought from those who have them. The idea of infectious memes, and the way that plays into a dysfunctional master/apprentice relationship is too perfect for this setting. The master becomes invested in the pupil, in some very strange ways.

Chris is right that you need a good way to make the sins look very attractive. My recommendation is that you mechanically model something like self-image, which the players need to defend. High School is a corrosive environment, filled with events and influences that eat away at self-image... climbing the rope in gym class, asking girls out to a dance, being called on for an answer in class.

Traits/Sins and (more importantly) the peer groups that go with them are the easiest (perhaps the only) defense against these attacks by fate. If you want to survive high school with your soul uncrushed, you NEED these things, at least in some measure.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: As I see it, there's only two endings for a Vespertine character. Either he becomes permanently a monster (the demon idea kicks ass, by the way), or he becomes an adult.

PlotDevice wrote: ...take a squiz at Sin/Zen.

Tony LB wrote: Is Sin meant to be addictive to the characters, or to the players?

And in terms of "Adults don't perceive", have you considered full Post-modernism?

Eero Tuovinen wrote: 1.) ...how sin is gained: from other people.
2.) Now, the game needs an uber-statistic in addition to the Sins...
3.) ...the highest levels of Sin are probably only learnable from adults or monsters.
4.) Either he becomes permanently a monster, or he becomes an adult.
5.) Maturity is used when checking on becoming monster.
6.) When a character is a monster it's up to his friends' Maturity to tame the monster...
7.) Stakes mechanics.

Tobias wrote: ...is 'sneaky' really the best term to use together with sloth?

TonyLB wrote: I think "Slacker" is a far more evocative and high-schoolish choice

Christopher Weeks wrote: If you adopt Eero's maturity and growing up idea, then I think the system for how sins are raised is different than if the point is to discover the monsterous nature of teenagers and fight to rescue your friends. Are there good guys in this game?

Marhault wrote: Would that be worth exploring, or are you more focused on the journey than the destination?

I also love the idea of "hybrid" monsters.

Jonathan Walton wrote: Well, yes. That's what I was originally imagining. In Little Fears, you lose your Soul or you become a teenager. In Vespertine, you lose your Soul (by becoming a monster) or you become a 20-something, with a job and responsibilities. But the effects of your Sins might still haunt you.

Jonathan Walton wrote:
Lots of good stuff here, Eero.

1.) Hell yes! I hadn't even thought of that, but it makes perfect sense. You start out innocent and then are eventually corrupted by your friends, enemies, family, and the people you happen to encounter.

2.) Well, there are two uber-statistics from Little Fears that we could potentially port over: Soul and Fear.

4.) Well, yes. That's what I was originally imagining. In Little Fears, you lose your Soul or you become a teenager. In Vespertine, you lose your Soul (by becoming a monster) or you become a 20-something, with a job and responsibilities. But the effects of your Sins might still haunt you.

5.) Or Soul, but a good idea. I think you're right about needing a meta-trait. So you roll over Sin X to draw on its powers, but roll against Soul to not become a monster? How do you lose Soul? By becoming a monster? That might work, but it seems a little circular.

6.) I think this idea has lots of potential. So you can try to turn into a monster in the presence of friends or teachers, but they can use their Soul or Maturity or whatever to keep you in check. Maybe certain adults in postitions of authority over the characters (such as teachers and parents and policemen) have a kind of permanently active Maturity that they project, which helps to keep people in line.

7.) You know, your ideas here aren't bad either. I think I'll end up tweaking them quite a bit, but something like this might just work.

The second one, however, is a really cool idea, and one that I've been wondering about today. Do we really need a seperate attribute though, or can your assortment of Sins serve as your way of constructing your identity and self-image? Identity is clearly different than Maturity, but they are related and they both help you rationalize away your Sins and live a relatively normal life. Good possibilities there.

See, I don't know that there necessarily needs to be an endgame for Vespertine, but I might be wrong here. Maybe we could have the game wrap with a kind of counseling session, where the characters and players speculate about their futures without really setting anything in stone. After all, part of the fun of graduation is not knowing what happens next.

Does having hybrid monsters overcomplicate things too much? I wonder about that. Would there also be tribes of succubi running wild in the woods with the werewolves and goblins? I think that make things a little messy. Then again, having characters transform into completely different types of monsters, based on their Sin expendatures, doesn't really make good aesthetic sense either. Maybe everyone picks a Sin to "major" in? But then they become splats and that's not so good. I don't want "werewolf characters" and "zombie characters" and the like. More thoughts?

More thoughts, after having the weekend to think a bit.

I'm thinking about having a meta-trait called "Self" which combines elements of Maturity and Self-Esteem and Identity. I think having more that a couple meta-traits gets messy, so I'm playing with just having this one for now. How many points of Self can you have? 6? 8? 10? Who knows?

As Eero suggested, you have to gain Sin from others (peers, adults, monsters). An encounter where there is an attempt to transmit Sin is called a Lesson. More experienced sinners "teach" their sins to the more innocent. The teaching of Sins is usually initiated by the elder, but sometimes a less experienced person can attempt it, since nobody really knows how much Sin other people have and there's a lot of bluffing involved in teenage interactions. Bobby may talk a good fight, but he may have never hit anyone in his life. He just intimidates people so that he doesn't have to.

Players initiate a Lesson by saying something like "I'm going to teach you/him/her/them a lesson." And then declare the Sin they want to use. I don't have a resolution system that I really like yet, but I have Vincent's "Dogs in the Vineyard" on my brain, so here's some initial thoughts. The "teacher" rolls dice equal to their Sin, behind their hand so no one else can see the results. Perhaps you could even roll "fake" dice of a different color, which wouldn't count but would make other people think you had more dice than you did (or maybe this is a GM trick, and all the players would have a general idea of what each other could do). The student rolls some dice too, but I'm not sure what these might be. Maybe equal to Self?

Then, the teacher begins by putting a single die forward, which the student can counter or accept. Countering requires a die of at least equal size (countering a 4 would require a 4/5/6). Acceptance means playing a die of lesser size. This process continues until either the teacher decides to stop (because they ran out of dice or just want to quit the lesson) or the student submits to the lesson or the student runs out of dice (teacher's victory) or the student escapes the encounter (not quite sure how this happens, yet) or one of the players indicates that play has gone beyond their comfort zone.

Each die put forward by the teacher is the equivilent of some attempt to teach the Sin. Wrath can be taught by beating the snot out of someone, for example, or encouraging the student to beat the snot out of someone else or commit some senseless act of violent destruction. Lust can be taught only through semi-positive sexual encounters (though intercourse doesn't have to happen, at least at the lower levels). The violence of rape, which will be handled very carefully in the text and in the game itself, almost always comes from Wrath and Gluttony, not Lust by itself (and there will be a long section about player consent and responsible handling of sex and violence). As such, there should be some way for characters to "up the ante" by switching from one Sin to another and getting more dice. For instance, you're teaching Lust by making out with someone and then say "you know, you're not as good in bed as Jeremy" and immediately switch over to Envy. Tactics like this would encourage players to be creative in their sinning.

What do the different dice stand for? I'm trying to decide. Maybe something like:

1 Words
2 Taunts
3 Deeds
4 Dirty Deeds
5 Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (yes, like AC/DC)
6 The Unthinkable

Obviously, if you roll all 6's, you might just decide to abandon the encounter and not use any of them. Just because you roll the dice doesn't mean you have to do the deeds.

Additionally, maybe if the student bids Self dice to try to resist the assault, each die that counts as an "accept" die loses them a point of Self. And every point of Sin taught gives the teacher another point of Self, though they have to roll against the Sin to gain it (since they feel pretty dirty afterwards).

And maybe you can call on the supernatural powers of Sin safely, as long as you have more Self than Sin. So a guy with Self 6, Wrath 5 is okay. He's probably not a very nice person, but he's rationalized most of that away. Sin 6 is never possible to rationalize away. If your Sins are greater than or equal to your Self, you have to roll against Sin every time you use it, to avoid becoming a monster temporarily. And it should be really easy to lose more Self while you're a monster, unless your friends can get you under control.

Self 0 is when you become a monster permanently, then. Having Sins of 6 makes this pretty easy to do, since you start becoming a monster more and more often, which is a sure way of losing Self fast.

What do you all think? Am I getting close?

Jonathan Walton wrote:
Players initiate a Lesson by saying something like "I'm going to teach you/him/her/them a lesson." And then declare the Sin they want to use. I don't have a resolution system that I really like yet, but I have Vincent's "Dogs in the Vineyard" on my brain, so here's some initial thoughts. The "teacher" rolls dice equal to their Sin, behind their hand so no one else can see the results. Perhaps you could even roll "fake" dice of a different color, which wouldn't count but would make other people think you had more dice than you did (or maybe this is a GM trick, and all the players would have a general idea of what each other could do). The student rolls some dice too, but I'm not sure what these might be. Maybe equal to Self?

Then, the teacher begins by putting a single die forward, which the student can counter or accept. Countering requires a die of at least equal size (countering a 4 would require a 4/5/6). Acceptance means playing a die of lesser size. This process continues until either the teacher decides to stop (because they ran out of dice or just want to quit the lesson) or the student submits to the lesson or the student runs out of dice (teacher's victory) or the student escapes the encounter (not quite sure how this happens, yet) or one of the players indicates that play has gone beyond their comfort zone.

Each die put forward by the teacher is the equivilent of some attempt to teach the Sin. Wrath can be taught by beating the snot out of someone, for example, or encouraging the student to beat the snot out of someone else or commit some senseless act of violent destruction. Lust can be taught only through semi-positive sexual encounters (though intercourse doesn't have to happen, at least at the lower levels). The violence of rape, which will be handled very carefully in the text and in the game itself, almost always comes from Wrath and Gluttony, not Lust by itself (and there will be a long section about player consent and responsible handling of sex and violence). As such, there should be some way for characters to "up the ante" by switching from one Sin to another and getting more dice. For instance, you're teaching Lust by making out with someone and then say "you know, you're not as good in bed as Jeremy" and immediately switch over to Envy. Tactics like this would encourage players to be creative in their sinning.

Additionally, maybe if the student bids Self dice to try to resist the assault, each die that counts as an "accept" die loses them a point of Self. And every point of Sin taught gives the teacher another point of Self, though they have to roll against the Sin to gain it (since they feel pretty dirty afterwards).

And maybe you can call on the supernatural powers of Sin safely, as long as you have more Self than Sin. So a guy with Self 6, Wrath 5 is okay. He's probably not a very nice person, but he's rationalized most of that away. Sin 6 is never possible to rationalize away. If your Sins are greater than or equal to your Self, you have to roll against Sin every time you use it, to avoid becoming a monster temporarily. And it should be really easy to lose more Self while you're a monster, unless your friends can get you under control.

Self 0 is when you become a monster permanently, then. Having Sins of 6 makes this pretty easy to do, since you start becoming a monster more and more often, which is a sure way of losing Self fast.

Hey Eero,

More good stuff but, like you say, some of it is a little dense, especially when compared to the relatively rules-lite Little Fears. I agree with a lot of it, though.

The idea of the optional Self pool is sweet. If you don't draw on Self, you're not risking anything, but you're not as likely to win the conflict. That's exactly the kind of mechanic I was thinking of.

Sins can definitely only increase at a rate of one level per lesson. I was assuming that from the beginning, but I guess I never made it explicit. As for the density of the Lesson mechanics, the game really is about Sin. The monsters stuff is a cool, secondary aspect, but that's not where the real horror is. The real horror is in what you do BEFORE you become a monster, the stuff that makes you a monster in the first place. This is the stuff that every parent is afraid of. "It's 11pm. Do you know where your children are? Do you know what they're doing?"

Since the Lessons use a different set of mechanics, though, I think characters can probably just use Mundane or Supernatural sin effects to escape from Lessons, since normal sin rolls don't require the same kind of dice pools (in my mind) and wouldn't, therefore, interfere with a Lesson in progress.

The reroll idea is cool, but I'm not sure that I like the context you give it. But if I can figure out a way for rerolls to really add something significant to the Lesson process, I might use them.

I had thought about stealing WW's permanent/temporary resource system. The earlier versions of Vespertine explicitly used them. However, they're not really in place in Little Fears (which, in actual play, can cause problems when players lose Soul and gain Fear too quickly). In some ways, you can simulate the permanent/temporary thing by just making people roll against Self a lot, with a low chance of actually chaning the score. That's more what I was leaning towards, but having a temporary score does have some clear advantages.

On the normal use of Sin (not in Lessons), I agree that the Mundane/Supernatural split should be clear. In my mind, it goes like this: to show off how Cool you are, you try to roll under Envy. If you fail (or if you don't want to bother with the initial Mundane attempt), you can make yourself Supernaturally Cool (or do something impossibly Cool), but then have to roll over your Envy or risk turning into a monster. In the case of dueling Supernatural Sins, both parties try to roll over the other person's Sin to win (which is a very Little Fears style mechanic), and then roll over their own Sin to prevent transforming. This can lead to ties and standoffs, which is fine.

Your system summery is close to what I want, but not quite there. I think I'd rather have a fixed cap for Self, to keep it fairly low and risky, since really high Self values would make descent into darkness less likely. What if we cap it at 6 like everything else? Otherwise, Little Fears caps meta-resources at 10, which would also make sense.

Also, I don't really think "magic" is the best way to describe the supernatural powers that Sin provides. Sin changes teenagers into monsters, so I think that the "magic" of sin should be a partial transformation or a act of power resembling something a monster would do. So auras of seduction and fear would work, leaping onto rooftops, ripping somebody in half, communicating with animals, that kind of thing.

Looks like we're getting close, but I'd really like to playtest this before I write up a final version of the game. It'll probably have to be online, though, and fast. I've already contacted Hive, the guy who did illustration and layout work for Little Fears (including the amazing cover), and he's agreed to do iconic images of the Sins and the teens and monsters that embody them. Exciting, exciting, exciting...

Jonathan Walton wrote:
More good stuff but, like you say, some of it is a little dense, especially when compared to the relatively rules-lite Little Fears. I agree with a lot of it, though.

Since the Lessons use a different set of mechanics, though, I think characters can probably just use Mundane or Supernatural sin effects to escape from Lessons, since normal sin rolls don't require the same kind of dice pools (in my mind) and wouldn't, therefore, interfere with a Lesson in progress.

I had thought about stealing WW's permanent/temporary resource system. The earlier versions of Vespertine explicitly used them. However, they're not really in place in Little Fears (which, in actual play, can cause problems when players lose Soul and gain Fear too quickly). In some ways, you can simulate the permanent/temporary thing by just making people roll against Self a lot, with a low chance of actually chaning the score. That's more what I was leaning towards, but having a temporary score does have some clear advantages.

On the normal use of Sin (not in Lessons), I agree that the Mundane/Supernatural split should be clear. In my mind, it goes like this: to show off how Cool you are, you try to roll under Envy. If you fail (or if you don't want to bother with the initial Mundane attempt), you can make yourself Supernaturally Cool (or do something impossibly Cool), but then have to roll over your Envy or risk turning into a monster. In the case of dueling Supernatural Sins, both parties try to roll over the other person's Sin to win (which is a very Little Fears style mechanic), and then roll over their own Sin to prevent transforming. This can lead to ties and standoffs, which is fine.

Your system summery is close to what I want, but not quite there. I think I'd rather have a fixed cap for Self, to keep it fairly low and risky, since really high Self values would make descent into darkness less likely. What if we cap it at 6 like everything else? Otherwise, Little Fears caps meta-resources at 10, which would also make sense.

Also, I don't really think "magic" is the best way to describe the supernatural powers that Sin provides. Sin changes teenagers into monsters, so I think that the "magic" of sin should be a partial transformation or a act of power resembling something a monster would do. So auras of seduction and fear would work, leaping onto rooftops, ripping somebody in half, communicating with animals, that kind of thing.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: The Lesson rules you outlined are IMO a little out of place with the one-roll resolution used for other stuff. ...The other way would be to find a way to do the Lessons as one-rolls, which I'd actually prefer if some simple way could be found.

The players could have multiple Lessons open at once, as different forces tug at them. This way you wouldn't have a dozen Lesson rolls per one normal roll.

On the other hand, I myself like to use multiple rolls to give structure to the narrative: each roll can represent a concrete bit of soul-searching that's roleplayed out, like in Nicotine Girls.

Or use multiple caps, like suggested above. A soft cap at six, after which the score'd have a greater tendency to drop. Kinda like a permanent and temporary score combined.

Note that really high Self is not necessarily a bad thing.

Let us know if you do an online playtest, I might just make an inroad into web-based roleplaying for this.

Jonathan Walton wrote:
-- The horror in Sinning comes from slowly digging yourself in deeper and deeper, until you're doing things or having things done to you that you wouldn't normally have allowed. It sneaks up on you and seduces you into it. Before you know it, you've broken some kid's face just because he made you angry and it was felt good to punch him. I don't see a way that we can simulate this kind of thing with one-roll resolutions. Sure, we could decide the ultimate outcome and then roleplay it out, but it's the details of these interactions that really matter, more than resolving who wins.

Only for the character involved. You know, the obvious solution is to have really high Self lead to a premature "adulthood," blinding the character to the supernatural and making them join the world of responsibilities and maturity. Still, that's a cap in and of itself, unless there's some Self check that determines whether a character has grown up, much like the check to avoid becoming a monster. I guess you could roll against Self every time you use your Self to try to control the monster in someone else. After all, that's what adults do...

Just made a playtest annoucement, here:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12291

Going to be a few changes before the playtest, from what's written here. I definitely think I want to make the Lesson rolling simpler, but still incorperate extra Self dice and even character traits (which, in Little Fears, give you extra dice that you can pick a higher result from).

So I'm thinking that you roll your combined pool (Sin+Self+Traits) and try to get over your opponent's Sin (if your opponent has none of that particular Sin, then they're all Successes). Then you save all Successes and can play them to attack or defend against your opponent's attacks. Self dice that don't Succeed lose you minor fractions of Self. That's the gist, and I'll work the rest out when I write up the playtest rules.

Jonathan Walton wrote: Vespertine is a sequel to Jason Blair's Little Fears. Not THE sequel, necessarily, but a possible one. Little Fears is a horror game about kids trying to survive, escape, and triumph over scary monsters. Vespertine is a game about teenagers trying not to become monsters themselves. Little Fears is the battle for Innocence. Vespertine is about resisting and indulging in the so-called Seven Deadly Sins: Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath.

Thanks, Chad. I'll definitely have to look at Dead Inside before I write up the playtest rules. Hopefully, without the Heavenly Virtues to get in the way, Vespertine will run okay with just the 7DS + Self + Traits, but we'll have to see.

Jonathan Walton wrote: Thanks, Chad. I'll definitely have to look at Dead Inside before I write up the playtest rules. Hopefully, without the Heavenly Virtues to get in the way, Vespertine will run okay with just the 7DS + Self + Traits, but we'll have to see.