Well, this is a personal project fairly advanced that I´m developing. The concept emerged from this sentence: "every choice you make changes you in retribution."

A shapeshifter is a special specimen, whose body and mind are so volatile and malleable that they change in response to any change in its spirit disposition. So a shapechanger tends to manifest externally his personality and internal struggles through his body. Some special considerations about its rules:

• A spirit´s shaped through vital choices, I mean, choices relevant to the dilemmas that are present on it. These dilemmas are called dimensions, and they´re literally the dimensions through which a spirit manifests. Each one is, then, a dilemma, belief, statement, prohibition, etc with two opposite ends, one affirmative and another negative. For example: "Should I be honest under any circumstance?", whose ends are "Yes, always" or "No, just as long as it doesn´t make more difficult my path". Each end´s associated with an animal, with the help of astrology or folk fables.
• Dimensions are chosen by players. 2 of them are social, and represent tabus, prohibitions, costumes, laws, etc,. They are shared by all shapeshifters. The other 2 are personal.
• Dimensions have a depth, a space that´s filled little by little through the already mentioned vital choices. This is handled by 7 empty boxes for each dimension. When you make a vital choice related to one of them, you mark an empty box. The accumulation of filled boxes (from one end or another) gives you skills and transformations, which are special powers related to an end´s animal. Also, other factors are important to account the access to skills and trans, other than the ammount of marked boxes: if one end´s dominant over the other, if the dimmension´s full or 50%, if an end has the last marked box, etc.
• The concept´s that a score´s created for each end (based on the factors mentioned above), which gives you access to specific benefits according to a table. The purest a dimension is (only one colour, not the two of them shuffled), the greater the powers you get from it. A player starts a campaign commiting his shapeshifter to an end of each dimension (a free point on that end´s score), and the GM will try to make it harder and harder for him to stick with that path, putting a shapeshifter in contradictory situations, between his goals and his priorities (relating to dimension filling).
• Dimensions, as a consequence of having a limited depth, may be completely filled. When this happens, a spirit loses part of its changing nature and remains fixed on a state. From then on, the shapeshifter loses great part of his control over that dimension. In simple terms, a shapeshifter is a being dominated by indefinition and a changing nature that, eventually, becomes more stable and loses his previous adaptability.
• At the beggining of a campaign, every player gets to choose some goals for his shapeshifter. If they fulfill them, their spirit expands, that is, boxes are added to a dimension. If they don´t, or they voluntarily abbandon them, their spirit narrows, boxes are deleted. This, in general, should be disadvantageous, but it has its value: first, pain takes you closer to human nature, which means you retain part of your control over filled dimensions. And second, a narrow dimension enhance the powers you get from an end, but I haven´t found how to do that yet.

The game would use 3d6, with a fixed difficult for every roll of 12. Skills boost your rolls (up to +4). An easy task gives you bonus dice (like the ones of TSoY): you roll 4d6 (1 bonus dice), and then discard the lowest result. A hard task gives you malus dice, the exat opposite of bonus dice (discard the highest result).
What you get from succeeding at a roll, how much do you advance towards your goals, that´s called the reward. What you may lose´s called risk. Both are rated from 1 to 4 (1 being the default level). They may be increased by the player, if he wishes to risk more to get a bigger reward. Or the player may just increase the risk of a roll related to a vital choice in order to mark more boxes as a result of it (a more dramatic choice). Some trans. let you change a reward/risk effect, or simply increase/decrease them. Besides, very high/low natural rolls (16-18, 3-5) may modify the risks/rewards.
The idea is to have both risks/rewards be chosen from relatively strict lists, reward by player, risk by GM. As an example, I leave here risk 1 effects:
--delay or important weakening in exchange of success: first level weakening, of next roll with a malus die.
--future complication in exchange of success: risk of future roll increased by 1.
--loss of an important object or ally in exchange of success.
--aparition of an easy complication (twist) in front of your path (bonus dice to solve it). If you overcome it, then you succeed also at this roll.

I have some doubts dealing as to what happens when you fill a dimension. I´d like to handle it as a permanent complication for the character, but not crippling him. I mean, you´re an incurable coward, so you will flee always when in front of a personal threat. But that shouldn´t be a way of cutting your fun, but just to make you find alternative solutions to such problems.
Also, I´m still trying to think how to make stress effects (spirit´s narrowing) a complication but also an opportunity to be different.
And, finally, I don´t know if I should create a special setting for this game´s concept, or make it settingless by default. If I were to create a setting, it´d probably be sci-fi/utopic/distopic/transhumanism or fantastic realism (gabriel garcia marquez). Which would you prefer or think it´s easier to create? A thing I´d like to avoid is a shapeshifter being discriminated as a mutant, or hunted. This is not a game about that. At least, the setting should allow the existence of people with animalistic features as normal members of a society.

Khimus

Welcome to the Forge! UR DOIN IT RITE.

I have a couple of responses to this thus far:

1) Yeah, you do have a challenge around what happens when you fill a dimension, because every way in which a character can't change is a way in which a character can't be dynamic and interesting. It would help me a bit to know how you, the designer, personally feel about the inability to change. It sounds as if you're thinking it would play out at the table as just a restraint on problem solving; I'm just one (potential) player but I know that would make me feel distanced from character in the extreme. If that's what you're after, that's cool, but you're also making some noises about lack of choice introducing kind of a tragic feel? Which makes more sense to me, and on that subject...

2) you need to get a hold of Hero's Banner and play it. It is right up your street (possibly waiting across from your residence in a white van).

Hope this helps!

Mike wrote:
1) Yeah, you do have a challenge around what happens when you fill a dimension, because every way in which a character can't change is a way in which a character can't be dynamic and interesting. It would help me a bit to know how you, the designer, personally feel about the inability to change. It sounds as if you're thinking it would play out at the table as just a restraint on problem solving; I'm just one (potential) player but I know that would make me feel distanced from character in the extreme. If that's what you're after, that's cool, but you're also making some noises about lack of choice introducing kind of a tragic feel? Which makes more sense to me, and on that subject...

(I couldn´t edit, so I have to double-post, sorry)
I see the concept of Shapeshifter as a metaphor of aging, and how your choices lead to both external and internal consequences, until a moment when you just can´t choose anymore and have to stick to your previous decisions. The idea´s not that the narrative potential ends here, but that it leaves a scar, a portion of your character that can´t be rewritten, and then new premises arise. They could be compared to a crippled leg, perhaps.

"Compel," eh? You might also want to have a look at the Dresden Files RPG. (It should be out by the beginning of next month, and you can get PDFs now.) It's driven in large part by negotiating the consequences of character choice limitation.

I´m having a hard time thinking how to represent physical, mental and social damage upon the character. These are the ideas I have right now:

-First, an abstract damage system, to take account of physical, mental and social damage received. There are 4 boxes of damage to be received, more if you have the proper skill (like resolution, resistance, or whatever), and once you start receiving damage, you go on checking them off. Each box checked represents one specific effect of damage, and its nature and fiction equivalent has to be specified (like: broken arm, coward fame, etc). Each box gives you one of these penalty effects:

• A penalty dice on some specific actions (like running when you´re lame)
• An increment of the risk or a disminution of the reward (if you´re a conscript, then you get +1 risk at social actions; the effect of failure could be being discovered and having to evade the law again)

Damage effects may be "healed" by solving them on the fiction or rolling to cure the character. Another possibility could be to stay away from the campaign during some in-game time, but that seems just boring.

-But I wanted to include another kind of damage, a sort of grief, depresion or inner corruption that results only from active choices about abbandoning a personal goal. Those should be negative at the beggining, but give you a benefit in the long term. They´d work as deleted boxes in a dimension. At first, they only corrupt transformations, by adding them negative effects from the above list. But when you get the second or third deleted box, a trans corrupted also get augmented: another bonus dice, more rewards, lesser risks (obviously, it shouldn´t cancel the corruption effect).

There could be a relation between both kinds of damage. A level taken in corruption/grief/whatever let´s you erase one or two boxes of common dammage. I don´t know if I should make of the second damage a limited one, like: when you´ve erased a total of 6 boxes from all dimensions, you become an NPC.

What do you think? Are there too positive effects for the second type of damage? How would you call it?

(When you fill a dimmension [somehow like BW beliefs], your shapeshifter loses part of his freewill around it. I was sure how to make this fun and not railroading or prone to abuse by the GM.)
I´ve just figured how to make closed dimensions work. When you´ve filled all your 7 boxes of a dimension (like, say, "Should I react to violence with fear or anger? [rabbit/bear]", you get a scar, a sort of aspect that brings you difficulties. In this case, it´d be "incurably coward", for example. You may invoke it to make difficult your path, choosing an effect from this list:

• Get a malus dice to a roll
• Increase the risk for a roll/ decrease the reward
• Close a path of action towards a sub-goal (you have to choose another way to do it)
• A complication arises in your path (roll to overcome it)

But, in exchange, you may choose another benefit to appear in a near future, from this list:

• A new ally/object
• A bonus dice to a future roll
• Discover a new path of action
• Increase the reward of a future rol
• [Heal a level of harm] [not sure about this]
• [Boost a future use of a transformation power] [not sure about this either]/li]

Obviously, the benefit has to be different from the complication.

A scar provided by a closed dimension (there are other kinds of scars) is different because the player may not act against his nature, unless he accepts to get a level of harm.
There are some instances that modify the cost to act against your nature.

• Every time you choose to abbandon a goal (generally, when in front of a difficult decision), you erase a box and get a scar related to it. But you also decrease by 1 the cost for acting against your nature when you fulfill that dimension, which means you could retain your freewill if you reduce the cost to choose to 0 level harm
• In front of difficult threats, you´ve got the option of shaping yourself completely like an animal of a dimension. When you do so, you get all the powers that animal provides and at a great level. And you mark a box of that dimension. But (always a but) you increase the cost of acting against your nature when you fulfill that dimension by 1. If, this way, the cost gets to 3 or higher, then it´s impossible to you to act against your nature

I think now closed dimensions are more interesting to have, and also better integrated with other rules (animal shaping, scars, spirit narrowing). Still, I´ll have to make strict guidelines about how often a GM can introduce a situation compelling a dimension scar.
What do you think of this way of representing closed dimensions? Does it give enough place for the player to make decisions? Isn´t abbandoning a goal to positive in terms of benefits (more freewill, a scar), or is it properly contradictory? What do you think of scars and how they work?

Ok, I´m beggining to write down a Playtest version of the game, and also a little story to be its introduction. It will be also a general depiction of the default setting of the game (fantastic realism, look above).

But I wanted to show you how the adventures are going to be structured on Shapeshifter. The idea is to have the structure be created during the game itself, and several elements of the game interact with it and shape it (risks, rewards, scars, etc.). Here´s what I´ve got so far:

An adventure is the path you´ve got to pass through to achieve your goals. They´re achieved after the climatic ending scene, which needs a roll with a reward 3 or 4. But, before that, a Shapeshifter needs to overcome several intermediate steps: if I wish to kill the count, I´ve got first to get a job as his servant, then gain confidence to reach his own room or to make the food for him, then sneak one night into his room and kill him, or poison his food.
Each intermediate step has a certain number of ways to accomplish it (paths of action), and obstacles that have to be overcome. To get a job in Count´s property, I may ask for a job as anyone would, or blackmail/extort his mayor butler to hire me, or even seduce one of his servants to help me get the job. A shapeshifter, as he tries to overcome an intermediate step, may fail and exhaust paths of action, with the hardest ways remaining. Some risk and reward effects, besides, may open new paths of action, close another ones, force you to take the most difficult ones, etc.

Also, between each intermediate step, a Shapeshifter may take support actions, not related per se with their goals, but that may help him accomplish it. Here we have healing, buying and selling stuff, looking for contacts and people to help you, and research about an intermediate step to find new paths of action. There are, nonetheless, limits to the ammount of sup. actions you may take during each intermediate step (between 1 and 3). If the player insists to continue taking them, the plot advances and a significant change occurs, perhaps even making your goal even harder.

Vital choices (ethical choices related to your dimensions) appear inside the adventures´ structure, generated from contacts and relationship pressure, failures or simply by GM offers. Basically, a situation that forces you to choose between two ways of doing it, and where the choice is relevant and has consequences is a good platform for vital choices
A GM may tempt you to act against your nature to get a clear benefit, or menace you to make your further actions harder if you act according to your nature. Also, a relationship may press you to act the way they want (I´ll help you find him, but only if you promise to kill him), or the GM may offer you to negate a failure outcome by acting against your nature (but perhaps generating future trouble): "It seems you won´t be able to find a way into the abbey´s library, unless you try to pickpocket abbot´s key. He´s ussually very distracted and surely won´t realise that you did it."
Obviously, all this has to adapt to each table, because different dimensions and goals will tend to different dramatic situations and vital choices.

What do you think of the structure of the adventure? Too rigid? Have the vital choices proper relevance, or they´re just not enough significant?

OK, I´m still putting in order all the rules for the game, though really slowly. This time, I wanted to share the rules for damage and death for Shapeshifter.

DAMAGE
Damage in Shsh (:P) comprises every kind of damage possible, both internal and external to the character, and physical and mental. Shortly, there are 3 types of damage: physical, social and mental. There is a damage layer with 3 boxes, which are filled as damage is received. Each box of damage (level of damage) is more serious than the one below. When a roll effect tells you to mark a box for damage, and that box is already marked, you go for the next higher one (if there´s no one, read below).
Each injury has an effect that applies within a certain context. If police´s looking for you, then this injury will make it harder for you when you´re socially exposed. The possible effects are adding difficulty dice to rolls, increasing the risk or decreasing the reward. If you´ve 2 injuries with effects of the same category (both increase the risk, for example) that could apply to a given situation, they don´t accumulate, you just apply the worst of them.
During character creation and improvement, you may choose to buy additional damage boxes. You may buy boxes for a certain kind of damage (i.e. social, physical or mental) as you would buy a skill. Thus, you may have more than one box for any level, but the extra boxes only absorb one kind of damage.

DEATHS
What happens when you receive damage of a level that is already marked, and there´s no next higher available box? (that is, for example, you suffer a level 3 injury, but the third box is already marked) Your Shapeshifter has "died". The quotes are there because it isn´t necessarily a physical death, just that the player loses control of the shapeshifter and he stops from actively acting in the story. In fact, there are 3 kinds of deaths possible: physical, mental (insanity, autism, etc.) or social (in jail, hermit, loneliness), related with the kind of injury that caused it.
When a death happens, the player may choose to let his shapeshifter die, but in exchange of a final heroic act. He receives a reward-3-effect, or the ability to cancel a risk-3-effect of someone around him. After this, he dies, but showing that he was willing to die for what he cares about.
But the player may instead state that his shapeshifter is not willing to die for what he cares about. In tha last moment, he pulls back and avoids a certain death, but then disappears for a while. When he comes back, he´s changed. All goals he had are lost (the things he used to care about no longer bother him) and now he bears a scar (scars are negative traits that hinder you in exchange for a future benefit), and he´s also weakened by the experience (some skills related with the death are lowered).

These "deaths" are interesting, as they leave room for the player to make that last decision. I´m also tinkering with other interesting deaths. Look at this:
-The player gets to narrate the epilogue of his character (how he dies or retires from social life), in such a way that his former character gives his next shapeshifter (for that campaign) a benefit. A crazy hermit in the mountain teachs the new hero how to protect himself in the wilderness, for example.
-The shapeshifter, when about to die, pulls back and abbandons. The player loses his control, but he remains as an NPC for the campaign, with the guilt of having abbandoned when his action was most needed. Later on, the same player may choose to invoke that character to make a final heroic act and redeem himself, only to die after.
-The shapeshifter reincarnates (not literally): something in his spirit carries on to the next shapeshifter that player runs. He starts with a benefit inherited from his previous life, and a shared dimension, but also a scar, an unresolved business from his previous life that hinders him. He must find out what it was and resolve it if he wishes to heal the scar.

What do you think of the death effects? Are they fun or interesting? Can you think of other interesting deaths?

HEALING RULES
To heal your character, you´ve got to spend support scenes and roll dice. Support scenes are scenes you receive between intermediate steps or goals, and you may use them to recover, gather contacts or get help, research about the future missions, buy or sell stuff, etc. They come in a limited ammount, and are somehow like Mouse Guard´s player´s turn.

You have to roll for a skill related to the kind of injury you want to recover from (meditation, a craft or working skill to pay debts, medicine, etc.) and get a level of reward appropriate to the level of the injury (1 for 1st level injury, 2 for 2nd, and so on...). How to do so is left to the player to figure out: he has many tools at his disposal for that. First, he may up the reward by 1 and do the same with risk (you get more but you risk more if you fail). He may get the right medicine for the right issue (money to pay debts, antidote for poison, etc.), or he may be helped by people he cares about (his relationships). There are not many resources available, but the idea is to force the shapeshifter to go and ask for help from his friends, family, couple, etc. It is, as you´ll see, a risky gambit also.

If you pass the roll, you recover. But if you fail, you´ve got to look at the roll´s risk (1, 2, 3 or 4). Each risk level has its own effects for healing, but the general rule is that you don´t have to roll again to recover from the wound. Let´s see some examples:
-You heal, but you´re left weakened as a consequence. You lose X skill points from related to the wound type.
-You heal, but it takes longer than you expected. If you´ve got an extra support scene available, you lose it while recovering from your wounds.
-You don´t heal, but the wound will heal by itself given time (beginning of the next session, or a significant ammount of in-game time, I don´t know).
-You heal, but (If a relationship was aiding you) your relationship, from now on, will try to keep you away from trouble and accomplishing your goals (not helping, actively trying to stop or persuade you, etc.)
-You heal, but your relationship believes you will kill yourself should you continue pursuing your goals. She will give you an ultimatum: if you don´t drop the goal you wanted to achieve while getting hurt, she will leave you forever.

As you see, the roll´s not to see whether you recover or not, but how much will it cost you. And sometimes it will lead to interesting decisions (the last ones). Should I press even more to force players to get help from relationships? (like: making medicines not increase the reward, just give +x).

Until next time!
PD: I´ve no trouble posting here about my project, as I use this to start getting attention for my game and "advertising" if I plan to release it in a future, but I´m interested in seeing if someone´s following this thread, and has any opinion about what I have up to this moment. Is my english the main issue to get what I write (I´m not a native english speaker)?

SKILLS AND ADVANCEMENT

Skills give bonuses to your rolls (3d6), which need to get a 12+ to succeed. Those bonuses may go from 0 to +4 (that´s the limit).

I have a doubt around skills and advancement. Basically, now the first and most important advancement method for a character is through his/her dimmensions (moral questions that give you powers and skills when you make decisions about them). But do skills require or need an independent advancement system? It´d be something like common advancement and epiphany in Burning Wheel, but in this case the epiphany method is already very powerful, so I don´t know if I need another subsystem for advancement, and if it´s important to have it, how much complex it should be.
I have these 2 ideas:

• The first and simplest one: characters advance as they work towards their goals and priorities (not just achieving them, but also failing and abandoning them). It is simple but not very interesting: every X intermediate steps, you advance or acquire skills; after a climax goal scene, and after abandoning a goal, the same.
• The second one is more complicated: it is based on Burning Wheel´s advancement (or rather Mouse Guard). You count the number of failures you had with each skill, and riskier failures advance skills faster (that is, a 2-risk failure´s worth like two 1-risk failures). Basically, your character only learns from making mistakes. The idea is for this subsystem to have a sinergy with scars (negative traits), to make them even more powerful as tools for the player. There´s a fixed number of failures you need to advance a skill, regardless of its level, because a higher skill (+3) will not fail as often as a low one.

What do you think? Which subsystem is the best for what I need?

Hi there,

First, as with Mike, I have to say I really like your laying out the game as you're doing. I think the reason you're not getting a lot of responses now is, well, there's not much to say besides "You seem like you know what you're doing, so try it!"

Sure, we could bat different damage systems back and forth, but at this point, it'd merely be delay. Pick one you think is perhaps the best choice, and take this thing for a drive. Post about it in the Playtesting forum and I suspect you'll see some more responses then.

Oh, one thing: you mentioned aging as the primary thematic factor underlying the game. This may be a language issue, but in American English, "aging" at least sometimes carries a strong connotation of senescence, meaning breakdown, or withering, or wearing down to the point of death. (We're an age-fearing culture, sadly.) Looking over the rules, it strikes me that maybe you're talking more about maturing, or coming to a stronger sense of identity through adversity and reflection. Do I have that right?

Best, Ron

I´m still writing a playtest booklet with the rules for me to handle them best when I test it with my friends. Also, I plan to make an adventure with pregen characters, at first, and only then start creating characters freely.
The playtest booklet is almost finished, it only lacks specific rules for relationships... I´ll share my thoughts on them.

RELATIONSHIPS
The term relationships comprises both allies and enemies of the shapeshifter, and essentially it means minor characters with whom the shapeshifter shares a deep or important conection. As such, having a relationship means telling your GM you want him to include them in the campaign.
In many ways, relationships are like goals: people your character wants to protect or attack.
There are two kinds of relationships, in terms of importance. The lesser ones provide help, but you don´t depend on them emotionally, and thus, will suffer no harm if they were to abandon you. The greater ones, though, function as a sort of second goal. If you abandon them voluntarily or just fail to protect/attack them, your spirit narrows as if you had abandoned a goal (erase a box from a dimension, get a scar, etc.). This means you´re not so free to ignore what they ask from you.
They are gained or lost by risk/reward effects, primarily; but also by support actions taken by the character during rest scenes, and by vital choices, when appropriate. Also, at the character creation, player chooses some relationships for his character.
Relationships may be brought to play to help the characters in dire circumstances. A roll is generally asked against them for this [which roll? Persuade, a circles skill?]. If you pass the roll, they agree to help without asking for anything. But if you fail, things start to complicate (but in general, they will help you):-They help you, but next time you ask help from them, they won´t agree so easily.
-They help you, but they attach a condition to it (they ask something in retourn).
-They help you, but your relationship with him/her becomes more important. If he was a lesser relationship, now he´s a greater relationship.
These rolls would abide by the general rules: risk and reward measurement, difficulty dies, etc.
Which stat or rolls could be related to relationships? I´m thinking about a sort of BW circles, but there chould be other possibilities.

Ron wrote: Oh, one thing: you mentioned aging as the primary thematic factor underlying the game. This may be a language issue, but in American English, "aging" at least sometimes carries a strong connotation of senescence, meaning breakdown, or withering, or wearing down to the point of death. (We're an age-fearing culture, sadly.) Looking over the rules, it strikes me that maybe you're talking more about maturing, or coming to a stronger sense of identity through adversity and reflection. Do I have that right?