As I mentioned in the previous post, I felt frustrated with the simple slot-system OSR -style character sheet, and I realized that I needed a different set of tools to work on the ideas that were brewing in my brain to ultimately be able to answer the questions: “What is this game about?” and “What will the player characters do?”
And what “saved me” was on my desk, a bad printed copy of Summer Myth Hunt, a small game I created almost a year ago.
So, what was already there on that character sheet? Maybe it is easier if I show you:
This already looks very different, right?
If you feel a little lost, below there is a summary of what each part of the character sheet does, so you can have an idea of the flux of ideas behind it.
But what I want to talk to you about is the most basic —and more “setting-agnostic”— portion of it; the way it manages conditions, specificity of the character and action.
In my previous attempt, with the more OSR style character sheet, I was trying to convey the influence of the world onto the character sheet using slots. I wanted to present something that felt like an open page, something that would allow the player to intervene the blanks to reflect the things their character experiences in the game (the things they could fill in is what defines what kind of game it is).
And the thing was that in Summer Myth Hunt I had already done this, and arguably, in a more flexible way.
Because what this character sheet does, it organizes the player's experiences into “different blocks” (as it is evident on the summary of the character sheet). But more important, allows devoting a portion of space to the things the character will obtain from the world (experiences, items, skills, memories, allies, or anything the game needs/wants to present as essential to facilitate the particular fantasy) that is both; modular, and intertwined with the mechanics suggested by the rest of the sheet.
Also, it produces a flow of action (represented by the blue flow-lines at the right), that begins from the intent of the character (here in the form of Imaginarium), passing by the “bad things” that have affected the character (Conditions that can stop/antagonize the intent of the character), and finally reaches the things-the-game-gives-to-the-players-to-define-themselves in the mechanics (here the Myths they hunt and the items they imbue with their magic/Imaginarium).
This action flow was what opened me the space to imagine a setting and the characters within. Because I could insert almost anything on the block of things-the-game-gives-to-the-players-to-define-themselves, and these will have some mechanical meaning because they will already be part of the action flow of the game.1
In this way, what I will insert in there, in this last portion of the action flow, will help me to answer the questions “What is this game about?” and “What will the player characters do?”
Here the exact rules of the flow could change, and they did (e.g., about how conditions antagonize the flow), but the important aspect I got out of it was having an intent, an antagonizer, and a thing to do at the end.