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The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG will forever hold a place in my heart for one significant reason. It goes like this:

• Buffy, you kick ass, so your stats and abilities will reflect that.
• Angel, you’re a vampire, so all that stuff’s on your sheet.
• Giles, you know a lot of stuff, so your numbers will show that.
• Willow, you’re smart and know computers and learn magic, so your stats rock.
• Oz, in addition to being Seth Green you’re also a werewolf. Stats and abilities woo!
• Xander… um, yeah… here’s a huge sack of Hero Points to spend to save yourself. Oh, and here’s an eye patch for when those run out.

It’s the recognition that on television, in movies, in comics, on old time radio shows, in pulp novels, in literature, in every other medium except roleplaying games, all characters within an ensemble are not equal.

Let’s look at the prototypical adventuring party: The Fellowship of the Ring. Merry is not the same level as Aragorn. Merry and Pippin together aren’t the same level as Aragorn. Hell, Merry, Pippin, Sam and Frodo arguably add up to the same level as Aragorn. But in a game, everyone’s the same level. Why? Because it’s fair.

No, it isn’t. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not, and I’ll tell you why.

Game balance does not come from game mechanics.
Game balance comes the gamemaster. Game balance comes from every character having something appropriate to do. It means your wizard gets to do wizard stuff and your ranger gets to do ranger stuff and your slayer gets to do slayer stuff and your xander gets to do xander stuff. Seriously, even if all the characters are the same “level” (I use this term generically to include “built for the same number of points” or whatever the equivalent is in the game of your choice), if you run an adventure that’s thief-skill heavy and the wizard spends the night sitting in the back picking his teeth, it’s unbalanced and, I’ll say it, unfair. If you run a magic-heavy game and the fighter hold action for 47 rounds, it’s unbalanced and unfair. What does level have to do with any of this? Not a blessed thing.

Think about this: why can’t you run a game where one player is Doc Savage and the other players are his aids? Conventional wisdom says you can’t. It’s not right to let one player be a higher level than all the others. Why can’t you play Jack Bauer and another player be Kim, or Chloe (assuming, of course, someone actually wants to be Kim or Chloe)? The standard game design playbook says no way.

Let’s re-define fair. You want to play a hobbit. Okay. You realize that you’ll spend a lot of time screaming and running away, right? Well, denying you the opportunity to play the type of character you want would be unfair, so let’s do it. You over there, you want to play the Ranger-King? You do realize that in every fight you’re going to be the one getting the living crap beat out of him and that you’re going to be putting yourself in harm’s way to protect these other characters that can’t fight, right? That’s the character you want to play, it would be unfair thof me to not allow it. You all picked characters you want, knowing the drawbacks to each, so that’s fair. I’ll be fair and give everyone something to do each session. Fair? Fair.

Equality isn’t a number. Equality is how you treat people, even fictional people.

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Typically your character will get Experience Points at the end of an adventure, or the end of a game session, maybe even at the end of an encounter depending upon the game and the style of your gamemaster. Characters will “level up” (a term I use generically to cover purchasing new and increased abilities as well as gaining levels in certain traditional RPGs) at random times and in random places. There’s no connection between the narrative flow of the story and characters suddenly manifesting new abilities.

Okay, sure, gamemasters wing this all he time. At least, some do. More should. A wizard learning a new spell should be at least a minor story point, a subplot at least. A superhero who adds a new widget to his power armor should at least get a mention. That stuff should get worked in, not go unnoticed or treated almost as a retcon.

Yes, I know quite a few gamemasters delay gratification. You have to wait until the end of the adventure to level up, and we hand-wave some bologna about learning stuff in the downtime between adventures. You have to find someone who knows that skill, or that spell, or whatever.

Here’s my question: WHY? does the system (i.e., perception of how RPGs work) function this way, and continue this way?

Assumption #1: Characters are going to level up at some point. This such a safe assumption, let’s just call it “fact”.

Assumption #2: It would be easier for gamemasters to plan adventures if they knew when and how characters were going to level up.

Assumption #3: It would be beneficial to players if characters leveled up at dramatically appropriate points in the story, i.e. you learn that wicked new spell right before going to face the evil big bad guy.

So why not do this: players discuss with the gamemaster how they’d like to level up. Talk about what skills, powers, abilities, whatever, they want the character to gain. The gamemaster than builds the ability to level up into the game, introducing NPC teachers and quests and whatever else might be an interesting way for the character to advance. Then, at appropriate points in the story, the gamemaster declares it a done deal. You know this spell. You gain that feat. You add ranks to that skills. Whatever.

Furthermore, you don’t have to do all of this at once! Instead of leveling up and getting a whole slew of stuff all at once, you get a little something every adventure or two… or three… or at whatever pace is appropriate to the game you’re playing.

This is how I think of it: experience points are like a gift. You can only spend it in certain places and in certain ways. It’s a reward. Instead of giving a gift card, why not get them what they really want, what they’re going to buy with the gift card anyway?

Someone out there is thinking, “but how do you level up all characters equitably”. That’s a whole other tirade coming up in the near future. Stay tuned.

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Arguably, Hero Points (aka Action Points, Karma, Fate, Bennies, etc.) and Experience Points are two very different types of player rewards, serving different purposes. But do they have to be? I’ve managed to combine them under a few different systems with a high degree of success. Here’s why you might consider doing it, and how to do it with the system of your choice.

How I Did It
When I first tried this, the system I was using had HP and XP on roughly the same scale; they’d automatically get 2-3 HP at the start of each adventure, and then get 2-3 XP at the end of the adventure. My initial thought was to just remove the automatic HP award and replace it with a merit-based HP system — you do something cool, you roll really well, you get a HP. The goal was to motivate the players to roleplay and do cool stuff. To offset this lack of up-front HP, I allowed them to use XP as emergency HP. This drove an interesting change of behavior; did they want to spend the XP for an immediate benefit, instant gratification as it were, or bank it for a permanent benefit. The players liked it, because it really made them think about the balance between the character’s in-game goals and their own desire to munchkin up. It was intriguing enough that I permanently made the change. HP were awarded for doing cool stuff throughout the game, but also at the end of the game for completing the objective. They could be used as either HP in-game for short-term benefits like rerolls, extra degrees of success, or dramatic editing, or banked until they could be spent to increase abilities or buy new ones.

Controlling Advancement
There are times when it makes sense for characters to be more or less “static” within a setting. They shouldn’t logically “level up” and become more and more powerful. Combining HP and XP solves this problem, as it gives the players the opportunity to burn the points on things other than character advancement. There’s a different sort of power creep to be aware of however, and that’s potentially ending up with so many HP that they can get away with anything. Depending upon the system and how HP can be used, you may want to initiate a cap on how many they can accrue, or only allow a certain number to carry over from adventure to adventure. You also want to manage your rewards, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Player Decisions, Choices, and Control
There have been times when a character I’m playing is, in my opinion, perfect just the way he is. I know, I’m a bit of a freak in that regard. I felt that “levelling up” or gaining new, or higher-rated, abilities would ruin the essence of who the character was and what made them fun to play. Yet I was forced to advance. Merging HP and XP would have solved that. I would have jumped at the chance to keep my character from getting killed by spending points to make the villain miss, or to do some dramatic editing to the storyline, rather than because they’d become an expert in combat.

It Rewards Roleplaying
Conversely, you’ve got the character that’s not really good at much because they’re low-level, but the player has a lot of great character bits. They may not be able to slay a who tribe of goblins, but they did other things that advanced the plot and kept the story going. Give them HP for that. By letting them spend HP as XP, they can power up so that they’re able to fight goblins without getting smeared.

How To Do It
First, figure out how many HP are typically awarded during a game session. Then figure out how many XP are given out. Divide the XP by the HP; that’s your conversion. For example, if you typically give out 5 HP and 500 XP, then 1 HP = 100 XP. I suggest using the lower number, as it’s easier to track, and letting the players do the conversion. In this example, you’d end up giving out 10 points per session. Understanding that players can use that as either twice the XP or twice the HP they’re used to and dramatic power creep can occur, you may want to halve either the total reward (5 points instead of 10) or halve the value per point (1 HP = 50 XP instead of 100 XP), depending on the problem you’re solving for.

Make It Tangible
A lot of games use poker chips or other tokens to track HP. Traditionally, XP is just a bunch of numbers on paper. By using the smaller number, players get tangible tokens to fiddle with. They can throw them onto the table when they use them as HP, they can cash them in to the GM when they power up, and they (or the GM) can write down the total they’ll start the next session with at the game’s end.

Obviously, this isn’t for everyone, but hopefully it will put some ideas in your head on how to manipulate existing systems to get different styles of play out of them.

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We’ve already discussed using genre to define the difficulty of tasks, rewarding players by making actions that reinforce genre tropes easier and increasing the difficulty of actions that go against the grain. Continuing this line of thought, let’s talk about how other player rewards can be used in a similar vein.

Hero Points
This type of mechanic is known by a number of names — hero points, action points, style points, bennies, fate, karma, courage, and so on. The first two games I ever played using this mechanic — DC Heroes and DoubleZero’s Legacy System* — called them hero points, so that’s the generic name I use. The concept is that when a player does something good — rolling well, roleplaying well, whatever the system defines — you get a point that can be spent later to give the character an advantage. This can be an increased degree of success, re-rolling a bad result, again, whatever the system specifically dictates.

Using this for genre reinforcement is fairly simple. The swashbuckler could just run down the stairs, but leaping for the chandelier so he can swing across the room is more dramatic and appropriate. Mr. British super-spy could just avoid, capture, or shoot the beautiful female spy, but no… he’s got to seduce her first. When trapped in a labyrinth of long corridors, the Doctor and his companion could just find a good spot to hide, or simply stand their ground and face the monster of the week… or they could send five or ten minutes frantically running first. The common denominators are that these things reinforce genre and setting tropes (you may even say cliches). They’re decidedly not the most logical, rational, or tactically sound actions, and involve some degree of risk. They’re roleplaying bits. They introduce some dramatic tension, humor, or human moments to the game. It makes the swashbuckler game feel more swashbuckling, the superspy game more superspy-like, the Doctor Who game more Doctory. When a player opts for this, give them a hero point. Give them as many as is appropriate for the system you’re using.

Experience Points
Hero points are situational. Experience points are meant as a greater reward for the overall experience in the game session and/or adventure. This can include anything and everything you desire, from the players description of their character, to how they interact with other characters, to general table talk. It’s more than just playing in character; it’s contributing to the overall flavor of the game. A ranger spends his down time walking the perimeter, snaring game, describing tracking techniques, and telling stories of patrolling the king’s wood for orcs, versus the player just saying “my character stands watch and makes jokes about the half-orc“. The player talks about a book he read on Robin Hood or medieval archery or some documentary about low-tech fieldcraft, versus chatting about irrelevant cartoons or the latest superhero movie. The player that stays focused on his character and the setting, maintaining the mood and the vibe of the genre, should get an experience bonus. His head’s in the game. Other players shouldn’t get penalized, but they’re only going to get standard awards. The ranger, for being consistently rangerly, will level up move quickly.

Magna Cartas
All of this becomes easier to manage if you’re using magna cartas, which we’ve also discussed previously. Players know the expectations; they’ve hopefully helped to create them. By performing tasks that reinforce what the group likes about the genre or setting, or at least performing those tasks in a way that’s appropriate, you have a basis for granting rewards. By having a list of the things players don’t like, things they want to avoid, you have a basis for withholding rewards. Again, you should never penalize or punish players, and always give them the base rewards everyone has earned, but no bonuses. You should also tell them flat-out what the rewards, or lack thereof, are based on. “You did this cool thing from our ‘like’ magna carta, so I’m giving you 500xp for that. You did another ‘like’ thing, but you also did something on our ‘dislike’ magna carta, so those cancel each other out.”

Social Contracts
Let me say up front that I’m not a fan of rewarding or penalizing characters for player actions that aren’t related to the character. If you keep telling the player to stop texting, or picking his nose, or bothering the host’s cat, you shouldn’t gig his character for it. Nor should you give his character rewards when he stops his annoying out-of-character behaviors. What will happen, however, is that those behaviors will stop and he will become more focused as the other players gain bonus rewards for being more immersive and engaged in the setting and genre. Maybe he won’t stop picking his nose, but he’ll be more concerned about his character and doing relevant things so he can get the bonuses and won’t have the time or attention span to text or bother the cat.

*To avoid lawsuits, I added the name of the game DoubleZero is a retro-clone of to the site’s naughty word filter. This worked against me when I tried to write a legitimate post about that legacy system. On the upside, it’s kind of funny to see the name of a spy game get redacted.

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One of the things that’s always bothered me about “generic” roleplaying systems is that genre enforcement is almost always invested in the player characters. You know you’re playing a fantasy game because the characters have spells. You know it’s a supers game, because they have powers. You know it’s a science fiction game, or an espionage game, or a horror game, because this list of skills available is different. With few exceptions, the rules themselves do not adapt to suit the genre.

What I’m doing in Imagination’s Toybox, and something you can do pretty easily yourself within the game system of your choice, is having the rules reinforce genre and setting tropes by having them drive the difficulty of certain actions. For example, if you’re playing a game about 17th century swashbucklers and one of the player characters wants to swing from a chandelier, that should be easy because that’s a genre trope. If your horror-game character wants to hide under the stairs in the hope that the serial killer will pass her by, that should be easy, because that’s a horror trope. If the horror character wants to swing from the chandelier, or the swashbuckler wants to hide under the stairs, those are probably normal difficulty, or possibly bumped up to be harder, because those fall outside the genre tropes. If it takes the game out of the tone of the genre, it should be harder.

Now, some will see this as a form of railroading, and if not handled deftly I would agree. The gamemaster could use this to steer characters in the direction he wants them to go by making certain tasks easier than others. But that’s not the idea here. It’s meant to reward characters for being in character, for players to work to stay with the story, the genre, and the setting. Have you ever had a serious or scary game ruined because a player got silly? This rule is meant to help curtail that sort of behavior, and enhance the experiences of players that play along.

This doesn’t just hold for player characters. Some gamemaster rolls will be easier, or harder, as well. In a four color supers game, it should be extremely hard to kill a hero. In a horror game, it should be easier to drive a character insane.

The way this will be handled in Toybox is through something akin to genre Magna Cartas. Lists, created by the gamemaster or the GM and players together, of the sorts of things that should be easy in the game, and things that should be hard. This also avoids the railroading aspect, because the tropes are understood up front. They’re living documents, of course, so as you play you can add or remove things that don’t work, or tweak the bonuses and penalties until you get the right “feel”.

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One way to build a world is to start with a single adventure and build outward. You make it up as you go along, based on elements suggested or implied by the setting. This can be a published adventure, whether or not it’s supposed to be part of a specific setting, or a story you make up on your own.

As an example, let’s take an old standby known to old gamers everywhere: You meet in a tavern. A merchant hires the player characters to guard his caravan. Along the way, the caravan is attacked by goblins. Or bandits. Or goblin bandits. The player characters fight off the goblins, the caravan arrives safely at its destination, and the player characters get paid. Let’s break this down, and see how we can start building a world.

You meet in a tavern.
Why this tavern? Is this a place where adventurers looking for work gather? Is it at a major crossroads in the relative middle of nowhere, or in a big city? Big tavern, or small tavern? The state of the tavern is going to inform the state of the local economy, and to some degree in turn the state of local politics, in the area. Is this tavern a one-shot location that we’ll never see again, or a possible base of operations for the adventuring party?

A merchant hires the player characters to guard his caravan.
Why doesn’t the merchant have his own guards? Were they killed? Did they quit? Can he not afford guards and is looking for gullible adventurers he can stiff at the end of the line? Why does he even need guards? What’s so dangerous along this trade route? If it’s a regular trade route, why doesn’t the local king or government dispatch men to protect it? If they did, what happened to them? Or is this a new trade route? If so, what’s at the other end and who does the merchant hope to sell to?

Along the way, the caravan is attacked by goblins.
Or bandits.
Or goblin bandits.
Everyone has a motivation, even villains and monsters. Especially villains and monsters, in good stories. Do the goblins consider this to be their land, and the humanoids are encroachers? Do they work as scouts and saboteurs for a neighboring kingdom that’s trying to start some trouble? Is there, in fact, a war on? Is the caravn carrying something special that the goblins, or whoever they work for, want or need? Have the human settlers ron off all the game, and the goblins are just hungry and trying to feed their families? Or are they just criminals, looking for easy prey because this trade route is unguarded for some other unrelated reason?

The player characters fight off the goblins, the caravan arrives safely at its destination, and the player characters get paid.
This is a big assumption. Do they get paid? What currency do they get paid in. What kind of cargo were they carrying, anyway? Was it simple trade goods, or stuff the people on this end needed, like medicine? Where are they, anyway? A city, a village, a military outpost? Now that they’re there, is the cargo going to get them in trouble? Were they hauling contraband? Is thise where all the normal protectors of the orad have ended up, gathering to fight something bigger? Does the merchant need an escort back? Is this is one-shot destination, or is this a recurring location, or even the new base of operations for the player characters?

Does your head hurt? It should. Every decision you make, every detail you fill in, on this simple adventure will lead to more questions, more details to fill in, more story ideas. You’ve taken the first steps toward making your world unique. Give this exercise to 10 different gamemasters, and expect to see the seeds of 10 different fantasy worlds.

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One of the keys to being a successful gamemaster is playing to your strengths. One of the ways to identify those strengths is to list out things that you like in the type of setting you want to run, and things you dislike. If you’re running a modern crime drama game, and you like heist stories, you’ll gravitate toward running heist stories. If you crime dramas about rape freak you out, don’t run stories that involve rape.

In the book No Plot? No Problem, Chris Baty calls these lists of likes and dislikes Magna Cartas. He pitches it as a tool for writers, but it’s useful for gamemasters and setting designers as well. Make two lists, one of things you like within the genre you’re working in, character types, stories, movies, TV shows, books. The stuff you dig. It can be as high level or as detailed as you want it to be. The only person who has to understand what it means is you. Make a second list of things you dislike. Keep these in a notebook somewhere, some place where you can refer to them from time to time.

Are these absolutes? Of course not. If you think of a good way to tell a story about something on your negative Magna Carta, do it. It’s simply a tool to help you form an idea of the type of world you want to create, the types of adventures you want to run, at the start of your worldbuilding process.

If you’re looking at running a long-term game with a regular group of players, consider sitting down and brainstorming group Magna Cartas. You find out that two of the people in the group love mafia stories, but someone is tired of stories about street gangs and drug dealers. Guess what? You now have an idea of the types of stories to tell that will make your players happy. Does that mean everyone gets what they want? Of course not. You can’t please all of the people, all of the time. But in knowing what they want, you can make some things pop and push other elements to the background, or make accomodations so that things fit better and feel better. Just go back into your story notes and change that gang-connected drug dealer into a mobster, for instance, or use the drug dealer story idea on the week that one player can’t make it. The players’ likes and dislikes will also feed you story ideas, especially when you start mixing and matching the group Magna Cartas with your own. Everyone will have a better roleplaying experience overall.

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Art by Greywulf.

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Everything in the game system is rated on a scale from 1 to 10, with one being the lowest possible value, 5 being “average”, and 10 being the highest possible value.

The game system uses 10-sided dice. These are available from most quality game retailers. If you don’t have access to 10-sided dice, you can use a deck of playing cards with the face cards (jokers, queens, kings, jacks) removed, and draw cards instead of rolling dice.

Your character’s ability score is the number of dice you roll when your character uses that ability. If your character wants to use an ability rated as 7, you roll 7 10-sided dice, or 7d10.

The difficulty rating for a task is determined by the gamemaster. The bigger the number, the harder the task. You need to roll that number or higher on your 10-sided dice. If the difficulty is 5, you need to roll 5 of higher.

The number of successes is how well the character did. Using the above examples, you roll 7d10 for your character’s ability. The difficulty is 5, so you need to roll 5 or higher. You roll 1, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10. That is 4 successes, a quality result of 4 on  scale of 1 to 10, a little below average.

Most competent characters will succeed most of the time. What is more important is the degree of success. Did the character barely make it, or did something spectacular just happen? This is one of the things that makes Imagination’s Toybox more than just a nuts-and-bolts tactical game and offers opportunities for storytelling.

That’s how the game works, at its most fundamental level. All other rules build from there.

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The earliest manuscript I can find for Imagination’s Toybox bears a copyright date of 1992. I wrote the system for a modern-day pulp setting, the disaster-plagued Knights of Torque & Recoil, but had decided to spin it off into its own generic system. I’m not going to bore you with the long, tedious history of the game and why it’s taken me two decades to get it published. What matters is that it will be published, and it will be published later this year.

Tabletop roleplayers steal, borrow, adapt and mashup material from other sources to create their settings and campaigns. At least, that’s been my experience in over 30 years in the hobby. It’s certainly what I do. If I’m running Game A, I might take bits from Game B, a character from a novel I’m reading, a plot from a movie, a magic item from a comic book, the look of a particular actor, and personality traits from a guy I work with, throw them into a blender, change the names and a couple of dead-giveaway details, and call it my own. It’s just part of the creative process, and in working with published fiction authors, comics creators, and people in the film, television, and video game industries, it’s a pretty universal part of the creative process. We all have our influences, our likes and dislikes, and frankly it’s easier to build on the foundation that’s come before. When you’re putting together a game for your friends, using elements you’re already familiar with, or taking existing bits and using them in slightly different ways, makes it easier to prepare. For the players, it’s easier to get into the game when there are elements that are familiar to them that they can interact with, build upon, and add their own twists to. It’s not like most of us are going to try to commit outright intellectual property theft and publish our chimeras for profit. Those who do are creative enough to bandy about words like homage and pastiche and to make the mixture feel fresh enough that it at least feels like something new.

Roleplaying, you see, has no unique genres. The earliest games were based and high fantasy, sword and sorcery, and horror fiction. Game settings, and game rules, are all adaptations and interpretations of things we’re seen in other media. Certainly, decades after the dawn of the hobby, there are players who came to tabletop roleplaying first and learned about the influences behind it later. But the origins of the hobby remain elsewhere.

When I first sat down to write Imagination’s Toybox, I didn’t want to write just another generic rules set. I wanted something that could act as a “universal translator”, letting me quickly and easily pull in disparate elements from a variety of places and graft them together easily. I didn’t want to have to create separate books, or even separate chapters, to describe different genres, tones, or media. “Superheroes work like this” and “movies work like that” and so on. What I found was that rather than creating statistics-and-dice systems, I was building a vocabulary and philosophy of telling stories and creating settings. Creators in those other media, after all, don’t assign numbers and roll dice to determine if the hero hits the villain; they have the characters do what best suits the needs of the story. This isn’t to say that character ability scores and mechanics aren’t important; it’s more that they work best with the context of some other types of rules.

Illegitimi non carborundum,
Berin

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