So I’ve been thinking of Nephilim Song 4.0 design and my goal is that characters naturally emerge that pass the empty room test*. The empty room test is if the GM tells his players, “Okay, it’s Tuesday morning, you wake up. There is no imminent threat, action or plot hook dangling in front of you. What do you do?” I don’t recommend GMs ever do this, but that isn’t the point.

A character that passes the test will immediately have something to do that drives the game forward. Having something to do that drives the game forward is different than just having something to do. A character can answer the empty room challenge by going down to his lab and quietly working on a gizmo that will increase his character’s power, but that doesn’t inherently drive the game forward. That answer lacks interaction with the setting or conflict. A GM can twist it into situation by forcing the character out into the setting to collect a flux capacitor since his burnt out yesterday, but this would be GM driven drama, not character driven drama.

There need to be goals or something that drives the characters to choose to interact with the setting. There should be something they want or need and there should be inherent conflict in trying to get it. “I want to destroy the rebels.” is such a goal. The rebels don’t want to be destroyed and it represents something the character can pro-actively pursue if he finds himself in an empty room. He can go out and seek information about rebel cells or operations, form and train a squad of anti-rebel forces, gain the backing of the Ministry of Security, etc.

Destroying the rebels is probably a campaign scale goal, meaning achieving that goal will be a campaign altering, if not ending event. A character should have at least one revolving arc scale goal as well. This could be the character’s immediate stepping stone towards his campaign goal or it may be unrelated if he has been distracted from his larger goal by a pretty face.

That would give me more than I’ve ever had before, but the question is could I add a third type of goal reserved for a conflicting goal. A character’s campaign goal is to destroy the rebels, but his conflicting goal is to learn swordsmanship from his uncle, who is a rebel commander.

That creates a complex, nuanced character. It provides flags for what the campaign should be about, what the character will be pursuing in the next few sessions and where the character’s big conflicts are.

Clearly in creating such a flag system, at least for the campaign scale goals, the players should talk and discuss and come up with what they want the campaign to be out. This doesn’t mean that they should all take the same campaign goal, but they should be thematically compatible. Unless you are going for a PVP game if one character has a goal, “Destroy all the rebels” another character should not have a goal of “Assassinate the King.” If you are going for a PVP game, have at it, in fact make sure the character’s goals are in meaningful conflict.

So since this is nominally about design I have to ask the question of whether there should be mechanics to support and reward pursuing goals? My instinct is yes. An easy solution is to turn them into quasi-aspects and so if they are pursuing their goals they will always have the ability to spend an inspiration to gain the +2 in a conflict. In the same sense they can be compelled and invoked for effect. Since they by definition are being pursued, it seems they would be compelled often causing the character pursuing his goals to gain inspirations.

The main issue with this is the arc scale goal will often be in effect unless the character’s are pursuing a different character’s arc scale goal. Someone’s arc scale goal will be invokable (Unless the GM sent ninjas to attack for pacing reasons).

Another option would be to award XP bonuses for pursuing the character’s goals. For that to work there should be some clear definitions. I’d like to avoid the sort of fuzziness that lead s to player pleading for the XP reward even if they didn’t do anything meaningful to pursue their goals. This will lead to rewarding players for driving the game. Bonus. However, it’ll probably lead to one sided rewards where pro-active players or characters whose goals are related to the central storyline are rewarded disproportionately compared to reactive players or character’s who goals did not end up being as central.

So I’ve pretty much talked myself into goals being quasi-aspects.

I still have to think about the changing of goals. They should certainly be able to change, heck the arc scale goal should change every few sessions. But they shouldn’t change moment to moment for maximum advantage.

My first thoughts is goals could change at the completion of a goal or a significant reveal, if the new goal is related to that reveal or the reveal is related to the old goal.

If a character had an arc goal of killing Stenri Gorvan because he had killed a cousin he could change that goal if the character killed Stenri Gorvan, it was revealed that Stenri was not the murderer or if the character chose to pursue Kefni Mei who gave the order rather than Stenri who did the killing. The character could not change his goal to an unrelated goal unless there was a new reveal about the new goal. The character is in pursuit of Stenri when he meets Sashira and is smitten. He puts aside vengeance for the time being and changes his goal to forming a relationship with Sashira, a hot and sweaty relationship.

Those are my thoughts for the time being.

* The Empty Room Test was derived from comments made on the Sons of Kryos podcast.