Generational RP system

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed May 16, 2012 6:51 am

I like the idea of roleplaying as a family or other mostly civilian group as opposed to a single adventurer, and the one guy you're playing right now is just the one who's currently off adventuring. Particularly, I like the way that you can string this across multiple generations to create a narrative centuries long without handing immortality out like Halloween candy.

Unfortunately, I've never seen a good "passing of the torch" mechanic that wasn't either "the next generation is a carbon-copy of the old one" or "you get a bunch of free levels/XP based on how awesome your last generation got." That's kind of boring.

Does anyone know of/can anyone think up a more interesting way of passing accumulated character goodies on to your character's successor? Preferably something that encourages actually planning for the longterm to settle down and raise a family and whatnot like normal people?

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Wed May 16, 2012 8:04 am

I've actually thought about this a little. I'll call a set of serial characters a "lineage" unless someone can come up with a better word for it. Some of my ideas:

Power is stored in equipment. A lineage passes down a gradually-growing pile of bows, rings, magic swords, items of power, guns, suits of armor, cars, spaceships, or what have you. Different lineages build up different piles of junk and develop differently.
Power is stored in knowledge. Think of a few lineages of wizards, for example, each passing down a separate set of spells which are gradually refined as they are re-learned and re-used over the course of a thousand years and each character adding a few new spells to the lineage's knowledge.
Power is stored in genetics. Think dog breeding, but with mutagens and teeth. Bonus: you can tell your parents that you're doing your biology homework.
Power is stored in social influence. Think 16th-century European politics; you only get to be royalty if your parents were royalty. Most long games are going to involve a lot of politics anyway, so a power like this works better than it would in any character-focused game I know of. Many grand strategy games do this, more explicitly (Europa Universalis) or more implicitly (Civilization).
Power is stored in the player learning about the world. Imagine Groundhog Day or one of the loopier Harry Potter fanfics. A simple framework here would involve hidden "locations of power", which a character can visit for a permanant power boost. The first characters only have a few locations to visit, but as the players map out more of the world they'll discover more and more powerful locations that future characters can use to grow steadily stronger.

The real problem is, as you mention, keeping each character in the lineage unique. Some ways that I've thought of to deal with this, not necessarily exclusive:

The lineage only determines the core of the characters. For example, if you're playing DND, your lineage would determine your race and class and you'd choose your feats and class features new for every character.
Randomly determine small parts of each character. This is really hard to do, but can be fun. The easiest system I can think of to drop this into would be GURPS; your lineage gives you one major advantage and one major disadvantage, you are randomly assigned some skills and small advantages and disadvantages, and you get to fill out the rest yourself.
The DM runs competing enemy lineages throughout the game. They evolve in response to the players and the players evolve in response to them. A bit slower, but very effective and can be just as memorable as a classic villain character.
Ignore it. Honestly speaking, the part of the game that you care about is the lineage. Memorable characters can add some flavor, but really the player will remember the lineage when you ask them what they played in a given campaign.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed May 16, 2012 8:13 am

The "Power is Equipment/World Knowledge" thing makes me think of Eternal Darkness, and how you play as a dozen characters, each armed with the knowledge of the people who had the Tome of Eternal Darkness before them (although in that case, that definitely isn't in chronological order).

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed May 16, 2012 12:53 pm

Do you want a linear or interleaved game? I.e., are you playing Primus, Primus, Primus, Secondus, Tertius, Tertius, or Primus, Tertius, Primus, Tertius, Secondus, etc.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed May 16, 2012 10:50 pm

I had been thinking linear, but interleaved could be interesting, too. The main point of the idea was that it would allow you to stretch a narrative of mortal characters out across centuries without introducing all kinds of potentially undesirable weirdness about how death works into the setting. That lends itself mostly to linear generations, unless you plan on swapping characters every single session. I am curious as to how you'd make interleaving work, though.

EDIT: And I'm starting to think about Vebyast's ideas. I like all of them, and I'm wondering if each one could be a different class, but for lineages instead. For example, the Belmont Clan is a Fighter lineage, so they get equipment-stored power. So not only does Simon pass his knives, crosses, and holy water onto Richter, but the Belmont Clan is the only one who can use these effectively. Not only that, their ancestral weapon Vampire Killer will actively try to murder any non-Belmont who tries to use it. But the Belnades family instead has a growing library of magical spells they pass on to their children, and there's...Uh...Some other family that can tap into leylines or something and get power from that.

The political power one is tricky, though. Even if you build up downtime to be more important than in dungeon-crawl focused games like more recent editions of D&D, you're still going to have to wrestle with the fact that it'd really be much more useful to leave the aristocrat at home, since that's the only place he's useful. You might just make political power available to all classes, since the other methods are much easier to balance against one another.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu May 17, 2012 2:36 am

Do it Johnny Quest style.

When you start the game you roll up two characters. 1 of them an adult and the other the child heir.

In this case our PCs are Dr. Benton Quest, world renowned super-scientist and Race Bannon the secret agent bodyguard who is secretly banging super-spy Jade, and thus is at least bisexual no matter how suspect his relationship with Benton becomes. Their heirs are Johnny Quest, the scientist's son and Hadji the orphaned mystic who they adopted in a backstory adventure.

Johnny and Hadji accompany Benton and Race on their adventures. They recieve adventure XP for this. Benton's play might get to declare actions for Johnny and Race's for Hadji (which complicates matters a little) or the boys might do most of their actions off screen without adult supervision (which requires some DM fiat but can make for great scenes if done well). Either way, they receive the same XP rewards as the main PCs (because we're certainly not doing per-encounter XP, that way lies madness) because they're completing the same adventures. You've got actual in-character justification for it. More importantly, the next generation is useful for more than just extra lives.

Then a few decades later you come back to the game and decide that you want to play the heirs instead of the adults, so you advance everything three years and make a girl character based on a one-shot NPC from an old game for your wife to play. And the adults can still stay on as supporting characters, just like the heirs were last time.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Thu May 17, 2012 2:46 am

brothers, sisters, cousins, are usually what comes into the game to replace a dead character. the easier way to pass to the next generation is the heirlooms of a retired character.

that means everyone in the game would need to agree on a stopping point where they go home and celebrate their victories in their collective home town and pass on their old items while still running the town.

this means they will have had to make a town while adventuring and settle down in it for a length of time during the original story to start a family.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu May 17, 2012 7:55 am

Hyzmarca, that's just the carbon copy problem all over again. Although different characters within a lineage don't have to all be memorable and distinct in and of themselves (just the lineage itself has to do that), there should be a feeling that when you pass the torch onto an heir, this is actually a different person. Not to mention the game shouldn't be built on the assumption that you pass exactly one generation and that just to do a sequel, but that's probably just because of the specific example you were running with.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Thu May 17, 2012 8:26 am

The Johnny Quest system works for two or three generations, but if you're playing a thousand-year lineage you'd probably end up with the same two sets of characters over and over again - "A" generations provide one half of the six-man band and the "B" generations fill it out. It's a good idea for ensuring continuity, though, and might work if you can find a way to enforce uniqueness it'd work pretty well. Maybe put all the classes on the table at the start of the campaign and say that each can only be played once?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu May 17, 2012 4:51 pm

I think it may be overly ambitious to demand that the system solve the problem of players making similar characters.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu May 17, 2012 5:22 pm

Chamomile wrote:Hyzmarca, that's just the carbon copy problem all over again. Although different characters within a lineage don't have to all be memorable and distinct in and of themselves (just the lineage itself has to do that), there should be a feeling that when you pass the torch onto an heir, this is actually a different person. Not to mention the game shouldn't be built on the assumption that you pass exactly one generation and that just to do a sequel, but that's probably just because of the specific example you were running with.

Well, the Johnny Quest method assumes that multiple generations of a lineage will be working together so that the young ones get on the job training, but that should encourage more variety. After all, you want heirs that can compliment you in-game, not redundant carbon copies. Hadji is a magic user whose tricks come in handy in several tight spots. Neither Race nor Benton is able to match his rope trick. Johnny, likewise, is very different from the two adults and generally provides unique solutions to the problem at hand. The four of them synergize quite well. You've got a scientist, a fighter, a mystic, and a rouge. The mystic and the rouge just happen to be ten years old.

Developing the heir during actual play should help reduce the carbon copy problem, as opposed to simply creating a new character out of the blue.

Vebyast wrote:The Johnny Quest system works for two or three generations, but if you're playing a thousand-year lineage you'd probably end up with the same two sets of characters over and over again - "A" generations provide one half of the six-man band and the "B" generations fill it out. It's a good idea for ensuring continuity, though, and might work if you can find a way to enforce uniqueness it'd work pretty well. Maybe put all the classes on the table at the start of the campaign and say that each can only be played once?

It doesn't work at all for a thousand-year lineage because you'll never play that long. If you're going to develop the younger characters during play, then you have to limit it to two or three generations. Even then there is a good chance your players will get bored and break up before you get to even the second generation.

But if you're going to play the 1st, 3rd, 8th, 16th, 21st, 24th, and 92nd Phantom, you really can't avoid carbon copies all that much. The entire advantage of Phantom-type lineages is that you've got a formula for throwing carbon-copy characters into different time periods.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu May 17, 2012 5:47 pm

hyzmarca wrote: It doesn't work at all for a thousand-year lineage because you'll never play that long. If you're going to develop the younger characters during play, then you have to limit it to two or three generations. Even then there is a good chance your players will get bored and break up before you get to even the second generation.

You've accurately summed up why I would not be interested in such a game system.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Thu May 17, 2012 5:57 pm

hogarth wrote:
hyzmarca wrote: It doesn't work at all for a thousand-year lineage because you'll never play that long. If you're going to develop the younger characters during play, then you have to limit it to two or three generations. Even then there is a good chance your players will get bored and break up before you get to even the second generation.
You've accurately summed up why I would not be interested in such a game system.

I think maybe we're thinking on different time scales here. I envision each character in the lineage lasting for three or four game sessions, perhaps 20 or 30 hours of play - about as long as it takes to play through one of the Castlevania games. You don't get all that attached to the characters or their individual stories because the really interesting part is the lineage's overarching story. As a somewhat more obscure example, if you've ever read any of the anthologies from Keith Laumer's Bolo universe, it's kind of like that. If you subscribe to the theory that "James Bond" is a codename for several different spies, it's also a lot like that.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu May 17, 2012 7:29 pm

The main point of having the characters be unique is not that they should be fundamentally different from one another. In fact, it's totally fine if some members of the same lineage end up identical to one another. Just so long as those two members aren't right next to one another in the line of succession, so that when you change generations, there is a sense of change.

But yeah, the original intent was that an average year-long gaming campaign (52 sessions, probably about 30 or so adventures) would cover, like, eight generations. So each individual character only gets about six sessions to himself to begin with, and it's the overall lineage that's important. If that's going to be the case, the lineage itself needs to be distinct from the others in the party, and having each lineage automatically tied to a certain race and class (assuming a D&D-ish system) is a decent way to do that.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu May 17, 2012 7:53 pm

Vebyast wrote:
hogarth wrote:
hyzmarca wrote: It doesn't work at all for a thousand-year lineage because you'll never play that long. If you're going to develop the younger characters during play, then you have to limit it to two or three generations. Even then there is a good chance your players will get bored and break up before you get to even the second generation.
You've accurately summed up why I would not be interested in such a game system.
I think maybe we're thinking on different time scales here. I envision each character in the lineage lasting for three or four game sessions, perhaps 20 or 30 hours of play - about as long as it takes to play through one of the Castlevania games. You don't get all that attached to the characters or their individual stories because the really interesting part is the lineage's overarching story. As a somewhat more obscure example, if you've ever read any of the anthologies from Keith Laumer's Bolo universe, it's kind of like that. If you subscribe to the theory that "James Bond" is a codename for several different spies, it's also a lot like that.

I get what you're getting at, but it's a double-edged sword. I'm not particularly interested in switching between PCs quickly. But if you switch between PCs slowly, then you don't get much of a lineage before the game ends.

I can imagine someone might be into it, but it doesn't sound like it would float my boat.

Chamomile wrote:But yeah, the original intent was that an average year-long gaming campaign (52 sessions, probably about 30 or so adventures) would cover, like, eight generations.

A year-long campaign for me would NOT be playing a full-length session every week.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri May 18, 2012 1:41 am

If you want to play a lineage, you should actually play a lineage and not a succession of characters. As in, you play all the different living members of your lineage all at once during the same session. You spend one encounter as Sir Roland La'Veyate, the young knight fighting to rescue his father from the orcish horde and then zoom across the map to play a different encounter as Roland's elven grandmother, Lady La'Veyate of the Sunken Forest during her negotiations with the Wolf Temple of the Fire Depths and then zoom across the map again to play as Roland's father as he makes his attempt to break out of orc prison by seducing the she-orcs with his half-elven wiles.

You want character generation to be quick, painless and based around on a simple operation that mashs together the parent's attributes to give you the attributes of their children, plus or minus some templates applied for their education and upbringing. You want character death to occur with reasonable frequency, but you also probably want to have only a light combat system that handles duels (be they character v. character or character v. single monster) and military campaigns well, but without too much focus on killing a dozen mooks personally.

Your next generation gets A] loot heirlooms and B] awesome genetics from the previous generation, who in turn got them from the generation before them. Starting a new generation and producing heirs is something that you do with a character so in order to free them up so they can go out in a last blaze of glory and exceedingly risky but rewarding adventures.

Don't limit a lineage to a single class. It's cool if one brother is a mage and the other is a knight and then they send their kids off to learn from their mage and knight uncles respectively in order to produce a generation of mage-knights and knight-mages.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri May 18, 2012 3:37 am

That's great, Grek, except that it's a lot of extra complications that accomplishes absolutely none of my stated goals, so actually that's not great at all and completely tangential to what I was asking for. I said in the very first post that it would be cool to play as a mostly civilian group, so if all of the named characters of your lineage are investigating mysteries, breaking out of prisons, or staging rescue missions, you are already doing something completely different from what I wanted in the first place.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri May 18, 2012 4:04 pm

If you're willing to settle for linear, you could have each level be a new character. Mostly though, I think the answer is "don't use dnd".

Maybe hack up the WEG d6 system, build separate characters, and keep a single CP pool to advance them? You may end up with an overbuffed primarch, but that could be okay. It's not that weird to have an entire family surviving on Great-Grandpa's reputation.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri May 18, 2012 9:18 pm

I would prefer a non-D&D system, but I'm barely familiar with WEG d6.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri May 18, 2012 11:46 pm

Chamomile wrote:I would prefer a non-D&D system, but I'm barely familiar with WEG d6.

Name a difficult 1-40+

Characters take their skill which is say lockbreaking, at 3D6+1. Do you beat the TN? Great.

Combat: Roll blasters, opponent rolls dodge. Highest hits. Roll damage. Strength soaks. Difference becomes damage and frags you quickly.

Advancement: you get character points, which you either spend like Karma in SR to advance skills/stats, or you can buy individual extra dice to buff rolls.

That's *really* the basics of WEG D6

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat May 19, 2012 1:22 am

Your stated goals are:
-Roleplay a family of civilians
-Have only one person off adventuring at a time
-Don't make the son character identical to the dad character.
-Don't give out free levels based on what level a character's dad was.
-Characters must pass on their accumulated power to their children.
-Characters should settle down and have children.

What I suggested satisfies everything but #2, and you can do that in your home game by saying "only one character per lineage can be an adventurer at once, everyone else is a civilian class and does civilian stuff back home", which honestly sounds fucking boring to me.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat May 19, 2012 4:34 am

Also "allow for players to play through a single narrative stretched out across centuries in the same amount of real time it takes to play a regular D&D campaign." The more people in one lineage are kicking around doing things at once, the harder that is. I also can't imagine how you manage to get through a normal D&D game, since playing more than one character is the exception rather than the rule.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat May 19, 2012 12:55 pm

That's not really a viable goal even at the lower limit, not in any meaningful sense. Let's assume that by "centuries" you mean just two and not like 5 or 10 or something crazy like that. So, a bare minimum of 200 years of ingame time. Since your campaign is only likely to survive 50 sessions at the upper limit, that's 4 years of ingame time per session, ie. 48 months worth of story covered every time you play. At the bare minimum. If your sessions last 4 hours, that's a whole year of narrative every 5 minutes. Not per character, but total for all the characters involved and the DM's actions to.

Assuming your players spend 1 minute on each of their turns, a 4 hour session can have at most 240 turns occur - assuming nobody goes to take a bathroom break or spends time dithering or has to answer the phone or some shit. Divided between 4 players and a DM, that's 48 turns worth of time going on at once. So, each player's turn has to be an entire month's worth of their character's actions. Which, in turn, means that the actions of that character can't be covered in any finer detail than "What did you do in October?" Which sucks.

But maybe you skip some years. Maybe you declare that, while the campaign will move ahead an average of 4 years per session, your actual screen time will consist of some tiny fraction of that, run in normal D&D time. That comes out to about 10 minutes for interesting things to happen in per four years. If you say that one interesting thing happens per generation, then you've got an hour and change worth of on screen adventuring for each generation of heros to A] establish their character, B] distinguish themselves from the previous generations and C] tell an interesting story worth caring about.

tl;dr version: It is literally unpossible to have a campaign that lasts for centuries of ingame time unless A] you have turns that cover months of ingame time with a single action or B] handwave entire decades, only playing out the smallest fraction of a fraction of the campaign time in play time.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat May 19, 2012 10:42 pm

Grek wrote:B] handwave entire decades, only playing out the smallest fraction of a fraction of the campaign time in play time.

Yeah, that's the idea. Game time always moves slower than real time, so if my concern was running out of years to tell the story in, why would I even consider playing a lineage in the first place when just one guy's life will last longer than I could possibly play? If you want to tell the story of a family rising to power, you must cut out the vast majority of that family's actions...Which is totally okay, because plenty of settings can have twenty-five years of a family's actions be limited to "we built a castle." Or maybe the three knight brothers got together and chased bandits for fun for the next two decades, but bandits are trivial non-threats at their level so we just make, like, two rolls to see if they completely wiped them out or not.

Not to mention most games, even in modern D&D which is basically nothing but a combat simulator, do not have 100% of their events played out in turns. A 4-hour session very regularly covers hours, days, or even weeks of in-game time in standard, non-lineage games.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Sat May 19, 2012 10:43 pm

Chamomile wrote: if all of the named characters of your lineage are investigating mysteries, breaking out of prisons, or staging rescue missions, you are already doing something completely different from what I wanted in the first place.

Wait. So...no mysteries and no action scenes? What did you intend for your lineages to do in this game? Own hotel chains? Generational Monopoly? Do you want to play the Belmont clan or not?