I’ve recently played with The Veil – the system featured a neat Giri system that tied the PCs together before the game even started. Similarly, I’ve noticed a few other Powered by the Apocalypse games have featured similar mechanics – Monsterhearts has Strings, while Apocalypse World has HX, etc.
I’m wondering – what other systems feature mechanics for connecting PCs before the game starts? Something that builds a web of inter-dependencies that would give the PCs a reason to stick together even if they might otherwise not get along?
The Sprawl does this as well with jobs against various corporations linking the characters together prior to the actual start of the game (ie. during chargen)
I’m reading Fate Core at the moment, and it has this cool backtory mechanic used during character creation called the phase trio: it gets you to briefly tell the story of your characters first adventure, and then the other pcs add how they were involved in it. Pretty simple, but cool. Kind of formalising stuff you might already do at the table.
fate-srd.com – The Phase Trio
Dungeon World does it very vadly (links between PCs, but in my expercience they mostly don’t care).
Urban Shadows uses a favour system – I don’t know yet if it works, though; it probably does, but I have yet to run it.
Pierre M I think Dungeon World is pretty good for making connections for the first session – just the bonds mechanic becomes irrelevant soon afterwards.
Undying has Debts and a Relationship map
Misspent Youth has you ask questions about the friendship between the characters before every episode.
In Technoir you’re connected because you share obligations to the same people in the setup (you always owe people favors)
Technoir also establishes uni-directional adjectives about how players feel about some of their contacts and fellow PCs during character creation, which can drive play and roleplaying quite a bit.
Lu Quade The Phase Trio is a super cool idea, and it can be moved over to PbTA games pretty well. Each player just writes a bond that represents that “crossover story” that they were in. “It’s Not my Fault” does a cool variation on the idea where there is a starting incident and then each player explains why that situation isn’t their fault and then blames the player to the left, rinse and repeat all around. Each statement forms an Aspect (story bond) that connects everyone. A really fun practice, lots of cool world-building and character drama always comes out of it!
Rich Glover Cool: I think I already do a kinda infromal Phase Trio at the start of new Dungeon World games 🙂 Will check out “It’s Not My Fault”. Thanks!!