Story Points
Story Points let a PC start without any backstory - instead you get 5 Story Points, and spend them to:
- know an obscure fact
- know a language/ culture
- introduce an ally to help with the current mission
- et c.
By the time players spend them all, they should have a chonky backstory which was always relevant to the current mission, so no info-dumping required.
- If all your points were spent introducing cousins and siblings, we have established the character has a big family.
- If all your points were spent knowing languages, and knowing highly obscure knowledge, we have established the character as a very clever, and well-travelled person.
Good features
- Speeds up game (no lore dump!).
- Players are less pissed about their characters dying early on session 2 they haven't invested the work of writing an essay on their origin story.
- It's probably the most popular part of the game whenever I receive feedback from someone reading (not playing) the game.
Bad features
Nobody spends Story Points
It doesn't replenish, so players hoard the points, refusing to spend them.
So far, I've tried:
- granting 1 new Story Point over a long Downtime period.
- granting XP in return for spending Story Points
- adding a one-page rules summary to the table, including notes on what you can spend Story Points on.
- demanding all new characters come from the pool of allies created through Story Points, meaning that:
- it's better to have more allies, so new people have a wider pool of characters to select from, and
- new PCs are never entirely new - they're known to the party.
...nothing works. Everyone likes it in theory, nobody uses it in practice.
The only idea so far is massively raising XP rewards for spending Story Points.
Is there another rule, or a better way to present this system, which would encourage actual use?
I have a similar-ish mechanic in Meteor, where you have "Undefined Skills" which you define on the fly. They're included for some similar reasons as you give, reduces analysis paralysis at character creation, gets the game running faster, and gives player a chance to suddenly declare they're good at something.
I've not really had issues getting players to spend them, but most of my playtests have been in one shots, so I might just be side stepping the hoarding problem. The other potential difference is that I'm usually running high tensions, life or death scenarios, so being able to say, "actually I'm Skilled at this thing" to avoid a difficult roll (or just be able to roll it better) is valuable enough that players will jump on the chance.
As for ideas to make players more likely to use them:
If the XP rewards go up to 5XP per Story Point spent, it's enough to buy the first level of a Skill, so that could work.
Auto-success is already in the system for knowledge-checks - still unused, but maybe it could be emphasized somewhere? ...though auto-success for attacks wouldn't make much sense. If someone's attacking a mimic for the third time, it wouldn't make much sense to gain a single attack bonus.
I'd be worried that 'use it or lose it' would result in bad outcomes:
That's a fair concern, although it sorta sounds like you're currently in a position where both shy and bold players aren't interacting with the system, so maybe getting just one group in is an improvement? Haha.
If you want a sort of radically different approach to the same idea, take a look at how Burning Wheel does it. There's a Circles stat that characters have, and you roll it like you would any other check to try and declare you know someone useful. A failure likely means they exist but they hate you (or similar), so there's a built in check against using it constantly.
Also, Meteor looks nice. I notice it's CC; are the source files available? It's pretty much impossible to build on a pdf without them, unless you want to spend a month resetting everything by hand.
Yes, it's all up on github, although it was private until just a moment ago because I barely know how to use the website and didn't realize that was the default.
https://github.com/AwkwardTurtle42/MeteorRPG
I'll have a gander. People often add a
README.mdfile which explains how to build the project. How do you make the pdfs? What are the gem files for?