What’s this? It’s another preview for Becoming!. Following the philosophy of “show, don’t tell”, I’m going to give you a sample turn of the game, along with a little bit of setup. I won’t delve too much into specific mechanics, but it should give you an idea of how the game plays.

Setup: Our Hero is a peasant named Carter whose home has been destroyed by a dragon. He used the Words of Virtue provided with the Quest to come up with a backstory for himself and his village, as well as three Virtues, to which he assigned some dice.

This turn is a few rounds in, in the second Act of the game. He’s lost some things and had to sacrifice some things to come this far, and the Chorus is starting to really put the screws to him. In addition to Carter (the Hero), there are three players in the Chorus: Fear, Pain, and Doubt. Pain is the current Choregus.

The Turn

Pain looks at the current Scene (entitled “Trouble”) and its associated Theme Words. She takes a few moments to gather her thoughts, then frames the scene.

Pain: You sit upon your horse, slowly following the path through the woods. An ominious presence bears down on you but you pay it no mind. When you look up, though, you find that you are surrounded by men wearing wolf skins, wielding naked swords in their hands.

A large fellow steps forward and speaks. “With a horse like that, you likely have other things we might want. Hand it all over and we won’t take your life, too.”

To illustrate the point one of the men behind you steps forward and swings his cudgel, knocking you from your horse. The challenge is simple: fight through the pain and drive these men off so that you can continue your quest. This challenge has a difficulty of . . . oh, let’s say twelve.

Pain slides some tokens into the middle of the table.

Carter: Yikes. Okay, let’s do this. I struggle to my feet and stare the leader in the eyes. I know that my family is depending on me to slay this dragon, an I can’t do that if these bandits kill me or take my weapons away. I’m going to use My Family Needs Me to grit through the pain and stand up to them. That gives me three dice.

Pain: Okay. There’s the very real threat of death here, though. I’m going to invoke one of your Flaws here: Fear of Widowing Your Wife. That gives me . . . let’s see, six more tokens. Difficulty’s up to eighteen now.

Carter: Uh oh. I could use some help here.

Doubt: You’re not sure you can do this. It might be easier to just let them have your things and go back home. You can always say you tried.

Doubt slides forward two more tokens.

Doubt: You might be able to fight past this, though. I might be willing to take these tokens back and give you a die for this challenge, but it’ll cost you something. To fight past your doubt you’re going to have to fight dirty. That’ll cost you a die from your Honor.

Fear: Not so fast. You’re pretty scared here. There are, like, seven of these guys and only one of you. Like Doubt said, you’ll have to fight dirty, but fear can give you power. You feel all that adrenaline coursing through you? That’s fear. If you give me that Honor die instead of Doubt, I’ll give you three dice for this challenge. How’s that sound?

Carter thinks for a few moments, then replies.

Carter: I’m going with Fear on this one. The difficulty will go up to twenty, but I’ll have six dice on my side. I like my chances.

Carter slides a die from Honor over to Fear, and Fear gives him three of her own dice. Doubt slides two of his tokens into the center of the table. Carter picks up his six dice and rolls them, coming up with 18. Not quite good enough.

No! Oh, man. That didn’t go well for me.

Carter takes two of his dice and gives them to Pain for winning the challenge. Then Pain and Doubt, who both had tokens in the challenge, get to put some of them on Carter’s Flaws. Fear gets her dice back.

Pain: You swing your sword wildly, killing two of the men and driving the rest off. However, one of them managed to give you a nasty cut across the ribs, and you injured your leg falling off your horse. I’m going to give you a new Flaw: Badly Injured.

Things didn’t go well for the Hero in this turn, but he’s got more chances to make that up. Doubt will be the next Choregus, and a new Scene begins.

I’m going to be running some games at Dreamation in February, and I just got my schedule. Here it is:

• Saturday at 9am I’ll be running “The Dragon Slayer”, a playtest session of Becoming.
• Saturday at 8pm I’ll be running “Cynners and Saints”, a scenario for Jeremy Keller’s Technoir.
• Sunday at 10am I’ll be running “The Long Road Home”, a second playtest session of Becoming.

I hope to see you all there!

Below is a rough draft of some of the introductory material for Becoming. I got inspired and wrote this tonight, and I thought I’d share.

What Is This Thing?
Becoming starts with a question: what does it mean to be a hero? A hero is someone who saves lives, protects others, and fights those who would do them harm. A hero stands up for what she believes in, suffers through great hardship, and wins the day no matter the cost. But what is the cost?

Being a hero is not easy. It requires pain and sacrifice; it comes at a steep cost. The hero often has to give up the things she holds most dear, the very things she is fighting to protect. When the hero comes back from her quest, she comes back changed. She has faced hardship and torment that her friends and family cannot imagine, and she is no longer the same person she once was. She is more, but also less. She is an outcast, and she cannot truly go home again.

That’s what Becoming is: it’s the story of the hero facing adversity and overcoming it at a steep cost. Sometimes it’s a story of triumph over impossible odds. Sometimes it’s the story of a fall from grace. It can be an exciting adventure or a heartbreaking tragedy; often it’s a little of both.

But Becoming is also a game. It’s a framework of rules that helps you tell these stories, your stories. It’s meant to be exciting and tragic, but it’s also meant to be fun. You may see the hero lose everything she has, but you’ll have a good time doing it.

It’s a special kind of game: a story game. During play you’ll each contribute to a shared narrative, building the characters and the world in turns, showing each other your own vision of the story and meeting in the middle to create something that is more than the sum of its parts.

Be not afraid, hero.

What Do I Need?
To play a game of Becoming, you’ll need a few things. First, you’ll need this book. This book contains all of the rules you need to play the game, as well as the Quests that you’ll use to help you tell the story.

You’ll need several six-sided dice in four different colors. You’ll need nine of one color (for the Hero) and five of each of three other, different colors (for the Chorus).

You’ll need tokens for the Chorus in three different colors. Each member of the Chorus needs twenty tokens in a single color. Poker chips work well for this purpose, as do glass beads. In a pinch, you could even use three different denominations of pocket change.

You’ll need some index cards, probably about ten or fifteen of them. If you don’t have any, you can use scraps of paper. You have paper, right?

You’ll need friends, three of them to be precise. Becoming is a game for four players exactly. If you don’t have friends you might find some at your local gaming store, supermarket, or homeless shelter.

Finally, you’ll need some pencils or other writing implements.

What Do All These Crazy Words Mean?
Becoming uses some mechanics that you may find unfamiliar, and certainly some of the terminology is unusual. Luckily, I’ve decided to provide a list of terms and their in-game definitions. Some of the words are weird, but it’s really not a hard game to learn to play.

The Hero: the protagonist of the story. The Hero is the one who goes on a journey, defeats evil, protects his loved ones, and saves the day. He’s also the one who has to sacrifice everything important to him in order to succeed.

Words of Virtue: a list of nine words, specific to the Quest being played, that provide inspiration for coming up with the Hero’s Virtues.

Virtues: a Hero starts with three Virtues. These are things that are important to the Hero, things he draws strength from. They are used to overcome challenges, but they can also be sacrificed or lost.

Flaws: when the Hero loses challenges, Flaws are introduced. Flaws represent the Hero’s weaknesses, his vices, or direct manifestations of Fear, Pain, or Doubt.

Quest: a collection of scenes to be played out in order, creating a cohesive story in which the Hero is the main character.

The Chorus: these three players provide opposition and temptation for the Hero. They frame scenes, present challenges, and offer bargains. There are three members of the Chorus: Fear, Pain, and Doubt.

The Choregus: first among equals, the Choregus is the active member of the Chorus. It is her job to frame the current scene, present the challenge, and decide upon its difficulty. The Choregus is a rotating position; each member of the Chorus will get a chance to play this role. Three, in fact.

The Stasimonos: the members who are not the current Choregus are known as the Stasimonos. While they do not provide direct opposition to the Hero, it is their job to tempt the Hero by offering bargains, aid for a cost. They can also threaten the Hero.

Act: the game is played in three acts, each containing three scenes. Things are relatively easy on the Hero in the first act, but the stakes get higher with each subsequent act.

Scene: there are nine scenes in the game. During a scene, the Choregus uses theme words to help frame the scene, setting it up and describing the situation. Each scene also has a challenge, presented by the Choregus.

Challenge: a conflict of some sort where the outcome is in doubt. The conflict grows out of the framed scene and is informed by it. It need not be a physical conflict; Fear and Doubt are motivators just as powerful as Pain.

Theme Words: a collection of nine words specific to a scene, used as inspiration for the Choregus while framing the current scene.

Challenge Tokens: chips or other small markers that the Choregus uses to indicate how difficult a challenge is to overcome. They can be wagered, lost, and bartered throughout the course of the game.

Bargain: the heart of the challenge mechanic, the Stasimonos offer the Hero aid in exchange for things the Hero holds dear. Nothing is free in Becoming, and all bargains are binding.

I got this image this morning from Christopher Barley, an amazingly talented illustrator and member of Meetup of Doom. I just wanted to share it with everyone because I had trouble peeling my lower jaw off the floor when I saw it this morning. This image exemplifies the mood of the game in a way that’s difficult to articulate. Kudos to Chris for capturing it so well.

At Metatopia I heard a quote that I can’t get out of my head. I’m unsure who to attribute the quote to (it could be Ken Hite, Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue, Brennan Taylor, Joshua A.C. Newman, or any number of smart people; I just don’t remember), but the quote itself strikes me as a set of words for a game designer to live by.

“If you want your game to be about something, you need mechanics supporting that thing.”

The corrolary of this is: If you do not mechanically support a thing, your game is not about that thing. You can say it is and you can support it with your fiction, but the grim truth is that, if you do not incent players to do the things you want them to do in your game, they may never do those things.

When it came time to design mechanics for Becoming, this quote was rattling around in my head the whole time. I knew what I wanted my game to be about. I wanted Becoming to be about what it costs to be a hero, not just in terms of the adversity that the hero must overcome but what he or she must give up to overcome it. The game is, at its core, about heroic sacrifice. At least, that’s what I wanted it to be about; I needed to make sure the mechanics said that too.

Becoming has a dice-based resolution mechanic where the Hero rolls dice to try to overcome a static difficulty set by a member of the Chorus (roughly analagous to a GM, at least a little bit). More dice equals higher chance of victory, and failure means that the Hero must pay a cost of some sort. I knew this much, but it wasn’t enough. The mechanic was sound, but it didn’t encourage sacrifice; it was a simple pass-fail mechanic that required sacrifice as a result of failure, but it wasn’t enough. In order for the Hero’s sacrifice to be meaningful in this game, it had to be a choice.

That’s where the bargaining mechanic came from. The Chorus is made up of three players, and there’s a very good reason for that. While only one player at a time may place a challenge in front of the Hero, the other members are not without purpose during that scene. In most cases the Hero will be outgunned, or at least daunted, by the difficulty of the challenge in front of him or her. Success is going to be a slim possibility.

That’s where the rest of the Chorus come in. The Hero can bargain with the other two members of the Chorus, giving up pieces of him/herself in order to gain aid from them. This aid comes in the form of additional dice for the most part, but it costs the Hero some of his/her own dice that are not currently being used (the Hero can’t bring all of his/her dice to bear on a single challenge). In most cases the Hero has the ability to pull off a victory, but it will come at a cost. The interesting bits come when the Hero has to weigh the cost of victory against the cost of failure, and decide which is the lesser evil.

Yesterday I sat down and wrote all of the mechanics for Becoming. The specifics of how to do things had been eluding me for a while even though I’d had some notes on things I wanted to achieve. Once I sat down to actually write them though, it was shockingly quick and easy. This is because I believe I subscribe to what I’ll call the “Just Goddamn Do It” school of game design.

What do I mean by that? Thinking about game design is great and talking about it is better. You can come up with all sorts of great ideas on your own and, just like no good plan survives contact with the enemy, you can’t help but change and generate ideas when you actually have someone to bounce ideas off of.

In the end though, thinking and talking about game design, while valuable, are not game design. There is simply no substitute for sitting down and writing your thoughts down, forcing yourself to actually think through the problems and come up with solutions. Writing it down makes the mechanics concrete, exposes many of the flaws, and causes you to see where your ideas need more development. I had a lot of ideas in my head but it wasn’t until I sat down that those ideas became a game.

I’ve also applied the “Just Goddamn Do It” philosophy to my freelance writing and I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve seen so much success lately. I was told not too long ago that the biggest reason that I got a particular job was because I responded to my email quickly; this is very much a manifestation of JGDI. Similarly, when asked if I want to work on a new project, I usually look at the work that I’m currently doing, consider for a moment, and say “what the hell?”

A month or so ago I got the seed of an idea. That seed sat in my head, refusing to let me think about other things until I watered it, nurtured it, and let it start growing. I did so, and it’s growing into a game called Becoming.

Rather than simply explaining what Becoming is, I’ll let my pitch do the talking.

Becoming is a game about what you must sacrifice to be a hero. Taking on the mantle of the hero makes you an outcast. In order to save the things you love, you must lose them. When you complete your quest will you still be a hero? Or have you become something else?

Simply put, Becoming is a game about going on a heroic journey, but there’s a twist: the outcome of the journey is not in doubt. You will succeed in your quest. You will slay the dragon or find a new homeworld for Earth. What is in doubt is the price of your heroism: what will you have to give up? Will you still be the same person at the end of the quest? Will you be able to go home again?

The core of the game is all about making choices, about choosing what to give up and what to hold on to. There is dice rolling. There are conflict resolution mechaincs. But tied intrinsicly to these things is a system of bargaining and of sacrifice.

The game is still in its early stages. I don’t have a fully playtestable prototype yet, but I will. I’ve made it my goal to get this thing written and published this year. My intent is to document the design process to some extent. Because I’m very excited about it, you’ll likely hear more about it in the future.