I’m noodling on an idea for using in my upcoming campaign, and I figured I’d put the nutshell of it here to gain feedback. Perhaps such a system already exists, and if so I’d love a link.
The idea is to have “Lore Tokens”, which are a tool for in-session shared world building. Often the gamemaster carries all the burden of creating and detailing the world their players’ characters exist in and this can be exhausting for many GMs. Using this idea you could share that burden with your players.
The basic concept of the system is that your players all start with a Lore Token. This can be spent at an appropriate time to create a place, organization, npc, etc., that is beneficial to their current situation. Conversely a player can create a detrimental piece of the world at any appropriate time to gain a Lore Token.
For example, say the party have just arrived in a new town and they are looking to recruit some mercenaries to help take down a nearby powerful bandit camp. One of the players could spend a token to say that there is a mercenary company headquartered here called “Marden’s Maces” that will be willing to work for the party for a fair price.
However, If they had no tokens to spare, a player could instead gain a token by stating that due to the nearby bandits the mayor (whom they name as “Basil Derelon”) has locked down the town to a strict curfew and put all of the guards on high alert. They’ll have to go elsewhere to recruit or work extra hard to convince the mayor to spare guardsmen or rouse a militia.
The idea is that the system should incentivise players to collaborate in shaping the world both for and against their characters and at least somewhat reduce mental load for GMs.
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That’s a pretty decent way to encourage players to contribute.
I kind of do this in a more informal way. If players ask me if something exists in the setting that I didn’t think about but makes sense to be in the place they are visiting then I’ll say “Yes, but…” The thing they are looking for exists but there is a complication that I improvise to make it so they have to do something or owe someone a favor to get the resource they are looking for. It might be a useful way to offload the worldbuilding by making the player tell me about the resource they are asking about but require they offer a downside to go along with the upside.
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I’m reminded a bit of Goblin Punch’s Bardic Services, which I’ve yet to use but always sounded cool.
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i like the gist of this but i think leaving it open to just make up something on the spot may make the tokens valuable to some and a burden to others. and being good at making things up would mean that players hand THAT person the token when they want something cool to happen.
my play on this concept would be to, and maybe i’m missing the point by doing this, come up with some basic forms of support such as, as you put it, “hire mercenaries”.. or “useful item”.. or gain an ally NPC.. basic beneficial things that help direct the GM to make that thing happen.
the fun part, for me at least, would be to have a player draw a card to see what benefit the party receives. the psychology of this is interesting to me and helps to kindof bond the GM and the players to this ethereal concept of chance and the story as a separate beast that you are both contending with and wrangling a story out of.
so, yeah, so much more to say about this and the concept could really be used in some fourth wall bending player class ways at the extreme end. at the simple end; tokens that players or the gm can spend, to make something crazy happen, sounds like a fun kind of chaos for the table. another layer of game to the game that doesn’t seem to complicate it much at all.
if you go ahead with this please post about the experience!