Tuesday, June 7, 2016

P5 Primer, Part 2 Possessions



P5 Primer, Part 2:



Possessions

By: Jesse C Cohoon

The P5: People, Places, Possessions, Powers, & Plot RPG engine is not meant to replace other roleplaying systems, but to help you by giving ideas as to what you might need and further define what is there providing the people, places, powers, possessions and plots for your game. It’s designed to streamline worldbuilding by helping to create vibrant locales, interesting characters, and complex, crazy plots for your games, both traditional and nontraditional. By using the P5 system, you’re able to take your world from concept to fully fleshed out form in five easy steps that should make world creation a breeze.

Possessions
Possessions are the things that characters, towns, and companies own. Usually possessions don’t have a mind of their own, but they can, such things as animals, sentient monsters (think stuff like Digimon and Pokemon), and AIs/ robots in futuristic settings. If there are a class of beings who are enslaved, those would go in the “people” section, talked about last time, because while they’re technically “owned” no one really wants to be thought of as an item to be bought and sold. Possessions can be as large or as detailed as you want them to be. They can be individual or corporate as you want them to be. It’s everything from the pair of socks that’s has a hole in each toe the orc wears to the suit of armor that the party’s fighter wears. It’s the scrolls, rings, and wands the sorcerer has on their person. But equally, the wealth contained in safe that is behind the painting in the study (and if the players are ambitious enough, the safe itself!), the sculptures that decorate the garden, and the library of books of the sage. It’s also the items the secret organization owns, the beer mugs and tables and chairs in a bar, and the religious books and hymnals in the pews of the church’s sanctuary. The key point in remembering when making lists of items that the person or organization owns is to think of them of things that are:


  • Important to the storyline: This can be anything from the lines of a clue which would lead to the ultimate antagonist, to a red herring to a piece of the puzzle that will be needed later on. Video games excel at these types of things. Truly excellent DMs are able to spin the most insignificant of items to become the clue that solves the whole mystery, the key to defeating the ultimate antagonist, or the missing piece that allows them entry into the treasure room.
  • Interesting to note: this can be everything from the style of clothing the person or those in the organization wears to the type of books that they read to some personal effect they always have with them.    
  • Valuable: This would be where all the coins and gems, jewels and trappings of royalty, works of art and literature would end up. If armor or weaponry is more decorative or ceremonial than practical, it would fall into this category as well. 
  • Transportable: if it’s too big, most of the time the players aren’t going to bother with it. A single suit of masterwork armor is OK to take because someone can wear it out. An entire collection of empty suits of armor (unless one enchants them to follow the players along) is another matter entirely. And while the mad sorcerer might have a tower in the middle of nowhere that the PCs cleared out, no one’s going to shrink it down to take with them.  
  • Practical & useful: these would be things like items of everyday use: china, tea sets, rations, and any sort of kits, armor and weaponry the PCs can use. 
  • Magical: This would be the belts, rings, armor and weaponry of a magical nature. (the powers such items possess would go into the next section)    


These categories are entirely artificial, and there are lots of overlap between them, but they are good for determining what types of things you might need to describe for your game.

One interesting thing might be to have there be too much stuff (possessions) to take with them, even if they have magic or technological devices that would normally allow them to do so, and have the stuff that the PCs chose not to take with them at a later point in the campaign.

Another thing one might do with possessions is somehow mark them as belonging to a specific person, either with magic, or a characteristic that is theirs alone, and anyone who knows who it belonged to would know it was stolen or that the party in question has been defeated.

More on the P5 worldbuilding system next time.


Saturday, June 4, 2016

P5 Primer, Part 1 People, & Places



P5 Primer, Part 1
People, & Places
By: Jesse C Cohoon

The P5: People, Places, Possessions, Powers, and Plot RPG engine is not meant to replace other roleplaying systems, but to help you by giving ideas as to what you might need and further define what is there providing the people, places, powers, possessions and plots for your game. It’s designed to streamline worldbuilding by helping to create vibrant locales, interesting characters, and complex, crazy plots for your games, both traditional and nontraditional. By using the P5 system, you’re able to take your world from concept to fully fleshed out form in five easy steps that should make world creation a breeze.

People
At the broadest sense, people are the characters that are in the world – both player characters (PCs) and non-player characters (NPCs). These are the roles, traits, and types of people that make your world truly alive. But when examining P5, don’t limit yourself to one type of personality type. People are very complex and may have many facets. Use as many as you think helps to describe the person you’re portraying – but keep in mind that more may not necessarily be better. It’s better to have more characters with fewer traits than to have fewer with more because the more categories a character can fit into, the less you’re able to make them shine because the few you have can do it all. 

When doing your own people for the P5 engine, think of all the appropriate types and broad categories of people that exist within the world that you’re creating and list them out, providing a short description for each. As you’re making these categories, try to make sure that there’s no significant overlap (there may be some in that categories are artificial and don’t exist in real life).  

Also, keep in mind that people aren’t limited to humanoids. This includes all the sentient and non-sentient monsters in your game as well.  

Once you have the people figured out for your campaign, you can start to give them stats, if your system uses such a thing. If you’re the type of a GM who has difficulty making names, nicknames, and or titles for the characters in your game, it’s also useful to provide a name generator there as well.

Places   
Places are the locations in your world. But don’t think of strictly outdoor places such as forests, mountains and streams. Places can also be movable things such as the tinker’s traveling wagon, the touring circus’ Big Top, the revival tent set up at the edge of town. They can be the rooms of the inn, the campfire around which they tell scary stories, the kitchen of the inn, and the grand ballroom of the duke. Places can be as specific or as broad as you want them to be, but the common thread when trying to pin down places to list for the P5 engine is to ask yourself:

  •  Where are the PCs likely to visit?
  •  How important is this place?
  • How much detail do I need to provide?

Answering these questions can be as simple as figuring out where the NPCs the PCs will be able to interact with to as complex as defining the rooms and parts of a castle and its surroundings or the layout of a dungeon. By doing so, you’ll know the necessary level of detail you need in order to provide your characters. In doing the P5 books, I base locations off of what’s absolutely necessary for the subject matter and present the information in broad strokes, as I figure that the individual DMs can provide the needed details when necessary.

 Next time, more about my P5 RPG engine.