Hillfolk includes some brief notes on how to decouple the DramaSystem and use the entire thing as a cap system, using a traditional roleplaying game of your choice to resolve procedural scenes while using the DramaSystem as a storytelling game for resolving dramatic scenes. I haven’t had a chance to try that yet myself, although it sounds potentially interesting. One of the things that caught my interest when reading through the DramaSystem, however, was the way in which its character creation procedure was capable of creating a group of PCs rich with dramatic potential, relationships, and tension.

And I also noted how easy it would be to strip that process down and streamline it into a generic core that you could use with any RPG (and most STGs) without using anything else from the DramaSystem. So even if the DramaSystem holds absolutely no interest for you, I think you’ll find this potentially very useful.

STEP 1: ROLE IN THE GROUP

Each player defines a role for their PC in the group. Some roles will be defined by their responsibilities; others may be defined in their relationship (familial or otherwise) to the characters holding those roles. Don’t shy away from setting a clear chain of command: Roleplayers often avoid doing that, but the tensions within a well-defined chain of command is a rich source for dramatic play. (Bear in mind that chains of command don’t necessarily need to be linear: Different characters can have ultimate power over different spheres of influence. For the excitement that can generate, study the history of the USSR’s Politburo.)

STEP 2: DEFINE RELATIONSHIPS

In reverse order, each player defines the relationship between their PC and another PC.

When you define your relationship to another PC, you establish a crucial fact about both characters. You can make it any kind of relationship, so long as it’s an important one. Family relationships are the easiest to think of and may prove richest in play. Close friendships also work. By choosing a friendship, you’re establishing that the relationship is strong enough to create a powerful emotional bond between the two of you. Bonds of romantic love, past or present, may be strongest of all.

As in any strong drama, your most important relationships happen to be fraught with unresolved tension. These are the people your character looks to for emotional fulfillment. The struggle for this fulfillment drives your ongoing story.

Defining one relationship also determines others, based on what has already been decided.

Players may raise objections to relationship choices of other players that turn their PC into people they don’t want to play. When this occurs, the proposing player makes an alternate suggestion, negotiating with the other player until both are satisfied. If needed, the GM assists them in finding a choice that is interesting to the proposing player without imposing unduly on the other.

Keep track of relationships as they are established during character creation with a Relationship Map. Represent each character as a name with a box or circle around it. As relationships are defined, draw lines between the characters and label it with the nature of the relationship.

Repeat this process until each character has a relationship with every other character.

STEP 3: STATE DESIRE

A PC’s desire is the broadly stated, strong motivation driving their actions during dramatic scenes. The desire moves them to pursue an inner, emotional goal, which can only be achieved by engaging with other members of the main cast, and, to a lesser degree, with recurring characters run by the GM. Your desire might be seen as your character’s weakness: it makes them vulnerable to others, placing their happiness in their hands. Because this is a dramatic story, conflict with these central characters prevents them from easily or permanently satisfying their desire. Think of the desire as an emotional reward that your character seeks from others. The most powerful choices are generally the simplest:

• approval
• acceptance
• forgiveness
• respect
• love
• subservience
• reassurance
• power
• to punish
• to be punished

Note that these are emotional, not practical goals. If you find yourself drawn to a practical goal, delve past it to find the emotional need behind it. Veruca Salt, for example, craves material things in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it’s because she’s desperately trying to elicit true affection from her father.

STEP 4: DEFINE DRAMATIC POLES

Driving any compelling dramatic character in any story form is an internal contradiction. The character is torn between two opposed dramatic poles. Each pole suggests a choice of identities for the character, each at war with the other. Events in the story pull the character from one pole to the next.

You’ll want to make both the poles and the conflict between them as clear as possible: In most dramatic scenes featuring your character, you, the GM, and the other players will want to play into this conflict, thus creating dramatic interest.

• Mark Thackeray (To Sir With Love): anger or civilisation?
• George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life): ambition or responsibility?
• Hamlet (Hamlet): justice or revenge?
• Joseph Cooper (Interstellar): adventure or family?
• Brian O’Conner (The Fast and the Furious): law or friendship?

STEP 5: WHAT YOU WANT FROM OTHERS

Finally, bring your dramatic poles into focus by declaring what they lead you to seek from particular other PCs.

In an order determined by the GM, each player declares what they want from another specific PC. Examples could include:

• love from the object of your affection
• approval from a mentor
• to punish your mother

The player of that character then defines why they can’t get it:

• “I could never love one of a lower caste.”
• “If I give you approval, you would stop trying.”
• “I will not punished when I am blameless.”

If necessary, both players adjust the statement as needed to reflect the first character’s understanding of the situation. (Note that it is crucial that the PC cannot get what they want at the beginning of play. If the other player feels that their character would readily grant what the first PC is asking, then the stakes must be raised or changed.)

Repeat this process until all characters are named as the objects of at least two other characters’ wants. (Additional, unaddressed relationships may be defined or developed during play.

This material is covered under the Open Gaming License.

(click here for PDF)

Robin D. Laws’ DramaSystem is tucked away inside the Hillfolk roleplaying game. Hillfolk is kind of an odd duck of a book: There’s about 50 pages of generic rules describing the DramaSystem engine. There’s 15-20 pages of setting material pertaining specifically to Hillfolk: A Game of Iron Age Drama. And then there’s another 150 pages providing everything you need to play in 30 other settings. In other words, there’s 200+ pages of material for the DramaSystem and only 15-20 pages of Hillfolk in there. The entire book is really designed as a generic resource for the DramaSystem, but it’s not branded, presented, or sold as such.

The raison d’être for the DramaSystem lies with Laws’ breakdown of fiction into procedural scenes and dramatic scenes: “In procedural scenes, characters confront and overcome obstacles — “they fight opponents, conduct chases, investigate mysteries, explore unfamiliar environments, and so on. (…) In a dramatic scene, the main characters confront internal obstacles, seeking emotional reward from people they care deeply about, for good or ill.” The majority of RPGs focus almost exclusively on procedural content. Laws wanted to design a storytelling game which specifically focused on creating and playing through dramatic scenes.

Laws believes that one of the primary obstacles to effective dramatic scenes in traditional roleplaying games lies in the fact that players tend to default to no, convinced that their characters are all possessed of a steely, unbreakable resolve that will never buckle, and thus creating flat, repetitious scenes that never build, centered around boring characters who never grow or change. (He says this in like the most insulting way possible, claiming that anyone who refuses to play games in an authorial stance is in denial about what roleplaying games are really all about, and that anyone who refuses to come to Jesus after experiencing the true glories of the DramaSystem is basically a petulant man-child who should be kicked out of your group. But except for the couple of pages where he goes on that Bizarro World rampage, he’s not fundamentally wrong.)

The DramaSystem structurally works to overcome these impulses by (a) specifically focusing gameplay on the dramatic content, (b) redefining “success” in dramatic instead of personal terms, and (c) mechanically encouraging (and, in some cases, forcing) characters to yield in dramatic scenes. The central mechanic around which these structures are built is simply framing scenes in terms of petitioners (and the emotional need they want fulfilled) vs. granters (and why they won’t give it).

One interesting feature in this is that Laws seems to identify these mechanics as modeling the storytelling techniques used by creators in other mediums. But that’s not really accurate. What the mechanics actually model is a process of literary criticism. (It is, in fact, the same lit-crit that Laws uses in Hamlet’s Hit Points.) Intriguingly, that’s also what the game’s mechanics feel like in play: A literary critique of the narrative you’re spontaneously generating.

The result feels very unique in play, and it definitely succeeds in forcing a group to aggressively focus on a type of character interaction which is, in fact, rather rare in most tabletop roleplaying. Having played it only a handful of times, I’m not 100% sure it actually succeeds as a game. But it definitely succeeds at being a very interesting creative exercise, and if nothing else I honestly think most groups would benefit from playing a half dozen sessions of it or so. The lessons you’ll learn (both individually and collectively) will likely have a very positive impact as they feed back into your other games.

SYSTEM CHEAT SHEETS

I’ve designed system cheat sheets for a number of RPGs and STGs now. This one is designed to be used with any DramaSystem setting (the 30 from the Hillfolk corebook, the 25 from the Blood on the Snow supplement, or any which you create yourself). For those unfamiliar with them: These cheat sheets summarize all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced options. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the table for both the GM and the players. (For more information on the procedure I follow when prepping these cheat sheets, click here.)

HOW I USE THEM

I generally keep a copy of the system cheat sheet behind the GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. I also keep at least one copy of the rulebook available, of course, and the cheat sheet probably won’t make much sense to you if you haven’t read it yourself. But the goal of the cheat sheet is to consolidate all of the mechanical content of the game, eliminating book look-ups: Finding something in a handful of pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in a rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive:

Page 1: This page contains the broad, general principles of the system.

Page 2: This page contains virtually everything you need in order to frame and play through scenes (which is the heart of the system).

Page 3: Something of a miscellanea. This includes general principles and rules for the GM, but the rules for player v. player conflict also got bumped onto this page due to lack of space.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).