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 found in DnD nobody ever uses inspiration during my games or rarely. When we switched to Pathfinder the same system is called Hero points I found it gets used all the time. I changed nothing about my games. Why is this? Both let you reroll a roll. In dnd you can gain up to 1 inspiration and you’ll get it back whenever the GM rewards it to you. In Pathfinder 2e you gain hero points when the GMs rewards it to you. And everyone gets 1 hero point at the beginning of each session. Also you can have up to 3 hero points.
So being able to have multiple allows you to keep using them while saving one for an emergency. Gaining one every session at minimum allows you to plan ahead and manage the resource instead of hoping to get another one. Lastly having a cap makes it so you never want to end a session at the cap and Likely don’t want to sit at the cap for long. The GM might soon reward you another point after all.
Maybe we can learn from this for your system.
I’d lower the starting amount to around 2 or 3 story points and use that as the cap. The players are instantly inventivized to spend them that way because they begin at the cap. Then set a predictable or at least semi predictable timer as to when a new point is gained. For example every x sessions. I think each session might be a bit too much. Finding the right value will take some experimenting. I can also see a variant where every character gains a story point when the group completes any minor or major quest or story arc. Additonally I like the idea of giving players a story point when completing a side quest related to their character backgrounds. That creates an ‘exploit’ where you can initiate a quest for yourself by using a story point to create an NPC or lore element for your PC which results in a quest. Then that quest results in a story point. Players will feel smart about this. And us GMs are happy we get player driven plots and story bits for free. Win win.
That’s a really clean solution, and works well with the Side Quest system in the book (there’s an explicit system).
Of course it’ll mean a boat-load of additional Story Points: 7 quests completed = 7 Story Points, but I think the plot can handle all the side-characters and locations as long as they’re small boons, rather than a full Deus Ex Machina.