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?

  • @NibodhikaEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    How about going the other way around, and instead of giving 5 points, each session every player earns one point up to a maximum of 5. Or maybe every two sessions if you think every session it’s too much. Also I would say that in order to gain the benefits the player needs to give details, i.e. “I know someone on the court” is not good, but “One of the members of the court used to buy swords from my father, I’ve known him all my life”. Finally an idea that I would do together with this is to increase the amount of things story points can do, and make stuff that costs multiple points (or really make the ones you have cost multiple points and give smaller ones that cost less) e.g.

    • 1 point for having an acquaintance, (an ally would cost 2 or more depending on who is the ally and how powerful/helpful he is)
    • 1 point for having a mostly useless skill/knowledge but that can help them at the time. e.g. I actually do know the exact distance to that city, I use to go there with my father every summer)
    • 5 points to state a fact about the universe (if you’re up for that on your game). e.g. Everyone knows that Orcs are allergic to Daisys.

    You get the idea, and can possibly customize it to your world. The reason I think this would work is that:

    1. It gives an upper limit, thus if the player doesn’t use the points they lose them. But doesn’t penalize them other than “you gain nothing”
    2. It gives them options to think on solutions outside of the box, e.g. “can I think of a reason why my character would know how the sewage system of the city is planned?”
    3. It allows players to keep doing things they liked, e.g. the player that has a large family can always have a cousin in every city they go instead of only 5, which would make him want to stick for dear life to the last cousin for a life/death situation.