I'm back for another trip into the design thinking behind Daybreak's playbooks! Today I'll be looking at the design for the Rising Star.

Design Story: Working on the Dissident had started to crack things open for me - while I wasn't yet sure what mechanical design space I wanted to expand into, I was pretty confident that there were plenty of conceptual niches still open. And although there aren't a lot of mechanics (like eclipse), that's probably ok - simply rendering an appropriate scaffold or tool in "mechanics" that serves the concept can do a lot of the work for fitd playbooks, especially in Girl by Moonlight.

The other thing that working on the Dissident suggested was that I already did have some useful knowledge about character/relationship archetypes, and that it's definitely possible to pull from across different genres by using that relationship focus, rather than a "power" or "ability" focus.

Feeling emboldened, I went back to my original thinking. Girl by Moonlight likes to frame things in terms of episodes and seasons, suggesting television shows. But in a lot of shows, you have a main character! The "Unlikely Hero" is a pretty good candidate for a main character playbook - it separates you mechanically, incentivizes  your friends to rush to your defense, has a built-in character growth arc, and just generally suggests that you're kind of special. I think it does these things really well! But it's definitely not the only way to be a main character. In particular, I think a lot of the most interesting consequences of main character syndrome are when that's taken seriously - yeah, what if everyone depended on you to save the day? That's a lot of pressure, and it makes you a prime target for your opponents!

Importantly, that also suggests a mode of relationship to the team and individuals - you can be kind of a centralizing focus of the team, the star quarterback that everyone else supports (and you might or might not be calling the shots); you might have a tense relationship with teammates who feel pushed out of center stage, or you might have a distant relationship with teammates who are worried about you, or you might have a really close relationship that's a source of strength (and what would happen if it were threatened?).

The inspirations are pretty obvious - Steven Universe in the final, "Future" season is a recent example that I personally found pretty powerful! it's also all over mecha fiction - Amuro (and Char!) who have to grapple with being war heroes, and what it means when a whole side is depending on you to win; Van Fanel as a prophesied hero who has to choose between becoming the instrument of fate considered to be his destiny or forsaking the robot (and letting his friends fight without him). It's easy to imagine some of these characters as "starting" as Unlikely Heroes and graduating to another playbook, but I think it's also common in fiction to just start with these kinds of stakes (especially if we're "starting" in season 2, as the text directs us!).

Running with the mecha inspiration, I dubbed the first draft of this idea the Ace. Eventually, I turned to Rising Star to help reassert that this archetype was a little more universal, and also for the implication - must what goes up also come down?

The concept felt solid. Mechanically, I wanted to make tools for playing in that tension, of being pulled in too many directions, of needing to be the hero and making yourself unable to rely on anyone else. I reached for an old tool - a special clock!

It isn't groundbreaking, but it does do a couple of things I like - First, by decoupling whatever this new consequence is from stress and harm, the Rising Star is kind of isolated. Even when their friends hang out or help them recover, there's something lurking deeper that they can't actually help with. It can't ever truly go away, not while they've placed themselves in this relationship to the team. As long as they think of themselves as the hero of this story, they will always risk burnout.

Second, it helps to establish that this consequence is worse than eclipse. Filling this clock is different than taking stress, and the ticks here persist. It sits on your character sheet (writing this also reminded me to finally add that clock to the playbook sheet), so it's constantly on your mind.

Third, it creates a little mechanical crunch for the rising star to dig into - abilities can be balanced around it; it gives us some leeway to bend some of the normal expectations of the design space. That feels right, too - the mechanical identity of a "main character" being a mechanic that nobody else has to worry about strikes me in a fun way.

A few abilities were obvious, but it took a few rounds of iteration to really settle on the rest of them! The big thing here was whittling away at the identity - "main character" is too broad. Truthfully, I've just been saying "main character" in this blog as a little shorthand for the core concept (which is less about specifically being the protagonist, and more about being the character that the team relies on in an important way). 

Mechanical Considerations: Television shows might have main characters, but hanging out with your friends is not a television show - I don't really like it when one person I'm playing a game with is the only person who gets to do things, or is the only person around whom the story seems to move. In short, even if I would have fun playing a "support" character (either mechanically or fictionally), the design of the Rising Star shouldn't make other characters irrelevant, or take away what makes them feel special. It's a little bit of a tightrope to walk - to pay off the promise of the premise, I think they do need to feel more "powerful" (in at least some regards) than other playbooks, but that feeling can't actually translate to statistical/objective power.

In a game like D&D, it's possible to analyze different character options in terms of their "power" - goals are well defined (reduce enemies to 0 hp), there are clear rules for how to do this, and there are a variety of options you can choose between in order to most efficiently accomplish that goal. "Power" in this context can still refer to a lot of things, but it's a pretty good and easy to understand shortcut for saying something like "which options most quickly and most reliably reduce enemies to 0 hp?" or "which class has the best access to options that are good at reducing enemies to 0 hp?" The difference between "power attack" and "two weapon fighting" has nothing to do with which is more feasible or reflective of any truths in the world of the fiction, the important distinction is which option has the better expected value for damage.

Is it possible to mess up a forged in the dark game in the same (or comparable) way? In some ways, things are simpler, which means more dangerous. There's less room for maneuvering a d20 roll vs a d6 dice pool, which means sources of extra dice are "powerful." The universal frame of position and effect is vulnerable to manipulation - a character option that gives easy access to higher effects or safer positions would be very powerful. But (luckily), often these mechanical alterations are tied to narrative constraints. "Take +1d when you ____" for example. As long as whatever fills that blank is at least moderately specific, it's complicated to assess the "objective" power of that option. 

Put another way - the Guardian is tied with the Unlikely Hero for the highest occurrence of abilities that grant "+1d" (technically, the UH has one more, but two of its abilities are mutually exclusive) - are those two playbooks equally "powerful"? And are they more powerful than every other playbook? We could try to really piece apart the different abilities, and I suppose assign some kind of statistical weight as to how likely they are to come up, based on analysis of played games, but that sounds like a huge waste of time. And more to the point, I don't think that when I read the Guardian playbook that I come away thinking "oh wow, this is powerful!"

So, let's return to the dilemma - we want to make a playbook feel powerful, but we can't simply turn up the power knob. Not just because giving the Rising Star constant +1d's or "increased effect"s would make for boring, frustrating play, but also because that's actually not really enough to make them read as powerful!

There are a couple of tricks we can pull. The easiest one is just flavor - the Rising Star gets abilities called things like "Unbeatable" and "Pinch hitter" and "Nothing's impossible" - even if these effects are perfectly in line with what other playbooks are doing, I think selling the fiction and framing the context goes a long way to making the playbook come across differently. 

The second thing is that we can actually turn up the power knob - it just has to come with the appropriate cost. The place I've seen this done in the way that most appealed to me is in Fellowship, the pbta game, which distinguishes some playbooks as "powerful." One of those playbooks is the Harbinger, a wizard/gandalf character, who wields great power but at a steep personal cost. We already established a steep personal cost for our Rising Star - Burnout! As long as burning out is an appropriately dire consequence, the "real" power of the Rising Star is mediated by that risk. This is the same idea behind making the Dissident's eclipse more powerful - there are only so many times you can dip into that well before it's unavailable to you (perhaps because you died).

The final move is the one I think is the most complicated - it's to make options with an effect that feels powerful because of the fictional position they assert or move towards. It's similar but not quite exactly a blending of the two other techniques - yes, it helps if the language makes it feel powerful, and yes it helps if the effect turns some of the knobs up kind of high. But the actual power isn't because of the statistics or dice, it's because it implies a line of action that makes you think "oh, that could be really good."

You can't pull this move too often, because this is the real power in a game like Girl by Moonlight - the ability to shape the fiction of a scene in a powerful (and widely applicable) way. Your dice bonuses won't always be relevant; sometimes you will have limited effect. But if you have an ability that establishes something in the fiction, you can kind of get "under" the rules to the real stuff. On the one hand, if all of your options were like this, you wouldn't have a lot of purchase in the position & effect mode - on the other, if you had a bunch of options like this, you would invariably step on the other playbooks' toes. So, just one I think is enough to make the playbook read different (and also play different).

Whew, that's kind of a deeper dive than I was expecting at the outset! But I hope it's explanatory of the line of thought, and maybe an interesting way of thinking about "power".

Assorted Inspirations: If you'll forgive me, I do want to cite myself here - I think two of my Dungeon World playbooks, the Gunslinger and the Spellblade, were doing some cool work in this "powerful" playbook space, and I think they hold up! Otherwise, there are too many inspirations from fiction to shout out - this is a pretty common arc, I think. I'll also shout out Wanderhome's heroic kith tag, for forever changing the way I think about protagonist syndrome, and Heaven Will Be Mine's Pluto. I should replay HWBM, which is also definitely an influence on Daybreak's series playset... I also want to acknowledge the inimitable Briar Sovereign's influence in Up my sleeve, which is inspired by a move from the incredible Armour Astir (Encore), as featured on the Friends at the Table podcast. I think my version is less likely to blow up, but I'm awaiting playtesting data to see if it should be a little riskier.

Favorite Text: I'm pretty proud of the transcendent abilities, although they're a little wordy. Since you made it this far, I'll talk about the two I haven't mentioned yet. I think Nothing's impossible accomplishes a pretty nifty trick; I think it's a nice little prompt to think big and heroic, while also staring at the contradiction right in the face - being the big damn hero is not enough, and you will never accomplish everything. But you can at least pick your priorities. Eyes on me is following in a tradition established in blades, but not really followed up on in a lot of fitd games. I think the "pay stress equal to the options you pick" model is really interesting, and I think the ability accomplishes what I wanted it to, as laid out in my third category of "powerful" character options. This ability opens up a lot of different lines of action! I think that's especially right for the Rising Star - a real hero is never backed into a corner.

Phew! Next up is the Essence, who I think should not run as long, but maybe I'll go really hard into my thoughts about downtime (which that playbook messes with in a big way). Thanks for reading!