Welcome back to another design blog! I'm working my way through the process of writing the four playbooks of Daybreak on the Battlefield - today we're taking a look at the Essence.

Design Story: This one is pretty simple - a lot of teams have a support player! It's a pretty clear and obvious relationship archetype that can be tricky to do in "traditional" rpgs. But I think GbM has a lot of different opportunities to make that archetype feel real and interesting and fun to play!

"Support" is, again, a pretty broad descriptor, so I wanted to drill down - what is it that distinguishes your Lunas, Merles, and Chibiusas from a Sailor Mercury or Amethyst? My favorite answer was that these support characters need someone else in order to take part in the plot. We could get a Luna-only episode, or see Merle go off on her own catgirl adventure, but for the purposes of the story they're in, they can only be talked about in terms of which character they're there with.

That's not that big of a deal during the "Mission" phase, since the whole team is usually together. Downtime, however, is a chance for players to act on their own initiative - even if 50% of the downtime actions are social, they're a major outlet for player expression. What if that were taken away?

I've been having a blast listening to Friends at the Table's most recent season, Palisade, and I am really taken with Armour Astir, the game they're playing. It has a pretty cool downtime phase - each player frames a single downtime scene for their character from a list to get a variety of effects, but they also have a pool of tokens that they can spend in anyone's scene to get those effects too. It's a really neat little system - characters who aren't as likely to be superstar mech pilots during the mission can get more tokens during downtime to accomplish more things, and you don't explode the amount of time too drastically (theoretically, since the amount of "scenes" remains unchanged). I thought a little tweak of it would make a lot of sense for the Essence!

There was one other major design piece that I thought the concept should probably interact with - if you're a "support" character, what is transcendence like for you? I toyed with making it out-of-bounds, like for the Unlikely Hero, but I think the inspirations are all pretty clearly capable of "transcendence" - just limited in some way, compared to the "main" heroes. Steven is actually a great example of this archetype in early episodes! It's not that he has no magical powers - it's that they're fleeting or difficult to understand. He can maybe pull out a big win, but most often he's there hanging out with his friends the Crystal Gems.

A couple of Essence abilities took a while to get to an iteration that felt right. There's a clear mechanical space for "helping" in forged in the dark games, but it's probably not so fun if that's the only thing you do - so what's the right balance of "help" abilities vs more personal agency?

Mechanical Considerations: Some big ones! Messing with downtime is kind of delicate - the numbers you're playing with are kind of small in some ways. The difference between filling 4 segments of the Investigations track and filling 6 is big. The Essence doesn't get to pick which action they bring to downtime (although they can be kind of picky about how they spend their tokens). How big of a detriment is that? I figured it probably kicks you down to rolling "0" dice pretty often - even in those cases, getting three downtime actions is likely to be more impactful (in terms of sheer numbers), even compared to rolling 2 dice! (taking the expected value of a single downtime action as the number of links/segments*the likelihood of rolling that result; 0 dice, EV of ~2.48; 1 die, EV = 2.66, 2 dice, EV = 3.36). And it only gets stronger as you fill out your action ratings! Hmm!

I think it's still the right call - even if you get to be "more powerful" than others at downtime, it comes at the cost of agency, which I think is a neat trade, and plays right into the core identity of the playbook. Yeah, you're great at helping - but are you ok taking a backseat?

The other lever here is of course transcendence. Having only a single transcendent action is kind of rough! I think that's again ok - if you're getting a lot of mileage out of helping people, you can maybe still contribute with setup actions or assist dice, even when you're kicked back into mundane scale. The other thing it opens up is that the transcendent abilities can be pretty generous to make up for it, and those can't be grabbed by anyone but the Unlikely Hero.

Assorted Inspirations: Let's collect these in one place: major mechanical inspiration to Briar Sovereign of Armour Astir: Advent, and some token thoughts from Possum Creek's Wanderhome and Avery Alder & Benjamin Rosenbaum's Dream Apart / Dream Askew. Merle from Escaflowne is maybe the character I most credit here, although Kero and Luna are huge inspirations. Chibiusa mostly by reputation - I confess I had a hard time watching those episodes. I think Nanami from Utena could be an interesting Essence (although I don't think she stays one).

Favorite Text: I really like the Mischief maker ability, although it's a little wordy! I think my favorite turn of phrase might be in Eyes open - that "their example can protect you from the consequences" felt very in-theme and appropriate to GbM.

That's that! I hope everyone is having fun checking out the first draft of the series playset. My playtesting has finally gotten off the ground, and has been immediately instructive - I'll be publishing a few revisions pretty soon, I imagine! But probably before then, wrapping up with the final playbook design blog, for the Firebrand.