[The Dark Forest] Beliefs Workshop document

[Paul B]

This is a doc I came up with for our Dark Forest game. There's some game-specific elements in it but more generally useful stuff as well. Any feedback? Did I give bad advice? Let me know so I can refine it for our use!

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Beliefs Workshop #1


Step 1: Identify what THE PLAYER cares about.

This step happens in two parts. First part is to lay out all the elements about which you can make a Belief.

• In what sorts of activities do you, the player, want to participate in this game? Here are some ideas:
  • Fight?
  • Negotiate?
  • Make things?
  • Escape?
  • Prove yourself (and to whom)?
  • Be vengeful (and for what cause)?
  • Make discoveries?
  • Get rich?
  • Overcome a weakness? (Take a look at your “bad” traits for ideas.)
  • Improve your character’s abilities? (Combat, DOW, crafting, wises, supernatural)
• What elements of the game as it currently exists do you, the player, care about? Here’s a rough list of things that come to mind:
  • The Key of Vol
  • The Old Ways
  • The New Faith, and its threat to the Old Ways
  • The town of Valdai
  • Poverty
  • The barkeep
  • The slutty barmaid
  • The as-yet-unmet girl at the mine
  • The Icesteel mine
  • The Dark Forest
  • Bandits
  • The Witch Hunt
  • Cyrus the scary wizard
  • Sahad the Viscount of Acubar
  • The other characters: the Witch Hunter, the idiot blacksmith, the jovial thug, the clever scavenger, the mysterious ranger

Second half of step 1 is to put together the elements in interesting ways. Idea: Pick one item from each bullet point and put them together. Examples:

• Get in fights + Key of Vol
• Negotiate + town of Valdai
• Prove yourself + Bandits
• Vengeance + Dark Forest
• Make discoveries + Poverty
• Cyrus + Supernatural abilities
• Slutty barmaid + improve DOW abilities

Step 2: Figure out the Ideology

Okay, so you’ve put together your elements in ways that are interesting to you, the player. THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT. Do not, under any circumstances, start out your Beliefs with “things my guy would do/believe/care about.” You won’t care about what your character is doing. The player MUST be the one who cares about this stuff. The character is an expression of what the player cares about.

Step 2 is to phrase your ITEM + ITEM idea in an ideological way – this is the “belief” part of Beliefs. Let’s look at the examples I already put up there, and figure out how to express your interest in the setting item via your character

• Fighting + Key of Vol = “The Key is sacred.” or “The Key’s true owner is already fated” or “The Key is worth a lot of money.”
• Negotiate + town of Valdai = “Valdai needs money to pull itself from poverty” or “My town needs a true leader” or “Valdai is a backwards and superstitious place.”
• Prove yourself + Bandits = “The bandits are a threat to my town’s well-being” or “The bandits are a disorganized rabble in need of leadership” or “My family would respect me if I did something about those bandits”
• Vengeance + Dark Forest = “Innocent people have died within the Dark Forest” or “Bandits use the safety of the Dark Forest to make their escape”

At this point it is absolutely okay to introduce new “facts” about the game setting if they don’t contradict what’s already been established. So, continuing down that list, you could do stuff like this:

• Make discoveries + Poverty: “There are tales of a forgotten fortress within the Forest” or “The Icesteel Mine surely must have a rich vein within it”
• Cyrus + improve supernatural abilities: “Cyrus teaches only the worthy the secrets of magic” or “Cyrus possesses the secrets of magic but will not share them with anyone.”
• Slutty barmaid + improve DOW abilities: “I care deeply about the barmaid’s soul” or “I love the barmaid and must save her from a life of prostitution.”

Step 3: What are you going to do about it?

Now that you’ve identified ITEM + ITEM things you, the player, care about, it’s time to lay out a plan of action to pursue those things. Questions to ask yourself:

• What’s in the way of accomplishing your goals right now?
• What are you willing to do to accomplish your goals?
• What do I want the GM to hit me on?

The reasons the “to do” part of your Belief is so important are many: They give you, the player, a clear direction of what to do with your character (yes, this is your job in this game, not the GM’s – at least not all the time). They tell the GM what to come at you with. Maybe most important, they let you know when you’ve accomplished your goal and you earn a Persona.

Here’s how those example Beliefs might be filled out with to-do items.

• Fighting + Key of Vol: “The Key is sacred. I will strike down anyone who touches it” or “The Key’s true owner is already fated. I will swear my sword to defend its holder” or “The Key is worth a lot of money. I’ll take it by force if necessary.” In all these cases, this is a clear message to the GM that you want to fight for the Key of Vol.
• Negotiate + town of Valdai: “Valdai is a backward and superstitious place. I will convert the town’s leaders, starting with the Mayor himself, to the New Faith.” Or “Valdai needs money to pull itself from poverty. I will make an agreement with the Viscount to provide funds to our town.”
• Prove yourself + Bandits = “The bandits are a threat to my town’s well-being. I will capture/kill the Bandit King and disrupt their operations.” or “The bandits are a disorganized rabble in need of leadership. I will find the bandit’s hideout and challenge the strongest one for the right to command them.” or “My family would respect me if I did something about those bandits. I’ll go to the town leaders and organize a posse.”

The bottom line

A well-written, actionable Belief should clearly identify the elements of the story the player cares about, and a clear to-do item in pursuit of that element.

Step 4: Beliefs 202

To further develop your Beliefs, consider the following:

• Make your BITs conflict with each other. Give yourself hard choices! You get a Persona every time a hard choice comes up.
• Be prepared with new to-do items in advance. Obviously this will be hard without knowing the context of how you fulfilled your Belief, but you can be thinking a few moves ahead.
• Develop your Beliefs with the overt intent of being able to fulfill at least one of them every session of play. EVERY SESSION. And then be ready to update them immediately for the next session.
• If you want to think about your Beliefs in terms of winning and losing: If your Beliefs get engaged during play and you’re earning Artha, you’re winning. If your Beliefs are not triggering – either because you don’t care to engage them or you decline to engage with them when someone tries to do so – you’re losing.
• When you’re setting up Beliefs, think like your character’s author and not your character himself. Your character probably wants to live a quiet, long, safe life. Tales of quiet, long safe lives are booooooring. Dream up ways to put your own character into hot water, and make sure the GM knows what kinds of hot water interest you.
• Take the Trait nomination under consideration when you're setting up Beliefs. If you see a kickass Trait you want to acquire, you need to spend a Fate or Persona pursuing it to get it nominated (1-3 point die trait for Persona, 4+ die trait or call-on for Deeds, a character trait for Fate).

[Sempiternity]

No time now (to comment), but wow - i think i'm going to print this thing out for next friday! >_<

[artellan]

Holy crap! This is awesome Paul. I always knew that beliefs need to be tied into the situation but the formula "what the player wants to do" + "what the player likes about the setting/situation" makes it so simple. I even think that group brainstorming those two lists in Step 1 should be part of world/campaign-burning.

The examples were all great and I liked the suggestion about adding new things to the fiction as well. Time for me to go review my character's Beliefs (for our ancient Greece campaign) with your document in mind.

I better stop gushing now. But this should be copied onto the wiki!

-Mike

[artellan]

I've thought of a couple other bits of advice you might want to consider:
- Remind them that although you want to try your best to make your Beliefs what you care about as player, you don't only get one try. If you find something to be boring, or something else catches your attention, you can always rewrite a Belief.
- No Belief is meant to be static. If you don't think it'll get updated or resolved at some point, it shouldn't be there. (Even the one faith Belief that Faithful characters have should probably be reinforced, eventually.)
- Your Beliefs should fit in with the rest of the group -- you don't want to have a Belief that requires you to journey to a faraway place unless the others players want to go there too. Largely this is handled by group acceptance/creation of your game-elements list in Step 1 though.

Oh yeah, personally I think it's okay for you to enter play with one Belief where Step 3 (what are you going to do about it) is left vague or unanswered. Then you can add that part based on stuff that happens in play - it starts out as a Fate mine and then becomes a Persona producer. This might apply more to the start of the game than to your situation though.

Cheers

[Paul B]

Mike, really good points and I agree with all of them. In fact re. the #3 step, I'm also running a game for my fiancee and this is how we started the game: ideology stuff with as-yet-undetermined to-do stuff. Sure enough, by the end of the first turn the to-do items made themselves obvious.

Also a point of clarification: I'm in no way trying to present this stuff as the only true/correct way to do Beliefs. It's just a system that works for me in my own head, and I find it easy to explain.

p.

[Paul B]

Just stumbled into a really good "Beliefs 202" item I'm going to add to the workshop document, which came up recently in our own game:

Take the Trait nomination process under consideration when you're setting up Beliefs. If you see a kickass Trait you want to acquire, you need to spend a Fate or Persona pursuing it to get it nominated (1-3 point die trait for Fate, 4+ die trait or call-on for Persona). Once you've had a chance to spend your Artha on it, you can even cycle it out and replace it with something more pressing to your current game.

p.

[Ratman45]

Just stumbled into a really good "Beliefs 202" item I'm going to add to the workshop document, which came up recently in our own game:

Take the Trait nomination process under consideration when you're setting up Beliefs. If you see a kickass Trait you want to acquire, you need to spend a Fate or Persona pursuing it to get it nominated (1-3 point die trait for Fate, 4+ die trait or call-on for Persona). Once you've had a chance to spend your Artha on it, you can even cycle it out and replace it with something more pressing to your current game.

p.

This is excellent advice for anyone who's looking to reap the full rewards the Belief-Artha system has to offer. However, unless what you've laid out above are house rules, two minor points of clarification...

1) I believe you meant Persona (1-3 point) and Deeds (4+ point).

2) It should be noted that Persona can net you a call-on trait of any cost. Read the "Evolving" section on page 71 carefully, and you'll note you only need a Deeds for major Die Traits.

I'd also like to chime in and say that your workshop system looks great, and I fully intend to adapt it for use in my own game in the near future.

[Paul B]

Yeah...I need to get that straight in my head. IIRC I just described the BE system, not the BW system. But I'm probably wrong about that one too!

I'll get it figured out. Don't nobody post this silly thing to the wiki 'til I've pulled my head out of my butt.

p.

[glitchpop]

This is great! Really helpful. Hopefully more of my players will use it to kick their Beliefs into high gear!. Thanks.