Prelude
I’ve been struggling with this for a long time.
In all the games I run, there’s usually a reward mechanic. Void Points, Drama Dice, Trouble. And now, with Houses, we have style points. The GM rewarding the players for throwing themselves into the game, for helping other players’ enjoyment, for being Good People. Throw them a point. A game bonus. Just give it to them.
And in all the games I run, there’s always that moment when everything goes right and the players gasp and the whole game stops because of some little twist I threw in. Some little surprise I’d been savoring. Something that knocks the players off their feet. And someone says, “Give John a style point!”
Unfortunately, that mechanic doesn’t really work. You see, giving the GM a point… it just doesn’t go anywhere. They don’t want to give me points because I’ll just use those points against them in some way. It isn’t so much rewarding me as punishing them.
So, when I started writing Houses, I had a lot of goals. One of those goals was this: “Have a mechanic that encourages the players to reward the GM.”
Listening to the second Sons of Kryos playtest .mp3… and I found it. I finally fucking found it.
NPCs in Houses of the Blooded (and pretty much every roleplaying game) are like ghosts. They exist for a short while, then disappear. They touch the world, then vanish. Like trained monkeys, they do their little trick, make everyone laugh, then go back to the cage and everyone moves along, forgetting about them.
I don’t want you to forget about my NPCs. I want the names of my NPCs burned on your brain. At least one of my NPCs is so hated, the players have vowed to kill him whenever they see him. Forget the consequences. Forget the costs. Just kill the bastard. Kill him so hard, the world hurts when it thinks about him. Likewise, there are NPCs the players absolutely adore. They would kill or die to protect them.
I work hard to make my NPCs as real–sometimes more real–than the players’ characters. I work damn hard at it. And now I have a mechanic that lets the players help me out.
Whenever a player ends a scene with an NPC, and the player finds he really likes the NPC, he can give the NPC a style point. (Which is really giving the GM a style point via proxy.) The NPC can then use the style point just like a player character. Most importantly, he can deny compels, veto wagers, and otherwise protect himself from player machinations.
The more style points the players invest in an NPC, the more real the NPC becomes. The more he can tell the players, “No, I’m not falling for your plots,” or “Yes, I will spend a style point to say something is true in your favor.” The NPCs truly become the avatars of the GM. Anything the players can do, the GM can do… through the NPCs the players invest in.
Official rules later.