11.2 Playstyles

One of the main aspects of this game, and most other roleplaying games, is conflict. In most cases, this manifests as battles between the PCs and others. The joy that players get out of these battles can come from different player goals and interests, and among those are being challenged, being badass, and being involved in dramatic storytelling. Other playstyles certainly exist, but for the purposes of improving your Anima Prime experience, I just want to talk about the ones I personally know well and enjoy, in part because they are actively supported by these rules.

Please keep in mind that, like all playstyle issues, these are not absolute: most players like to do several of these to some degree, at various times, even during a single play session. When I talk about “this kind of player,” it’s just shorthand for “a player who has this interest at this particular moment of play.”

Three Broad Categories

Players who are interested in challenges like to prove their skill at something. They enjoy having to work for a payoff. If you are the kind of person who plays video games on the highest difficulty level, working on your mastery of the game until you finally get the reward of beating it against all odds, then you’re very familiar with the thrill of challenge-based playing. I love to play this way, and our previous game Beast Hunters was built specifically for this playstyle.

Players who enjoy wish fulfillment like to be successful in the game. They like their characters to be not just good, but undeniably great at what they do. They don’t mind if the difficulty of the game is low, because the payoff is being able to pretend, just for a little while, that they’re unstoppable asskickers who can reliably make a difference in the world. I used to play Werewolf: the Apocalypse partly for this reason: it allowed me to be a badass who can tear apart anyone in his way while fighting the corruption of our modern world.

Players who enjoy drama in their stories like to put their characters through the wringer. They are not thinking in terms of how they as players can beat the challenge, and they definitely don’t want their characters always to come out on top. Quite to the contrary, they understand that the most dramatic stories involve loss, sacrifice, defeat, tragedy, and other ways of suffering. They may act contrary to their characters’ interests in order to make the outcome of a conflict more dramatic, and they purposely set up stories to lead their characters to the toughest choices they could possibly be forced to make. More often than not, this is the kind of play I enjoy.

Here’s an example. In the movie Die Harder, terrorists have taken over an airport and messed with the landing guidance system. The hero runs out onto the runway and tries to warn the incoming plane. However, the plane crashes and burns, and hundreds of innocent people die. You could look at this event, if it happened as a conflict in an RPG, in different ways. You could say: nice effort on his part, but not good enough; I would have done x, y and z (that is, you think of the situation as a challenge to be solved). You could feel bad that the hero didn’t succeed and think that the story’s worse for it; maybe you were in the mood for something uplifting and not all this death and suffering. Or you could be excited at the dramatic impact of the hero who tried his hardest and failed, and imagine the potential for how that will play out during the rest of the story.

There are other possible playstyles out there as well: genre emulation would be an example, where the players enjoy creating moments and experiences that are comparable to a particular genre or style. Anima Prime is designed to emulate a certain type of source material, namely anime series and movies and Final Fantasy games. That’s directly built into the way conflicts work: lots of cool maneuvers and stylish action, customized weapons, summonable creatures, and so on. I think that this emulation is fully compatible with any of the playstyles I’m talking about, so there’s no need to balance it against anything else.

And surely there are more playstyles than I’m listing here, but the three above are the ones Anima Prime is most suited for, the ones I personally know and like, and the ones that you’ll have to balance against each other because different approaches tend to support or frustrate them to varying degrees.

Relation to Game Mechanics

Many games are skewed from the outset for supporting one playstyle much more than any other (whether by design or because of unexamined notions of how an RPG is supposed to be structured). If the mechanics make it hard to be successful even at moderately difficult tasks, for example, wish fulfillment will be constantly frustrated by the characters’ failures. This is often obvious when the odds for doing what characters regularly do in the game are low, such as when a 40% chance of hitting an opponent in a combat-centric game is on the high end within the game. Players sometimes like to rationalize this by redefining what a failed roll means, but in the end, the player rolls more failures than successes.

When I first roleplayed with my kids many years ago, they became quickly bored and frustrated with Dungeons&Dragons because their characters were frequently failing, and that wasn’t much like playing Legolas or Aragorn at all.

The death of a PC is especially frustrating for this playstyle. After all, random death just doesn’t fit with the idea of a competent hero.

At the same time, a game with a high failure rate may not promote challenge-based play either. This is because that playstyle not only needs difficulty, but also plenty of options to improve one’s odds. If the best way to achieve something is obvious, and most of the options are within character creation rather than during play, the challenge-oriented player will quickly get bored during conflicts.

But if there are many options during a conflict and, in my preference, the ability to use elements from within the story (that is, narrative options rather than just mechanical ones), this kind of player can address each conflict in a satisfying way. The player might even enjoy the possibility of character death in a conflict, because it raises the stakes of the challenge.

Finally, dramatic story-oriented play works best if the player has the ability to control the setup and outcome of a conflict to some degree, not just regarding winning and losing, but also how much to give up in the process and which things to prioritize. Sometimes this coincides with challenge-oriented options. But often, other kinds of options are needed that allow the player to express character priorities, make tough choices, and sacrifice something in the process.

Character death is only good, in this case, if it’s meaningful, not if it’s based on bad luck during any conflict. This doesn’t mean PCs can’t die a lot, if that’s the theme of the game. In the RPG Classroom Deathmatch, based on Battle Royale, a whole class of students is forced to kill each other off, and players go through character after character. The game gains its meaning from the collective horror of all the deaths and how characters find something to hold on to during all of this. But in most cases, PC death for dramatic play needs to be based on a climactic choice.

Promoting a Playstyle

You can create conflicts in a way that appeals to these different playstyles to varying degrees. For example, if you ramp up the difficulty very high, you might promote challenge-based play, but you might frustrate wish fulfillment-play and take away dramatic choice. If you make the difficulty very low, there’s no real challenge and not much room for drama, but the characters’ success is virtually guaranteed.

In this game, there are several ways to address these different playstyles. First, of course, you need to talk with your players about what they like, and how much of each playstyle they’d like to see in their game. This involves the establishment of your game’s mood when you’re setting up the game. Revisit this conversation every now and then to make sure everyone’s still on the same page, and watch for the players’ reactions. You’ll see whether they are excited at a challenge, upset that they lost a conflict, or smiling about the suffering of their character. You can also let them rate the three styles on a scale (say, 1 to 5, with 5 being most enjoyable), and adjust your game accordingly.

Once that’s figured out, use the following techniques to promote particular playstyles. While there are several things to consider, the secret to getting the most out of this game lies in the conscious use of goals. You can use goals to promote all three playstyles in different ways, as you’ll see below.

Challenge-Oriented Play

For challenge-oriented play, start with difficult adversity. There needs to be a good chance that, unless the players step up, their opposition is going to kick their asses all around town. For maneuvers, there’s already a mechanism in play to allow players to show their skill: the GM-awarded dice. These range from one to four dice, which makes for a substantial difference in character effectiveness. If the player puts in two action dice, then going from three to four GM-awarded dice raises their chance of earning an Awesome Token from 13% to 35%. If they’re impressive enough to gain a die from another player as well (or the players just work together well), the odds go up to 57%, with an 83% chance to gain at least four strike and charge dice. Powers and action dice rationing allow for tactical choices as well.

The second important lever for challenge-based play is the ability of players to suggest goals. You should emphasize the ability of creating goals that give players tactical options to lower the adversity’s stats, inflict conditions, or boost their own side. This enables the players to beat the kind of opposition that they would not be able to overcome without their ingenuity.

Combining the narrative nature of maneuvers with the endless possibilities of situation-specific goals will enable you to throw conflict after conflict at the players while constantly keeping them challenged and entertained. The one thing you need to remember in such instances is that challenge-oriented players need a lot to work with: environments with lots of usable content, descriptions of the adversity, inside knowledge, and other narrative sources of tactics. It’s up to the GM to provide those, and remember that the players have the ability to make up scene details in their maneuvers as long as they fit with what’s already been established.

Wish Fulfillment Play

When creating conflicts for this playstyle, keep the difficulty generally low. The game should revolve around the characters as the ones who are the movers and shakers, and when they step up to the plate, they generally succeed in what they do. During maneuvers, be more generous with GM-awarded dice than you would be in a challenge-based conflict.

Goals you create for and during the conflict should also have low difficulties, and they should be focused on allowing the characters to really shine. Basically, where in challenge-based play goals are opportunities for making a win more likely, here they are opportunities to add additional laurels to the win. Not only do the PCs beat the opposition, but they humiliate them. Not only do the PCs save the day, but they look damn good in the process.

The adversity should rarely go for achieving goals; taking them away would frustrate the players. Instead, the adversity drives toward a (mostly futile) attempt at winning, thereby framing the window for what’s at stake for the PCs: yes, you win, but what else do you achieve?

Think of your game as a Steven Seagal movie. The bad guys constantly throw up new roadblocks and get closer to achieving their ultimate goal, but the good guys keep catching up, freeing the hostages and disturbing the evil plans, until the final confrontation (which the heroes win, of course). If anyone on the good side dies, the heroes were never in a position to help them (that is, it’s not their fault).

Keep in mind what I said about playstyles being in flux: sometimes it’s good for the characters to have an easy battle, even if they’re usually out to be challenged or have dramatic situations. It shakes things up, allows the characters to show off, and makes the hard and tragic parts stand out that much more. A character who’s first established as a badass makes for good challenge and drama situations when the opposition gets really tough, and all of the character’s powers may not be enough to avert a tragedy or two (see Pitch Black).

Dramatic Play

The basic difficulty of adversity for dramatic conflicts needs to be moderate to high. It should be in a range where the characters could overcome the opposition, were it not for the important goals that will use up valuable resources. That’s the kind of stuff that sacrifice stories are made of.

The goals you create for a dramatic conflict must tap directly into who the characters are and what they care about. If they are compassionate, put the fate of friends or innocent bystanders at risk. If they are idealists, allow them to pick between winning the fight and sticking to their ideals. Establish goals that give the PCs an edge at a horrible cost.

The nature of goals is very important in this context. If you didn’t notice this on your first read-through of the rules, let me emphasize the following: A player who achieves a goal gets to determine its outcome, but it does not have to be the one their character strives for. If the conflict has a “Save My Character’s Father” goal, and I achieve it, I can declare that the attackers manage to kidnap or kill him. People who are not familiar with the dramatic playstyle might think: Why on earth would I want to do that? The response is: It makes for a great dramatic story, and that might be more important to me than doing what my character wants.

In conclusion, set up plenty of goals that force the characters to pick what they care about most. Allow the players to achieve some of the goals and figure out in which direction they want to take the story, and make sure that the consequences of their decisions have a powerful and lasting impact. In order to set this all up, establish sympathetic NPCs and use character scenes to get the PCs tied up with them.

Sacrifice

Remember the sacrifice rule: the only way a character will die in this game is if the player sacrifices the character for the achievement of a goal. This keeps wish fulfillment characters alive (avoiding the biggest possible frustration for those players), allows you to make really challenging conflicts without fear of destroying hours of investment into a PC, and provides an opportunity for the most dramatic move any character could make: to give one’s life for the one thing the character cares about more than herself.

If you’re thinking about changing this rule and introducing the chance of death as a conflict outcome, you should understand that this will put all of those benefits at risk. The only situation in which I would advise this is if your players like high-stakes conflicts where the intensity of the challenge is increased because of the possible death of the PCs. This will lead to characters turning more into disposable playing pieces than otherwise, but it might be worthwhile for the added intensity. Just be sure that that’s what everyone wants.

Mixed Playstyles

Chances are your group is not 100% on the same page regarding these playstyles at all times. As I said before, each player might go through different phases where they are interested in one playstyle over another, sometimes even during a single session, and not all of the players will line up with each other when this happens. So what do you do to balance different preferences?

The first step is to vary the way you set up conflicts. Some of them might be challenging. Others might be easy. And some of them will have dramatic choices to make. Throughout these conflicts, the challenge-oriented players can strive for GM-awarded dice in maneuvers, the wish fulfillment-oriented players will survive the harder challenges and still be able to often look good (thanks to the high success rate in die rolls), and the drama-oriented players can consider most conflicts preludes to the dramatic showdowns.

Within conflicts, you can do several things for each type of preference. Create a range of adversity and send the difficult ones against the challenge types while customizing others to be vulnerable to the wish fulfillment-types’ strengths. Make some goals that the challenge types can use to their advantage, and others that are specifically aimed at the dramatic ones. Over time, the group will learn to use the different parts of this game in a way that’s fulfilling to most players most of the time.

Finally, talk to your group about having spotlight sessions. These would be tailored specifically to one of the characters and their player, and everyone would get a turn. One session might focus on the first character and consist of her saving the day with plenty of style while the other characters help out and do their best to make the spotlight character look awesome. The next session could be all about the second character, giving her the opportunity to make tough choices and explore what the character’s really made of, with the other characters pushing her or giving her openings to act. And in the following session, the third character can take the lead, with everyone supporting her against overwhelming odds and following that player’s tactical lead against a powerful challenge.

In the end, whichever way you end up playing is up to you, and no one playstyle is superior to another, just like taste in music or movies. It’s all about balancing the interests of a group of friends during your shared hobby. My design goal with this game was to give you the tools to do just that, but remember: the first and last step is always open communication with your fellow players.