11.3 Flags

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll define “flag” as follows:
“Something that tells the GM what the wants to play out during the game.”

Flags help to focus the game on what’s fun for each particular player and allow the players an indirect input into the direction of the game and story. They can come in many shapes and forms: the powers (or feats, class, race, skills, etc.) that a player chooses, background items that a player writes out, a diagram of the PC’s relationships, and so on. The GM can look at a flag and put something fitting into the game, which makes it more enjoyable to the players.

In many games, there are no obvious flags. One of the learned skills of a GM for those games is to figure out from the players’ choices about their characters what the players are interested in and then delivering that. Basically, the GM is trying to find hidden flags on the players’ sheets or in the choices they make during play. While that can work well, it’s not very reliable and really depends on how well the GM can guess at the players’ reasons for doing things.

Misunderstanding Flags

Flags based on character abilities (such as powers in Anima Prime), for example, can be easily misunderstood. As an example, let’s say your player picks “Darksight” as a power for their character, which allows the character to be resistant to Blinded and Darkness. The player could do this for different reasons. Some possible ones are:

1. The player wants to have fights in the dark and against creatures of darkness. That would make this power a flag. This is often the case with “niche” powers, skills, and classes (picking the rogue because the player wants to do sneaky stuff, picking the socialite because she wants to play out social intrigues, etc.).
2. The player expects that the PCs’ adventures will take the characters into situations where they will be blinded or it will be dark, and she wants to be prepared. This is not a flag but a preparation based on specific expectations of what’s going to happen. This is basically a reverse flag, where the player tries to read the GM.
3. The player has had bad experiences in this or other games where her character became much less effective by being blinded or having to fight in the dark, and the player hated that experience, so she wants to be protected against it. This is an anti-flag, a way of protecting against things that the player doesn’t want to experience.

Therefore, just looking at powers (or feats, skills, etc. in other games) won’t give you the complete picture. This is an area where talking about it is a great way to figure out what the player’s reason is and whether the player is really expressing an interest. A second solution is for the player to rate their powers, feats, and whatnot: let them assign a number from 1 to 5 to each, indicating how much they would like to use each one during the game (and let them change their minds about it whenever they want). Then design your conflicts, encounters, and other opportunities to use the powers that the players are most interested in.

Many players also write out backgrounds for their characters. In most games, this has little effect on the actual game mechanics. And now the GM has some or a lot of background material and doesn’t know which parts of it the player made up to explain who the character is (but wants to keep that way), and which parts the player made as possible story hooks for the GM to use.

An example of a misunderstanding of background flags is a story I heard from someone about a character whose background was the loss of his wife. The PC was transporting her body around with him, looking for a way to resurrect her. At one point, the GM played an NPC who just gave the PC the means to do that. But the player didn’t really want to resurrect the wife. It was a character motivation that was necessary in order to play the character the way he wanted to, and his character’s story was suddenly at an end because now the PC would simply retire with his resurrected wife. The GM thought it was a flag: an indication of what the player wanted to play out in the game. But the player meant it as a motivation for the character that he’d keep for much longer. It might have turned into a flag at some point when the player was ready for it, but there was no way inside of the game to signal this.

Flags in Anima Prime

In order to avoid these kinds of misunderstandings, Anima Prime has some direct and obvious flags. The first ones are story seeds. They give the GM very obvious ideas on what the players want their characters to deal with during the game. The GM should always try, as best as possible, to guide the game along according to the seeds that your group has developed. They give your game good plots and subplots to develop through play and provide a framework to tie conflicts into.

Links are also direct flags: the player puts all of those things about the character into links that she wants to come up during the game, and she puts all of the stuff she doesn’t want to play out in the background section. This avoids the problem of the GM meaning well but addressing the wrong things about the PCs. The division between background items and links is a neat little trick that you can easily use for any other game, with very little effort but guaranteed payoff.

As a third flag group, traits tell the other players and the GM what the player would like to play out during character scenes and conflicts regarding the character’s personality. The GM can now bring up situations where the PCs’ traits can come out and become important to the story. Traits can also be easily plugged into other games as an add-on if you allow some sort of reroll in that game in exchange for the players bringing up their character traits in play.

Using Flags

Flags might seem unnecessary if you have excellent communication among your group. You might have regular meetings where you sit down and tell each other what exactly you like about your game, what each player would like to do and have happen, which parts about the characters are off-limits, and so on. But even then, flags can accelerate the process and save you some time, and they allow the players to change their minds during the game and have the GM react to it without stopping the game for a discussion.

As a GM, you should look at flags in two situations. First, when prepping a game, you can use the flags to tie events and future conflicts together. If one player has a lost brother link, and another has a link to a cult he used to belong to and now opposes, let the lost brother be connected with the cultists. Was he kidnapped by them? Is he leading them? Tying the characters together through their flags, and weaving it into the game story, is a great way of ensuring that both the characters and the players care about what’s going on. You should be flexible here: feel free to change your mind mid-game about your prepped work if a better, cooler, more dramatic opportunity arises.

Second, during a game session, you can look at the flags when you’re trying to figure out what to throw at the players next. They should always provide you with enough fodder that you can use to spontaneously create meaningful events and opposition for them. Don’t forget the story seeds, either. A link they have might be connected to the setting seed, or a trait will get them into trouble with a faction connected to their group seed. Whenever you are about to introduce something new into the game, or when you have an opening to do so, quickly think about (or look over) all of the flags and try to work one or more of them into the game.