RPG Tax Review: Posthuman Pathways by Jason Pitre

What is it?

Posthuman Pathways is a GM-full roleplaying/storytelling game about the impact of technology on society, as seen through the lens of three characters. It comes as five folded pamphlets in a cardboard envelope. One of the pamphlets unfolds to become a play mat, one describes setup and character creation, and the other three give details about the game roles players take. The game is for three people, needs 14+ index cards, and claims it will take 3-4 hours. There’s a PWYW PDF version at DriveThruRPG.

How did it get my attention / Why did I buy it?

I received Posthuman Pathways for free as a reward for participating in the Genesis of Legend Emerging Voices Challenge. I’m embarrassed it’s taken me so long to get around to reviewing it!

What are my first impressions?

My very first impression was surprise at the unusual format of the game. The envelope of pamphlets makes for a compact form factor, and I think the breakdown actually works for the game. One pamphlet becomes the play mat, one has the game setup instructions, and the last three pamphlets detail the three game roles. All pamphlets except the play mat also include the overall game structure and rules. They’re small enough to be easy to hand around as you rotate roles.

During game setup, you prepare the Context (locations) and Pressures.  Each player creates a character, deciding on a name and their four drives: Status, Identity, Vision, and Ritual. For each drive, name what they value most in that category. e.g. for Status, name a social standing or political position they are desperate to attain.

The game consists of three eras with three scenes each, plus brief transitions in the middle and epilogues. The eras are the Human Era, the Transhuman Era, and the Posthuman Era. Each scene, each player takes on one of the three rotating roles: Trailblazer, Voyager, or Guide. The Trailblazer sets the scene, the Voyager plays their character, and the Guide provides antagonism. For the next scene, pass the booklets around so the Trailblazer becomes the new Voyager, the Voyager becomes the new Guide, and the Guide becomes the new Trailblazer.

The first Trailblazer kicks off the game by answering the question “What augmentation technology changed everything?” At the end of the scene, they write a new question for the next Trailblazer. If they’re stumped, the game includes suggested questions, which all push the game towards exploring the societal and cultural ramifications of new technologies. The Trailblazer also sets the broad context of the dilemma facing the current character, and then hands narration off to the Voyager and the Guide.

The Guide’s main responsibility is to provide pressure and antagonism to the Voyager, ultimately forcing them to choose whether to sacrifice one of their drives to get what they want. At the end of the three eras, a character may be down to a single drive. The Trailblazer/Guide split makes the game easier to play by distributing the usual GM responsibilities across two people, and allowing them to focus on specific aspects of the fiction.

After every three scenes, the current era ends. After the first two, time jumps forward to the next era, and each player gets to narrate a short interlude about it. After the end of the Posthuman Era, each player narrates an epilgoue for their character.

The game structure lends itself to big idea social science fiction, grounded by focusing on the lives of three specific characters. The Trailblazer questions and pressure to sacrifice drives encourage exploring the social impact of technology. A possible drawback is that in order to keep things moving and focus on the big changes, there’s not a lot of time spent on each character.  People who like to really spend time with and inhabit characters may find it unsatisfying. In that way, Posthuman Pathways is similar to Microscope. I think the focus on specific characters and the role breakdown make it easier than Microscope’s “hot seat.” I’m really curious about playing it, but it’s rare for me to wind up with exactly three people up for playing an RPG. I may see about finding a group online, or using it to outline a novel!

Roll Difficulty in Blades in the Dark

(Update 2018/12/11: Added details on “other consequences”: reduced effect, complication, lost opportunity, worse position)

As a GM, setting difficulties in Blades in the Dark is different from games like D&D, and it can take some getting used to.

When GMing D&D, when a player rolls for something, you the GM decide what the chances of success or failure are. You sometimes define what happens on success or failure, but for most rolls, the meanings of “success” and “failure” are defined in the rule book. The simplest way to represent a harder situation is to reduce the chance of success.

It’s the opposite in Blades. As a GM, you decide the success outcome (Effect) and failure outcome (Position), but the chances of success are determined by the player. To represent a harder situation, you need to think about the whole situation and what makes it harder:

Does it have severe consequences for failure? Worse Position.

Are the PC’s actions unlikely to have an impact on the situation? Worse or no Effect.

Do they need to face danger to even try? Require a Resistance roll before they can take the action.

For a given Position, you can tune the difficulty by changing the consequences for 4-5 and 1-3 results. Roughly from hardest to softest:

  1. Harm
  2. Lost opportunity
  3. Other consequences: Complication, worse position, reduced effect
  4. Clock to Harm
  5. Clock to complication

I rate Harm the hardest because it mechanically affects the player’s future chances of success, and takes the longest to recover from. The harshness of other consequences depends heavily on the context. I rate losing the opportunity harsher than others because it closes off player options and can result in the game stalling. This is why in the rules reference, you only see it in the 1-3 results for Risky and Desperate position.

Like Harm, worse position and reduced effect have mechanical consequences, but unlike Harm they’re ephemeral. Worse position is a key way to escalate the action and get the PCs into trouble. Reduced effect is the easiest to think about as a GM, but can be frustrating for the other players and lead to a lot of “I try that again.” Complications are a wildcard that let you introduce any other potential dangers into the score.

Clocks to Harm or complications are the softest consequences because they’re delayed. Depending on how the Score goes, the threat may never materialize. Even if it does, the players have had ample time to watch it develop and prepare to deal with it.

Keep in mind this is a fuzzy ranking. It’s possible to come up with a consequence that the player rates as worse than Harm depending on the situation. Long-term complications, like increased Heat or dinging the crew’s status with a faction, can be worse than Harm as they force the crew to deal with the fallout using precious Downtime actions. If the crew is racing to complete a clock before their rivals complete theirs, reduced effect (tick once instead of twice) might be enough to make them lose the race.

Another way to tune difficulty is by changing how effective Resistance rolls are. This also affects the feel of the game. For an easier, more heroic feel, let a resistance roll completely negate Harm and other consequences. For a harsher, grittier feel, have resistance rolls only lessen the Harm or consequence.

Blades in the Dark Resistance Roll Stress Values

Someone on G+ asked about the expected Stress values for Resistance rolls depending on the size of your dice pool, so I calculated them.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1npGJbX4salI56zjyxOT6OCwMcwgq9MDcRwbJYCVIkr8/edit#gid=0

At 3 dice, on average you’ll spend just under 1 Stress

At 4 dice, you have a ~52% chance of not spending Stress, with a ~13% chance that you’ll actually gain back a Stress.

I first tried to tackle this in Anydice, but my skills are rudimentary. I wound up writing a Python script to count the possibilities for each Stress outcome.

import itertools

def stress_outcomes(dice):
    counts = {1: 0, 2: 0, 3: 0, 4: 0, 5: 0, 6: 0, 66: 0}
    all_rolls = list(itertools.product([1,2,3,4,5,6], repeat=6))
    for roll in all_rolls:
        if max(roll) == 1:
            counts[1] += 1
        elif max(roll) == 2:
            counts[2] += 1
        elif max(roll) == 3:
            counts[3] += 1
        elif max(roll) == 4:
            counts[4] += 1
        elif max(roll) == 5:
            counts[5] += 1
        elif max(roll) == 6:
            if roll.count(6) > 1:
                counts[66] += 1
            else:
                counts[6] += 1
    print("\n%d dice" % dice)
    print(counts)
    total_count = len(all_rolls)
    print(total_count)
    print("\n".join([("= %d/%d\t= %2.1f" % (count, total_count, 100.0*float(count)/total_count)) for count in counts.values()]))

for i in range(3, 7):
    stress_outcomes(i)

Output:

3 dice
{1: 1, 2: 63, 3: 665, 4: 3367, 5: 11529, 6: 18750, 66: 12281}
46656
= 1/46656       = 0.0
= 63/46656      = 0.1
= 665/46656     = 1.4
= 3367/46656    = 7.2
= 11529/46656   = 24.7
= 18750/46656   = 40.2
= 12281/46656   = 26.3

4 dice
{1: 1, 2: 63, 3: 665, 4: 3367, 5: 11529, 6: 18750, 66: 12281}
46656
= 1/46656       = 0.0
= 63/46656      = 0.1
= 665/46656     = 1.4
= 3367/46656    = 7.2
= 11529/46656   = 24.7
= 18750/46656   = 40.2
= 12281/46656   = 26.3

5 dice
{1: 1, 2: 63, 3: 665, 4: 3367, 5: 11529, 6: 18750, 66: 12281}
46656
= 1/46656       = 0.0
= 63/46656      = 0.1
= 665/46656     = 1.4
= 3367/46656    = 7.2
= 11529/46656   = 24.7
= 18750/46656   = 40.2
= 12281/46656   = 26.3

6 dice
{1: 1, 2: 63, 3: 665, 4: 3367, 5: 11529, 6: 18750, 66: 12281}
46656
= 1/46656       = 0.0
= 63/46656      = 0.1
= 665/46656     = 1.4
= 3367/46656    = 7.2
= 11529/46656   = 24.7
= 18750/46656   = 40.2
= 12281/46656   = 26.3