I had a thought this morning. What if your highest stats were your flaws?
What if, when you made a mistake, it was because you over relied on your strength? For example, someone who’s smart but thinks they’re a genius. Or someone that is determined but sticks too long to a plan that isn’t working.
The idea is to paint the character in a way that could range from cartoonish to deeply dysfunctional. The goal is to explain failure with a theme that builds who the character is or maybe wants to be.
I think the Energy System could be used to do that. I wonder if it would resonate with players? If built right, it could deliver a lot of laughs.
Hell, my highest stats are -definitely- my flaws.
Yeah, some of this is a personal realization but it also is reflected in a number of movies and tv shows. I have a rough idea how to do this but the idea definitely needs polish.
Maybe something like: Every time you use a stat twice in a row, without having used some other stat in between the uses, you simultaneously roll a “Goes Off the Rails die” for the possibility of, well, that happening. For every subsequent use of the same stat (if no other stat has been used in between), there’s a modification to make the potential disaster that much worse, based on the number of uninterrupted uses of the stat so far. The chain ends *either* in a hopefully spectacular “Goes Off the Rails” failure, *or* in the player wisely choosing to try a different stat now. Either way ends/resets the chain.
If you want to make it thematic, I guess each character would choose a single stat, the only one that came with a Goes Off the Rails die for that character; this would be the “Seinfeld” option. A more zany, general-comedy option would be to apply the GOTR die to *any* stat a character uses more than once in an uninterrupted row.
Random thoughts.