solidork
2022-07-22, 07:11 PM
I just finished listening to the Sangfielle season of Friends at the Table, and one of the things that I liked about the game they played (Heart: the City Beneath) was the "beats" system. In Heart, you select two "beats" for your character each session - these serve as a meta level indicator of things you want your character to accomplish, experience or encounter and you are rewarded with character advancement when you accomplish them. Heart isn't the first game I've encountered that does something like this (shout out to Chuubo's Quest system and CoD's aspirations) but this particular incarnation was what inspired me to cross the line into trying it in our weekly 5e game.
Rather than tie beats to advancement in 5e, we're trying out tying it to the often forgotten inspiration system. Each player wrote a selection of beats based on their personality traits, ideals, bonds, flaws or any other salient character detail they wanted to highlight. Each session we're picking three of those beats, and during play you can trigger each of them one time to immediately gain inspiration.
These are usually things you're "supposed" to get inspiration for anyways, but formalizing it this way keeps the aspects of your character that you want to highlight in the forefront of both your and the DM's mind and empowers the player to be in the driver's seat about when they get inspiration while hopefully placing limits that curb potential excesses of that kind of mindset.
It's still a work in progress; writing beats that are evocative for your character and not too narrow or too broad is definitely a skill that needs to be cultivated, and we're still working out how often you can re-use the same beats or if there should be ways to change them mid session if you get thrown a major curveball and end up with a bunch of inappropriate ones. You could argue that characters in 5e don't really need any additional help, but the actual play experience of choosing your beats and then hitting them in play for some kind of reward is very fun - maybe some other benefit would make sense.
I'll finish off with the beats I wrote for my glory paladin, Gideon Kazan. He's a former heir to a noble house who was cursed to become a Harengon, and has since joined an order of knights and gained some notoriety on the tourney scene.
-Propose something that can be learned from a defeat or failure.
-Do something impressive in front of spectators.
-Allow a grudge to complicate your life.
-Meet someone notable who has already heard of you or your exploits.
-Offer to help someone or something that is (literally or figuratively) cursed.
Rather than tie beats to advancement in 5e, we're trying out tying it to the often forgotten inspiration system. Each player wrote a selection of beats based on their personality traits, ideals, bonds, flaws or any other salient character detail they wanted to highlight. Each session we're picking three of those beats, and during play you can trigger each of them one time to immediately gain inspiration.
These are usually things you're "supposed" to get inspiration for anyways, but formalizing it this way keeps the aspects of your character that you want to highlight in the forefront of both your and the DM's mind and empowers the player to be in the driver's seat about when they get inspiration while hopefully placing limits that curb potential excesses of that kind of mindset.
It's still a work in progress; writing beats that are evocative for your character and not too narrow or too broad is definitely a skill that needs to be cultivated, and we're still working out how often you can re-use the same beats or if there should be ways to change them mid session if you get thrown a major curveball and end up with a bunch of inappropriate ones. You could argue that characters in 5e don't really need any additional help, but the actual play experience of choosing your beats and then hitting them in play for some kind of reward is very fun - maybe some other benefit would make sense.
I'll finish off with the beats I wrote for my glory paladin, Gideon Kazan. He's a former heir to a noble house who was cursed to become a Harengon, and has since joined an order of knights and gained some notoriety on the tourney scene.
-Propose something that can be learned from a defeat or failure.
-Do something impressive in front of spectators.
-Allow a grudge to complicate your life.
-Meet someone notable who has already heard of you or your exploits.
-Offer to help someone or something that is (literally or figuratively) cursed.