Humanity, Endeavored

The party of heros faces down a horde of zombies. They grip their swords tight as the smell of rotted flesh wafts their way.

Racers rev their engines, with palpable antipation as their eye flicks from the start gun raised high to their fuel gauge. Supplies hit hard this past year, this race will be a hard balance of speed and economy.

The crowd's cheers rattle the stadium almost as much as the loud speakers. The battling bands give it their all, in this land where a strong performance manifests as a spectral forces rowdy and ready for combat.

Museum alarms blare. Sunlight gleams off the broken glass falling from the broken second story window. The rouge's feet hit and the ground and they are off--forbidden artifact under arm.

TL;DR: Supplement defining new Endeavor types, "Humanity, Endeavored," available at https://snotskie.github.io/ttrpg/endeavored.html.

This past year for me, my main project was to finish and defend my dissertation. (Check, done, complete 💅)

But in between the chapters, revisions, and burn out, I worked on Humanity, Blessed and I watched TV. Lots of TV.

As a DM running other systems, I've always viewed TTRPGs as serial stories we write together, and I often took my inspiration from TV shows. You can bend the rules of a system just up the point of breaking as much as you like, so long as what remains is still legible within the storytelling genre that your players want and expect. One of the ways I kept things legible was, like Aabria Iyengar, by describing the "camera" of the action and how it moved, panning from one focus to another, showing what was moved into focus--and what was left as private, off screen, to the imagination.

Where TV shows and TTRPGs overlap is in their general movement between two types of action: low tension, character- and world-building narrative moments, and high tension "mini games."

Many systems focus on providing rules for combat encounters. But not all genres are "combative" genres! Adapting these systems for non-combat-yet-high-tension encounters can feel awkward, especially when the wording of the game's underlying rules is so focused on tactical positions, damage, conditions, and health.

(Looking at you, "Chase" scenes.)

I built Humanity, Blessed to meet the needs of my specific game table and my own sense of pacing and balance. It is a genre-agnostic system, since I did not want to bake into it the story-telling conventions of one genre and then later have to adapt those when my table's interests changed. But, I also did not want the game to feel too generic, too detatched from the genre-defining high tension tropes that makes stories fun to tell and recognizable at the same time.

One way I tried to achieve this balance was through the Lifestyle and Ethic mechanics, which ground character creation in the broad themes common across a group of related genres.

But we can get more specific, more genre-defining than that.

I did this through the Endeavor mechanic. Rolling dice, moving pieces around a board, looking up what moves the opponent might be likely to take--these "mini games" should feel like we are in the kinds of scenes we are trying to play. Racing scenes should naturally feel like resources and terrain matter. Clashing summons against one another should feel like tactics and emotional bonds matter. And stealth scenes should feel like--oh shoot, sorry guys, I cut the wrong wire, we should start running now.

The base Endeavor mechanic is just a set of rules for how to manage tracks, positions, actions, and "buttons" that have effects on those tracks. But on its own, it's an incomplete mechanic.  Different types of Endeavors, each definitive of its own narrative genre, step in to complete the mechanic. This prevents one type of encounter from being akwardly adapted for scenes its just not fit for.

The core Humanity, Blessed book only defines two types, Monstrous and Racing Endeavors. However, I've always imagined the system as a two-book system: the core rules (just enough to get you started), and a supplement that provides a laundry list of additional Endeavor types for covering any imaginable setting.

So, it's minimal right now, but you can now access the Humanity, Endeavored supplement at https://snotskie.github.io/ttrpg/endeavored.html.

(Core rules still at https://snotskie.github.io/ttrpg/ as always.)