In Support of Belief Based Games

Physical copies of Vesta Mandate are live with Indie Press Revolution! We’re doing a Giveaway starting now and ending December 22nd with four digital bundles of Storygames Chicago Games.

Each bundle will include PDFs for: Vesta Mandate, City of Blood and Plaster, and Diabolic Dialect!

Multiple ways to enter:

In other news, Diabolic Dialect is getting a Kickstarter in the coming year! Whether you liked the print & play or have no clue what this is, check it out. It’s a blast and the zine is gonna have a whole host of new content detailed in the pre-launch page.

Thanks for supporting us, now onto the article!

The first thing every player does when sitting down to make their character in Vesta Mandate is write their Ideological Statement. Starting with something as complex as ideology can be pretty daunting. Players often spend a good amount of time working through the rather meaty question of “who am I and what do I believe”. The result of this is a game where players are asked to spend time and energy building their characters from their beliefs up.

Now you might ask, what makes starting with beliefs so important? Why make or play a belief based game?

Think for a moment about the things you strongly believe. What elements of your life are driven from this? Do you believe in a tight knit community? Do you have strongly held beliefs about how to treat others? These beliefs add a richness to your life, they develop who you are as a person. In the same way, they create depth for your character in roleplaying games. If you’re creating an archetypal wizard you might have a strong belief about the acquisition and protection of knowledge, or the hoarding and destruction of knowledge so only you can reap its rewards.

In Vesta Mandate, players create a core Ideological Statement that reflects who their character is and what drives their beliefs and political motivations. These aren’t their only beliefs though. There are numerous assumed and prescribed beliefs that come from the text of the game. These secondary beliefs can compliment or contrast against your character's core Ideological Statement and help to create a varied, unique character. All games have these assumed and prescribed beliefs, even if they don’t have you write an Ideological Statement.

Beyond just what an individual believes, there are also norms--an expectation or rule in a culture or society about how people should act and how they should think. All games with fictional worlds have norms and beliefs, but not all games mechanize or address them. Often, games assume or prescribe beliefs for a character. For instance, chivalry is a real world norm that is often found in Arthurian TTRPGs. These games often assume your character will act chivalrous, without necessarily mechanizing it.

In the game Spire: the City Must Fall, important norms shape the world and are reinforced through gameplay. Player characters are revolutionaries for an organization called the Ministry. In this world, it is a norm that aelfir elves are superior to drow. This norm is supported by the government and religion. It is reinforced, again and again, that the aelfir hate drow and their culture. This is expressed not only in the lore at the back of the book, but even during character creation. When you create your character, you select a durance. A durance is a period of indenture to an aelfir. There are a lot of other norms and beliefs in the game, but this norm of drow inferiority shapes play.

Importantly, this norm is prescribed by the world. By playing Spire, you play a revolutionary Minister who believes in resistance against the aelfir and who wants to resist the aelfir ideology. This belief in revolution is necessary to play a Minister character in the world of Spire.

In Vesta Mandate, we used a mix of both prescribed norms and player created beliefs. Vesta Station had a revolution to escape the Corporation. On Station, being anti-Corpo is a norm, to oppose the Corporation, and to believe in independence. This is prescribed by the game. But nothing is stopping you from playing a pro-Corpo politician, this will just create friction in the setting.

Believing in things that conflict with norms can imply things about a character. It forces you to make decisions about why the character believes those things. You’re a pro-Corporate politician on an independent Station, what happened? Did the Corporation bribe you, are you from Corporate-controlled Earth, or did a lifetime of parental trauma lead you to become an authoritarian sycophant?

When there is tension between norms of the society and the beliefs of the character, both the world and character are so much richer. A powerful politician who supports the Corporation that occupied its people? That’s a complicated character. This politician will need to be careful about what they do on Station and keep certain things a secret. This is a rich friction to explore in play.

Whether your game prescribes strong evocative beliefs like in Spire, or asks you as a player to build your own ideologies; there is always a tension between beliefs and action. In Spire, this looks like the players confronting the norms of the world. Revolutionaries with ideas to tear it all down, forced to subvert and work in the shadows under the heel of the oppressive aelfir. In Vesta Mandate, this plays out as a tension between your actions and what you say you believe as a member of the political elite. You often balance your actions and beliefs in order to project a specific image. This is always in service of accomplishing, and sometimes obfuscating, your long term goals and secrets from the Station.

Beliefs: What your character truly believes.
Actions: How your character acts to project an image of themselves, in concert or contrasting their beliefs.
Secrets: Hidden information - sometimes including beliefs.

This tension between beliefs, actions and secrets is something that will exist in most any good political game. You can see how it plays out in Spire, where the evocative beliefs and norms are prescribed to the players. These then create an environment of tense drama. Players are confronted by those with radically different beliefs or those who just want to keep the status quo. Balancing your actions against your beliefs and the necessity to not be caught by the aelfir creates a strong central tension.

In Vesta Mandate, this tension develops in a much more ad hoc manner. Players create strong beliefs and by the very nature of the political system you reside in, some important characters will have differing beliefs. Often this will include other players. The balance of these tensions create a driving force in narrative play. If a Corpratist player resolves a Crises or makes a deal with a Union there are built in consequences to those actions.

At the beginning in character creation, you develop your beliefs and secrets. During play, you show your actions. Let’s say your character’s ideology is a belief in unions, and they meet for cocktails with the corporate boss. Do their actions really line up with their beliefs? Maybe they keep the meeting secret, or maybe they do it in public and spin the meeting as a show of their talents as a great negotiator. Creating a tangible structure for beliefs allows for these moments in game.

The tension between hidden and known information creates a complex set of choices for the player when they take actions. How will their actions affect the way they’re perceived by the powerful factions on Station? Similarly in other games with strong beliefs at their center, those beliefs can often put people into conflict. Choosing how to telegraph their beliefs through their actions becomes a complex and interesting question. These types of choices make for dramatic scenes and interesting decisions in all sorts of games!

How do you make your game political? You can write tons of mechanics about voting, backstabbing, elections, or organizing. But politics needs ideology, it needs belief. Even if the characters are cynical and believe nothing, politics is always about projecting a belief in something and opposing what someone else believes. Worlds need to give GMs and players something to believe in.

Beliefs, norms, and ideology add richness to fictional worlds and mechanics even if you don’t want to explore politics or intrigue. While Spire and Vesta Mandate are much more explicitly about politics and intrigue, there are other games that use beliefs for different genres. Burning Wheel mechanized belief statements to push characters toward goals that were tied to their identities and the fantasy setting. Blood Feud explores norms around toxic masculinity in the vikings of pre-Christian Scandinavia. But this can really be expanded to so many other genres: What does the white hat sheriff really believe about justice and morality? What does the werewolf really believe about selfhood and humanity?

How might you explore norms and beliefs in your games?