Mantra System

Most of these words below are Rhizome's from the design documentation.  I've done some minor editing and added the examples.

Mantra System

This system can be roughly conceptualized as an advancement upon the idea of alignment. Like alignment, mantras are intended as indicators of character personalities and thus guides for role-playing a character in meaningful ways. Mantras, however can be integrated into game systems far more effectively than alignment. Thus, mantras go far beyond abstract representations of characters' outlook and ethics, or lack thereof.

What is a Mantra?

The word Mantra comes from Hinduism. In that context a mantra is a sacred verbal formula repeated in prayer, meditation, or incantation. More generally it is a repeated word or phrase. It is something that an individual would say or chant to her/himself repeatedly as a source of strength and guidance. The mantra effectively comes to orient an individual’s personality, thoughts, desires and actions.

Obviously people are more complex than to ground their personality in just one mantra. For any individual there would be multiple mantras. This is exactly how we have set things up for this system. There are a series of “mantras” which players must think about in relation to their character and try to represent his/her personality with them. In other words, there will be a list of concepts or philosophies which characters can subscribe to as a way to live their lives.

Opposing Mantras

Mantras will be paired with an opposing mantra. So, if you adhere to one, you will oppose the other. For example, a mantra that someone might think to themselves often would be something like this: “Be active; never be passive.” So, one may believe strongly in the idea of being active, and thus at the same time believe strongly against the idea of being passive. In gaming terms what this means is that the positive effects of adhering to a particular mantra will have proportionally negative effects upon its opposed pair.

This leads us to setting things up as a slider which is moved on a continuum between two polar personality traits. And, as mentioned earlier, there are a series of sliders. See the charts below for the actual mantras and how they are paired.

Mantra Sliders

On character generation a player will set the slider for each mantra pair. The more the slider is moved towards a particular mantra, the more that character’s personality is oriented around that specific mantra. This slider will have demarcations along it representing the various levels of adherence to a particular mantra you can have. For example, there will be a mantra for selfless. If a character moves the slider into the slight adherence range, then they will think that selflessness is a slightly good idea. If they move it to thoroughly adherent, well then that character will orient his/her life as thoroughly as possible around that idea.

Through this system players will be able to determine the thoughts, desires and actions of their characters in various contexts. In other words, the complexity of this system will help players think through the personalities of their characters during creation and give them a concrete and visible representation of the character’s personality and thus help guide role play. Not only that, we are designing this so that the “mantra adherence” directly affect certain game systems we'll elaborate on later.

Mantra Adherence and Mantra Points

Mantra adherence is represented by points. The reason for the points is twofold. First, it gives a player a means to understand a particular character's adherence to various mantras. Second, as mantras play an important role in other game systems, such as Spellpraying, the points are critical for enabling particular game mechanics. In both cases it is the degree of adherence which truly matters.

Regulating the Mantra Sliders

There is potential for exploitation in the mantra system, as someone may try to powerbuild a character by moving all the sliders to +/- 4 adherence associated with skills they deem most useful. This behavior will be curtailed by restricting the number of each adherence range. Thus, the percentages of overall mantra adherence will be limited for each character.

In character creation each player will get a total of 32 mantra points which they can do with as they see fit. They can all be used or none of them used. What this means is that a character can only possibly max out 8 of the 18 mantra sliders. But doing so would obviously leave 10 balanced and have the strongly negative oppositional effect with 8 of the oppositional mantras.

This dynamic allows a player to build a moderate or balanced player with no difficulty. A player can set her character's mantra adherence at 0 for all mantras, believing in nothing in a sense, and receive no benefits from adherence to a mantra at all. An alternate approach would be to be an extreme character, believing strongly in just a few mantras and perhaps believing slightly in a few others, or none at all. This makes good RP sense, since if a PC is truly 100% cruel, then that PC will seek out cruelty as often as possible, letting only other strongly adherent mantras guide the PC's sentiments and actions.

Mantras and Deities

Mantras will also be associated with deities. A PC who is a worshiper of a particular deity is required to have at least one of that deity's mantras set at or beyond +/-1 (slightly) adherence, two set at or beyond +/-2 (Moderately) adherent and at least one other set at or beyond +/-3 (Greatly). Each deity has four mantra associations, and this means that a follower of a particular deity must at least partly believe in everything that deity represents. This is critically important for anyone intending to use Spellpraying. Spellpraying is only possible when a PC has a deity. Through developed systems for mantra adjustment and gamemaster based adjustments you could potentially lose the patronage of your deity.

Mantras

Here are the mantras, presented in a table alongside their opposing pair:

One thing to keep in mind regarding these mantras and how they relate to a character is how certain mantras would work in conjunction with others. For example, if you are cruel and selfish, then you would be sadistic. However, if you are cruel and selfless, then you would be masochistic. If you are ordered and active, then you would be the type of person to try to regulate others. However, if you are ordered and passive, you would be the kind of person to allow authority figures to regulate you. Chaos and active would be rebellious whereas chaos and passive would be flighty. The list of combinations is endless of course, but as a player slides the mantra bars around, the combinations will add up to a truly unique character.

Figure 1 and Figure 2 are examples of the current mantra selection UI (work in progress).  As you can see in the first image we've moved our sliders in various ways to help define our character.  We see that based upon our own mantras, Katia, Kithairien or Shadon would offer us patronage thus opening the Spellpraying skill to us.  But say we want to follow Beryl, we click her button (Figure 2) and we can then see on the left side her exact mantras and more importantly her base ones which we must adhere to as specified earlier.  In this case we see them in bold, Materialistic, Deceptive, Dramatic and Playful.  If we were to slide our Materialistic-Idealistic slider over to the Materialistic side to suit Beryl we'd see then that Katia would no longer offer us patronage as we no longer adhere to one of her base mantras.

Other systems aside from the deity restrictions which are pertinent to the mantras are things like skill bonuses, attribute adjustments that are not entirely defined or NPC interaction.  We will have these defined when the numbers are better finalized through play testing.

Thanks for reading!