Revisiting Dharma, Kharma, Karma, and FASERIP

I’ve finalized all the way up to the very end of chapter 2, and here I’ve stubbed my toe re-reading the advancement mechanics (or, more familiarly, the “XP rules”) for Lone Wolf Fists. The system is simple enough, but on this rereading I found myself, as I often do as a game designer, plagued with doubt almost to the point of utter despair.

This isn’t an uncommon feeling for a tabletop roleplaying game maker, so no need to be concerned; we eat soul-shredding doubt for breakfast (right next to our favorite cereal, depressi-o’s and a tall glass of imposter syndrome: it’s all a part of a balanced existential crisis).

Anyway so I’m sitting there woofing down my depressing breakfast and contemplating the XP rules. It’s no secret that my game has stolen liberally from (I mean, “been inspired by”) the Marvel FASERIP system (FASERIP being an acronym of the game’s statline for characters; Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, and Psyche) .That game’s XP rules were inspired and straightforward; let me give you the rundown.

In FASERIP, the dilemma was to differentiate advancement from the traditional “gather loot and kill monsters” incentive system used by the big TTRPG of the time: I don’t remember what its called; Delvegeons&Durgon? Anyway the name isn’t important, the IMPORTANT thing is that it was dealing with characters that fit a comic-book mold of heroics, and loot acquisition didn’t really compel the likes of Spiderman or Professor X. Although they laid out entire trauma wards of henchmen and matched muscle with supremely nasty villains, none of these things could be said to be their core motives.

Dwerrors&Dirtpike characters were assumed to have a certain mercenary, or at least materialist caste in the vein of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan or even John Carter of Mars. Vanquishing enemies, acquiring gold and building keeps in the savage chaos-filled borderlands WERE heroics acts for them. They were frontier heroes; their brand of heroism assumed a hostile world that needed to be battled then civilized, and wealth acquisition was critical for every frontier hero from Beowulf to Wyatt Earp.

Marvel characters lived in New York City; their heroism was about protection, not conquest. They were champions of the status quo, only being considered heroes whenever contrasted with bad actors who wanted to do crimes.

This is, by the way, one of the reasons a hero like Spider-Man was so compelling; his material situation never improved, not until he became a professor and married his teen sweetheart anyway. But all his heroics didn’t help that; getting a job and growing up did. Spider Man was a hero despite its personal costs to him, but the world he fought for was one that rewarded him with material comfort, security and even true love. That was a world worth fighting for, a status quo worth upholding, even if the short-term cost of his heroism was personal loss and suffering.

The XP system of FASERIP, called Karma, captured this difference by placing MORALITY, specifically the Marvel-brand comic-book morality, as the criteria for XP acquisition. Characters were expected to prevent crimes, bring criminals to justice, stop wicked conspiracies, save people (even villains!) from injury and death, and uphold their personal and professional obligations. They could also act charitably and make personal commitments, granting villains outstanding opportunities to screw with them.

Importantly, Karma in FASERIP is punitive as well as. Don’t prevent a crime? Karma penalty. Let somebody die? Karma penalty. Get your ass beat in public? KARMA PENALTY.

The system does a wonderful job of putting players in the hotseat of marvel heroes; they’re often torn between conflicting loyalties, or personal and heroic obligations. Just reading the two-page spread of Karma rules and the corresponding chart, you get not only a cheat sheet for nearly limitless binds to squeeze player characters into, but you get something like a social contract, a shared language of heroic troubles and exploits which can be used cooperatively by players and gamemasters to articulate and hammer out the stakes of nearly any comic-book conundrum that the heroes might find themselves in.

Should you chase down Doctor Doom, knowing that if he escapes, he’ll lead a conspiracy to separate all of Wyoming from the United States and make it official Latverian territory? Or should you let him get away and save the bus transporting a team of top-scientists he left dangling off a collapsing bridge? Well, you can look at the Karma Chart and suss out which has the best Karma reward, and contrast that with your strategic understanding of the stakes of each choice, and make your own decision about what puts you in the best position.

(For the record, the Karma chart puts a lot of emphasis on immediate heroics which save lives over long-term schemes that do more nebulous damage, like conspiracies. This is also ingenious, as it keeps characters “in the moment” and lets the game’s circumstances drift in interesting ways as the villain’s more diffuse and long-term plans are left to wreak havoc)

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So Karma in FASERIP accomplished the goal of giving players a default method for advancement; IE getting XP. If you do something heroic or “good” and avoid acting villainous, you get XP. But, it was also smart in that it placed itself in direct opposition to traditional loot-and-conquest methods of advancement.

In Dracons&Dingleberries, your advancement compounded; if you got GP, you got XP, and you could ALSO spend your GP to get mercenaries, followers, castles, magic items, and all sorts of supremely useful stuff for furthering your personal power. In other words, there was a twin reward mechanism for loot acquisition; as you got more money and more political and military power, you ALSO gained more hit points and class abilities, furthering your PERSONAL power.

In FASERIP, however, you often had to SACRIFICE something material to gain personal power. Acts of charity, keeping personal commitments, and placing yourself in danger to help others didn’t help you to gain wealth, property or political clout; in fact, it RISKED those things, sometimes requiring their loss or direct sacrifice, to advance your personal powers.

This simple but ingenious move paid a lot of dividends. It kept heroes closer to their starting status quo, which played more authentically to the comic-books in a way that Iron Man becoming the governor of New York and starting a mercenary army in Stark Tower wouldn’t have. It also kept players focused on acting in-line with the expectations and motives of their characters by making them THINK like those characters. If Timmy the power-gamer wanted a new Ion Repulsor for his War Machine Armor, he had to THINK like James “Rhodey” Rhodes about how he approached things; “Where can I prevent the most crime?” “There’s a collapsing building; who can I save and how can I save them?” “What is Dr. Doom’s scheme with Wyoming, and how can I prevent it?”

Because players had a method for evaluating any circumstance as a hero would, including its complications and tradeoffs, they naturally approached the world as those heroes do. And this drove fantastically characterful roleplay; first by articulating it, then by rewarding it.

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That method of placing a player’s natural inclination to seek rewards into a lens that made them interpret the world as their characters would was EXACTLY what I was attempting to steal with my Dharma mechanics.

The DNA of the Dharma rules should be very familiar. They require a player to act in a specific way, often contrary to the purely materialistic method of rational acting. They come in three flavors, each representing a distinct level of commitment;

Burdens, requiring a single action, reward 1 point
Services, requiring about a Scene’s worth of action, rewarding 2
Tasks, which could require a Campaign Arc or more, rewarding 20

Burdens are usually provided by showing commitment to an underlying philosophy or oath. Clan Dharma provides characters with three, based on the philosophy and methods of the clan, and more are acquired in play as characters commit themselves to various causes.

Services are generally opportunities for heroism that fall into the party’s lap. When they see a situation that they could change for the better (saving someone’s life, or vanquishing some minor marauding evil, negotiating peace between squabbling tribes, etc.) the GM tempts them to get involved by offering them some Kharma (note the “h”) for acting like heroes.

Tasks are long-term goals require a lot more investment. Rebuilding destroyed temples, tracking down and slaying the seven killers of a revered master, finding a new source of water for a dying village, etc. They’re big asks, and they come with a big reward; they’re there to be what a given campaign arc is “about”.

The shape of these creates an interesting incentive system. Players generally hit a lot of “burden triggers” in a session, approaching lots of circumstances through the lens of their philosophy and commitments to rake in a considerable amount of low-value Kharmic rewards. They’re occasionally presented with juicier rewards that tempt them into fights or scenes of intrigue, and these point them towards Tasks which they can invest their time and energy into to get a big end-of-arc payout (just in time to train!).

Also, because the rewards are set values, and because players will require larger payouts over the same in-game timeframe as they grow more powerful, this angles them to think bigger and more long-term as they advance in power. The slow conquest and building of territory into a thriving civilization re-unifies the goals of personal power with political and militaristic power, as it presents players with large numbers of Tasks to accomplish simultaneously in their climb to power, while double-rewarding them with more territory, loyal followers, and greater wealth.

So it’s brilliant and I’m a genius. Except of course, for the small problem that it doesn’t seem to work.

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Nobody has yet used this system to my knowledge. Not in the way I just outlined it above, at any rate; people are sometimes reminded of their Clan Dharma by a heavily invested GM, and snag a few points of Kharma here and there as a result, or occasionally they’ll complete something that the rules have articulated as a Task and get a juicy payout, but all of that seems… Incidental. An accident of reward arising from the players seeking their goals, not a goal unto itself.

Generally players seem frustrated by this system, rather than inspired. In its core goal of crafting a dialogue between player, GM and designer, I’ve utterly failed; neither players nor GMs (not even myself!) consistently use this tool to communicate to each other and the game’s intended play-state. GMS are generally baffled by how to implement it, forget it, and just focus on making the asskicking happen as much as possible.

Analyzing this failure, there are at least a few issues that seem to be the root.

This is a new and complex system with a lot of moving parts and a lot of unfamiliar requirements for new GMs. Dharma simply gets lost in the mesh of new and complex things that GMs are juggling when they attempt this game.
Players are similarly too busy with the immediacy of kicking the asses in front of them to split their attention to the Dharma mechanics. They’re conditioned to get XP rewards for kicking ass, not for how and why they kick ass.
There aren’t concrete specifications that players and GMs can reference to form a meaningful dialogue (ie; a Karma Chart). There are guidelines that allow GMs to start the dialogue, but without a list of more specific and detailed actions, they’re left to puzzle out the meat of the conversation on their own.
The Dharma rules aren’t brought up again in the GM section to give GMs a method for bringing the raw mechanics into the realm of game processes IE I gave them tools without an instruction manual. And the tools are weird.
The timing and requirements of getting Kharma aren’t clear enough; players are naturally nervous to “ask” for a reward, and doubly so to “demand” one by referencing unfamiliar rules. The current writing is too vague, leaving players unsure of when and how they hit their Kharma triggers.

My solution, I think, is going to involve the following elements:

Make a Dharma chart with more tiers of reward and specific entries. This should give players something to look at and plan with, motivating them to engage with it.
Clean up the writing so it’s more specific in its timing and requirements. This will make the rules more usable by providing a more disciplined framework for GMs to say “yes” and “no” to player asks, and will facilitate a dialogue between players and GMs that has a core set of standards.
Add a small bit of writing to the GM section articulating methods for using the Dharma tools to drive gameplay. This should tempt GMs to give it a try, at least, which I think will get them thinking of ways in which it can work; that’s a good place for a set of rules to be, doubly so if they’re good rules.