What do you think of the style of roleplaying espoused by Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine?

Really cool. I would try it given the chance. As you mentioned, the sacrifice that it makes is the end is never in question. That works well with savvy groups of players for whom that is true most of the time anyway.

I'm interested in some specific details. Does the system suggest methods for selecting quests? Can players select competing quests? If so, is it balanced to work well when they do?

>the end is never in question
What did he mean by this?

Probably that it's assumed that PCs will "win" and reach the end of their journey. The true question is HOW they will do it. Nobody listens to stories to hear about "and then they all die and all of their plot hooks stay unresolved, the end." That's bad storytelling unless you are trying to make some postmodern meta-statement.

>That's bad storytelling unless you are trying to make some postmodern meta-statement.
I fucking hate modern films

What if their final "quest" involves them dying as a major goal OOC?

Then do that. It's assumed they will make their sacrifice, that they will reach the finale and do what is required of them to fulfill their narrative arc. It's on your shoulders as a player to make to journey there count and make it meaningful and interesting.

If you meant that the quest/arc was to simply die without an oomph then... do that? Still, there is probably some kind of context, some interactions and obstacles along the way. Focus on that.

Fuck you. I was thinking of a system almost identical to this earlier (identical in ideas and mechanics, not aesthetically)

I hate it. I hate it beyond any reasonable degree. It's everything I oppose in roleplaying. It makes "roleplaying" into a story you've already written, where you're not trying to earnestly test out your characters against the GM's world -- you're just trying to tell the best story. But that's hollow; it's cheating. It has no stakes, it has no weight, and it's not engaging. It doesn't even allow you the freedom of writing a book. It's an abortion.

Roleplaying (non-gamey roleplaying) is about making characters and setting them loose in a world. It's about playing a role. The story is emergent; it comes from the characters interacting with the GM and each other. It's character driven in the most literal sense. The fact that nobody knows what's going to happen is a good thing; the whole game is essentially one big "test" of each character, and the way they succeed or fail IS the story.

You've got talking about how 'nobody listens to stories to hear about "and then they all die and all of their plot hooks stay unresolved, the end."'. But roleplaying isn't a story you tell someone. It's not a book. If I wanted to tell a story, I wouldn't do roleplaying.

Because I do want to see those deaths before narrative threads are tidied up. That's a good emergent story. If it's simulationist, you saw the party fail, and they lost, and their narrative threads fell into nothing -- just as it should do. If it's narrativist, then your system jiggles things around so that your deaths are appropriately...narrative.

To be clear, I don't have any problem with other people playing this. This is just a spergy rant in answer to OP, about something I hate.

I also don't have anything against things like (at least, I don't think I do) -- that still allows characters to drive the story, and in fact it helps them to do so.

You don't even understand the system. Those quests are for what you're trying to accomplish on your downtime, essentially. It all goes on between scenes unless you're purposefully bringing it into a scene. There's still the GM guiding the characters through something that matters to all of them, but these are the things they are doing by themselves, so that they don't take up game time with them.

This system is easily the best thing Chuubo has in it, and I'd personally port it into fucking ANYTHING if I could get the time to work on some cards for the game. Something like Beyond the Wall, and maybe even something like Shadowrun, could really use this thing and use it well.

The problem with Chuubo's is that this really shining fucking system is surrounded by other things that are not as good.

This one is specifically a joke example. Don't jusge the system by it.

Emote XP goes into a pool that gets redistributed, but XP from quest goals and flavor goes directly into the quest.

Would a thread about anons making some of these work out? Someone should make one

>You don't even understand the system
I don't know why you'd think I would.

How do the quests work as between-scene filler? The idea of a scene is pretty worrying anyway, but these things look involving. You have people visiting your shrine, trying to set you up with a friend, you attending a wedding, selling biscuits -- that's a lot. Is it broken down? Do you do less than it seems like you would (e.g. you have five options, but you realistically only do two)?

Regardless, I oppose it in any context, whether as the focus or as downtime filler. I mean, I oppose downtime, assuming we're using this to mean "players not doing much" and not "the narrative's been very tense lately, we just had a climax, let's bring things down".

That first one seems a lot better-written than these two:
The 3 Major Goals for Breakup are all things that *you* can do, and can even intentionally try to set-up. You want to save your SO from danger? Go on dates to the shady side of town. Yeah, that's pretty perverse, but it's in-character for a toxic relationship!

The Shrine stuff seems much harder to set-up unless the GM decides to serve it to you on a silver platter. Hopefully, if you picked Shrine Duties, the GM is already planning a festival, or is letting your character organize one. But the other two seem pretty strange if your shrine maiden tries to engineer them. You'd have to be a pretty fucked-up shrine maiden if you're faking paranormal shit to bait an exorcism, or constantly dropping romantic hints to bait an arranged date.

This kind of GM reliance could probably work in a solo game or a game with only 2 PCs. But if you have a party of 4 or 5 players, some people's quests are definitely gonna feel forgotten.

In the shrine example, the three top things serve as scene sugegstions for the GM, which you can remind them of and mark off once they happen in the game. The flavor options are things you do or mention in other scenes. If a story scene happens at your shrine, you can remember to offer your friend tea, and mark an experience. You don't actually need to do the specific things, for flavor, you can just mention them in dialogue.

You can have more than one quest going on at once and you can distribute your emote experience after the pool gets distributed to quests to get them done more quickly.

Generally you would take shrine duties to signal you want to focus on the shrine, and when the GM asks if anyone has a scene they want to do, you can point at one of the 15 exp options and ask for it, then other players can join in. The game is meant to have big timeskips if you're playing pastoral, which is the feel of that specific quest by the symbol. The pastoral chunk of the setting, Fortitude, has a calendar with a parodic amount of excuses for festivals and shit because it's basically all that setting ever does.

What would you say are the biggest flaws of this system? I am about to read it but it's a pretty big book and it would be nice to know beforehand.

There's nothing as big as Flaws in it, that I could identify anyways, but I don't like the emote system because it's pretty cringy and I don't really like a lot of the arcs. Beyond that I really like the setting, the quests system, the arcs and the wounds system.

The wounds system is something that never gets talked about. When you take a wound, you decide what the wound is, first of all. Then, rather than penalize you, the wound gives you a bonus if you roleplay it, and does nothing if you don't. If you take too many wounds you're out of the game, but till then they make for a great dramatic thing.

Oh, if I had something I'd call a flaw it'd be the focus on the premade characters. The titular Chuubo is one of them, and you'll read about the rest as you go through the thing. They're not bad characters, but I don't like that they're so present and that the game tries to make you play as them without outright telling you. Playing Glassmaker's Dragon, the campaign book that's out, is still probably the best way to play the game till you understand it better, and that uses the premade characters.

Never read the rules for Chuubo's, but Marvel Heroic Roleplaying has a quite similar XP system that rewards you for playing to the character's history and personality, and following through on their established pathos. So while the GM provides the general scenario and the action scenes, the real interesting stuff often happens when the players start talking to each other and the NPCs with guidance from these Milestone sets.

>emote system because it's pretty cringy
Why is that cringy?
>I don't really like a lot of the arcs
Why?

The difference is that Chuubo is unintuitive because the XP doesn't actually go towards your character, it goes towards your quests. Once you fill a quest's track, that quest is finished, and you often get some sort of reward, either from the GM or implicit in the quest itself (if you quest if fixing a house, you get the house). After a set number of quests, you gain a level in an arc, which gives you special gifts. Quests are sometimes coded to a specific arc and are better at justifying a new level in it, and sometimes they give you arc-specific rewards. Arcs grant ridiculous powers, like the titular wishing engine that lets you wish for anything.

The emote system is cringy because it asks the other players to exaggerate their reactions so can take note of them for XP. Your sheet basically has a "if other people facepalm, I gain 1 XP" reminder, which is a better example than most. Sometimes your XP button is something like "when the other players hug me" or "when the other players mime kissing", and it gets weirder. It also makes the game hard to run online, though I guess discord emote reactions could work now that they're a thing.

As for the arcs, the big offenders are mostly relegated to Jenna's tumblr, so the ones in the book are mostly fine. I don't like Creature of Fable, though, mostly because it's boring.

Yeah, that is definitely more awkward and esoteric.

There are still similarities though:
When you do the 10 XP milestone you "reach your milestone" and pick or write another set;
you also have the option of trading out a character-specific milestone set for one based on the adventure or setting;
and you can spend XP on 'Unlockables,' essentially turning the XP into similar sorts of rewards, but that's not the only thing they do and the rewards connect them to the adventure in different ways like representing favors and opportunities they're picking up along the way.

>It also makes the game hard to run online, though I guess discord emote reactions could work now that they're a thing.

Is this a game of emojipasta-tier memery?

What makes this so unintuitive?

Your XP isn't centralized, it's all spread out throughout quests you've been on or are currently on. Quests like the one in the OP. You don't actually keep track of your total XP, either, just of how many quests you've completed recently. Usually four or five net you an arc level.