RPG Self

This Google Doc is my todo list.

I’ve played a lot of video games and RPGs, and the way characters in them pursue goals feels so compelling. I’ve been writing up goals as quests and self-improvement tasks as ways to increase stats, and my meaning-maker loves this. Being productive is awesome.

I don’t force my perception of life to line up with the system, but rather try to make the system match my real life—while adding a good dose of dramatic and whimsical flair.

The RPG sheet is for me, not me for the RPG sheet. Sometimes my overall path changes out from under me, and none of the quests are applicable anymore. Then it’s time to find new goals that are compelling and write those up.

The framework is highly inspired by Mage: The Ascension.

In general, stats go up by an order of magnitude. 0 is below average, 1 is average for a human adult, 2 is average for someone who has put in a good amount of deliberate effort, 3 is the level of someone who has dedicated their life to this, and so on. 5 is incredibly rare. 0, Unskilled: No training in the ability; rely on natural talent.

So for something like reputation, being well-regarded by 1000 people might be Reputation 1. The next level would be at least 10,000 and so on.

Traits are mostly for flavor. Next up, quests:

For quests, the difficulty of them is related to the Impact Level. I can comfortably do Level 0 and 1 quests, maybe taking a month for the hard ones. Doing a Level 2 quest might take me half a year or longer or a lot of resources I don’t have yet. One day I’ll get to Level 3. Like with Skills, the difficulty goes up approximately an order of magnitude with each increase in number.