Realis: Ashcan Edition

I was sold on Realis by an excerpt advising players to focus on dramatic intents, the emotional and narrative directions the story should take, rather than mere action. “I want to humiliate my rival in front of his peers” is a stronger dramatic intent than “I want to punch my rival”, which both clarifies why the story should progress, and provides more interesting possibilities.

Mechanically, the heart of Realis are Sentences (capital S to indicate a game mechanic) of the form “I always {do X} when {contingency Y}”, such as “I always kill my foe” (Berserker) or “I always hear the whispers of the countless daemons” (Theologicant). This is brilliant! This is dolly-zoom-dawning-realization brilliant!

I’ve long believed that RPGs are about collective storytelling and that the mechanics exist to guide the collective storytelling in interesting directions. Giving everybody a small set of “I always” statements is like putting Chekov’s RPG (in the rocket propelled grenade sense of the acronym) on every way in a small room.

I need to actually play Realis to check on the rest of the game, but I’ve got some skepticism. The first is the pacing of the advancement system. The “I always…” statements become more specific and more powerful after they fail 3 times. (Even though “you always {X}”, it doesn’t work if there’s a directly countering more powerful “I always {Y}”). They’re ranked from +0 to +3, and the meta-structure of is finding out who exactly your character is as their Sentences evolve. But this is going to take a while, depending on the number of scenes and how often Sentences clash at the table. Failure as advancement has been used widely, notably it’s a pbtA XP marking condition, and some FitD variants mark XP on a 0d roll, but I’m not sure how well the pacing works in practice.

My second issue is the setting, which is cool and imaginative but not very gameable. Realis is a planet orbited by 1000 moons, under the red light of a Corpse Sun. It’s all very Dying Earth/The Book of the New Sun science-fantasy, with various decadent nobles/merchants/wizards/warriors etc enacting abstruse plots in the mysterious ruins of things no one understands. Admittedly, this is not my genre, but I’m not sure how much this kind of setting can support extended storytelling without collapsing under its own weirdness. I’m reminded of Spire/Heart, which have layers of arcane weirdness made playable by a structure of “You are revolutionaries. You will die horribly.”

Realis has a very good core mechanic in the Sentences. I think the system could be fantastic for one-shots or 3 session mini-campaigns, and I’d like to see a version of the rules supporting that playstyle.