Welcome to the Chromatic Roleplaying Simulation Game system! This chapter is just a brief intro to the game. If you are familiar with tabletop roleplaying games, you can skim this section for the essentials, because Chromatic is basically a roleplaying game designed to simply gameplay, maximize the fun for all personality types of gamer, and lay down a system that can be applied to any genre of setting.
0.1 What is an RSG?
Octagon Games has decided to call its roleplaying games “Roleplaying Simulation Games,” or RSGs. But, the two are really the same thing.
A tabletop roleplaying game is like a boardgame without a board. Instead of moving pieces around a board, each player controls a character in an ongoing story in a setting simulated in the imagination. There may be props, images, and sound effects to help the imagination, but when roleplaying pieces start moving around a board that’s really a miniatures wargame, and the two types of game each deserve their own space.
Chromatic, being an RSG, doesn’t use miniatures except perhaps as reminders of what the characters look like. Drawings can also serve this purpose. But, the players themslves should be the true embodiment of their characters. This doesn’t mean that the players need to cosplay during games, just that the primary expression of characters is RSGs is in the players’ roleplaying, not in miniatures as in a miniatures wargame.
Yet, Chromatic also emphasizes that the players should maintain a narrative distinction with their characters. As honest actors, players should refer to their characters as he, she, it, etc. not as I. The characters are different people! This helps the players play their character’s true, according to the character’s own drives, instead of just projecting their personal drives onto the characters. It helps the player step forward and play the character’s role.
The setting of an RSG story is most often fantasy, but some games take place in science fiction, horror, and mystery settings. In fact, any setting you find in fiction, you can find in a roleplaying game.
We prefer the term RSG because it encompasses all three sources of the roleplaying game genre: roleplaying, simulation, and gaming.
If you’re not familiar with the history, don’t worry, because it’s simple. The earliest example is the legendary Dungeons & Dragons, where Dave Arneson brought an innovative roleplaying element into Gary Gygax’s simulation wargaming, which was an existing blend of simulation and gaming. The basic idea was that, instead of playing faceless antagonists in a wargame simulation, gamers take on the role of individual characters in a setting similar to that of the old simulation wargames. Back then, the games were pretty much all set in a quasi-historical military setting, but RSGs have since expanded into science fiction, superhero adventure, detective fiction, horror, and many other genres.
This integration of different sources—roleplaying, simulation, gaming—also brought a storytelling element into the concept, to bind the three types together. Basically, an RSG is a simulation game based on storytelling, where the players take on the roles of characters, almost like actors in a play. There is (or should be) a reasonably well-simulated setting, as in a play, with one gamer acting as a sort of director. Unlike the director of a play, however, this person doesn’t tell the actors how to play their roles. He or she just maintains the integrity of the setting and guides the players’ characters through an adventure.
So, imagine a game that’s like a group of writers coming together to create a story, with most of them taking responsibility for key characters and one of them keeping the whole thing on track according to a set of rules that maintain the integrity of the setting. That’s an RSG.
0.2 How do RSGs work?
It’s like this. A bunch of friends or acquaintances, some of whom might be familiar with RSGs, decide they want to put together a gamer group. They’ve heard about the idea, playing characters in a fictional setting. Sword and sorcery, spaceships and aliens, superheroes and supervillains, spies and assassins. So, someone suggests a game system and a game setting (often the same thing), maybe there’s some haggling and comparisons to other options, but finally everyone agrees on something that sounds fun. They put together the rule-books (like the one you’re reading) and any other necessarily supplies like paper, pens, and dice.
What next?
Most of the gamers will be regular players, controlling one character (or maybe a few, depending on the house rules of the group), but one of them has to run the game. In other games, this person is called the dungeon master, game master, referee, or something like that. In Chromatic, which tries to bring different player styles into the story of the game, this gamer is called the narrator. The players need to learn the rules and the setting, but the narrator must master them. Despite being, in a sense, “in control” of the game, the narrator has the most demanding job. You’ll probably find fewer than one in four RSG gamers want to be narrator. It’s a lot of work, but a few lunatic gamers will revel in it.
Perhaps at a preparatory session, the players (in consultation with the narrator about the setting) create their characters. The setting and the narrator might impose restrictions on the sorts of characters that the players can create, but in general they should be allowed a fair range of freedom. Players decide on their characters’ attributes—how smart, perceptive, strong, etc. they are—as well as the skills and equipment they start with. There are rules to keep these decisions from overpowering characters, keeping them fairly realistic.
Most importantly in Chromatic, however, the players choose their characters’ drives: their loyalties, virtues, fears, and ambitions. These drives define who the characters are, and indulging or resisting these drives will guide them through their adventures.
Before the first game, the narrator studies the setting (or, if they’re brave, creates it!) and crafts a series of scenes for the player gamers to play through. These scenes should have obstacles to overcome and tests for the characters’ drives, to give the action emotional impact. Insider tip: these tests of the characters’ drives also help the players advance their characters. That’s the fun of RSGs! Playing your character true is how you get better.
There are some practical details as well. In all RSGs, there has to be some way of resolving conflicts like whether a character is able to climb a wall, fool a guard, or hit a target with a weapon. There are many ways RSGs handle conflict resolution, but the most common is rolling dice, and that’s how Chromatic does it. You may have heard that these games have a bunch of different kinds of dice that you have to buy at a specialty store. Chromatic makes it easy on you by handling conflict resolution with regular, six-side dice (d6) which you can buy pretty much everywhere.
Of course, you can still go to those specialty stores to get fancy d6 in all sorts of styles and colors. Have fun with it!
So, the narrator sets up a scene, the players decide what their characters are going to do and, if necessary (it’s not always necessary!), dice are rolled to help determine what happens. If the narrator has done a good job setting up the scene, the characters will find a way to advance their adventure and successfully strategize their way there. But, maybe they screw things up. This can be fun too, so long as everyone keeps their perspective and just tries to enjoy themselves.
One way or another, the scene comes to a conclusion. Either the characters moved forward in their adventure or they made a huge mistake. They won an important ally, or they alienated them. They defeated a key foe, or they got smeared. They found a crucial clue, or they missed it completely.
Don’t worry to much about the mistakes; every story has its ups and downs. Either way, the narrator should be prepared to move on to another scene, which usually means the characters move on to another location. Then, just like in a novel or a movie, the adventure continues!
As you can probably tell now, I wasn’t kidding when I said the narrator’s job is hard. She or he has to be prepared for all sorts of player shenanigans, but usually it’s a success-failure dichotomy. Either the characters achieve the goal of the scene or they don’t. This often means the narrator needs to have more than one scene prepared for the characters, based on whether they succeed or fail in the last scene. Or, maybe the players completely surprise the narrator with their decisions, which means it’s time to improvise.
Prospective narrator, never fear. This rule-book has some guidelines on how to do all of this, including how to weave the overall narrative so that the characters can get back on track, even if they’d made a misstep. But, also, how to indulge the characters’ missteps and rewrite the entire adventure accordingly.
Luckily for narrators, a typical gaming session should only consist of three to, at the extreme, nine scenes. However many there are, the scenes should be broken up into three stages: the set-up, the journey, and the climax. This is referred to as a sequence in Chromatic terms, but it’s okay to just call it a gaming session. Some kind of big conclusion happens, after which the gamers take a breath, play out the aftermath of the conclusion, jot down notes on their character sheets, and make plans for the next gaming session. Also, probably, finish off any drinks or snacks remaining while sharing jokes about the gaming session or showing each other photos of partners or kids.
Then, the players go home, spending their time until the next gaming session reliving their characters’ adventures. The narrator also enjoys this reminiscing, but they have to spend some time planning out the scenes of the next gaming session. So, even if things go insanely off-track (which they rarely do, I promise) the narrator will have some time to rework the overall adventure. Normally, the narrator just needs to make a few adjustments to a follow-up sequence they already had worked out.
Rinse and repeat!
0.3 Why was Chromatic created?
There was a notorious debate in the RSG community about whether games should cater to specific gamer personalities (Roleplayers, Gamers, Simulationists) or try to make everyone happy. The specialist faction gained preeminence for a while, arguing that trying to make everyone happy would just alienate everyone. So, design a game that focuses on the win-lose competitiveness of Gamers, or a game that focuses on the realism perspective of Simulationists, or a game that focuses on the theatrical instincts of Roleplayers.
But, the specialist games they produced did not do so well in the marketplace. That’s some pretty good real-world evidence right there.
Octagon Games is picking up the opposite argument, that a genre of game born and finding remarkable success in integrating different styles of play would find its best expression in a system that focused on integrating all of those different styles and laying down some rules for keeping them from sniping at each other.
Key to this daunting task is making the game as simple as possible. Many games suffer from being cobbled together from a variety of different systems for handling character attributes, equipment, moral aspects (drives), etc. Even the venerable Dungeons & Dragons was cobbled together from Gygax’s Chainmail wargame and Arneson’s independently developed roleplaying dynamic.
To avoid the Frankenstein effect that comes from clumsily sewn-together game dynamics, Chromatic is designed around a single color-coded set of archetypes that integrate all game dynamics into a single system, to make it easier for gamers to understand and improvise from. What are we trying to do? Does it fall under BLUE or YELLOW? Or a little of both? Chromatic provides a single framework to simplify this.
Finally, Chromatic was created to give narrators specific guidance on how to craft engaging narratives that stay true to themselves, in the same way that good fiction stays true to itself. This may sound like a concession to roleplayers, but it also informs how gamers win (which is their motivation) and feeds into simulationists’ motive by casting the game as a simulation of a story rather than a simulation of some real-world event.
A lot of RSG systems relegate the issue of creating engaging storylines to vague advice. Chromatic puts it front-and-center in game design, embedding character advancement in the rules of story and organizing game time according to the time-tested beats of fiction, so that narrators are better prepared to keep players engaged, keep the story moving along, and keep the story true to its own terms.
0.4 What do you need to play Chromatic?
To play Chromatic, you will need this rule-book, which you have. You will need copies of the character sheet, an appendix in this rule-book, and some six-sided dice. The more dice the better. At least eight, preferably more. Dice are relatively cheap. Stock up.
To help build immersion in the setting, your narrator might need some maps, drawings, photos of scenery, and background music. Some of these may be provided or suggested by supplemental Chromatic setting guides.
Pragmatically, the game session will need drinks and snacks, a place to play, and a few hours of free time. This all might sound like a lot, but it will be worth it. You’re going to love gaming!