First things first – Century uses a variant of White Wolf’s WoD system – scale of things is 1-5. In stats, 1 means poor, 2 means average, 3 is good, 4 is great, 5 is as good as it gets. In skills, 1 is amateur, 2 is professional, 3 is great, 4 is an expert, 5 is one of the top names in the world. Instead of the typical WoD attributes, the ones in Century are a bit more ambiguous. Things like “control” and “sanity” and “coldness” And skills are more open, and decided by the players themselves. Some example skills include “spy”, “gentleman”, “British” and “poet”

Between games, time passes. A lot of time, in fact. Years. One of the big points of the campaign is that time passes and things happen. It’s spanning over a century, what do you expect?

So, in a typical game, you are playing your soldier type and go from one game session to the other and buying new shooting skills because that’s what soldier types do and it pays off to concentrate your skills to get bigger skills to shoot bigger things. But in Century, it’s a bit different.

First of all, the game sessions decide the direction your character is heading towards. Using the soldier example above. You start your character in 1943 game as a nice 20 year old British soldier, the game session theme being war and all that, and the GM saying that you need to have a character that can be in the battlefield. So you create your soldier type dude with skills like “killing and maiming” and “playing poker”

The next session you participate is the 1950 one that happens to be a social game where the characters are there to broker a deal with some industrial mogul. In a typical game this is the point where the guy who is playing the soldier type starts complaining that he will not have anything to do in the game because it’s a social session and he’s playing the shoot-em-up character.

But, in Century, he’s actually playing exactly the character that is useful for the game, since his character has changed enough over the 7 years to be the perfect fit. This means that you, as a player, will have to steer the character to become a diplomatic industrialist type during the 7 years that happen in between. Not complain about how your character doesn’t fit the theme.

Sounds strange and I admit that grasping the concept can be difficult, but in Century life, as it usually is in reality, is unpredictable. Looking back 7 years in my own life I couldn’t have pinpointed where I was, I most certainly am not where I was planning to be. This holds true for shorter periods of time as well, like last year. If someone had asked where I was going to be this summer, I would have never guessed that I was back working at that one company that I quit 3 years ago.

So “I used to be a sniper 7 years ago, but now I’m a successful businessman” isn’t really that huge a deal, once you think from the perspective of “I’ve heard stranger stories”. Life just sometimes gives you a different path than the one you were planning on taking.

The other part of life being unpredictable is the fact that for each year in between games, your character gains an experience, in form of drawing a Tarot card from the deck. This represents how that paritcular year has been for the character. So, you draw a card that represents wealth, you have had monetary luck (or something). Draw “Worry” and that has been the theme of your year.

Now, the system allows leeway in how you read these things. It’s more or less up to the player to interpret the card, but from what I’ve seen so-far, the people who “let go” of their character during this phase are the ones who have enjoyed it more than those who have clear “my character will be doing this” attitude.

Prime examples include a “I will never marry” type of a girl, who during her card-phase picked cards like “love”, “happiness” and such and found her party-girl type married to a loving man, who passed away just before the game session she participated next. And the bittered angsty type who couldn’t find his place in the world, until he by some odd chance found his place and purpose in the First World War, suddenly becoming quite stable and clear minded.

There are of course some players who want to keep their character the way they’ve been, and while I don’t mind it, I have a fear that they’re not getting as much out of the system as those who are actually just letting life take hold of their characters during the time when they’re not playing.

The reason I brought up character stats back there is that during the Tarot phase, your characters statistics change. If you draw a minor arcana, you can move one dot from one stat to another, or from one skill to another (but not from a stat to a skill or vice versa) and if you draw a major arcana, you get one additional “dot” to your skills. So, quickly you can see that your skills will increase over time, but your stats will only change.

Oh, almost forgot the rule that you can kill your character at any point of the Tarot drawing. No-one has yet used this option, but I can see it being a valid option at some points of some character arcs, so it’s there, in the rules.

And it should be mentioned once again that there are rules that I am not allowed to talk about, either because the players haven’t researched them yet (I’ll get to that in another blog post) or because I’m not allowed to talk about them.

Until next time

This was the spotlight game of Mikko’s character Johnny Smalls, who is a great conman, an expert womanizer, and 100% on top of his game, always. His aspects (important thingamobs that quite well define what he’s about) were “Stylized image”, “Non-violence” and “Lyonne Ritz – an heiress girlfriend” plus the two that all characters have “Health” and “Primary role”.

When a player is in a situation where he still wants to accomplish something in the scene with his character but he is out of chips (the mechanical way to track how much stuff the character can still do) he can trade in one of these aspects to get more chips. Now, Johnny-boy has been spending the past two games hanging out with a rap-star Puppy D and his crew of gang thugs to get Puppy as a pawn in his schemes. During this session, Johnny ended up with D’s gang on the desert, where the gang was doing drugs, shooting cans and drinking booze. For a while, everything is good, but then the drugs come in. Johnny declines taking any, and a moment later he won’t shoot beer cans with the guys (Johnny has a strict no guns policy). The thugs aren’t happy. I set up a challenge with two parts – “Stay good friends with Puppy D (3 chips)” and “Stay in terms with Puppy D’s crew (2 chips)”.

(I might remember the details wrong, but it went something like this) Mikko has one chip when he actually got to paying things off. He decided to use his Con Artist role to buy off the three chip part of staying friends with Puppy D, but that meant the crew would be left disgruntled. So, Mikko sacrifices Johnny’s “Stylized image”, and Johnny unbuttons his shirt, lowers his Armani pants to a ridiculously low gangsta-position and gets a scarf on his head and some bling-bling and a funny hat… and by lowering Johnny from the standards he’s set for the character, Mikko gets 3 chips, two of which he uses to get the gang-members to accept Johnny even if he doesn’t take their drugs or shoot their guns.

Now, why I think this was very nice test of that part of the system – until Mikko has a moment to take a break, and enough chips to buy the aspect back, it’s gone. This means that for the rest of the session, Johnny was never quite as sharp-looking as he’d like to be. He chose the wrong shoes for the suit, forgot his belt, that sort of stuff. And according to Mikko, when I talked with him after the game, it was something that really hit him bad. Since the aspects are character-defining things, loss of one feels like a loss. A blow to even an insignificant one like “Stylized image” can hurt like a bullet in the upper leg area.

Mikko also lost the “Lyonne Ritz” aspect during the game, to keep the FBI from realizing Johnny’s schemes and keep the secrets for a while longer, by what was probably the most horrible break-up I’ve ever seen or heard of in my life. Matti’s old Russian gentleman mastermind ended the game session as a short-tempered drunk who didn’t care if people got roughhoused around during a gig. Matijas and Maija on the other hand, survived with everything just fine. Such is gambling. When I say I’d do things differently on the second run, I’d make the gig a bit more personal – the fact they’re running other peoples’ errands makes it less about “what I want” and more about “what I have to do”.

But the greatest thing is that we got the damn game session played after 6 weeks of cancelations. Next session coming up maybe in a week, unless something goes wrong again