The retconned lifepath

I want to develop an idea about a novel RPG progression mechanic which was pitched here:

https://www.tumblr.com/alexanderwales/771838390587047936/pitchposting-retcon

The main idea is this: it's a narrative game where the majority of the gameplay involves placing the pieces of your own past.
[...]
So the whole game would be this: slowly adding to your own backstory, penning yourself in over time, until there's no room to maneuver anymore, and shortly thereafter, the game ends. The fundamental tension of the game is that you want to keep the character as amorphous as possible, to commit to as few details as possible, but commitment is necessary to actually accomplish things.
[...]
in this game "progression" does not come from increasing skills because you got better, it comes from defining the past.

I view this as an interesting twist on lifepaths.

 

Refresher: Lifepath mechanics

In TTRPG gaming, characters are classically generated by picking character elements (or clusters of them) from a set of options, supplemented with dice rolls to instantiate numerical attributes. Most games still do something in this vein.

A lifepath character generation system switches this up. Now you make early life decisions as your character, and/or roll to see what happened to them before gameplay began, and the outcome of that process is your character's start state.

(Aside: I made a comprehensive lifepath character generation book for D&D 5e which you can check out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/438774/Steps-to-a-Hero)

Lifepaths are an attractive alternative because they (can) restrict a player's decisions to only those of their character, not a bunch of things that their character was never in a position to choose themselves like their 'intelligence' stat. As a result,

• They add more gameplay to the game
• They feel more real
• They reduce the pressure on the player to be creative
• They replace the part of a role-playing game that has little to no role-playing (character generation) with a version that is mostly role-playing

Refresher: Retcon mechanics

Retcon is retroactive continuity. It's a broad category of ideas, and 'deciding parts of the past which were left undecided' is just one very narrow part.

The main RPG retcon mechanic I'm familiar with is the one Alexander Wales mentions in his pitch. Blades In The Dark, the GLOG, etc, permit a character by 'careful preparation' to retcon in things they have available to them, e.g., by carrying a bundle of unspecified equipment.

Outside of RPGs, something like this is a common part of story-telling games, where there are mechanisms for a player (as opposed to game master) to determine or replace parts of the world, often to the benefit of a character favoured or controlled by that player.

 

A possible synthesis

So we have this idea for, essentially, building a character by determining underdetermined bits of a lifepath.

➡️ Let's say characters all start at age 25, having had formative experiences since the age of 15, and initially have just one or two of their traits determined.

➡️ There's experience points, and you 'spend' xp at any time to declare how you 'spent' one year of your life (a nice little verbal correspondence).

➡️ Each year of your life grants you an appropriate character trait: an ability, skill, power, whatever.

➡️ Each trait you 'gain' in this way is, of course, one you've always had within the continuity of the game world. You're just revealing it now.

So you decide you spent a year traipsing the desert trade routes, and get increased endurance. Or
you were pressed into military service as an archer, and are capable with a war bow. Or you spent a year repairing fishing trawlers, and have basic sailing and carpentry skills.

This setup allows for ten "level-ups", one for each adult / young adult year of your life prior to starting the game proper. You could tweak the time periods to get more buffer. If you do bump into the end game having 'spent' all your undetermined years, the game master would need to contrive a year-long time skip between adventures for the player characters to keep progressing, or switch to a different progression system.

Other than managing time, I see two main open problems. They're shared by most retcon / story-influencing mechanics:

1. Things in the game world can / should be able to interact with your character's history before you're "ready" to determine it. When this happens, the choices are: do the character advancement early, contrive a way out of revealing (deciding) it, or suffer contradiction later on.
2. When you do determine part of your character's history, it may make previous in-character choices and outcomes seem very stupid indeed. "You're telling me you apprenticed as an acrobat for a year? So have you been deliberately clumsy these last few weeks?"

 

Closing thoughts

By its nature, I think as a class of game mechanic this idea leans a bit towards the story-telling game end of the spectrum. It doesn't have many of the advantages of lifepaths which I mentioned.

It's a way for players to influence the overall narrative or game world more than their character's decisions. So I think if you were to develop it further, you'd be better off implementing it in a story-telling game or hybrid game rather than a 'strict' TTRPG.