Character Creation: Marks: A Game for Fools

Oh what fools these mortals be. I pity the fool. Fool me once, etc. 

The Game: Marks: A Game for Fools
The Publisher: Charanaut, or Braden Liatris, I guess
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

Marks is a weird game. It tells us up front that there's lots of mature content, it's about violence and abuse and all kinds of other horrible things, but the game itself is...one step removed, I guess? 

Like, the game it most closely reminds me of is Whispering Vault, with Riders maybe in there too. Characters (Fools) are people that fight monsters. Monsters ("glories") spring from someone doing something awful to the point that the awful actions take on physical (?) form, and then the Fools come in and kill them, and there are separate scenes for dealing with the glories and then fighting the World (the "World" is also the name for the GM, and with the PCs called "Fools" I thought we'd get more Tarot imagery, but nah). 

The system looks interesting, it's very involved and requires players to work together and cap dice results and interpret based on what kind of dice (clear or clouded) come up, but none of it is contextualized. At no point do we get an example of play or even any discussion about what this game might look like at the table. Honestly, it feels like a 5AM discussion on Sunday of Metatopia that someone wrote down, laid out, and put up on itch. It's not without promise, but if you know anything about PbtA games it feels like a lot of familiar elements, but without the attention to the flow of conversation and the principles of crafting a story that those games rely on. It's not written in character per se, but it's very formal and serious. 

Now, this is interesting in comparison to Gods of Metal: Ragnarock, which I started reading earlier today and decided I actually want to finish the book before I make a character because I'm digging it. And that game commits to its premise and takes a lot of care in explaining its core ethos and what the hell the players are doing. 

Anyway, let's make a character. First thing, I need to pick a design (class, playbook, archetype, whatever, a splat is a splat). I think I'll shall indulge my inner rabble-rouser and pick provoker.

(Gripe: Everything about these sheets could have fit onto one page, dammit.)

O...kay. So, in this game you have clear and clouded dice. If you roll a pool and you get success (sorry, "crowns", which is a 6) on clear dice but no clouded, that's a real success. If you get any "crowns" on clouded dice, it's a "muddle." No crowns at all, it's a failure. Cool? Cool. Blades in the Dark and its various descendants also put more probabilistic weight on getting qualified successes, that's fine, moves the story forward and all.

What annoys me is this:

That's the section of the character sheet for recording your dice in your "Lethal" stat. If there's some way to indicate which dice are clear and which are clouded, or how you mark those things to know which is which, I don't know. I assume you'd mark the boxes on the right for clear and the ones on the left for clouded, but we're never told that. That's what I'll do, anyway.

OK, so I get three clear dice in Bent, and two clouded dice in Lethal, Clever, and Carnal. And then I get 3, 2, and 1 clear dice to put into those traits. Hmm. So what do I want my Fool to be good at? I guess if my playbook thing is making threats, it wouldn't be terrible to be able to back them up. I'll put three clear dice in Lethal, two in Clever, and one in Carnal, how bout da. 

And then I pick two traits for my Carnal stat. I'll take Tough and Sexy, why not (there's a list).

Strain starts at 0, so nothing to do there.

And then the game does that fucking annoying thing where it breaks off of chargen to explain the game rules for several pages before jumping back in. No summary of chargen or anything, so it's easy to feel like you missed something. I'd blame it on this game obviously being a pretty early draft, but a lot of finished games do it, too, so I blame brain parasites. 

Anyway, next thing that I think I have to choose is my inexorable fate (this game has levels of pretentious terminology that would put Wraith to shame). 

And, not to harp, but:

But what does it mean to be a Fool? How would you choose it? 

Anyway, it would be tempting to pick the angsty "you end alone" fate, but I'm gonna pick No Rest for the Glorious - you end fighting. If I'm about making threats, it'd be interesting to have that finally come back around for my final fate. I guess.

Next up, transient gestalt. (Seriously, it's billed as a game for fools, but reads like a game for the tragically overeducated.) This is really just a few things that one would notice about the character. 

OK, well, I've been playing Baldur's Gate III and my characters have an unsettling tendency to lose eyes, so I'll say my character has a false eye made of obsidian (if this game is gonna go all-in on the Spooky, I'll play). Walks as though dancing, sure. Sharp voice, and then finally expensive suits. 

Heart's ease is the next thing. It's basically a thing that by doing, I find comfort. Doesn't have to be nice, of course, and that's fine, because I'm not seeing this guy as particularly nice. One of the examples on the list is "ruin someone's day," and I kinda like that, but I think I want to get more specific. How about "break something important," instead. Basically means I could steal or break someone's phone and it'd almost always qualify. (Do cell phones exist in this world? WHO KNOWS, there's no setting info!)

Pernicious drive is similar, but less specific, and frankly the difference isn't all that well explained, but whatever. I think mine is "I refuse to admit I'm wrong."

Weapon of choice has nothing to do with Fatboy Slim, here, it's just literally how the character kills. I think that this system would probably support something that's not a conventional weapon, a la cars veering off and smashing into people. Could I have my weapon of choice be "the curse of fatal bad luck?" Sure I could. I'm meant to give it a couple of elements, so I'll say takes a moment to manifest and makes the air go chilly. 

That's basically it. I see this character as a looming figure of death, causing "accidents" in a Final Destination kinda of way (which actually ties into his heart's ease, as I think about it). Killing is easy, but it's perhaps better to give people near misses and a good story to tell. Refuse to learn from the lesson, well, that's a risk. 

The word "name" never appears in this book in the context of "give your character a name," and since what a "Fool" is is never really explained, I don't know if we have them. But just in case, let's say he goes by Mr. Castor. He's not really on a first-name basis with anyone, you see.

That's it. Don't know what I was expecting, but I don't think this was it.