Recovery in RPGs is boring as hell. It’s something you do to get back to the good stuff, a penalty for not rolling well enough. Some games just hand-wave it as much as possible. And most games I’ve played or read ignore long-term consequences entirely. Get back to the good stuff!
Well Crescendo doesn’t do that at all. Recovery is a core component of gameplay.
The first question was what I felt qualified to model: not much. I’m not a medical professional. So designing mechanics around the actual physical healing process wasn’t something I felt comfortable doing. And given that Crescendo is a psychological and spiritual fantasy it would have felt wrong anyway.
The first step was to incentivize healing. Now in Crescendo that’s easy enough: you get tons of XP for getting rid of Conditions! But that’s not enough. The system needs to SCREAM that character weakness isn’t a bad thing. So I made it to where you could use Conditions to make bad things happen in the narrative… and not just get XP for it but tone down the difficulty of the next check.
But this is a game about character growth and change. You can’t not have mental conditions. That would not make sense. The sound of that may turn off some, but if there is one thing that should have a set of rules to help you manage it respectfully it should be mental conditions. So I then spent time on mental conditions and how to make them fun and respectful. And I think I pulled it off! Most forms of trauma are the result of uncontextualized life events. Your brain doesn’t know what to do with whatever it is, which stresses your body out. Bodies want to get back to normal, so under enough constant pressure IT MAKES THAT STRESS THE DEFAULT. Deviate from the new norm and your body kicks into high gear to get you back to “normal”.
But what about actual traumas? Y’know, stuff that keeps coming up? That’s simple enough. Just make it a Condition that keeps showing back up. And it gives you additional Conditions whenever it does. And it doesn’t go away permanently until the end of an arc, MAYBE. In the meantime you’ll have it on your character sheet, in PEN. None of this is just mental: your broken ankle could break again, throwing out your other knee or causing any other physical issues. You use the same systems to track these issues. The actual clinical reality ain’t that far off.
So I went and designed my recovery options for mental stuff to be all about recontextualizing: mythology (aka making lore), talking about what happened, and moments of sheer beauty that set a new context altogether. But I found that physical maladies needed some additional modeling in play. That and there needed to be something to where Traumas could be put into recession.
So I made a mechanic called Town. You hunker down for a few weeks and get rid of Conditions in batches. Also all Injuries and illnesses can only be healed while in Town. The more Conditions you heal the more XP you get. It costs some money, but the payoff in XP is enormous. But the part that’s truly awesome is that the entire world moves forward RANDOMLY. By hunkering down things will change all over the setting, creating new conflicts while resolving old ones. It only takes a few minutes to do, and gives Town this roulette vibe: are you willing to hunker down, even at the cost of changing everything?
The key to all these mechanics is that they’re actually really relaxing. Crescendo is a crazy game. The dice mechanics push you into really dark places and there needed to be a spot in the game where you could just RELAX. And Recovery does that. You get to just free-form RP, do some lore building, and try to make sense of the craziness. That’s really important in a game as crazy as Crescendo.
What comes out of recovery being a core component of the gamr are wide a variety of sessions, where each time feels new. There’s a dynamism to this game that’s hard to explain. But I’ve personally never seen a game naturally go this dark and just a session later feel so peaceful. You’ll never quite know what you’re going to get.
You just know it’ll be good.
I don’t know, that’s what I want from a game night.
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