I'm trying to think of games in which characters pick up interesting traits/affects/quirks/effects in response to their experiences or time spent adventuring around.
For instance, Heat Signature has some good ones that really impact the flow of gameplay with a given character, although they're assigned to characters on generation and don't (to my memory) change in response to their experiences in-game. Darkest Dungeon's Quirk system is a cool way that the game literalizes the effect of characters' time spent in the different dungeons—I think they work better as gameplay considerations than as actual records of what characters have been through, but it's still neat to watch a character pick up a set of descriptors as you send them out over and over again. Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld have a whole lot of traits that can be appended to their colonists and work well to distinguish otherwise-similar pawns from each other, but those are also overwhelmingly generated simultaneous to the characters' own generation, I think.
I'm sure there are a lot of tabletop systems that have very bizarre, cool systems for tracking a character's experience, corruption, improvement, yadda yadda, but I don't know much about that world. Veins of the Earth, at least, has some really incredible "effects" that player characters develop as the subterranean horror gets to them, and was actually the inspiration for me to make this thread.
I'm sure there are a lot that I'm missing. I would really love to hear about them, whether digital or tabletop. Any good ones? Any bad ones? What do you look for in these systems? What do they do for you? What does or doesn't work for you?
For instance, Heat Signature has some good ones that really impact the flow of gameplay with a given character, although they're assigned to characters on generation and don't (to my memory) change in response to their experiences in-game. Darkest Dungeon's Quirk system is a cool way that the game literalizes the effect of characters' time spent in the different dungeons—I think they work better as gameplay considerations than as actual records of what characters have been through, but it's still neat to watch a character pick up a set of descriptors as you send them out over and over again. Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld have a whole lot of traits that can be appended to their colonists and work well to distinguish otherwise-similar pawns from each other, but those are also overwhelmingly generated simultaneous to the characters' own generation, I think.
I'm sure there are a lot of tabletop systems that have very bizarre, cool systems for tracking a character's experience, corruption, improvement, yadda yadda, but I don't know much about that world. Veins of the Earth, at least, has some really incredible "effects" that player characters develop as the subterranean horror gets to them, and was actually the inspiration for me to make this thread.
I'm sure there are a lot that I'm missing. I would really love to hear about them, whether digital or tabletop. Any good ones? Any bad ones? What do you look for in these systems? What do they do for you? What does or doesn't work for you?
