Jupiter Sovereign: The Hamartia Mechanic

One of the things that drives any game are the consequences for failure.

In Jupiter Sovereign, there's a problem with this because consequences for failure are essentially narrative. Death is temporary, since people can just jump between bodies as needed. Theoretically there's the potential for a mind to be lost or damaged, but even this can be trivial in the sense that a functional consciousness can be restored most of the time.

In the past, I've talked about Golden Sky Stories, an interesting roleplaying game that has narrative-defining mechanics, and I was pretty negative about the game design side of it. I've also talked about The Quiet Year, which I barely consider a game due to it having almost no mechanics, but which creates a very compelling narrative structure.

For Jupiter Sovereign, I want to make a game with a mixture of consequences for failure and rewards for accepting limitations.

The solution to this is the Hamartia mechanic.

WIP disclaimer of everything being subject to change aside, here's how it works:

Hamartia is a pool that increases as characters grow and develop. It is gained whenever a character fails to accomplish a goal. It's an equivalent to suffering damage, but it's also more: it can be lost as a consequence of a bad roll or also by narrative means (though a note of caution is added about giving it too loosely). A character gains flaws through their origins that make it so they do not gain Hamartia in certain situations by voluntarily sacrificing dice on associated tests.

Hamartia is removed through the process of catharsis, which involves a process detailed by the character's origins.

Two optional mechanics are that a character can have separate pools of Hamartia associated with developing crises, and that Hamartia functions as a sort of negative Psionic Boost.

If Hamartia builds to a high enough level, the character falls to tragedy, essentially dying, being converted to an NPC, or otherwise being removed from play.

The idea behind Hamartia is to foster a more open-ended storytelling that uses the setting to its fullest. A character's downfall may come in an explosion as their Gigas is shredded by an orbital railgun and their upload doesn't broadcast in time, or they may buy into a lie that causes them to destroy their lives.