World Mood Thoughts

World Mood is one of those cool inventions inside SBRPG. A lot of games are written with one World Mood in mind, by default, this is how the world works. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, as once you define a mood, you can write rules and content to support that mood. For example, a horror RPG might have all sorts of squicky wounding rules, horrendous monsters, and possibly even insanity rules to liven things up. The dark nature of the 'horror' mood is reinforced through the rules and content supplied with the game.

Now, divorce mood from the game, and try to write a game around that. What we did with SBRPG's World Mood system was exactly that, and the base game was deliberately written to be mood-neutral. As a result, we don't have a lot of color-call rules and items supporting a particular feel or violence level, the rules are what they are - supporting combat, statistics, task resolution, etc. The game itself is a neutral base upon which everything else is built.

All right, we setup six specific World Mood levels, and created framework rules around that. One of the core concepts was 'the worst thing that could happen' - and this worked very well. In some lighter World Moods, the bad guys could not knowingly target an innocent; and in others, it was not easy for a PC or NPC to die. We wanted to simulate cartoon-action realities such has GI JOE, or any number of other Saturday morning action cartoons with some of these moods, just for fun. In SBRPG, it was totally okay for you to shoot up a squadron of enemy fighter jets, and have every enemy pilot parachute to safety, just like in the cartoons.

It wasn't easy, and we needed specific rules for what could happen in a fight, what happens when someone gets wounded, and even story stuff like what the worst thing a villain could do to someone? We put an upper limit on the violence too, at a sort of gothic-cool "dark" level. Dark isn't necessarily a super-slasher film level of violence, we purposely tweaked it to be more psychological and foreboding - something like, "The whole world is against me, an insidious dark force opposes my every move."

In a dark World Mood, even the reactions of strangers is tweaked by the overboding sense of dread and fear. People in small towns in a dark mooded game would never trust outsiders, even the guy at the gas station over on highway 61. In a lighter mooded game, the referee adjusts NPC reactions upwards, to inviting the new-in-town PCs over for dinner with the family. Random events, encounters, acts of god, NPCs, situations, story arcs - everything is colored by World Mood. Played right, it is incredibly immersive and fun.

World Mood in the obvious sense also is a contract between the players and referee. A lot of games let the referee run anything, and some types of players aren't comfortable with that. The whole act of role-playing implies a trust and understanding between the players and referee, and some players are not comfortable at all with character death, horror, or deep psychological stuff. In this case, World Mood is a promise among everybody, "this is what we are playing, and we won't stray into uncomfortable areas." It seems like a silly thing, but for many players, setting a World Mood they are comfortable with is reassuring, and allows them to relax and play.