Remember Tomorrow Review Part 2

In the vein of trying to get more updates out, here is a quick second look at Remember Tomorrow with my opinions after having played a second time.

We played a second session of the game last Monday.  Josh was unable to make it because of some sort of pandemic that was localized to his house.  Therefore it was just me, John, and Emily.  Luckily Josh's character had achieved his goal and been written out at the end of the last session; so it all worked out.

The session ended up being fairly short.  I wrote myself out pretty quickly and managed to get my character's mind transferred into an android body.  John also wrote his character out after a few more scenes and ended the session with a cool scene where his character found his long lost brother.  Emily I believe did not get very close to achieving her goal; but she most likely would have very quickly in a third session; or if that session had gone one a few more scenes.

After I wrote my character out I made a new character that was basically a crazy loose cannon that was aimed directly at the other two characters.  I did not get to play him for very long; I think only 2 or 3 scenes. But in the short time I had I think I managed to really GET how this game can be done correctly.  It is very much as I and John said in the last post; a game where you are playing a GM first and mostly just reacting as a PC.  Coming into it with that mindset totally made things click and my opinion on the game pretty much did a 180.

I really think that the game could heavily benefit from instructions or at least a heavy suggestion that when you make your initial characters you should be looking to create interesting points of antagonism with the other PCs.  At the very least you should have to make your Faction be set up to go against and interact with someone else's character; and not make it be about your own.  I think that that would really help you come to the first play session with a correct mindset and a better setup for making the game work the way it was intended to work.

Overall when I look at the game and the play experience with a more objective point of view; I think it was really fun and a very well designed game.  The problems I had the first time around where with me; not really with the game itself.  There are some really cool ideas that I may be stealing or modifying for my own projects in the future, and I think I would enjoy doing another round of it at a Game Day or something.  So I'd say definitely give it a shot if you get the opportunity, it is worth your time and effort.

Remember Tomorrow Review Part 1

Quick Update

Boy have I been horrible about putting up posts this week.  Not to get into too much complaining; but work has been soul-suckingly terrible, and I finally get why so many of my friends so often do not feel like hanging out after a full day of work.  So all I have felt like doing is sleeping and consuming mindless entertainment, for the most part.

There has been some stuff going on though, and when I can get the mental energy to work on it, I'm really excited about my current project.  Yes, I do remember that I was right in the middle of analysing the Cortex Plus system; and I'm going to get back to that soon.  Hopefully later this week.  But I also have a brand new project that I'm working on.  My first built from scratch RPG project, which is all about giant mecha fighting robots, crazy space monsters, galactic exploration and conquest, and vending machines.  Don't worry, it really all does tie together.

I've been working on coming up with the base mechanics, and doing some online play testing with friends.  I've got the core combat rules partly figured out; I mostly just need to try out a long list of bells and whistles to see what should be added and what should not.  I've got initial concepts for the out of combat stuff and some portions of character creation and advancement; and I'll be testing those out soon.  Also I've come up with a decent framework for the story and worldbuilding, as well as a cool concept for the physical book when I get it done.

I've got my own little sub-forum over on NWARPG.org where I can do all my play testing.  Here is a link.  I will be posting most updates there, as well as trying to do some more play testing on the forum.  I have every intention of developing this to a full and complete game, and then at least trying my hand at a Kickstarter project to get it made.  Who knows if folks will want to see it happen, that is something I'll deal with when it is done.

Besides that I have 21 other project ideas on a list that I want to work on and make at some point.  Some are one shot scenarios for Game Days, some are more custom RPGS.  There are even some board and card  game concepts.  Hopefully 2 or 3 will actually come to fruition at least.

Plus I'll be keeping up the posting of APs and reviews as much as I can, and putting up some more snippets from my short fiction story.  I promise to try harder to be more consistent for you guys.

Last Will Board Game Review

A few Sundays ago I played a board game called Last Will. Here is an excerpt from BGG that explains the theme of the game:

“In his last will, your rich uncle stated that all of his millions will go to the nephew who can enjoy money the most. How to find out which nephew should be rich? You will each be given a large amount of money and whoever can spend it first will be the rightful heir. Visit the most exclusive theaters or eat in the most expensive restaurants. Buy old properties for the price of new ones and sell them as ruins. Host a huge party in your mansion or on your private boat. Spend like your life would depend on it. Spend to become rich! If you're the first to run through the money on hand, you'll receive the rest of his inheritance – oh, and win the game.”

Sounds fun doesn't it? I sure found it to be quite well designed and a lot of fun.

For starters the art in the game is very well done and a theme that I particularly enjoy. I'd call it Victorian or Dickensian I guess. You know top hats and corsets, gaslights and horse drawn carriages. There are quite a few cards in this game and pretty much every one of them has something nice to look at on it.

The board exhibits good graphic design, with an appealing look, nice, easy to understand layout, and plenty of space for what is there. The individual player boards are nicely arranged as well, and heck there are even little wooden top hat meeples!

The game rules were, in my opinion, fairly easy to learn and understand, and the strategies seem both deep and varied. This is obviously a very good thing.

The game is played out until the end of seven turns or someone spends all their money, whichever happens first. If no one wins before the end of seven rounds, then the winner is the player with the least money and property values. If someone goes bankrupt on a previous round, then you play out that round and whoever is furthest in debt by the end of the round wins.

A turn takes place in five distinct phases. The first phase is setup, and is nice and quick. Basically fill the 8 card slots on the main game board with the designated type of card; and there are icons on the board to tell you which type goes where.

Next up is planning. There are eight different planning options on the board in a 4 player game, I think there are less with less players. Each option has four components to it: Card Draws, Errand Boys, Actions, and Turn Order. Each plan has different combinations of the first three, i.e. Four card draws, one errand boy, and two actions. The turn order portion is determined by how far to the left in the line up of planning spaces you place your token. The plans to the left go before the plans to the right; but the plans to the right have the advantage of getting you more stuff. You pick a plan and place your token on it, and then immediately draw the designated number of cards from any of the four main card decks (more on them later).

After that you, in turn order as determined by the planning track placement, place your Errand Boy tokens (the awesome little wooden top hats). You will have either one or two errand boys on a given turn, and each player takes turns placing one at a time until everyone has placed all of theirs. You have a good selection of options for what to do with them. First, the biggest variety of options are the various face up cards that you dealt onto the board during setup. You can place an errand boy on one of them to immediately take it into your hand. These cards range from being exactly the same type of cards you get from draws, to special more powerful version that you can only get this way, or even wild cards. There is one spot for getting an expansion to your player board. Your player board starts with five slots for cards, and this allows you to add more slots. Each player has a color coded space that allows them to just draw a card from a deck. There is the real estate market, where you can go manipulate the price modifiers for the four different types of buildings. And one person, if they don't really want to do anything else, can just go to the opera and spend $2.

The next phase is the Action Phase. Remember back when you got actions from your chosen plan? Here is where you spend them. You can play cards from your hand or activate cards that are already on your player board. Most cards will take at least one action to perform, and many will have an option to spend more actions to get more benefits out of the card play. Each card will explain what type of actions are needed and what you get from spending them on the card itself. This phase looks fairly straight forward, but the majority of the strategy and planning is in this phase. The other two are mostly just worker placement. Here you have to plan out the use of the limited resources of Actions and Cards in order to move towards your goal as quickly and efficiently as possible. Lots of interesting approaches can be taken.

Finally you have an End of Round Phase. Here you discard down to two hand cards, depreciate properties (more on that later), reset any activated cards on your player board, clear unclaimed cards from the main board, reclaim figures, move the turn marker, and pass the first player marker to the left.

Now, to understand all the things you can and might want to do during a given turn you need to know about the different types of cards in the game. There are four main types of cards, in four main decks: Events, Companions, Helpers and Expenses, and Properties.

Events are white bordered cards that represent one time expenses and experiences. They will be things like going to the theater, taking a sailing trip, going on a carriage ride, having a fine dinner, etc. Each will take one or more actions to play, and are played directly from your hand. Almost all will result in your being able to spend a certain amount of money. Many of them can be enhanced by either spending more actions to cause the expense to go up, or by attaching companion cards to the event to also make the expense go up. The card will have the details as to what particular companions can come along, and how many actions are necessary to bring them. These cards ended up being a huge portion of my strategy, and one of my favorite ways to spend money.

Helpers, Expenses, and Properties all are black bordered cards. To play them you have to have an open space on your player board. Most will take an action to play down to the board, and can then be activated for further effects later on, usually by spending more actions. Expenses work like events, except they stay in play and can cost you money each turn. Some will just drain money without having to spend actions, and some will require one or more actions to activate. I also really found that I'm a fan of non-action costing Expenses.

Helpers give you cool bonuses and advantages. Some of them also cost you money, which is nice, but even if they don't you will always get something cool; like extra actions, or being able to activate things without spending actions, or giving bonuses on buying or selling properties; stuff like that. The one that gives extra actions is VERY nice.

Properties are one of the main ways that you can get rid of large chunks of money. You're best case scenario is to buy the property at a high price, then sell it again later at a much lower one; losing as much money as possible on the deal. You can affect the prices via the real estate market and by special abilities from cards. Also, as long as you don't pay the maintenance cost on property, most of them will depreciate in value at the end of each turn; further adding to your loses. Which remember is a good thing. The other thing you can do instead of letting the property depreciate, or on the ones that don't depreciate, is to activate the property and pay the maintenance costs. This is another good way to spend money each turn, and you can enhance the amount spent with extra actions and companions, just like with events.

Properties are however a double edged sword. Sure you can lose a good amount of money on them, via depreciation or maintenance, but you also have to sell off all of them before you can declare bankruptcy, go into debt, and win. So if you are getting near the end of the game; you should probably start ditching those properties. Also, because of the short number of turns, you won't get to pay those maintenance costs very many times, or allow is to depreciate naturally for every long if you want to ditch it before the game ends. When I played I was the only one not to have any properties when the game ended (in round six with me winning btw :) ). I think properties CAN be good, you just have to avoid the temptation to hold on to them for too long. And remember, when you sell that property you are probably going to get a decent amount of money back, even if you sell at quite a loss, and you will have to plan for getting rid of that money quickly if you want to win.

The last type of cards are slate (blueish color) bordered, and these are the companions. There are four types: Dog, Horse, Guest, and Chef. There are also a couple of wild cards that can be any of them; and these are available face up on the board, not from drawing. As I've stated in the descriptions of the other cards, these are used to enhance the amount of money you spend on events, expenses, etc.

Technically there is one more deck of cards, the special cards, but they can't be drawn up the way the other ones can. You can only get them by claiming them off the main board with errand boys. These cards will be both white and black bordered; and will tend to be slightly better versions of the same type of cards from those respective decks.

I'll wrap up with my thoughts on the game in general. I've already stated how I loved it aesthetically, and that I found it to be well designed and have deep strategy possibilities. All very good accolades in the games metaphorical cap (or top hat). Properties are a double-edged sword and may or may not be worth it. Events seem to be where it is at, at least in my opinion. I loved that there are lots of different paths to victory that you can take though; and none is really the right way.

I think that you don't have to be too caught up in picking the right plan during the planning phase, both because you can always get something good no matter what order you go in the turn; and because everyone gets to be first player once or twice.

Top hat meeples rock!

Overall this was a great games, that was tons of fun, and I look forward to playing it some more. I will probably buy it at some point in the future, and that is about as strong a recommendation as I can give I guess.

Night Shift Terrors, Chapter 1.2

“Holy s@#t! What the hell?” Silas rubbed the back of his head where he had slammed it against the wall.

“You act like you've never seen a cat before.”

“Not on in a mirror, and certainly not one that talks!”

The tabby stepped forward through the mirror, the surface of the glass rippling like water as it passed through.

“Better now?”

“Halfway,” Silas responded, not looking at the cat as he tried to twist around to see the back of his head.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out what is causing me to hallucinate you.”

“I'm not a hallucination.”

“Which is exactly something a hallucination would say.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why is that something a hallucination would say, exactly?”

“I don't know. Maybe being not real gives you low self-esteem and you want to try and reaffirm your non-existence by stating it?”

Silas gave up trying to see the back of his head and just felt it instead. There was some tenderness, but nothing that felt critical. So why was he seeing things?

“I assure you I'm not trying to alleviate any self-worth issues. Also you saw me before you bumped your head.”

“That does lend a bit of credence to your non-hallucinatory argument.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“You're welcome.”

“So you believe me now?”

“That or I'm dreaming, either one works for me cause I need the sleep.”

“Frankly, either works for me as well. Now please come with me.”

“Where to?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“I'm believing a talking cat.”

“Quite commendable of you.”

Silas opened the door and followed the cat down the hallway, down past the front offices and into the conference room, right to a door in the back labeled “Supply”.

“I wouldn't believe a supply closet?”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

The tabby jumped up, grabbing the handle and pulling the door open.

Looking through the opening door, Silas gasped.

Chapter 1.1

Chapter 1.3

Remember Tomorrow Session 1 Review

Last night me and the MGG played our first session of the new cyberpunk "GM-less" game called Remember Tomorrow.  The game is created by Gregor Hutton, who is a fairly well known indie RPG designer and previously known to me for his really fun space bug killing(like the Starship Troopers movie) RPG called 3:16.  I enjoyed 3:16 when I played it way back at the start of MGG, would actually enjoy playing it again sometime.

As I said Remember Tomorrow is a cyberpunk game.  If that doesn't mean anything to you then think of the movie Blade Runner.  If that doesn't mean anything to you then I'm sorry, your life must suck.  Go watch that movie right now.  Stop reading and go watch it.

Have you corrected that sin against your own humanity?  Good.

Remember Tomorrow is also a "Gm-less" game, as in there is no set gamemaster, everyone gets to play.  That is a little bit of a misnomer in this one, because it really comes across as almost more of a "player-less" game (that observation was made by John, and after considering it I agree) because what you really end up doing with the bulk of your effort in this game is trading off the GM chair.

The basic structure of the game involves going around the table and taking turns framing and narrating scenes.  When your turn comes up you have three options for scene type:  Introduction, Deal, Face Off.  The only time you don't have access to all three options is during the first two rounds of scenes, when each player introduces the PC and the Faction that they created during setup, using, you guessed it, Introduction Scenes.

Character and Faction creation are simple and quick.  They have to be, because you can and will be creating more of each on the fly as you play the game.  You pick or roll randomly for various components of your character, and quickly assemble them all into a short but succinct picture of a PC.  To create a PC you do the following steps:
1.  Pick a Name/Handle (lists are provided and they are in sets of 10 if you just want to roll.)
2.  Roll/Pick an Identity:  You're looking at things like Activist, Dealer, Tech, Hacker, etc.  Purely color and fluff here.
3.  Roll/Pick a Motivation:  Envy, Greed, Freedom, Respect and the like.  No mechanical weight to these, but they do have a large fictional weight.  Your goal and drive in the game will be heavily tied to it.
4.  Gear:  Roll or pick 3 pieces of fun cyberpunk gear, like flying cars, needler guns, artificial limbs, etc.  Once again this is going to be fluff and color.
5.  Parameters Ready/Willing/Able:  These are your "stats" for this game, they describe how Ready, Willing, and Able you are to pursue and accomplish your goal.  They will be rated on a scale of 1-9 and you basically roll d10s and try to get at or under these scores to get successes.  You get 12 points to split between the three, none can start higher than 8 and lower than 2 is probably dangerous.
6.  Conditions:  You get one Positive Condition (Angry, Connected, Prepared, etc) and one Negative (Confused, Dying, Lost, Hunted, etc).  These flavor your RP and end up being a currency that both you and your opponents spend to affect outcomes.
7.  Goal:  Finally pick a goal.  No option to roll randomly for this sadly :)  Look at your Identity, Motivation, Conditions, all that and let it influence your decision when coming up with a goal.

Making a Faction is pretty much the same sort of thing.  You pick a Type(like Identity), Conditions, Motivation, and Influence (like Parameters but just one and starts at 4).

I rolled randomly for pretty much everything I possibly could, except Parameters, Goal, and first name.  I ended up with the following character:

Elias Yamamoto, Activist.  Motivation: Survival, Ready 5, Willing 4, Able 3, PCondition: Angry, NCondition: Dying, Gear: VTOL, Flechette Gun, Knowledge Skillsoft, Goal:  Get my consciousness transferred into a synth body.

And Faction:  Orange Micro, Pharma Corp.  Motivation: Revenge, Influence: 4, PCondition: Enthused, NConditon: Coerced

John created an Arms Dealer named Connor Wu and the Green Dragon Triad faction.  Emily made Vitoria Chen, a VR entertainment cube dealer and the Doki Doki Gang(a professional group of contract killers), and Josh came up with Leonard Spencer, an antiques dealer, and the Kleinen Pharmaceuticals faction.

We all started off in various places across the world, me and Josh somewhere in Europe, Emily and John over in Asia around Hong Kong.  I had a bit of trouble keeping together track of all the details of the four different stories that were all happening at once; so I'm not going to go into much detail as to what happened in the actual play.

Connor Wu spent time trying to track down his estranged brother, while dealing with the Green Dragon Triad trying to pull him back in.  Vitoria Chen was dealing having been financially cuckolded by her ex and trying to get out from under her dad's influence; though the forceful offer from the GD Triad was not the way she wanted to do it.  Leonard Spencer was constantly going out the fire escape to get away from IRS agents, Triad thugs, and the like; while working for Kleinen to acquire some sort of giant Faberge egg that supposedly had a deadly virus sample hidden within it.  Oh and Elias hired the Doki Doki Gang to try and take out the leader of the anti-android Church of One Life, as well as spending time looking for a place with the equipment for the consciousness transfer.

Back to looking at the framework of the game.  As I said before when your turn comes up you are basically stepping into the GM chair to one degree or another, its called being the Controller in game terms.  Your three options if you remember were Introduction, Deal, and Face-Off scenes.  An Introduction scene is exactly what it sounds like, you introduce a new character or faction.

Your first two rounds of scenes will all be these, introducing each players initial PC and Faction.  Then as you play if you want to bring a new PC or Faction into play, just whip one up real quick (nice to have a good stack of blank sheets available for this) and then run an Intro scene for it.  After narrating the intro, you make an unopposed roll (all rolls are 3d10 by default) and then compare the die results to your Parameters or Influence to see how many successes you get.  You then spend the successes 1 for 1 to get various improvements like increasing a Parameter, adding a PCon or removing a NCon.

A Deal scene lets your Held PC make a deal with a Faction.  I just realized I didn't address Held PCs yet.  Basically each player gets to hold on to a single PC as their exclusive character that only they can use, but one can change the PC you have Held with other PCs that are out in the middle if one wants to.  All non-Held PCs are in the middle and usable by anyone.  In a Deal scene you pick 1 Faction in the middle and narrate a scene where you negotiate a deal that advantages both your PC and the Faction.  The Faction gets an automatic +1 Influence bump, and the PC gets an unopposed roll to try and get successes to spend on improvements.

The main meat of the game are going to be Face-Off scenes, at least that is the intention.  In a Face Off scene you pick either your Held PC or one of the common PCs or Factions and then go after someone else's Held PC.  You narrate the scene, and then when you come to a point of conflict you each state a scene goal and make an opposed roll.  The side with the most successes wins and gets their scene goal for free, and then gets to spend their margin of success (difference in successes between the Winner and Loser) on improvements, similar to the other two scenes.  The big difference is that here in a Face Off is the only place you can spend a success to get a Tick or check on one of your Parameters.  Accomplishing your goal requires a Tick on each of your Parameters btw, showing that your totally Ready, Willing, and Able to carry out your goal.  Also, if you lose this roll off, and want to still hamper your opponent, you have the option of removing one of their NCons to reduce their margin of success by one.

The other side of the currency in the game are the PCons, which can be spent before a roll to add an auto-success, or after for a re-roll.

Now I know there has been a lot here, and the post is long already, but I'm going to finish off with a few of my thoughts and impressions about the game so far:

Pros:
- Love the ability to have random character creation
- The wording and language of the game really seems to work well for it and its genre and theme
- It is a tight, clean well designed game
- You feel like your almost always improving your character and driving forward
- Core mechanics are easy to figure out and prepping is a simple process
- Seems to do a good job of handling the disparate stories that end up connecting later style

Cons:
- Not a big fan of the Cross mechanic.  Which I forgot to mention, but its basically if you roll a double or triple on the dice then the next person's scene has to incorporate something from yours.  Its meant to integrate the stories, but it comes across forced and can be annoying
- Keeping track of four different stories, or three other peoples stories while planning my own, was very difficult.  And driving someone else's story via Face-Off scenes is very important, so you HAVE to know what is going on.
- I feel a strong disparity between the natural desire to drive your goal forward, and the place where your power is vested in the mechanics.  Basically you have the ability to drive other's stories forward, but your own mostly has to wait on others to drive it.  This was very hard for me to get totally.
- Standard issue with highly narrative games, if you take full control of a scene things can get a bit masturbatory, but if you hand off control of NPCs the other people may feel self-conscious that they don't know the NPC or know where you want to go, or may just "mess things up" if your view.  Another hard thing for me to deal with.
- It can be hard to frame scenes in other's stories without stopping game flow for a meta-explanation of where they see their story going, and what they are doing with it so far.

Overall you have to really pay attention to the other stories, get invested in the other characters, be thinking of what you can do to drive their story home; and pretty much just be reactive with your own story and character.  All of that is very counter intuitive to me.  It definitely feels more like what one would be doing in the GM chair instead of the player chair, and getting into that mind set was a bit beyond me for the first session.  But I really like the design and aesthetic here, and we will be playing again next week.  So hopefully I can grok it this time and come at it with a better attitude and understanding.

Remember Tomorrow Review Part 2

Night Shift Terrors, Chapter 1.1

Silas leaned back in his chair, stretching and yawning.  Turning to his co-worker next to him he said, "Hey, I'm going to go take a break, see if I can wake up."

Keith looked at him and grunted an affirmative.

Silas yawned again as he pulled his keys out and opened the locked door leading out of the resident hall and into the rest of the building.  It had been two months since he had started working on the night shift, and he still had not gotten used to the crazy sleep schedule.

As he walked towards the bathroom something caught his attention in the corner of his eye.  He turned quickly in that direction, peering out the large floor to ceiling window to the outside, searching for whatever had caught his attention.

The shadowy landscape out the window, barely illuminated by the soft pools of light from a couple of nearby street lights, revealed nothing to his scanning eyes.  After a few seconds he shrugged and turned to continue down the hall.  It was probably just one of the stray cats that hung around the building.

The bathroom light flickered on and off a couple of times before resolving into a solid, humming glare.  Silas shook his head in annoyance.  The maintenance worker here was really slow about getting things fixed.  Though in all fairness there was a lot of stuff broken in Pickman Hills Center.

After washing his hands he turned the faucet to cold and left it running.  He looked at his face in the mirror, sighing at the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes.  He had to do something to get his sleeping back under control.

He cupped his hands under the flow of cold water and splashed his face.  With his eyes closed he splashed his face again and then groped for the paper towels.  Drying his face off with a couple he opened his eyes and jumped back as he met the gaze of a striped tabby, staring out at him from the other side of the mirror.

"Hello," said the cat, grinning broadly.

Chapter 1.2

Cortex Plus Design Diary 02: Components of Character, Part 3

Upon looking at the list of different Trait types for all the Cortex Plus games I have noticed that a few patterns emerge.

First off you can find the Distinctions Trait in every game.  I think this is very telling of the quality and design of the Margaret Weis Productions games.  Distinctions are all about the character of your PC, and all of these games do a wonderful job of exuding and promoting character through mechanics.  It is one of my favourite things about them.

Next let's look at what else is common across all four games.  Though the name and details may change, there is always a type of Trait that deals with the skills and training of the character, as well as one that deals with the physical abilities, be they natural, preternatural, or supernatural.  Since the use of these type of abilities is the most logical way to take actions and just plain do things, this completely makes sense.

Relational Traits are the next most common, appearing in three of the four games.  The only one without them is Dragon Brigade, so technically they are in all of the published games.  They are more of the focus in some games, Smallville, than others, Marvel, but they are there.  I'm very happy to see them too.  I love mechanically codifying relationships and social connections in roleplaying games.  Yes, there is a good amount of debate about whether you should have this or that amount of social mechanics, and how you should "just roleplay it."  But I really think, if you put the weight and consistency of mechanics behind your social roleplay, as long as you stay in the mindset of putting fun and story first, you only help out the roleplay.

The last of the five categories of Traits I'm going to talk about are ones that deal with morals and values.  Two of the games, and only one of the published ones, have an explicit Trait type that deals with this topic.  But I think the subject is there in the others, it just isn't focused on as much.  Also, in Marvel and Leverage you are playing superheroes and Robin Hood types respectively.  So to a degree an amount of moral viewpoint is already pre-set by the very character types.

So as I move towards creating a system where one can customize Cortex Plus to whatever setting you want, I'll be looking at five distinct Trait categories:  Character, Relational, Skill, Physical, and Morality

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love Cortex Plus.  The Traits system is just so wonderfully flexible and modular.  It strongly integrates great roleplay aspects, like unique character qualities and relationships, into the mechanics.  And at the end of the day, in all my experiences, it has been just a ton of plain old fun.

Next up is stripping the setting and fluff off of Smallville character creation and looking at its base framework, but that will wait till later in the week.  Next few days will have the start of a serial story and some game reviews.