The Spirit of Ite' Elucidated

The true heart and soul of the HiBRiD game stems from its use of a novel mechanic called Ite'. While many games have some sort of mechanic for fudging rolls or bending the rules, the Ite' mechanic represents not just "another part of the system" but the defining game mechanic that really separates HiBRiD characters and players characters from the rest.

But it didn't start out that way.

Ite' evolved from the simple, tacked-on, home-brewed luck point system used to fudge die rolls that I had designed for my original role-playing campaign. Each character possessed a randomly determined number of luck points (by rolling 3d6) which the player could spend to modify any d20 die task roll on a one-for-one basis. Each time a character leveled up, the player was allowed to roll again to replenish the character's luck points, but could never replenish more than the original number pool from character creation.

Despite its lack of beauty, I really liked the system because it resonated with my own sensibilities a number of ways. It reflected the concept of the hero in charge of his own destiny. It reflected the truth that luck would only get one so far. It reflected the fact that as one gains more experience in life and learns from his mistakes, he learns to capitalize on opportunities no matter how small. It was optimistic realism at its finest.

But it was slow. It didn't really flow with the hodge-podge amalgam of mechanics of our home-brew game. It too readily enabled all too often inter-party conflicts. While the essence, intent, and purpose of it was an integral and fun part of our gaming, it remained yet another clodgy, jury-rigged, mismatched, tacked-m system.

When I sat down to write HiBRiD v1.0 in 1994, I had originally endeavored to write an original, more uniform, more balanced game system. Through the playtesting, I found myself retooling, simplifying, blending, or even shredding rules left and right, resulting in a very lean rule set, reflecting a more rules-light approach toward gaming in general. When HiBRiD v2.0 emerged from the smoke and rubble in 1998, I looked back and realized that throughout my exhaustive attempts to design and redesign game mechanics, the one thing that never once changed was my desire to provide players a balanced and exciting way to control their character's own destiny without mitigating the element of randomness that makes role-playing games so great. The system I had devised so clearly and perfectly reflected the control over destiny I was looking for that I shredded the term luck and coined the term Ite'. (A story I may capitulate at a later date, should anyone so request it).

Unfortunately, though I found it easy to describe how to use the mechanic in game play on a mechanical level, when it came to articulating the spirit of the mechanic in the game book in a way to foster the fast-paced, bold, and decisive action I was hoping to achieve, I was at a loss. In the interest of moving along to other parts of the book, I took the easy way out by cursorily outlining how Ite' could be used to heal a character and "whitewashing" all the other ways to use it by using such vague terms as "acting heroically" and "creating unlikely events". The resulting prose failed to excite me when I wrote it, failed to excite me when I read it, and absolutely failed to communicate the real fun and spirit I wanted to capture when a player read the game book. Since I had so many other things to attend to at the time, however, the lackluster prose languished.

Until just today.

While I was driving to work and trying to plan the timetable for the  layout of the next chapter, I was painfully reminded of the slipshod text that awaited me. But rather than simply cringing and accepting the abysmally lackluster prose, something in my spirit attacked it without my conscious approval. As a result, I pretty much classified the use of Ite' into just a few, exciting options in a flurry of brainstorm steeped thought.

Without further adieu, here are the results of that brainstorm:

Option One: Cut Scene Healing

Ite' can be used to heal a character. In any scene a character is reduced to 0 points of STUN, he may spend a point of Ite' to bring his STUN up to full next round, when the "camera" is back on the character.

 

Option Two: Reach Into The Magician's  Hat

Ite' can be used to pull an unforseen object from seemingly nowhere, so long as it is plausible, fits the genre of the game, and can be explained quickly and extemporaneously by the player. e.g. "...darn it, the bad guys are coming...oh, look, a point of Ite' says that some guy left his car here on the street running while he went in to get his wallet...". Of course, the level of power and unlikeliness of the object can be increased by spending additional points of Ite' by all the members at the table workign together...

Option Three: Kick It Up or Down A Notch

For each point of Ite' he spends, a player can increase the level of success of a task roll.of any task he attempts, or he can affect the task roll of an opponent that would affect him by one. e.g if an opponent hits the character with Crit Success, the player can "Kick it down a notch" from instant gruesome death to standard damage, or convert a task roll from a Success to a Crit Success.

Option Four: Make It Happen

Each point of Ite' can be used to have a specific unlikely event occur. While a point of Ite' can't directly be used to affect an occurrence or event the director describes, it can be used create an event that might interfere or interact with the event the director describes. e.g. "Yes, I realize that the crazed zombie cable guy is about to run me down in his work truck and pin me against the alley wall, but this point Ite' says that a garbage truck just happened to pull out from the alleyway and slide right between me and his pickup truck...".

Whew...well, hopefully you all get the idea...and an inkling of what makes a HiBRiD game a HiBRiD game...

Implementing Design

Designing a book is more difficult than many would imagine.  I'm not meowing; it really is.

Though the prose for the game have been finished for quite a while, I struggled a long time with where to begin. Who is the audience and what is the reading level of that audience? Should it be written in an informal or informal style? Should it be in the first or third person? Will it have an academic, textbook, or flowery flavor to the prose? Will there be footnotes or end notes? A glossary? An index?

And once I had completed that task, I struggled with graphic design decisions: what will be the color scheme? black and white? Tricolor? What weight and type of paper? How is the artwork to be layed out? Typeface? How many and how will the tables look? Standard A4, comic book, or some other novelty page size? Over the years, I have started and stopped layouts because they just didn't "feel right". The designs and plans I had made, cancelled, and remade...that I had jotted down and thrown in hanging folders...that I had implemented and finished 10+, 20+ or even 40+ pages of and placed in loose leaf binders that have piled up in my spare room...all have shaken free of their chaff and the wheat within has been rushing to the forefront of my thoughts.

Something changed when I started the HiBRiD Basic character sheet; and now that I have finished it, I found words and answers to all of my design questions drawn from within me. I have reached my Zen. I have finally rediscovered my muse.

HiBRiD was meant to be what I wanted a role playing game to be and my attempt to share it with the world. Nothing more. And with that, I am diving forward into Book One with not an inkling of doubt.. About anything.