Game Play Principles

These principles are part of the Incarnaverse™ perspective. They are ours, and may not reflect your own or your group in all ways. They are intended to explain the design and development approach of the materials around the Infinite Incarnations™ (“Incarna”) game materials.

Abbreviated Principles:

Social Fun: We believe gaming should be a social event and ultimately your biggest expectation should be to have fun; If all you want to use is your imagination, you can read any number of books. When people get together and share the gaming experience, it is often far more rich, memorable, and interesting than any single person’s imagination. Expectations and experience will be different for everyone – each person can have different reactions to situations that come up during the play.

Group Cooperation: Tries to foster a positive collaborative group experience instead of a competitive one (unless the competition is key to the story). Success in shared endeavors and common goals binds a group together. Mechanics should do as much as possible to enhance the levels of character interdependence that many systems have introduced beforehand.

Character Challenge: Additionally, we have found that players who challenge themselves – choosing to play within limitations, who see risk and character death seriously – will have the most fulfilling time. Knowing your character cannot die tends to promote power-gaming and cheapens the satisfaction of solving puzzles and surviving the scenarios the GM provides.

Advancement on Story: Incarna™ gameplay was conceived around an overall slower and more precise advancement with capability based on individual skills, traits, and feature development. Ideally, the Game Master determines when the characters advance based on story milestones and way points (see 5E DMG p.261) that are tailored to their characters and the adventures they are undertaking. Most Incarna™ adventures are written for a middle range of character capability, so that they can easily be modified to make them scale for different challenge levels. However, epic actions are encouraged through limited use bonuses – characters must be judicious in their use.