Sunday, September 25, 2022

Foreground Growth and Dialectical Growth

I’ve been catching up with posts on foreground growth at Bastionland.com. Foreground growth is an alternative take on character development put to work in RPGs such as Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland and Cairn. It’s a principle I'm finding dovetails nicely with a materialist approach to gaming, serving to ground character development within the gameworld.

Foreground growth seeks to subvert the abstract style of class advancement you get in D&D. Instead of a magical metamorphosis occurring in downtime, development of your character is based on events in-play. For any character ability, players should be able to relay a story from a game session that explains its origin.

There is a good illustration of this in Cairn’s FAQs, in an extended descriptive example of gameplay. An unexpected encounter with a patch of bioluminescent water leaves a character with a foot that glows in the dark. This somewhat dubious ability isn’t found in a shopping list at the back of Cairn’s rule book, but emerges in the context of an adventure.

Fear my glowing leg