thoughts on remember tomorrow

My review of Gregor Hutton's Remember Tomorrow:

Gregor Hutton’s Remember Tomorrow packs a lot of game into a small book. My copy is a mere 48 pages long, and there are plenty of pictures and tables and reference charts, making the whole book a quick read. And what you get for that quick read is a lot of cool mechanics that give you the tools to create a near-future cyberpunk story without any preplanning or long-term commitments. I keep looking for the place where the game cuts corners, but I can’t find any such place.

Let me make clear that I haven’t played the game, only read it.

The game runs without a dedicated GM. Instead, the players take turns creating scenes for the characters, and during your turn you can create one of three types of scenes. In the first type of scene, you can introduce a new PC or a new faction. Each player is responsible for a “held” PC, meaning you and you alone can play that character and drive that character to reach her goal. In addition to held PCs, players can make up additional PCs to be played by anyone in any given scene. Opposing all the PCs are various factions: organization or individuals who are trying to grow their influence in the area, who have debts to settle and favors to grant. Factions are never held, only shared. In the second type of scene, you narrate or roleplay your held PC making a deal with a faction. Your character gets to improve her situation and the faction increases its influence. In the third type of scene, you play a faction or a non-held PC trying to hurt or set back another PC. Round and round the table it goes, each player creating a new scene and playing them out.

Each character has three stats, called parameters: Ready, Willing, and Able. In addition to those stats, each PC has a motivation and a goal that they need to be ready, willing, and able to achieve. Through gameplay, the players attempt to gain successes for each of the three stats. When the third stat is ticked, the goal is accomplished. When a PC is opposed by factions and other PCs, they can have those tick marks erased, making the players not ready, unwilling, or unable to achieve their goal. If you achieve your goal, the PC is “written out” of the narrative. The player of that PC can pick up the non-held PCs and factions as play continues. The other way to get written out is if one of the character’s stats is reduced to zero. Factions don’t have R/W/A stats. Instead, they have a single stat called Influence. If a faction’s influence is reduced to zero, or if it is increased enough, the faction can be written out of play as well. The game ends after the third PC or faction is written out of play. If you get too kill happy, then the game might end before your character achieves her goal, so you have an interest in keeping the characters well enough to let you be one of the three written out characters to end the game.

For all the simplicity of play, there are a lot of cool elements to the game. While the character sheets are lean, there is plenty of heft to them to guide your roleplaying. The three tags of Identity, Motivation, and Goal go a long way to giving you a focused character, and the three parameters of ready, willing, and able, neatly define what your character is all about. The other thing on your character sheet is a list of positive and negative “Conditions.” Conditions walk a really cool line between fictional descriptors and currency, as you can remove positive conditions in order to give yourself an additional die before you roll, to allow yourself to reroll all your dice after a roll, or to increase your gains during a success. Negative conditions on your character sheet can be erased by opponents in order to lessen the measure of your victory when you win an opposed roll. You then, of course, have to work those details into the fiction, but doing so looks to be not difficult in the least.

Factions are a cool tool to join the PCs’ disparate stories together as you work with one faction and against another in intended or unintended opposition to the other players. It looks to create a dynamic set of relationships rife with excellent drama.

Edge dice are dice you earn if you win a conflict against another player while you are playing a non-held PC or a faction during a Face Off scene. Edge dice are extra dice that you can add to any roll you make, giving your character that much better a chance of success. It’s a neat reward system to encourage players to embrace the oppositional factions and make life hard for the other players.

Oh, and doubles and triples rolled cause “Crosses” to occur, which means that the next scene mush include some element or ramification from the current scene. Not only is it clever to have double and triple crosses be a thing (and it is clever), but it’s a really cool way to further ensure that the PCs' stories overlap and interact. It blows my mind because it is so simple, creates no extra work or burden on the player, and it’s a fun thing to do with something that is naturally exciting (rolling doubles and triples) anyway.

The concept of characters and factions being “written out” seems like an awesome tool too. It not only builds in an end point, but it allows for a number of stories to come to a conclusion (tragic or triumphant) while leaving a handful or threads unaddressed. In short, it creates something tidy enough to provide some closure to the narratives and messy enough to leave things to wonder about, and there is something incredibly attractive to me about that.

Other than Remember Tomorrow, the only book of Hutton’s that I have read is 3:16. From those two works, I can tell you Hutton is a fantastic writer. There is a ton of voice and flavor, but in a way that never interferes with the instructive nature of the text. The writing itself is setting and inspiration, aligning the reader with the types of stories the game is designed to tell. The tables and charts are evocative and productive without ever being dense or difficult to navigate. The lists all come in sets of 10, so if you don’t want to just pick an item from the list, you can roll for it. There is also a motif of words joined together by slashes (winner/loser, characters/factions, name/handle ,etc.) that runs throughout the book that is surprisingly cool and effective in creating a unifying look and feel.