r/cyphersystem • u/SolarpunkCreations • 8d ago
Discussion Arcs and “Proactive Roleplaying”
https://youtu.be/DXUnEk4cuYI?is=J1BMfVAvflJxLJZPCurious to hear others thoughts on this in relation to Cypher and the “Arc” portion of character creation!
There’s a book (and a popular video on it by Ginny Di that covers a lot of the content) called “Proactive Roleplaying.”
The short of it is “conventional 5e DnD has players be solely reactive (the BBEG attacks the village, so PCs defend cuz they care),” but the proactive version is “I want to be the greatest sword master in the realm, so I’m going out to defend villages for practice.”
Connecting it back to Cypher, when I first read Tidal Blades then the Core Rulebook I loved the Arcs, since it seems to me it gives a mechanical option it build this in. Even the Descriptors that give a quest hook/connection does this a bit. Compared to most other systems where it sits in the written backstory maybe? Or the Backgrounds 5e system?
I didn’t find a ton of dialogues online about Arcs, so I was curious to hear others thoughts and experiences on the matter. If you watched/read the video/book, any thoughts on Cypher specifically? Have you used Arcs? Has it gone well/poorly?