underside dev diary #6: statless in seattle pt. 1

the first edition of underside, capes in the dark, had a stat system, mostly inherited from the 'official' (made by the creator) worm ttrpg weaverdice. ultimately, it didn't suit the game very well -- and i think D&D-style stat systems (strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc) rarely do, honestly. i'm a strong believer in information economy -- the stuff on your character sheet should be the most important stuff about your character. sometimes this is how physically strong or fast they are, but even for most tactical combat games i don't think this is really true (at least, not narratively). if you're all-in on sword-and-sorcery conan style stories where the genre conventions do tend to come down on 'strength is virtue, heroes are strong' then having 'strength' on your character sheet makes a lot of sense. 

but underside isn't about that. it's about dark and gritty cape media and in those how strong or fast you are don't matter unless they're your superpowers. your body is made of squishy meat and it doesn't matter if you're an olympic bodybuilder or a weedy dork when Titanium Man puts a fist through your torso. so i decided to take a leaf out of FATE's book and use approaches -- ways that a character interacts with the world. how 'clever' someone is is les sinteresting to me (and imo a less interesting feature of cape media) than whether they use their intelligence to solve their problems. that's what approaches represent: how your character approaches problems. 

one problem i ran into while coming up with lists is that a lot of the words i was coming up with were words that aesthetically suited a villain but not a hero, or vice vera. in the end, i resolved it by deciding to lean into that rather than try and find aesthetically neutral worlds: each of the game's eight approaches has a 'standard' name and an alternative 'heroic variant', which describes broadly the same method of problem-solving but with different connotations and aesthetic baggage. for example, while a hero who uses wits and trickery to defeat their enemies might be Smart, a villain who does the same is going to be labelled Devious. i like this approach a lot because a major theme in underside is how the lines between heroes and villains are insubstantial and amorphous -- swapping the aesthetics of a mechanic while retaining its core elements seems like a good reflection of that. 

approaches are a great tool to make character creation engaging too, because while saying 'my character has 3 strength and 4 intelligence' says very little about what they're actually like, saying 'my character is Ruthless and Aggressive' or 'my character is Patient and Devious' immediately conjure up a personality. next week's underside dev diary will go into more detail on approaches and exactly how they work, because they form the core of underside's dice pool system and the only attribute that's likely to be checked on almost every roll you make.