Schema
Alex dives into the Schema system, another "adaptable" TTRPG System.
Another generic system, you say? Say it isn't so!
It's not so! Don't take my word for it, take a look at what Schema has to say for itself:
Schema is described as an engine rather than as a game because it is intended for tinkering and fitting to your group and your setting. It's not 'generic' or all-purpose, but it is adaptable. - Schema Rulebook, 2022a, p. 3
I think that's a very fair assessment of what the game is and what it means. Schema is a fun little weird system that's built around Fudge (Fate) die and spending the pluses and minuses for effect.
Let's dive right in.
Background and System
Schema was created by Levi Kornelsen available along with a companion setting, Skinchangers. It has a lot of interesting features about it that we're going to talk about in short order.
I'm using the 2022a version of the rule book as that's the version we used for our campaign, which is Iteration 7. The latest version on Itch.io is 7.1, which added some more exposition around condition clusters.
The playtester list includes Jason Tocci of 2400/24XX fame. That's also cool.
The book itself is a modest affair, with clean typography and a unique vector line-art style for the graphics. Levi did all the artwork in the book, and his style is present in a lot of his other games. I love how expressive some characters look with nothing but lines of varying color and thickness to represent them, it's both really clean and technically impressive. In short, they're great.
It's not particularly lengthy, only clocking in at 61 pages, and the majority of those are examples for how to use the various mechanics. The "core" portion of the game is the first half of the book, with supplemental rules taking up the back half of it.
The writing is clear and understandable; I didn't have any trouble understanding the mechanics (I hope) when going through the book.
The Dice Mechanic
As I mentioned before the basic dice mechanic consists of building a pool of fudge dice based on your skills and abilities and then rolling those dice. For each die that comes up a + you gain an "Augment", and for each — you may cancel a "Danger" (which the GM will have put in your way). You get a certain number of re-rolls based on your approach, luck, and a few other factors letting you re-roll some dice to try to get more + or -, depending.
Ultimately, you're liable to get what you want from a roll, but it's going to cost you a variable amount depending on how difficult and dangerous the action you're attempting actually is. Once you've exhausted your re-rolls, have cancelled out the dangers, and purchased augments, the GM narrates the outcome and continues with play.
This is a fairly unique dice mechanic, and it takes a bit of practice to get it right. Fortunately there are several examples in the book, and eventually you'll get the hang of it. The biggest challenge to overcome is for the GM: just how many dangers do you want to include on a roll, and what does that do to the overall difficulty? It can be really hard to get a feel for just how much danger the character is until you've done it a few … dozen (?) times.
On dangers and augments
This is worth digging into in its own section, dangers are the primary way that you make a roll exciting and reward cautious (or bold) actions. So what is a danger, specifically?
So, there are some pretty obvious dangers: Injury, for one, represents your character getting hurt. You can stack multiple dangers on a single roll, so you can do something like Injury 3 which means that for every injury you do not negate you'll take a point of damage. Take too many and your character is dead. Likewise, one of the book's examples shows a situation with 7 injury, which is immediately fatal if not countered.
There are also less direct dangers, like Menace: which represents something akin to some Powered by the Apocalypse games where you have a front or advance a "bad/doom clock", it means that some off screen danger or NPC will become more of a direct antagonist (for example).
In all, there are 10 dangers represented in Schema along with 10 Augments, but you're free to make more if you choose. Generally, you don't need to do that, but as a good example of why you might: one of my friends ran a Schema hack of Mage: The Ascension, and one of the dangers she included was "Paradox" to directly represent the paradox track from the White Wolf game. That was a solid inclusion. That could have been represented with Injury or Affliction, but since Paradox is a pretty ubiquitous thing in Mage it made sense to have its own danger.
Augments are the opposite of dangers. During a challenge the GM can either include some suggested augments when they set the stakes, or leave it wide open for the player to add some so long as it makes sense to do so.
Augments include things like Efficacy, which makes your action work better for each time you take it and Duration, which can extend or shorten (as appropriate) the result.
You have a lot to work with when setting the stakes, which is awesome, but it can also bog down the game if you don't already have a good sense of what the stakes of an action would be. You have to practice adding dangers on the fly and have a good set of reference materials ready, or it might take several minutes to come up with the right consequences. I know, I've seen this happen.
Storytelling support, design elements
Schema also includes a bit of storytelling support in the form of a metacurrency: Luck, and a character descriptor called Cues. Cues remind me a bit of Fate Aspects, where they're a description of both the character and the stuff you'd like the other players to interact with. The book gives the following as one example:
"Burning eyes in black armour, fearsome in all ways" is prompting others to approach with trepidation or defiance, and likely to treat their character as inhuman. - Schema, p. 18
Whenever a player acts on the information in a cue, in the previous example perhaps being unnerved by the other character, they are awarded a luck token. Luck tokens are used to power abilities or to augment rolls (including the option to not re-roll dice if your first roll comes up well).
This, like Fate aspects, encourages the players to work them into the ongoing narrative but unlike Fate it doesn't tie them as directly to the dice mechanic (the Luck tokens become decoupled from the roll by the time they're used). It's reasonably elegant in its design, and the more I sit with it the more I enjoy having the token decoupled.
Other Stuff
The only other thing I want to call out in this post are "Condition Clusters", which are highly variable depending on what kind of game you're playing. The first one Schema talks about is the Injury condition cluster, which is represented (in an example setting) as Hurt 1, 2, 3 ⇒ Injured 1, 2, 3 ⇒ Dead. Meaning, when you take a 4th Injury, you move into the "Injured" category and take a -1 die penalty to all rolls. If you roll over past Injured 3, you're dead. At each of the inflection points (Hurt to Injured or Injured to Dead) the player may instead take a condition of Unconscious or Comatose, respectively. But if they forgo that opportunity they will ultimately be risking death.
You can also use this to model Social consequence, or any other consequence track. In the Mage game I mentioned, we had "mental" consequence tracks for the psychological and cosmic horrors we were encountering called Confusion 1, 2, 3, Otherness 1, 2, 3, and Corruption 1, 2, 3 each representing different things.
Thoughts and Wrap Up
Overall I think the way Schema plays winds up being pretty great, except for getting stuck on making rolls feel smooth with good narrative consequences. Many times during that Mage game, we wound up stuck for a good several minutes coming up with what the best consequences would be. Likewise, we became a bit allergic to taking paradox / corruption, so we always wound up trying to bend our spell casting to our specialties instead of thinking outside the box.
It's a tough balance to strike, but I think with some more refinement we could have gotten to the point where we were taking more risks with spell casting. That Mage hack was the only Schema game I've played in (though I've modeled how I'd run a few different settings for fun), and I had a blast with it for many months of gameplay.
If you want to check out Schema it's available as a PWYW on Itch and 0.00 PDF on DriveThruRPG (and available as Print on Demand from them).
