Investigators’ Truth in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
We have mentioned before on this blog when talking about Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy that in Eureka roleplay is mechanics-driven and mechanics are roleplay-driven, but what does that mean?
The short version is that when making your PC, you put things on their character sheet that give bonuses when they act in a way that is consistent with their intended characterization.
One of these elements is called a character’s Truth. Every Eureka PC has a Truth, and they may even have multiple Truths. A Truth can even change as a result of events in the campaign.
A character’s Truth is some strong element of their personality or beliefs that is likely to spur them into action, get them into trouble, or both. It is not necessarily a flaw, but it easily can be, as one of the main purposes of it is to encourage and reward players for letting their characters screw up.
When playing a video game or a TTRPG, it’s often very easy to sit back and think out every problem and approach them perfectly logically, especially when time usually pauses as you discuss the next move among the other players at the table. But if every character in a movie or book or any other story always made the most perfectly logical decision, that would probably be a pretty boring story, and it certainly wouldn’t be a very realistic story. People don't always make the most logical decisions in real life.
However, when playing a game, it can feel like “losing” to intentionally make a character make a decision that you, in your logical detached mind, know will probably not work out well for them in the long run. Eureka argues that this is not “losing”, and that this is actually exactly how Eureka is supposed to go. To encourage this, we added the Truth mechanic.
Like I said before, Truth is not exactly a flaw, just some part of the character’s personality or beliefs that would spur them to action or get them into trouble. It could be a hot temper, a need to always have the last word, an overly competitive nature, a love of violence, or a compulsion to lie, but it could also be a strong desire to selflessly protect others, or the trust that one’s fellow man are inherently good.
Whatever it is, when a character acts within the parameters of their Truth, they get a +1 to the dice roll for whatever it is they’re doing, or whatever dice roll results from them acting in their Truth.
This doesn’t mean that a character acting within their Truth is always the worst course of action on their part, sometimes emotional gut decisions do turn out to be right. Maybe a character whose Truth is somehow based around trusting others is right to lower their weapon, because the monster might be just as scared of them as they are of him, and that +1 Truth Bonus is going to come in handy in the resulting Comfort roll to try and de-escalate the situation—or maybe they’re completely wrong and the monster was just waiting for an opportunity to seize the upper hand, and that +1 Truth Bonus is instead going to be used on an Athletics roll to run like hell.
This also doesn’t mean that a character always has to act within their Truth, no one realistically reacts the exact same way to every situation, and we do not encourage GMs to push or punish players if their characters do not act within their Truth, but Truth helps reward realistic, in-character behavior from the PCs.
In this way, the rules/mechanics of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy are tied directly to the roleplay of the character, and the roleplay of the character is encouraged and supported by the rules/mechanics.
Stay tuned for another post about a way that in-character roleplay and rules/mechanics are intertwined with the Traits system.
