Teachers and Students

In Kannagara, teaching is an important part of the game. It is a way for personae to develop, and a way for personae to help characters to develop. In addition, the relationship between teacher and student is an important one, and relationships between people are another important feature of the game. That means that Kannagara needs good rules for teaching.

There are two ways that a persona can be involved in teaching: as the teacher, and as the student. In theory, we could use the same rules for both, but at the moment I would prefer not to. Having someone keep track of experience points for all characters is likely to be too big a burden, and characters cannot use the same advancement rules as personae anyway, as they do not have much opportunity to do things that are important to the personae’s narrative. So, at least to start with, I will create different rules for the two situations, and in this post I want to consider what happens when the persona is the student.

First, a teacher is a source of study, and as such has the same statistics as a book: experience point bonuses, elements he can teach, details of content, and features. However, a teacher is also a human being, and so the persona should be building a relationship with her teacher.

This could, of course, be a central part of the story, involving all the personae. The rules for the effects of building a relationship should certainly allow for that possibility. However, the default assumption has to be that the relationship with the teacher is part of the background of a single persona, and that while she might build a good relationship with her teacher, the other personae might know him as little more than a name.

This can work in two ways. First, the group could organise one-on-one sessions to deal with the relationship between the persona and her teacher. For certain groups, this might be a very useful option, while for others it might be incredibly disruptive. Therefore, this needs to be clearly possible, but also very clearly optional.

The other alternative is to have building the relationship be part of the persona’s downtime activities, but with an influence on play. For example, the persona discovers that, in order to improve her relationship with her teacher, she must do something, or learn something, and then that becomes an individual goal for that persona, one that she tries to achieve during the story. In general, there need be no secret about why she is trying to achieve something, nor need she do it alone. Indeed, it is often better if she is open and gets help, because that makes her teacher an important part of the background for everyone.

This is, you may have noticed, still very vague. This is because I have not yet discussed the rules for building and improving relationships, so I do not yet know what kind of rules go into this framework. Those rules are due for discussion soon, but there is one last point about advancement to consider first. In Kannagara, personae do not just become better at what they do, they can also completely transform themselves. How does that work?


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