I like this a lot and I’ve occasionally included this. This came out of experiences where players clearly felt uncomfortable what a game was asking them to do… and often a discomfort because it was just a thing not in their wheelhouse; like scene framing, for instance.
Regarding the categories, I think they are good for reflection. For me they all tend to end up to revert back to “what play will demand”.
So when thinking about what else beyond CATS you should be mention to set the right expectations, I like this list (but I wouldn’t extend the acronym by each of those categories).
When I have done this, it was usually to indicate that a game specifically demands something of its players for it to work.
I can add some examples (CATS context shortened).
Here for Songs for the Dusk (version from December):
Concept: Songs for the Dusk is […] about a crew of brave and compassionate adventurers exploring the ruins of a broken world and building a new world from the ruins of an old one. There are mysteries[…]
Aim: We play to find out if the crew can truly build something good and kind among the teeming threats of warring factions, tyrant monarchs, […]
Tone: This is an optimistic, hopeful game about […]
Subject Matter: In Songs for the Dusk, magical realism, post-utopia, afrofuturism, […]
Play: Songs for the Dusk is still in development, and it is Forged in the Dark.
While the text covers all the major points, is very fleshed out and Forged in the Dark games tend to be very robust in their base mechanics, we might run into situations where we need to find our own solutions and/or later revise rules/rulings, or adapt to a newer version.
We will work together to make sense of this in the fiction.
And the game is a Forged in the Dark, so it build on what Blades in the Dark and Scum & Villainy have done. While it is very different in tone, it is very similar in the way it is played. Most importantly, everything flows from the fiction and back into it.
This means being pro-active, being curious and wanting to find out and discover in-play what your character is about is what the game works best with. It rewards switching from “behind your character’s eyes”-play to a more “writers’ room” approach and back, again, frequently.
This also means players get to ask questions, make up NPCs and frame their own scenes and be surprised by their own PCs.
Or for Vagabonds of Yoon-Suin:
Concept: You are a group of adventurers following a substantial rumor about a some cultists that have hold themselves up in a place in the abandoned Old Town, west of the Yellow City.
They are supposed to have come into possession of an Ancient Artifact that you (for whatever reason) covet.
Aim: We play to find out if these adventurers can retrieve the artifact, how they will handle the cultists and if they can make their way out of Old Town with the prize and/or their lives.
We are also trying out Vagabonds of Dyfed and how it could be used in a typical sandbox setting, in this case with Yoon-Suin: The Purple Land.
Tone: Typical hapless but savvy and capable adventurers exploring, conniving and fighting their way through dangers. Lots of random tables that will inform and inspire moment to moment play.
Yoon-Suin is a setting that is heavily south-eastern Asian inspired that leaves a lot of the details vague and to be determined by the group instead of presenting elements as straight real life analogies. It’s like how D&D is inspired by western myths.
Subject Matter: Cults and possessed people. Potentially unethical motivations in the PCs. Strange and unusual (for western fantasy) monsters. Fantasy fighting and the violence associated with it. Grave robbing. Greed. Death. Also potentially: opium and tea.
Play: Vagabonds of Dyfed is designed to facilitate a fiction-first approach to typical dungeon delving/OSR-type of content. The latter means it’s about adventures that aim to be fun by focusing on player ingenuity and an unpredictability of events. To achieve that it asks for somewhat impartial judgement and openness to unforeseen outcomes (random tables galore!).
Hearts of Wulin example (I knew I had some players that were inexperienced with PbtA and came from 5e):
Concept: In Hearts of Wulin players take the role of skilled martial artists in a world of rival clans, conspiracies, and obligations. Stories will be driven by the characters’ duties,romantic desires, and entanglements with other characters.Everyone has ties to factions, loves they can’t quite express, and secrets which will shake them to their core.
Aim: We play to explore this melodrama and action. So, we aim at reactions and responses that are heightened; where nothing is ever simple and always something at stake.
And while there may be factions, intrigue and shady dealings as backdrop, the game is about playing to find out about the web of relationships and the conflicts therein.
Tone: By default character do wondrous things and fighting can be a conversation while otherwise drives, desires and emotions are often only spoken obliquely of.
People believe things: if it it written down it must be true, a disguise is perfect until it isn’t. Embrace sincerity.
Subject Matter: This is a fictional version of China, with the historical and cultural accuracy of a soap opera. We will be respectful of the cultures involved within the context of this heightened and fantastical space. There is a lot of fantasy martial arts and violence in-
volved and fighting is a major part of character expression.
Play: Hearts of Wulin is Powered by the Apocalypse and heavily mechanically inspired by Monsterhearts and Masks.
What this means for how it plays is that (almost) everything mechanically is supposed to flow from the fiction and back into it. So, players get to describe and roleplay their ideas out and it’s the MC’s job to call when mechanical “moves” have been triggered; we then follow their procedure and work the outcome back into the fiction. That doesn’t mean players are not welcome to be explicit about the mechanics they are trying to hit but that we will make sure how that is represented by something happening in the fiction.
These were the actual CATSP I gave out.
