While discussing the Ghost Punchers roleplaying game last week, our discussion of how ghosts fight back against the living delved deep into a rabbit hole of potential game mechanics and how they all work together. (And then I vanished down a rabbit hole of pastel ponies, from which I am just now emerging.) So now that we’ve seen how the rules can handle spectral violence, let’s look at how the rules should handle such things.
Essence
First, it’s important to understand that each ghost has a pool of Essence points. Essence is the supernatural fuel that ghosts spend to keep themselves from vanishing into their final reward. They can also spend it to activate certain powers and abilities, or make those things more powerful.
To gain Essence, ghosts have to drain life force from humans — or, in the vernacular, go haunt some fleshies. This is an opposed Spirit roll between the ghost and its victim. On a success, the ghost adds a point to its Essence pool and the victim takes a level of Fatigue (it takes a day to recover this Fatigue level). On a raise, the ghost also creates a “drain link” with the victim, and all subsequent drain rolls against this victim receive a +2 bonus.
Crossing Over
In order to touch the world of flesh, a ghost must first make a Spirit roll or spend a point of Essence. (This might be easier or harder depending on where the ghost is located.) Once the ghost has done so, it has one round to push, pull, or punch the world around it before going ethereal again.
The exception is when facing those who have used the Enchanted Fist power (i.e., ghost punchers). Since those with this power activated are able to interact with the spirit world, the spirit world can interact with them — “interact with” in this case meaning “make an attack against” — without making a roll or spending Essence. The ghost doesn’t have to cross over to the physical realm to punch the punchers; the punchers are already here on the spirit side.
Essentially Done?
The core of the ghost experience is Essence, and we’ve just scratched the surface of what can be done with it, mechanics-wise. But surface-deep is all we need to to put a playtest together, so I’m going to leave it dangling there, like a sparking power line hanging from a tree after a storm, and get back to it later.
