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When I first read character creation rules for Keystone, I have to say, I was a little lost. A lot of ideas of efficiency and specialization were wrapped up in this weird terminology involving colors and shapes.
Now, weird terminology is all relative. 3d6+2d8+4 is pretty weird terminology, but most people reading this get it, no problem. But shapes and colors just seemed so abstract. Sure, they map out to dice and bonuses and rules, but why not just write out typical dice roll equations, or give them names?
It wasn’t until a little later, when reading another section, when it started to click for me. These shapes and colors actually kind of worked, because I didn’t bring meaning to them already. I started to think of [triangle] as a adjective that had meaning about success, reliability, and outcomes. It wasn’t an overloaded english word, like Fudge’s Superb, Great, Good, Fair, etc. It wasn’t dry numbers, like 3d6.
In the current text, that’s a little hard to get, but explained well? That’s a powerful thing.
In fact, it’s pretty much exactly what Burning Wheel does. The Shade of an ability in BW (Black, Grey, White) becomes a short hand for describing things. It’s a little more like common english than Keystone’s shapes, but it serves a similar purpose. If one BW player says to another that something’s White shade, that means something, just like if a Keystone player said to another that they had a [triangle] in something.
One of the things I always admired about the White Wolf character sheet is that you could look at it and quickly get some ideas about that character. They way the dots cascaded and where those dots were, told you a good deal about what the character was about and what kind of tough customer he was. One think I like about the Color/Shape thing is that on the character sheet you can clearly see how far the character is along their journey and what kind of conflicts that character/player wants to engage in. If as a Director I see alot of Red and some filled in shapes, I have a person who wants to be in the thick of action and is a capable individual who has hit some Milestones and made some tough choices. If I see a lot of greens I may have a character who wants a more intellectual scene, filled with the careful cultivation of information to use to summon an extra planar being, to discover the designs of the Bane.
The Colors/Shape dynamic walks a very fine line between useful and technical jargon. For some it will fall flat into useless coding, and that stinks, but for some folks that’s true of anything that isn’t a d20 centric system, or a dice pool mechanic. I think some people in gaming believe numerical representations for everything is the easiest route, because they are numerical people. Were I effortlessly fluent in musical notation, perhaps the easiest way for me to grog a combination of mood and capability would be to stat out characters using a muscial staff. For me, I think symbols, shapes, and colors do speak to certain people better than a string of numbers, and that was something I wanted to look at in Keystone. I think it’ll be important when writing a first chapter (the current version skips right the chapter two), to prepare the reader from what is to come and how to use it.