Shadow. Bad-Ass. Graverobber. The one thing we’re sure about: Professional Focus Achievements (PFAs) have awesome names. The majority of plot requests we receive at Dystopia Rising New York involve PFAs, as well as quite a few complaints. PFAs are some of the coolest things that can end up on your character’s sheet, and take the longest to achieve… you have to have spent at least 100 Build before you can have one, then put in a plot request. And then… to use one, you have to have an expensive piece of equipment or “be in the right place at the right time.” All this results in PFAs being a source of confusion for players and staff alike. So what is a PFA in DRNY?
A Disclaimer - No One Right Way
First, we’re just talking about PFAs in our local chapter. You might not like our approach, but we want to be clear and transparent about how we treat PFAs. Most importantly - we’re not saying “you’re wrong” if you disagree with us… there’s no one right way to use PFAs. We know that players are (rightfully) very attached to some of the PFA titles (more on that below) and want them to behave a certain way. What’s important is that we’re clear on how they behave at our game.
The Problem
PFAs are a relatively new game concept; we’ve only been playing with them for about three years. The rulebook doesn’t actually tell you what they are… pages 138 through 139 tell you how to get them, but not really what they are. The book does describe the titles associated with Professional Achievements, however:
Titles of Professional Focus Achievements are used as an honorific title related to a skill tree and the skill requirements of related equipment bonuses. They are not intended to be a literal description of any profession, title, or description can ever encompass all potential routes and mechanical design focuses an individual could use to describe a Professional Focus Achievement.
However, at the same time PFAs arrived, an older mechanic - Advanced Professions - disappeared. Advanced Professions were a mechanic you could purchase for your character that opened up unique skills: if you had an Advanced Profession, you could do things no one else could do, like perform Grave Mind procedures, raise the dead, and kill powerful undead by pointing a finger. To receive an Advanced Profession, you needed months of roleplay, with a minimum of three lessons. For most of their existence, these lessons could only be taught by NPCs, and for a time, advanced professions were extremely rare. For many, achieving an advanced profession like Grave Robber, Saint or Mercenary were long-term character goals. They’re very different from PFAs, which are really just capstones to individual skills.
But while PFAs and Advanced professions are different, they have one thing in common: the titles. Many of the old Advanced Profession titles (like the aforementioned Grave Robber, Saint, and Mercenary titles) became PFA titles. So while people remember how important those titles used to be using the old mechanics, they don’t carry the same weight under our current rules system.
Further Complications
Let’s admit a problem: Advanced Professions went away because they relied on a gatekeeping mechanic. If you met the prerequisites, you could apply for an Advanced Profession and the staff would decide if your character was worthy of it or not. While this did keep Advanced Professions rare and prestigious, it also led to bad feelings if someone was not approved. Further, there were issues of favoritism and, even worse, biases as certain professions were gatekept unfairly. When PFAs arrived, they removed the approval process: while you still have to put in the plot request, you can’t really “fail” a PFA “test.” You just have to meet the prerequisites, put in the request, and after your mod, you put it on your sheet. This effectively solves the gatekeeping problem.
However, without rarity, PFAs lack the same prestige. You don’t “earn” a PFA; you buy it like you would Mind, Body or another skill. You receive a mod not to determine if your character is “worthy” of a PFA, you go through a story to make it more enjoyable. But what about the people who remember being gatekept out of their Advanced Profession, or never had a chance to achieve that goal, and remember what it meant to have one of those Advanced Profession titles? This introduces a new problem: the PFA title doesn’t match player expectations of what that title means.
So What Does A PFA Mean (and Do)?
The best way to approach a PFA in DRNY is to treat it exactly as it behaves mechanically: it means your character has achieved a certain level of skill and knows how to use specific pieces of equipment more efficiently. It doesn’t mean you’re inherently better at anything than other characters without the PFA.
For example, the Shadow PFA allows players to use certain Stealth related items more effectively: with the right items, they can stay in disguise longer and use “Never Here” more advantageously. It also signifies they’ve achieved a certain level of skill at Stealth, and suggests this may be a focus for their character. However, it doesn’t make them “more stealthy” than other characters, or mean they should automatically succeed at Stealth mods.
But what about the ability to use PFAs in specific plots? Storytellers can design scenarios to include a special opportunity for specific PFAs to stand out with unique mechanics. While we do try to do this in DRNY, the numbers make this impossible - we have about 150 active players in the database, and well over 200 PFAs to account for. Further, this number is heavily skewed: at our last game, we have more than a dozen Shadows (23), Veterans (20), Mercenaries (20), Graverobbers (16), Assassins (16), Flankers (15), Bone Breakers (14) and Inner Circle (13). Even if we include special mechanics for PFAs in our mods, with these numbers, the mechanic has to be something multiple people can enjoy, as opposed an overwhelming advantage one person can use to “win” the mod.
Big Picture: The Game Has Changed
It’s been three years since we introduced PFAs… the majority of our players never had an Advanced Profession, and at least 20% of them never played with those mechanics. However, when the rules changed, we didn’t emphasize the change enough, and some perceptions bleed over into how we think about PFAs. In human factors engineering, there’s a concept of negative transfer - where you take previous expertise in a situation, and apply it to a new situation where your expertise doesn’t quite fit. We have to remember not to apply negative transfer to our mechanics… a PFA is a cool title you can add to your sheet, and while it can be very important to you as a player, it doesn’t fundamentally change how your character interacts with the game as a whole.