Yearbooks in Disgrace

First Day of the Rest of Your School Year

The first thing you notice is that the school is laid out like a labyrinth in a video game: Huge passageways, multiple levels, and monsters, lots of them. Not actual monsters. Not orcs or dragons. But there are bullies, stressed-out teachers with a grudge against freshmen, and you could swear that you saw the vice-principal breathe a little fire. 

Yeah, that’s it. Laugh a little. It’s just high school, first day. Mom got you up early and gave you the whole speech about how you needed to do better. “Come back with your shield or on it,” or something like that. And not just better than you did in middle school, and not just better than her, or dad, but better than anyone else in your entire family has ever done, at anything. Because if you don’t do better, you are just going to be another miserable-slacker-loser in a family full of them. 

By better, of course, Mom meant good grades culminating in a scholarship and a career that makes real money. Breakfast was not the right time to tell her about your dreams. It never is. The last time you tried, she told you she couldn’t afford them, and that you couldn’t either.

You find your class, and you sit down. Your teacher, in his forties, is desperately young. He smiles a lot, talks quickly, and bounces around the classroom. He tells the class about his band, which plays less and less since he’s a math teacher. And then he starts the lesson. You like him and pity him at the same time. Is this what Mom wants for you? If you had his sad life, would that make her happy? 

Sorry, Mom, not me. 

Overview

Yearbooks in Disgrace  is a role-playing game about teenagers and the pain, joy, and growth that teenagers experience. It is meant to evoke such films as Easy A or The Fault in Our Stars and television shows such as Everybody Hates Chris or Freaks and Geeks. In Yearbooks in Disgrace, most of your group will consist of players, each of whom has a teenage character with talent both actual and potential and some real problems too. One of you will be the game master (GM), the person who will create and run scenarios for your characters that let those talents shine and develop (or not) and test and overcome the problems (or not). 

Setting 
The default setting of Yearbooks in Disgrace is an era, neighborhood, and high school with which you would feel familiar. So if you and your friends graduated nearly 30 years ago from a public math-science magnet school in a poor neighborhood (like I did), that would be your default setting. But suppose that you are of different ages, went to different schools, want to play in different eras, and so on? The best move is to let everyone who cares (some of us are happy just to play, after all) contribute to the setting. If one person seems to care more than everyone else, that person should likely be the GM. 

Character Creation
Your character is assumed to be a new freshman at the start of a new school year. You should decide on a name, gender, race, overall general appearance, and some parts of your background such as friends, family, hobbies, unrequited loves, and so on, and you must roll for the following abilities:

•	Academics -- This is your ability to succeed at schoolwork, though this is not necessarily reflective of your intelligence.
•	Status -- This is your ability to be respected for your achievements, to be forgiven for your mistakes, and to simply be admired.
•	Vitality -- This is a combination of strength and coordination. 
•	Individuality -- Your ability to think and act for yourself. It is used for any activity that is personally important to you or to defy anyone who attempts to make you conform to their standards. 

Roll 1d6 for each of these abilities and record the score. A score of 1 is poor, and a score of 6 is excellent, making you one of the elite in that ability at the school.

Since these rolls are all random, it is possible to end up with a character whose scores are objectively terrible. I really suggest that you play whatever scores you get, no matter how good or how bad. If you think about all those high school stories, there are always characters who don’t fit in, who would have lots of low scores if they were statted in this game, but who were sympathetic anyway. And I know some people who, in real life, would have had lots of low scores too, but who have grown high school measurements. Those are interesting characters and people, at least as interesting as the prom queen valedictorian.

Playing the Game

Your GM will put certain obstacles in your way, such as a bully, a new time-wasting hobby, an argument between your parents that spills over and affects you, and so on. Usually these obstacles will be based on your abilities and background or on the setting. In addition, you may certainly decide to focus on something that you want to achieve or improve. 

Common themes will be fitting in, being good enough, making friends, and dealing with authority. Basically anything you had angst about in school or gave other people grief for (statistically speaking if you’re playing this game you were the teased and not the teaser, but we take all kinds here). 

Your GM should pit your friends, family, fun, work, and school against each other. You can’t do everything or be everything to everyone. Something has to give. You have to decide what is important to you, and try to juggle everything else. 

When you attempt something, your GM will assign a difficulty of 2 (very easy) to 7 (very difficult), or rarely, more than 7. If you roll against another player-character (PC), you simply roll against each other, and the high roll wins. Whether you roll against a situation, a non-player character (NPC), or a PC, you roll 1d6 + an appropriate ability score. If you are in an advantageous position, you roll 2d6 and then add your ability score; similarly, if you are at a disadvantage, you roll 1d6-1d6 and then add your ability score.

Advantage and disadvantage are usually the result of effort or lack of effort. You will have advantage on an Academics roll to pass a test, for example, if you have studied for it. Sometimes cleverness can also give advantage, and a poor choice can lead to disadvantage. For example, you decide to ask the couple for whom you babysit for a raise, but in doing so, you point out the shortcomings of their children, and they feel insulted, resulting in a disadvantage on the Status roll to ask for your raise. Finally, you can receive help from someone else in order to gain advantage on a roll. Similarly, someone can attempt to interfere with you, thus giving you disadvantage. Attempting to help or hinder someone else does require a roll. It is not automatic.

There are limits to how much effort you can put into different areas. The GM is within his rights to ask for a roll, even a hard one, when you try to spread yourself too thin. In general, the better you are at something, the easier it is to prepare. In a sense, you have done a lot of preparation for it previously. Conversely, the worse you are at something, the more difficult it is to prepare.

It is possible that a particular roll might be impossible or automatically successful. 

Success and Failure

Each time that your character succeeds or fails at a task, note that success or failure as well as the ability score that was used to make the roll. 

Once you have accumulated four successes or four failures in an ability, erase all success and failure marks for that ability, and either increase that ability by 1, in the case of a success, or decrease it by 1, in the case of failure. 

If you attempt to increase an ability score beyond 6, you earn a level for that ability as well as a score for that level, starting at 1. The level indicates against whom you are fair competition, or how well known you are, or both. The new score indicates your expertise at the new level. If you have a level, you also have all of the previous levels, and you always roll at advantage against someone of lower level or no level, and against those opponents, your score is a 6.
The levels are listed below:

•	County 
•	Regional 
•	State 
•	National
•	International

If you have a level, then the ability score is written like this: Level + Score. For example, a gifted soccer player known statewide might have a Vitality of State 4. Against other State-level players, that character’s score is a 4, but against a County player, the State-level character has a score of 6 and rolls at advantage. If your score for a particular level is 1, and you accumulate 4 failures, you drop down a level, and your new score is 6. Scores attached to levels are harder to improve: It takes 8 successes to improve the score of a particular level, not 4. Accumulating 4 failures will still drop your score by 1.

If an ability falls to 0,, you are in danger of leaving the game due to expulsion, depression, poor health, an act of violence, a run-in with the law, or some other reason altogether, or any combination of reasons. The next game session should be about your attempt to stay, to improve that 0 to 1 by accumulating four successes in that ability before you accumulate four failures. If you fail to improve your ability, your character leaves the game and you may make a new character. 

If you would decrease a score, you can instead attempt to deflect the loss. The various methods are listed below. If you succeed, you do not lose the point, but your success and failure marks for that ability are still erased:

•	Share the pain: Pick another player-character (PC), and make sure that the other PC get some negative attention too. Point out his or her flaws or mistakes or lapses of judgment or betrayals, real or imagined. This is an opposed Status roll or possibly a Vitality roll if you attempt to physically bully the other PC. Whether you succeed or fail, you gain a failure mark in Individuality and Status, which are noted last, after any marks have been erased. As a group you may want to ban this move, but I would suggest keeping it if you can handle it.
•	Share the folly: Similar to the above, except that in case, you attempt to make the other PC a co-conspirator. This is a matter of negotiation, not rolls. Whether you succeed or fail, you gain a failure mark in Individuality and Status, which are noted last, after any marks have been erased.
•	Hurt yourself: You starve yourself, or you cut yourself, or you start abusing drugs, etc…This requires no roll. You gain a failure mark in Individuality and Vitality, which are noted last, after any marks have been erased.
•	Become obsessed: This one can be dangerous because it is so subtle. You become obsessed with something that is a seeming good, such as your relationship or your schoolwork.  This requires no roll. You gain a failure mark in Individuality, which is noted last, after any marks have been erased.

About Trigger Warnings and X-Cards:

This game does not have a trigger warning. I do mention some unpleasant things, but I do not go into detail. However, I expect that the game will be mild compared to what could happen in play, so I suggest that you use trigger warnings and John Stavropoulos’s X-cards. You can go to this address for more details:.  http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg

In short, X-cards are a way to make the game enjoyable for everyone. The GM places an index card with an X at the center of the table, and let’s everyone know that they can touch (or even simply point to) the card anytime they like to make the current subject off-limits. There is no discussion necessary, no judgment. This system takes into account the improvisational nature of role-playing games. You can’t really predict what will happen in the game, so trigger warnings, while useful, are also by the nature of RPGs incomplete.

And although the seriousness of this seems to indicate that it would only be used for weighty topics, and it can also be used if someone introduces something ridiculous such as “a modern realistic horror game [in which] someone introduced funny elves” (John Stavropoulos).

For those of you uncomfortable with such measures, I ask for your indulgence. Like you, I am not easily offended, so if anyone did something so strange or vile that it forced me to press the X-card, I would likely simply not play with that person again. But I am lucky, and so are you. Some of our fellow players are not so lucky.