Dark Provinces: HEXACO, The Six Dimensions of Action

The Six Dimensions of Action

H — HONESTY–HUMILITY

Honesty–Humility governs sincerity, fairness, modesty, and resistance to greed. It shapes how characters treat shared resources, promises, authority, and advantage.

Adaptive q expressions represent integrity, transparency, and self‑restraint. Characters expressing adaptive Honesty–Humility stabilize trust, prevent exploitation, and protect the group’s moral footing—even when doing so costs them power or reward.

Expedient p expressions reflect manipulation, entitlement, exploitation, or performative virtue. These choices offer fast gains—loot, leverage, or glory—but erode trust and reputation. In Dark Provinces, exploitation rarely stays contained; one unfair success can destabilize an entire group.

E — EMOTIONALITY

Emotionality governs fearfulness, anxiety, dependence, and empathy. It shapes how characters react to danger, loss, and sustained strain.

Adaptive q expressions represent emotional awareness, caution, empathy, and mutual support. These traits help groups survive fear without denying it—allowing careful responses, shared burden, and protection of the vulnerable.

Expedient p expressions include panic spirals, emotional withdrawal, catastrophizing, or numb detachment. They often produce psychological self-protection, urgency or decisiveness, but at the cost of spreading stress. Fear becomes contagious; detachment isolates those who need support most.

X — EXTRAVERSION

Extraversion governs confidence, sociability, boldness, and visibility. It determines who steps forward, who speaks first, and who sets the tempo of action.

Adaptive q expressions represent leadership, morale‑building, and coordination. These traits focus attention, clarify direction, and transform chaos into motion.

Expedient p expressions reflect showboating, dominance, recklessness, or attention‑seeking. They may seize control or accelerate outcomes—but often fracture coordination, silence quieter voices, or draw unnecessary danger toward the group.

A — AGREEABLENESS

Agreeableness governs patience, forgiveness, gentleness, and tolerance. It shapes how characters respond to friction, grievance, and disagreement.

Adaptive q expressions represent diplomacy, restraint, and de‑escalation. These traits preserve cooperation, absorb shock, and allow groups to recover from mistakes without tearing themselves apart.

Expedient p expressions include resentment, pettiness, passive aggression, or sudden cruelty. These reactions often feel justified, but they convert internal pressure into open fracture.

C — CONSCIENTIOUSNESS

Conscientiousness governs discipline, foresight, structure, and precision. It determines how carefully plans are made and how reliably they are executed.

Adaptive q expressions represent diligence, preparation, and reliability. These traits enable complex coordination, mitigate environmental threats, and prevent cascading failure.

Expedient p expressions include rigidity, micromanagement, tunnel vision, or reckless shortcuts taken "for efficiency." They can boost immediate results, but introduce brittleness—systems that collapse the moment reality deviates.

O — OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE

Openness governs curiosity, imagination, intuition, and tolerance for ambiguity. It shapes how characters engage with the unfamiliar and the unknowable.

Adaptive q expressions represent insight, creativity, lateral thinking, and pattern recognition. These traits unlock solutions others miss and enable adaptation when conventional methods fail.

Expedient p expressions include over‑interpretation, magical thinking, distraction, or detachment from shared reality. Insight becomes obsession; creativity becomes incoherence. The group imagines it gains flashes of insight while losing clarity and consensus.

Playing People, Not Stat Blocks

In Dark Provinces: Broken Waters, personality is not flavor text—it is the engine of play.

Your HEXACO traits determine how you cooperate, how you fracture, and how your group survives pressure over time. Stress does not merely punish; it reveals.

Who do you become when cooperation is costly, truth is dangerous, and every success carries a price?

Leadership In Role-Playing Games: Dark Provinces

 

Leadership in Dark Provinces is not a position of permanent authority, superior competence, or social dominance. Instead, leadership is treated as a form of legitimized influence exercised under conditions of uncertainty, scarcity, competing priorities, and incomplete information. The game draws inspiration from Adaptive Leadership, a leadership framework developed by Ronald Heifetz and later expanded with Marty Linsky at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Adaptive Leadership proposes that leadership is not primarily the act of providing answers or directing followers. Rather, leadership involves helping groups confront difficult realities, navigate competing values, distribute unavoidable sacrifices, and remain functional while tackling problems for which no perfect solution exists. Leadership is therefore understood as a process rather than a status, and every player in Dark Provinces is expected to experience both leadership and followership throughout the campaign.

This philosophy is reflected directly in the game's mechanics. The Leader role rotates continuously, ensuring that no individual permanently controls the group. However, the Leader role is not always available. Trust serves as the game's measure of social legitimacy. Players whose Trust falls below -3 are ineligible to act as Leader, regardless of how many cards, resources, or personal rewards they possess. In this way, the game distinguishes between authority and legitimacy. A player may be individually successful while simultaneously becoming less capable of influencing collective decisions if they have lost the confidence of the group.

The Leader possesses several important powers during play:

• Chooses the party's next destination and therefore helps determine which Challenge the group will face next.
• Commits the initial HEXACO Trait Card around which the group may organize its response to the Challenge.
• Proposes the initial interpretation of the problem and guides discussion during the planning phase.
• Breaks ties when necessary.
• Distributes Loot earned from successful Challenges.
• Serves as the focal point for numerous Trait Card effects, synergies, penalties, Trust adjustments, and Stress effects.
• After a successful Challenge, the Leader may grant +1 Glory, +1 Trust, or −1 Stress to a single player, whether that player was a Partner or a Free-Rider.

These powers represent influence, legitimacy, and responsibility rather than command authority. The Leader cannot dictate participation, determine which cards other players commit, or guarantee success. Instead, the Leader helps determine which problems are confronted, how those problems are framed, and how the group's limited resources are distributed.

Leadership is also deeply connected to the game's HEXACO-based Trait Card system. Trait Cards do not represent skills, abilities, or professions. They represent behavioral approaches to solving problems under pressure. Every Challenge asks players to decide not only whether they will participate, but how they will approach the situation. The Leader's initial Trait Card therefore acts as a form of problem framing. An Honesty–Humility approach may emphasize fairness, legitimacy, and transparency. An Emotionality approach may emphasize caution, protection, and mutual support. An Extraversion approach may emphasize confidence, momentum, and coordination. An Agreeableness approach may emphasize cooperation and de-escalation. A Conscientiousness approach may emphasize structure, planning, and reliability. An Openness approach may emphasize creativity, adaptation, and discovery. Different situations reward different approaches, reinforcing the game's central lesson that no single HEXACO dimension is universally superior.

The Leadership Award at the end of a successful Challenge represents the Leader's ability to allocate social resources within the group. Glory represents recognition and contribution. Trust represents legitimacy and credibility. Stress relief represents recovery and future capacity. The recipient may be either a Partner or a Free-Rider because effective leadership is not simply about rewarding past contributions. Leaders must also consider future challenges, player capacity, emerging risks, and the long-term health of the group. A heavily stressed Partner approaching a Blow-Up may require immediate recovery. A player with declining Trust may need reinforcement to remain an effective contributor. A Free-Rider may warrant support because the group depends upon cards, resources, or capabilities they have preserved for future Challenges. Leadership in Dark Provinces therefore involves judgment about the allocation of scarce resources rather than the simple reward of desirable behavior.

This reflects one of Heifetz's central observations: many of the most important problems faced by groups are adaptive challenges rather than technical problems. Technical problems have known solutions and established procedures. Adaptive challenges require people to make difficult trade-offs, reconsider priorities, distribute burdens, and determine which values should take precedence. The prisoner's dilemma at the heart of Dark Provinces creates precisely these circumstances. Universal participation is often unsustainable, while excessive free-riding eventually undermines group success. Leaders must continually navigate questions such as: Who should carry today's burden? Who should conserve capacity for tomorrow? Who requires recovery, recognition, or support? These questions cannot be solved through formulas alone. They require judgment under uncertainty.

For this reason, players have strong incentives to avoid allowing their Trust scores to collapse. Trust is not merely a scoring track. Trust determines access to leadership, and leadership determines access to influence. Players who maintain sufficient Trust remain eligible to shape where the group travels, which challenges it confronts, how problems are framed, how Loot is distributed, and where recognition, legitimacy, and recovery are directed. Players who lose that legitimacy may continue to gain personal rewards, but they increasingly lose the ability to influence how the group confronts future challenges. Losing leadership eligibility therefore represents not simply a personal penalty, but a loss of access to one of the game's most important forms of decision-making.

The leadership lesson of Dark Provinces is therefore not that leaders deserve greater rewards than other players. Rather, it is that leadership is the process through which groups coordinate competing behavioral approaches, allocate scarce resources, manage pressure, preserve legitimacy, and adapt to changing circumstances. Success depends not simply upon solving today's problem, but upon maintaining enough trust, capacity, and cooperation to confront the next challenge together. In this sense, leadership is not the reward for success. Leadership is the mechanism through which groups decide how success, sacrifice, responsibility, recognition, and recovery will be shared.

Why I Designed Dark Provinces: Reimagining the Role-Playing Game

 

Dark Provinces began with a simple question:

Why do tabletop role-playing games devote enormous mechanical attention to combat, but comparatively little attention to personality, leadership, trust, cooperation, legitimacy, investigation, and decision-making?

After decades of role-playing game development, we have highly refined systems for swinging swords, casting spells, tracking hit points, optimizing builds, and resolving combat encounters. Yet many of the activities that dominate real human experience—leadership, persuasion, cooperation, resource allocation, trust, social conflict, and moral decision-making—are often handled through a single die roll, a GM ruling, or pure improvisation.

Dark Provinces is my attempt to address those limitations. It is not simply a new setting or a new ruleset. It is an attempt to rethink several foundational assumptions of tabletop RPG design and explore what happens when personality, leadership, cooperation, and problem-solving become first-class game mechanics.

Problem 1: Dice Often Obscure Decision Quality

Most RPGs use randomness as their primary resolution mechanism.

A group may spend twenty minutes developing an excellent plan, gathering information, coordinating responsibilities, and accounting for risks, only to fail because of an unlucky die roll. Conversely, a poor plan may succeed because somebody rolled well.

Randomness can be fun. It creates uncertainty and tension.

But if we are trying to understand leadership, cooperation, judgment, and decision-making, randomness often obscures the very thing we want to examine.

Dark Provinces replaces dice-driven resolution with a deterministic challenge system.

Consider a challenge involving a starving settlement. Players must decide:

• Which approach to take.
• Which Trait Cards to commit.
• Who will become a Partner and contribute.
• Who will Free-Ride and preserve resources.
• Which synergies to activate.
• Which risks to accept.

The outcome emerges from those decisions.

If the challenge succeeds, players can usually explain why.

If it fails, players can usually identify the choices that produced that failure.

Success and failure become products of judgment rather than luck.

Problem 2: The Dungeon Master Bottleneck

Traditional RPGs depend heavily upon a Game Master.  The GM typically:

• Creates adventures.
• Controls information.
• Reveals clues.
• Determines challenge difficulty.
• Adjudicates ambiguity.
• Controls pacing.
• Represents the world.

A great GM can create wonderful experiences. The problem is that every campaign depends upon finding one. The GM often becomes:

• the host
• the organizer,
• the referee,
• the content creator,
• the rules expert,

Many groups fail not because players lose interest, but because no one wants to carry that burden.

Dark Provinces was designed to function without a permanent GM.  Challenge Cards create situations.  Maps generate exploration choices.  Scouting mechanics reveal information.  Outcome tables determine results.  Leadership rotates.  The system itself performs many of the traditional functions of a referee.  This distributes responsibility across the entire table and eliminates the "Forever GM" problem.

Problem 3: Combat Is Mechanized. Role-Playing Usually Isn't.

This may be the single most important design problem that motivated Dark Provinces.

Most RPGs have detailed procedures for combat.  There are rules for:

• attacking,
• defending,
• damage,
• movement,
• armor,
• spells,
• initiative,
• status effects.

Now compare that to:

• trust,
• leadership,
• legitimacy,
• persuasion,
• cooperation,
• emotional regulation,
• negotiation.

Many systems reduce these activities to:

"Describe what you do."

or

"Roll Persuasion."

Combat receives a sophisticated game system.

Role-playing often relies on improvisation.  I wanted the opposite.  I wanted role-playing to become procedural. 

The HEXACO Solution

Dark Provinces uses the HEXACO personality framework as the foundation for its Trait Card system.  The six dimensions are:

• Honesty-Humility
• Emotionality
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Openness

The game is not trying to diagnose personality.  Instead, HEXACO is used as a framework for modeling behavioral approaches to solving problems.

Imagine a challenge involving civil unrest.  Different approaches might emerge:

• Honesty-Humility:  Establish legitimacy through transparency and fairness.
• Emotionality:  Focus on protection, security, and reducing fear.
• Extraversion:  Create momentum through confidence and visible leadership.
• Agreeableness:  Reduce conflict and create compromise.
• Conscientiousness:  Build procedures, accountability, and structure.
• Openness:  Explore alternative solutions and challenge assumptions.

These are not role-playing prompts.  These are game mechanics.  The Leader commits an initial HEXACO Trait Card, establishing the framework around which the group organizes its response.  Role-playing is no longer separate from the rules.  Role-playing becomes part of the rules.

Problem 4: Character Statistics Often Matter More Than Character Choices

Traditional RPGs frequently define characters through:

• attributes,
• classes,
• levels,
• equipment,
• powers.

The numbers often become more important than the decisions.  Many systems also create "good" and "bad" characters before play begins.  A player who rolls exceptionally high attributes starts ahead.  A player who rolls poorly starts behind.

In Dark Provinces, characters are defined primarily through behavioral approaches.  A cautious character is not weaker than a bold character.  A skeptical character is not inferior to an optimistic one.  Different approaches become useful under different circumstances.  The goal is not to determine who has the best numbers.

The goal is to determine which approach best addresses the problem.

Why Trait Cards Instead of Character Sheets?

This design philosophy led directly to another question:

If behavior is more important than statistics, why use a traditional character sheet at all?

Most character sheets become collections of numbers.  Players must scan large blocks of text looking for relevant abilities.  Trait Cards work differently.  Your options exist physically in your hand.  You can immediately see:

• the approaches available to you,
• potential synergies,
• adaptive responses,
• expedient responses.

The cards become a visible representation of your character's personality and experiences.  Instead of searching through a sheet, players manipulate the actual behavioral tools available to them.  The deck effectively becomes the character.

Problem 5: Exponential Power Scaling

Many RPGs create dramatic increases in power over time.  A first-level character with 10 hit points who advances to 20 hit points has effectively doubled their durability.  Later increases continue this pattern.  As characters become stronger:

• old challenges become irrelevant,
• numbers inflate,
• vulnerability disappears,
• encounter design becomes increasingly difficult.

Dark Provinces takes a much flatter approach.

A player typically begins with approximately eleven Trait Cards.  After their first advancement, they now possess twelve.  That is roughly a 9% increase in options rather than a 100% increase in survivability.  Advancement broadens capability rather than multiplying power.  Characters become more flexible rather than becoming superheroes.

Problem 6: Combat Dominates RPG Design

Many RPGs become combat-focused because combat receives most of the mechanical attention.

This often leads to the "murderhobo" problem.

Violence becomes the default answer because violence is the most developed system.  Dark Provinces intentionally shifts attention elsewhere.  Combat exists.  But it is simply one challenge type among many.  Most challenges involve:

• leadership,
• logistics,
• investigation,
• governance,
• resource management,
• infrastructure,
• social conflict,
• ideology,
• legitimacy,
• crisis response.

A broken irrigation network.  A factional dispute within a temple.  A refugee crisis.  A famine.   A breakdown in trust between institutions.

These are every bit as important as combat encounters.

The central question becomes how should we respond to a problem rather than how do we kill the thing?

Problem 7: Cooperation Is Usually Assumed Rather Than Studied

Most RPGs assume the party works together.  Few examine why cooperation succeeds or fails.  Dark Provinces builds a repeated prisoner's dilemma directly into play.

Every challenge requires players to choose between:

Partner	Free-Rider
Contribute.	Contribute nothing.
Spend resources.	Preserve resources.
Assume risk.	Gain short-term advantages.
Help the group.	Reduce personal costs.

Neither choice is universally correct.  If everyone cooperates all the time, players cannot recover enough health between sessions to succeed at the next game session.  If everyone free-rides, challenges fail and the doom clock advances.  The game is therefore not merely cooperative.  It is about managing cooperation itself.

Problem 8: Leadership Usually Exists Outside the Rules

Every RPG group eventually develops leaders.  Usually these leaders emerge informally.  The loudest player.  The most experienced player.  The person comfortable making decisions.  Most systems barely acknowledge this reality.  Dark Provinces turns leadership into a formal game mechanic.

Leadership automatically rotates, and trust determines eligibility.  Leaders:

• choose destinations,
• determine which challenges are faced,
• commit the initial HEXACO approach,
• distribute Loot,
• allocate recognition and support.

Leadership becomes a practical exercise in legitimacy, influence, and responsibility.

Players who squander Trust lose the opportunity to lead, regardless of their personal success. 

Problem 9: Mysteries Should Be Solved, Not Granted

Many investigative RPGs place all information behind the GM.  Players discover clues when the GM decides to reveal them.  I wanted exploration and investigation to emerge from the system itself.  This idea owes a great deal to games such as Magic Realm, where exploration emerges from interacting with mechanics rather than following a scripted narrative.  In Dark Provinces:

• locations are visible,
• regions are categorized,
• maps communicate information,
• scouting cards reveal future opportunities and risks.

Imagine a player using a scouting Trait Card to examine an upcoming location before the group travels there.  The information is gained because the game system permits it, not because a GM felt it was time to provide a clue.  Players solve mysteries through investigation rather than GM fiat.

Why Challenge Cards Instead of GM-Written Encounters?

Challenge Cards serve a similar purpose.  Traditional campaigns often depend upon handcrafted encounters prepared by a GM.  Challenge Cards instead provide:

• consistency,
• portability,
• replayability,
• procedural mystery,
• predictable structure.

 The Challenge defines the pressure.  The players determine the response.  The card does not tell the group what to do.  It tells the group what problem must be confronted.  This distinction is important.  The game structures situations without prescribing solutions.

What Dark Provinces Gives Up

Every design choice involves trade-offs.

Dark Provinces intentionally sacrifices several things common to traditional RPGs:

• Deep tactical combat.
• Large numerical progression.
• Heroic power fantasies.
• Character optimization as a primary activity.
• Extensive magic systems.
• Infinite improvisational freedom from a human GM.

Those sacrifices were deliberate.  In exchange, the game places greater emphasis on:

• leadership,
• cooperation,
• personality,
• trust,
• investigation,
• legitimacy,
• adaptive decision-making,
• collective problem-solving.

Some players will prefer the traditional model.  That's perfectly reasonable.  Dark Provinces is trying to answer a different set of questions.

What Dark Provinces Is Really About

At its foundation, Dark Provinces asks what if role-playing games focused less on character power and more on character approach?

The game is built around the belief that personality, leadership, cooperation, trust, and decision-making deserve the same mechanical attention that RPGs have traditionally devoted to combat.

Rather than asking "How powerful is my character?"

Dark Provinces asks "How does a group solve difficult problems when trust is fragile, cooperation is costly, information is incomplete, resources are scarce, and every solution creates new trade-offs?"

The deterministic challenge system, HEXACO Trait Cards, rotating leadership, prisoner's dilemma, Trust economy, Stress system, exploration mechanics, and GM-less structure all exist to explore that question.  Whether the game succeeds is ultimately for players to decide.

But that is the problem it was designed to solve.

Dark Provinces: the prisoner’s dilemma

The prisoner’s dilemma is a foundational concept in game theory used to study cooperation and self‑interest. In its simplest form, two individuals must independently choose whether to cooperate (partner) or defect (to act selfishly, or free-ride). A dilemma arises because:

• Mutual cooperation (partnering) produces a collectively good outcome.
• Mutual defection (free-riding) produces a collectively disastrous outcome.
• But free-riding is individually tempting, because if one free-rides while the other partners, the free-rider does best of all.

Even though cooperation would benefit everyone, rational self‑interest pushes individuals toward defection or free-riding —especially when trust is uncertain.

The key insight is that individually rational decisions can produce disastrous group outcomes. The prisoner’s dilemma is not about villains or bad people; it is about incentive structures. When costs and benefits are unevenly distributed in the short term, cooperation becomes fragile even among well‑intentioned participants.

Importantly, real-world prisoner’s dilemmas are rarely one‑shot. In repeated or group versions, additional dynamics emerge: trust, reputation, retaliation, exhaustion, inequity, and burnout. Nuanced uses of the prisoner’s dilemma therefore focus less on individual transactions and more on how systems slowly corrode or stabilize cooperation over time.

Where the prisoner’s dilemma lives in Dark Provinces

Dark Provinces explicitly states that its core loop is a repeated prisoner’s dilemma embedded in a cooperative survival game. This is not metaphorical: the prisoner’s dilemma appears as a formal decision point every challenge round, embedded right in the rules.

Each challenge forces every player, independently and secretly, to choose between two roles:

• Partner (cooperate): commit a trait card, share the risk, contribute to the group’s success.
• Free‑Ride (defect): commit no card, avoid immediate cost, but still benefit if the group succeeds.

This choice occurs after discussion but before resolution, and before the vote is held, it is simultaneous and private. No player knows who will cooperate until the reveal. That simultaneity is critical: it recreates the uncertainty that makes the prisoner’s dilemma function.

Payoff asymmetry: why free-riding is rational

Dark Province's "Universal Outcome Table" makes the prisoner’s dilemma mathematically explicit.

On a successful challenge:

• Partners expend two trait cards and gain:
• +1 Glory
• +1 Trust
• Free‑Riders expend one trait card and gain:
• +3 Glory
• −1 Trust
• +1 Stress

This asymmetry is deliberate. Free‑riders gain three times the glory of partners while avoiding the immediate cost of expending an additional trait card, which represent your health in the game. Glory is the primary individual scoring and recovery currency for your health, so in the short term, free-riding is often the better individual choice.

Critically, the game does not hide or soften this incentive. The game is explicitly structured such that free-riding is often rational and is intentionally rewarded. This mirrors the prisoner’s dilemma’s central tension: the strategy that helps you most right now harms the system that keeps you alive.

Even in failure, the asymmetry persists:

• Partners suffer more stress than free‑riders.
• Free‑riders still lose trust, but avoid the heavier cost of commitment.

This means partners generate fewer rewards relative to free-riders on success— and it is also the riskier strategy on failure.

Why cooperation still matters: cumulative systems

If the Dark Province’s prisoner’s dilemma rewards stopped at individual payoff, the game would collapse into opportunism. It does not, because it’s long‑term systems convert repeated defection into systemic collapse. Four cumulative tracks enforce group‑level consequences:

Trust (individual, persistent)

Trust loss from free-riding is small per challenge, but trust gates leadership, credibility, and several trait synergies. Players with very low trust cannot be leader and lose the reward distribution and other powers that come with the leader position. Over time, habitual free-riders lose influence even as they hoard glory.

Stress (individual, escalating)

Stress accumulates from challenges and use of expedient p traits. At 10 stress, a blow‑up occurs: an adaptive q trait of that player permanently mutates into an expedient p trait. This models burnout and erosion of healthy behavior. Stress does not care why it was accumulated—only that pressure is escaping somewhere.

Reputation (collective moral ledger; cumulative external judgment)

Reputation functions as an additional cumulative system that translates repeated cooperation or exploitation into the group’s standing in the world, extending the prisoner’s dilemma beyond the party itself. Unlike trust, which is individual and directly affects coordination, reputation is collective and external: it records how the group’s patterns of action are perceived by factions, institutions, and the broader social environment. In game‑theoretic terms, Reputation introduces an iterated audience effect: choices made to optimize short‑term individual payoff (especially free-riding supported by exploitative or deceptive traits) may succeed tactically, but gradually degrade the group’s credibility, invoking harsher penalties, fewer options, and hostile reactions in future challenges. Because reputation modifies outcomes, faction responses, and final scoring multipliers, it ensures that cooperation is not only a private bargain among players but also a public signal assessed over time. This mirrors real repeated prisoner’s dilemmas in social systems, where free-riding does not only erode trust among peers but also reshapes how outside agents allocate risk, tolerance, and enforcement. In Dark Provinces, reputation therefore closes the loop between internal incentives and external consequences: a group that survives by habitual self‑interest may still persist for a time, but it does so under worsening conditions, until the cost of lost legitimacy outweighs the gains of defection and the system collapses under its own moral debt.

Doom (collective fail clock)

Doom advances on failures and panic events. If doom reaches its threshold, the campaign ends in total loss regardless of individual scores. No amount of personal glory can outrun doom.

These tracks ensure that while free-riding is locally optimal, excess free-riding destabilizes the system that makes success possible.

What is HEXACO? Replacing traditional ability scores

 

HEXACO is a modern psychological model of personality that describes human behavior using six broad dimensions, each expressed across a spectrum rather than as a fixed category. Instead of assigning people to rigid types, HEXACO captures patterns of tendency—how individuals usually think, feel, and act, especially when under stress.

The six HEXACO dimensions are: H — Honesty–Humility; E — Emotionality; X — EXtraversion; A — Agreeableness; C — Conscientiousness; and O — Openness to experience.

In psychology, HEXACO is used to study cooperation, ethical behavior, leadership, risk‑taking, stress responses, and social breakdown. A defining feature of the model is that it treats personality as situational and dynamic. Traits do not disappear, but the way they express themselves shifts depending on pressure, incentives, fear, and exhaustion.

That idea sits at the heart of Dark Provinces: Broken Waters.

This is not a game about heroes who always act optimally. It is a game about people making decisions inside pressure and uncertainty—about trust eroding, leadership emerging or failing, and stress turning good intentions into dangerous shortcuts.

From Ability Scores to Personality Dimensions

Traditional fantasy role‑playing games rely on a familiar set of six ability scores—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. These attributes measure capacity.

Dark Provinces replaces that framework with HEXACO dimensions, which measures disposition.

Not "How strong are you?" but "When force is needed, do you push, hesitate, coordinate, or exploit?"

Not "How intelligent are you?" but "Do you plan carefully, improvise boldly, or notice patterns others miss?"

Not "How charismatic are you?" but "Do people trust you, follow you, resent you, or feel manipulated by you?"

Abilities describe what a character can do in isolation. HEXACO dimensions describe what a character is inclined to do in a situation—and what it costs them.

Adaptive and Expedient Traits, and Stress

Each HEXACO dimension in the game has two kinds of expression: Adaptive q expressions and Expedient p expressions.

q Adaptive expressions are represented by the Water symbol and represent sustainable responses to pressure. Like water, they endure, adapt, and preserve. They may not always provide the greatest immediate advantage, but they help people and institutions survive over time.

p Expedient expressions are represented by the Fire symbol and represent consuming responses to pressure. Like fire, they can provide power, urgency, and transformation when needed, but they leave consequences behind. Fire is not evil. Sometimes it is necessary. But it always burns something to produce its effect.

Adaptive q expressions represent healthy, constructive, and cooperative uses of a trait. These traits usually contribute +1 to a challenge and support stability, trust, and coordination.

Expedient p expressions represent risky, selfish, distorted, or extreme uses of that same tendency. They offer more immediate power — often +2 or more — but impose costs—stress, trust loss, reputation damage, and other long‑term consequences.

Expedient p traits do not represent low HEXACO scores. They represent maladaptive or expedient expressions of a dimension under pressure. Both high and low HEXACO tendencies possess situational strengths and weaknesses. Challenges will occasionally reward strengths associated with either end of a HEXACO dimension, while Expedient p traits model behavioral distortions that emerge when pressure, incentives, or stress overwhelm adaptive functioning.

Stress is the engine that pushes characters toward expedience. As pressure mounts, the distance between what is wise and what feels necessary begins to shrink. Characters do not become villains—but they may become sharper, colder, louder, or more reckless than they intended.

Dark Provinces and the prisoner's dilemma

PSYCHOLOGY, GAME THEORY, AND THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

The design of Dark Provinces is explicitly informed by modern psychological theory, especially the HEXACO dimensional model of personality, alongside game theory—most notably the prisoner’s dilemma. These frameworks are not flavor or metaphor. They are embedded directly into the mechanics.

The system is deliberately structured so that, in many moments, defection (free‑riding) is the rational individual choice, but may have disastrous group consequences.

When a challenge succeeds, players who defect (free-ride) gain more glory and conserve their scarce resources. Over the short term, defecting increases a character’s chance of surviving to the next challenge—or even the next session.

The game does not punish this behavior. It rewards it.

At the same time, defecting erodes trust, increases stress across the group, and weakens the party’s long‑term capacity. If too many players choose self‑preservation, challenges begin to fail outright. Challenge failure accelerates stress, damages reputation, advances doom, and triggers cascading penalties that no individual can escape.

The system creates an intentional tension:

• Cooperate too consistently, and you risk burnout, deck mutation, or personal collapse.
• Defect too often, and the group enters a death spiral that no one can personally outpace.

There is no stable equilibrium where everyone cooperatively survives indefinitely. The question is not whether cost will be paid, but who pays it, when, and for how long.

A GAME OF PERSONALITY UNDER PRESSURE

What distinguishes Dark Provinces is that these choices are not abstract. They are mediated through the HEXACO personality dimensions, which shape how characters experience stress, risk, power, empathy, and restraint. Personality is not a roleplaying prompt—it is a mechanical resource that changes under pressure.

The game does not ask players to be “good” or “heroic.”

It asks them to be strategic about cooperation, knowing that both selfishness and self‑sacrifice carry consequences.

Dark Provinces: The Summons

From distant provinces, desert watch-posts, crowded sanctuaries, and forgotten shrines, you journey to Zarahemla at the command of the High Custodian of Dogma, whose authority is exceeded only by that of the Hierophant himself. As inquisitors of the Faith, some among you extirpate dangerous deviations hidden within neglected scrolls and half-forgotten recitations. Others expose corruption and sedition through relentless interrogation. A few employ methods neither gentle nor temporary.

You are ushered into a sepulchral vault deep within the Custodian's Palace, where ancient mosaics molder beneath the wan glow of bronze incense lamps and fragrant smoke coils into unseen darkness. There the Custodian lets fall a single name:

Adam-Ondi-Ahman.

That city stands upon the marches of the Hierocracy. Through its’ defiles pass foreign caravans, pilgrims, merchants, prophets, visionaries, and liars. Adam-Ondi-Ahman has long borne an infamous reputation as a haven for heretics, madmen, dissidents, and seekers of forbidden things.

Now dark reports trickle in.

An ancient Abban heresy, believed extinguished centuries ago, is said to have arisen anew. Forbidden symbols appear upon walls and sepulchers. Lost writings resurface. Names long erased from doctrine are spoken openly once more. Nor are these rumors the only cause for alarm. Springs diminish without cause. Cisterns fail where they should remain full. Ancient channels, abandoned for generations, carry water once again. In a land where all waters move according to Abba’s will, such irregularities invite questions.

The Custodian falls silent.

As the weight of his words settle upon you, the bells of Zarahemla toll faintly beyond the palace walls. Their distant echoes seem less a summons than a knell.

Each of you understands why you have been gathered.

Adam-Ondi-Ahman is not merely troubled.

It is remembering, and the Hierocracy fears what may awaken with it.