Path/Focus

Basically, path is a concept derived from the white wolf system. My take on it is that, in societies where morality has become varied, what is important in life, ie ideas about good, bad, and everything in between, vary as well. I used this in the iliadic game because in iliadic times our modern view of "morality" was essentially non-existent. I plan on using it in Gemini because I thought a.) that it was a good mechanic from a metagame perspective and b.) that in a cyberpunk-y, somewhat chaotic world, people's ideas about right and wrong might vary quite a bit. As such, your "path" essentially is a representation of your character's fundamental morality: what sorts of things does he/she think a person absolutely has to do? what sorts of things should a person never do? In the modern world, you'd get a lot of similar answers: no killing, pillaging, raping, stealing, etc, etc. But if you asked people in iliadic times, or in my opinion in cyberpunk times, you'd get a lot of different answers with a lot of qualifiers depending on who you were talking to. A critical element of the path is that it is GM assigned. You can dispute things on it on grounds that it doesn't faithfully reproduce your characters morals, but not on any other grounds. The GM designs the path based on your background: obviously, the more detailed the background you write, the more likely the Path will reflect your ideas about your character. Focus is the flip side of Path. It represents the idea that when you are striving towards things important to you, you are going to work just a little harder. As such, a Path comes with a hierarchy of focus that describes in what sorts of activities your character is particularly good because of his/her moral code. If you do stuff your code says you shouldn't, or fail to do things it says you should, you may lose Path rating. Of course, then you also can't apply your focus to as many things any more. If your path drops to zero, you also lose your focus rating entirely.

Anyone who played in the Iliadic game is welcome to chip in with thoughts about their experience with what path/focus (then called path/timae) is or does in terms of gameplay.