Last night during character creation for our RuneQuest campaign, my group employed a tool we use before almost every new game: CATS.
Created by P.R. O’Leary, CATS stands for Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject Matter, and it’s a social contract-adjacent pregame discussion to get everyone on the same page, set expectations, and avoid potential issues. It only takes a few minutes and we find it hugely helpful.
I’ve also noticed that most of the time, like last night, in my group it becomes CATSOS — with the OS standing for Other Stuff. I’m declaring CATSOS to be pronounced “catsauce” because it’s funny.
CATSOS
So what’s Other Stuff? It varies. It’s just, you know…other stuff. For example, last night we veered into a discussion of whether RQ is a game where the party is expected to stick together most of the time, like D&D, or one where that’s not the baseline, like Ars Magica, and how everyone felt about both options. You could fold that into the Concept portion of CATS, or maybe even Aim, but it doesn’t neatly fit into either of them.
Without running through CATS, though, we likely would never have surfaced that topic. It was productive (we landed on “no expectations that the party is always together”) and made an already useful CATS chat even more so. Talking about CATS tends to segue naturally into talking about OS as well.