Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap
Posted: 26 Oct 2018, 22:48
Bare with me here, this may be a long post. There is a relevant point, however. I promise.
What is a Game About?
As a consequence of designing this game, I've processed a whole lot of game design theory and philosophy. If you've ever gone down that rabbit hole, there's a ton of it out there and a lot of it is contradictory. Some of it I agree with, some I don't. One of the pieces I have taken to heart is the notion that for a game to be about something, it has to mechanically support or explicitly incentivize that thing.
By this metric, D&D (here referring to the editions im familiar with, OD&D-3e) is chiefly about overcoming obstacles, and it's about combat, magic, and dungeon delving/exploration. How do we decide this? Overcoming obstacles is the main incentive, and the various editions all feature dedicated subsystems for combat, casting and researching spells, and dungeon delving/exploration. These are things that the game cares about as evidenced by the fact that more detailed rules were written to support it.
D&D is not a game about social conflict. You can include social conflict in your D&D game, but there is nothing in the game that actually supports it. The editions being discussed have, at best, a skill check you can make. By that metric, D&D is at best no more about or interested in social conflict than it is riding horses or using rope.
By contrast, Burning Wheel cares a great deal about social conflict. Duel of Wits is a subsystem every bit as complex as their combat subsystem and arguably used more often.
The Holy Trinity of Fiction
The overwhelming majority of protagonists in fantasy fiction fall squarely into one of three categories: warrior, wizard, or thief. They are a fighty dude, a mystical (or holy) dude, or a sneaky/thiefy/roguish dude. Some characters will fall into multiple camps, being a fighty dude and a magic dude, or a fighty dude and a thiefy dude, but pretty well everyone sits somewhere on that triangle. Even more interestingly, most sci-fi falls under this as well, albeit with magic dude being expanded to "esoteric mental ability" dude, whether that's hacking, science, or psionic ability.
What's interesting is that this translates over to RPG design as well. Aside from games that make this explicit through character classes or similar, you can also see this concept reflected in what games choose to build into the subsystems. Nearly all role-playing games have a dedicated combat system, even if that combat system is just a series of add-on rules for their core mechanic. The immediate example of this to come to mind is the Apocalypse World family of games. While nearly everything in the game is resolved as 'Player rolls 2d6, compares result per move," even AW adds a few extra rules to provide more depth for combat. Fighty dude is covered.
Most games will include a dedicated subsystem for mystic dude. In a fantasy game, you will almost always see a magic subsystem and sometimes several magical subsystems. Either lists of spells you can cast along with rules to do so, or rules for allowing the player to come up with their own. In modern or sci-fi games it's fairly common to see rules for hacking, mad-science/inventing, psionic whatsits, and so on. Mystic/smart dude is almost always covered.
I have never seen a game that particularly emphasizes thief dude. Most games have the option to do thief things, but I struggle to think of any game that treated thief-things as anything other than a skill check, or using their standard task-resolution system. It's generally a skill check vs. lock difficulty. Stealth skill. vs opponent's detect skill. Are there any examples of dedicated subsystems for intrigue, cloak & dagger, or other underhanded shenanigans?
Passion, Violence, & General Skulduggery
There is an obvious degree of self-interest in this topic, as Sword & Scoundrel is supposed to be about certain things. It's called Sword & Scoundrel. This is not an accident. One of the core assumptions is that this is a game where people are pushed to see how far they will go for what they care about. It deliberately assumes that your character will be doing some shady things. They may even be a Scoundrel.
The trouble is that while our system have robust support for Passion and Violence, we fall short in our support of General Skulduggery. Like most games, we have skills that allow you to do various forms of underhanded shenanigans, but they are nowhere near the support we give to combat or have planned for magic. Being a principled man, I find this bothersome because it creates a contradiction between what I believe about game design, what I want for the game, and what the game presently does. So I sat down and tried to think about how to fix this.
The question is: what to do about it? The more I think about it, I'm struggling to come up with anything that would fall into thiefy-dude territory that would actually benefit from a subsystem. I'm not convinced that we gain anything by, for instance, expanding lockpicking into a system wherein we broke Bump, Tap, Push, and Jiggle into different maneuvers for a more detailed lock-picking experience. We've bandied about the idea of making a dedicated stealth system, but even that is such a context-dependent situation that it's difficult to conceive of how to build parameters around it. At best, we wind up with the same sort of full contest/complex skill check setup that you could use for anything.
What sort of systems would you want to see to help support scoundrely play? What games have done this well in the past?
What is a Game About?
As a consequence of designing this game, I've processed a whole lot of game design theory and philosophy. If you've ever gone down that rabbit hole, there's a ton of it out there and a lot of it is contradictory. Some of it I agree with, some I don't. One of the pieces I have taken to heart is the notion that for a game to be about something, it has to mechanically support or explicitly incentivize that thing.
By this metric, D&D (here referring to the editions im familiar with, OD&D-3e) is chiefly about overcoming obstacles, and it's about combat, magic, and dungeon delving/exploration. How do we decide this? Overcoming obstacles is the main incentive, and the various editions all feature dedicated subsystems for combat, casting and researching spells, and dungeon delving/exploration. These are things that the game cares about as evidenced by the fact that more detailed rules were written to support it.
D&D is not a game about social conflict. You can include social conflict in your D&D game, but there is nothing in the game that actually supports it. The editions being discussed have, at best, a skill check you can make. By that metric, D&D is at best no more about or interested in social conflict than it is riding horses or using rope.
By contrast, Burning Wheel cares a great deal about social conflict. Duel of Wits is a subsystem every bit as complex as their combat subsystem and arguably used more often.
The Holy Trinity of Fiction
The overwhelming majority of protagonists in fantasy fiction fall squarely into one of three categories: warrior, wizard, or thief. They are a fighty dude, a mystical (or holy) dude, or a sneaky/thiefy/roguish dude. Some characters will fall into multiple camps, being a fighty dude and a magic dude, or a fighty dude and a thiefy dude, but pretty well everyone sits somewhere on that triangle. Even more interestingly, most sci-fi falls under this as well, albeit with magic dude being expanded to "esoteric mental ability" dude, whether that's hacking, science, or psionic ability.
What's interesting is that this translates over to RPG design as well. Aside from games that make this explicit through character classes or similar, you can also see this concept reflected in what games choose to build into the subsystems. Nearly all role-playing games have a dedicated combat system, even if that combat system is just a series of add-on rules for their core mechanic. The immediate example of this to come to mind is the Apocalypse World family of games. While nearly everything in the game is resolved as 'Player rolls 2d6, compares result per move," even AW adds a few extra rules to provide more depth for combat. Fighty dude is covered.
Most games will include a dedicated subsystem for mystic dude. In a fantasy game, you will almost always see a magic subsystem and sometimes several magical subsystems. Either lists of spells you can cast along with rules to do so, or rules for allowing the player to come up with their own. In modern or sci-fi games it's fairly common to see rules for hacking, mad-science/inventing, psionic whatsits, and so on. Mystic/smart dude is almost always covered.
I have never seen a game that particularly emphasizes thief dude. Most games have the option to do thief things, but I struggle to think of any game that treated thief-things as anything other than a skill check, or using their standard task-resolution system. It's generally a skill check vs. lock difficulty. Stealth skill. vs opponent's detect skill. Are there any examples of dedicated subsystems for intrigue, cloak & dagger, or other underhanded shenanigans?
Passion, Violence, & General Skulduggery
There is an obvious degree of self-interest in this topic, as Sword & Scoundrel is supposed to be about certain things. It's called Sword & Scoundrel. This is not an accident. One of the core assumptions is that this is a game where people are pushed to see how far they will go for what they care about. It deliberately assumes that your character will be doing some shady things. They may even be a Scoundrel.
The trouble is that while our system have robust support for Passion and Violence, we fall short in our support of General Skulduggery. Like most games, we have skills that allow you to do various forms of underhanded shenanigans, but they are nowhere near the support we give to combat or have planned for magic. Being a principled man, I find this bothersome because it creates a contradiction between what I believe about game design, what I want for the game, and what the game presently does. So I sat down and tried to think about how to fix this.
The question is: what to do about it? The more I think about it, I'm struggling to come up with anything that would fall into thiefy-dude territory that would actually benefit from a subsystem. I'm not convinced that we gain anything by, for instance, expanding lockpicking into a system wherein we broke Bump, Tap, Push, and Jiggle into different maneuvers for a more detailed lock-picking experience. We've bandied about the idea of making a dedicated stealth system, but even that is such a context-dependent situation that it's difficult to conceive of how to build parameters around it. At best, we wind up with the same sort of full contest/complex skill check setup that you could use for anything.
What sort of systems would you want to see to help support scoundrely play? What games have done this well in the past?