Category Archives: Bulldogs

What Makes a Skill

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Yesterday, I stole one idea form Bulldogs! and today I’m going to steal another.

Back in the day, Feng Shui presented a very interesting way to handle skills that worked very well for it’s wide, loose model. In short, a skill represented three things. The first, Physical Ability, was the traditional meaning of a skill – actually doing the thing the skills described. If the skill was guns, it means shooting people. If it was Thief, it meant breaking picking locks and such. All standard enough.

The second thing, Knowledge, measured how knowledgeable you were about the skill in question. Thus, if you had a high guns skill, it also meant you had an encyclopedic knowledge of guns. This worked very well for the action-movie focus of the game, since that tends to be how action heroes operate. The thief may not be “The Smart Guy”, but he can rattle off the details about a specific type of bank vault with nothing more than a glance.

The last thing, Contacts, measured the character’s connection to the community surrounding the skill. This meant you knew who the other big players were in your space (“He was killed with a golden bullet through the left temple, the signature of Midas Mayhem!”) but also the broader network around it, including gun dealers, collectors, specialists and so on. Among other things, this meant that a thief could find a fence or a gun-bunny could get his hands on a bagfull of guns without much real hassle.

Now, I don’t know if Laws took this from another game, but for me it was a total eye-opener. By establishing these Skill Components, he’d neatly solved a ton of problems from more detailed systems that emerged from a disconnect between the character as envisioned and the character as supported by the rules. That is, even if you bought up your core skill, you would usually need to also buy up the far less rewarding Knowledge and Contact skills to avoid looking like a chump (or, as was more often the case, ignore them and hope the GM did the same).

I internalized this approach in my own play, to great satisfaction. In time, I added my own spin in the form of a fourth Skill Component for Perception (So gun guy could spot a sniper or a concealed carry without being Sherlock Holmes) and happily meandered onward.

But for all that, there was a bit of a downside to this, since it did not map to all sill lists, especially if you want to go to a finer grain. As an example, Feng Shui had the Intrusion skill, which covered a wide range of thiefly pursuits, and that worked. But if you ever needed to split it up (into, say, Burglar and Stealth) then you ran into weird questions, like what exactly Stealth Contacting meant. Is there a big Stealth community out there? Do they have a very sneaky newsletter?

Bulldogs! strikes at the root of that problem by taking a similar (but more detailed) breakdown and building _up_ from it to construct skills. The basic idea is that a skill can be used to do the following things: overcome an obstacles, make an assessment, make a declaration, place a maneuver, attack, defend or block.

Now, what exactly those mean has some system-specific weight, so if you’re not clear on what “make an assessment” means, then don’t sweat it (or go read SOTC) but what’s important is that those are, effectively, the seven mechanical things that a character can _do_ in the system, so using them as the baseline to define the skills makes for super tight engineering.

The idea is not portable in and of itself – those 7 things are fate specific – but the idea is a fascinating lens to take to another game and ask what characters can actually _do_. Curiously, you can end up coming around to a similar space as Apocalyse World’s moves this way, albeit from a somewhat different direction. In both cases the bones of system are laid bare, and the construction on top of them is made apparent to the reader.

So, yeah. It’s a good trick.

Space Race

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Before I start, let me give a quick plug for a young gaming blog, charactergen.net. The authors are a pair of talented and inspired writers who are already off to an excellent start, and promise many cool things yet to come.

Anyway, it should be obvious that I’m a big fan of Bulldogs!, and if it’s not obvious, I suggest taking a look at the lower left hand corner of the back cover, which should answer any questions about where I stand. It’s a fun game standing firmly on a well-loved piece of sci-fi real estate and, notably, just launched its own foray into fiction with Redwing’s Gambit, by the ever talented Monica Valentinelli, if that’s your bag.

For all its explosive, sci fi fun, I want to really call out two pieces of gaming technology that any designer might want to take into account. Neither is FATE specific (though one leans that way) and both could be powerful seeds for other games.

Today I’ll talk about the first, the handling of race. Race is a tricky thing – in fiction as in life – but it’s also an essential part of this sort of sci-fi. Alien races need some manner of hook to make them something other than different colored rubber suits, but at the same time it gets very dull when every member of the race is incredibly similar. The classic racial template model tends to stray a bit too close to the latter problem – it works very well when you have one alien of a particular type on the crew, but as soon as you introduce a second one, it gets weird. Think of any six episodes of Star Trek and you can probably see the problem.

However, if you stop and think about any six episodes (well, any six *good* episodes) of Deep Space 9, you can get a sense of what you want to see. Since DS9 had so many recurring alien characters, it was no longer sufficient for “Ferengi” or the like to be a sufficiently distinguishing feature to leave it at that. Instead, it was a starting point to build a character on. Bulldogs! has found a way to build that into chargen, and quite cleverly.

See, it starts with a list of 10 aspects for every race. They’re good, colorful aspects and they paint a nice and complete picture of each race. Presenting them this way spared the author the need to write up long descriptive blurbs for each race that restates the content of those aspects. The aspect tell us plenty about the race and about how others might feel or react to them. That’s all implicit in the aspect list itself. It’s a dirty trick, and a super clever one.

If you stop there, this is basically just a clever presentation of the classic racial template – good, but dull. The twist comes in application. A character is only expected to take two of those aspects.

It’s a simple thing, but the impact is profound for a couple of reasons. First, it creates a range for a lot of different aliens of the same species, but it does so in a way that doesn’t abandon the complete picture – the fact that your character doesn’t use 8 of the aspects doesn’t mean those don’t exist, it just means they’re less important to you. The full list provides a context that the narrowed selection takes advantage of. To put it in concrete terms, it means Klingon poets might be a rarity, but they’re not impossible to make (or even penalized) – just pick the aspects that dovetail with your concept.

And as a bonus, it makes the GM’s job MUCH easier for creating NPCs. The simple act of choosing _not_ to use some baseline aspects can tell you plenty about a character. Plus, if you’re feeling lazy, you can just use more than two of them if you need to quickly stat someone up.

It’s also worth nothing that the game gracefully avoids the “Humans are the baseline” problem which often accompanies these systems. The human-equivalents are handled in exactly the same way as everyone else in this regard.

For interested GMs, it’s super portable to any system that uses descriptors of any sort (whether they’re feats, distinctions or anything else) to construct groups. Races are the most obvious application, but it’s easy to see how this could be used for organizations in the vein of White Wolf’s old splats. Hell, it could be narrowed in scope and be used to create fencing schools. Anything where you need things to share a common root but have different expressions could be well served by borrowing this idea.