Category Archives: Design

Single Elimination Vs The Dungeon

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Simple diagram of a soccer field overlaid on graph paper

If you have ever tried to design a sports-centric game, you quickly run into the core question of how you will handle winning and losing, and how it impacts progression of the game. For a sports story, it is necessary that every game (or at least enough games) be won to allow the team to make it to the big game. Doing less than that is pretty unsatisfying.

There are a couple different solutions to this1, but at the moment I’m speaking to the problem itself, because it underlies so many potential RPG models. Fiction (and life) is full of single elimination events (Games, Duels and such) because it’s an easy way to set the stakes. Losing has an obvious cost.

In an RPG, this model proves VERY fragile, because losing tends to not be fun. Even if losses aren’t punitive, a loss cuts off a direction of action. This is a big reason that so many media properties (fighting anime in particular) seem like they’d be great RPG material, but always end up dull as dirt. The secret ingredient is single elimination action, and it doesn’t translate.

This is a well known problem, and I’m hopefully not saying anything too surprising here. But what got me thinking about it is that the dungeon avoids this problem, and I think that’s part of why the model is so powerful.

At first glance, this seems odd. Dungeons are dangerous – as a series of fight set pieces, that seems like it should have a similar single elimination problem. And, yes, there are occasional TPKs, but by and large, the dungeon avoids this. How?

The obvious answer is “balance” – dungeons are designed for a certain level band and are meticulously balanced to produce just the right experience. But that’s nonsense. The rules are simply not constraining enough for that to be true, at least taken as a whole.

But that does get us pointing in the right direction – it is uncommon for any single encounter in a dungeon to be enough to overpower the party. Rather, it is the accrued cost and effort of multiple conflicts that will make them more vulnerable, increasing the odds that the next fight will break the camel’s back.

Which points to something interesting – Dungeon fights are supposed to be easy (on an individual basis). In fact, the best trick they pull is making them FEEL challenging while the reality is that the first few rooms are more or less guaranteed wins.

How is this possible? Well, let’s consider – a game like D&D has a lot of different currencies in play (Spells, abilities, and hit points most notable) and they’re set up so you can buy success. That is, the more willing you are to spend your currency, the easier the victory.

This sounds obvious when said this way, but consider that if that was true, the way to make adventures more challenging would be to add more encounters and more reasons to press on. Instead, the go-to method is to make things harder, which just pushes players to tactics like the 5 minute workday, where they use all their currency to win, then withdraw.

But to bring this back to the question that got me thinking, it’s a strong case that the dungeon’s play model is not single elimination, but rather, press your luck. This makes sense, and it also highlights an important element here – agency. Players control how they engage, what rate they engage, and whether they withdraw (which is why one more technique of the cheese GM is removing that agency). So, even if incentivized to take risk, they will usually be able to pull the ripcord in time to avoid the single elimination.

Where I find this useful is in considering how to set up adventure templates in other genres, and specifically consider how I can move them from single elimination to press your luck. Mecha battles are a good example of this – assuming you don’t want a gritty game of pilot death, how could you restructure it in this way? You don’t want people to fight til one of them dies (that’s single elimination again) but you also don’t want there to be no cost to defeat (like if all the mechs were remote drones) because then people would fight to the last hit point “just in case”. You also don’t want the cost of defeat to remove the opportunity to play. This is a challenge with “Mecha are expensive, so they’re also the cost of loss”, because you need to answer the question “Then why let this loser pilot another one?” (Hint: A setting element that limits who can pilot a mech can smooth over this).

This is not a hard problem to solve, but only if it’s a problem you’re LOOKING to solve. And that’s the trick.

It also has me pondering other victory models, and that is where I think it gets VERY interesting.

  1. Options include: Flexible paths to victory, Out of game priorities, or working backwards from victory with mechanical losses translating to costly victories. ↩

SWOT in the Dark

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Ok, nerdbusiness time.

There is a technique used in business called SWOT analysis, which is used for things like brainstorming or figuring out next steps. It’s a tool for stepping back and analyzing the reality of your business, group or the like, and hopefully gleaning insight into what to do next.

Conveniently, it is also a really handy template for adventure creation and for fleshing out your game. A PDF with the form and some directions can be downloaded here.

For purposes of illustration, I’m going to use Blades in the Dark, because the specifics of that game align particularly well with this approach, but the underlying idea applies equally well to any game where the players are a coherent group in a consistent context.

So, this technique, like so many expensive consultation driven models, is a glorified way to label four boxes. In this case, the boxes are summarized in the acronym SWOT:

4 boxes: Upper left labeled "Strengths", Upper right labeled "Weaknesses", Lower left labeled "Opportunities" and Lower right labeled "threats"

S – Strengths
W – Weaknesses
O – Opportunities
T – Threats

The practice of filling in the boxes is largely self-explanatory, but there are a few tricks that can make it a little easier and more fruitful.

Strengths

What is it that the crew does well enough that someone else might want them to do it? That is to say, while crews can do a LOT of things, this is where we focus on things that might distinguish them from other groups, both generally and specifically.

Generally, the crew type is probably a pointer towards this, but it’s also somewhat incomplete. A gang of cutters might excel at doing violence, but that is something that many groups can do. What sort of violence does this crew excel at? Do you call them when you want maximum intimidation? Do they specialize in ambushes? Are they a top notch security force?

Individual character strengths also contribute to this, but only if it can be tied clearly to the team. If one of the team members is a master of disguise, that is only a strength if the group integrates that skill into its activities, rather than is just being an adjacent activity.

It’s worth noting that the real value of this list is often found in the combinations rather than the individual elements. That is to say, if strengths include “doing violence” and “knowledge of Six Towers”, neither of those are terribly distinguishing, but in combination they suggest an obvious opportunity the next time violence is needed that depends on the details of Six Towers.

Weaknesses

On the flipside, what is the group bad at? Where are they vulnerable? What kind of jobs do they really not want to end up needing to do.

As with strengths, the crew type probably provides some pointers towards this, but it will also probably be a bit less clear cut because there’s a good chance that the players have made choices to intentionally mitigate group weaknesses. For example, even in a group of slides and lurks, there is probably one cutter who acts as the team’s muscle.

The thing is, that does not cancel the weakness, it merely mitigates it. In our prior example, this crew would still be in trouble in a rumble, even if the cutter is able to put up some resistance, so their relative inability in a fight is probably still a weakness. But if a few more members toughen up, or if the gang recruits some muscle, then they might be able to offset the weakness.

In situations like this, look for the “single point of failure” – situations where the only thing which keeps a problem at bay is one individual or resource. If something happening to that individual would expose the crew to trouble, then that’s a weakness.

Weaknesses also may cover domains of operation or information. What happens if you drop this group into high society? The Docks? A roomful of ghosts?

Sidebar – In The Middle

The ghost thing raises a key point: there are lots of things which would be bad, but are not necessarily weaknesses. Just as crews can do many things which are not necessarily their strengths, there are many things which would be bad but are not necessarily weaknesses. The key thing to identify a weakness is that this group would be worse off in this situation than a comparable group. Similarly, a strength distinguishes the group in some way.

In short, most of the things a crew can do are neither strengths nor weaknesses, but are simply facts of life.

Context absolutely plays a role in this. To use one example, crew tier is not intrinsically a weakness or a strength – it’s just a fact of life. It becomes a weakness or strength in certain situations. If a small crew has big enemies, their Tier is weakness. if a large crew is throwing their weight around on a neighborhood level, their tier is probably a strength. But for a crew operating largely around its own weight class, it’s just the way things are.

Opportunities

Opportunities are things the crew could do but haven’t yet, for one reason or another. The reason might be as dull as “haven’t gotten around to it yet” or as challenging as “if only we could get past that dragon”.

Just as the crew type provides the first pointers for strengths, the crew sheet is the first place to look for opportunities. Right off the bat, claims are something of a laundry list of opportunities for the crew. Any adjacent claim is potentially an opportunity, with the main limiter being how well or poorly it’s been fleshed out.

Faction relationships also

Note that while opportunities can be very discrete (as in the case of claims) they can also be a little bit general (as may be the case with factions) in a “there is an opportunity there but we don’t know what it is yet.” An opportunity for an opportunity is still an opportunity.

One other useful thing to look at is the intersection between opportunities and strengths, and specifically ask whether the group has the opportunity to develop new strengths.

Threats

Where weaknesses helped us understand where the crew might be vulnerable, threats help us understand who might exploit those weaknesses or otherwise do harm to the crew.

It’s important to note that while enemies may be threats, not every threat is an enemy. While an enemy might consciously choose to exploit a weakness (if they know about it), there are other forces that will exert pressure on a weakness in an utterly indifferent manner. That is, if the crew is dependent on a single source for their goods, that’s a weakness. Even if none of their enemies know about this source, then that source is still vulnerable to other forces – his enemies, sure, but also the vagaries of day to day life. If your source is Iruvian and the Ministry starts rounding up Iruvians, that is a threat to the crew even though it’s not directed at the crew at all.

None of which is to say enemies shouldn’t be tracked here. Any faction with a negative relationship with the crew probably deserves a mention in this box. Even if they’re not actively engaging the crew at the moment, they certainly won’t pass up an opportunity if the situation arises.

Using the tool

Obviously, the act of using SWOT analysis is as simple as filling out the form, but there are better and worse ways to go about it. Critically, this benefits most strongly from being a shared exercise between players and GM, because getting EVERYONE’s answers to these question is incredibly informative, especially on the subject of opportunities and threats.

Opportunities in particular are an area where the GM really wants to know how the players see things, because if they players don’t see opportunities, then the game is likely to stall. Having an exercise like this where the group contribute their answer to these questions and express opinions on this is a much healthier way to flesh this out than to have the GM just present a buffet of things that she finds interesting.

Some GMs might feel a little bit of resistance to being equally transparent about threats for fear of spoiling surprises or telegraphing their next move to the players. This can be a fair concern, depending on the specifics of the table, but in that case the concern is easily mitigated by fact that there is no need to get to specific about how the threats might manifest. The table can have an open discussion about the fact that the crew’s hq is vulnerable without the GM needing to say “and this faction is going to exploit that”. If anything, getting buy in to the existence of the threat means players will be more strongly invested if it is brought to bear.

A Few More Tricks

  • As the GM, if you are looking for ideas for your game, take a look at any group or faction connected to the crew (for good or ill) and do a SWOT analysis on them. I promise that after one or two of them
  • Almost anything in the threat box can be a clock. Hell, feel free to put clocks IN the threat box.
Same diagram as above (4 boxes: Upper left labeled "Strengths", Upper right labeled "Weaknesses", Lower left labeled "Opportunities" and Lower right labeled "threats") but with Strengths and weaknesses labeled as internal, and opportunities and threats labeled as external.
  • If it is not obvious what category something should fall into, use the following rule of thumb: Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the crew. They are things which are part of their nature, and (to at least some extent) under their control. Opportunities and threats are external to the crew, and are parts of the environment that the crew operates in, and are things to be responded to, but are not under the crews control.

It’s All In The Cards

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Apologies for the repost. I originally posted this right after the game, but then we lost it in the server migration. I meant to repost immediately, but then I started actually writing up the rules for this and was going to release both, but those are taking a bit longer than planned, so rather than keep waiting, I’m just reposting this now and will get to the rest of it later.

Needed to run a game for an interesting mix of folks today, and for a variety of reasons I decided to dust off some Amber-derived ideas I’ve had and take them for a spin. Final result was, while not flawless, REALLY interesting, and I certainly had fun. It was also deeply arts & crafts heavy, so it might be of interest to some.

So, we started from a blank slate at the table, and I introduced Proteus. Proteus is, as the name suggests, a shapeshifter, and they are very old and very powerful. They have a tower at the center of several cities in several worlds, and this is their place of power. Proteus also has a number of children, each of which is a power in their own right. They are…

So, at this point I had 7 cards with names on them (Meredith, Finn, Indigo, Keller, Sparrow, Cassia, and Bowie), and I dealt out the top 6 in a circle, setting aside the 7th.

For the next prompt, I pulled out another 7 card deck and said “Let’s flesh them out a bit” and I handed the player to my left a card. Now, this deck was 7 archetypes (The Prince, The Warrior, The Lost, The Wanderer, The Scholar, The Seer, & The Hunter) and I asked players to associate each one with a name, and again I set aside the 7th card.
We repeated this with the next deck of 7 “domains” (more or less arenas of power or similar) – Warden of the Tower, Keeper of the Flame, The Watcher, Nature’s Hand, The Shaper, Walker of Secret Ways, Guardian of the Void, once again letting players assign them. This is where it started getting interesting, since there was some interest in pairings making sense or seeming at odds. When we were done, we had:

  • Finn, The Warrior and Walker of Secret Ways
  • Meredith, The Lost and Keeper of the Flame
  • Sparrow, the Wanderer and Guardian of the Void
  • Indigo, the Hunter and Nature’s Hand
  • Keller, The Scholar and Watcher
  • Cassia, The Seer and Warden of the Tower

(And I had privately set aside Bowie, The Prince and Shaper as a potential future NPC)

So, this was a solid start. I had icons associated with the roles and domains, and at this point we had the skeleton of a setting, so I unpacked a little bit more, and explained that these characters we had just created were the parents of the characters we would play. These characters would be slightly superhuman, heel quickly and be able to travel through dimensions due to the blood of Proteus. They had also been favored by Proteus sufficiently to have lodgings in the tower, which effectively has many floors of well staffed hotel rooms (Proteus has odd ideas about family). As we discussed this, I threw out questions about setting elements, like the cities surrounding the tower, as well as interesting things to be found in the tower. Unsurprisingly, the player contributions did great things to flesh out the setting.

So, at this point we had enough foundation to start diving into actually making characters, so we started with parents and names. I had a list of names for each of the elders, and when players picked a parent, they were urged to pick a name from the list. They had the option not to (representing their name coming from their other parent or some other source) but no one took that option, so we ended up with:

  • Lucas, son of Finn
  • Kaspar, son of Indigo
  • Doris, daughter of Meredith
  • Edda, daughter of Meredith

With another quick round of dice, we used some of the other names to come up with NPC siblings, alive and dead. And now the real show began.

So, for a bit of context, I was using a simple four stat system (Might, Wits, Grace & Resolve), so for each elder I put out 5 cards – one labeled by the secret of their domain and four of them had the name of a stat on them. The stats were not evenly distributed – Finn, the Warrior has three Mights and one Resolve, for example, while Keller, the Scholar, had two Wits, one Grace and one Resolve. I’d set these distributions up in advance based on the roles, and because one role was missing, the distribution was slightly asymmetric. I also added two extra cards, once for Proteus themself and one labeled “Forbidden Secrets”.

I also gave each player a sheet with the list of elders and a few blank spots, and two tracks for the relationship, one which measured support, one which measured respect.

The mechanical part of this was very straightforward – the players went around picking up these cards. If they picked up a stat card, they got a point in that stat. If they picked up a secret, they got some sort of power, trick or item. In each case their relationship with whichever elder’s card it was, and they got a “talent”, which was effectively a skill keyword.

Where the rubber hit the road was that when a card was pulled, that was a prompt for a question (often a series of questions) about that elder, the character and what the story was behind this. When possible (especially with secrets), the player was offered a choice – ideally one which was pointed at other players at the table. Exactly how this played out could impact how the elder relationships would shake out, and it would be used to select the talent for that round.

Secret cards were put back after they were used (Largely because I hadn’t printed multiples), but the stats got used up as we went. This had a very fun effect of forcing players to develop relationships with Elders they normally would not have picked, and since the Elders had gotten steadily fleshed out as we went, these choices felt toothy.
For example, Kaspar’s first draw was to learn Indigo’s secret (Hand of Nature). I asked how old Kaspar was when Indigo took him on his first hunt, and Kaspar’s player’s answer was “Three!”. I couldn’t pass up that opportunity, so as it turns out Kaspar spent ages 3-5 as a hound in Indigo’s pack. Next round, he picked up one of Indigo’s Resolve card, and the story was even less kind. While Kaspar’s player was enjoying it, everyone else at the table pretty much concluded that they did not want to learn anything from Indigo if they could avoid it.

The other two cards were a bit wild cards. The Proteus card called for a die roll which would provide a random boon, though the character also got to spend time doing something useful for Proteus. Only one character went that route and ended up getting turned into a knife and being used to sacrifice a unicorn, so there’s that.

The Forbidden Secrets deck had a set of cards for other powers and groups in the multiverse, and drawing that meant that I drew one of those and offered them something delicious but terrible. One player immediately drew that, got a fun item out of it, and then discovered she was in a horrible position as a result, and was gun shy after that. However, the deck still showed up occasionally when I needed inspiration for an outside force. A few of the factions on that deck ended up getting added to the blank spots in the relationship sheets, usually as enemies.

So, there were 8 rounds of this, and it was pretty marvelous. As often happens in this sort of thing, players ended up with characters that were not quite what they expected them to be at the outset, but in ways the players really ended up enjoying. The downside of this is that we spent long enough on charges that we did not actually get to start play. However, the players are conspiring to play on Discord or similar, so I take it as a good sign.

All in all, definitely a good experiment. A few takeaways:

  • 8 rounds was probably too many. Went a bit slow.
  • About halfway through I switched from players drawing one at a time to everyone drawing at once, then doing resolution. It sped things up and made it easier to thread these things together.
  • I had intended to pre-load the questions to the draws, but ran out of time, so I was improvising them. Worked out ok, but prepared questions would have sped things up.
  • The relationship sliders were really satisfying, but I think I should have leaned on them a little more. Most of the changes were positive, which doesn’t quite align with the tone I imagine – should have had a little more tension in that space.
  • I ended up improvising some of the interactions between the secrets. As designed, they were effectively three tier powers, but I hadn’t really considered how they might synergize.
  • The deck of threats was a last minute addition, but may have been my single favorite deck. Partly because it was the wildest, but also because what drove me to create it was remembering that putting a bunch of demigods in the middle of reality is only interesting if you can give them something to push against.
  • I did not have enough explicit lateral connection and questioning. Added plenty will well-made questions, but if I add another deck, it will be for player to player relations.

So, successful test. The Proteus setting is one I’m absolutely going to use again – it’s my current personal Amber alternative. This particular variation on card-driven chargen – probably the most complicated I’ve tried so far – still holds up.

System Engagement

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Decisions, Decisions

Buckle up. This is a weird one.

One thing that makes it hard to talk about “play” as a unified thing is that it’s not a unified thing. There are a host of different activities that fall under the umbrella, and some of them are radically different enough to defy generalization. One of these vectors is the level of engagement with the system.

Ok, roll with me a moment: the biggest difference between a game and a story is uncertainy. Excepting very edge cases, the story might have uncertainty within its fiction, but that’s a sham – it will be the same story each time you read it. On the other hand, a game can be expected to be different each time it’s played. If it’s not, then it’s a script, not a game.

Now, given that, where does this uncertainty come from? The obvious sources seem to be “dice” and “other people”, and that’s true enough, but I might go a step further and say that the difference is found in decisions, which are made either by people (who are highly variable) or by systems (which include an element of randomness to introduce variability). This is a very simple endpoint that glosses over the many, many ways that variability can be introduced, used and managed, but the heart of it is decisions.

However, a game is not just a collection of decisions. There is something that makes those decisions (individually or collectively) enjoyable to a player, otherwise they would not be playing.

There’s no one good answer to this. I could say something like “engagement”, “investment” or “stakes”, but that would just be a tautology – for players to care about decisions they need to care about decisions. Not super helpful in and of itself. From a certain perspective, one might even argue that a primary act of play is the creation of that investment in decision.

But knowing that there is something is valuable, since it then lets you look at specific games and specific people and ask why they care about that decision, and it’s often possible to find that out. There are a host of well known motivations – Challenge, fiero, empathy, drama – stuff like that, and there are ways to drive towards those if you have reason to think they’re the desired values.

Ok, so given all that, we have three interesting data points:

1) Games are made of uncertainty resolved by decisions.

2) Those decisions can be implemented in many ways

3) Those decisions can be valued in many ways.

Now, why is this interesting? Because if we accept the premise that making decisions is the defining activity of the game (and it’s cool if you don’t, but I’ll be riding this train for a bit) then it shows us where the nails that connect system to play are (or should be). That is: your play is full of decisions, how does you game’s design interact with that?

If that seems abstract, then consider the slightly more concrete question of “What decisions are being made in play without the game system, and is that gap a problem?” Consider the classic example of “we played all night and never touched the dice once!” This is one of those odd contradictions of game design because the play experience was great, but clearly there is some sort of disconnect because (implicitly) this was an experience the rules as written couldn’t provide. There’s an instinct to consider this as a flag for a bad design, but that seems excessive. It might indicate a mismatch – they might be trying to drive a hammer with with a screwdriver – but that is a different sort of problem.

But where this gets useful is that during that “no dice” session, decisions were still being made. They were just being made by a human rather than a system. This has risks, but in this case it turned out pretty well, and the question becomes whether there’s anything we can learn to replicate the success (and, ideally, fold those learnings into the system in order to automate it).

This is fine as far as it goes, but what’s important to note is that the reality is that while the dice may not have been engaged, this does not mean that the system was not. This is because while the system may offer the means of making decisions, it is also the container for many of the things which influence decisions.

Again, that’s pretty abstract, so let me make it concrete. If you are playing a very skilled thief and you come to a locked door, this is a moment of uncertainty – will you be able to get past the door? (The game may ask a different question, but let’s stick with this for now). The default system almost certainly has some means whereby I could roll some dice, compare it to something, and get a yes or no answers. That is one way to make the decision. Alternately, the GM may simply think “You are a very skilled thief, of course you can pick it, you succeed and move onto the more interesting thing.” This is also a way to make a decision.

But wait, you might think: Have we just stripped the situation of uncertainty? If nothing else, we have stripped it of uncertainty for the GM.

This is, I think, a really interesting philosophical question with curious implications. If you have a sense that uncertainty needs to be fair or evenly distributed in some way then having unevenly distributed uncertainty is a no go. If you shrug and note that it’s still uncertain for the players, then it’s no big deal. But this is such an essential difference that it has really profound impact in design and play.

However, it’s also a bit of a sidebar. The interesting thing in the thief example is that the system contains the information that your character is an accomplished thief in some way. It might be a high skill rank or many levels or whatever, but something in the game reflects and communicates that idea. That informed the GMs decision – should the fighter have come to the same decision, they would not have gotten a pass – so the system is still engaged, even if it’s not engaged in the ‘right’ way.

The result of this long, twisty route for me is to really look at this idea of there being different ways to engage the system in play and consider it as a feature rather than a bug. The premise of this would be that just as there are different kinds of investment and different kinds of decisions, it may be desirable that there be different means of engagement for the system.

This is hardly an unprecedented idea. Turn it a little bit in one direction and it’s the same argument for games having different subsystems for different types of action. But most existing examples proceed on a single axis: granularity. That is, they may have a simple procedure for doing one thing, but a more complicated one for doing something more specific. For example, a game might have a general resolution mechanic for most action, but a more detailed system for combat.

But the possibility which intrigues me is that this could be done on drastically different axes. Go back to that list of things that invest people in decisions and you could have different tools for engagement that support different modes with the expectation that they could change up on the fly.

(As an aside, I think the ability to implicitly do this is one of the appealing elements of very light, very interpretive games. 3d6 in Risus is a very concrete things, but the number of ways to use and interpret it is vast. This is harder as the system picks up more parts).

This is all crazily abstract, so let me make it a bit more concrete with a Fate Hack.

When engaging with Fate in a normal way, these are the things that aspects do at my table:

  • At a cost, it might grant a bonus to a roll
  • At a cost, it might be able to turn an opportunity into a resource or other outcome
  • At a cost, it might remove an impediment
  • At no cost, it might create or impede an opportunity
  • For a payment, it might impose a penalty
  • For a payment, it might remove an opportunity
  • For a payment, it might become an impediment

In this case, “In a normal way” generally means “Declare an action, move around some fate points, roll some dice”, which is to say, directly engaging the system.

However, let’s say I want to capture that “we never touched the dice” feeling in a Fate game. I would simply narrate events, answer questions, and play NPCs until we come to a point of uncertainty. In many situations, I will look at it, look at the skills and aspects in play, and resolve the uncertainty with that information. I would probably also be mindful of how “pushing” an aspect might change the outcome, and use those possibilities as options for fate point spends to nudge things along. I’d need to come up with a good rule of thumb to handle situations where no “right” answer suggests itself, but that can be as simple as “Say yes or ask a question”.

I am, at this point, playing a RADICALLY different game than an “engaged” game of Fate. And yet, in practice, I can move pretty seamlessly between these two modes because they both draw on similar source material (the character sheet), they differ only in how the decisions are being made.

Now, I think this is a good thing. Tastes vary, but this is my jam. However, the question it now leaves me asking myself is how to write the game in such a way that this is the intent, not just a happy outcome. I don’t have an answer for that yet, but I feel like this rambling has brought me closer.

Stress is Best

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Ok, let’s talk about Stress in Blades in the Dark.

This is an amazing mechanic – metamechanic even – that is easy to overlook. For all that it seems faily simple, it’s one of those things that really jumps out at you when you start looking at making hacks for Blades, and you find yourself wondering “Can I use stress to model THING?” and discover that the answer is “Yes. Yes you can.”

For the unfamiliar, BitD characters have a certain amount of stress, represented by a (mostly) fixed length track reminiscent of a Fate stress track, or the wound tracks from any number of games.1 Players can mark off stress for some effects like flashbacks or die bonuses (2 to push oneself for effect, 1 to assist an ally – very simple and nicely teamwork encouraging) but the real meat of the system comes up when it’s used for resistance rolls and how it’s recovered.

This is not going to come as a surprise to anyone who has played much Blades in the Dark, but it is not necessarily obvious when you read the rules or even if you just play it ones. Resistance rolls are one of the most powerful levers in the system – maybe the most powerful. They work as follows:

  1. Something bad happens to your character as a consequence of your actions.
  2. You do not want that thing to happen as presented, so you choose to resist.
  3. The thing does not happen. It may be cancelled, changed or mitigated.2
  4. Dice are rolled and a cost of 0-5 stress is extracted. There are dire consequences if you don’t have enough stress.

Which is to say, guaranteed success, but unknown cost, though the cost is roughly predictable. It starts at 6, then you subtract the highest of 1-4+ dice from that. The player doesn’t know for sure what they’ll be rolling until the GM calls for it, but in a lot of circumstances you can guess, since the categories are largely Physical, Deception or Social, with weirdness only when it’s not in that space.

This is a wonderful mechanic on a few levels, so lets pull it apart.

First, this is possibly the purest expression of “Hit Points as Pacing Mechanism” that you could practically implement. The stress track defers consequences, so it extends the amount of time a character can stay on their feet and in play. But since it does not couch it as “damage” you don’t get the (now familiar) complaints that pop up if it were to actually frame social conflicts as “combat”.3

Second, it has a degree of uncertainty, but also has the possibility of a “good” outcome. There is always the possibility of rolling a 6 on your resistance roll and paying no cost at all. If that was not there, then there would be a ratcheting inevitability that would suck away that potential thrill of victory.

Third, the level of risk is very knowable. When you look at your stress track and you know how many boxes you have left, you can make an educated guess at your odds. If you have 4 boxes left and are going to roll 3 dice? You’re probably going to be fine. But if you’re not? That feels fair. You are not getting blindsided by something being secretly harder than you expected.

Fourth, it introduces a mechanical point for the player to say “no”. This is kind of tangential enough to maybe merit it’s own post someday, but that invitation is a WONDERFUL addition to GM/Player interaction.

Fifth, it let’s the GM push HARD, because the players have the ability to pull it back. How well this works in practice has a lot to do with how much the GM respects resistance rolls, but it’s potentially very powerful4.

Sixth and most relevant to this discussion, the use of stress for this purpose is a wonderful bit of sleight of hand because it frames stress in an agnostic manner. The terminology and presentation5 of stress is like it’s a real-in-the-gameworld thing even though it’s absolutely a meta-currency. The game would function just as well if the currency was “Darkness Points” or “Drama” or whatever, but not calling it that allows people to handle it like they do things like hit points – by just accepting it and moving on. Never underestimate the power of not picking a fight you don’t need to.

Seventh, it’s like saving throws that don’t suck.

So, resistance rolls alone would be a very robust use of currency, but there’s actually a whole engine here, which also includes how you regain the currency. Rather than resetting based on time or triggers, it is restored with explicit action6 (pursuing your vice) and even that has a little bit of risk (it is possible to overindulge). That risk is not huge, but it loads the choice to recover with some necessary thought when you have 5 stress to clear, and you’re worried about rolling a 6. (In case it’s not obvious, this is a wonderful solution to the 5 minute dungeon problem, which is a shame because Blades doesn’t have that problem.)

So, this is all great for Blades, but why am i so excited about this in a general sense?

Because this engine is covered in knobs.

Consider that this cycle of stress use and recovery includes the following things:

  • Spending stress to do ARBITRARY SET OF THINGS.
  • Spending stress to Resist an ARBITRARY SET OF THINGS with SOME RISKS
  • Recovering stress by doing an ARBITRARY SET OF THINGS with SOME RISKS

Almost every game with some sort of currency does the first bullet, but tend to be a bit light on the others. And that’s fine, because the real trick is that every place where I wrote ARBITRARY SET OF THINGS or SOME RISKS?

Those are the things your game is about.

Like, not in some deep metaphorical way, but in the very straightforward “these are the actions you will pursue and the consequences you will face”. And those things, in turn, determine what the currency is.

That may seem circular, but let me illustrate. Stress works well for Blades because it’s a kind of unpleasant setting. Things are under high stress, and the consequences of things going bad are bad for mind and body, but are largely internal to the characters. After all, the main consequence of stressing out is taking on some amount of trauma, a change to the internal landscape.

Consider the very small change where we called stress “luck” and changed almost nothing else. The game would still play about the same way – you could press your luck, and your luck might run out. In that game, I suspect the consequences of your luck running out would be external – loss of resources, harm to the setting and so on. What appears to just be a change in terminology and tone becomes as change in rules because there is an explicit place to do it.

This is why it is so easy to think of other things stress might be (Reputation! Resources! Divine Favor! Popularity! Mana!) and then very naturally fill in what that means by changing the variables (the “ARBITRARY SET OF THINGS”) rather than the formula.

Combine that with the track-style presentation (which makes the whole thing friendlier to a category of players AND makes the use of currency feel more explicit and constrained) and you have a really powerful tool that is not hard to point in new directions. And, hell, while the specific details are tied to the BITD dice system? The model could be extracted further into any system you like. Hell, I could do it with D&D. I couldn’t sell it, but I could totally do it.

  1. Though really, it’s a clock. I mean, clocks and tracks? Same thing. Just different psychology of presentation. ↩︎
  2. This is probably the single most powerful knob in the game (and the game knows this) and it has very little guidance around it. Exactly how much resistance helps in a given situation is a decision that the GM has very broad leeway over, and whether resistance means “This, but not as bad” or “No, that’s not an interesting outcome” is entirely the GM’s decision. ↩︎
  3. Some folks are fine with that abstraction, but the people who hate it HATE IT A LOT. ↩︎
  4. Ironically, if the GM pushes hard before and after the resistance roll (that is, only minimally reduces consequences) then that discourages hard pushes. Player will be more careful and risk averse. If, on the other hand, the GM pushes hard, but then takes a resistance roll as a player statement to step back from the line, then you can get some pretty high octane, high trust play going. And just for completeness, if the GM doesn’t push too hard, but is also conservative with resistance rolls, there’s no harm save wasted opportunity. Weak push/strong resistances is a weird combination but could work well for a game where moment to moment success is a given, but the real attention is on the big issues that underly things (that is, the consequences of blowing out stress). ↩︎
  5. Also, by making it a track rather than some other counter (like tokens) it feels like “loss” rather than “spend”. This may seem like a trivial difference, but the psychology is pretty big. For an easy illustration, try playing Blades with tokens for stress sometime. The entire feel changes, and specifically tilts towards the non-resistance uses because those are more “spendy”. ↩︎
  6. Hat tip to The Shadow of Yesterday which laid the groundwork for this (and many other amazing mechanics). ↩︎

Worldbuilding Rewards Bias

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Bowl of Jellied Eels

I wrote some stuff about food in Blades in the Dark the other day, and I’ll probably turn it into a blogpost, but there’s one point that came up in the discussion that I feel needs some highlighting.

One thing I did in my discussion was say “Ok, we have no sunlight, but we need some agriculture that thrives in the dark” and I went with root vegetables (potatoes, onions, garlic, turmeric, ginger, stuff like that) as being growable-but-weird. The reasoning for this was simple: things that grow underground seem like the things we’d expect to grow well in the dark.

Now, the thing is, this was reasonably called out as somewhat nonsensical. In reality, those plants need sunlight as much as anything else, so if I’m going to introduce dark tubers, why not just introduce dark everything?

I 100% understand where this question comes from, and I do not fault the person asking it, but I want to highlight it as something important. Specifically, I want to highlight it as a question which will destroy your world building1.

Bold claim, I know, but bear with me.

When you are building a world, there is a necessity for some consistency, but complete consistency is impossible to achieve for two reasons.

First, it is an infinitely complicated and boring process when taken to that level.

Second, actual life is staggeringly inconsistent, and things which are consistent feel super fake.

Now, everyone has their own approach to world building, and I’m just talking about what works for me here, but let me unpack how I walk this line: with bias. See, it is easy to imagine world building as a sort of pure intellectual exercise where you start from some fixed set of counterfactual elements, and then “build logically” from there. Now, this can be a SUPER fun exercise, and I totally encourage doing it for fun, but it has a dangerous edge to it when it creates a sense that there is a right answer to what the counterfactual world would look like. This illusion of certainty can result in us pretending that this is not an act of creation, but rather simply analysis, which becomes a real problem if we want to work and play with other human beings.

So, when I world build, I try to be cognizant of the things I want to see. Things like genre touchpoint or random cool stuff, as well as any elements of theme that I consider appropriate. These explicitly are not born from the setting being “logical”, but instead force me to bend and think to try to find ways to make them fit. This has a trio of benefits.

First, it’s fun. It’s my storytelling equivalent of the Apollo-13 tabletop dump.

Second, it keeps the world from entirely making sense. Adding these irritants to the mix is what adds eddies of color and shape to what otherwise may be uniform and uninteresting material.

Third, since these things are fun and thematic elements of the game, they improve play, because they help the world stay in line with expectations.

In the case of blades, I had a few needs (theme of darkness and a desire for fish and chips, plus the dark industrial tone of Duskvol) and potatoes lined up very well with all of those things, so I rolled with that. Now, I can ABSOLUTELY justify it2, but I can always justify whatever I come up with. The point is that the justification feeds the end rather than the reverse.

Not everyone’s going to be comfortable with that, but I encourage trying it. Worldbuilding that only makes sense tends to be very flat – throw in a little of your bias and taste, and I think you’ll find the results much more satisfying and fun (and, honestly, you’re already doing it, but acknowledging it makes you the owner of the process rather than its servant).

  1. Tangential nod to the Fate Toolkit’s magic section here which I’ll reiterate: Once you introduce magic, the most important thing you need to define is what magic CAN’T do. These constraints will be arbitrary, but their alternative is really, really boring, ↩︎
  2. Because someone will ask: A food chain is just an energy transference system. For us, that energy originates from the sun and trickles forward, but once you accept a magical world, you can posit that the energy comes from somewhere else, like the soil. As such, plants which get the bulk of their nutrition from the soil makes sense if the soil has energy. And let’s assume it does. Maybe it just has it. Maybe it depletes, but is refreshed by blood (because spiritual energy has nowhere to go). I kind of like the idea that it depletes and can be replenished because that then makes good soil something valuable and suitably creepy. ↩︎

When the Campaign is the Game

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One thing that Blades in the Dark has really made me think about is fruitfully constraining the setting of a game.  The Blades setting is actually pretty big and I could think of a LOT of games I could fit within it (up to an including Exalted) but as written it ignores all of those options in favor of a very specific focus within a very specific setting.

The focus is not as small as it could be.  The variety of crew types and the size of the city both leave a lot of flexibility, but it’s still a fairly narrow slice, especially when compared to most setting driven RPGs. 

Now, I admit, this is counter to my instincts. I’m a kitchen sink guy.  I want to offer readers as many tools and options as possible, and that can be great for certain things, but it definitely comes at the cost of focus. If I do zoom in, it’s usually in an attempt at brevity, but it’s worth noting that Blades is not a concise book.  I kind of want to deliberately subvert my own instincts and see what designing at a verbose but tight zoom would produce.

My current thinking is that its skeleton would need to be something akin to a certain style of published adventure, specifically a certain style of campaign book which evolves a particular location.  I mean, I guess I could make a game that is explicitly designed to do the Slave Lords arc, but i genuinely don’t see how that would work very well, since it’s just a series of dungeons and dick moves. But more specifically I’m thinking about things like Pool of Radiance or Ruins of Intrigue, where there’s a specific place to play in, with content that unlocks over time.   I could very easily see narrowing a game down and saying “Here are the rules for doing this well.  There is more in the world, and maybe there are other conversations about that, but right now? We’re doing just this thing”. 

So now I’m thinking about other adventures that might work for this.  I mean, there’s probably a whole game to be distilled out of Keep on the Borderlands, but that game might be called “Basic Dungeons and Dragons”.  Dragon Heist is awesome, but I already have Blades and Dusk City Outlaws, so I’m kind of covered there. 

Going to have to go through the bookshelf for ideas, so with that in mind, suggestions are welcome.  Bear in mind, it doesn’t really matter if they’re good adventures (The Pool of Radiance module is…not) but rather that they’re structured in a way that seems like it could contain a whole game. 

What Skills Provide

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Spirit of the Century had 3 different chapters on skills – one on what skills did, one on how you, as a player, could be awesome with that skill, and one on how you as a GM could make that skill awesome in play.  To this day, while I regret how much bulk it added to the book, it’s a model I love because it speaks right to the *story* your skills tell about your game.

Skills are weird in RPGs.  We like to think of skills as “things characters can do”, and we play around with that some. For example, I love the five corner model where a skill is:

  • Do the thing
  • Know about the thing
  • Contact people related to the thing
  • Perceive things that relate to the thing
  •  Perform support actions for the skill

So, the “guns” skill would allow you to Shoot, be knowledgeable about firearms, contact arms dealers, spot a sniper and repair your gun. 

Now, this is a cinematic model (the roots of it are from Feng Shui, where skills cover doing, knowing and contacting) that assumes broadly capable characters, and it interacts interestingly with the overall skill list.  That is, if you have a model like this, what do engineering or perception skills provide?  Note, this is not the same thing as “You should not HAVE engineering or perception skills”, but rather a challenge to make sure those skill are interesting.

In contrast, Cortex (like, pre-prime cortex, specifically thinking the BSG version) did a thing I’ve seen in a few games where it had a short-to-medium list of general skills with the idea that more specific skills were specialties on that skill.  For example, you could buy the “guns” skill at d4 or d6, and that covered all gun skills. But if you wanted to get any better, you bought individual skills up from there (so you might buy pistols at d8 or sniper rifles at d10).  I disliked the specific implementation (because cortex granularity is such that the cap ad d6 felt punitive) but I liked it a lot conceptually.  Done right, it allows for everyone to do stuff, but gives specialists opportunities to differentiate and shine.  

The thing is, where it gets weird is in making differentiation and capability proceed in lockstep.  In this model.  There is no real difference between being good at pistols and bring good at rifles at this point of granularity.  Of course, this can be solved with another layer of complexity.  If you have feats or stunts or something like that. then you can use skill level as a gate on buying them.  To buy the quickdraw stunt, you must have pistols D8 – easy peasy!

And yet…

In practice, this always seems like the path to overcomplicated exercises in bookkeeping (form this, most stunt trees are born).  That’s an annoyance, but over time I’ve come to realize that it can also be kind of fun-destructive, depending on expectations.  In almost every stunt tree system I’ve found, there are hidden patterns of things you actually need in order to be cool. Their exact shape varies – they might be thematic groupings or they might be some mechanical threshold at which point things click.  A very common example of this in various editions of D&D is the collection of hoops you had to go through to emulate a particular fighting style (like fencing, or two weapon fighting) because god forbid you just *start* with a rapier (newer editions are better about this, but I still have 3e flashbacks on this topic).

A further complication on this is that because you end up needing to fit the model of modular bits, you frequently invite balance problems. To continue the D&D model, two weapon fighting was a stylistic goal for some, but because the combination of rules around it were frequently broken, it also became a mechanical goal.

So adding a layer of other elements like stunts is a solution, but it’s one with some concerns.  Enough concerns that it raises the question of whether we can solve these problems within our skill design.

On the surface, it seems obvious, but digging into it reveals something a little bit painful about how we use skills in most RPG design.  That is, skills end up providing between one and three of the following: 

  1. Capability (that is, the ability to do the thing)
  2. Differentiation (that is, a reason why this skill is different than some other skill)
  3. Permission (that is, an assertion that the character *can* do the thing)

it is rare for a design to openly acknowledge this, but at the same time you can see it everywhere.  Whatever skill allows brain surgery has an implicit permission element (assuming the game does not permit everyone to try their hand at brain surgery).  Freeform skill system constantly struggle with differentiation. But for all that, we still go about designing skills like they are only about capability, so all it needs is a rating. 

Some games have addressed this by forgoing skills entirely (but that introduces its own challenges) and other games have tried different approaches to varying degrees of success.  i can’t point at one thing that I think is the right answer here, but the question is rattling around in my head for the moment. 

Who Would Win

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As a result of my niece’s interest, I am now playing the first Danganronpa game. I admit, I had not been previously aware of this series (It’s a video game, and there have been several), and while I’m only a little bit in, I’m hooked. It’s sort of a character-driven-visual-story-puzzler-mystery full of anime tropes with a layer of weirdness. Which is to say, it’s very much to my taste.

I may talk more about the game itself later, but a thing that’s fascinating me about it is that part of the premise is that each character is the “ultimate” something (ultimate pop star, ultimate martial artist, ultimate programmer and so on). It’s a key part of the fiction, but it’s an idea that kind of intrigues me from a game perspective.

One of the key truths of comic books is that the fans love the question of which character would win a fight. Old hands and writers roll their eyes and explain that it depends on who is writing. And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that overlooks a lot of assumptions about the characters and writing.

Yes, it is entirely possible for a writer to insert a Squirrel Girl beats Thanos victory and it’s a thing that happens, but that is not an answer to the instinct that drives the question, it’s an active snub. This is fine if you’re paid to write comics, but works less well for GMs.

What people asking that question are looking for (besides validation of their favs) is a satisfying answer, which is to say one which is consistent with the characters and the stories as they understand them (and their opinions on the “right” answer are usually expressions of their understanding.

To make that concrete, if Batman beats Superman because he had a clever plan that leveraged Superman’s weaknesses, then that’s satisfying because it’s true to both characters, and tells us something about them both. If Batman beats Superman because he’s been bitten by a kryptonian werewolf and temporarily is more powerful than Supes, then that’s a valid story but a deeply unsatisfying answer because it isn’t about the characters.

These may seem like disconnected threads, so let me pull them back together – that idea of a satisfying resolution is an essential part of almost any GM decision about character capability, because that is what the player is looking for when we talk about respecting a character’s capability.

Which brings me back to those “Ultimates” from Danganronpa. In simplest game terms, each of them has an arena where they are guaranteed to win any conflict, and a penumbra of related things where they are likely very capable.

Resolving their ultimates is easy to resolve, but the penumbra is where things get interesting. To come back to Batman & Superman, there is a reason the question is “who would win?”, not “Who can lift more?”. The easy question introduces no tension. I look at two characters in this show and I wonder how a conflict (social, physical, mental, whatever) between them would resolve and how I’d model that in a game.

And the thing that it reveals to me is that the winner is the uninteresting part of the question, and that the key is what this shows about the character.

Sorry for the rambling nature of this one – I’m wrestling with some thoughts about what dice are FOR, and this all feeds into it.

Lessons From The Young

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Musical score with the text "Don't mess with the Bard"The roles seem well received so, at some point, I may need to write those up a little more. I suspect there’s also a player version to be had, but that seems like a daunting task, so we’ll see how that shakes up.

But I’m still chewing on the underlying Santorini issue, and have ended up looping back to it from a strange vector. My son is 9 years old, and we had the opportunity to play some RPGs this weekend. This is not new, but we got to do more than we usually do, and it was somewhat illuminating to me because on many levels he is looking at the same issues as our Santorini player – he is enthusiastic and engaged, but disinterested in work getting in the way of play.

The first two sessions we played were back to back 5e D&D and Fate Accelerated, with the additional twist that it was the same character between the two. Neither game was a perfect match, but the things that worked and didn’t were very interesting to me.

For starters, his primary motivation in making a character was to get a pseudo-dragon familiar, something he had discovered existed in an enthusiastic read-through of the Monster Manual. I 100% cannot fault this and wanted to support it, so we did charge and talked about what it would mean for various classes and races, and he ended up making a human bard (with a 20 Charisma and the Actor feat, no less). He loved some of the explicit bits – the skills he was exceptionally good at, the specific spells, stuff like that. He really enjoyed looking through the backgrounds and considering the RP hooks, but he also ended up reading ALL of them in order to find ones he liked. He groaned at some of the bookkeeping and largely wanted me to write stuff down. All in all, there were a LOT of choices to be made, and he cared a lot about maybe half of them.

Actual play was decent. I stuck primarily to things involving skill rolls because – as the one fight reminded me – a lone level 1 character can be killed by a stiff breeze. That actually made it a little hard to GM, because I had to be VERY CAREFUL about potential threats, but he had fun.

The next session started with just porting the character to FAE and starting up. He was not too excited by the character. It had taken a long-but-specific list of cool things he could do and replaced it with a shorter-but-broader list that pushed more of the creative work onto him. Now, the Little Dude has no shortage of creativity, but he definitely felt this was less exciting than having explicit cool abilities. I could theorize a lot about this – the balance of prompts vs. creation, the dangers of the blank page, constraints breeding creativity and so on – but in practice lists of cool things are pretty fun and they are more what he wanted. I “cheated” and gave him 3 stunts to start out to try to mitigate this, but the reality is that it would really need to be longer. Also, aspects didn’t really grab him – I think they felt more like constraints than opportunities to his eyes, but it may also have been that because I ported quickly, his aspect list was a little uninspiring.

The actual play part went great. He did lots of cool stuff, I had less need of kid gloves, and he absolutely got to be a hero working towards his big plot (defeating the evil priest that had killed his noble parents and seized their lands, a hook that had come out of the 5e prompts). But in the end, he had liked D&D better.

All of which suggests a sweet spot somewhere between these two. A little bit less bookkeeping than D&D, but a bit more explicit than FAE. Curiously, those are probably also very good Santorini style goals. The “Less Bookkeeping” part is pretty obvious, but the “more explicit” bit might need a little unpacking because it is easy to think of FAE as a “light” game, one that’s easy to pick up and play. That’s largely true in terms of pure page count, but it absolutely pushes the burden of creative labor onto the reader and player.

That is not a bad thing in general, but it’s a problem for an introduction. Worse, it’s also a blind spot for our community as we think about these things. When things don’t work because of the level of creative labor they demand, we have a habit of (overtly or passive-aggressively) blaming the reader of the game for not being creative enough. This is…well, it’s lazy bullshit. The idea that “creative players” (carefully distinguished from “normal players”, of course) will solve these problems at the table is a tool of shame that spares the designer from needing to actually think about the human beings using their game. This problem is independent of whether you feel authority likes with the rules or the GM – this is about the utility of the rules, and authority is just a smokescreen to hide that. While I may personally lean towards the GM as authority in my play, holy crap do I appreciate how much clarity a system-centric approach brings to writing because there is less of an easy cop out (though it can still find its way in).

Anyway.

The game he ran is nominally a Fate game, but in practice, the only overlap is the use of the dice. The rest of it is all born out of his head in an amalgam of terms and visuals he’s encountered in other places (our character sheets look a LOT like something from the World of Warcraft UI). He has a lot of classic GM foibles – his insertion NPC can be a bit scene-stealing, and he sometimes narrates our response to events – but they’re normal learning stuff. What intrigues me most is that at some point he very strongly picked up the idea of mixed results (“You succeed but…”) to the point where he uses them ALL THE TIME, so that part may take a little practice.

But it also revealed another tidbit to me in his relationship with the dice. When he rolls, he is really looking at the dice for what happens. He will occasionally remember that there are modifiers and such, but he does not have any instinctive sense of there being some invisible target number which is translated too and from somewhere off the table. This was weird to me at first (since target numbers, difficulties, move tables and such are all second nature to me by now) but if I remove my own baggage, it makes all the sense in the world. Why would he want interstitial steps?

So assuming I want to build to that, there are a few options, and the double-edged part of it is that they lean towards die pool systems. That’s double-edged because die pools are incredibly robust in a mechanical sense, but also can quickly become cumbersome game delays.

Option 1 is Blades in the Dark or a variant (possibly Blades of Fate). The number of dice equates to the chance of success, the highest single result tells you what kind of outcome (good, mixed, bad) you get. Building the pool is pretty simple, so it’s speedy, but there’s room for a little mechanical tooth.

Option 2 is something in the Cortex family. The idea of the size of dice matching to effectiveness is very intuitive, and the trick is all in how pools are built and how rolls are used. More mechanical versatility here, but also greater risk of feature creep.

Option 3 is diceless fate dice. Use a simple diceless system to answer Yes/No, but then add in a fate die roll (I’d be partial to 2df, but whatever) to reflect the situation. Very easy to do, quite powerful and intuitive, but it would also take him on a path very far from “normal” RPGs, especially in terms of what dice mean. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something to keep in mind.

(Since someone will surely ask, no, PBTA is not option 4. It’s a table lookup system, and while I suspect he’d enjoy that exercise, it seems like a dead end. The parts of PBTA I think he’d respond well to – playbooks and stunt like things – are better represented with Blades in the Dark tech, at least for my needs).

All of which is bubbling in my head. Practically, we’ll stick to D&D. Once he’s comfortable with 5e, that is a game that he can play with people who aren’t me, and that’s valuable. But also, there is nothing this kid wants more than a Magic: The Gathering tabletop experience and the Ravnica Books have only fueled the fire for this. I feel like that setting prompt, plus his system needs could dovetail very well.