Influences Part 2 - Scum And Villainy

Continuing on the last post about Games that are influencing Beacon design.

One of the bigger influences I have had these past years is Blades in the Dark and the Forged in the Dark rule set.  The influence of this game is so much so that I almost decided to start on my own Forged in the Dark skin instead of coming back to Beacon.

I started to hear about Blades in the Dark on podcasts and on google+ (haha) quite a few years ago.  I was really into Ashen Stars at that time and was struggling with some of the downtime mechanics and the reputation economy and ship as a character in that game and the ideas I was hearing about from Blades in the Dark* sounded like they would be interesting ways to address some of those issues. I think that the stress economy and downtime mechanics was the initial big draw.  I really liked the idea that PCs would accumulate stress and need to take non-optimal actions to blow off steam in some way to get it back.  Stress and vice is universal story fodder, just like money being a real world game mechanics everyone is familiar with.  I also was taken by the idea of the PC group as a game entity in its own right.  I saw this idea first in a Warhammer RPG game, and in Ashen Stars there is a ship sheet for the crew but Blades takes this a step further.

But as much as I like the rules for Blades in the Dark, I really wasn't into the setting.  I mean I have nothing against the setting, its a fantastic setting and a lot of people love it, I would probably like playing in it, but I don't have any fire to run it unfortunately.  I like sci-fi games and I like games where there is a code of conduct or some other reign on the PC actions so it does not just devolve into murder-hoboism.  I really wanted to somehow merge the stuff I was hearing about Blades in the Dark with Ashen Stars and see if I could have the best of both.  I tried a few times to either re-skin Blades into a sci-fi, game or tack on the mechanics I liked onto Ashen Stars but nothing really stuck.

Enter Scum and Villainy.

I bought the book when it came out and although it wasn't an exact match for what I wanted, it was close and  I did want to try to run it.  Because I had been thinking of the mechanics so much in the context of the Ashen Stars, I decided to run it as a continuation of that campaign.  I originally wanted use the ideas I had for skinning the system to make it fit the space cops concept, maybe even tack on some Ashen Stars rules, but I decided against that since I wanted to understand how it worked first.  I played it pretty much straight, although I did mash in my own "Ashen Stars" setting material from past games.
If Scum and Villainy had come with a really detailed setting and I had to substantially work it over to play, I probably would have started adding in my own rules.  However S&V is pretty loose by design and with the more narrative system I thought I would be able to make it work pretty much as written.  I started the campaign on a 'lets see' basis and found that I didn't really have to change anything mechanical to make it work and I was even able to incorporate a lot of the setting materials that came with the game, they had a similar iconic feel as the Ashen Stars material.  The only substantial difference between the old game and the new game was that the players were no longer space cops, but bounty hunters.  That's a slight difference, but it did have a big impact and I'll get back to that point later.

I got lucky running it with a good group of players who were willing to put in some sweat because the first few sessions were very rough.  First off the players were not inclined to take any actions because the resolution system seemed too punishing.  Their perception was that so many rolls had consequences or bad outcomes that they didn't ever want to roll the dice and when they did they gamed things so much they had no room for roleplay.  Part of this I believe was based on the player facing system changed the dice mechanics so that bad rolls were very bad and even many of their successes seemed like failures.  This was not the case of course, but it felt that way since I wasn't rolling for the bad guys and their rolls now drove the game opposition.  So although from my perspective there was a net neutral outcome in this new system, and the PCs were actually very competent, from the player perception they were not able to do what they wanted and their characters were doing very poorly.
The second issue was that I had a hard time understanding how to scale things in a system without hit-points and levels and so things were either a cakewalk or devastating.  Either I was pulling my punches and they were breezing by challenges or I was giving out consequences and they players were taking on damage and serious conditions before the missions even got started.  Initially this because of the players not remembering to use their resistance, but it also took time for them to get used to spending stress to resist things, since they guarded their point very jealously.  I find that when ever you have points in a system players will hoard them.
Thirdly I really tripped up on the effect and consequences relationship and we didn't understand the concept of trading position for effect and so I was overusing harm as a consequence.  I didn't initially understand this dynamic so I was ticking off clock segments based entirely on the roll results instead of assigning an effect for an action and allowing the players to negotiate a better position or by using lesser effect as a consequence.

What saved this game was some whining good discussions with the players about what they were not liking and then I really had to go do my homework since we were obviously missing something.  It also really helped to find some good reference material.  By luck I found this great YouTube series Let's Learn Blades in the Dark.    This is a really good series stepping through the core mechanics and very useful for anyone thinking about running a Forged in the Dark system.  Between this and boning up on specific mechanics that seemed wrong, it gave me the insight I needed to understand how the various game systems work together.  The most important thing that our table learned coming from a more traditional roll 20 type background was understanding resistance and understanding how to trading position for effect.  Once we sorted that out there was a lot more flex in the system and players would take lesser effect as a consequence and spend their stress to resist harm more often.  Once we got that we started to appreciate how flexible they resolutions were and how they could model all kinds of conflict.

There is a lot of good stuff in the Forged in the Dark system,  Things like stress, conditions and the downtime mechanics are really interesting to play with and there is some similarities in how Beacon uses hit points and fatigue and the Forged stress mechanic.  There is also a lot of similarity in how the Beacon skill system and the FitD skill system work.  Even with keeping the resolution mechanics very d20, you can still take away the idea that resolving challenges can be more of a conversation and a negation in how to apply their stated actions into a roll.  Beacon already has the idea of matching skills to activities but I like moving away even more from all the incremental +1 -2 type modifiers and making things a little more organic based on the narrative and this is one of the reasons I want to bring in the advantage/disadvantage mechanics from 5e.  Advantage/disadvantage works well to model all sorts of situations, is easy to understand and speeds things up.

The idea of downtime is a bit more of a stretch to incorporate into Beacon without loosing the d20 compatibility although there are a lot of precedents in d20 games for something like this.  In the core game Beacon has built in downtime for stat healing, making potions etc and the times it takes for players to level up.  Conditions and stress are an attractive idea but I don;t know if they should be built in systems.  Also since its roll20 bases you can always add in campaign specific rules as well depending if you are playing a story type game or a hex crawl or a west marches style shared world.  I though about adding in more of these but I'm not sure if they should be in the core rules or just floating around out there.  Lots of these, like these nifty resource ideas I would be stealing from other OSR blogs in any case.






*When mentioning stress as a mechanic I also have to mention Torchbearer here and the amazing and related Darkest Dungeons video game which I was also looking at at the same time.  I don't remember all the details but apparently it was a heady time filled with madness, alcohol and self flagellation...