The Liz Hack: Introduction

 Like my forefathers before me, I’m putting together my own tabletop game. Since chronicling its rough development is gonna be one of the primary attractions of this blog, I figured I’d set out my rough goals right now.

My Home Game

Right now I’m running a game of Worlds Without Number. It’s going great in a lot of ways: the characters are fun, the action is going well, and it's freeing to be able to not give much of a shit about session prep in the same way. However, there is some stuff I’ve found my players struggling with, mostly in the form of tackling minutiae. This piece by Binary Star Games talks a lot about how to make games run faster, and I’ve noticed my home campaign running into a few snags, such as a five-minute discussion on just how much gold the party actually had. So mandate the first is to try and simplify things as much as possible.

It seems to me like plumbing the ruins of an ancient complex would be lonely work.

Liz <3 Blades in the Dark

I have a very personal relationship with Blades in the Dark. I named myself after one of my PCs, and the game and its derivatives have been tumbling around in my brain for years. In particular, I adore its game structure, where the tense skin-of-your teeth action cuts right to “the good stuff” and the (relatively) calm nature of downtime flow into each other like two rivers of good game design. Something I’ve struggled with as a GM running WWN (and playing in games like Dungeon Crawl Classics) was how disconnected I would feel from any sense of Things Happening. This might just be because I have an attention problem, but those phases to me helped make it feel like every session I got the complete experience (there’s a post here about why I fell off comic books, but that’s a story for another day). 

My crude recreation of the gameplay loop of Blades

Dungeon Bastards

I am not the first person by any means to come to the conclusion “Hey, dungeon-delving seems like a job that would be really bad for your mental health.” Darkest Dungeon did it, Torchbearer did it, and so on so forth. I’d personally never been grabbed by any of these until I encountered Goblin Punch's sanity system, which adds an element of push-your-luck, with each point of Insanity pushing you closer and closer to permanent damage. Coupled with Blades in the Dark’s own mechanics for stress and trauma (where you expend it to improve your rolls at the risk of being traumatized), and suddenly I started cooking with gas; here was a way to offset the relatively lower success chance of traditional OSR characters while having it come with a real risk. 

Of course, why should only your mind be at risk? Worlds Without Number (and other games by Sine Nomine) includes the concept of System Strain, where after a certain point a character can’t get magically healed anymore because their body can’t take it. As someone still rehabilitating a broken arm almost a year after it was operated on through surgery, I…felt that, for lack of a better word. Adding a similar system for physical strain where you can damage your body fascinated me…and was also the point I realized I’d need to make a new character sheet, at which point why not make a new game?

Sometimes you just need a little rest and relaxation

That’s my schtick, get your own

Something I’ve really dug about Worlds Without Number and its relatively modular nature (with classes getting to select their own Foci and feats) is that it makes each character feel like their own thing, whether it's our Goblin Warrior who is almost untouchable, our healer/duelist, or our psychic/necromancer who’s easily the most unethical of the bunch. I also like when characters grow out instead of up, gaining new abilities instead of just increasing their math. The current plan is to be class-based, but hopefully have the class features be selectable and impactful, to two Rogues or w/e are distinct from each other. 

I put my goals in a bulleted list

• Simplify, simplify, simplify. Keep people playing the game as much as possible. 

• Borrow the game loop from Blades in the Dark to make “What to do when” a bit more obvious and provide some narrative structure.

• Highlight the wear and tear that affects the common adventurer via stress mechanics.

• Help everyone feel unique by providing new abilities instead of just math increases.

Next time, we’ll cover the Core Loop in a little bit more detail, as I break down the phases of gameplay and what happens in each one.