The Best and Most 'Stealable' Mechanics from Tabletop RPGs

[Music] all right looks like I'm live and we're ready to start talking about some RPGs and theft see I knew there were going to be fans of theft in this audience so uh what are we talking about today we're talking about role playing games the tabletop variety not just the video game type but specifically the wide and wondrous world of interesting mechanics and styles and books and there are a lot of them uh that's part of why I did this talk there's just so much to Wade through and so much to steal and put in our video games I've heard it kind of as occasionally worked so let's get into it uh who am I so for those who don't know

uh my name is Evan Hill I've been a level designer for about 10 years I'm currently at obsidian making outer Worlds 2 I also used to be a part of nauy dog making The Last of Us Part Two also somewhat relevant I've made torment tides of num Manera solar Ash worked on a game called Pia and very specifically uh this one uh inspired by or followup by planescape torment um is really relevant to this talk because it's one of the few major games to adapt Monty Cook's Cipher system it's very different than DN it's rather complicated we don't have time to get into it now got a lot of slides to get through so let's just get to the stealing so here's the plan I'm going to walk you guys through each game we're going to case The Joint we're going to study the mechanics and then we're going to figure out how to steal it and fence I mean put it into our own video games and then we're going to learn from others so here are the targets I've broken this down into six simple steps targets areas we're going to talk about characters and time basically character

stats interesting things like that weird resolutions which is Bonkers ways that you can play games instead of rolling dice uh short and sweet one-page RPGs in the absolute territory of strange interesting things that come out of there ancient knowledge where we're going to start talking about people Reviving The more gigian days of tabletop RPGs and uh I'm not going to explain disco Mist apocalypse yet you can get there when we get there first let's do characters and time how could I start a talk about stealing without first talking about blades in the dark by John Harper there's a reason for The Hoots this game is phenomenal and one of the first things we're going to dive into is other than it's just basically greatness it's basically a uh tabletop Dishonored for those who don't know that's all we really need to jump into the best first mechanic which is flashbacks like any good heist movie this game allows us to meet an obstacle and instead of actively trying to to solve it in the moment we

can jump backwards in time and say fix it before we even got there say you see a guard around a corner in blades in the dark instead of stealthing behind him or trying to take him out non-lethally you can say I jump back to a week ago where I threatened his life with a gun or bribed him and then we actively make that role to see whether or not you succeeded already we can see the opportunities this provides and a lot of games have started to do this rather successfully where we take an obstacle and instead of just letting the player figure it out with their Tools in hand we get this Rich Cornucopia of options we can do a lot more social gameplay we can interject and incorporate skills that aren't necessarily your stunning your stealthing or uh immediate onhand gear into the gameplay Loop and I mean I think there's a lot of opportunities we've got a lot to cover but uh say like with Assassin's Creed the RPG ification of that series is going further and further and can you imagine imine if

like we go back to being iio and I can bribe a guard just as easily as I can stab him in the neck I kind of want to play that game uh but you might be asking this is a really powerful ability how does blades in the dark balance this idea of time travel uh pretty well I'd say it uses a system called stress so stress and blades in the dark is kind of like this Expendable resource that also is a measure of your mental health so anytime you do a flashback push yourself on a roll or try to undo something bad happening to you immediately you can take a stress it's rather hard to get rid of as you can see too there's also a ticker at the end if you fill up your stress bar you're going to take a permanent debuff called a trauma and what I think makes this so excellent is that it's not just a second health bar this is something that has real tangible resource value that's not just oh can I take mental damage it's I'm actively pushing myself I'm actively tangibly taxing my body and character Beyond their normal limits what's the

consequence of that I think darkest dungeon demonstrates a really good example of this even though I would say this kind of leans much more into that second health bar territory where it's you know your mental health points but more than that it's long-term consequences I think are just something phenomenal to learn from as I said stress focuses on something that's more than a second health bar but now I think everybody who did the lose probably going to love this next one we're going to talk about clocks so the way blades in the darks works is really special instead of a normal Quest log instead of you know tracking inventory or hit points you also track all of the Myriad threads and events that are going on with really simple circles and note cards and quickly it starts looking like this so to explain it simply uh a progress clock is just what it says it can represent anything

it can be a measure of the guard's alertness it can be your vampire investigation it could be time until the werewolf Uprising it is this flexible tangible tool and anytime a player does a flashback spends some stress or nearly fails something the GM is given the opportunity to advance one of these various clocks as a response and it creates this very winding Clockwork experience where every little action is pushing and pulling on this wide variety of intricate threads and stories and states that would be nightmarish to write all the rules out for like a guard alert system is already complex enough that we have an entire stealth game genre so this just lets us condense that all down and focus it so how can we Implement something like this as I kind of buried the lead on I think this is a really clean example where we can just wholeheartedly yon this and put it in our Quest log system like more quests can behave in this incremental way and I think we

would see huge gains from utilizing this uh pathologic 2 also kind of has some Vibes of this though it uses a real world clock but we'll talk about that in a bit now we're going to move on from blades in the dark because again we've got a lot to cover uh Burning Wheel and mouse guard uh so this is a very beloved uh RPG Series this is one of my favorites by far um so initially built by Luke crane as this kind of obscure fantasy focused uh role playing system it then partnered with uh David Peterson to make mouse guard which is a distillation and evolution of everything Burning Wheel was it is this very character-driven nuanced experience all of your stats incrementally change over time your characters have very defined characteristics identities and those two most startlingly of all change over time and the way it does this is through beliefs and instincts so we're going to

just focus on mouse guard for a second in mous guard you're basically in a medieval Society but you're made of tiny little guys look at them you're part Mouse part human and as a result there's this giant tapestry of roles professions identities ideologies all at play and you get to roleplay that as a part of this intricate little Society so how the defines it both in Burning Wheel and mouse guard is with beliefs and instincts a belief is something kind of tangible it is a concrete understanding of the world that the character has and it is meant to be a stance it is not just a wishy-washy like oh I believe hope should save the world it is something like you're a peasant farmer and you get to write down on your character sheet I am the true king of this land it is uh for example uh in Burning Wheel this orc here writing this wolf

has beliefs like I must interrogate an elf a dwarf and a human to discover if they have Minds like my own also the legion I will Forge my own path and then the little mouse on the side has an interesting little belief of a guard Mouse needs to think with their head and feel with their heart they can be simple little character threads but where this then comes back into the mechanical is anytime that you operate in accordance with these beliefs you get rewarded you're given Persona points you're given resour sources to further Drive the story and push on a future role and now an instinct is like a baby version of it they are the automatic behaviors your character is expected to do and these are really interesting because they are things that the GM is allowed to say that you do without you saying you do it so an example of a good instinct is like I always draw my sword at the sign of trouble that's great you can play it where you might get the equivalent of initiative role anytime something pops

out of you it's less great in a courthouse and now all of a sudden you're being presented with these very character-driven tradeoffs that can be often helpful sometimes harmful but even more interestingly none of these are meant to be static the player and the character kind of weave over time you're able to level up and alter these things if say your belief is I will always guard The Prince and the Prince dies what happens now and again this tangible reward is always there going back to the instincts anytime that an instinct negatively affects you the game design is explicit in that the player then gets that same resource if they opt into it you can decide to not draw your sword in the courthouse but that extra XP is really good so it drives the story forward and some of you might have noticed that uh this is very similar to the cop types and thought cabinets in Disco elesium because uh these people are very smart and they stole very good things

but I want you to think further on though like if we started implementing that in our RPGs closer to Mass Effect we could demonstrate interesting character arcs like Commander Shepherd's trust in earth authority or where they sit on the various relations between the different species it would be one thing to decide whether the rakite queen lives or dies it'd be another knowing that your bonuses matter towards it blowing it up versus sacrificing maybe like a level worth of experience to change your beliefs now or otherwise adjust against it um I said I'm not you you can take this and run with it however you want but the one this is the reason I made the talk though this next set vice and nature stats so in Burning Wheel and mouse guard there are these unique categories of skills they are not basket weaving they are not sword fighting they are these emotional aspects of your

character and they have massive trade-offs so to start with in Burning Wheel I think they're still a bit rough but still very interesting to talk about the examples in Burning Wheel are greed grief and anger they work just like your other stats if you use them on a roll you take your number and you roll that many dice or you can combine them if like sword fighting and athletics they're usually very good they give you the option to substitute on any role a relatively High number the catch is you need to demonstratively show that it aligns with theice so let's take an example if you have a four in greed and there is an object that you want to bargain for instead of using your charisma check you can decide to use your greed stat and potentially get four times of an effective chance of of getting it the negative though is like

other stats in Burning Wheel the more you use it the more it levels up and the more a vice stat levels up the further your character is restricted from certain actions uh greed is another really good example I believe if you get past rank three in it anytime you are divvying things up even something as simple as a pie you are not allowed to divvy it up evenly and fairly with other people you always always have to take an edge you always always have to behave in a certain way and right there the player is given this Arc this option that's more than just what's my build but balancing short-term gains and long-term character-driven consequences and now there's a lot to like unpack there I don't know if we have full time for it but modeling with these like negative traits can be a bit dangerous and that's why I think uh Mouse guard's approach is even a step better like this is the truly refined version of it and it's dead simple like if you pause this you'll be able to read

this really quickly the way mouse guard works is because you're just a cute little guy if you do things that a tiny little mouse thing would do you can substitute your nature stat basically anything that's like climbing escaping hiding foraging you just get natural ability at doing that thing now where it gets interesting is you can also use it to act against your nature standing up and fighting guarding running through fire anything that's against your nature you can then substitute this stat that ranges usually from 1 to seven in a game where seven is like level 15 to do anything but anytime you act against your nature taxes it meaning the next time you use it for any reason it's one less rank if you deplete it you're going to lose an entire pip in it until you recover possibly taking multiple sessions so you're presenting the player with this like easy Road of good bonuses moving towards an alignment or a style

or a class that you see as valuable and helpful but they're not limited to that they are constantly given this choice to Nitro boost their roles to try and succeed but with that balancing consequence of the cost later the character impact if you deplete your nature all the way your character gets described as either obsessive or odd if you let your nature get too high your character kind of settles and doesn't want to go out and Adventure any anymore and they get negatives on both ends of the spectrum and the game itself then suddenly demonstrates that it has this tension between these two different Essences that the character has both as a mouse and as a warrior or a Craftsman or uh you know somebody who will go out and fight an owl face to face but yeah what I really love about this and again the whole reason I built this talk was because what we're seeing is something that is a resource and a stat all at once you able to spend this

stockpile it utilize it however you want to shape the story and how you use it naturally creates a dynamic character even with this just singular access you're showing a character's ups and downs confronting with not only how they perceive the world or act in it but their own internal landscape gets shifted one way or another depending on how this action goes out and I can't think of a game where this wouldn't be interesting and yeah that's what we're here to do is just I think there's a ton of these tools that can just be put nearly anywhere but let's just keep going into the simple easy to steal stuff one of my favorite rules in Burning Wheel which is a game that's normally very complex is just roll versus Bloody it's dead simple two people fight they just roll die and see who gets the bigger number and they get the damage no checking against AC no maneuvering it's meant to be just like oh we get to do a bar brawl uh we're about the same strength what happens some of you might notice that uh another favorite cop of ours also uses this

mechanic because again these people are very smart and I like them but now we're on to part two weird resolutions so who here's played Jenga so the games we're about to talk about are wonderful bits of design on completely OPP ends of the Spectrum in dread it is a survival horror game where every time you take a risky action you need to take a block out of the D janga Tower and if the D janga Tower Falls over everyone dies and then in starcross you're playing a romantic scene between two Star Cross lovers and every time you take an action you take a block out of the D janga Tower and when it falls over you have to make out now that is the complete breaking point of the tension and yeah so the whole Jengo of it all already we're seeing that like when we talk about RPGs when we talk about storytelling games we don't need to be limited to just Dy and paper we

can produce the same kind of emergent behavior and engaging stuff with radically different tools and well I think this is like a fun example I think there is even more an explored territory here so some of you might already be thinking how do I put this in a video game oh do I just model the figs instead of Jang Tower you might then realize that that's not necessarily the most compelling thing it's also still just Randomness and variety but I think we're also missing another aspect of it if I have something like this and I'm in a scene where there is a cataclysmic or critical event that happens when I knock it over you're constantly giving your player the option to just flip the table over if you're playing this in a negotiating game instead of it being necessarily like oh when the janga tower Falls I fail it's I can decide to knock this over walk out of here maybe with my dignity intact and certainly a lot of negative reputation but some other way uh this is also basically what happens

in stealth games so for my work in Last of Us and my love of metal gear like one of the best ways to describe failing stealth is knocking the janga tower over sometimes you're going to deliberately try to pick it apart move through paths naturally just accidentally tip it over and things get loud and other days you're just going to bust the door open with a shotgun and start screaming and both of these are these valid interesting narratively relevant ways of approaching something so think there's something there but moving on still uh roll and write this one might be slightly unfamiliar to some people it's a new kind of emerging genre it's getting quite popular where it's almost a solo game you sit down with some friends you roll some dice you allocate those numbers onto a table and you do things like build railroads or Condominiums if you're thinking it sounds like yatsi it essenti is but there is this massive diversity of genre

and style and mechanics and some people are already starting to use it uh many of you have probably heard of Citizen sleeper and basically that's all this game is at the beginning of the day you're given a pool of dice of varying values and the game and the story evolve depending on where you allocate them like this was one of the most compelling games of last year and it's essentially cyberpunk yatsi and it doesn't end there um there's this uh survival space Sim called uh tharsus I hope I'm pronouncing that right that again uses this same really simple mechanic to tell deep complicated stories about survival and resource allocation and just the risk of attempting risky Maneuvers in the vacuum of space and this doesn't have to State like in the survival main like dicey dungeons came out like four years ago I want to see more combat more interaction mechanics that have the kind of pop and

depth as this game and I think it's not a hard sell again some people are very smart uh but let's keep moving so we also have onepage RPGs so often people think RPGs are these massive TOS that just require a master's degree to even approach much less fully comprehend now sometimes you just have a game like honey heist where you are a bunch of bare criminals with two stats be and criminal and you can play this in an afternoon and just have a wonderful time with your friends or sexy battle Wizards which just has sexy battle and wizard as stats or John is everyone where three of you get to play as John and the vo is inside of his head they're simple and cool and I'm going to leave it at that because they're simple and cool uh and

now we're going to get into something a bit interesting the osr for people who don't know there is this uh Trend among Dungeons and Dragons afficionados of the old school Revival it's kind of an attempt to return to their digal ways of like ad and D there are some caveats a lot of these people sometimes uh maybe go for the aesthetic of the 1980s a little too hard and end up being coming off a little crusty but I think the core of this thing is still very good and wholesome and really uh demonstrates some of the things that we're lacking in a lot of modern game design uh focuses on player agency they tend to be rules light one of my favorite systems in it is just about 10 pages as a pamplet it's usually highly thy and low power so you know everybody's played a level one campaign or at least seen people try to stream it and die very quickly on it and it's usually very focused on resource management uh credit to uh

p credit to lines for uh writing the article I got that all that from but uh some of the most standout people in this are uh Ben Milton uh he's the one who wrote that small 10-page pamphlet I just mentioned called Nave which you can just pick up and play it is really approachable really easy to play and hits all the things that we're talking about even more importantly he wrote one of my favorite dungeons of all time called The Waking of Willoughby Halls where you were stuck in a haunted mansion where another adventuring party runs in with a stolen Goose from an angry giant so you're dealing with this just lasagna of problems that turns into the tabletop equivalent of a Hitman level on acid can't sell that better than I just did he also has an even shorter even more comp condensed version called maze rats this is just a couple Pages there are no classes and even when it comes to spell casting you get one spell a day and you randomly roll it it is just meant to be raw immediate

quick fun that captures all of the beauty and all of the Just intricacy of improving with your friends um another major standout that is always worth looking at is Chris McDonald's into the odd so its followup is even more stunning and this is the one we're going to focus on here it's called electric Bastion land as a setting as a piece of art check it out for just that there is an entire racial category for Muppets I did not stutter but one of the most interesting things of this and Nave is you can make a character in this game in less than five minutes you just have three stats you roll them and then you figure out what failed career your character is there is no quibbling over what color belt buckle do I need but there is a random table for it if you really want to dig that far and you can be everything from a science Mystic a prize breeder a machine Whisperer there's 100 plus of these things and you were just me to be thrown into this wild strange

world and all of these mechanics facilitate that they facilitate you jumping into this setting with no need to be on- ramped no need to again sit down and do three hours of studying or a session zero you're just able to go your characters will probably not be around long enough anyway so you'll just roll up another one again uh a lot of you might be realizing that this is fairly similar to a lot of other game designs that we're used to today and that makes sense this is the core of what seated things like Rogue not just Rogue likes but the original Rogue things like system shocks uh Hitman anything with emergent Sims or Rog like design really finds its roots in these things and even still we're finding more to look back on and kind of harvest from this era of game design there's just so much to be said about simplifying about removing complexity and letting you just kind of get to the meat of the story of the narrative by getting out of the players way and just letting them roll some

numbers and now for the my favorite part of this talk the Disco misk apocalypse this is the big score this is the thing that during my research I kind of came across and absolutely fell in love with uh there's this system called apocalypse world it's brilliant it kind of came out and was a bit obscure but since then it's been continually licensed there are multiple games that utilize this uh dungeon World monster hearts and I think most poignantly and the best example is city of mist so what makes this thing special unlike all of these other settings unlike all of these other um systems this is built story logic first it's not coming from the ground up and trying to establish uh complex systems it is I want to take a story action what's the result and one of the benefits of this is it lets you have really simple characters just like with

the osr here we have somebody who's based off little red writing Hood her abilities are not complicated rules text they are literally bulletproof Red Hood arsenal of hunting weapons High School rumors those are the things she's good at if you can justify her using any of those things you get a bonus to your role if you mess up on that role you're going to take some consequences or partially accomplish your goal uh we're running out of time a little bit so I'm just going to kind of speed through this but overall this system is wonderful you need to check it out we it's flexible it's able to render tons of characters of any variety and style and really all you need is what you see on this table dice you don't even need these note cards but the real reason I found this so compelling was very quickly I realized is this is what disco elium utilizes not just oh hey we're rolling 2d6 or oh hey we're using tags but this very fundamental approach of story logic first systems not even tertiary you're being

presented with a a game that focused on articulating the attributes of its character and seeing what happened failure being one of the most interesting Parts about that equation there's such things as near misses and interesting funny fuckups in this game and I really think it holds itself uh a lot of credit to the apocalypse system whe whether or not this was conscious or unconscious it wound up kind of blossoming out and it's what separates it from other games of its era I think and also why it's very difficult to just look at disco elesium copy its stats copy its systems and attempt to get the same results because it's just so fundamentally about this top- down approach that's why the tribunal is so effective there is no combat system in this game because it never needed one it has a system for Revol resolving story conflict and it just presents any fight like a story conflict and yeah no this this talk

might have kind of always secretly been a little bit of a love letter to disco elium and I'm unabashedly okay with that because they're very good but uh we're running out of time so we're going to skip or through some of this bonus stuff that I was hopefully going to cram into the end uh but you need to check these out pathologic 2 this is off the table this is not a tabletop game it's very good you all need to use this Quest system that they have is a mind map it is not a quest log it is not just a list of things you can do it is wonderful and great and I don't have time to gush about it now but absolute credit to its designer uh she's an absolute genius also NOA this is an odd one this is a single player visual novel among usik where you are deciding and figuring out who to cold sleep because some of you are aliens it also has a porpose in a pressure shoot you need to play this game but anyway if you take anyway anything

away from this talk it's learn and steal from the best don't feel ashamed of this game design just like any other discipline is something that is collaborative and evolving and we stand on the shoulders of giants and that's all we can really hope for even if a heist like this like this talk that I gave may have been a little less Mission Impossible and a little more Fish Called Wanda thank you for listening uh you can also all follow me on Twitter please rate the talk and then hopefully I'll also have a little bit more to share of this little thing that's not a video game that will be coming soon but yeah everyone have a wonderful GDC I hope to uh see most of you all [Applause]

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