Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/21/neon-skies-a-standout-cyberpunk-ttrpg-worth-your-attention.html
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99% of those is basically skinned D&D #changeMyMind
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Neat! Paint the miniature of shade for Tactical Breach Wizards? (New game on Steam.)
I don’t know about those in particular, but for a “definitely not reskinned D&D” I submit for your consideration:
Dogs in the Vineyard
The mechanics revolve around stating a conflict, building a dice pool, rolling dice and matching or raising until you can’t or won’t, and then either giving-in or escalating (your brother in law is going to town to kill a prostitute that his son has been frequenting, you try to talk him out of it…if you get out rolled you can escalate to violence, get a new pool of dice depending on weather you are using fists or guns). The live of escalation has a lot to say about the outcome of the conflict. If you try to stop him with your words succeeded or fail you might cause bad feelings, but that is. If you escalate to fists someone might get broken bones, but in Dogs nobody dies in a fist fight. If you escalate to guns someone might be dead by the end of the conflict. There are mechanical advantages to “giving”, so if you realize you can’t talk your bother in law out of murdering someone, and you are sure you can’t punch them into doing what you want and you don’t want to kill them you can give and get to keep the best die you rolled in your failed conflict to use in a conflict with the same actors later.
You select your mechanical action before you narrate it, so if you are fighting and the other guy swings a rake at you and he has a ten on his two dice and the best you can do to match is is more then two dice you shove your ten on three or more dice forward and narrate how you are “taking the blow” – “I see the rake swinging towards me in slow motion, I twist out of the way, but just as I do my foot lands on a rock and I fall forward the rake hits my shoulder with a sickening crack”. (ok, personal bugbear describing a great combat move in D&D rolling dice and getting a result nothing like it…or describing a ho-hum move and getting a fantastic result – seeing how good or bad the dice are before describing what happens make it easier to match the tones).
So hey “ok, it’s like D&D you are fighting over stuff, so what that the combat and social interactions systems are unified”, but unlike D&D none of the action is really tied to combat rounds or linear time. In D&D you get ambushed int he middle of the night without your gear and you are badly screwed. It typically goes so badly that a DM never does it because everyone feels hosed.
In dogs it works: “the murderer silently enters your tent and you catch the briefest glint of moonlight on the axe as he swings it towards your head”, so you roll your fightin’ dice…and you narrate “not long before nightfall I catch a glimpse of the murderer as he tracks me thought the woods. I build my campsite and bring my pack in, I stuff my bedroll with twigs and lay my canteen out with my hat on it just out of the bedroom, I hide behind my backpack, hunched down, gun out…after hours of boredom FINALLY the axe swings, my canteen is shattered, and a shocking BOOM as I fire my gun…”
That scene can’t really be made in D&D.
Plus you don’t really play a bunch of murder hobos slowly amassing wealth by killing anything you can. You play a bunch of teenagers armed with a book and a gun solving problems that absolutely shouldn’t be solved with a book and a gun.
Also the balance is quite different. In Dogs the players as a group can almost always mechanically defeat anything the DM is doing. The “trick” is to get the players into situations where they don’t all want the same thing and see what happens.
Oh, plus there are also a few other tricks. Frequently people become convinced the dice tell the whole story, so an old lady steels from the store. You confront her, try to use your words to shame you, but she rolls well or has a bigger social pool then you and her narrative about the theft as essential food to survive is competing. You are going to have to let her walk out, or physically stop her. You escalate to physical violence dice pools ar rolled, you see the GM’s dice, he has a bunch of great rolls, so you put your biggest die forward knowing it will only delay things, and narrate how you grab her and stop her from leaving, prying the cans out how her hand. The DM has a pair of dice that can match yours, but rather then use them they push out all the small dice they have. She takes the blow. You broke her arm! You’re a monster! She crys out as you take the food from her limp grasp. Granted D&D can do that because social conflicts are largely iceless and made up by the GM anyway, but here the expectations the game sets up where you looked at her dice pool and went in strong only to be reminded the GM doesn’t have to play their best dice if they want the story to go differently…
It definitely isn’t D&D, although I have to admit it is a bit much in large doses.
Then again it could be worse. I could have told you how Ten Candles (a very different RPG) plays out. I’ll spoil a small bit. Everyone makes a recording of what their character hopes to accomplish. An hour or so later you all play that back and I haven’t yet played a ten candles game where there weren’t tears in people’s eyes. Then again in ten candles the characters are almost certainly dead at the end of two hours. For me it is absolutely just a “once in a great while” game, but it has been great each time I’ve played, and never felt like D&D.
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