So I'm currently making my own pointless fantasy heartbreaker, Coin & Candle, and a problem I've come up against is finding good ways to differentiate non-magical characters.
The idea is that each PC, besides an ability score array, has one little extra talent that they can do that no one else can. I have some loose rules that I'm following for these talents that will probably be familiar to anyone in the OSR space:
- Horizontal, not vertical. It's not good enough for the talent to make you numerically better at something any character can do. It ideally should open up a new avenue for problem-solving altogether. So "+2 to sneaking" is absolutely not good enough.
- Active, not passive. This is somewhat related to the above. Your talent has to be a thing you can choose to do at any point, not something that is attached to another course of action or, heaven forbid, a die roll. This is just more engaging and exciting for players, and makes the talent more likely to come up in play.
- Tools, not weapons. Talents are intended to be utilities first, and only have a function in combat if used inventively. This is because my system is mostly about exploration and lateral problem-solving, and the threat of violence informs/flavours that, rather than it being the main focus.
- Diegetic, not mathematical. Again, related to the above, the talent should be something it's easy to model with narration. Its applications and implications should be easy to picture and ideally not require any maths.
- Mundane, not magical. This is because Coin & Candle is more about encountering weird things than it is about being a weird thing. PCs are assumed to be relatively normal unless they're a Warlock (more on those in a later blog post), and I want a really clear, obvious delineation between Warlocks and everyone else.
To illustrate the above principles, here are some example talents I've come up with:
- Schemer. Once per session, you can retroactively declare that you took some sort of action in preparation for the current situation - e.g. bought an item, arranged for someone to meet you, set a trap, did some research, donned a disguise, or whatever else is plausible.
- Contortionist. You can fit through any gap larger than your head, and scrunch yourself small enough to fit in a backpack.
- Ugly Bastard. Something is really wrong with your face. You wear a mask, normally, but if you remove it any NPCs who can see your face must make a morale check. PCs who can see your face, meanwhile, have disadvantage on everything because they are crying and vomiting.
- Clockworker. You can craft palm-sized clockwork devices that serve a variety of functions. They can do anything clockwork devices in real life can conceivably do: walk a preset path or distance, vibrate, carry small objects, make noise, strike a match, etc. They can be rigged to start operating after a set amount of time has passed, or in response to being touched or moved or even in response to vibrations in the ground.
So for the most part this was going well... at first. It's that final principle that has started tripping me up. It turns out it's quite hard to come up with talents for PCs that are impactful, relevant to adventuring, and don't require magic or some other weird superpower. There are only so many ways to use the human body without straining credulity. I had hoped to stock perhaps a d50 table of talents, and stalled out around 18...
Clash!
,,, until I played Clash! And here we finally get to the point of the post. For the uninitiated, Clash is the third game in the Zeno Clash series of beat-em-ups from the Chilean studio ACE Team. I highly recommend it: it has a compelling story, satisfying gameplay, and a delightfully weird art style. But the part that's important today is one specific mechanic/plot element: the Ritual.
The Ritual
So the idea of the Ritual is that nearly every combatant in the setting of Clash has agreed that, before attempting to bludgeon each other to death with their fists, one can challenge the other to a fun little dice game. The winner of the game gets to impose some kind of penalty on the loser in the coming fight. Some examples would be covering the loser in bait that attracts monsters, restricting them to a particular area of the arena, forcing them to come to the winner's aid in a later fight, or even just getting one free hit on them with a big stick.
So, a fun little wrinkle on an already fun brawler. But here's the brilliant twist: the Ritual is not magical or supernatural in the slightest. The only reason it can have the mechanical effects it does is because every character involved consents to participate and abide by its rules. The Ritual is important more or less solely because they decided it is. Breaking the laws of the Ritual doesn't place a curse on you. You aren't struck by lightning. It's not a geas. People just go along with it because they feel they have to.
Weird as it sounds, this isn't too unrealistic. The reader has probably already noticed parallels between the Ritual and real-world social institutions like the concept of money, or marriage. Things that have any real-world effect at all solely because people act like they do.
Oh yeah, this was about D&D
Anyway. How does this relate to elfgames? Well, playing Clash gave me another perspective on talents for Coin & Candle. Specifically, it made me realise that I could create "talents" that were just exploitations of customs and social institutions. Done right, this would adhere to all of the principles I outlined above. I haven't been able to come up with a better name for these than "weird social powers", but here are two I have come up with so far.
Example 1 - Truth-Priest
You are a priest devoted to a God of Truth. Your creed prohibits you from intentionally telling explicit lies, or even trying to mislead people with white lies. Everyone knows this about you, and therefore they will believe anything you tell them, without exception. But if you ever break this code, you will be hounded to the ends of the earth by holy assassins for the rest of your (short) life. And the Church has spies everywhere...
So this one initially just seems like a pure detriment - but then you realise that, used correctly, it actually has powerful utility. You have more leverage in negotiations because the other party knows you'll hold up your end of the bargain. You don't have to convince sceptical authority figures that the problem you've brought to them warrants their full attention and powers - they'll just believe you. You can broker peace between factions that don't trust one another because they at least both trust you implicitly.
The players can also have fun trying to game the rules. What if another PC impersonates the Truth-Priest without the latter's knowledge? Would that count as breaking their code? Probably not, but it would certainly earn the Church's ire (but that's tomorrow's problem). Or what if a PC lies to the priest and the priest innocently repeats the lie? This talent not only helps solve OSR-style challenges, it begets them itself.
Finally, this is cool becaue the priest basically has a once-in-their-life megapower to get anyone to believe anything at all: they get to lie once. Kill a Dragon by telling them the world is a simulation and the only way to wake up is by drowning themselves. Tell the archmage that they love you like their own son and would do anything to aid you in your quest. Tell the king that your comrades are actually innocent of all the crimes they committed in broad daylight in front of a dozen witnesses. Basically, lying gives the Truth-Priest temporary social omnipotence at the cost of them, you know, getting assassinated five minutes later. Seems like an epic way to retire a character to me.
So with one short paragraph we have a talent with (in my opinion) utility, depth, and flavour. And no magic required - just the diegetic knowledge and beliefs of the characters.
Example 2 - Fallen Noble
You're the last scion of a destitute noble house. You have no money or political influence, but you can still utilise an obscure by-law that no one has repealed yet. Namely, you can command anyone to do one thing for you, and they have to obey or risk arrest and prosecution.
There are restrictions, though. You can only use this once on any given individual. You can't command people to commit crimes. And obviously, people who don't care about the law for whatever reason (e.g. they're wealthy enough to bribe judges, they're too stupid to comprehend the consequences of their refusal, they are already wanted criminals, they are too personally dangerous to arrest) may refuse.
One thing I quite like about this talent is how it's kind of self-balancing. Something that has warped ability design throughout D&D's history is the question: "But what if this trivialises a fight with a dragon?". This has necessitated mechanical fixes like 5e's Legendary Resistances, or brute-force immunities to charm and poison and what-have-you, or certain spells only working on people with fewer than x HD. These things clutter rulebooks and systems and can be easily forgotten. This talent's limitations are built into the fiction, with no mechanics required. Unlike a Charm Person spell, its contours are intuitive and obvious. You can't forget that this power won't work on a dragon because the dragon can't be arrested and prosecuted, because it's a giant fire-breathing lizard with plate-armour scales. No non-deigetic rules, no numbers. Just common sense.
Setting impacts
So one thing about weird social powers which may be a strength or a weakness, depending on your tastes and needs, is that each says something quite strong about the game's setting. So they may or may not work for you in that respect. Personally, though, I'm really quite excited about the potential these represent and I'm probably going to spend the next couple weeks coming up with more.
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