Welcome. I’m experimenting with an altered format this month. In this installment, I’ll reflect on a game I played and introduce our design discussion topic for the month. Later in June, I’ll send out a reflection on a game I ran and continue that design discussion, incorporating your contributions!
Played: Hutt Cartel
I returned to Star Wars Saturdays to play a delightfully wild series. SWS mastermind Rich Rogers joined as a player, while Will H took the GM seat. The game was Cartel, Mark Diaz Truman’s gnarly engine for narcofiction. We reskinned the game so it was still about morally compromised characters caught up in the drug war, but instead of Durango, Mexico we set it on Coruscant, Star Wars’ planet-sized Imperial City—specifically down in the grim and gritty depths of Level 1313. Once again, the videos of these sessions are available on the Star Wars Saturdays Youtube playlist—scroll down to May 2021 for the games I was in.
Highlights: The stress system in Cartel is a beautiful piece of design, and it ported over nicely to Star Wars. As our characters schemed, maneuvered, and threatened each other, we racked up Stress. We could relieve Stress by making Stress moves (Lose yourself in a Substance, Deliver a Beatdown, Confess your Sins…), but rolling badly on those might make our situation worse. The main tweak for our setting was introducing Star Wars equivalent’s for Cartel’s real-world drugs… and adding the possible consequence of “make an unexpected psychic connection” for using the drug Spice, since we’d decided a bad batch of psychically-active Spice was going around.
A really interesting character moment happened when my PC, a crooked cop with the Coruscant Security Bureau, visited a semi-conscious rookie colleague in the hospital. I told her I was sorry about what had happened to her and held myself responsible—as well I might, since I’d inveigled the location of the prisoner she was guarding from her and given that info to a Cartel assassin! But I was so used to double-talk and deception I didn’t really trigger the move Confess your Sins—the GM contended, and I acceded, that what was really happening was a different move called Justify your Behavior. Mechanically, it would have probably been more advantageous to Confess my Sins, but I couldn’t deny that the character wasn’t really being straightforward, but was in fact still trying to keep up her double life and avoid showing her true colors.
Musings: Characters are very mortal in this game! When you Get Karking Shot (our reskin substituted a Star Wars expletive for a real-world one) you simply die if you roll low. Thus, when violence broke out in the penultimate session, our Protocol Droid was offed pretty unceremoniously. The player was a good sport and turned an NPC into a new PC for the finale. (And revealed the Droid had been recording us the whole time, creating additional pressure for all surviving PCs when the cops found those recordings.) I think this absence of plot armor for PCs makes perfect sense for the genre, but might be difficult for some players to adjust to. In running the game, I’d emphasize that it’s not primarily about combat, that getting into fights is a good way to die fast, and that the story is largely about tense conversations where people try to Get the Truth or Justify their Behavior.
Final Thoughts: The unlikely combination of Star Wars and Cartel is a big hit. I think the touches of sci-fi leaven the darkness of Cartel just a tad, while the game does a great job bringing to life a particularly scummy and villainous corner of the Star Wars Galaxy. After playing this homebrewed Star Wars take, I’m excited for some of the official setting drifts for Cartel to come out. I believe there’s a Cold War Berlin take in the offing…
Design Discussion: Dice Uses Beyond Rolling
Gamers love dice, and game-makers love to sell us dice, from very standard six-sided dice to the iconic polyhedrals of D&D to even stranger fare. Obviously dice are most often used as randomizers, but that’s not the only use that can arise from their design.
For example, Avery Alder’s brilliant The Quiet Year uses dice as countdown clocks: you place dice on the map to represent long-term community projects, and tick them down turn-by-turn until they are completed—or something derails the project to set it back or destroy it entirely.
I also know a couple games that call on players to stack dice into towers and see how high they can go before they fall. Icarus has a teetering dice tower that represents the fragile achievements of a decadent civilization. (You can listen to me playing the game on the podcast Bored Ghost here, where we tell the story of a collapsing Martian colony.) My own game Victory Garden is a solo journaling game where you’re stacking a dice tower higher and higher to represent the plant you’re growing to send off to war.
What other ways to use dice have you observed? What else can we do with dice beyond rolling? Chime in down in the comments, or in the threads I’ve started here on the Gauntlet Forums and here on Twitter.
Elsewhere
—My game The Great Soul Train Robbery is available in PDF on DriveThruRPG and Itchio. I’m enjoying getting to hear about people running and playing it. Some folks on the Gauntlet played a session and posted the video. You can check it out on Youtube, or find it as a podcast here. It features one of the wildest trick shots a Sharpshooter has ever attempted on the train to Hell!
—I got to run my game Checkpoint Midnight on the Twitch channel Actual Play. Many thanks to Sean Nittner, Tom Lommel, and Sophie Lagace for creating an indelible trio of characters (an Automaton, a Collector, and a Matagot) to take on the Behemoth Sonata mission. You can watch the video of the session here:
—Vincent Baker of Apocalypse World fame is answering questions about PbtA design on his blog. He tackled a question of mine in the first installment. I asked this:
His answer may surprise you! Definitely check out the Q&A series for some insights and provocations from one of the originators of Powered by the Apocalypse designs.
Till next time, may you find healthy outlets for stress, invent novel ways to use familiar tools, and get at the central question of your playbook.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi