So I’m kiiiiiiind of out of the phase of design for Chorus that’s interesting (for me, anyway) to talk about. In the bit where I’m filling out prompts and trying to conceptualize the math needed for enemy encounters because, frankly, that stuff needs doing. One of the goals the system has is to be as helpful to the Narrator/GM as possible ‘cuz a lot of games like The Fifth Edition Of The World’s Most Popular Role-Playing Game(tm) do basically break down after a while if the person running it doesn’t do a ton of work.
And while I’m in this kinda boring stage with it, of course that part of my brain starts spinning out when given half a chance, thus some half-formed thoughts about game design from a concept that hit me in the face while watching John Wick (the first one) and trying (in vain) to quiet my brain enough that I can get some sleep.
As such, gentle reader, I offer you the core of Damned (or: “I’ll See You Soon”), which may or may not ever become a full thing but hey: Original Game Do Not Steal, yeah?
So, okay, there are a lot of “action movie”-themed TTRPGs and I’ve looked at a couple (though they were derived from PbtA or Palladium systems so I didn’t look all that hard), but since this blag is “Let’s Do a Game Designing”, let’s do a simple breakdown of how one would try to build a game that has mechanics and flavors that emulate the John Wick kind of movie.
The big question: What makes a John Wick movie feel like its own thing as opposed to just any old action movie?
I would argue that it’s the combination of relatively complicated but easy-to-follow action scenes in interesting locations with a kind of glamorous seediness (a more elegant way to put that would be 'old-style' or, as my partner put it, "old Hong Kong style") and the feeling of a larger world. To tie it all together, the series introduced the idea of these big gold coins that are used as a kind of ubercurrency so that even as there is conventional money on the table, the characters always have the cool move of trading or offering the coins for favors to explain why everyone’s on Our Hero’s side or how Our Hero pays his debts.
Many of those things are things one could make into mechanics, so now we have some basic guiding principles to look for.
So, let’s do the goal list:
So when I was trying to think of the feeling the action in the films gives off, the word I kept coming back to was “granular”. This isn’t the usual thing where you have a generalized attack roll and maybe you describe the cool thing you do if you get a really good roll, this is a series of specific moves in sequence executed with uncanny precision. The fantasy a John Wick-inspired game would put forth would be having a couple moves you can do like that and eventually having a whole suite of things you can do with little-to-no effort.
And, hey, I already kinda did something like that (with admittedly very different flavor) when I started and subsequently abandoned my prototype Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired game, Gotta Go Fast. Of course, that was in turn inspired by thirdhand descriptions of the“stamina” mechanic from the Japanese Dark Souls TRPG I read (which I mention because I believe in credit where it’s due).
The pitch of this is that every [small unit of time], your character has a certain number of actions they can do, but they have to declare at the start of that [small unit of time] how they’re going to allocate their energies: into offense or defense. I tend to frame it as action and reaction, but that’s a taste thing.
So we create a situation where at the start of every round of combat, you state how much effort you’re going to put into protecting yourself and how much you’re going to put into dispatching your target (and/or the obstacles/mooks who get in your way). Once you’ve stated that, you’re then free to react as the [small unit of time] ticks down. There’s an initiative count (the details of which I’ll worry about if I keep up with this, but probably something to do with stats or rolls of a dice or something) and each character goes when they go, once for every unit of time until the whole period budgeted for is used up and it’s time to resolve things like damage and junk.
In this instance, I’m saying the [small unit of time] is three (3) seconds. We break the actions down to half-second beats, meaning there are 6 points of stamina to allocate: all-in on action means you have no options to react; all-in on reactions mean you have no active things you can do and if you don’t use all 6 points of reaction, that’s just gone. Half and half means you can’t use some of your highest-damage options, etc. etc. etc. It should create some real drama when, at the start of every 3-second round, each person declares how the next three seconds is gonna go for them when, barring some very special abilities you can’t get until much later, you cannot change that. You are committed for the next 6 combat sequences to only having that kind of abilities available to you.
I also like 6 because it makes me think of a revolver, which in turn makes me think of Russian Roulette because I have brain problems.
But design is about perspective, so let’s put those brain problems into the game, right? Maybe call the declaration part “loading the chamber” or “spinning the chamber” because every empty chamber represents a chance to react while every loaded one is that you’re acting?
Stuff to play with if it goes beyond this post.
Further complicating things is that different abilities might take more time to use. If you have an ability called, say, “Steady Shot” that takes 6 action points to pull off and does an unholy amount of damage at the cost of leaving you vulnerable for the rest of the combat, that creates interesting drama.
Like, sure, we can add in things like ducking for cover for free if you’re out of action/reaction points for a round, but those would have to only have limited utility because we absolutely want to make using the big ol’ fuck-off abilities ASAP into a risky proposition. Do you want to spend 5 sub-rounds (or whatever you’d call things inside the smaller turn order) scrambling for cover with a low chance of success so you can risk it all on exploding someone’s head?
Reactions, by contrast, are there to help ameliorate when you take a hit because things like hit points (or whatever they’re called here) don’t get resolved until the 3 seconds are up. So a really hardcore badass could charge in and use all their stamina (or whatever it ends up being called) trying to kill people, but a more prudent fighter will have things on-hand to patch themselves up or catch their breath or whatever we call it. This would hopefully create an interesting push-and-pull in the moment because you can be down by three wounds and then patch yourself up using a low-to-moderate cost reaction and be fine by the time the round is over because you were careful.
But, of course, if you’re that kind of careful, the battle might end up being a slog because every baddie would be designed with a certain damage threshold you have to cross before they even start going down.
Because the other thing about the action in the source material is that while a lot of mooks go down quick, the main targets are seasoned enough that it takes a lot of thought and effort to put them down.
If nothing else, this all should create some interesting moment-to-moment combat drama. On paper, anyway. Real life is always more complicated. But it does allow us to be specific about the moves you do.
And, again, the specificity is part of the fantasy here.
This, in turn, points to another thing we go with and another reason I’m not making this game at this time, which is building suites of actions and reactions which encompass your assassin’s base/signature style of murder-making.
In my head, it breaks down to:
Your character can, of course, learn abilities from other schools, but the suite you get at first would define a lot about your assassin’s initial style, making additions from outside that main suite feel like you’re developing a style of your own.
They’d probably also affect the cost to learn a new skill, but that math is for muuuuch deeper in the design process.
As mentioned both at the start of this post and in the Battlefield design thoughts post, making the environment a consequential part of things makes set pieces a lot more fun to do.
I’d go into things more, but the basic gist is that certain kinds of environments have positive or deleterious effects on doing the murder you’re here to do, which makes things like casing a joint beforehand (probably a skill you can get or something a Patron, below, can offer) feel useful but which can also increase the feeling that your target(s) are clever or desperate.
Like, okay, off the dome we can say that if your target’s on the rooftop on a rainy night, you’re going to take a lot of penalties if you go after them with a sniper rifle, but those are negated if you’re fighting them hand-to-hand. Or if they lead you into a dance club, there’s all these distractions (lights, noises, civilians you aren’t supposed to kill, etc.) so you’re at a flat disadvantage of some kind when pursuing them. Indeed, your Code (again, below) may demand that you protect those people from this desperate target because a bunch of random people not involved in your big weird underworld is going to draw attention that your masters would happily offer you up to avoid.
While we don’t have all the stats or dice figured out as yet, suffice to say that some places will offer penalties (or advantages) for certain kinds of styles (necessitating branching out) and some may even play with how many action points everyone gets when loading their chamber. A crowded room means it’s harder to act so everyone loses 1 or 2 possible points; a wide open plain on a sunny day might actually give everyone an additional because there are so many fewer things to think about (and also because that’s a perfect place for a climactic battle so let folks go extra hard!).
Movement becomes a bit of a funny thing here and rules would have to be built for that, but largely would consist of how long it takes to reach any given wall and how thick a wall has to be to offer meaningful obstacles. So a drywall barrier (in, say, a house) doesn’t really do much (outside of making it so you can’t see someone) but someone ducking into a building from outside might complicate things a lot and necessitate moving after them (unless you have a sniper ability and boy are sniper things going to be really hard to mess with and probably a thing I should toss out as higher-level stuff? This is all conceptual right now, anyway).
To me, the John Wick films are the first property to manage to put forth the feeling so many World of Darkness products have tried (with some success, even) to impart on the players. Indeed, there’s a world where this is just straight-up a Vampire: the Masquerade hack and if that doesn’t exist already somewhere, I would be legitimately surprised.But we aren’t here making a WoD hack, even as I will confess that there is some mechanical inspiration there.
How to represent this mechanically, though?
My main thought is that the world put forth in the films is one with complicated rules and many, many undersocieties which mimic fantasy tropes of, say, a guild of thieves or assassins. A lighter-hearted version of this is found in the Discworld novels, various Ds+Ds settings and rulesets have this (indeed, they’ve made Thieves’ Cant a major thing since at least 3.5e), to say nothing of a lot of literature meant to make rich and middle-class people feel afraid of those devious poors.
So, yeah, we’re gonna take a little inspiration from the WoD games here. But thankfully design isn’t really copyrightable because even as I ask people not to steal this design, I’m happy to snag the odd bit here and there. Design is a language and what is language but some awful combination of standing on the shoulders of giants and also making our own from spare parts by studying the wreckage left in their wake?
Thus:
Patrons represent the kinds of criminal organization your assassin owes fealty to because, yes, your character is a killer, but every criminal organization needs killers. So to reflect the power of the patrons, we give every character a new Thing They Can Just Do. I love a Thing They Can Just Do.
For instance, an assassin who owes fealty to The Thieves’ Guild can open any door (even if there might be a time cost associated) while an assassin who’s supported by The Protectorates (read: a kind of meta-mob who’ve got protection rackets around) can find a hideout in any storefront, even as they canNOT expect the shopkeepers to do anything beyond letting them back there and not calling anyone (they won’t risk their life; not for you).
On top of this, of course, your character also gets access to combat abilities exclusive to that organization. I’m not filling out the list, of course, but there should be a few. Probably a free or low-cost action you can take once per round (or whatever fancy name I give it).
You pick one of these at character creation and while you can technically change your Patron organization, it involves a lot of doing because why would they just give up a monster into which they’ve poured all this blood, sweat, and treasure?
Codes represent the counterweight of the overworld (as opposed to the underworld where you live) on your vicious activities. Yes, you can do all this sick action movie shit with bullet time or incredible dodges or impossible accuracy and you’re so bloody clever, aren’t you, but if you just go around being a super-badass-murder-fellow, the trouble you make for your masters is going to overwhelm your utility to them.
So each Code is a specific limitation on your behavior; you’ll pick one at character creation (oops, we should talk about that!) and pick another from a list offered by your Patron. You can take on more as the game goes to get certain benefits, creating another layer of weird underworld red tape that doesn’t really have to make sense. It’s things like never Working on a Sunday or to never use a sniper rifle, to never steal from another thief or to slap every thief you see on the ass. Or overriding things like “Once you take on a Job, you have to complete it ASAP” or “Never Work on neutral ground”. Things that seem easy right up until you have the option or obligation to do otherwise.
Breaking a Code (of your own or of your Patron) incurs some kind of penalty relevant to the importance of the Code to your Patron, your employer(s), or the wider underworld.
Realizing just now that if one of the possible titles of the game is “Damned”, a lot of these Patrons or Codes could be plays on Dante. Associate each broad kind of Patron with different circles of Hell? Or just go whole-hog and name them after the Seven Deadly Sins? Just a thought.
In this way, Breaking a Code can be an invitation to further drama. Do you take a high-value job knowing that it’s asking you to work on neutral ground and that the penalty for this is you doing $X work for the organization OR that they’ll put a hit out on you?
This will also offer options where, if you take a job from someone with a different Patron (as would happen, one imagines, in the kind of team-based play we’d want to have where everyone’s from different Patrons with different Codes), you have to kill inside one of the other Codes if you want your full payout, etc. etc. etc.
Tying up the main things from the inspiration material, we have what I’m gonna call Tokens to further file off the serial numbers. Basically, Tokens end up as the be-all/end-all reward in the game because they can do pretty much anything.
They can be traded in for a certain amount of conventional currency (via a Banking or Fencing Guild?) to be determined later but which is, off the dome, around $15k or an item roughly equivalent to that (a new cool gun or a late-model, like-new used car).
They act as classic Experience Points, allowing you to purchase training so you can add a new ability to your repertoire OR upgrade one of your existing ones to either make it hit harder or cost a little less in time (with the cost going up as the time it takes goes down).
A whole bunch can be used to raise your stats, of course. If I keep on this long enough, there’ll probably be a thing where after you complete X jobs, you can add 1 to your stats but we’ll worry about that later.
Finally, the Tokens can also be used to buy flashbacks or rewrites so in certain circumstances, you can say “Ah, but I hid a gun here” if you can justify it or assert that “This cop’s owned by my Patrons so when I give him the sign, he convinces his buddies that I’m clean” and, provided you haven’t violated the Codes the police have about looking the other way, you’ll be fine.
It all
leads up
to this
Which is to say, your assassin.
I spent a while trying to figure out how best to make the characters with or without stats because, hey: stats are fun. It’s nice to have an idea of what your character can DO as a baseline concept of their whole deal. But you have too many stats and things get complicated to a degree that’s not fun. During the design process for Damned (which has been, at time of writing, 14 hours including 7 hours of sleep because the idea hit me late at night), there have been between 3 and 9 stats, but since I like keeping things simple and have been playing a lot of RuneQuest (a wonderful game that is far more fiddly on its face than anything I’d want to make), which has six main stats which create a number of derived stats, but which are also affected by the six Power Runes and ten Form Runes, I decided that three was comfortably enough to create the ways your assassin would build their style and do their many creative murders and also navigate the world when not doing murders or on your way to do a murder.
Those stats would be:
Having stats that are so wide means that every combat move you could acquire could be triggered by two of the three so as not to lock people out of a build entirely, but each would also favor certain kinds of styles because who doesn’t want to min/max a little, at least, right?
The other big thing we’d have to figure out to finish up the design is to figure out how health is gonna work. Normally, I’d sort of handwave that away because it’s boring and frequently more about justifying the how and why of things because it’s never supposed to represent how much blood is in your body or what-the-fuck-ever but at the same time, the numbers contain drama because once you’re at zero, then you, presumably, can’t play anymore until that number goes up to at least one.
Off the dome, I call your HP “luck” because when you’re outta luck, you’re in some deep trouble, so the reaction part of things is about keeping your luck up. You use up some luck when you take a hit, you see, so finding ways to avoid that or patch up from it makes things real interesting.
That said, I think you don’t drop just from being “out of luck”, instead every time you get hit, you have to roll some kind of save (probably the same roll you make when you’re out of action/reaction points) to stay on your feet.
Would probably also either have a random result table or a series of “still fighting, but...” results. Like you can’t stand and then you can’t even sit up but you can still shoot or dodge or something like that. You’re dead when you can’t even lift your gun because, ideally, long before then your teammates (if you have them or if you brought them) would come in to save you.
Which would make things like a flashback/rewrite use of your Token real handy because maybe for a certain amount of them or just all the ones you have (with a minimum of, say, 3), you can have one of your target’s mooks save your life (but also make you have to do some jobs for them or take on one of their Patron’s Codes) because now you owe them your life and unless you want them to take back their gift, you gotta show gratitude ‘cuz them’s the rules of this awful criminal society of yours.
Basically trying to make even stuff like death into something that can advance a story instead of stopping it dead in its tracks.
That said, if someone is willing to let their character die and make a new one, no argument here.
The basic idea is that this is a dice pool system. I think that means I’m borrowing an awful lot from the WoD folks and should take a lot of this back to concept, but this is the baaaaarest start of a thing so here we go.
You’d ideally take your stat (Alert/Fight/Style) rating (1-3 at the start of the game) and add that many dice, followed then by the number of dice you’ve invested into or given by a certain ability. The idea is to get a success, which would probably be between 6-9 on a d10, with a 10 counting as two successes and 1 counting as a negative success.
Probably do some changing up with the dice (d6s are always fun for this kind of thing) but it’s a basically useful pitch ‘cuz “The way you do it + the thing you’re doing” is a pretty great way to build any system.
And that’s the basics for a shot of inspiration side of things. It’s a raw idea that needs a lot of work, but I just thought that maaaaaybe it could be of use in the old design process thingum.
Or you could just watch that one Matt Colville video on guns in D&D 5e, I guess. It’s probably a lot more entertaining than me elaborating on a thought I had while watching a movie.