In the Beginning
A week before the game jam started, my wonderful girlfriend told me about this one show she stumbled upon and convinced me to watch it. Am I Being Unreasonable? is a British comedy thriller that, honestly, at a glance gave me the impression of a low-brow British comedy about an awful mother and her son who's way too emotionally mature for his age. I was quite impressed after binging it for over three hours, having gone through all of its twists, turns, and reveals. It's best to go into it blind, but I think it could be compared to Odd Taxi, another short-ish show that I liked a lot. Thinking about these two shows, and some others, had led me on some interesting thought trains. One of them is the essence of social interactions.
A mechanical way to run a social interaction feels to me like a holy grail within the TTRPG designer community. Some games have done it and are known because of it, but generally, I hear folks say "It can't be done", or "It shouldn't be done". I've given it a try, several times actually. Giving attributes like Trust, Stubbornness, Composure, and others, or mechanizing it, turning it into a social combat as per suggestions on Tribality. But it didn't feel right, something wasn't clicking. When I actually ran the social combat I just linked in my D&D campaign, the novelty wore out quickly and it devolved into a literal name-calling fight. Why? Because I required players to keep making arguments and to roll to see if they convey the arguments well enough. It was a fine thing to try, but I can tell now in hindsight that I likely didn't play it right. After all, you don't require your fighters to describe every single maneuver as something completely new in a battle, right? Of course, after a time it would get tiresome and they'd devolve into something simple. Experiences like that one, combined with never achieving the goal of designing a good social interaction system had led me to a conclusion that it's not impossible, but not worth it either. My philosophy ever since has been that what players need isn't an intricate mechanical system, it's a set of tools they can use to do what they want.
Coming back to the shows, I had an epiphany sometime in the week after. These shows, and social drama generally, are about manipulating the information flow. Think about it: character A finds out about something character B hides from characters C and D. What will they do about it? Will the character B find out? We might assume that character C would react to this fact with sadness, while character D would use the secret in the future against character B, but can we be sure? I was pondering this over the weekend before the game jam began, staying up a little past midnight while chatting with a friend about this, toying with the idea of making it into a game. And then, the game jam began. I put those thoughts on hold, refreshed the game jam website, and waited... That's when the theme was revealed, and it hit me.
This title provided me with the other half of the social dynamic. Sure character A holds the power because they know something nasty about character B, ... but what if it's not true at all? And just like that, I had the perfect game for this game jam.
Finders, Keepers, Binders, Weepers
I started writing down all the rules, slowly but methodically. The structure was clear: secrets, rumors, discovery, revelation and finding out if it's true or not, reactions. To speed up the process, I decided I'll need a basic setting to write this game for instead of trying to make a generic system on my first try. I chose medieval royal courts, and I believe it worked quite well.
What are some basic secrets that I need? I narrowed down the qualities I needed them to have and came up with several, seeking a fourth one online in various group chats. Each secret must be something that can be done rather quickly instead of over the case of days or months. Each secret must be something doable by a single person. Each must harm at least one other person. And each one must be something immoral. I settled on these four:
- murder,
- theft,
- affair,
- and libel.
In the original version of this game, I started with two stats: Composure and Trust. Composure goes down whenever you find out that another person knows about any of your secrets. Trust goes up and down based on who one shares secrets with, whether these secrets turn out to be true or not, and whether the secret could harm you. Based on my theories before, I developed four character roles that you can see in the title:
- Finder is someone who finds out about a secret.
- Keeper is the original owner of this secret, the one it regards.
- Binder is a finder who would use the secret against the Keeper, for example in blackmail.
- Weeper is whoever would be hurt by learning this secret.
Of course, these roles would be dynamic, and related to each secret individually. A Finder of one secret could be a Keeper of another and a Weeper of yet another. One might even have multiple roles at the same time. Sadly, this roles system kind of fell apart the more I wrote and the more I realized just how complicated this system is getting, involving inconsistent dice rolls, as well as some other props. Originally this system was even supposed to be played on a simple building map, with rooms similar to Runehack: Fairy Heist's or Slasher Oneshot System's. I had to ditch several things and simplify it, and the one tool that helped me out the most was a deck of 52 playing cards.
Your Royal Slyness
Cards are great because drawing a card is like rolling two dice and then banning that combination of die rolls for some time. Suits and ranks can represent a lot of different stuff. Inspired by Bang!, I started with cards that would define player characters: one for Class, their social standing, and one for their secret Motive. Unlike in Bang!, I don't use the face-down card for tracking hit points, and these two cards don't come from a separate deck.
Depending on one's Class, they came with several Secrets and Rumors off the cuff. Yes, it's a little on the nose, seeing the theme of game jam is literally that, but I can't argue - it has inspired me. These numbers increased based on your Class card's suit: hearts giving you both an extra rumor and an extra secret, diamonds giving you an extra rumor, spades giving you an extra secret, and clubs not giving you anything extra. That's also why the suits are ranked the way they are: Hearts should get to go first because they hold more Secrets as well as Rumors, and so on.
There were three Classes: Monarch, Noble, and Servant. The only things they determined were the starting amounts of Secrets and Rumors, as well as the turn orders and how they can be possible targets for other players' Motives. Speaking of, Motives could be grouped into five categories: Collect more X than any other player, Silence (kill) X, Slander X, Steal from X, and Seduce X. The first motive's X is a resource that takes the form of one of the card suits, the other X's stood for one character at the table each.
Fun fact, originally I had four resources tied to the cards: hearts for favors, spades for military stuff, diamonds for material resources, and clubs for information and development. I couldn't fit these into the rules, though, so... I guess they'll remain hidden here on the blog.
The game needed turn order, and turns should be made up of distinct actions. I borrowed the basic structure from Bang!, which is: draw cards, do stuff, discard cards if you have too many. To limit how long a turn can take, I decided to make the middle phase a "do one or two of these actions", listing: Bartering with other players (for cards or Secrets), Plotting, and thus creating a new Secret for yourself (and possibly another player), Presenting two or more cards which can possibly earn you secrets or their details, and Revealing a Secret to the public. Each new Secret created by Plot gave you mechanical boons, Revelation of a Secret had some mechanics, and I decided that the game will end after the drawing deck ran out three times. The game was almost done.
But how would one motivate the players to create a new Secret for themselves, if it puts them at a risk? To keep it simple, Secrets are power in this game: you get as many marker tokens as you have Secrets in the game, and at the start of your turn you draw that amount of cards. Though looking back at it, instead of secrets I could have just asked the player to keep track of their number of secrets on a paper slip. But tokens are nice, I imagine them being little stones or poker chips that the player can toy with to show off just how many secrets they have.
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You don't need to personally do your secrets. You could let poisons do it for you. Or you could also get a trusty loyal servant (NPC, not a player) to do it for you. I'd count all of those as your own Secret, you were their direct cause.
This artwork is from Gwent. |
It was at this point that I knew the game needs a better name. Finders, Keepers, Binders, Weepers was kind of lame for the concept of royals playing dirty. I did my research on the puns and rhymes and settled on... Your Slyness. But to make its setting a little clearer, Your Royal Slyness.
The Second Page
One Page RPG Jam allows for the second page to cover stuff like character sheets, variant rules, and GM tools, so I figured I'd make use of mine. Among the examples, there's a variant ruleset there for longer-term games that span several sessions. You just need to record your characters and make a mark for every time they've succeeded in their Motive while also surviving a session without getting murdered. It's simple, and yet a little complicated. I like the way it turned out.
Hacking Potential
Could this system be hacked? Absolutely! After all, most of it is a card game. You could replace Classes with something else, like school roles (Principal - Staff - Students), and you could establish that there are more or fewer of the highest Class people, that they do or don't belong to different "kingdoms". You could also swap out the types of Secrets and their effects when one Plots to make a new Secret. There's some potential for hacking and reflavoring it all, even adding more actions to the middle phase and magic. Maybe someone can draw an extra card in phase 1 and return one to the top of the drawing pile. Maybe some Plot could let you swap one card with a player against their will. Maybe you could just hand someone a card (maybe this counts as Barter where you get nothing and they get a card?). Plenty of possibilities.
There are some things I could have handled better. For example, if a player does some secret through the Plot action, others will certainly know it's not a rumor, so they wouldn't be afraid to Reveal such secrets. I don't know yet if and how I could fix that. Another potential issue is that players could be killed off before their first turn, which could be not fun. I might update it later on down the line if I'll feel like it.
And that's about it! While I hope I'll get to write another TTRPG for this game jam, because the game is excellent, I'm not sure if I will, because I have about two weeks of time left before I go for a summer vacation. Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!
