Long-Term Consequences: Great RPG Mechanics
#RPGMechanics Week Three
I read Blades in the Dark sitting in a Discount Tire. It was a long wait to get my flat fixed, as I hadn’t had an appointment. I still have a strong physical memory of working through the book with a lukewarm bottled water in my hand. I’d hit a rule and try to process the consequences of it at the table.
One of those things which hit me early on was the concept of Trauma. Basically when you burn through all of your Stress you suffer a permanent condition. It offers a role-play moment and a way to gain end of session XP. At first I assumed it was a substitute for madness and insanity, just based on the name. But it’s a death clock on your character, and, as I realized, an easy one to hit. Stress is your key resource, you need to spend it. Blades emphasized that fixing trauma wasn’t really a thing, at least not with herculean effort.
This struck me, given that I’d really only seen two tracks for character loss. Either you run out of hit points and die, or you choose to remove your character (through retirement, death, life changes, etc.). This offered something new.
Later I’d discover two earlier games used a similar concept, but tweaked to individual character archetypes. In Night Witches, each playbook (Nature) has a set of marks. These offer a slightly different death clock, a set of milestones. There’s a shared set of possible marks among the different natures. All natures can “suffer the death of a loved one” or “witness the death of a comrade.” But it is the Sparrow who can mark “speak truth to power,” the Raven’s duty to “share a premonition,” and the Pigeon’s place to “betray a friend or love.”
These are more descriptive ticks, but they’re still a countdown towards your character’s ultimate fate.
Impulse Drive also has a similar way of handling these long-term consequences. This takes the unique mark approach of Night Witches and extends it. Here marks are called Calamities. Each playbook has a unique set of these beyond one shared result (you suffer a terrible wound, illness, or debility). Like NW the idea is to have these reinforce character and offer different tracks for each playbook.
Here’s The Hound’s unique list:
A contact you have in the local criminal underground reaches out to you with some info or a lead.
You broaden your career options, take the other Work Ethic move.
The family or gang of someone you hunted is coming after you, hard.
You get a lead on a valuable target you hunted long ago but got away, but you’ll have to act now to follow it up.
A friend or ally you rely on is in trouble with the authorities, and is asking for your help.
Now or soon, you encounter a long-time nemesis with whom you have a long history of bad blood on both sides. They challenge you to a duel to settle your differences, and you must accept. When you duel your nemesis, roll+Volatile
I particularly like that the Calamities have varied effects. Some are good, some are bad. You can take one that gives you a new cool move, but eventually you have to start digging into the more challenging ones. They’re great for long term play where the pressure of this form of the Death Clock feels stronger because they aren’t all negative.
One of the things I love is when games present a thematic archetype, template, or playbook with enough room for players to make it their own. These are games that understand the genre tropes but offer you ways to tool that, but within that theme. Long term consequences present another way designers can give players the opportunity to make their version of the Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, etc. live a different life and die a different death from any other.