Hitmen don't need dice.
It's June!
And it’s hot. Every year I am surprised by this.
Here’s what’s going on.
On The Docket
You heard it here first(-ish): VOID 1680 AM is up for Best Solo TTRPG in The Crit Awards! That’s the very first category when you click “2024 Voting is Now Open.” If you’re obliged, I would not mind you voting for VOID 1680 AM. And no, you do not need to choose someone in every category (and there are a lot of them) to vote.
No-Tell Motel is shipping out! If you backed the campaign at a physical reward tier, you should have your shipping notice now or very soon. If you don’t hear anything by late next week, drop me a line at bannerlessgames@gmail.com.
If you’re experiencing FOMO over not getting the Stellar Motel keychain or “Dice Tray,” I’ll have some for sale at the shop Soon™. All physical orders will get a couple-few Stellar Motel matchbooks as long as those last.
I’ve begun writing in earnest on the introductory stand-alone adventure for Saint of Blades, tentatively called Boss of All Bosses. The system is FitD-adjacent, but everything you need to know to play will be included. Hit me up at the email above if you or your table would want to playtest a 1950s mafia/cosmic horror tale that can play out a few different ways.
I spent tens of minutes on this graphic. The Disc 2 Jam is still going strong through the end of June! We’ve got some titans in there, including Wanderhome, Apocalypse Frame, Outliers, Moriah and like 30 more amazing entries. It’s been really cool seeing people roll out with commentaries and - in the case of Sam Dunne’s Space Fam - longstanding passion projects they finally get to share with the world. Jump in! The water’s fine!
On My Mind
Here’s me stumping for Dice Exploder again, this time the episode on exploding dice (eh? eh?) with Bannerless favorite Mikey Hamm. What are exploding dice? A common use goes something like this: you roll a handful of d6’s on a skill check. Any 6’s you roll you can roll again, and add any new successes to the pile. This can go on for as long as you keep rolling 6’s, which can lead to some truly absurd results.
Notice something about that example? It hit me as they worked through their examples of its usage in published games: exploding dice are seemingly always used to measure success, never failure. I think I’ve got room to make hay out of negative exploding dice. I have a backburner mech game (don’t we all?) called Street Sweeper, and one of the big conceits of the setting is its dawn-of-the-mech-age technology. These rickety-ass mechs are kind of like how fighter planes and tanks were in WWI: invaluable to the cause yet nearly as deadly for the crew as they are for their targets. What better way to introduce the risk of catastrophic system failure than runaway 1’s on your dice rolls? Much to think about dot jpeg.
I’ve been watching videos of Hitman III levels because while I’m pretty sure I’d be awful at playing these games, they are exactly my kind of thing: big puzzle boxes that allow the player to dictate their approach and tone to solving the problem. You are given a scenario, a sandbox, and a million little variables, and told to solve the impossible. They are, in short, my shit.
I’ve been trying to glean some useful game-design thoughts from what I’m seeing, and this is where I landed: It is assumed and indeed plays like your character is just good at the baseline pieces of his job. Hack a computer, crack open a door, throw a wrench to knock someone out, fly a helicopter, play bongo drums in a band at a drug lord’s unveiling of a statue of himself, whatever: you just do those things automatically without playing a minigame. The only real X factor is timing. You still have to manually aim a gun, but depending on playstyle gun use is pretty minimal and usually means you goofed.
So if the game isn’t a constant test of its own premise (you’re a badass hitman, or are you?), what is the game? The real gameplay seems to come from observing the environment and exploiting useful aspects you uncover to get yourself into the right position to do the automatic things. No prolonged gun fights or martial arts battles with your target; if you’re in the room with them, they’re fucked. How you get to that room is where the juice is.
In contrast, I think of the last long-running D&D game I was in, where one of the running jokes was that the group Barbarian was better at rogue stuff than my actual capital-R Rogue because my dice rolls were so consistently bad. It stone cold sucks to fumble at the baseline actions of your special little niche, and Hitman III completely sidesteps that problem.
Another way to put it: this shift makes the challenge how do I crack this puzzle? instead of will the odds let me crack this puzzle?
P.S.: I can see an argument that this is what tags and aspects are for, and while I agree that’s true in theory, in practice I do not find handfuls of adjectives all that compelling. So I’m gonna keep thinking.
For Your Consideration
Here's some stuff I've been into lately.
Per the above, there’s this GDC talk on “Hitman Levels as Social Spaces: The Social Anthropology of Level Design,” which was cited in this excellent thread about the stealth mechanics in the High Magic Lowlives adventure module Aw Jeez, The Airship’s On Fire!
Absolutely vibed with Ty’s “Glimpses” idea, which takes the usual Add A Detail approach to collaborative scene-building and both simplifies the process and ups the “wow” factor. Short version: the GM gives out a couple-few prompts to each player, who can then play them at will to add something to a given area. I’ve already got ideas on how to use this for Saint of Blades that should help build setting and character.
“The empty brain” counters a notion so pernicious that it spends a good amount of its wordcount just unpacking the ways we take it as a given: our brains are not computers, and they do not have “memory storage,” “information retrieval” and so on. The piece is regrettably long on assertion and short on citation, but I found the “throw a baseball” example a really helpful alternative framework. It suggests the brain is less “computer” and more “muscle shaped by circumstances,” which is less romantic but pretty compelling.
"See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities. Nobody else in the world can do it, or ever could do it, or ever will be able to do it again.” - Ursula K Le Guin. I agree with her about musicians.
I’ve put together a rolling “Songs of Summer ‘24” playlist. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but if you’re looking for a new(ish) certified banger or a chill jam, you may find something here that moves you. I do add and remove songs on a regular basis, so keep an eye on it. Enjoy!
That's it.
See you next time.
