A Retrospective on my Dishonored (2d20) System Campaign
Well, looks like it has been a bit since I last posted. My schedule is a bit fuller than I had previously anticipated, but I am still unsure if it is because it is so busy or if it is because I have lately been making a strong commitment to staying on top of everything.
Anyway, a retrospective on my most recent little campaign which ended Tuesday!
A Brief Overview
I only somewhat recently discovered that the Dishonored series has its own tabletop RPG. I got a digital copy of the book and read through it, discovering that it runs on what is known as the 2d20 system. The core mechanic is that characters (Players and NPCs) both roll 2d20s (or more) and try to roll at or below their target number. Nat 1s are critical successes and count double. The goal is to get a certain number of successes, set by the DM. Target numbers are created by combining an Action (ie. Fight or Move) and a Style (ie. Forcefully or Quietly). Each of these is rated from 4 to 8, giving a resulting target number from 8 to 16.
To help keep things in theme, there are also pools of tokens known as Momentum and Chaos. Momentum can be used for a variety of things, which I will cover later. Chaos is the DMs counterpart and is usable for all of the same things, plus some more.
With this incredibly brief overview, I will now start getting into my opinions on the different parts of the system. If you don't want to read it all, my opinion is that the system can work, but it has a lot of issues that will need to be worked around.
The Book
Overall, the book seems to be of decent quality, with more wonderful Dishonored art and a very solid coverage of the setting for everyone who isn't familiar with it. However, the book has some incredibly bewildering issues. While I will admit that these might be unique to my digital copy, but they are still a problem people will face.
The first, is that there are an incredibly number of typographical errors. Bullet points are printed on top of the text that goes with them and sentences that should be a new paragraph or section just continue from the previous paragraph. In one particularly notable instance, I was reading one section about rules for weapon crafting or something, when suddenly the sentence I was in the middle of changed to another one. This other sentence was verbatim the second half of a paragraph from earlier in the book. How do issues like that make it past editing? I can understand misspelled words, but this is paragraphs mixed with each other!
Further, the bookmarking of the digital edition is functional, if a little strange. It only covers chapters or the largest of headings, which is better than nothing but still less than ideal. In more traditional terms, the index of the book is pretty poor as well, with not a lot of help for finding certain specific things. Luckily, chapters are well organized and the system is simple enough that finding certain rules and such is fairly easy.
The Rules
At its core, the 2d20 system is fairly simple and that works in this system's favor because it has a serious issue with explaining, elaborating, or providing examples. The two locations I found this most troubling, were with Momentum and Chaos.
Momentum can be used to buy extra dice, make actions create or change Truths about the scene, or ask the DM questions. The last option there is the strangest one. The DM is supposed to lay out a scene with lots of information, but if players want more details it seems like they are supposed to pay momentum to ask questions. The momentum pool is refilled by overshooting the difficulty of tasks and the entire party shares a pool with a max of 6 points.
Limiting the flow of information from DM to player is just a bad idea no matter how I look at it, which makes this incredibly frustrating. It also implies that if players are out of momentum, they can't ask questions! And to head off those thinking that this would be to gain meta-knowledge, the rules themselves limit the questions to something that the character could actually notice or see. I could be wrong in my interpretation of this, but the rules give no further explanations after a couple sentences and there are absolutely no examples given.
Chaos has a similar problem, where it is just explained as the DMs counterpart for Momentum. It can do anything momentum can and is spent to make situations worse. No more explanation or examples given. It is implied to be used for other things, but no specifics are listed.
Other mechanics are similar, like Combat which has rules for both using fixed difficulties for hitting enemies and rules for having enemies roll to defend themselves. This is especially confusing, as the guidelines for which skills and styles to use for combat are never explained (though using something other than Fighting would be strange). Then, there is a mechanic called Tracks which are meant to represent something progressing, whether that be danger, stealth, or chaos. I have the vaguest idea on how to use these thanks to enjoying the Ironsworn RPG, but the book seems to enjoy musing about all of the great things that can be done with this system, but it fails to actually show implementation or integrate it with the rest of the system!
The Adventure
Thankfully, unlike many RPGs, there is an example adventure included in this book. It is paced to last about four sessions and focuses on a group of former rebels escaping prison and then leading a worker revolt, basically.
The ideas are interesting, and there are a lot of good examples on how to implement various rules, but the entire storyline is effectively on rails. It does not handle player initiative very well and handles players not knowing what to do even worse. Everything hinges on having pretty specific character types (which it does call out as a requirement), but it is still bad design.
Other issues include one point where players are scoping out a mansion for a march/assassination and can overhear a conversation. However, the first thing the book lists them to overhear actually has nothing to do with anything and instead seems to be from an earlier version of the adventure that was only partially removed. It makes no sense and there is no reason it should be there.
Another particular sticking point is that the adventure has several points which are CALLED OUT as being critical points where characters need to make a certain choice or do a certain thing in order to continue. The first of these happens when characters are smuggling explosive whale bladders in prison. If they fail their checks, one blows up, and the book effectively says they have lost the game.
Further, in case this isn't clear (since I messed it up) there are actually three different statblocks for guards. One officer statblock, one watchman statblock, and one lower watchman statblock. The difference between them, is that the lower watchman vs normal watchman is about 9x the health and improved combat capabilities. There are several occasions in the game when players will find themselves facing multiple guards, and if they aren't the 1 hp guards, the fight will be very hard. To illustrate, my players nearly died to a 1 hp rat swarm that attacked them in the sewers. Normal watchmen are stronger than that most of the time.
The Experience
Character creation is actually fairly nice and easy, but a little poorly written. At one point the book says that characters get 8 points for focuses (crit-range-expanding specialties) and may have a contact, but every single archetype listed says they get 11 points for focuses and everyone gets at least one contact. The explanations for how points are distributed to Focuses is confusing, and it all leads into a central problem: characters are samey.
The difference between one starting character and another is going to be which focuses they have (many of which will not necessarily come into play), which beginning trait/perk they got, and maybe 1 or 2 points in stats/skills. When the difference between someone who starts as "good" at something and someone who starts as "bad" at something is probably only 2 points on the target number, everyone ends up feeling pretty generic. Obviously this is a goal, but it isn't fun.
In terms of actually running the system, it works well enough, though my players did complain that rolling the multiple d20s and trying to be under their target just felt a little underwhelming when the system could instead have had big bonuses or something. I see where they were coming from, though I believe their dislike of the system was also due to other issues (like me accidentally using the wrong watchman statblocks) and everything not quite clicking together.
When you build a character in this system, they will feel weak and powerless, which is a goal, but they also feel fairly generic.
Final Thoughts and Making it Work
This system has a lot of flaws, including some that I have failed to mention or forgotten about, but it also has a lot of potential. Everything clicked together just right at the end of our campaign when we launched an ambush on a noble. It was the end of the prewritten adventure, but it was glorious. Everyone involved - guards, gang members, target, and even the players - ended up dying as things went ever so slightly sideways. It was a wonderful way to end the campaign.
So yes, I believe this system could work. Here are the things that I recommend to anyone interested in this system:
- Let everyone have their own Momentum pool, but let anyone spend momentum to help a situation. All of the pools tick down when a scene changes.
- Most difficulties should be 1. If something is difficult, it should be 2. Anything with difficulty 3 or more you should expect your players to fail.
- Give out a couple bonecharms early on, they are unique to the system and really make players feel more powerful
- Use the optional heroic character creation rules OR double the bonuses everyone gets to their starting skills and styles
- Use Chaos regularly, but also save some up for when you want to really make a situation suck
- Customize your campaign to play into character strengths and focuses!
- Use the right statblocks, erring on the side of too easy. Use chaos to balance it, since you don't have tools to make a situation easier for the most part
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