If you're from around the modern OSR blogosphere, you're probably much more familiar with Farmer Gadda than you are me. While I forget what finally drew me into their Barnyard, I'm thankful for it because it ultimately got me connected with a lot more folks passionate about yelling on the internet about RPGs. If you're familiar with Gadda, you'll probably also know about their Sanic Hack - an attempt to mash up 16-bit era videogames with Into The Odd, which I recommend you go read if you're a fan of Sonic and/or Super Mario RPG and also Chris McDowall's whole TTRPG oeuvre.
Late last year, I was possessed of a particularly cursed thought which I brought to Gadda's attention, and one which has led to this very blog you're reading now as well as a companion piece over on their blog and hopefully more to come - and that thought was "Hey, Sonic SatAM is kinda janky but don't you think that its episodic nature and weird lore would make for interesting TTRPG content?" Little did I know that Gadda had watched the entire Sonic SatAM series in the not terribly distant past, but they had and they were into the idea - and from there our first chat about what gold there may be in those mines began in earnest.
Poor Old Cat
If you didn't watch the series back in the 90s or on one of its very rare DVD releases, this series is tied to the Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog comics that we are absolutely not going to get into here, but suffice it to say if you're only familiar with the Sonic the Hedgehog videogames, this plot may be unfamiliar to you so to very, VERY briefly summarize: this surprisingly dark universe sees Sonic on the planet Mobius aiding a group of freedom fighters in their conflict against Dr. Robotnik who is bent on turning all living creatures into his robot slaves. Sonic and Tails are there, but since this show predates Sonic 3 we basically have none of the other extended cast, instead leaning on this group of freedom fighters: Princess Sally, daughter of the rightful king of the land; Antoine Depardieu, the living French stereotype; Rotor, the mechanically-minded walrus, and many more side characters. One particular side character from the first episode (the actual first episode that wasn't the pilot - the series aired out of order, something that didn't help its longevity) "Sonic Boom" - a character named Cat, who is essentially introduced to show what characters are disposable and which are not. After being captured very early in the episode while Sonic, Sally, and Antoine all escape from Dr. Robotnik's HQ after getting some important data about the whereabouts for Sally's father, Cat is basically seen two more times - once, being threatened with torture by Robotnik, and once where Sonic finds him in a holding cell and tells Sonic to leave him behind so that he can help Sally find her father. We never learn Cat's fate, but he certainly doesn't show up in any other episodes so it can't be great.
So like, that's wild, right? A surprisingly adult premise for a kid's show - a POW refusing rescue from the enemy stronghold because the resistance's resources are best used towards the mission than helping him. While I'd originally tried mapping out the plot of the episode as a series of encounters to present here a la a Five Room Dungeon (something which I suspect you could do with any of these episodes, were you so inclined), when Gadda and I got to talking it turned out we had way different takeaways - I'm always in encounter design mode, but Gadda focused a lot more on the dystopian reality of the world of Mobius and what it means when you have a superheroic character fighting alongside a resistance of regular people. Furthermore, what does it mean to try to adapt this to be played by folks in a game where none of them are that superhero - how do you make the choices of regular characters matter when it's assumed they're basically just serving to kill time until the Main Character comes to save the day? And what happens when you play a game that doesn't have that Main Character at all?
Stealing from the Barkeep
Before I tell you my response, I need to share a brief story from PAX Unplugged last year - or rather, I need to share someone else's story that I briefly intersected with. Prismatic Wasteland's own birdman ran Barkeep on the Borderlands at PAXU, and I briefly got to meet him and a bunch of other very cool blog people when Josh McCrowell introduced me to them all right before they started playing (and I sheepishly asked for Warren's autograph for my copy of Prismatic Wisdom). As Warren details in Game 6 of that above linked blogpost, he introduced a mechanic to Barkeep where he gave people advantage on rolls if they downed a Fireball whisky airplane bottle in one go, while offering that for every main quest objective that was completed, he'd have to drink one. That also meant it was a limited supply, meaning that once they were out, they were out (and so too would the players be, probably - 20 oz of whisky is nothing to scoff at). Keep that in mind as we jump back to my chat with Gadda.
A Sacrifice I'm Willing To Make
When Gadda asked me how you make character choices surrounding the success or failure of missions matter in a world like Sonic SatAM, I responded "If you're assuming an ensemble of NPCs along with the player characters on a mission, start off by giving each NPC a name and a description, and then any time you fail a roll, you may elect to describe your character's relationship with that character...and then kill that character to get a reroll."
And we both just kinda stopped for a minute.
In the context of the show, the NPC in question is given their own agency to make that choice to sacrifice themself for the cause - and of course because it's a children's cartoon, we don't really see any consequence of the action. As a player, choosing to arbitrarily kill an NPC for a small potential advantage feels...horrifying? Disgusting? And that is very much the point - not in an edgelord-y way (remember, this predates the creation of Shadow the Hedgehog, we don't need to go full edgelord) but in a very real sense to feel the horror of the violence in the moment in a way many modern TTRPGs refuse to engage with.
It should also be noted that I've had The Between on my mind quite a lot these days, and in particular how it handles teasing out backstory about the characters only in situations where your characters are vulnerable - either by needing to get out of a bad situation, or by indulging in each others' vices together to grow closer. Any time you get a reroll in that game, it comes with the caveat that you must narrate a scene based on the prompt of whichever reroll you took - sometimes describing important things about your character's past, sometimes setting up horrors of the future, but always taking a moment to explore an emotional scene somewhere in the character's timeline. I also very recently played in a longer-form Mothership campaign where this reroll mechanic was borrowed and it led to some very emotional moments that helped reinforce the very bleak tone we were going for.
While it may be cliché to have a character's life flash before their eyes right before they die, in the context of what I'm giving to you today, I think that introducing this kind of Devil's Bargain mechanic into certain kinds of games gives you a lot of room to have brief tonal shifts that can break the tension of a scene by allowing a brief flash into a happier time before you are forced to go back to the terrors of the present - or, as a way to show how far the player characters are willing to go to succeed and be forced to reckon with their choices. So with all that in mind, here's the quick breakdown of the mechanic for you to take to your games:
- At any time the players are functioning as a part of a larger operation with NPCs around, should a player fail a dice roll, they may elect to sacrifice an NPC to reroll their dice.
- If a player chooses to do this, they must name that NPC, and they must narrate an important moment these characters shared. They must also narrate how the NPC's sacrifice allows them to re-attempt the check.
- The only limit on how many times someone a player invoke this reroll on a single roll is how many NPCs there are available - remember, you are not trading their life for an automatic success, merely an a chance to try again.
OUTRO
So hey that was pretty dark! That's uh...that's not how I hope the rest of these go, but they do pack in the grimdark in that first episode to really differentiate it from the OTHER Sonic cartoon show that was airing at the same time which was very gag-a-minute. If you do end up using this particular Devil's Bargain in your games, I'd recommend 1. checking in with your players to make sure everyone's on board with telling that kind of story and 2. doing a post-game decompression session because there's no way you're telling a happy story with that kind of mechanic at the table.
If you're curious, I have actually run a version of this mechanic in a game before, and this is why I know it doesn't necessarily land as cartoonishly as it might appear on the surface: there was a D&D 5e game I ran for about 8 years that the party had noped out of the Isle of Dread about halfway through doing the main plot of it, and on one day where we were missing one of the players I thought it'd be fun to finish it up by giving the party access to a huge tribe of kobolds they had previously sailed across the sea with by way of the pinnacle of kobold engineering (big coconut-shaped orb-boat with a internal hamster wheel-powered paddle/propeller system) and let them take the kobolds through the final dungeon area. While I'm sure the folks over at Kobold Press and Goodman Games would be delighted to hear that I basically ran a funnel adventure with a mass of special kobolds, my players were super resistant to throwing kobolds at problems to get to the end! This wasn't even with the part where you give that NPC a backstory to sacrifice them, I just assumed that Comic Relief Guys + Kobold War Machine + Cartoonish Violence would be funny for everyone, but this could just be from my brief time playing Orks in 40k. My players only begrudgingly sacrificed kobolds to get through problems, and while they did ultimately end up with just one kobold left, last warrior of his tribe, wearing a Helm of Demon Command and going off to adventure through the Hells until the climactic finale of the campaign a year later when he made a cameo, the really uncomfortable way my players reacted to that rule and premise made me realize that there might be real narrative meat on these bones when the situation is played straight instead of for laughs. And for more information on exactly what kind of scenario you might find yourself in at the gaming table that might have you pondering both the narrative weight of the lives of NPCs (and, thus, reflecting on those topics as they apply to your real actual human life), if you haven't already I'd recommend you check out Gadda's post about all that here.
Do let me know if you do end up using this in your games - I'm interested to see what kinds of storytelling moments come of it. And hopefully next time, there's something a lot sillier to draw from because THIS ISN'T THE LAST YOU'VE SEEN OF THIS ADAM AND GADDA CROSSOVER SERIES.
Stay weird out there.
No comments:
Post a Comment