Dune: Home Secrets and techniques is a story-driven recreation impressed by award-winning Detective: a contemporary crime board recreation. The sport makes use of the identical system to inform an interesting story, however on the identical time, with some tweaks and modifications within the guidelines, it brings a really totally different expertise. On this article, I’d like to debate a few these modifications.
The board
Detective: a contemporary crime board recreation was all about placing gamers within the footwear of characters from procedural TV exhibits like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Gamers take the position of regulation enforcers and detectives. They go to the Lab to look at DNA samples, they go to Courtroom and Metropolis Archives to dig in outdated information and circumstances, they go to Richmond PD to query suspects and witnesses. The sport comes with a small board to assist manifest this easy construction – Lab, Richmond PD, Courtroom – that is your terrain, that is your playground, that is your process.
Dune: Home Secrets and techniques invitations participant characters to Tel Gezer, a small metropolis on Arrakis they by no means visited earlier than. They’re members of resistance on a secret mission. There is no such thing as a construction, there may be solely unknown, there may be solely the fog of secret conflict.
In Dune: Home Secrets and techniques, I made a decision to throw out the board as gamers understand it from Detective to take away the security of well-known places. I gave them the map of Tel Gezer, an enormous paper map like in RPG classes. I marked on it 26 totally different places – tavern, palace, touchdown pod, gallery, market, all totally different locations—the entire massive metropolis, the town that’s unknown to the newcomers. As a substitute of strong construction from Detective, they’re given a handout with issues they should discover and locations they should study.
It’s a easy design change. Take away the board with 4 acquainted places and provides a map with 26 unknown ones. All of the sudden from the assured regulation enforcer, you flip right into a traveler that visits a brand new place.
The sources
In Detective, initially of every recreation, characters add their capability tokens to the pool. This represents their skillset and the way they’ll add worth to the group by excelling in some areas. These tokens are then used within the recreation to dig deeper into some playing cards and be taught extra about sure plot parts.
One of many attribute parts in Dune is Fremen’s frugality, their sacred look after water and spice. They’re fairly the other to as we speak’s society through which the phrase waste goes together with day-after-day. I wished to point out it within the guidelines, each the shortage of sources and the respect to what an individual has. The flexibility tokens obtained one easy tweak. As soon as spent, they’re gone. They don’t replenish initially of the following recreation.
Gamers start the marketing campaign with just a few useful resource tokens. That’s all they’ve for the entire 4 mission-long marketing campaign. Every time they need to spend a token, they suppose twice. Every time they spend sources, they debate if that is the second. Every time they spend sources, they really feel the gravity of the motion.
Welcome to Arrakis.
Taking dangers
In Detective gamers are regulation enforcers. Confidence is their limitless useful resource. They’ll go to crime scenes, they’ll query witnesses, they’ll test police databases, they’re in charge of the scenario.
In Dune: Home Secrets and techniques, you play a insurgent combating in opposition to evil Harkonnens. You act undercover, you run in shadows, you watch each step you are taking, and your each motion is a threat.
To signify that with a easy mechanism, we determined so as to add a small Push your luck mechanism within the recreation. When taking sure actions, like passing behind guards or breaking right into a Harkonnens constructing, gamers should take a threat take a look at and draw a Consequence token. We now have 2 good ones within the pool and three alert ones. If you draw the purple one, the Consequence monitor strikes, and if it ever reaches the ultimate spot, the resistant forces are in hassle.
It’s a easy mechanism added to the Detective system, however it provides this second of uncertainty, the split-second-long thrill once you draw a token understanding that you’re simply doing one thing very dangerous…
Epilogue
These are three small modifications, small tweaks within the Detective system we launched in Dune: Home Secrets and techniques that allowed us to alter the texture of the sport and assist gamers immerse into Dune. They’re not detectives. They’re rebels within the metropolis of Tel Gezer.
Within the second half, I’ll focus on how we approached the Antares web site and adjusted it to the world through which computer systems don’t exist…
