Dune: Home Secrets and techniques is a story-driven sport impressed by award-winning Detective: a contemporary crime board sport. The sport makes use of the identical system to inform an attractive story, however on the identical time, with some tweaks and adjustments within the guidelines, it brings a really totally different expertise. On this article, I’d like to debate a few these adjustments.
The board
Detective: a contemporary crime board sport was all about placing gamers within the sneakers of characters from procedural TV reveals like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Gamers take the function 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 previous recordsdata 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 isn’t a construction, there may be solely unknown, there may be solely the fog of secret warfare.
In Dune: Home Secrets and techniques, I made a decision to throw out the board as gamers realize it from Detective to take away the protection of well-known areas. I gave them the map of Tel Gezer, an enormous paper map like in RPG periods. I marked on it 26 totally different areas – tavern, palace, touchdown pod, gallery, market, all totally different locations—the entire huge metropolis, town that’s unknown to the newcomers. As a substitute of stable construction from Detective, they’re given a handout with issues they should discover and locations they should find out about.
It’s a easy design change. Take away the board with 4 acquainted areas 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 assets
In Detective, originally of every sport, characters add their capability tokens to the pool. This represents their skillset and the way they’ll add worth to the crew by excelling in some areas. These tokens are then used within the sport to dig deeper into some playing cards and be taught extra about sure plot components.
One of many attribute components in Dune is Fremen’s frugality, their sacred look after water and spice. They’re fairly the other to at the moment’s society through which the phrase waste goes together with every single day. I needed to point out it within the guidelines, each the shortage of assets and the respect to what an individual has. The flexibility tokens acquired one easy tweak. As soon as spent, they’re gone. They don’t replenish originally of the following sport.
Gamers start the marketing campaign with a number of useful resource tokens. That’s all they’ve for the entire 4 mission-long marketing campaign. Every time they wish to spend a token, they suppose twice. Every time they spend assets, they debate if that is the second. Every time they spend assets, 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 will go to crime scenes, they’ll query witnesses, they’ll test police databases, they’re answerable for the state of affairs.
In Dune: Home Secrets and techniques, you play a insurgent preventing towards evil Harkonnens. You act undercover, you run in shadows, you watch each step you’re taking, and your each motion is a danger.
To symbolize that with a easy mechanism, we determined so as to add a small Push your luck mechanism within the sport. When taking sure actions, like passing behind guards or breaking right into a Harkonnens constructing, gamers should take a danger take a look at and draw a Consequence token. We’ve got 2 good ones within the pool and three alert ones. While you draw the pink one, the Consequence observe strikes, and if it ever reaches the ultimate spot, the resistant forces are in bother.
It’s a easy mechanism added to the Detective system, but it surely provides this second of uncertainty, the split-second-long thrill while you draw a token realizing that you’re simply doing one thing very dangerous…
Epilogue
These are three small adjustments, small tweaks within the Detective system we launched in Dune: Home Secrets and techniques that allowed us to vary the texture of the sport and assist gamers immerse into Dune. They’re now not detectives. They’re rebels within the metropolis of Tel Gezer.
Within the second half, I’ll talk about how we approached the Antares web site and adjusted it to the world through which computer systems don’t exist…
