Errant Design Deep Dive #6: The Deviant

For the duration of Errant's Kickstarter I will be doing a series of posts where I go through Errant, more or less in order, diving into the design of the game and its inspirations. To follow along, I suggest reading the relevant section being discussed at errantrpg.carrd.co. Also, we have a Discord server now.

Today we'll be discussing the second of Errant's archetypes: The Deviant. This is an interesting one because I had been increasingly growing dissatisfied with the design of The Deviant as of late, but as of about a week ago gave them a complete and total redesign. I'll be explaining my thought process behind this. But first, a quick digression to an aspect of combat I didn't cover in the last blog post: Rolling for Initiative.

Rolling for Initiative

So: the GM rolls a d6; the player also rolls a d6, but before they do, they announce whether the sum of the results will be odds or even. If they call it right, they win initiative; if they call it wrong, they lose initiative.

For anyone even vaguely familiar, they'll realise this is a variation on side initiative inspired by the popular Japanese street gambling game Chō-Han. I don't have much to say about this except for the fact that, despite being mathematically equivalent to regular side initiative, this feels so much better because players are invested in the outcome of the die because they made a decision. Victory is so much sweeter and defeat extra bitter; a player who makes an incorrect call is lambasted, while the player who calls it correctly is a hero. I also love the weird superstitions players develop around it: "always odds/evens" or "keep calling odds/evens until it happens."

That's all, digression over.

The Deviant

So what you may immediately notice, if you're following along on carrd, is that the version of The Deviant posted there is quite different than the one pictured above.

Ever since I started playing RPGs, both tabletop and videogames, the thief/rogue type character was always my favourite. As a designer, I have noticed ever since my very early drafts of Errant, a tendency towards bias creeping in as my version of this class always ended up a little (or a lot) overtuned. This is something I tried to be conscious of, but even after balancing in the obvious ways (they used to be able to get absurd levels of backstab damage) I soon found that the class was unbalanced in other, subtler ways that made me grow to dislike it more and more.

The first is that I had decided that the sort of "design niche" of The Deviant is that, while casters like the The Occult and The Zealot broke the laws of reality diegetically, The Deviant broke them extra-diegetically. That is to say, they messed with the rules and systems of the game itself. This gave them a sort of Puckish fourth wall breaking trickster vibe akin to your Deadpools and your Bugs Bunnies and so on. While I liked this idea in practice, they way the interacted with certain core elements of the game like Event Dice, inventory depletion, and so on both made the game much easier, disrupted the natural rhythm and pace of the game, and made many things harder to keep track of in terms of book-keeping. I managed to simplify some of those issues out (for example, instead of saying "light sources have 1 extra burn" on the Alchemist ability, I made it "ignore the first Burn result on an Event Dice"). But this still didn't solve the second, larger problem.

The Deviant gets too much for too little.

In the Kickstarter I say class abilities are designed to be "Active, not Passive". The Deviant breaks this design point entirely: almost all their mastery abilities give passive bonuses; they reduce the DV of checks related to their skills passive, and if they have mastery they change the position and impact passively as well. A few passive abilities here and there are fine but it is the fact that cumulatively, the weight of all these passive abilities add up with no primary active ability to balance them out.

The weight of my dissatisfaction with this design grew, compounded by the some twitter dialogue on what is "broken" about the thief class in traditional D&D, but I didn't have a solution and felt like it was a bit too late in the process to start fucking with as core a component to the game as one of the classes.

Thief is the worst class in any dndalike and the thief in my dndalike is the worst of them all

— 𝖆𝖛𝖆 #𝖟𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖖𝖚𝖊𝖘𝖙 (@yungdumbitch) February 17, 2021

At the same time I was still brainstorming different mechanics that might make me like The Deviant. 

I wanted to lean more into their "storygame-style narrative bending mechanics" niche, while also giving them an active resource they had to manage tied subsystem disconnected largely from the core mechanics of the game like every other Archetype did, all while making said system feel, in terms of game feel, distinctly related to the flavour of The Deviant and asymmetrical in terms of play to the other Archetypes.

Reading Rogue 2e and The Treasure At The End Of This Dungeon Is An Escape From This Dungeon And We Will Never Escape From This Dungeon really helped inspire and clarify my thoughts on what I wanted from The Deviant.

So, this leads us to the new Deviant. They still get a small DV reduction for having Expertise, and they still get improved Position & Impact for having Mastery; the weight of that is offset by the fact that at mid levels they are no longer trivially auto-succeeding every check passively now. I think of the justification for improved Position & Impact being that someone who is a master in stealth, for example, is naturally going to be more effective when they succeed and less disastrous when they fail; think the difference between a paladin in chain mail bouncing down the stairs alerting every guard in earshot vs a guard catching a quick glimpse of a shadow and Skyrim style going "huh, what was that?" before going to investigate. All of the mastery abilities have been pared down now too: they still give passive bonuses that change the way some mechanics work, but these bonuses are now small, the mechanics they influence not core, and they only get one little ability with Mastery rather than two.

The big mechanic is the introduction of Jettons as a resource (Jettons is just a fancy french word for poker chips: I picked it instead of just saying chips because I didn't want people to think of the food, and because I think the smug french pretentiousness fits the character of The Deviant more).

Jettons both allow The Deviant to continue to be better at checks then everyone else, at the cost of a resource, but also allow them to do boastful, betting, gambling style wagers in order to pull off impossible, nigh supernatural displays of skill and proficiency, though they are just as likely to have the attempt spectacularly blow up in their face. The devil's bargain mechanic introduces a push your luck system that reinforces both the gambling and cockiness type feel of the mechanic. Special thanks to Elias for suggesting that The Deviant get some Jettons back on a successful devil's bargain, as it both wonderfully encourages risky behaviour, and also helps balance the amount of Jettons The Deviant gets in between downtime turns: when I had Jettons reducing the DV of checks by 1, it felt like they got too few, but if I increased each Jetton to reduce the DV of checks by 2 they got too many and were too powerful; fiddling with the total amount of Jettons The Deviant got would either leave me feeling like they had too few for checks but too many for wagers, or vice versa, but having them reduce DV by 1 but get the occasional "refund" ends up striking the perfect balance.

That has been my second deep dive of the day. Tomorrow (hopefully) I will be covering two Archetypes, as well as two magic systems, for the price of one, as we cover The Occult and The Zealot.