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 modifications within the guidelines, it brings a really completely different expertise. On this article, I’d like to debate a few these modifications.
The board
Detective: a contemporary crime board sport was all about placing gamers within the footwear of characters from procedural TV exhibits 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 information and instances, 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 any construction, there’s solely unknown, there’s solely the fog of secret battle.
In Dune: Home Secrets and techniques, I made a decision to throw out the board as gamers comprehend 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 periods. I marked on it 26 completely different places – tavern, palace, touchdown pod, gallery, market, all completely different locations—the entire massive metropolis, town that’s unknown to the newcomers. As an alternative 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. Out of the blue 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 means 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 sport to dig deeper into some playing cards and study 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 alternative to at present’s society during which the phrase waste goes together with day-after-day. I needed to indicate it within the guidelines, each the shortage of assets and the respect to what an individual has. The power 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 just a few 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’ll go to crime scenes, they’ll query witnesses, they’ll verify police databases, they’re in command of the state of affairs.
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 danger.
To characterize 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 now have 2 good ones within the pool and three alert ones. Once you draw the purple one, the Consequence monitor 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, however it provides this second of uncertainty, the split-second-long thrill if 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 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 during which computer systems don’t exist…
