Getting your inFAMOUS in my D&D 2

Ok. I know. I made one post about inFamous already in the last week. Why write another one… well, there is so much of this game that I like, that I just can’t stop thinking about all the ways those good elements could be incorporate into my tabletop game.

One of the core elements in inFamous is the Good/Evil choice in relationship and the city you explore. Throughout the city, you are confronted with various quests in the side quest and main quest variety. Although the main quests help move the story along, there are tons of little side quest which you can do between these main quests which help to build your reputation in the city, or, break it apart.

I find a lot of the side quests in inFamous to be repetitive and lame. After clearing the 10th building of cameras, I pretty much hated that type of quest, but although I dislike the actual quests themselves, I do like what they do for you with respect to the game.

When you complete a minor side quest, you get some experience points and you lock down a section of the city. You essentially gain control of a single portion of the sandbox and prevent enemies from returning to that area. I like that mechanic a lot. Though it wouldn’t work very well with D&D, because there are not all that many random monster/fights you have in cities, I think there are several ways that you could make it work.

The other aspect of the side quests in inFamous that I like are the good/evil choice quests. You have an alignment in the game which effects what kind of powers that you can use. As your alignment goes more towards the hero side of the scale, people love you and want to take your picture. As your alignment shifts the other way, people start to fear you (though I am not sure exactly what happens since I haven’t gone that path in the game… yea… I became a goody two-shoes hero-boy). As you do these alignment shift quests, every good choice quest you complete locks out one of the villain quests. That is a great idea as well. I like it a lot.

I think there is an easy way that you could make these work in a D&D game. For each minor quest you complete, whether that be just breaking up a bar fight, or helping get someone’s cat out of a tree, your reputation in a particular part of the world increases or decreases. Every quest makes you more notable, but the way you conduct yourself in completing those quests, either through good means or evil ones, affects how the majority of people in the world see you. You could then easily make these quests connect to encounters; for example, if you were trying to be a good, law abiding citizen, and happened to clean up some of the scum of the city, the city guard might approach to either recruit or aid you. On the flip side, if you were constantly stealing horses and causing bar fights, you might get in trouble with the law, but seeing your potential, the local thieves guild might try to get you out of trouble in return for your service.

I also think that the city control aspect could be easily implemented as well. If you do more good quests, the presence of evil elements in a part of town might dry up, but go stronger in areas where you have not fought them before. On the other hand, if you happen to pressure the city guard enough, they might need to get out of the bad areas of town for fear of being over-run (or, you might develop enough power that you convince them through their wallets that not being in the slums is a good idea).

I like what World of Warcraft has done with its new quests system. It made them a lot of fun for players of all races and classes. Combining the style that inFamous does with its quests, with the content and variance of depth that you get in WoW quests, could make for a perfect pairing.

Have you ever done something like this in one of your games? If so, how did it work out? What was your experience with that style of quest system in D&D?

Getting your inFAMOUS in my D&D

I talked a little while ago how I would love to see a version of Demon’s Souls made as a table top RPG that uses dice. Demon’s Souls has got to be one of my favorite games for PS3 period. But, lately, I have been playing some other stuff. One of these “other” games that I am playing right now is Infamous. That came out a couple years ago, but like everything else, I am pretty late to the scene. If you haven’t tried the game yet, but have a PS3, I strongly encourage you to go pick it up for $20. You won’t be disappointed. It isn’t a game that would make me want a PS3 just from playing it, like Demon’s Souls was, but it is a game definitely worth giving a try.

There is one aspect of that game that I think would be really cool to have in my D&D games. In Infamous, there is a collection mechanic which revolves around exploring the world and its tiniest minutia. In order to increase your total health and energy, you must travel around the world, exploring the city and collecting “blast shards”. What these shards are actually from is totally lost on me, but their purpose in the game is clear and two-fold: a) through them you are encourage to explore the sandbox, climbing buildings and exploring tunnels and b) they are there to help you and provide you a statistical, permanent bonus to your character.

This is a mechanic which I can get behind and I would encourage DM’s to do likewise if you have a big sandbox you want your players to actually explore. Looking at this mechanic, I went back to the old days in 3.5 D&D when you had all the tomes, which were crazy expensive, but when used, would permanently give you a bonus to one of your stat bonuses. These books were WAY more pricey than anything else in the game, but the benefit they provided could not be taken from you in any way, nor did it take up a slot on your body.

I am thinking that you could do something similar with these “blast shards” in D&D, Gamma World, or pretty much any other game out there. The key, I think, would be not to give it to the players all at once. In Infamous, you have to collect bucket loads of these shards in order to actually finally get that benefit, not only that, but the number of shards you have to collect goes up exponentially as you gather more. I think I have to get like 30ish more shards before I finally gain another energy bubble.

What I came up with for D&D, which may be stolen from an anime or something… I am sure I have heard about it before somewhere… is to have the players collecting pages of a book. Every time they complete a chapter of that book, i.e. collect a sufficient number of pages, they receive a boon. You could give the boon to everyone in the group and it wouldn’t matter all that much.

The problem that I see with this though is you don’t want to make these boons too powerful, or put too much emphasis on them for the story; if you do over-hype these pages, you risk the players ignoring your story in order to simply travel the world in search of all these pages (that might be a nice way to develop a major campaign, but not some minor quest which is simply a carrot to be waved in front of your adventurers in order to keep them moving and exploring a city or nation).

You could do something very similar with Gamma World. Hell, with Gamma World you could even leave them as blast shards and simply let them build up into gaining some new Omega Tech or some new Alpha Mutation.

TL;DR – provide your players interesting motivations for exploring your world by giving them a quest that offers a mechanical benefit, but don’t give that benefit to them all at once.