Divergence in Forging Techniques (Patreon)

I just watched the very fun one-shot actual play collaboration between Quinns Quest and Jump Over the Age, playing CBR+PNK in the world of Citizen Sleeper. Longer-term patrons and fans will recognize Citizen Sleeper as one of my favorite games of 2022, a melancholy cyberpunk game about identity, labor, disability, and the supreme importance of community.

The game they played, CBR+PNK by Emanoel Melo, is a stripped-down Forged in the Dark rpg with some interesting variations on the core mechanics. I'd heard of CBR+PNK a while back and got the extremely slick physical edition in the last year, but hadn't really internalized the rules, including these variations, which reminded me of how Felix Isaacs built the core mechancis of Wildsea, a game that draws on Forged in the Dark but sets out in its own direction, with its own Tales By Wild Worlds tradition label. Interestingly, CBR+PNK and The Wildsea share a publisher - Mythworks.

The thing I want to talk about in these games' overlap having two types of character traits that a PC primarily references when building a dice pool.

In Blades in the Dark and many Forged in the Dark games, a player builds their dice pool largely with the PC's rating in the action they're using. So a character trying to lie their way past a guard would say something like this:

"I'm going to Sway this guard with lies. I have a 2 in Sway, so I take two dice..."

In CBR+PNK, each action has both an Approach and a Sill, with the player listing out how they're taking the action.

In CBR+PNK, the same attempt at deception might go like:
"I'm going to bullshit my way past this guard with my Stealthy approach and the Influence skill. I have 1 in Stealthy and 2 in Influence, so I've got three dice."

And in The Wildsea, charactes combine an Edge and a Skill or a Language to build their dice pool (languages include some related skills/cultural knowledge, like how Saprekk-- the language of the cactus people called the Ektus--"might include lore about deserts, heat, and winds, as well as cultural information on the ektus."

And someone trying to lie their way past a guard might say:

"I'm going to lie my way past this guard. I'm using my Veils edge and my Outwit skill. So one for Veils plus the 2 I have in Outwit gives me 3 dice."

There are 4 approaches in CBR+PNK, and PCs get one approach at 2, two at 1 each, and one at 0. There are 7 Edges in The Wildsea, and a PC will get 3 of them.

This bi-axial system of building a dice pool is similar to games like the Storyteller/Storytelling system of World of Darkness or AEG's Legend of the Five Rings, games I played a lot in high school through college. In some ways it's a more 'traditional' design framework, separating some kind of more fundamental quality/capability of a character from their acquired skills. But as it applies in The Wildsea and CBR+PNK, it doesn't feel like a throwback to me, but instead an additional lens through which a player can imagine and color an action.

A CBR+PNK character who is using their Aggressive edge and Influence looks more like intimidation, where if that same character used their Empathic edge and Influence, they'd be attempting to achieve the goal of talking their way past the guard in a very different fashion.

The multi-axial system also helps characters differentiate themselves from one another - a wildsailor with the edges of Tides, Grace, and Iron will come off differently from a similarly-skilled character with the edges Veils, Instinct, and Sharps. The Edges are described in a very vibes-forward fashion (Teeth is "an edge of savagery, passion, and destruction" compared to the more straightforward approaches (Aggressive has listed with it "Force" "Intimidation" "Destruction").

The more I chew on this bi-axial system, the more I like it. Not surprising since I've been working as a designer on Daggerheart, which has a bi-axial results schema for its core resolution system (one axis is the total of your roll, the other is whether Hope or Fear rolled higher).

What other interesting variations have you seen in Forged in the Dark games? Whether they're in setting, tone, mechanics, etc.