Band-Aids & Bullet Holes Design Diary: Mechanical Problems Meet Diegetic Solutions

Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is my upcoming deckbuilder tabletop roleplaying game built for bloody revenge operas inside a tight-knit clique of professional assassins. Here’s a post where I take one story from its design and break it down so maybe you can better design your own games. If you want more context on how the game works before diving in, check out this free demo.

Welcome to the first post in a series of “Sam blogs about Band-Aids & Bullet Holes design stories!” I’m not gonna go through the design chronologically in this series, I’m just gonna pull individual stories I found interesting from the three year design process and post them in whatever order I’m compelled to. Let’s do it.

I’m starting today with one you’ve probably heard if you’re a regular listener to Dice Exploder. I’ve told it on the show a couple times now, but I think it’s a great example of how the fiction of your game can solve mechanical problems, and I want to be able to point to it on its own.

I was deep into BABH design, and the game was playing great, but it had a reliable and annoying problem. To describe the problem, first I have to describe how scenes work in BABH: we go around the circle taking turns, and when it’s your turn to frame a scene, you answer these questions:

• Which character are you playing as?

• What does that character want?

• Who do they want it from?

Then someone else picks up the “who do they want it from?” character (the term for the someone who picks this character up is the “accomplice”). The accomplice says where they are and adds some color to the scene, and we basically just roleplay it out from there. There’s a few pbta style moves that can come up, but for the purposes of this post we can ignore them.

An example: it’s my turn, and I want to play as John Wick. Mister Wick wants to know who killed his dog, and I say he’s going to the local bartender Barf to find out. Barf always knows the latest gossip.

You raise your hand to pick up Barf and become my accomplice. You say Barf’s at his bar working on a broken pinball machine. It’s early afternoon but there’s a thunderstorm pouring down. Lightning flashes and suddenly there’s John silhouetted in the doorway...

I say how John walks up to Barf, grabs him by his stupid Hawaiian shirt collar, and shakes him. “Who killed my dog?”

And this is where the problem would kick in. Because you were likely just caught between two competing instincts:

1. Barf should tell John who killed his dog. Why would Barf protect a dog killer anyway? He doesn’t have a death wish.

2. The conventions of the genre demand that Barf doesn’t just immediately tell John who killed his dog. That would be stupid. What would the point of this scene have been?

If you’re smart about story structure, you probably understood this tension intellectually pretty quickly. But even if you were a first time roleplayer, I found that you very very reliably identified the tension here on an instinctual level and felt trapped by it.

The thing is, this tension is fun. “I want to tell you but I can’t” is good drama. That’s like the whole point of the game: find those kinds of moments and see what happens with them.

So here, plainly, is the problem: coming up with a reason for “I can’t tell you who killed your dog” is hard.

What to do?

The first thing I tried was making a rule that said “when you’re the accomplice, you’re not allowed to give someone something for nothing.” No free lunches. This at least verbalized the problem for people, so when they felt tension they knew why.

Effectively what this was saying is that to play this game you need to get good at coming up with a reason Barf can’t tell John who killed his dog. Maybe Barf is in love with the dog-killer and doesn’t want John to take his vengeance. Maybe Barf’s being threatened or bribed by the dog-killer. Maybe Barf hates John’s guts from last time (whatever last time was) and wants to fuck him over on principle.

I think this is a fine solution. It played okay, which is to say it played great at experienced tables with a culture of making shit up on the fly while playing stressfully at inexperienced tables. I wanted something more accessible.

The next thing I tried was giving the accomplice a list of potential reasons to say no on their reference sheet. This failed because the reasons were either too specific to reliably apply when they were needed or too broad to be compelling.

I sat on this for a long time until eventually cracking it while thinking about Triangle Agency and how that game uses its diegesis, the facts of its fiction, to influence play. What if I changed something about the fiction of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes that Barf could point to as an excuse?

Introducing the Laws of Heaven: as in the world of John Wick, let’s say there’s a shadowy council of anonymous but powerful assassins who call themselves Heaven, and that Heaven has established several Laws for this community of assassins to follow. And let’s say one of those Laws is “no killing each other.”

Now when John comes to Barf and asks “who killed my dog?” Barf can be like “why, you gonna kill them? Because I’m not gonna get caught helping you break one of Heaven’s Laws.” Maybe John comes back with “if you don’t help me, I’ll kill you now” but that’s just great drama. Now we’re cooking.

This not only worked perfectly, it had a bunch of other positive knock on effects I’m sure you can already feel thrumming around your head. What does it say about the world that these assassins are so well organized and polite? What happens if you do break a Law? What if I have beef with the people who run Heaven? What are all the other Laws? Some of these answers ended up in the game text. Some are implied but left to your imagination.

It was fascinating, and so cool, to watch a fictional change in my game so cleanly solve a mechanical problem. If you’re stuck on something in your game, try it out.