Band-Aids & Bullet Holes Design Diary: Ten Guys Named Barf

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.

I won’t shut up about how much I love games that come with pregenerated, stock characters. I love it when a game gives me all the tools to get Put Into A Situation as quickly as possible so I can start agonizing over what to do about it, and very little does that as fast as stock characters plus a fixed starting situation.

When I sat down to make Band-Aids & Bullet Holes (there’s that Kickstarter link again, you should click it), I knew I wanted a game that would play hard and fast in a two hour slot. That screamed stock characters to me. But the centerpiece mechanic, calling cards, didn’t fit that particularly well.

In BABH each character is made up of a handful of “calling cards,” basically playing cards with a short phrase written on them like “nail gun,” “the stench of cigars,” or “bisexual lighting.” When you give a character three of these, you really get a sense of who they are and what their deal is. And they’re so fun to write! I didn’t want to keep players from getting a chance to write them.

On the other hand, if I dialed in the characters tight and made a game about a specific professional assassin who wanted revenge on a specific bastard for doing a specific bastardly thing, the game stopped feeling very John Wicky. It felt small, one specific story, where the Wick-verse feels vast and open-ended. I wanted people to be able to come back to the game and build up a mythos.

So I split the difference. Now in BABH there’s a bunch of stock characters, but they each only come with two out of three calling cards. You fill in the third.

Let’s see an example:

God he’s such a sad, wet man.

So you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of Barf’s deal from all that. A little art, an evocative name, a couple calling cards, an evocative need.

But when you play, remember you get to bring in a third calling card of your own. Imagine ten different Barfs with these ten different sets of calling cards:

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and heart-shaped aviators

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and a taxidermy squirrel

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and a deep, sexy voice

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and a good heart

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and a disarming accent

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and half a kilo of C-4

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and memorized poetry

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and his mentor’s disapproval

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and an operatic film score

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and all the latest gadgets

They’re all still kind of Barf, right? Like his name’s still Barf. But you can see a comedic version, a dramatic version, a harmless version, a gross and scary version…

Of course these characters aren’t that useable without the larger game and framework around them. There’s another subsystem in BABH called powder-kegs, basically specific revenge stories without any characters cast in the story’s roles. So in the powder-keg “Dead Mentor” there’s two students of a mentor, one of the students kills the mentor, and the other wants revenge.

Now imagine each version of Barf above and how he changes again when he’s:

• The murderous student

• The heartbroken student

• The dead mentor

• One of these people’s love interest

BABH gives you this very solid chunk of character to play with while still leaving you a ton of space to reimagine him based on context.

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to compare how all this works to three other games I love: Fiasco (loose characters, loose situation), The King Is Dead (loose characters, tight situation), and Last Train to Bremen (tight characters, tight situation).

Oh and as a treat, here’s a few more Barfs to show off something else you can do with calling cards:

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and a Santa costume

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and a cybernetic arm

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and the fairy king’s true name

• bloody knuckles, stench of cigarettes, and a cartoonishly large technicolor mallet

Cheers.