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 was going to do a post on all the basic moves of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, and maybe I still will, but I realized mostly I just want to talk about my favorite one.
Let’s go all the way back. After my first playtest, it was unclear if this game even wanted moves. The game is in some ways a lot closer to Fiasco than a powered by the apocalypse style game, where small details and a scene-setting structure do a ton of work to support play.
Specifically in BABH, characters get calling cards, basically character traits that you write directly onto playing cards and then shuffle into a little character deck. You slot the characters into a powder-keg, basically a story seed with roles for six different characters (i.e. “after the two of us robbed someone, you shot me and left me for dead so you could keep it all for yourself”). Then when it’s your turn as a player to frame a scene, you pick a character to play, you say what they want and who they want it from, and then we start roleplaying. All that character detail and story setup means by the time we get into the scenes, freeform roleplay seems likely to serve us pretty well. Would moves just be a distraction?
When I got to playtesting I found that thinking was, by and large, correct. Many moves I wrote just never get used. As I gradually cut move after move from the game for being some combination of distracting, annoying, and consistently ignored, there was one move I loved enough I kept it on despite its trigger often interrupting good roleplay. This is how the earliest version of it read:
Be truly vulnerable with someone. Clear a Desperation if they reciprocate. Mark a Desperation if they don’t.
Let’s check back in on how that “your character is a deck of cards” mechanic works here. You get a few of these character-defining calling cards like “toothy grin” and “nail gun”, you shuffle them together with “wound” cards and location-based calling cards (“neon lights” or “pouring rain”), then you flip your top card against whoever you’re in conflict to find out who gets their way.
Desperation was a mechanic that didn’t make it to the final version of the game, but essentially it added dead cards to your character deck which made you weaker overall. So what this move said was “if you open up to someone, that’s dangerous. If they don’t validate you, you end up hurt.”
I love the idea that emotional vulnerability is hazardous to your health. It’s risky. I love this both because it feels so genre-appropriate to a John Wick inspired bloody revenge game and because essentially all the art I make is about emotional repression. Who could possibly say why.
Anyway, this move got even juicier when I cut Desperation from the game:
Be vulnerable with someone. If they reciprocate, clear a Wound. If they don’t, mark a Wound.
Now being vulnerable could literally get you killed, because when you get your third Wound, that’s it. You’re out. So are you sure you want to risk telling your ex you miss them? Sick stuff.
Playtesting this further, I consistently ran into this speedbump: people felt weird triggering this move if they didn’t have any wounds of their own because that meant the only possible mechanical outcome was receiving a wound. Why would they want to do that?
Personally that sounds great! I love getting into trouble. And on a purely competitive-brain level, you might want your first wound because wounds function as trump cards in the game (i.e. they count as higher than any other card - the more beat up you get the more badass you become). But people didn’t like it, and early in the game before anyone had any wounds, it kind of trained people to ignore the move. Ugh.
Meanwhile I had this problem where players were really excited about the prospect of mucking with each other’s calling cards, like “I want to turn your stench of cigars into nicotine patches.” Cool idea! I had no way of doing that built into the rules, so I tried it out in a few places. This vulnerability move was one of them:
Open your heart. They choose one or more:
Offer you care or kindness. You heal a wound.
Give you what they think you need. They write you a new calling card and pick its rank, or rewrite one of yours and change its rank.
Betray you. You suffer a wound.
This version solved the “I don’t have any wounds” speedbump by giving players a reason to trigger the move regardless: maybe whoever they were opening up to would give them a cool new calling card. It was still risky to open up, but at least now there was always some potential reward.
The problem with this one was just that it was clunkier. It took longer to resolve, and it exacerbated another problem I’d been having with the move. Here’s an example of how it would get used:
Alice and Bob are in the middle of a scene that’s kinda come to a standstill. Alice looks at her sheet, sees “be vulnerable” is a thing with rules attached, and describes her character Barf being vulnerable. Maybe he says like “please, you gotta help me. Without you, I’m not sure I’m coming back from this one, hoss…”
Everyone leans in to hear what Bob has to say in response… and then Alice (or worse, me from the peanut gallery) interrupts with “oh by the way I think I’m doing the ‘open your heart’ move.”
We negotiate the mechanics for a minute. Bob is unsure if the thing he wanted to do fits the move’s options well or not. All the tension goes out of the interaction.
While I was kicking this problem around, Vincent Baker published this blog post about what happens when you flip the POV on a move. His example is in Apocalypse World 3E, the move “attack someone” sees the attacker choosing from a list of options if they roll well. But what happens if you flip that and make the defender choose? How does it change the feel of the fiction? How does it change the feel of play at the table?
I saw a chance here to potentially solve the problem of “open your heart” interrupting roleplay by switching who triggers the move:
When you catch them with their heart exposed, choose: risk something in return and you each heal a wound, or close yourself off and just they suffer a wound.
Lots of changes here. We’ve returned to the cleaner version to keep it simple and quick in play, but let’s stay on topic. With this version of the move, a typical use looks more like this:
Alice and Bob are in the middle of a scene that’s kinda come to a standstill. Alice decides her Barf is going to try pleading for help. “Please, you gotta help me. Without you, I’m not sure I’m coming back from this one, hoss…”
Everyone leans in to hear what Bob has to say in response…
And Bob goes “I think I’ve caught Barf with an open heart”
Everyone goes “oh shit, you got him!”
We negotiate the mechanics for a minute. We don’t lose the built up tension for nothing, because the gotcha moment already made use of and diffused some of the tension.
Bob comes up with a response, and we’re back in it…
The difference here is subtle. The move is still interrupting the roleplay, but now it’s written such that the interruption comes from the person we’re all looking to to speak next. It’s a smoother ride. And instead of being an action you take, it’s a threat always hanging overhead from the other person.
Like in Apocalypse World, the moves on your sheet in Band-Aids & Bullet Holes are very often playing the role of buttons you can press on your controller. Not sure what to do? Pick one, smash it, and see what happens. But BABH doesn’t need that. People get what they’re supposed to do from the genre conventions. Instead, this being a reactive move means you have to be careful to tiptoe around its existence as a pit trap. That echoes the feeling of the genre here: be careful what you say lest someone catch a weakness in your armor.
And of course if you love trouble, you can still drive straight into the move or call out “hey, you should get me here, I’m definitely exposing my heart.”
I can’t emphasize enough how small a change this is. The old version where Alice triggered the move worked fine! I’m really talking about smoothing out tiny bumps in the rug that is the game. But this worked a little better.
A couple other changes here: the wording of “catch them with their heart exposed” captures that feeling of this move being a threat while also hitting some nice poetic language with “heart exposed.” In a game where people are getting shot and stabbed, there’s a physicality to that which I love.
Instead of “if they reciprocate, heal a wound” now it’s “if you risk something in return, you each heal a wound.” I like sticking the word “risk” in here to emphasize that opening up is always a risk and to allow for a broader set of responses. If someone’s vulnerable to you and you want to respond positively to them, that doesn’t have to mean being vulnerable in return, but in this world it does always mean risking something.
And finally, now if you do respond positively and risk something in return, you both heal a wound. It seemed only fair. Share the love, you know what I mean?
That’s where the move is right now. I still gotta playtest this a couple more times before release, so maybe we’ve got one more change to go, but I’m optimistic.
And that’s 1700 words on a 30 word move. Never say I don’t have a brand.
Until next time.
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