Genre Police: Friendship Is M…echanical

I recently watched a video on the playtest of Critical Role’s new game in production, Daggerheart. In it, the commenter revealed that players spend a resource called ‘Hope’ to activate abilities, then went on to explain this resource can be shared – players can give each other hope. And it got me thinking about how games represent the bonds between characters. 

I talked in the last article about affiliation (feeling like you belong to a community), and I realised it’s important to look at exactly how games create a sense of belonging and family. If we are still looking at games as a text, this gives us a sense of how games want us to arrange the narrative between characters in our group.

When we look at D&D, often a narrative about a group is about found family or how outcasts come together to trust each other. It seems the natural fit, but the development of rules for this isn’t immediately obvious. Beyond the ‘bonds’ section of a sheet, there’s little in the way of mechanics in the core rules that set up any kind of sense of belonging to each other or community. But scratching below the surface of the ruleset reveals an interesting dynamic. Spell selections allow for boosts to allies and synergies of abilities or feats can be pieced together through players entering combats and challenging situations. Through them, players learn combinations or ways to augment each other through their character playstyles. 

Each group eventually defines its combat style in a different way depending on the pieces it has available. Perhaps from this, we can surmise that in D&D’s worlds, friendship is a thing that is earned, forged by shared adversity, and constantly evolving. As the players level up, they learn to work together. There’s little in the rules about actual friendship or social scenes, but in the place the game likes to focus, that narrative of growing together is still present. 

In contrast, the old World Of Darkness game, Vampire: The Masquerade had a lot of social mechanics but almost no powers that helped other vampires out. You could choose to use your abilities to help others but a lot of abilities were not exactly altruistic without some complex implementation. This was a game where your alliances are fraught and people never really learn to trust each other. Alliances shift, people lose faith. Players can trigger frenzies and meltdowns in each other, but very rarely grant each other willpower. There are exceptions, but they are there to prove the rule. This variation teaches us about the game – in a Vampire chronicle, the drama comes from the tension between characters or NPC motivations and goals.  

We can see this reflected in other games too. Call Of Cthulhu has perhaps one of the most interesting takes on friendship. It’s a small rule that throws a few interesting things into focus about the game that we could otherwise miss. You see to most people, CoC is about the struggle against cosmic horrors and the terrible realisation of just how small and insignificant our existence is when measured against a vast ancient universe that considers us specks of dirt in its machine. So far so horrific. An inevitable tide of death and sanity loss.

Except, well…there’s this mechanic. It’s buried away in the ‘increasing sanity points’ section, and it basically states that if a player spends some of their downtime with the person or thing marked as important to them in their backstory instead of investigating the mythos, then there’s a chance they can gain some sanity back. The suggested actions include ‘A Holiday with a loved one’. 

Now let’s just unpack this for a minute. In a world full of cosmic horror where we are losing our minds, one of the things that can save us is to remember that we are loved. In focusing on the small friendships and connections in our lives, we can hang on to our sanity and see our lives have meaning, no matter how big things get. It’s maybe less than a paragraph, but it shows us that despite how much the overarching theme of the game is ‘the universe is cold and cruel and hates you’ that on some level, the game wants you know there are things worth fighting for. That humankind itself has some beauty in it. And I love the game more because this rule exists.

By contrast, in some PBTA games, friendship is a complex thing that we have to keep redefining. Friendship must be worked at to be maintained. In games like Masks, Monsterhearts and Apocalypse World the shifting relationships within the group are the whole story of the game. The games create a loop where emotions are damaged; people act out and test the boundaries of friendship but have the tools to heal each other if they think hard about how they relate to each other. This can be challenging for some and feel like the game is forcing people to make those decisions but often games in the PBTA spectrum are about finding yourself, growth and change. It casts friendship as a struggle, an inspiration and a thing that pushes us to places we wouldn’t otherwise have gone.

There are a whole host of games where friendship can be healing mechanic. In Tales From The Loop, reconnecting with the people in their lives allows kids to heal the only type of damage the game hands out – emotional damage. Because in this game, players can’t die, the game instead can go savagely at other areas, including the players loved ones and ties. It puts the stakes of the game firmly in the personal connections of the characters, asks us what they do for us and how it feels when that is challenged. Which, in a game where you play kids with a small friendship and family circle, causes every broken connection to feel like the world has changed.

I know this is a small look at how friendship is mechanised in games and what it tell us about a game. And I didn’t even mention the My Little Pony RPG even once. Feel free to comment on games that have interesting takes on friendship! For myself, I feel a desire to come back to this topic at and continue my inspection of the social elements of RPGS soon. But for now, feel free to hug your friends close and fight back the night until my next column!