I. Dear Reader
In 1980, SPI, a company known for its wargames did a strange thing and published an RPG based on the Dallas tv show. If you don’t know anything about the tv show, don’t worry, I will protect you. It’s too late for me though. You go on ahead. Basically, it was a hit TV show of big money family feuding. Imagine Succession but it was written in the 1980s and instead of TV news, it was an oil company. Unlike the show, the RPG wasn’t a hit. The art director of the game famously wrote that they printed 80,000 copies and that was 79,999 more than people wanted. That one person seemed to be this person’s grandma who bought it for him to save his soul from D&D/Satan.
What is this game though? Well, James F Dunnigan, founder of SPI and designer of legendary wargame, Panzerblitz, seems to have applied his analytical mind to the internecine squabbles of Dallas and decided that, if you think about it, petty family drama isn’t so different from CIA covert ops. And he was right.
As you’d expect from a wargame, the rules are dry and clinical to a fault. You start by picking one of the 9 characters from the show – JR, Jock, Sue Ellen, Pam, etc. They all have stats like Persuasion, Coercion, Seduction. And these stats have attack/defend values. For example, JR has a Coercion of 24 because he’s a real jerk. Sue Ellen has a Seduction resist of 18, but it’s 20 against JR, because again, he seems to have been a real jerk. This game genuinely went out of its way to make sure you know JR’s wife really really doesn’t want to go near him.
Each character starts the session (“episode”) with a secret story-based objective. Jock wants to run an angry former employee out of town, JR wants to cheat an Arab oil magnate out of 100 million dollars, Sue Ellen wants to do a favour for an old boyfriend. Yeah, what can I say? Some of these objectives feel more important than others. Regardless, you achieve these objectives by controlling 4 or more specific minor characters and organisations by the end of the game. For example, to enact his 100 million dollar plan, JR has to control the Ewing Oil Company, Mustafa Quattara, Professor Bayard, the reporter Mary Cleef, and so on. But characters’ objective overlap so Pam also wants Mustafa Quattara and Jock also wants Professor Bayard. These conflicting goals means players need to scheme, negotiate and attack each other so they can win.
The sessions play out in five rounds. Each round, the GM sets the scene. Then, the players can negotiate and make deals. Then, we enter the conflict phase where each player makes three moves – either trying to gain control of uncontrolled NPCs, or attacking another player to steal an NPC from under them, or protecting their own NPCs. And the game throws in little curveballs every round: Oops, some of JR’s drinking buddies are in town and he can’t say no to them, so his character is out of this round. Hopefully the player has some NPCs that they can use to act instead. Oops, Mustafa Quattara is being chased by assassins. Whoever controls his card has to give it up as he disappears for a bit and comes back uncontrolled. The end result is somewhere in between Vampire the Masquerade (or rather, Undying) and Blood on the Clocktower.
Sure, the math is dense (you roll 2d6 under the difference between the attack value and the defense value, plus or minus any currency spent). Sure, it takes 9 players to really sing. Sure, multiple people can complete their objective so you need to track victory points separately to decide the real winner. Sure, you have to take the homophobia out of the Seduction rules. Sure, roleplaying is completely optional. Sure, sure, sure. The game is a mess. But it’s a very playable mess. I’d go so far as to say it’s an electric mess. It’s shockingly (sorry) fun to play. I think the secret lies in a very clear agenda for the players, a tight boardgame-like action economy, a premise that supports hilarious degrees of pettiness, and an inter-personal experience that demands everyone pay attention to what their friends are doing.
So. Am I planning a full 9 person play-by-post game of this? Yes. Am I thinking of changing the setting and the math? Yes. Is that basically designing a new game? Yes. Should this game be labelled “Powered by Dallas” or, as one of my players suggested, “Hornswoggled by Dallas”? YES.
Yours hornswoggled-ly,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
- In the latest Design Doc, a fun episode about the “taste talent gap” i.e. the idea that your taste develops faster than your skill, so when you’re learning new, you tend to be disappointed in your work.
- Enjoying this series of me reviewing historical games? Support the newsletter on patreon and get access to extra writing!
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
- Rascal News report on itch.io’s trend of delays and various other troubles in paying out the large amounts of money collected via charity bundles. (Paywalled)
- If you’re playing Old School Essentials, this one page cheatsheet for the dungeon crawl rules might come in handy.
- On the murkdice newsletter, a nice short post about the power of GM’s just pausing and being silent.
- On Cannibal Halfling, a nice review of Deathmatch Island and also a new series about rules-light superhero RPGs.
- Some cool people from the OSR Latin American community have made a collective zine in Spanish called Mestiza and Issue #1 is out.
- Geoff Englestein, Elizabeth Hargrave and Sen-Foong Lim, all notable boardgame folks, have formed the Tabletop Game Designer’s Association (which includes RPG designers).
- As Critical Role’s Daggerheart playtest continues, Dicebreaker reports that rules are getting sanded down in favour of more open mechanics.
From the archive:
- Stras Acimovic’s timeless advice on how to run a Blades in the Dark one-shot. (Issue 29, Feb 2021)
- The same issue is where I talked about why Crash//Cart by Galen Pejeau was a great one-shot experience. I didn’t know it back then but that game would basically decide the next 3 years of my design work.
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- Troika! is the perfect RPG for new groups and this GM screen makes your first steps into fantastic worlds effortless. Evocative art, clear reference, two size formats, PDF and POD.
- Paratype is a post apocalyptic role-playing game taking place in a world filled with giant mutant insects and strange abilities. Now running a Crowdfundr for a soft cover book release!
- The Curse of Punk is a Call of Cthulhu scenario set in 1985 that explores the Cthulhu mythos through the lens of the punk movement.
- The Wild Frontier of Venture is a completely free game of lassos & six shooters on a rugged, weird world. It’s 125 pages of evocative, art-filled adventure.
This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.
- If you’re fans of Traveller, there’s a bundle of 4th edition products.
- Also, Onyx Path’s b-movie/pulpy horror game, They Came From Beyond The Sea
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!
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