What do I want from a Discworld TTRPG, anyway?
I have read and loved the Discworld books for decades. This doesn't give me any particular ownership over them, but it means that I have certain feelings about the Discworld and the kinds of stories that get told there. These feelings necessarily color my expectations for a TTRPG set in that world. You may have different expectations, and this is fine - "takes all sorts to make a world"*, don't it?
So before I dive into the new Discworld Quickstart from Modiphius, let me try to articulate what aspects of Discworld stories bring me joy, so I know what I'm looking to bring to the table.
*Going Postal
Iconic Heroes:
Robin D. Laws' distinction between iconic heroes and dramatic heroes is key here:
While a dramatic hero follows a character arc in which he is changed by his experience of the world (examples: Orpheus, King Lear, Ben Braddock), an iconic hero undertakes tasks (often serially) and changes the world, restoring order to it, by remaining true to his essential self. [Emphasis mine]
To me, the most endearing characters of the Discworld are eternal in this way. Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, Mustrum Ridcully, Moist von Lipwig, Rincewind, Tiffany Aching, as well as the supporting characters who recur in their stories, all bring their essential qualities to bear on the world around them. They are able to affect change because they stay true to themselves even when the weight of trends, and sometimes the story itself, pushes in another direction.
This isn't to say that the main characters of the Discworld don't learn or change, or that they're invincible emotionally or physically. But they continue to embody their central traits and remain true to their selves, and I think this gives them the ability to accomplish heroic and dazzling things that the villains and the background characters of the Discworld don't.
A Humanist Outlook
What was it that Granny Weatherwax had said once? "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things."*
This is a theme that flowered more as the series went on, but was prominent at least as early as the third book, Equal Rites. You can usually tell the villains in a Discworld novel pretty quickly because they're the ones discounting the humanity of the people around them. This is not to say that Discworld's heroes are saints; indeed, they're all willing to inflict harm on others, to manipulate them, and to otherwise behave in ways that remind you that good is not the same thing as nice. But they always, infallibly, fall on the side of the inherent dignity and agency of sentient creatures ("humanity," give or take, for the setting).**
Case in point: while Death (he who speaks with THE CAPITAL LETTERS) appears in every Discworld book, he doesn't become a true hero of Discworld until he learns an empathy for humanity, becoming the main character of Reaper Man (the 11th book) in a story that is lovely, heartbreaking, and weirdly shares the stage with a storyline about a parasitic shopping mall.
*I Shall Wear Midnight (book 38)
**Incidentally, I never felt that the Rincewind books brought out this theme as well as the others, so they never resonated as much with me. Rincewind exists more to parody fantasy tropes, which is fine but doesn't really move the needle for me. Once the tourist Twoflower becomes prominent in Interesting Times (book #17), he introduces more of the humanist outlook that I felt was lacking in Rincewind's stories; same with Cohen the Barbarian in The Last Hero (book 27).
Humor
Pratchett's humor comes from all angles: observational jokes about the human condition - sometimes sharp, sometimes gentle; puns and wordplay; absurdism; parody of media tropes; and unexpected footnotes.*
Importantly, Pratchett's humor is in line with his humanism. Laughs never come at the expense of someone's degradation. In other words, the jokes that are about people or institutions are all "punching up," if they aren't puns or one of the other kinds of humor. These are the jokes of someone who has a great love for humans and the absurd universe we live in, sometimes laughing through tears, but always maintaining a central belief in the value of simply being human. That's a great foundation to build a tone on - how well does it translate to a game?
*Not this one. You expected this one.
How Well Does the Game Bring Out These Elements?
Now that I've laid out the 3 elements that are most important and impactful for me in the Discworld universe, let's look through the quickstart and see how good a match this game seems to be for me. I'm going to limit this discussion to the ways the mechanics and theming serve my particular interests, but if there's a mechanic that seems particularly delightful or clunky I'll call that out as well.
Tone - A Good Start!
The quickstart has a section of Tone towards the beginning, and the tone they're going for seems to agree pretty well with what's important for me. Some examples:
- "The focus is on the characters, the world, and the words. People are defined by traits, not numbers."
- "we encourage players to bend the English language far beyond what is usually considered reasonable. Terry Pratchett used words in ways that were unexpected, in combinations and meanings that were playful, joyful and often unreasonable. We heartily encourage you to do the same."
This is great! "People are defined by traits, not numbers" seems to dial in the "Iconic Hero" framing that I'm looking for. Your player character will affect the world using their traits, their inherent qualities, rather than trying to get a numerically-defined edge in their skills or characteristics.
Also very happy to see the explicit promotion of humor based on language.
However, I'm not quite sure what to make of this:
- "The world and the players vie to control the story as Narrativium sluices finely through everything, gently pushing things towards a satisfying conclusion."
Narrativium is a special thing in Discworld. As Modiphius explains it: "Discworld itself operates like a story, and top research wizards have found that it is helped along by an element found in abundance on Discworld: Narrativium."
In the TTRPG, this leads to the fundamental tension of the game: "The Disc has a story it wants to tell, and left alone will spin on much as it has always done. [However] the players want to change this story to one more to their liking."
In one interpretation, this tension plays well into the Iconic Hero idea: the world has a certain way that it wants to be, and it's up to the Hero to bend the world into a better one through being themselves. However, in another interpretation, the Narrativium device might make gameplay more about overcoming (and maybe parodying) fantasy and related tropes. In fact, the early Discworld books were more about this, sometimes explicitly as in the 12th book, Witches Abroad. We'll have to see which focus the rest of the mechanics give more weight to.
Basic Gameplay Loop
The basic gameplay is set up around contested rolls between the player and GM.
- When the PC does something with a risk of failure (a "test"), the Player chooses a Trait and justifies to the GM why this is a reasonable trait to use.
- Traits include everything from Name to Background to groups and roles in them, to consequences earned from failures or bad luck. Basically everything on the character sheet is a Trait that can be used towards a Test.
- The GM then decides how hard it is by choosing different die sizes (d4, d6, d8, d8 or d12). Interestingly, this is not based on the difficulty of the action, but by how well the trait fits the action and how well the Player uses their words to justify it.
- Then the player rolls the chosen die, and the GM always rolls a D8. For reference, a player rolling a d4 will win about 1/5 of the time and tie 1/8 of the time; with a d8, the player wins a little less than half the time and ties 1/8 of the time; with a d12, the player wins about 3/4 of the time and ties 1/12 of the time.
- You can also have some replacement rolls as another PC helps the main PC or the GM re-rolls using an NPC's trait. So you have potentially 2 or 3 opposed rolls for each test.
- A failure results in consequences or twists that are represented as new traits.
The act of justifying a trait is likely to introduce a LOT of wordplay humor and keep things light at the table - so long as the GM leans towards generosity. If this part gets sour, the game is going to be a miserable experience.
In a pull directly from the books, the players can also propose a plan so ridiculously unlikely and over-the-top, and hopefully so charming, that the GM decides "it's a million-to-one chance, but it just might work" - and therefore will. However, the Quickstart advises these to be rare - in practice, I would say if they're happening once per session, that's too often.
Also, death (the state of being, not the Anthropomorphic Personification) is a rare-to-never event for PCs. This should give players enough confidence to take wild, interesting, funny risks and use sub-optimal traits, as long as the mood at the table encourages that.
So, How Well Does it Support The Things I Want to See?
Pretty well! The Iconic Hero piece is there. The Humor - always so, so hard to design for at the table - is potentially there in the meta-wrangling over justifying Trait uses for skills. The Humanism, I think, will depend entirely on the kinds of adventures that come out in support of the game, and the things that GMs and their players do at the table. There does not seem to be any inherent humanistic leanings in the mechanics or design.
In summary, I think Modiphius really understood some of the most important aspects of the Discworld and did some very interesting and creative work to bring those to the table. We'll see how it plays at the table, but I am pretty optimistic that they're on the right track.
Also, there is an adventure that comes with the Quickstart, which I will try to come back and review. But it's getting late and I've got some work to do, so let's leave it here.
Stray Notes on Mechanics
The system is designed to support one-shots rather than long campaign play. This suits the tone of the book series, where characters recurred but plots usually wrapped up within a single book. I wonder if some guidance will be given in the full rules on sustaining characters across one-shots.
I worry about the game dragging with all the opposed rolls and managing new traits as a result. Optimistically, this could feel like the kind of narrative digression that shows up as footnotes in the Discworld books, but at an exciting moment this could really bog the table down. In the full rules, I would consider either recommending that Tests be restricted only for important actions and used for decisive moments, or else offering an option for unopposed rolls where the player simply rolls the chosen die against a target number of 4 or 5, without bringing in help or luck or any of those.
Granted I haven't seen the game in action yet, but it also feels like it puts a lot of work on the GM, which may be very tough for new players or tables used to more narrative collaboration. Having to come up with interesting, multi-leveled consequences will be familiar to GMs who've run games like Blades in the Dark or the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars, but it is work, and not everyone enjoys it or is well suited for it.
Related to this, I also think having 5 levels of dice for the GM to choose from might be too many. It feels like it will be hard to meaningfully explain why a D6 or D10 is a more precisely correct die to use on a Test than a D8. I might recommend dropping those two middle dice and just using D4, D8 and D10.
