New update from Brandon O'Brien on the Grayshade TTRPG: information on character classes!
over 1 year ago
– Fri, Apr 07, 2023 at 05:34:12 PM
Hi all,
We hope all is well, as work continues to proceed on the book, audiobook, and TTRPG fronts for Grayshade. It's that last part which we're going to talk about today, as designer Brandon O'Brien speaks about some unique features within each new character class. Hope you enjoy, and we'll have more updates for you in the near future, as circumstances warrant!
Greg
Hey there! Just checking in from the wilds of the Grayshade RPG design process to let you know that Greg and I have been slowly polishing the features of the new classes that you’ll be taking the reins of as you explore Cohrelle and its environs. So I wanted to show you one unique feature of each of them to give you a sense of what these classes can do, what other design spaces they’ve opened for us, and what we hope they will offer you in play. These are all still drafts, so we’re more than happy to hear what you think so far, but we hope the general intention we have for them gives you cool ideas about what you’d like to do when you get to play with them yourselves. Starting with…
The Acolyte
As is already shown through the Faith mechanic, a lot of the flavour of both the novel and the game shines through most obviously in acolytes—their devotion reveals the politics of faith in their communities, their acumen in subterfuge and combat reveals the nature of political conspiracy between territories, and of course, they expose us to the techniques of soundshifting because they are the only ones with the prowess thereof. So what does soundshifting look like in the game?
Soundshifting Prowess
You have mastered the esoteric art of using sound to manipulate not only other creatures’ senses, but the very physical world around you. At 2nd level, you earn the Soundshifting ability feat, as well as one Soundshifting skill you may perform with it. You don’t need to perform a Charisma check in order to perform that feat (although you may still need to in order to accomplish a specific effect in some circumstances). You earn the opportunity to gain additional soundshifting skills, or expand the effects of skills you already know, and at your 5th, 10th, 15th, and 18h levels.
I’m particularly intrigued about how we’ve laid this out because it illustrates a couple things about the Acolyte. First, it describes the class as one of well-honed acumen, but still leaves room for other classes to discover soundshifting. As we imagine it, soundshifting is a skill that can be taught, and therefore it should be theoretically possible for anyone to learn some of it—you just can’t ever be as good as the guys who train underground in dark abbeys to get it right every hour of the day. Other classes will first have to take the Soundshifting feat in the place of an ability score increase first, and if they need another skill, they will have to do that again; plus, that feat for non-Acolytes means never advancing an existing skill’s effects, so they will always use the basic form of that skill.
The second interesting thing is also an interesting thing about soundshifting itself: our intention is to give players room to explore an incredible breadth of soundshifting abilities for offensive, deceptive, and retreat purposes, so players can mix and match what they consider a valuable way to use them. Maybe you like distracting enemies with loud and overwhelming sounds, or maybe you just want to be better at playing ventriloquist in specific scenarios. You get to choose which is most useful for you, and that means that there is still hopefully a wide room for non-Acolyte classes to gain powerful usefulness from the ability while empowering Acolytes to dig deeper into what those abilities can do at their most elite.
The Merchant
The Merchant is a fun one for me. In chats with Greg about the classes, I am prone to translate how I see each class through the lens of a character from media or history. (I am not sure whether this annoys Greg or not—in the interest of finding out, feel free to say what pop culture character you connect each class to in the comments!) In that vein, this is probably going to delight some of you if you watch Our Flag Means Death, because my counterpart to the Merchant is Stede Bonnet. I just like leaning into the idea of a socially powerful but potentially naive person capitalising on the few skills and power they have to save the day, and in the class I wanted to lean in on one of those powers being wealth and trade in a comical way, which gives us the Priceless Weaponry feature.
Priceless Weaponry
You have access to some of the most exceptional weaponry on the continent—but that doesn’t guarantee you can use them at their peak efficiency. At 2nd level, during a combat encounter you may instead equip any simple or martial weapon and attack with it using a damage die one level above its typical damage die (for example, you may equip a shortsword, which now does 1d8 piercing damage instead of 1d6). Whenever you roll to hit while equipping such a weapon, a result of 1, 2, or a critical hit will cause the weapon to break, and you will not be able to equip another weapon, even one you own, until after your next turn. A critical hit will still do critical damage before it breaks. At 6th level, the break-points of your priceless weapons change to a roll of 1, 2, or 3, and at 10th level, they change again to only rolls of 1 or 2. At 17th level, you gain the ability to use two such weapons at once, and to offer one of those weapons as a bonus action to any allied combatant with proficiency with that weapon; they get to use that weapon at that increased die level, but with all of their other proficiency bonuses or related features included, and without the possibility of breaking it. You may offer both weapons to allies this way, but if you do, you cannot equip a weapon of your own until after your next turn.
The rough sense of the feature is this: the merchant is essentially a caster, but with money instead of magic; they use their access to funds and trade to shift the tide of situations in their own favour, but that means they also need to do so in combat, especially as the least initially armed of the Grayshadeclasses. Priceless Weaponry is our tongue-in-cheek way of resolving this issue—turns out, the Merchant actually has lots of knives and swords and maces and scimitars, it’s just that they brought them to sell, and have never used one before. The break-points emphasise that this is not a perfect combat use—you’re still better off drawing your own weapon if longevity is your concern, but you can also do this as many times as you wish, money not being an object, so long as you’re prepared to be ducking and weaving a lot after your last weapon breaks. It strikes me as a very silly early-game ability that gains far more tactical utility at future levels, when you become less afraid of it breaking and get to toss one of those gold-inlaid, jewel-embossed swords to your teammate for the real killing blow.
The Informant
The Informant (and the Investigator, as we’ll see soon) are fun because our intent is to more forcefully play with the distribution of information in the game. As the saying goes, knowing is half the battle, and that is especially so in tabletop RPGs—if your character doesn’t actually gain the fact that reveals the big bad’s plot or where that special item is hiding, then the players get to know that something cool was planned but the characters never get to learn it, and that can kinda suck. So we built in a lot of mechanics where instead of simply gaining a mechanical benefit to the act of learning, sometimes a class can just know a thing instead of wrestling with the dice gods, and Street Shadow is a good way of illustrating this.
Street Shadow
Starting from 1st level, you gain a number of Shadow Points equal to your Intelligence modifier. You may spend a Shadow Point to gain one noteworthy fact about an NPC or organisation as if it were a fact you already knew about them. You regain all Shadow Points after a long rest.
If you’re already an Informant, it must stand to reason that you already know a hell of a lot about the world, and mechanics like Street Shadow make that true. You aren’t omniscient, to be sure, but every once in a while instead of leaving it up to chance, you can just have that fact, and while it doesn’t make a certain level of ignorance impossible, it does somewhat mitigate that feeling of your character never learning the big stuff you know is under the surface. Shadow Points also obviously play into some other features, but to talk more about what that means, I’m actually going to move over to…
The Noble
The Noble was the class that revealed a very unique challenge point in design that, instead of making the process effortful or confusing, actually opened me up to thinking more deeply about each class and their forte in play terms. The Noble, much like the Merchant, is a social power player moreso than a combatant (although they do have their very good combat tools); similarly, as we’ve pointed out with the Informant, there are classes that lean heavily into investigation as their toolset. In a setting like Cohrelle, it stands to reason that trading on these merits is another kind of value in game, so we decided, what if you can just trade it?
Noble Favours
As a person of means and status, you can leverage your power to gain access to high society. Starting at 1st level, you gain a number of Noble Favours equal to your Charisma modifier plus one. You may use a Noble Favour to instantly succeed on a Charisma check or Charisma saving throw, and to immediately gain access to locations or resources where one’s status, lineage, and upbringing would be a means of access. You regain all Noble Favours after a long rest.
If you would ever have no Favours to spend, you may still act as if you have additional Favours available to spend. However, after doing so, the number of Favours available to be regained after a long rest is reduced by one for each additional one used, until none remain. You can regain Favours spent this way by performing social actions for those from whom you have requested graces using these Favours, or by making yourself available for such graces asked by other NPCs of your status or higher.
Noble Favours is a pool of social resource that the Noble can draw on to turn the tide in a tense situation. Much like the Informant can just say that they’ve learned a vital fact about someone at the cost of a Shadow Point, a Noble can say that you all get into the fancy ball or gain the ear of a high-ranking power player at the cost of a Noble Favour.
Not including the Acolyte (who I imagine, just like your favourite action hero, does not trade in graces or play games of manners in order to do their work), every other class has a pool of similar resources that they can spend. For the Informant and Investigator, those pools are spent initially for access to key information about pertinent facts; for the Noble and Merchant, they are spent to trade for access and resources. Some classes may even have the ability to give one such point from one pool as if it’s from another… but for the moment, Noble Favours’ key value is being able to leverage your status to simply gain that access instead of leaving it up to chance.
Each pool, as you can see, also has its costs as well. For the Informant, you just eventually run out of things that you know—you aren’t always in the loop, after all, and that means you have to work harder to keep your knowledge pool up. For the Noble, however, there is room to push your luck in order to keep gaining access for your party, but at the expense of paying off your debt to those you have sought the favour of. This is hopefully some good fuel for future social play, because it means that the Noble is guaranteed another interaction in the future, either alone or alongside their group, where paying off that debt may mean them or another party member currying favour with an enemy, promising an improbable job, or paying off a background element that their character may have a dramatic relationship with.
The Investigator
Having now read both Grayshade and Renegade (which, by the way, Renegade is awesome and you’re going to love it even more than the first one), I’m very excited about one of the design spaces related to the Investigator because it gives us even more room to think deeply about the rest of the world and the ways they play alongside each other. The Investigator in the game is a very morally challenged character—much like Grayshade the character, being a moral agent in strongly immoral structures can bring with it obvious conflicts of interest that are fun to qualify mechanically as well as narratively, and we hope we can do so with the Precinct feature.
Precinct
The investigator’s 3rd level coincides with one’s elevation within the ranks of fellow investigators, and a level of prestige that comes with said rank. You are now identified as a ranked investigator within the local constabulary of a given location, the investigation team of a specific merchant guild, or another private organisation, with relevant features as mentioned [in the Precinct table].
Instead of what would normally be subclass choice in 5E, the Precinct feature gives you a bit of the same in terms of self-defining your character, but has that interact with all of the features that are otherwise core to the Investigator regardless of Precinct, and play more heavily in the narrative space of the game you’re individually playing.
To be sure, a Precinct also means organisation-specific tools and resources that we are designing to ensure you are always learning and leveraging that knowledge in cool but narratively specific ways. However, picking a Precinct also means confirming the stakes of who you work for—are you a public servant with the local guard (and therefore beholden to the whims of your political superiors, however misguided), or an armed spook in service to a specific merchant union (and therefore prioritising their interests, however capitalist, over actual public good)? After all, you’re definitely someone that people without power or force will trust or fear as a result of your rank, so we’re hoping this feature pays off in ways that make you feel like a cool Renaissance private-eye while also giving you meaty story beats to play off of. Put simply, this mechanic should give you at least one moment to feel like the police detective in a murder mystery when the captain asks you for your gun and your badge.
That’s all we’re showing off for now—again, all of these aren’t set in stone for quite some time, so feel free to let us know how you feel about these and what other stuff you’re eager to be able to do in the Grayshade RPG. We will have much more to share soon—I haven’t even spoken about how some of the mechanics we’ve just showed you means that I get to ask Greg all manner of worldbuilding questions about stuff you haven’t even seen in the books yet!—but you’re gonna have to wait a bit to hear about those.
In the meantime, I would like to ask you to keep sharing the good news of Grayshade with your friends and fellow nerds. Since we’re still in the throes of designing the game, and especially on the heels of the novel being an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award finalist, I really want this to feed back into more people discovering the joy of reading Greg’s work. After all, the more people know how kickass Grayshade is, the more people you’ll have to play this RPG with when it’s done, right??
‘til next time,
Brandon
