Hey
there. Once again, I’m Brandon, and I’m going to talk a little about
Demeanors. Demeanors are the social side of our City of Heroes tabletop.
They represent how player heroes can interact with NPCs, including the
villains they’ll face.
When
we first decided to include some sort of verbal non-combat system, we
had no idea exactly what we wanted it to do. We had two rules.
1.)
Everyone would be able to participate. In some of the other tabletops
that we’ve played - Dark Heresy in particular - you have combat
characters, and non-combat characters, and no one gets to be good at
both. In Dark Heresy, Clerics are good at talking; they get persuasion
skills, bluff skills, and so on. But they pay for that in not having the
points to pick up combat abilities. So once combat starts, the Cleric’s
job is to find somewhere to hide, maybe take a pot shot or two, and
generally twiddle his thumbs until it’s time to interrogate somebody. We
didn’t want to have that. Every superhero - especially in City of
Heroes - is capable of fighting crime.
2.)
This would not be a substitute for roleplay. We didn’t want to have a
system that took the dialogue out of the players’ hands and put it
solely on the dice. Part of the fun of tabletops is in creating a
character and experiencing the world through his or her eyes. If we take
all of the player’s creativity out and make it just “You rolled a 10,
so you convinced the shop owner to give you free stuff,” it takes a lot
of the fun out.
After a couple of iterations, we finally came to the Demeanors system we have now.
There
are six Demeanors, which pair off into three groups. Sympathetic or
Frightening, Honorable or Deceptive, and Logical or Absurd. When a hero
wants to talk to someone, they pick a Demeanor to use in that
conversation. Every NPC will be open to some and dislike others. For
instance, if a hero is trying to get information out of a member of the
Warriors, they’re going to be more persuasive if they take an Honorable
approach than a Deceptive one. Trying to talk to the Carnival of
Shadows, it’s better to be Absurd to fit in with their circus theme.
The
player picks one of these Demeanors, rolls a D10, and then roleplays
the conversation. If the GM feels that they have properly acted in the
Demeanor they’ve chosen, he gives them a bonus to their roll, and then
checks the final roll result against the difficulty on the NPC’s
character sheet.
If
the GM and players decide they don’t want to use the Demeanor system,
they don’t have to. They can choose to simply make all of their social
interactions purely roleplay, and it doesn’t hurt the system at all.
It’s purely optional.
The
part of the system that I’m most proud of is that it also fits
perfectly into combat. In one of our playtests, the Tanker decided to
try to convince one of the Family goons they were fighting to give up.
He rolled a Demeanor check in the middle of combat, using up his move
action, and he succeeded. The Button Man was moved by the Tanker’s
speech, and he chose to turn himself in.
It’s
among the last of our systems to be completed and tested. We now have
finished fleshing out powers and enemies, and we’re putting the last few
changes into the Skills system.
As I said, we’ve already begun internal playtesting. So far, we’re
extremely happy with the way the game is playing, and we can’t wait to
open it up to more testers. Keep an eye on our Youtube channel, on this
development blog, and on the thread on the City of Heroes forums. Thanks
for following us this far, and I’m looking forward to playing with more
of you in the future.
