Dissecting A Giant: The Heart
Since I'm going to be releasing this game soon (keep your eyes peeled for the announcement) I thought I might as well do a nice big breakdown of my design decisions and inspirations in creating Jack Kills Giants. Keeping on theme, I'm going to attach each topic to a body part. Naturally it makes sense to start with the heart: the core resolution mechanics.
Death of the modifier
I'm not opposed to a game having modifiers, they work great and it's really easy to calculate probabilities, but for JKG I wanted to reduce dice math as much as possible. I found my answer in an inventory system. I really liked the idea of Usage Dice that has gained some popularity recently, having a die scale up in size rather than adding a modifier sounded perfect for my dice math allergic game.
So I had my dice but what am I rolling?
If there's one single game to place on a pedestal as THE inspiration point for JKG's mechanics it would have to be Nate Treme's lovely little game Tunnel Goons. I was playing in a Goons-hack play-by-post game and fell in love with how ridiculously simple the system is. The game I'd been working on at the time was all player facing rolls which although they lead to me not needing to give NPCs any form of statblock at all, the rolls got kinda cumbersome; and here was this very simple black and white system that said:
"This is the difficulty score, roll to beat it."
I wanted a little more nuance in the result so I added a Mixed Success to the result but I also wanted to not have a set number to hit since all my dice are scaling up and down all over. To do that I simply decided that every roll in a contest. The player rolls their dice and the GM picks a couple dice they think fit the difficulty to roll against them. the difference between a mixed success or a major loss coming down to GM interpretation: Big difference = major loss, small difference = mixed success. With these lightweight systems I'm very comfortable giving the GM more fiat to control the situation while still having the impartiality of a random roll.
The Six Gambits
When I was first writing up my initial ideas about this project I wrote the following list that ended up in the book:
LUCK gets you out of dire trouble, or helps you win a game of cards
WEALTH greases palms and puts good steel in your hands
SWORDS take things head on.
DAGGERS lie, cheat and stab in the back
BOOKS impart the wisdom of ages, and reinforce prejudices.
BALLADS make up for lack of coin, warm hearts and bring forth tears.
Just by writing this down I had already started to subtly shift some of my ideas about how the game would work. So many games in this OSR-adjacent space (shout out to the NSR Discord) are still quite tied down to the traditional D&D abilities, either reducing the number of abilities or changing the names a bit, but still at their core treating ability scores as innate things your character can do. For a long time I also called JKG's abilities "Stats", but in changing the wording to "Gambits" I shifted their meaning.
Gambits in JKG are approaches to problems NOT innate skills
With that re-framing I started to get into what that could mean. In the book I included a brief list of interpretations for each gambit. Something I stumbled into (and something I've also toyed around with in other games I'm developing) is how to get away from the dreaded charisma/speech problem where a player can simply dump their points into the social interaction stat and make NPCs eat up every word they say. In this list you'll notice that EVERY GAMBIT CAN BE A SOCIAL SKILL. You need to approach different classes of people differently if you want to get on their good side, a scholar might respect your knowledge of books and the sciences while a soldier in the Legion appreciates a direct, to the point approach.
Luck and Wealth as things you can leverage rather than just spend.
While Swords/Daggers/Books/Ballads are the core gambits I also wanted to make your Luck, which is kind of the stand-in for hit points in this game & Wealth also be able to work as gambits rather than simply being numbers to track. But of course these two things needed to work a little different since they still do need to be tracked in some way.
The Idea for luck originally came from Hearty Dice Friends Podcast Episode 163: Ghosts of the Mech Game where Grant and Chris talked about creating a game about climbing mechs and breaking inside to fight their pilots. In that episode they had the idea of GRIP as the health system since when fighting a mech (likewise when fighting a giant), if you fall off, you're probably going to die, so any sort of hit point you have represents the number of times you can avoid danger at the last minute.
Taking that Idea I made Luck something you can spend to avoid bad outcomes.
From there I thought about treating wealth in a similar way. Counting coins and writing up price lists just leads to a lot of busy work so I made money have a die attached like everything else.
I healed… by playing poker?
The best thing about having Luck and Wealth work like this were the synergies it creates between the two that allowed for really interesting ways to trade wealth for luck or luck for wealth. The standard health regeneration move in a lot of games is simply sleeping well for a night, or taking a rest. In Jack Kills Giants, since the "health" is your luck it meant I could get weird with it and make Lucky Charms bought from shady vendors take the place of health potions & have Gambling become a very risky but rewarding way to get rich quick. To keep things from getting too dire I also made it so that when a giant is slain, all players have their luck die boosted back up to a d20.
Final Notes
There it is, the core of the system, fitting neatly onto a couple pages. With this set of rules you can do pretty much anything. I built Jack Kills Giants to be very modular and hack-able. You could probably run the game and still have a lot of fun without some of the systems I'll discuss next time but I do think they add a lot to the look and feel of the game world.
