When I was first getting started in playing tabletop roleplaying games, a good friend of mine (one of the ones responsible for getting me to stick with the hobby in the first place) had a bit of an addiction: an addiction to starting new campaigns. I had my own campaign I wanted to run, but he would constantly jump all over any opportunity to start yet another one of his own, and it bugged me to no end. Unfortunately, this compulsion turned out to be contagious: currently I\u2019m running three tabletop campaigns and playing in one, with another three on the back burner and three in the works. There are, however, even more games that have eluded me, and one of them in particular seems to be an especially challenging thought experiment: the world of \u201cDishonored.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDishonored\u201d is a 2012 video game made by Bethesda Softworks, featuring adventures in a steampunk city, guards with swords and Victorian helmets riding steam-powered boats and two-legged mechanical walkers. The setting is wonderfully fleshed out, a perfect and artistically unique representation of a world in which both magic and technology are feared but commonplace, forbidden but powerful. This already makes the game a great candidate for a tabletop conversion, since \u2013 as Eberron, Numenera, Pathfinder\u2019s Iron Gods adventure path, and countless other tabletop settings indicate \u2013 the melding of magic and technology in an aesthetically unique world is a gold mine for the imagination. The game\u2019s setting, however, isn\u2019t all that compels me to convert it to a tabletop format: the game\u2019s mechanics do, too.<\/p>\n
Video game mechanics are oftentimes not looked upon kindly in the tabletop industry \u2013 after all, video games tend to be limited in freedom of choice for programming reasons, and mathematically complex to take advantage of computing power. \u201cDishonored,\u201d however, excels at the feel and aesthetics of the gameplay itself, the main character being a magical, knife-wielding assassin that can Blink forward, pull an enemy into an alley while silencing him, mind-controlling the guard\u2019s hapless comrade and using him to stab the ultimate target in the back. The controls are smooth and interactive, the ways of using the powers and abilities only as limited as the imagination, and any conversion of the game would have to be similarly fluid to capture the essence of the game.<\/p>\n
The idea of running a game inspired by or even set in the universe of \u201cDishonored,\u201d combined with the fluid and lethal (or challengingly non-lethal!) combat and mobility of the game, is absolutely intoxicating. Think of the societal predisposition towards antiheroes, or misunderstood people with great power, or people trying to come to terms with their own abilities and nature, and imagine it happening in a steampunk universe of corruption and disease \u2013 teams of player characters arcing over walls, slipping into windows, one distracting a guard and enchanting him with a simple whistle or whisper while the others isolate and silently take down targets of opportunity and necessity before disappearing into the night as mechanical walkers scream and hiss on the hunt for the killers.<\/p>\n
The problem is that finding or running such a tabletop campaign would require a system capable of supporting such gameplay. Freeform games like Fate, for instance, would be able to represent the smooth and accessible powers, but would fall flat in terms of providing highly lethal, methodical combat; the Kickstarter game Blades in the Dark is a hack of the Apocalypse World system that aims to replicate some of the atmosphere of the universe, though this is tied to the more narrative and freeform combat of the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. Games like GURPS and Legend of the Five Rings manage to capture the specific, skill-demanding and dangerous feel of combat in \u201cDishonored,\u201d but fail to provide the more powerful and smooth elements of the \u201cDishonored\u201d magic system without substantially tweaking the games. It may be possible to use more cinematic rules, especially with GURPS \u2013 perhaps using the one-hit minions rule to kill guards and other simple enemies in one hit, just requiring more effort for stronger and more important enemies. One-roll combat resolution could also work in numerous systems \u2013 one-roll combat often involves the use of a single (or at most a few) rolls to resolve combat, even provided as a written-in options in GURPS and the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars RPGs.<\/p>\n
Speaking of Fantasy Flight, it might also be possible to convert other systems to fit the purposes of a \u201cDishonored\u201d campaign. Some users of the FFG forums have already made fantasy conversions for the Star Wars RPG system, and more could undoubtedly be made, especially since crossbows and guns alike are found in \u201cDishonored,\u201d meaning ranged weapons wouldn\u2019t be out of place or without variety. Games like Dungeons and Dragons 4th<\/sup> Edition, which relies heavily on combat and maneuvering, could work with a \u201cre-fluffing\u201d towards the idea of more modern, magic-and-gunpowder technology, as could somewhat more popular games like Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 and 5th<\/sup> Edition, Pathfinder, or Numenera, all of which could potentially work to represent a nice balance between power and lethality best applied to a \u201cDishonored\u201d game.<\/p>\n One last complication of converting \u201cDishonored\u201d to a tabletop game is the fact that the abilities and situation of the main character are intended to be exceptional, a sort of \u201cone man versus the world\u201d kind of situation. The setting already has other people with similar or even identical powers, like the spellsword-esque teleporting villains seen early in the game, and the upcoming \u201cDishonored 2\u201d will feature another such character, but the game master in a \u201cDishonored\u201d game would have to be rather careful to control the scale and scope of the players\u2019 power; after all, one man in \u201cDishonored\u201d can topple entire schemes and kill hundreds along the way, so a group of three or four or six or seven of them would inevitably just run out of bad guys to kill. Keeping things challenging would be a constant challenge in and of itself for the aspiring game master.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the video game world of \u201cDishonored\u201d would be a challenge to convert to a thematically and aesthetically faithful tabletop campaign, requiring work on the part of the game master to either tweak the rules or shift the atmosphere of the game world. That said, \u201cDishonored\u201d represents prime and fertile ground for tabletop roleplaying, combining a tight and well-crafted atmosphere with fluid and engaging gameplay opportunities, making a Dishonored-themed campaign one of the RPG loves I so often pine for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"