How do I make relationships important in my Burn Notice-inspired spy game?

[Elizabeth]

So I've been hard at work on a new game inspired by one of my favorite TV shows, Burn Notice. The premise of my game is that you're all a bunch of people who have spent your lives outside the law, right– ex CIA maybe, or ex-FBI, or you're in Witness Protection, or you're a gun-smuggler wanted in a bunch of countries and now you're laying low. Whatever the reason, you're all stuck in the same town, and you're making a little extra money by helping people, while trying to fend off the bad dudes who got you stuck in this town in the first place. I don't want to overwhelm you guys with text, so if you want more of the background on my game, you can check out the posts about it on the Two Scooters Press blog.

This is what I've got for system thus far:

So, there's an exciting list of professional abilities (demolition, heavy artillery, surveillance, hand-to-hand, linguistics, hacking, knife-throwing, battlefield medicine, poisons, and whatever else you can think of). The characters also have relationships with the other players. Both the abilities and the relationships exist on a scale of one to five.

    * Lifers get four professional skills: one 4-point, two 3-points, and one two-point. They also get one 3-point relationship and one 2-point relationship. Everything else is at 1.
    * Artists get three professional skills: one 5-point, one 2-point, and one 1-point. They also get a 4-point relationship and two 2-point relationships. Everything else is at 1. They also get a Workshop.
    * Civillians get two choices with professional skills: either one 2-point or two 1-point. They also get a 5-point relationship and 3-point relationships. Everything else is at 2. They also get a Hideout.

The number of points you have in your professional skills denotes how many times you can roll that skill during a job. If you run out of points in a profession and want to roll it anyway, you can sacrifice a point of relationship.

Professional conflict usually involves having to roll a number of successes equal to the relevant professional skill before rolling a number of failures equal to the relevant relationship. When dealing with personal conflict, the opposite is true.


So what I need to figure out: how do you make relationships mechanically important and good? The whole thrust of the game is that the things which make you a good friend/lover/relative are real liabilities as a secret agent/spy/gun-smuggler, and the things that serve you well in that line of work lead you to being really lousy in relationships. Even for non-civillians who care about each other, stuff is awkward except when you're working a job together, but you still try to make it work because those people are important to you. I'm not sure how to express that in the system.

[Alokov]

I don't know much about system but I will certainly be looking into your game. I had thought of trying to make a Burn Notice-esque game myself and am glad to see someone has done such a bang-up job.

[Noclue]

So what I need to figure out: how do you make relationships mechanically important and good? The whole thrust of the game is that the things which make you a good friend/lover/relative are real liabilities as a secret agent/spy/gun-smuggler, and the things that serve you well in that line of work lead you to being really lousy in relationships. Even for non-civillians who care about each other, stuff is awkward except when you're working a job together, but you still try to make it work because those people are important to you. I'm not sure how to express that in the system.

The characters need to have a need or desire attached to their relationships that has nothing to do with any missions, but is personally very important to the PC and the relationships should want something from the PCs too. I would put it on the character sheet under a heading like THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS. Otherwise, the connections might just become a distraction between adventures. The trick is that the adventures should be distractions (exciting ones of course) from the character's real life.

You could probably use a mechanic similar to your professional conflict mechanic for personal scenes, but in reverse. You could also build in a stat like Detachment, which is useful during, and improved during, mission scenes. However, this same Detachment could make it harder in the character's personal life and be ablated everytime the character succeeds in personal connections.

[Callan S.]

What IS the most important thing in the game? Even if it's something like short term survival or complete the mission of the day?

Once you find it, you make relationships numerically important to meeting it.

[chance.thirteen]

I don't know Burn Notice enough to know why you would link thre decay of relationships to giving a skill use one more try (perhaps you do something that is more the old bad you instead of the better you you are becoming and the person trusts or gets along with?).

However, immediately it came to mind that you might want to link what kinds of actions in the story, or which skills can have what type of relationship loss associated with it. Its's a very informed thought, but if you used the model above as an example, then skills(or the action taken in game)  might be grouped under virtuous values like trust, compassion, generosity, and so on. So getting one more hacking attempt in might burn only trust type relationships, ... or inversely the specific s of how and why you need the extra roll might define what sort of relationships get burned, eg if the hacking roll highlights your greed, then maybe only things from the greed group fails.

I think it is important that these relationships are what keeps you from sliding back into what you were. They represent your new value as a better person, your redemption in numeric form. ... Wasn't their a horror type game that had your redemption be what you were fighting for? Anyhow I could see the relationships being the source of will power and determination, directed towards positive goals and more than survival and feeding vices.

[Luke]

Two things: Relationships need to be a beneficial resource that a player can use. Build incentive for a player to incorporate relationships into his story.

Second, what's the priority system in your game? How does a player say what it is she is trying to accomplish in the short term? And in the long term?

-L

[Elizabeth]

Thanks for all the responses guys, I really appreciate it.

Alokov: Thanks, I hope you still think I've done a bang-up job when it's all done!

James: I was definitely thinking about having personal scenes as a mechanical reversal of the professional ones. I'm not entirely sold on the characters needing to have a need or desire attached to their relationship with no relevance to the missions, although I was thinking about that pretty heavily in my initial work on the game. What you're saying about the missions being a distraction from real life kind of turns the feel of the game on its ear for me-- I want it to be less "Oh good! I don't have to face my feelings for you because the drop is happening in 10 minutes!" and more "Dammit Fiona, I'm trying to dismantle a bomb here, can't talking about our future wait until this is over?" I see this as a fish-out-of-water game, where the professionals feel completely stranded and that's why they've started this do-gooder routine.

Callan: for some people it's going to be getting the heck out of the town, and for others it's going to be completing the mission.

chance.thirteen: It's a story thing. A lot of the time, when Michael gets hell-bent on something (finding out who burned him, getting back into the CIA), he ends up having to disappoint Fiona, who wishes he'd just be content to help out people who need it for cash and otherwise lay low in Miami. Sam keeps ruining relationships with the lady-friends who provide him his fancy cars and comfortable lifestyle by allowing the missions to encroach on that life-- blowing up his girlfriend's cars and apartments, usually. The more you stick it out during a mission, the less happy people will be with you when you get home. I do really like the idea of linking the types of relationship to the types of skills.. It might be a little more complex than what I'm going for (I want this to have a super-easy start-up time, and be something you can more-or-less pick up and play) but there's no way of knowing that until after it's been playtested. Might as well give it a shot.

Luke: on the first part, I agree. This is something I was talking out with a friend last night:

The number of points you have in a relationship is the number of favors you can ask of them. The favors can be both personal and professional. If you're turned down when you ask for help, you lose a point of relationship and gain a point of whatever skill is relevant. (Example: you ask your demolition-expert boyfriend to rig the package you're delivering, he says he's too busy, so you do it yourself and gain a point of demolition, and probably have an argument later). And that's how you become a Life-- you learn the skills you need while your relationships deteriorate. There needs to be a second way you can gain skills via working with a team you trust, but I haven't wrapped my brain around it yet. But anyway: yes. The stronger your relationship with someone, the more you can lean on them, which is useful. I'm also considering something where relationships act as mental soak during long missions, but that's still in the nascent stages. You'd be able to refresh your ability to withstand torture/etc. by hanging out with the people you care about on a purely recreational basis.

Right now, the only way to show what's important to a character in the short and long term is through what they're willing to use up, and what they're willing to work to replace. Especially if there's an overall goal to the game like "Getting out of the city," "Getting ___ to treat me better," whatever, there probably needs to be a more robust tool set for demonstrating and working towards those goals. I'm not sure what that looks like yet, but I want it to be there.

[chance.thirteen]

By the examples given, I would say that the relationships get burned based on what the character needs as a resource. It's a little clearer with "I need to have a car that can get blown up without me in it" is a way of burning a relationship that primarily exists to provide said car. Or are those relationships meant to be satisfactory emotional ones, but the schtick is the associated material property tends to get beaten up? I could also see each character having roughly one drive that tends to burn things for them, again limited when this can be called upon thematically. So even if the relationships are sometimes casual, sometimes for money, and sometimes for love, somehow these ladies cars still end up blowing up often.

Trying to nail the feel of the relationships and how they relate to getting burned up to help the characters succeed is probably a show feel thing, but making sure the relationships are linked to something positive for the player is crucial, I think, which  has been said already.

[SeeThirty]

I do think it is probably "best" to make the relationships need working at. Have relationships vary by type, and importance. For example, while it can be handy to know Vinnie the used car salesman personally, you probably won't have to take him out to dinner and a movie every once in a while, like you would Suzanne, the waitress, with whom your character has a personal type of relationship, as opposed to business or buddies. Rather than think of relationships in terms of a resource to use up, as one person suggested, consider relationships and how well they are maintained in terms of reward. If you have very few relationships, or let all or most of them lapse in stability, how about making character advancement more difficult, or award less experience points for completing an adventure? You could also consider relationships as a sort of safety net, if the people looking for your character move into the area. Vinnie and Suzanne are more likely to tell people they've never heard of you, if you don't owe them unpaid debts, or didn't stand them up on movie night.

You could also look to your own relationships in your daily life for clues to how they work in the game. What do you get out of conversations with the local grocer? Maybe they cut you a break at checkout once in a while. That's something that might be useful in-game. A character goes to buy necessary items, and if they have a poorer relationship "health" with the supplier, the more that supplier will try and shaft your character, overpricing things, and claiming some are conveniently unavailable, but he'll be happy to sell you this "slightly older" firearm, or the clunker car out back that should work fine with a little elbow grease..maybe.

If you want to make relationships important to players, to the point that they want to keep them maintained, then you have to make them valuable somehow to their characters in tangible ways they can see and feel. The best way to do this in a RPG is by offering perks, punishment, or making things run smoother with these relationships in place. In a game setting where the characters are hiding out from someone, relationships can be used to provide short-term cover. The character can stay at a friend's place for a few days, until the heat dies down, or maybe that travel agent friend can get your character a quiet ride out of town until everything goes back to normal.

[Jason Morningstar]

If relationships are central, make them central.  Maybe your success or failure hinges on them, and all your esoteric professional wet-work skills are just givens, sort of like clues in Trail of Cthulhu.  Michael Westin never screws up his surveillance op or car bomb, because he's BADASS, but he's always missing an appointment with his mom.

So to save the illegal immigrant single mom from the MS-13 thugs who want to kill her for what she witnessed, a player is going to line up, test, and stress the character's relationships.  There's no doubt that the character is going to break into the warehouse and steal the whatzamahoosit, that is essentially color and the necessary steps can be outlined early in the session.  The question is what it will cost to his relationship with his girlfriend. 

Another way to approach this would be to make the special ops stuff both necessary and outrageously difficult, and let adding stress to relationships either attenuate the difficulty or increase your skill.  To do the job, you miss a date.  You need their expertise.  You need them to play a role in the actual job.  You expose them to danger.  Stress could be a hierarchical progression - confused/upset/disgusted/estranged/enemy.

Just some thoughts!

[Elizabeth]

Jason, you're spot on. I don't see the skill points as being stuff that's about failure or success: you will succeed at what you're trying to do, but it's more along the lines of.. if you're not good at something, it takes you longer to do/costs you more. If you've got Interrogation 5, then getting the Latin King to give up where his boss stashed your client's son is pretty easily and quickly done, and you're not in danger of missing your mom's new mother-son pottery class down at the center. If you've only got Interrogation 2, though, then you're going to start burning through relationships while you stick it out until you get what you need. Infiltrating a Ukrainian hit squad is easy, it's making small talk on a first date that's hard.

SeeThirty, I think in the sense of simplifying the ideas down (making the spy stuff easy to get through, a given), that the idea of relationships as insulation from external sources is a pretty hot idea. I'm not sure what the long game looks like here-- about the experience stuff and character advancement. The example of relationships being used as short-term cover is a great one, though. I can see some sort of mechanic where, when you've done a certain amount of crazy shit, you're going to need a place to lay low until you're off the radar.

chance.thirteen: what you said made me think-- let's say person A keeps bugging person B for cars that can be blown up without people in them. That puts a strain on person B's relationship, but it also strains person B's relationship with person C, the actual car owner. Do you think it's too complex to allow relationships to drain from degrees of separation? Should there be a mechanical issue when you screw one friend to help another? It's not really something that's addressed in the source material; the "Person C" characters are almost always offscreen.

[dindenver]

Elizabeth,
  I had an idea that works like this:
Every PC has a stress meter. It is rated from 0-5 levels.
  So, at the start of the scene, take the stress level and that is a penalty pool that the GM can use against that player.
  Also, at the beginning of each scene, set a goal for the scene (e.g., The team gets an entry code or Fiona will take my calls again).
  During the Scene, players can take on a Stress Point to trade a Failure for a Success.
  If they accomplish their goal by the end of the scene, they lose a number of Stress Points equal to the number of PCs participating in that scene.

  Then, the trick to making Relationships matter, is make sure that the rules specify that every other scene has to be a mission scene and the rest are Relationship scenes.

  Anyways, that was just a thought, take the pats you like and ditch the rest, lol