Stras Acimovic
(Copying question over from twitter per request.)
What were the main goals of the Gambit system in S+V? Provide room for a bit more success/heroism than Blades? Ship upgrades that can appear in ground missions? Balance out the fictional lethality of all the plasma weapons?
So Devon—let’s talk about fictional beats.
If you take a look at a heist movie, the film will start with a bunch of experts coming up with a bulletproof plan and accounting for things that could go wrong, only to have something unexpected happen, the tension ratchet up, and them make a series of desperate gambles to try and pull off the job.
If you play a game like Dishonored or Thief, this is often reflected in the “sneaker” genre. You wait patiently. Time everything. Make flawless careful moves until you pick a lock perfectly while the guards are rotating and open the door to find … three guards you didn’t know about inside. Well poop. Do you run? Fight? Things are pretty desperate now!
Blades mimics this very well. Controlled has better outcomes. It’s a good position to be in. You want to be dominant. Desperate is fun for us to watch. It has XP to lure you there. The consequences are dire. Risky is sort of the unwanted child in blades. No xp for your action, but more risk than controlled. But that fits the genre just fine.
Space Opera functions on different beats. It lives in the risky space. You want to try a slightly dangerous and risky plan, but Han Solo runs when faced with a full squad of stormtroopers. There’s times to go risky and times to know when to fold. This is repeated in most of our source material (Mal folding when surrounded by Alliance, Spike/Faye knowing when not to take on entire syndicates, etc). So for one, we knew we wanted to punch up the risky actions.
Next—teamwork is sort of the secret sauce of Blades. This is about characters making openings for others to take their shot. Earlier actions cascading into the future. The ability for luck and destiny to take a hand. To quote Jyn Erso: “We’ll take the next chance. And the next. On and on until we win… or the chances are spent.” (which came out years after gambits were written but it’s too good not to use here ^_~)
Also… it helps us control narrative beats. There’s a certain power to saying “Ok, I’m all in” and pushing and grabbing that gambit. That’s a good feeling and mimics things we see in the source fiction, but it doesn’t happen all the time. Gambits (like pushes) gives us moments when you can “go hot” but it limits the beats. The scale (crew vs single person push) is different, and that creates a sense of unity and teamwork which brings me to …
Finally … tone—SaV is a bit more upbeat. A bit more colorful than perpetual night. A bit more teamwork oriented despite crew squabbles. And gambits are a part of that. They give you reasons to go risky, reasons to work with your team, and reasons to believe that fate and destiny favor you.
So it’s mostly genre and narrative beats.
There’s a bunch of side benefits (ground crew stuff, good mechanization on a couple things, better probability curves on a few things) but our first question was “what do controlled, risky and desperate mean in this game” and we needed to push risky up a bit more, and somehow incorporate that into tone.
Hope that answers your question!
Thank you Stras for a great explanation! I too was curious about the inclusion of gambits.
Thanks for the in-depth answer! (I was traveling for a few days, so didn’t see this until this evening.)