 Goto [ Index ] |
Enough of all that -- on to the breakdown.
What It Looks Like
Secrets & Lies is a 30-page digest-sized PDF. The only piece of art (aside from charts and example diagrams) is a full-color cover by George Cotronis with "beat-up cover" elements that makes it look like it's been kicking around in your backpack for a week and a half. It's written by Daniel Bayn, edited by Clint Krause and has some fiction by Ben Baugh. The layout is very basic one-column Arial text with headers and page numbers. There's so little here that it's hard to quibble, but I'll quibble anyhow -- I think I would have preferred a text with serifs to make it look more like a pulp magazine and less like a Word document. But it's not a problem -- just a personal preference.
Prelude
A bit of that Ben Baugh fiction I mentioned, followed by a quick whip through what the game's about (it's a crime game about secrets and lies featuring hard-boiled detectives, in case you were wondering), and a short list of "things to watch if you've got a stick up your ass about reading Raymond Chandler." Since I can't possibly imagine a reality where that's possible, I assume the list is actually meant as a course of educational viewing in addition to reading Chandler. I know I've watched half of this list already, so already I'm thinking this game should be titled Secrets & Lies: A Game of Stuff Eddy Likes.
Playing It Straight
The first rule is that "the awesome is automatic." In typical Bayn style, he's telling us that your characters are already so awesome that they transcend dice rolling most of the time. He then goes on to talk about a characters "vitals." They're kind of like attributes, except that it's an indication of the number of times you were awesome in a certain situation -- the Director can tell you to "take a hit" to a vital to pay for your awesomeness. Each vital starts at two dice, and each hit adds another die. When the Director decides that your awesomeness isn't a sure thing, he can tell you to "boil a vital," and that is either soft-boiled or hard-boiled. You roll the dice and look for matching numbers. No matches, and everything's fine -- you continue to be awesome. If there's a match, though, you have problems.
(At this point, I realized that the kind of dice was never specified in the text. I'm assuming d6s, but changing the die code would change how often your dice match, so keep that in mind.)
A soft-boiled failure just means that things aren't as good as they could be. Your bribe works, but the cop wants more. Your "interrogation technique" leaves some blood on your shirt just when your mom pulls up. You got what you want, but you also got more trouble than you expected.
A hard-boiled failure means things go sideways. The cop refuses the bribe and calls for backup. Your suspect pulls a knife while you're knocking him around and then takes your mom hostage. You also lose all dice in that vital and have to put an X through it, meaning you can't use that vital for a while.
Your Director can also add flop dice to your roll to make it harder. The flop dice also check for matches, but they have to match at least one of your vital dice -- flop dice matching each other don't mean anything.
But it's not all bad. Each character has a means and a motive. The means is a short character concept -- broke detective, disgraced cop, mafia henchman, etc. The motive is what keeps you going -- revenge for the death of your sister, a need to know who screwed you out of your job, a pathological desire to find the answer, whatever. If boiling a vital relates to your means or motive, you get a "knockout," which means you can drop one die from your roll. If it hits both, you can knockout two dice.
All this is followed by a detailed example about a sweet young lady who has to kill someone for her father.
Playing The Angles
Now we start layering on the good stuff. We start with relationships, which also have dice (and can be boiled) like vitals. Everyone gets one for free, called a "crutch," but you get a lot more through play. The more you lean on a relationship, the harder it is to get info, but you can remove dice from a relationship by doing them favors, and you can do a bit more than that to repair a broken relationship. The weird thing that took me a moment to get is that the weaker the relationship, the more dice it gets (since it's more likely to break if you have more dice). Secrets work the same way -- if you have a secret on someone, that's essentially a relationship that you can ride until it breaks (maybe the secret gets out and can't be used for leverage, or maybe the blackmailed just snaps and tries to kill you).
Related to that, if a conflict with a character gets one of your vitals hard-boiled, you can create a vendetta. Essentially, if you do something that promotes your vendetta, you can drop hits off your vital and move them to the vendetta. However, the Director can ask you to boil that vendetta when you're near your target, forcing you to do stupid things. Also, you can never drop hits off of a vendetta -- you can only add to it until one or the other of you is out of the picture.
I really like the idea that vendettas just continue to heat up, but it does seem to be a separate system entirely from normal relationships and secrets. As a noir fan, I love it. As a game designer, it feels strangely tacked-on. Still, for this I prefer genre emulation over elegance of mechanical design, so I'll give it a pass.
Shaking The Tree
This section actually gets something key about hardboiled detective stories: the clues just don't matter all that much. It's more about dodging killers while telling bigger lies than the liars (just watch The Maltese Falcon for an example of this, or most any episode of Burn Notice). This section is all about the formula of that story -- ask questions to stir the pot and draw out the real players (for and against you) and start pulling on those relationships and secrets to get to the truth. It's still a game about evidence, but it's less about Sherlockian deductions and more about taking what little you have and using that as leverage to get the right people to open up and confess before you put them in jail. You can also go the Mike Hammer route and just cap the guy that's the problem, if vengeance is more your speed.
Protagonists
How to make a character. Most of this you can probably deduce from the previous sections, but it's all spelled out here. Weirdly, the "crutch" relationship is actually defined here instead of in "Playing the Angles," and it's a special case where you can push (and maybe boil) that relationship to clear hits off of your vitals. The priest that takes confession from the cold-blooded killer or the wife of the abusive drunk are both crutches to their respective protagonists. This is followed by six noir stereotypes as examples.
Calling The Shots
The Director's section. Because this is more a test of relationship web tensile strength than an exercise in collecting clues, the pre-game prep is much easier, focused primarily around the relationships between the various supporting characters. Come up with a few characters, tie them together, throw in some of the characters from the players' sheets, and you'll have a complex series of relationships that Hammett couldn't untangle. This also works for murder mysteries (since it's more about finding the one who did it amongst a sea of potential candidates, rather than cleverly deducing the method of the murder) and revenge stories (similar set-up, different end result). Antagonists don't even need sheets -- just toss some flop dice into the boil and go.
Again, the game is really focusing on a key element of hardboiled detective fiction, but I think the actual clues are downplayed a bit too much -- although they're not the focus of the story, they are valuable tools to pry open those secrets that you can use later for leverage. However, the way the game prep is set up means that it's damned easy to move to a completely player-motivated game (or "sandbox gameplay" as the kids call it these days). Since the characters are vague sketches, you can come to game with a list of random names and relationships, and pick and choose as needed. There's even a table of example relationships and character concepts you can use for just that purpose.
The Bullet Is An Afterthought
Most of this section is based around "if you try to beat it up, expect to get beaten in return," which deals with another noir trope -- detectives often have to use their heads, and when they do use fists, they at least try to use them tactically and with a certain goal in mind. It breaks down violent scenes into a few key types of scenes, and then gives three examples of gameplay.
Final Thoughts
Secrets & Lies takes a hard look at hardboiled detective fiction, picks out the good bits, and focuses on those. I'm a little confused as to how dice move back and forth from vitals to relationships, and some of the rules are explained in weird order, but I expect a lot of that would be cleared up with playing through a story. S&L reminds me of the Gumshoe system (another favorite for detective gaming), in that it took a hard look at a certain style of gameplay, figured out what wasn't fun about how it was handled traditionally, and tried to make it more fun and more appropriate. You could use either Gumshoe or S&L to run hardboiled detective games, but you would get two very different styles of play, and I think my personal sweet spot is somewhere between the two extremes. Gumshoe doesn't focus on the tangled knot of relationships enough, but S&L doesn't focus on the actual clues a whole lot either.
That being said, Secrets & Lies knows exactly what kind of game it is and goes about giving you just that experience without any frills or digressions. It comes out, tells you what you want to hear, and then gets the hell out of the way. If you want something different, then this game won't be able to give it to you, and it's so focused that it won't even budge much to try and work with you. But if you want a game about lying bastards doing horrible things to each other, then you won't find much better than Secrets & Lies.
