Hello there! I completely forgot that Mechanic Mondays are on Mondays, so here it is now to make up for missing it. This one is very fuzzy and cloudy in my head, so let’s talk through it together, shall we?
So there’s this series of books that I think have a lot to like, but which have started to tire me. It’s the Gentleman Bastards series, starting with The Lies of Locke Lamora. Now I love rogues and fantasy and heists and worldbuilding and all that. I love it. But there’s a funny thing about thievery in fantasy books; it’s usually non-magical, and is therefore typically set up as a mundane foil or counter to magic, an ability that anyone can learn, with practice and charm and sufficiently nimble fingers and loud distractions. The thing about the Gentleman Bastards books is that after a while, the Thief Tricks became so effective and spectacular as to be comparable to magic, and eventually, indistinguishable. There’s a scene where someone pickpockets a pickpocket’s reverse pickpocket and it - it stopped feeling like something any mortal could do if they were canny and desperate enough.
Now, lots of media does this. And again, I love this shit. I love the forger coming through with a copy of the key to the getaway car, I love when the protagonists convince the antagonists to open the vault to prove that the target is still safe, I love a good yoink. But part of that is I love seeing people sweat, because the stakes are high and they know that they cannot, in fact, magic their way out of things.
So this leads me to cheating. Again, I love when scamps cheat in media. Not like - on someone, but at something. Spike and Faye’s first meeting in Bebop, the traincar poker game in The Sting, the airship all-in tournament in The Paladin Caper. Every single Western ever. It’s the best. You get the sense that cheating is a known, quantifiable skill, obvious to everyone but the rubes. And perhaps this is why casino games in Rogue fiction don’t set off my magic-o-meter; the hustlers may have transcended the rube game with its rube rules, but they are bound to the hustler game with its hustler rules. And of course, when you violate the magic circle of the rube game to establish the hustler game, you open the door to breaking the magic circle again, usually with violence.
Anyway, let’s gamify this.
Formalized Cheating
In Cut Me Own Throat, players draft a private hand of Sleights, which they keep face-down in front of them. Then, the Face deck is shuffled and dealt; the Face deck is a mundane deck of cards in three suits, and will be used for the game that all the players and the Mark are ostensibly playing. At any time during a player’s turn, in addition to playing cards from the Face deck, they may reveal and/or activate one of their Sleight cards, attracting unwanted Attention every time they do so. Sleight cards bend and break the rules of the Face game to afford a player advantages, but play them too often or at the wrong times, and the game erupts into Violence.
So there are some strong precedents for this, namely there’s some of Heat by Chris Cieslik and a bit of Hocus by Grant Rodiek in there. But what I want to capture here, especially by including one or more automated Rube players, is the superficial mundane chance-based game that the real game is built around. I can also see multiple currencies being a thing; the currency of the Face game, along with secrets, intel, objects of important Plot value, things like that. Because if the Face game isn’t the real game, why should the Face chips be the real points? Heck, a secret objective or two wouldn’t hurt either.
So there’s this series of books that I think have a lot to like, but which have started to tire me. It’s the Gentleman Bastards series, starting with The Lies of Locke Lamora. Now I love rogues and fantasy and heists and worldbuilding and all that. I love it. But there’s a funny thing about thievery in fantasy books; it’s usually non-magical, and is therefore typically set up as a mundane foil or counter to magic, an ability that anyone can learn, with practice and charm and sufficiently nimble fingers and loud distractions. The thing about the Gentleman Bastards books is that after a while, the Thief Tricks became so effective and spectacular as to be comparable to magic, and eventually, indistinguishable. There’s a scene where someone pickpockets a pickpocket’s reverse pickpocket and it - it stopped feeling like something any mortal could do if they were canny and desperate enough.
Now, lots of media does this. And again, I love this shit. I love the forger coming through with a copy of the key to the getaway car, I love when the protagonists convince the antagonists to open the vault to prove that the target is still safe, I love a good yoink. But part of that is I love seeing people sweat, because the stakes are high and they know that they cannot, in fact, magic their way out of things.
So this leads me to cheating. Again, I love when scamps cheat in media. Not like - on someone, but at something. Spike and Faye’s first meeting in Bebop, the traincar poker game in The Sting, the airship all-in tournament in The Paladin Caper. Every single Western ever. It’s the best. You get the sense that cheating is a known, quantifiable skill, obvious to everyone but the rubes. And perhaps this is why casino games in Rogue fiction don’t set off my magic-o-meter; the hustlers may have transcended the rube game with its rube rules, but they are bound to the hustler game with its hustler rules. And of course, when you violate the magic circle of the rube game to establish the hustler game, you open the door to breaking the magic circle again, usually with violence.
Anyway, let’s gamify this.
Formalized Cheating
In Cut Me Own Throat, players draft a private hand of Sleights, which they keep face-down in front of them. Then, the Face deck is shuffled and dealt; the Face deck is a mundane deck of cards in three suits, and will be used for the game that all the players and the Mark are ostensibly playing. At any time during a player’s turn, in addition to playing cards from the Face deck, they may reveal and/or activate one of their Sleight cards, attracting unwanted Attention every time they do so. Sleight cards bend and break the rules of the Face game to afford a player advantages, but play them too often or at the wrong times, and the game erupts into Violence.
So there are some strong precedents for this, namely there’s some of Heat by Chris Cieslik and a bit of Hocus by Grant Rodiek in there. But what I want to capture here, especially by including one or more automated Rube players, is the superficial mundane chance-based game that the real game is built around. I can also see multiple currencies being a thing; the currency of the Face game, along with secrets, intel, objects of important Plot value, things like that. Because if the Face game isn’t the real game, why should the Face chips be the real points? Heck, a secret objective or two wouldn’t hurt either.
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