Small Dungeon World hack idea here.

Small Dungeon World hack idea here.

I’ve heard discussion before on “Discern Realities” and elsewhere about how parley as a move can be stretched a bit thin, and how Dungeon World would provide a bit richer of an experience if there were a tad more social mechanics (I especially like Jeremy Strandberg’s take on parley).

Disclaimer: I am a huge believer in “lightweight” rules systems, but rules that guide and inspire the fiction, “demanding to be invoked” as it were, are fun and useful. Dungeon World embodies much of this philosophy, and I seek to provide a small addition.

With all that in mind, I submit to you a minor addition to character creation:

ETIQUETTES

The concept in brief:

An Etiquette is an abstraction of the body of knowledge a character may have regarding the customs, jargon, tendencies, mannerisms, and the like of a certain type of people or a certain strata of society. Example Etiquettes: Mercenary, Sailor, Royal, Urchin, Cultist, Trader, Arcane Scholar, etc. These can be adapted for any setting, or made up by the players at character creation if you’re into player world building. At character creation, each character chooses the same number of Etiquettes as their CHA (negative modifiers are treated as zero).

Etiquettes provide a +1 ongoing to social interactions of any sort with someone who runs in circles relevant to the Etiquette in question, or who is “part of that world”. This represents the character leveraging knowledge of how that type of person thinks; colloquialisms, slang, and special jargon; hand signs and gestures; and an awareness of ongoing events relevant to that Etiquette (Sailor might know which fishing grounds are rich this season, Mercenary might know what contracts are hot right now, Royal might know which court fashions are in vogue, etc). The character should explain exactly how they are using their familiarity with this type of person to their advantage to gain the bonus, and only one Etiquette can be leveraged on a given role, although there are likely NPCs for whom multiple Etiquettes could be leveraged, in which case the character must chose which aspect of that person they are trying to appeal to.

Yep, that’s it. If you want to expand this, you could make certain people only willing to negotiate with characters possessing a certain Etiquette, or give characters the opportunity to learn new Etiquettes over time (possibly gaining them as additional bonuses related to a Compendium class).

Let me know what you all think! Could you see a use for this? Is it cumbersome?

Credit: This idea is essentially lifted right out of Harebrained Studios “Shadowrun Returns” game, and subsequent games in the series. In that game (which is essentially a single player RPG), Etiquettes provide special dialogue options to influence NPCs in alternative ways. They were great fun, and really lent color to the characters and world.

The below example shows a situation in which the character does not have the relevant Etiquettes.