# RPG a Day 2026 - 25: Familiarity tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] There is a real problem in a lot of traditional TRPG design in that relationships aren't part of them: who you know, who your rival is, who you love, who you hate, who you're related to, whether you like it or not. None of those things matter except insofar as you *choose* to make them matter by making choices in game, but in many games they have no reified grounding. That your brother's a cabbage seller doesn't matter to your level 14 Fighter/Assassin. That your cousin has been with the Sol Space Cargo Protection Special Force for the last 15 years and doesn't like you very much just never comes on screen. It's just something tucked into that *"backstory"* that a lot of GMs bitch about reading at all in the first place.[^1] I consider this a mistake, and I've said so before. Things that your character cares about are the primary motivators that get them moving in the world, that give context to their choices, that give impetus to their actions. Relationships express that very specifically. But characters don't have relationships purely with people. ## I Do So Swear For obvious reasons, I've had multiple opportunities to read the **[[Ironsworn]]** text on Bonds during character creation recently. Bonds are an interesting thing to inject into the course of character generation. You need to stop and think about what places know me, what organizations know me, who and what do I care about beyond just a person or two? Am I a known figure in my hometown? That would count as a bond. Is there a group of people who know who I am and would care? That counts as a bond as well. Your local band of mercenary brothers, your cult, or the criminal syndicate you sometimes work with. All of these things are great bonds. Note one of the key things about a good bond. It's not only someone or something that you know about, but that explicitly knows about you and cares to some degree. If the Defenders of the Galaxy don't know who you are, it's not a bond. One of the things I've always felt that **Ironsworn** could do better is to remove the polarity of your relationship as described by a bond. If you look at the campaign moves, you'll see that making a connection doesn't have a particular flavor, but developing your relationship and testing your relationship certainly does. I believe that the inverse of those actions should also count as developing your relationship or testing your relationship: rivalry, active hatred, the state of being an enemy, all of which should count as a relationship. That means that yes, I would roll on the Develop Your Relationship move if I were to swear a vow to undertake a perilous quest, or I were to oppose my rival, or complete a quest that harmed them, or get dragged in to help someone *against* them, take something of worth from them, or even share a profound moment with them. Still counts, just it's a different kind of profound moment if you think of them as your enemy.[^2] Standing against them, when it is costly to you. Overcoming a test of your relationship. All things that could develop your relationship with your rival or your enemy, and that work perfectly fine within the context of the mechanics and your narrative. It's just not phrased that way. Speaking of testing your relationship, what *would* test your relationship with your rival? Being in a situation where you must fight together against a common enemy, or you have a moment of actual emotional connection that is positive and pleasant; anything that would erode that emotional standing. With these changes, you certainly could evolve a relationship between your character and another from friendship to rivalry to hated enemy, and through repeated situations that throw you together in support of one another, erode your relationship as an enemy and bring it back to a more positive one, or vice versa. You love your brother, but he has chosen to go into the Yakuza while you've decided to become a cop. Your relationship worsens on every encounter until he ends up violating your trust one too many times, and you become bitter enemies. Notice how the bonds draw out a story that could happen just by existing. That's what you want. You want things to just happen. You don't want to tell stories so much as you want to recount stories. Things will happen when you care about the elements at play within them. You want systems that will help evoke those opportunities. ## I Want to be Free Let's take a look at a more constrained way of working your familiar relationships into the character mechanics. **[[Scum and Villainy|Scum & Villainy]]** is a great manifestation of the *Forged in the Dark* system. During character generation, you pick a playbook, which essentially provides some starting action ratings, some example builds, and the abilities and gear that you're likely to pick up along the way. One of the other things included right there on the first page of your playbook are potential relationships, which are a list of characters whom you know and can decide on your relationship to. The key thing here is that given a list of people that you already might know and whose relationship you're familiar with, you can bridge that into creating an association with other player characters. If the ship's Mechanic brings up Slice, a junkyard owner that she once ripped off for some gear, the Scoundrel has a great opportunity during the ensuing interactions to decide how they feel about Slice. Perhaps they see an opportunity to manipulate them and play on that antipathy to the mechanic to take them for a little bit more, or maybe it's an opportunity for the Muscle to stand up for the mechanic and do a little threatening looming. Even a relationship mechanic as straightforward and understated as this provides the fodder for characters to care about their relationships by actually providing some to choose from, some seeds that could grow into something more exciting. If you look a little bit deeper into the suggested friends list, you sometimes find repeated archetypes. The Pilot and the Scoundrel both have a ship mechanic friend. Different friends, but both ship mechanics. The Speaker and the Stitch both have a doctor friend. The Muscle and the Scoundrel also have a bounty hunter friend. This provides a potential second-order effect where the guy referred to in "I know a guy" *himself* knows a guy (the other PC) and might like him — or really *not* like him. Creating the opportunity for conflict and complication as well as elements to call on to solve problems is a solid mechanical move. ## I Used to be a Spy Let's surface an RPG that is almost entirely about the relationship between people and reifying those relationships in a mechanical way, the framework upon which everything else depends. I'm talking about **[[Blowback]]**, which I don't think I've heard anyone talk about in decades, which is a terrible shame since it was a good innovator in the nascent co-op tabletop RPG space.[^3] Now, you might normally not expect me to find this to be to my taste. After all, it does assume that the protagonists actually care about the people in their lives and want to protect them. And yet, dig into the fine print, look down into the character advancement system, and you'll see that for the professionals, the hardcore ex-spies, the only way that they advance their abilities is by burning their relationships. The one thing that, at least notionally, they don't want to do. When I say that relationships are key to this game, I mean they are literally the energy that the mechanics run on. In fact, in character generation, you are told to create one professional and one civilian, but that civilian can't be one with a relationship to your professional. Instead, it is a character with a relationship to someone else's, which gives you an interesting amount of influence over what someone else's background can and might be. Someone else at the table is playing your nosy mom who won't stay out of your life and keeps getting into trouble, or your bumbling brother who's never been able to keep a business together but is really good with cars. This is another one of those dynamic game design concepts that drive interaction between players based on relationships and things that they have immediate motive to care about. You get drama, yes, but you also get the ability to affect the world. **Blowback** reinforces relationships as a first-class mechanical entity in one more blunt way: any relationship rated 4 or higher carries an agenda, and the person with an agenda *wants* something from the other. Given that relationships don't have to be and often aren't reciprocal at the same value, this can lead to very interesting tension. Somebody who cares a whole lot about you wants you to do something for them. You may or may not be so inclined. In fact, it's probably better if you're not.[^4] ## Exeunt Familiarity certainly may breed contempt, but without familiarity, without the agency to become familiar with things, you can't generate the opposite of contempt: appreciation. Motivations fall to the wayside, connections with the world wither. You can't make a decision about what you don't know. You can't act on what you can't perceive. Systems that make relationships tangible within the mechanical architecture have become more popular over the years. Now it seems they're more common at some level in the indie space than those without. It's always good to look at where you came from and to consider where you might be going. Next time, maybe we'll even talk about summoning familiars. [^1]: As an aside, this is one of the things I hate about a lot of modern discussion in the traditional RPG space. The wholesale rejection of backstory just really gets up my ass. When a player cares enough about the world and their character to let you in on the things that they care about, you should listen. That's not an immediate sign to throw out all of their stuff because it'll get in the way of telling your story. It's a sign that they have things that can turn into your shared story. [^2]: That incredibly dramatic scene when you stand face to face with them and tell them exactly all the reasons that you hate them and wish that you could spit in their eye? I'd say that counts. [^3]: My suspicion is that it fell off the radar as soon as high-action spy TV fell out of the public consciousness, and that's a damn shame.  [^4]: Remember the three important questions — see **[[Day 06 - Motive|RPG A DAY 2025: Day 06 - Motive]]**.