Facade: A Resistance Toolbox Game

Recently I've been working on Hwaet, a Resistance toolbox game, and today I learned about Facade, another game built on the Resistance toolbox.

Facade's a game about becoming a vampire, and it is a tremendous example of how to use game mechanics to foster a narrative. It's created by Nora Snowblake (who you can find on Twitter and itch.io) and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

It's an interesting approach on the system, a sort of lightening and rebuilding of the Resistance toolbox to change some of the things that go into it. A thirteen-page PWYW title, it takes the system and transforms it into something that is quite recognizable.

As it stands in Spire, the Resistance toolbox is very sturdy, but that comes with a certain amount of weight, and the majority of that weight comes in the form of reference items: the roll table; skills, domains, and special abilities; even things like weapons.

Facade takes the core concepts and mechanics–fallout, resistances, the die-pool based success system–and makes them flow a whole lot faster.

Characters are very fast and light, consisting of their name, Reputation, skills, and background.

Reputations take the place of resistances in the core toolbox, and function analogously. Characters see their Reputations suffer stress when they do certain actions, and their Reputation thresholds permanently fall when they suffer Fallout.

In an interesting shift, there's a sort of bohemianism to this; you actually want the thresholds to fall (causing more Fallout), because it reflects transformation into a true vampire (as it were), and this actually then leads to a process of Exultation.

I'm really in love with a few things about Facade.

The d6-based system (which I got permission to steal borrow, so we might see it in Hwaet), which I find to be absolutely lovely, has a much easier system to remember: 1-3 fails, 4-6 succeeds, the lowest number in either set adds a complication and the highest adds an advantage.

The advantage system in particular is cool. It encourages momentum in play, which is nice, and it's worth taking a look at in more detail when I'm a little more lucid.

Also, the system encourages transformation and metamorphosis, something that is important and interesting from a narrative perspective. Characters don't become more powerful (if anything, they tend to spiral out of control) automatically, but they do become different and that makes them really interesting.

It's a lot lighter than Resistance, which is good for what Facade is doing. It really feels like something that you could run as a replacement for Vampire: the Masquerade, though it does have the element of the PCs becoming more powerful in spite of their failures (their arc of development may still be tragic, however).

It's worth noting that there's no risk to the PCs at any point; they don't have rules for dying or even mechanics to measure the need for blood. However, I actually think that this might be a strength of the system; it is the growth of power and the temptations that come with it that drives the conflict.

All-in-all, I'd say that Resistance is tremendous. It kind of reminds me of the passionate 72-hour games I used to make, only it's a lot better in terms of design principles than anything that I ever made in a game jam.

While Facade demands more of players and storytellers as a result of its simplified nature and narrative conceits, it's still got the powerful core of the Resistance toolbox on its hands and it's definitely one to check out as both a case study and a really cool play experience.