D&D Mechanics Inspired by StarCraft II

 

I browsed an old strategy guide for Age of Empires: Rise of Rome from 4th Grade, and pretty soon my years-dormant interest in real-time strategy games was enthusiastically re-ignited. I played Age of Empires, Age of Kings, StarCraft, and now I'm playing the third campaign of StarCraft II, Legacy of the Void. You might not think that RTS games have much in common with an RPG like D&D, but good inspiration can be found anywhere, and here are some of the things I've been inspired by from the past few weeks playing StarCraft II.

Woven Campaign Structures

This isn't as poignant with the second and third acts of StarCraft II's storyline, but in Wings of Liberty, I was super impressed with the organic, nonlinear nature of the narrative and how my choices affected it. There's a main storyline arc, of course, but as you move along with it, you meet new characters with goals and tasks of their own. These side quests don't directly affect the outcome of the campaign, but completing them gives you valuable rewards, interesting lore, fun exploration opportunities, and satisfying ends to storylines—all great things in a D&D campaign.

Having a structure like this for a D&D campaign is fairly simple at a base level: Have a main goal that all of your player characters care about, and have the majority of the campaign's focus, adventures, and quests be centered around it. But also have shorter side quest lines that only loosely tie in to the campaign's goal, but which matter to individual player characters or NPCs the player characters care about. Each of these should of course be worth the players' while in some way, and the final quest in each side questline should come with a very significant reward for seeing a quest line through to its conclusion.

Some quest lines in Wings of Liberty end with their respective NPC awarding you with a trophy to display in your cantina. You could reward your players with an actual art piece of a souvenir they gained as part of a quest line. Looking back on achievements in a trophy room of sorts is a great psychological reward for both the players and their characters.

Memorable NPCs

One way to keep the quest lines straight and memorable is to tie each one to a different NPC. The best way to keep NPCs from being forgotten by players is to make them recurring. I can remember each quest-line NPC in Wings of Liberty, mainly because I remember each step I took with them to realize their individual goal. I like how Wings of Liberty spaces out these interactions, too—a quest line usually requires you to beat two other missions before the next quest in the lineup is available, giving the notion of each long-term objective taking an extended period of time to research, plan, and execute. It also just lends a feeling of familiarity to an NPC returning every once in a while to request further help with their problem.

StarCraft II does a good job of adding variety to the different NPCs you interact with as well. Each one is over either a questline or a function of your base. This helps differentiate them and give them memorable personalities based on the different purposes they have and when you interact with them. This sample list of NPCs from Wings of Liberty may be useful for reverse-engineering NPCs for your own campaign:

• Your captain and first officer who gives you advice and heads out travel to different planets; he is very formal and loyal to you and has a complicated marital past with a crazy mercenary.
• An engineer with a mechanical arm who is in charge of your unit and building upgrades; he tends to have nicknames for all the other characters.
• A science advisor who helps you use alien research to enhance your human technology; he's a nerd and is fascinated with research, but he hates combat.
• A mercenary who you consult for purchasing mercenary contracts; he's mysterious and always hangs out in the cantina.
• One of your former soldier buddies who advises you on finding pieces of an artifact that are worth a lot of money, and that end up being the key to beating the end boss; he has a criminal record, no one but you trusts him, and he has a dark hidden agenda.
• A biologist who is dedicated to finding a home for her fellow colonists that is safe from alien corruption; she's somewhat of a love interest possibility and a force for bringing out your good side.
• A rebel assassin who hires you to help him bust his fellow rebels out of prison; he is extremely shady and secretive, but wealthy and useful to your cause.
• An alien mystic who you fought alongside in the past who gives you a recording of some troubling secrets he discovered; he is wise and troubled by his past, but honorable and willing to sacrifice anything to save his people.
• The son of the tyrant villain you are fighting against, who wants to replace his corrupt father's rule with justice.

Valuable Downtime Progress

I've spoken before about how valuable I think downtime is in D&D, and StarCraft II, particularly Wings of Liberty and Legacy of the Void, illustrate this really well. As a real-time strategy game, the bulk of playtime is of course spent in RTS combat; but between each mission, you go to a hub location—the Terrans to a battlecruiser, the Zerg to a gargantuan leviathan organism, and the Protoss to a colossal arkship. Having a base, whether that be a stronghold, an inn, a ship, or a camp like on Baldur's Gate 3, gives you the chance to converse with NPCs, allocate resources, and plan strategies for your next mission.

There are two keys to making downtime worthwhile to players: the first is to relieve tension. Having a break between adventures helps the players slow down, learn new things, understand the stakes of what quests they'll be going on, and take inventory of their character and the tools they have at their disposal. Downtime allows players to absorb context on quests and understand their objectives better, and possibly more importantly, allows you to learn what your players care most about to help you tailor your campaign toward those ends.

The second key to valuable downtime is to make it directly enhance the playing experience outside of downtime. It varies by campaign, but each act in StarCraft II offers a specific type of resource for completing each adventure, which you can spend on upgrades that make future missions easier. Additionally, most levels offer bonus objectives which, though harder than a straightforward approach, grant you bonus resources to expedite this growth. These resources can be used in various ways, from simple purchasable benefits to talent-tree-like systems and unlockable tiers of choices.

In D&D, the most likely resource you have to work with is gold. Downtime in D&D is the time the characters will take to spend their hard-earned money, but since the base game of D&D doesn't have that many ways to spend it, it's a good idea to tailor a homebrewed system that works for your specific campaign. Below are some ideas for how gold can be used outside of adventures, based on StarCraft II's systems:

• One-and-Done Purchases. The classic reward system is just saving up your money to buy something. Aside from magic items, you could offer your player characters Feats for a certain amount of money for purchase (the cost of which probably multiplies after each subsequent purchase), favors in the form of sidekicks who join them for one adventure, or buildings in their stronghold that gave them a once-per-long rest boon or spell.
• Tiered Rewards. Perhaps for 500 gp, a player can enchant their weapon to be a +1 weapon. When they have 5,000 gp to spend, they can upgrade it to a +2 weapon, or grant it some kind of single-use-per-day ability. Once they have around 25,000 gp, they might upgrade it again to a +3 weapon, and from 50,000 and beyond, they can have a Legendary magic item of their choosing. Organizing rewards by tier thresholds gives players something to look forward to and lends a feeling of progress and growth.
• Selective Array. Similar to the Tiered Rewards, this system allows players to unlock a set of mutually exclusive benefits they can choose from. They can switch between these selections (one per tier) between adventures, but can only enjoy the benefit of one at a time. For instance, a wizard could gain 1 extra spell slot, but only for a specific school of magic decided at the base. A similar approach would be the ability to gain one consumable magic item per downtime, selected from a set of options that increases over time (for example, an alchemist who only has time to brew you one potion per visit).

The trick is to offer benefits that are temporary, consumable, or incremental. You can get more inspiration for this in my article about improving 5e Bastions. If you're having trouble thinking of a way of presenting all these options to the players without overwhelming them, simply use an NPC to make the offer to them. Each offer the players refuse can be retailored and offered to them again later until they find something worth their treasure.

Although gold definitely needs more things to spend it on, don't let that discourage you from making up other resources for your players to hunt down as bonus objectives. Some kind of rare gem, religious idol, plant, or piece of an arcane contraption could be scattered across any campaign, with each new acquisition unlocking new benefits in the next tier.