Hi, this is Gareth Damian Martin, the developer and creator of Citizen Sleeper!
Citizen Sleeper is part of this week's Tabletop Fest and to celebrate I thought I would share a little more on the tabletop games that inspired me to make the game, and the ideas I borrowed to bring Elrin’s Eye to life.
Obviously any game which features dice is most likely inspired by TTRPGs, but Citizen Sleeper is full of other features inspired by some of the most exciting games in the contemporary TTRPG scene.
First up is John Harper’s excellent TTRPG Blades in the Dark. Set in the dark fantasy city of Doskvol, Blades in the Dark focuses on high intensity heists, narrative-first gameplay and elegant and lightweight systems to simulate a whole city of criminal factions vying for control. One of the first tabletop games I ever ran as a game master, it immediately impressed me with its focus on “success at a cost” which gives its heists a fluid sense of escalation. Blades simulates the experience of being a master criminal always on the edge of failure, and so I found its balance of luck and strategy a good inspiration for modeling Citizen Sleeper’s sense of also living on the edge, not as a criminal, but as someone marginalized by society.
Blades in the Dark is also where I first encountered “clocks”, a simple way of tracking progress towards objectives, time passing, and upcoming events. I was really impressed by the utility and simplicity of this system and there’s nothing I love more as a GM than introducing a mysterious clock and ticking it up when the player fails a roll to give a sense of impending doom! So when it came to designing Citizen Sleeper I knew I wanted to use clocks to track everything from relationships to debts, something which also gives the game a unique TTRPG flavor.
Another part of Citizen Sleeper designed to feel very TTRPG is character progression. Rather than give out numerical XP in a traditional manner, I wanted character progression to reflect the players choices in the world, and to be a tool for letting the player figure out what they wanted to do next. Out of this came the idea of “drives” instead of “quests”, with the distinction being that Citizen Sleeper’s drives are all optional, and focus on the player's choice to engage or not engage with different parts of the world. I wanted players to choose their priorities, and then be rewarded for following through.
This kind of design is part of a wider movement in TTRPGs which began with the game Apocalypse World by D. Vincent Baker. First releasing in 2010 and going on to inspire a whole genre of TTRPGs under the label “Powered by the Apocalypse'', Apocalypse World focuses not on simulating everything that is happening the world, but instead abstracting ideas to simple dice systems so that the player has more agency and the game master is focused on driving the narrative, not adjudicating a complex rule set. This narrative-first kind of TTRPG is exactly what I hoped to emulate in Citizen Sleeper.
Finally, one of the key inspirations for Citizen Sleeper comes from something that is a massive part of the contemporary TTRPG scene; actual play! For the uninitiated “actual play” is the term for video and audio content where players play TTRPGs live, telling stories that can change with a single dice roll. In particular Citizen Sleeper takes inspiration from one of the experimental and innovative actual play podcasts, Friends at the Table. Often telling richly diverse sci-fics stories with contemporary relevance, Friends at the Table’s brave approach was a huge inspiration for me. This counts double when it comes to the games 3 episode DLC sequence, which I wanted to have the story-telling rhythm of an actual play podcast, where the episodic story feels unpredictable and like something you discover as you play!
Whether I have achieved this goal will be decided when the final episode, episode: PURGE, launches on the 30th of March. But however it turns out, it has been an exciting journey to bring some of the most interesting ideas from the contemporary TTRPG scene to video games, in some cases for the first time. I hope you’ve enjoyed it too, and if any of this has piqued your interest, I strongly recommend getting hold of a copy of a TTRPG mentioned above and trying to run a game with a few friends!
See you on the Eye!
Gareth
Grab your copy of Citizen Sleeper here for 30% off during the Tabletop Fest!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1578650/Citizen_Sleeper/
And remember to stay up to date with all the latest Citizen Sleeper news here:
