Defiant TTRPG

This is such a weird game to talk about

Defiant (Quickstart available here) caught my attention because it's a game where "what kind of marriage are you in" (as in, happily married, purely a political arrangement, power struggle hours) is a required part of character creation with mechanically relevant options. That's a level of drama baked into character concepts that I'm very interested in seeing more of. The roll mechanic was also intriguing, 3d6 as a base that "steps up" as you invoke relevant character aspects, trying for as many successes (die rolls 5+) as possible. I like step dice, sue me.

ANYWAY I'm through the book's player material now, and yet again I'm thinking of these "powder keg" set-ups that Spire got me noticing. In Defiant you have obligations to your Province, you have obligations to the local apocalypse-seal, you have obligations to your House, you have obligations to your Courtiers, and furthermore the game provides several time-bomb mechanics that force you to get your character in trouble or otherwise raise the pressure to propel them to action. A lot of this is dependent on GM interpretation and mediation, so it would need some tightening before it became my exact brand of rules-machine nonsense, but it's still very intriguing.

Unfortunately, Defiant is 1) the type of World of Darkness urban fantasy that isn't as culturally sensitive as it would be wise to be, 2) blatantly sexual+kinky, and 3) uses a digitally-altered stock photo art style that, despite the creator's assurances that it's not AI art, looks close enough that i don't want to have to explain it repeatedly. So the rules tech is interesting but venues for discussion are uh, limited.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯