LONG MOSTLY UNEDITED POST AHEAD! tl;dr Eureka’s devs made the unconventional choice to create an imbalanced, volatile, and deadly tabletop combat system, and it helps make the game really good at telling detective stories. If you’re ever making a game that’s inspired by genre fiction, you shouldn’t be afraid to copy tropes that other games don’t normally use. Also, check out Eureka! It’s incredibly fun to read and play, and a master class in thoughtful game design. Full write up below.
One underrated aspect of @anim-ttrpgs’s Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy that I think tabletop designers should look to for inspiration is the fact that it doesn’t shy away from the conventions of its genre, even if they conflict with the conventional wisdom of how TTRPGs usually work. Eureka wants to be a toolkit for mystery stories in the vein of Agatha Christie-style mystery novels, film noir, or detective TV shows like Columbo and Kolchak, and it’s willing to bend tabletop gaming tradition to do that in a way that seems limiting, but actually increases the potential for compelling and appropriate stories.
The example that made this observation come up for me is the choice to create a crunchy, tactical combat system where guns and explosives absolutely break the power curve. Usually, in games that are heavily opinionated about combat and dangerous situations, the goal is for the player characters to fight with finesse and skill, often growing in power over time, and to that end there are many viable strategies that all scale massively as the players upgrade them. This is a great way to allow for fights that feel balanced, larger than life, and satisfyingly heroic. It’s also not remotely what Eureka does.
Eureka’s combat isn’t meant to emulate a modern action film, a high fantasy adventure, or a shonen anime. It aims to emulate the deadly, fast paced, environmentally driven heightened realism of action scenes in classic film noir, and to do that, it’s brave enough to ask its players to change their expectations about what a crunchy combat system looks like. Combat moves quickly, it’s physically and mentally taxing on the people involved, it’s character driven, and it is supremely dangerous. That’s abstract, but it’s pretty clear from the rules about weaponry: any bullet can incapacitate an average person in one shot, and explosives instantly kill people within their blast radius.
That’s of course not the only thing driving the danger of Eureka’s combat — another fun figure is that it only takes ten good punches or kicks to incapacitate or kill someone — but I think it’s a good way to get at the core of what Eureka tries to do: it forces you to consider what options actually make sense and create opportunities for interesting stories.
Eureka doesn’t want investigators valiantly charging across a battlefield to push up against their assailants or anything, because the stories it tries to produce are very grounded in depicting how unlikely that is to work. (If a character in a vintage noir film gets shot anywhere in their torso or head, they aren’t likely to survive without intensive medical attention, and Eureka is faithful to that!) Eureka wants people to scope out the location to improve their strategy, make smart use of ambushes and weaponry to get an advantage on people who threaten them, and run away or avoid combat if they come across someone they can’t handle.
This extreme volatility massively limits the reliability of characters’ abilities and ensures that far fewer options are available in combat, which seems like it would be less fun, but it’s quite the opposite. The action sequences that Eureka produces are incredibly engaging and fun to play out, because it makes smart use of tried and true tropes to make fights in mystery stories feel compelling and relevant. Heightened realism, danger, and desperation are important to mystery genre fiction, and Eureka seeks to put the players in that headspace. Fights are swift, violent, and often primarily decided by who had better plans and supplies. That’s by design.
There are a lot of great interactions that are enabled by this design philosophy — if a mafia goon pulls aside his jacket to reveal a handgun in his waistband, Eureka encourages the players and characters to take it seriously, because using a gun is seriously raising the stakes! That’s a trope that’s commonly used in all sorts of media, but if guns were easy to deal with, it would make no sense to worry about it. Creating a system that reflects how threatening guns can be in mystery stories and real life is a great way to avoid ludonarrative dissonance and encourage genuine character interactions, and Eureka is oozing with other design tidbits that accomplish similar things. (Hell, half the trait list is basically just there to allow investigators to embody classic genre tropes, and it’s awesome.)
(Deadly weapons in Eureka are balanced by the fact that they and the training needed to use them effectively are often challenging and expensive to get, especially by legal means — which also allows for some interesting social commentary on how violence is exceedingly easily enacted by the wealthy and powerful, while the self defense of marginalized people is criminalized and villainized — but there’s enough there for a whole other post, and this one is long enough as is.)
All that to say, if Eureka had blindly gone with the prevailing approaches taken by popular RPGs in this area (and many others), it would not be half as good at what it does — it would just feel like a reskin of some other game, but marketed as investigative urban fantasy. Instead, it’s a wholly original toolkit that lets writers, GMs, and players create their own spins on a classic plot structure in a fun and engaging way. Taking risks, thinking about incentive structures, and comparing the stories you want to tell with other media that creates a similar vibe is what takes an RPG from being just good to being great. If you’re designing a game, you can accomplish a lot by knowing what stories you want to create and honing in on why you enjoy them. And don’t be afraid to adapt ideas wholesale, either. Eureka cites multiple full pages of inspirations for the vibes, stories, and mechanics that make up its identities, and it’s a better game for it.
And, I must add, if you’re looking for a game that’s fun, good at telling stories about people investigating mysteries, has a friendly and active community, and doesn’t funnel money to Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, then absolutely consider taking Eureka out for a spin! It’s a brilliant take on the mystery genre that gives players and GMs the tools to explore deep, realistic, and sometimes supernatural situations in an easy and character driven package.
