So, let’s talk Dallas, the 1980 TTRPG based on the primetime soap opera of the same name. It’s a wild game, one that does not have any other contemporaries that I’m familiar with. Where the games at the origin of the TTRPG hobby are rooted in a combination of miniatures wargames, free kriegpsiel, and the science-fiction and fantasy communities, Dallas draws from different sources. By my estimation, it seems to drawing more from Diplomacy-style wargames, along with point control maps and (perhaps bewilderingly) murder-mysteries-in-a-box.
Let’s start by talking its gameplay loop. Overall, the game seems to be focused on one-shots (a relatively rarity for its era) due its lack of advancement mechanics. Instead of pursuing the long term objective of becoming the strongest, each player is pursuing the specific goal of their character in the given scenario. From a purely ludic perspective (ignoring any narrative elements for now), each scenario starts with the players being given their characters (which comes with their stats and any special abilities), their targets of acquisition, and their starting resources.
From there, the game progresses through the scenes of the script, typically five of them. In each scene, the Director goes forth, introducing new elements to the board state and manipulating each character’s condition to make sure that there is no runaway winner (or loser theoretically). Then there is a round of negotiations, where the players freely trade resources and information amongst each other, according to mutual agreement. It is highly suggested that players be able to separate into smaller groups during this time to make secret plans.
Finally, each scene has an action phase where the characters use their stats to force other players or the Director to give them resources or information (or in one case, compel unallocated resources to take actions for them). Once every player has taken up to three actions (though also capped by the number of one kind of resource they have), then a new scene starts. Once all the scenes have played, whoever has achieved their goal has won, and in the cases where it doesn’t make sense for there to be multiple winners, the player who has earned the most VPs (most determined via total resources controlled) is the formal winner.
The victory conditions are all about control of specific resources, and are set up in such a way that it is not possible for everyone to have the resources they require. In addition, each player’s goal is unknown to the other players, allowing for a great degree of deception and politicking on the way to acquiring the necessary resources. In addition, it is always possible for a player to forcibly claim a resource, but also players can repeatedly try to affect a more powerful player in order to weaken their position and drain a bonus resource called Power which offers a bonus to rolls.
Rolls are resolved fairly simply but described poorly. A player chooses their action and their target. All characters and resources have an attack and defense value for every action, with the attack values broadly being higher. The defender rolls 2d6 and adds it their total. If their total is equal or higher than the attacker’s score, then the defender is unaffected. In addition, Power may be spent on a one-for-one basis by both attacker and defender to increase their scores. If the defender fails their roll, they can then follow up with a 2d6 roll-under compared to their Luck score (which is rated 2-8 for everyone, all but the luckiest are unlikely to succeed at their Luck rolls) as an addition saving throw of sorts.
All in all, a fairly simple game with lots of room for player cooperation and competition. I’d argue that of the current games out there, the ones closest to Dallas are megagames, with their combination of negotiation and board state manipulation.
Now, where Dallas becomes truly interesting, at least to me, is when the narrative is added back in. Unlike every other game of its era, it is not a Fantasy or a Science-Fiction or a Western or a historical game, it is a contemporary drama, which is not a genre that is not often explored even today. This comes with a much lower emphasis on action, and a much stronger emphasis on interpersonal dynamics.
The resources in play are in fact a combination of other characters in the setting, organizations with influence in the setting, and important objects (called plot devices). Claiming a character or an organization means controlling it, highlighting the sort of emotional and intellectual manipulations at the heart of these sorts of intrigues, and it’s controlled characters and organizations that allow a player to take multiple actions, thus encouraging even the least cutthroat characters to get others on their side.
The actions themselves are an unusual set: Seduction, Persuasion, Coercion, and Investigation. (Thankfully Seduction cannot be used on blood family, but also the rules prevent their use on same gender characters, but this was the 1980s.) Through these four actions, the game is able to achieve a degree of genre emulation that was largely unmatched by games at the time. The difference in the actions, sadly, is relatively limited ludically speaking, but it opens rooms for a kind of RPS of using one’s strength to attack another’s weakness.
Scripts also come with them heavy narrative elements, though it is largely a case of the Director leading the story with how they describe events unfolded. The game does not offer any guidance on how a player might roleplay their actions or negotiations, but it’s easy to see a way where the player leads with their ludic choices and then must find a way to justify them via roleplay, which would be a very interesting twist on the typical fiction-forward approach of modern games.
The game comes with three pre-written Scripts (which are more outlines than actual scripts) and a whole host of side characters, some of which are used by the Scripts, others of which the game leaves for the Director to make their own Scripts for. Finally, the game comes with a history of Dallas, both the real world history and the fictive history as seen on the show. All in all, these help the Director at least to create a stage for writing their Scripts and telling their stories, while weaving a complex ludic stage for the players to interact with.
All in all, Dallas is a fascinating game, and one which deserves to be further studied by TTRPG designers, to see what tools they can add to their tool box from within it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good game, especially without further roleplay guidance I worry that it would be too easy to play it purely ludically. I do think, though, that it has many lessons left to teach.
For me, it’s got me thinking again about doing a worker placement TTRPG.
