Delta Green Design Notes: Making Bonds Matter (Patreon)

When we were developing Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, the Bonds rules quickly proved immensely important. They keep disorders and temporary insanity from setting in too quickly, and they affect the tone of the Sanity rules by giving players a fleeting hint of control over their Agents' fates. Perhaps most crucially, they make Sanity damage more intimate by showing that what happens to an Agent affects their family and friends.

One challenge we had from the beginning, though, was making it intuitively clear to players what might qualify as a Bond in Delta Green. And more importantly, what should not. 

Here are the Bonds rules from the Agent's Handbook:

Bonds measure your Agent’s relationships with the vital people in his or her life: loved ones, family members and close friends. A Bond can protect your Agent from SAN loss (see PROJECTING ONTO A BOND on page 74) or offer a chance to repress the effects of a disorder or temporary insanity (see REPRESSING INSANITY on page 75).

Bonds are not merely motivations or things your Agent likes. They are your Agent’s connection to humanity. [Emphasis added.] An Agent with no Bonds is more susceptible to psychological trauma than one who has people waiting back home.

...

Sample Bonds

Spouse or ex-spouse (individual)
Son or daughter (individual)
Parent or grandparent (individual)
Best friend (individual)
Coworker or partner (individual)
Psychologist or therapist (individual)
Spouse and children (group)
Parents (group)
Siblings (group)
Colleagues in an intense job (group)
Church or support group (group)
Survivors of a shared trauma (group)

Let's unpack that.

Bonds are relationships. They are not abstract. A Bond is not a belief. It's not loyalty to a cause or even a country or organization. Bonds are connections between your Agent and the people who matter most to your Agent. They connect your Agent with humanity. They represent the reasons your Agent is trying to keep humanity alive and sane in a horrifying world.

Bonds are personal. A Bond with an individual represents one of the two or three closest, most important relationships in your Agent's life. If your Agent has a Bond with a group, it's still a group of individuals. It's a group small enough that by alienating one or two of them your Agent can alienate all of them.

Bonds are reciprocal. A Bond score represents the resilience of the relationship. It's how your Agent regards the Bond's subject. And it's how the Bond's subject regards the Agent. And crucially, it's how important that regard is to your Agent.

Bonds can reject you. What gives a Bond the power to protect your Agent from Sanity Point loss is the vulnerability it implies. What gives a Bond power is that when your Agent takes stress out on a Bond too much, the Bond can say "Enough." A relationship is only a Bond if it can reject your Agent—and if that rejection would devastate your Agent to the tune of losing 0/1D4 SAN from helplessness.

Bonds require Sanity Points: Only a character who has Sanity Points can have Bonds or be a bond. And only a character who has Sanity Points can be a Bond for another. At SAN 0, all Bonds scatter like cheap perfume in a storm.

THINGS THAT ARE NOT BONDS

Delta Green: Too impersonal. The Agent probably only knows a handful of members of the group. And the group's secrecy means rejection by one member won't have any effect on most members. Make it "My DG cell" instead.

The FBI: The same issue as with Delta Green. Make it something like "The violent crimes desk at my FBI office."

The Local Ghoul Warren: As unnatural monsters go, ghouls aren't so bad. Sometimes they're even helpful. But they have no Sanity Points. That means you can't rely on their regard and patience to sustain you. If you are convinced you can, that's still not a Bond, it's a delusional disorder picked up because you've hit the Breaking Point. 

My Beloved Dog Who Supports and Protects Me and Is Part of the Family: In most instances, speaking as someone who has loved and kept dogs his whole life, my answer is no. A dog may well give you life-saving comfort, but it does not represent your Agent's connection to humanity. And if your Agent's connection to a dog is so powerful that it feels like it should be a Bond, ask yourself: Can this Bond reject the Agent when the Bond's score hits zero? Can the Bond decide it's had enough? Again, my instinct speaks against it. In a relationship that close, nothing is going to persuade a dog to leave of its own volition and deliberately never return. But short of the odd ghoul who's so new to it that they still have SAN, a dog is the closest thing here to an edge case. If your group wants to allow a dog as a Bond, go for it. But don't make me watch when the Bond score hits zero and you have to play out the dog abandoning your Agent. There's only so much misery at the table that I can take.

BONDS WITH AGENTS

Bonds with fellow player characters can be tricky. They usually develop in play when the Agents have shared some horrible experience. But they are often one-way. Agent Marly has gained a Bond with Agent Margaret but Agent Margaret has not gained a Bond with Agent Marly.

With a one-way Bond, the relationship between those Agents gives one of them powerful strength and support against trauma that it does not give the other. It's always up to the two players to define what that looks like. The players should trade ideas until something feels right to both of them. 

Here's one example: 

• Agent Marly has a Bond with Agent Margaret. Marly draws strength from their relationship and Margaret's goodwill. If Agent Margaret dies, Marly will be devastated. If Marly projects lost SAN onto her Bond with Margaret until it reaches zero, something happens that completely alienates them. They might remain colleagues and teammates, but Marly will never again be able to rely on her relationship with Margaret for strength. 
• Agent Margaret does not have a Bond with Agent Marly. She sees their relationship as the same kind of working relationship that she has with any other Agents. She probably trusts them with her life but they're not family. Maybe she knows how much Marly depends on her opinion but she puts up with it for the sake of the team and for Marly's well-being. But when the Bond on Marly's character sheet hits zero, things fall apart. Maybe Margaret finally loses all patience and explodes Marly's illusions of the nature of their friendship. Or maybe Margaret never knows about Marly's Bond with her, Marly's deep reliance on her, until Marly's Bond score hits zero and she does something that makes Margaret realize it and reject it altogether.

The most important part here is for the players to talk it over between themselves and decide what they are willing to play out.