Houses As Characters

Dune: The Roleplaying Game
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I am starting to get my head around the abstract nature of the Dune Rules, and while in the process of doing this something occurred to me.

That as well as the normal information on the House Record Sheet we could also use a Character Sheet for a House, and use Skills as indicators of a House’s competence in different areas:

  • Battle: the size of the armed forces available to the House, and how competent they are,
  • Communicate: the House’s information gathering, espionage and spy capabilities,
  • Discipline: the level to which the House forces not only follow the chain of command, but also abide by Imperial, and Local laws
  • Move: how mobile the House assets are, whether or not they have Smuggler allies who can help move things for them from Planet to Planet, but also how quickly they can respond to emerging situations in general,
  • Understand: the House’s ability to use the data it gains from Communicate, how advanced its own technology R&D is, etc.

A similar pattern could be followed with Drives; and together they would create a framework that could be utilised in Architect Play.

When a PC is controlling the House’s assets in Warfare it might be appropriate to limit the House’s Skill Rating to that of the Controlling PC.

Just an idea.

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It would certainly take the concept of the House as a character to the next level.

It is similar to how Star Trek Adventures handles the ships, where it has Systems in place of character Attributes but generally follows the same mechanics as a character.

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I like that idea.
I’ve been thinking of something similar and it works well in 2D20 as this is how ships work in Star Trek to a large degree.
We will be expanding a lot about House management so I’ll have to think about that one.

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