Recently I've been playing (well, GMing) a bit of Torchbearer. In basic structural/mechanical terms, it's a spin-off of Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard, made by the same people (Luke Crane and friends). But in spirit and rationale-of-play it's a dungeon crawler. Like all that gang's books it has a list of inspirational/influential works, and in Torchbearer's case that includes the following:
*The Caverns of Thracia, by Jennell Jaquays
*Dungeon Module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands, by Gary Gygax
*Dungeons & Dragons Rules for Fantasy Medieval Wargames Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, Tactical Studies Rules, 1974
*Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Adventure Game, by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (edited by Tom Moldvay), TSR, 1981.
*A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, by Matthew Finch
As influences, or ideals to shoot for, those are pretty unambiguous!
But our PCs have
relationships. It's built into PC build, and every PC also has a Circles rating, which is the ability used to meet useful or friendly people in town (a bit like 3E's Gather Information rolled into 4e's Streetwise). Here's a taste of the relevant section of the Dungeoneeer's Handbook (p 36):
Answer the following questions to generate relationships and a Circles rating. You cannot take a friend, parents, mentor and an enemy. You can choose to have three of the four at best.
Circles starts at 1; your answers to the questions below add to that rating:
Do you have friends who enjoy your occasional visits or are you a loner, tough and cool?
* If you have a friend, add +1 Circles. Some friends will help on the road or in the wild; others will help in towns. See the Starting Friend rules.
* If you are a loner, tough and cool, your Circles starts at 1, and you have an enemy. Write down the name of your nemesis or mortal enemy on your character sheet and see the Starting Enemy rules.
* Skip the rest of the Circles and Relationships questions and take the Loner trait at level 1 or increase it by one if you already have it. Also, go get snacks for the rest of the group while they finish answering the Circles questions.
So choosing to be a loner is a thing, that brings with it a mechanical feature (the Loner trait). Choosing to have a friend is a thing, too - it boost your Circles (to at least 2) and means that when you visit your friend, you have somewhere to stay that you won't have to pay for (and having to pay for things is a big deal in Torchbearer).
But having friends and enemies also shapes gameplay. Here are a couple of snips from my write-up of our last session:
Fea-bella [an Elf PC] clocked up another +1 Lifestyle by making a Circles check to meet her adventurer friend, the Elven Ranger Glothfindel, who would then be able to guide the PCs back to the Tower of the Stars. But her player failed to get 3 successes on six dice (Circles 5 +1D for Dream-haunted trait) - so whereas she had hoped that her dreams would reveal that Glothfindel was nearby, in fact they revealed that he had been riding near the Tower of the Stars having heard Fea-bella was there, and had been captured by her enemy Megloss!
So we then had a town phase, in the Bustling Metropolis of Stoink. I rolled for a town event and got a 15:
Actually. On the street, you hear a fool prattling on to their lady friend about the nature of the moon and the stars. Tip your hat and correct them using Scholar vs their Scholar 4. Suggested twist: you make a new enemy.
Fea-bella had no interest in interjecting with a correction, but Golin [the Dwarf] did! With Will 3, -1D for Injured, +1D for help from Fea-bella whispering in his ear, all halved for Beginner's Luck, he rolled 2D against my 4D. And lost. The player anticipated he had to add a new enemy to his list before I even got a chance to tell him: Ebenezer the Erudite had plenty of rude things to say about this rude and ignorant dwarf. But the PCs went off to find the houses of healing
<snip>
Golin, meanwhile, also added 2 to his lifestyle cost. First, he went to the Guild Halls and repaired his helmet. Which succeeded. (Yay!) Then he went to the markets to try and buy food, hammer and pitons. He decided to test for food first, Resources 1 against Ob 1. And failed. He learned that no one would sell to him - not food or hammer or pitons - because Ebenezer had persuaded them to blackball him! So, still angry [a condition], and having already been contemplating the possibility, he sought out Ebenezer with the plan of making a fool of him in front of his lady friend. I used the Professor NPC stats for Ebenezer, and calculated he had Beginner's Luck Orator 3, the same as Golin's skill level. The rules for Angry say that at the GM's option it causes an obstacle penalty to Orator, but I thought that in this case the angry was fuelled rather than hindered by his fury! The result of the versus test was a clear victory to Golin, and he shamed Ebenezer in front of his lady - the note on Golin's PC sheet describes Ebenezer as now
shamed, hot, and single.
This is hardly great literature, but some fairly straightforward mechanics - Town Events roll, Circles check to meet a friend, Resource check to buy adventuring gear, and a player requesting a scene in which his PC confronts a NPC in a duel of words - when combined with the narration of consequences (both failures and successes), help bring the PCs' social relationships front-and-centre in play.
When we play again, and the PCs head back to the Tower of Stars, in addition to the opportunities for loot that they didn't pick up on their first foray, there is the prospect of confrontation with Megloss over the fate of Glothfindel. And and any failure that Golin's player rolls is a chance to introduce some hostile undertaking by the humiliated, plotting and still erudite Ebenezer.
Now as it happens I think that Torchbearer is a much more tightly designed game than 5e D&D, which for primarily commercial reasons imposes a lot less structure on play at the system level. But I think that a 5e group who wanted to foreground the PCs' social connections could to that easily enough - class and background provide a rationale for establishing them, there must be a gazillion WotC and/or 3P products that have rules for town encounters, and 5e gives the GM a lot of leeway in narrating consequence and framing subsequent scenes in order to make those social connections matter.
Heck, when I GMed bits-and-pieces of the 4e module H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth, which has an early room with a prisoner in it, I substituted for the NPC Mearls had written in a different NPC who already mattered to the PCs (and the players) as a result of previous events in play. They rescued that NPC and went on to make a deal with some duergar to redeem other NPCs they cared about who had been taken prisoner.
It doesn't seem that hard, if a GM is willing to let go their own hold on the reins and allow the players to inject their own priorities and concerns into the fiction.
