August TGD Design Contest: Diceless Friendly Hugs Design

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Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I'm in.

Trying to decide between a couple concepts.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2012 02:17

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 07:52

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I haven't decided on a name yet, but I would describe the concept I've settled on as Final Fantasy Borgias.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2012 23:55

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Manage an adventurer's guild in the frontier town of Pereg, where magic and technology are two sides of the same coin. Recruit intrepid heroes, equip and train them with the best money can buy, and send them off on dangerous missions to win fame and riches! And maybe offer a dental plan.

Peregrine Union is a game of resource management and risk taking, and of shared world building. Everyone takes turns playing the Game Master, setting up new challenges and twists for the guild to face.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2012 01:02

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Ad-Blurb and Outline!

This replaces my previous Peregrine Union idea because that was going to be too goddamn complicated for this contest, not to mention my own fingernail grip on sanity.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2012 00:58

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Rules module and pretention!

The pretention is kind of crappy but I got sucked into a phone call at the last second.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2012 00:56

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

alakath posted:

Ministry of Heaven, by Comrade Gorbash: I really like your theme. as a mechanic amuses me. And I love your sample characters - they really follow through on the promise of the premise.

I'm happy to hear that. Also, I felt pretty good about them because it felt like it was very easy to come up with them. I didn't spend much time thinking of them, but they came together pretty well.

alakath posted:

Under problem creation, I wonder if it's a bit too free form. I feel like I might get lost while playing.

Just speaking from my own workplace experience, I feel like you should have each player create an obstacle for another player by blaming them for something they should have done. I.E. Manager says "Toilets are flushing the wrong way, why is that, John?" Then John says, "It's because Martha reversed the earth's spin!" Then Martha says, "That's because Mike installed Windows 8 and it's not compatible with our Earth Spin program!" It adds a touch more structure.

My only other request is for a few examples.

I like that suggestion, I sort of felt like it was too free-form as well, but the solutions I tried, I didn't like. Having them based on character aspects, choosing from a menu... Didn't quite get the right feel. That one feels like it would work well.

Examples will come in the next module!

alakath posted:

I have to ask: why let other people at the table pick your strengths? It's just an interesting wrinkle, and I'd like to hear your reasoning.

It's something I've been playing with for a while. I feel like it encourages something that's missing from RPGs a lot, which is investment not only in your own character but in the group. To me at least one of the great things about RPGs is the social aspect, but sometimes people get so wrapped up in THEIR CHARACTER IS LIKE THIS that it can lead to all sorts of silliness. It's not something I'd want in every game, but having other players start the game with an investment in the other characters at the table seems like it would encourage compromise and interaction. FIASCO does some similar things with different mechanics.

Plus I always like seeing different interpretations of the same character, it can really provide a lot of inspiration that would otherwise get missed.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2012 06:29

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Ulta posted:

Ministry of Heaven - I really like the mechanics and the concept here. Character creation by others is great too. There�s a little bit of complication here and there, but it feels like a game that plays simpler than it reads. I got the idea that you could reskin it into �Better Off Ted� the RPG, which made me smile. Also any game where you can play Coyote is extra points in my book. Overtime could be clarified, and there�s a definite advantage to betting last that might have to be addressed, but other than that, very solid.

Straight up forgot to say that everyone bets at the same time, in secret. My bad. Some of the complication is due to not really having a good feel for how some parts will function in play, I'm hoping to do some playtesting soon to find the rough patches. There's definitely a few spots where I wasn't quite sure how to explain something because I wasn't sure what questions would come up.

Overtime I think is one of those places where it's explained in a more complicated way than it should. Functionally its that you can take a third shift on a day so you can catch up with removing Obstacles on the Problem. It really should be that simple, but I definitely didn't say it that simply. I'll have to work it over again.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2012 01:00

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Ministry of Heaven

Since I'm going out drinking tonight, posting a bit early (for me anyways). The formatting is screwed because it turns out I can access Google docs at work but they don't really work. I'll fix it later.

StarterPack

# ¿ Aug 17, 2012 20:04

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Ministry of Heaven - Expansion Pack

This contains two alternate modes of play. I had a third which was Wacky Normal Office Hijinks, but trying to work on it made me depressed because I work in an office. I also had some ADVANCED character creation rules that I realized at the last minute added a lot of pointless complexity and made the game actively worse, so they have been cut.

edit: Also, have some logs of funhaving. I play Lowell, Martian Ranger.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2012 00:41

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I liked trying out FYEW. The idea of an adversarial story telling game is really interesting. But I feel like there are some rough edges.

It's less that objections and favor don't work, and more that the way they work is, frankly, not that much fun. Because it's so easy to get knocked out, it discourages risk taking. It would probably be better if you got knocked out of the Phase instead of the game, or gained some other penalty.

Also, the objections feel too much like nitpicking, when I think the idea is to get everyone to be creative in the midst of each other's stories. Rather, maybe when someone makes an objection they add a new fact that the story teller has to incorporate into the tale?

That could combine with the issue of getting knocked out so easily by making it so the story teller has an increasing number of ideas to fit into the story, and if they don't do so successfully they lose favor. If they lose all their favor, then they lose control of the story.

There's a card game called Once Upon A Time with a similar goal - its competitive story telling where you try to guide the story to a particular end. It might be worth checking out to give you some ideas.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 19:21

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 07:52

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

That is the most amazing and completely inexplicable prize. Congratulations Ettin, totally deserved!

I'm going to come back to Ministry of Heaven and give it an overhaul in the near future. I like the core of what I have there, but it clearly needs work.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2012 00:53

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