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Don't you hate it how to play any RPG nowadays you have to get so many books? You need a Player's Handbook, a Gamemaster's Book, at least three Monster Manuals, stacks and stacks of feats and tracking sheets and supplements... Who has the time anymore?  Makes me sick just looking at it So! This month's contest is to take things in the opposite direction about as far as they can go. How clean and basic can you make your game? Time to find out because this month's challenge is to design a complete readable RPG that fits, in its entirety, onto one side of one sheet of paper. And I mean all of it. Character creation rules, the character sheet, any GMing rules/advice/etc., and the setting (if any) all needs to fit on one side of one sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper.  Your canvas Now, you don't have to keep the paper in once flat piece; you can cut it into pieces, you can make it into a PocketMod, fold it into a paper fortune teller, whatever. As long as you don't stray off the one side of the paper, you're good.  For those of you who've never seen a PocketMod Now, I know you're wondering: what's in it for you? Well, I'm going to have two "winners": the coveted Best Game award, and the Most Creative Use of Paper award. The first is self-explanatory, the second will go to the person who comes up with the coolest way to work the one-sheet-of-paper thing into their game. Both winners will recieve DriveThru gift vouchers because I'm a nice guy, and one or two ~*~MYSTERY PRIZES~*~ depending on if I can get them before the contest is over and what's in my stack of Forbidden RPGs. QUESTIONS Is there a specific genre or theme we have to stuck to? Nope. Go nuts. Does there need to be a setting? There doesn't have to be, but if there is it needs to fit on the same piece of paper as everything else. Can I use notebook paper, graph paper, or some sort of specialty paper? If it's 8.5" by 11", sure. Can I use a hack of an existing system? Sure, if you can get it to fit. Does it have to be readable game? Yes. No 1-point fonts, you filthy cheater. Can I use dice or cards or whatever for the random elements? Yes; it's just the game itself that's limited. External tools should be stuff that's easy to come by, though; dice, beads, playing cards. I don't have Photoshop, how can I make a PocketMod? Get the PDFtoPocketMod program, which will turn any 8-page PDF into Pocketmod format. You can also use CutePDF to print a Word document (or whatever) to a PDF. That's pretty much it. Deadline for entries is April 30. Help save paper. Enter today! Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 03:03
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Asymmetrikon posted:Sure, I'll enter. Why not?
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Apr 1, 2014 03:11
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Talkc posted:Okay. After an HOUR of HARD GRUELING LABOR, the working draft of my game is complete. Bucnasti posted:I'd like to suggest the additional challenge of incorporating your randomizer into your single sheet of paper. Mr. Prokosch posted:Stayed up way to late to finish this! Sometimes that happens with little projects, can't sleep until it's done. I like it though, gave me a chance to play with Illustrator.
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Apr 2, 2014 14:43
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TheDemon posted:I'm really sorry, when I reread our first draft I realized our CORE GAME MECHANIC and our SANITY SYSTEM hadn't been implemented! Of course it didn't read like an RPG if the CORE GAME MECHANIC, through which all the role playing must be done, is missing. Here is the second draft, where we have corrected this glaring oversight and added a SANITY SYSTEM for all the simulationists out there.  Mr. Prokosch posted:I think of it as a variant of FUDGE, not FATE, since it uses the FUDGE skill system and skill ladder but not the Fate Point and Aspects system that FATE invented. quote:I like that there's not only a skill component, but a risk component. When you're taking a big risk to pull off something amazing, you're more likely to get the +0 or disaster than when you play it safe.
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Apr 2, 2014 21:22
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Covok posted:That said, as a general question, what is a readable font size for a pocketmod?
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Apr 3, 2014 02:55
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Nissir posted:Now write all this stuff down on another sheet of paper, and crumple these rules into a ball. Ahem. Evil Mastermind posted:this month's challenge is to design a complete readable RPG that fits, in its entirety, onto one side of one sheet of paper. Now, if you proved sections on the one page to write their skills down, then cut them off of the original page and crumple them up, that's fine. You know, something like one of those "tear off the phone number" fliers or something.
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Apr 3, 2014 16:35
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DalaranJ posted:If the Game Master needs to write things down in order to run the game am I required to provide blank space on the page for that?
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Apr 4, 2014 02:04
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TheSoundNinja posted:Is there a bonus if the game rules can be folded into your miniature?
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Apr 4, 2014 15:45
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The Skeep posted:MACHEWARRIOR
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Apr 5, 2014 19:03
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ZorajitZorajit posted:Is printing a QR code linked to more rules a legitimate way to increase the amount of space available on the on page limit?
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Apr 7, 2014 17:41
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BashfulBanana posted:Would including instructions for folding/cutting the pocketmod to be printed on the reverse side count against the single page limit? (I suppose I could just leave that out for the submission)
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Apr 10, 2014 20:45
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lord_daeloth posted:I'm not the judge, so my input may not be valid here, but when I was experimenting 8 point was more than readable. Heck, with a good layout you might even be able to get away with 6 point. You can also gain a smidge more space by reducing the space between lines and reducing your margins to the minimum print safe level (just set it to narrow margins if you're using Microsoft Office). Something Else posted:Hey, I wrote my first RPG for this! It's called You and Your Dumb Friends and it's about how I hate you. quote:You and Your Dumb Friends is a game for 3 or more grown-ups, wherein each player takes on the role of one of the other people in the group. That’s right - you all roleplay as each other.
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Apr 10, 2014 23:19
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I'm back from PAX East, and I picked up some of the prizes that will be going out. Once I've recovered, I'll start going through the stuff posted this weekend.
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Apr 14, 2014 02:03
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LordVonEarlDuke posted:my game is called HELL VICE MERCILESS. It's a hotline miami inspired game where you yell at your friends and take 5 second turns to the beat of whatever 80s inspired murdertheque you can find. It's not at all ready but initial playtests were pretty beastly fun.
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Apr 17, 2014 16:20
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You didn't make the pocketmods public.
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Apr 18, 2014 04:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:this month's challenge is to design a complete readable RPG that fits, in its entirety, onto one side of one sheet of paper.
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Apr 20, 2014 04:34
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LordVonEarlDuke posted:Is there a limit for how many of these things we can enter? assuming it's just 1 per quote:It's called "You are young children in a heartless place" and it is about as happy as it sounds.  Holy poo poo, man...
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Apr 21, 2014 17:39
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Volcano Style posted:My non-Goon housemate TeaCrusader wanted to submit something for the contest, so I hope this is eligible and doesn't count as account sharing otherwise. I would have just posted it, but I don't want to take credit for something that isn't mine. quote:This is Lost Skies, a game about a recently deceased person becoming a ghost and having to resist infernal energies called the 'Rhapsody' to avoid becoming a demon. Your stats and the dice you have access to are related to the person you were in life.
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Apr 26, 2014 21:35
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Okay, we're coming up on the end of the month, so here's a rundown of all the entries. Please make sure I'm linking the correct versions. Talkc or TheDemon, which of you two wrote ICYC? Because you both linked it with updates. LordEarlVonDuke, which game are you entering? HELL VICE MERCILESS or You are young children. Either Talkc or TheDemon, I'm not sure which: I CHOOSE YOU CTHULHU! Mr. Prokosch: FLIC-GUM Nissir: Who are you The Skeep: MACHEWARRIOR Covok: Save the Date lord_daeloth: We Are All Starstuff Paolomania: Some One-Page Heartbreaker frankenfreak: PlayGods Something Else: You and Your Dumb Friends Boob Marley: Mikey's Friday Night A.D.D. Dragonlance Adventure Spekhogger: Wizard Community College LordVonEarlDuke: HELL VICE MERCILESS LordVonEarlDuke: You are young children in a heartless place AaronMFK: Combat Poets UnCO3: Drowns the Sky TeaCrusader via Volcano Style: Lost Skies
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Apr 26, 2014 21:40
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Volcano Style posted:I did ask if he wanted to submit one as well as the filled in one. He said he'd rather submit this one only as a) an example and b) an anti-plagiarism thing in case he makes something bigger of it later. If you want the blank one to judge it on, I'll ask him to upload it. Talkc posted:I wrote it, he just edited it for extra rpg goodness.
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Apr 26, 2014 22:58
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It's now May 1st, so submissions are closed. A huge thanks to everyone who entered; I'll admit I was a bit worried at first because it didn't look like there were going to be a lot of entries, but people really stepped up and we have some amazing games here. Of course, now I have to playtest them. I'll be hopping into IRC over the next few days to try and get some games going; hopefully it won't take too long for me to run through everything. Again, thanks to everyone who entered!
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May 1, 2014 14:42
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I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT THIS. I have also not done any playtesting yet because I am terrible and got distracted by starting another project and finally getting the Feng Shui 2 playtest docs.  I'll try to get some stuff going this weekend.
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May 15, 2014 21:37
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Yes, I'll provide at least some feedback on everything. Unfortunately I don't think I'm going to have time to do playtests at this rate. Unless people want to volunteer for that...
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May 28, 2014 21:26
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I AM SORRY I HAVE NOT FINISHED THIS YET Okay...end of this week, I promise.
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Jul 20, 2014 18:20
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Thoughts on the first half of the entries! I CHOOSE YOU, CTHULHU! I said this when it first came out, but ICYC doesn’t strike me as an RPG as much as a party game. You don’t really play “characters” as much as come up with a list and try to convince everyone else to pick your thing as the Best Thing three times. Also the font honestly hurts my eyes. That being said, I bet if you turned this into a CAH-style card game it’d work pretty well. FLICK It's an interesting idea to tie the resolution mechanic to a physical skill test, to wit flicking a penny along track foosball style. It’s a nice, simple idea and I could see it being fun, but I can also see it leading to player frustration when they just want to perform a task and keep flinging the penny off the sheet. The only problem is that it's very hard to flick a coin on a piece of paper and not have it either barely move or go flying off the sheet, as my brief experiments showed. Still, it’s cool to see how simple a generic system can be. WHO ARE YOU At the base, this is about as generic as an RPG can get; assign 20 points to items on a List Of Stuff You Can Do. The resolution mechanic, though, it pretty drat funny. The GM figures difficulty, you place a garbage can that many feet away, and the player tries to toss a paper ball into it. Simple! But again, while I’m sure it’s fun, you really need a group who’s going to buy into the overall concept to make it work. MACHEWARRIOR It’s always good to see a nice, simple mech system that doesn’t get caught up in stupid-long gear lists. Unfortunately, that genericness kind of hurts the final product here; while the player gets to define what their mech parts are specifically (i.e., saying that their Utility part is a High Soliton Radar or whatever) there’s nothing that makes that choice matter. I feel the only thing missing here is some mechanic that allows the device choices matter. Otherwise there’s no real difference saying that your weapon is a sniper rifle versus a rocket launcher. A simple result-tweaking mechanic would work well here; maybe if your part is appropriate to the task the Cooldown is reduced or you get a free reroll or something. SAVE THE DATE This one kind of reminds me of games like Shoot the Moon or Boy x Boy. It’s an interesting premise you don’t see in games often (simple normal human interaction), and the presentation and mechanics make this “Romantic Comedy: The RPG”. The mechanics are really simple, but that’s fine because the premise is really simple too. Why overcomplicate? I also like how it’s a “multi-GM” game where everyone gets to narrate and be the target of the actions of others. WE ARE ALL STARSTUFF Let’s start with the most interesting thing in this game: Once the characters are created, anyone can play any character. It’s a neat idea that fits well with the idea of playing the whole crew of a starship, and if the group isn’t into that idea not including it doesn’t break anything. There’s a clear Fate inspiration here in the Aspects, and I like how the die pool building works. It encourages players to think in a larger scale about the things that can help them, and the GM to do the same. It's always nice to see mechanics that reinforce having a strong concept and back that up. It’s a surprisingly complete game for what amounts to a five-page pocketmod. SOME ONE-PAGE HEARTBREAKER You know, this feels like a different take on a *World game, with the delineated “moves” that depend very highly on narrative context. I also like how narrative and dramatic scenes are treated differently mechanically, but not in a way that feels jarring. The dramatic resolution setup where you have to get 20 “goal points” to win is cool, and I like how anyone can contribute at trying to get that goal completed. In fact, you could probably expand this out to a full PbtA style game. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 19:40
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Hey, if anyone should be apologizing for this contest, it's me. I went back and tweaked my comments.
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Jul 21, 2014 20:00
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Ah, I missed that. I was bouncing back and forth through the document too much, I guess. I'll redo my notes when I get home.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:56
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Review Batch 2! PLAY GODS At its core, this feels like a very light version of Microscope or Kingdom. The players are gods who are competing to create a world. It's very simple, can probably be run in an hour or two, and would make a good lead-in to a different game. To a certain degree, it also reminds me of Epidah Ravidol's "Vast & Starlit", which is a diceless narrative-driven game. I can see this being something fun to run as a PbP game, too. YOU AND YOUR DUMB FRIENDS You know a game is something special when it starts off with "You and Your Dumb Friends is a game for 3 or more grown-ups, wherein each player takes on the role of one of the other people in the group. That’s right - you all roleplay as each other." Because there's absoluetly no way for that to go bad. Really, I can't imagine this being played and not devolving into an argument at some level. MIKEY'S FRIDAY NIGHT A.D.D. DRAGONLANCE ADVENTURE This feels like it was almost a good idea, but in all honesty it's a very minimal effort thing. It's not the fact that everyone just picks a Dragonlance character and go do something, but the system boils down to "to do something, figure out the percent chance and roll under", and isn't tied to the characters' definitions at all. I could at least see if there was something saying "if you have a trait you can <dice trick>", but unfortunately there's not much here. WIZARD COMMUNITY COLLEGE At first blush this reminds me of the old "Eldrich rear end Kicking" RPG, which was also about wizards blasting the poo poo out of each other. I like how you can be a wizard of anything, and you can really only do things that relate to your spellcasting style. The only real problem I have with the game is that there's no real levels of status ailments before you're out of the game. You could get to the point where everything in three realities is destroyed and you still keep playing. Which is fine if that's what you're going for, but it seems like it makes it hard to make one bad thing feel worse than another since they're all technically equivalent. HELL VICE MERCILESS This game is "Hotline Miami: the RPG" and it does that ridiculously well. At its heart it's basically a PbtA game, but using 1d6 and with a different structure. By breaking everyone's actions into "what you can say you do in five seconds", it encourages people to not think and instead act off their first instinct, but at the same time the more stuff you try to do an your move the greater the chance you gently caress up, so there's an interesting balance between being the cautious guy and the insane risk-taker. The whole thing clearly moves at a fast pace because that's built into the game mechanics.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:57
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Final batch! COMBAT POETS Another game that I think would work really well as a PbP game, Combat Poets is about killing each other with words. It's a very simple premise, and I like how the whole thing is based around writing poems to make yourself sound less bad than everyone else. But what's really neat is how you can use specific types of poem structures for special effects. Iambic Pentameter lets you heal, Limericks do a ton of damage, and Haikus let you turtle up when you're on your last legs. The only downside I see to the system is that there's no reason to not use one of those forms because any other form of poetry doesn't give you anything extra. DROWNS THE SKY This one's straight up misery tourism, but in a good way. You play as colonists on a dying world who know there's no hope of rescue before The End comes. What do you do? How are you going to try and be remembered? What will you try to accomplish before you die? However you do it, each player has the choice of trying to either protect themselves, someone else, be remembered, or some mix thereof. What impressed me is how evocative it manages to be in such a small space; trying to make a monument works and feels very different from preparing for the end, and I like that just experiencing the world (either peacfully or by engaging in vices) doesn't help you in the end because it makes it feel like a form of quiet acceptance or denial. This is one game I'd really like to try myself and see what kind of narrative comes out of it. LOST SKIES Lost Skies has a really interesting premise: you're dead and stuck in a hellish purgatory between Earth and the afterlife, and are slowly turning into a demon. Your character is composed of a Human Soul that represents your better traits, and a Demonic Beast that all your worst traits. Eventually you will transform, so you're trying to delay this as long as possible. And while I like the mechanics and the setup, the biggest problem I have is that I feel like I'm only seeing half the system here. Like, I don't get what the characters do, if there's an outside force they're working against or if they just loiter around the afterlife. There's also the problem that I don't know how conflicts are supposed to work; are NPCs stated up like PCs, or are bad guys handled more simply? All that being said, I'd love to see this game more fleshed out because it's a really good foundation, it just needs more built on it. FINAL FORM This game may be one of the anime-iest things I've ever read. The whole game is pretty laser-focused on animes beating the poo poo out of each other in the most over-the-top ways possible. I think the greatest idea is that everyone makes up a bunch of insane fighting abilities, but instead of making them for their own characters, all the powers are dumped in a pile and drawn randomly to see what power your character apparently has. It's a great way to simulate the pull-a-new-power-out-of-my-rear end factor of most fighting anime, and while I normally wouldn't like it the "roll to see how you act before the actual punching starts" table is great and just further cements the insane nature of the genre. Letting everyone who isn't involved in a particular fight vote for who was more badass is pretty cool too, and would encourage people coming up with entertaining descriptions. TWICE AS BRIGHT Twice as Bright has a similar theme as Drowns the Sky, to wit characters facing their inevitable deaths. TAB is more "traditional", in that it's more about going down swinging. Every resource your character has is limited, up to and including your skills. You get 15 skill slots to fill in, and you "spend" these skills to pass tasks you can't shoot your way past. You can even spend irrelevent skills, it just uses up more of them. I'm not sure what (if anything) is supposed to happen when you run out of skills, though. I suppose that ties into the "Death Move", where you can sacrifice your character to automatically overcome any obstacle. Again, I like how thematic all the rules are, and I also like how it models the dwindling resource idea by having you write your resources down on parts of the sheet and tear them off as you use them. Man, now I just need to determine who the winners are...not an easy task given the quality of entries.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:46
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Well, it's three months late, but it's finally time to announce the winners! It really wasn't easy; there were some amazing games people put together, and everyone should be pretty proud of themselves here. There are some seriously amazing concepts in this thread, and some really innovative mechanics. Ultimately I looked at two factors: the usual "I really want to play this" factor, and how well the authors worked with the concept of only using one sheet of paper. At the start of the contest I said I was going to have two main prizes, but due to the delays on my part and a surprising amount of foresight on my part, I actually have enough for four winners! So, without further ado, the four winners of the One-Page RPG Design contest are: LordVonEarlDuke for HELL VICE MERCILESS, which is both thematically excellent in both mechanics and visual presentation. (also "You are young children..." is amazing but so sad) Auralsaurus Flex for Twice As Bright, for best use of the one-sheet concept by modeling dwindling personal resources (and life) by destroying parts of your character sheet. Palolmania for Some One-Page Heartbreaker, which crams a lot of PbtA mechanics into one sheet and has a very interesting conflict resolution system. UnCO3 for Drowns The Sky, which has what I feel is an amazing amout on emotional depth in such a small design space. Congratulations, folks! Each winner will receive a copy of Epidiah Ravachol's microRPG Vast & Starlit, as well as all three supplements. Each microgame weighs in at about 650 words and is about the size of a business card.  In addition, each winner will recieve a $20 gift certificate to DriveThruRPG! So, if LordEarlVonDuke, Auralsaurus Flex, Palolmania, UnCO3 could please PM me your contact info, I can get the prizes out early next week. Again, thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners!
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Jul 26, 2014 19:30
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shoot me an email at sean dot m dot dunstan at gmail. I need your mailing address and your DriveThruRPG account email.
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Aug 16, 2014 00:34
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