If John Hughes directed a RPG

If you were looking for a role playing game that let you relive movies like Sixteen Candles or Some Kind of Wonderful, Unrequited fits that bill. In fact, that's pretty much all you're going to do with it.

Unrequited is a short form role-playing game for two players. One player will play the Infatuated, who is in love with the Crush, an NPC. The other player plays the Friend, who supports the Infatuated but is secretly in love with the Infatuated. 

Yeah, you can see where this is going.

You play out three scenes, heightening the Infatuated's obsession with the Crush and depending the Friend's love for the infatuated. Throughout the scenes, you develop dice pools that will help determine who ends up with who at the end of the game.

One of the things that I don't like about how you earn those dice. You get them by performing very specific actions during the scene. While the rules state that the setting can be anywhere, the actions are really, really geared towards a John Hughes style 80s teen movie. Seriously, I can't see using this rule set with any other kind of setting.

What I do like is that the Friend can choose to give their dice pool to the Infatuated to help them win the love of the Crush, sacrificing their love for the desires of the Crush. It's pretty standard for the genre but it is the most dramatic choice in the game. Perhaps the only dramatic choice.

In short form games, particularly narratively driven games, I do think that it is important to have a strong framework. A lot of games, you go in knowing what kind of story they are trying to tell and the framework helps you tell that kind of story. In the case of Unrequited, I feel like the structure is so rigid that it's telling me how the story is to be told in addition to what the story will be. In fact, if we were given a very specific setting and three pregenerated characters for the three roles, I think that it would bother me less because the rigid structure would make more sense. 

Unrequited suffers from comparison to a number of games. For me, the most obvious one is Breaking the Ice. Two player, romance games aren't part of my RPG interest but the depth and many interesting choices in Breaking the Ice would make it my game of choice. 

Since Unrequited is part of the Indie Mixtape Megamix, I also can't help but compare it the game right before it on the play list, A Courteous Night, another romantic short form for two. And one that I feel allows for more interesting choices and more freedom, despite also having a very tight structure.

Interestingly enough, although there are other was not very much alike, since the scenes in Unrequited are all conversations, I find myself reminded of Until We Sink. That's a Nordic LARP that consists of nothing but conversations around the table. Making it a tabletop LARP, I guess. 

Unrequited isn't a game that I can see myself playing, even if I was in the mood for a romantic game. It's certainly not a game I can see playing twice.

A Courteous Night - Romance in two pages of RPG

A Courteous Night, from the Indie RPG Megamix Tape, is an eety, bitty little role playing game for two players. No prep, no GM, requires just a deck of playing cards and should play out in just an hour. 

 

In a Courteous Night, the players play two lovers and they play out three events in the development of their relationship. The game is couched in fantastical terms with one player being the Enchanted and the other the Sotted with both characters being under curses. However, the roles really just dictate play order and a curse can be something mundane like crippling shyness, overprotective parents or heroin addiction.

The game has a simple but very defined structure. An introduction, where you meet the characters, three scenes that define the relationship, and an epilogue.

The scenes are played out in a call and response fashion, with the active player describing things and the reactive player responding to them. The active player will be playing cards face up and the reactive player will be playing them face down.

The value of the cards sadly doesn't have a direct correlation to the story. Instead, the face up cards will determine who controls the third act and all the cards will determine who is the 'winner'.

I have to note that the third act is a consensual seduction. Unlike Emily Karen Boss's romance RPGs, there aren't any guidelines for respecting people's comfort levels (to be fair, A Courteous Night is only two pages so there is size constraints) but including the word consensual goes a long way to keep things from getting creepy.

The 'winner' gets to narrate the epilogue, which describes how they break the _other_ player's curse. So really, everyone gets to be a winner. Yay!

To my mind, A Courteous Night has a couple strikes against it. First of all, I'm not terribly interested in romance RPGs. Second of all, if I did want to play a two-player romance RPG, the first game I would reach for would be Emily Care Boss's very excellent Breaking the Ice.

I also wish the mechanics of the card play were a little more tightly tied to the narrative. They do serve as a place keeper and help determine who controls certain elements. However, you can play towards winning or losing without that reflecting on how you tell the story.

However, there are some things I do like about the game. First off, an hour running time. As I have grown older and life has grown busier and more complex, shorter playing times have became more valuable.

Second, it has a tight structure. I have found that with narrative games, particularly short form ones, having a tight structure helps keep the game focused, which can be very important with the free form mechanics of many narrative game systems.

Third, I like how the player with the higher point total breaks the _other_ player's curse. It creates a cooperative, collaborative atmosphere.

A Courteous Night is by no means a perfect game. But an hour playing time and a structure that should keep the game moving along  does help it have a definite place in a very specific niche.